Chapter X Lucy's Dream

When she was a very little girl, Lucy went to school. She took Puss with her to keep her company as the other little girls didn’t understand her need for a security blanket and teased her. One day they all went on a happy excursion to visit a farm. The farmer’s wife showed them how to milk a cow. Lucy really wanted to try but they chose a different little girl and Lucy missed out. When she grew up, Lucy still dreamed of milking a cow but she lived in the city & cows lived in the country. So she decided she would have to move to the country.

First she needed a husband to be the farmer so she could be the farmer’s wife. She was sitting in the pub one day reading about bushrangers when the evil Pignig Rug walked in. He was disguised as a man and Lucy fell for him. He looked like the perfect candidate to make her a farmer’s wife. His job was mopping-up on construction sites. But his friend was a thief and they considered Pignig guilty by association & he got the sack. Lucy had just had their first child, a beautiful little girl she named Matilda.

Now was the perfect time to start putting her plan into action. They leased a place in the country where they lived happily growing vegetables. Lucy learned about a new farming method called “the no dig garden” It worked brilliantly, and they grew enormous vegetables on top of the hard clay soil. They didn’t have much money but they had each other and that was all that mattered.  It was lucky that Lucy loved the picnic rug back then because they spent every day together for the next seven years before the picnic rug got another job. Their little girl Matilda grew up playing happily in her sandpit and playing make-believe.

They couldn’t afford a cow yet. They lived on a river with snakes and long grass. They borrowed the next door neighbour’s cows to eat it. They dug a hideout in the sandy river bank with some of the neighbour-hood kids. Lucy liked to watch the river flow. She got a job taking people out for coffee and cheering them up. She saved up every penny she could to put towards buying a cow of her own. But their landlord was a miser and he kept putting the rent up on their hovel till they could no longer afford to stay there. He even cheated them out of their bond money, he said they made the carpets dirty.

The little family found a beautiful big house high up in the mountains to move to. The new house was a palace compared to the cockroach infested hovel they used to live in. It was huge, roomy, comfortable and spacious with a back yard of yellow flowers and the ancient Wollemi Pine growing at their back gate. Matilda soon had a new baby brother which wasn't actually very good for her as he cried all the time leaving little time for Lucy to give Matilda attention. Sometimes Lucy’s father the worm would come up to help, to nurse and rock the screaming baby rocking in a rocking chair. Rocking was the only thing that kept him quiet. It was all quite miserable actually, but at least they had a nice home and Lucy cooked delicious meals. Until it got sold.

Then they moved down to the end of a road into a fairy house. The walls were askew and the doorways all crooked. It was heated by an old black furnace in the middle of the house and it had a room upstairs that to get into you had to go outside and climb up the stairs up the wall. At the top of the stairs Lucy’s head was high in the trees, the air filled with birds. Inside the room she could look down into the room below through a man hole cut in the ceiling. Sometimes she spotted their cute kitten, Vincent asleep in the bed with his head on the pillow and the covers tucked up to his chin or Postman Pat sitting up watching Postman Pat on TV.  It was her studio to write and paint; she could leave her stuff out without naughty children messing it up. She had precisely two hours a day to use it when William had his afternoon nap.

A fairy house

Matilda was a good little girl; she went to school on the bus and studied hard to be top of the class. William was terrible, he stayed home and smashed plates.

Magic red mushrooms with white spots grew in fairy rings and when they stood in them they were transported into other worlds where reindeers ate mushrooms and leapt high in the air, flying like Santa’s reindeer and Vikings ate toadstools before battle to transform themselves in mighty frothers with no fear of death. Or even further back, to the creation of civilization in ancient Egypt with Isis and Ra.

  

                     

The garden was strange. They raked up all the old fallen leaves, the home to black funnel webs, burned them all off and made a glade round the house. Tall, skinny turpentine trees grew round the house. The trees were homes to tiny birds and native animals, finches and fairy wrens. Tiny fairy gliders came onto the porch at night to eat morsels of food. They brought their friends; ring tailed possums and bandicoots, lizards and bush turkeys and animals that made weird noises at night. You’d be looking at a rock one day only to realize that it was looking back at you. The rocks were carved into faces and animals. They kept chooks in an old water tank turned on its side and the garden had a marvelous swing, a push-me-pull-you that could be loaded with kids.

Down a bushy track was a beautiful dam to swim in in summer; it had a punt to dive off into the strange green coloured spring. Their favourite mode of transport was a toboggan made from an old pram. It was a mad ride over the bumps and the sticks down the track to the dam, it was well sprung, past towering gums, through swaths of daffodils and sweet smelling jonquils. There were big red proteas and peach trees in blossom and apples and pears. At night the family went for torch-lit walks in the bush over hung with the branches of gum and wattle trees.  When they walked back the house glowed with a soft orange lights, like a dolls house, like magic, it was easy to see that fairies that lived there.

One day a huge rainbow filled the sky and Lucy set off to find the gold at its end. A grove of grevilleas all golden and glowing in the light of the sun, lit up in the seven colours of the rainbow.