The Man on the Headland Read online

  There was one boy Roddy despaired of teaching anything. He called him over to the house for a talk.

  “Jim,” he asked, “what have you learnt this year?”

  Jim thought. “I know two verses of The Lady of Shalott‘,” he said. “There’s water in it.”

  “You always seem very tired?” Roddy queried.

  “I go netting for bait at night,” said Jim. “I earned sixteen pounds last week.”

  “I think you are wasting your time at school,” said Roddy. “Get your mother to come up and sign a form. Then for the next nine months, until you are really old enough to leave, just put in an occasional appearance.”

  A couple of weeks later Jim put a grinning face in at the schoolroom window. “Earned twenty-eight pounds last week, Mr Rodd.” When he was made a member of the crew of his father’s snapper boat he met his former headmaster in the street. “I made sixty pounds for my share of the catch this week, Mr Rodd.”

  “Congratulations,” said Roddy. “I don’t make nearly that much.”

  Roddy would come over from the school and say, “I need a new play. Three good speaking parts for girls and two for boys. The rest to walk on with a few lines between them.”

  Everyone had to appear on the stage. This included one pretty girl who had had polio and had to sit down. It was easier to write the plays than to adapt others, and my English publisher, rather surprisingly, brought out the little books of plays in edition after edition. One play, The Bushrangers’ Christmas Eve, has become something of a hardy annual in Australian schools.

  When Roddy was persuaded by an enthusiastic inspector to take the children and put a play on at a teachers’ conference in Taree a teacher in the audience grumbled, “It’s all very well for Rodd with those bright children. I’d like to know the LQ. of that girl who’s taking the lead.” Tracy, Rodd’s assistant, leant over and said, “It may interest you to know that she hasn’t got an intelligence quotient. She can’t read and learns her part by hearing it repeated to her.” The girl was an excellent mimic and could reproduce any gesture or even the intonation of my voice.

  Once a month the school would straggle over to the Community Hall in an array of costumes. The duller the child the more it loved to have a part on the stage. All the mothers came and many of the fathers, paying a small coin which went to the school funds. How the children shone—the wild delight and pleasure of applause!

  I was useful rehearsing and writing plays, but when it came to the sewing class, that was the school’s weak point. It had been explained to me that either I taught sewing and was paid or one of the staff taught it unpaid. This mysterious ruling may still be in force. I was left-handed, but my mother-in-law taught me to sew right-handed before we came to Laurieton. I also fortified myself with a correspondence course on dressmaking, but the older girls borrowed it and were always ahead of me. There was an old relic of a sewing-machine. “Mrs Rodd, the sewing-machine won’t go,” some heavy-fisted child would report. I became an expert at repairing the sewing-machine. They all learnt to use it but, as they bought ready-made clothes, making their own was not very useful. They learnt embroidery stitches because I could embroider.

  They never did learn to draft patterns because these completely bewildered me. I taught the class to sing part songs while we sewed. An inspector was puzzled: “They’re all doing something different,” he complained. “Why aren’t they all sewing the same thing?” Some years later by some mysterious ruling a regular sewing teacher was appointed and every child lifted its needle at the same moment and in complete silence. The inspector loved it.

  One pretty young assistant boarded with us. She just refused to find board elsewhere and moved in on us. Other teachers merely shared the midday meal because you couldn’t see them munching a dry sandwich in the playground. Then later there were too many to feed and they had homes near by. Our boarder was very surprised when on her first afternoon, in the grey rain, we took her down to bring back my ducks from the mill-pond. They didn’t want to come and the drake kept calling them out into deep water. I became impatient and plunged in fully clothed, swam out and herded them ashore. The ducks were as surprised as the assistant.

  The drake was eaten by the airmen, who loved Laurieton and kept losing parts of their plane so that they would not have to leave. It was an inside job and I know which boys were in it—innocent, cherubic little fellows. One moonlight night the gang came up from the hotel, stole my drake and cooked it in the scrub. I only found the feathers. Three planes fell into our river during the war. One just cleared the roofs and presently I saw four people gesticulating and talking at the Guvmint Wharf at the foot of the street where a boat had put them ashore.

