I’d brought back a couple of books from my own childhood-library, and in the days after Easter I introduced the younger children to Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill series and the older group to Ethel Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo. I’d chosen these books because of the children’s eager response to any story featuring animals; I also judged them to be a little above the reading capabilities of the kids for whom they were intended, so I read them aloud.
The littlies just loved Blinky and his exploits; they made several requests for me to get on with the next instalment. But Dot didn’t receive the same joyful reception, so the older children and I formed a plan for me to cease reading if they said they weren’t enjoying it enough to continue. Fair enough, I thought, and this had given me a chance to talk with them about what we loved from our reading and what we might look for in stories that could entertain us—a really insightful discussion, and one that helped them focus on the positive results of reading rather than just the mechanics.
As I left the school on the Thursday after Easter, I was reflecting on the enjoyment the smaller kids were gaining from Blinky and pondering how, through the expression with which I read aloud, they might be picking up the real value of punctuation. Mentally, as I walked back to my hoochie on the veranda, I started to rehearse my reading performance.
At Kegworth I had bought totally into the need for a teacher to perform. Teachers, I came to believe, must at times adopt personas, attitudes, behaviours and roles so as to stimulate the children, imbuing lessons with drama and fun—often to revivify flagging interest. I was fully aware that when kids are sitting in one place for up to six hours a day, they become distracted sometimes and, understandably, bored. I accepted that part of my role was to help them through low times with a touch of make-believe. Handstands in the aisles and swinging from the chandeliers were my thoughts as I acted out and tried to have as much enjoyment as did the kids.
I strolled slowly along, deep in silent planning, down the school track and then onto the main road. Across that road and just up the hill from my lodgings was the compound of three huts where the elderly brother and sister lived. We’d occasionally waved a greeting to each other, but because they never left their property—as far as I could tell—I had no opportunity to speak with them. From time to time I had pondered if they could gaze straight into my camp on the veranda and know more about me than I would want them to know. Even so, I’d decided to introduce myself to them if an opportunity arose.
That afternoon I noticed the brother in his yard, so I crossed the road, shook hands and gave my name. He introduced himself as Perc Buckland. I could see he was in his late seventies. His sister, he explained, was named Ethel, and he invited me to meet her and take afternoon tea with them. It was already late in the day, almost dark, as was usual when I left the school, so I begged off and said I’d join them the next day.
That following afternoon, Perc showed me around their property before we went in for the refreshments. The first of the three huts, right on the road, was a tumbledown, galvanised-iron affair, its walls leaning in all directions and seemingly dependent on overgrown vines for their ability to stay upright. Perc told me this was where he slept. It had been the petty sessions courthouse in years gone by. I didn’t ever see inside.
Perc told me he acted as an agent for a New England hide merchant. Any local with hides, skins, furs or pelts to sell brought them to Perc, and he stored them in his hut until the monthly attendance of the merchant. After the hides were valued, the money was handed over to Perc and could then be distributed to the right people. This kept him in touch with some of the locals, and he chatted happily with them when they visited with hides. Apart from that, neither Perc nor Ethel had any contact with their neighbours as they never ventured beyond their own boundaries.
The second hut, down the slope a little from the first, was a more substantial wooden structure. It was only one small room, though, with a tiny front veranda. This was Ethel’s hut, where she had her bedroom. Sometimes, when I later called on the siblings, she would be sitting in a wicker chair on the veranda. I saw inside this hut once only, when she was in bed sick but wanted to say hello. The little room was neat, with lined walls, and Ethel lay in a proper old iron bed with a snowy-white spread. A wardrobe and bedside cabinet quite filled the rest of the space. There was a vase of flowers, some books and magazines on the cabinet, and a rug on the floor. It was snug and gave an air of comfort, although I could see no sign of any fire having been laid in the fireplace.
On my first visit, Perc and I proceeded down the hill a little further, along a well-trodden track, until we came to the third hut, in which the brother and sister did much of their living. Here I met Ethel for the first time. She seemed a year or two younger than her brother but still well into her seventies.
This hut was also of galvanised iron, with not one right-angled corner to be seen. Thick vines covered the walls and roof. There was no window, so sunlight only entered when the door, swung on leather hinges, was left open. It took me some minutes to regain my full vision. The walls were unlined, and the rafters, of rough-cut tree branches, were visible just overhead. The dirt floor was almost level and very clean; decades of use had packed it down hard and smoothed it out, with a little shine from so many footsteps. At one end was a huge open fireplace, but there was no cooking range or stove. Above the fire hung a metal arrangement—a crane, the siblings told me. Its various branches or arms, each at a different height from the hearth, could hold a pot or pan over the flames.
