Free The Sausage Tree by Rosalie Medcraft

from the woodheap were used as cutlery. The garden, the yard and surrounding paddocks provided a never ending supply of “food”. Dry dock heads were used for tea, plants, weeds and flowers were all used as food, and then there were the “sausages” from the sausage tree. Our mud pies were put to use and one of them usually adorned the centre of the table which was draped with an old curtain. We always fried the “sausages” on our non-burning stove erected on the woodheap. Before playing house we would once again be dressed in the clothes from the ragbag and at times we combined playing “shops” with “setting up house”. The laurel tree which was also a good place to hide in, must have played a big part in our lives because the entire family always refers to it as “the sausage tree”.
    If we promised not to take him out of the yard and onto the road, Peter would let us dress him in girls clothes and hat and wheel him around the yard in the old twin pram. One day after pushing him around the house and the yard for a while we decided that was too boring so we went onto the road, running as fast as possible so that he couldn’t jump out of the pram. We looked up and there was an elderly lady who lived further up the road. She stopped us to see who we had in the pram, bent over and said “What a beautiful little girl” she was and stated that she had never seen such beautiful brown eyes before and asked us who she was. Quick as a flash one of us told her that it was ourcousin Betty who had come to stay. We didn’t have a cousin Betty but we felt sure that if we did she would have been very flattered over the praise of her beauty. However, Peter wasn’t at all impressed and that was the end of that pastime; he flatly refused to get into the pram after that.

    As winter followed autumn our outdoor activities slackened and finally ended as the rain and the cold drove us indoors. Our house was not very big and seven children inside around one fire was rather crowded and sometimes a bit of a nightmare. However, Mum was very inventive and we can see now how we came to have such active imaginations and the initiative to amuse ourselves. There was nowhere else to go and no-one else to play with because no-one ever wanted other children besides their own, cooped up inside their house.
    Mum was a wizard with a piece of newspaper and a pair of scissors. She showed us how to fold and cut the paper to make a chain of men joined together by their hands. The longer the chain of little men we could cut out, the more puffed up with pride we were. We could also cut paper into patterns that looked like paper doilies. There was only one rule; we were never allowed to touch Mum’s sewing scissors.
    Another game that Mum taught us to play was for us to find as many Christian names, animals, trees or flowers that started with the letter A, working our way through to Z. The purpose of this game was to find the longest name possible as each letter was counted when we had all finished at the end of the time limit set by Mum. This game had many more variations and was an ongoing favourite as we vied with each other to show how smart we were. We played a lot of noughts-and-crosses (today’s tic tac toe) and dots-and-dashes.
    Sometimes we would draw a head on a piece of paper and then fold it over and pass it on to the next one until a figure was complete right down to the feet. Sometimes people parts were joined to birds or animal parts. We concocted some weird and wonderful beings. Board games were definitely out because we argued like you’d never believe.
    Banishment to a cold bedroom to cool down soon saw us back in the warm dining room subdued and ready for another game, even if it was only “snap” with the cards. Then of course there were always newspapers to be cut into squares and threaded on string ready for use in the dunny.
    Mum always gave us plenty of