Auntie Bess and the Colour Man
Rimless glasses, severe cheekbones made
unsmiling Auntie Bess the one we feared.
Staying with her you must finish your chores
before anything in the way of fun.
Weeding the vegetable garden
under a hot January morning sun,
grinding maize off the cobs for the chooks,
hand-turning the separator to extract
cream from the cow's milk; then hand-turn
the machine that made cream slowly
then fast turn into butter! dismantle
the machines and clean, clean, clean.
Reward? - drink the buttermilk, yuk.
Pat pat pat the lumps of butter
into shapes for the table later.
Some will melt on our boiling hot
cobs of 'sweet corn', some on the green peas
we'd shelled, the sour broad beans we'd shelled,
the new potatoes we'd dug and washed,
and boiled till they'd begun to peel.
*****
Bess had mislaid her first husband,
the mysterious Mr Beckett,
but not her daughter Shirley,
who was in town hairdressing,
waiting to marry her soldier boy.
Eric would be my cousin one day,
I might stay on their back-blocks sheep farm.
Shirley would teach me to bake bread,
Eric to break a rabbit's neck with one blow
if the poisoned jam hadn't done it in.
Bess was remarried - to old uncle Bill.
Now she was Mrs William King
of Kings Road (No Exit) in his farmhouse
where uncle and time shared slow routines.
Once it was a big farm - small now
to suit his stiff old age. One dairy cow,
two idle dogs chained to kennels
barking at me from under the pines, a dray
his one horse let itself be harnessed to
and ploddingly pulled taking hay
to the few cattle fattening for beef.
A tin shed out there too, for his old car.
Which only Bess drove now.
Uncle was in the dining room
slowly reading the paper
and clearing this throat.
Come along, we're going to town,
so auntie can see the colour man.
Her doctor despairs of her headaches -
someone must know what she needs for her back.
The colour man has taken a Napier room
and is seeing people in the afternoon.
Sister and I have a free hour on Marine
Parade with money for two ice creams.
Bess returns, straighter and taller.
No medicines to go to the chemist for -
she has what she needs on paper,
and it's not being shown to us youngsters.
Back home, she's moving her bed
(uncle sleeps in the other room),
so now it faces the other way;
she's tying colours from the colour man
at each corner of the bed-frame.
Something to do with cosmic rays.
She'll sleep on it. Next day,
already she feels rather better.
By the weekend much better.
By the next, maybe she needs
a further visit to the colour man,
as he'd predicted. Really,
the help he gives is worth more,
far more than he charges.
Bess is smiling seriously,
and so are we. The colour man,
he must have been smiling too.
Farmers' wives across the whole province
swore by the help he gave them. Hawkes Bay's
womenfolk after years of painful delays
at last were in line with the cosmic rays.
