childhoodhome

Our home in Dorrigo

The linoleum covered floor in the my bedroom creaks as I tiptoe from my bed to peer through the uncurtained window. I’ve had that dream again - the one where I see through the window a vast expanse of satiny silver-grey metal stretching to the horizon. Narrow cylindrical columns of the same stuff rise and fall at different times. I try to run across the silver ground and suddenly a column rises to block my way, while another shrinks to nothingness.

I’m now fully awake and my heart turns over with excitement, but not fear, as I stand shivering at the window only to find all is normal. There is no moon tonight and the trees are silhouetted against the starlit sky but I still search the darkness for a hint of my dream.

In the morning light I know somehow - because of my dream -, that one day I’ll live in a different world and silently promise to always remember this one. My parents never knew - how could they understand what drove me to store memories of this house in my special ‘memory box’?

My bedroom was sparsely furnished with a small iron bed and some hooks to hang my clothes. Then one day I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world when I acquired a dressing table. Well, it was really a wooden tea chest on it’s side and dad made a kidney shaped top for it out of some old timber. Then mum hung a curtain around it to cover up the box and make it look like a real dressing table, and I put my one and only toy on top - a slighted dented moulded celluloid kewpie doll.

My brother’s room was on the other side of the passage and was very similar to mine except he didn’t have a beautiful dressing table of course. Then there was my mum and dad’s room which had a proper timber bed and a dressing table and even a wardrobe. Mum also had a chamber-pot which she kept under the bed because the toilet was a long way away out in the side paddock.

I remember the house from inside out, because my room was the centre of my world. But it will be easier for you if we go in through the gate and make our way inside slowly. First you have to walk a couple of miles from the town - or drive if you’re rich and own a car, but it’s just cart tracks not a proper road so you have to drive carefully.

When you can’t go any further because of a wide heavy wooden gate, you’ve reached our place. It’s hard to open because it’s dropped a bit - dad says because we used to swing on it too much but I think it was just too old and tired. Through the gate and to your left there’s a bit of a clearing, perhaps about 50 yards or so across before you get to a another wooden fence and gate only feet from the house. Mum killed a snake there in the clearing once and we watched it wriggling ‘round for ages and it had little white baby snakes which came out and wriggled around too.

On the left before you go in the door was a small open space then a separate wash house. It had a wood fired copper for washing clothes and heating water for the bath which was partitioned off a bit. My brother and I didn’t use the big bath though - we were allowed to have our bath in a round galvanised tub which mum put in front of the stove in the kitchen.

The first room you come into was the full width of the house, and we spent most time there. Down the left hand end was the black wood stove where mum cooked and to the left of the stove was a window. I used to watch out there for our neighbour who led a draught-horse and wooden sled to get turnips from his top paddock. When we saw him coming about a mile away mum would help me make a jam tart for him - in return he’d give me a ride on his sled and sometimes gave us milk especially when our one cow called Polly died.

There was no electricity and we didn’t even have a radio until somehow we acquired a cheap crystal set. Although many farms had kerosene fridges we were too poor so our fridge was quite different - though probably just as good. On the left of the house there was another tall wooden fence close to the house wall. It was always shady and cool along that strip and our ‘fridge’ was a large metal milk can set fully into the earth with only the lid visible. Foods needing to be kept cool, like our pats of home made butter, were wrapped in damp calico or hessian then tied and lowered into the can on a piece of string. The string ends were left trailing over the mouth of the can for easy retrieval.

The other end of our main room was furnished with a plain wooden table and chairs. Lighting was kerosene lamps and lanterns, and candles were used for going to bed. From the rear of this main room was a central hallway with the two small bedrooms off to the left and right. Then the hall opened to a room on the left which might have been intended as a lounge room but in our time held only my mothers treadle sewing machine and a square black storage trunk. I remember the trunk because it sat under the window and was my favourite place to sit and watch my mother sew.

One day I remember she sewed some green check material to make curtains for the long row of windows in our kitchen/living room. She got the material for sixpence a yard from a Sydney mail order catalogue which had it as a special in a ‘fire & water damage’ sale. Mostly though I remember her cutting down and re-sewing worn out clothes to make them useable again, even making herself a bra from a worn out dress.

It’s a tribute to my mother that I can remember that house so well and so fondly. Her life must have been very hard but she never once complained, and we were never upset by having so much less than other people. In fact it probably gave us a sense of joy in small pleasures when they did occur. Like the day I tasted my first apple. We didn’t have money to buy things from the shops (If there was any ‘dole’ then, we were certainly too proud to ask for it), so when my brother and I found an apple floating in the creek on our way home from school one day it was a treasure beyond compare. It was carefully carried home and cut into four so we all could have some, but first I admired and studied the tiny red veins running from the red skin into the white frost-like flesh.

Other people might have had more comfortable houses, but this first house I recall living in was truly my childhood castle. And my childhood dream? Yes, that happened. A repeating dream that didn’t make sense until I was about 23 years old. Perhaps I’ll tell that story sometime too.

Copyright Lynda Cracknell (nee Stevens) 1999