Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  ‘There were a lot of men helping me to hold him while the doctor went about his work,’ Granny told me.

  Uncle Ted’s room was always a shambles and I tidied it with a feeling of doing good. He saved his cigarette butts in tins, a habit of the Depression. When I complained he told me of men in the bush who used to flip their butts up to the ceiling where they’d stick by the end moistened from the lips, and there they’d stay until they were swept down in the day of need. He also showed me how men smoked very short butts without burning their fingers by sticking a darning needle in them.

  Teddy undoubtedly was the black sheep of the family. I knew by the polite manner with which my mother greeted him. But I liked him. He gave me the best presents anyone outside my immediate family ever did. Each time I cleaned his room he gave me a gift. Once it was a tiny pair of scissors that folded up to a little packet one inch square. They were not new and Mum was very sceptical as to their origin, but I didn’t care of course. Another time he gave me a very much used copy of Billabong’s Daughter, by Mary Grant Bruce.

  ‘I’ve had that for nearly eight months waiting for your visit,’ he told me. ‘I thought it looked the sort of book you’d like.’ Mum swiftly recalled that he had recently been employed as a gardener by a family whom she knew had a great collection of books.

  ‘They’ve probably got one less now,’ Dad joked, but Mum never saw the humour in situations involving this ‘unfortunate’, as she termed him.

  No doubt there was much about Granny Smith’s life that would upset an adult, but for a child she was wonderful. She enjoyed her food at a period when it was genteel to glue your elbows to your ribs when brandishing a knife and fork and stick your little finger out like a cup-hook when drinking. All this was not for Granny. She could slurp louder than anyone I ever heard. When she drank soup she could actually hold the spoon away from her mouth and with tremendous suction draw it across the gap. She ate and drank everything boiling, so probably this was a cooling method. She had no stove but cooked on an open fire. There was an iron bar across the chimney and long hooks hung down from this to hold the big iron kettle and her iron camp oven. The kettle was always boiling and the oven (a circular iron pot with a close-fitting lid and three little legs) was always simmering. She’d put anything at all in that camp oven. I’ve seen turnips, beans, potatoes, onions, ox-tail, lambs’ brains, oatmeal and left-overs from the day before all put together and left to simmer for the day.

  Before I could walk she had given me a big china mug that Dad had given her as a lad when he’d received his first pay. It had green leaves and red holly berries as decoration and the words REMEMBER ME in gold letters. Each year when I came down on holidays I’d get the mug from her cupboard and show her the dust on it, and we’d both be pleased at this evidence of its not being used since my last visit. I have that mug still.

  Though her burr was so thick you could cut it with a knife she hated the bagpipes. Some pipers paraded through our house to celebrate Hogmanay when she was living with us near the end of her life. Fortunately they’d gone before she found her walking-stick.

  HO! HO! TALLYGARO!

  There was always plenty to amuse us on the long train journeys. Some games were elaborate, but the favourite was simply to cross our fingers when we saw a white horse and keep them crossed until we saw a white dog. Once Mickie travelled from Shepparton to Spencer Street with her fingers crossed, and Mum only persuaded her to uncross them by saying she could begin again at daylight next day.

  Another favourite was imitating the noises of the train. Dad always thought up the funniest of these, although Mum’s were the more apt. A guard came into our compartment one day and was startled to hear Dad chanting, ‘I ought to take his teeth out, I ought to take his teeth out . . .’ Mum’s train noises often took the form of rhymes using the names of stations we passed through:

  Tallygaroopna, Tallygaroopna,

  Ho! Ho! Tallygaro!

  Tallygaroopna, Tallygaroopna,

  Play the game for Tallygaro!

  The one of hers we thought brilliant was:

  Katamatite, Katamatite

  The drunk fell on the bed,

  He spoke to his wife whose name was Kate,

  ‘Kate-am-I-tight?’ he said.

