Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  Mrs Young ran up the road, still with her apron on, to the little cottage, and I ran after her. By the time I got to the door I could hear her praying. She was down on the floor where the dead woman still lay, shouting into her ear. It was the Confiteor she was saying, hoping that its words of supplication would penetrate any spirit still alive in the now dead body. I walked back to the road. Still I could hear her: ‘I confess to Almighty God . . . that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.’

  Out on the road I struck my breast three times from habit.

  THE TRANSPLANTED SHAMROCK

  Once a year I held the floor at school, no matter where we lived. I would stand up before the end of the day and announce that I would not be coming to school for two weeks.

  ‘We are going on holidays.’

  I never knew anyone else who had holidays; certainly no one went away as we did. We could travel interstate to one destination and return on our pass, but in our home State we could have stayed on trains for the whole two weeks travelling from one end of the country to the other. We virtually did this.

  Mum’s seven sisters and one surviving brother all lived on farms at one time or another, and many of them worked, or had worked, on the railways. They were scattered from Nullawil in the north-west of the State to Cabbage Tree Creek in the south-east. They were a close-knit family and circulated freely between one another. We circulated annually. Dad’s family was not so clannish and had fragmented to such a degree that they were spread from Perth in Western Australia to Beaudesert in Queensland and down to King Island in Bass Strait. Those who were not farming were in timber-milling, having all been brought up in the big timber country round Noojee in Gippsland. Thus we had a number of calls to make, a plurality of towns to visit and exciting occupations to investigate.

  But the first journey of the two weeks was always to the two grandmothers who lived in Gippsland: Grandmother Adams in Longwarry, Granny Smith in Warragul.

  For me, the travelling was certainly better than the arriving. We’d start off on the ‘Beetle’ at 4 p.m., change to the steam train at Numurkah, and arrive at Spencer Street late at night. Then we’d troop across the street to the Batman Hill Hotel where the owner’s wife, after taking one look at us, would put us into an upstairs room where there was a double and two single beds.

  ‘The little girls won’t want to be alone in a strange city,’ she kindly reasoned.

  While we waited the following day for the train that would take us to Gippsland, we’d have a pie and a cup of tea at the Flinders Street station cafeteria. Mick and I always took a toothpick from the jar on the cashier’s desk and ostentatiously picked our teeth as we walked the platform. No one could say we didn’t know what to do in the Big Smoke!

  Grandmother Adams was small and dainty and pretty and narrow-minded, and I didn’t like her much. She felt the same about me, and because she was old and could think quicker she usually got the last word in, first. I was building make-believe houses with the needles from her pine trees once and showed a young cousin how to do the same. When Grandmother called us for tea she saw the results and said to my cousin, ‘That’s a nice house.’ To me she said, ‘Are you trying to copy her?’

  We had only one thing in common: we admired the pioneering spirit. She would tell me stories by the hour of the pioneering days, and I would listen for as long as she would talk. She and my grandfather had pioneered the hills of Gippsland.

  It is a sad commentary on our national outlook that the poor are never mentioned in the annals of pioneering history. These people were given no grants, assigned no servants. They took up and paid for land that the wealthy (and often absent) landowners had rejected because it was worthless or too isolated to expect people to live and work on it. They built slab huts with an ‘earth’ floor. They took work where they could find it to buy their first couple of cows, and the women and children milked the cows while the father went shearing, fencing – anything to try to make ends meet, for cow-cockying never did. And when they lost that place, as lose they mostly did, they moved further back to land even more isolated and barren and therefore cheaper and began again.

  Surely that spirit is worth recording.

  Grandmother Adams had been burnt out twice in the Gippsland hills. Once she narrowly escaped with her life. My grandfather was away.

