Free Old Drumble by Jack Lasenby Page A

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    The kitchen window popped open. His mother’s head stuck out. “Did I hear you barking?”
    “It was Dad.”
    “I’ll show that man! What are you staring at? Get on with those leaves. And when you’ve picked them all up, you can put them on the compost heap. And if I hear so much as another yap, I’ll buckle dog collars round both your necks, chain the pair of you to the clothes-line, and you can have a bone for your tea tonight.”
    That afternoon, Mrs Jackman went down to the bottom end of Ward Street to have a look at the Crimson Glory rambler that Mrs Jitters had flowering. “She’s going to give me a cutting, this winter,” she said to Jack when she came home. “How dare you tell Harry Jitters your mother has strong ears? I thought I told you: I’m not some sort of dog!”
    “I just told Harry you can see through doors and hear what I’m thinking. I was trying to train him as a huntaway.”
    “Yes, well, I don’t think Mrs Jitters wants her son growing up to be a noisy sort of dog. I don’t know what the world’s coming to—dogs barking and eyeing each other up and down Ward Street. Talking of dogs, look who’s tying up his horse—”
    J–ck didn’t need to be told who it was. He tore out. Nosy was already trying to undo her reins off the fence, and Old Drumble was holding a mob of sheep the other side of the hall corner.
    “I’m training a heading dog and a huntaway down thebottom end of the street,” Jack told Andy, who nodded as he took a sugarbag filled with bits and pieces from the pikau behind his saddle.
    “It’s a good idea to have a young dog coming on,” Andy said. “You never know when you’re going to need him. Just this morning, that Young Nugget nearly got himself skittled as we came round the back of Matamata. Some coot in a cut-down Model A, careering along Burwood Road, doing the better part of thirty miles an hour, not looking where he’s going and, the next thing, he near ploughs into my mob. Young Nugget leaps out of the way, just in time.
    “Old Drumble keeps the mob bunched while I give the driver a piece of my mind. I tells him, ‘It would have cost you a tenner to run over Young Nugget, twenty-five quid for Old Nell, and you hit Old Drumble—the sky’s the limit!’
    “Here we are,” he said to Jack’s mother, “a cutting out of Mrs Kevin Ryan’s garden, some plum chutney from Mrs Bryce, and the recipe for Mrs Oulds’s seed cake, the one she said you admired at the church Bring and Buy. And these here are from old Tom McGuire out Okoroire, seed potatoes—Maori Chief. Old Tom says they’re a good cropper, and they stand up against the blight better than most.
    “ ‘As good a tatie as Oi’ve tasted since Oi came out here from Oireland, just a spalpeen no taller than halfwayup the hoight of a donkey’s shin,’ he told me. Of course, he swears Irish spuds tasted better than ours because they used to dig in seaweed. Enough kelp, and you never had to add salt to the spuds, so he reckons. Now, I wonder if that’s true, or did he just kiss the Blarney Stone? What do you suppose, Jack?”
    But Jack was too busy watching Andy’s scalp appear as his hat came off. Also, he was waiting to ask his mother the question that she knew he had trembling on the tip of his tongue.
    And, because she knew he wanted to ask it, she didn’t look at him, but busied herself filling the teapot from the kettle on the stove, getting the milk from the safe, the sugar bowl, a teaspoon, and setting out some ginger-nuts on a plate. And all the time exclaiming over the cuttings, the recipe, the seed potatoes, swapping gossip and news, asking questions of Andy, and telling him what she’d got for him to drop in to others along his road.
    “No, it’s too late,” she said, when Jack went to open his mouth. “You’re certainly not going down to the cemetery crossing with Andy. It’s far too far for somebody who’s silly enough to let a little girl pull his nose. Besides,