We walked miles over paddocks wet with heavy dew and too far away was never too far when searching for “mushies”. Those early morning walks were magic with spider-webs damp with dew, the fine gossamer threads hung between the wires of the fences shining like many jewels in the rays of the rising sun and the birds singing their dawn chorus. This was something we only heard at this time of the year because mostly we hated getting out of bed.
Everyone got excited when a fairy ring was found. What luck! We believed them to be something very special. We imagined that was where the fairies had danced in the moonlight the night before and the magic dust from their tiny toes had created the perfect circle of button mushrooms. The lucky finder was entitled to stand in the middle and make a wish, which even now must not be told or we’ll have bad luck. The amount of mushrooms gathered was irrelevant, it was the time that mattered.
The sawmill blew its starting work. whistle at 7.30 and could be heard all over the district. When we heard it we knew it was time to go home as fast as we could as Mum would have the stove alight and the frying pan ready for the mushies. As soon as we had peeled them and they were starting to cook we got ready for school and after each one had eaten a fair share it was off to school, youngest first because they had the smallest legs. It was just as well that school went in at 9.30 because we needed every second there was so that we would not be late.
The cooler weather saw the end to many of our activities as we switched to other well tried games which we could play in the shed where, besides Dad’s tools, timber and lots of other junk, was a box of old clothes. Some of them were dresses, coats, hats and shoes that Mum had brought with her when we moved from Victoria. We would all delve into the big box hoping to grab the very best items before someone else found them. We dressed in the clothes and prepared everything we needed to play shops. For some weeks before, we would rescue all the cartons and packets from the kitchen before they could be burnt in the stove. We would scavenge on the rubbish heap looking for tins with labels and any other saleable items until we had a large variety of goods to sell.
We also gathered leaves from the “sausage tree” in the front garden. Our sausage tree was a laurel tree and it had wide shiny leaves and we reckoned the leaves looked like fat sausages so to us a laurel tree was, and will forever be, a sausage tree. Our green sausages were arranged on pieces of broken plates (which along with other items had come from the rubbish heap) and then placed very carefully on the plank that we had set across a stack of wood in the corner of the shed.
At last it was time to open our shop and the designated shopkeeper would stand at the shed door and callout “Come and buy, come and buy”. The customers, dressed in their rag-bag finery, would come from all directions of the yard, wobbling precariously in high heeled shoes, to purchase the groceries from the wide range on the shelf. The cost of all the items would be added up very correctly and the money changed hands.
In preparation for our shop, money had been made in the evenings by running a pencil over paper under which were real coins. We cut out and pasted the tracings onto cardboard and cut that out so that we’d have plenty of cash. We also made paper money and put our own fancy writing on the notes. All the money was shared equally and we were quite wealthy. As we paid for our purchases the shopkeeper said “Ding”, imitating the bell on the cash register at the corner store, as she opened her imaginary till. We all took turns at being the shopkeeper and we often had arguments about the prices we had to pay. They were changed as often as the shopkeeper after all it was her shop and her groceries so she could please herself what she charged.
We played house and, depending on the weather, this was either in the shed or we would set out our “toys” in the yard. We used bits and pieces of crockery we found on the rubbish heap behind the dunny. Everything was neatly set on our table which in reality was a box. Different shaped sticks from the woodheap were used as cutlery. The garden, the yard and surrounding paddocks provided a never ending supply of “food”. Dry dock heads were used for tea, plants, weeds and flowers were all used as food, and then there were the “sausages” from the sausage tree. Our mud pies were put to use and one of them usually adorned the centre of the table which was draped with an old curtain. We always fried the “sausages” on our non-burning stove erected on the woodheap. Before playing house we would once again be dressed in the clothes from the ragbag and at times we combined playing “shops” with “setting up house”. The laurel tree which was also a good place to hide in, must have played a big part in our lives because the entire family always refers to it as “the sausage tree”.
If we promised not to take him out of the yard and onto the road, Peter would let us dress him in girls clothes and hat and wheel him around the yard in the old twin pram. One day after pushing him around the house and the yard for a while we decided that was too boring so we went onto the road, running as fast as possible so that he couldn’t jump out of the pram. We looked up and there was an elderly lady who lived further up the road. She stopped us to see who we had in the pram, bent over and said “What a beautiful little girl” she was and stated that she had never seen such beautiful brown eyes before and asked us who she was. Quick as a flash one of us told her that it was our cousin Betty who had come to stay. We didn’t have a cousin Betty but we felt sure that if we did she would have been very flattered over the praise of her beauty. However, Peter wasn’t at all impressed and that was the end of that pastime; he flatly refused to get into the pram after that.
As winter followed autumn our outdoor activities slackened and finally ended as the rain and the cold drove us indoors. Our house was not very big and seven children inside around one fire was rather crowded and sometimes a bit of a nightmare. However, Mum was very inventive and we can see now how we came to have such active imaginations and the initiative to amuse ourselves. There was nowhere else to go and no-one else to play with because no-one ever wanted other children besides their own, cooped up inside their house.
