TOLD WITHOUT GLAMOUR

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 165, 14 July 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

TOLD WITHOUT GLAMOUR

LOST YOUTH.

A BACK-BLOCKS TRAGEDY.

0 FEE - W ORKED CHILDREN

(By DOMINIE.)

I hare & beautiful view from my cottage windows. My town friends delight in it, and during the week which they spend with me imagine that they delve deep into the innocence and charm of true backblocks life. "So remote from sordid care or the greed for gain," wrote one, an aspiring poet, it is true, in a letter to the paper on his return to town. Yet Ido not know. The smiling landscape holds its secrets too, and the bitter struggle for survival against Nature and the elements seems sometimes to blunt fine sensibilities and to dull bright minds. "Child Slavery." Of actual child slavery in the back- | blocks I have, it is true, seen very little, and the experience "of many years * ,g ° taught me that the country child is, on the whole, as fortunate as his city cousin. He works harder, but has greater compensations. He mis9€s pleasures, but he gains joys. He bears responsibilities earlier, but knows also the pride of achievement. Usually in the backblocks, where isolation restricts dairying, and poor pastures limit the size of herds, child labour is not frequently exploited. But the very isolation which renders such children immune makes it more difficult to cope with cases when they do occur. One has to rely almost entirely upon personal influence, for in scattered and lonely districts the force of public opinion is almost negligible. One such case I have never been able to forget. It was after the establishment of a dairy factory in our midst, a struggling affair, collecting indifferent cream from a wide area of deteriorated farms. Certainly I bore it a grudge, for from its inception I dated sleepy eyes and weary bodies amongst my flock. There came to our neighbourhood a family of share milkers, established on a large farm by an absentee owner with the laudable but visionary ambition of making the cows pay the interest on his mortgage. Personally I disliked the man X from my first sight of him—a suave person with a shifty eye and cruel mouth. The mother, poor soul, was a negligible quantity. Pretty, -ossibly, in her youth, she had long resigned herself to grinding poverty, a cruel husband, and a relentlessly increasing family. She and the elder five children milked a herd of CO cows by hand, for the owner of the property had not thought it worth while to instal machines. The husband kept out of the shed, having discreetly established a reputation for roughness and cruelty that frightened and upset the herd and lntule his family glad to be without liim. A Household Drudge. I taught five of the children, and they were docile, if not intelligent, but it was the eldest girl, Mary, who became more particularly my friend. At this time she was 15, with a face that could have been pretty had it not been so apathetic and colourless, and a thin, small, ill-nourished body. It was her amazing unselfishness and gentleness that attracted me. Her harassed mind and over-worked body allowed of little progress with her studies. On several occasions when she fell asleep in the early afternoon I found that she had had a sleepless night with a fretful ex-baby, and had been up at daylight to get in the cows. I remonstrated with her father, but with no success. So when I found the child wornout and incapable of further strain, I used to send her across the paddock to my house and let her sleep her fill in the orderly quiet of my bachelor quarters.

Her lot was the harder because the second child was a girl also, and three years younger. This gap in the ranks of the X children was to be explained by the death of an intervening boy. So that Mary had often to act as nurse and midwife as well as mother and cowboy, and the burden had prematurely bowed her thin young shoulders.

I have never forgotten my only visit to their home. The children had come weeping to school that morning with the marks of a stockwhip on their bare legs, and no man could bear that sight. In the evening I rode round to the unpleasant spot they called home. The latest baby was a fortnight old at the time, and the mother was down at the shed milking, while a six-year-old boy was in charge of the baby and of two other small children. All the rest of the family were milking the miserable herd, though even the half-starved animals were no more wretched than the family themselves. The sight of them haunted me for days, for they were ill-nourish<*d, miserably clothed and utterly apathetic.

The father, however, was not in the shed, and by the time I had found him my wrath had gathered fresh fuel. I fear that at times I am a hot-tempered man, and it is possible that I deserved X 's appellation of a "swaggering, fire-eating old bully." That even in tbe heat of the moment I could actually threaten with physical violence a man so much smaller than myself, has ever been a matter of regret to me. In any case my end was achieved, and I am confident that it was my threats of the police, and not, as averred by gossiping neighbours, the fear of a more active interference on my own part, which ensued protection to the children in future.

However, I was soon to lose my little friend, for the absentee owner .of thej farm became dissatisfied, and theX 's were soon on the move again. They went to another farm as share-milkersJ about twenty-miles away, under conditions that sounded worse, if possible,! than the last. j

The move took place in the middle of winter, apd X , true to type, repaired immediately to the new farm. The heavy end, as usual, fell to Mary's share. Situated as I was, at the junction of metalled road and mud, I naturally was frequently called upon to help. The horses' were so thin, the harness and gear so poor, that continual'trips had to be made. It was Mary who always drove, harnessed and unharnessed the horses, fixed the loads that would shift, and walked bare-footed up all tbe hiils •o that the younger ones might sit in