The nightmare of the correct ordering of letters fades from Brennan’s face. He beams. If there is to be singing, Brennan will be asked to sing solo. His chunky little body produces a voice as open and clear as the summer sky. He would sing all day, and most would stop to listen.
‘We could sing “Rose of Tralee”,’ says Rose of Tralee.
‘We could indeed,’ says Mrs Rasmussen, trying not to notice the fresh bruise under Rose’s eye, and her tangled unwashed hair. ‘And Rose could sing solo. Wouldn’t that charm any Inspector from Nelson now?’
Bella Rasmussen ignores for the moment Brennan’s black brows descending; Rose needs something to live for.
But the miners’ children have other ideas. Rosser Scobie wants ‘Bread of Heaven’ with the older boys doing the bass part. Dylan Rees thinks ‘All Through the Night’ would be more suitable.
‘I can do verse two of that one,’ offers Brennan, still hoping for a solo.
Mrs Rasmussen smiles at the enthusiasm. ‘Well, children, this is an occasion. It would seem that a bracket is called for. And if my husband is not on duty, he may accompany us on the accordion.’
There is general excitement over this. Con the Brake’s accordion brings out the best in everyone.
‘But can he play “Bread of Heaven”?’ asks Andrew Scobie. The twins are determined to sing the bass part, which they have just learned at Chapel.
Brennan’s hand goes up. ‘My father can play “Bread of Heaven” on the cornet. And our brother can do tenor horn.’
‘And Uncle Arnold …’
‘No, he can’t.’
‘He can. He has a trombone under his bed.’
‘And David …’
‘No, Dad says he’s not good enough yet.’
‘But he can do “Bread of Heaven”, can’t he, Rosser?’
‘Anyone can do “Bread of Heaven”.’
‘Not David — he can’t,’ says Rosser Scobie.
‘Not David,’ agrees young Brennan, and the Scobies are quiet for a moment.
‘Well now,’ says Mrs Rasmussen into the silence, ‘I did not know Denniston had a brass band in its midst. I believe an entire concert may be called for, not a single bracket. We will invite the Inspector to stay the night. What do you say, children, to an Entertainment! We will surprise him, shall we, and the whole of Denniston, and raise funds for the new school?’
Everyone pays homage to this shining idea.
‘Will you sing too, Mrs Rasmussen?’ asks Michael Hanratty, who has heard her rich, swooping voice rise from the parlour late at night as he lies in his bed upstairs. He can never catch the words but her songs throb with feelings so powerful that the boy can hardly bear it. He finds himself moaning and thrashing under the blankets until the voice sobs and sinks its way to the end.
‘Well, Michael, we shall see,’ says pink Bella Rasmussen, itching to kick up her heels and dance a step or two to show the children what she can do, but mindful of her new position in society.
‘And another thing,’ she adds. ‘While the Inspector is here, Mrs Hanratty will be your teacher.’
‘Why?’ asks Rose. Her favourite word.
‘It is a secret. A game. She will be teacher, and I will be her assistant.’
UP the plateau at Scobies’ the twins and Brennan are jumping around their father like a pack of eager puppies.
‘She wants a brass band, Dad, for the concert.’
‘She wants “Bread of Heaven”.’
‘Does she now?’ says Josiah Scobie.
‘She wants an Item of our Choice, too.’
‘David’s not ready,’ says Josiah, ruffling fifteen-year-old David’s wiry hair. David is now first boy in the family.
‘It’s three or four weeks away, Dad.’
‘Chapel is one thing,’ says Mary Scobie, ‘but to play in a concert, in the town, is another.’
The boys wait. They know what this is about and look to their father. Josiah sighs and nods to his wife. They are seated at their own table in their own home, built by the Scobie men and boys, and there is good food in front of them.
‘We cannot stay up in Burnett’s Face here forever, Mother,’ says Josiah. ‘The twins and young Brennan here have made the move, and we must too. Denniston should be one community. We have a need to stand together.’
Mary’s plate is barely touched. She has grown thinner. The steady warmth that used to draw people to her has faded. She clasps her head as if she would tear out the thoughts in it.