  ‘I sent your aunt Anastasia to ride to neighbours to tell them we needed help; the fire was surrounding us. Not long after she left, the wind changed. I looked at the track she had taken and now flames criss-crossed it and as I watched a blazing tree fell right across it. She was a wonderful horsewoman, you know, and I knew she’d get to the neighbours but I thought she’d never get back. The bigger children helped me pull my sewing machine outside and we covered it with wet bags and I gathered up what we could carry. As we left the house I looked across to the only gap that was clear of flames and there was your aunt, sailing high over a fallen log, her horse bringing her home at the gallop.

  ‘“How did you find that opening?” I asked her.

  ‘“I followed the two men,” she said.

  ‘“What men? There’s no men here.”

  ‘“Oh yes, they jumped the log ahead of me. When the wind changed I didn’t know which way to go and these men rode out ahead and beckoned me to follow them.”’

  My grandmother always blessed herself at this stage.

  ‘There had been no men. It was God Himself that led that girl home.’

  But men did come through the gap after her and they brought horses.

  ‘We strapped a mattress on each of the two horses’ backs and I ran with the baby covered in a wet shawl. Sparks caught a mattress and it went up in flames.

  ‘While the men were dragging it off the horse’s back we heard the other horse scream. The mattress on its back had caught afire too and before the men could stop it it galloped straight into the blazing forest with the burning saddle strapped to its back.’

  Whenever I thought of that scene it was my aunt Stasia that I could see. For as long as I remember her she was an austere, dignified woman. I never heard her measured, organ-like voice or watched her stately ramrod-backed walk but I thought of that ride and that brave leap over the smouldering log when she was a young and beautiful girl, ‘the belle of the Gippsland Hills’.

  It was Grandmother Adams who told me of the struggles of the Irish.

  ‘Never forget what the English did to the Irish,’ she said. Yet hanging on her kitchen wall was a picture of Queen Alexandra and another of Queen Mary.

  ‘Yes, well,’ she’d say, ‘they’re different.’

  One day when she was saying she’d never lift a finger to help England I reminded her that her sons Stephen and Jack had died fighting for England at Gallipoli. But that was ‘different’ too.

  She had a lot of superstition and folk-lore that probably came from her mother, my great-grandmother, who, she told me, smoked a little clay pipe secretly, hiding it in her cupped hand.

  One day when I was older I was cutting up raw steak for a sea-pie. I was feeling miserable and told her I was menstruating. She ordered me to put the meat down at once.

  ‘Never handle meat when you’re having your monthlies,’ she warned me. ‘It will turn it bad.’

  Her favourite reply when we’d ask what was for the next meal was, ‘Bread and point.’ This originated, she told me, from a common Irish meal, potatoes being a substitute for bread. ‘When the British were starving the Irish out all we had was our crop, our potatoes. Mothers would cook potatoes and put them on the plates. In the centre of the table she’d put a small piece of cheese or bacon; some hung an onion from a string down from a hook in the ceiling. You’d stick your fork into a potato and point it at the tasty thing and that would make your mouth water and you’d taste the thing you were pointing at and it would aid the digestion of the potatoes.’

  She told me of living at Bungaree when she was a child.
Bungaree is near Ballarat and is now a rich agricultural area.

  ‘Bungaree was a little Ireland. We’d all come out when the blight struck and the crops failed. The boys there were a lively lot. They took their politics seriously. It was a brave politician trod the boards at Bungaree! A man came there once, Billy Hughes I think it was, all for having conscription brought in on our poor boys [quite forgetting her own three sons had volunteered for that same war]. Anyway, they tipped up his platform and threw chairs and there were fights everywhere and his cronies whisked him away just in time. Well, a few weeks later this same man was speaking in Ballarat. "Citizens of Ballarat," he began. "Savages of Bungaree." The name stuck; Bungaree Savages we were and proud of it.’

  Granddad Adams was a big man, and very strong. Sometimes he’d pick me up by the back of my dress at the waist and carry me around that way with one big hand while he fed the horses. He had beautiful horses. Punch and Prince were two that would have carried off prizes at any show. Sometimes he’d run short of tank water for them and he’d yoke one of the horses to the little iron furphy and we’d go to the butter factory for water.

