Authors: Jack Lasenby
D
AD REACHED OVER
and gave me half of his last sausage.
“Are you sure?”
“There’s a couple left over.” Dad licked his lips. “I can always eat them after you’ve gone to bed.”
“I thought they were for lunch tomorrow…”
The tiger smiled and licked his lips again.
“Promise you won’t get up in the middle of the night and eat them? Why are you putting your hands behind your back? Dad, you crossed your fingers. You’ve got to hold both hands out where I can see. Now promise.”
Dad tried to change the subject. “How are your new shoes? Not too tight?”
I shook my head. “Promise.”
“I promise.”
“That’s all right then. When will my feet stop growing, Dad?”
“They should have stopped by now, but it looks as if they’re going to keep growing bigger and bigger.” He
looked worried. “We’ll have to get bigger and bigger shoes made. At least people won’t be able to push you over.
“You’re teasing because I made you promise not to eat the sausages.”
“Your feet will stop in a few years, when the rest of you stops growing—except for your hair.”
“Our feet stop, but our hair keeps growing,” I told Milly. “Just as well for you.”
Having tea late means you’ve just put away the dishes, swept up the crumbs, folded the tablecloth, cleaned your teeth, put on your pyjamas, and it’s time you were in bed.
“Can Milly go down to the dunny with me?”
“Be careful with the candle down there.”
“Can I leave the back door open? Come on, Milly.”
I lit the candle before taking the lid off the dunny seat and called “ ‘We be of one blood, thee and I’” down the dark hole.
“Milly!” She must have run back into the house.
Mr Bryce’s calendar hung inside the dunny door, a picture of roses. Cut-up pages of the
Herald
hung from a nail for dunny paper. The walls had yellowing pictures out of the
Weekly News
pasted all over them: the 1928 All Blacks; Kingsford Smith and the
Southern Cross;
some skinny kids at a health camp—sharp shoulder blades sticking out of their backs like knives; and winged scows
sailing in the Auckland Regatta.
I always liked an advertisement of a woman climbing into a canoe. She was holding a Japanese parasol and wearing silk stockings. “Bond’s Sylk-Arto Hose” it said. “Of course you will be purchasing Silk Hosiery as part of your holiday season equipment.”
I recited the rest in a loud voice: “‘But you want to be sure the Silk Hosiery you select—’” I knew the words by heart, but held the candle close to see them better, and my hair swung forward. I remembered Dad singeing the chook, the smell of burnt pin-feathers, the hairs on the back of his hand frizzling, and jerked my head back.
The flame jumped from the candle and whooshed up the bits of dunny paper on their nail. Whoosh!—up the old dry pictures out of the
Auckland Weekly;
Whoosh!—up the spiders’ webs; Whoosh!—the wall was on fire, flames rolling under the corrugated iron roof, and I was pulling up my pyjamas, running: “Dad! The dunny’s on fire!” and he was there, picking me up, patting me, making sure I was all right.
“You’re not burned?”
“The dunny!”
“The hell with the dunny!” He had a look and said it was too late even to wrench the door off.
Mr Harsant was running across from their place with a shovel, and Mr Murphy was coming through the hedge from the other side, waving a wet sack, Mrs Murphy
after him. Voices saying, “Well, thank goodness, she’s not hurt!” Mr Harsant and Mr Murphy and Dad laughing and whooping and dancing around the blazing dunny, patting their mouths with their hands and going, “Woe! Woe! Woe!” like Redskins on the warpath at the pictures.
“We should have a live sacrifice,” said Mr Murphy.
“The old dunny!” shouted Mr Harsant, and they danced around again shouting, “Woe! Woe! Woe! Death to the old dunny!” raising their knees, bending their heads up and down, while Mrs Murphy and Mrs Harsant clicked their tongues, “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!” like Mrs Dainty. The tower of flames didn’t seem funny to me either.
“There’s a lot of resin in it for O. B. rimu,” Dad said to Mr Harsant, and I heard other voices. People came running in the gate and up the path, and I heard Freddy Jones shouting at the top of his voice. I tore inside and looked for Milly.
By the time Dad came in, I’d tucked myself into bed and was pretending to be asleep, but he knew and had a good look at my feet and hands, to make sure, he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I wet my pyjamas.”
“I would have, too. Here’s some dry ones. I’ll put these to soak. We’ll have to use Harsants’ dunny in the morning.
“Lucky it’s Saturday, the day after tomorrow, and I’ve
got enough old timber under the house, for framing, and a few sheets of iron. I was going to have to dig a new hole anyway.
“Now, you get to sleep. You’ve got school in the morning.”
“Do I have to go?”
“The girl who burnt down the dunny in the middle of the night? You’ll be famous. People will ask you to write something in their autograph books.”
“Freddy Jones will point and snigger, and everyone’s going to stare. It’s not fair.”
“There,” Dad rocked me and stroked my head. “You got a fright, but you didn’t burn yourself, thank goodness. We can easily build another dunny, but not another Maggie.”
