Do your gumboots lose their flavour (in the cowshed overnight)?

Country folk like to celebrate. They may have a reputation in some quarters for being chronic whingers – wool prices are either too low, or too high. The river levels likewise. The weather lows are too persistent, bringing too much rain, or there’s nothing but highs bringing the threat of drought. But when country folk kick up their heels the whole district hears about it. They can’t miss the cacophony as decibel levels throb out from community halls, across the plains and into the hills.

There was the time Old Man Reddish was due to crack his century. He was about to hit the Big Ten-oh after fighting in two wars (and too many melées outside the town piecart), enduring the Great Depression (‘What’s so great about the Depression?’ he used to say when rounding up scrawny stock), and generally riding out the vicissitudes that life as a Northland farmer can visit upon a man.

It was about this time that the Labour Government removed farming subsidies. That was a sea change and an emotional landslide for many farmers, who now saw themselves pitted against the pitiless forces of ‘the market’. A deep depression settled over agrarian New Zealand. The weather packed up as well.

So the good folk of the district organised a knees-up. They needed only half an excuse to throw their troubles in their old kit bag and get down to the hall on a Saturday night. Old Man Reddish’s century would do just fine. A ‘do’ was organised around the coming of age of one of the district’s most recognisable names. Not that anyone could recall seeing the old man in a while.

Willem van der Hout was on the organising committee and the logical choice as barman. He had pumped suds for 20 years at the Railway Hotel (there was no railway, just an understanding that in the Kiwi scheme of things every rural town had a Railway Hotel). Willem was also rounded up to supervise aspects of the spread – the several tons of food that appeared on trestles after the supper waltz. Several committee members were not so sure about his appointment. Willem had his primitive moments. He could be blunt to the point of boorishness and tended to throw his weight around, along with that of butchered animals.

He was a traditional provider of food for his wife and eight children. Caveman-like, in fact. Often he’d leave freshly butchered and bloody meat on the bench and his dutiful wife would turn it into the focus of the evening meal. Once, when the Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling and his wife had allowed them to doom and gloom their way into the kitchen, Willem threw the calf’s liver destined for dinner onto the bench with an aggressive rugby pass. The steaming, freshly-plucked offal slid gruesomely along the terrazzo and plopped into the sink, where it continued to ooze and steam.

The Witnesses beat a hasty retreat, dropping copies of Awake and Watchtower as they went.

They repaired to the next farm down the road, Trevor Lampp’s place. At least Trevor took the time of day between milkings to debate the meaning of life and the inevitability of death, although when it came to the afterlife he was a sceptic. He had seen too much carnage to ascribe to the view that there was a place in Heaven for farmers who destroyed God’s creatures simply to make a fast buck.

That buck had been slowed considerably by Rogernomics in the 1980s, and Trevor was itching to kick up his heels at a shindig and forget for a while. At least Trevor wasn’t about to be found hanging by his heels, unless life imitated art and certain aspects of Animal Farm became reality. That would be all the local farmers needed.

Trevor’s allocated role in organising the do for Old Man Reddish was to jack up the music. He was well-placed to do so. He was the leader of a rural band (some called it an orchestra) known as the Six Seasons or the Trevor Lampp Orchestra. It had started life as the Four Seasons, but someone reckoned an American group had flogged the name. Trevor doubted that very much but, rather than incur lawsuits – and because there were always six members of his Four Seasons (named for the weather rather than the number of musicians) – the band became the Six Seasons.

A sextet it remained and despite slurs alluding to Trevor’s motivation for cobbling the band together in the first place, there was little likelihood of rock’n’roll groupies showing up. Trevor, who played the trumpet, boasted in an unguarded moment that one or two encounters with the opposite sex beyond a peck on the cheek and a pick at a woman’s pavlova had befallen him. So there may have been some sex in the sextet.

But farmers understood those things better than townies. The mechanics at least. Rural kids saw calves being born. They realised early on that when the bull served the cows they weren’t playing bovine tennis. But farmers also knew that a few too many complimentary beers could inflame agrarian desires to equal those of city slickers and swingers, or town bikes and the cyclists who rode them. They weren’t prudes.

The do for Old Man Reddish had little to do with prudes, city slickers and townies, unless you counted the bunch of itinerant farm labourers and fruit pickers who were, inevitably, invited to the hall party simply because rural folk were generous and inclusive. And this despite the fact that a group of fruit pickers living in a farm cottage on Russ Buckley’s property had been the victims of a home invasion a few weeks earlier. A welcome-to-the-district gesture – an impromptu, spontaneous raiding party of well-meaning local farmers – had seen the cottage inundated by ruddy-faced, beer-bearing blokes and their beaming, pavlova-twirling wives.

The itinerant fruit pickers, city types who had experienced burglars and worse first-hand, reacted grimly. One wild-eyed, spike-haired youth grabbed his sawn-off shotgun as the friendly farmers stormed the cottage, and pumped a round or two into the roof. The welcome party scattered as plaster from the ceiling flaked down on the shattered pavlova – the women had dropped everything and run. Someone said that at least the blokes had dived out the windows with their bottles of DB Brown still secure under their armpits.

That had been an isolated incident. Apologies, and more pavlovas, were presented and firm handshakes offered all round. No charges were pressed by either party. Certainly now, as the hall began jumping, the incident was assigned to the back-burner. As Russ Buckley fired up his barbecue out the back, it was the matter of celebrating Old Man Reddish’s unique milestone that provided the focus. Sausages, chops and steak sizzled with a friendly sound and the only jarring note was struck when Willem van der Hout’s offal bangers did in fact explode on the hot plate.