3.
38 Baker Street. 1940.
‘Did you see Violet!’ Young Mary’s hand was at her mouth as
if to prevent the outrage from escaping. ‘She was wearing trousers!’
Her sister Clarissa had indeed seen Violet wearing trousers
and although she knew it was not the Brethren way, did understand that to drive
a truck, wearing a long dress would make clutch, brake and accelerator pedals
difficult to manipulate. ‘They were overalls.’ She corrected, and continued
stirring flour on the way to becoming bread.
‘But, Clissy!’ Mary insisted, now beside her in kitchen.
‘Father saw her!’
Clarissa wiped her hands on her apron and pushed the kettle
over the flame. ‘Mary, you run along now and get ready for school. I’ll have a
talk to Father.’ She pushed Mary toward the door, but the child resisted.
‘But Clissy,’ she insisted. ‘If she dresses like a man, she
will go to Hell! Deuteronomy 22.’
Clarissa laughed. ‘Not quite, Mary. Deuteronomy 22 is not
quite that harsh. It is an abomination, but does not guarantee an eternity in
hellfire.’
‘But it’s still bad.’ Mary insisted, ‘Violet’s sins will
bring dishonour upon our house.’
Clarissa hugged her little sister and wondered at the wisdom
of filling children’s heads with the language of retribution without the wisdom
to assess its appropriate applications, then led her to her room. ‘Now, get
dressed. The bus goes in fifteen minutes.’
Mary glanced at the big clock in the hallway then closed her
door to dress.
The kettle was boiling when Clarissa returned to the kitchen
so she made a pot of tea and carried it out to where her father sat in the
sunroom reading his Bible.
‘Here you are, Father. Would you like some cake?’
Her father patted the arm of the easy chair, where his wife had
spent so much time with him for so many years, knitting, crocheting and
reading. ‘Sit a minute.’
She sat and began to pour tea but he stopped her with a
raised hand. ‘No, leave that, I want to talk to you about Violet.’ He looked to
the door where Mary was waving her hand in goodbye. ‘Bye Mary and mind you do
not eat with heathens or the Lord might not find you on Judgement day.’
The happy smile faded as Mary contemplated another lunch time
alone. She turned and left, the clack of the front door closing allowing him to
turn back. ‘I heard what you said to Mary about Deuteronomy 22, and cannot
agree with you. Did you ever see your mother wearing trousers? No. Did you ever
see your sisters wearing trousers? No. Did you ever see any other women of the
Meeting wearing trousers? No. So I don’t want you watering down the word of
God. The directive is clear. Women are not to wear men’s clothing, no matter
what you call. Is that clear to you?’
Clarissa was still frozen with the tea pot poised over his
cup. Before speaking, she started to pour. ‘Did you also hear me say that as a
truck driver perhaps she could wear overalls, which are not strictly speaking,
trousers.’
He did not stop her pouring, but waited until she had added
milk and handed the cup to him.
‘I think if you tried to make that distinction to our elders,
you would be laughed at. Trousers are garments that cover the legs that are
split into two, and that is what defines them, as against a single piece
garment that covers the legs, like a dress or a skirt.’
She poured herself a cup while she considered his words. ‘Do
you really think or Lord cares that much about what Violet wears while she is
driving a truck, that he would see only an abomination?’
He drank half his tea before lowering the cup gently.
‘No, He would not. She is a good woman who has been led from
the Lord’s path by her father. But, if she wears trousers she cannot live under
my roof. I will tell her when she returns.’ He lifted his cup to his lips and
sipped. ‘When is she coming back?’
Clarissa had put her cup back in its saucer and laced her
fingers together to keep them quiet. ‘I have no idea. She is delivering
something for her father, so she could be quite late and might even stay tonight
with Marjorie.’
The old man’s face reddened. ‘But today is Saturday! I hope
she doesn’t think she can come back here on the Sabbath dressed in men’s
clothing! She will not enter this house!’
She sighed, drank her tea then collected cups, tea pot and
milk jug onto the tray then stood. ‘Perhaps you should speak to Bill about her wearing
trousers before you throw her onto the street.’
He picked up his Bible and opened it at the pages marked by a
narrow purple ribbon. ‘I might do that. Where is he working, do you know?’
She paused in the doorway. ‘He’s working with Walter, but I
don’t know where.’