‘I know you are right, Josiah. I know it with my head. The heart is another matter. But you must get a band together and play for them. I will come if I can.’
The boys still wait. Josiah pushes himself up from the table, walks with a heavy tread around to Mary’s end. He puts one rough hand on her shoulder. The boys have never seen him so gentle with her.
‘You will find the strength, with the Lord’s help.’
He looks at the boys with a grin that is like fresh sea air entering the house.
‘Well, lads, we will make up a band, shall we? A brass band to make all at Denniston proud, eh?’
The boys grin back, hardly daring to break the moment as their father plans.
‘Samuel Rees plays the tenor horn like Uncle Arnold, so I hear, and another of the Welsh miners is a bandsman, though what instrument I have not learned.’
‘Cornet, Dad, so Taffy McDavitt says, but he has no instrument.’
‘Oho, cornet! Is he good, do you hear?’
‘Can’t touch you, Dad,’ says Mathew stoutly, though he has no idea in fact.
‘We must see what we can organise, then. The Company might be persuaded to assist with an instrument or two, though there is little time.’ He turns to the younger ones. ‘Is there anyone else down at the Bins plays an instrument that you’ve heard?’
‘Con the Brake plays accordion,’ says young Brennan.
The older boys are scornful and Josiah laughs. ‘That’s not a proper instrument, lad; what son of a bandsman would even suggest such a thing? Accordion!’
The small papery sound is Mary. Her first laugh.
‘And will you sing solo?’ she asks Brennan.
The twins look sharply at Brennan, but even he knows this is not the moment to discuss the matter.
‘Yes,’ he says to his mother.
He doesn’t say that Mrs Rasmussen is teaching him and Rose to sing ‘Rose of Tralee’ as a duet, and that she would like Josiah to accompany them on solo cornet.
Facing the Music
‘THEY NEVER COME to the school,’ pleads Brennan Scobie. ‘They won’t be there, Mum; I know they won’t.’
‘Leave your mother,’ says Josiah Scobie. ‘It is her choice. Now, come in the bedroom, lad, and let me hear your scales.’
Mary Scobie looks out her tiny kitchen window and up to the bleak mountains, which seem to press down on the little settlement. In the distance a heavy fog crawls down the slopes of black hills, softening and rounding the ridges. Soon all the Hill will be engulfed, silenced, deadened. She sighs. The landscape fits her mood — or perhaps augments it. Since the deaths, a lassitude that she cannot control has crept through her bones. Mary recognises the signs, has warned other miners’ wives against it, knows that living with the possibility of sudden death must be accepted, but somehow cannot help this endless, slow sinking of the spirit. Back in England she had been the strong one, the Chapel wife who had used her faith and good sense to haul other despairing wives to the surface again. No one, it seems, can do the same for her.
She stands, now, at the window, her hands scrubbing and scrubbing at the same potato, waiting for the advancing fog.
In the bedroom, brassy arpeggios slide up and down. Young Brennan will be as good as his dad one day; there is music in his bones, no doubt about it. Mary dreams of another future for her youngest son. Not a mining life but one above ground, where the boy goes to work in clean clothes and returns unscathed. Where he walks down a sunny main road to a sunny office
, and looks out all day at trees and other green things. Mary remembers the picnics in the bush when Scobies’ gang was scrub-cutting. The softness of the air, the spread of it all. She would be ashamed to mention, in this house, that she misses that time, but there is the truth of it.
Now Brennan is singing and his father is accompanying on cornet. The instrument is muted, allowing the boy’s clear voice to float above.
That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee, sings Brennan, and his mother, Mary Scobie (not Tralee), cries into the sink.
It is not possible to go to the concert.
‘A brass band is all very well,’ grumbles Con the Brake, ‘but too stiff for an evening entertainment. Who can dance, you know, to a brass band?’
‘Who’s talking dancing? This is a formal occasion.’
‘Mrs C. Rasmussen, you are taking respectable too far. A bit of a clap and a stamp — you expect it if you pay money. Who can sing a good song along with a brass band, you know?’