Mum was a wizard with a piece of newspaper and a pair of scissors. She showed us how to fold and cut the paper to make a chain of men joined together by their hands. The longer the chain of little men we could cut out, the more puffed up with pride we were. We could also cut paper into patterns that looked like paper doilies. There was only one rule; we were never allowed to touch Mum’s sewing scissors.
Another game that Mum taught us to play was for us to find as many Christian names, animals, trees or flowers that started with the letter A, working our way through to Z. The purpose of this game was to find the longest name possible as each letter was counted when we had all finished at the end of the time limit set by Mum. This game had many more variations and was an ongoing favourite as we vied with each other to show how smart we were. We played a lot of noughts-and-crosses (today’s tic tac toe) and dots-and-dashes.
Sometimes we would draw a head on a piece of paper and then fold it over and pass it on to the next one until a figure was complete right down to the feet. Sometimes people parts were joined to birds or animal parts. We concocted some weird and wonderful beings. Board games were definitely out because we argued like you’d never believe.
Banishment to a cold bedroom to cool down soon saw us back in the warm dining room subdued and ready for another game, even if it was only “snap” with the cards. Then of course there were always newspapers to be cut into squares and threaded on string ready for use in the dunny.
Mum always gave us plenty of encouragement to read and we can be forever grateful to her. Although money was very scarce we had “Boofhead” comics and “Humour” books which were full of jokes and riddles. We were member sofa club that was run in one of the women’s magazines. We also had our books that we collected as prizes at Sunday School. We were avid readers and we gradually and systematically worked our way through the books in the school library.
As the dark cold days of winter warmed and turned into spring our thoughts turned towards kite flying. The
strong gusty winds that blew on fine spring days had us itching for this outdoor exercise. No doubt about it, Mum would have felt the same way as she always helped us make our kites and they always flew high in the sky.
Small slithers of wood were made and cut into the exact size as approved by Mum, one small crosspiece and one large one made the frame. These were firmly joined in the middle with a fine tack and finished with a crisscross of string. More string was fitted tautly around the four points of the frame, all under close supervision by Mum. Then came the crucial part. Thin brown paper was pasted firmly to the frame, the paper being folded over the outside string. As every parcel of meat and drapery was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, we always had a good supply of both. The paper was carefully folded and put away in a top cupboard and the string rolled and tied in a bow and stored in the “string tin”. A lot of string was wound in a special way around a stick of wood that fitted easily into our hands and the exposed end of string was attached to a central piece of string on the back of the kite. Lastly a long tail made of paper tied onto string was attached to the bottom of the kite. Now we were ready to go and fly our kites.
It was Mum who made the paste, supervised five kites being made and then sent us off into the paddock behind the house to fly our kites high in the sky. She must have been glad to see us off and away from the house. It was very disappointing to spend hours making our kites only to find that the wind had dropped, but when the gusts came the kites danced high in the sky, ducking and diving and nearly pulling our arms off as we guided them clear of other kites. We never had a failure and all flew high and wide.
In later years, no matter how hard we tried and used the same style, not one of us could make for our own children a kite that would fly like the ones Mum helped us to make.
9
Work and play
Our life was by no means all fun and games. We had some hard work to do. One job that we had to do in the spring was to cut the grass in the front yard. This did not mean we had a lawn mower and a lawn, we just had grass that had to be, cut and we seemed to be always sat it. We had an old pair of sheep shears and an old pair of scissors. It was hard work and no sooner had we finished cutting than it was time to go back to the start and begin again. The handles of the shears caused us to suffer plenty of blisters but we’d tie a strip of rag around our hand and keep on snipping. We were determined to show that we weren’t to be beaten at anything.
While the grass was short we looked for the corbie grubs that often infested the ground and fed on the roots of the grass. We made hooks on the end of long pieces of wire and carefully put it into the small telltale holes made by the grubs. When other kids asked us what we were doing, we told them we were fishing for corbies. They then wanted to know what for, so we told them Mum was going to make us a corbie pie for tea and showed them the old pie-dish we used to put them in. We were only having them on but they looked as if they believed us.
Because of the very real danger of snakes, keeping the grass cut was very important. Our first encounter with a snake was just after we moved to Lilydale, when Geoff was helping Dad pull up an old slatted wood path between the front verandah and the front gate. Geoff bent down and picked up what he thought was a piece of old bark. When it moved and he saw that it was a snake the poor boy nearly had a heart attack and so did Dad. Luckily the snake was still in hibernation and was very sluggish.