  Sometimes in peak periods we had to travel in the old-style ‘dog-boxes’, separate little compartments as opposed to carriages with a corridor. The door at each side of the dog-box gave access from platforms at stations. These old carriages had spittoons in the floor, brass funnels let down through the boards, twelve inches in diameter funnelling down to a two-inch outlet. I never saw them used as spittoons (evidently the day of spitters was gone) so I never learnt if others were as adept as my grandfather in their use. People shoved lolly papers down them then; Dad didn’t think much of this practice. ‘Think of the men having to pick up those papers,’ he’d say with a grimace. The dog-boxes didn’t have lavatories and it was often a long way between stations and even then problematical whether or not you could get to the lav and back before the train left the station. Hal Gye, who did the wonderful illustrations for The Sentimental Bloke, told me that on his first trip to Melbourne from the bush he travelled in such a dog-box, and as the train rattled on through the night he heard a peculiar noise and peering through the gloom (the lights had been extinguished just as we used to do if we wanted to sleep during long night trips) he saw two ‘painted women’ squatting over the brass spittoons relieving themselves.

  Dog-boxes were the exception rather than the rule. Guards seeing our pass which branded us as railway people, and seeing our general appearance which no doubt branded us as bushwhackers if only by our carefreeness and lack of restraint, would try to get us the best seats possible, with windows for us two girls. When we moved from Briagalong to Waaia the train was crowded out of Spencer Street and Mum and Dad were each nursing Mick and me when the guard came along to check tickets. He saw our pass.

  ‘You’re going to be tired nursing those kids all night,’ he said. ‘What time did you knock off?’ Dad told him, 5 p.m.

  ‘Starting in the morning at the new place?’

  ‘As soon as I get enough unpacked for the wife to set up house.’

  The guard jerked his thumb for us to follow him out into the corridor and led us to the first-class section, which was never crowded. There we sat for the rest of the journey, stiff, uneasy, unspeaking, our poor cases conspicuous among the other valises on the racks above our heads.

  Another time, when we were on our way to Bunyip, the guard after checking our pass came back a little later to tell Dad there was another railway family on the train. We all trooped along the corridor to look for them. They weren’t hard to find, the man with the badge of the navvy – lumps of flesh off his hands where a ‘dog had got him’ (the iron dogs used in laying rails), shoulders hunched from carrying weights, his face brown and leathery from the weather.

  They were glad to see us. Dad told them of the different places we’d lived on the line, and Oh, yes, they knew of us.

  ‘I worked with Negri from Wingeel on a section a while back,’ the man told us. ‘Is this the baby he said you brought to Nowingi?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said proudly.

  ‘Well,’ said the other navvy, ‘it looks as though you can rear kids as well as Kelly can rear dingo pups!’ We all laughed, delighted that the story of the struggle to keep the baby alive in ‘woop-woop’ had been passed on.

  Then there was talk of others we knew.

  ‘If you’re going to Bunyip you’ll find a cobber of mine in the gang. Used to be with me at Wycheproof. Black by name. Give him my regards and tell him we’re still growing pumpkins from the seeds of his big ironbark.’ There was a camaraderie between navvies; whether it was the period we were passing through or the age of our young society, or the type of hard, often crippling work, it made no difference to the end result. We had the feeling of ‘belonging to a big family’, as Harold (later Sir Harold) Clapp, Commissioner for Ra
ilways, once said to Dad. To say you were a navvy or the family of a navvy on the line was a passport into companionship.

  The two big city stations in Melbourne gave us as much pleasure as anything else in our travels. Flinders Street was good, but Spencer Street was better. Flinders Street was more of a city-dwellers’ station; Spencer Street was where most of the lines to the country places that we knew ran from. Mick and I always made ourselves known to the Man in Grey who announced trains as they came and went and answered queries.

  ‘Do you know where So-and-So is?’ we’d ask to try his knowledge of whichever outlandish place we were then living in. He knew Nowingi but he didn’t know Wingeel. Then, full of assurance we tried – Waaia!

  ‘Waaia?’ he said. ‘You’re making that one up, you little bush rats.’ We were delighted. Superciliously we pointed to where it was on the big illuminated map beside his shelter, only of course it wasn’t actually marked there. He asked the station-master and the assistant station-masters and none of them knew if what we said was correct until the big ‘route’ book was produced and there in tiny print was ‘Waaia’. When the next inquirer came to him the august Man in Grey introduced us to him as, ‘Two young ladies from Waaia! What do you think of that?’