Bella Rasmussen closes her lovely pink velvet curtains. Her secret bedroom indulgence, which no one on the Hill, except her husband Con and Rose of Tralee, have seen. In the parlour she has hung proper and serviceable cream cotton duck, 7 ½ d. a yard and easy to wash. She raises heavy white arms and turns her back to Con, inviting him to unlace her stays. He attacks the armour with relish, the rough fingers surprisingly nimble among laces and frills. A seaman can untangle any knot.
But even in this excitement he has not forgotten the argument. ‘We will need a bit more spice in your entertainment or the men will go away disappointed.’
‘This is not a billiard-room occasion, man; there will be women and children. And the Inspector.’
‘The Inspector, I’ll lay odds, will enjoy a lively tune like any proper person. I am not talking bawdy, Bella.’
Bella turns in his arms and strokes her giant’s curly chest. It is rare for him to call her by name. It reminds him of how they met.
‘Tell me, then,’ she says, ‘what you have in mind and be quick about it, man. It is cold standing here in my skin.’
‘An accordion band,’ says Con the Brake. He swings his laughing wife into a step or two of the polka. ‘Squinty Tim has one, and Billy Genesis can pick out a good enough tune when he’s sober. And Tom Hanratty used to drum down in the Westport brass band. I want to grab him before Josiah Scobie finds out.’
Bella laughs out loud. ‘Oho, now we hear it. A competition. Get into bed, man. You are worse than my pupils.’
A little later Con rumbles into her neck, ‘They look down on us, you know, those Chapel miners. Think we are nobody much from nowhere. They should realise.’
‘Well then, gather your band,’ says Bella, softer now, ‘and we will finish with a lighter bracket. But do not expect me to entertain. I will be in an official capacity. And no dancing.’
‘Ah, come on now …’
‘No dancing. It will get out of hand.’
‘Out of hand is good. Kick up your heels, woman!’
‘You are teasing me.’
‘Ah, my Bella, Bella.’ He kisses her gently, hums a tune, his fingers accompanying on the broad expanse of her bosom. ‘We will show them anyway. You will see. Every Chapel foot will be tapping in spite of itself.’
Just before Con crashes into sleep, Bella slips in the news she has been holding back for months, fearing another loss.
‘Conrad, I am with child again.’
Con the Brake says nothing. Bella thinks she has missed the moment; he is asleep. But slowly the big man’s arms close around her. He rocks his beloved wife and they cling together like two lost children.
The Entertainment
‘MY ASSISTANT, MRS C. Rasmussen, will announce the items,’ says Totty, trying not to grin. Deceiving this pompous little Inspector is adding spice to the whole evening.
All day the children have been on their best behaviour: sitting up straight, answering as best they could the Inspector’s curly questions. Totty has stood up at the front like a teacher, while Mrs C. Rasmussen has kept order from the back. Once, under cover of a cough, Mrs C managed to pass the answer to Rosser Scobie, who piped up, wide-eyed and innocent. The Inspector did not see through the game, although any mother would sense immediately that something was up; the held-back laughter in their faces has been transparent.
Now Totty, in fine cream taffeta sent by her mother from Westport, sits next to the Inspector in the front row at the Volunteer Brigade Hall, which is still unfinished but at least closed in, and the only hall on the Hill big enough to hold a sizeable slice of the Denniston population.
Tom, who has built himself a cart and commandeered a pit pony to pull it, has driven around the community collecting chairs. Latecomers will have to stand.
Bella’s hopes for a united community are not quite realised. A dark, respectable and silent phalanx of Burnett’s Face miners and their families fill one side of the hall. The rest chat and laugh on the other side, displaying odd quirks of behaviour and clothing: Lord P’s scarlet cravat, Con the Brake’s outrageous waistcoat (embroidered by Bella), Totty’s finery, Old Huff McGregor’s huge braying laugh. It’s like two families at a wedding. But there’s goodwill in the air, for the sake of the children. No hint of how the evening will end.
The Inspector, dead centre in the front row, sits on a fine carver from Hanrattys’ dining room. All day he has been fidgety. Trying, no doubt, to regain his dignity, lost somewhere halfway up the Incline. He had appeared over the brow, crouched inside the wagon and clinging desperately to young George Abernethy, who does maintenance on the Incline. Eight interested and experienced Denniston children, though strictly on their best behaviour, could not quite disguise their scorn. Riding the Incline was part of life.
