I Can Jump Puddles, page 16
When the candle lamps of the buggy were still a little way off the driver pulled his horse to a walk and when he came level with my chair he called out, ‘Whoa,’ and the horse stopped. He leant forward in the seat and peered at me.
‘Goodday, Alan.’
‘Goodnight, Mr O’Connor.’
He looped the reins over his arm and felt for his pipe.
‘Where you off to?’
‘I’ve been fishing,’ I told him.
‘Fishing!’ he exclaimed. ‘Strewth!’ He ground tobacco between his palms and murmured, ‘It beats me what a kid like you wants to go round ridin’ in that bloody contraption in the middle of the night for. You’ll go and get yourself kilt. Look, I’m tellin’ ya!’ He raised his voice, ‘You’ll get bloody well run over be someone who’s boozed – that’s what’ll happen to you.’
He leant over the mudguard and spat on the ground. ‘I’m damned if I can make your old man out and there’s a lot more can’t make him out either. A kid crippled up like you should be home restin’ in bed.’ He shrugged resignedly. ‘Well, it’s nothin’ to do with me I suppose, praise God! Have you got a match on you, now?’
I climbed from the chair, untied my crutches from beside the seat and handed him a box. He struck a match and held it to his pipe. He sucked vigorously with a gurgling noise as the flame rose and fell above the bowl. He handed me the box then raised his head with the pipe projecting upwards at an angle and continued drawing on it until a sudden glow came from the bowl.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we all have our troubles. Here’s me with the rheumatiz in me shoulder somethin’ terrible. I know what it is . . .’ He gathered in the reins then paused and asked ‘How’s your old man goin’ these days?’
‘Pretty good,’ I answered, ‘he’s breaking five of Mrs Carruthers’.’
‘Her!’ snorted Mr O’Connor. ‘Hell!’ then added, ‘Ask him if he’ll handle a three-year-old filly I’ve got. She’s broken to lead. Quiet as a lamb too . . . How much does he charge?’
‘Thirty bob,’ I said.
‘Too much,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll give him a quid – an’ a good price too. She hasn’t got a buck in her. You ask him.’
‘All right,’ I promised.
He pulled on the reins. ‘I’m damned if I know what a kid like you goes round in the middle of the bloody night for,’ he muttered. ‘Giddup.’
His horse roused itself and moved off. ‘Hurroo,’ he said.
‘Goodnight, Mr O’Connor.’
When he had gone Joe emerged from the clump of trees and came running over to the chair.
‘I’m frozen stiff,’ he muttered impatiently. ‘If I bent me legs I’d crack ’em. What did he stop so long for? Quick, let’s get goin’.’
He clambered on to my knee and we set off again, Joe shivering convulsively between exclamations of concern and anger at the loss of his trousers.
‘Mum’ll go stone mad. I’ve only got one other pair and the backside’s out of ’em.’
I pulled and pushed at the handles with all my strength, my forehead pressed hard against Joe’s back. The chair bounced along over the rough road with the long rods clacking together and the eels slipping from side to side in the bag at our feet.
‘One thing,’ said Joe seeking to comfort himself, ‘I took everything out of the pockets of me pants before they were burnt.’
swagman sitting near our gate had told me he knew a man who had both legs off and yet he could swim like a fish.
I often thought of this man swimming like a fish in the water. I had never seen anyone swimming and I had no idea how you moved your arms to keep afloat.
I had a large, bound volume of a boys’ paper called Chums in which there was an article on swimming. It was illustrated with three pictures of a man in a striped bathing suit and a moustache who, in the first picture, stood facing you with his arms stretched above his head; the next picture showed his arms stretched out at right angles to his body, and in the last picture they were by his side. Arrows curving from his hands to his knees suggested he moved his arms downward in what the writer called the ‘Breast Stroke’, a name that was faintly distasteful to me since I always associated the word ‘breast’ with a mother feeding her baby.
