by John Wells
Everything behind us is history – it need not be a hundred years ago, or a thousand.
My grandmother's house in Drouin is part of my history, and I'm only going back 60 or 70 years. I don't know why it was "Grandma's house" when Pa lived there as well, but that was the way of the times.
Nearly every Sunday we would have Sunday dinner there, when dinner was the midday meal and tea was the meal you ate at night. Sometimes old Biddy would reluctantly haul the float up the Longwarry hill with all of us aboard. From late 1953 we'd go up in the back of the Commer 10 ute that we thought was such a grand car. There were no seatbelts but none of the five boys ever fell out.
That is not quite true. David once fell out of the ute up near Euroa but that is not part of this story.
Most of the time we walked up the railway. Our farm ran beside the line from the butter factory paddock, up the Longwarry Bank and almost to Rock Cutting. Grandma's house was behind the cemetery on the west side of Drouin, so the line provided an easy walk. On the way home we'd collect spilled briquettes for the copper.
We'd leave the line and cross the road into the cemetery. There was something very strange and a little alarming (to me, anyway) about walking through a cemetery but I had no choice. We'd hop through the fence at the back and there we were. Grandma's house.
It was always a welcoming little house, though it did not seem so little at the time. Looking at a photo I have here I would put it at about seven squares, but when I was about seven it was much larger, just as the Tarago was a big river.
It was on what is now Clancy St, off Weerong Rd, but "Clancy St' was then only a road reserve. The track ended at Grandma's but the reserve carried through to what is now Parinda R but was then "the tip road" because that is where it went, and on many a Sunday afternoon my brothers and I would find good things in that tip. We were definitely little tip rats.
There was always a little smoke rising from Grandma's chimney because the Lux stove was always burning. Grandma could cook up a storm on the stove, Beside it was the fireplace, with two bars across it that we called "the hobs", It had a swinging arm with a hook for the billy, so it could be brought over the fire.
The lunch would always deserve a stronger word. It was a traditional hot Sunday dinner, with a roast of one sort or another. There would be roasted vegetables, too, and we knew better than to leave them. There were heaps of bread and butter, and the butter was made on the table where we ate it.
We would sometimes stay at Grandma's during the school holidays and one of the treats was to be allowed to turn the handle of the churn, as the cream turned into lumps and then into butter. Grandma would press it into shape, with a wooden block that left the butter with an embossed scene on it.
It is the puddings that have been swallowed up (pardon the awful pun) by the movement of time. There were jam roly-polies, Spotted Dicks, Suet Puddings and so forth. Sometimes there was a luxury like bread and butter pudding, or sago with raisins. Suet featured large and we were no doubt eating badly by today's standards, but back then that was not an issue.
The little house was a standard country cottage of its time. There was a front verandah facing east to sit on if the day was hot. Everyone came in through the back door, aligned with the front door to allow a cooling breeze to blow through. The back door opened into the kitchen, with a washhouse to the far left. Crossing the kitchen, up the middle of the house, the 'dining room', where no-one ever dined, was on the right and the first bedroom opened off to the left. The corridor led to the front door between two more bedrooms.
There must have been at least fifty thousand cottages around Australia built with exactly the same layout, because it worked.
The gabled roof was built fairly high so that the heat from the corrugated iron was not passed straight into the house. The front garden was a place where a wise child did not play running games, or kick a football. Grandma tended it very carefully and it was full of flowers that are fairly uncommon now, like foxgloves, snapdragons and hollyhocks.
This humble little wonderland also had a cow, and an orchard, and a chook house. It had an outside toilet down the slope from the house, where magazine and newspaper pages, town into squares, hung from a nail. One could sit here quite comfortably, with heaps to read.
There was a small haystack to climb and a little creek on the swampy north side.
Grandma's little house was wall-papered in dark colours, which used to worry me a little, and in the dining room were four large, framed formal photographs of her brothers, in the uniforms of the Great War. Only two came home and one of those died not long after coming home. Even as an old lady decades after the Armistice Grandma would get emotional when she talked about her brothers. I wish now that I had listened more carefully.
The kitchen table was ground zero. That was more than just a place to eat. It was a place where people sat and talked, and drank cups of tea. It was a place where harness was repaired and a place where Grandma taught her grandsons to play euchre, and cribbage. We liked playing those games because it usually ended up with bedtime being postponed a little.
I've wandered about a little here. The point I wanted to make was that this little house was the core of our large clan, and at Christmas time there were, by my count, around 40 people seated at the various tables, and we all fitted into that tiny kitchen-some-living-room. There were old ladies and there were babies. There were young men and little tackers. They were all pat of the clan and there was great love among us all. We belonged. We were cared about by so many people.
Grandma's little house had far more importance than its humble looks would suggest.