THE FIFTH HOME
We left B---- in 1877. The diocese of Ballarat had been carved out of
that of Melbourne, hitherto bounded by the boundaries of the colony;
and the knife had lopped off a portion of our parish, leaving only
enough to support a "reader," who is supposed not to want anything to
live on.
We passed then into the new diocese. And, to begin with, we did a
stupid thing--possibly two stupid things. G., after consultation with
his bishop, accepted a living without seeing it. A charming photograph
of the parsonage, and the knowledge that it was situated in a pleasant
district, within a short drive of our then metropolis, Ballarat,
seemed to make a preliminary inspection unnecessary, especially as the
financial soundness of the parish was guaranteed. We had dismantled
our house at B---- and packed our furniture for L---- before personally
making acquaintance with the latter place. Then--for I was fretting to
see and rummage over my new home with a measuring tape in my hands--we
arranged to drive over. It was on a Saturday that we started, in very
wintry weather; and all our subsequent lives might have been different
if only it had been summer or a fine day.
We spent the night in Ballarat, and after breakfast drove to L----,
timing ourselves to get there for morning service, G. having taken
duty for the day. It teemed. There was hardly any congregation in
consequence, and the church was dark, cold, and dismal. Amongst the
absentees was the organist, and I was called upon to play the selected
music, without preparation, to a few watchful critics. They gave us a
kindly welcome after service, and invitations to dinner and tea; after
which we were able to inspect the parsonage in privacy. It had been
empty for some weeks, and rain had rained on it for days. The
picturesqueness of the photograph had been wholly washed away. We
should have made allowances for all this, but when we found one room
with the paper peeling from the wall, and another showing a wet patch,
and when we sniffed the fusty, mouldy, shut-up air, we exclaimed to
each other, "A damp house!" and there and then determined that it was
impossible for us to go into it. We had lost two children; nothing
should induce us to imperil the safety of the third.
At dinner, and again at tea, our entertainers apologised for the
exceptional weather, and assured us that all was quite otherwise as a
rule. The parsonage needed fires for a few days, perhaps a patch on
the roof, possibly the clearing of leaves and birds' nests from the
water-pipes. They answered for it that, when in order, it was a
perfectly healthy house. I daresay they were right, for we never heard
that the family of the clergyman who subsequently jumped at it took
any harm while living there. But the possibility of its being damp was
enough for us; we dared not risk it.
It was with some difficulty, and not without unpleasantness, that we
backed out of the engagement we had deliberately made. It was our
unexpected luck not to suffer more than we did. In the end, instead of
declining upon a lower level in the matter of the next appointment, it
fell to our lot to be promoted to what I think was considered at the
time the most important country parish in the diocese.
Here, at anyrate, there was no fault to find with the parsonage house,
unless one objected to its lonely situation--which we did not. As a
parsonage house it was unique in Victoria, and I believe in Australia.
The wayfaring stranger might have taken it for but another station
homestead, on a smaller scale than most; as a fact, he frequently did,
in the person of the professional sundowner.
We did not go there at once on leaving B----. Our first welcome was to
one of the "mansions" in its neighbourhood--the seat, as it might be
called, of the new squire of the parish--and such was the treatment we
received in it that we remained there as visitors for nearly half a
year. The lady of the house was young, and we became friends. She
said, "Why should I be here by myself, while you are over there by
yourself? Let us keep each other company." Never did I live in such
utter ease and luxury. Men and maid-servants to wait on one at every
turn, and to pet the year-old baby so that even her nurse found her
place a sinecure; a dear old housekeeper continually pursuing me with
"nourishment"; daily drives with my hostess, alone or with a cavalcade
of more ephemeral guests--so numerous that we seemed to have a
dinner-party every night; no domestic cares; no parish work--the
conditions were not only pleasant, but most beneficial to my health.
Meanwhile G. worked the parish from this base, using the horses and
buggies of the establishment as if they were his own.