The article mentioned that a frog used the breast stroke when swimming and I caught some frogs and put them in a bucket of water. They swam to the bottom, circled it, then called up again and floated with their noses on the surface and their legs widespread and still on each side of them. I did not learn very much from watching them but I was determined to learn to swim and on summer evenings began sneaking off in my chair to a lake three miles away to practise.
The lake lay hidden in a hollow with the steep, high bank rising in terraces for two or three hundred yards from the water. These terraces must have continued beneath the surface, for a few yards out from the edge the bottom dropped abruptly into depths where trailing waterweeds grew and the water was cold and still.
None of the boys at the school could swim nor could any of the men I knew in Turalla. There were no suitable bathing places in the district and only on very hot evenings, and under a strong incentive, were men tempted to go to the lake which was always regarded as dangerous. Children were warned to keep away from it.
However, groups of boys sometimes ignored their parents’ instructions and splashed in the water round the edge trying to teach themselves to swim. If any men were present at these times they kept their eyes on me and wouldn’t let me go close to the ‘holes’, as we called the place where the bed dropped away to deep water. They carried me from the bank to the shallow section, being concerned if they saw me crawling across the stones and through the belt of mud that skirted the edge.
‘Here, I’ll give you a lift!’ they would say.
They concentrated the attention of all who were there upon me. When no men were present the boys never seemed aware that I crawled when they walked. They splashed water on me, plastered me with mud in our mud fights, or fell upon me and pummelled me with wet fists.
In our fights with mud I was a perfect target since I could not dodge or pursue the one who attacked me. I could easily have withdrawn from such battles; I could have called out ‘barley’ and given them the victory. But if I had done these things I would never have been able to preserve an equality with them. I would always have been an onlooker, the victim of an attitude they reserved for girls.
I was never conscious of any reasoning behind my actions nor was I aware that I was directed by motives designed to give me equality. I acted under compulsions I did not recognise and could not explain. Thus, when faced with a determined boy throwing mud at me, I crawled straight towards him, disregarding every handful he hurled, till finally, when I was about to grapple with him, he would turn and flee.
It was so in fights with sticks. I moved straight into the fray and took the blows, for only in this way could I earn the respect given by children to those who excelled at games.
Swimming was an achievement upon which the children placed great value and it was the custom to proclaim you could swim when you could lie face downwards upon the water and draw yourself forward with your hands on the bottom. But I wanted to be able to swim in deep water and since other children so rarely went to the lake I began going out there alone.
I left my chair in a wattle clump on the top of the bank then scrambled down the grass-covered terraces till I reached the shore where I undressed and crawled across the stones and mud till I reached the sand. Here I could sit down with the water no higher than my chest.
The article in Chums said nothing about bending your arms and thrusting them forward in a way that offered no resistance to the water. My interpretation of the drawings was that you merely moved your straightened arms up and down.
I reached the stage where I could keep myself afloat with a mighty threshing but could not go forward and it was not till the second year, when I discussed swimming with another swagman at our gate, that I learned how to move my arms. I learned very quickly after that until there came a day when I felt I could swim anywhere. I decided to test myself out over the ‘holes’.
It was a hot summer evening and the lake was as blue as the sky. I sat naked on the bank watching the black swans far out on the water, rising and falling as they rode the tiny waves, while I argued with the Other Boy who wanted me to go home.
‘You swam easily a hundred yards along the edge,’ he reasoned. ‘No other boy at school could do that.’ But I would not listen to him until he said, ‘See how lonely it is.’
It was the loneliness that frightened me. No trees grew around this lake. It lay open to the sky and there was always a still silence above it. Sometimes a swan called out but it was a mournful cry and only accentuated the lake’s isolation.
After a while I crawled into the water and continued on, keeping erect by moving my arms in a swimming stroke on the surface, till I reached the edge of the drop into the dark blue and the cold. I stood there moving my arms and looking down into the clear water where I could see the long, pale stems of weeds swaying like snakes as they stretched out from the steep side of the submerged terrace.
