Lantana Lane (2 page)

He farms in a slap-happy sort of way, working furiously for a few months, and then disappearing for a week or two. He doesn't keep a cow, or fowls, because he says he likes to be able to walk out any time, and just shut the door behind him. (This, by the way, is a mere figure of speech. We do not shut doors when we go out—far less lock them; probably the only key in the Lane is the one old Mrs. Hawkins keeps hanging on a nail in case someone's nose begins to bleed.) But this desire to be untrammelled in his comings and goings seems to have been always noticeable in Ken, for his sister tells us he once got down from a bus he was driving, left it standing there bulging with passengers, and was seen no more for six months. She also assures us that he held the record for the whole Army in the matter of being A.W.O.L.

Bruce Kennedy and his wife were both teachers. He is a tall, thin man who speaks slowly, and she is a short, dumpy woman who speaks fast. He works to a relentless timetable, and reaches his deadline triumphantly, like a sprinter breasting the tape; but there are times when he becomes possessed by a desire to do something which will serve no purpose other than exercising his muscles or his grey cells—both of which, his wife thinks, are too active anyhow. He is much given to mental arithmetic, and does many useful sums, but also many others whose usefulness is not so apparent; for he will suddenly produce discouraging statistics about how many hours per year they spend washing-up, or how many times Marge will have to loop the wool round her needle before she finishes knitting her new scarf. He has even been known to tackle the problem of how long it would take to fill a ten-foot square room entirely with paint, if you painted it once a year—assuming, of course, that you had somewhere to stand during the later stages of this chore, though why anyone should assume such a thing, we do not know; at all events, Bruce derived some mysterious satisfaction from discovering the answer to be fifteen thousand years. His degrees were in science, and even before he turned farmer he was always reading books about agricultural theory and experiment. He belongs to the compost and organic manure school of thought, views chemical fertilisers with reserve, and will talk for hours about methods of controlling erosion, the need for preserving soil-bacteria, and the evils of monoculture. He is enthusiastic about worm-casts, and frequently invites Marge to admire them; indeed, one is tempted to wish that the common earthworm were a more sensitive and responsive creature than it appears to be, for on Bruce's farm not even Royalty could be more warmly and respectfully welcomed.

Marge gained her academic qualifications in the faculty of Arts, and her whole approach is less erudite. She has an eccentric theory that farms should be pretty as well as productive, and consequently she is always galloping through her farm jobs, or leaving her domestic ones undone, so that she can find time to plant a flowering tree, or sneak some of Bruce's compost to put round her gerberas. They have a son and a daughter—both married and living down south—who think they are crazy.

Tim Acheson was a bank clerk until about five years ago, and his wife, Biddy, was a typist. Tim is a good-looking young chap with a ready laugh, but when he is not laughing he wears a rather harassed expression. Possibly, in his former capacity he saw too many farmers' bank statements; at all events, he works as if a mortgage did close behind him tread, and Biddy swears that he once talked in his sleep about overdrafts. No matter how early we get up in the morning, there is always a light burning in the Achesons' kitchen, and no matter how late we stay out working, we can always see Tim, still plugging away until the darkness swallows him. Biddy says they occasionally talk of the time when they both worked eight hours a day, and they agree that sunrise to sunset doesn't seem as long as that did. Not while you're doing it, she adds pensively, but you ache more after you're in bed.

As for Dick Arnold (and you may believe this or not, when you see him in his mudstained jeans, and note the state of his hands), he once managed a beauty salon in a fashionable city hotel. Even now, when he goes to Church, we catch a glimpse of him as he must have been then—large, suave, well-barbered and well-tailored, with a trick—doubtless perfected as part of his professional stock-in-trade—of bending over the weaker sex in a protective and confidential manner. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—the womenfolk in the Lane were at first apt to vanish in confusion when they saw him coming, for they all felt that he must be noting with contempt their un-permed, un-manicured, un-groomed and generally un-glamorous appearance. But when they learned that his wife, Heather, who had worked in the hotel office, first attracted his favourable attention because she was the only one of several girls so employed who never patronised his establishment, they were reassured; and since Henry Griffith reported him as saying it was a treat to see women who looked like women, and not like bloody film stars, they have quite recovered their self-respect.

