Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven/Chapter 7

by Blanche Edith Baughan

VII

AN ACTIVE FAMILY

The Post Office clock was just striking seven, that fine midsummer morning when “Mother” and “Dad” and I drove out of town and took the seacoast road. “Dad” was a spare, spry little man, somewhere between fifty and sixty, with a shock of grey hair and an eye of burning fire; “Mother” was a buxom presence, comfortable and comforting, I just a stray guest; and we were all off, this rare mid-week holiday, to see how the up-country farm was getting on, and “the children,” who were in charge of it.

In less than five minutes the country spread all about us—the good, green, grassy country, rolling in gentle swells and undulations like a summer sea. Here and there one lonely cabbage tree stood up, curiously distinct; at long intervals we passed a squad of plantation-pines, or some homestead nestling in among the gentle hills; but otherwise all was wide sky and billowy grass, interspersed with browsing cattle. The skylark sang overhead; there was a fine fresh breeze; and away to the west, along the bright blue of the sky, there lay, straight and low, a dark blue band of sea.

Dad flicked the whip at Brownie with a nervous energy; he was “in a bit of a rush to get home.” Always full of nervous energy was Dad, and more often than not “in a bit of a rush.” He was a delicate man, who had survived, Mother alone knows how many “bad turns,” and he was often ailing and irritable, but never without a certain dash and vigour. “More pluck than bulk,” a neighbour once summed him up, and, “You’d think he’d a fire inside of him,” agreed one of the listeners. Suppose it was so, then this fire had two flames—a love of music, and a passion for the soil.

The latter was paramount and urging. Dad, without capital, and with a numerous family, of which the eldest were but just emerging from school age, had nevertheless, some few years previously, managed, at last, to take up a bit of land; by dint of stern determination had ploughed and fenced and got it into some kind of going order; then, with the same sternness, had torn himself away from it. It needed money; that money he must make. The children were now growing up; they could manage things between them, and he would go back to town and earn. Accordingly, for the sake of his heart’s delight, he banished himself from the sight of it all week long, and served in a grocery store, hurrying home, each Saturday night and every chance holiday, to take a general survey, and issue orders. Mother would not leave him—of all her children he was the one who needed looking after most. “So he’s bachelorisin’, an’ I’m keepin’ house for him,” she would explain, with a twinkle. And “the children” managed the farm.

As we drove along, Mother related reminiscences—tales of the early days when she had just come out to New Zealand, and the Maori troubles in that part of the country were at their worst. “Dad was ordered off, with all the rest of the men, the moment we landed, and all us women and children were herded together for safety,” narrated this Pilgrim mother. “I remember how I sat down with my young one in my arms—he’d been born on board ship comin’ out—an’ cried an’ cried. I was but only eighteen, and I’d made my mind up that we’d come out just to get killed. Things quieted down a bit after awhile, but for long enough they wasn’t properly settled. Once, after we’d got us a house to ourselves, there was a band of Maoris come into it at the front door, just as I’d caught my babies together (two there was by then), an’ run out into the flax-swamp by the back. Everything they could put their hands on they stole, them natives did; not a crumb of any one thing did they leave behind ’em; and, as I peered out from behind the flax an’ watched ’em go, I could see they was finishin’ up with eatin’, what do you think, now? Soap! Then, there was another time, an’ that was in the winter—bitter cold. I locked all the doors an’ went without fire for a week, that they might think the house deserted, for there they was, bands of ’em again, goin’ a-singin’ an’ a-screechin’ up an’ down the road. Hows’ever, none of ’em come in that time. . . The babies? Nay, I’d lost ’em, dear. I never reared them two.”

So peaceful looked the smiling country all about us, so placid were Mother’s soft tones, that it was hard to realise what danger and excitements, what sore straits at times, both land and woman had suffered in those bygone days—not bygone so very far yet, either.

The hills grew steeper as we proceeded, and the road rougher, but Brownie was a good horse, and she had a resolute driver. “They’ll have begun the stacking to-day, I shouldn’t wonder,” Dad kept observing, whenever there was a pause in the talk; and we made good time. It was not yet quite nine o’clock, when we passed a hollow filled with glossy karaka, mounted the hill above it, up which ripe grasses ran before the wind—and there we were, at a white gate before a thick plantation, and—yes! they had “begun the stacking.” Dad flung the reins to a girl who came flying out of the gate just as we stopped before it, kissed her somehow as he passed her, and bounded straight for the oat-paddock, pulling off his coat as he ran.

