Mum was offered a job as a cleaner at our school at the beginning of the year I started Grade Six. The hours were perfect, because they fitted in with the two other part-time jobs she was doing. But she didn’t accept the job straightaway. First, she got us all together and asked if we would mind her taking it.
‘What on earth are you talking about, Mum?’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t want to take the job if you children would mind. I thought you might worry about what your friends would think.’
Without hesitation I replied, ‘We wouldn’t mind, Mum, we’d really like it because we’d see more of you.’
Mum smiled at me. She knew how naive I was, that I didn’t realise being a school cleaner carried with it very little status.
We helped after school, wiping down the boards, emptying the bins and sweeping the floors. I enjoyed the boards the most, mainly because it gave me access to the chalk. Before wiping them down, I would scrawl rude comments about school across the whole length of the board. It gave me a great sense of power.
With more money coming in, Mum took to indulging us whenever she could. This indulgence took the form of unlimited lollies and fruit, rather than new clothes, toys or books. She’d managed to take us all to the Royal Show the year before, and this year she told us that, because of her new job, we would really do it in style.
Like the year before, our first port of call at the show was our uncle’s stall. He ran one of the amusement centres in sideshow alley, and we thought it was such a magical place. While we looked at the machines, Mum chattered on to Uncle, discussing one triviality after another. Even when Uncle excused himself on the pretext of fixing one of his money-grabbing machines, Mum followed, mentioning the weather or some person they both knew but whom she hadn’t seen for years. Eventually, Uncle fished out five ten bob notes and told us all to run along. Mum could be boring when it suited her.
We bought show bags crammed with Smarties, Cherry Ripes, Samboy potato chips and Violet Crumble bars, we weren’t interested in the educational ones. Mum insisted on buying Nan a Mills and Ware suitcase filled with biscuits. Nan loved it. She ate all the biscuits and then used the suitcase to store things in.
One of our show bags had a large packet of marshmallows in it and Mum came up with the super idea of toasting them over the fire. Just like the Famous Five. We were all terribly excited about this, we loved anything new.
While Mum stoked up the fire, we all gathered sticks from the garden. I cleaned down my stick as best I could and then hurriedly shoved a marshmallow on the end and placed it close to the coals. It immediately smoked and went black. Everyone laughed. Jill insisted on having a turn then, but the same thing happened. Finally, Mum squeezed between us, her stick adorned with blobs of pink and white, one marshmallow for each of us.
We waited patiently. Mum’ll be able to do it, we thought. She can do anything when she sets her mind to it. Seconds passed. We all leapt up in fright when she let out a sudden shriek.
‘Arrgh! Stupid bloody thing!’ Dropping her stick, she jumped up, holding her hand. The bottom pink marshmallow, being closest to the coals, had melted quicker than the others and slid down the short length of remaining stick and onto her hand. It was hot and sticky, and clung as Mum tried to remove it by stretching it from one hand to the other.
We all choked. It was a compromise between coughing and laughing. Mum’s pantomime had us in stitches, but the stick she’d dropped had fallen into the fire, and the remaining marshmallows were smoking vigorously. Carefully, I reached over and flicked her stick from the fire with my own. It lay on the floorboards, blackened and sticky. Mum retreated to the kitchen, she needed a knife to scrape the marshmallow off.
Fifteen minuter later, she returned with a tray laden with tea, toast and jam, and sardines. Soon, we were all laughing and joking as we normally did on a Sunday night.
For Nan, Mum’s extra job meant she had more work to do around the house, but it also meant a twice-yearly bottle of brandy and a reasonable amount to bet on the TAB. Sometimes Nan let us pick a horse, too, and she would get the lady next door to put a bet on for us as well. We had a rule in our house when it came to backing horses: never back the same horse as Nan, they never came in. Before any of us picked out our horses, we asked Nan which ones she fancied. It narrowed the field down considerably.
Besides the TAB, Nan loved lottery tickets. Both she and Mum were convinced that, one day, our family would come into a lot of money. It was a poor-man’s dream, but we believed it. The dream became such a reality in my mind that I often thought, well, it doesn’t matter if I don’t get a job when I’m grown up, we’ll probably have won the lotteries by then. Billy thought the same, Jill was the only one among us who seemed keen to work at anything.