The next time a snake gave us a scare was when Valda lifted up the small washing tub that was upside down on the grass near the back door and found what she thought were two lizards asleep. Recalling stories she had heard that if you held a stick on a lizard’s tail and pushed hard the tail would come off and it would grow another one, Valda went looking for a stick to use when Geoff decided to have a look as he thought it would be most unlikely that two lizards would be asleep together. It was just as well he did because the lizards were in fact one three foot long copper-head snake that Mum immediately killed.
That same year Dad shot a huge black snake near the big gate. The next year in the summer Joan was sweeping the front verandah when a big snake crawled out of a honeysuckle plant and over her foot. She screamed and screamed and Valda who was going out the front door to talk to her was so terrified by the noise that she began screaming too. Poor Mum rushed from the kitchen calling “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Valda, still screaming, managed to tell her “I don’t know, but Joan’s screaming” and then continued screaming. No-one was bitten but we were heard as far away as the shop and people appeared from everywhere to see who was being murdered!
The fourth episode happened one day after school when Mum was in town and we saw a big black snake in the front garden. At first we didn’t know what to do but when we saw it slide under the front verandah a decision was quickly made, the snake had to be killed because it could easily bite one of us and Wilma and Peter were only little and had to be protected. We all donned our gumboots and Joan went for the garden spade. Next, we very carefully and cautiously, with our eyes on the snake, prised up and removed the verandah boards that were directly over the snake. Joan thrust the spade as hard as she could on the snake’s back just below his head. Now we had him but what were we going to do next! Valda had the bright idea that as we had lit the stove and the kettles were boiling, we would pour the water on him! We did and he died, then we hooked him out and hung him on the big gate because we’d been told that snakes don’t die till the sun went down. Anyway, we had all seen dead snakes hanging on fences so that was the right thing to do.
When Mum came off the bus she nearly had a fit when we proudly told her we’d killed the snake. She wanted to know why we hadn’t gone for Mrs Brooks and we truthfully told her there hadn’t been time.
Another snake episode involved Rosalie. One evening she was crossing the bridge that spanned the ditch that ran along our side of the road when a snake suddenly appeared. When she saw it Rosalie ran up the road with the snake chasing her. The baker who lived across the road ran from his house to see what all the screaming was about. He quickly grabbed a hoe from his garden, ran onto the road and killed the snake. For weeks Rosalie had “snake” nightmares. One night she dreamed that she climbed onto a log to get away from a snake. She was sitting on top of Barbara who woke her up and told her to get off as she was being squashed!
On the outskirts of town were old deserted farmhouses that belonged to people who lived in town. In spring the old houses were surrounded by masses of beautiful daffodils and were a picture to behold. They were, to quote William Wordsworth “a host of golden daffodils”. Some old farms didn’t even have houses or sheds to show that someone had once lived there, all that remained were the daffodils and sometimes a lonely chimney stack.
One particular farm we walked to was about five miles from home and was owned by our landlady and her husband. We always let Old Mother Brooks know we were going there because if we didn’t we were sure to get into trouble and that always meant a hiding or castor oil and that was almost too unbearable to even think about. The old house on that farm hadn’t been lived in for years and years. At one time it had been quite beautiful; there was still some pretty blue flowered wall paper on some of the walls. The doors and windows were gone but to us it seemed much bigger, and probably was, than the one we lived in. The remains of the garden were still there and over the years the daffodils had multiplied so that every spring there were hundreds of lovely golden flowers spread all over the ground.
Three or four of us would pick as many as we could carry and take them home. All this would take us about four hours. After a rest and some lunch we’d go to the shop and ask for some cartons. We were always shown a great heap and told to help ourselves. We knew exactly the sizes we needed. From paddocks closer to home we gathered more flowers. After standing them all in a bucket of water overnight, we would be up early the next morning to pack the flowers very carefully into the cartons.
By eight o’clock we’d be standing outside the gate on th
e side of the road with two shillings clutched tightly in our hands, waiting for the bus to come along. We’d pay the driver the freight and ask him to deliver all the flowers to the Launceston General Hospital to cheer the sick people who had no flowers to brighten their wards. After the second time we sent flowers, the driver delivered them free of charge. On one occasion we received a lovely thank-you note from two ward sisters on behalf of all the lonely patients who never before had received any flowers. Barbara, Rosalie and Wilma continued sending daffodils into the hospital until 1951 when the twins went to town to work, Barbara as a telephonist on the Launceston exchange and Rosalie as a trainee schoolteacher.
Never at a loss for games to play outside, we could invent a game to play with almost anything and have fun. Many hours were spent playing on the woodheap as this was something quiet that wouldn’t worry Mum. Everyone in the town used waste mill wood for their stoves and open fires. The wood came in two lengths and was delivered by a man with his draught horse and tip tray during summer and autumn. This was a highlight for us but was overshadowed by the knowledge that we children had to stack all the wood—but before the horse and dray left we would be given a ride out the gate and halfway up the road to the mill. We weren’t allowed to go any further. This was the limit Mum set, but we thought we were made; this simple act meant so much to us.
The Sausage Tree Page 6