Highways to a War (5 page)

I stared, not knowing whether to believe him or not. He winked, and I knew I’d been fooled. I would come to recognize this wink, which I’d find all the Langford brothers employed: a country wink, to be used on townies like me. Then he smiled; but his smile was without mockery or malice. No, he said, just bullshitting. This is where they dry the hops. He spoke softly, as though any loudness here would call down trouble. We’re not really supposed to come up here, he said. But I thought you’d like to see it.

He wore old khaki overalls, and his yellow hair was shaggy and long for the holidays; yet he somehow appeared cleaner than other people. His eyes were wide-set, and his long face was fair-skinned: seen from certain angles it had an almost feminine prettiness. But this impression would vanish when you looked at him again, to be replaced by ordinary, even hard good looks, and his full lower lip projected in a way that warned you to be careful. I found his face chimerical, its different aspects blending and separating and blending again. It was a little the same with his character. Unlike most ten-year-old boys, Mike Langford was always kindly, I’d find, with a sameness that was not monotonous; and his voice was always quiet and even. We’d confide, as we got to know each other; and yet I’d always feel that he kept things back; that he could never quite be known. Secrecy infected that whole household; it permeated the farm like the hop smell; it was in Mike’s bloodstream.

I stared about the large, dim loft with its small windows. The ceiling was of steeply sloping planks and beams, and the floor’s woven horsehair sacking was stretched across slats, on which a few pale brown pods lay scattered. Baskets and antique-looking wooden rakes stood about; a small door led into another bare room, where a large iron press stood. It was very dry and quiet here, and uncomfortably warm. It seemed like a strange church. Streaks and shafts of sun leaked through the windows, and lay like syrup on the sacking.

And a queer feeling came over me. The whole world outside was shut out, and the invisible afternoon was going on without us. We were cut off from the farm, and from the whole softly murmuring country; we even seemed to be cut off from today altogether, and to be nowhere. I began to have a sense of being stifled, as though we were sealed in a box, and of trespassing on something invisible; something very old and sad, hanging like the smell of last year’s hops in the big, warm quiet.

As though reading my thoughts, Mike said: ‘We’d better go down now, Ray.

When we came out into the simple glare and warmth of the farmyard, where a big old ash tree gave shade, and hens pecked and drawled in the gray dust, it was as though we’d escaped from something; and we smiled at each other to signal. that we knew it. But nothing was said.

 

 

The forbidden zones at Clare came to seem natural.

Like many nineteenth-century farmhouses in Tasmania, it contained two distinct regions: two spirits. What was forbidden mostly lay in the first region. This was the territory of the floor-oil-smelling entrance hall, of the bedrooms, and of the sitting room. That dim, formal chamber, with its drawn, floor-length red curtains and nineteenth-century cedar furniture, was like an empty stage set, waiting for some momentous action to begin. No action ever did; and Mike and I were not encouraged to go in there.

This was still a time of chamber pots under beds; of marble-topped washstands in bedrooms, on which stood china jugs and basins, decorated with the last century’s sentimental roses. There was electric light at Clare, but not in all the rooms: the sleepout at the end of the front verandah, which Mike and I shared, was lit by candles. There was no sewerage: a gray weatherboard lavatory Mike called
the dunny
stood in a small glade of plum trees at the side of the house. The rambling roses climbing over its roof could not disguise the dunny’s profoundly serious stench—which came, in my mind, not just from the shit of the present but from somewhere in the dark old century that had gone.

The second region of the house was at the back, and was utterly opposite to the first. This was the true farmhouse, where life was lived: a territory full of good cheer, based on the kitchen and on the long back verandah with its posts of rough, undressed cyprus and its jumble of old hats, milk cans, dogs and mewing kittens. The big, hall-shaped kitchen, dominated by a long pine table at which nearly all meals took place, had a black, wood-burning stove at the far end that never went out. This was the house’s center of power and warmth, controlled by Mike’s mother, Ingrid Langford. Mike’s father and his three brothers walked through constantly, with a bang of the screen door that led onto the verandah.

