‘Waste not want not’ was one of Mrs Zena Bromyard’s favourite precepts. She said it very often to her daughter-in-law and the girls who came to help out in the kitchen. She reminded them that in the old days when the steamer brought supplies only once in three months everyone had to learn to make do with whatever lay to hand. She had grown up in a house built by her father from split timber straight from the bush with chaff bags lining the inside under the wallpaper. Other bags were dyed to make mats for the floor. Mrs Bromyard’s mother sewed rabbit and possum skins into bed covers and coats and used grated sassafras bark in place of nutmeg. Every box and button, every tin and scrap of thread was hoarded and reused in one way or another, and every bit of wool was knitted up, unpicked and used again.
Not that all this thriftiness had made Zena Bromyard niggardly. She was one of the best cooks in the district, famous for serving three vegetables every day for three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. Her picnics were legendary and her fruitcakes and sponges sure-fire winners at every show. Her jellies and jams, her chutneys and sauces, her bottled fruit and vegetables had carried off trophies all over the state. Towards the end of the Second World War she had even featured on the front page of a leading newspaper under the headline IF YOU’RE TIRED DON’T READ THIS STORY OF A HOME-INDUSTRIALIST. Below this were photographs of Mrs Bromyard making cheese (Cheddar, cottage, buttermilk or cream); picking out cabbage seedlings in her seed house; holding up a conger eel she’d caught from her powered dinghy; stalking game with her rifle (‘quail and other edible birds to be prepared as a table delicacy’); packing home-made crystallised fruit for her son and his mates in the RAAF; and inspecting a flitch of bacon from her smokehouse. There was also a picture of a vast pyramid of Kilner jars containing twenty-five different types of vegetable and thirty different types of fruit, part of a special one-woman show that she was preparing for the Country Women’s Association’s annual exhibition in September.
Each of these jars carried a label cut from one of the used envelopes that Mrs Bromyard collected for this purpose, and on each label, under ‘Raspberries’ or ‘French Beans’, she had written in her finest copperplate a date and the name of the property that was her home: Shendlestone.
This name had been part of her life for as long as she could remember. It has been printed across the bottom of a picture that had hung over the fireplace in her old home. On winter evenings after tea when the whole family was gathered round the fire—all busy, of course, with useful tasks, knitting, sewing, making dolly-pegs or fish hooks or some such— little Zena had peeped up from time to time at the picture, repeating to herself the beautiful name that flowed through her mind like a clear wavelet whispering among pebbles on the beach. In the foreground of the picture there was a man in a broad-brimmed hat with a long stick in one hand. Zena though he might be a shepherd although there were no sheep to be seen, just a sweep of a green pasture and, at the top of the rise an enormous house, Shendlestone Manor, at which the man with the stick was gazing very intently. The house—a great oblong stone place—was far larger than any building that Zena had ever seen, larger even than the Town Hall in Hobart. It had row upon row of windows and, at the front, a huge porch supported by pillars with steps on three sides. This, her father said, was where her grandfather, Jabez Lamprey, had lived until, after a terrible quarrel with his elder brother, he had set out almost penniless to seek his fortune in Australia. Apparently he had failed to find it and died at an early age, leaving a wife and three sons with nothing but a few small heirlooms, scattered sparks from the blazing glory of his former home: the picture, a mourning ring with a sprig of asphodel picked out in diamonds on a jet shield; the works of Alexander Pope printed in six calf-bound volumes in MDCCLXVI; and a gold brooch in the shape of an ivy leaf with a pearl nestling like a softly glowing berry in the crease above the stem. Somehow Grandma Lamprey had managed to survive and bring up her family of boys without selling any of these treasures.
‘She’d rather’ve cut off her right arm,’ said Zena’s father. ‘Though she always made sure none of us went short. Always had good food on the table. Always had us all properly dressed. Just like your mother.’
In fact Zena’s mother, though she worked all the hours God gave, was an altogether softer, tamer person than Grandma Lamprey. It was Zena who turned out to have inherited her grandmother’s fabulous energies and driving purpose. By the time she was fifteen she could hoist a case of apples on to her shoulder and run with it like a man, milk fifteen cows, turn out a hundred pounds of best butter every week, speed through a heap of starched pinafores with a gophering iron and bake a better loaf than her mother.
