by Jack Lasenby
The Dance of the Hunger of Kaa, How You Go to the Lavatory in Hospital, and Why Freddy Jones Tiptoed Down the Other Side of the Road.
“WHAT A MEMORY YOU’VE GOT.” Dad found the place in the Jungle Book.
“‘“It is half a night’s journey—at full speed,” said Bagheera, and Baloo looked very serious. “I will go as fast as I can,” he said, anxiously’”
“Baloo’s so fat, he can’t run fast,” I explained to Milly.
Bagheera and Kaa left Baloo behind. And when they came to a stream, Bagheera left Kaa behind.
Inside the Lost City, Mowgli was sore, sleepy, and hungry, but the monkeys were too busy chattering to give him anything to eat.
“‘“We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true!”’”
Outside, Bagheera and Kaa waited for a cloud to cover the moon.
“‘“Good hunting!” said Kaa, grimly…’”
“Good hunting,” I whispered to Milly, and shivered. “Don’t stop, Dad. Milly wants to hear the rest.”
“It’s pretty scary.”
“I’ll put my hands over Milly’s eyes.”
Dad nodded.
“As long as the goodies win,” I told him.
“The goodies always win.” Dad laughed and read on. “‘The cloud hid the moon, and as Mowgli wondered what would come next he heard Bagheera’s light feet on the terrace.’”
The fighting began, and the Bandar-log shoved Mowgli into the summer-house, but it was full of cobras. Mowgli gave the Snake’s Call: “We be of one blood, ye and I!” so they didn’t bite him.
“We be of one blood, ye and I,” I whispered into Milly’s ear, which flicked. I blew, and it flicked again. Twice.
Kaa saved both Bagheera and Baloo, let Mowgli out of the summer-house, and then told them, “Go and sleep, for the moon sets, and what follows it is not well that thou shouldst see.”
“Milly wants to see,” I told Dad. And he read: “The Dance of the Hunger of Kaa.” I was so busy covering Milly’s eyes and putting my fingers in her ears at what Kaa did to the Bandar-log, I saw and heard it all myself.
When Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with the monkeys towards Kaa, and Mowgli laid his hands on their shoulders to wake them, I felt dizzy and laid my own hands on Milly. “I’m stopping you from walking down Kaa’s throat,” I told her. Then she was purring at the last bit about Bagheera giving Mowgli a hiding for playing with the Bandar-log, and carrying him home on his back.
“‘Now,’ said a strange voice, ‘jump up on my back, Little Brother, and we will go home.’” And Milly and I were carried to bed on the back of the Black Panther.
“I think we could let Milly have a look outside the back door,” Dad said in the morning.
“What if she runs away?”
“Let her out on to the back porch, and she’ll follow you into the wash-house, while you clean your teeth.”
Milly explored the wash-house and followed me back inside.
“Whew!” I said.
At lunchtime, Colleen Porter came home with me to see Milly, and we let her out on the back porch again, and Colleen loved Milly and told Dad she was just like her cat at home. We went back to school in plenty of time, because it took Colleen a while.
“The doctor said my leg’s getting better,” she told me. “I can skip a bit now. At first I couldn’t even hop.”
“What was it like in the hospital?”
“It’s away over in Hamilton. I wanted to go home; I wanted my mother; and I was scared I was going to die, but one of the nurses told me that was nonsense.
“She said, ‘Thank your lucky stars you haven’t got the infantile badly, and remember to say your prayers.’ She was nice, that nurse. Most of them were. There was a funny nurse who used to make us laugh because she was forever doing things round the wrong way. She always dried my face with the towel before she’d wiped it with the face cloth. I couldn’t laugh, but I remember trying to smile, just to show her.
“She hid under my bed and pretended to be scared of the other nurses; but they were all really scared of the matron. Even the doctors were. The matron’s uniform was starched so stiff it creaked. We listened for it, so we knew when she was coming. One day, she told me she went to Waharoa school, too, when she was a little girl, but I didn’t think she was ever little.”
“I don’t think I’d like to go to hospital.”
