by Nevil Shute
Jennifer said, “It’s quite all right—there’s really heaps of food. Of course, it’s not like it is here, or on the ship. But there’s heaps to eat in England.”
“Not meat, is there?”
“No. Meat is a bit scarce.”
“When you say scarce, Jenny, what does that mean? One hears such different stories. One day you see a picture of a week’s ration of meat in England about the size of a matchbox, and then someone like you comes along and says it’s quite all right. Can you get a steak?”
“Oh, no—not what you’d call a steak.”
“What about restaurants? You can’t go in and order a grilled steak?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so. You might at the Dorchester or some hotel like that that ordinary people can’t afford to go to. I’d never tasted a grilled steak till I got on the ship.”
“Never tasted a grilled steak?”
“No. Even if you could get the steak, I don’t think you’d cook it that way, because of wasting the fat.”
Jane asked, “But what do you cook when you go out on a picnic?”
The question rather stumped the English girl. “I don’t know,” she said, and laughed. “Not that, anyway.”
“You eat a lot of fish, don’t you?”
Jennifer nodded. “A lot. Do you get much fish here?”
“Not much fresh fish. I don’t think we’ve got the fishing fleets that you’ve got at home. We get a lot of kippers and things like that.”
“Like the English kippers? Herrings?”
“They are the English kippers,” Jane said. “Scotch, rather. They all seem to come from Aberdeen.”
“Do you get those out here?”
“Why, yes. You can buy kippers all over Australia.”
“They’re getting very scarce at home,” the girl said. “I remember when I was a schoolgirl, in the war, the kippers were awfully good. But it’s very difficult to get a kipper now at home.”
“Funny,” Jane said, “We’ve had lots of them out here for the last two or three years. It always makes me feel very near home when we have kippers for breakfast.”
The girl asked, “Have you ever been home since you came out here?”
Jane shook her head. “Jack suggested we should go home on a trip a few months ago,” she said. “But I don’t know. All the people that I’d want to see are dead or gone away—it’s over thirty years since I left home. And everything seems to have changed so much—I don’t know that I’d want to see it now. Our old house is a school. It used to be so lovely; I don’t want to see it as a school.”
“That’s what everybody says,” the girl replied, “that England used to be so much nicer. Of course, I only know it as it is now.”
“Old people have always talked like that, I suppose,” said Jane. “And yet, I think there’s something in it this time.”
There was a silence, and then Jennifer said, “Have you been doing a lot of shopping since you came down here?”
“Oh, my dear. Do you know anything about pictures?”
Jennifer knew absolutely nothing about pictures, but she listened with interest to the results of the picture hunt to date. She went to bed early with the Dormans, thinking that these were simple and unaffected people that she was beginning to like rather well.
She went shopping with them next day, feeling rather shabby as she walked with them on a round of the best shops. Jane wanted to buy a wrist-watch for Jack Dorman to commemorate their holiday, and they all went into a shop that Jennifer alone would never have dreamed of entering, and looked at watches; finally Jane bought a gold self-winding wrist-watch for her husband for ninety-two guineas, and never turned a hair. Clothes did not appeal to Jane very much—“I so seldom go anywhere, Jenny”—but shoes were another matter, and she bought thirty-eight pounds’ worth in half an hour. Jack left them while this was going on, and they went on to Myer’s and bought a new refrigerator for a hundred and twenty pounds and a mass of miscellaneous kitchen gadgets and equipment for fifty-three pounds eighteen shillings and sixpence. “We get down to Melbourne so seldom,” Jane said happily.
Jennifer wandered after her relation in a daze; she had never spent a morning like that before. Jack caught up with them as they were having morning coffee and said that he’d sometimes thought that Jane should have a car of her own and not use the station utilities, and he’d found a Morris Minor that had only done a thousand miles and was a bargain at a hundred quid above list price, and would Jane like to come and look at it? They went and looked at it and bought it, and then they had lunch and started on the curtain materials and carpets. “The homestead is so shabby,” Jane remarked. “I don’t know what you’ll think of it, coming from England. I must brighten it up a little.”
