by Jack Lasenby
“It must be tough on his tablecloth,” I said.
“By the end of the day, when he’s made such a mess he can’t read that page of the Weekly any longer, he just tears it off and chucks it into the stove to light the fire next morning. That’s how Old Gotta starts off every day with a clean tablecloth. I don’t know that I’d go telling your mother, though. It’s the sort of thing that gets her dander up.”
“Does Mr Henry use serviettes?”
“That’s another story,” said Uncle Trev. “I’ll tell it to you some time. Hooray.”
I sat up and waved to Old Tip, but all I saw was his tail disappearing around the side of the house. It was a few minutes before Mum came in, and the noise of cranking and backfiring and tooting and rattling off down Ward Street had died down.
“What’s that man been telling you behind my back? Why didn’t he stay and have a cup of tea like a civilised human being? There’s a whole tinful of Louise cake in the cupboard; I only bake it because I know it’s his favourite.”
“How was Mrs Macdonald?”
“She said to say hello, and she sent along some of her old Weeklies for you.”
“Uncle Trev takes the Weekly, and Mr Henry –” I pulled myself up before I said too much. “Mr Henry borrows it from time to time,” I told Mum.
“Borrows it for what? Everyone knows the man can’t read a word to save himself.”
I stopped myself just in time. “He likes to look at the pictures,” I whispered.
“Well, if that’s all he does with it, then we should be thankful for small mercies,” said my mother. “For a moment, I thought you were going to say he uses it as a tablecloth. Just the slovenly sort of trick those men get up to, baching on their own. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
I closed my eyes.
“That uncle of yours, he’s tired you out, hasn’t he?” Mum drew the blind, and tiptoed out to the kitchen. She pulled her chair up to the table, sat down, and I heard the rustle as she opened something, the Auckland Weekly by the sound of it.
Chapter Twenty-six
Why Old Tip Barked at Gotta Henry
“When we came home from the Great War,” said Uncle Trev, “Old Gotta Henry was a bit crook from the shell-shock.”
“Mum says that’s all over now. She says we’re best forgetting war; it’s time to get on with things.”
Uncle Trev scratched his head, put his hat back on, and nodded. “Your mother’s probably right, but I’m not talking about the war: I’m talking about the time afterwards, and how Old Gotta was still a bit funny. On the troopship coming home, he reckoned that once he got back to New Zealand they wouldn’t ever get him out of the place again, not for all the Kaisers and Johnny Turks in the world.
“Back home we put our names in the ballot for what they called the Soldiers’ Settlement. As it worked out, the blocks they gave us were next door to each other. We propped up the shafts of a dray and slept under a few sheets of corrugated iron till the government hired us a bell tent that we put up on the boundary. Old Gotta slept on what he reckoned was his farm, and I slept on mine, and we got stuck into clearing the scrub, burning off, ploughing, sowing ryegrass and clover to replace the danthonia and brown top.
“Our stores sometimes came wrapped in old copies of the Herald, and I noticed Old Gotta shied off looking at them. And when I first started taking the Weekly News, he didn’t open it, not even to look at the pictures. He didn’t want to hear anything more about the war, he didn’t want to read about it, talk about it, he didn’t even want to think about it. In a way, I suppose, he was like your mother.”
“Mum wouldn’t like to hear you saying that.”
Uncle Trev nodded again. “Old Gotta still won’t have anything to do with Anzac Day.”
“Nor will you, Mum says.”
“Well, there’s a lot like us, you know. Anyway, the County Council decided to put up a memorial at the Totaraville crossroads, and the chairman wrote to Old Gotta asking if he’d make a speech at the unveiling.”
“Why did they ask Mr Henry?”
“He’s a decorated man, Old Gotta.”
“What does that mean?”
“They gave him a medal on Gallipoli, and another in France.”
“Has he still got them?”
“He biffed them over the side of the troopship on our way home.”
“Why?”