Observe that the occupations in which all these people were formerly engaged are highly reputable ones. No curse has ever been called down upon them, nor has any been the subject of solemn warnings, either human or divine—though it is true that Shakespeare made Hamlet say some pretty bloodcurdling things about beauty-culture. They are all respectable avocations, and you can even make money at them. Why, then, have they been so rashly abandoned for the sweat and sorrow, the thorns and thistles of a pursuit blighted by an age-old malediction? Why have the Dawsons, the Griffiths, the Kennedys, the Arnolds and Ken Mulliner all deliberately chosen to become Anachronisms?

It is a simple question of heredity. We can only regret that Genesis tells us nothing about how Eve brought up her sons, but presents them to us fully grown—the elder farming, and the younger keeping sheep. But we may confidently assume that during Cain's formative years his mother must still have been feeling a bit browned off about that Curse; a bit defiant; a bit inclined to toss her head, and say to her firstborn that in her opinion there was really nothing so marvellous about that garden. You just took seeds from things, and put them in the ground, and up came plants. Anyone could do it. She could do it. Cain could do it if he wanted to, and she'd like to see any son of hers scared off by a lot of bogey-talk about sweat and thistles. The idea!

So Cain, nurtured on subversive propaganda, grew up a rebel, and meddled with creation, while Abel (who was more the caretaker type, like his father), took care of sheep. And in Cain's posterity the urge for farming has persisted to this day—though there have been those who strayed into other paths. We have explicit Biblical information, for instance, about some who went in for cattle, some who dealt in musical instruments, and some who worked in the metal trade; and, as we have just noted, there are many in Lantana Lane who at first ignored the summons of their blood, and addressed themselves to callings not their own. But in the end, given half a chance, they will all find their way back, rejoicing, from ease to adversity; they will return, singing hosannas, from liberty to bondage; they ask nothing better than to till the ground, come sweat or cyclone, come drought or depression, come curse or creditors; and if the voice that thundered o'er Eden has not taught them sense in six thousand years, the voice that now analyses their economic predicament, and coldly foretells their ultimate extinction, might just as well pipe down. Cursed they may be—but they are cussed too.

Turning from the Old to the New Testament, we may recollect an occasion when a certain seafaring type told Paul that the freedom he enjoyed as a member of the master-race had cost him a packet; and Paul replied, rather loftily : “But I was born free.” In a like manner, perhaps, do Joe Hardy, the Bells and the Hawkins regard their neighbours who have come late to farming.

Joe is nowadays not often visible at close quarters. We see him working among his pineapples, and he lifts a hand in answer to our waves, but he is of a solitary disposition, and rarely leaves his property unless some crisis in the affairs of a Lane-dweller calls for an extra pair of hands. Then he willingly appears—although, in fact, he has only one really effective hand to contribute, the other having been injured in a cyclone. He lives alone except for his Uncle Cuth, and his blue kelpie, Butch.

Alf Bell hardly ever leaves his pines, either. He is a large, dark lump moving slowly up one row and down the next, all day and every day. No matter how brilliant the sunshine, it never seems able to arrange its shadows in such a way as to lend Alf clear definition; he is just a shapeless object which we know to be a man because it moves. At first one thinks him surly, for he seldom speaks, and when he does his voice is an inarticulate rumble, like a roll of drums. His wife, Gwinny, does his talking for him, and interprets him to us. “Alf says . . .” she tells us; “Alf thinks. . .” And thus we have learned that Alf is a person worthy of much respect; a person with immovable convictions and uncompromising standards of behaviour; a person with an almost agonisingly sensitive and accurate perception of what ain't right.

Jack Hawkins is a lean man of middle size and middle age, with a deeply lined face, a very quiet voice, and a remarkable gift for looking cleaner and sprucer than anyone in the Lane. He is our Oracle. As the ancients took their problems along to Delphi, so we take ours along to Jack—though the analogy is perhaps defective, for it seems that a good deal of skulduggery went on at Delphi, and you had to pay through the nose for advice, whereas what you get from Jack is free, and dinkum.

Now that we come to Herbie Bassett, we are stumped. We don't know what to make of him. He behaves like a descendant of Cain in that he tills his minute patch of ground, but we suspect a bend sinister somewhere. We think Abel was his true progenitor, for if ever there was a bloke who liked to leave nature alone, that bloke is Herbie Bassett. No; when it comes to Herbie, we give up. He belongs to no group in the civilised world, though he might have found himself at home, perhaps, in some primitive tribe before progress sneaked up on it; or in Eden, before Eve.

