Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  The Youngs were English and their outlook on going to church was different from ours. Some people said we were ‘bog Irish’. Be that as it may, I never met a non-Irish priest until I was fifteen years old, and then he came from Irish parents. The Youngs had two cars. On occasions they would drive in to church, but only if it were convenient. The ten-mile drive was over a dusty, bumpy, potholed road and they felt it was unreasonable for one to travel weekly on such a road. We were horrified. Miss Mass because the road was bad? Why, Mum drove the jinker drawn by Billy our grey harness pony many Sundays over the same bumpy ten miles of red road. Occasionally, though he was not a Catholic, Dad took us in on the Casey Jones.

  One Sunday morning Mum sent me to ask if the Youngs were going to drive in. No, they told me, they couldn’t, they had guests. From where I stood in the vestibule I could see the visitors sipping tea. I knew these people must hear everything I said, but it made no difference to one brought up as I had been.

  ‘That’s a mortal sin’, I said, ‘to miss Mass on Sundays.’

  Mrs Young looked startled. ‘Now, now,’ she said.

  I replied, ‘You’ll burn in hellfire everlasting.’ She evidently thought the heat had affected me, for she gave me a drink of cordial from the Coolgardie safe. It did cool me down. I think I had a second one. By the time I arrived home it was too late for Billy to be driven the ten miles in by road. So Mum drove him up the railway track, which was nearly two miles shorter.

  With Mick and me hanging on beside her she drove on the narrow cleared fire-break beside the fence. Where roads cut the line and post-and-rail fences blocked our path we’d let the sliprails down and drive Billy over. Sometimes there were ditches. Then we’d all get out and walk, Mum leading Billy by the reins close up to his mouth. The jinker wheels would grip in the dry drainage gully and Mum would urge the pony on, clicking her tongue, coaxing him gently, scolding and threatening him with the whip. And then we’d be over, the sliprails up again, and off we’d go at a grand old bat to make up for time lost. There were dry boughs that had broken off trees during thunderstorms across the track, and Mick would clamber off the iron step and drag these aside; there were other living boughs hanging low from trees and we’d all duck, Mum holding our heads down with her arm. Then we were on the outskirts of Numurkah and able to get out onto the main road cum street.

  Mum immediately looked us over. ‘Look at your hair,’ she warned me. I twisted the curls round my finger. ‘Kathleen! What have you got on your face!’ Mick spat on her handkerchief and rubbed vigorously at odd spots. ‘And the pair of you, look at your socks!’ Mum despaired of raising two little ladies. We hitched our stockings up and folded them over our garters. Shoe-dusting was easy. We both wore black stockings, so dragged our shoes over the backs of our legs when Mum wasn’t looking. She was straightening her own hat and pulling on her gloves. Billy was given a drink and secured to the hitching post outside the church. There was only one other horse there but several motorcars. Mum lined us up one on either side of her and ran her eye over us. Evidently satisfied, she led the way in, the three of us holding our handbags in our left hands, prayer books in our right. No one could call us bush bumpkins!

  Once a month a priest came from Nathalia to a little bush church five miles south-west of us. If we walked to the turn-off a mile and a half from Waaia he would pick us up and drive us the rest of the way in his car. I liked this church best of all. It was the only actual ‘bush’ church I ever went to. Because Mass must be celebrated by a priest Catholics have not tended to build the little chapel in the bush that so many Churches served by lay preachers have done. It was a square room in the middle of the golden land. It held about twenty people. There were a few long, backless stools, but for the most part we sat on strong boards resting on boxes for support. The first time I went there I knelt on the floor to say my prayers then sat back – right on the head of a man who was leaning on the seat praying. For a terrible moment as he lifted his head I rose in the air, then Mum pulled my arm and I bumped off.

  There was no vestry there to which the priest could retire to don his vestments, so he had to robe and disrobe in front of the congregation. Instead of the procession to the altar warning you that Mass was about to begin, he’d say, ‘Nomine Patris et Filius . . .’ and there’d be people sitting, standing, walking round and talking. But there was a quality of feeling there I never knew in any other church. We’d all of us come from scattered places in a ten-mile radius to this lonely building to take part in this strange, beautiful, mystical ceremony. There we shared the simplicity, the belief, the hope, the prayers and the company of people like ourselves.

