I KNEW HIM BY HIS HAT, when it bobbed past the kitchen window. “We set a place in case a starving traveller came to the door,” I told him. “And we did some extra spuds and peas, too.”
Mr Bluenose bowed and shook Aggie’s hand, and she smiled. He told Milly she’d grown and said, “Bagheera sent a dead rat as a Christmas present for Milly.
“I did not want to hurt his feelings by telling him it was an unsuitable Christmas present, so I hid it in the ditch by the hall.”
Mr Bluenose swung the sugarbag pikau off his back and took out three bottles. Two were beer, but the third was wrapped in brown paper. He held it sideways and unwrapped it carefully.
“Merry Christmas, Maggie, for all the help sorting apples, feeding the pigs, and for the time you taught Horse to push the wheelbarrow.”
This bottle was clear glass, a different shape to the beer bottles; inside it was a red ship with white sails, on rows of green waves.
“A cod-fishing schooner,” said Mr Bluenose. “The one I told you about.”
“But—”
“See the dories stacked on deck? The one on top is mine, the one I was lost in.”
“But—”
“See the captain who wanted to throw me over the side?”
“But—”
“And the mate at the wheel who said they would keep me for bait?”
“But how did the ship get inside the bottle? With all its sails, and masts, and ropes? And, look, I can see the anchor. And a little chimney with grey smoke coming out.”
“From the stove in the galley. The cook is busy inside. With one hand he is holding on; with the other, he is cooking Christmas dinner.”
“What are they going to have?”
“Boiled cod and dried peas.”
“Thank you for the schooner, Mr Bluenose, but how did it get inside the bottle?”
“Ah,” Mr Bluenose tapped his nose. “That is a great secret.”
I set the schooner inside the bottle in the middle of the table. “It’s the most beautiful ship. Is it really the one you were on?”
“The very same ship.”
Aggie and I sat on the bench behind the table, our backs to the wall, and stared as the schooner sailed on and on across the rows of green waves, in the smell of roast chook, fresh peas, new potatoes, and brown gravy.
“Children should be seen and not heard,” I told Aggie, who sat very straight, never put her elbows on the table, and spoke only when she was spoken to. She was dainty in her eating, took small mouthfuls, and nibbled like a lady. I had a wing, the neck, a slice of white meat off the breast, some new potatoes, green peas, and a big spoonful of stuffing, all runny with gravy.
“Look what I got!”
“You always get the wishbone,” Dad grumbled. “It’s not fair.”
“Don’t cry.” I knew he was just trying to get it off me, so I pulled the wishbone with Mr Bluenose and made a secret wish.
“What did you wish?” asked Dad. “You can tell me.”
“If I told you my wish, then it wouldn’t be a secret any longer. He always tries to get me to tell him,” I told Mr Bluenose.
“I once got the wishbone,” he shook his head, “then told somebody what I had wished, and the wish worked round the wrong way. Seven years’ bad luck I had before my wishes started working again. So do not tell your father.”
Lifting the Christmas pudding out of the boiler, Dad pretended not to hear. “Can you look after the custard, Maggie?”
“You sit there and make polite conversation to Mr Bluenose,” I told Aggie.
“Any lumps,” Dad said, “and the person who made the custard has to eat them herself.” I stirred it very smooth.
“What about that?” Dad unwrapped the cloth, and put the smoking Christmas pudding on the table. “It weighs enough.”
“A noble plum-duff,” said Mr Bluenose. He and I stamped our feet, and Aggie clapped her hands.
“It looks like a very hot cannon ball,” I told Dad.
“Do you want to cut it?”
I stuck the carving knife in the middle, cut down, and the cannon ball gushed steam and smelled even better.
“Well cut,” Mr Bluenose clapped.
Dad served big slices. I passed Mr Bluenose the jug of custard and the cream Dad had brought home from work, and we ate our noble plum-duff. “Merry Christmas,” we told each other, and Dad and Mr Bluenose had a swig of beer.
“To absent friends,” said Mr Bluenose.
“Absent friends.” Dad raised his glass. They said nothing more but drank, and I watched them and wondered who they were toasting.
I didn’t ask because I took the first mouthful of Christmas pudding, and my teeth grated on something so hard my head shivered. A threepence. Then I found two more, and a sixpence. Mr Bluenose got a threepence, and Dad coughed and spluttered and thought he’d swallowed something.
“It felt like a half-crown going down,” he said and rubbed his throat.
All through dinner, I never stopped looking at the red schooner sailing over the green sea, and wondering how it had sailed inside the bottle.
“Aggie wants to know something, Mr Bluenose, but she’s too shy to ask. If it’s the schooner you were on, why aren’t you inside the bottle, too?”
“Tell Aggie I climbed out the neck of the bottle, ran away, and got a job on a ship that brought me to New Zealand.”
I whispered in Aggie’s ear, put my own ear to her mouth and listened.
“Aggie says, you must have been skinny.”
“Very skinny, but for my age quite tall. And perhaps the bottle has shrunk,” said Mr Bluenose. “Perhaps it looks smaller because we are looking back down all those years to when I was a boy.”
Aggie nodded. She understood that, she told me.
Dad and Mr Bluenose finished their beer and talked about the Depression and what sort of a summer it was for the farmers, and about Old Peter Rust who’d got the sack from Mr Hoe and gone on the swag. I opened my new paint tin, got a jar of water, and painted a red schooner on a piece of Mr Cleaver’s brown paper.
Aggie sat and watched, but Milly wanted to lick the paint, even though she’d had her Christmas dinner, then she sat on the paper and got some Crimson Lake on her tail. “Hoy, that’s my painting,” I told her, but she took no notice, so I did another which I gave to Mr Bluenose.
Boxing Day, Dad had to go to work. “At least I had Christmas Day off,” he said. “The trouble is, nobody told the cows what time of the year it is, so the milk keeps coming in.”
I was busy most of the morning, sewing Aggie a skirt out of an old dress. I didn’t know how to go about making a blouse, but a skirt wouldn’t be too much trouble. That’s what I thought, as I cut it out and fitted it. The sewing took ages, because Milly wanted to chase the end of the thread and, since I’d tied a knot in it, she got it between her claws, and when I tugged, her eyes grew big and she tugged back. She tugged so hard, she pulled the whole thread out of the needle and wouldn’t let me have it.
I tried the skirt on Aggie, but it was too tight, because sewing it together up the back had taken more material than I’d allowed for, and I had to start all over again.
“Lucky there’s lots of the old dress.” I said. Then, instead of just hemming it round the top, I made a proper waistband, and that gave the second skirt a better shape, and it fitted Aggie better, even though it was still a bit on the tight side.
“You’ll just have to hold your breath and eat less noble plum-duff,” I told her. “And no cream.”
Jean Carter came along to show me what she’d got for Christmas: a golliwog with a big grin, lots of black, woolly hair, white teeth, a little knitted red jacket with white buttons, and white trousers.
I showed her my old golliwog who was pretty worn and faded from going to bed with me for years, and the time he was watching Dad doing the washing and fell in the copper and got boiled, and turned all our singlets and sheets streaky black and red, so for weeks we had to bleach them in the frosts on the back lawn.
I let Jean undress Aggie and put all her clothes back on again, but she still wasn’t too good at doing up buttons. I showed her the skirt I’d made Aggie.
“It took me ages,” I said. “My mother would have run it up in a few seconds on her machine. She was very clever with her hands; and she could do anything she liked with a needle and thread.”