The table had been created by banging two large tree stumps into the earth and then attaching hand-sawn planks on top. I soon discovered any cup or mug had to be placed with care to ensure the contents didn’t tip or spill. On each side of the rough table were long stools for sitting, each made from two small tree stumps driven into the earth and the careful placement of roughly cut planks. These had been smoothed out over the decades, so I had no fear of splinters. Beside the fire was a sagging, softly upholstered chair, its stuffing hanging out all over; it was draped with a multi-coloured rug, crocheted by Ethel in years gone by.
Whenever I visited, we’d sit before the fire in this hut. Ethel would take the soft chair, and Perc and I would sit on the stools on opposite sides of the table. Except when Ethel was sick, we never varied that seating pattern over my hundreds of visits.
There was no electricity in Weabonga. In the Bucklands’ huts, light was provided by one pressure lamp in the living hut and smaller kerosene lamps to take to each bedside. If we sat talking until it grew dark, we sat on with just the firelight jumping about, illuminating little. There was ease in speaking intimately in the semi-dark.
On my first visit I was stunned by the siblings’ living arrangements, but I quickly came to disregard them: my joy in spending time with the elderly pair overrode everything. I paid attention only to our happy chatter and vibrant conversations.
Perc was still strikingly handsome, and Ethel was always alert, lively and merry of face. They got about easily enough, although never with any speed. Their lifestyle had helped them to remain slim, and they stood very upright, with strong handshakes, and bright and open gazes. Both laughed easily and smiled often.
That first afternoon it was love at first sight for me, and it seemed mutual. Perhaps, like me, they were starved of companionship. Perhaps, like me, they revelled in talk of current affairs, politics and society. Perhaps, like me, they loved reading and discussing books. Whatever was in play in our friendship, we never stopped to analyse it, just thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was.
After that first visit, I sat with Ethel and Perc several times each week and shared many cups of tea as we discussed the world, our opinions, and our likes and dislikes. In more than seventy years the siblings had never been further from Weabonga than Tamworth, thirty miles away, and neither had any secondary education. But they were wise and insightful and surprisingly well read. After carefully testing out my opinions over a few visits, they began to be more outspoken.
I’d found most people I knew to be progressive in their thinking, and there seemed to be a general agreement that Australia needed to change. Nearly everyone I talked with was concerned about the poor level of educational provision; the lack of good health care and hospitals, particularly in regional areas; and the lack of efficient industries that could compete with those of other developed nations. Australia, to most I knew, seemed an unnecessarily backward country, and we all wanted to see progression. No matter one’s political persuasion there was general support for initiative and development. So in that sense I wasn’t at all surprised by Perc and Ethel’s modern ideas, but I found it remarkable that folk of their age wanted change as desperately as I did.
Australia’s involvement in both the Korean War and the Malayan Emergency had been unnecessary and unwise. Ethel and Perc could see trouble brewing in Vietnam and believed our country would be drawn in—and they didn’t want that. The ongoing Cold War was a great worry to them.
They believed that Bob Menzies, a prime minister for whom they had never voted, was disappointing, and they found, from their pensioners’ point of view, he was hard to trust. We all felt that development should have been receiving significantly greater governmental support. Australia’s annual growth rate of just over one per cent was regrettable to all of us at a time when we believed the country should have been booming. And while Perc and Ethel both spoke with a pleasant, lilting accent, they found Menzies’ plummy tones a bit silly and affected.
The siblings delivered their opinions with style and humour. Both were witty and often provoked loud laughter. Merriment rippled along under every conversational stream. Both were always interesting, and there was no lull in our chatter. Not once did we look at each other and say that it must be five to the hour as a silence had descended.
From them I heard little of the past, and I admired that, at their ages, their focus was almost entirely on the future. They rarely spoke about their early life and not once referred to their parents. On only one occasion did either comment on the early history of Weabonga: Perc told of the enjoyment he’d received from riding his horse for weeks at a time around a large district to distribute and collect the census papers.
While accepting that the past was forbidden territory, I couldn’t help but feel what a treasure they would have been to an oral historian, if they did decide to share their memories. Through a little fossicking in records, I found that the Court of Petty Sessions—of which their father had been the appointed magistrate—had opened in Weabonga, or Swamp Oak as it was known, in 1891, and the magistrate had presided in the courthouse tin shed until his sudden, totally unexpected death. Assuming they’d come to the village with their father in 1891, Ethel and Perc would have been young children on arrival and seen nearly seventy years pass by as village residents.
Ethel told me that once a week Bon brought them, in his mail car, newspapers delivered originally to his home for his family to read during the preceding week. Each paper was read, by Ethel and Perc, from cover to cover in the correct calendar order. They then re-read each, many times over. Bon also brought them any paperbacks he could scrounge, along with recycled magazines that folk along his mail route would hand back on his next run.
