The Far Country Read Online Free Page A

suppose you can always spin your own wool on the station and weave it can’t you my grandmother always did that better than this horrible bulk buying that makes everything so dear. My dear, thank you again for all your lovely parcels and your letters write again soon and all my love.
    “Your affectionate Aunt,
“E THEL.”
    “Keeps it up, doesn’t she?” said Jack Dorman.
    “Yes,” said Jane, “she keeps it up. I don’t like the thought of her living alone though, at her age.”
    “That’s since this Aggie died?”
    Jane nodded. “It looks as if she’s living by herself now, quite alone. I wish we were nearer.”
    He turned the pages of the letter back. “Who’s this Jennifer she speaks about?”
    “That’s Jennifer Morton, her granddaughter. Her daughter Lucy married Edward Morton—the one that’s a doctor in Leicester.”
    “Oh.” He did not know where Leicester was, nor did he greatly care. “This girl Jennifer works in London, does she?”
    Jane nodded. “Just outside London, I think. Blackheath.”
    “Well, can’t she go and live with the old girl?”
    “I don’t know,” said Jane. “I don’t suppose there’s much that we can do about it, anyway.”
    Jack Dorman went out to the yard, and Jane began to lay the kitchen table for the midday dinner. She was vaguely unhappy and uneasy; there was a menace in all the news from England now, both in the letters from her old aunt and in the newspapers. The most extraordinary things seemed to be going on there, and for no reason at all. In all her life, and it had been a hard life at times, she had never been short of all the meat that she could eat, or practically any other sort of food or fruit that she desired. As a child she could remember the great joints upon her father’s table at Sutton Bassett, the kidneys and bacon for breakfast with the cold ham on the sideboard, the thick cream on the table, the unlimited butter. These things were as normal to her as the sun or the wind; even in the most anxious times of their early married life in Gippsland they had had those things as a matter of course, and never thought about them. If she didn’t use them now so much it was because she was older and felt better on a sparing diet, but it was almost inconceivable to her that they should not be there for those who wanted them.
    It was the same with coal; in all her life she had never had to think about economising with fuel. From the blazing fireplaces and kitchen range of Sutton Bassett she had gone to the Australian countryside, milder in climate, where everybody cooked and warmed themselves with wood fires. Even in their hardest times there had never been any question of unlimited wood for fuel. Indeed, at Merrijig with the hot sun and the high rainfall the difficulty was to keep the forest from encroaching on the paddocks; if you left a corner ungrazed for three years the bush would be five feet high all over it; in ten it would have merged back into forest. Even in the city you ordered a ton of wood as naturally as a pound of butter or a sirloin of beef.
    Whatever sort of way could Aunt Ethel be living in when she could not afford a warm vest for the winter? Why
a
warm vest—why not three or four? She must do something about the washing. Was clothing rationed still? She seemed to remember that clothes rationing had been removed in England. She stopped laying the table and unfolded the letter and read the passage over again, a little frown of perplexity upon her forehead. There wasn’t anything about rationing; she hadn’t got the vest because it was expensive. How foolish of her; old people had to have warm clothes, especially in England in the winter. It was true that the price of woollen garments was going up even in Australia by leaps and bounds, but Aunt Ethel couldn’t possibly be as hard up as that. The Foxleys had always had plenty of money. Perhaps she was going a bit senile.
    She went and rang the dinner bell outside the flyscreen