Having more money also meant that Nan could really indulge in chain-smoking. In fact, she took to smoking so consistently that the front of her hair changed colour. While the rest of her frizzy mop was a light grey, the front was nicotine yellow. When we pointed it out to her, she was quite pleased. ‘It’s better than hair dye,’ she chuckled as she looked in the mirror, ‘now if only I could get it to go round the back as well …’
We came to consider Nan’s cigarettes as an extension of her anatomy. She had mastered the skill of being able to talk and smoke at the same time. It seemed it didn’t matter what Nan did, her cigarette would remain glued to the corner of her mouth as securely as that part of her lip.
And she had the longest ash in the neighbourhood. I always waited expectantly for it to fall off. I was sure that with one more puff, it would disintegrate and burn yet another hole in her cardigan. Four puffs later, it was still there. While smoking, and the cough she was developing with it, were now an integral part of her personality, there were two important occasions when she didn’t smoke.
The first was at night when she was in bed. For a long time, one of her greatest pleasures had been to lie in bed and enjoy a leisurely puff. However, one night she’d set fire to her mattress, and Mum, seeing the smoke, had rushed in and thrown a kettle of water over her. Nan hated getting wet, so she gave up her night-time fag.
The other occasion was during summer when the dry bush surrounding the swamp would ignite into a raging bushfire. She never smoked while the fire was still burning. She felt it added to the heat.
Bushfires were a real threat to our house in those days. As billowing clouds of black smoke engulfed the neighbourhood, the firemen came knocking at each door with the message, ‘Look luv, if the wind doesn’t change soon, you’ll have to evacuate.’
Nan always responded with, ‘We’re not leavin’, this is the only home we got.’ If the men tried to argue with her, she pointed to her garden hose and said, ‘You’re not the only ones with water, you know.’
Their usual response to that was to try and explain to Nan how easily the flames could leap from roof to roof. Nan countered this by giving them a tour of our yard just to show them how many hoses she had. For some reason, six strategically placed garden hoses meant little to the firemen. ‘Listen, luv,’ they reasoned, ‘if that wind doesn’t change, the flames’ll be in next door’s and then they’ll be in your place and you’ll all go up in smoke. You got five kids here too, can’t someone have them for the day?’
‘We got no one,’ Nan would reply grumpily. ‘Anyway, they’re all right, I’ve wet them down.’ It was true, we were dripping wet. Any hint of a fire in the swamp and Nan would line us all up and squirt us down with the hose. Then it was the chooks’, cats’, dogs’ and budgies’ turn.
Sometimes, Mum thought Nan’s precautions were a little premature. ‘God, Nan, have you wet them down already?’ she’d complain. ‘No one’s even called the Fire Brigade yet!’ Nan always narrowed her eyes and looked at Mum as though she couldn’t believe how stupid she was. When Mum turned to go inside, she’d squirt her with the hose.
Nan kept great stores of men’s handkerchiefs in case of fire. She would wet them and then plaster them over our heads and faces. It made it easier to breathe when the ash rained down.
Fortunately for us, the wind did always change, and somehow we survived the heat and the ash and the billowing smoke. It was only when the fire in the swamp was completely out that Nan would relax and light up another cigarette.
Grade Six in primary school wasn’t a bad year for me. Jill and I were often taken off normal classwork to help paint and design special things for the school. Also, I liked my teacher. He was firm, but very kind, and he got on well with Mum. He’d broken his nose as a child, so he was an unusual-looking man. I was impressed with the way he joked about his nose and never let its odd shape worry him. He always used to point out to the accident-prone ones in our class how they would end up if they didn’t stop doing silly things.
I was unexpectedly made president of the Red Cross Club that year. Part of my job was instructing younger children in road safety. There was also a paper test that they sat for in their lunch hour. If they passed, I was allowed to award them a Safety First Certificate. Jill sat for the test and went home crying to Mum because I failed her. You were only allowed to make two errors and she, uncharacteristically, had made three.
Mum was furious. She maintained I should have passed Jill simply because we were related. Jill sat the test the following week and passed. I breathed a sign of relief. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold out against Mum’s Blood’s Thicker Than Water routine.
They had a Safety First Week at school that year and several members of parliament were invited to attend. Being president of the Red Cross Club, I was to have the honour of showing them over the class displays.
That Friday, just before the bell rang for home time, our teacher warned us again to be careful over the weekend and not to have any accidents. Unfortunately, our class was accident prone. There was a small nucleus of children who were always missing the bus for swimming, skinning their knees on the playground and jamming their fingers in the sliding door. We all glanced guiltily at one another, each of us wondering who was going to be stupid enough to muff it.