“Let him go!” says Mother with an indulgent smile, leisurely descending in her turn from the gig. “Well, Flo, how’s everybody?”

“Oh, fine!” says Flo, a big, broad-shouldered girl, of perhaps eighteen, with a happy face, a friendly smile, and two long plaits of rich dark hair hanging nearly to her waist. “How do you do?” (to me) “you must be pretty well starving, I’m sure! I’ll take Brownie, Mum, you two go in. Nance is in the kitchen.”

So we leave Flo to unharness, and turn in at the gate. The path beyond it leads, first, through an avenue of breakwind pines, through which, turning for a moment to look back at Flo, I catch the smile of sunlit sea half a mile or so away; and then out upon an open space, bright with hardy flowers, and surrounding a ramshackle wooden house, with an overflow of outbuildings, all stained, rather than painted, with a various, weather-washed red.

“Nancy’s flowers!” says Mother, stooping to smell a bit of lemon verbena, and to lift up a branch of fuchsia, all bowed down beneath its load of royal purple and crimson. “That child would grow flowers in a dust-pan, I do believe—Ah, Nance, here you are!” as another girl comes flying out of the house—they all seem to take after their father as to movement, and carry the wind in their hair.

Nance is slighter than Flo, and fairer; perhaps she is a couple of years older. Her pale-green blouse is faded but spotless; and the untrimmed “gégé” hat tilted back upon her head frames in a face that is very nearly pretty, and so happy that it has the effect of being pretty quite; and that is a real triumph of mind over matter, since one cheek is red and swollen, and Nance’s hand goes up to it, even as she smiles a charming welcome.

“Toothache?” asks mother, sympathetically.

Nancy nods. “But it’ll go,” she says brightly. “Come along in! The kettle’s on the boil.”

“None of ’em really strong, someway,” Mother confides to me. “But they all take after their dad—they won’t give in till they must.”

The house door leads right into a large bare room, with a long table and some benches in it, all polished by much use, and a great open hearth, fit for burning huge logs of wood. The brown wood walls, guiltless of paint or paper, are decorated only with a couple of Christmas Supplement pictures, unframed; the floor is covered with a brown linoleum which lost its pattern long ago; the cupboard that occupies one corner, the dresser, hung with mugs and cups, that runs along one wall, the lounges underneath the two great windows, are all obviously home-made. But, frugal though its furnishing, there is a most comfortable homeyness about the place. A green jug upon the table, too, holds a handful of Canterbury bells, purple and white; plump cushions, with bright covers mollify the lounges; there is plenty of light; above all, there is plenty of air, for both windows are open, and another door, opposite to that by which we entered, frames another glimpse of garden-green. Through this second door Nance disappears, while Mother smooths out an imaginary crease in the cloth laid at one end of the long table, and straightens the quite straight cups and plates.

“We’ve a cooking-shed outside,” she explains, as Nance returns with a tray and a steaming tea-pot. “Where’s Eva, Nance?”

“Eva? Oh, still at the butter, I expect,” says Nance. “There’s a splendid lot this week.”

It is hours since we breakfasted, and the delicious bread and butter and jam, all home-made, of course, are more than welcome, not to speak of the hot tea, and sweet rich cream.

“How about Dad, though?” says loyal Mother, as she takes her seat.

“Oh, Dad’s all right,” Nance answers, putting brisk finishing touches to a great “kit,” covered in with a spotless tea-towel; “I told Benny to be down for the lunch just about now”—and even as she says the words, in shoots a breathless, towheaded twelve-year-old. He smiles to his mother, nods to me, catches up the kit, together with a mighty billy by the door—and shoots: out again.

“Who’s up there?” asks Mother, “and how are they gettin’ along?”

“First-rate! They reckon to be done to-night,” says Nance. “Benny’s there, of course, and Bruv and Sandy; Flo and Bonny have been there most of the time, and . . . Hugh is helping.” Nance hesitated a little before that last name, and it seemed to me she blushed ever so slightly, too. If she did, however, Mother took no notice.

“That’s good. And how’s the ducks?” said she.

“There, now!” replies Nance ruefully. “I do wish you hadn’t asked; I was hoping to break it to you gently. All gone, mother! Poor Waddle, all her babies gone! Rats, we think; so we’ve moved Toddle and her little lot. But oh, Mother! what do you think? We’ve had somebody after the place!”

“That’s good,” says Mother again, taking the translation of the little Waddles as equably as she takes everything else. “Likely, d’you think?”

