Trust Me

by Lesley Pearse

  Dulcie deeply regretted now that she’d ever expressed a desire to come to Australia. She hated St Vincent’s, it made the Sacred Heart look like paradise. She’d had school to go to there, and on the walk to and from it she could see shops, buses, cars and ordinary people, so she still felt like a human being.

  Since the day she’d arrived here she hadn’t been out of the grounds once, and she had no idea what, if anything, lay beyond the scrubland they called ‘the Bush’ which surrounded St Vincent’s. While she knew she couldn’t be very far from Perth – she had after all seen for herself the big shops, the wide Swan River and King’s Park, and recalled it only took another fifteen or twenty minutes to reach here – she wouldn’t know in which direction to go once she’d reached the end of the dirt track which led to St Vincent’s gates.

  Even the nuns who weren’t actually cruel couldn’t be described as kind. They had sour faces, as though they had forgotten how to laugh, smile or say anything pleasant. But she supposed as there were a hundred girls here, and a great deal of land, they hadn’t got much to smile about.

  The heat was what wore her down – sometimes the intensity of the sunshine made her cross-eyed, and her head felt as if it might explode. Just ten minutes out in it, hanging up the washing, weeding or feeding the chickens, was enough to burn her fair skin – at night it was like trying to sleep lying on a hot stove. She might have been thoroughly miserable on icy days out in the playground at the Sacred Heart, and too cold in bed to sleep sometimes, but she found herself looking back on that longingly.

  It was a lie that the food was better and more plentiful than in England. For breakfast they had something called Granuma which was horribly like semolina; at dinner they mostly got a kind of thick soup which didn’t taste of anything, boiled grey fish on Fridays, and only bread and marge for tea. She was hungry almost all the time.

  Along with the hunger and heat, there was the work too. The day started at six, and the cleaning of the dormitories and washrooms, and sweeping and washing the verandas had to be completed by breakfast-time at eight. Then there was a service in the chapel, followed by lessons. Some girls, Dulcie included, were often called out of these for other tasks – laundry, polishing floors or out on the farm. After dinner there were more lessons, or chores which could range from weeding the gardens and drive to mending clothes and household linen. They might get an hour or two to play between tea and evening prayers, but quite often still more jobs were found.

  It was real school that Dulcie missed most of all. She had loved everything about it, the smell of milk, chalk and polish, the little desks, collecting things for the nature table. She loved to learn, and whether that was geography, history or just doing sums and writing essays, she had enjoyed it.

  The two schoolrooms here had only wooden forms and rickety scarred tables. There were no pictures on the walls, few books, and such things as painting, handicrafts or playing percussion instruments were unheard of. The hundred girls from five to fifteen were divided into two groups, and even though Dulcie had been put in the Senior group as soon as she reached her eleventh birthday in December, only two of the other forty-nine girls were as advanced as she was, and they were fourteen-year-olds.

  The Sisters weren’t trained teachers, so the lessons were sketchy and very dull. Dulcie had been told by one of the oldest girls that no one in St Vincent’s ever got to sit examinations, and they would all be sent out to do domestic work when they were old enough, so there was little point in trying hard.

  All the sisters really cared about was neat handwriting, spelling and multiplication tables. They took the view that that, and being able to cook, clean and sew, was all a girl needed. As Dulcie could already read, write and spell well and knew her tables backwards, she was a prime candidate for any extra domestic work around the school.

  This was why she was cleaning the laundry that afternoon while most of the girls were having spelling and multiplication tests. It seemed grossly unfair to her that she should be given a job that amounted to a punishment when through her own efforts she had mastered the skills the other girls lacked. But to voice such thoughts was unthinkable.

  She rescrubbed the shelf, and after dampening a corner of her apron to hold against her burning neck, she sat down on the doorstep. From there she would be able to hear Sister Anne coming back along the gravel path from the school to the laundry, then she would jump back on the stool, dampen the shelf again, and be ready for the inspection.

  In front of her was the kitchen garden where the Sisters grew all kinds of vegetables, behind that was a chicken coop. They called them ‘chooks’ here, just another alien word she had to remember to use or risk getting a clout for being a Pom.

  The soft clucking noises of the chooks, mingled with the chanting of tables coming from the schoolroom, was a peaceful, pleasant sound, and in the shade, a slight breeze fanning her, she was in danger of falling asleep.

  But she fought against it, ears cocked for Sister Anne.