“‘I didn’t ask for them,’ Old Gotta said. Then a few days later he mumbled, ‘They can’t make me wear them if I haven’t got them, and nobody else’s going to wear them either.’ It took me a while to realise what he was talking about.”
“What was the memorial they wanted to put up?”
“A field gun, the sort they used to tow behind a team of horses.”
“Wow.”
“People wrote into the local rag and said it mightn’t be such a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“You never know what the larrikins are going to get up to in Totaraville on a Saturday night. Anyway, the County Council set it up at the crossroads with the wheels fixed in concrete. Nothing was going to shift that gun, the chairman said.
“Old Gotta hadn’t replied to the first letter, but now he got another, asking him to make a speech at the unveiling. ‘I’ll unveil their gun,’ he said, and he was silent again.
“The time was coming closer for the ceremony, the anniversary of Armistice Day, the day the fighting stopped.”
“I know. The factory whistle blows at eleven o’clock. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. And you’ve got to stop whatever you’re doing and stand silent for two minutes and think about the dead. Mr Strap told us at school.”
Uncle Trev nodded. “Much good it does them.”
“Mum said you mustn’t talk like that.”
“I told you, I’m not talking about the war. I’m talking about Old Gotta and that field gun.
“Old Tip woke me with his barking, early one morning, it must have been nearly time to get up for milking, and I heard a horse trotting up our road. ‘Who’s riding home that late?’ I said to myself, and went back to sleep.
“Old Gotta was bringing his cows up to the shed when I was letting the last of mine out of the bail that morning, so I went over to give him a hand or he’d miss the milk lorry. He didn’t have much to say, and I didn’t say much myself. We got his cans on the konaki, and sledged them out to the milk-stand at his gate. Then I noticed the saddle Old Gotta borrowed off me was slung over the fence near his whare. And I thought of how Old Tip had started growling at Old Gotta as we arrived at his shed earlier.”
“He growled at Mr Henry?”
“Only because Old Gotta looked different. Once Old Tip got a sniff of him, he knew who he was all right.”
“Why’d Mr Henry look different?”
“No eyebrows, moustache all frizzled up, and he’d lost the hair off his forehead.
“‘I was in a hurry lighting the fire this morning, Trev,’ Old Gotta told me. ‘I put on some kerosene to get it going, and it must have blown back when I threw on a match.’
“Now, I knew kerosene doesn’t blow back like that, not like benzine and meths: they go off with a whump. Old Gotta was deafer than usual that morning – something went wrong with his hearing in France – so I didn’t say anything much, just went home and cooked my porridge.
“A few days later, I read in the Matamata Record that somebody had been playing around with that field gun at the Totaraville crossroads.”
“What had they done?”
“Shoved a stick of gelly down the barrel, plugged it up, and put a match to the fuse.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think? The barrel ripped apart like a half-peeled banana, and the wheels tore out of the concrete. Somebody said whoever blew it up must have n
ear blown himself up as well, because it was fast-burning fuse he’d used.
“They dragged what was left of the gun across the road and tipped it into the drain. It’s still down there, under the long grass and blackberries.”
“Did they find out who did it?”
Uncle Trev shook his head. “That was when they built the concrete cross that’s there now. The local witchdoctors squabbled over who’d unveil it, and the chairman of the County Council, the mayor, the chairman of the school committee, all the rank and stank from up and down the district gave speeches. It was written up in the local paper and in the Waikato Times.”
“Did Mr Henry make a speech?”
“Like I said, he wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Did you go?”
“No, but I went over to Old Gotta’s that day. As well as the cowsheds, we’d built a whare on each other’s farm by that time: you know, one room with a corrugated iron chimney on the south end, a window and a door. They were on skids, so when we built our houses a few years later, we just shifted the whares and used them as harness sheds.
“I went over, as I said, and Old Gotta lit a fire and boiled the billy, and we had a cup of tea and talked about the paddocks we were shutting up for hay, and what the weather was going to be like.”
“Had Mr Henry’s eyebrows and hair grown back?”