  Roddy was chopping wood in the back yard when I came with the information, given by an excited girl, that the four were film stars on an entertainment tour. “There are two men,” I reported. “One with a large moustache is called Jerry Colona and another is called Bob Hope.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Aren’t you even going to look at them?”

  “Why should I? Now if it was Dorothy Lamour I’d go and see her.”

  There was great glory for Laurieton and a dance at die Community Hall where the tired entertainers were kept up till two in the morning. We could hear the music across the street. Next day I received a telegram from a Sydney paper asking for special articles and “any exclusive information about Bob Hope”. I wired back, “Have no exclusive information about Bob Hope”, and walked over the top of the Big Brother to Eddie Dobson’s farm to be out of the way.

  The trouble with Laurieton was that there was too much happening all the time. If it wasn’t castaways it was visitors or the confounded horses. Uncle Johnny Longworth and I used to ride up together seven miles to Kew to have them shod. His daughter said she liked to know I was with him when he went to get his horse shod because he was so very old and something might happen if he were alone.

  Uncle Johnny, as a timber man, had a hatred of trees. He had lopped all the trees in the streets into green mops and the school, with huge trees all around it, made his fingers itch for an axe. He would go past and see me on the roof cleaning leaves out of the gutters.

  “Want to get a boy to do that, Mrs Rodd.”

  “It’s too dangerous, they might fall off.”

  “Trees—no good near a house. Rot the gutters. Branches fall down. Dangerous in storms. Ought to have all these trees cut down.”

  I might have known the old devil was planning something when he sent a message that he wouldn’t be coming to the blacksmith’s to have his horse shod. It always took most of the day. I would be towing Betty while I rode Creamy. Then you had to find the blacksmith. He had to open the smithy and heat his tools. On our way there one day Uncle Johnny and I rode past a bullock team hauling a log. The men had sat down by the roadside to boil the billy. It was probably Ace Crane, whose daughter was the ornament of my sewing class. His bullocks were not as badly knocked about as the whip-gashed teams from the Kendall mill that tourists thought were so picturesque. By the time we rode back the bushfire started by the bullock-drivers’ fire had leapt the road and burnt its way to the top of the Big Brother where it flared until the next rainstorm.

  On this day when Uncle Johnny cunningly stayed home I came plodding back in the afternoon and from far down the main street saw the gap in our fence trees. I let out a yell of rage. The great pine-tree had fallen in an explosion of boughs, one of which had shattered the bush-house above my orchids. The top of the tree was six inches from the residence gate, which wouldn’t open.

  “Why did you let him do it?”

  “He was too quick for me,” the headmaster explained. “I was teaching and he just popped his head round the door. That old dead pine,’ he said. ‘I brought my axe over. Have it down in no time.‘“ Roddy was really full of admiration. “You know, it was rather dangerous. No one else would have been game to climb up as he did.” Uncle Johnny was seventy-eight when he shinned
his way up that tall tree to put the guide line round the top of the trunk. It wasn’t his fault it hadn’t fallen clear of a great gum-tree.

  A year later the white Saanen goats I had bought were still playing chasings up and down the trunk of the pine-tree. It was harder to get rid of than a stranded whale. Finally we paid Terry McGeary and his father to saw it into sections. The butt was as thick through as a cartwheel. The mill manager came and looked at it, but he wasn’t interested in pinewood. “Nice bit of firewood,” said the McGearys as they went off, leaving the great chunks. We were still at that time trying to burn off my church-kitchen which the builders had left stacked up in the back yard.

  It was Uncle Johnny’s passion for neat symmetrical arrangements that caused him on Sundays, when he was counting the money from the collection plate, to replace all sixpences and threepences with two-shilling pieces from his own pocket. He would arrange these on a little ledge round the plate. “Makes it easier to count, Mr Rodd,” he would mutter to his fellow warden in the vestry.

