Sweet Home Summer

by Michelle Vernal

  Isla paused in her fiddling. ‘No, not likely but a ram on heat could.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I’m joking! We’re not likely to see anything other than a couple of horses grazing. Yes that’s it.’ The gate squeaked its protest as Isla pushed it open and she waited until Bridget and Carl were through before shutting it behind them once more. ‘Watch your step on these stones Gran.’ The path’s shingle was loose underfoot. A sign that read ‘Church of England’ hung from the smaller gate to their left, and behind the low wire and post fencing was a grassy area laid out in four neat rows of graves. Bridget pointed up to where you could no longer see the path. ‘Up the top, that’s where the Presbyterian and Methodist cemeteries are.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ Carl asked, following Isla who had unlatched this second, smaller gate with no great difficulty.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Gran?’

  ‘I gave up trying to figure it all out a long time ago,’ Bridget said sighing. ‘Religion’s got a lot to answer for in my book.’

  Carl looked at her curiously.

  ‘My parents were Presbyterian, quite devout too. I was a bit of a black sheep in that respect.’ Her lips formed a thin line that told them she would say no more on the subject.

  The grass surrounding the graves was long and tickled their ankles. A few of the heavier headstones were beginning to lean precariously, a large stone cross in particular looked like one good storm would topple it. Carl leaned forward to peer at the inscription on a headstone, the urn having fallen from the top of it, now lying by the side of the solid slab of stone, ‘Look! This man died in 1893 at the age of eighty-five. That’s not a bad innings for back then. He must’ve eaten his porridge for breakfast.’

  The grave was surrounded by a spiked iron fence that was orange with rust and covered in loose pebbles through which clumps of grass were beginning to grow. The headstone, like the others in the small cemetery, had lichen threatening to overwhelm it. Isla was aware of there being no sound at all except for their voices and the chirruping of birds. Surprisingly, it wasn’t an eerie place to be, she thought. It did have a feeling of calm and the inscription on the headstone her eyes had alighted on seemed fitting. Peace Perfect Peace.

  ‘Are you alright to walk up there, Gran?’ She pointed to the top of the hill.

  ‘Don’t fuss, Isla,’ Bridget said for the second time that day. ‘It’s hardly Everest.’

  Chapter 13

  They wandered up the path past a wooden caretaker’s hut and as Isla had predicted they saw a few horses grazing in the fields beyond the gaps in the trees. At the top, the view afforded them a glimpse of the rocky tips of the Southern Alps, their sharp angles peeking through the gaps in the surrounding bush range. They had a mooch around the Methodist Cemetery first, with Carl exclaiming over the old-fashioned names. ‘Look, Eliza and Abraham! Ooh, doesn’t it make you think of a fierce looking man with a tophat and tails, thumping his bible and a woman in a plain dress with a white bonnet, baking bread or something?’

  ‘Hang on, wasn’t that a scene in that old Harrison Ford movie about the Amish?’ Isla laughed.

  ‘You might be right. I do love a good Harrison flick. Now he’s a man who’s aging well even if it is dubious as to whether he should still be allowed to fly that plane of his.’

  Bridget had gone on ahead to the Presbyterian plots, Carl and Isla decided to hang back to give her a few minutes. She was standing in front of her parents’ double grave reading the inscription they’d chosen; in my father’s house are many mansions. She was lost in her memories.

  Bridget’s parents had lived through the Great War and had both lost several brothers to it. They’d also survived the 1918 flu epidemic and the Depression of the late twenties and early thirties. She’d heard her father talk about how he and his brother had been given the grim task of removing the bodies from homes at the end of each day when the flu epidemic was at its peak. Miraculously neither brother had succumbed to the dreaded virus.

  Yes, like their parents before them, her mother and father had known what it was to suffer loss and go hungry. That was why she’d forgiven them for the hard line they took with her from time to time as a child. That steely determination or stubbornness she’d been accused of more times than she cared to remember had been inherited. It had caused her to butt heads with her parents, time and time again throughout her childhood.

