Produced by Geoffrey Cowling. HTML version by Al Haines.
Seven Little Australians
by
Ethel Turner
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I Chiefly Descriptive
II Fowl for Dinner
III Virtue Not Always Rewarded
IV The General Sees Active Service
V "Next Monday Morning"
VI The Sweetness of Sweet Sixteen
VII "What Say You to Falling in Love?"
VIII A Catapult and a Catastrophe
IX Consequences
X Bunty in the Light of a Hero
XI The Truant
XII Swish, Swish!
XIII Uninvited Guests
XIV The Squatter's Invitation
XV Three Hundred Miles in the Train
XVI Yarrahappini
XVII Cattle-Drafting at Yarrahappini
XVIII The Picnic at Krangi-Bahtoo
XIX A Pale-Blue Hair Ribbon
XX Little Judy
XXI When the Sun Went Down
XXII And Last
To
MY MOTHER
CHAPTER I
Chiefly Descriptive
Before you fairly start this story I should like to give you just a
word of warning.
If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with
perhaps; a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay
down the book immediately and betake yourself to 'Sandford and Merton'
or similar standard juvenile works. Not one of the seven is really
good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are.
In England, and America, and Africa, and Asia, the little folks may
be paragons of virtue, I know little about them.
But in Australia a model child is--I say it not without
thankfulness--an unknown quantity.
It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the
sunny brilliancy of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and
the people are young-hearted together, and the children's spirits not
crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years' sorrowful
history.
There is a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and mischief
in nature here, and therefore in children.
Often the light grows dull and the bright colouring fades to
neutral tints in the dust and heat of the day. But when it
survives play-days and school-days, circumstances alone determine
whether the electric sparkle shall go to play will-o'-the-wisp
with the larrikin type, or warm the breasts of the spirited,
single-hearted, loyal ones who alone can "advance Australia."
Enough of such talk. Let me tell you about my seven select
spirits. They are having nursery tea at the present moment with
a minimum of comfort and a maximum of noise, so if you can bear a
deafening babel of voices and an unmusical clitter-clatter of
crockery I will take you inside the room and introduce them to
you.
Nursery tea is more an English institution than an Australian one;
there is a kind of _bon camaraderie_ feeling between parents and
young folks here, and an utter absence of veneration on the part of
the latter. So even in the most wealthy families it seldom
happens that the parents dine in solemn state alone, while the
children are having a simple tea in another room: they all
assemble around the same board, and the young ones partake of the
same dishes, and sustain their parts in the conversation right
nobly.
But, given a very particular and rather irritable father, and
seven children with excellent lungs and tireless tongues, what
could you do but give them separate rooms to take their meals in?
Captain Woolcot, the father, in addition to this division, had had
thick felt put over the swing door upstairs, but the noise used to
float down to the dining-room in cheerful, unconcerned manner
despite it.
It was a nursery without a nurse, too, so that partly accounted
for it. Meg, the eldest, was only sixteen, and could not be
expected to be much of a disciplinarian, and the slatternly but
good-natured girl, who was supposed to combine the duties of
nursery-maid and housemaid, had so much to do in her second
capacity that the first suffered considerably. She used to lay
the nursery meals when none of the little girls could be found to
help her, and bundle on the clothes of the two youngest in the
morning, but beyond that the seven had to manage for themselves.
The mother? you ask.
Oh, she was only twenty--just a lovely, laughing-faced girl, whom
they all adored, and who was very little steadier and very
little more of a housekeeper than Meg. Only the youngest of the
brood was hers, but she seemed just as fond of the other six as
of it, and treated it more as if it were a very entertaining
kitten than a real live baby, and her very own.
Indeed at Misrule--that is the name their house always went by,
though I believe there was a different one painted above the
balcony--that baby seemed a gigantic joke to everyone. The
Captain generally laughed when he saw it, tossed it in the air,
and then asked someone to take it quickly.
The children dragged it all over the country with them, dropped
it countless times, forgot its pelisse on wet days, muffled it up
when it was hot, gave it the most astounding things to eat, and yet
it was the healthiest, prettiest, and most sunshiny baby that
ever sucked a wee fat thumb.
It was never called "Baby," either; that was the special name of
the next youngest. Captain Woolcot had said, "Hello, is this the
General?" when the little, red, staring-eyed morsel had been put
into his arms, and the name had come into daily use, though I
believe at the christening service the curate did say something
about Francis Rupert Burnand Woolcot.
Baby was four, and was a little soft fat thing with pretty
cuddlesome ways, great smiling eyes, and lips very kissable when
they were free from jam.