From July 25th, 1877, to January 8th of the following year, we lived
this feather-bed life. Then our friends set us gently down upon our
own premises--there had been a doubt as to whether they were to be our
own, up to this time, which partly accounted for the delay--and
started us in life again on our own base. A Brussels carpet from one,
a set of tea-things from another--it was like the going to
housekeeping of the newly-married. The buggy that finally took us to
our fifth home was found on arrival packed with toothsome tokens of
affection which the housekeeper had stuffed in at the last moment.
That fifth home was a survival of the old, old times--quite the
beginnings of the colony. In those old times, before townships were,
the princely pioneer squatters (our late host the chief), wishing to
have their church represented amongst them, made a first gift for the
purpose of one hundred acres of their fat lands and a house--the
nucleus of this house. It was an inalienable endowment, not to any
parish--for there was none--but to the incumbent for the time being;
so that afterwards, when it came to belong to a parish, whose centre
of town and church was six miles off, the vestry could not turn it
into money, as they desired, so as to bring their parson to
headquarters.
The first incumbent--a D.D. eminent in the Church and in the history
of the Western District, a pioneer himself, whose name is now
perpetuated in a Trinity College scholarship--began his long ministry
as a missionary at large. He saw all the changes that turned that
fertile wilderness into the garden of Victoria, studded with wealthy
homesteads and prosperous towns, while sitting, as Dik would say, upon
his own valuable bit of it, living the same pastoral life as the
squatters around him. The reader will remember that the term
"squatter," with us, means roughly the landed gentry; in its original
sense the word has no meaning now.
In his old age Dr R. went "home" for a holiday, leaving two curates in
charge. Shortly before he was expected back, came the news of his
death, and, after a sorrowful time of inaction on the part of the
mourning parish, G. was selected to take his place. It was always
impressed upon us that it was to take his place, not to fill it, which
nobody could do.
For six years we lived as he lived. Then the authorities six miles off
decided to put an end to the old _regime_. Incumbent No. 3 had to be
brought into line with other incumbents somehow. His property could
not be sold, but apparently (with his consent, I presume) it could be
let; for let it was, as soon as we had vacated it. Tenants of a class
to suit the house needed more than a hundred acres of land with it, so
it was let to a farmer, an ex-free-selector, whose selection adjoined.
He took up his abode in what we called the "old part"--the original
house (our kitchens, store-rooms, etc.), to which, according to Bush
custom, another and better had been attached, the two being connected
by a planked, bark-roofed, trellis-walled passage; and he used my
drawing-room and our other living-rooms to stack his produce in. And
the parson went to live in the town, beside his church--in a
corrugated iron house that was run up for him.
I am glad it was he--not his predecessor. There is no ill-nature in
this, seeing that he doubtless congratulated himself also. For he
could get daily letters and newspapers, immediate access to the
stores, the schools, the church, the doctor, and next-door neighbours;
whereas we were often in straits owing to our six miles' distance from
them. Between us and the road lay a (to us) bridgeless river--it is
called a river--which it was necessary to pass to get to church and
back, and at the best of times its banks at the crossing-place were so
steep down and up again that I dreaded the spot on a dark night, after
going through it in safety hundreds of times, and after all the
breaking-in to such things that I had had. Its flood-water used to
overflow into what we called our "lane," the unavoidable approach to
the house, covering the fences on either side in the lower parts,
which between-whiles were either soft bogs or rough ruts and ridges
like those of a frosted ploughed field. Owing to these lions in the
path, we had few visitors in winter. In summer there were Bush
fires--of which I will say more presently.
Then there were long waits for the doctor in dire emergencies, and
per-mile fees (if the doctor were non-Church-of-England, or you could
successfully save yourself from taking charity) for his tardy
attendance. Our groom nearly killed a pair of horses one night--when a
commonplace domestic event was impending--trying to make them do
twelve miles in time that would but comfortably cover four. One day my
nurse and I found a white speck on the throat of the youngest baby,
when no man or buggy or even wood-cart was at home. While I looked at
my devoted colleague in despair she began briskly to gather and tie on
our respective hats. "We have to get him to the doctor somehow," said
she. And off we started, and carried him (he was then twenty-one
months old), turn and turn about, the whole six miles, all up-hill,
since there was practically no alternative. As it chanced, the doctor,
when we got to him--dead beat as ever women were--laughed at the
baby's throat; but the incident illustrates some of the drawbacks of
our isolated life which were not suffered by our successors.
