Lantana Lane (16 page)

Unfortunately all this common sense failed to obliterate from Biddy's mind the picture of a small creature newly ready for life, and trusting in it; she flung herself face downward on the unmade bed, and when she heard the shot she began to cry as if her heart would break.

But a farmer's wife may not for long indulge in moods and vapours. There is too much to be done. By now they were harvesting the Sevilles and the grapefruit, and while Tim picked, Biddy made cases. She never managed to drive a nail with one tap and one bang, but she could nearly always do it with one tap and two bangs. She also became very expert at packing, and liked to show Tim how, when she ran her hand over the top layer of exactly graded golden globes, not one of them budged.

But perhaps the less said about the citrus the better. Not many people want Seville oranges, but very many are so addicted to juicy, bitter-sweet grapefruit that they will pay quite astonishing sums for them in the shops, and we are therefore unable to explain why Tim, instead of receiving a cheque for this fruit, should have received a bill for the expenses incurred in dumping it. He was naturally disappointed, but he was far too busy to brood over mysteries.

He had been grabbing an hour or two here and there to get ready for his new pines, and the patch was rotary-hoed, and ploughed, and fertilised, and prepared for contour planting. Though Biddy grew tired rather quickly now, she insisted on laying out some of the butts for him when he began to put them in. They were in good spirits, for the weather was really co-operating; it was warm and sunny, rain had been coming along at nicely spaced intervals, and the beans were leaping ahead.

When the planting was finished, and they stood on their verandah looking out over the farm, they felt quite proud of it. The bearing pines were as clean as a whistle, and the elegantly sinuous curves of the newly-planted ones were a joy to behold. The magnificent appearance of the new beans almost compensated for the fact that Joe Hardy had been right, and the old ones must be written off as a dead loss. Tim had found time one Sunday to mow down the long grass round the house, and straighten some of the fence-posts, so altogether the place was losing its dilapidated air, and beginning to look like a well-tended, self-respecting little farm.

They were not surprised, or unduly alarmed, when the bean-fly got to work. They were prepared for it, and Tim got to work too, and kept them down with spraying. Of course the spray cost money, and the job took time, and meanwhile the weeds were again beginning to make a green film over the earth between the pinapple rows. At last the flies were routed, the bean plants grew ever sturdier and bushier, and their rich green, much darker now, was liberally besprinkled with white flowers. Soon the flowers were replaced by clusters of tiny beans, and still the weather was perfect, so they grew apace, and Tim's hopes kept up with them. But he was cautious, too; he halved his order for bean bags—because, after all, he could always get more if he found he needed them. Biddy sat in the shed doing the branding with Tim's stencil, and when that was finished they were all ready for the crop.

Then one day the crop was all ready for them, and they began picking.

“There's no need for you to help,” Tim protested. “It'll make your back tired.”

“Look,” said Biddy mutinously, “I held strings to get those rows straight, and I helped to hoe them, and I went along them putting the fertiliser in, and I went along them again dibbling the holes, and again planting the seed, and again covering it over, and again hilling up the plants, and again keeping the weeds down—and now I'm damn well going along them to pick some beans if it kills me.”

So there they both were at daybreak one momentous morning, stooping over the rows, and moving slowly from plant to plant with their kerosene tins. You never saw such beans. They were fat, and crisp, and long and perfectly straight. Biddy found one which she could lay across the top of her tin, and walked half-way down a row to show it to Tim, and there were many only a little shorter. But no one who has picked beans will be surprised to learn that by half-past eight she said apologetically that she thought she would have to stop for a while. Tim replied that it was time they got some breakfast, anyhow, so they straightened their backs with difficulty, and went up to the house. After breakfast Tim returned to the beans, and Biddy joined him again in the afternoon. They stopped at sundown, and when they had finished their evening meal, and washed up, they took the lantern down to the shed, bagged the beans, and got to bed by ten o'clock. Tim said he thought they should be able to afford to get the electric light connected to the shed in . . . But he was asleep before he could complete the sentence, and Biddy had only time to wonder drowsily whether he meant in a few months, or a few years before she was asleep too. In the morning they put the flag out for Doug Egan to stop, and saw their bags safely loaded on to his truck, and began to talk about how much they would fetch.

