The Sausage Tree (5 page)

7

We always looked forward to the holidays but in a way also dreaded them because Mum was never really well as it took her many years to recover from the burst abscess which later needed further surgery. We had to be careful not to make too much noise or have too many extra kids in the yard, but we could always tell when Mum was having a “good day”. She had a strong, true soprano singing voice and it was always a pleasure to hear her singing the old songs. “Danny Boy” and “Beautiful Dreamer” were two of her favourites and she used to sing for hours. When she wasn't well she'd yell out “You kids behave yourselves, I've got a headache.” How familiar that speech came to be as unbeknown to her doctors, Mum was also suffering from Paget's disease. This affected her skull, hips and legs, and being a rare complaint at that time, was not diagnosed until 1954, some twelve years later.

School holiday times were different to those of today.
Summer holidays started in the third week of December and finished at the end of January. School always started on the Tuesday after the Australia Day long weekend. In later years this was extended by another three weeks into February.

Christmas was a very exciting time and we spent a great deal of time wishing and hoping for all sorts of things we'd like for Christmas. We wished for a bike, a tea-set or perhaps a sleeping doll dressed in beautiful clothes. We fantasised about all the wonderful toys we might get from Santa, just like other kids got. All the wishing and hoping in the world would never have brought our dreams into reality, we had no concept of rich or poor—the haves and the have-nots. While our playmates received bikes and dolls prams complete with new celluloid dolls dressed in pretty clothes, we usually got a rag doll, a new dress or undies, a tin of lollies and maybe a jigsaw puzzle.

Dad made some toys for Wilma and Peter. One year he made a two-wheeled dolls pusher for Wilma. He painted it a pretty blue and it took Wilma about six years to realise that it was painted the same colour as the bedroom suite he had made for them. For Peter he made wooden trucks and trains to add to the collection he played with on the woodheap.

We always bought Mum a Christmas present with the little bit of money we earned doing chores for other people. We would spend ages wandering around the shop looking for a very special gift. After our purchase we'd hurry home, wrap it very carefully in brown paper, tie it tightly with string and hide it in our wardrobe.

On Christmas Day we would proudly give Mum her little parcel. She would look surprised, smile and say “thank you”. Then, as she did with birthday presents, she would go through the same frustrating routine. She would sit in her chair and slowly and carefully undo every knot in the string
which she then tied in a bow ready to put in the “string tin”. Then without tearing the paper she'd carefully unwrap our wonderful gift. We would get a little hug and another thank-you. How graciously Mum accepted our gifts, even though she must have been terribly disappointed that she had received another glass jam or butter dish to put in the cupboard with all the others we had bought her. These were the only things that we could buy with our Iittle bit of money.

Christmas was the only time we ever received presents from anyone besides Santa. The week before Christmas Day a brown paper parcel arrived for us at the post office. It came from our next door neighbour in Oakleigh. Mum would again go through the slow process of unwrapping the parcel. That dear lady always sent something for everyone; no-one was forgotten. Inside would be pretty hankies, little books and perhaps a brooch or necklace. Our neighbour was a Hungarian lady, Mrs Szekfy whom we all called Auntie Szekfy and we still have fond memories of her. Years later when she went to work in Melbourne, Valda frequently visited her and spent many happy hours with her.

On Christmas Day we were allowed small talk at the dinner table, but we had to be careful not to overdo it and so ruin our Christmas dinner. We always had roast chicken and potatoes, peas and carrots and parsnips from the garden. Most important of all was the pudding that we had all stirred after Mum had added the threepences and sixpences before popping it into the saucepan of boiling water. Somehow Mum managed to give us all a coin each as she ceremoniously cut the pudding from left to right, serving the youngest first. This was a family tradition from her own childhood and was never varied. After a small second-serve some of us would ask to be excused from the table and come back again after running around the house and jumping up and down in an attempt to make room for
another serve of pudding. This was the only day of the year we were allowed to leave the table and then return.

One year when Peter was four, he asked Mum for two shillings (twenty cents) so that he could buy her a birthday present. Money was a little bit more plentiful then so Mum gave it to him. Peter was gone quite a long time and Mum thought she'd better see where he was. When she went outside she found him playing with a new red ball so asked him where he'd got it. Peter told her that the shop didn't have any presents for that money so he bought himself a ball. As he was the apple of her eye and she could see the funny side, Peter didn't get into trouble.

We were never bored—there was always too much to do. Our imagination and initiative were endless. Whatever we were doing outside to amuse ourselves was done only after we had finished or if we skipped our inside jobs, although we could hardly dodge the breakfast washing-up as Mum was usually in the kitchen. Mum always washed the lunch dishes and one day when we were playing hide-and-seek she came to the end of the back verandah, tossed the dishwater sideways round the comer right over Valda who was hiding there. She was covered from head to toe in greasy water and it smelled terrible. Cleaning the greasy dishwater away was no easy task as Mum had used all the hot water to wash the dishes.

Although there were seven of us we were not all involved in the same activities. Being a boy and the eldest, Geoff was responsible for keeping a good supply of kindling stacked in the shed and also had to dig most of the vegetable garden. When he was not busy with his jobs he would be away doing “boy things” with the two boys next door and
Wilma and Peter, being much younger, were too little for most of our activities.