Household supplies had to be laid in wholesale--sacks of sugar and
flour, chests of tea, boxes of kerosene and candles. We had to make
our own bread, and our own yeast for it; we had to kill our own mutton
and dress it; gather our own firewood and chop it. This meant keeping
a man (for the first time); beside whom we had a general servant, a
nurse, and a young lady companion.
The kitchen party were not at all lonely in these wilds. They had
friends on the neighbouring stations and farms, with whom they
foregathered in their leisure hours; they had many picnics and
excursions to the town; they gave a ball every Christmas (which rather
scandalised a section of the parish, although the rigid etiquette
observed at them might have been copied with advantage in higher
circles), and were tendered balls in return. At ordinary times they
seemed sufficient for themselves. Sitting in my detached house of an
evening, I would hear cheerful sounds from the other building, and,
being mysteriously summoned thither, would find the groom, with his
concertina, playing reels and jigs for the little ones to dance to,
the dancing-mistresses standing by to enjoy the achievements of their
pupils and the surprise they had prepared for me.
A new member was added to the household in a singular manner. The
selectors with families needed a school. To get a school, Government
had to be assured that so many children--twenty-five or
thereabouts--were entitled to it; and the parents came to ask if we
would aid them to make up the number. Our three were babies, and we
certainly did not mean to foist them on the State for their education,
but we somehow reconciled it with our consciences to sign the
requisition on our poorer neighbours' behalf. Thus they got their
school--a tiny white wooden building, and one teacher. The building,
consisting of schoolroom and teacher's quarters, was set up on the
public highway, just outside our outer gate, on the bank of the
so-called river (where the bridge was), a night camping-place of all
the teamsters and drovers on the road; and the teacher appointed to
live there, beyond call of any other house, was a good-looking young
woman.
She came to us one day in great distress--perplexity, rather, for she
was far too sensible to make a fuss. She could not, under the
circumstances, live alone in her school quarters, and she had tried in
vain to find lodgings in the farmers' cottages: they were all too
small and full. What should she do?
She was an extremely nice girl, and, finding we could solve her
difficulty in no other way, we took her in ourselves. Strange to say,
the experiment answered admirably. In the servants' house there was a
large spare room, which had once been Dr R.'s study. We put a screen
across the middle of it, made a bedroom behind and a simple
sitting-room in front, and there installed her. She attended to her
own little housework, and the servants took her in her meals from the
adjacent kitchen--a job to which they had no objection in the world;
and she used to sit in her basket-chair on their common verandah and
pass the time of day with them when so inclined, and adjusted herself
to the position generally with perfect taste, just as they did. To us
personally she made no difference whatever, except in her services to
the children. She paid us the trifle that covered the cost of her
board, and as a further return for hospitality took the two older
little ones to school with her once a day, taught and specially
shepherded them while there, and brought them back again. So, by
accident, we kept faith with the Government after all; and anything
like the rapidity and thoroughness with which all the drudgery of the
three R's was got through in that little school-house I never saw. I
used to walk over the paddock of an afternoon to see the process. We
made a new track across the paddock with our goings and comings, the
home-returning before nursery tea being usually a family procession,
led by the baby's perambulator. We were amused one wet winter to find
Miss C. and her charges making a bridge of a bullock's carcase that
conveniently spanned a muddy rift. They went over it, they said, until
the ribs bent too much and threatened to "let them through."
Besides the milking cows of the establishment, we always had a herd of
bullocks on the place. We bought them as "store," intending to sell
them as "fats"--intending, indeed, to make our fortunes as land-owners
and cattle-dealers. Our hundred acres were notoriously one of the rich
patches of the district, coveted by our wealthy neighbours as badly as
ever Ahab coveted Naboth's vineyard; anything could be made of it--on
paper.
