The house that Jack built

Our house at Longwarry had the usual floor plan of the time. The back door opened into the kitchen with access to the wash-house and the office at one end. The passage (not a corridor in those days) ran due south to the front door, which was never used because Dad had not had time to build the necessary stairs. Equally there was no verandah. Verandahs were normally built right across the front of houses back then.
When you stepped into the passage on your left was the main bedroom and on the right was the dining room, so-called at the time because we did not have lounge rooms. The passage then continued with the other two bedrooms opening off on either side.
There were good rugs in the dining room (where no-one ever actually ate) but the other floors had the ubiquitous lino. It looked good and could take a high polish, but it was really cold on our feet when we got of bed. I remember that well.
I also remember the new lino being laid in about 1954 or so. We laid the newspapers we had saved to cover the bare floorboards.
Under the pressure of feet and movement and furniture those lines were developing from the day the lino was laid but as with almost everything else one accepted that nothing stayed the same. Everything wore and decayed and needed repairs time and time again until replacement was needed, a situation to be put off as long as possible. For there was no money. Or rarely was there money.
Perhaps sometimes the accumulated cost of the repairs however economically done would have overtaken the cost of replacement, but then time became part of the equation. Did 10 years of repair costs, for the mower, the roof, the tank equal the cost of replacement? Fifteen? Twenty? Perhaps the question, had it ever been asked, would have been purely rhetorical. Repairs could be attempted. If materials were available, newspapers, eight-gauge wire, old roofing iron, then repairs could be tried. Often they worked for another year, or two, or even more if one was lucky.
We did what we had to and what we could do, and we put up with the rest. I remember dad sticking cloth strips over leaks in the water tanks and painting over them with many layers of paint. It worked well, too, but the tanks did start to look a little patchy.
The weather sometimes decided the length of life of the repairs. On a dairy farm, and, indeed, on most farms the weather determined much of what went on.
The rain was usually welcome because there is something inside us that needs to feel the rain every now and again
When we lived in caves we sat close to whatever fire we could manage and we listened to the rain beating down on the rocks outside, running down the cliffs, swelling the runnels and the creeks and the rivers. The rain meant new growth, new life.
Later, when we came to grow crops the rain had a new music, as it wet the ground, swelled and burst open the seed, filled the veins of the plants so that they stood up ready to greet the sun when next it came. Now the music held within it the swelling, climbing chords of growth and promise and hope, of renewal.
Is this when came the quietly intense pleasure of listening to the music of the rain, from a warm bed or some other dry place? We learned to love the rain, even if we also learned to prefer not be in it.
We would leave school at about four o'clock with a three-quarter hour walk to the farm. It was more if we found interesting diversions along the way, and what country road, what swamps, what railway lines, do not provide diversions? On those winter afternoons our senses were somehow heightened. It was cold. It would be wet. It was winter, so that was to be expected. Yet there was beauty in it all, in the low, leaden roof of the world, and the brighter understory to the clouds away to the east.
There was drama to it all that was not lost on us, young as we were. The cold and the rain were not merely something to be endured, but something that simply was, that had to be lived through and that had its moments of beauty. The colours were metallic, lead, and silver, and pewter and stainless steel, and those colours held the sharp coldness of the metals, and they were beautiful.
To children of primary school age, say five years to 11, it had the delicious contrast in coming home cold and wet, changing into dry clothes, standing in front of the stove until warmth came back into our toes and feet and fingers. You get a strong sense of the joy of being home when you get near the fire and start to dry.
Then it would be time to go out into the weather again to bring up the cows, but now with an improvised raincoat and insulation, perhaps made from a hessian feedbag. If you put one bottom corner of the feed-bag inside the other you make a sort of hood and cape. It would be a little coarse for today's folk but it worked, and it smelt nicely of pollard, or bran.
We wore gumboots much of the time. A few people even then called them rubber boots but I'd never heard of Wellingtons. They kept your feet warm, as well as dry, until the rainwater started to get into them and then they turned rather slippery on the inside, but still stayed warm.
We didn't have a great deal of clothing and it tended to be passed down a few times. I said before in this column that I can still remember getting overalls (with short legs, alas) with a buck jumper printed on both side pockets. I wore them to school with great pride. They were the first bought clothing I ever wore, I think.
We had 'good' clothes for church. We had reasonable clothes for going to school, and we had some quite disreputable clothing that was held under the name of 'yardies'.
I'm afraid I have once more wandered far away from my intended topic, which is not all that unusual, but I'll come back to next week, this time I'll stick to it. Probably.