The Milking Time

In 1813 while Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth fought their way through the rugged Blue Mountains to open up a path to Australia's hinterland, on a small farm outside a tiny village on the outskirts of Vienna, a youngster named Johnny forced his eyes open.

He shivered at the thought of leaving his bed for it was winter, it was dawn, and it was the milking time.

Johnny, well Johann really but everyone called him Johnny, was a dreamer. He was a scrawny lad who had lived in the city with his father, a beer hall owner, for most of his nine years. On medical advice he had moved to the farm with his Uncle Sebastian for six months in the hope that the fresh country air would help to strengthen his consumptive lungs.

He earned his board at the farm by doing such chores as milking cows and churning butter, but his heart was in the city and his soul was full of the music he had heard since the cradle.

When his tasks for the day were finished he loved to sit at Sebastian's old piano playing the music he had learned at the beer hall and trying out new ideas that floated, of their own accord, into his welcoming mind.

Unwillingly this morning he slipped from beneath the blankets and pulled outer garments over his nightshirt to make himself as warm as possible before moving out across the snow to the big barn behind the farmhouse. Thrusting his bony, bare hands into the pockets of his ankle-length black coat, a hand-me-down from his cousin, he slipped out into the icy morning.

He spoke to the cows as he entered the barn; he was fond of the animals and, if he didn't like the farm work he associated with them, he never held it against the beasts themselves.

Beverley was his favourite, a friendly old cow whose tail often beat time to the tunes he hummed as he milked. She was rather like a bovine metronome.

Moving a three-legged stool into position beside her he placed a bucket beneath her udder and flexed his fingers. Taking a teat in either hand and commenced the familiar routine.

Squirt-squirt, he squeezed and pulled at the same time. Squirt-squirt, he began to build a rhythm, humming tunelessly as he went. Squirt-squirt, then he'd pause for a beat, squirt-squirt and Beverley picked up the tempo, adding a swish of her tail to the space, producing an effect something like this:

Squirt-squirt swish, squirt-squirt swish . . .

Excited Johnny began to scribble lines and notes and treble clefs in the muck on the floor of the barn as he realised that he had discovered a whole new world of music. When he returned to Vienna he called his new rhythm "milking time" but years later, the Viennese gentry renamed it "the waltz".

But it was called milking time first, and it all happened because of a little boy called Johnny and a cow named Beverley.

This was set as an assignment at a weekly writers' group I once attended. We each wrote a topic on a slip of paper and dropped it into a hat from which, in turn, we selected our next assignment.

Mine just read "milking time" and being a city boy I didn't have a clue what to do with it.

When I discovered that my friend Beverley had been responsible there was always going to be some kind of pay back.