He looked up from the passage he had been reading. ‘Now
there’s a God fearing woman,’ he asserted. ‘You’d never see Nellie sporting
herself in men’s trousers.’
As she turned to continue her path to the kitchen she
mumbled, ‘There seems so much to fear from such a loving God!’
He heard what she had said and turned back to his book. ‘Yes
indeed!’ he whispered and turned another page to more of what he knew by heart,
still searching for the love and certainty he lost when his Mary died, now four
years gone.
Eusebia’s Diary, August 5, 1941.
‘Eric got up at 4 o’clock to
get away for deliveries and still have time to order a gas producer (charcoal).
‘I reckon I can make one of those.’
Owen Turnbull was poring over drawings recently arrived from
the government with an accompanying letter that exhorted all that could, to
reduce their consumption of petrol to an absolute minimum, with the warning
that future supplies could not be guaranteed, even for essential occupations
like transport and farming.
His father, Erwin Wilberforce Turnbull was a horse man, and had
already ‘dusted off’ old horse-drawn machinery that had been rusting away at
the edges of paddocks since the purchase of their first kerosene powered
Fordson tractor, with its steel spiked wheels and cranky oil-bath clutch.
But Owen was an inventor and mechanical wunderkinder. He
embraced mechanisation with the simple argument that “tractors don’t eat grass
when they’re in the shed”.
But tractors were not his only foray into the wonders of mechanisation.
An old T model Ford motor had been sourced from a wrecking yard and “done
up”, to drive a long shaft of flat belt pulleys that powered a row of small
tools and implements. Ranged along a rough hewn bench were grinders, a drill
press, a grain grister and, with a change of belts, a chaff cutter and a circular
saw. “Henry”, as the old four cylinder side-valve motor was known, was
controlled by a governor that kept his revs within required bounds. The
radiator that had kept him cool when he was on wheels was not used, but rather,
he was connected by hoses and galvanised water pipes to a 44 gallon drum of
water that bubbled away happily at exactly 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
On a sledge, he had mounted a similarly sourced Maxwell
engine to drive a centrifugal pump that was used for irrigation and water
transfer wherever it was needed on the mixed crop, chicken and dairy farm.
Now with extensive citrus and apple orchards, hand drawn
water of his father’s day would no longer suffice, so Owen’s investigation of
alternative sources of fuel for the farm’s multiple petrol and kerosene engines
had moved from “urgent” to “vital” as the war prevented tankers of crude making
the perilous journey across the Pacific.
But through the grapevine, he had heard that engines running
on charcoal gas suffered excessive wear from charcoal dust and sand pollutants cbeing sucked into
cylinders to chew into rings and bores, then to bypass worn rings and enter
sump oil and grind away at big ends and main bearings, not to mention cam
shafts, timing gears and chains.
He turned a drawing toward his father. ‘What this system
needs is a hookah,’ he said, nodding to encourage his father for support.
But Irwin’s understanding of the drawings now before his eyes
was only marginally greater than his grasp of Einstein’s General Theory of
Relativity. He pushed the papers back to his son. ‘If you reckon you can make
one, how long will it take, and how much?’
Owen pushed the papers together and stood to place them on
top of the old Harmonium. ‘Don’t know. I’ll think about it.’
Eusebia watched as her elder son walked to the door and wondered
what was to become of them all if he was called up. Both girls had gone to the
city, then married, leaving the farm and their parents in the care of her two
boys. She was still relatively young, under fifty, but Irwin was well past sixty
and no longer confident he could still control the horses he so loved.
Father followed Owen out to help with the cream separator and
to wash up after milking, that had been completed before breakfast then to
drive the cows, now fed, back to pasture. The early start had left much of the
day free until afternoon, when the three of them would again need to milk the
herd by hand and drive the cows to the high paddock to overnight.
She watched through the fly screen door as Rowdy stirred
himself from his place in the sun and trotted after them to the milking shed,
where he would curl up again on a pile of pollard sacks in the sun beside the cattle
feed trough that had been fashioned from a hollow log, split in two longitudinally,
the two halves now butted end to end with the free ends plugged by sheets of
galvanised iron, beaten to shape and secured by nails.
She made herself another pot of tea and fetched her writing
pad, pen and ink. “Dear Ella,” she began and filled a page with her
schoolteacher handwriting that expressed her anxiety at the war and possible
call up of either or both of her sons.
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