Meat For Our Pies
Rationing in Melbourne during the war years of 1943 was severe. No one could buy petrol, sugar, butter, tea and many other essentials without producing a ration coupon. There was a black market in ration books and many people tried to make counterfeit copies of the little coupons that made all the difference to your diet that week.
Good meals were difficult to prepare. All kinds of tasteless substitute were made and offered, for example, sausages made out of bread crumbs which had all kinds of additives to make them taste like meat, never really satisfied. However, there was one good alternative: you did not need ration coupons to buy a meat pie.
My parents sold thousands of meat pies each week from Moyes Bakeries, 591 Station Street, Box Hill, E 11, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, as I used to write my address on school books. A meat pie cost threepence but if you had “White Crow’ tomato sauce that was an additional halfpenny.
The meat was good. It was fresh gravy beef and my parents gave strict instructions to the butcher there was to be no fat and no gristle.
Jacky Walters was the butcher in Box Hill, just over Station Street from our shop. He used to mince the meat, carry it across the street on large enamel trays where my mother pre-cooked it in large cookers. It was then spooned out into pie crusts which would nestle in their tins. Thousands of pies were made by hand each day.
I often helped the bakers cut out the lids for each pie from the flaky dough and prick a hole in the top of each one to let out the steam so the pastry would be crisp.
As a five year old, I was waiting to start school in the early summer of 1944. I was known to all the shopkeepers in our city and used to visit them regularly. Our city only had two blocks of shops and every shopkeeper was a friend. I wandered in and out talking to people as young boys used to do, picking up a “spec.” banana at Cincotta’s the fruiters or being given a chocolate frog when I stopped to speak at Mr. Masoud in the milk bar. I said “Hello” to Mr. Ellis the florist and even went upstairs over Tait’s corner store to greet Mr. Tweedie the dentist.
So it was not surprising that I was also helping one day in Jacky Walters’ butchers shop. I’d probably been sent over the street by my mother to see if the meat was ready for cooking.
I loved to watch the huge meat mincer working. Jacky Walters used to cut the meat off a cold carcass hanging from the chrome bar which used to run from his freezer door out to the very front window of his shop. He thrust the meat down the throat of the mincer. At the other end, a plate with round holes in it, forced long wriggling worms of minced meat out of the machine. The mince would struggle and fall down into piles of tangled skeins on the enamel tray.
Some times a hand was needed to stop the overflow falling down onto the floor which was covered with sweet smelling pine sawdust, fresh from Payne’s timber mills and brought in sacks by old Tom Black with his horse and cart.
I loved helping in the butcher shop. I liked the way Jacky Walters would sharpen his knife on his steel with each swift stroke making a ringing sound. I loved the hanging carcasses of animals all naked and clean with blood dripping onto the floor and all over the butcher’s apron and white trousers.
Helping Jacky Walters was a special treat. He was a friendly man, one of my father’s drinking companions. He was the one who on the night I was born drank to my health and christened me by the name of “Mick”, a name which stuck and was used throughout my childhood by all the shopkeepers around Box Hill. The first time I was brought home from the little private hospital where I was born just at the back of the shops, he declared that he would never call me anything else but Mick, the habit which he has held to this day.
To call it a “private hospital” was to dignify the old house somewhat. Matron Tank had opened up her large old home and had been for decades the midwife for all the children born either in her home or in the home of our parents. Dr. W.A. Kemp or Dr. H.G. Judkins would always come at the time of birth, of course, but Matron Tank would make it clear that when it came to the delivery of babies, she was the one in charge.
Jacky Walters was a special friend. On this day he was cutting up meat and dropping it into the throat of the mincer where I lent a hand every now and then pushing it down the throat of the mincer. He was explaining to me how Hitler was on the run and the war should end soon. The Japanese were now the main worry and the Americans. They had saved our country of course but there were too many of them in Australia. They were doing no good being in Australia with all of their money and flash ways they should be up in the islands where they were needed.
Not very good fighters the Yanks. It was our boys who were pushing over the Owen Stanley’s and up the Kokoda Trail, and out along the Burma Railway. “The Yanks are too soft. They have to be flown in and driven everywhere. Nothing against the Yanks. They saved us at the Coral Sea from the Nips it’s just that the Yanks are overpaid, oversexed and over here!”
Naturally I agreed. I pushed some more meat down into the mincer when our conversation was cut short by excruciating pain.
The end of my index finger had just been cut off by the mincer.
I remembered that I did not cry just then. I pulled my hand out of the mincer and half the nail and the end of my finger was gone!
Jacky Walters swore, picked me up, and in a few strides we were out of the butchers shop and heading over Station Street to the bakery. My finger must have bled profusely. His apron was usually covered with blood anyhow, but by the time I was carried into the cake shop, blood was all over my hand and it appeared to be all over his apron and trousers as well.
Miss Perry, the forelady in the shop screamed and ran for my mother. A couple of the sales girls started to cry and run round the counter. Miss Perry was calling out for towels and basins of hot water.
My mother rushed up the passage from the bakehouse. She never screamed. She was calm and always knew what to do. She simply said “Over to Chessie’s”.
Frank W. Cheshire was the chemist in Box Hill. His shop was near the butchers. He too was a friend and a drinking companion of my father. So over the road ran Jacky Walters in his blood stained apron, with me in his big arms followed by my mother, Miss Perry with a fresh supply of towels, several girls from the shop, and my father and some men from the bakehouse catching up with the women, wanting to know what had happened.
Chessie was a big man, no, an enormously fat man. He had a big stomach and was always dressed in a white coat with a red carnation in the buttonhole.
His eyes were very watery and his bottom eyelids seemed to hang down on his cheeks. He always looked to me as if he was crying. His breath always smelt pink. Whenever anyone came into his shop he swallowed a mouthful of pink water from a glass just behind a partition that led from his dispensary into the shop before he ever went to speak to the customer. However, when the customer had left I noticed that he often a mouthful from another glass in the dispensary that smelt even sweeter.
Chessie knew what to do. Immediately he had some cream, some salve, some bandages, and soon the pain was gone and the finger and my whole hand was swathed in bandages.
That hand in bandages was the talking point for weeks as I did my rounds of the shops in Box Hill. For years afterwards people would often stop me in the streets and say something like this “You know I almost took one of your parents meat pies back to the shop one day with a complaint. I was enjoying it when I bit on a piece of finger with a nail on it. You would know to whom it belonged would you?” I would proudly show the end of the finger and how it was healing. To this day, it still hurts when I hit it, and when I type I have one index finger standing out above the keyboard.
I often used to look at the end of that finger and think of Jacky Walters the butcher, of Miss Perry running around calling for towels and basins of hot water, and of the sweet pink breath of Chessie the chemist, as I walked up Bank Street along the railway line to the top of the hill and No.5 Miller Street, Box Hill, a great city which was once a village where the adults were kind, and where the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
