The Sausage Tree by Rosalie Medcraft

to was about five miles from home and was owned by our landlady and her husband. We always let Old Mother Brooks know we were going there because if we didn’t we were sure to get into trouble and that always meant a hiding or castor oil and that was almost too unbearable to even think about. The old house on that farm hadn’t been lived in for years and years. At one time it had been quite beautiful; there was still some pretty blue flowered wall paper on some of the walls. The doors and windows were gone but to us it seemed much bigger, and probably was, than the one we lived in. The remains of the garden were still there and over the years the daffodils had multiplied so that every spring there were hundreds of lovely golden flowers spread all over the ground.
    Three or four of us would pick as many as we could carry and take them home. All this would take us about four hours. After a rest and some lunch we’d go to the shop and ask for some cartons. We were always shown a great heap and told to help ourselves. We knew exactly the sizes we needed. From paddocks closer to home we gathered more flowers. After standing them all in a bucket of waterovernight, we would be up early the next morning to pack the flowers very carefully into the cartons.
    By eight o’clock we’d be standing outside the gate on the side of the road with two shillings clutched tightly in our hands, waiting for the bus to come along. We’d pay the driver the freight and ask him to deliver all the flowers to the Launceston General Hospital to cheer the sick people who had no flowers to brighten their wards. After the second time we sent flowers, the driver delivered them free of charge. On one occasion we received a lovely thank-you note from two ward sisters on behalf of all the lonely patients who never before had received any flowers. Barbara, Rosalie and Wilma continued sending daffodils into the hospital until 1951 when the twins went to town to work, Barbara as a telephonist on the Launceston exchange and Rosalie as a trainee schoolteacher.

    Never at a loss for games to play outside, we could invent a game to play with almost anything and have fun. Many hours were spent playing on the woodheap as this was something quiet that wouldn’t worry Mum. Everyone in the town used waste mill wood for their stoves and open fires. The wood came in two lengths and was delivered by a man with his draught horse and tip tray during summer and autumn. This was a highlight for us but was overshadowed by the knowledge that we children had to stack all the wood—but before the horse and dray left we would be given a ride out the gate and halfway up the road to the mill. We weren’t allowed to go any further. This was the limit Mum set, but we thought we were made; this simple act meant so much to us.
    Stacking that wood was not easy; our poor hands used to get very sore from handling the green sappy wood. Wedidn’t have to stack the loads as they came, but we were expected to keep at it and stack a little each day. There must have been about twenty ton, because there was always at least twenty loads. With our imaginations running at full speed ahead we made the most of the piles of wood. There is a real art in stacking wood properly, and so that the wood we stacked didn’t fall down we built a square stack at each end. Sometimes we built a hollow square big enough to hide in, which was handy when we played hide and seek with the neighbouring children. They never did find that secret hidey-hole.
    Playing on the woodheap was made to last as long as possible and as we stacked wood from the dumped pile, one of us would be over in the middle throwing wood out to make a big hole which was turned into an imaginary bus with flat pieces of wood positioned for the passenger seats, and long thin bits for the gear stick and hand brake. The steering wheel was imaginary but there was nothing imaginary about the loud buzz-buzzing noises