On the many occasions that Mum was really ill and confined to bed, we would sit forlornly in the yard making daisy chains or play very quiet games such as “plum pudding” or “hide-and-seek”. We also played “soldiers”. We picked the long-stalked, brown-topped part of nobby grass or ribwort. Each person had the same number of “soldiers”, one person held the very end of the stalk and their “enemy” tried to chop the head off by hitting at it with one of their “soldiers”. We made the rule that if we hit our enemies' fingers, we missed a turn and if the head of the “soldier” wasn't chopped off with the first swipe, we had to keep using it until its head came off. The one with the most “soldiers” at the finish was the winner.

At the end of our road, only five houses up and over the railway line, was a timber mill where in later years Dad gained employment. This might seem as though we lived out of the town, but no, the mill was only about three hundred yards from the shop and post office and we lived halfway between the two.

The mill was run by a steam engine that burnt a lot of the waste timber to generate the steam, but there was always plenty leftover. Along the side fence next to the railway line was a huge stack of long narrow poles, some of them five to six foot long. We would ask Mr Green, the foreman, if we could have some of the poles. We were very selective in our choices because the poles had to be narrow enough to put our hands around and also be as long as possible without bending.

We balanced the poles on our shoulders and proudly carried them home into the old shed that Dad used as a workshop for making furniture. Then would come the task of measuring each one so that we had matching pairs. If we needed to shorten any we used Dad's handsaw for the job.
Next came the selection of the “steps” that we found on the woodheap. These also had to be in pairs and wide enough for our feet to fit on properly. Using Dad's hammer and nails, we then fixed the steps at a pre-determined height to the poles. We used lots of nails, not only to make sure the steps were strong enough, but because we weren't very good at straight hammering!

Now we were ready to walk on our stilts. We had a lot of fun with them and as we became more adept and daring we would hammer more steps higher and higher until we had to stand on the top rail of the fence or on the wood stack to get onto them. We were all very good at stilt-walking and could walk right around the house without falling off. We would carefully hide our stilts by sliding them under the house when it was time for Dad to be coming home from work because we were not supposed to touch his tools or his nails. Our pride in our stilts was hurt and our joy vanished when he growled about us wasting his nails. Still, we had this year's stilts and next year we'd happily make some more, knowing full well that trouble was bound to come around when Dad found out! We had to make new ones each year because the others always ended up as firewood during the winter.

We also made stilts from empty fruit cans. We turned the cans upside down and made two holes exactly halfway round the outer edge in the bottom. Next a length of string was threaded through and knotted on the inside of the can. After measuring the required length for each person, the string was then knotted on the other end. The stilts were fun and made a lovely tinny “klonk, klonk” as we walked over boards and hard ground. Even the youngest could walk on them and the neighbourhood children came to join us. Imagine the noise of seven or eight pairs of tin stilts as we walked around making patterns on the ground. We kept our tin stilts for walking in the mud in the winter. It
was fun to see the mud oozing everywhere we walked. Even the bitterly cold weather could not diminish our fun—we could always get warm by the fire when we went inside. Sometimes we would pretend we were horses and stamp and gallop around the yard to keep warm. The other kids must sometimes have wondered at our sanity but we knew we were okay; it was just our imagination at work again.

Behind the sawmill up the road was a steep hill which in springtime was covered with lush green grass, no trees, just a big bare hill that ended near a huge stockpile of saw logs at the bottom. When the grass turned straw-coloured we and the two boys from next door went to inspect the grass to see if it was dry enough for a sledge run. We were hardly ever wrong in the time we made our inspection. We were experts; it was usually just right.

Back home, we'd gather the wood we'd put aside from the wood stack during the winter for our sledge making. The carefully selected wood was duly laid out and then we were into Dad's nails again! We made two sledges and the boys next door made one. The design was simple and never varied. A strong runner for each side was shaped to a blunt point at the front with the small axe. Then firm flat pieces were carefully nailed in place to form the seat—all neat and tidy with nothing out of place. On the front of the runners we bent a nail into a staple to attach the guide rope to form the handle. This was usually last year's skipping rope, we were very thrifty sledge builders. Next we raided Mum's dripping tin for soft fat to rub into the bottom of the runners. After two days of sledge building we were ready for the fun to begin. We'd take a small tin of dripping with us and pull our sledges which were very heavy, all the way to the top of the hill.

The eldest sat on the front of the sledge with a younger one behind hanging on for dear life. A shove and a big push and the vehicles would career down the hill carrying
yelling, screaming kids having the best fun we'd had for ages. After each run we dragged them back to the top again, inspected them to see if they needed regreasing, changed the crew and the hill would again echo with excited screams. Sometimes when other kids heard us we would have quite a queue waiting for us to let them have a ride.

To this day we can still remember the thrill of the danger and the exhilaration of the speed that created a wind in our hair as we sped down that hill, choosing the exact moment to steer the sledge away from the pile of logs at the bottom. We were well aware of the danger and the risks we took with our sledge rides. Looking back at the hill now, through mature eyes, we find it hard to believe that Mum let us do such a dangerous thing. That hill is nearly perpendicular! In one word, suicidal. Because Mum showed us how to make the sledges in the first place, perhaps she had faith in our ability to fly safely down the hill without hurting ourselves.

We never rode our sledges at the weekend when Dad was home he could think of too many jobs for us to do. Saturday was always our main cleaning day with bedrooms and dining room swept, polished and dusted. We washed the floors on our hands and knees, then we'd put on the polish. By this time our poor knees would be a bit sore so we tied old jumpers and rags to our feet and slid around pretending we were ice skaters or ballroom dancers until the floors had a high shine on them. Sometimes in anticipation of falls we tied the cushions to our bottoms. Sliding was good fun—but we made sure we didn't make too much noise because Mum or Dad would put a stop to our enjoyment.