Marcus was the eldest brother; then came Ken, then Cliff. They were all in their twenties: men, in my eyes. Marcus was usually silent: a stocky man with flat black hair and a private smile. Ken and Cliff were fair-haired, friendly, and talked a lot. At tea with them all in the kitchen on my first night there, I learned about another of the house’s prohibited zones.

John Langford, at the head of the table, cleared his throat.

I don’t know whether Michael’s told you this, Raymond—but you’re not to go near the pickers’ huts, he said. Some of those people are pretty rough. They’re here to work, not to be made friends with.

He had a soft, precise voice that made everything he said sound official, and he was shorter than his three grown sons; but he appeared big because of his powerful shoulders and upright posture. The sleeves of his clean khaki shirt were rolled above the elbows, and his tanned forearms, planted on the table, were heavily muscled from hard work. But the head was scholarly: large, bald and tanned, with a few strands of darkish hair, oiled and slicked back, a narrow nose and a very thin mouth. He wore sinister rimless spectacles, and had the potential to become frightening.

Across the table, Ken looked at me and winked, swallowing his glass of hop beer. Big and lean, with his father’s long, narrow nose and with thick, lank hair the color of rancid butter, he sat very straight, and his eyes had an amused gleam. He’d just come back from the war in New Guinea, which he’d volunteered for, while his brothers had stayed on the farm. He worked about the place now in the green Army trousers he’d worn for jungle fighting, and his broad-brimmed AIF Digger hat with the badge removed—getting some wear out of them, he said. He’d been decorated for bravery on the Kokoda Trail, and Mike admired him uncritically; if there was anyone on whom he modeled himself, it was Ken.

Better do as Dad says, young Ray, Ken told me. And another thing. When you go out in the bush, there’s a funny-looking crit ter you might find wandering about. Whatever you do, keep away from it, because it’s dangerous, and no good to anyone. It’s called a Politician.

Cliff, smaller and curly-haired, seated next to Ken, gave a snort of laughter. That’s right, son, he said. Steer clear of it. It’ll tell you a whole lot of lies.

I was puzzled; I’d never heard of a Politician. But then Ken gave me the wink.

Don’t tease the boy, Cliff. He’ll never go out in the bush, if he listens to you.

Ingrid Langford’s voice was deep and slow; she spoke seldom, but when she did, all the men listened. Her lips were pursed now, as she surveyed her sons, and she wasn’t smiling; but then I saw a gleam in her eyes that I guessed to be amusement.

She was a tall, big-boned woman whose straight blond hair was faded, and tinged with gray. Her firm jaw slanted sideways, and her large, deep-set eyes seemed often to be staring at something in the distance. Before her marriage to John Langford, she’d been an Olsen, from Moogara: one of a clan of Norwegian-descended timber-getters famous throughout the island. Many of them were champion axemen: her father and then her brothers had won Australian wood-chopping titles at the Sydney Show for many years running. Ingrid Langford herself would split wood for the kitchen stove like a man, wielding the axe at the wood-heap by the barn with cold precision. She was, up at six each morning to milk a small herd of cows that seemed to be her responsibility, and she kept a large number of fowls that ran free about the yard: the usual mixture of black Orpingtons, white Leg-horns and bantams. She gave them names, and when I’ve remembered her over the years I’ve usually seen her standing in the yard in one of her faded, short-sleeved print dresses, serious and monumental as a Viking matron, scattering wheat to her hens from a battered tin saucepan. While Mike and I watched, she would frown judiciously, distributing the wheat with long sweeps of her serious white arms, the feathered crowd jostling hysterically about her feet.

Come along, ladies. Don’t push. You’ll all get your turn.

Mike was far-eyed Mrs. Langford’s chick: her youngest, the baby of the family, for whom she had a special fondness. She seldom demonstrated feeling of any kind; but once, as we watched her feed the hens, she put her hand briefly on Mike’s head, not looking at him, before reaching into the pot again; and I saw in his quick upward glance a complete and serene admiration.

 

 

When we were fifteen, we were always hanging about the hop fields. Whenever we were free from our chores on the farm, Mike’s feet would lead us in that direction. For a time, I wondered why.

We weren’t allowed to do any picking: that was the job of the skilled tribe of strangers with whom we were forbidden to fraternize. But in the hop fields, we could observe them at work without opposition from Mr. Langford. They seemed to be of growing interest to Mike, in that year.