By tea-time they were all dead tired and they had spent about thirteen hundred and sixty pounds. Jennifer felt with all her instincts that the Dormans must be crazy, and then she reminded herself of the letter to Aunt Ethel and the statement that the wool cheque had been twenty-two thousand pounds, and thought perhaps that goings-on like this were normal to Australia. After all, Australia was on the other side of the world and so all Australians, and she herself, must now be walking upside down relative to England, so it was reasonable that all their standards should be upside down as well.
“We don’t always go on like this,” said Jane. “In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever done it before.” Later that evening she showed Jennifer a gold and blue enamel dressing-table set that Jack had bought for her all by himself, and had presented to her rather sheepishly.
Jennifer felt that surely there must be something wrong in spending so much money; her upbringing in the austerities of England insisted that this must be so. The queer thing was that here it all seemed natural and right. The Dormans had worked for thirty years without much recompense and now had won through to their reward; in spite of the violation of all her traditions Jennifer was pleased for them, and pleased with a country that allowed rewards like that. She had been brought up in the belief that money spent by the rich came out of the pockets of the poor, and she had never seriously questioned that. But in Australia, it seemed, there were very few poor people, if any. In her two days in the country she had seen great placards at the railway stations appealing for boys of nineteen to work as railway porters at twelve pounds a week, and she had seen sufficient of the prices in the cheaper shops to realise that such boys would be much better off than she had been when working for the Ministry of Pensions in England. It was all very difficult and very puzzling, and she fell asleep that night with a queer feeling of guilty enjoyment in Australia.
They took things a little more easily next day, and bought nothing but an English grandfather clock for one hundred and eighty guineas, because it was just like one that Jane remembered in her English home, thirty years before. They took delivery of the little Morris before lunch and Jane drove it to Toorak to show it to Angela, and after lunch they all drove out in the two cars, Jane driving the Morris with Angela beside her and Jack Dorman following with Jennifer in the new Ford utility to pick up the pieces if Jane hit anything. They followed the shore of Port Phillip Bay in the hot sunshine nearly to Mornington, and had tea in a café, a Devonshire tea with splits and jam and a great bowl of clotted cream with a yellow crust. They were back in the city in time for drinks before dinner, and then to the theatre to see Sonia Dresdel in A Message for Margaret.
Next morning Jane and Jennifer went out early in the little car to look for a boarding-house, and found one that they had had recommended in a suburb called St. Kilda, not far from the sea and about twenty minutes from the centre of the city in the tram. There was no room vacant for three weeks, which Jane Dorman considered to be a very good thing. Jennifer liked the look of the woman who kept it and bowed to the inevitable, and paid a deposit, and engaged the room. Jane and Jennifer drove back to the city and had their hair set, rather expensively.
“I’ll have to watch out how I spend my money
,” the girl said a little ruefully. “You’re getting me into bad habits.”
“We don’t go on like this at home,” said Jane. “I think we must be a bit touched, the amount of money that we’ve spent in these few days. We’ve never done it before. Do your father and mother ever go mad like this?”
Jennifer shook her head, thinking of the hard economies her parents had to make. “I don’t think you could do it in England, even if you had the money,” she said. “There wouldn’t be the things to buy—not the cars, anyway.”
They went to the pictures that night and saw Gary Cooper; next day they left for Leonora. By a last-minute decision Angela came with them. The virtues of a utility became clear then to Jennifer, because Jack Dorman went out in the morning and loaded up the refrigerator and the grandfather clock and about a hundredweight of kitchen gear, and came back and took on board five suitcases and Jennifer’s trunk. At about eleven o’clock they were ready to start.
