The wetness of water

Like so many of us, I love a rainy, dark, moody day. I love the ‘lowering sky’. I especially love a storm with thunder and lightning. Of course, I like it more when I am sitting under a tin roof, with a warm jacket and a glass of red wine.

It might be that I am a moody sort of person, or it might be that as a little bloke I spent a fair bit of time out in the rain. On a dairy farm in those days everything revolved around the times for milking, not the weather.

Sometimes in the season that is upon us now the Wells’ would leave Longwarry State School and step into the wind and the rain knowing that we would be wet and cold long before we got home. Still, it was only a mile and a half and the going was good. Up past the butter factory, on the south side of the line, over the factory creek (we didn’t know it had a proper name) and up the road past McReady’s farm to the railway sub-station, where the road curved away to Boxshall’s place. Onto the line for a bit and then down to the fence, under the wire and across the creek. Up the ‘railway paddock’ to the shed and along the track to the house.

Mind you, that had to be before the five o’clock whistle sounded from the factory. No matter how good our stories about flooded creeks, waiting for trains to pass, being set upon by wild dogs, having to win a yonny fight, whatever, none of them were ever good enough as excuses.

That creek could be fun, too. It had small fish, freshwater mussels and even leeches. There was a plank for a bridge and when I was in grade one I fell off it and into the water of a winter flooding, Dad was nearby and he pulled me out about 20 or 30 yards downstream. I was allowed to go home and change into dry clothes, but then I still had to walk to school and know that I was going to be late. The note from mum was cold comfort, as was the rest of me.

It seems strange, looking back, that we got so wet when we had rubberised raincoats and sou-wester hats like the fishermen in Enid

Blyton books, but we did not have gumboots until we got home (and we did not always have raincoats, either). You couldn’t wear gumboots to school, but if we got our school shoes wet Mum was not pleased. They’d be wiped as dry as possible, stuffed with paper and put in front of the fire. In the morning they’d be as stiff as wooden clogs.

Just by the way, they were gumboots back then, not rubber boots. That name came later and I even came across some stepbrothers from England who called them “wellies”. Dear me.

We wet and cold little kids, on the other hand, were not put in front of the fire. We had to go and get the cows. We’d have a ‘piece’, as we called it, a slice of bread with dripping and salt. That sounds a bit unhealthy now, but it was good tucker and it filled and fuelled us.

We found, too, that a feed bag with one top corner tucked into the other made a fine and fairly weatherproof cloak. Itchy and a bit heavy, it was dry (for a while) and sometimes even warm. We found that it was easier to leave the gumboots in the shed and get the cows up in bare feet (us, that is, not the cows) and there were three reasons for this.

First, in herding the cows up there were always a few flighty heifers we’d have to keep in the moving herd, like a good collie would. We didn’t have a good collie, though. We only had old Bluey (you can guess the breed from the name) and he was as likely to bite us as to bite the cows.

If there was any thunder about he stayed on the chain, because then he’d bite anything that moved, and he had a bite like a bolt cutter. You can’t run fast in gumboots, so we’d not use them. Our bare feet would get very cold but we could warm them by the copper in the shed, and our feet were, after all, quite waterproof. Dad said so.

Second, the rain always found its way inside them anyway because we always wore shorts. Eventually we’d be slipping and sliding around in them. It was easier not to use them.

The third reason was that in the winter the bottom half of the cow yard was more than half a metre deep in mud (it was about 18 inches back then) and if you got bogged in your gumboots you’d have to step out of them anyway, and then wriggle and fish and haul to get them out. By then any parts of you not covered in mud had not really been trying.

Still it was not bad. The copper would be warming water to wash the cows’ udders, so we could wipe off the worst of the mud, get fairly warm and even a little bit dry. There was also the very comforting feeling of leaning against a warm cow in its bail, soaking in the warmth and soaking in, too, the comforting smell of wet cow. I suppose you had to be there.

Smell is a powerful sense and the shed had all the smells you might expect, about equal parts mud and manure, but there was also the smell of the gum wood burning in the copper, the smell of the warm milk in the buckets, the smell of the kerosene hurricane lanterns, the small of the bran and pollard in the feed troughs – and the smell of the cows.

It is now a pleasure now to just remember them.

It was a pleasure to warm our hands in the udder-washing water, too. I suppose you had to be there to appreciate it. The greatest pleasure, though, was in finishing up the milking, washing down the vat and the cooler and the buckets, and getting inside to the warmth of fire and family.

It sounds like a hard life, and I could write a great many more words about it, but I am grateful now for the hardships and the rewards, because like all of those in my generation and before who worked the dairy farms, we learned to work toward and appreciate the good times, rather than just expecting them.