However, a good meal of corned beef and a steamed raisin pudding seem to have smoothed his ruffled feathers somewhat. Tom, sitting on his other side, engages him on the subject of government funding for school buildings. Totty hands him a programme, hand-written by the older children, in a very creditable script, though this Inspector would not notice. He has been mean with praise all day. Tom Hanratty, stiff with pride, points out to the Inspector the amazing fact that his six-year-old son has written a poem, and will read it himself:
A MUSICAL ENTERTAINMENT
In Honour of the School Inspector
and
To Raise Funds for the New School
~ Programme ~
God Save the Queen
1. ‘Bread of Heaven’ sung by pupils of Denniston School and accompanied by the Denniston Miners’ Brass Band
2. A Speech of Welcome by Mr T. Hanratty, chairman of the School Building Fundraising Committee
3. ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’ recited by Andrew and Rosser Scobie
4. ‘Richmond’ by T. Haweis, performed by the Denniston Miners’ Brass Band
5. ‘Sunrise’ An original Poem, written and recited by Michael Hanratty
6. A Sailor’s Hornpipe, performed by the Boys of Denniston School and accompanied by Mr C. Rasmussen on Accordion
7. ‘Rose of Tralee’ sung by Brennan Scobie and Rose of Tralee, accompanied by Josiah Scobie on Cornet
SUPPER
8. A Selection of Shanties and Folk Songs, performed by the Denniston Rovers’ Accordion Band. Recitations from the floor invited.
DONATIONS HOWEVER SMALL WELCOME
On a makeshift platform the eight pupils of Denniston school are lining up. All are in white shirts. Rose wears a white smock — a surprise, as neither Totty nor Mrs Rasmussen has had any response to their efforts to include Rose’s mother in this event. To the left of the stage seven men of the Denniston Miners’ Brass Band, three of them Scobies, are seated importantly. Each wears a miner’s cap to which Mary Scobie has sewn a brass button. Outside the lugubrious moans of a tuba can be heard. The eighth bandsman, young David Scobie, is nervously warming up his dead uncle’s instrument.
The hall is overflowing. Eddie Carmichael has allowed the skipway
to operate an hour after closing so the families further up the plateau can ride it into town. Going back will be another matter.
Mary Scobie is not here. She has never ridden the skipway and has even less reason now. But unknown to her family, who consider her appearance a lost cause, she is plodding steadily through the dark towards Denniston. Brennan, in his excitement, has left behind the little waistcoat he is to wear for ‘Rose of Tralee’ and Mary is bringing it to him.
Rose is the only girl on stage. It is a mystery, the way people up here have sons. Perhaps the women’s bodies know. Totty makes good daughters, of course —two so far —but then she’s not bred to mining. Now five years a citizen of Denniston, Totty has become a handsome woman, forthright as ever but steadier. Everyone says she and Tom will go far. From the comfort of Westport, Totty’s parents have never let up the pressure on her and Tom to leave the plateau and return to ‘civilisation’. Mrs McGuire, habitually unwell, writes yearning letters to her daughter. Rufus McGuire feels insulted and in some uneasy way threatened that his pretty daughter should choose to consort with the rough trade on Denniston rather than adorn the family home.
Perhaps it is that Totty’s independence needs to be challenged and sharpened by a place like Denniston; perhaps it is her good solid Tom who keeps her so contented. There is no doubt anyway that Totty loves this difficult, damp, back-breaking, isolated life. Five years ago Bella Rasmussen, noticing soft white hands and delicate bones, gave her three months at the most, and is pleased now to admit how wrong she was.
Apart from little Elizabeth and Sarah Hanratty, Rose is the only other girl at Denniston. Not a single one up at Burnett’s Face. It makes you wonder, Bella has been heard to say darkly when Burnett’s Face women are not around.
Rose is as excited as the boys. She hops from one foot to the other, chatting to Michael and Brennan, while Mrs Rasmussen has a word with the band.
The Denniston Rose Page 12