Jane Dorman was not a fast driver, and the Morris was new to her; it was evening when they came to Leonora after a slow drive through magnificent mountain and pastoral country. Jennifer learned a good deal of Victoria as they drove; she was amazed at the brilliance of the birds. The robin was more brightly coloured than a bird had any right to be, and the red and blue parrots in the woods amazed her. Here birds, apparently, had few enemies and so no need of a protective colouring, and freed from that restraint they had let themselves go. Only the lyre bird, a sombre being with a long tail like a peacock, appeared to exercise a British discretion in colours. The rest of them, thought Jennifer, were frankly gaudy.
They saw wallabies at one point, hopping across a paddock at a distance from the road, and at another place a black and silver animal about the size of a large cat, with a bushy tail like a silver fox fur, ran across the road in front of them; she learned that this was a possum. She saw a good many rabbits, exactly like the English rabbit, and was told about their depredations and the methods that were used to keep their numbers down. The style of the small towns and villages through which they passed reminded her of movie pictures of the Middle West of the United States; the same wooden houses with wide verandas and tin roofs, the same wide streets, at one time cattle tracks. It was a gracious, pleasant country that they passed through on that drive, the grass becoming yellow in the midsummer sun, but a well-watered and a friendly country, all the same.
In the evening they came to Leonora homestead on the slopes of the Buller range above the bridge and school and hotel that was Merrijig. Jennifer was driving with Jane Dorman for the last part of the journey; she closed the last paddock gate and got back into the car, and Jane drove into the yard behind the homestead where the new Ford was already parked with Mario and Tim admiring it. They got out of the Morris, and stretched after the long journey. “Well, this is it,” said Jane. “Is it like what you thought it was going to be?”
Jennifer looked around her. All the buildings were severely practical, the walls of white-painted weatherboard, the roofs of corrugated iron painted with red oxide. There were numbers of great corrugated iron water tanks, cylindrical in form, disposed to catch the rain that fell upon the roofs, and there was another such tank high up on a wooden stand from which the house was supplied. The house itself had deep verandas on two sides and fly-wire doors, and screens on all the windows. Standing in the yard she had a wide view out over the basin of the Delatite, pastures and occasional woods, and behind that again the sun was setting behind a wooded mountain. It was very quiet and secure and peaceful in the evening light.
“I think it’s simply lovely,” said the girl from London. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a beautiful place.”
They turned to the homestead and started on the business of getting themselves and the luggage indoors, and the refrigerator, and the grandfather clock, and began the business of preparing supper. Mario had killed a sheep and butchered it and there was cold roast mutton in the larder; salad and tinned peaches with cream and plum cake completed the impromptu meal, which they ate in the big kitchen that was the central room of the homestead.
Leonora homestead had several bedrooms, but, with Tim Archer and Mario both living in, Angela Dorman and Jennifer shared a room. Jennifer soon found that Angela was frankly curious about England; the barrage of questions began as soon as they retired.
“Have you ever seen Westminster Abbey?” Angela asked.
Jennifer was taken by surprise. “Why—yes.”
“It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?”
The girl from London had to think a bit. “It’s all right,” she said at last. “I don’t know that I ever noticed it particularly.”
“It’s where they have the Coronation, isn’t it? Where the King and Queen get crowned?”
Jennifer wasn’t quite sure if the Coronation took place there or at St. Paul’s; neither of them meant a great deal in her life. “I think it is,” she said, and laughed. “You know, it must sound awfully silly, but I’m not quite sure.”
“I’m sure it’s Westminster Abbey,” said the Australian girl. “I was reading a book about the Coronation of the King and Queen in 1937. It had a lot of pictures taken in the Abbey. It must be marvellous to see a thing like that.”
“I should think it would be,” Jennifer agreed. “I haven’t seen it, of course. I was a kid at school, in Leicester. I remember that we got a whole holiday.”
“We got a holiday here, of course,” said Angela. “I was only little, but I remember Banbury was all decorated with flags and bunting everywhere.”