  Dear old Uncle Johnny had never been sure of Roddy’s Christianity since, as lay reader, he had read the congregation Tolstoy’s story, “How much land does a man need?” instead of a sermon. Uncle Johnny took it much the way Mrs Hoschke, a keen gardener, had taken our parson’s Easter sermon on the beautiful white butterfly that emerged from its ugly chrysalis. “That was a cabbage moth,” she hissed in my ear.

  If Uncle Johnny, a laconic man, had been able to reply to Roddy, he might have done it like this and I would have sided with him:

  “Mr Rodd, you are a clever man and well educated. You have read us the story of a man who ran himself to death trying to own more and more land until he died and needed only six foot of it. You and Tolstoy are saying that men should not be grasping and straining to own land. But what is Christianity if it does not teach a man to exert every effort and sinew, expressing himself in what he does best? And if you have a talent for acquiring land you might as well exercise it. Since when has land-owning become unrighteous? Is making a living such a poor thing? Is a milkman under a curse for taking the cow’s milk? Is a butcher un-Christian? Or a man that tears down trees in a forest ? Is he committing a sin ? For every man that lives is, by breathing, depriving some other creature of breath. And all that lives lives on the flesh and blood of some other thing. So why should you come and disturb our minds by asking, ‘How much land does a man need ?’

  “Ah, and the small bird in his bush will dart out to defend it, because it is his, and for his young to leave to them for ever. And you are talking of a dead man, Mr Rodd, when you say he needs but six feet of earth. A living man needs more. And that is the great debate. How much does a living man need, and his young—or maybe the tribe of townsfolk ? How much does a city need ? And it takes centuries to work that one out and get the sum wrong in the end. So that this is a question we shall maybe die of—and then you can talk of six feet of ground—not till then!”

  And indeed no gentler man than Uncle Johnny ever went to his inheritance of six feet of earth. Once you try to eradicate the human urge for ownership the human race is done for, because this and being human are synonymous. Those who want no money or land still demand attention and the cry of, “Look at me, Lord!” goes up from every church. And very right, too.

  Chapter VII

  IT WAS A FEW MONTHS after we first arrived that Mrs Twomey, a handsome, stately woman from Humbug Bay, called to see what the new headmaster’s wife was like. She brought a basket of rosellas to be made into jam, and later sold me a side of goat for Easter. The Sydney visitors, even when they knew what it was, found it delicious. She not only had a herd of goats but kept bees and invited me to visit her at her home far up the lake shore.

  A week later old Pop Twomey came stamping in wanting to know which day he could call to take me to Humbug. He was a huge old man with stormy eyebrows and his thirteen children were settled all around the district. He immediately got into an argument with Roddy, who said that the same bee could sting you twice. He personally had been stung twice by the same bee. Pop roundly told him he did not believe him. Roddy said the bee had stung him on the foot and when he had gendy picked it off so as not to break the barb it had stung him on the hand.

  Pop obviously had doubts whether the school-teacher should be trusted near children. Nevertheless he repeated the invitation to Humbug and I rode out, leaving my horse for his granddaughters to ride during the Christmas holidays. The mare, after I left, bucked off the youngest granddaughter and went back to Moorlands to look at her colt, from which she had been removed far too soon by an unscrupulous dealer.

  I made a worse impression on poor old Pop than my husband by asking if I might come out with him to watch him ring mullet. He was an “inside” fisherman who fished the lake rather than go “outside” with the snapper boats through the surf. Pop intended to go ringing mullet at midnight and it was raining hard. Fishermen always, depending on the tides, seem to go out at midnight or dawn or two in the morning. Pop was shocked by my request. He bluffly refused. What hurt him was that I did not seem to realize that he was a hale man of seventy-five. I was perfectly willing to trust myself with him in the boat. He was not sure which was most sinful—that I should make such a proposal or that I didn’t realize what I had escaped. His wife tried to keep her face straight but he could see she was laughing.