Here they are, then—a bunch of unrepentant anachronisms assembled in Lantana Lane. They are all—except Herbie—farming because they like it. True—true—they will declare, if questioned, that farming means drudgery, misery, penury, monotony, anxiety, bankruptcy and calamity; that it is a mug's game, perpetually bedevilled by floods, droughts, tempests, soaring costs, sinking markets, debts, gluts, weeds, mud, viruses, nematodes, fruit-fly, bean-fly, top-rot, base-rot, black-heart, water-blister, white scale, gall wasp, bunchy-top, tip-wilt, melanosis, backache, heartache and holes in the tanks; that anyone who chooses such a dog's life is a beetle-headed, foolhardy, fatuous, gullible, impractical and deluded numbskull, and for two pins they would walk off the flaming place to-morrow. Nevertheless, they like farming.

“By golly!” they will snort bitterly. “Just take a look at us, and then take a look at the graziers! They have it all taped out—half the work, and a hundred times the profit! They're the Government's little white-headed boys, all right!” (And is not this the very voice of Cain, contrasting the genial commendation of his brother's offering with the cool reception accorded to his own?) But growl and grumble as they will, the fact remains that they are farming because they want to, and they will continue to farm until they die—or (like Cain) are driven out. For let us make no mistake, driven out many of them have been, and will be. We need not here usurp the function of the Economist by enquiring into the nature of the power that drives them; it is enough that the bone is pointing straight at their hearts.

But so long as the seasons are still permitted to follow each other in their appointed order, and behave more or less as they have always done; so long as the sun, moon and stars are not crowded out of the sky by satellites, and the rain is not too radioactive; just so long as this will the posterity of Cain mulishly defy every power on earth or in heaven for the undisputed possession of one small plot of earth. For although any farmer will, at the drop of a hat, denounce farming in the terms we have quoted, he will also say, now and then : “It's a good life.”

And both times he is right.

T
HE
L
ANE'S
oldest inhabitant is Jack Hawkins' mother, who was born where she still lives—aged eighty-six—with her son and his family, on its south-western corner. The next oldest is Herbie Bassett, who has also lived in the Lane all his life—but he is only fifty-three.

Herbie's mother died when he was about sixteen, and he and his father worked the place for the next ten years or so, until his father died too. It had been about fifty acres once, but by then it had dwindled to twenty, and after his father's death Herbie sold another twelve, keeping only a narrow strip which runs southward from the Lane, fairly level at first, and then—growing steeper and steeper—plunges down to Late Tucker Creek.

Herbie got married a few years later, but his wife was delicate, and they had no children. Her health kept on going from bad to worse, and for a long time before she died she spent most of her time in bed, so Herbie had to do nearly all the domestic chores as well as his own work. But he was—and still is—a brisk, neat, methodical little man, and everything was always in apple-pie order. In those days he used to have a few sidelines to supplement his earnings from the farm. He made picking-baskets—enormously strong, with a metal band passing right round the bottom, and woven into the handle, to support the weight of the pineapples—and he made smaller and lighter ones, too, which he sold to the women for shopping baskets. He also made
objets d'art
out of seashells and fragments of coloured glass or china which he embedded in plaster of paris plaques, and often arranged so that they spelt out some legend, such as
HOME SWEET HOME
, or
COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS
. But this was mainly a labour of love, and he gave most of them away as Christmas presents. He was a good cobbler, too, and mended boots and shoes for everyone in the Lane. Though he was as fine-drawn as a fiddle string, and often looked haggard, no one ever heard him complain; and considering how small his place was, he seemed to do well enough. We all thought it rather hard on him that his wife—who came from the city—was not a bit interested in farming—but only after she died did we discover that Herbie wasn't either.