  All these amusements of travel would cease as we neared home. Coming back to Waaia we would leave the lush green rolling hills of Gippsland and travel into the flat, dry, golden, warm land of the Goulburn Valley, and we sensed, with the sorrow of leaving another holiday behind us, the joy of coming home. Though we had only been gone two weeks we would notice changes.

  ‘The grass is drier,’ Mum would lament. ‘There’ll be nothing left of my flower garden.’

  As we rumbled over Dad’s section of the line close to home you could see him ‘listening’ with all his body to the track beneath the train’s wheels.

  ‘We’ll have to put a bit of ballast here,’ and, ‘Sounds like a sleeper gone there.’

  And then we were back where time moved slowly, and no doubt for city visitors a little dully, but for us, home.

  VELLY NICE FLUIT

  The tradesmen who visited us at Waaia were little travelling oases of variety.

  There was a Chinese greengrocer who drove his horse-drawn wagon down from Nathalia once a week. He was a small yellow man wearing in winter a black skull-cap and in summer a battered grey felt. He spoke as we expected Chinese to speak – as many English-speaking people still expect them to do.

  ‘Velly nice lipe melon. You tly?’ He’d slice off a piece and we’d ‘tly’.

  ‘You likey lettucey? You likey clisp ladish? Fluit?’

  One day a steam train came shrieking in and took his horse by surprise, which made it rear a little.

  ‘Horse!’ said Charlie. ‘You likey box on ear?’

  He always gave us kids something to eat. Each Christmas he brought a Chinese jar of sweet ginger in syrup as a gift for Mum.

  ‘Happy Clissmus, missus,’ he said. ‘Happy Clissmus.’

  One day Mum said, ‘You work hard, Charlie. Why don’t you have a rest?’

  ‘Me no lest,’ he said earnestly. ‘Me savee money. Go home. Die in China.’ And he did.

  There was a butcher every Friday. He let down the back of his van to form a table with a small chopping block. There were scales hanging from the roof of the van beside the joints. On the floor were dishes of smallgoods.

  A fish man who fished in the Murray River came down on occasions to sell his catch. He drove an A Model Ford and had the fish spread out in the back of it on gum boughs with more gum boughs over them to keep the flies and heat away. He brought the succulent red-fin and the great cod that sometimes grew to prodigious size in deep holes in the mighty river.

  The Afghan or Indian hawkers with their beautiful turban pins sparkling above their foreheads were later ousted by the practice of catalogue buying, but looking in an illustrated brochure never held the thrill of the cry: ‘Quick! An Afghan’s coming!’

  The sides of the Afghan hawker’s wagon divided lengthways, half being fastened up, half down as a counter when he stopped. All his goods were thus displayed. Aprons, house-frocks, socks, children’s fleecy-lined pants, men’s ‘blueys’ and dungaree trousers, hats, slippers and towels. It must have taken Eastern sleight of hand to fit the many things into a wagon that one horse must pull.

  Sometimes an Afghan would camp in our house paddock and we’d watch his silhouette passing across his camp-fire near the black bulk of his caravan, and all the antique exotique of the East encircled us and made us aware of the crude, stimulating newness of our land.

  Waaia was on the line to Picola, which is the same as saying it was on the line to nowhere. Yet we had enough travellers to amuse us, and when there was no one else we amused ourselves.

  No one much ever came by train except Miss Genevieve Pendleton, Kevin Young’s aunt. She came to stay with Mrs Young, her sister. Miss Gen. stepped fresh from the train in what we called ‘flash’ clothes, meaning they were very smart, and she carried neat, new suitcases. She was companion and confidante to a wealthy Melbourne socialite. This was so far beyond the horizon of our experience that she was always a thing of great wonder to us.

