He Called Me Son (The Blountmere Street Series Book 1)

by Barbara Arnold

  ‘And don’t forget the girls. Young ‘uns.’

  ‘Good as gold.’

  We exchanged one ship for another, this time sailing from the North Island to the South Island.

  ‘What a carry on, but pretty, though,’ Joe said as we sailed through a channel, flanked on either side by inlets and islands smothered with vegetation. I ignored him. I imagined natives like the one in my nightmare darting from the forest all around. I stood outside on the deck and clutched on to a pole, trying to put another layer of concrete over my heart. I pretended not to care about natives, or Fred and Lori not wanting me, or this godforsaken place, or Eleod Downston below deck drinking.

  The harbour we sailed into was quiet, with a street of shops and a few houses, the same as the ones in Wellington. Beyond were more and yet more hills.

  On a strip of grass by the waterfront, a group of kids played games that didn’t look much different from the ones we’d played in Blountmere Street.

  We left the ship and Eleod Downston lurched along the jetty. Although he was slower than Joe and me, he shouted, ‘Get a move on! You’re not in bloody London now.’ Heaving for breath, he caught up with us and, for no reason, slapped the side of my face with the flat of his hand. He said something, but I couldn’t hear beyond the ringing in my ear. I held my hand to it to ease the stinging.

  A truck was parked on the quayside.

  ‘Well, jump in,’ Downston slurred. He seemed to expect us to know the truck was his. We struggled into the back and immediately slid on animal dung. The stench was so strong it hurt my nostrils, then hit the back of my throat. It made me want to gag.

  ‘Blimey, what a pong,’ Joe said, holding his nose between two fingers.

  Although we couldn’t see through to the cab of the truck, we heard Downston slam the door, turn on the engine and grind the gears.

  ‘Where d’you reckon we’re going?’ Joe asked as Downston revved the motor and began throwing the truck round endless corners. It caused us and our cases to slither from side to side and become coated with animal doings.

  The only light came from two small windows at the back of the truck and I slid to the end, wiped a patch in one of the windows with my sleeve and squinted out.

  ‘I can’t see much out there,’ I said.

  ‘I hope it’s not far. I’m so hungry, my guts are rumbling.’ Joe’s voice vibrated, as the truck shook and swayed along gravel tracks and the engine made a graunching noise as we began to climb.

  I continued to wipe condensation from the window and looked out at the landscape. Outside, there was nothing but a mat of trees. I wondered how long it would be before we were out of this forest and we would see a house or someone walking along. But the trees stretched on and on. Joe crawled further up the truck and huddled next to me, as our stomachs became emptier.

  ‘You frightened?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Course I’m not.’ I hoped he couldn’t hear the fear in my voice.

  Snippets of light began to appear and the sky became wider. Down below, a river wound its way through a haphazard band of shingle, and mountains rose behind it like monsters with pointed heads. I shivered at the emptiness – nothing but trees; not tall like the ones in Bushey Park, but smaller, a bit like the ones in the spinney Up The Common. It was as if the mountains refused to allow them to compete. The river in its shingle case appeared and disappeared, playing a game of hide and seek, but the mountains stayed there all the time, keeping guard.

  ‘It’s like Journey Into Space,’ Joe yelled, as the road curled round and round, up and down, through the undergrowth, finding and losing the river, all the time watched over by the pointed-headed monsters.

  Unexpectedly, the sea appeared and we travelled alongside it for a few miles. We watched the waves break on the rocks. It left them ringed with foam like soap suds.

  Then we turned inland and away from it. Still there were no houses or people.

  After we’d travelled for what seemed hours and the daylight had become purple before it finally disappeared, Downston took a sudden turn, causing the truck’s tyres to spin, and the truck to tip as if it was going to topple over.

  ‘Blimey, he’s trying to kill us.’ Joe fell across my legs. We slithered in circles, and clutched each other for support.

  No sooner had the truck righted itself, than it lurched in and out what felt like a series of potholes. My stomach rose and fell.