  Ma Twomey told me how to make a double-headed penny for playing two-up, which she had learnt when her husband was working on the railway—I think it was her first husband. She was living in die railway camp and all the men used to leave their money with her because nobody would steal from a woman. She advised me that a new hive should be wiped out with peach leaves because the bees liked the smell, and it was Mrs Twomey who first took me to Diamond Head.

  When Pop went into town on Saturday morning in the car he dropped his wife and me off on the road across the plain and we walked over to visit Clara Metcalfe. The Metcalfes had just moved into their new house and the old one was still standing. We came up through the red-gums to the gate I was to know so well—two sliprails fitted into posts—and as we went along the track shaded by tall trees I exclaimed with pleasure at the blue lilies on the lake.

  Then a head emerged from the earth—curly hair going grey, a pointed beard, then the whole of Ernie in a grey flannel singlet and corduroy trousers held up with a leather harness strap, his brown arms like tree-roots, his navvy’s shovel gleaming silver. The trench in which he had been standing was over six feet deep. He fell into step with us and explained he was draining the lake, but the roots were giving him trouble.

  “Why are you draining it? It’s so beautiful.”

  Ernie said, straight-faced, “I need the exercise. A man’s got to do some little thing to keep fit.”

  There was a small red-headed great-nephew with Clara, so it must have been before the great pig argument. Indeed, I remember Ernie taking me to see the pig. The great-nephew, John, rode on Ernie’s shoulder up to the cliffs, where the gill-birds were at their eternal fluting in the banksia combs and we stood to look far down the fifteen miles of beach to Crowdy Light, over the rocks, the beach lagoon, miles of scalloped surf, dunes, with the tangle of swamp and scrub behind them. When I had a septic jaw for three months from a local tooth extraction I used to imagine I was standing on the cliff looking south with the smell of pale wild violets coming up from the grass. We scrambled down the cliff and looked at all die drift thrown up by the storm, then circled back by the lagoon and the creek running into it, through tall she-oaks and wild hops with their pale green umbels.

  Clara Metcalfe and Mrs Twomey were still drinking tea and indulging in that allusive conversation of women who have been neighbours for years. They treated me indulgently, finding me interesting and harmless but not quite human. Ernie, of course, with his sympathy for strange animals, was at ease with me. He remembered, however, I was the wife of a school-teacher and for this breed he had a great antipathy.

  The next time I c
ame to Diamond Head I was riding down the coast with young Len Shoesmith, who had been given leave from school to act as guide over the fishermen’s track to Crowdy Head. We would stay overnight and come back next day. Ahead of us waddled Len’s stout old cattle-dog, Bill, who flushed out a snake just before my mare Betty put her foot on it. He chased it into the bushes, for he was a great snake-killer but slow with age. We did not see any death adders, though the scrub was reported to be alive with them.

  We called at Diamond Head on our way out and Clara gave us cake and tea. Ernie showed us the short cut through the paperbarks by the creek to the trail across the plains going south. Nobody went that way any more. Indeed, Len and I often had to take to the beach.

  Ernie stood to watch us, his brown felt hat over his eyes, under the shadow of the paperbarks. He blended so well, in his old grey flannel and corduroys, that you could not have seen him at any distance.

  “Why don’t you call in when you’re in Laurieton and borrow some books?”

  “I might do that.”

  He had always carried a book in his swag although book-reading was nothing that he had ever been encouraged to do.

  On our way home Len and I did not call at Diamond Head. There was a grey scud of cloud over the lonely farm and the horses were keen to be home. Len was telling me about his sister, whom I remembered meeting at Humbug, a wild dark girl on a fidgety horse. “She always rode with me,” Len said. “Never any good in the house but good with horses.” The two of them had been coming down the ranges when something frightened the girl’s horse. It bolted down the road and round a corner and when Len urged his horse after it he turned the corner and found Gloria lying in the road dead. “I miss her,” the boy said.