But it had been warm down south too, and the bean market was considerably depressed; so were Tim and Biddy, when their cheque came back. Still, it was something—if not very much when you thought of the time, labour and money which had gone to produce it. The second picking was a little bigger than the first, and the cheque for it was about the same. Then Biddy was not very well for a week or so, and Tim said she was to take it easy, and not do any more picking. But he had to have some help if all the beans were to be got off before they became post-mature, so he hired a youth from Tooloola to give him a hand. When the cheque for this picking came back, and he deducted the youth's wages, and the other costs, he perceived that his profit was very small indeed. The crop was now past its peak, so he picked the next lot alone, and this time, when he came to do his reckoning, it was clear that he was not even squaring expenses. Others in the neighbourhood who had been making similar calculations arrived at a similar conclusion. Both Joe and Alf assured Tim that if he and Biddy liked beans, the best thing they could do now was to eat them, because it wouldn't pay them to send any more to market.

So Tim and Biddy ate beans. Jack Hawkins had tried half an acre, too, so he and his family also ate beans. But even with the best appetite in the world the Hawkins and the Achesons could not eat all the beans those lusty plants were still producing, so everyone in the Lane ate beans, and still there were more going hard and knobby on the stalks. Biddy said rather rebelliously that women in her condition were entitled to food-fads, and what she really wanted was pickled onions; but she took some more beans, and conceded that they were probably better for It. The last figures in Tim's banks statement were now ominously printed in red, but strangely enough he was more cheerful than he had been for months. It oftens happens this way with suckers. The more you bash them down, the more they bounce, and Tim was already explaining to Biddy why it was quite inevitable that they should have better luck next year.

Biddy need not have worried, of course, about going to the hospital in the ute, because when the time came she could have had her pick of any vehicle in the Lane. It was a very wet night, as it happened, but she went in the Arnold's car quite comfortably, and despite all her anxieties, exertions and afflictions, little Jeremy was as fine an infant as you could see anywhere. For farming is a healthy life; she had spent much time out of doors, drunk gallons of Lassie's creamy milk, and eaten pounds and pounds of beans.

D
ICTIONARIES
inform us that ullage is that amount by which a receptacle is short of being full. Some of them stand pat on casks and bottles; they quite ignore such things as crates, cases and bags—thus implying, if we understand them rightly, that it is, though non-existent, always liquid. Others apply the word, rather confusingly, to what is left in the bottoms of wine glasses; but since this would appear to be piling ullage upon ullage, we, for our part, shall stick to dregs.

The lexicographers also allow us a verb
to ullage
—a very versatile verb, for it may mean to calculate the amount of nothing in a vessel, or to replace the nothing with something, or to draw a little of the something off; but by this time its versatility has greatly impaired its usefulness, and we are left with no clear picture of an ullager in action. The verb we use in the Lane is entirely different, and much better. Everyone who sends any sort of produce to market knows that somewhere between its harvesting and its destination it may be, and occasionally is, ullaged. Consequently our verb has just one grimly simple meaning—namely, to pillage what used to be where there is now nothing but ullage. And an ullager is a. . . well, we have a number of words to describe ullagers, but not one of them is printable.

The tale we have to tell concerns the ullaging of some Bopple-nuts. It must be understood that although other kinds of nuts have long been seriously grown, seriously investigated by scientific persons, and so seriously regarded by importers, exporters, wholesalers and retailers that the public needs to think very seriously indeed before buying two ounces in a cellophane bag, it has been quite otherwise with these things, which just grow wild. They have always lived in the scrub hereabouts, and of course it is known all over the world that what nature grows at your own back door is hardly worth a glance. Therefore, although Bopplenuts have been eagerly conveyed to other lands, and there grown, harvested, processed, packaged, sold and generally treated with the respect they deserve, they have had but little honour in their own country. This may seem strange until you remember that, owing to the Curse, small farmers have become so accustomed to crops which drive them grey with worry, that they feel a strong mistrust of something which, in its native habitat, just keeps on growing and producing for a lifetime without causing any trouble at all.

Everyone in the Lane has at least a couple of Bopplenut trees—usually in some spot too steep, or too dry, or too wet, or too low, or too high, or too exposed for anything else—but all bear nuts, and if their owners are not too busy with their real crops, they gather these up from the ground and send them to market; for, as they say indulgently, Bopples are not a bad little sideline.