  Eventually, the truck skidded to a squealing halt. We heard the door open and Downston jump from the cab. He flung open the back doors on to blackness. ‘Don’t just sit there. Shift yourselves.’ He commanded, leaving us to scramble from the truck.

  ‘I said, move your backsides,’ Downston struck us both a blow across the back of our heads.

  Our cases, like us, were caked with dung, as we stumbled after Downston towards the outline of a broken-down wooden building.

  Downston opened the door, and punched us through the opening. Inside, two men were playing cards by the light of a kerosene lamp. Sacking was nailed at the windows, and the place smelt of food, sweat and farting.

  ‘A couple of hands for you. Useless by the looks of ‘em. You’ll ‘ave to thrash ‘em to get anything out of ‘em. But, then, a couple of nice little boys might suit the two of you.’ Downston’s eyes glazed over and his mouth slackened.

  ‘Beggar me, Boss …’ The older of the two men began, but Downston was already striding through the door. The hinges groaned. It was a frightening sound.

  ‘Beggar me,’ the man repeated. Tufts of hair sprouted in clumps from midway across his head and down his neck. He was wearing a tattered singlet from which more straggly hair protruded. ‘What’s the Boss thinking of? What do we know about kids?’

  ‘Perhaps we should start by telling them our names and finding out theirs?’ The younger of the two men got up from the table. He walked towards us. He had an Irish accent and was taller than the older man. ‘This here’s Murray, and he’s the shepherd at Downstons Farm. I’m Fergus, a rouseabout, a bit like yourselves.’

  ‘Tony and Joe,’ I mumbled. I wondered what a rouseabout was.

  ‘Well, me boys, it seems you’re going to be sharing the men’s quarters with us. You’ll have to use the bed we keep for the swagmen. Stinks a bit, but then the two of you don’t smell too sweet,’ Fergus said. ‘Old Candlewax, the last swagman to use it wasn’t too clean in his habits, but you can sleep one at each end until we can knock together a couple of bunks, and get some more sacking to cover them. To be sure, it seems you’re going to be here a whiles.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  A bellbird called into the morning hush of the men’s quarters, as I turned on my wafer-thin mattress and wiped the window beside me. Outside, the first light of day was splintering the sky and smudging the mountains purple. Even now, the New Zealand landscape seemed alien, with its folds of hills rolling towards the mountains. In winter, they were crowned with snow. In summer, they faded to a hazy mauve. In the distance the river snaked through a steep gorge which was edged by tangled bush. From there, it forged its way onwards into nothingness.

  I prodded Joe awake. ‘Come on. You know what Downston’s like if we’re late up.’ I kept poking Joe until he stirred, and his head appeared from beneath his sacking bedcovers.

  ‘All right, all right, I ain’t dead.’ In spite of being warned by Downston that he’d beat his Pommie accent out of him, Joe remained defiant. ‘I’ve spoke like this all me life and I ain’t talking different for him nor nobody.’

  Like Joe, I wanted to cling to every bit of my Englishness. It would be all too easy in this place on the edge of the earth to forget where I came from. At Fergus’s suggestion, Joe and I wrote our birthdays and the year we were both born on the margin of a piece of newspaper. We tore off the strip we had written on, and hid it in our cases, for fear we might miss a year in this land of topsy-turvy seasons.

  I pulled on my shorts, and made my way outside to the pump, leaving Joe to huff and puff his way out of
bed. I filled a tin bowl, and dunked my face into it. I shook off the water, then plucked a frayed piece of cloth from its usual place on a nearby bush. I rubbed it over my top half, which was weathered the colour of the logs I had recently been splitting. Months of working on the land had hardened my body and although, as Joe said, I was still as thin as a whippet – the Missus’ tucker saw to that – I had grown upwards like a tree starved of light. My shirt which had been given to me less than a month ago now finished above my midriff, while my shorts crept higher up my legs, and cut into my groin.

