The Far Country (20 page)

Jennifer went out presently into the yard in the fresh morning, and found Tim Archer lifting a couple of dogs into the back of the old Chevrolet utility. They were nondescript dogs, one a sort of mongrel collie and the other a blue roan, a kind of dog that Jennifer had never seen before. She asked Tim what it was, and he said it was a “heeler”, but when she pressed him to say if that was a breed or not, he could not tell her. It was a heeler because it went for the heels of the cattle and not their heads, apparently.

“Do you use them for the sheep as well?” she asked.

“My word,” he said. “I’m going down to get the mob out of the river paddock ’n put them down the road. Want to come along?”

She got into the utility with him, and they started off across-country in it, driving over the short pastures. They went about a mile, passing through three gates, and drove round behind the sheep; here Tim stopped the utility and put the dogs out. He shouted a few orders to the dogs and got one out on one flank and one the other and got the sheep moving, seven or eight hundred of them, in the direction of the gate. They got back into the utility and drove about the paddock for a time rounding up the stragglers with the dogs; then when the mob was compact in one bunch they drove along behind them in the centre, one dog at each side. They went very slowly, at the walking pace of a sheep.

Jennifer stretched in the warm sun. “I suppose this is the modern way of herding sheep,” she said. “By motor-car.”

“Too right,” he said. “It’s a sight quicker and easier that messing about with a horse. The boss, he likes a horse and he’d ride if he was on this job. But to my way of thinking, by the time you’ve caught the horse and saddled up, you could have done the job in a utility.”

He turned to her. “Don’t they use utilities in the paddocks in England?”

She was nonplussed. “I don’t think so,” she said. “They don’t have utilities at all. Most of the farms in England are quite small, much smaller than these. It’s all different here.”

“I know,” he said. “The properties are bigger here, but you’ve got better land. Or else, perhaps you improve it more than we do. How do you like it here, after England?”

“I like it so far,” she said. “It’s a very, very pretty bit of country, this.”

He stared at her in surprise. “Prettier than England?”

“It’s different,” she said. “You’d have to go a long way to find such unspoilt country in England. England might have been like this once.”

He digested this in silence for a time. Then he said, “Angie doesn’t like it here. She wants to go to England.”

“I know. She was telling me last night.”

“Do you think she’ll like it there?”

“She’ll like it all right,” said Jennifer. “She’s determined to. She’s expecting an awful lot, and she’ll have some disappointments, I should think. But—yes, she’ll like it.”

They drove on for a time in silence while he digested this unpalatable opinion. The sheep baa-ed and scuffled in front of them, the dogs whimpering on either side. “What I can’t make out,” he said at last, “is why anybody leaves England, if it’s such a bonza place as that. Is it because they don’t get enough to eat?”

“I don’t think it’s that,” said Jennifer. “England can be difficult at times.” She paused. “I think Angie may find that, when the glamour wears off. I shouldn’t think she’d want to spend her life in England, after living here.”

“You think she’ll come back here?” he asked quickly.

She laughed. “I don’t know. She might marry somebody in England and settle down there.”

“Too right,” he said quietly. “She might do that.”

It seemed to be a difficult conversation, and Jennifer changed it, and asked him what sort of sheep they were. He told her that they were Corriedales, and described to her the points that made them so. From that they passed to discussing the Hereford cattle in an adjacent paddock, and the difference between those and Shorthorns.

“I wish I knew more about all this,” she said presently. “About the land, and how to make it grow more grass. That’s important, isn’t it?”

He said, “Well, stands to reason if you grow more grass you can feed more beasts. There’s a lot to be done in this part of the country to improve the pastures.”

“Aren’t people doing all they can?”

“Aw, look,” he protested, “it costs money, you know. Mr. Dorman, he’s ploughing up eighty acres of the river paddocks we’ve just come from this autumn, and sowing it down to clovers and rye-grass. He’ll have to spend three hundred pounds on seed alone, let alone the labour and the tractor and that, and then the paddock will be out of grazing for six months. I’d like to see him doing a lot more than that, but it’s a big thing to close a paddock for six months, with wool the price it is.”