What Mrs. Herbie was interested in was interior decoration. She was always surrounded by very shiny and colourful magazines describing, illustrating and extolling a state known as Gracious Living. This state was to be attained, they said, by acquiring picture windows, free-standing fireplaces, piazzas, cocktail bars, barbecues, and a great deal of glittering gadgetry for the kitchen. It was also a help if you made one wall of your living-room lime green, and the others shocking pink; and it was of vital importance that you should remember to call the room where you slept with your husband the Master Bedroom. Herbie really couldn't do anything about picture windows and free-standing fireplaces, but he felt he could at least co-operate in this last matter. By that time he was sleeping in the other room, though, and rarely entered the Master Bedroom except to take trays to his wife, so he suggested that the Mistress Bedroom would really be a more accurate phrase; of course the words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realised they didn't sound right at all, and Mrs. Herbie's expression showed clearly that they weren't. Poor Herbie often put his foot in it when he tried to show an intelligent interest in Gracious Living. Perhaps his worst blunder was over the board. The magazines, although indulgent enough about the naming of houses, made it clear that The Trend was towards numbers—which, however, must not be displayed in figures, but as words. So Mrs. Herbie asked her neat-fingered husband to paint the word THREE on a board for her, which he was very glad to do; but he argued that their place was the second in the Lane, and should therefore be TWO. When she explained that odd numbers went on one side, and even numbers on the other, he wanted to know how she knew they were not FOUR, seeing that none of the other places had numbers you could go by. To this she replied rather tartly that they were going to be THREE because it looked nicer than FOUR, on account of being longer, and if any of the other places wanted to put up numbers they could just fit in with hers, so would Herbie please get on with it, and do it with that black shadow effect which made the letters stand out. It so happened that she had a bad turn just afterwards, and Herbie, desirous of having a really nice surprise ready for her when she was better, bethought himself that SEVENTEEN was even longer than THREE, and he worked late into the night producing a board which would have done credit to the most accomplished professional signwriter. His wife wept when she saw it, and said it was done lovely, but it wasn't any use. When Herbie, in great distress and bewilderment, asked why, she wept harder and said there weren't seventeen places in the whole of the Lane, at which Herbie scratched his head and pointed out that there weren't any numbers either, so why couldn't she have any one she liked, and she'd said the longer the better? . . . But she was adamant and inconsolable, so he threw the board down under the house and got to work hurriedly preparing another shorter one for THREE; this was duly put up, and much admired, and it lasted until white ants got into the gate many years later. But the most imperative rule for Gracious Living was undoubtedly an operation known as Bringing the Outdoors Inside. Mrs. Herbie was never able to interest the rest of us in this very much, though, because it is a thing which occurs quite naturally in our part of the world where we are always finding mud, leeches, ticks, Noogoora burrs, bulldog ants, Cobblers' Pegs and even snakes littering our floors.

However, it was acknowledged that Mrs. Herbie studied all these mysteries very closely, and she was the recognised authority on them. Of course it was her dream to pass from study to achievement, and to this end she bought a ticket in the Casket every month—or rather (for she herself rarely went out), arranged that Amy Hawkins, her next-door neighbour, should buy one for her. She knew perfectly well that her chance of acquiring the requisites for Gracious Living by this means was about a hundred thousand
to
one—don't we all? But since her chance of acquiring them by any other means was precisely nil, she very sensibly persevered, and passed many happy hours making lists from her magazines of the things she would buy when she received a cheque for six thousand pounds.

Now of all the narks known to psychological science, there is none worse than the man who seeks to set himself above his fellows by loftily declaring that he despises money, doesn't want money, and wouldn't know what to do with it if someone left it to him in a will. Everyone wants money. Nevertheless, “money “is a very elastic word, and due allowance must be made for the fact that Mr. Rockefeller's notion of wealth would be substantially different from that of, say, Herbie Bassett. Herbie often thought it would be pleasant to have plenty of money, but he thought it only when he had to cut down his tobacco to pay a bill, and then his idea of plenty of money was just enough to pay all his bills without ever having to cut down his tobacco.

He was worried at first by his wife's monthly bid for riches, because the thought of Gracious Living terrified him, and he was afraid her ticket might win. Moreover, he was a man who liked life to proceed placidly, and he found the recurring cycle of anticipation mounting to a climax of excitement, and then plummeting into an abyss of despair, very trying. But he endured it with patience (having been lavishly endowed at birth with this quality), and, as the years went by, and Fortune continued utterly to ignore the numbers on her tickets, was gradually reassured; he even had a feeling, sometimes, that he was buying her all the satisfactions of Gracious Living very cheaply, and with little inconvenience to himself. The whole business seemed simpler and more harmless than ever when Amy Hawkins—having decided to give up growing vegetables, and buy them from Herbie instead—took to deducting the ticket money from what she owed him, so that he was not troubled about it at all.