  Bridget herself had fleetingly, vague recollections of the shortages the Second World War brought with it. She did, however have a vivid memory of sitting on the floor by her mother’s knee hearing the voice of the BBC radio announcer crackling over the car battery powered radio in the evening. ‘This is London calling.’ In the mornings it was the now iconic Aunt Daisy who graced the airwaves, encouraging women with her household tips and to cook their way through the war. It was her mum who taught her how to cook though, not Aunt Daisy. It was a necessary skill back then in the days before anything frozen was available. It was a skill she lamented not being able to pass down to Mary despite her best efforts; she’d had more success with Isla.

  It was washing day that Bridget had found the biggest headache of all, especially when the rain didn’t let up, as it often didn’t for days on end in their part of the world. Their house had a large, back porch where the washing could be hung until it was almost dry. Then it would be brought in and aired out in the kitchen, hung from a contraption dangling from the ceiling. To this day she couldn’t stand the smell of damp washing in a house, and her one winter luxury was using the clothes dryer instead of stringing her whatnots about the house. She shuddered thinking that while life was harder, it was also simpler in some respects. She wished though that she’d found it easier to forget the hard line her parents had taken with Charlie. She could still hear her mother’s voice in her head. ‘Nothing is perfect Bridget, so it’s a waste of time crying to the moon.’

  With her mother’s voice echoing in her ears she moved slowly, almost reluctantly down the row of graves, coming to a stop in front of a simple headstone. There were no flowers adorning it because there was no one left to bring any. The family, Bridget knew, had moved away, unable to stay in Bibury after the tragedy. Most, if not all of them, would be long gone now. She shivered despite the sunshine. ‘I would’ve brought you some flowers Clara, but I didn’t know I was coming to see you today.’

  ‘Alright, Gran?’ Isla ventured resting her hand on her arm, perturbed by the strange look on her face.

  Bridget blinked. She hadn’t heard Carl and Isla approaching. ‘I was just remembering the way things used to be that’s all. This is where my friend, Clara, was laid to rest.’

  Isla looked at the inscription; she had died in 1957 at the age of seventeen. It was a year shy of the age she’d been when she’d moved to Christchurch to begin her design course. ‘Gosh she was young, Gran.’ She wondered why she’d never mentioned her before. It was odd given that they’d visited the cemetery every year when she and Ryan were small, to put flowers on their great-grandparents’ graves.

  Carl reiterated the sentiment.

  ‘Too young to die, far too young,’ Bridget murmured making her way back to where her parents lay before Isla could ask her anymore. She wasn’t sure whether she heard her say, ‘she’s been on my mind a lot lately,’ or not.

  Carl continued to walk around the small Presbyterian cemetery, but Isla trailed behind her gran. Her eyes settled on the plastic pot sitting on top of the familiar double grave where Bridget had been standing a few minutes earlier. The cloth roses it housed were faded, and she made a promise to bring her great-grandparents some fresh flowers before following her gran back down the hill.

  ‘Have we got time to pop by Barker’s Creek Hall, Isla?’ Bridget asked once they were all back in the car.

  ‘I thought you were there this morning for a meeting Gran?’

  ‘I was, but I want to show you what I was talking about when I said it’s been let go. You wouldn’t have had time
to have a good look at the exterior when you went along to your dance thing-a-me-jig.’

  ‘No Lights, No Lycra,’ Isla offered up by way of explanation for Carl.

  He shrugged. ‘I’m in no rush ladies, just so long as there’s a glass of something nice on offer afterward.’

  Isla started the car and drove back down the hill towards the hall.

  A rusty sign at the entrance with a missing letter ‘H’ from the word ‘Hall’ told them they were there and Isla pulled into the carpark. One lonely cabbage tree presided over the overgrown front garden area, and even from here in the light of day, she could see that the building’s paintwork was beginning to flake and peel.

  ‘Oh, I had some good times at the dances here back in the day,’ Bridget said, as much to herself as to Isla and Carl. She closed her eyes and could see the carpark as it had been the night of the Valentine’s Day dance when she first met Charlie. All the lads milling around alongside vehicles that were mostly borrowed from their fathers. Cigarettes dangling from their mouths in a practised, cool fashion, cat-calling as they smoothed their quiffs and eyed the girls in their full skirts heading towards the hall.

