Not that there was much time for thinking about anything other than getting through each day.

The farm made a good living for the Pearson family. Swampy, and not the very best of dairying land it was, nevertheless, big enough to support a herd of seventy cows. Clarrie Pearson had a reputation as a hard man, a hard-drinking man, and a reasonable farmer. Before most of the smaller dairying units in the district had thought of it, the Pearsons had installed milking-machines and, in many ways, the cowshed was better than the family home.

One day followed another and the Pearson farm became Jake’s only world. He thought little about where he had come from. Occasionally he would think of his father and would wonder, very briefly, how he was getting on, if he had managed to find a job; jobs were scarce for one-legged men. More seldom still he thought of his little sister, Janice. He would shrug, almost indifferently, and send up a sort of prayer that she had ended up somewhere other than on a farm and with people who were the absolute opposite of the Pearsons.

‘You must write every week from your new land of milk and honey,’ his father had said. ‘When you have time from sitting in all that sun they say they have out there and you’re big and fat from all that good food.’

A new land of milk and honey? One thing was right, Jake would think; there was plenty of milk. Maybe one day he would find some honey. Resolutely, he would put thoughts of home from his mind. Above all he would close his mind from picturing his mother and the sight of her pottering around the little two-up-two-down they’d called home until the dreadful day they were bombed and half the street obliterated. Jake didn’t want to remember her touch, the soft and sweet smell of her, the sound of her voice as she called him or Janice in from the street. Deep within himself he knew there were some things that were better left unremembered—at least for now.

Just occasionally he would wonder about the others who had come out with him to this new land, that sometimes funny and sometimes sad collection of others, like himself and Janice, being sent to better lives. Not that it really paid to think too much about the few good times they’d shared on the long six-week sea voyage to paradise.

Not much time for thinking at all when you slaved seven days a week for a bowl of porridge, a slab or two of dry bread and a plate of grey stew. Not much time at all when you only had five minutes of electric light to shove another wad of damp newspaper into another hole in the corrugated iron that the rain had found to trickle through. A moment or two, sometimes, just before you went to sleep to wonder just when the half-crown weekly pay might start and you could hide it away, hoard it, save it in order to somehow get yourself out of this hell-hole.

Jake wasn’t religious but he did take to muttering fragments of the Lord’s Prayer, remembered from school, from another world. ‘Our Father who art in heaven, or is it which art, it doesn’t matter…Hallowed be thy name and let your Kingdom come and deliver us from all evil for thine is the Kingdom and dear God in heaven get me out and deliver me from this bloody place!’ and, as an afterthought. ‘Help the poor bloody cows, too. Thank you kindly, amen.’

The dairy herd controlled his life, from the moment he walked out in the dim, damp light each morning, opening gates and herding the beasts along the track they knew. If he liked anything at all about this place, it was the cows. The only time he spoke voluntarily was to the beasts. He hadn’t been worried about their size and had sensed, right from the beginning, that the cows were the only benign, docile presence on the property. He called them all by the same name. ‘Come on Big Brown Eyes, and don’t you worry, I won’t twist your old tail,’ and he would tap one on the rump. ‘Don’t you be lookin’ at me, Big Brown Eyes, and you get a move on before I get it in the neck and you, too,’ to another. ‘Do you have to shit right on my foot, Big Brown Eyes? I’ll thank you not to do that ever again and don’t you forget it! It wasn’t me sent your little baby to the knacker’s yard and you mark my words, Big Brown Eyes, your little one is better off down wherever it is. Well, I think it might be up in heaven by now. If calves go to heaven and I think they should.’ And he would yard them, bale them, wash their rear-ends and udders and have the right number ready before his bosses turned up to make the lives of the lot of them, cows and boy, as miserable as they could.

He learnt to separate the cream from the milk and haul the full cream cans to the stand down at the gate, one can at a time, using a sled built for the purpose. He stoked the fire that heated the water needed to scour the cream cans and the milking equipment, frequently scalding himself in the process.