‘Hard work,’ she said—and went on saying—‘never killed anyone.’ But she saw very clearly that hard work hadn’t done much to help Grandma Lamprey or her parents get ahead. It turned out that her great uncle, master of Shendlestone Manor, had been a real no-hoper. He had frittered away all the Lamprey money through fast living so that Jabez’s family had never seen a penny of it, and the great house had fallen into the hands of strangers. With no capital behind them and large families to feed and clothe, Grandma Lamprey and her sons had spent all their lives battling to keep their noses above water. They’d managed to hang on to their little hoard of Shendlestone relics but, like the man in the picture, had remained stuck in the same spot, unable to move towards the palace on the hill or claim any more of the splendours hidden away inside. Zena, on the other hand, meant to be mistress of a place she could be proud of. Not a palace, but the best house in the district with big rooms lined with something better than chaff bags, a modern range, a proper bathroom and a lovely garden with lawns and an ornamental fish-pond as well as flowers, vegetables and all kinds of fruit trees.
Her chance came when Herbie Bromyard began looking at her sideways in church and turned up one Sunday evening at the Lampreys’ back door with a bag of Democrat apples from the new orchard he had put in at Mercer’s Bay. He was a mild-mannered, hard-working young man, rather like Zena’s father, but his arrival threw Mrs Lamprey into a fearful state. The Bromyards were well-to-do and well-respected. Everyone looked up to them. And Mrs Lamprey on getting home from church had taken off her Sunday best to help Zena’s young brothers cart water to fill the copper for wash-day in the morning. So she had to send one of the boys up to the house for her corsets and good clothes and change behind the dunny before she could come flustering in to greet Herbie.
By this time, warmed by Zena’s interest, Herbie was sitting in the parlour describing the two hundred acres on which his father had set him up several years back. He owned the two points enclosing Mercer’s Bay as well as a great swathe of land facing the sea. Working with axes, crosscut saws, a stumpjump and a bullock team he and his men had already cleared at least half the property and he was putting in apple and pear trees as fast as he could go. The first trees he’d planted were already bearing well. To prove this point he offered Zena a Democrat which she ate with appreciation while Mrs Lamprey hovered in the doorway and Herbie went on explaining how eventually his orchards would cover eighty acres and how he was starting to cut timber for apple cases in the sawmill that he’d built.
A few weeks later he took Zena on a tour of inspection, pointing out the new packing shed, the sites he’d chosen for barns and workshops, the paddocks where he’d chipped in grass seed for horses and cattle, and the slab hut in which he was making do until the homestead could be erected. He asked Zena her opinion on the best spot for his permanent home, although there was really only one choice—a flattish area at the top of the rise sloping up from the sea, right in the middle of the spreading acres of fruit trees. As they walked up and down the site Herbie did his best to keep pace with Zena’s ideas on bathrooms and fish-ponds but his attention kept straying to other parts of his property: a new dam; two men felling a tree up in the bush; the four Jersey cows he’d added to his herd.
It was much the same when, a year or so later, he brought Zena home as a bride to the hut at the top of the track. Every night after tea they’d light the candles and sit down opposite one another—Herbie with his elbows on his knees, patiently cutting scions for grafting in the orchard, Zena leafing through catalogues of pressed steel wall and ceiling panels from the House of Wunderlich or making sketches for the builders who came every day to work on the homestead— sketches of every detail from the pantry shelves to the semi-circular fanlight that was to go over the front door with the twelve letters of Shendlestone arching round the rim. Once the girls had gone off with the scones and sandwiches for morning tea, the kitchen seemed very quiet. Zena relished these moments, alone in the room at the heart of the whole farm, when she could hear from far away voices, engines, the stutter of hammers, the faint jingle of harness. It seemed as though she could feel her vigilance spreading out to every corner of the property and receive back from the farthest ranks of trees, the cattle dozing in the deep grass of the paddocks, her son’s new house on the hill, messages that told her all was well.
From the window of her kitchen she could oversee, still more satisfactorily, the packing shed and the sawmill lying at the foot of the track beyond her flower garden. She watched her girls setting out plates of food on the bench under the big wattle; Herbie and his men filing out of the mill; the workers who’d been cleaning up the packing shed ready for the picking season gathering round the big billies of tea she’d sent down. Then Syd Hemp came up the track from the road, leading two horses back to their paddock, all of them slouching along with their heads down, kicking up puffs of dust, while scrawny little Norm Hemp, who followed his father everywhere, scrambled up on the fence and began teetering along the top like a tightrope-walker.
