The Cherry Picker's Daughter

by Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert

  6

  Kids will be kids, and jumping fences

  One day, sister Lynnie was climbing on the bookcase when it fell on her. There was a scream and a big crash; she was knocked out and had to go to bed. Me and the two boys had to keep checking on her while Mummy finished off all her jobs.

  We sneaked up to the bed and listened to see if we can hear her breathing. The boys reckon, ‘Lynnie’s not breathing. She’s dead.’ I don’t believe them and say they’re lying but Kevin reckons he can prove it. He goes and gets the lid of the Sunshine milk tin and holds it up close to her mouth. He tells me, ‘If there’s no fog, then there’s no breath coming out and that means she’s dead’.

  He holds the lid close and I watch, eyes glued, for that fog to appear. I wanna know my sister is alive and just asleep; I don’t want her to be dead. Kevin pulls the lid away from her mouth and there’s nothing, no fog; nothing, not one sign to say my sister is alive. I’m about to cry when Paddy tells Kevin to do it again. He does and still there’s no fog on the lid. Tears start rolling down my face and I turn to run screaming to Mummy but Paddy catches me before I make it out the door, putting his hand over my mouth, telling me to quieten down. I stand, tears running like a tap as I watch my sister laying on that bed, not moving one inch, not one breath of air coming out of her lungs.

  The boys reckon they can bring her back to life. I’m stuck watching her body, wondering what would happen next. Her eyelids flicker. I hold my breath, wishing she would be alright. All of a sudden, Lynnie opens her eyes and starts laughing. The boys join in; they got me again! I walk outta the room, threatening to tell. Their laughter echoes behind me. Us four younger ones get on pretty good except when they tease me, and then we fight.

  There are lotsa trees and bushes scattered all around the Island. There’s even some big old fig trees and quince trees down the back in Pawsy’s paddocks. When they’re ripe, we sneak down and pick a heap. We gotta be careful that we don’t get caught but us kids reckon it’s worth the risk. Those old trees have got the biggest and nicest fruit you ever did see.

  Usually, I play cockatoo (lookout) just in case Mr Pawsy or his sons are coming to check on his paddock. The bigger kids reckon I can’t run as fast so I gotta sit on top of one of the fence posts and keep looking down the road for their car. I’ll know it’s him because the dust will be rising up into the air as he drives over the gutters and heads towards us. If I see him coming, I gotta yell real loud so we can run back home.

  The boys will grab a handful of fruit each and Lynnie holds her shirt out like a basket and they fill it right up till she can’t hold no more. Then we all head home and sit under our big old gum tree and start eating our rewards. After we’ve filled our faces, we all look at each other and laugh. The juice has run all down our mouths, making us look like babies dibbling. We even slobbered onto our shirts and blouses.

  We all head inside after we’ve had our bellyful. We try to sneak inside on Mummy but I reckon she knows what we done.

  She asks, ‘You kids ain’t been down where you shouldn’t have been, have you?’ She’s looking straight at the four of us. I try to duck a little bit behind Paddy.

  We tell her ‘no’ and then she tells us again, ‘You know you’re not allowed down there’.

  All together we tell her, ‘We know, Mummy’. Partners in crime forever. When Mummy’s not looking, we sneak some figs and quinces onto the fruit bowl on the kitchen table so that everyone can share in our prize.

  7

  This old house

  I reckon we got the best house on the Island. Lots of things happen there, good and bad. A real bad time was when I had to go to the hospital when I was about five and a half—it was terrible. They made me lie on a bed with this big, bright light over my head and then they put this white mask over my nose and mouth and then sprayed stuff onto it. I thought I was gonna die. They told me to close my eyes. I did, but then I opened them. I was terrified. There were all these people with masks over their faces standing over me. All I could see was these real big eyes looking at me. Then, this man was spraying me in the face and I’m screaming at the top of my lungs, trying to pull it off. I couldn’t breathe but they grabbed my hands and held me down real tight.

  I kept on trying to turn my head this way and that way, still trying to scream out for Mummy but they kept holding my arms and that mask against my face. Then, I don’t remember nothing till I woke up and Mummy was sitting beside me.