“I see. You’d get more meat and wool later on, but not this year. You’d get less.”

“That’s right. And next year the prices might not be so good. The time to close the paddocks for reseeding is when prices are low, and then you generally can’t afford to do it.”

“It’s terribly important to turn out more meat,” said Jennifer. “I should have thought people would have taken a chance.”

“It’s just a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence,” he said.

“It’s a good thing to do as well,” she retorted. “That ought to count for something.”

He stared at her. “How do you mean?”

“The food’s so badly needed,” she said. “It’s important to turn out as much as possible, isn’t it?”

“Well, I dunno.” All his life Tim Archer had lived in communities that had a surfeit of food; it was a condition of his employment on a sheep station in Victoria that he should be entitled to buy as much mutton as he wanted at threepence a pound, and this for a family meant half a sheep a week. It was hard for him to realise what this English girl was getting at. “We don’t need any more food here,” he said. “You mean, because of people at home?”

She nodded. “It’ld make a difference at home if people could live like you live here. It isn’t till one comes away that one realises how bad things have got in England. If anybody here wants to do something for England they can just set to and grow a bit more food.”

“I wish you’d tell Angie that,” he said with a faint smile. He could not keep from talking about Angie to this girl; every topic seemed to work round to her in the end. “She’s wanting to do something for England by going home to take a job in a London hospital.”

“She wants to see England,” Jennifer said. “That’s what she wants to go for. She’d do a better job for England by staying here at home, on Leonora, and driving the tractor to help make more food.”

“Well, you just tell her that.” He was grinning now.

“I don’t mind, but it won’t cut any ice. She wants to see England. But it’s true, all the same. If there was a bit more food we mightn’t want so many hospitals.”

Jennifer spent the morning in housework with Jane; Angela did a little bit about the house and then borrowed her mother’s Morris and disappeared for the day to look up old school friends in the district, and to bring back a few vegetables and stores from Banbury. Jennifer refused an invitation to go with her, preferring on this first day to stay around the homestead and help Jane to get the lunch. It was hot in the kitchen and they let the wood stove out at about ten o’clock, and served a cold saddle of lamb for dinner with a great dish of potatoes cooked upon a Primus, and a cold jam tart.

They sat out, after washing-up, in deck-chairs on the veranda; Jack and the two men were away in one of the paddocks cutting up a dead tree for firewood. There was a little breeze from off the mountain, cool and refreshing; they sat drowsing and gossiping, looking out over the wide valley in the blazing sunshine.

Presently Jane said, “Tell me about Aunt Ethel. What did she die of? I didn’t gather that from your letters.”

It was an awkward question, and one that Jennifer was not prepared to answer directly. Ealing and the suburban house in the dark November rain seemed very far away. “She was an old dear,” she said at last, “but in some ways she was rather stupid. She ran out of money, and she wouldn’t tell anybody about it. You see, her pension came to an end.”

She explained the matter of the pension to Jane. “She had another old lady living with her,” Jennifer explained, “a Mrs. Harding, widow of an Army officer.”

“Is that the one she called Aggie, who died?”

“That’s right,” said Jennifer. “Aggie died last May, and that probably made things difficult because, of course, they shared expenses. My mother wrote and asked her, but she said that she’d be quite all right. Well, she wasn’t all right at all. It was about that time her pension came to an end, but she never told anybody about that. She hadn’t got anything to live on then, so she began selling things. Furniture that she hadn’t any use for—and little bits of jewellery.”

“My dear …”

“We didn’t know a thing about it,” the girl said. “I went and saw her one Sunday only a month before she died, and she gave me a marvellous lunch—roast duck with all the trimmings, and a mince pie made out of some of the dried fruit parcels that you sent her….” It was incredible, sitting here on the veranda in the warm breeze, that those cartons had come from here. “She had buttered scones for tea, and a great big cake. She never let on for a moment that there was anything wrong. And all the time she was—well, starving. That’s what it amounted to. When she got ill, it came out that she hadn’t eaten anything for days, except a few of your dried fruits.”