I was extra careful that weekend, but, on Sunday, Billy teased me once too often. I decided to teach him a lesson. Around and around the house we ran, Billy’s howls of laughter slowly changing to cries of trepidation as I gained on him. As we rounded the corner of the house for the fourth time, Billy decided he needed Mum’s protection. He leapt onto the front porch, flung open the door and darted inside, slamming the door in my face as he went. I was running so fast I was unable to stop myself from going into it. Unfortunately for me, the entire door, except for the jarrah frame, was made of bubbled glass. I went straight through and landed with a thud against the inside wall. I screamed when I looked down at my arm. There was a large slice of skin missing, and a long, pulsating blue vein was protruding.
Mum came running. She took one look at the multitude of tiny cuts all over my body, then focused on the gash in my arm and shrieked, ‘Oh, my God!’ Wrapping my arm in a towel, she drove straight to Hollywood Hospital. Well, as straight as she could in her condition, shock was beginning to set in. On arrival, they placed us both on stretchers and, while they stitched me up, Mum revived. A cup of tea and two Milk Arrowroot biscuits later and she was her old self.
On Monday, I arrived at school with a large, white sling, an armful of stitches and a guilty conscience. My teacher eyed me in dismay. I conducted the tour of the Safety Displays anyway, trying to walk discreetly, with the injured part of my body turned away from our Very Important Guests. I think they found my efforts amusing.
By the time Guy Fawkes night came around that year, we had a huge amount of fireworks stockpiled in the laundry, so it was only fitting that we build an extra large bonfire as well. It took us all day. We gathered everything that was burnable and dumped it in a heap in the yard. We even raided the swamp for dry wood.
Mum was very impressed with our efforts, so we gave her the honour of lighting it. With great ceremony, she set fire to a long length of rolled newspaper, which she then pressed firmly into our huge mound. Instead of being rewarded with the usual sudden vrroom as the fire took hold, there was only a small hissing sound. Even the fire on Mum’s newspaper extinguished.
We all began complaining and arguing about what had gone wrong. Finally, Mum told us all to be quiet and she inspected our creation very closely.
‘Nanna!’ she growled, ominously, as she turned around, ‘what have you done?’
We all turned to look at Nan. As usual, she was standing by with her faithful garden hose. She chuckled guiltily and wiggled the hose at us.
That was the last straw for Mum. ‘How could you have wet down the kids’ bonfire after they worked so hard all day? So help me I’ll never buy you another hose as long as you live!’
Nan defiantly squirted a bit more water on the bonfire. ‘You’ve got no sense, Glad. You know how bad those fires were last summer.’
‘What?’ Mum gasped in astonishment. ‘You mean those bloody bushfires? That was over eight months ago. What’s that got to do with the kids’ bonfire?’
As they continued to argue, I sighed and dropped down on the grass.
I don’t know why Mum even bothered to try to reason with her. After years of living with Nan, she should have realised that there didn’t necessarily have to be a direct connection between any two natural events for Nan to feel she was doing the right thing by protecting us from possible danger. The evening was a real fizzog.
That Christmas, Mum’s old friend Lois gave her a dog. It was a tiny pedigree terrier. When Billy first heard we were getting another dog, he was keen for it to be his. He’d always liked dogs, and had a hankering for one that belonged solely to him. He was sick of family pets. However, when he saw the size of it, he changed his mind. I mean, what self-respecting eight-year-old boy would want to be seen with a dog that size yapping at his heels.
But Jill loved our new dog and her affection was returned. Tiger, as she named him, soon answered only to her. Tiger used to yap viciously from our bedroom windowsill every morning at anything that moved. I complained to Mum one morning that she never let him outside. It wasn’t a healthy way for a dog to live. Mum said she was afraid he might get run over or bite someone. I howled with laughter.
But, because of my complaint and the fact that Tiger spent his time tearing around the house destroying anything he could sink his fangs into, Mum relented. Tiger was given his freedom and then proceeded to attack the cat next door. By the time Mum managed to catch him, she was worn to a frazzle. I got The Silent Treatment.
We were certainly glad that Widdles wasn’t fierce. He’d grown into a beautiful big dog and could have really hurt someone if that was his nature. With absolutely no encouragement on our part, he’d trained himself to do many helpful things around the house, like bringing in the paper, and generally tidying up the place. He shared his food and bed with our black and white cat and had never been in trouble in his life, until now.