Bruce Kennedy quite likes his because they supply him with endless statistical material. He can tell you in a moment the relative weights of a gallon in the husk, a gallon in the shell, and a gallon of kernels; he knows how many nuts go to a pound, how many pounds to a kerosene tin, how many kerosene tins to a bag, and how many bags to a ton. Once, when a cyclone almost stripped his trees of their immature crop, he went down on his knees, counted the little round, green corpses in a square yard, and came up with the intelligence that the total casualties numbered thirty-eight thousand five hundred and forty-six. Marge said coldly that she would have preferred not to know.

Like everyone else, Bruce has a packing-shed which gapes on to the Lane, and in this he has built a rack for his nuts, pending their despatch to market; it will hold (the figures, of course, are his) three hundredweight, two quarters and nineteen pounds. One day he looked sharply at this rack, and realised that his nuts were being ullaged.

It was a staggering discovery. Strangers, as we have pointed out, do not come into the Lane, and Lane dwellers do not ullage. Nevertheless, someone had been ullaging, and in order to explain this mystery we must turn, with regret, to the most juvenile inhabitants.

Tommy Hawkins is a month or two older than Jeremy Acheson, and a couple of months younger than Joy Arnold, and long before they were born their mothers used to say fondly that they would be such nice little playmates for each other. During the time when they were no more than bundles they were, indeed, thrown much together, but the moment they could toddle it became noticeable that they showed a marked tendency to toddle away from each other as fast as they could. Joy preferred the company of older children; Tommy had his own brothers and—better still—Herbie; and Jeremy was a child who favoured the contemplative life.

Children frequently mislead their parents, and arouse all kinds of hopes or fears by manifesting, at a tender age, a fierce absorption in some particular pursuit. One will indefatigably collect pebbles, so that his mother feels sure he will become a world-famous geologist; but no—he turns out to be a restaurant proprietor. Another will display so ardent an interest in bones that it seems certain he will eventually put up a brass plate; but in the end he takes to dry-cleaning. So we dare not prophesy too confidently that Joy will some day preside over what is known as a mixed business; we merely state the fact that by the time she was rising four, she had begun to develop a passion for selling things over a counter.

For this it is of course necessary to have customers. The older children were rarely willing to co-operate, so Joy—whose passion was riding her relentlessly at the time we have to deal with—found herself forced back upon her contemporaries, and actually managed to infect them, for a while, with her own enthusiasm. She perceived that Jeremy was ill-equipped by nature for a role which calls for loquacity and a great deal of spirited haggling, so Tommy was cast as the customer; Jeremy, as his little boy, had nothing to do but stand by and recite at intervals : “Daddy, c'n I have'n ice-cream?” His little sister, Jennifer, and Keithie Hawkins, were both, at three, too small to be entrusted with any lines, but they made the shop look busier.

Now Joy's father has half a dozen nut trees, and one day when Joy had borrowed the kitchen scales for her shop, and lost the weights, he provided her with a gallon tin, promising her three-pence every time she filled it with nuts; this, he told Heather optimistically, would keep her out of mischief. Joy was at first unimpressed by the offer, for she was unable to see that real money was much use to her without real shops, and although she did visit the store about once a fortnight, she could not contemplate such infrequent spending sprees with much excitement. On the other hand, pretend money was perfectly adequate for pretend shops, and of this she need never be short while there were leaves on the trees or pebbles out in the Lane. But it suddenly occurred to her that she might have her cake and eat it—a prospect which even adults find irresistible—if she collected nuts as pretend money for pretend shops, and later, when a visit to a real shop was imminent, exchanged them for real money.

So she announced to her customer and his hangers-on that henceforward the only currency acceptable to her would be nuts. They protested that leaves were easier, so she was compelled to take them into her confidence, and promise them a rake-off from the vast sums she would receive from her father when they had collected thousands and millions of nuts, and spent them freely on her merchandise. Being simple souls, they agreed to this, diligently searched the ground under their own home trees, and presented themselves at her counter with brimming jam tins and bulging paper bags. Soon—as always happens when money is plentiful—inflation set in, and they found that instead of charging five pennies for a stone representing an iced cake, the rapacious Joy was demanding twenty-six.

But suddenly the nut supply failed. The reason for this was that Amy and Biddy were saving up to buy a Mixmaster between them, and Biddy had suggested that they might as well collect their nuts, and pool the proceeds for this purpose. When they went out with their tins, they were surprised not to find more, until Dave and Daphne explained that the kids had been taking them to play shops with. The mothers only shrugged; for in the Lane pines, oranges and avocadoes are sacred, but no one grudges the children a few nuts as playthings.

