Aunt Effie's Ark by Jack Lasenby

stop teasing the animals, but he couldn’t help it. The strange thing was – the tigers asked Alwyn to come back and play with them. Then the rattlesnakes begged him to come and play his tin whistle. As for the monkeys, they saved up handfuls of peanuts for him. We couldn’t understand that.
    Our caulking, felting, schenamming, sheathing, and tarring worked pretty well, but a few leaks came in where somebody whose name we didn’t like to say aloud had fired a blunderbuss at the door. Peter melted a billy of tar over the fire, and we teased out some old plough-line, hammered it into the holes made by the nikau  berries, and tarred it. We split open kerosene tins, and tacked them over the caulking to hold it in place.
    â€œA bit of of a mongrel way to caulk,” said Peter, “from the inside out, but she’ll be right!”
    â€œWe’ll have to give her a name,” said Marie. “Aunt Effie reckons a ship’s nothing till she’s got a name.”
    â€œMrs Chapman told us a story at Sunday school,” said Peter. “About an old man with a beard, Mr Noah, who saved all the animals from a flood in a ship called the
Ark
.” We thought we remembered the story, and the name sounded all right to us – except for Daisy.
    â€œI’m almost certain Mr Noah turned his wife to a pillar of salt,” she said. “And then he went on the ran-tan in a town called Sodom or Gomorrah. A nice example to set the little ones!”
    â€œI think you’re mixing up Mr Noah with a lot of other people,” said Peter. “The dictionary says an ark is a covered ship for sheltering people and animals during a flood.”
    We hung Casey, Lizzie, Jared, and Jessie over the front of the ship by their ankles. They swung a bottle of Aunt Effie’s best champagne and smashed it on what we now called the bows.
    â€œWe name you Aunt Effie’s Ark!” they chorused.
    We pulled them back on deck, brushed some broken glass out of their hair, and Daisy told them not to lick their lips.
    â€œIf you once acquire the taste for champagne, there’s no knowing to what depths you will sink!” she told them. And before we had a feast to celebrate the naming of the ship, Daisy insisted they sing her favourite temperance song:

    Â 
    Away, away with rum by gum, 
    With rum by gum with rum by gum!
    Away, away with rum, by gum!
    That’s the song of the Salvation Army!
    Â 
    The little ones chirped the song while Daisy danced, twirled, and smacked her tambourine so hard all the bells fell off, and she burst into tears.
    Marie helped Daisy into her bunk. “Here’s a nice cup of tea. Now, you have a good lie down.” And she told the little ones, “It’s all right, Daisy just got too excited.”
    We were grateful now for the haystacks Aunt Effie had insisted we sledge into the barn, and for the crops we’d stored: turnips, swedes, spuds, carrots, parsnips, pumpkins, poorman’s oranges, lemons, apples, pears, dried figs and grapes, quinces, almonds, walnuts, chestnuts, dried mushrooms, onions, sides of bacon and ham, barrels of salt beef and pork, and smoked mutton carcasses. We had tier upon tier of barrels of pigeons, pheasants, quail, ducks, black swans, wild geese, pukekos, wekas, and eels – all preserved in their own fat. We had sacks and crates and bins of wheat, maize, barley, oats, lentils, artichokes, dried beans, and split peas. We had lockers filled with jars of marmalade, gooseberry, and strawberry jam. There were more lockers filled with peaches, nectarines, and pears preserved in Agee jars. And whenever we wanted honey, we just went to the beehive in what used to be the wall of thebarn but was now the hull of Aunt Effie’s Ark. We had a continent of tucker, and we were going to need it!

    We had several hundred great barrels of cider. There were also Aunt Effie’s hogsheads of wine, rum, whisky, and brandy, as