The Last Orchard – Chapter 1
Uncle Vern's Farm
Leigh always remembered The Summer with Uncle Vern as a magical time.
Mummy had fallen ill with one of her vague but devastating complaints. That warm and busy woman, the hub around whom family life turned, had become a pale and silent ghost, keeping to her room. The doctor attended weekly, spoke with Daddy in whispers.
Daddy was a harried operations officer at the Port of Melbourne, tasked with cajoling stubborn captains and berthing ships that would keep arriving a day early and leaving a day late. He was utterly at a loss to look after three lively daughters for the whole holidays.
Marjory, the older sister he would normally have turned to for advice and material support, had fallen out with her husband and gone off in a huff. Moreover, on a ship. All the way back to their native Shepton Mallet in Somerset, England.
No summer holidays in Portsea with Aunty Marj and Uncle Reggie, then.
Mummy’s parents were out of the question: Pops was keeping fire watch on the farm with Uncle Jerry, and Granny was … Granny.
How about Uncle Vern in Tasmania, then?
‘Uncle’ Vern was in truth second cousin Vern once removed or some other such obscure branch of the Pelletier family. He and Daddy had been the closest of friends in their youth. Officer cadets together at Dartmouth, they’d spent summers crewing on racing yachts in the Solent and Lyme Bay. They’d been posted to the Far East Fleet in Singapore.
Visiting Sydney on leave, they’d agreed that this would be a fine place to put down roots, and that the peacetime naval life was awfully dull – and twelve years ‘a jolly long time.’
So they’d worked their notice, then emigrated. From Sydney, romance and career opportunities had taken them in different directions, and to different states.
The girls had met Vern only on a handful of family occasions: weddings, christenings and a funeral. Still, they’d taken an instant liking to him, and he to them. Particularly Leigh, the baby of the family.
The question was, could a busy orchardist take on three young girls for the entire month of January? And if he could, would he?
Daddy sent a telegram down to Hobart, and received a reply by return. Vern could – and he would!
Flying to Hobart was quite the adventure. None of the girls had flown before, or travelled anywhere at all without their parents. The Ansett stewardesses were very kind and they weren’t scared one bit.
Vern was waiting at the airport. He scooped them up into his vast black Dodge.
‘I only dust her off for special occasions, girls. And special visitors. I can’t have my nieces rattling around on the tray of the farm truck, can I?’
The girls didn’t really see why not.
Soon they were swooping around the bends, diving down the dips and flying up the steep inclines of the Huon Valley.
The sisters were shy and quiet at first, but by the time they’d reached the farm gate, Vern had them all chattering and laughing.
‘Is all this land yours, Uncle Vernon?’
‘That’s right, girls. All this land – as far as my eyes can see! Until I put my spectacles on.’
For city children from the busy streets of Port Melbourne, the farm in the hushed, wooded valley was a playground of vast proportions, a never-ending supply of discoveries.
The apple harvest wouldn’t start until the first week of February, so the three girls had the pickers’ bunk barn all to themselves. Everyone could have top bunk!
With naval efficiency, Vern assigned to each girl her own duty roster. Little Leigh, just five years old, was in charge of feeding the ragtag flock of chooks and collecting their eggs. Eight-year-old Emma was responsible for keeping the veggie garden behind the house watered, that hot, dry January. Ten-year-old Sophie kept the roadside stall stocked with eggs, jars of honey and produce from the garden.
When he had no guests and no pickers, Vern lived alone in the weatherboard farmhouse. Mary Jones, the dairy maid from the next farm down the valley, came up and ‘did’ for him once a week. Otherwise, he ran the ship by himself.
‘I’ve never had much time for marrying, girls,’ he explained.
Which was really no explanation at all, when you thought about it. Sophie considered Uncle Vern quite a dish, as she confided to her younger sisters. That caused some giggles in the bunk barn.
Vern was tall and fair-haired. His cheeks were as round and red as the apples he grew, and his energy as inexhaustible as the bees’ in his hives. He was cheerful and good-looking in a way that seemed somehow naive and wholesome.
Yet that twinkle in his eye hinted at a talent for mischief. Oh yes.
Uncle Vern may not have had much time for marrying, but he never seemed short of company.
His good mate Johnny came up from Hobart every Friday, and often stayed until Monday morning. The two of them spent hours in the workshop up the slope, hammering and filing, tinkering with something they called ‘The Contraption’.
Johnny was some sort of inventor. A mad scientist, the girls speculated. Like Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
He was very dapper, when he arrived in his fancy duck-egg blue Ford, in his fashionable city clothes. By tea time he was in grubby overalls, with soot or grease on his face and his hair sticking out at all angles.
‘What’s it for, Uncle?’
‘Ah, that’d be telling, girls,’ said Vern, tapping the side of his nose and winking at Johnny.