Thus Joy found the economic situation dramatically changed. The inflation was over, and a sharp depression had set in. Prices tumbled. You could now buy an iced cake for one penny. When things became so desperate that Tommy began trying to pay in leaves again, she faced disaster, and almost decided to close her shop. At this critical time a new source of supply was discovered by—of all people—Jeremy Acheson.

Wandering down the Lane one day, with Jennifer at his heels, he had spied beneath the Kennedys' packing-shed an empty breakfast-food carton. As all the world knows, these cartons supply the young not only with breakfast, but also with jet aircraft, space-ships, sabre-toothed tigers, fiendish masks, cards with pictures on them, and other things which make them highly prized; so Jeremy naturally lost no time in crawling under the shed to secure this treasure-trove. And what should he find beside it but a nice little heap of nuts. Even as he stared, another nut fell from above. He looked up, and observed a crack between the floorboards which, at one spot, widened to a hole. He poked an enquiring finger into this, and immediately a little stream of nuts descended. He tried again, with a similar result. He takes things as they come, so he did not wonder why nuts should be falling through the floor, but the fact was that he had happened on a rat-hoard.

Rats have such a taste for Bopplenuts that they will employ much time and ingenuity in providing themselves with a cache where they may lay up a supply for future use, and in Bruce's shed they had found arrangements readily adaptable to their purpose. There was a rack nearly full of nuts; there was a nice, dark corner of it strategically hidden behind a pile of packing-cases; and directly below this there was a crack in the floor. A creature which can gnaw through the armour-plated shell of a Bopplenut, thinks nothing of gnawing through hardwood, so the crack was easily widened at the appropriate spot; and with a little more gnawing at the corner of the rack, and a little pushing aside of its wire-netting base, the sagacious rodents were able to exploit the law of gravity in such a manner that their larder was practically self-replenishing. For although a pile of Bopplenuts will come to rest above a small hole, the merest touch from below is enough to release a temporary trickle, and thus the hole in the rack deposited a pile on the floor, from which the hole in the floor shed a pile upon the ground.

But this interesting lesson in natural history was quite lost on Jeremy. He merely filled the carton with nuts, and crawled out with it to rejoin Jennifer, who accepted the miracle with a composure equal to his own.

The moment Joy saw that one of her customers was in the money again, she put her prices up and began to rake in more pennies from Dick. Of course she asked Jeremy where his riches came from, but he replied only with a sweet smile, nor would Jennifer say more than that he had got them from a Nole—which, indeed, was all she knew. But every financier understands that money has no smell, and Joy took the business-like view that so long as she got cash for her goods, it was unnecessary to enquire too closely where it came from. She merely kept a shrewd eye on Jeremy, limiting her demands only by his capacity to pay. When he abandoned jam tins and paper bags, and began to bring his money along in his billy-cart, her prices became astronomical.

Alas, the sudden and ostentatious flaunting of wealth has been the downfall of many crooks. Even the most absent-minded and overworked parents wake up some time, and when Dick discovered one day that both he and Heather had been cleaned right out of small change, it suddenly dawned upon him that there was something odd about this endless stream of nuts. They could not possible have all come from his own trees. And almost simultaneously it dawned upon Bruce that although he threw a kerosene tin full into his rack now and then, it did not seem to be getting any fuller.

Then the fat was in the fire. Joy, hard pressed by Dick and Heather about her source of supply, protested that it had all been acquired by perfectly legitimate trading, and tearfully sought assurances that she was a werry, werry, indeed good girl. Dick said he gravely doubted it, and put the screws on harder. Joy then said that Jeremy had millions and millions of nuts which Jennifer said he got out of a hole, and this, though certainly not a solution, was at least a clue. Jeremy, under interrogation from Tim, was all co-operation, and volunteered, sweetly smiling, to show Daddy where he had found the nuts. By now, naturally, the whole affair was a
cause célèbre
among the children of the Lane, and they were there in force when Joy and Jeremy, in the custody of their respective fathers, halted before Bruce's packing-shed, and Jeremy invited Tim to crawl beneath it. This Tim declined to do, saying that he had his good trousers on, but he summoned Bruce, while all the children waited, round-eyed and whispering.