I have a memory, snapped years ago and preserved, like
all our memories in the unchangeable sepia photographs of our minds.
My husband was the only teacher in a tiny school near
Mudgee NSW. There was a fairly large
complement of kids in those years, scattered through the grades like dissimilar
pebbles in a conglomeration of the rocky outcrops from which their surroundings
were made. They were all so different
and yet they were all the same; lively,
likeable products of their farming origins.
It was hard, harsh country, almost on the snow line
between Mudgee and Bathurst. At first,
to my unknowing eye, it was a poor, stringy landscape, a meagre substitute for
the fertile rolling hills of my childhood farm. I learned soon, that the sheep
which roamed it’s flinty hillsides, produced wool which would eventually, with
prosperous regularity, be made into fine
wool suits; elegant garments which would
rest, cloistered, in the quiet and dignified atmosphere of some of London’s poshest menswear shops, waiting for elegant,
dignified Englishmen to buy them.
But I digress. I must hurry on and tell you about this
disaster.
The summers in [ privacy thingy ], which was
the name of the villiage, would fling their brief, baleful heat at the
countryside before retreating, beaten by the altitude into an almost autumnless
winter. The local kids would fill the brief summer days with boisterous stints of activity
at the local waterhole. It was a fairly
deep pool, with rocky sides defining
it’s spring-fed depths. Even in the heat
of summer, the water was cold. It was a pretty spot, partly overhung with
Eucalypts, where the water was dappled by the filtering sun. As well, there were flat rocks in the full glare of the
sun and the kids would stretch out like lizards on them.
On one occasion, we sat draped about
the banks in clumps of wet humanity.
After a bit one of the kids called out to me.
“Hey
Miss, come and look at these.”
This was from Chris, a fair-headed, sun-freckled boy on the verge of the
turbulent adolescent years. He was all
bravado and postering; a leader amongst
his peers. I picked my way along the
bank to where a group of boys was propped together like old-fashioned hay
stooks, looking at something held by James.
Into my hands he tumbled a bundle
of little skinny sticks which were all roughly the same size and colour; almost identical. I turned them over in my hands. “Where did
you get these?” I asked, puzzled.
“On
the rocks, down in the water, all over” they pointed and threw generous arms
out to indicated how wide was their catchment area.
“But what
are they?” I looked down at their newly-silent, squinting faces and fell right
into their game.
Chris was quiet for a moment,
gathering everyone’s full attention, then he said “Well, actually, they’re
these”. He took me over and began to
explain the gory process. Aparently, as
is the grissly inclination of small boys, they were in the habit of collecting
leeches, impaling them on slender sticks; turning their bodies inside out on
the sticks, putting them into the sun to dry and then extracting the sticks, so
that the dried leech body remained, forever rigidly repenting of it’s parasitic
lifestyle.
I told you it was a disaster. But only for the unfortunate leeches.
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