The Cherry Picker's Daughter

by Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert

  Then I remember sister, Meryl, telling the story of the time Mummy was really sick and had to go to hospital for a big operation. The doctors thought she was gonna die. She had no one to look after the six bigger kids—me and Kevin weren’t born yet—so she had to tell the Welfare they were ‘uncontrollable’. It was the only way she could get help to look after the big ones when she was in hospital, but they put my brother and sisters into a Home; I don’t think Johnny and Darryl went. The place was in Sydney although I can’t remember for sure. The people there did terrible things to my family, just terrible.

  When they were kids in this home, Meryl had to make a bed on the floor beside Paddy’s cot. This was so that she could change him and his sheets before the nuns came and found him wet in the morning. They used to flog him if he was. So, each morning before those bad people woke up, Meryl would change him and his cot sheets and then run back to her bed, pretending that she slept there all night and that everything was okay.

  Mummy’s never around when the older girls tell us these stories about the Home; she’d be upset to know what they had done to her kids. I hear the stories and I hate the Welfare so much. Soon, Mummy comes home and we’re happy.

  18

  Cherry-picking time

  We’re still living on the Island in the humpy and the bus, and we keep heading for the work in the paddocks to earn a living and eventually to get another house. We do the cherries in Young and then head to Orange to start all over again. It’s six o’clock in the morning. Mummy’s singing out, ‘Time to get up’. Okay, I don’t want to get up, but I gotta. We gotta pick the cherries. If we don’t, it’s simple: no Christmas and no house.

  There’s Mummy getting our breakfast. She never complains unless the cherries are bad or green—then we can’t earn as much money. My brothers are yawning and pulling the blankets over their heads and Lynnie’s still pretending to be asleep. Me, I just don’t wanna get up at all.

  Mummy’s hurrying us, telling us to move. I hold my breath hoping she’ll let me stay asleep. I pull the blanket around me tighter, telling Mummy I’m tired and feeling sick, too; trying just a bit harder to escape getting out of bed this early in the morning. It’s freezing cold out there where the fruit is.

  She tells me that the fire is going outside so I’m to get out of bed in ten minutes. When I’m feeling better, then I have to come down to the paddock and work. Mummy didn’t like leaving us anywhere by ourselves for too long; she always worried about us. Me, I’m happy. I knew I could do it, get away with blue murder. The other kids are calling me a sook.

  I don’t care. I lie back, counting my blessings—how happy I am—but then I think about the cherries and how we’re supposed to work really hard. Slowly, I climb out of bed and get dressed and head down to the cherry trees. My feet are dragging. I kick the dirt, dust flying all around, my heart aching as tears run down my face in the cold. I look around at the cherry trees. I reckon we would’ve picked every single one in all the years that our families been coming here.

  It’s the same when we go to Young, too; we pick all the time at Cunich’s. Gegg, he’s our boss; he thinks the world of Mummy and us kids. He saves our job for us every year and our hut, too. Every year, we come back to the same bosses and the same paddocks. I tell everyone I was born under a cherry tree ’cause it sure feels like it. I meet Lynnie halfway because Mummy sent her back to come get me.

  Matt, our boss in Orange, is pretty good, too, and he saves our hut for us each picking season. It isn’t really a hut, it’s actually an old rundown railway carriage and cold. It feels like the morning air finds its way through every little crack in the walls just so it can make us colder. It’s divided into two rooms, one for us girls and Mummy, and the front room for the boys and the tucker.

  There’s no kitchen, just a dish and a tea towel that gets used every tucker time and gets cleaned and put away after every meal. We make our furniture out of old boxes and old picking tins. Mummy puts tablecloths and tea towels over everything to make it look nice. It’s home for the next couple of weeks so we gotta make the best of it. The old train has lotsa holes in it. Us kids gotta screw up and wet old newspaper to plug them up; we make a game of it, even though it’s so freezing.

  Another day and I hear Mummy’s voice again. ‘It’s up and at ’em’—her favourite saying—‘Cherry-picking time.’ I drag my poor little body out of that warm bed. ‘It’s cold, Mummy.’ She puts another log on the fire outside, building it up so it hasn’t died out by the time we get out there. We’ll warm ourselves up before walking to the row we are working on. I rub my eyes and try to make my body move.

