A scent of summer, compounded of bleached grass and eucalyptus scrub, filled the dry air. Summer sounds — the loud and unreturning hum of errant blowflies, the steady chirr of crickets — were all that could be heard by Mrs. McGillicuddy, standing at the door of her lean-to kitchen. She sniffed, and then looked carefully round the horizon. No smoke anywhere.

Her hand, cracked and grained with hard work and too much immersion in hot water, rested on the paintless doorpost. The wood was cracked and brown too, and hot and tinder-dry to the touch. “A high fire risk,” they had just said over the wireless.

They didn’t need to tell her. A north wind blowing, and the sun blazing in a cloudless sky — no, there was a little cloud, almost overhead, and of a startling whiteness against the blue.

Even as she watched, its edges frayed out and were lost, the whole thing dissolved and disappeared like a chip of ice in warm water.

She went back inside and stirred the jam on top of the wood stove, keeping to one side to avoid the heat of the fire. Then she sat down and cut out rounds of white tissue-paper. The jars were washed and ready on the table. As the scissors cut the doubled paper, her jaws with their wrinkled dewlaps moved in sympathy.                               

The apricot trees were on the south side of the house. They would make a fire-break if a fire came from that direction. But it wouldn’t; it would come from the north, racing before the dry breath of the wind.

 Down on the bitumen, the main road that went through the township, the big coloured warning-sign would have its indicator pointing to the red band in the spectrum. It moved automatically with the rise in temperature, and although it was only eleven in the morning the wireless had said the century was passed already.

She got up and stirred the jam again. It was about ready; too much boiling and it would darken in colour. The fruit had been exactly right this year, and the jam was a lovely colour, if she said it herself. It should take a prize at the local show this time. She couldn’t understand why the judge had passed hers by last year, and wondered darkly if it had anything to do with Mrs Carlson, the winner, being his wife’s cousin’s sister-in-law.

As she was lifting the heavy stewpan on to the wooden stand on the table, a man’s voice cut across the musical programme of hymn-singing from a city church.

“We interrupt this programme to tell listeners that a bushfire has broken out to the north-east of the township of Mybunga. All emergency fire services in the hills district are asked to stand by. Residents are warned that they may have to evacuate their homes.”

She stopped with the heavy pan suspended in her hands; then her arms began to tremble and she set it carefully down on the table. Wiping her hands on her apron — a nervous gesture, for the handles had not been sticky — she hurried out the back door and looked towards the north.

A great cloud of yellowish-brown smoke stained the blue sky in that direction, and there came the scent of burning scrub, which every summer she dreaded to smell upon the wind. The house was all she had now that Jim was gone — that and the pension, but who could live on the pension and pay rent as well, without the bit of land that provided so much of her needs?

Forty years ago they had come here. It wasn’t anything very special, and it had gone back a lot since Jim died, but it was her own. For forty years she had seen the sun rise over those tree-covered hills to the east (for she liked to be up with the dawn) and set behind the bare, grassy hills to the west. She looked at the dry yellow grass that covered them, blown flat and sleek by the wind. They had been company to her, those hills, in the last, lonely year since the old dog died. Like friendly animals covered in tawny fur, they crouched along the horizon.

How could they lie there so calmly, with that warning breath upon the wind? But she was beginning to wander. The jam would be cooling; she must get it into the jars.

But first she went to the well with every bucket and basin and jug that she owned, and stood them filled and ready round the back door. The precious rainwater in the tank she would keep until last. She never even considered the possibility that they might stop the fire; nor did she think for a moment of leaving the jam unbottled.

She kept the wireless on, and heard them call for emergency fire fighters from the city. “The fire is on a five-mile front, sweeping before the north wind, and has already entered the township of Mybunga. Tooberang will next be in danger unless the wind changes.” Mrs. McGillicuddy compressed her lips and dipped up another cup of jam. Her home was on the northern outskirts of Tooberang.

The jam was a lovely old-gold colour, and not too thick — just right, in the sample she had cooled in a saucer. She dipped another cup of the hot mass and poured it into a wide-necked jar, dollop-dollop-dollop, hearing the note rising as the liquid neared the top. She could almost fill jars of jam blindfold.

When they were all filled she wiped the jars clean with a damp cloth. She smelled the hot glass, the sweet, sharp, fruity smell of the jam, and forgot for the moment that other ominous smell of burning forest. She dipped the double rounds of tissue-paper into a saucer of milk, one by one, and smoothed them down over the hot jars. In a few minutes they were dry and firm as parchment, and the jam was sealed. Then she fetched the thick greeny-blue ink that she rarely used, and the quill-pen cut from a hen’s tail-feather that she kept for making jam. Once more her jaw moved carefully as she wrote, APRICOT, Jan. ’55.

Funny it looked when written, as if it ought to have two P’s. But she knew she had spelt it right.

January the second — Black Sunday, it was called afterwards. She was to wonder, later on, whether it hadn’t been a judgement on her for making jam on a Sunday — but the fruit had been just right, and all days were much the same to her now. And surely the Lord wouldn’t have killed several men, and all those poor sheep and cattle, just to punish an ordinary sinner like herself?

As she wrote on the last of the jars and looked up, she noticed that it had got much darker. The sun was veiled. She dropped the quill and hurried to the back door.