That made me laugh, but I was in the middle of crying, so my nose ran, my throat hiccuped, and Dad had to pat my back. My eyes went all smeary, and I could hear my voice laughing and crying at the same time.
“Freddy Jones told his mother the policeman’s coming from Matamata tomorrow, and he’s going to handcuff me and put me into gaol.” My voice went up high at the end, like the primer kids talking to Miss Real. “He shouted loud so everyone heard him.”
“They don’t put people in gaol for burning down dunnies. Look on it as an adventure. Tell everyone at school that your cruel father’s going to make you dig the
new dunny hole, and they’ll want to give you a hand, like the time Tom Sawyer whitewashed his aunt’s fence. And tell Freddy Jones he’s too scared to burn down his dunny. No, don’t. He might just be silly enough to try it.”
Dad chuckled as he tucked me in, kissed my wet nose, and went through to his own room. “‘We be of one blood, thee and I’.”
“Who are you saying that to?” I snuffled.
“I always say it just in case there’s a wild animal under my bed.”
“‘We be of one blood, thee and I’,” I told Milly and slept.
It wasn’t so bad, using Harsants’ dunny in the morning. Everybody was in a hurry, and at least it wasn’t Freddy Jones’s.
He was waiting outside his place and ran backwards all the way down Ward Street to school, pointing and yelling, then he ran in the gate, shouting, “She burnt down her dunny!” as if everyone didn’t know already.
“Dad burned down our old dunny,” said Pete Schollum. “He reckoned it was going to fall down anyway, so we might as well have a bit of fun.”
“Ours blew over in the big storm, last year,” said one of the Tuhakaraina twins. “With our dad in it. We had to pull him out.”
“And he still had his trousers down,” said the other twin.
Everyone had a dunny story, and nobody took any notice of Freddy Jones, not even when he held his nose and pretended to be lighting a candle. At playtime, I joined in the skipping, and Colleen Porter put her hands on her hips and told Freddy Jones, “Clear off. This is the girls’ playground.” She had brothers, so she knew how to talk to him.
Dad had dragged some timber out from under the house, by the time I ran home at lunchtime. “More of that old rimu,” he said. “Only trouble is, it’s so dry, it’ll be hard to nail.”
We started digging on Saturday. Dad shovelled aside the black topsoil, and I tipped the lighter-coloured dirt down the old hole, just a small barrow-load at a time. As the new hole got deeper, Dad went down the ladder, and I gave a hand pulling up the bucket on a rope. After the dirt there was orangey-yellow clay that turned to light-brown pumicey-looking sand, and then to white sand which was damp. The bucket got heavy, so Dad stood on the ladder and pushed it up to help me.
B
Y THE TIME
the old dunny hole was filled, I could see the bottom of the new hole glistening with water.
“Come up,” I said. “You might sink.”
Dad laughed and went on filling the bucket.
“What if it’s quicksand?” I felt like crying again.
Dad took his time climbing up the ladder and, even when he’d got out of the hole, I couldn’t help him pull up the last bucket. I felt sick, angry, and scared all at once.
Mr Harsant came over to give a hand, pointed at the different layers of soil and said, “You can see how the district was all swamp in the early days, but since they dug the drains earlier this century it’s dried out and sunk. That sand down there looks as if it was once a riverbed.”
I rubbed my face against Dad’s hand. I didn’t want him sinking out of sight in some underground river.
We finished the dunny on Sunday. The rimu was so hard, we had to drill it, and that took ages, turning the little handle. The roof and walls were the corrugated iron from behind the bottom shed.
“We’ll have to do without a door till I can knock one up next weekend,” Dad said. I tried the new dunny first, and found nobody could see, because of the big poorman’s orange; the sun shone in and made the seat warm.
Freddy Jones kept on, but no one took any notice now. Mr Bryce and Mr Cleaver teased me a couple of times, but I didn’t mind, especially when Mr Bryce told me a story about the Birchall boys out Walton. They were supposed to be using a splitting-gun on a log for firewood, but they acted the giddy goat and blew up their dunny instead.
Mrs Dainty came in for her paper, heard the end of the story and sniffed. “It sounds very irresponsible. I was never allowed to play with matches and candles when I was a child.”
I thought of poor old Mr Dainty and made a picture of him in my mind blowing up their dunny with a splitting-gun, then running away to be a swagger, sleeping under hedges and haystacks, cooking himself a feed of sausages with gravy and mashed potatoes, and laughing and laughing.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” said Mrs Dainty, looking at my face and stalking off.
We were still having frosts, but Dad reckoned there were signs of spring.
“Before you know it,” he said, “the cockies will be closing up their paddocks for hay, and next thing it’ll be summer.”
On the way to school, the dew glittered on the cobwebs between the fence wires—white diamonds stitched on lace. I wondered if the spiders knew about spring, and thought about the ones that burned to death when our old dunny went up.
