and sought shelter behind my sister.
Grandpa Sands was the first of my grandparents to die, when I was seven. In my favourite memory, he sits on a small wooden bench on the verandah of his rented fibro-cement farmhouse at Woodglen, playing his button accordion. Grandma Alexander died when I was 10. I was not taken to either funeral. I missed my grandmother especially. She had patiently taught me, a left-hander, how to knit and crochet. I talked to her in my prayers every night. When she and Grandpa Alexander lived on the farm, I occasionally awoke in their bed, always feeling safe and snug with a grandparent either side of me. My parents placed me there when my bed was needed for visitors. Grandma would scratch my back, let me help undo and do-up her tight-fitting corsets, and brush her beautiful, long, silvery-white hair that she pinned into a neat bun during the day.
When Grandma died, she left a small Vegemite jar with a hand-written piece of paper taped on top, stating: ‘ This is June’s’. The jar contained pennies, halfpennies, threepences and sixpences. I treasured that little jar, more for its message than its contents. In years to come, those three words, penned in my grandmother’s hand, would give me strength.
After my grandparents moved to Bairnsdale, their bedroom became known as the ‘top bedroom’ for guests. From the age of five to 10, when my bed was required for visitor over-flow, I slept on an inflatable rubber mattress on the floor of my parents’ bedroom. By summer 1962, I was sleeping on the camp bed on the verandah. Visitors at this time of the year were mostly city cousins, and their parents, my Aunty Carlie and Uncle Roy.
My cousins were allowed to sleep in, but I knew that when my mother came briskly out the back door, like now, I had two minutes in which to get up. That’s how long she took to go out the back gate to the toilet to empty her chamber pot, rinse it under the garden tap and return it inside to its seclusion under her bed. I needed to jump out of bed before she came out the back door again, this time to briskly sweep the concreted garden path. Otherwise, she would wave the broom to remind me that Dad was expecting his tea and toast. Besides, if I didn’t get up right then, the flies would drive me crazy.
I threw off the thin grey woollen blankets and swung out of bed, pulled on my shorts, T-shirt and gumboots, headed for the back door and yelled: ‘Mum, I’m ready to go to the dairy—is Dad’s tea and toast ready?’
She loaded me up with a chipped enamel plate carrying several thick slices of high tin bread. The bread had been toasted on a homemade wire fork over embers in the firebox of our small, shiny, black wood stove, and soaked with butter. An old saucepan lid was placed on top to keep the flies off. With this in one hand, I took the handle of the shining clean billy, half-filled with well-sugared black tea, in the other, and plodded in my boots down the garden path, out the front gate and down the gravelled track to the unpainted weatherboard dairy as fast as I could without slopping the tea or dropping the toast.
While I walked, I thought about what the day would bring. My cousins and I had made plans the previous night for a maize cob fight in the stable after breakfast, followed by a swim in the river before lunch. My favourite ‘swimmy hole’ was by the willows and windmill downstream from the rapids. There, depending on water flow, the river was about 50 metres wide and was bordered with a small sandy beach on the far side.
I took over milking our cows while Dad stood in the dairy’s wash-up room and ate his toast, washing it down with a pannikin of tea poured from the billy. Our dairy herd of about 45 cows was milked four at a time with machines powered by a diesel motor. By the age of 11 I knew pretty much how everything worked, as I’d been going to the dairy since I could walk. At first, my parents sold cream in cans that were collected by a lorry and taken to a butter factory in Bairnsdale. The leftover milk was fed to our pigs. Then we progressed to selling water-cooled milk. The milk, always deliciously warm, frothy and sweet, fresh off the cows, was cooled as it ran over small stainless steel bars filled with water from an underground tank. After cooling it was stored in a big stainless steel vat until the milk tanker came, once or twice daily, to collect it.
I managed to milk a few cows before Dad returned to the yard and then I fed the calves. First I went to the wash-up room, which was more modern than our house because a briquette hot water service provided running hot water. I used a well-worn broken axe handle to mix powdered milk with water in two big stainless steel buckets. To prevent lumps forming and floating on top, I mixed the milk with first cold and then hot water. For extra nourishment I added fresh milk from the big vat, and heaved the buckets, swinging one and then the other, trying not to let milk slosh into my gumboots, to the wooden calf pens behind the dairy.
I poured the milk into tins, made by Dad from five-gallon (19 litre) oil drums, and fed the calves, which were bellowing for their tucker. Knowing the greedier calves would drink fast and headbutt for more, I held onto the tins’ wire handles and used a stick to ensure the little ones got their share. Minutes later, tummies full and tails swinging, the calves pranced and kicked up their hooves as I shooed them out of their pen into the calf paddock. Checking that their trough, which had been carved from a log, was filled with fresh water, I returned to the wash-up room to scrub the buckets. I washed Dad’s tea billy too, and filled it with fresh milk to carry up the hill for Mum to serve at breakfast.
My lazy cousins were still in bed. Wondering where Mum was, I heard her call from up the hallway. I found her in her bedroom. Bother! What did she want?
Mum closed her door. This seemed serious.
‘Tim, I have something to tell you.’
What had I done?
‘Did you notice anything when you got up this morning?’
Notice anything? What?
I hadn’t made my bed but Mum usually made that for me while I was out helping Dad with the farm jobs.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Did you notice your pyjamas, or look at your sheets?’ she asked.
What had I done? Had my cat made a mess? Couldn’t have been me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I found some blood,’ Mum said.
‘Blood? What blood?’
Then Mum was talking. I could hear her but absorbed only snatches of what she said.
After talking about ‘periods’ and ‘bleeding every month’, she withdrew a small book from her dressing table drawer and told me to read it. The book’s title was something like Mothers and Daughters. I thought I’d read every book in the house long ago, but I hadn’t seen this one before.
Then Mum pulled something from another of her dressing-table drawers. It was a thin, circular, elasticised belt with two dangly bits. From a bag in the depths of her wardrobe she pulled a white flannelette nappy. I watched, numbed and horrified.
Spreading the nappy on the blue eiderdown of her freshly made bed, she folded it several times into a thick, narrow shape. Next, using two large safety pins from a little box on her dressing table, she attached the ends of the nappy to the two dangly bits. Mum held her work of art out towards me and said, ‘Wear this pad.’
I took it, speechless. My mother walked from the room, closing the door behind her. But not before pausing to add: ‘And no swimming today or tomorrow; not until you finish bleeding.’
I didn’t want to hear any more. I felt disgusted. Me, wear a nappy, a baby’s thing?
Left alone, I slowly lowered my shorts and my pants. There was a little red patch. I