The sight of the Hemps made Zena bristle with exemplary energy. She turned back to the two dozen jars of apricots she’d bottled after breakfast and sat down quickly to write the labels. There was nothing special about this batch—nothing fancy, like the exhibits she’d taken to preparing for the bigger shows. For those she now chose fruit or vegetables exactly matching or carefully graded in size, carved sometimes into scallops, cubes or even flower shapes, and arranged with the aid of long-nosed tweezers in elaborate towers, swirls and spirals that rose like jewelled sculptures in their glowing syrups. Even when her bottling was of a more modest kind, Zena usually enjoyed putting the finishing touches. She took pride in the look of her elegant black lettering on the white labels, and, as she placed the jars in line on her pantry shelves, she relished the sense of having made provision for the future, preserved a bountiful harvest, added another course to the wall she’d raised against the onslaughts of chaos and decay. But, today, her glimpse of Syd Hemp dragging his feet in the dust and his child acting the fool had tainted her pleasure. There was no excuse for such people— feckless, work-shy, never taking the least bit of care over how they looked or anything they did. When she was young she and her sister, Bella, had got up every morning at five to give a hand with the horses or the milking or whatever they’d had to do. Then they’d got all the little ones dressed and helped cook breakfast before walking four miles to school. One year she’d won a prize for the pupil walking the most miles to attend classes. She never missed a day. And then at home after school it was work, work, work all over again. They had to cart all their own water in those days and struggle with a brick oven, scraping out all the ashes before they could bake their bread. But you never saw any of them slopping around looking like the Hemps—far and away the most down-at-heel of all the itinerant families who came to Shendlestone at picking time.
Always the Hemps arrived first, wanting to move into one of the pickers’ huts before Zena had made sure the whole lot had been properly cleaned up for the new season. And always they hung around after the picking was finished, hinting that they’d like to stay on through the winter. Time and again she’d told Herbie they’d be better off without the Hemps but on this one issue, mildly, peaceably, he took his own line. He had a soft spot for Syd and said he was a marvel with the horses.
‘Well, his wife’s no marvel,’ Zena would snap. ‘And the children are a disgrace.’
Then Herbie would mutter something about ‘poor old Syd’.
‘Poor old Syd! Poor old Syd! If the chap’s such a marvel why doesn’t he make something of himself? Get a home together, get his family something decent to wear?’
Sometimes she wondered if draggle-tailed Ida Hemp was all there, wandering round with her ropey hair hanging down her back and her skirts trailing in the dirt. She had no idea at all how to bring up children. It wasn’t just the ragged filthy clothes. Norm and his brothers and sisters were skinny as rakes, they had scabs on their knees and elbows, and every year Zena had to get the district nurse to come and check their hair for nits and make sure they weren’t coming down with anything catching. She couldn’t, after all, risk Tom’s babies picking up something nasty.
The thought of her two grandchildren lightened Zena’s mood. Tom’s wife, Pat, though she couldn’t always see eye to eye with her, was a good mother. Baby Ronny was a dear little fellow and his sister Jenny was the pride of Zena’s life— the prettiest little thing you ever saw with bright blue eyes, beautiful blond hair, and skin with the warm summer bloom of a ripe apricot. Born less than a year after Tom had come home from the war, she was two and a half now, trotting everywhere, into everything, clever as a boxful of monkeys. Zena tried not to show her preference or her pride but sometimes at night when she and Herbie were on their own she’d burst out with some story of what Jenny had said or done: ‘D’you know what she said to me today? Well, I was just filleting a bit of flathead and she picked up this scale. Just a scale off the fish on the end of her little finger. And she said, “What’s this, Granny?” And I said, “It’s a scale, Jenny, off the fish.” And d’you know what she said? She said “No, Granny, scales is for weighing sugar.” Really. That’s what she said and she’s not three till September.’
