by John Wells
The roof was 'tin', corrugated iron, and we heard the rain clearly as we sheltered warmly inside and tried to avoid any suggestion of going outside.
"Rose-coloured glasses", you might say, and you would probably be right. In truth, when it was too hot we got hot, and when it was too cold we got cold. When it rained we got wet.
We had a kitchen where the air seems always to have been warm. I know that cannot be entirely true, but that is how I remember it.
The firewood was in the wood-box, with a hatch opening inside right beside the stove. We watched anxiously as mum or dad fed the stove or the kitchen fire, because we knew that when the wood ran low someone would be going outside in the rain to get more, and the woodheap was not near the house.
The walls were weatherboard, as in most farmhouses of the time, with fibrous plaster on the inside. Occasionally one or two of the weatherboards would come loose, and if it was not nailed back on quickly, and sometimes it was not, we'd find ourselves with a swarm of bees as neighbours, or we'd find blackbirds building nests in the walls.
The bees were fine. Both the standard yellow and black honey bee and the smaller black 'bush bee' – we didn't know their proper names back then – made honey, and at the right time dad and my big brother would raid the hive, dressed with every protection they could muster, and the honeycomb would be put into a pillow-slip that hang at the unused end of the passage. The honey would drip into a dish, sweet and pure.
The bush bees' hives were in hollow trees, and it was easy to smoke them out, just not so easy to get to the honeycomb. It was always managed in the end, but the bush bee honey was of a much thinner nature (and it always smelt of smoke).
The house must also have smelled of smoke, with a stove, a copper and two fireplaces providing various amounts of smoke inside, but I don't remember it going so.
The two chimneys would get sootier as the carbon built up inside them. When it was time to clean them dad would make up a block of wire netting and with him up on the roof, on a ladder leaning against the chimney, and with my big brother inside the house, the block of wire netting would be dragged up and down until all the soot had been scraped off.
Most it was in the fireplace below, but quite a bit would be out on the floor, some of it on spread newspaper pages and some of it not. Mum was remarkably tolerant in some ways. We didn't a vacuum cleaner, and we didn't have the electricity to run one, anyway.
If we let the soot build up we'd eventually get a chimney fire, sucking oxygen from inside and making a giant blowtorch visible for miles.
The house always needed work done, but so did the farm, and as dad so often said, if the cows were not looked after properly they'd give less milk and we would not the milk cheques we needed. That all came to a heated climax when dad started building a new, more spacious, more easily cleaned cowshed. Mum was more than slightly ticked off. You can imagine the comments.
We got a little money set aside and there was talk of painting the house, which surely needed it. Instead, we had a bore drilled at the high point of the farm.
When the electricity was brought in mum and dad agreed the house needed a refrigerator. That was a wonderful development for all of us – I've told you about that before – and there was still a little money left over and mum talked about painting the house. Dad had a milking machine installed.
We got a little money set aside again and his time Mum got her revenge. Dad was out somewhere and when he came home he saw a television antenna on our roof. It was 1956 and the Melbourne Olympic Games were upon us.
Dad chose not to fight this battle, but the house still needed painting.
Two years later Dad died and two years after that we moved off the farm and into Drouin. The house was still unpainted. (A few years ago my brother, David, and his wife, Lyn, bought the site and built a very lovely house there. Mum would have loved the fact that it was fully painted).
It was not only painting that the house needed. There was no plumbing. The lavatory was down the slope, well below the well and quite a trek on a dark and frosty night. The water for the house was pumped up from the well by hand and carried inside in kerosene-tin buckets (we had proper buckets, but only in the cowshed).
On washing day all the house buckets would be used to fill the copper and that meant carrying many loads up, each as light as we thought we could sneak through. It never occurred to us that bringing up half-buckets meant making twice as many trips from the pump.
It happened all over again when we were having baths. The water would be heated in the copper and bucketed into the bath, topping it up as each of us took his turn. There was always a delicate balance between having heaps of hot water and the effort of pumping it up and carrying it inside.
When we got muddy in the cow yard we'd clean up in the boiler-room in the shed, where there was always plenty of hot water and where we could spend a little time by the fire on wintry nights.
One thing the house that Jack built lacked, among many, was insulation. Insulation was not a widely used practice back then but most houses in the country were built with a large roof-space which filled much of the same role. The front door was lined up with the back door to allow the breezes through. Combine those two factors with the verandahs most houses had and with the shade of a few large shade trees and you had the ideal Australian architecture, one from which we have moved away, to our cost.
I'll leave the reminiscing for a few weeks, but at least I stayed more or less on track this week.