by Nevil Shute
They came to Midhurst presently. A fence of two wire strands tacked to the trees, with an occasional post in the wider gaps, crossed their path, with an iron gate; beyond the gate the track became the semblance of a road. She got out of the utility and opened the gate and he drove through. ‘This is the home paddock,’ he said. ‘For horses, mostly.’ She could see horses standing underneath the trees, lean riding horses, swishing long black tails. ‘I’ve got about three square miles fenced off like this around the house.’
The road swung round, and she saw Midhurst homestead. It was prettily situated on a low hill above the bend of a creek; this creek was not running, but there were still pools of water held along its length. ‘Of course, you’re seeing it at the worst time of year,’ he said, and she became aware of his anxiety. ‘It’s a lovely little river in the winter, oh my word. But even in the worst part of the dry, like now, there’s always water there.’
The homestead was a fairly large building that stood high off the ground on posts, so that you climbed eight feet up a flight of steps to reach the veranda and the one floor of the house. It was built of wood and had the inevitable corrugated iron roof. Four rooms, three bedrooms and one sitting-room, were surrounded on all four sides by a veranda twelve feet deep; masses of ferns and greenery of all sorts stood in pots and on stands on this veranda at the outer edge and killed most of the direct rays of the sun. There was a kitchen annexe at one end and a bathroom annexe at the other; the toilet was a little hut over a pi, in the paddock, some distance from the house. Most of the life of the building evidently went on in the veranda and the rooms seemed to be little used; in the veranda was Joe’s bed and his mosquito net, and several cane easy chairs, and the dining-room tables and chairs. Suspended from the rafters was a large canvas waterbag cooling in the draft, with an enamelled mug hung from it by a string.
Five or six dogs greeted them noisily as the utility came to a standstill before the steps. He brushed them aside, but pointed out a large blue and yellow bitch like no dog Jean had ever seen before. ‘That’s Lily,’ he said fondly. ‘She had a bonza litter, oh my word.’
He took her up into the coolness of the veranda; she turned to him. ‘Oh Joe, this is nice!’
‘Like it?’ Puppies were surging about them, grovelling and licking their hands; odd-shaped yellow and blue puppies. Along the veranda a small animal stood erect behind a chair, peering at them around the corner. Joe took the puppies one by one and dropped them into a wire-netting enclosure in one corner. ‘I let them out this morning before driving in,’ he said. ‘They’ll be big enough to go down in the yard pretty soon.’
‘Joe, who fixed up these plants? Did you?’
He shook his head. ‘Mrs Spears did that, when she used to live here. I kept them going. The lubras water them, morning and evening.’ He told her that he had three Abo women, wives of three of his stockriders, who shared the domestic duties of the homestead and cooked for him.
He looked around. ‘There’s the joey somewhere.’ They found the little wallaby lolloping about on the other side of the veranda; it stood like a little kangaroo about eighteen inches high, and had no fear of them. Jean stooped beside it and it nibbled at her fingers. ‘What do you feed it on, Joe?’
‘Bread and milk. It’s doing fine on that.’
‘Don’t the puppies hurt it?’
‘They chase it now and then, but it can kick all right. A full-grown wallaby can kill a dog. Rip him right up.’ He paused, watching her caress the little creature, thinking how lovely she was. ‘It’s all in fun,’ he said. ‘They get along all right. By and by when he gets bigger and the dogs are bigger he’ll get angry with them, and then he’ll go off into the bush.’
A fat, middle-aged lubra, a black golliwog of a woman, laid the table and presently appeared with two plates of the inevitable steak with two eggs on the top, and a pot of strong tea. Jean had become accustomed to the outback breakfast by this time but this steak was tougher than most; she made mental notes to look into the Midhurst cooking as she struggled with it. In the end she gave up and sat back laughing. ‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ she said. ‘It’s because I’m English, I suppose.’
He was very much concerned. ‘Have a couple more fried eggs. You haven’t eaten anything.’
‘I’ve eaten six times as much as I ever ate in England for breakfast, Joe. Who does the cooking?’
