A sign of the times, this scarcity of frogs, it seems. What with global warming, too few streams and ponds, and too many houses the world has become inhospitable for frogs. But a sign of what times, I wonder? That the times, they are a'changing? Now, when I was a lad (here we go again!) there were frogs all about. If one wanted a dozen or so frogs, they were easy to find. Often they kept you awake at night with all their croaking.
This week one of my brothers turned 83 (my other brother is 84); I bet they miss the frogs too. My birthday brother and I lived our first years on a small farm about twelve miles from a small town that was, in turn, some 85 miles north of the capital city; colloquially, we lived in the mid-North of South Australia.
How were our times? This was just before the outbreak of the second World War and toward the end of the Great Depression. You might think we lived a primitive sort of life. True, we had a motor car, and a truck, and our father had not long begun farming with a tractor having used horses in the early years of his farming life. On the other had, we had no electric power and had only a wood burning stove for cooking. No refrigerator of course, just an evaporative water cooler for keeping things cool. In the evening, our parents lit kerosene lamps. We were not cut off from the world however as we had a party line telephone and a radio that worked off a car battery (when you turned it on you had to wait for the vacuum valves to warm up so the sound came up gradually).
In America, and I suppose in the big cities of Australia, things were much more advanced. With the outbreak of war, an administration called Manpower sucked away all the casual labor left as men enlisted. My father found he could no longer run the farm and he too rejoined the Army. My mother moved into the town with my two sisters and me. My brother had moved to the city and my other brother had joined the Navy. Even in this small town, we were rapidly embroiled in the war effort. We knitted for the troops, collected all sorts of stuff to be melted down for the war industry, and wasted nothing. We grew our own vegetables as much as possible. Being in the town, we now had electric power but still had to rely of rain water collected from off the roof into two large water tanks. Alas, there was still the wood stove and the water cooler but now we also had an ice box with ice delivered! Each day the milk man called by, as did the bakery man. Every so often a grocery cart would come by or perhaps the haberdashery man. All horse drawn with the horses knowing just where to stop. The horse manure was prized for the garden!
Petrol rationing meant that only a few could continue to run motor cars; ours was put up on blocks in the garage. Some folk ran their cars on coal gas held in rubberized bags atop the bonnet (car roof) and others had gas generators mounted at the rear of the vehicle!
How quaint! These used coke, wood, or coal to produce methane gas to power the car. The cars looked just like this.With almost no cars on the roads, we rode our bikes about with complete abandon and virtually no road sense.
Looking back on it, I realize that ours was a wood and coal dependent society. If we had to travel any distance, it had to be by steam train.
Somehow we all got by. If something happened that was particularly frustrating, a common oath was, "Well, wouldn't it rip your ration cards!" Just after the war ended, the local electrical store featured an electric stove. We rushed down to see it in the store window display. How, I wondered, might a stove work on electricity?
No comments:
Post a Comment