Alas! the usual fate of the amateur farmer befell us. Perhaps we were
not there long enough. Certainly we had the worst of luck in the
matter of seasons. It was one long series of droughts, punctuated by
those floods already alluded to, which came at the wrong time to
benefit the grass. The store cattle would not make fat, on which we
could make profit; the precious "water-frontage," when it became a
rope of sand threaded with water-holes, unfenced one side of the
property, allowing the stock to stray at large. The stock, also, by
degrees became largely composed of unproductive horses, those
happening to be G.'s special weakness and temptation. He had an
assortment, continually being added to, for his own riding, and we had
two concurrent pairs for the buggy; the groom had one or two for his
constant journeys to the post, and there was one for the wood-cart.
They were for ever going to be shod, or they met with accidents and
had to be replaced. The most valuable that we ever possessed was
pricked in the haunch with a point of fencing wire--a wound almost
invisible to the naked eye--and died of lockjaw from it.
Finally, we let fifty acres to a real farmer at L1 per acre. He
strongly fenced this off, and grew lovely crops of corn on it. And I
think that was about all the "increment" we enjoyed.
Here we learned something of what Bush settlers have to suffer in our
frequent years of drought. We had a large underground rain tank, with
a pump to it, but there were times when it seemed a perfect sin to
wash. Our selector neighbours had only their zinc tanks and the
river--muddy, and fouled by creatures alive and dead; and the nurse
and children used to make it an object of their summer evening walks
to carry little cans of water to their friends, to make at least one
nice cup of tea with. It was regarded as a handsome present. Hydatids
raged over the country-side. Two of our servants (who married each
other, and went to live at the school-house by the river, in Miss C.'s
empty quarters) were crippled with the disease.
"The reservoiring of rain-water is the greatest economic question in
South Africa," says the Subaltern in those charming _Letters to His
Wife_. "At present little or nothing is done to combat drought." The
same here, to the very word and letter. Another thing he says:--"After
all, it is the atmospheric conditions that make the veldt, and give
their character to its children." That applies as exactly to the
Australian Bush.
A young soldier of ours came home from the war the other day. He had
been in seventy-five engagements, and might reasonably have felt a
little sick of South Africa. But no. "When it is all over, I am going
back there to settle," said he. "The climate and the country--somehow
they just suit me."
Those hills around us, in formation like bread-dough turned out upon
the board and just beginning to sink--low and softly wavy, like the
Sussex Downs--were as good as tropical seas for the sun to set on, and
better. Such lights! Such tints! Such purity! Apply to them the
Subaltern's description of the uplands of the Orange River Colony--of
the sunset that he saw as he rode to Bloemfontein--and there you are.
I need not add a word.
We were very close to Nature at this place. The wild things lived with
us even more intimately than at Como. Opossums did not keep to the
river; they loved the fruity old garden, and stuck to it in spite of
dogs and guns. Driving home o' nights we used to see them sitting on
the house roofs, silhouetted against the sky, and they used to keep us
awake with their talk to each other in a tree near our bedroom window.
On one occasion we were roused by the nurse calling to us that a
'possum had come down the chimney, and was flying round the nursery
and smashing everything. A candle and a stick soon ended the career of
that enterprising little animal.
We had all the birds of the country flighting over us in the grey
dawns and the golden twilights. The lovely gabble of the cranes and
the wild swans comes back to me whenever I think of the place. My
diary records that on one occasion we had a young native companion,
"roast, with forcemeat," for dinner, and that it was "delicious." Also
that, two days later, we experimented upon a swan, and found it "not
so good." The gun, of course, went out for duck and snipe and quail in
their season, to vary the too-constant mutton. They were not easy to
get, for this is no true game country, but those huge sheep stations,
with their lonely dams, were practically wild country for them.