  One morning when she was having her early morning cup of tea in bed (in itself a thing of wonder to us because she wasn’t sick!) she heard herself being serenaded. For a spinster this was a thing of delight: someone was trilling and warbling a beautifully whistled rendition of ‘Genevieve’ – ‘Oh Genevieve, I’d give the world . . .’ She sprang from her bed and ran to the window. There, hobbling by with his hop-and-carry-one was Yorky; only an old, wizened boots at a pub, but able to whistle down the angels – to say nothing of the chagrined Miss Gen.

  Old Gran. Pendleton, Kevin’s grandfather who lived with the Youngs, was a good storyteller. He’d been in the constabulary in India and would hold us enthralled for hours while he told us of the mutiny and of cavalry charges in his parade-ground voice. He had a Kitchener-type moustache which would quiver as he roared, ‘Forward the Foot!’

  Sometimes a railway ‘home on wheels’ was shunted off on to our siding and in this would live a fencer and his mate or two painters. These men who lived a lonely life usually played an instrument or had some other method of entertaining that made them welcome at bush homes. My Uncle Frank, the husband of Mum’s eldest sister, used to work on the railways as a fencer and he played the fiddle ‘wondrous gay’. There is the world of difference between a fiddler and a violinist that only those who have heard a fiddler know. When Uncle Frank played the fiddle you wanted to leap and dance and sing and laugh and live.

  Out Barmah way where mighty red gums grew, gangs of sleeper-cutters lived in the bush. Every quarter of the year these men came in to Waaia station to sell their sleepers to the Victorian Railways. A railway inspector came up from Melbourne to examine their red, redolent pile in the station yard. Sometimes the men might have to wait a week, so they camped in the lee of the wheat stacks or up in the big grain shed. Almost to a man they played the gumleaf, getting a variety of tones and pitches from different leaves. They were gregarious and wanted to talk to everyone.

  Waaia State School Mothers’ Club always had a raffle going for something or other and the day these men got their cheques I’d take my raffle book over and they’d say, ‘How much the lot?’ and take the whole book between them. I made the transaction last as long as I could because I’d only be permitted to go to their camp this once and it was the only chance I had to watch them work. They used broad axes like the one the executioner used to cut off the head of Mary Queen of Scots, razor-sharp ‘trimming’ axes to trim the chosen sleepers. The condemned sleepers were sold in the yard, and Dad often could buy them for as little as threepence each. They made the best burning of all and burnt to a hot ash.

  We once had a trip to see the sea. Mum, as president of the Mothers’ Club, organised this and coaxed Dalton Beswick from the hotel to take us down on his flat-top truck. We travelled all through the nig
ht, wrapped in rugs at our mothers’ feet while they sat on backless wooden forms. As daylight broke, the truck pulled up and we all climbed stiffly down and stared. As far as our eyes reached there was this shimmering, silver, rippling water. Some of us sifted sand through our fingers but our eyes never left that shimmering mass that rolled over the horizon. At last Billy Wilson broke our trance. ‘What a bloody lot of water,’ he marvelled.

  Aborigines no longer roamed this land although they must have been numerous here once because all the places in the district were named by the blacks before the coming of the white man: Picola, Nathalia, Numurkah, Barmah, Barwoo, and of course Waaia, which meant water that Aborigines found at Broken Creek. On the New South Wales side of the Murray was the Aboriginal settlement of Cummeragunja where full-bloods and half-castes lived in humpies made of flattened-out kerosene tins. When any of our numerous relatives would visit us we’d take them to this settlement, crossing the Murray on an old cable punt. The men would go fishing along the banks of the river, the women would set up a picnic lunch under the gums, and we kids would play with the Aboriginal children. There were still paddle-steamers on the Murray and the crew and passengers would wave to us as they churned by, and we white kids would try to look as much like blacks as possible by turning our knees in and clasping our hands and putting our heads on the side and giggling shyly as we waved so we too could be thought curios to be examined by the passing parade.

  I had a full-blood friend there whose name sounded like Dollery, so I called her Dolly. One night Mum’s sister Sadie who played the accordion came up and we had music and singing and dancing on the banks of the Murray in the light of a big fire and the moon, and Dolly sang,