Jenny was always interested in everything her grandmother did, everything that happened in the kitchen. She was particularly fond of the pantry—just the sight of the big shining jars on the upper shelves, the different colours of bottled beans, pears, raspberries, carrots, and lower down the massed jams, jellies and chutneys with their taut cellophane caps, the fish curled in brine, the smoked mussels packed in oil. She would stare and stare with her head tilted back as though filled with wonder at the sheer height of Zena’s ramparts against want, disorder and the pace at which the seasons ran by.
Later in the day, thought Zena, Jenny would want to see the bottled apricots. But it would have to be some time towards evening because after dinner Zena was going into Pyana to present prizes at the school. It seemed queer to be doing this in February, just when the school year was beginning, instead of back at the end of last term. But in December there’d been a big scare over diphtheria and the prize giving had been cancelled. So today was the great day with somebody coming down from the Education Department in Hobart and afternoon tea for the pupils, parents and visitors after the ceremony.
In summer Zena kept her bedroom curtains closed, so when she went into the room to change it was cool and dim after the hot dinner-time bustle, and the scents of camphor, eau-de-cologne and beeswax seemed, in the half light, more pungent than usual. She pulled open a drawer, put on her corsets and silk stockings, twisting round to make sure the seams were straight. She put on cool, slippery lingerie and the frock pattered with black, cream and heliotrope flowers she’d bought to wear at her father’s funeral under her black, edge-to-edge grosgrain coat. Leaning forward to peer into her dressing-table mirror she combed back her hair and then turned her head this way and that. She had a good look at her teeth, wiped a powder puff over her nose and cheeks and stood back to size herself up. She thought she didn’t look too bad for her age—tall, upright with her flowered dress settled smoothly over her hips. After she’d put on her edge-to-edge coat, her best hat with the spotted half-veil, and her court shoes, she came back to the dressing table, took the Shendlestone ivy leaf out of her jewel box and pinned it carefully on to her coat just above her left breast.
When she stalked into the kitchen carrying her glacé kid bag and gloves, the girls, Ruby and Joan, stopped in the middle of washing up to stare at her. They said she looked lovely and went out with her to the car, carrying the tins of shortbread and lamingtons she was taking as a contribution to the school tea. Then they stood together, waving, as she drove off in the Humber down the track to the packing shed and on towards the road above the bay.
It was a still, hot afternoon. The Supervisor from Hobart had to pause in the middle of his speech to mop his face with a handkerchief. While tea was being served several of the guests went outside to get a breath of air and stood around in groups looking anxiously at the southern sky. There was thunder about. Most of the parents from fruit-growing families were on tenterhooks, worried that a gale of hailstorm might sweep down on their orchards and wreck their harvest just as a whole year’s work was coming to fruition. Zena remained quite calm. It was no use, she told them, meeting trouble half way. Yet, at Shendlestone she and Herbie had done just that, carefully placing their orchards so that the bush-covered hills to the south protected them from the worst of the stormy weather. There’d been a few years when the crop hadn’t quite come up to expectations but the Bromyards had never suffered a really severe loss like some of their less provident neighbours.
Driving home again Zena reflected that it had all gone off very well. She’d handed out copies of David Copperfield or The Water Babies to the prize winners and presented certificates for proficiency in first aid. Afterwards she’d given a short speech on how to succeed in life. She’d made some notes on a card but found she didn’t need to refer to them. ‘Make up your mind what it is you want,’ she’d told the children, ‘whether it’s having your own farm or a nice house or whatever it is, and work hard. That’s my advice. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t succeed if you use commonsense and are prepared to work.’
During the vote of thanks Mr Dunn, the head teacher, had referred to Zena’s own success as a ‘home industrialist’ while the Supervisor from Hobart had congratulated her on both her speech and her lamingtons.
When she turned off the road Zena had to get out of the car to open the big gate with Shendlestone painted on a plaque on the top bar. There was not a breath of wind. The bay was as still as a millpond with the low cliffs of the far bluff reflected in the water. As she was pulling the gate back she was struck by how quiet it was, much quieter than it had been in the kitchen earlier on when she’d stood and listened to the far off reassuring sounds of a working day. Now, for some reason, although it was long past the time for afternoon tea, there was no sound of sawing from the mill, no beat of hammers. Only once, as she got back into the Humber after closing the gate, she thought she heard someone shouting, then the sound was cut off as though a lid had been dropped.