  Because of the lack of a vestry the end of Mass was as peremptory as the beginning. One Sunday Father Healy gave the blessing, old Jack Heggarty who was acting as altar ‘boy’ said, ‘Amen’, and the priest turned and in his thick brogue said, ‘And phwat d’ye think is goin’ to win the Cup, Jack?’

  The same old Irish priest forgot us one day. It was so hot that a mirage crept ahead of us all the way to the turn-off. We were stretched back along the road in a tired line, our shoulders hunched and heads down under the heat and glare. For an hour we sat on the fence posts at the turn-off, but he didn’t come, so we had to walk home again. We were all fasting from midnight the night before in anticipation of going to communion. We would have borne it stoically had it not been for the embarrassment of having Ted O’Grady with us. Ted had worked at the store at Waaia for a year and never been to church. With a name like O’Grady he must be a ‘Pat’, Mum reasoned, so of course he must be gathered in.

  ‘I’ll go just this once,’ the wicked young man said, and once only it was.

  Nowadays one need not fast before going to communion. In those days not even a sip of water was permitted from midnight until after the sacrament was administered. Terrible? No. Not a one of us – except Ted O’Grady – begrudged our good intention as we came light-headedly, head-achingly up the track to home that day. (Mass then could only be celebrated between midnight and midday.)

  After Mass at this bush church the priest would have a cup of tea from the thermos one of the women would bring for him, and the men would squat on their heels under the solitary gum outside and chew a piece of bark just as did the men in John O’Brien’s poem, and just like the men in that poem they talked about the crops, and the rain that was always too late or too early or not there at all. And the women would have an impromptu meeting to decide who would launder the altar cloths next, and we kids would charge round playing ‘He’ and all of us would forget we hadn’t eaten or drunk since the day before. Then we’d drive off, some in gigs, some on horses and some in cars.

  SITTING LOOSELY IN THE SADDLE

  There was a boy from the city whose name was Marcus Fox came to stay with the Youngs in 1934. He was not a remarkable boy, but I never forgot him. He was the first child I ever heard say he couldn’t find anything to do.

  Mrs Young and Mum spoke about it. ‘He might be homesick,’ Mum pondered.

  Mrs Young had a different theory. ‘I don’t think he’s a very bright boy.’

  We always had something to do. The great difficulty was to keep hidden from our parents many of the things we did do. Such as horse-riding or, to quote Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘sitting loosely in the saddle’ – if, of course, we had had a saddle! We didn’t own a riding hack, but there was never a time in our lives when we couldn’t ride. We always had a jinker or gig and from the time I was a baby Dad would sit me on the back of the harness horse as he brought it in to harness up. There are pictures at home of Mick and me on horses from the time we were toddlers onwards. Always bareback and always in dresses. Quite a few kids rode to school. They rode bareback on a bag or folded rug, the boys in short trousers and sandshoes, the girls in ordinary cotton dresses. Hunting pink, riding breeches and black velvet caps were unknown amongst the real horsemen and women of the Australian bush. There can be no more inspiring equestrian sight than a bush girl with her hair flying
out behind her, her dress tucked in under her knees in front and fluttering out at the back, and yelling out, ‘Hey! Watch me!’ as she and the horse take a fallen log together.

  Mickie was a good rider. She had that dare-devilry that horses sense and respond to. A horse that jog-trotted for me would break into a gay gallop for her. On weekdays we’d ride the horses at school owned by other children; on Saturday we usually managed to ride our own harness horse. Dad coached a football team at Nathalia and he and Mum would set off before lunch on the little inspection motor along the line and wouldn’t return until tea-time. We’d continue industriously with our washing-up or bed-making until the sound of the motor disappeared. Then we were off.

