I wondered whether E stood for anything, like Edward or Evan. It was only later I found out why E was called E. There I was aged 16 on my first day at Tully’s cherry orchard just outside Beechworth. Mr Tully drove us up from the town in his ute. He was very much “”Mr Tully” to us. Sheer heaven. Cherries everywhere and you could eat as many as you wanted.
E pointed me to a large tree with branches dripping cherries. He left me three large wooden cases (the size of a banana box) and a metal bucket with some leather straps to put around my neck, and drove slowly off in the ute with the rest of the pickers in the back.
I picked and ate furiously. The metal bucket filled and I tipped it into the wooden box. Soon the case was full. We were paid a dollar a case. (And a 1967 dollar was worth, say, $15).
I started multiplying. One box in 45 minutes, meant 12 cases a day. That was $12 a day or $84 a week because they picked every day. Five weeks of holidays meant $420. This was a fabulous sum.
The cherries continued to fall into the metal bucket and I tipped them into the next case. I always wanted a transistor radio and a watch. Until that day in the cherry orchard they had been out of reach.
Another case in just under 50 minutes. I could even give my parents and brothers and sisters Christmas presents … generosity unheard of till then. My parents usually financed separate presents for each child from “”all the other kids”.
The sun was getting a little higher. I moved to the next tree. My picking rate slowed a little, but it was still pretty good, say, 55 minutes to an hour per case. I was still rich by any teenage standard. I even dreamed of a motor-bike. A friend of my brother’s was selling an ancient oil-spewing BSA. (It stands for Birmingham Small Arms, but my younger brother insisted that the length between the handlebars and the seat was perfectly suitable for someone with normal length arms.) Anyway, the motor-bike was in reach. E was a very short man with an officious, squeaky (though very Australian) voice. He was a bit of tyrant as a pickers’ supervisor, doing Mr Tully’s bidding.
“” ‘ere, what’s this,” E cried looking up. “”You can’t start a new tree without finishing the first one. Get up on that ladder and get the rest of them cherries.”
The ladders (before the occupational-health-and-safety obsession) had only one prong for a support, so they formed an unstable triangle. “”Up there, right up there,” E shouted.
I got the few cherries at the top of the tree and struggled down, spilling the ladder. At this rate it would take two hours to pick a case. Then E looked walked over to my first two cases.
“”That’s not a proper case of cherries,” he said. And he picked up one case and poured the cherries out of it on to the other case, creating a small mountain of cherries … as many as he could physically pile up. And he lifted the over-flowing case on to the ute while I stood aghast at the other case now one-third empty. “”That’s how you pick a case of cherries,” E said.
My mental arithmetic worked like a yet-to-be-invented pocket calculator … two thirds of a case in 45 minutes is a full case in 67 minutes, is only eight cases a day, is only . . . . is NO MOTOR BIKE!
And then he, too, looked at my depleted second case and lunged into it, picking out cherries with light brown bruises (that I had not noticed before) and hurling them into the dust. Then he tipped the whole case … and my earlier familial Christmas generosity … into the black-brown dust.
At an estimated $5 a day, I’d be lucky to earn enough to buy a watch. I was sweaty, knackered and sunburnt and E’s watch showed only 10am. Like the pickers in the Grapes of Wrath I knew then that manual labour was no way to fulfil dreams and that the joy of honest toil and sweat in harvesting the fruits of the land was romantic twaddle.
But the subversive humour of Australian workers was not. At that moment the supervisor was holding up the bruised cherries and saying, “”‘This is no good. “E can’t sell a cherry like that. If “e saw that cherry “e’d have me out of here. If “e comes down here they’ll be hell to pay.”
His reverence and fear for Mr Tully was such he never spoke his name. Then another picker, seeing the performance from atop another tree, yelled, “”Don’t worry about E, mate. ‘E does that to all the first-day pickers.” An irreverent, mocking cockiness was evident in the slight difference in pronunciation between E the proper noun and ‘e the improper pronoun.