The Sausage Tree by Rosalie Medcraft Read Free Book Online Page B

specialties we all enjoyed was her custard tarts. Another memory is of her lovely big home with the huge sitting room at the front where the big pianola with the music rolls were. We’d sit for hours pumping the peddles as hard as our skinny legs would go, reading the words as we sang along, forgetting for a while the reason that we were staying at Granma’s.
    Then there was the carpet-sweeper. We would grab it and race up and down the long passage “cleaning” the carpet. On one occasion the twins were tearing up and down when the dirt and dust kept dropping out of the sweeper. They thought they had broken it so they shoved all the dirt backthrough a crack and put it away. They didn’t know that it was full of dirt and it could be opened and emptied.
    Wilma’s earliest memory is back when she was about three years old and Granma arrived at our house in Lilydale and gave her a doll. It had a rubber head, a rag body and was dressed in a beautiful green dress with a matching bonnet with lace on it. She still has fond memories of that episode but doesn’t know whether it was in a line-up when us older kids decided to see how many dolls we could jump over. We do know that the twins rag “Dutch dolls”, a couple of other rag dolls and some celluloid dolls belonging to the girls over the back fence were carefully laid on the ground and we took it in turns jumping over the line. As we got more confidence we spaced the dolls further apart. It was a disastrous pastime as one of us didn’t make the distance and the celluloid dolls were never again fat and nicely shaped. Once again we were in terrible trouble.
    Granma loved poppies. Whenever we see those fragile, brightly coloured flowers we always think of her because when they were in bloom there were always two vases of them on her mantelpiece with more on the big sideboard and the dining room table.
    One thing we didn’t like about staying at Granma’s was having our hair combed. She and all her family had thick coarse curly black hair that needed a large wide-toothed comb to control it. We had inherited our mother’s fine mousey hair that Granma called cotton hair. When we grizzled and complained that the comb hurt our heads she told us we should have grown proper hair. No amount of “ouching” stopped that relentless bang, bang on our poor scalps.
    Although we spent such a lot of time at Granma’s we hardly ever saw Grandad as he left home early every day to work in the kitchen at the Launceston General Hospital.
    Granma had her own cures for all ailments and the onewe remember most of all was “ooka-tiptus” as Granma called it (eucalyptus) and jam. She’d mix that awful stuff in a teaspoon of raspberry jam and we had to swallow it. She was convinced that it cured colds, sniffles and upset tummies, but it did cure something. It cured Rosalie of eating raspberry jam—and to this day is it any wonder she prefers not to eat it.

    Although we hated Granma’s cure-all, it was much better than our parents’ cure-all for everything including misbehaviour: one tablespoon of warm castor oil. Yuk! To make sure we really swallowed it, Dad would hold our nose while Mum tipped the oil in our mouth and made sure it really went down. We had been known to just pretend and run outside and spit it out. The holding the nose bit made sure this couldn’t happen. Mum said she’d make sure we were too busy the next day to get into mischief again.
    One memorable day we older kids went over the back fence to Harry Brook’s farm to steal apples from his storage shed. Valda was made lookout, but when she saw Mr Brooks coming she got scared and instead of telling us she ran away and hid. We were marched home and Mum was told what we’d been up to. Would you believe that after having a feed of green apples we were given castor oil? Well, that was one time we wished for, and indeed needed, a second dunny.