Tiger decided that he liked his freedom, so as soon as Mum opened the front door early in the morning, he darted swiftly between her legs and tore onto the oval opposite. There was a large group of neighbourhood dogs who were in the habit of taking an early morning stroll and Tiger loved to nip behind each one and sink his sharp little fangs into their back legs. Within minutes, the pack would be in a frenzy and Mum would dispatch faithful old Widdles to the rescue. He would bark his authority over the pack and then pick Tiger up by the scruff of the neck and carry him home.
It was a wonderful partnership, but one destined for an early end.
One afternoon, Mum broke the sad news to Jill that Tiger had passed on. Jill naturally assumed that one of the bigger dogs from the pack had finally got its revenge. Mum found it difficult to keep a straight face as she explained how Tiger had single-handedly attacked the number 37 bus. It was a fitting end.
With all the extra jobs Mum kept digging up, the money was really rolling in. At least, that’s how it seemed to us. For one thing, we now had access to ridiculous quantities of food, especially during winter. We arrived home from school, soaked to the skin, dumped our bags in the hall and then made straight for the wood stove in the kitchen, where we set our smelly shoes and socks to dry on the open door of the oven. I always managed to squeeze the closest to the fire, and, when Nan wasn’t looking, I poked my bare feet inside the oven, a practice that invariably led to chilblains.
‘Eat! Eat!’ Nan commanded as she placed huge chunks of jam tart and mince pie before us. ‘You kids got to eat. I know what it’s like to be hungry, it’s a terrible thing.’
We never thought much about the way Nan carried on over food, much less considered the possibility that she might have known hard times. We had no conception of what it was like to have a really empty stomach; even when Dad was alive, there’d always been something to fill up on. Nan had cooked rabbit a lot and she was good at making damper. Now we had food aplenty, and Nan was giving us the impression that going without food for any length of time wasn’t normal. While she thought she was doing the right thing by squeezing in as many meals as possible in one day, it would lead to eating habits later in life that were difficult to break.
We learnt not only to eat in quantity, but quickly as well. It was a matter of expediency. The child who finished its dinner last often had part of its dessert pinched, or missed out on the extra baked potatoes browning in the oven.
Our conversations were never regulated either. When we spoke, we all spoke at once, and whoever had the loudest voice or the funniest story dominated the table, even if his or her mouth was full of potato.
There was nothing we loved better than huddling around the wood stove on cold afternoons, swapping stories. An open fire was always at the centre of our family gatherings. If it wasn’t inside, it was out in the yard. And if it wasn’t the wood stove in the kitchen, it was in the red-brick fireplace in the lounge room. There was something about an open fire that drew us all together. We felt very secure in front of an open fire.
Countless times, after Nan had woken me early to show me something special in the garden, she said, ‘Come inside, we’ll light the fire.’ I screwed up newspaper and Nan pushed the kindling in on top and then passed me the matches. I lit it just the way she’d shown me, striking the match away from my body. Sometimes, if the wood was green or a bit damp, we helped it along with a dash of kero.
Once the fire was lit, Nan passed me the toasting fork. It had been handmade out of two bits of wire twined together. There were three sharp prongs and a long handle with a loop on the end so you could hang it on a nail next to the stove. The nail had fallen out a couple of years ago and had never been replaced, so we tended to keep it lying around on top of the oven. I thought of it as the devil’s pitchfork.
I stabbed a piece of sliced white bread across the prongs and poked it towards the flames. Having singed one side, I quickly turned it over and singed the other. It couldn’t really be called toast, because it was soft in the middle, but on cold mornings it did just as well. It was hot, topped with melted butter and lashings of jam, and it soon warmed an empty tummy. By the time the kettle had boiled, we’d eaten at least six slices.
Pretty soon, my four brothers and sisters wandered out and demanded breakfast. ‘What’s for brekky?’ Jill slurred as she eyed me gulping the last sweet, sticky remnants of tea in my mug. ‘S’pose you’ve eaten all the toast.’
‘Get a move on, Sally,’ Nan muttered. ‘You get dressed for school and let Jilly cook the toast now.’ I was always reluctant to leave the warmth of the fire. I slowly eased myself off the small, white stool and let Jill take my place. I knew she hated cooking toast, so I took my time.
She was a puzzle to me, she didn’t like gutting chickens or chopping wood either, and she kept her clothes neat and tidy. She had a natural sense of order.