The sky was filled with clouds of yellow smoke, through which the sun showed dull, small and shrunken. Above the hills to the north-east the smoke was dark, almost black; and beneath it was a wavering line of reddish-orange, following the line of the hills. Her mouth went suddenly dry. She dipped a handful of water from the nearest bucket.

If she had a man to help her … if she had been able to clear all that long grass between the fence and the pine-tree that stood near the house … she thought of burning a break, but looking at the dryness of the grass, feeling the strength of the wind, she quailed. It would get out of hand in no time; she couldn’t do it single-handed.

The front, with its little green garden, bright with petunias and phlox, would be all right, and the south with its green fruit-trees; but to the north and west the dry, grassy paddocks, the patches of inflammable scrub stretched right to her fence.

The wavering orange line, shooting up now and then in a geyser of vermilion as some tree burst into flame, was moving rapidly down a gully towards the wide floor of the valley in which lay the township of Tooberang. An improvised fire-truck, with a square grey tank slopping water on to the tray, rattled past along the road. Men with knapsack-sprays clung to it; she could not see how many for the cloud of white dust that streamed out behind the wheels. She looked after them with a sense of comfort. She would not be fighting the enemy alone. She soaked two old sacks and laid them ready by the back door. Then she went in and moved the kettle to the centre of the stove. She might as well have a cup of tea.

Over the wireless they were now singing “O God Our Help in Ages Past”. She turned it off. She had to help herself, for there was no-one else. She threw three of the buckets of water over the woodwork at the back, and filled them again from the well. If she turned on the tap of the tank the rainwater would flood out and make a sodden patch about the back door, but then the water would be gone. She decided to turn it on for a little while. The water as it came from the tap almost burnt her hand.

Before she realised it the fire was upon her. A patch of grass by the side fence began to burn. She thrashed it out with a wet sack, and the savage strength of one who is defending all she has in the world. But one of the posts further along was burning now. She carried a bucket and flung the water over it; no time to refill it now. She resoaked her sack at the tank and turned off the tap, rushed back to beat out new flames. Her eyes stung and watered from the smoke, the backs of her hands were scorched.

But the grass was fairly alight now, and the flames, fanned by the wind, raced towards her. She retreated to the house, and despairingly threw some more water on it, while the fire, coming to the cleared back yard, circled to the west and approached the pine-tree. She felt a burning sting on her right shoulder-blade, and twisting her neck saw that the back of her dress was alight from a red coal. She threw a bucket of water in the air so that it fell over her.

A fire-truck stopped at the front fence, and half-a-dozen blackened, devilish figures leaped out. Mrs. McGillicuddy saw two strange shapes, like men from Mars, with swathed faces and knapsack-sprays on their back, appear from the smoke.

“Come on, Missus,” they shouted urgently. “You’ll have to leave the house. We’re trying to hold the fire along the road.” But she shook her head obstinately and picked up another bucket.

“Quick, Joe, grab her other arm.” And they hustled her towards the road, one on each side, just as the flames reached the pine-tree and ran up to the top with a roar.

“But me things! Me jam! Let me … ”

“You should have got them out earlier, Mum. We thought everyone would be well out of it by now. Haven’t you got a wireless?”

But she still struggled to go back, a wild figure with soot-streaked face and red eyes, damp grey hair hanging down to the shoulders of her burnt and torn dress. They put her in the truck and two of them drove her to the church hall where there were a lot of other evacuated people, and someone gave her a cup of tea that she drank without tasting.

That night the wind dropped, and clouds came up quietly and covered the sky. The air was moist and mild, though no rain fell. The fire was brought under control, although it leaped the white road to Tooberang, and many other roads, and thousands of incinerated sheep lay in grisly piles in the corners of paddocks, where they had climbed over each other in their desperate, panicked effort to escape.

The tree-trunks glowed all over the dark hills like the lights of a city, amber and red, and half the horizon was ringed with a lurid glow reflected upwards on the clouds. It was very quiet and still after the hot violence of the day. Several firefighters lay in hospital, and some were dead.

In the morning the sun rose in a clear sky. There was no menace in its heat; it was mild and golden, and the air was soft and moist. But the grassy hills behind Tooberang were black instead of gold; the hills to the north-east, yesterday green and blue with eucalypt-scrub, looked like burnt scalps covered with singed hair.

“Mother Mac” McGillicuddy, trying not to think of her own loss, helped in the emergency tents put up for the homeless. She comforted children who had lost favourite dolls, and wives whose husbands had been injured in the fire-fighting. They had all lost something, some more, some less, and they tried to cheer each other. She still couldn’t quite believe that her home was gone.

Even the following day, when she went back to look among the ruins for anything that might have survived, the full sense of loss had not struck her. The pine-tree had turned brown, the garden was withered, the tank gone from its stand; even the apricot-trees were scorched on one side. But she felt like a sightseer looking at someone else’s place. This could not be her home!

There was nothing left but a heap of twisted iron, charcoal, and ash. She poked among the still-warm ashes, and found the remains of the kitchen clock, a black iron saucepan still intact.

Then she noticed a queer, flat, shiny mass, it looked like pale green glass, melted and fused by the great heat. With a piece of wire she poked it out of the ashes, and suddenly realised what it was.

She turned away heavily, and sat on the cement edge of the tank-stand. She stared at the ground. Two tears formed and fell slowly down her lined cheeks.

“Me jam!” she muttered. “Me beautiful jars of jam … The best lot of apricot I ever made!”

First published in Overland issue 14—1959