She drove up the winding track between the oak trees Herbie had planted for her over thirty years ago. Then, as she swung round the last bend and came in sight of the packing shed, she was startled to see a crowd of people standing round the bench by the wattle tree. Her first thought was that Ruby and Joan had got behind with their work and brought down the things for afternoon tea over an hour after the proper time. She was really angry, thinking she couldn’t turn her back for a minute without everything going to the pack, but as the car slowed she saw Herbie push out of the crowd and come running towards her, no hat on his head and his face all creased with worry.
‘What?’ she asked, getting quickly out of the Humber.
‘My Lord, I’m glad you’re here, Zene. It’s Syd’s boy. He came off the fence.’
Zena clicked her tongue in exasperation. What did they expect?
‘Now, I s’pose he’s broken something,’ she said angrily. ‘Has someone phoned the doctor?’
‘Ruby’s gone up. And Joan’s getting a bit of warm water…’
He took her arm, hurrying her along towards the wattle tree, saying it was barely five minutes since it happened—Syd had only just put Norm on the bench—and how lucky it was she’d turned up when she did.
Everyone knew Zena was the President of the Pyana branch of the Red Cross and had handled dozens of accidents—fractures, gashes, burns, a leg crushed by a falling tree, somebody gored by a bull. They all looked relieved to see her and fell back to let her through. She jolted the straps of her bag up her arm and stripped off her gloves, still possessed by indignation at not being able to go off for five minutes without something going wrong, the Hemps’ failure to take proper care of their kids, and the bother of having to cope with what seemed to be a bad accident just at the busiest time of the year. Probably she was going to have to find some way of getting Norm up to hospital in Hobart. ‘I ask you!’ she thought. ‘As if I hadn’t got enough to think about!’
As she came up to the bench, the first thing she saw was Syd Hemp on the far side, leaning forward for all the world like a shopman behind a counter. She looked down at the boy—his little ragged jacket, his shirt half pulled out of his shorts, the thin legs sticking out, the dusty broken boots. Someone had put a folded coat under his head and she saw it was soaked in blood. The child’s hair was all black and spiky and more blood had run down over the bench on to the ground where a viscous crimson pool gleamed in the dust. Syd, who must have been trying to stop the flow, was holding a blood-stained cloth in one hand.
‘Dived off the fence,’ whispered Johnny Spratt—a good worker—making a quick dipping motion with his hand. ‘Right on this rock.’
‘Wasn’t too far to fall though,’ said someone else, more loudly. ‘Couldn’t ’a done himself a lot of harm.’
Zena lifted one of Norm’s arms, looking sideways at his face, part turned towards her with half-shut eyes. She stared at the snub nose; the front teeth, that looked too big for the face, resting on the lower lip; freckles scattered over the white skin; smears of blood and dirt, and as she was trying to find a pulse she noticed that the child’s wrist was so small that she could have put her thumb and forefinger round it with room to spare. She looked down at the grubby little hand with its black-rimmed nails, then thumped her bag on to the bench and scrabbled in it, searching for her powder compact—her best one with a shell embossed on the gold lid. When she found it she held the mirror in front of Norm’s mouth and nose, waited, peered at the glass and saw to her astonishment that she was still wearing her hat with the smart spotted veil. Then she dropped the compact back into her bag, reached out and quickly drew her hand down over Norm’s eyes.
By this time Syd had come round the bench and was standing beside Zena. When he saw the mirror with not a trace of mist on its surface, not even the faintest dimming of its brightness, he clapped one of his great red hands over his eyes as though he was trying to keep his face from falling apart. Then, to Zena’s horror, the hand slipped to his mouth and, standing there in his battered clothes, covered in sawdust from helping in the mill, he began to weep and, lurching forward, fell against her, blubbering into the shoulder of her grosgrain coat.
The whole crowd knew in a moment what had happened. Five or six men came round Syd, patted his shoulders, took hold of him, muttered ‘Come on, mate, come on. Let’s get you out of here. Come on, Syd.’
‘You do your best,’ he sobbed, lifting his face. ‘You try to do what you can for ’em. But what’s the point? Eh? What’s the point?’
Herbie was there and Tom.
‘Where’s the mother?’ asked Zena. She was shaking like a leaf.
‘It’s alright. They’re looking after her…’
Always at times like this everyone relied on Zena to take charge.