  Murray and Fergus brought our clothes back from the Catholic Mission when they were in the township collecting supplies. They probably chose them after a skinful at The Travellers. What would two men like Murray and Fergus know about the clothes boys wore? They had once brought me back a girl’s pink blouse, patterned with milkmaids! ‘The nuns at the Mission said it would do just as well for a boy as a girl,’ Murray tried to persuade me, but Downston had laughed himself silly, snorting, ‘Can’t tell if you’re Arthur or Martha. A proper poofter you’re turning out to be.’

  The only thing I hated more than that blouse was not having underpants. Not wearing underpants was shameful. When things had been at their worst, Mum had seen to it we had underwear. “Well mended, but respectable,” she’d said.

  If clothes were a problem, shoes were equally so. The work boots sent by the Mission were either too big or too small. They caused blisters on my feet that burst and stung. At night they rubbed on the sacking covering me. They kept me awake, and made me wish I was more like Joe, who hadn’t grown much since we’d arrived. His shoes were at least comfortable, even if they were almost in pieces.

  I hung my wash rag back over the bush, and ran my fingers through my matted hair in an effort to subdue my curls. There was no mirror in the men’s quarters. Once, as I waited outside the homestead to collect the nightly boil-up, I noticed the Missus had left the kitchen. I could see a mirror, and I slipped through the door and sidled along the wall. The mirror was spotted with fly dirt and chipped around the edges, but I was able to see myself well enough. My face had changed as if it had become more permanent. I ran my fingers over my nose, then along my lips, up my cheek and to my eyebrow. I doubted anyone in Blountmere Street would recognise me. The thought of appearing a stranger to them was unbearable. Although I’d had the opportunity a few times since, I’d never looked in that mirror again.

  I pulled my shirt over my head, and struggled to button up my shorts. Beyond the men’s quarters, Fergus was on his way across the paddock to milk the house cow. I waved and in answer Fergus called out his usual morning greeting, ‘To be sure, today’s a clean slate.’

  I had no idea how an educated man like Fergus came to be working on a back country farm in New Zealand for someone like Eleod Downston. He belonged in a nice house in Ireland with a nice lady who kissed him goodbye every morning. He needed to be nearer a library, like the one Fred and Lori used to belong to. And he needed to have someone other than me listen to him when he recited poetry. But when Fergus and Murray went to the township for supplies, Fergus always arrived back paralytic. Downston banned liquor from the men’s quarters, saying he’d got no time for a man who couldn’t hold his drink. He could talk! Often in the far off distance of the homestead when I went to the long drop at night, I saw Downston himself staggering around the place, drunk. I finished my business as fast as I could, and raced back to my bed in the corner of the men’s quarters, well away from him. He was even swifter with his fists than the Old Man had been when he was drunk.

  Murray and Fergus said that Downston was partial to young girls and that he was in and out of the scullery maid’s bed so often, he was wearing a hole in her mattress. They said that all the time there was a young girl about, Joe and me would be all right on that count, even if we were seldom free of a black eye or bruises from Downston’s boot or rock-hard knuckles. Although Joe just shrugged and recited that stuff about “sticks and stones”, it made me seethe with anger and swear that one day I’d get even with him.

  I made my way across the scrub to the pigsty, where the squealing and grunting of pigs shattered the serenity of early morning. It was one of my easier jobs. It allowed my thoughts to transport me back to Blountmere Street; at least to a Blountmere Street that had once been, before Fred and Lori left, and Dobsie and Mum died. It was the one freedom I had; a secret to be savoured, a place nobody knew I went to, or could stop me visiting. It was exquisitely sweet and unbearably painful. Yet, every morning in my head, I visited my old home – my only home. To Mum smelling of coal tar soap, sitting in her chair staring at something or somewhere only she could see, as I was doing now. I imagined the Gang, as it had once been with Dobsie, squatting on our stones at the camp on the bombsite.

  My thoughts roamed to Paula, who stepped out of her front door on her way to school, with her satchel hanging across her chest, while Mrs Dibble brushed a speck from her daughter’s pleated skirt, and checked she had a clean hankie. Behind them, Old Dibble loaded ladders on to his motorcycle cart. Then into my mind came Lori, calling something about the weather from her front door and looking up at the window to wave to Fred, who, as usual, was immaculate as if he hadn’t been to bed to get creased and crumpled like everyone else.

