Fairy Hills between 1940-1950

Every day between 1940 and around 1950 my life was full of activity due to a constant stream of people who were like shops (before supermarkets) coming to our front door with just about everything we needed.

They came in trucks or carts of all shapes and sizes. Most of them were drawn by horses. They’d stop every few houses with the sound of “Whoa” and then move on to the sound of “Gid’yup” – with or without the driver. They were very well-trained horses, mostly draft horses bred for this kind of work.

At some time during the day I’d come with my beach bucket and spade and scoop up the poo left behind on the road by all the horses. Then I’d bring back my buckets full of horse poo and empty it onto my Dad’s vegetable garden. He grew great vegetables.

In those days there was so little traffic that it was never a problem. You see, we lived away from the main roads so there was no through traffic, the only traffic was to and from the nearby houses.

First off I’d be woken early in the morning by the sound of the milk man coming in his cart with noisy bottles of milk. It’s hard to believe the milk man would come right to our front verandah, collect the empty bottles left there, and leave full ones according to whatever my mother had ordered in a note pushed into one of the empties. There would be a clank-clank of the bottles then the “Gid’yup” instruction to the horse, often before it was daylight.

Next came the baker with fresh bread I could smell even from inside the house. His horse-drawn cart was like the fortune tellers’ carts with his name and other words painted all over them (like the picture below). Inside were shelves loaded with fresh warm bread, rolls, buns and fruit loaf. Yummy.

Then there were the ice cart and the night cart which I’ve told you about. The ‘bottle-o’ calling “botto”would drive past in a horse-drawn dray collecting empty bottles to recycle for a few pennies each.

Another thing we didn’t have were supermarkets. Instead there was a butcher, a grocer, a fruit and vegetable shop, a milk bar and a deli (my mother called it a ham-and-beef shop), all separate shops in the shopping centre.

In those days most things sat in the grocer’s shop in big tins or huge sacks, very little in packets or jars or bags. Sugar, rice, flour, all sat on the floor of the shop in big hessian sacks, biscuits loose in big tins on a shelf. Everything would be weighed on the scales sitting on the counter. A black cat lived in the shop to keep the rats from eating all the exposed food.

The grocer, Mr Walters, would deliver my mother’s order that she given him while out shopping. Everything came in brown paper bags or wrapped in fish and chips paper. He would put everything on our kitchen table, take a pencil from behind his ear and write down the price of each item on one of the ends of paper. Then he would add them up in his head and tell my mother the price. No beeping checkout registers and no credit cards in those days.

Once or twice a week a Chinese market gardener would park his horse-drawn covered wagon full of fresh fruit and vegies picked straight from his market garden nearby. My mother would go to the back of the wagon and peer in at the produce. Then he would weight whatever she had chosen on scales hanging from the roof. Nothing could have been fresher.

Then there was the ‘rabbit-o’, as we called him. He would park his car on our corner and open his boot to reveal a whole pile of rabbits which he had caught himself. My mother would choose one, he would skin it on the spot and wrap it in paper. How did he skin the rabbit? My mother had a saying whenever she pulled my jumper off over my head “skin-a-rabbit”. That’s what it was like.

At the Ivanhoe Boys Grammar School a bit further along the scenic road that wound around by the river, called the Boulevard, they used sheep to keep the grass cut on their large playing ovals. So when the grass was eaten the sheep were herded along the road, past our house, stopping along the roadside to munch on any long grass they could find to eat. Cars had to stop and wait until they had passed.

The sheep also provided me with an excellent source of poo for my Dad’s vegetable garden.

During the war (World War II), until 1945 when I was 7, the Grammar School was a training base for the soldiers. So as well as sheep there was often the tramp, tramp, tramp, of soldiers marching along the road past our house.

(Excerpt from my book ‘Fairy Hills: A Memoir’ by Neil WJ Smith)