  ‘Gran met my granddad at a dance here. He was from down Haast way but came to Bibury to work in the Barker’s Creek Mine,’ she explained to Carl.

  Isla didn’t notice her gran’s expression cloud as she opened her eyes. ‘Clara and I met him here at the Valentine’s Day Dance in 1957. It was Clara, who went out with him first. She was a lovely girl, such fun,’ she said giving a small smile. ‘Everybody loved Clara. You couldn’t not.’

  ‘Was she sick, is that why she died?’ Isla hadn’t known her grandfather had been out with someone else that he’d met here too. It made her feel odd, and she felt a prickling on the back of her neck. It instinctively told her she was about to hear was an important story from her gran’s life.

  ‘No, an illness might have been easier to bear. Clara fell down an abandoned mine shaft in the hills up there.’ She waved towards the hillside with its felled logs and scrubby bush. ‘She hit her head and that was that. It was dreadful, for all of us, for the whole town. She was only seventeen.’ Bridget shook her head. ‘Death’s such a hard lesson to learn when you’re young and think you’ll live forever.’

  ‘Oh, Gran! I’m sorry, that would’ve been tough.’

  Bridget nodded. ‘It was, but it all happened a long time ago now.’ At times though it still felt like yesterday. Memories were funny like that.

  ‘Yes, that’s awful.’ Carl recalled the impact his dear friend Roz’s death had had on him. ‘But how did it happen? I mean to fall down an old mine shaft, surely it would have been boarded up?’ He did that funny thing with his face that Isla had come to recognize as a frown.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t like it is nowadays with Oscars breathing down everyone’s neck.’

  Carl looked puzzled and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, you mean Occupational Safety and Health, OSH.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I said.’

  He decided not to argue the point.

  ‘The area was an accident waiting to happen, and then it did. The men searched through the night for her and found her at first light. The womenfolk were all holding a candlelight vigil in the town hall waiting for news.’ Her sigh was heavy. ‘And when it came, it was the worst possible outcome.’

  ‘I can imagine how it must’ve affected the town,’ Carl said.

  ‘It did, her death touched everyone. Bibury’s had more than its share of tragedies. Mining towns are like that.’

  Isla rubbed her arms which were covered in goosebumps.

  ‘She’d gone to meet Tom up there.’ Bridget gestured up towards Barker’s Ridge, where the defunct mine was hidden by an overgrown tangle of greenery. A lone rain cloud hovered low over the ridge, spectre-like. ‘He was pulling a double shift and Clara’s father, Mr Brodie, dropped her off at the bottom of the hill. He was on his way to a meeting in Greymouth, and it was out of his way as it was. I suppose Clara thought one of the other lads clocking off would give her a ride back to town later. Her poor father never got over the fact he hadn’t driven her the whole way up to the mine, but he’d been running late, and Clara insisted she’d be fine walking. She was taking Tom a meal. He’d been working all the hours under the sun, and she was missing him. At some point she decided to take a short cut across the valley,’ Bridget said shrugging. ‘The shaft wasn’t boarded up properly, and she fell through it.’

  This backstory to her grandparents’ romance made Isla feel peculiar. She shivered, a chill settling over her from the story her gran had just told. Bridget wasn’t finished yet though.

  ‘It was grief over Clara’s death that brought Tom and me together eventually.’ She didn’t mention the grief she’d already been experiencing thanks to a broken heart. What she’d just told Isla and Carl was more than she’d ever told anyone and it was enough.

  ‘How come you have never talked about any of this before, Gran?’

  ‘It wasn’t time.’

  ‘And it is now?’ Isla was puzzled.

  Bridget nodded. ‘It is. Clara told me once that the Valentine’s Day Dance here was the best night of her life. It was such a short life, for someone who was so full of the joy of it all and there’s nobody left here anymore who remembers her except me.’

  Isla reached out and rested her hand briefly on her gran’s arm.

