Free And Did Those Feet ... by Ted Dawe Page B

the time, softly and to himself. I thought that this was a bit weird when I first came, but after a few days I hardly even heard it any more. It had its uses too. It made him easier to track down, which is handy when you are living in a big place.
    When we got back, the island of light had become a sucking , clattering, rural party complete with Beethoven belting out of a little ghetto blaster Uncle Frank had tied to a wall. There were only a few jobs, and they were simple, it seemed to me. Changing the cups: this was the most skilled, along with getting the cows into the bale. Uncle Frank made a big point of pulling a cup off and squirting me with milk straight from the teat whenever I was standing around watching. The other two thought this was real funny. Ho, ho, ho. Country humour, eh? You have to laugh.
    As well as these jobs there was the full time one of hosing away cow shit. They make a lot of it, cows, more than youwould think. So it’s a busy scene; there’s milk being sucked out into a vat, there’s cow shit flowing down a drain into a sort of swamp, there’s cows coming in and cows going out. I guess it’s sort of organised. The smell’s a bit weird but I stopped noticing it after a while. No one talked much because of the noise. So we all just kept our heads down and got on with it.
    Those noises! There was the clang of gates slamming, the stamp of hooves on concrete, and the Beethoven filling in the gaps. (Good milk music, Uncle Frank says.) Jamie particularly enjoyed singing along to the Beethoven so he sure added his four pence worth. And that was just background music.
    On top of this racket there was also another rural number that went like this.
    Suck, suck … moo, moo … suck, suck … splat, splat … suck, suck … “Hold still Molly!” … suck, suck … “Iain get that hose!” … suck, suck … “whoa, whoa” … “Open the gate Jamie!”… suck, suck … “Watch out Sandy!” … squirt, squirt … “Yaaaargh!”
    That last one was me being squirted with warm cow’s milk, which is Uncle Frank’s way of saying, “Come back to planet Earth, you space cadet.”
    This chorus goes for the full eighty minutes. And the weird thing is no one else seems to hear it, just me.
    When I got back to the house, boy was I hanging out for that porridge. After cleaning up, I get on with the cream, milk, golden syrup routine and I’m into it. Halfway through I notice that I am going hard in the eating department too,slurping away with the best of them. I guess I’m getting ruralised , real fast. I remember thinking, “Hmmm. Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, it’s too early to say.”

D OWN T IME, C OUNTRY S TYLE
    ALTHOUGH it sure seemed like it sometimes, life on the farm wasn’t only chores. There was down time and we always seemed to have plenty to do. I guess with no TV, radio, or even a newspaper we weren’t too concerned about what was going on in the outside world. Looking back now I see how this had a positive side. We were more creative about how we had fun. We had to be. There was nothing to spend money on, and nowhere to spend it.
    One of our favourite places was the barn. This was a huge tin shed with hay bales stacked at one end and machinery and work bench at the other. It was the oldest building I had ever been in, filled with strange objects that had been hung on a rafter forty years ago and were still waiting to come in handy. In the country there could be a saying (although I have never heard it said): “Can’t think of what to do with ten metres of barbed wire/set of antlers/length of chain/old tractor seat/tin of grease/pair of fishing waders? Hang it on the rafters, so it’s right there, when my grandson needs it, in fifty years’ time.”
    Iain had this talent though; he could make things out of that kind of old stuff. Just the junk he found lying around. They were really good things too. Give that boy a bit of copper pipe, half a metre of hose and a