Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) by Carrie Tiffany Page A
Authors: Carrie Tiffany
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Youngâs Sanitary Belt and write to Mary.
I ask Mary for advice about Folly, who often gets the better of me. She is hell to catch and has twice broken into the hay shed and eaten herself sick. Mary has enough on her plate with a new husband and a baby on the way and having to support her parents as the depression has hit Gippsland hard, but she always writes back.
After lunch I collect Folly from the roadside and tie her under the peppercorn tree for an Insectibane bucket wash to keep the flies away. The chemicals must sting her udder because she skips around and steps on my toes. Robert is bucket washing the car at the same time and I think I catch him smiling at me as I curse Folly and hop about in pain.
Doris sends her husband, Ern McKettering, and he helps Robert with the fencing. One day Ern brings Robert a dog â an eager collie cross with a tufty coat. Ern says the dog is called Jumbo but Robert calls him Will. The dog trails Robert through the paddocks, nose down and shoulders sloping.
I take tea out into the paddocks where Ern helps Robert to dig a deep, long hole to take an old strainer post. The timber, mainly greybox, is still metal hard after many years in the ground. The first layer of soil is hot and smooth. Tiny grains pour over each other. I stand back and watch as Robert uses the back of his shovel to shore it up. He tells Ern of his time at the Research Station when he saw men with great skill on the shovel. They were trialling new fencing styles and a team of labourers worked with the students digging holes. He saw a man dig perfect holes, square or circular or even a simple triangle, so smooth and clean and deep they looked like an arrow had been shot into the ground. There was another man who had lost a hand in the war yet he dug with a smooth flicking action, the shovel handle pushed high on his stump. Robert said that these men knew the earth intimately. They knew the exact angle at which to use the blade and the depth and force required.
Later Robert and Ern remove an old dogleg fence â a fence like a living cross-stitch of timber without a single nail or strand of wire. Ern brings Doris over for a look before they tear it down because sheâs in the local historical society. Doris shakes her head at her husband. She doubts anyone would be interested in a dirty old fence. She spends the afternoon in the kitchen and I find her easy company. She tells me about her three boys who are all up in Queensland working on the sugar cane. She laughs at my stories about Sister Crock and is grateful for advice on the double reinforcing of side seams.
After our evening meal I sit with Robert at the kitchen table. He works on his samples, opening wheat heads on the chopping board to search for bunt and smut. I watch him stroke out the arms of a young plant still pale in its early growing while I hem the curtains for the caravan.
Robert has built the caravan from old fencing timber. It is a timber box on an old plough axle to be hooked behind the tractor. It will mean he can go further and work longer without having to come back to the house each night. There is a small window at the front and a door at the back. Inside, a narrow bed and a fold-down table. I make him a mattress for his new bed, stuffing kapok into the calico and finishing it in neat blanket-stitch. I sew a loop onto a white huckabuck guest towel that he hangs on a nail behind the door.
I sit a while in the caravan each day while Robert is out on the farm. It is cool inside and I must check the length of the curtains, but as soon as I am sitting on the narrow bed I fall into an engrossing daydream. I imagine the caravan is my home â and I imagine how I would live in it. My mind carries each of my essential possessions into the tiny space and thinks of ways to arrange them â my books on a shelf above the door, a drawer for clothes under the bed, a corner for my sewing things. The daydream gives me such a sense of
I ask Mary for advice about Folly, who often gets the better of me. She is hell to catch and has twice broken into the hay shed and eaten herself sick. Mary has enough on her plate with a new husband and a baby on the way and having to support her parents as the depression has hit Gippsland hard, but she always writes back.
After lunch I collect Folly from the roadside and tie her under the peppercorn tree for an Insectibane bucket wash to keep the flies away. The chemicals must sting her udder because she skips around and steps on my toes. Robert is bucket washing the car at the same time and I think I catch him smiling at me as I curse Folly and hop about in pain.
Doris sends her husband, Ern McKettering, and he helps Robert with the fencing. One day Ern brings Robert a dog â an eager collie cross with a tufty coat. Ern says the dog is called Jumbo but Robert calls him Will. The dog trails Robert through the paddocks, nose down and shoulders sloping.
I take tea out into the paddocks where Ern helps Robert to dig a deep, long hole to take an old strainer post. The timber, mainly greybox, is still metal hard after many years in the ground. The first layer of soil is hot and smooth. Tiny grains pour over each other. I stand back and watch as Robert uses the back of his shovel to shore it up. He tells Ern of his time at the Research Station when he saw men with great skill on the shovel. They were trialling new fencing styles and a team of labourers worked with the students digging holes. He saw a man dig perfect holes, square or circular or even a simple triangle, so smooth and clean and deep they looked like an arrow had been shot into the ground. There was another man who had lost a hand in the war yet he dug with a smooth flicking action, the shovel handle pushed high on his stump. Robert said that these men knew the earth intimately. They knew the exact angle at which to use the blade and the depth and force required.
Later Robert and Ern remove an old dogleg fence â a fence like a living cross-stitch of timber without a single nail or strand of wire. Ern brings Doris over for a look before they tear it down because sheâs in the local historical society. Doris shakes her head at her husband. She doubts anyone would be interested in a dirty old fence. She spends the afternoon in the kitchen and I find her easy company. She tells me about her three boys who are all up in Queensland working on the sugar cane. She laughs at my stories about Sister Crock and is grateful for advice on the double reinforcing of side seams.
After our evening meal I sit with Robert at the kitchen table. He works on his samples, opening wheat heads on the chopping board to search for bunt and smut. I watch him stroke out the arms of a young plant still pale in its early growing while I hem the curtains for the caravan.
Robert has built the caravan from old fencing timber. It is a timber box on an old plough axle to be hooked behind the tractor. It will mean he can go further and work longer without having to come back to the house each night. There is a small window at the front and a door at the back. Inside, a narrow bed and a fold-down table. I make him a mattress for his new bed, stuffing kapok into the calico and finishing it in neat blanket-stitch. I sew a loop onto a white huckabuck guest towel that he hangs on a nail behind the door.
I sit a while in the caravan each day while Robert is out on the farm. It is cool inside and I must check the length of the curtains, but as soon as I am sitting on the narrow bed I fall into an engrossing daydream. I imagine the caravan is my home â and I imagine how I would live in it. My mind carries each of my essential possessions into the tiny space and thinks of ways to arrange them â my books on a shelf above the door, a drawer for clothes under the bed, a corner for my sewing things. The daydream gives me such a sense of
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