‘Hello, Joe – over here!’ a nun wearing a brown habit, dirty white apron, gumboots and swinging a stick called out. She was standing on a mound of dirt surrounded by a group of boys who seemed more interested in watching me than doing any work. Hurrying towards me, she wiped her dirty hands on her apron then held out a hand for me to shake. ‘I’m Sister Cornelius, your English, Science and Gardening teacher. Grab a hoe and start digging. We need to get this manure turned over and mixed in ready for spring. Get cracking – it’ll be dark soon.’ She didn’t look big enough or old enough to be a nun, and the stick she was holding was almost as tall as she was. There were at least twenty boys in the veggie garden wearing overalls and gumboots just like mine, only dirtier. I looked at the tools they were using and picked up one like theirs.
‘That hoe’s no good, mate. The head keeps flyin’ off,’ a small boy next to me said.
‘No talking, Pete. You know the drill,’ said Sister Cornelius. I took Pete’s advice and picked up a different hoe.
It felt good digging in the dirt. The manure was all dried out and didn’t smell at all. I swung the hoe higher and higher until I got into a rhythm. The last garden tool I remembered using was a shovel to dig a hole in the backyard to bury our old cat, Sammy.
‘Well done, boys!’ Sister Cornelius called out. ‘Time to pack up the tools and get these cabbages and cauliflowers to the kitchen.’
We piled up the cabbages and cauliflowers as high as we could in the wheelbarrow and then carried the rest. They were so big we could only carry two each.
‘Cabbage makes me fart,’ Pete said, juggling his two cabbages.
‘Me too,’ I said, and we both laughed.
‘Watch this!’ he said, throwing a cabbage in the air and kicking it three times before catching it. When I tried to do the same, my cabbage split open. I quickly picked up the two halves before Sister Cornelius noticed.
We carried them to the kitchen, waiting outside on the verandah. It was the first time that I’d met Mrs Lucas – the cook, housekeeper and Henry’s wife. She isn’t as friendly as Henry, and is about twice his size.
‘Where am I s’posed to put all those?’ she said, throwing her arms up in the air. ‘Ya may as well leave ’em in the wheelbarra an’ put the rest on the table. At this rate, we’ll be eatin’ cabbages an’ cauliflowers till the cows come home.’
We did our best to balance them on the long table but as soon as we walked away, some of the cabbages rolled off. Pete and I kept going; it wasn’t our problem anymore.
While two boys took it in turns to pump water from a forty-four gallon drum, the rest of us lined up, washing our hands in the outside washbasin that looked more like a cattle trough. The water in the trough was a dark grey by the time it was my turn to wash. Showers are only every second day so I’d have to wait another day for that privilege.
I was one of the boys on wood duty, so I carried armfuls of chopped wood into the kitchen and stacked them next to the fireplace for Mrs Lucas.
A huge kettle and two enormous pots were hanging from chains over the blazing fire. It was much warmer in the kitchen than outside on the verandah where I then sat down with the rest of the boys, shivering and waiting for dinner to be served. The nuns sat inside around the kitchen table with Henry and Mrs Lucas to eat their dinner.
We had cabbage and cauliflower soup that night, which tasted better than it sounds. The hot freshly baked bread wasn’t half bad either. Mrs Lucas might be an old grump, but she knows how to cook.
After the table was cleared and the dishes washed, wiped and put away, I needed to go to the dunny. Looking around out the back in the dark, I couldn’t see anything.
‘Where’s the dunny?’ I asked Pete.
He put up his hand to get the attention of Sister Cornelius. ‘Sister, can I show Joe where the dunny is?’
‘You know the rules, Pete – it’s one at a time. Joe, you just need to go down the track past the cabins until you get to the flame trees then turn right. You can’t miss it.’
With only a kerosene lantern to light my way, I followed the dirt track, my gum boots flicking up stones as I walked. I watched the light from my lantern reflecting back at me from the cabin windows. A family of kookaburras started laughing in the nearby flame trees, their laughter echoing off the mountain that was hidden in the darkness. Crickets were chirping all around, and I could feel eyes watching me the whole time. I managed to find the dunny, which, at first, looked like any other dunny back home. The timber was held together with a few rusty nails and the door was hanging off. I heard a buzzing sound before I smelt the stench. Inside, the toilet was just a hole in the ground, a bit like Uncle George’s but more disgusting and covered with the biggest flies I’d ever seen.
I wandered over to the flame trees and peed there instead, deciding that if I drank and ate less, I wouldn’t have to go to the toilet as often, and that whenever I got the chance, I’d just go somewhere in the bush. I remembered Walter, an Aboriginal boy at Glebe Public School, telling me that soft leaves and grass are just as good, if not better than newspaper for wiping your bum. I was keen to put it to the test.
After dinner, Sister Cornelius and Sister Ambrose (who’s young like Sister Cornelius but much bigger) took it in turns to tell us Bible stories and parables around the campfire that was blazing on the far side of the cabins. It was magical listening to their soft Irish voices, watching the flames rising out of the burning logs. I lost myself in the stories about Cain and Abel, Abraham and the rest of the family. I can’t believe that Cain killed his own brother!
It was a dark, starry night without any moon, and pitch black when it was time to go to bed.
A kerosene lamp was flickering on the verandah of the cabin and I could see two buckets, one at either end – our night toilets – so that we didn’t have to find our way out the back in the dark.
That first night, I kept warm by breathing and farting under my two thin blankets. Judging by the noises and smells coming from the other beds, we were all doing the same thing. Must have been the cabbage and cauliflower soup we had for dinner.