  Billy was the best of all the horses that came and went in our house paddock. He could usually be trusted outside the fence. The others, used only to harness, would go crazy when we got on their back and would have taken the bit between their teeth and headed for the scrub if we’d let them out the sliprails. One such horse nearly killed Mickie one day. It shivered and whinnied while we struggled to put the bridle on and throw a bag over its back, but stood quite still when Mick climbed on while I held its head. The tensions bottled up inside showed only in its rolling eyes and flat ears.

  ‘He’ll get used to me,’ Mick called. Off she went to the far end of the paddock and around the solitary ghost gum, the horse pig-rooting all the way. As she turned she dug her heels in and off he went in a long, even stride. Mick’s hair was flying out red-gold behind her, her skirt flowed back over his rump, her long legs crouched round him. Near the rails she hauled him back on his haunches.

  ‘Open them up, I’m going out,’ she ordered. I hesitated.

  ‘Open them or I’ll jump them,’ she said. She pulled on the bridle and said, ‘Back boy, back,’ and the horse backed with a pushing movement as he was used to doing in the jinker. Mick tucked her legs up so her knees would take the weight off the horse when he jumped and gathered the reins in. She would jump all right! I let the rails down. ‘Yahoo!’ Mickie shouted. The horse lit off like a rocket out into the railway yards down the track. Mick was laughing, the horse’s hooves thudded on the hard earth, then it veered off the track and across the rails. Mick couldn’t drag its head round and it ran beneath a thick bough of a gum which caught her sideways across the head and flung her to the ground. When I got to her she was lying on her back with her eyes closed. I looked at her. ‘What’s the matter?’ She didn’t say anything. ‘Why don’t you get up?’ Still she was silent. I thought she was pretending to be asleep so I went home and left her there. It was nearly dark when she came in. She had a drink of water at the tap and then began to retch.

  Before Mum returned we had coaxed the horse back into the house paddock with dry feed and had taken the bridle off. We explained away the lather of sweat by saying we thought it had seen a snake, because it had been bolting round the paddock all afternoon in fear.

  This same thick bough unseated Mick another time, but then it was with the better-behaved Billy and was Mick’s own fault. She rode him hell for leather down to the gates one Saturday and called back, ‘How’s that?’ Then, ‘I’ll show you a trick.’ She swivelled round on his broad white back and faced back to front. Taking the reins in her hands behind her back she shouted, ‘Yahoo!’ and kicked out, her heels drumming into the animal’s ribs. He shot off like a streak of lightning. Mick as usual was laughing and calling out. Suddenly the hard hoof-beats thudded more softly. Billy, guided by the reins Mick held without being able to see her path, obediently swung off the track, straight towards the gum. Down went Mickie again, the bough catching her across the back of the head. She was sicker still this time, and all I did was kneel over her begging her to open her eyes and crying. She was a quiet girl for a few days after that.

  Billy not only was a good horse to ride, he looked wonderful. An all-white, he paced like a racer and kept his neck arched high. Both on together Mick and I would jog down to the railway gates, open them up, then off up the road we’d gallop, me holding loosely onto Mick’s waist, my head turned sideways to miss her flying hair.

  Usually we rode over to Marvels’ place, probably because that was the last place Mum would have let us go had she known it well. As it was, her social contact with the Marvels was limited to an invitation she had accepted from Mr Marvel for herself and Dad to go there to play cribbage one night, and then she saw no further than the living-room.

  ‘I feel Mrs Marvel hadn’t quite expected us,’ Mum said.

  Mrs Marvel not only expected her but went further than I ever saw her go again by shifting the cats, dogs and poultry out and removing the traces of their shortcomings. She was the dirtiest woman I ever knew. Her husband, ‘Bull’ Marvel, ran trotters. His son Pete, who was only my age, exercised them; you could hear him trotting them round and round the paddock when you lay warm in bed on cold winter mornings. Their house had probably been a fine home once. The kitchen had a flagged floor and great iron fittings over the iron range, heavy oak furniture and beams across the ceiling. As well as a lounge room there was a parlour with crumbling antimacassars on crumbling chairs, and a crumbling green plush cover over the now tinny piano. There were two pictures on the wall and faded patches showed where others had hung. ‘When Dad makes me get morning sticks I cut up anything I can find,’ Pete told us, indicating that the remaining frames wouldn’t be there much longer.