“Bruv says so,” Nance replies. “Dad would be pleased, wouldn’t he? He’d have us all up at that new Bush place in a twinkling. Only—you do get fond of a place you’ve done the settling of yourself, don’t you, Mum? It’ll seem a bit hard to move on.”

“Well, but after all that’s what we settled it for, isn’t it?” returns Mother comfortably. “Bring out the sewin’, will you? Machine still all right?” And, while Nance and I clear away, she establishes herself in a good light with a pile of dilapidated shirts, and a half-made white muslin blouse. “Worst first,” says she, and begins upon the shirts.

The cups washed, Nance proposes that I should see the butter, and takes me over to the dairy-shed, where Eva, a second edition of Flo, though several years older, smiles merrily out at us from behind a great, pale-primrose-coloured hill. Long before breakfast, I learn, with the help of old Dobbin—harnessed to the cream-barrel, and steadily tramping round and round—the butter “came” in about ten minutes; then it was copiously washed with clear, cold spring-water; and now, well worked and salted, here it lies upon the dark wood table, a mellow, shining mass, from which Eva is deftly wedging out, and weighing, and shaping, pile upon pile of “regulation” pounds. Table and concrete floor are running with clean water; Eva has gumboots on her feet, her skirt, of dark-blue cambric, is pinned up, her snowy apron covers her from collar to hem. Bright are her great grey eyes, and her cheeks very pink and pretty. The very air seems clean and coloured in the dairy, and we stay there a good while, chatting.

Then, after a satisfactory inspection of affairs in the cooking-shed, Nance takes me up to the oat-paddock. “For, though I am cook this week (Flo and Eva and I take it in turns),” she explains, “the dinner’s all on now, and, besides, Mother’s here.” Watch, the old rough-coated dog, comes with us, and on the way there is yellow-haired Custard to be seen, with her six unparalleled pups. From the pigeon-cote above the cart-shed, a flock of snowy fantail pigeons comes circling round our heads, not at all timidly; and Nance says, “You can see they’re pets, too, can’t you? Everything we’ve got is a pet. You know, we don’t believe in our animals working for us for nothing.”

Past the last of the many sheds, through the kitchen-garden, through the orchard, and then out, upon what a breezy hillock! High up it seems suddenly to have been lifted, and now to be held high up, all bare to the bright breezes. The view from it is all in breadths of blue and green—blue sky, blue sea, and other great green grassy knobs like itself; all the land on this side is hilly. Here and there a fire-blackened pole, or stubborn old grey stump, bears witness to the long-banished Bush; in one gully, tree-ferns spread their delicate pavilions. Up two more hillocks we climb, and chase each other down two gullies. Shouts and laughter greet our last ascent, and here we are, among the harvesters!

The crop is being carried. Benny, and Bonny, his twin-sister, whose flying fleece of yellow hair catches every sunbeam, are helping Flo to rake. Sandy is in charge of the sled, as Dobbin takes it back and forth between the rakers and the rick; while Bruv, the eldest of “the children,” is pitching, with the help of Hugh Miller, a neighbour’s son. As for Dad, he is everywhere, of course. All the lads are well-grown, honest-looking, and natural. Soft shirts with turned-down collars, blue dungarees, belts, and great “gégé” hats make up their “rig”—how they would laugh if one told them that it was picturesque! it is, though, all the same. Work is proceeding at top-speed; nevertheless, Hugh Miller, I perceive, finds time between his forkfuls for a word or two with Nancy, standing, with glowing face uplifted, close beneath the rick; and I do my best to engage that burning eye of Dad’s elsewhere. But before very long there comes to my relief a prolonged “boo-oo!” rumbling through the racy air—the unmistakable sound of a horn. “Dinner already? It can’t be!” cries poor Dad in dismay—nevertheless, dinner it is. In we all scamper, and lively presently about the kitchen-door are the demands for “more soap,” and “another towel.”

Mother has dished up; and now she and Nance take their stand at one end of the long table, and pass down, to any one who is seated, a generous plateful of roast pork, apple-sauce, and potatoes.

“We’re rough, you know,” Dad says apologetically, handing me the salt.

“And ready!” chuckles Sandy, falling to with a will upon his share.

“Roughest is best at times,” Mother placidly winds up.

But, in reality, there is very little that is rough about it. The cloth is clean, the set of sun-browned faces round it, shining with health and good humour, is a finer sight than any possible amount of silver on it could be, and the meal itself, though perhaps it might make a conscientious dyspeptic shudder, for the pork is followed by a hot plum-pudding, would likewise almost certainly make his mouth water, for it is excellently cooked. There is only one thing wrong, and that is, that every one of us drinks tea. Delicious, pernicious tea! when shall we of the back-blocks learn to do without you, anyway at dinner? No wonder that Nance has toothache, and patent medicines such a sale!