She had a weakness, however, for making the General cry, or she
would have been really almost a model child. Innumerable times
she had been found pressing its poor little chest to make it
"squeak;" and even pinching its tiny arms, or pulling its
innocent nose, just for the strange pleasure of hearing the yells
of despair it instantly set up. Captain Woolcot ascribed the
peculiar tendency to the fact that the child had once had a
dropsical-looking woolly lamb, from which the utmost pressure would
only elicit the faintest possible squeak: he said it was only
natural that now she had something so amenable to squeezing she
should want to utilize it.
Bunty was six, and was fat and very lazy. He hated scouting at
cricket, he loathed the very name of a paper-chase, and as for
running an errand, why, before anyone could finish saying something
was wanted he would have utterly disappeared. He was rather small
for his age;-and I don't think had ever been seen with a clean face.
Even at church, though the immediate front turned to the minister
might be passable, the people in the next pew had always an
uninterrupted view of the black rim where washing operations had
left off.
The next on the list--I am going from youngest to oldest, you
see--was the "show" Woolcot, as Pip, the eldest boy, used to say.
You have seen those exquisite child-angel faces on Raphael Tuck's
Christmas cards? I think the artist must just have dreamed of
Nell, and then reproduced the vision imperfectly. She was ten,
and had a little fairy-like figure, gold hair clustering in wonderful
waves and curls around her face, soft hazel eyes, and a little
rosebud of a mouth. She was not conceited either, her family took
care of that--Pip would have nipped such a weakness very sternly
in its earliest bud; but in some way if there was a pretty ribbon
to spare, or a breadth of bright material; just enough for one little
frock, it fell as a matter of course to her.
Judy was only three years older, but was the greatest contrast
imaginable. Nellie used to move rather slowly about, and would
have made a picture in any attitude. Judy I think, was never
seen to walk, and seldom looked picturesque. If she did not dash
madly to the place she wished to get to, she would progress by a
series of jumps, bounds, and odd little skips. She was very thin,
as people generally are who have quicksilver instead of blood in
their veins; she had a small, eager, freckled face, with very,
bright dark eyes, a small, determined mouth, and a mane of untidy,
curly dark hair that was the trial of her life.
Without doubt she was the worst of the seven, probably because she
was the cleverest. Her brilliant inventive powers plunged them all
into ceaseless scrapes, and though she often bore the brunt of the
blame with equanimity, they used to turn round, not infrequently,
and upbraid her for suggesting the mischief. She had been
christened "Helen," which in no way account's for "Judy," but
then nicknames are rather unaccountable things sometimes, are they
not? Bunty said it was because she was always popping and
jerking herself about like the celebrated wife of Punch, and
there really is something in that. Her other name, "Fizz," is
easier to understand; Pip used to say he never yet had seen the
ginger ale that effervesced and bubbled and made the noise that
Judy did.
I haven't introduced you to Pip yet, have I? He was a little like
Judy, only handsomer and taller, and he was fourteen, and had as
good an opinion of himself and as poor a one of girls as boys of
that age generally have.
Meg was the eldest of the family, and had a long, fair plait that
Bunty used to delight in pulling; a sweet, rather dreamy face,
and a powdering of pretty freckles that occasioned her much
tribulation of spirit.
It was generally believed in the family that she wrote poetry
and stories, and even kept a diary, but no one had ever seen a
vestige of her papers, she kept them so carefully locked up in
her old tin hat-box. Their father, had you asked them they would
all have replied with considerable pride, was "a military man,"
and much from home. He did not understand children at all, and was
always grumbling at the noise they made, and the money they cost.
Still, I think he was rather proud of Pip, and sometimes, if Nellie
were prettily dressed, he would take her out with him in his dogcart.
He had offered to send the six of them to boarding school when he
brought home his young girl-wife, but she would not hear of it.
At first they had tried living in the barracks, but after a time
every one in the officers' quarters rose in revolt at the pranks
of those graceless children, so Captain Woolcot took a house some
distance up the Parramatta River, and in considerable bitterness
of spirit removed his family there.
They liked the change immensely; for there was a big wilderness
of a garden, two or three paddocks, numberless sheds for
hide-and-seek, and, best of all, the water. Their father kept
three beautiful horses, one at he barracks and a hunter and a
good hack at Misrule; so, to make up, the children--not that they
cared in the slightest--went about in shabby, out-at-elbow clothes,
and much-worn boots. They were taught--all but Pip, who went to
the grammar school--by a very third-class daily governess, who
lived in mortal fear of her ignorance being found out by her
pupils. As a matter of fact, they had found her out long ago, as
children will, but it suited them very well not to be pushed on
and made to work, so they kept the fact religiously to
themselves.