Read Online You Never Met My Father by Graeme Sparkes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Graeme Sparkes
Ads: Link
went to town: to Apsley, the closest little community, or Naracoorte, just over the border into South Australia for any serious shopping. I never gave her appearance a second thought, suffering the impairment of familiarity, but she must have been attractive. If she turned heads or received lecherous remarks I was unaware of them. Sexuality was not yet part of my consciousness, despite my intimacy with the girl-next-door in Brisbane. Pat was a mother without a personality, except for maternal traits and, since she laughed at some of the things I did or said, an unsettling sense of humour. I feared there was callousness in her laughter, but I might have been mistaken, oversensitive as I was about my childish foibles, half the time unable to recognise affection. Much to my surprise she was also capable of fear. I saw it once.
She had permission to drive the farm ute whenever she went to town. On her return one day she saw something crossing the track to the homestead. âA bloody snake!â she cried, more in fear than hatred.
She deliberately tried to run over it. I was in the cabin with her and she asked me if sheâd got it, by which she meant killed it. I looked through the rear window and told her I thought it was still wriggling. Her trembling hand struggled to find reverse.
She drove over it again, backwards and forwards, a dozen times or more, unconvinced by my eventual declaration of its demise. Finally, with the blood drained from her face, she stopped and parked as close to our quarters as possible.
She shepherded me indoors.
Still shaking when the manager dropped by sometime later, she asked if he had noticed any dead snake on the track. Judiciously he inquired about its length. She guessed about three foot. He shook his head. The one he had seen was at least that wide and nine foot long.
She laughed at his joke, recalled it now and then throughout her life, revealing an ability to be amused by her own dreads and fears.
I loved her incontrovertibly. She took care of us without complaint. If I was unaware of the emotional strain of her predicament, precociously I began to realise that she had twice the work of most mothers. I tried to help her, doing whatever odd jobs I could: fetching kindling for the stove, polishing shoes, sweeping the back porch, feeding scraps to the chooks, dusting the big empty rooms of the mansion. I even volunteered to milk the cow, something she had learnt herself as a child. And after she taught me I took on that responsibility too, with gusto, seduced by pungent bovine smells, the warmth of Daisyâs yielding flank against my forehead as I reached for her rubbery teats, the harsh squirts against the metal pail. I would have liked to look after the sheep in the paddock adjacent to the mansion. Their smell, too, and their bleating, their silly woolly coats, far too thick for the climate, and little legs that made them run oddly appealed to me. But so far I was put in charge of only one, an orphan, and even that was not mine alone, merely a joint responsibility with my sisters, which we fed from a bottle, amazed at its appetite and wildly wiggling tail. I thought I could play a part when a farmhand moved them from one paddock to another, but I soon learned I could never compete with the clever farm dogs that already had that job.
Eventually the summer holidays came to an end. Jean and I were enrolled in the primary school in Apsley, but on the first school day we were cut off from the town by a grass fire that swept across the southern half of Kirkwall . Smoke rode on the sharp, unpredictable winds, leaving Pat fearful. She had lived through the â39 Black Friday Bushfire in Gippsland, in which scores of people lost their lives and the sun had been completely blocked out by menacing clouds of smoke. The manager and the farmhands were in the paddocks shifting sheep to safety, while volunteer firemen fought the blaze from trucks with huge square tanks, which
She had permission to drive the farm ute whenever she went to town. On her return one day she saw something crossing the track to the homestead. âA bloody snake!â she cried, more in fear than hatred.
She deliberately tried to run over it. I was in the cabin with her and she asked me if sheâd got it, by which she meant killed it. I looked through the rear window and told her I thought it was still wriggling. Her trembling hand struggled to find reverse.
She drove over it again, backwards and forwards, a dozen times or more, unconvinced by my eventual declaration of its demise. Finally, with the blood drained from her face, she stopped and parked as close to our quarters as possible.
She shepherded me indoors.
Still shaking when the manager dropped by sometime later, she asked if he had noticed any dead snake on the track. Judiciously he inquired about its length. She guessed about three foot. He shook his head. The one he had seen was at least that wide and nine foot long.
She laughed at his joke, recalled it now and then throughout her life, revealing an ability to be amused by her own dreads and fears.
I loved her incontrovertibly. She took care of us without complaint. If I was unaware of the emotional strain of her predicament, precociously I began to realise that she had twice the work of most mothers. I tried to help her, doing whatever odd jobs I could: fetching kindling for the stove, polishing shoes, sweeping the back porch, feeding scraps to the chooks, dusting the big empty rooms of the mansion. I even volunteered to milk the cow, something she had learnt herself as a child. And after she taught me I took on that responsibility too, with gusto, seduced by pungent bovine smells, the warmth of Daisyâs yielding flank against my forehead as I reached for her rubbery teats, the harsh squirts against the metal pail. I would have liked to look after the sheep in the paddock adjacent to the mansion. Their smell, too, and their bleating, their silly woolly coats, far too thick for the climate, and little legs that made them run oddly appealed to me. But so far I was put in charge of only one, an orphan, and even that was not mine alone, merely a joint responsibility with my sisters, which we fed from a bottle, amazed at its appetite and wildly wiggling tail. I thought I could play a part when a farmhand moved them from one paddock to another, but I soon learned I could never compete with the clever farm dogs that already had that job.
Eventually the summer holidays came to an end. Jean and I were enrolled in the primary school in Apsley, but on the first school day we were cut off from the town by a grass fire that swept across the southern half of Kirkwall . Smoke rode on the sharp, unpredictable winds, leaving Pat fearful. She had lived through the â39 Black Friday Bushfire in Gippsland, in which scores of people lost their lives and the sun had been completely blocked out by menacing clouds of smoke. The manager and the farmhands were in the paddocks shifting sheep to safety, while volunteer firemen fought the blaze from trucks with huge square tanks, which
Similar Books