Dinner done, the harvest-hands take a brief “spell” upon the lounges, while the rest of us clear away, and wash the dishes. Then, back they go to the paddock, Eva this time with them, Mother resumes her mending, and Nance and I proceed to bottle “barm,” Nance enlivening the task with a sketch of the family fortunes.

“At first, you know,” she says, “we’d terrible luck up here. The cows would get milk fever, and the pigs took bad, and oh! we knew so little about it all! Then we’d a horrible scare about codlin moth (though I’m thankful to say that didn’t come off); and then, for two years running, we lost all the potatoes with blight. Next, the kitchen-shed caught fire—nobody knows how; and it burnt right down, and Dad had thought he could do without insuring. Luckily, it was like this one, right away from the house, but oh! the dairy nearly went as well! The water sizzled as we threw it on the walls, and once Bruv, who was drawing up the bucket from the well close by, gasped out, ‘I can’t stand it any longer’—he was only sixteen. But Dad, who was really right inside the dairy, all smothered up in the smoke, shouted out to him, and said, ‘We Must!’ So, he did. I can see poor old Dad’s face now. Oh, I was sorry for him that time; it fair broke him up—if the place had all gone, he’d have died, I do believe. Of course, to us kiddies it didn’t really matter much—we didn’t know enough, for one thing, and for another, as Sandy said, it was such a change! Anyway, you can pretty well always think how much worse things might have been, can’t you?

“Oh, yes, thanks, they’re ever so much easier now. We’ve fifty cows in milk, butter keeps up, and there’s talk of building a factory four miles off. And then, if this man that’s after the place now, you know, does take it, we’ll be able to sell out well, and Dad can leave that hateful store.

“Neighbours? No, of course, we haven’t many—nor much time, either, to go and see those that we have; but then, we’re a host in ourselves, aren’t we? and we can all sing, and most of us can play. That’s one thing, though—I do want Eva to get away to town, and have some lessons; you ought to hear her; she has got a proper voice! And she’s the only one of us all that doesn’t like this life, and she tries to boss Bruv and Sandy sometimes, and naturally that doesn’t do. Sundays? Oh, well, of course there isn’t any church, and if there was, I doubt if we’d ever get, for we’re mostly pretty tired, you see, by Sunday. So we just ‘doss’ a bit, read a bit, eat a meal when one happens along, doss again, read again, and wind up with some music in the evening. You’ve got to milk on Sundays, of course, just the same as weekdays.”

I wondered what the reading was, and asked.

“Oh, just the papers—and a fool of a yarn sometimes. We’ve none of us got any brains to spare,” says Nance frankly. “I can’t stand reading dry stuff, anyway; can you? There! that’s the last bottle; thanks! Now shall we go and pick up windfalls in the orchard? I want to make some apple-pies for tea.”

There was a certain foreigner who came to New Zealand not so very long ago—a Russian, if I remember rightly—and saw a good deal of our workaday doings; and at the end he broke out into this lamentable cry: “Oh! you live so bad, you do live so bad!” It was not our material existence, nor, happily, our moral, that he intended thus to rebuke; it was the performance of our intellects and spirits. And, as I followed Nance into the orchard, his words came back to me, and I wondered whether, after all, he were not right; whether such as Nance and her family, toiling thus, year in, year out, were not actually, that the farm, forsooth, might prosper, being starved in brain and soul; whether, in fact, they could be said truly to live at all? Unlike the Old-World workers, we in this country have no burning wrongs to awake our energies and point us to ideals—or, at any rate, if we have, there are but few of us that have caught fire. Church and chapel, the immemorial “way-out” from mere existence to so many of our labouring forefathers, mean (whatever the reason; I do but state the fact) very little to our younger generation. Art comes at all times scantly to the back-blocks; and with what hope can Literature appeal to brains exhausted already by the exhaustion of the body? While, on the other hand, what have we in the place of these, to exercise our higher faculties, and so give us, in addition to material existence, life? Oh dear! despite our soil and our sunshine, our independence and our labour laws, don’t we some of us live really rather “bad”? In our ardour for “the land” are we not keeping our regard fixed rather too sedulously upon it? forgetting that the wide-winged air, the lofty sky, are also facts, and unconscious that man really cannot ever live by bread alone; no, not even with the agreeable addition of roast mutton and butter!

