She was sitting in the sun, and her mind rolled back down the decades to the days, when war had ended, of repair and gladness and sadness and regrowth. The sun warmed her, and she told the story.
Winny was named after Winston Churchill, and Dynon after the great North Melbourne captain and centreman. Winny and Dynon were small bantam hens. It was 1947. Postwar optimism was co-mingled with severe shortages in materials, building supplies, clothing and food. It was called austerity. Australians were packing food parcels and sending them off to Britain - great and wonderful Britain - source of our laws and our stoicism and our culture and our ... recipes.
Len was twelve. He was my mother's younger brother. The bantam hens were his, and they lived in the back yard of the single-fronted terrace in Ascot Street, Ascot Vale, directly across from the racecourse, which had recently been turned over to public housing. Bantams can fly. It would have been easy for them to escape. Len restrained their flight to freedom with some chicken wire crudely attached to the fence.
My grandmother had grown up on a big sheep and cattle farm near Corowa. She was cooking by twelve for the house; and catering for the shearers by fourteen. She moved to Melbourne as a nurse at twenty and now, a decade or two later, was resigned to married city life.
One day in winter, Len and his older sister, my mother, sat down to the evening meal with their mother and father, my grandparents. The evening meal was chicken soup, warm and nourishing and fragrant and well-salted, with carrots and potato and turnips and barley and shredded chicken. Shortages were rife and raised the obvious question. My grandfather asked it. The table was in silence. I was told my grandfather left the house and walked the streets to cool down. Len was philosophical. He was already twelve. He wasn't a baby. He was promised more birds: ones you can't eat.
My mother recalled a big cage, and canaries and budgerigars, set up in the backyard, that spring.
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Then she went inside, out of the sun, to make tea. She drinks tea day and night. With honey, not sugar.
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