“It’s not bad. There were lots of other kids.”
“Any Maoris?”
“A few. One of them died.”
“Dad said some Maori kids didn’t go to hospital. He said too many of their parents don’t have the money to go to the doctor, and they don’t trust them anyway. They’d rather go to the tohunga.”
“What’s the tohunga?”
“The Maori doctor.”
“I didn’t know they had a doctor. I thought they weren’t supposed to be there in the hospital, till I saw them in bed. And one of the other kids’ mothers said they had no right.”
“Have you ever seen any Maoris at the doctor’s in Matamata?”
“Hardly ever.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?”
“I never thought of it before,” said Colleen. “Some of the other kids died, too.”
“Did you see them?”
“You could tell the ones who were going to die: they had screens round their beds. You’d wake up at night, there’d be voices, lights, and shadows moving around, and in the morning they’d be gone. Like a bad dream.”
Colleen pushed back her brown hair. “One morning, they took a boy away on a trolley, and we never saw him again. I asked the funny nurse, and she said, ‘You don’t want to go bothering yourself about the poor creature now.’
“We were all scared they’d come and put the screens around us, and put us on a trolley, and take us away. One of the big kids said that’s what they do to you when you’re dying: shove you into a room and leave you to die there on your own. It’s called the mortuary.”
“All alone?”
“That’s what he reckoned. The little kids cried, but I asked the nice nurse, and she said, ‘Why would we even dream of doing that to a child?’ And she gave the big boy a telling-off.
“Some of the very sick ones got better, ‘cause I saw them again. Lying there all the time, you see lots of things in hospital. One night, I woke up and there were screens around a little girl’s bed, next to mine, and somebody was crying in the shadows. I heard her sniff, blow her nose, and go back in behind the screens. I couldn’t see properly, but it was the matron.”
“How—?”
“Her uniform crackled. I told the funny nurse next morning, and she said, ‘She’s the same as everyone else, but she’s not supposed to show it, or we’d all be boo-hooing our eyes out instead of getting on with our jobs.’”
Colleen did the nurse’s voice so well, I laughed.
“What happened to the little girl behind the screens?”
“They’d taken her away next morning.”
“Did you ever see the mortuary?”
“That boy said you only see it when you’re going to die.”
“Oh. How did you go to the lavatory?”
“They put you on a sort of pot.”
“In bed?”
“They lifted you up and slid it under. It’s called a bedpan.”
“Eugh!”
“You got used to it. The nurses helped you and wiped you. It was like when you’re sick at home, and your mother holds you on the chamber.”
“I remember my mother holding me,” I told Colleen, “because I was scared of falling in.” We both shrieked.
“We had to do exercises to help us walk again. Holding yourself up between two rails. I was lucky, so I can walk without callipers.”
“I wouldn’t like to wear them.”
“One of the boys in hospital,” Colleen said, “I saw him in Matamata last Friday
night, having trouble getting along Arawa Street, and he has crutches as well as callipers.
“My mother says the infantile’s something to do with the sun. It comes in hot summers, like 1925, and again now. And it goes away once the weather gets cold.”
“Mrs Dainty said it’s a punishment God sends because we’re sinful.”
Colleen grabbed my arm. “Why’s Freddy Jones walking like that?”
“He kept saying I’ve got no mother, so I fixed him. I told him there’s a tiger called Shere Khan under the lawsonianas; that’s why he’s tiptoeing down the other side of the road. Have you read The Jungle Book?”
“I got it for a Sunday school prize. What was the snake’s name?”
“Kaa!” I hissed and huffed.
Colleen hissed and huffed, too, and we went after Freddy Jones, hissing, huffing, and flickering our tongues in and out, but he tore through the school gate and hid down in the boys’ dunnies where we couldn’t go.
Chapter Nineteen
What Went Into Dad’s Old Furry Soup, What We Found Put Away in the Cupboard, and Why My Mother Said I Was Always Going to be Special.