  I told Mummy, ‘I don’t ever wanna go back there again’.

  She said not to worry, ‘That’s what doctors do to make you better’. Well, they musta made me better—I never went back. I’m always happiest at home on the Island.

  There’s always music in our house. The big girls gotta gramophone; the music is always playing, with lotsa fun and laughter. Meryl and Maureen can rock ‘n’ roll. Today, it’s dancing time and Johnny, my biggest brother, and Meryl, my eldest sister, do the rock and roll steps for us. Johnny picks Meryl up and slides her over his back and underneath his legs, and they move their bodies to the sound of the music.

  I sit back and watch, not taking my eyes off them for a minute, as they slip and slide all over the polished floorboards of our lounge room dancing away. I wanna dance like that!

  After a while, we all get up and dance, even Mummy; she doesn’t rock’n’roll like the big ones but she moves her body around. Soon, everyone is worn out from the fast music. Somebody changes the music on the gramophone and puts on slower music; we learn to dance to the waltz. I gotta stand on Mummy’s shoes so she can teach me—‘one, two, three, one, two, three’. Everybody swaps around so that we all have a dance with each other.

  My big sisters, they know all the best songs; me and Lynnie, we know all the words, too. “North to Alaska”, “Roses are Red”, “Wolverton Mountain” and Elvis—they sing his songs, too. Always happiness is in our house, and laughing and singing. We’re all pretty happy together unless the other kids tease me.

  I’ve got wonderful big sisters, Meryl and Maureen, and they’re so beautiful. They wear pretty dresses with hundreds of petticoats underneath. They tell us girls that when we get big, we can have dresses like them. They let me and Lynnie slip on a petticoat; it’s made of net and scratches my skin but it doesn’t matter. We both dance and prance, showing off and feeling real pretty and very happy. We both smile up to our big sisters, wanting so much to be like them.

  They’re good big sisters, too. They cut up their dresses so they can make clothes for us kids. Mummy made our Condo Show Day clothes out of the girls’ old dresses. We all looked so beautiful and flash.

  Sometimes, if Mummy has enough money, us younger ones are allowed to go to the pictures up the main street. She lets us go to the matinee show on the weekend by ourselves. One day, we watched a Shirley Temple movie. Maureen reckons I can have ringlets just like her. She rips up some brown paper and wraps it in my hair. All night, I slept with my hair in the brown paper. The next day, when Maureen takes the paper out of my hair, the ringlets didn’t work. I got a head full of fuzzy hair instead. The kids call me a golliwog.

  I start to cry and run to tell Mummy: ‘I don’t look like Shirley Temple’.

  She gets Lynnie to wash my hair but it don’t straighten up. Lynnie tells me she’ll iron it straight for me. No way am I gonna let anyone iron my hair, especially with an old cast-iron iron that you have to heat up on the stove. She’ll burn my hair off! My hair went back to normal eventually but it took days. No more trying to look like Shirley Temple!

  Each night, we all sit around in the lounge room and listen to the wireless. First, we gotta listen to the news, then it’s music time. Everyone sings along to the songs that they play. Mummy, she can sing country and western and she can yodel, too, ‘yodelllllleettteeeee’. She even makes up songs as well but my favourite is when she sings the song about the frog.

  A frog went a courtin’ on a summer’s day, ha-hum

  A frog went a courtin’ on a summer’s
day, ha-hum

  There’s lotsa fun and singing but Mummy’s always working, too; she has to feed and clothe all us kids. We all have to pitch in and help do the jobs around the house. Mummy says, ‘We all gotta learn how to do these things so, when we’re grown up, we’ll be able to look after ourselves’. Paddy, Lynnie and Kevin are bigger so they have real jobs to do but I do little jobs, too. We take it in turns. One night, the boys cut the wood and bring it in while us girls set the table and wash up. The next night, they set the table and wash up, then it’s me and Lynnie’s turn to do the wood.

  I’m still only little so I’m not allowed to cut the wood yet but I help carry it in. Today, when it’s our turn to get the wood, Lynnie tells me, ‘Hold your hands out and bend them now, this way’. Starting to get angry, she plomps the wood onto my arms and the weight is getting to me.