  In contrast to the excess of ‘living’ rooms there were only two bedrooms. The Marvel family numbered twelve. Opposite the parlour the parents slept in one small bedroom. Under a horse rug at the end of the double bed, Pete slept. He was one of the toughest, most unlovable children ever born, but when he died under that horse rug on that horrid bed at the age of eight we cried for him.

  The other bedroom was tiny too, and in the double bed that filled it almost wall to wall slept the two eldest sons. The rest of the family used the front verandah where a piece of sacking formed a ‘sun-blind’ across the front, and there, underneath two bags in two double beds, slept the rest of the brood. Mum taught us nothing about the facts of life. The Marvels left nothing to our imagination. We knew that if Mum knew this and knew that we went there, there would be the dickens to pay, but the place had that carelessness that is a lure for children who come from homes where discipline is strict. If we sneaked out to the home of anyone else in the district we would be asked, ‘Does your mother know you’re here?’ and our parents would be told of the visit. The Marvels worked on the reverse pattern. They would teach us how to avoid detection.

  They owned several hundred acres of land, a little of which was sown in wheat by a neighbour who leased a patch, but the rest was untended, as they were too indolent to do anything about it. There was old machinery lying everywhere. Reapers, binders, harrows, ploughs, and threshing machines stood in paddocks like memorials to lost enthusiasm. In the big machinery shed harness mouldered and grew fur; horse collars hung from nails, their stuffing poking out where rats made nests; old wheels and a broken sulky tangled in a corner; and what must have been one of the first cars brought to that district was used as a roost by hens. In a pile of decayed horse rugs and driving gear on the floor a fox once hid her cubs and when one of the boys found them they had been there so long they were big enough to run away and escape.

  We never knew if the cow-shed had been abandoned because it was falling apart or if it was falling apart because it had been abandoned. It is likely that the latter was the case because the cows were now milked on the house verandah, which was certainly more convenient.

  There was never a dull moment at Marvels’. One Saturday when Mum and Dad were away we rode over and played football with them. The ball they had was like a big milk-coloured balloon. It had a cord at one end and this was fastened shut with cat-gut.

  ‘That’s the pig’s bladder,’ Pete told us. ‘That pipe’s where he . . .’

  On the ride home Mick warned me, ‘Don’t tell Mum!’

  Yabbying in their dam was fun
. It was a big dam, full of bright, rust-coloured water surrounded by rust-coloured soil banks. We’d bait our pieces of string with pieces of raw meat and lower them under the surface. When the yabbies took the bait we’d haul in slowly until their ‘whiskers’ were just out of the water then scoop them up quickly with a net we made of chicken wire fastened to a piece of fencing wire. Young Pete, the boy who trained the trotters, could get the little grey yabbies out by hand; he was an excellent bush boy. But he was also a cruel boy. He claimed that ‘spraggies’ (sparrows) were the best bait and he’d pull young naked birds out of nests and tear them apart while they were alive and tie the still flinching pieces to the string. I hated him. If you were taking a short cut home across the paddock when he was training the trotters he’d ride straight at you to see you run for the fence.

  Then, one morning, he didn’t take the horses out. He had rheumatic fever. He never rode again.

  ‘He’s been crook like this before,’ old Marvel told Dad. ‘He complained all last week. But he rode all right. Treated the horses well.’

  Mrs Young and Mum went across to see him and found him huddled under the horse rug at the end of the double bed in his work shirt and socks. Mrs Young made a red flannel night-shirt and took bottles of warm broth to him. He died early one morning and the parents found him at lunchtime. Next day the Marvel kids turned up at school.

  ‘You could have stayed home,’ the teacher told them.

  Their answer made some of us weep, not for them, but for poor unloved Pete: ‘We haven’t missed a day yet,’ they said. The teacher sent us all home in the afternoon in memory of Pete, whose last atonement was still on the blackboard, ‘I must not stick pens in the ceiling’, one hundred times. He had only got to forty-nine times on the Friday before he died. There were still some of the nibs in the ceiling above our heads that the broom hadn’t been able to dislodge.