As my old clothes got too small for me, we washed and patched them, sewed on missing buttons, and pressed them. I asked Dad if he was keeping them to look at when I got older.
“There’s too much wear left in them, just to throw out.” He put them into a sugarbag with my old shoes that he’d cleaned and polished. “I thought of giving them to Mrs Wilson, down the pa.”
“Peggy Wilson’s only in standard one, so maybe she’ll get her feet into my old shoes.”
“Maybe.”
“Dad?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Dad, will they like taking my old clothes? You know…”
“With her mob, Mrs Wilson’ll be only too pleased to get them.”
“All the same…”
“If you could only see your face. But I know what you mean about giving them to somebody down the pa. You’re wearing somebody else’s hand-me-downs yourself, aren’t you? You’re grateful for them, but you don’t have to go feeling bad about it. The main thing is to have the clothes.
“Mrs Wilson’ll drop in some blackberries and mushrooms next autumn. She did it before, when your mother used to pass on her old things. We’re not giving your old stuff away; it’s more like swapping.”
I still felt a bit funny about Dad giving my old clothes to Mrs Wilson.
“Dad says it’s because they live down the pa,” I told Mr Bluenose. “He says that’s why it seems different.”
“You are both right. It is different.’ Mr Bluenose looked very serious. “The Wilsons are Maoris. But your father is right, too: all that matters is having the clothes, not where they come from.
“You have no mother to make your clothes now. Perhaps somebody will help you and, if they do, what matters is the help, not who gives it.
“Of course,” he added, “it depends how the help is given. If being helped makes you feel bad, perhaps you are better off without it. If you can afford it.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“And something else,” said Mr Bluenose, “if you feel
good because you are giving something away, then it is probably better not to give it. Is that what made you feel uncomfortable, Maggie?”
“Perhaps.”
After talking to Mr Bluenose, I didn’t feel quite so uncomfortable. I wore my new shoes and hoped Peggy Wilson would have my old ones, but still didn’t see her wearing them. Then it got warmer, and everyone started going barefoot again. Maybe, I thought, Peggy was keeping my old shoes for next winter.
Our Christmas plum tree flowered white, and Dad said he’d noticed them all around the district.
“Talking of flowers,” he said, “do you notice all the new farmhouses are going up nearer the road these days? You can see where the old places were by the bulbs that come up in spring. Look at McKenzies’ up the Matamata road, the line of the drive to where the old place stood before it burnt down, halfway up the farm.”
It was like Dad said. The sides of the old drive were lined by clumps of snowdrops and daffodils, curving across the paddock to the big walnuts where only the brick chimney stood. Looking at it made me feel sad.
When I went down to Mr Bluenose’s now, his early plums had finished flowering. I wished the apples would hurry up with their buds and cover the cut-off branches.
Mr Bluenose shook his head. “Apples are the last to flower; when they do, spring will really be here. Already
there are young birds, fledglings, trying their wings.
“That Bagheera, all winter, he caught many rats, but now he is catching young blackbirds and thrushes in the orchard. I hoped they would see him coming, but they have not yet learned about black panthers.”
“Is he hungry?”
“Even well-fed, a hunting cat like Bagheera still kills. It is his instinct. He kills, glares around, and leaves the bird uneaten.”
“I’m glad Milly’s a sleeping cat,” I told Mr Bluenose, “even if I am afraid I’ll find a rat in the wheat barrel.”
Mr Bluenose smiled. “We each got the cat we wanted.”
“Milly caught a mouse,” I told him, “but she played with it till it got away, so she pretended she meant to let it go. Dad says if we get another rat in the bottom shed, she can jolly well sleep down there till she catches it, but I like her sleeping on my bed.”
“Now it is warming up,” said Mr Bluenose, “the rats and mice are not coming inside, but cats still like it. Even the reliable Bagheera sleeps in the sun.”
School broke up, and I walked home with Freddy Jones, Billy Harsant, and Ken and Jean Carter. Freddy and Billy sang,
“No more spelling, no more sums, no more teachers to whack our bums.”
Jean said she was making a pompom out of old bits of wool to give her father for Christmas.
“What are you giving your father?” she asked.
“I’m knitting something.” I didn’t say a scarf, because Freddy would throw off at whatever I said. “Milly always wants to play with the wool.”
“Remember the long holidays last year?” said Ken. “They went on for ever.”
“My mother said we won’t have the infantile this summer,” Freddy told him. “She says it only comes every few years, something to do with the water.”
“Our mother’s making us hats that come down the backs of our necks,” said Jean. “She says it’s something to do with the sun.”
It was the flush, the time of year when carts and lorries were bringing milk into the factory from first thing in the morning till last thing at night, so Dad was working long hours. The grass grew tall in the paddocks shut up for hay. I finished knitting my present, and Mrs Harsant cast off for me.
“I’d love to show you how, but haven’t the time now, Maggie. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”
She was always on the go, Mrs Harsant.