Well, it may be that no new country, after the first noble excitements of pioneering have died down, ever quite escapes this peril. It may be with healthy young nations as it is with healthy little boys, that the affairs of the soul interest them a very great deal less keenly than the affairs of the stomach—and, for the time being, rightly so. Nance’s next words, moreover, showed that, for her at any rate, one gateway of escape into the larger life was always open—the universal woman’s way, of the heart.

For, “What makes it all so worth while, you see,” she observed confidentially, as down under the leafy fruit-trees we gathered our aprons full of fallen fruit, “is, that it does make Dad so happy. When one feels dead-beat, you can’t think what a stand-by that is. And then, I do love the country; don’t you: the animals and flowers and things? We all do, Eva too. Besides . . . oh well!” finished up Nance rather abruptly, and as if she were taking a flying leap over a dangerous reason to a sound conclusion, “I wouldn’t change with any one, not if it was the Queen herself!” I could not help giving a guess at that reason she left in the gap, and unless I am greatly mistaken, the colour of its hair strongly favoured that of Master Miller’s.

When we got back with our apples, there was afternoon tea to be prepared, both for paddock and house; then we made the pies, and then it was milking-time. I never knew the hours to fly so fast as they did on that farm. Nance put on a short old skirt and a cotton overall, and led me over to the yard. It was full of cows, creamy and mouse-coloured, brindled and red-and-white, deep chestnut, glossy black; the slanting sun-rays brightened and grew richer as they caressed those shining hides. Benny and Bonny, Flo and Eva had come down from the oats to milk; Mother, too, was quietly taking part with bucket and stool as a matter of course.

Much to my surprise, there was no leg-roping, and hardly any bailing-up. Silky, Mima, Jewel, Fiddle-face, and the rest, knew each her name, responded to the call of it, and stood to be milked, patient and contented, either in the open yard, or else in the paddock that led from it. It really was as though that spirit of willing good-nature which possessed the human members of the farm extended also to the animals—or rather, as Nance had said, they were obviously all pets. Fat old Pudding, the cat, waited for her evening meal in the most peaceful proximity to Watch, who, for his part, having brought in the cows from hillside and gully without any undue fuss or chasing, now lay by the yard-gate, more as a spectator than a sentinel. The very calves were tame already—far too tame, remarked Flo, as with a milk-pail in one hand and a stout stick in the other she dealt out mercy well-spiced with justice to their eager, jostling little host.

Barely were the calves fed, when down trooped all the harvesters, exultant—the oats were stacked! Tea was the next detail, and after tea Dad agreed that there was really time for an hour’s music before we need start back for town. The boys had all fallen fast asleep upon the living-room lounges, and nobody had the heart to wake them; but when, the dish-washing quickly dispatched by our many hands, the rest of us had gathered together in the little sitting-room—furnished with a cottage piano, a few chairs, a big pile of music, and very little else—and Dad had begun to play (one of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux, if you please!) one by one the missing members all crept in on tiptoe, rubbing their eyes, and murmuring under their breaths, “That’s it!” “Go it, Dad!” or “That’s good!”

The Schubert ended, he began a glee; upon which the whole family, except mother, who sat nodding her head while she knitted, but more, I fancied, in maternal than musical appreciation, burst spontaneously into voice, taking the parts and singing them together as though they had but one soul between them. Every note rang true, round, and rich, and Eva especially really had a beautiful contralto. After the glee, Bruv brought out a violin, Benny a ’cello, and Flo took her father’s place at the piano, and played their accompaniment. Real music it was; the whole family had evidently a natural gift. Nobody spoke, every one was hanging on sweet sound. It was good to look round on all those absorbed faces; it was fine to feel that uplifted ending to a day that, arduous with toil, had nevertheless throughout been made lively with interest and sweet with love. Perhaps they did not actually “live so bad” after all, these individual sons and daughters of the soil?

And then it was Good-bye, said lingeringly, and with regret. One felt for Dad, going back into exile. A load of butter and some apples were packed into the back of the gig, last congratulations were exchanged about the oats, and then we were off. An hour’s downhill drive in the sweet starlight brought us back into town.

“Ay,” said Dad, as we parted. “Good kids all, as you say; ne’er a scabby sheep among ’em. Won’t be like some I know of, a-wantin’ the State to keep their father an’ mother in old age, I’ll warrant. Only Hughie I s’pose’ll soon be wantin’ Nance, an’ that girl Eva has got to have lessons. Well, we shall manage. Glad you enjoyed yourself. Good night!”