  Sometimes, Lynnie stacks the wood real high on my arms and its real heavy. When she does that, I try to tell her but she won’t listen. I can’t carry it so I usually drop it all halfway between the wood heap and the house. Then, she has to stack me again.

  So, it’s two trips to the house instead of one. Some days, she’ll carry the other half for me, too. I don’t mind carrying the wood but I can’t wait till I’m big enough to be able to pick up the tomahawk and the axe, and swing them and split that wood in half.

  I wipe when Lynnie washes up while the boys do their work outside. The best job we got is polishing the lounge-room floor and making the boards nice and shiny. I sit on the polishing rag so they can pull me around to shine the floor while I hang on to the sides with all my might so I don’t fall over.

  Depending on who’s pulling me along, they even spin me around in circles! The boys do this real fast, trying to make me fall off. Sometimes, if I’m not hanging on real tight, over I go. Paddy, Lynnie and Kevin all take turns having a go at pulling each other. I try to help drag them around the room.

  After the floor has been shined with our bums, we turn the music up real loud and we stand on a rag each, and we dance and glide all over the floor. We have races, too. We have a race to see who can make it to the other side of the lounge room first. I don’t win that often since the other kids are quicker. Every now and then, they let me win and I think that I’m just it when they do that.

  When we’re finished playing and polishing, the floor always is real shiny and we can see our faces and bodies in it. When we’re happy with it and had enough playing, we sing out to Mummy to come and have a look.

  Lynnie puts Chubby Checker on the gramophone and we start doing the twist; Paddy pretends he has a microphone in his hands and starts singing to the song “Let’s Twist Again”. Kevin’s twisting right down to the floor. Mummy stands at the door watching us, a big smile on her face. We show off when she’s standing there.

  She’s happy. Her eyes twinkle and she says, ‘What a great job you kids did’. She tells us she’s got a surprise for us.

  We follow her into the kitchen, and on the table, are some freshly made jam and apple tarts that she just pulled outta the old wood-fire oven. Our bellies are hungry all of a sudden. We sit down to pig-out on some of Mummy’s wonderful cooking and a cup of Milo. Summer is here and, after a good feed and rest, we all head down to the best swimming spot in the Lachlan. We’re happy kids. Life is good.

  8

  The silo and the Welfare Man

  One time, during a flood, we stayed on the Island as long as we could, avoiding school, waiting for the water to go down. If the river floods, we gotta leave the Island but the Welfare reckons school is more important than staying put. When the river goes down, we come home again.

  When the next flood happens, we go live in the tent up near the old silo beside the railway track. It’s in town and not too far from the school and the shops, and there’s a water tap there. Whenever we go live in the tent, we have to make sure that we can have clean drinking water.

  The silo is big and old and dusty, and some kids have written inside and outside with paint; they mainly write their names. We use the silo for our playground and we sneak a look inside when Mummy’s not looking. We always check to see if somebody has written something new on the walls while we were back living on the Island. We’d be in real trouble if Mummy caught us playing inside.

  We’re not allowed to play on the railway tracks either. It’s dangerous and the trains are real fast and noisy. All we hear is a ‘chug, chug, chug’ and ‘whooeee’—the sound of the whistle blowing. The tracks are so old they rattle as the train storms down the line. We don’t have to worry about a clock. We can tell the time when the train comes by.

  Mummy’s got our spot for the tent. Putting us to work, we start picking up the sticks and stones to clear a spot for it to go up.

  ‘Come on, you kids, you’ve gotta sweep all the leaves and stones up now,’ she says.

  Clutching the broom and leafy tree branches, we start to sweep away. Grabbing the buckets, Paddy and Kevin head to the tap to fill them up with water so we can sprinkle the dirt, settling it. No dust will fly around now. Laying the tent out in the middle of the clearing, we grab the corners and start to spread it out. The tent is huge!

