Far From the Rowan Tree Day 29

Itook pleasure, believe it or not, in washing. Our clothes had got rather grubby at Redwoods. Here I made full use of my galvanised tub, setting it on the hot stove each morning and boiling all the clothes that would boil.

Every day I hung them out on the line to dry under a faultless prairie sky. Boiling water, frost and sun made everything satisfyingly bright and clean.

I would take the clothes in at sunset, enjoying the excuse to watch this magnificent event. Golds and crimsons merged and moved in the wide prairie sky to fill the west with an ecstasy of colour which reflected on everything below.

Sunrises were similar. If there was nothing else beautiful in this barren land, for this experience alone it was worth having come here! I never tired of looking.

Slowly Alberta began to seep into my blood, to become part of me, and I knew I was not rejecting this land. I was learning new dimensions.

Cut off

In some ways ‘Jacobs’ Place’ wasn’t lonely at all. Redwoods had been lonelier, more cut off from civilisation.

Here a gravel road ran past the front of our house. An occasional car passed, splaying out small stones that sometimes rattled on the cabin windows.

When the last vestiges of snow and frost had left the surface of the land, cars stirred up great clouds of dust that hung in the air like grey voile curtains long after they had gone.

About two miles away and easily seen from our house, rose a large green corrugated iron shed – the local ‘sell-everything’ store.

It would have been simple to walk there had I not had the children. It was difficult to push a pram along a gravel road.

I could have driven there after we got the Chevrolet but I required a Canadian licence. “Wait till after the baby’s born,” Ronald said.

Beyond the road running past the house, a couple of hundred yards further on, the super continental trains trundled their heavy way across the plains.

There was a railroad crossing quite near to us. Before reaching it, each train would blow its loud whistle.

The boys loved to watch these long trains, both freight and passenger, and spent a lot of time looking out the window to see if one was coming.

One day Richard said in a matter of fact way: “Mummy, all the trains whistle for me to come out and see them.”

Every time he heard the whistle, no matter what he was doing, he would rush out of the house to wave and wait till the long monster had passed.

There was a moment (Tom Jacobs knew it well) when the ground lost just enough frost on the top layers for the seed to be scattered.

No ploughing was needed on this land. The surface of it was worked with discs and harrows and the seed sown.

“They don’t use a plough here any more,” Ronald informed me, “they found it was causing erosion and that they didn’t really need to use it anyway. It’s a completely different method of farming to that back home.”

Long hours

It was too, and it now meant very long hours for Ronald. Before seeding time his hours were 7am to 7pm with half a day off on Saturday and only the essential chores to do on Sunday.

Now it was literally day and night. Tom Jacobs had four quarter sections of arable ground – 1,000 acres in all to be sown and three weeks or less to do it in.

“It wouldn’t be so bad,” Ronald complained to me one evening, “if Jacobs’ quarter sections were all together but some of them are miles apart.

“The sensible thing to do would be for Jacobs and his neighbours to get together and rearrange things a bit. The land looks all pretty much the same to me.

“Farms have not been long in existence here. The farmers don’t seem to have a sense of pride or ownership about their places.

“Tom Jacobs told me it’s just somewhere to scrape a living or make money if they’re lucky and have what it takes. They do it for as long as their health lasts and then pack up and go into the city or get a cushy job in a gas station.

“I’ll say one thing for them though, if they demand a lot from other people, they are equally hard on themselves.”

Tom Jacobs never gave Ronald much more information about anything other than what he wanted him to do.

Before May it looked as though the seeding of a thousand acres would have to be done by Ronald and Jacobs between them. Then one day, from across the lonely prairie, Adrian arrived.

Adrian, as the romantic novelists would put it, was tall, dark and handsome. He was English and came from the county of Somerset.

He and his friend Kenneth had come to Canada the year before and had found work on a farm in Ontario. Wanting to explore fresh fields, they decided to move west.

Adrian came into our lives like a chinook after hard weather. He was the laughing and irresponsible wind – didn’t know the meaning of the word serious.

Practical

Ronald, with all of us to care for, found it difficult not to worry, but there were no lines of worry on Adrian’s young face. He could take Tom Jacobs and his tantrums very much less seriously than we could.

We had been right to reserve our judgement about Tom Jacobs on that first day at the station. He was, as we had reckoned, a fair and just man, also practical and able, but we never quite understood him.

Firstly, you couldn’t tell him anything. Once when a cattle beast was ill and likely to die in the feed lot, Ronald ventured to tell Jacobs what he thought was wrong with it.

He also told him what he thought the remedy was, as we once had similar trouble with a cattle beast back home.

Jacobs didn’t want to know, to the extent that he did nothing about it and the beast died. After that Ronald was taken off the feed lot altogether.

He knew too much about cattle. Later, we heard he was the same with the neighbours. Nobody could tell Jacobs anything.

Consequently, he made some terrible mistakes by which, I expect, he learned.

(More tomorrow.)

Slowly Alberta began to seep into my blood, to become part of me, and I knew I was not rejecting this land. I was learning new dimensions