‘Palmolive did this,’ he said. ‘It’s her day. Mary cooks much better, but it’s her day off.’
‘Who are they, Joe?’
‘I’ve got a ringer called Moonshine,’ he said. ‘Palmolive’s his gin. My boss Abo, he’s called Bourneville; he’s a bonza boy. Mary’s his gin. Mary cooks all right.’
‘Tell me, Joe,’ she said, ‘do you ever get any indigestion?’
He grinned. ‘Not very often. Just now and then.’
‘You won’t mind if I reorganize the cooking a bit when I come in?’
‘Not so long as you don’t do it all yourself,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t like me to do that?’
He shook his head. ‘I’d rather see you keep time for the things you want to do, the shoes, and the ice-cream parlour, and that.’
She touched his hand. ‘I want to keep time for you.’
He took her out before the heat of the day and showed her the establishment. Although the property covered over a thousand square miles, there were no more buildings round the homestead than she had seen on a four-hundred-acre farm in England. There were three or four cottages of two rooms at the most, for stockmen; there were two small bunkhouses for unmarried ringers, white and black. There was a shed housing the truck and the utility and a mass of oddments of machinery. There was a stable for about six horses, which was empty, and a saddle-room, and a butcher’s room. There was a Diesel engine that drove an electric generator and pumped water from the creek. That was about all.
Once he said, ‘Can you ride a horse?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not, Joe. Ordinary people don’t ride horses much in England.’
‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘You should be able to do that.’
‘Could I learn?’
‘Too right.’
He put his fingers to his mouth like a schoolboy and blew a shrill whistle; a black head came poking out the window of a single-room cottage. ‘Bourneville,’ he called. ‘Get out and bring in Auntie and Robin, ’n saddle up. I’ll be down to help you in a minute.’
He turned to her, surveying her cotton frock. ‘I dunno about your things. Could you get into a pair of my strides, or would you rather not?’
She laughed. ‘Oh Joe, they’d go round me twice!’
‘I wasn’t always as fat as this,’ he said. ‘I got a pair I used to wear before the war, I can’t get into now. It doesn’t matter if they don’t fit right; we’ll only be walking the horses so you’ll see what it feels like.’
He took her up into the homestead and produced a clean man’s shirt and a faded pair of jodhpurs and a belt for her; she took them from him laughing, and went into his spare room and put them on, with a pair of his elastic-sided, thin-soled riding boots that were far too big for her. It gave her a queer feeling of possession to be dressed all in his clothes. She walked gingerly down into the yard with the feeling that everything was likely to fall off her, as it had done on another memorable occasion.
He helped her up into the saddle; once astride the patient fourteen-year-old Auntie the feeling of insecurity left her. They adjusted her stirrups and showed her how to set her foot; once she was fairly settled she felt very safe. She knew little about horses or saddlery at that time, but this saddle was like no saddle she had ever seen in England, even in a picture. It rose up in an arch high behind her seat and high in front of her, so that she was seated as in a hammock. There was a great horn that projected above each of her thighs and another one under each thigh, so that she was as if clamped into place. ‘I don’t believe that anyone could fall off from a saddle like this,’ sh
e said.
‘You aren’t meant to fall off,’ he replied.
They walked the horses out of the yard and down the track to the creek; as they went he showed her how to hold the reins and how to use her heels. He took her up the creek for about a mile and then by a wide circuit through the bush, winding beneath the trees so far as possible to seek the shade. Once she saw four scurrying black forms vanishing among the trees and he told her that these were wild pig, and once in a wide stretch of water covered with water lilies there was a violent swirl of water as an alligator dived away from them. She saw several wallabies bounding away before their horses.
They returned to the homestead after an hour or so. Although they had walked the horses all the way Jean was drenched with sweat under the hot sun, and she had a raging thirst. In the veranda she drank several mugs of water, and then she went into the bathroom and had a shower, and changed back into her own cool clothes.
They lunched in the veranda on steak and bread and jam, a repeat of breakfast without the eggs. ‘Palmolive hasn’t got much imagination in the matter of tucker,’ he said apologetically.