I looked up at the sky and it was immense above me, an empty dome of sky with a floor of blue water. I was alone in the world and I was afraid.
I stood there a little while then drew a breath and struck out over the drop. As I moved forward a cold tendril of leaves cling for a moment to my trailing legs then slipped away and I was swimming in water that I felt went down beneath me forever.
I wanted to turn back but I kept on, moving my arms with a slow rhythm while I kept repeating over and over in my mind, ‘Don’t be frightened now; don’t be frightened now; don’t be frightened now.’
I turned gradually and when I was facing the shore again and saw how far away it seemed to be I panicked for a moment and churned up the water with my arms, but the voice within me kept on and I recovered myself and swam slowly again.
I crawled out on to the shore as if I were an explorer returning home from a long journey of danger and privation. The lakeside was now no longer a lonely place of fear but a very lovely place of sunshine and grass and I whistled as I dressed.
I could swim!
ur gateway was shaded by huge redgums. The scatteredcharcoal of campfires lay amongst the leaves, twigs and branches that littered the ground beneath them. Swagmen passing along the road often slipped their swags off their shoulders and rested here or stood looking speculatively at the house and the wood heap before coming in to beg some tucker.
Mother was well known to those swaggies whose beat passed our home. She always gave them bread, meat and tea without asking them to chop wood in return.
Father had humped his bluey in Queensland and was familiar with the ways of swagmen. He always called them ‘travellers’. The bearded men who kept to the bush he called ‘Scrub Turkeys’ and those who came down from the plains he called ‘Plain Turkeys’. He could tell the difference between them and whether they were broke or not.
When a swaggie camped at our gate for the night Father always said he was broke.
‘If he were holding well, he’d keep on to the pub,’ he told me.
From the stockyard he often watched them carrying billies to our door and if they clung to the lid of the billy and didn’t hand it to Mother he would smile and say ‘old-timer’.
I asked him what it meant when they held on to the lid while Mother took the billy and he said, ‘When you’re on the track there’s some people as wouldn’t give you the smell of an oilrag. You’ve gotta work ’em along like you was a sheep dog. Say, now, you want tea and sugar – that’s what you always want. You put a few leaves of tea in the bottom of the billy – not many, enough so she knows you’re light on the tea. When she comes to the door you don’t ask for tea. What you ask for is a drop of hot water to make some tea and you say “The tea’s in the billy, lady.” She takes the billy and you hang on to the lid, then you say, as if you’d just thought of it see, “You could stick in a bit of sugar if you don’t mind, lady!”
‘Now when she goes to put the hot water in the billy she sees there’s not enough tea in it to colour a spit so she chucks in some more. She mightn’t want to but she don’t like handing it back to a bloke weak as dishwater so she shoves in more tea. Then she chucks in the sugar and he’s got the lot.’
‘But why does he hold on to the lid?’ I persisted.
‘Well, you never get as much if they can cover it up. When there’s no lid to hide what they give you they don’t like facing you unless the billy is full.’
‘Mum’s not like that, is she, Dad?’
‘Hell, no!’ he said. ‘She’d give you the boots off her feet if you let her.’
‘Has she ever?’ I asked, interested in the picture of Mother taking off her boots and giving them to a swagman.
‘Aw, well . . . No, if it comes to that. She could give them old clothes or boots but anybody’d give them clothes. It’s tucker they want, especially meat. Giving tucker costs money. A lot of people’d sooner give ’em a pair of old pants their old man won’t wear no more. You give them meat when you grow up.’
Sometimes a swagman slept in our chaff house. Mary was feeding the ducks one frosty morning and she saw a swaggie covered in a blanket as stiff as a board. He had frost on his beard and eyebrows and when he got up he walked round in a stooped position till the sun warmed him.