  All in a row, we sort out the tent posts, pegs and ropes, getting them ready to stick into the tent to hold it up. Mummy grabs the longest pole, putting the two ends together. The top looks like the teat on a baby’s bottle. She finds the opening of the tent, shoving the pole with the teat end into its guts and sticking it out through the top hole—it begins to look like a tepee.

  Her muscles ripple as she follows the pole inside the flaps, yelling out to Paddy to come inside and help hold it up. He runs inside and Mummy comes out so we can get the ropes and pegs in. The tent starts to buckle in the middle, but Paddy quickly rights it again. It would have fell on him if he had let it go.

  ‘Hold the post tight, Paddy,’ Mummy sings out.

  ‘I’m trying to,’ he yells in reply. She sends Kevin in to help him.

  Hooking the rope over the top of the side posts, she pulls each rope tight. Lynnie and me run and help, holding the tent while she pounds the posts into place with the hammer. Soon, she calls out to the boys and they help pull the ropes tighter into the dirt. The tent is firmly placed.

  Dragging in our clothes and some old tea boxes, we begin to make our tent a home—working out where the kitchen and beds go is fun. Our cupboards and drawers are made from the tea boxes that have tablecloths draped over them so they look real nice and people can’t tell what they are. Covered over, the box quickly becomes our kitchen; a dish for our washing up is close by. The pots and pan are stored together with the plates, bowls, knives, forks and spoons into other boxes.

  Paddy strings some rope down the middle of the tent and Mummy lays a sheet over it, dividing the room. She’s a real stickler for privacy. The boys have a bed each on their side of the tent and Mummy and Lynnie have a bed each, too. I sleep at the foot of Mummy’s bed. I don’t mind—I don’t need my own bed. She reads each night as she waits for us kids to fall asleep. She doesn’t read too long as candles are expensive and she don’t like them being wasted.

  We’ve been living in the tent next to the silo for a while now and the Welfare man, he’s coming today, checking up on us. Mummy tells us how important it is for us to be real good in front of him and that everything’s gotta be spotless. The tent is spick and span. There’s not one thing out of place. I don’t know why she worries, it’s always clean, anyway. Mummy, she’s real neat and tidy and us kids are, too. We make our beds, wash up, wipe up and put things away.

  She tells me to be good when he’s here and to have nice manners like the other kids who have gone to school. We always have nice manners anyway and are always good. I wonder what the fuss is all about.

  Mummy gets the straw broom this day and sweeps our dirt floor inside the tent. She fills a bucket of water and sprinkles water over the dirt to stop the dust rising. Us kids sweep the dirt outside around the tent, picking up any leaves or rubbish.
I love the smell of the water on the dirt. It smells like when it rains. I have fun sprinkling the water but I think I made more puddles than sprinkles.

  The Welfare man comes and goes, and she tells us we’re good kids. We all smile and feel real proud of ourselves, each one of us wanting and needing her praise. I think we’re good kids, too, except when the others tease me. We know the importance of having to be good, especially when we hear the word ‘Welfare’. Somehow, we know life’s hard enough as it is without having the Welfare knocking on our door. Living in fear of the Welfare quickly becomes a part of my young life, even though I don’t really understand why.

  I ask Lynnie who is the Welfare, but she just says, ‘Don’t worry about it’.

  She thinks I’m too little and wouldn’t understand. I get real mad when they do that to me, treating me like a baby. I wanna know. I yell at her and stamp my foot; she tells me that she’ll tell me later when no one’s around.

  Later, Lynnie tells me a horrible thing: the Welfare man, he can take us away from Mummy if the house isn’t spotless or if we aren’t going to school or even if we muck up. He can take us away just if he feels like it! She says he can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t need any reason and no one can stop him—not even Mummy.

  She tells me I’d better be good or the Welfare will come and take me away. I tell her I’ll always be good—I don’t wanna go anywhere. I just wanna stay here with my family.

  It’s different living in town and living in a tent. The shops are closer so we don’t have to walk down the gutters day or night, but we all wanna go home. The Island’s the best place. We all wait for the day Mummy says we can go home to the Island—home to where we belong.

  One day, the other kids go to school and, when they come back to the tent, Mummy and me are packing our things up. The river’s gone down again. Time to shift home.