  Time to head down to the paddock. At Matt’s place, you don’t have too far to get to your rows and it’s easy to carry your buckets and your ladders from tree to tree and row to row. Matt gives each family a certain number of rows so that we’ll get big trees and little trees, good trees and bad trees. It’s also a way for him to keep a check on how you treat the trees and who are the good pickers.

  In some other paddocks, it seems like you gotta walk for miles or sometimes, if the cherry trees are too far away, the boss will pick you up on the tractor. Then, you gotta load your buckets and your ladders on, too. Sometimes, the other pickers, they’ll take your favourite bucket or ladder and, when they do, it causes us more work. It’s easy to get angry with them when you gotta walk all around the paddock and find it and lug it back. Picking can be really hard work and we have to work harder than the white people, too. They get more money for a pound of cherries than we do. We only get ten cents a pound while they get twenty cents. It doesn’t seem fair to me, even as a little kid, especially since we’re the hardest workers Matt’s got. One day, I ask Mummy why we get paid less than white people. She tells me, ‘That’s the way it is’.

  Although we get paid less, Matt is pretty good. He looks after us and treats Mummy with respect and is kind to us kids. After the cherries are over, he lets us stay and get all the leftover fruit, like the ones that didn’t ripen in time, so we can earn extra money. It’s not too bad but it’s harder to pick a lot as the trees may only have a handful left on them. We have to lug our heavy ladder to a tree but might only get ten cherries off it and then have to lug it again to the next. Us kids have fun in the paddock by ourselves, though, and we don’t work too hard once the season is ending. I think we play more than we pick. Our poor old Mummy—she always works hard.

  Once we have picked all the leftover cherries, we sell them door-to-door, trying to earn that extra dollar. People are pretty good, too. The ones we sell to, they usually buy them. We make sure there’s no kids around when we sell door-to-door as we really don’t like being teased for doing it. We don’t mind too much here in Orange, though, ’cause we don’t know anybody in this town.

  Mummy, she’s a ‘gun’ picker, even in Young. That means she’s the best picker in the paddock but she also picks a lot of buds. Me and Mummy, we’ve got a trick that Matt or Gegg don’t know about. When you pick cherries, you’re not allowed to pick the buds—they’re the leaves with the new buds on them—because that’s next year’s fruit. The very first job you get as a tiny kid is to pick the buds out of the cherry box and hide them. This is my job from when I’m old enough to know what a bud is. I get them from the bin every time Mummy empties her buckets so that they don’t find them in amongst the cherries.

  But the best job is to run around the tree and pick up all the buds that have fallen on the ground, and then run and hide them. Sometimes, I dig a little hole in the dirt and bury them or I’ll climb up another tree, real high, and hide them in the fork. I always have to hurry and to be real careful that Matt or Gegg don’t catch me or find all of the buds. I don’t want Mummy to get into trouble. These cherries are our ticket to a new life, a house and escaping the Welfare.

  19

  All the way to Grafton Jail

  It’s 1967 and all those whispers about another father were true! Lynnie wasn’t lying; she was telling the truth. Anothe
r father and he’s me and Kevin’s, not Lynnie’s or Paddy’s or anyone else’s but ours. He belongs to nobody but us two. Mummy tells us we’re going to see him. She must think me and Kevin’s real grown-up now. I’m still seven so I must be big enough to know about grown-up things. Feeling special, deep down inside me I glow, feeling love in my heart for this man and knowing, too, that somebody else loves me.

  We’re gonna go and see our Dad in Grafton Jail. Grafton is a long, long way away and Daddy is gonna drive us there.

  ‘What time we going, Mummy?’ I ask.

  ‘Sparrow fart.’

  So I know we’re going before the birds wake up. We’re excited because it’s our first trip without the other kids which makes us feel important and grown-up at the same time.

