"PARCELLING UP THE SCRAPS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 358, 3 May 1946, Page 22

"PARCELLING UP THE

SCRAPS"

(A Short Story

written for "The Listener’"’

by

ETHEL

FIELDING

SUPPOSE there are lots of feilows who would turn their noses up at my job, but I reckon it’s the best one I’ve ever had. It’s not a white-collar job, certainly, but when I knock off in the evening, and have a bath, and spruce up, I reckon I don’t look any different from any of the other chaps round about. My job has lots of points in its favour, You wouldn’t think there was any romance about it, either, would you? Just wait until I tell you. It is a very interesting job. It has variety. A chap sees hundreds of people daily. Well-I certainly saw hundreds of people daily, when I had my last job, driving a city lift. That nearly drove me crazy-shut up in a moving box, with a lot of people, all day long. But this job is different. You see people as they really are, in hair curlers, and sweeping their back steps, not dolled up, with the false personality they put on with their best clothes, You soon get to know if they are dinkum or not. Some of them will smile, and wish you "Good morning," when you come around the yard, with the bin on your shoulder, and others will just ‘look through you, as though you were a pane of glass. They never stop to think of how important the job is, and what they would do, if there were no garbage collectors. * % * a os OU learn a lot about human nature in my job. I can practically tell, from the contents of the bin, what kind of people live in the house, There are the extravagant ones, the food wasters . . . . good food spoiled, and thrown* away. Then there are the careless housekeepers. They lose things. I have already a collection of cutlery, and silverware, salvaged from rubbish bins, some of it is good stuff, too. . Cleaned, and polished, and put in cases, it looks good. Emmie will be pleased when she sees it. Long before I met Emmie, I knew from her bin that she was the sort of woman I liked. Neat and natty ... that’s how it struck me. All her bits of foodstuffs, and rubbish, neatly wrapped in paper, and stacked in the bin. It was a pleasure to empty. Almost dainty, it.was. I got to wondering what she was like. You gets lots of time for thinking, and noticing things on my job. We go-slowly along, old Blackie, the draught horse, and me, thinking, and taking time to look about. We start our job early in the morning. It is quite a large round, and a not very thickly populated suburb. s. * * * [Tt is surprising, how different things look early in the morning. The puddles of water, left on the road, by the over-

night shower, are tinted from the sunrise, and those little webs the spiders spin on the grass, are all beaded, like tiny spun-glass umbrefas. I told Emmie the other day about the things I see in the early morning, and she listened very seriously, and said that I was a poet, as well as a garbage collector. Emmie is very practical, and sweet. She tries to see things through my eyes, screwing up her kind, funny little face with the effort. But I laugh at her, and tell her it doesn’t matter, and that it is just as well for one of us to be practical-minded, and not given to seeing more than there is to see. * % 8 | WAS driving back to the Depot one evening when the thought came to me that I would like to marry Emmie. By that time I knew her name. I had found it, written on the wrapping paper, around the potato peelings — "Miss Emmie Myers"-and then I remembered part of a conversation I had overheard at the house next door. Emmie’s old father had died that morning. "A good thing," the voice said, "that girl has given 20 years of her life caring for the old man; ungrateful, he was too!" Twenty years! That made Emmie somewhere round about my age. I tried to picture her... . "Neat and dainty," I thought, because of her parcelling up the scraps, "Small-ish"-I had found a very small glove in te bin one day. ... "Patient and kind" he had looked after. her ungrateful old father for 20 years. Well, that was all right as far as it went. I could not marry Emmie by just thinking that I would like to. I had to meet, and speak "to her, first of all, and somehow, in all the months, I had not even caught a glimpse of her. (continued. on next page)

(continued from previous page) I found out afterwards, that she had watched me, sometimes, through the louvres on the verandah. She said that she liked me from the minute she first saw me, on account of how I looked happy, and her poor old father had been always very miserable, and complaining. She said ‘that she wanted badly to speak to me, but having been shut up for 20 years, so to speak, she had become afraid of people. But one day she plucked up courage. She had practised saying "Good morning," in front of her mirror, for weeks, and one morning she said it, but in such ‘a small voice that I didn’t hear. Poor Emmie! She told me later that she cried, % Bg * ELL-time was going on, and one day I left the bin, and came to the back steps and knocked. Emmie came out, and [I asked her if I might have a drink of water. She said in a breathless

little voice, "Oh, YES!" as though I had asked her if she would like a thousand pounds, She got the water for me, and I wondered what she would have said, if I were to tell her, right then, that I was going to marry her,.by and by. ‘For, as.soon as I laid eyes on her I knew that I had been right about her. Small and dainty she was, with a plain, kind face, and big, very young, grey eyes. She had some lines on her face, but not as many as me. I thought that we would get along very well together. Every week after that, when I called, she had a cup of tea, and something to eat, ready for me. I didn’t hurry her. She was so little and scary, somehow, and I wanted her to feel quite certain about me. Wellit has worked out fine. ... Sis Who would have thought that romance could come out of a garbage bin? But you never know!