2004
1
Boarding houses largely filled the niche now occupied by the motel, or the B&B. Almost every large country town had a boarding house when I was a young man. They provided an alternative to living at the pub, and a “homeaway-from-home” for itinerant businessmen, travelling salesmen, schoolteachers, bank johnnies and various single men and women. The speciality of the boarding house was a cheap room and cheap meals, but they also had a certain ambience about them, depending on the personality of the landlady. I heard about a boarding house at Manjimup in which conversation at the dinner table was forbidden, but the ones I knew were clean, happy, bustling places with friendly staff and opportunities for fun and games.
Back in 1964 Pemberton had two large boarding houses, and they did a thriving business. They were great rambling old weatherboard and iron-roofed buildings, with a huge kitchen and dining room, a rabbit warren of single rooms and a unique backyard ecosystem of old stables, giant woodheaps, rusty implements and puddled yards around which dwelt a variety of cats, dogs, chooks, rats and snakes which lived off food scraps and each other.
After only one night’s test run at the boarding house, I re-arranged my life completely. Henceforth I continued to live in the SOQ but I had my evening meal and breakfast each day at the boarding house, and they made me a crib, which I picked up after breakfast. All of this cost me less than five shillings (50 cents) a day . . .
2
At McCall’s Boarding House, you entered by stepping straight off the front verandah into the dining room. This was a large low-ceilinged room, poorly lit, and made darker by polished jarrah flooring and oiled dado walls. Beyond was the kitchen with its great cooking table and massive wood-fired range. After I had insinuated myself with the cook (who was also the landlady), I was always allowed to eat my breakfast in the kitchen, which I loved to do on winter mornings. I would eat my bacon and eggs in a glorious atmosphere of warmth from the wood stove amid the heavy aromas of hot fat, bacon and coffee, and look through the window at the rain sheeting down across the distant hills. The cook, a jolly, buxom Englishwoman with mighty arms and curly hair, would chatter away cheerfully to me, as she bustled about preparing the breakfasts for the other guests, who mostly came in later than me.
On my first night I was immediately introduced to the rules of the place. The first was that meals were served “on the dot”. On the dot, you were expected to be seated, and to have your knife and fork poised; the kitchen door would swing open and out would come the young ladies employed as waitresses, neatly uniformed, bearing steaming plates of food to the tables.
The second rule involved seating arrangements. There were four large tables in the dining room, and you couldn’t just sit where you liked. You were allocated to a table by the management, and there was a rigid hierarchy. The table nearest the door (known as “Table One”) was for casuals – tourists, for example, or people not known to the staff who just popped in off the street for a meal. I started there. Table Two was for the travelling salesmen, who came in on their circuits of the bush, and would turn up like clockwork on the third Monday of the month or whatever, as they moved around the country towns soliciting buyers for their wares from the local shopkeepers.
After a night or two as a casual, I graduated to Table Three. This was closest to the kitchen, and was reserved for local regulars, mostly old retired mill workers and one or two bachelor shopkeepers. Table Three also boasted the presence of Old Paddy, the boarding house’s odd job man. Old Paddy had spent most of his lifetime chopping wood for the kitchen and the hot water system. He was a tireless worker. Over many decades of chopping from dawn to dusk, he had got well ahead of the demand for wood, and his pile of chopped mill ends had developed into a pyramid that the Phaero Rameses II would not have been sorry to call his own. Another Table Three regular was Alec Evans, who for many years had been in charge of building the bush railway lines that ran out from the mill. Alec had a fund of wonderful bush yarns, and would entertain me for hours, often sitting on well after dinner was over.
But it was to Table Four that I aspired. Here were the young people, mostly schoolteachers, but also a bank johnny and a fisheries officer. They were all about my age, and every night I would watch from afar as they skylarked, roared with laughter, flirted, chatted, and generally had a grand time. One young lady caught my eye immediately, with her flashing brown eyes and charming manner, and my interest in moving tables intensified. I put in to the management for the first available transfer to Table Four. This I eventually achieved, but not until the start of the new school year a few months later.
Many of the residents complained that boarding house food was monotonous and unenterprising. It was, but I still enjoyed it, and I never complained. Almost every night we had a roast dinner, with beef, pork or a joint of hogget smothered in rich gravy, roast potatoes and pumpkin, parsnip or carrot and peas or beans, plus a choice of sweets. The sweets were usually trifle or steamed pudding, both served topped by viscous yellow custard, but occasionally there would be a treat and a massive tin of fruit salad would be opened for us, which would be served with fresh cream.
Breakfast was invariably bacon and eggs. Perhaps there were other options, but I never felt the need to inquire. They were cooked in a huge black frying pan, containing about 10 centimetres of bubbling fat, into which the eggs and the bacon slices would be plunged. When breakfast was over, the frying pan would be simply set aside and the fat would congeal, ready for re-heating to boiling point the next day. I don’t know about the healthiness of all this, but I do know that nothing has ever tasted as good as those deep fried eggs and bacon, eaten in a warm kitchen on a winter morning, as a watery sun pierced the morning mist.
‘An early chapter from a life in forestry’, paper presented at WA 2029:
A Shared Journey, WA History Council, 2004