  Kevin and me are on our best behaviour; we don’t want nothing to stop us from seeing our Dad. We play games to make the time go faster: spot the milepost, spot the number plates starting with ‘S’ or maybe ‘H’, make words from them. Then it’s ‘I spy with my little eye something that starts with T’—it has to be in the car: thermos! Mummy has tea and sandwiches for us to eat along the way. We laugh a lot, excited. Mummy sings her favourite songs to us, then we sing with her. Daddy keeps driving. The miles from Condo go fast; we’re getting closer to him with each minute.

  Mummy starts crying for her baby brother. She tells us, again, about being good—no crying—and what it might be like when we see him. Daddy tries to stop her from being sad, saying, ‘It’s all right, Joyce. It’s all right.’ Kevin and me stop smiling. We look at each other, sit back and don’t say nothing for a long time. No more games. I feel like crying, too.

  There’s Grafton. It’s got lots of funny trees growing everywhere. We ask Mummy what they are. She tells us they’re banana trees, but there’s no paddocks. Me and Kevin can’t believe it; the fruit trees are everywhere.

  We have a little holiday in town and stay in our first motel, ever; I think I’m a real lady, pretending to be real flash with lotsa money, living like kings and queens. We can even run out and pick a banana off the tree but we gotta be careful to get a ripe one. Me and my brother get on so good, not fighting or mucking up, and I know that Mummy and Daddy are real proud of us.

  Tomorrow, we’re gonna see our Dad.

  20

  Behind the bars

  This is our first time meeting him, this man who is our Dad, but I know nothing about him. My real father—that sounds so good—I like the way it rolls off my tongue: ‘my real father’. There’s a sweetness to the words that I never felt before but that doesn’t mean I don’t love Daddy. I do—he’s my father—but now I’ve got two fathers; that’s something so special and so good.

  I’m excited. I don’t have to share him with anyone, only Kevin. Having two fathers made me different from the other kids. Having another father made me different ’cause when you’re the baby of eight you get lost in everyone else’s world. I’m sad for Lynnie and Paddy, though; their real Dad (Uncle Athol) died but ours didn’t—only our mother (Goma). At least we all still got Mummy and Daddy to share.

  Telling us about what it will be like seeing him, Mummy tries to tell us that he will be in a big place where they keep people. It might be scary. We don’t understand but say, ‘Yes, Mummy’. She says that we have to be good, that we can’t cry when we leave or in front of him and to make sure to tell him that we love him.

  Mummy never cries but she’s crying. She’s saying, ‘It might be hard for us—we might not be able to touch him or talk to him much’. She doesn’t tell us why. She wouldn’t have told us or let any of my older brothers or sisters tell us; it was her way of protecting us. That’s why Lynnie would’ve got a hiding if she did tell why she made me promise not to say nothing.

  We’re there at last and we go into the jail. It is scary. Big red-brick walls and barbed wire loom in front of me. Walking down a long hall, the walls feel like they are crashing into me. There’s nothing but brick and iron bars. This place is so gigantic. Clutching Mummy’s hand, I cling tighter with each step we take. I want to hide behind her skirt and never let go.

  We walk for a while and there’s a wooden seat plank stuck out from the wall. Above it, there’s a square window with bars across it. The man in uniform tells Mummy to wait before he goes away and comes back out. She looks through the window and talks to someone. She stands Kevin up on the seat to see him. Then it’s my turn now.

  On tiptoes, I try to stretch my body as far as I can so he can see me. He’s behind the brick wall and the window’s real small, just a square cut into the wall. The bars are so thick; we want to force our face between them but we can’t.

  We take it in turns, me and Kevin, standing up there. He makes us turn our faces this way and that so he can see what we look like. We aren’t allowed to touch him or to put our hands up to his face and he can’t touch us neither. He tells us to walk right back to the other side of the hall so he can see how grown-up we are. I walk back to the other side and turn this way and that way so that he can see how grown-up his two babies are. He tells us how handsome Kevin is and how pretty I am. My belly does flip-flops; I’m beaming from deep down inside with happiness.

  We’re smiling. Love is all over us from loving this man with the sad eyes staring at us from behind the bars in a wall. We visit and talk. Mummy’s turn again. She tells him how the rest of the family are going, how the house got burnt down and everything else she thinks he needs to know; hiding her tears behind her hanky.