They had a radio, tuned mostly to the ABC and listened to for many hours each day. I had not heard them tune to the local radio, which played turgid songs either about faithful dogs or unfaithful lovers.
We spent loads of time discussing books, both past gems and present joys. Whenever I spent time away from Weabonga, I returned with reading materials. Most were for my students, but I also carried back anything I thought my elderly friends might enjoy.
We immersed ourselves in Dickens. I had begun reading fiction early in primary school but it was Great Expectations—which I read when I was about ten and borrowed from the travelling library of Randwick Municipality—that had introduced me to adult novels. That extraordinary scene of the convict rising out of the mud had captured me for all time.
Perc explained that he’d been about the same age as me, about ten years old, when he’d also first read Dickens. The difference being that, for Perc, the novels had been published only thirty or so years earlier but, by the time I was swept up by them, they’d been read and loved for nearly a century. Nevertheless, to both of us they were fresh and remarkable doorways to new experiences.
We all agreed that the opening of Bleak House, with the embroiling London fog, was the best piece of descriptive writing any of us had enjoyed. We had all entered unfamiliar worlds through that and other creations of Dickens. The siblings explained this was, among many benefits, a great joy they received from their reading: a good novel could take them away from Weabonga and give them satisfying experiences available to them in no other way.
We all shared a love of Thomas Hardy and could never agree which novel was his best. They chided me on my preference for and love of Jude the Obscure.
Perc jibed, ‘You like it as you identify with Jude, deprived by circumstances from pursuing further education.’
That struck home, as did Ethel’s suggestion. ‘No. You like it as it begins with a schoolmaster leaving the village school.’
What prescience. I hadn’t revealed my recent decision to seek a transfer if matters didn’t improve, so these comments underscored our closeness. Perc and Ethel always seemed to have clear insight into my feelings and concerns, but I never found that disconcerting—rather, it was reaffirming.
Of the American authors, Hemingway and Steinbeck met with our approval, but when I mentioned Salinger there was a silence. Even when, after a holiday in Sydney, I was able to supply a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, they couldn’t share my unabashed enthusiasm. Perhaps you just had to have read it when you were sixteen to have been struck with wonder at its veracity.
I spoke to them about the books read by, shared around and discussed by all my mates. This included a recount of how, at one point, the six of us had gone through a phase of reading on the beach and enjoying any undemanding, one-shilling paperback Western, especially anything by Louis L’Amour. They giggled a bit at that confession, but when I said we’d all been bowled over by Atlas Shrugged, laughter ceased. They had heard this novel and its author discussed on the radio, and remembered some critic’s reading of it as fascist propaganda. That forced me to think about it more clearly. From then on, Perc and Ethel made me more aware of the underlying messages in novels I chose to read.
Thinking about Great Expectations, as we did occasionally, had me remembering that the heiress in the story had been modelled on an Australian woman, while the convict character had made his fictional fortune from a sheep property in the colony. Maybe that sheep station had been near Weabonga. I thought of the lives of my elderly friends: beginning with much promise then leaving them stranded at a young age, and never suggesting a way to succeed or even to extricate themselves from the trap they were in. Either Hardy or Dickens might have made a compelling novel from these ingredients. Such thoughts, though, I never shared with my pair of dearest companions.
Each time I visited we took part in a minor tea ceremony. Perc and Ethel could observe the school, on its little rise, from their property on the adjacent hill, so they knew the exact moment I commenced my walk to visit them. When I reached their hut the kettle was just on the boil. Taking in hand a hessian square—edged with fabric by Ethel—Perc lifted the kettle from the fire and wet the leaves in the teapot Ethel had waiting. We each took a biscuit—a buttered Sao, or an Anzac cookie baked by Ethel in the camp oven placed directly in the fire—then we were ready for Ethel to pour. No cup matched any saucer, and all crockery was of a similar light brown, whatever its original colouring, the pieces patterned with crazed veins. They were the remnants of any number of tea services going back over seventy years, and to take tea was to hold history in one’s hand. A small jar of powdered milk and a sugar bowl with a beaded net cover stood ready on the table. As we performed our ritual, not one moment was wasted. Both brother and sister had a topic ready to set us talking, and away we’d go. With each visit I nestled contentedly into the routine; it was warm, hospitable and calming, and I felt cherished.
I never questioned how it was that my friendship with folk at least fifty years my senior was such an important part of my life. The friendship was never taken for granted, and I thanked the stars, or whatever had overheard me in my darkest times, for gifting me such gorgeous company.
Perc and Ethel, I loved.