  I wondered whether Angela was still in her orphanage or whether, like me, she had been put on a ship and sent somewhere. I wished with all my heart I had been nicer to her. I imagined myself catching in my hands every unkind word I’d ever said to her, and throwing them far, far away, so that they couldn’t touch and hurt her anymore.

  I remembered the softness of Paula’s cheek when she had kissed me at the orphanage, and told me she loved me. What school would she be at now? It was probably one where she wore a posh straw hat and a fancy blazer. If I was back in Blountmere Street, I would be at Grigham Road Secondary Modern, a dump. It would still be better than getting no tuition at all other than what Fergus gave me at night by the light of the oil lamp, or outside on the ridge when it was light enough.

  I carted buckets of swill backwards and forward, used to their heaviness and the rank odour, like the pig bins in Jack Moody’s yard.

  In the distance, Joe was dragging his mattress outside to air. It made the place stink like a piss house, Fergus and Murray complained. They threatened Joe he had better get it outside or he’d be sleeping under a tree where he could pee to his heart’s content.

  The “piss house” was a long drop, a few yards away from the men’s quarters, and was enclosed by a wooden structure with gaps that the south-westerly whistled and sliced between, and through which you could see and be seen. Murray said that by rights we should put lime into the pit, but the Boss was too mean to buy it. When it was full, Joe and I had to cover it over, and dig another, while once a week we cut newspaper into precise squares, which Murray skewered onto a hook hanging on the back of the door. “Better than all that fancy stuff,” he asserted, and scratched his backside as if he could already feel it. “So what if it does leave newsprint on yer arse. Who’s goin’ to look at yer arse?”

  I finished filling the troughs and began hosing down the sty, before making my way back to the men’s quarters.

  Inside, Murray was standing over a potbellied stove stirring the morning mutton in the blackened pot Joe had just collected from the homestead. This morning the Missus must have been feeling generous, because she’d sent us over a bit of bread with it. Murray took four tin bowls from a shelf and placed them on the rough wooden table. After he’d brought the boil up to the table, he gave it another stir to dissolve the soft white paste that had already begun to form a fatty cap on the top. Then he returned to the stove, which stood in the corner like some fat and kind protector, took off the lid, and stuffed more wood inside. The flames shot up. Immediately, the hut was caressed with warmth.

  ‘Worth its weight in gold, this stove.’ Murray said the same thing at least five times a day.

  ‘To be sure ‘tis a blessing from t
he saints themselves,’ Fergus replied, coming through the door. He stamped his feet. It disturbed the cobwebs and caused the calendars around the walls to flutter. The calendars dated back at least ten years.

  Murray took another pot full of water and put it on top of the stove ready for a mug of tea that would be the colour of mahogany, or later to wash away the grime of the day.

  ‘Tucker’s up,’ he said, as if it was some kind of banquet we were being invited to. ‘Worse where there’s none.’

  I sat down carefully on my chair. It was creaky and I was sure one day it would refuse to hold my weight and I’d break a bone or something.

  ‘To be sure, the Missus must have climbed the spire of St. Patrick’s to throw in the mutton. There’s so little of it. By all the saints, why doesn’t she toss the whole thing away and start afresh,’ Fergus complained.

  Joe grimaced, and said it shouldn’t be used as pig swill. But, like me, he devoured it. We were too hungry to be fussy.

  Sometimes the Missus, her hair scraped back, her overall pulled flat over her chest, brought the boil-up over herself. Her ball-bearing eyes constantly darted round the hut, before she left without uttering a word although Murray always said, ‘Hooray, Missus.’ And afterwards, Fergus said. ‘To be sure, tis because she wants a few minutes respite, poor soul.’

  I didn’t think she was a poor soul. I hated her expressionless face and her shuffling way of walking. Being married to Downston meant she was as evil as he was.

  As usual, the following Sunday, a larger cauldron which took all day to heat gurgled on top of the stove ready for our baths.