After that, when Mary saw a swagman camped at the gate, she sent me down to tell him he could sleep in the chaff house. I always followed him into the chaff house and when Mother sent Mary out with his dinner she would send me out my dinner too. She knew I liked swagmen. I liked to hear them talking and hear about the wonderful places they had seen. Father said they pulled my leg but I didn’t think so.
When I showed one old man my rabbit skins, he told me that where he came from the rabbits were so thick you had to sweep them aside to set the traps.
It was a dusty night and I told him if he put the Age over his face it would keep the dust off him. I slept out on the back verandah and I always did it.
‘How much dust would it keep off?’ he asked me as he raised a black billy to his mouth. ‘Would it keep off a pound of dust now?’
‘I think so,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Do you think it would keep off a ton of dust?’ he asked, wiping drops of tea from his moustache and beard with the back of his hand.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it wouldn’t.’
‘I been crossing outback stations where you got to sleep with a pick and shovel beside you when a dust storm’s coming on.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘So’s you can dig yourself out in the morning,’ he said, looking at me with his strange little black eyes that had lights in them.
I always believed everything I was told and it troubled me when Father laughed at the stories I repeated to him. I felt it showed he was criticising the man who had told me.
‘It’s not that at all; I like the blokes that tell ’em,’ he explained, ‘but they’re fairy stories, see; funny fairy stories that make you laugh.’
Sometimes a swaggie would sit over his campfire and shout at the trees or mumble to himself as he looked at the flames; then I knew he was drunk. Sometimes he would be drinking wine and sometimes methylated spirits.
There was a man called ‘The Fiddler’ who always held his head a little to one side as if he were playing a fiddle. He was tall and thin and was a three-strap man.
Father had told me that one strap round the swag meant a newchum who had never been on the track before; two straps meant you were looking for work; three straps showed you didn’t want to find it; and four straps was a travelling delegate.
I always looked at the straps on their swags and when I saw the three straps on The Fiddler’s swag I wondered why he didn’t want to work.
He was a metho drinker and when drunk would call out to teams of horses he could see beyond his fire. ‘Whoa there! Hold up! Gee, Prince. Gee, Darkie. Come over . . .’
Sometimes he ran round to the other side of the fire, swinging an imaginary whip with which he would flog some horse that angered him.
When he was sober he talked to me in a high-pitched voice.
‘Don’t stand there movin’ from leg to leg like a hen in the rain,’ he said once. ‘Come over here.’
When I went over to him he said, ‘Sit down,’ then added, ‘What’s wrong with your leg?’
‘I got Infantile Paralysis,’ I told him.
‘Fancy that now!’ he said, nodding his head sympathetically and clucking his tongue as he put more wood on his campfire. ‘Well, you’ve got a roof over your head, anyway.’ He looked up at me, ‘And a bloody good head it is; like a Romney Marsh lamb.’
I liked these men because they never pitied me. They gave me confidence. In the world they travelled, being on crutches was not as bad as sleeping out in the rain or walking with your toes on the ground, or longing for a drink you had no money to buy. They saw nothing but the track ahead of them; they saw brighter things ahead of me.
Once, when I said to The Fiddler, ‘This is a good place to camp, isn’t it?’ he glanced round and said, ‘Yes, I suppose it is – to a bloke who hasn’t got to camp here.’ He gave a scornful laugh. ‘A cocky said to me once, “You blokes are never satisfied. If a bloke gives you cheese you’ll want to fry it.” ’
‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘That’s me.’
‘I’ve seen the time when I’ve been on the track and I’ve thought if I only had tea and sugar I’d be right; then when I’ve got tea and sugar I want a smoke, and when I’ve got a smoke I want a good camp, and when I’ve got a good camp I want something to read. “You don’t happen to have any reading matter on you, do ye?” I asked this cocky. “I can see I won’t get any tucker out of you.”’
The Fiddler was the only swagman I met who carried a frying pan. He took it from his tucker bag and looked at it with satisfaction. Then he turned it over and looked at the bottom which he tapped with his finger.