AFTER SCHOOL, MILLY EXPLORED THE COALSHED; she went into the darkness and didn’t come when I called. I sat on the back step and, suddenly, she was there, shaking her head as if she was going to sneeze, wiping her paw over her ears, like the time she explored the chimney.
“You will go poking your nose into the cobwebs.” I put her inside, and ran down to the shops.
So many of the girls came home with me, Dad said he never knew who he’d find having lunch, but he didn’t mind, not really. I asked Flora Guy, and she said, “I’ve got two grey cats at home with black stripes and eyes like barley-sugar. So there!” and she looked away.
Milly explored the shed under the other tank-stand, sniffing between the jars of bottled fruit. By the time I took her down to the bottom shed, she was used to being outside. She disappeared among the barrels, and I was scared she might have met a giant rat like the one that wanted to fight Dad, but she came out, sat down, and washed and wiped her face and ears, as usual.
The first time she met the chooks, she stuck her tail straight up, bent her back, and spat. I remembered what Dad said about the wicked old white rooster pecking my eyes, but he was out in the paddock, so she was okay.
It got colder; we kept the doors closed and sat near the stove. We had stews, and Dad made Old Furry soup out of old bacon bones, old split peas, old carrots, old parsnips, old potatoes, and any-old-anything-else he could find in the cupboards.
“A bowl of Old Furry a day keeps the scurvy away,” he sang, and I sang back, “Old Furry’s so thick it makes Milly sick.” Then Dad said he was going to fill the hot water bottle with Old Furry, and I gulped.
Milly grew bigger and became an outside cat while I was at school each day. The old rooster squawked a warning to the chooks once, and I ran to see if there was a hawk, but it was Milly crouching on their roof, her barley-sugar eyes glaring like a tiger’s.
Dad read his way through both Jungle Books, and Mowgli killed Shere Khan with the help of the buffaloes, spread his striped skin on the Council Rock, and said, “Look well, O Wolves!” I liked the sound of that so much, I tried saying it to Freddy Jones each time we met, but he didn’t understand because his father didn’t read The Jungle Books to him.
The chapter about the bees killing the Red Dogs was scary, but nothing frightened me as much as Kaa, when he hypnotised the Bandar-log. I loved the story about Rikki-tikki-tavi, but Milly wouldn’t be a mongoose.
Dad told me, “You can’t make a cat be anything it doesn’t want to be, Maggie. They’re what you call independent.”
“What’s that?”
“They’ve got a mind of their own.”
“Anyway,” I said, “it takes too long to say Rikki-tikki-tavi every time I call her.”
Milly enjoyed winter: she slept on my bed, in front of the fire, and in the sun on my windowsill, but I still had to run to school through the frost. Freddy Jones showed off, cracking the ice on the puddles with his bare feet, trying to be tough, then rubbed his red toes on the back of his legs under his desk and looked thoughtful.
“Chilblains,” Dad said. “That reminds me.”
One Friday night, Mr Carter gave us a lift to Matamata, and we went to the Broadway Café, where the waitress wiped the table and said, “What are you going to have?” She brought us fish and chips and a whole plateful of buttered bread, and Dad had a cup of tea, but it was too strong for me. Then we went to Hannahs.
Mr Craig perched like a chook on the other end of the little stool, said “Put your foot up here”, and used a shoehorn to get my foot in. He pushed with his fingers to make sure there was plenty of room at the toes, and that the shoes were wide enough.
“‘Flat shoes, fat shoes’,” I whispered.
“Wouldn’t mind a bob for every time I’ve heard that.” Mr Craig laughed.
When we got home, Dad said, “At least I know your feet are warm. Besides, those old ones were getting tight.”
“This dress is a bit tight, too.”
“It’ll have to last you the winter, but I really must do something about your clothes this summer. I can buy shorts and shirts for you; it’s the dresses that worry me. Mrs Dainty’s bound to know somebody who does sewing, who’ll run up something for you, for next year.
“We were lucky you had all those things to grow into, the last couple of years. I didn’t even know your mother had them put away.”
We’d found the clothes in the big cupboard in the spare room, laid carefully between soft tissue paper, with mothballs. “I knew there were spare sheets and towels, things like that,” Dad said, “but not clothes for you. Just as well we came across them when we did.”