The hop fields were like nowhere else. Leaving the summer blaze outside, Mike and I wandered through infinite, ordered glades of deep cool, as though under water. It was another climate here, and a differently colored world, where the pungent, beer-like smell I’d first met in the kiln was all around us. No green in the olive and tawny-colored countryside around New Norfolk was like that of the hops, which was the green of another hemisphere, brought here and planted by Langfords of long ago. Moving down the aisles of rustic poles, under the strict, strange wires, Mike and I were walled in by green and roofed over by green: the very light was green, the glades like the emerald-glowing church of an unknown sect.

Far off, at the end of one of the rows, in the hard, unpitying sun of day, old John Langford presided like a king, attended by Ken. Cliff drove a four-wheeled cart pulled by two draft horses called Duke and Prince, taking away load after load up to the kiln; and in among the glades, the quiet brother Marcus moved, in his gray felt hat and dark blue shirt.

Marcus, like his father, never quite looked like a farmer to me, as Ken and Cliff did. There was something almost monk-like about him: a sort of saturnine refinement and inwardness. He supervised the pickers like a high official, carrying a long, medieval-looking pole with a sickle on the end. This was for pulling down the hopbines from the wires; and it was Marcus who supervised the weighing of the hops from the pickers’ bins on a set of scales, recording the names and bin numbers. He was followed by two acolytes: young hired men in overalls and straw hats, who loaded the bags onto the scales. When the hops were weighed, dirty picking was sometimes found out: stones and other rubbish would appear, with which dishonest pickers weighted their sacks. None of this escaped Marcus, who rummaged sternly in the piles. The pickers would go quiet then, giving him quick glances; sometimes one of them would argue, but mostly they were good-humored. There was no use their arguing with Marcus; a dark glance or a frown would still them.

The pickers came every summer when the hops were ripe: families of itinerant workers who moved about the island like gypsies. They arrived in crazy, battered cars on whose roofs swayed bursting suitcases and kitchen utensils, and they took up residence in a row of weatherboard huts on the south side of the property, on a dry, grassy slope near the dam. The huts were little more than sheds, with no glass in the windows; but the pickers seemed satisfied with them. They had no fixed homes, Mike told me; they trapped rabbits, and picked different crops in season, doing whatever they could find. Their children hardly ever went to school, and the authorities seldom caught up with them, since the pickers were always moving on.

Wish I could go with them, Mike would say.

He was fascinated by the pickers, and would ignore his father’s prohibition: we’d often walk by their huts in the evening, enjoying the thrill of the forbidden. Kerosene lanterns would glow from the doorways and windows; men would stand outside smoking; women would gossip in groups; wild children would play and shout. They all looked at first glance like other people, but little touches gave them away: a strange dark blue cap like a seaman’s; a scarf knotted at the throat in a way we’d never seen before; women in strange hats of felt and straw, like those in old pictures; small girls in their mothers’ dresses, with ragged hems trailing the ground.

Lately, Mike had kept leading us past a particular hut, where I always noticed a red-haired girl of about our own age, standing with a group of others. She wore a white linen sun hat and a green cotton dress that was too big for her—probably an older sister‘s—but nothing could disguise her prettiness, which was of the white-skinned, freckled kind. She had prominent cheekbones, and her blue eyes were wide-set and somewhat slanting: an unusual feature which I decided was explained by her being a picker. At fifteen, I still thought of the pickers as an alien tribe.

Once, as we passed, the girl smiled at us, showing prominent front teeth. She seemed to be looking at Mike, and when I glanced sideways at him, I found that his face had gone pink: he always flushed easily. He said nothing, and neither did I; we walked on. Behind us rose the laughter of the group of girls, mingling with the piping of plover in the dusk.

Now the voices of the pickers were all around us, coming from among the hop leaves: fathers, mothers, children, all working. They tore the rustling pods off in handfuls, picking at great speed, their brown arms covered in scratches from the bines. Somewhere, in nests beside the poles, babies cried; but the sound was diminished (as all sounds were in these green aisles), and seemed to go ignored, like the wails of changelings. And as Mike and I patrolled the aisles, we always seemed to pass a particular family group which included the red-haired girl.