  ‘Look at the way Prince lifts his feet,’ he’d say. ‘Look at the neck!’ On the little iron tank of the furphy was a plaque with the motto engraved, ‘Good, better, best, never let it rest, until your good is better and your better best.’

  Grandmother Adams had long ago tired of Granddad and he was never at his best in the house. He had a big walrus moustache and a moustache cup which had a sort of verandah to keep the whiskers out of the tea, but invariably he would get them wet and have to wring them out with his fingers. The ends of the white whiskers were orange from pipe smoking. The pipes hung in a rack beside the kitchen stove and smelt badly. Grandmother had never got used to them in a home where everything was spotless and polished. These smelly, grubby, chewed pipes called forth many caustic comments.

  ‘Has someone trodden in something nasty or is it the pipes?’ she would say if she were displeased with him.

  As for his spittoon – that was the cross of her life.

  ‘Holy Father in Heaven,’ she’d say when she heard the loud ‘Splop!’ as Granddad aimed across to the big saucer-like receptacle. ‘Dear God!’ Sometimes: ‘Holy Mother of God!’

  Granddad had none of the bushman’s philosophy and the only time I heard anything approaching such wisdom from him was when I innocently asked him about his ancestry. ‘I heard the women talking last night,’ I said. ‘They said we were all descended from a President of the United States.’ I wasn’t very impressed by this. America was not a nation of such account in those days. I was interested only because I’d read at school that the second President of the USA was named John Adams, as was my grandfather, and many of the names of that American Adams family were the names of the men of Granddad’s family.

  He turned on me quite angrily: ‘If the only good part of you is your ancestors you’re no better than a potato, the best part of you under the ground.’ He never mentioned it again and neither did I, but I marked his wise words, the only quote I ever heard from him.

  Most of his stories were of early days in the bush. He told me of the strikes and lock-outs of the 1890s.

  ‘The squatters tried to starve us out but we never gave in till our hides were cracking. I walked home from the Queensland border once. I’d sold my saddle-horse and my pack-horse for food and boot leather. It was a long tramp. And when I got home there was no cheque to hand over. Christmas had come and gone and Bridget had managed somehow. I think there must have been a bit of that bread and point she tells you about.’

  These stories of my grandparents made me admire them, even wish to emulate their bravery and to tell people of their exploits in helping pioneer this once wild country, but that was the only thing I was happy about when I stayed with them. I felt always the most dreaded uneasiness there as though some day something would happen; what it would be I didn’t know, couldn’t even imagine, but there was something wrong, and I could tell it as only a child can sense these things. My grandmother was often openly hostile to me. My grandfather never humiliated me but I often caught him looking secretly at me as though he were pondering about me. This unnamed thing made me nervous and apt to be either tongue-tied or garrulous.

  THE COLONIAL THISTLE

  It was with relief that I would accompany the family to Warragul, the home town of Granny Smith. I liked staying there, as most children would have done; most parents, like Mum, would be against it.

  Granny Smith was the antithesis of Grandmother Adams. What the neighbours thought never worried her. She wouldn’t have understood the term, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Life was no problem to her. She did as she pleased twenty-four hours a day. She ate when she pleased, went to sleep in front of visitors, and broke the stuffiest rules of gentility. Her eccentricities were equalled only by her dignity, a nobility of bearing that set her apart from the harassed, worry-bent women of her age. She was very beautiful, tall with fine bones, tapering sensitive fingers and a tiny waist. In her young days, as photographs we have of her show, she dressed elegantly, her smart ensembles topped always with a toque the like of which Queen Mary later affected. Now, when she was already old (she was forty-six when my father was born), she dressed for comfort; in summer she wore a type of muu-muu, in winter she put on everything she owned.