‘She’s looking very tired,’ Jean said. ‘Great black circles under her eyes. Give her the afternoon off, Joe. I’ll make tea for you.’
He offered her the use of the spare room bed to sleep on after lunch, but they had seen so little of each other in the last fortnight that the time seemed too precious to waste in sleep. ‘Let’s sit out here,’ she said. ‘If I should go to sleep, Joe, it’ll be just one of those things.’ So they pulled two of the long cane chairs to the corner of the veranda where there might be a little breeze, and sat together close, so that they could touch hands. ‘It’s not always as hot as this,’ he said, still anxious for her approval of the place. ‘Just these two months are the bad ones. By January it’ll be beginning to cool off, when the rain gets properly under way.’
‘It’s not too bad,’ she said. ‘I remember times when it was quite as hot as this in Malaya.’
She led him on to tell her about his work on the station; having seen a little of the terrain that morning she felt she could appreciate what he told her better now. ‘There’s not a lot to do this time of year,’ he said. ‘I like to get up to the top end of the station once a fortnight, if I can, in case of duffers. Make a cache or two of tucker up there, too, this time of year, and shoot the worst of the scrub bulls you see around.’
‘What’s a duffer, Joe?’
‘Why, cattle duffers – cattle thieves. We’ve not had much of it this year. Sometimes the drovers coming down to Julia Creek from the Cape stations – they pick up a few as they go through the property and put them with the herd. It means faking the brands, of course, and there’s the police at Julia to keep an eye open for fresh-branded beasts as they go on the train. They caught a joker at it two years ago and he got six months. We’ve not had much since then. Poddy-dodging, now – well, that’s another matter.’
‘What’s poddy-dodging, Joe?’ She was beginning to grow sleepy, but she wanted to know all she could.
‘Why, a poddy’s a cleanskin, a calf born since the last muster that hasn’t been branded. Some of these jokers, even your best friends, they’ll come on to your station and round up the poddys and drive them off on to their own land, and then there’s nothing to say they’re yours. That’s poddy-dodging, that is. It’s a fair cow. Of course, there’s always cattle crossing the boundaries because there aren’t any fences, so it’s a bit of a mix-up generally when you come to muster. But I’ve been on stations where there weren’t hardly any poddys there at all when we come to muster. All the jokers on the other stations had got them.’
She said, ‘But do the poddys just stay on the new land? Don’t they want to go back to mother?’
He glanced at her, appreciating the question. ‘That’s right – they would if you let them. They’d go straight back to their own herd on their own land, even if it was fifty miles. But what these jokers do is this. They build a little corral on their land in some place where no one wouldn’t ever think to look, and they drive your poddys into it. Then they leave them there for four or five days without food or water – don’t give them nothing at all. Well, if you do that to a poddy he goes sort of silly and forgets about the herd, and mother. All he wants is a drink of water, same as you or I. Then you let him out and let him drink his fill at a waterhole. He’s had such a thirst he won’t leave that waterhole for months. He forgets all about his own place, and just stays in his new home.’
Her eyes closed, and she slept. When she woke up the sun was lower in the sky, and Joe had left her. She got up and sponged her face in the bathroom, and saw him outside working on the engine of the truck. She tidied herself up, looked at her watch, and went to investigate the kitchen.
Primitive was the word, she thought. There was a wood-burning hearth which mercifully was out, and a wick-burning oil stove; this was the cooking equipment. There was a small kerosene refrigerator. Masses of cooked meat were stored in a wire gauze meat safe with nearly as many flies inside it as there were outside. The utensils were old-fashioned and dirty and few in number; it was a nightmare of a kitchen. Jean felt that the right course would be to burn it down and start again, and she wondered if this could be done without burning down the house as well. There was little in the store cupboard but staple foods such as flour and salt and soap.
She put on the kettle to boil for tea and looked around for something to cook, other than meat. Eggs were plentiful at Midhurst and she found some stale cheese; she went and consulted Joe, and then came back and made him a cheese omelette with eight eggs. He cleaned his hands and came and watched her while she did it. ‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘Where did you learn cooking?’