“Why?”
“Well, at the rate you’re growing…”
We hung them out to air, but the sharp stink of mothballs took a while to go, even in the sun and wind.
“Why did Mummy put away all the clothes for me?” I asked.
“She liked to have things ready,” said Dad. “Some of those dresses, she might have been given. Women pass on clothes their children have grown out of, anything with a bit of wear in it.
“A lot of people can’t afford to buy new things. Most kids are lucky to get cast-offs and hand-me-downs.”
“Is it the Depression?”
“The Depression’s not making it easy, but clothes always get handed down, specially in a big family.”
“All Colleen’s things get handed down to her. She says it’s not fair.”
“Is she still trying to skip?”
“Not vinegar and pepper, and she can’t run in, but she can start from standing for a few skips before her leg gets tired.”
Dad held up some of my old baby clothes, a little dress ruched in front, tiny knitted bootees, and a crochet woollen cap—all with pink ribbons through the gathers.
“Did I fit into those?”
“Babies are pretty small. I suppose your mother kept them to look at, when you got bigger. Perhaps I should give them to somebody.”
“Can’t I keep them?”
“If you want to.”
“Did Mummy make them?”
“Like I said, women pass on a lot of stuff. You’ll see things go the rounds of umpteen different babies. Bassinets, prams, and cots. But, yes, all your baby clothes your mother made herself, before you were born.”
“For me?”
“She said you were always going to be special, her first baby, so she must have everything ready for you. By the time you were born, the drawers were so full, your mother said she was going to have to put several lots of clothes on you at once, or you’d grow out of them before they got any wear.”
I laughed. “Several lots. Was Mummy good at sewing?”
“She’d run up something on her sewing machine in the blink of an eye.”
“I wish I could sew.”
“Look at all the things you’ve made a
t school. You can darn socks, and knit. What about the blanket you sewed from peggy squares for Milly?”
“That’s not real sewing. Besides, Milly doesn’t like sleeping under it.”
“She likes sleeping on top of it though.”
“Dad, why are they called peggy squares?”
“After a girl down in Wellington, Peggy somebody or other. She made a blanket of them: it was in the paper, and the next thing, the idea caught on throughout the whole of the Dominion.”
“Was she the first?”
“That’s what the paper said.”
“I could make Bagheera a blanket. I wonder if he’s become a reliable cat?”
“I saw Mr Bluenose down at the shops, and he said to tell you that Bagheera’s a great hunter, like a black panther.”
“I might go down to the orchard tomorrow.”
“Take the basket to school with you, and you can go to the shops on your way home.”
Mr Bluenose was digging potatoes out of a clamp, to send off on the train.
“Bagheera? He is around somewhere. Give him a call. But he will only come if he wants to. He is—what do you say, Maggie?”
“Independent?”
“That is it, independent. I think you say he is a cat who knows his own mind.”
But I was already running through the orchard, between the rows of fruit trees, their pruned branches like tortured fingers.
“Bagheera! Bagheera!”
“Hello, Horse.” I stopped and patted him. Most of the pigs had gone, but the breeding sows oinked.
“Has anyone seen Bagheera?” I ran on.
Chapter Twenty
What I Told Mr Bryce About Bagheera and His First Rat, Why Mr Cleaver Said He’d Biff Dad One, and What Happened to the Last Bit of Sausage.
I’D ALMOST GIVEN UP, then saw the entrance to the gloomy tunnel under the macrocarpa branches and ran in.
“Bagheera!”
Mr Bluenose’s pumpkins glowed red and yellow in the dark. Something moved, and my feet stuck to the ground as I remembered the ghost that once floated down the tunnel, and scared the living daylights out of Freddy Jones and Billy Harsant.
I thought of Kaa’s enormous mouth, stared into his eyes, and heard his terrible voice hiss: “Come one pace nearer to me.” I swayed forward one step, a piece of blackness moved out of the dark, and rubbed itself around my legs, and I shrieked.