‘I’d better have a word,’ she said, looking round. She caught sight of Ida sitting by the fence clutching her baby with her hair hanging round her face. There were four or five people crouching round her. Johnny Spratt was putting a blanket over Norm.
‘Are you right, Mum?’
Tom was holding her arm, peering anxiously at her face.
‘You don’t look too good, Zene. D’you want to go up to the house?’
Zena broke away and began to run. She pulled off her hat and lolloped up the track in her fine get-up with the gold brooch gleaming in the evening sun and her best shoes plunging through the dust. There was sawdust all over her black coat but it seemed cruel to brush it off so she left it and didn’t even make a move to brush herself down when she was back in the quiet of her kitchen. She sat at the table and, when Herbie came hurrying after her, told him to give her a minute to herself. After a bit she got up to put on the kettle, thinking someone would be bound to want a drink. The pantry door had been left half open. She saw a last brilliant ray of sunshine strike across her exhibition jars so that the glass sparkled and the sculpted fruits shone golden, scarlet, emerald and pearl in their translucent columns of rich juice. They seemed queer and alien like pagan idols from a distant country.
‘I’d better go to Ida,’ she thought. It was her duty, it was what she was expected to do. But what would she say? All she could think of was Norm’s blood on the ground, his limp hand and the father blubbering ‘What’s the point?’ The question rang and rang in her ears like the trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho.
It was a wild night. The storm that had threatened in the afternoon broke as dark was coming on. Dr Moore arrived just after tea and when he’d looked at Norm, laid out in one of the barns, and done what he could for the Hemps he had a word with Herbie and Tom who were worried stiff about Zena.
‘Never seen her like this,’ Tom kept saying.
‘Been overdoing it, I expect,’ said the doctor comfortably. He left her some sleeping tablets and promised a nerve tonic for later.
In the morning Zena was fit for nothing. She tried to get up but when Herbie urged her to stay in bed, and Tom and Pat came down, and Ruby and Joan insisted they could manage, she gave up and lay back on her pillows. There’d been deaths at Shendlestone before—one of the pickers, old Garnett, had dropped dead from a heart attack just before the war and not so long ago a nephew of Herbie’s, a silly stuck-up young chap who knew it all, had rolled a tractor up on the hills and broken his neck. Zena knew what to do. There were the police and coroner to be dealt with, the grave site to organise, funeral arrangements to be made. She ought to be up seeing to these things, taking all those burdens off the Hemps. As it was she felt as weak as a kitten and scared that if she opened her mouth she’d burst out crying.
At about ten, Pat turned up again, this time leading Jenny by the hand. The little girl looked puzzled by the strange sight of her grandmother lying in bed. They both kissed Zena on the cheek and tried to get her to drink a cup of tea they’d brought her. After a few minutes Jenny sidled over to the dressing-table and started trying out a hair brush from the set with the tortoise-shell back, and poking about in the jewel-box. Pat sat down on a cane chair by the wardrobe, for once at a loss for words because she and Tom had talked the whole thing over and agreed to avoid mentioning the Hemps or anything that Zena might find upsetting. Eventually she said, ‘That’s a lovely lot of apricots you did yesterday, Mum. What’s next? Greengages is it?’
‘I don’t know that I’ll be doing any more. What’s the point?’
Pat was flabbergasted.
‘Well,’ she said after a bit, ‘we all enjoy ’em and they’re good for us. Look at Jenny. She loves your fruit. She gets hours of pleasure just looking at it, leave alone eating it.’
‘But what if she wasn’t here?’
‘What d’you mean? She is here. She’s here now. Aren’t you, sweetie?’
Zena lay in bed till nearly dinnertime, breathing the familiar scents of the room, listening to the far off sounds of the farm which were all going on again today as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. At about twelve she got up, put on one of her house dresses and tidied the dressing table. Jenny had left half the contents of the jewel box scattered among the brushes and combs. There was the Shendlestone mourning ring with the jet shield lying on a pin-cushion. Zena picked it up and turned it over in her hand. As she stared at the ring she made up her mind to give it to Ida Hemp, along with a box of stuff from the pantry. And she’d tell Herbie to let the Hemps know they could stay on through the winter—if they still wanted that when the time came and the Bromyards were still growing fruit at Shendlestone.