“It took a few months before he looked like his old self again, but Old Gotta kept close to home. Nobody took any notice, because he often kept to himself, borrowing what he needed from me. ‘Gotta bit of this, Trev? Gotta bit of that?’ Besides, everyone knew he was still a bit funny from the shell-shock. A lot of folk found it a bit tricky talking to him because of the deafness, so they didn’t mind having an excuse not to speak.”
“Is he still deaf?”
“A bit. Some of them got worse with the years; some like Old Gotta stayed much the same. It was the guns that did it.”
“Does Mr Henry ever say anything about the war now?”
“He still doesn’t want to know about it.” Uncle Trev heaved a sigh. “It might be better if you keep all this to yourself. It’s not exactly talking about the war, but you know what your mother’s like.”
“I won’t say a word,” I promised Uncle Trev. And I didn’t, not till now.
Chapter Twenty-seven
A Kerosene Tin of Spuds, Eggs, and Eels
“When we were baching on our blocks that first year,” said Uncle Trev, “me and Old Gotta, we cleared a patch of scrub, burnt it, ploughed in the ash, and planted spuds.
“One of us drove the single-furrow plough; the other came behind with a bucket of seed potatoes. Take a step and plonk a spud in the furrow; another step, another spud. It gets you in the back, after a while. Next thing you know, your mate’s got the horse snuffling and nudging you from behind. He’s sneaked up with the plough, turning the dirt over the spuds you’ve planted and leaving a furrow for the next row. ‘Get a move on, Trev,’ Old Gotta yells, and I tell him he can take a turn planting the spuds himself.”
“Were you still living in the bell tent?”
Uncle Trev nodded. “The spud patch we planted was like the tent, half on Old Gotta’s farm and half on mine.”
“Wasn’t that awkward, if you were going to put up a boundary fence?” I asked.
“We’d been through the war together, and the Spanish Flu in 1918, so we weren’t too worried about which was his and which was mine. We cleared our blocks together, a few acres here and there. Somebody had been running sheep on what grass there was – a mongrelly mixture: brown top, danthonia, and clumps of tall fescue and cutty-grass.”
“What about the potatoes?”
“They came away good-oh! Funny thing, you know, I remember when their shoots came up, Old Gotta said they looked like the rows of armed men that grew where somebody sowed a dragon’s teeth. Some old Greek story, he said.”
“I know that one. Mr Strap read it to us at school.”
“Old Gotta said the chap who planted the dragon’s teeth threw a stone among them, so the armed men turned and fought each other to death.”
“His name was Cadmus,” I told Uncle Trev.
“That’s it. I remember Old Gotta saying that. He had some funny ideas at times: armed men growing out of the ground. I put it down to the shell-shock. ‘Take it easy, Gotta,’ I told him. ‘We planted spuds, not dragon’s teeth.’ And I chucked a stone among the potato shoots. ‘See,’ I told him. ‘They’re not going to kill each other.’ I’m pretty sure inside his head he’d got your old Greek story mixed up with the fighting in France.
“Then the spuds grew so fast, we were too busy to worry about whether they’d start scrapping or not. We ran the plough along between the rows and turned the soil over the growing stems – moulding them up it’s called. That way you get more spuds, and the top ones don’t turn green in the sun. You never want to eat green potatoes.”
“What did you live on while you were waiting for them to grow?”
“We took turns with Squeaker Watson: killed a mutton every second week, and hung the meat in a safe we built under a macrocarpa. We milked a few cows by hand, and sent one can and then two into the milk powder factory at Waharoa. Later, we supplied cream to the butter factory, so we had all the skimmed milk after the separating. We bought some pigs, weaners, fed them the skim-dick, and they grew like billy-oh.
“We made our own bacon, rubbing salt, brown sugar, saltpetre and pepper into the meat twice a day, and turning it over. Crikey, does that salt let you know about every scratch on your hands.”
“But what did you live on till you got your cows and milked them, and fed the skim-dick to the pigs and made them into bacon?”
