Ash Road by Ivan Southall Read Free Book Online

the proper sense. Most of the time they couldn’t be bothered with her because she was always wanted at home, and even when she said she’d meet them somewhere she hardly ever turned up. ‘Lorna George,’ they used to say, ‘she’s no fun. She always lets you down.’ (Pippa, too, had said it at times, angrily and irritably, though her anger was not directed against Lorna as a person; it was directed against something that Lorna seemed to stand for. Something
un-Australian
, whatever that might mean.)
    It was tough luck for Lorna that school-holiday time was also berry-picking time. Berries, along with carrots, came before holidays, before anything. Young carrots were a terrible worry during December and January; in the course of a single day tender plants could die in their tens of thousands, hot sun and scorching wind could burn them into the ground, and when that happened the Georges were in for a bleak winter, for carrots were the winter crop. Carrots were money during the winter.
    Night and day for weeks on end the diesel engine on the creek pumped and the sprinklers turned, protecting the carrots from the malignant heat and wind that seemed to strive to destroy them. Every three hours during the day the sprinklers were shifted, and every three hours during the night. It was an endless, wearying chore which John and his father took turn about. Unless it rained—and it didn’t rain often at that time of year—they never had a night of unbroken sleep; and they were up again at dawn anyway, when the heat was really on, picking the ripe red berries before the burning sun withered them or scorched them and rendered them worthless.
    It was a frantic season, a frantic struggle. Mr George would not employ pickers to help the family out, and every day the berries kept coming, kept ripening, and the hotter the weather the faster they came, until sometimes, as now, they came all at once. Mr George didn’t like pickers, he said, because they trampled his strawberries and rough-handled his raspberries. They did more damage than they were worth. Even more than that, he didn’t like paying them. They were a luxury, he said, that he couldn’t afford. Perhaps they were; but it all added up to form part of the illness that afflicted Lorna’s mother. She hated the physical misery of summer with an evil-tempered hatred. Perhaps the doctors realized that, perhaps they didn’t; anyway, they took her away from it and she rested blissfully in her convalescent home while Lorna (at fourteen years and three months) cooked and swept and washed clothes and helped with the picking and snatched at her holidays—an hour here and an hour there—when her father would allow her.
    To John it was painfully clear that his kid sister had a colourless life. She was much too patient, much too good-natured. The paddock was no place for a girl of her age at this hour, for a girl who had to look after the house and get the meals and everything else as well. She should still be in bed asleep instead of staining her hands almost indelibly with a lot of useless fruit, smearing dirt and juices and sweat across her face every time she brushed the hair from her eyes.
    His father was a stubborn old fool; he’d call black white if it suited him. Any reasonable man would admit that the crop was a write-off and start trying to live with the idea. If Lorna were to achieve anything by being here, all right, let her pick; but this was senseless; no less ridiculous than denying the reality of the smoke in the air. Telephone call or no telephone call, John knew he should be on duty. It was his place on a day like this. It was not as if he lived and worked fifty yards from the first station; he lived and worked three miles out. It was too far in an emergency. The other firefighters would be compelled to go without him. And this would be like a ship putting to sea without a navigator.
    â€˜For crying out loud,