Shaving grandpa
When grandpa suggested that I give him a shave, I was more than a little daunted. I wasn’t old enough to shave myself and the tools of trade did not give me confidence. It used to make me wince when I watched grandpa’s routine for shaving. He always began by sharpening his cut throat razor from a leather strop which hung limply from the end of his caste iron bed. Methodically, he ran the blade backwards and forwards and intermittently tested the sharpness by cutting hair on his forearm. He then plunged a hand held brush into a cup of boiling water and applied a generous lathering of cream to his face. Finally, I held my breath as he manoeuvred the cut throat razor at all sorts of angles to accomplish the job. Luckily this was not a daily routine but more for occasions that required ‘sprucing up’, for church or travelling into town for shopping. I think this is why the task seemed so intimidating for me because grandpa often went a week without shaving.
I began by wrapping a towel around grandpa’s shoulders and started to apply the lather to his face. My first mistake was not waiting a few seconds until the boiling water on the brush cooled a few degrees before applying the cream. Grandpa jumped with the searing pain and immediately I started to feel nervous about the responsibility he had entrusted to me. I was relieved however when he gave me a hand shaver with a Gillette blade but even so it didn’t seem any easier. It was difficult to see where grandpa’s skin was under all that lather and the long white stubble was not coming off very easily. I wasn’t aware that you held the skin down with one hand to make the bristles stand up and that you then cut against the grain. These were skills that I was only to understand when I began shaving myself.
Of course by the time I had finished and gave the mirror to grandpa he was wishing that he had done the job himself. He certainly looked like he’d been in the boxing ring for a few rounds and no amount of dabbing with the towel seemed to stem the flow of blood from the many nicks I had made and I don’t recall him asking me again.
Grandpa was never one to be overly generous with money but when you consider he endured two economic depressions and witnessed two World Wars in his lifetime, you could begin to understand his caution. Besides, from what I could see, farmers never seemed to make much money except for the major landowners who often had the habit of swallowing up those poorer farmers left behind. Probably there was only that short time in early 50’s when wool sold for a Pound per pound weight that farmers really had it good, but mostly it was a case of battling drought, fire, unstable prices, the fallout from the common market in the 60’s, and a host of other problems that mitigated against reliable incomes.
One activity which always gave Grandpa great satisfaction was smoking. He smoked to relax and ponder, but as he got older it became very difficult to roll his own cigarettes. It took him quite some time to roll out the tobacco in the palm of this hand, remove the paper from its less that user friendly container, moisten it and poke the ends in of the completed smoke with the match. The finished product was often very bulky because grandpa’s fingers were far from nimble. He would then screw up a small piece of newspaper and light it from the open stove. This was fine in theory but by the time it reached the cigarette paused ready on his lips, the flames were often considerable. He then sucked the air in on his crudely made smoke and it was quite hilarious for me to see him contend with his false teeth dropping up down but when his silver, fringed hair started to smoulder I had to act. It was then that I decided to make smokes for grandpa. I use to roll out 100 at a time but they never seemed to last too long. He lived until the age of 87 and I think he was too tough to succumb to such things as cancer. The only time I ever saw him smoke filtered cigarettes was when Dad offered him some of his own Craven A’s.
After lunch, grandpa listened to a serial called ‘Blue Hills’ by Gwen Meredith. I think it went on for decades on the radio and for a kid like me it was deadly boring. When it was over, grandpa went for his mandatory daily nap and after that he sat on a large log for endless hours out underneath the pine trees. He usually draped one leg across the other lent slightly forward and puffed on this cigs. I often wondered what he used to think about as he vacantly blinked across the beautiful hills and distant mountains. Was he remembering the teams of thistle cutters from Winnenburn Station making their way systematically across the paddocks, or was he thinking of his immediate family who occupied the land across the Tarrenlea Road. The house had been taken by a bush fire in the 60’s but the generous pines still surrounded the area that marked his childhood. Was he remembering the struggles over the years and the people who used to occupy the now deserted farm houses? Was he pondering the folly of War that claimed his older brother? I was not to know because Grandpa was one to keep his thoughts to himself.
I used to enjoy the same classic story which he told over and over to me when I was a young fella about the steam engine trying to reach the summit of steep graded hill. Grandpa would get animated and mimic the sound of the engine: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…… And when it got to the top he quickened pace. “I thought I could, I thought I could, I thought I could!” A steam engine was thought to have started one of the devastating fires in the region in the 1950’s.
It was indeed a sad day when I received the news that grandpa had died when I was 18 years of age.