After his wife died he allowed this custom to continue because—like many other people, including such wise and illustrious folk as statesmen—he had found that it was easier to let customs alone than to alter them. Amy now not only bought his ticket, but kept it, paid herself for it, and looked up the results, so there was no need for him to give it a thought, and he didn't. True, she said to him every month: “No luck, Herbie!” and he replied : “Can you beat it?” But this exchange was no more than a polite formula, like saying : “Lovely day? . . .” or “Nice drop of rain? . . .” And he came to regard it, in his increasing preoccupation, as merely a form of polite greeting peculiar to his intercourse with Mrs. Hawkins.

For he now had much more important things to think about. He had discovered that he, too, had ideas about Gracious Living, and that these, unlike his late wife's, could be translated into reality without any expenditure whatever.

As far back as he could remember, Herbie had always liked to look at things, and as far back as he could remember he had always been hauled away in the middle of looking at something to milk a cow, or make cases, or run a message, or plant beans, or pick pineapples, or wash his hands, or brush lantana. Now, for the first time in his life, he seemed to see opening before him the miraculous possibility of an existence in which he could look as long and as hard as he liked.

He was not choosy. He would look at anything from a sunrise to a separator, but he had to take his time over it. He was quite willing to study machines—or, for that matter, human beings—if only they would keep still long enough, but they rarely did, so he was driven more and more to nature, whose activities and metamorphoses proceeded at a pace which allowed leisurely contemplation. He was no mute, inglorious Burbank, and his interest was not scientific. If a flower had red petals, that was all right with him, and it did not occur to him to wonder if he could turn them blue. He liked to observe the golden pollen on its stamens, but was content to believe that the wind and the bees knew their business, and felt no desire to do officious and impertinent things to it with a camel-hair brush. He found weeds just as rewarding to look at as the more useful or decorative forms of vegetable life, but could have named only those which are a bane to farmers, and must therefore have a name to be cursed. However, looking at things with the attention he felt they deserved obviously required a great deal of leisure, and he had always patiently assumed that leisure was, for him, an unattainable luxury.

Now he was not so sure. He was beginning to believe that it might be within his grasp, and he soon realised that if he were to grasp it he must first make some changes in his way of life. He began by getting rid of everything in the house except necessities, which left him with a bed, a table, a broom, a bucket, three blankets, two towels, a stove, a cupboard, a spoon, and a few oddments of crockery. Having sold his surplus household goods, and disposed of such unsaleable trifles as remained by throwing them in the lantana, he looked round his bare dwelling with as much pleasure as his wife could have felt in contemplating the most graciously equipped house that ever was lived in.

Do not fall into the error of imagining that Herbie now began to lead a feckless, sordid, grubby sort of life. Not at all. He regularly scrubbed his house out from end to end, and there were so few things in it to be out of place that nothing ever was. He hung his washing on the line punctually every Monday morning—a pair of shorts, a shirt and a towel. A bath towel—for he had perceived that tea towels are necessary only if you wash up, and washing up is necessary only if you cook, so he lived with sumptuous simplicity on bread and butter, cheese, raw eggs and vegetables, milk and fruit. He kept his knife in a sheath hanging from his belt, and cleaned it by pushing it into the ground, rinsing it at the tank tap, and drying it on his shorts. He brewed tea some six or seven times a day in a billy out of doors, and his stove remained cold except when he wanted to dry his boots.

Herbie is far from lazy. He has never minded doing a little work, and he continued to keep two acres under cultivation, milk his cow, feed his fowls and tend his vegetables. The rest of his land he left to be slowly swallowed up by lantana, and when he recalled how much of his life had been spent in brushing the stuff, he felt very peaceful and luxurious as he watched it creeping like a slow, green tide over his paddock, and knew he needn't do a thing about it. Sometimes his contentment was disturbed by a few guilty qualms, for there was a good deal of groundsel getting in too, and he had been brought up to hate groundsel like the devil. But he meant to get it out some day when he wasn't so busy. His training had never gone far below the surface of his mind, and underneath there were depths of conviction which told him the main business of life was to be happy.

He now began to be very happy indeed. It was noted that he lost his taut look, put on a bit of weight, and grew quite rosy. He was, if anything, more brisk, neat and methodical than ever as he went about his irreducible minimum of chores, for now there lay beyond them glorious, uninterrupted hours of looking.