Free The Sausage Tree by Rosalie Medcraft Page A

encouragement to read and we can be forever grateful to her. Although money was very scarce we had “Boofhead” comics and “Humour” books which were full of jokes and riddles. We were member sofa club that was run in one of the women’s magazines. We also had our books that we collected as prizes at Sunday School. We were avid readers and we gradually and systematically worked our way through the books in the school library.

    As the dark cold days of winter warmed and turned into spring our thoughts turned towards kite flying. The strong gusty winds that blew on fine spring days had us itching for this outdoor exercise. No doubt about it, Mum would have felt the same way as she always helped us make our kites and they always flew high in the sky.
    Small slithers of wood were made and cut into the exact size as approved by Mum, one small crosspiece and one large one made the frame. These were firmly joined in the middle with a fine tack and finished with a crisscross of string. More string was fitted tautly around the four pointsof the frame, all under close supervision by Mum. Then came the crucial part. Thin brown paper was pasted firmly to the frame, the paper being folded over the outside string. As every parcel of meat and drapery was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, we always had a good supply of both. The paper was carefully folded and put away in a top cupboard and the string rolled and tied in a bow and stored in the “string tin”. A lot of string was wound in a special way around a stick of wood that fitted easily into our hands and the exposed end of string was attached to a central piece of string on the back of the kite. Lastly a long tail made of paper tied onto string was attached to the bottom of the kite. Now we were ready to go and fly our kites.
    It was Mum who made the paste, supervised five kites being made and then sent us off into the paddock behind the house to fly our kites high in the sky. She must have been glad to see us off and away from the house. It was very disappointing to spend hours making our kites only to find that the wind had dropped, but when the gusts came the kites danced high in the sky, ducking and diving and nearly pulling our arms off as we guided them clear of other kites. We never had a failure and all flew high and wide.
    In later years, no matter how hard we tried and used the same style, not one of us could make for our own children a kite that would fly like the ones Mum helped us to make.

9
Work and play
    Our life was by no means all fun and games. We had some hard work to do. One job that we had to do in the spring was to cut the grass in the front yard. This did not mean we had a lawn mower and a lawn, we just had grass that had to be, cut and we seemed to be always sat it. We had an old pair of sheep shears and an old pair of scissors. It was hard work and no sooner had we finished cutting than it was time to go back to the start and begin again. The handles of the shears caused us to suffer plenty of blisters but we’d tie a strip of rag around our hand and keep on snipping. We were determined to show that we weren’t to be beaten at anything.
    While the grass was short we looked for the corbie grubs that often infested the ground and fed on the roots of the grass. We made hooks on the end of long pieces of wire and carefully put it into the small telltale holes made by the grubs. When other kids asked us what we were doing, wetold them we were fishing for corbies. They then wanted to know what for, so we told them Mum was going to make us a corbie pie for tea and showed them the old pie-dish we used to put them in. We were only having them on but they looked as if they believed us.
    Because of the very real danger of snakes, keeping the grass cut was very important. Our first encounter with a snake was just after we moved to Lilydale, when Geoff was helping Dad pull up an old slatted wood path between the front