  ‘The thing is you see, I don’t want my friend forgotten. I’d like to hold a memorial of some sort for her here at the hall, but it wouldn’t be fair, and more to the point the council wouldn’t allow it in its current state.’

  ‘Oh, I think that’s a lovely idea, Gran,’ Isla breathed.

  ‘Me too,’ Carl echoed.

  ‘I’m the secretary of the hall’s committee,’ Bridget told him. ‘We had a meeting to brainstorm fundraising ideas this morning, but it wasn’t very fruitful. The problem is everything’s been done before and well, people just don’t get behind community projects like they used to.’

  ‘The interior was a real slice of kiwi history too,’ Carl said as they strolled around the outside of the building. ‘It’d be sad to lose that.’

  It was easy to spot the rotting boards amidst the flaking paintwork and as Isla poked at a timber sill, the wood crumbled to dust beneath her fingers.

  A circuit completed, Carl clapped his hands. ‘Come on. I think it must be wine o’clock. We’ll put our thinking caps on for some fundraising ideas over a nice glass of mulled red. It’s good for the brain, red wine, it’s do with all the antioxidants.’

  ‘Mulled red wine? Carl, it’s summertime and have you been to the Pit yet?’ Isla feared his illusion of a warm and welcoming West Coast pub with a roaring fire and the ghosts of weary gold miners past still holding up the bar, would be shattered when he stepped over its threshold.

  ‘No, and I’m looking forward to checking it out. Come on girls we’ve earned a drink.’

  Bridget quite like being called a girl, but she wasn’t feeling like a girl. She was tired with all the things weighing heavily on her mind these days. Still, a drink with her granddaughter and their new friend would be a nice way to finish the day. She exchanged a glance with Isla, knowing they were both thinking the same thing. Carl was in for a surprise when he got to the Pit.

  Chapter 14

  Carl side-stepped the collection of muddy boots as he pushed the door of the pub open and held it for Isla and Bridget. Isla walked in first, and the small group of men propping up the bar, clad in black singlets and shorts, all sat to attention.

  Her eyes moved on to the array of jugs lined up in front of them. It must be happy hour; she thought catching a waft of stale beer. It transported her back to her barely legal pub days. A quick glance around at the decor on her way up to the bar confirmed what she had suspected. Nothing had changed in over twelve years, apart from the publican. She didn’t recognize him.

  Bridget followed behind her, shooting one of the singlet men a sour look. It
was a look that spoke volumes; stop leering at my granddaughter because you’re old enough to be her father. Carl let the door close behind him and sauntered inside, eager for a taste of an authentic West Coast pub.

  His step faltered as with a sweeping gaze he took in the scene. It was a drinker’s hall, not a cosy wee pub. Down the middle of the room was a row of lean-to tables with stools and around its periphery were a smattering of tables with blue cushioned seats. He knew without looking that they would be stained. The cigarette burns decorating them would be a nostalgic reminder of the good old days for those who were slaves to nicotine. There were two pool tables on the far right of the lounge bar area with a door leading to an outside courtyard. One lonely smoker, stood out there chuffing away.

  Up ahead and to the left of Carl was the bar itself. A television set adorned the wall at the far end of the room, and the channel was set to the horse racing, although mercifully the sound was off. A jukebox was pushed up against the wall near an empty stage area. His eyes swiveled to his immediate left where two men were playing darts near the door leading to the toilets. He hoped their aim was good or one could get more than what one bargained for on a visit to the little boys’ room!

  He reached the conclusion that a classy joint, it was not. Isla had tried to warn him, he supposed, seeing her beckon him over to the bar. Looking at the group of drinkers standing next to her, he was glad he’d worn his checked shirt and jeans because at least he’d look the part. In keeping with his Southern Man role, he attempted a swagger. It was how he imagined a cowboy who’d been riding hard all day and had earned a beer would move towards the bar. Bridget and Isla watched in bemusement.

  ‘Do you think we should call in on Mary and ask her for something to help with that chafing of his?’ Bridget asked, wondering why Isla giggled, but she was distracted by the publican clearing his throat.