Ethel Turner

“ She saw Arabs wandering about the lines, offering their wares. She saw the drill-weary men stretched out in easy attitudes, letters in their hands, rough preparations for tea—loaves of bread, mugs, a packing-case broken open and marked in clear letters X Y Z jam.
And then there came into the scene a figure clearer than any of the others, and closer to her—a figure bulking large and grey, since it was right in the foreground, a figure walking slowly, carefully, his hands holding a burden of tins of jam. ”

“ HE was opening tins of jam, and exercising solicitude to avoid letting any sand make a way in. The men said that they were not proud, but they had an inborn objection to spreading the dust of the Pharaohs on their bread.
Violet plum, Cape gooseberry, Passion fruit, lemon and melon, quince—his eyes quite gladdened at the infinite variety that had unexpectedly turned up out of one of the new cases. For three weeks nothing but raspberry had fallen the way of the entire battalion, and raspberry is a confection of which it is quite possible to get too much. ”

“ His mother was bent on making the jam that day. His father was away, and he himself was the only one of his sex about the place. He could remember the sense of manhood that came to him when, overriding his mother's misgivings and his little sisters' squeaks of terror, he had armed himself with a great stick, and, basket over arm, had plunged boldly into the gathering. It was his first concrete realisation of the fact that the dangerous work of the world fell by Divine law to men. ”