“My dear, I am so very, very sorry.”

“I know,” the girl said. “She was very proud, and she wouldn’t tell a soul. She needn’t have let things get to such a pitch. If she didn’t want to tell us, she could have got help from the Town Hall. There’s an official called the relieving officer who’s there to deal with cases like that, and help with money. She could have gone to him. But she wouldn’t do that.”

“She didn’t want to take charity, I suppose.”

The girl said, “I think that was it. She’d have thought that was an awful thing to do.”

“I can’t imagine Aunt Ethel ever taking charity. She—she was different.”

“I don’t think it a very good thing to be different in England,” Jennifer said. “It’s better if you go along like everybody else.”

They talked about the details of what had happened in Ealing for a time. Presently Jane asked, “Tell me, Jenny—is this sort of thing common now? Do old people, people of Aunt Ethel’s sort—do many of them die in poverty?”

The girl said cautiously, “I think a good many of them have a pretty bad time. It’s difficult to tell, because one doesn’t hear a lot about them. Old ladies who die quietly and make no fuss don’t get into the newspapers. Granny didn’t have to die like that. She was too proud to let anyone know that she was hard up. She could have died like that anywhere—it wasn’t anything to do with England. It could have happened in Australia.”

“It could, but it doesn’t,” said Jane.

“Why not?”

“I think this country’s too prosperous for that to happen. An old lady who was as old-fashioned and as proud as that would almost certainly have some relation, some son or grandson or nephew, who was making a whole heap of money, to whom the little assistance that she’d need would be a flea-bite. It
could
happen here, as you say, but I can’t imagine it doing so.”

“She had some odd ideas,” Jennifer said presently. “It all happened within twenty-four hours of her death, so I suppose she would be a bit funny.”

“What sort of ideas?”

The girl said, “She was thinking of the time when she was young, and how easy and how prosperous everything was then, in England. She kept talking about that, saying what a much better time she’d had when she was a girl than I was having. I let her talk, of course; one couldn’t argue.” She sat staring out across the sunlit valley to the blue hills. “And then your letter came with the five hundred pounds, and you said that you were sending it because the wool cheque had been twenty-two thousand. I suppose you said that to make it easy for her to accept.”

Jane said, “I thought it was best to tell her. She’d known that we were hard up for so many years.”

“I thought that was it. I think she thought a lot about your wool cheque, although she didn’t say. She was lying there so still…. I think she got to feeling that if you had twenty-two thousand a year, you’d be living in the way that she lived in when she was young—a great big house with three servants and a butler, and grooms, and hunters, and being presented at Court—all that sort of thing. I think she thought that if I came out here to see you, I’d be getting back into the world she knew when she was young….”

“Poor old dear,” Jane said softly. “You mean, she was a bit confused.”

“I think she was,” said Jennifer. “I don’t think she could realise all that sort of thing has gone for ever.”

“I wonder if it has!” said Jane.

Jennifer turned and stared at her. “People don’t live like that out here, do they?”

There was a short silence. “No …” Jane said slowly. “Only a very, very few—big station owners in the Western District. They
have big homes, and play a lot of polo, and they hunt, and give dances, and get presented to the Governor-General. They
do
live rather in the way Aunt Ethel lived when she was young, but there aren’t very many of them. Ninety-five per cent of graziers are people like ourselves, people who’ve always been hard up until the last few years. Since the beginning of the war the price we get for meat and wool has gone up steadily, and now we’ve got so much money that we don’t know what to do with it. So far we’ve all been paying off our debts and mortgages. What happens next is anybody’s guess.”

Jennifer asked, “But will these high prices go on?”

“I don’t know,” said Jane. “We’d still be well off if they fell to half what they are now.”

“They’re bound to fall, aren’t they?”

“Wool’s bound to fall,” she said. “Wool will go down when the rearmament stops, but meat has been going up steadily for years. The world seems to want more and more food, and each year more and more gets eaten in Australia as our population rises, and so there’s less each year to export. It’s the same in the Argentine, and everywhere. That seems to mean higher and higher prices for meat….”