When pressed, the two men gave a range of explanations, each more absurd and creative than the last.
‘The Tasmanian Space Programme. Johnny’s going to land her on the Moon and shake hands with Neil Armstrong. Eh, Johnny?’
‘That’s right, girls,’ affirmed Johnny, solemnly.
Johnny wasn’t the only guest, either. Far from it. On Saturday evenings a procession of cars would rattle up the dirt road to the farm, and assemble in the lower paddock, rather than attempt the fearsome incline to the farmhouse itself.
As the dust settled there’d be laughing and whooping and banging of vehicle doors. A procession up to the house with cases and bags. Then, on the veranda or in the kitchen depending on the weather, there’d be endless tuning and squawking of musical instruments. Uncle Vern would take his saxophone from its battered old case, Johnny would tune his guitar, and the refreshments would flow freely.
Just apple juice or lemonade for the girls, mind.
At length, the tuning would give way, after a few false starts, to actual tunes, and floorboards would be bouncing under stomping feet. The girls were always disappointed to be sent to bed at nine, but Vern was quite firm on that point.
‘I promised your father, girls. Don’t get me into trouble, now.’
Saturday nights were fun – everything on Uncle Vern’s Farm was fun, in fact – but what Leigh loved most were the early mornings, when the mist hung thick down in the valley, like great wads of cotton wool, and the kookaburras and Admiral Nelson, Vern’s old one-eyed rooster, competed to call up the lazy sun from where it lay slumbering, beyond the wooded, secretive hills.
When adult Leigh looked back and tried to identify the seminal moment – that point in time and space where her love for nature began, the love which determined her career and her course in life …
Well, it was right there, right then.
All too soon, the holidays were over. School beckoned. Mummy hugged the breath out of the returned adventurers, and seemed almost her normal, warm and busy self again. Almost.
For years, Leigh yearned for a repeat of that wonderful summer.
Her parents and Uncle Vern fell out, though, in one of those obscure family quarrels that grown-ups were so fond of. Leigh and her sisters were never again allowed to visit the farm.
Vern had nailed his colours to the mast, and laid his cards on the table. He had put himself beyond the pale and must lie in the bed he’d made.
It was impossible to wheedle out of Mummy and Daddy exactly what all this meant. Even Sophie couldn’t. They fell to wild speculation, then shrugged their shoulders and got on with life. The Huon Valley was a very long way away. It might as well be in another country.
Henceforth, Uncle Vern was absent from family weddings, christenings and funerals. No more was his name mentioned in their household. It was a household which had more than enough troubles and crises of its own, after all.
Eventually, even Leigh allowed that apple-cheeked smile to fade into the sunlit haze of her childhood.
She was busy growing up. There was school, and rowing on the Yarra, sailing at Williamstown – and boys! Then there was uni, a B.Sc. with Honours in Zoology.
Sophie and then Emma fell in love, got engaged and in due course, married. Soon there were little nieces and nephews. Leigh took a little longer, but eventually she met that special someone, too.
At least, Ben seemed special, for a good long while. Too long.
Then there was her job. Ah, her job!
The frustrations and disappointments of a shire environmental officer in Melbourne’s peri-urban west had no end. She was seeing the last of Victoria’s precious native grasslands, the beloved subject of her honours dissertation, disappear under developers’ bulldozers. Weak regulations were blatantly flouted, prosecutions were rarer than the grassland earless dragon; fines had less sting than a leptotarsus costalis.1
There were times when her love of nature drove her to despair, and she cursed her career choice. But it was necessary work, that dogged rearguard action against a resourceful and devious enemy.
And so, the decades passed. So swiftly.
When Leigh was well into her fifties, she learned that Uncle Vern had passed away. He’d lived to the ripe old age of eighty-eight, stayed on the farm to the last.
In a sudden flood of memory, she remembered that summer, and felt a sharp pang of regret. What had he been doing all these long, long years? Why had she not made the effort to keep in touch?
Then she received a letter from a Hobart solicitor.
Coming up:
Next Tuesday in Audrey Liza: On the Spirit of Tasmania, Jamie meets a sceptical woman.
Next Friday in The Last Orchard: On the Spirit of Tasmania, Leigh meets a charming man. (Paid subscriptions.)
Author’s note:
The protagonists of Audrey Liza (Jamie) and The Last Orchard (Leigh) will feature occasionally in each other’s story. The stories can be read separately, and will make perfectly good sense that way. However, reading them together will add depth and contrast to the reading experience.
To give you all a feeling for how this will work, I’m sending the first three chapters of The Last Orchard free to all subscribers.
Grassland earless dragon – critically endangered small lizard, thought to be extinct in Victoria until its rediscovery in 2024.
Leptotarsus costalis – common brown cranefly: looks like a giant mosquito, but is harmless.