  The man in uniform comes over and says we gotta leave. We start walking out but then we both turn at the same time and yell, ‘We love you’. The hall reveals itself in front of us again. An eternity flashes past us before we reach the outside. Sadness is deep inside me with a hundred million questions.

  How come he’s there, Mummy?

  When is he coming home, Mummy?

  How come there’s all that barbed wire around the place?

  Why couldn’t we see him again, Mummy?

  Why couldn’t we touch him, Mummy?

  We ask those questions, getting some answers but not. Some things are better off left unsaid. I look at Mummy’s face and glimpse the tears that well from deep inside her heart. Her eyes are so sad; sad like my father’s eyes were. My brother has his head down, lost in his own thoughts, like me. He’s not knowing what to do. Maybe he’s feeling like me; he don’t know what to say, just feeling helpless, a feeling like you’re drowning in the river and no one’s reaching out to save you.

  I wonder why life has to be so bad to us that it wants to cause us all this misery. Our house burns down, my father’s locked in a bad place and I don’t know why. Mummy’s sad, our father’s sad, today me and Kevin are sad, too. And we got the Welfare.

  We go home to the other kids and tell them all about our visit. I start crying as I tell Lynnie. Me and Kevin don’t talk too much about it. I guess we really don’t understand what’s going on. All the grown-ups in the family want to hear the news and want to know how our father is doing. They come for a visit: Uncle Paddy, Aunty Carol, everyone. All us kids are sent outside to play. We know we’re not allowed to be around when the grown-ups are talking. ‘Kids are seen and not heard.’

  I hear Daddy and Uncle Paddy telling Mummy that everything will be all right and not to cry. ‘He’ll be home one day, Joyce.’ I wanna run away and hide; I hate it when she cries.

  In a few days, she yells out to Kevin and me to show us a letter and photos she is sending to Dad. On the back of the photo she wrote, ‘To Dad, love Kerry xx’ or ‘To Dad, love Kevin xx’. We know now we have this Dad—one that’s locked away and miles from us. Today, she has a parcel to send to him. Soon, however, memories of our father get lost in everyday life.

  21

  Earning a quid

  Uncle Paddy comes and takes us rabbiting. He loves hunting and we love going with him. We come back with the best mob of rabbits you ever did see. Uncle lets us pick good ones to give to Mummy. I guess he thought they�
�d cheer her up. Usually, he keeps the good ones and sells them.

  I’m about eight when brother Johnny, and his wife, Beryl, come to live with us in the bus. The bigger boys add another room onto the hut for Paddy and Kevin. One day, Nay is screaming. He fell on his bottle and cut his face bad. There’s blood everywhere. They rush him to the hospital and he has to have stitches down his cheek; it doesn’t look good.

  Nay, he likes to have black tea in his bottle with a little bit of sugar—it’s his favourite. But the people at the hospital, they don’t like him having black tea and sugar in his bottle. Beryl says that it’s the only way he goes to sleep.

  Us kids visit him on the ward and, when they’re not looking, we run and make him a bottle just the way he likes it. The hospital’s old and scary, too; we gotta walk a long way to go and see him ’cause where they have him is right at the back. They kept Aboriginal people in a different ward: one for them and one for us. Nay comes home from hospital and the wound heals. It leaves a scar but he looks as cute as he did before.

  We go back to school and Mummy looks for whatever work she can find. She gets a job as a cook at a pub. Sometimes, when we have enough money to buy a lolly at Archie’s fish-and-chip shop, we go up there from school during lunchtime, to say hello to her.

  At the shops, we might get an old sixpence in our change and, if we do, we save it and take it home to Mummy because she likes to save old coins. Us kids love it when that happens; that means we’re doing something special for her, for once—she’s always doing something special for us.

  Sometimes, Mummy would give us spending money on the way to school. We stop at Wright Heaton’s, our favourite shop, and buy sixpence worth of hard-boiled lollies or a shilling’s-worth of broken biscuits. Mr Wright Heaton, he gives us good biscuits as well as the broken ones, and I always seem to get more than the other kids, the lollies, too. If we only have a sixpence or a shilling for the lot of us, the other kids send me into the shop to get the biscuits or lollies. Mr Wright Heaton always gives me a big bagful, even bigger than before.