In the elbow of the river at the corner of our paddock we used to
watch for the platypus, which had a home there, under the broken
banks. Four of these precious rarities were shot in the six years--we
are sorry for that now, but were proud of it at the time--and the
house smelt horribly while their dense, oily coats were being stripped
off and dressed. The same river provided a beautiful set of furs for
my friend at M----; they were made of the golden-brown skins of
water-rats, caught and cured for her by her butler. There, too, we
used to sit amid the evening mosquitoes, and angle for black-fish and
"yabbies." It was a corner much beloved by school-boys of our
acquaintance with Saturday afternoons or long twilights upon their
hands. One young fellow, the son of a lawyer in the town, spent many
patient hours there, all alone; but we, prolonging his enjoyment by
the offer of a meal or a bed, would sometimes look on at his tranquil
sport, amused by his methods. When he needed to bait a hook, he bent
the crown of his head earthward and took off his cap gingerly,
afterwards combing his rough locks with his grubby paw. He kept his
worms there, between his cap lining and his hair; it saved the trouble
of a bait-can. When he caught a fish, he slipped it into his pocket,
where it tangled itself with his handkerchief and oddments in its
dying throes. We were somewhat nicer in our proceedings. Neat little
blobs of meat at the end of strings were let down into the water, and
when the tiny cray-fish fastened upon them they were lifted delicately
into the air, the whole art consisting in not frightening them into
dropping off until the bank was under them. Nothing messy or murderous
or offensive to the sensibilities of women and children--until the
black creatures were boiled red for tea or breakfast, and that was
done by the cook in private, and we tried not to know anything about
it. A few dozens of them, warm from the pot, with bread and butter,
made a delicious meal.
But Nature took toll of us in return for what she gave. Eagle-hawks,
that hankered after the lambs, and their lesser brethren that were
interested in the poultry, hares that loved young vegetables with the
morning dew upon them, nocturnal wildcats, and the tame cats gone wild
that were far worse than they--for them, too, the gun was kept in
readiness, and, alas! I grieve to say, the trap. Once we had an
extraordinary visitation of caterpillars; a dense, enormous mass,
marching straight in one direction, taking everything as it came. We
were in its path, and, until it had disentangled itself from the
premises, were simply overwhelmed. We barricaded all doors and
windows; we tried, like so many Mrs Partingtons, to sweep back the
living waves with brooms--in vain; those little, soft, green things
were as irresistible as the sea. We ran about, shuddering and in
tears, while they crawled up legs and arms, and down necks, and
amongst our hair; we went into the dairy to find them lining roofs and
walls and drowning all over the cream in every milk-pan--went to bed
to find sheets and pillows thick with them. No plague of Egypt could
have been more agonising while it lasted, which, fortunately, was not
long. They did not even stay to eat the garden up, as the grasshoppers
did when similarly out on a big march. Some end they had in view and
pursued relentlessly, without a pause. It was a phenomenon never, in
my experience, repeated or explained.
But the terror of terrors was--fire. The land was rich, the years were
droughty, and we the innocent victims of a systematic incendiarism
directed against somebody else. The somebody else was like the Russian
Government, all palace and diamonds at the top and all black bread and
taxes at the bottom; or like the Government that we here groan under,
which acts upon the theory that the more you cut down trade the more
money you will get out of it. A station that "marched" with our
Naboth's vineyard had a black mark against it.
Why does the Australian pastoralist provide free board and lodging
for every loafer that comes for them, instead of kicking him out and
telling him to go to work? Because he knows how easily and safely the
loafer could avenge himself if sent empty away--and how well the
loafer knows that he knows it. There is a tacit understanding between
them. The wise blackmailer is easy in his demands--the regulation
allowance and no more--and the blackmailed is glad to purchase
valuable good-will at no greater cost. It is one of the oldest
institutions of the country, which even we upon our hundred acres
would not have dared to flout. Our wealthy but frugal neighbour did,
as we were told, and reaped the consequences--which would not have
mattered much if the undeserving poor had not stood in the path of the
reaper. Thus, for weeks together, G. and his man never put up their
horses at night until they had circled round and round the place,
looking for little trails of dead sticks and straw carefully led into
a fat paddock that was not ours, as a fuse to a mine. One Sunday
night, on the way home from church, without looking for them--because
they were all alight, though refusing to burn effectively without a
wind--he found three.
This was in what we call the "fire year." That summer we had ten in
almost ten consecutive days, each of which menaced the mass of old
sun-dried woodwork in which we lived. Two horses stood ready to mount
at the first signal, every homestead around being similarly prepared.