  Born Isabella Hutton in the lowlands of Scotland in 1850 to a wealthy landowning family, she came to Australia with her parents and brothers when she was a young girl in her teens. Squeezed in beside her on her old spring rocking chair I’d listen to stories of her childhood in Scotland, ‘an uncoo wild country’, she described it, and to tales of Australia in the later gold-rush days. In this chair she told me about Granddad Smith, ‘Jem’ as she called him. He had died when I was still an infant.

  Unaware that the passage of time had annulled the penalty due to him she told me in conspiratorial tones that he had jumped ship in Sydney to look for gold.

  ‘There were notices in all the papers,’ she whispered. ‘He read some of them to me. "James Adam Smith, Bosun" they had written in big letters. They offered a reward too. You see, they had found gold here and the men all left the ships and went to the diggings and there was no one to take the ships out. When Jem brought me to Melbourne there were scores of ships tied up in the port with not an officer or seaman to man any one of them.’

  ‘How did you come to be in Melbourne, Granny?’

  ‘Jem brought me.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘The goldfields.’

  Her parents, she told me, while awaiting the ship that was bringing their flocks and shepherds from Scotland, toured about the new country while waiting to take up land.

  ‘My brothers were amusing themselves trying their hand at gold-digging; they each took out a claim, but in a short while we were going on to the place we had made arrangements for before we left Scotland. We were going to raise the same sheep there we had raised on the Cheviot Hills for years without number.’

  ‘But what was Granddad doing in the diggings? Where was he going?’

  ‘He was passing through’ – here she’d giggle like a young girl again. ‘Putting a distance between Sydney and him.’

  I understood his desire for that, but I couldn’t understand a runaway seaman and the daughter of landed gentry –

  ‘Your parents let you go with Granddad?’

  ‘No.’

  After a while: ‘Did you ever see your parents again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t you write?’

  ‘I couldn’t write. It was Jem who was the educated man.’

  ‘Did you never want to see them again?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ It was so long ago she couldn’t remember. ‘I don’t think I missed them. So much happened. We went deep in the bush here in Gippsland out Tanjil Bren way. Your grandfather could do anything. He was big and strong.’ She had old, faded pictures of him splitting palings in the bla
ckwood forests that stood in Gippsland last century, tree-ferns twenty feet high crowded where he and his mate posed with their broad axes, paling knives, cross-cut saws, mauls and wedges, their crib bags hung on a nearby sapling. (Strange times the birth of our nation saw: grandfather, a runaway ship’s bosun; his mate, a lawyer who later took up a lucrative practice in Melbourne.)

  There were fourteen children born to the family, and Granny was her own midwife every time, with a neighbour to help her. She was known over a wide area as an excellent midwife and was often called on by doctors for help.

  All her sons were good bushmen, handy with the axe and their fists, willing to have a go at anything. My father won a five-mile cross-country race against the top professional runners of the State when he was only fifteen. He ran in an old pair of sandshoes and his school pants.

  ‘Your uncle Teddy could run too but you never knew what he’d do next. A naughty boy was my Teddy!’ Granny would chuckle. ‘Once, just before the start of a race Jem went to him and told him he’d put ten shillings on him to win. Halfway through the race Teddy was well in the lead. Then he remembered he had himself backed another runner to win so he threw himself flat on the ground and called, "Water, water." Someone took water to him and helped him to his feet just as Jem reached him. "I’ll give you water," your grandfather said and swung his fist. He had a good punch, my Jem had. Teddy had to be carried off the ground.’

  Uncle Ted was the only member of either side of my huge family tree who lived apart from the marital partner. This would have put him beyond the pale even if it hadn’t been that he was a wild, eccentric man who cared no more than Granny for convention or worldly acclaim. He lived at home with Granny now, a huge man with an angry ridge scarred right across his forehead where his skull had once been lifted up and later replaced with crude surgery. Working in the bush in the tall timbers he had fallen from the staging forty feet up and the axe had laid his head clean open. He was brought into the hotel in Warragul and Granny and a doctor closed the gash and clamped it together as best they could. The then young man was conscious.