‘Wake up, mate, yer on bucket duty.’
Pulling my overalls up over the shirt I’d slept in, I followed a broad-shouldered boy with a deep voice I’d recognised from the day before, out onto the verandah.
‘Pick up that bucket, I’ll get this one,’ he said. ‘There’s a trench down near the creek where we empty ’em.’
As soon as I picked up the bucket and started walking, yellow pee and brown turds splashed onto my overalls and bare feet. Everyone laughed, and some boys whistled. They were all watching, waiting for the show, and I didn’t disappoint.
‘G’day, I’m Lance, ya team foreman. Congratulations, yer officially a Farm boy,’ he said, smirking. One of his front teeth was missing and the other one was black. I shook hands with him, even though I felt like punching his head in. Lance put a pole through the handle of my bucket. ‘Grab the other end – it takes two to empty a night bucket.’
We walked along the dirt track, down past the orchard and veggie garden, emptying the first bucket into a trench, not too far from a creek that flowed around the base of the mountain. ‘Alright then,’ Lance said, ‘let’s get the other one. I’ll race ya.’ He got a head start but I was faster – I ran like the wind. By the time I jumped onto the verandah, Lance was still coming past the barn. When all the boys cheered, I raised the pole in the air, waving it around like a flag.
‘Smart arse,’ Lance said, as we picked up the second bucket.
The barn is also the milking shed. Every morning and afternoon, we’re on rosters to herd the cows into the shed, wash their teats ready for milking, milk them by hand, collect the milk buckets for separating or to go straight to the kitchen, use a separator to take the cream out, wash up everything, and then herd the cows back into their paddock.
Pete showed me how to use the separator the first time I was on milking duty. As I turned the handle, he poured in bucket after bucket of fresh, warm milk, which spun around and around. The heavier milk moved towards the walls of the separator, while the lighter cream stayed in the middle. Milk started pouring out the bottom spout into one bucket while cream ran out the top spout into another. As each bucket of milk filled up, Pete swapped it for an empty one.
We took the buckets of separated milk to the kitchen for breakfast, as well as half a bucket of cream for Mrs Lucas to churn into butter.
It’d be so much easier to just buy the milk and butter, I thought. By the time we cleaned the separator, buckets and ladles, I was starving.
Mrs Lucas had two large pots of bubbling porridge ready to serve. My mouth was watering as we said grace. There was no sugar, just honey from the beehives, which tastes even better. I poured milk and honey all over my porridge, mixing it in. Delicious! No sooner had Mrs Lucas put the bread and butter on the table than it was all gone. Henry supervised the boys on tea duty who poured thirty-two cups of hot tea, leaving room in the cups for lots of fresh milk and honey. Yum! I was on clearing up duty so I got to lick one of the ladles. I could’ve eaten a whole potful of porridge, I was so hungry. The porridge was much better than the slop we used to get at St Bart’s.
Sister Agnes, Sister Cornelius and Sister Ambrose (or the Three Sisters as we call them) eat breakfast by themselves then join us when the tea is poured. Sister Agnes, the Principal, is always bright and cheery in the morning, but as the day wears on, she gets crankier and crankier until by late afternoon – watch out! ‘Good morning, boys. We are going to be blessed with another beautiful day,’ she says every morning – rain, hail or shine; only the roster changes.
‘About the roster for this morning: Lance, Pete, Charlie and Joe are on water duty. You’ll need to water the vegetable garden and fill up the animal troughs, kitchen basins and shower drums – it’s shower day. Trevor, Ray, Douglas and Tom are on wood duty. Now that the weather’s turned cold, we need a lot more wood chopped and split. Make sure you put all of the unseasoned wood in the barn, and only stack up the older, dried-out logs on the verandah.’
And so the roster goes on until each of the eight work teams has been given their list of chores, which can also include: weeding, pruning and picking fruit and veggies in the orchard and veggie garden; clearing scrub, roots, rocks and weeds from a new paddock to get ready for ploughing; cleaning out the barn and chook pen; looking after the stock; digging up charcoal and making new pits; planting seeds, seedlings and trees; building and repairing fences; and collecting honey from the beehives (under Henry’s watchful eye).
Water duty is a real chore. That day, I made twenty-seven trips, filling up and carting buckets of water from the creek to water the veggies, then filling up the animal and kitchen troughs, and the killer forty-four gallon shower drums.
It took our team more than three hours, two swims and four water fights to do water duty. We’d tried to fire up the old pump to pump water from the creek to the veggie garden, but all it did was cough black soot over us. On our last trip back down to the creek to fill up the buckets, Pete was the first one to take off his overalls and jump in the water. It was our second swim of the day.
‘Is it still cold?’ I called out, undoing my overalls.
‘Find out for yaself !’ Lance said, pushing me into the creek. It wasn’t cold, it was freezing.
‘Bastard!’ I yelled, throwing my wet overalls at him, and then splashing him with as much water as I could before swimming away towards Pete. I caught up with him in the middle of the creek. Lance and Charlie stayed on the bank watching us. Neither of them could swim.
‘I’m glad I’ve got a swimmin’ partner,’ Pete said. ‘Not as much fun swimmin’ out here by meself. Do ya wanna see a waterfall?’
‘You bet!’ I swam with Pete further up the creek, through a school of very small fish that were darting about, trying to avoid us. The water was crystal clear but getting too deep to stand up in. Suddenly, something long, thin and snake-like glided past underneath me, going in the other direction. I caught up to Pete and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Did you see that snake?’ I asked, treading water.
‘It wasn’t a snake, it was an eel,’ he said, laughing. ‘Take a look at that beauty!’ Pete pointed up at the mountain and the biggest waterfall I’d ever seen – actually it was the only waterfall I’d ever seen. Water was flowing over a rock ledge, half-way up the mountain, splashing into the creek below. ‘Ya wanna swim under it?’ he asked.
‘You bet!’ I shouted, swimming with him under the waterfall to the rock face, then in and out so many times, I lost count. It was a lot of fun, but we couldn’t keep it up for too long, we had work to do.
‘Ya lazy bludgers, get out o’ there!’ Lance said, waving his arms about. At least that’s what I thought he said – I couldn’t actually hear him. He was about fifty yards away, jumping up and down on the creek bank.
Pete and I planned our attack. We swam back and filled up our buckets of water, put our overalls back on and then followed Lance and Charlie to the shower drums. Pete poured his bucket into one of the drums, while I tipped in the water from my first bucket then threw the next one over Lance before running as fast as I could towards the flame trees for lunch. I was a marked man, but it was worth it to get back at Lance.
The Three Sisters were waiting impatiently for us with the rest of the boys under the flame trees. No-one seemed to notice that my overalls were wet.
Lance was fuming when he arrived, and kept giving me the evil eye. I don’t know why he was so angry; it was clean creek water that I threw over him, not the muck from the night buckets that went all over me that first morning.
There were loaves of freshly baked bread, a slab of butter and a couple of jars of blackberry jam from Mrs Lucas’s pantry spread out on a rug on the grass. After saying grace and quickly demolishing my two slices, I took the opportunity to lie down and dry off in the noon-day sun.
This is the life, I thought. Beats Rowing, Rugby and ’Rithmetic at St Bart’s any day.