We slept with blinds up and windows open, and anyone waking would at
once jump up and go out and look into the night for the dreaded flare.
No matter where it was, or when, the men were off to it with the speed
of professional firemen; and if it was near, or the wind towards us,
we women started to make bucketsful of tea to send out to them.
Helpless with a new-born baby, I used to lie and smell the smoke and
listen to the flap of the bags, and wonder what was happening, and
nearly died from want of rest. One morning one of us unluckily
remarked that "actually here was breakfast nearly over, and no fire!"
Scarcely were the words uttered before the groom appeared with his
"Fire, sir!" and the next instant both were galloping across the
downs, to join other horsemen converging from all points of the
compass upon the same spot. It was Saturday morning, and that battle
lasted into Sunday, when we could have walked, we were told, ten miles
in a straight line from our back door without going off burnt ground.
One other morning, when I was well enough for a drive and wanted to do
some shopping, and it seemed safe to leave home for an hour or two, G.
took me to the township. We were hurrying through our business in the
street when a man came up and said to G., "There's a fire over your
way, sir." We had a pair of very fast horses, and we flew down those
hills in record time. Reaching home, we found our good neighbours
pouring water over the charred posts of the garden fence.
Of course, this was not all incendiarism. Even the aggrieved sundowner
is not so bad as that. Under suitable conditions, nothing is easier
than to start a blaze that flies out of your hand before you see the
spark. A castaway bottle, a little ash knocked out of a pipe, will do
it. My own eyes have proved to me from what a small cause a great
conflagration may result. A cavalcade of vehicles from M----, while
we were staying there, was on the road to church; it was a well-used,
fenced Bush road, all dust and wild peppermint weed--a fire-break in
itself, one would have thought. But I, in the second buggy, saw a
flicker under the wheel of the first; it ran from one scrap of tinder
to another and was away over the country before one could draw breath.
"Like wildfire" is the best image for speed that I know. It used to
pour over those grassy rises just as released water does, a spreading
black stream with a scintillating yellow edge; not a menace to life as
in forest country, but sickening to the heart of one who knows his
home to windward of it, and knows the frailty of the most
carefully-prepared "break." The buggies were stopped, the men in their
Sunday coats out and after it on the instant, but there was no church
that day for any male of the party except the parson. An examination
of the spot where the fire started showed that the buggy wheel had
passed over a wax match. The unwritten law of the Bush is that no
matches must come into it, at these times, except the wooden ones
guaranteed to strike on the box only.
The "fire year"--or the fire summer rather (1879-80)--is literally
burnt into my memory. Now, when I smell Bush smoke I feel as I would
at the sudden sight of blood in large quantities. All those old scenes
come back, and the old terror of the nerves, which were strained so
long that the effect upon me was something like what in pre-scientific
days was called going into a decline. My strength refused to return
after the birth of the child that arrived in the middle of the ordeal,
so that at last I had to be sent away out of sight, sound, and smell
of the place, to give me a chance to recover. But the worst was over
before I went. We were sitting at tea one night--evening dinners, by
the way, had early been given up--when there suddenly fell upon our
ears the sound of rain pattering. We nearly jumped from our chairs; we
looked at each other, beyond speech; and then I burst into a fit of
hysterical tears--some of the happiest I ever shed.
In the evening a neighbour rode over--for the first time, as he
remarked, without his sack on the saddle, and for the first time on
any errand unconnected with its use. We had all been keeping guard of
our homes for weeks that had seemed years, friends meeting only on the
field of battle--as heroic a field of battle as those that our
"contingenters" went to, and better than the playing-fields of Eton as
a preparation for them; but we were free at last. And we could hardly
realise it. All the evening we sat, almost in silence, inanely
smirking at each other and listening to the rain. It was too sweet a
sound to drown with talk.
The "old parsonage" was (allowing again for the enchantment that
distance lends) a charming home; but it had that against it. I have
been glad ever since to live where there is nothing more to do than
turn the gas off at the meter when one goes to bed.