‘In Ealing,’ she said, and it all seemed very far away: the grey skies, the big red buses, and the clamour of the Underground. ‘I had a sort of little kitchenette with an electric cooker. I always used to cook myself a two-course evening meal.’
He grinned awkwardly. ‘Afraid you won’t find many electric cookers in the outback.’
She touched his hand. ‘I know that, Joe. But there are lots of things that could be done here to make it a bit easier.’ As they ate their tea they talked about the kitchen and the house.
‘It’s just the kitchen that needs altering,’ she said. ‘The rest of it is lovely.’
‘I’ll get a toilet fixed up in the house before you come,’ he promised her. ‘It’s all right for me going out there, but it’s not nice for you.’
She laughed. ‘I don’t mind that, so long as you keep up the supplies of the Saturday Evening Post.’ He grinned, but she found him set upon this alteration. ‘Some places have a septic tank and everything,’ he said. ‘They put one in at Augustus when the Duke and Duchess stayed there. I reckon that we’ll have to wait a while for that.’
They ate their tea out on the veranda as the sun went down, and sat looking out over the creek and the bush, smoking and talking quietly. ‘What are you doing next week?’ she asked. ‘Will you be in town, Joe?’
He nodded. ‘I’ll be in on Thursday, or Friday at the latest. I’m going up to the top end tomorrow for a couple of days, just see what’s going on.’
She smiled. ‘Looking after the poddys?’
He grinned. ‘That’s right. It’s a bit difficult this time of year, in the dry, because the tracks don’t show so good. I got a boy called Nugget on the station now, and he’s a bonza tracker, oh my word. I’m taking him up with me. I’ve got a kind of feeling that Don Curtis, up on Windermere station, he’s been at my poddys.’
‘What would you do if you found tracks, then, Joe? Tracks leading off your land and on to his?’
He grinned. ‘Go after ’em and find ’em and drive ’em back,’ he said. ‘Hope Don doesn’t come along while we’re doing it.’
He drove her into Willstown at about nine o’clock that night; they halted for a while outside the town to say goodnight in proper style. She lay against his shoulder with
his arm around her, listening to the noises of the bush, the croaking of the frogs, the sound of crickets, and the crying of a night bird. ‘It’s a lovely place you live in, Joe,’ she said. ‘It just wants a new kitchen, that’s all. Don’t ever worry about me not liking it.’
He kissed her. ‘It’ll be all ready for you when you come.’
‘April,’ she said. ‘Early in April, Joe.’
She started up the shoe workshop in the first week of December, three or four days after Aggie Topp arrived. To start with she had five girls, Judy Small and her friend Lois Strang, and Annie, whose figure was beginning to deteriorate and who had been sacked from the hotel, and two fifteen-year-olds who had recently left school. For cleanliness and to mark the fact that they were working in a regular job she put everyone into a green overall coat in the workshop, and gave them a mirror on the wall so that they could see what they looked like.
From the first days she found that the fifteen-year-olds were the best employees. Girls straight from school were used to the discipline of regular hours of work; she seldom got the girls from outback homes to settle down to it so well as the younger ones. The monotony was irksome to the older girls who had left school for some years, or who had never been to school at all. She tried to help them by ordering an automatic changing gramophone from Cairns, with a supply of records; the music certainly intrigued and amused the whole of Willstown and may have helped the older girls a little, but not much. The big attraction of the workshop was the air-conditioner.
The air-conditioner was the best recruiting agent of the lot. In that torrid summer heat which ranged from between a hundred and a hundred and ten degrees at midday, she managed to keep the temperature of the workshop down to about seventy degrees, at which the girls could work without their hands sweating. For the girls it meant that they got respite from the heat of the day, and music to listen to, and the novelty of a clean green overall to wear, and money in their pockets at the end of the week. The workshop was popular from the first, and Jean never had any difficulty in getting as many recruits for it as she could handle. For the early months, however, she was content with five.