Jennifer tried to visualise the little country town that they had passed through all decorated and rejoicing over an event that happened twelve thousand miles away, and failed. “Really?”
“Why, of course. And then when the film came to the picture house Daddy and Mummy took me to it. It was the first film I ever saw; I think I was about five. It came back during the war, and I saw it again then. I’ve seen it three times altogether.”
“I remember it was a good film,” said Jennifer. “I saw it in England.” She reflected as she brushed her hair that Angela Dorman, then a little country schoolgirl at Merrijig, probably knew a good deal more about the Coronation ceremonies and Westminster Abbey than she did.
“Have you ever seen the King and Queen?” asked Angela.
Jennifer tried to remember if she had or not; surely she must have seen them some time, other than at the cinema. Surely she must have? In any case, she couldn’t possibly say she hadn’t. Recollection came to her just in time, and saved her from having to tell a lie. “I saw them in the procession when Princess Elizabeth got married,” she said. “I was standing in the Mall; they passed quite close.”
“How marvellous! The Mall—that’s the avenue between Buckingham Palace and the Admiralty Arch, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.” It was incredible how much Angela knew about London.
“Did you see Princess Elizabeth, too?”
Jennifer nodded.
“And the Duke of Edinburgh?”
“Yes. I’ve seen them several times.”
“Tell me—do they look like their pictures?”
“Yes, I think so—as much as anyone looks like their picture. They look very good sorts.”
“It must be wonderful to see them close to, like that,” Angela said. “I suppose you’ve seen everything there is to see in London?”
“I don’t know about that,” said Jennifer. “I lived in London for two years, but I was outside in one of the suburbs, at a place called Blackheath. I worked in an office there. I didn’t see an awful lot of London, really.”
“I’m going to London next year, if the wool holds up,” said Angela. “I want to get a job in one of the big hospitals. Have you ever seen Winston Churchill?”
“I’m not sure,” said Jennifer. “I’ve seen him on the pictures so many times, one gets muddled up.” She searched for a palliative for her disgrace. “I’ve seen Bob Hope.”
“Have yo
u really? Have you seen any other film stars?”
“One or two. I saw Dennis Price once, at a dance.”
“You are lucky. Have you seen Ingrid Bergman? I think she’s beaut.”
It went on and on, long after they were both in bed and growing sleepy. To Angela the English girl was a visitor from another planet, a beautiful rose-coloured place where everything that happened was important to the world. “I should think you’ll find it awfully dull in Melbourne, after living in London,” she said once. “Nothing interesting ever happens here.”
Jennifer could have answered that nothing interesting ever happened in Blackheath, but she forbore to; she had not known Angela for long enough to damp such a guileless enthusiasm for England and everything English. She herself, so far, had found Australia far more interesting than England. She liked the prosperous dignity of Melbourne better than the shabby austerity of London; she was deeply and inarticulately pleased with the good country she had seen that day, with the brilliant birds and the novel beasts that roamed the woods and pastures where there were so few people to disturb them. She could do without the sight and the propinquity of famous or of interesting people in return for these good things, for a time anyway.
She slept well, and woke with the first light of dawn to the sound of people moving about in the homestead; she looked at her watch and found that it was half-past five. Outside was sunshine and a man’s step in the yard; she rolled sleepily out of bed and sat on the edge. Angela opened an eye and said, “What’s the time?”
“Half-past five.”
“We don’t get up till eight. I never do.”
“People seem to be moving about.”
“It’s only Mummy. She gets up in the middle of the night all the year round.” Angela rolled over firmly and went to sleep again.
Jennifer got up and dressed in jumper and slacks, and found Jane Dorman drinking a cup of tea at the table in the kitchen; the fire was already lit in the new stove. She poured Jennifer a cup. “You didn’t have to get up,” she said. “Angela isn’t, is she? I thought not. I often get a bit of cooking done before breakfast, in the hot weather. It’s better than having the stove going in the middle of the day.”