“Puha and watercress. We started off buying sacks of spuds and onions, till our own were ready, and we bought butter from the store and kept it down a hole. Two or three feet down, it’s cooler and the butter keeps pretty good.”
“What did you do for bread?”
“We bought flour, a hundredweight at a time. Old Gotta baked a nice loaf in the camp oven. And we made our own yeast bug.”
“Yeast bug?”
“Boil up some hops. Add a bit of salt, sugar, flour. Keep it warm and stir it for a couple of days, then boil some spuds, mash and stir them in. That’s your yeast bug. You keep him in a bottle, and every time you use a cupful to raise the flour, you put in a bit more mashed potato to feed the bug. Sometimes he dies on you, and you have to start all over again. Old Mrs McCready, halfway into Waharoa, she had a yeast bug her mother brought out with her from Home early last century.
“You could buy fresh yeast from the baker in Waharoa, but it was easier to ride over to one of the neighbours, borrow a bit of their bug, and get your own going again.
“When we started breaking in our blocks, you’d often see a wild pig eating a dead lamb, or digging up grubs and roots. Sometimes, we’d take the day off and have a bit of a hunt to keep them down. The sows were good eating, but the dogs got knocked around. It got to the point where we didn’t like to risk them on the big boars. That’s when Old Gotta stepped in.”
I looked at Uncle Trev.
“I mean Old Gotta was often in there ahead of the dogs, stopping and bailing the pigs. You should have heard his bark. If I hadn’t warned him off, he’d have tried holding, too.”
“Holding?”
“That’s when your dog goes in and grabs hold of the pig while you stick it.”
“Did Mr Henry do that?”
“He turned out gamer than the dogs. He’d rush in and hold a pig, grappling with his teeth in its ear while I stuck it. That’s why Old Gotta’s got no teeth now. A big boar, he’s got skin like corrugated iron.”
“What did the pigs do when they saw Mr Henry coming?”
“They didn’t hang around; they heard his bark and went for their lives. It’
s years now since anyone’s seen a wild pig this side of the Waihou River. All because of Old Gotta. Mind you, he had that terrifying bark, and when he bared his teeth, and went in on a big boar, he was a pretty scary sight. I didn’t blame them for taking off.”
“So what else did you have to eat?”
“By the time Old Gotta had driven the pigs back into the Kaimais, we were eating our first spuds, and our chooks were laying so we had more eggs than you could poke a stick at. That’s when Old Gotta had an idea that saved us a lot of cooking.”
“What was that?”
“You won’t go telling your mother now?”
“Course I won’t.”
Uncle Trev looked at me. “You know how she’s a great one for table manners?”
“I won’t tell her.”
“Well, Old Gotta lit on the idea of boiling up a four-gallon tin of spuds in one go. ‘It saves time, Trev,’ he said, and he was right. With a kerosene tin of boiled spuds, you can get along without cooking the rest of the week. What’s more, Old Gotta hit on the idea of chucking in some eggs when the spuds were almost done, hard-boiling them. We just dipped in and helped ourselves, and it saved a lot of cooking and a lot of washing up, eating straight out of the kerosene tin. If we wanted a change, we’d fry some spuds and eggs in the camp oven.
“All the time it saved us, that’s probably how we got our blocks cleared faster than a lot of the other returned men. We sowed ryegrass and clover, and were sending in twice as much milk as anyone else. That’s when the Slump came, and the price of butterfat fell, but Old Gotta and me managed on spuds and eggs. Then the price went up again, and we thought we were right, but the Depression started, the bottom fell out of butterfat, and we thought we might have to go back to pig hunting.
“Old Gotta had lost all his teeth by that time, and it turned out the wild pigs weren’t scared of false teeth, but we were in luck. We dug a sand and gravel pit right where we first put up the bell tent and started clearing our blocks all those years ago. We carted sand and gravel in our drays, and worked on the roads for the County a couple of days a week, and that brought in a few bob. Then Old Gotta had another brainwave. He set a hinaki in the swamp, and boiled the eels with the spuds and eggs in the kerosene tin. We reckoned we were doing all right.”