Fash-Back!

Flash Back!

From King's Cross Bread line to New Guinea House-cook

By Judy Tudor

LAST Saturday I was hovering uncer tainly on the edge of a ten-deep crowd in a bread shop—we are hav ing one of a series of bakers’ strikes in Sydney—when a Leviathan of a female with a protruding front, a fur coat and a hat like a bewitched pie-funnel, with a red feather and three yards of veil, evi dently deciding instantaneously that I was the weakest link in the horde between her and the counter, attacked me from the rear.

Before the well-aimed elbow of the old campaigner, and a thump at the back of the knees with a string bag full of assorted tins, I melted before her deter mined advance. She had the hypnotic eye that attracts shop assistants while lesser fry wilt and wait.

“I’ll have a wholemeal loaf—square— with crushed wheat on top!” she announced.

But it was the shop assistant’s picnic: “We’ve got white—round. Take it or leave it!” Then, as she warmed to the theme: “Don’t know what some people expect, I’m sure! Don’t seem to know there’s a strike on—and that it’s only through the goodness of master bakers, managing directors and such like that we are getting bread at all!”

The Leviathan backed out snorting, taking her fur coat, bewitched hat and string bag full of tins with her. And, in the vacuum caused by her departure, I got in.

“Next?”

“I’ll have a white one—round,” I said, meekly.

“Got any paper? You can’t expect us to put it in a bag! Bags cost a ha’penny and take away all the profit from the bread.”

I intimated that I would take it naked and, after another tussle with the still unserved. I reached the footpath. I examined my trophy—a poor, anaemic specimen, the misshapen product of a managing director, surely. “Well, think of the starving Russians,” I comforted myself, sourly.

But why hadn’t I bought half a pound of biscuits and let the bread go hang?

Whv this panic—this frantic, insatiable desire for bread? ♦ ♦ ♦

Fash-Back!

In place of the towering flats of King’s Cross, there are the towering mountains of New Guinea, and, at the base of one of them, on semi-level ground, a camp. In the camp sit I, harangued by the bread-making member of our outfit—soon, alas, to depart for pastures new.

“Have you ever lived on biscuits for a weeE?” he asks; and I admit that I have not.

“Well, it can’t be done. Whatever hap pens, you must keep the camp supplied with bread. There’s nothing to show you how.”

Bent on doing my Empire-building the hard way, and so raw that the original creases had not yet worn out of my khaki shorts, I agreed to everything with enthusiasm. “I’ll see that there is plenty of bread,” I promised. I watched him make two batches, and it seemed, indeed, that it was easy.

A week later, our alleged “cook” appeared, before retiring to his house for

the night, and announced in my general direction: “Bread ’e close up finis. More better missus work ’im new fella.”

“What the devil did he say?” I asked, catching a word here and there that gave me qualms.

“Bread is' almost out. Better make some more—Dad showed you how, didn’t he?”

I digested the notion for a moment, and then said “Certainly!” I took the lantern down off the nail and walked nonchalantly off to the house-cook—a frail erection about two feet from the front door that had been built so that all the smoke from the fire blew back through the house and practically choked us. In one corner of the house-cook, illuminated by a still dingier lantern than mine, the monkey washed dishes and wept into the basin. He had these periodical spasms of melancholy, but no one knew why. The cook said that he was “long-long” (mad).

The cook found the enamel bread-dish, dusted off a couple of cockroaches, shoved the flour-tin temptingly nearer to me, and then rested his elbows on the table, while he rolled a cigarette.

I went ahead as I had been instructed: flour . . . hole hollowed out in the centre . . . warm water and yeast (yeast didn’t seem to give forth a vigorous enough “pop” when the cork was removed!) . . . mix from the centre into the correct bubbly constituency.

The cook’s brown eyes followed every movement and a Pidgin sentence started to form dizzily in my brain. “You savvy work ’im this fella?” I got out at last.

He giggled coyly: “No got!”

“Well, clear out!” I yelled, at the top of my voice. Crestfallen and oozing hurt dignity, he crammed his half-smoked cigarette back in his bag and went. I covered the basin with the cleanest

looking rag available, placed it near the dying fire, and retired for the night. ♦ * ♦ CAME the dawn. The dough had not done what I had hoped it would do, nor as my instructor had said it

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would do: it was not overflowing the dish.

But at least it had risen some. It would do (I hoped).

The oven takes two hours to heat, I had been told; the bread takes approxi mately an hour to come “up” for the second time. To the oven then, forth with.

The oven was a clay contraption with a stone foundation, and about the size and shape of a large ant-hill. It was heated by lighting a fire inside it—the fire coming out as the bread went in.

The monkeys started a roaring fire, and I returned to my dough. I grappled and fought with it until the house-cook looked as though a tropical snowstorm were in progress, and I finally hacked off the required number of pieces for the bread-tins.

Once more it was placed by the fire.

I went down the river to swim.

An hour later the cook appeared to announce that the fire was ready. I went to my bread. Had it risen? Yes?

No! Nary a budge—the dough lay as I had left it: sodden greyish lumps in the bottoms of the tins.

“Make another fire,” I said to the cook, as though this were the regular thing in the place from whence I came. One, two, three hours went by; two other fires were made. By noon the dough had crept slowly and unwillingly three-quar ters of the way up the tins.

There had to be bread, and I was des perate. The monkeys and the cook were up the bush, cutting more wood —the wood-pile had vanished into the red maw of the oven. I raked out the remains of the last fire myself, shoved in the tins of dough, slapped a wet sack over the oven opening, and retired to the doubtful shade of a paw-paw tree to wait.

“In three-quarters of an hour,” my instructor had said, “the bread should be cooked. It should give a hollow sound when tapped.”

In three-quarters of an hour my bread was very black on top but the sound it gave forth was anything but hollow. It was ominous. The heat of the mid-day sun, plus that of the oven, was intense; I was caked with flour and wood-ash and rivulets of perspiration; and I was fed u$ “Take it away,” I said to the cook, who had again appeared. “Take it out of the tins and let it cool.” He understood the gestures, if not the words.

“Where’s the fresh bread?” I was asked at lunch.

“It’s too hot,” I said, brightly. “Better finish off the old stuff.”

But they liked fresh bread—by all means bring it in hot!

The cook transported it, exaggeratingly weighing it in his hand.

“All the same s’tone!” he said, trium phantly, as he thudded it on the table.

“Maybe it eats better than it feels,” I suggested, dubiously, hacking off a cor ner with difficulty and looking inside.

The interior was like very off-white, raw rubber. More, defeat as well looked out of that bread.

“Boy,” I said, resigned, “bring ’im tin biscuit!” ♦ ♦ * THE sequel to this initial failure is wrapped around the words, “They had to have bread.” And, in the words of the great Churchill, at the price of blood (or, in this case, burns), toil and sweat, they had it.

Made with “moulie” yeast, or coconut yeast, or yeast from hops, or patent stuff out of a tin, and cooked in clay ovens in the camps, or in a camp-oven on the track, and, at last, in a regular cast iron domestic stove, bread was an ever

pressing duty. I learned by trial and error.

In a civilisation where practically everything edible can come from a can, bread is a notable exception^ The Americans are fond of canning things—from music to marmalade—and in all humility I suggest to them, “Vacuum-packed, Oven-crisp Bread Straight from Factory to Jungle.”

Well, why not?