  To her right was the orphanage, a series of four white-painted single-storey wooden buildings with a veranda along one side, linked to each other by covered walkways. Two of the buildings had two dormitories in each, twenty-five beds to a room with exactly two feet of space between each bed. Between the two dormitories was a small room where the Sister in charge slept and a bathroom and washroom. The Juniors were in one, the Seniors in another, and even sisters in the same age group were split up to discourage any closeness.

  The schoolrooms took up another building and the fourth was used as an assembly hall and dining-room. Wire mesh covered all the windows to keep the flies out. Dulcie remembered how she’d thought they were prison bars the day they arrived. She didn’t view that mesh with horror now, only gratitude, for the flies here were like nothing she’d ever seen in England. They tried to get moisture from your eyes, nose and mouth, and as fast as you flapped one lot away, another lot would appear. Then there were mosquitoes too, horrible things that made her arms and legs swell up in great itchy bumps. Thankfully she hadn’t seen a snake yet, or any of the many poisonous spiders she’d heard about, but then she kept well clear of the places they were likely to be in.

  Behind the laundry room and over to the left, out of her present line of vision, was the convent itself. It was a fine-looking stone-built, two-storey building with pointed eaves, grand chimneys, deep cool verandas and a chapel as splendid as any church she’d been into back in England.

  There were dozens of nuns living there, many very old and sick and rarely seen outside. In front of the convent in the middle of the circular weed-free gravel drive was a large marble statue of St Vincent, the patron saint of orphans; beyond this, up to the heavy iron gates, were beautifully kept lawns shaded by pines and giant Moreton Bay fig trees. The irony that the Sisters who were supposed to live a life of humility and poverty should be housed in such a grand place, while the children who St Vincent vowed to take care of lived in little more than sheds, hadn’t escaped Dulcie. She was often ordered into the convent to scrub and polish floors and she thought maybe this was why so many of the older girls thought they might become nuns themselves. As so many of the girls here, Australian or British, had never been in a real home, or even seen a film showing one, they probably thought the Sisters’ life was like being a princess in a palace. The Sisters had wonderful food – real butter, fresh eggs, vegetables straight from the garden, a plentiful supply of meat and fish. Dulcie remembered bitterly how Mr Stigwood had told them back at the Sacred Heart that Australia was a land of plenty, a land that hadn’t been torn apart by war. Yet she could recall Granny’s neighbours dishing out far better meals even while the war was still going on, and afterwards in the terrible winter of 1947, than they ever got here.

  She mopped her burning neck again with the damp apron and looked out beyond the vegetable garden to the paddocks. When they arrived here the grass had been lush and green, much like at home, and studded with wild flowers. Now it was just bare, dusty soil, th
e sun had scorched all the grass. The front lawns were watered nightly, but this was too vast an area to receive the same treatment. A flock of twenty or so sheep picked miserably around the lower paddock, and she wondered if they were as hungry as she was.

  Yet for all the misery here, the Australian trees and wildlife enchanted Dulcie. When they first arrived there were bottle bushes in full bloom, scarlet flowers which did look exactly like a large bottle brush. She found the gum trees, with their curious misshapen trunks and papery barks, beautiful too; the grey-green leaves smelt heavily medicinal, wafting into the dormitories at night whenever there was a slight breeze. The huge Moreton Bay fig trees were lovely as well, creating such deep cool shade around their vast trunks. And the birds were an unfailing delight, ones called ringnecks, red wattles, Willy wagtails, grey fantails and singing honey-eaters, all so different to English birds and their songs so joyful.

  At dusk they often saw kangaroos and emus too, though they rarely came close to the buildings. She wished they would, but Sister Ruth said they were too nervous as Father Murphy, who lived in the convent, regularly shot at them.

  Overall, it seemed to Dulcie that Duncan had been right in thinking that British orphans were only sent out here to be got rid of. It wasn’t a better life at all. They never got taken to the beaches, even though she’d learnt they were only a few miles from one. They learned nothing about the outside world.

  Most of the girls were Australian, only ten British – six English and four Irish – and if any of them were caught together talking about home, they were always punished. Dulcie had thought the punishments were severe enough at the Sacred Heart, but they were nothing to the ones here. Like there, bed-wetting was punished by making the girl stand with the wet sheet over her head, but she also got the strap. Being forced to kneel on a gravel path for an hour or two could be used to punish anything from talking after lights out to not knowing multiplication tables. The strap was ever present, the Sisters used it in class, at mealtimes and while the girls were doing chores. Just being a bit slow scrubbing a floor was enough to get a couple of stripes on a bare leg.

  There was absolutely no affection, or even recognition that the girls were individuals. Birthdays were only marked by having your name and new age called out. At Christmas each girl was given an orange, a small bag of sweets and a handkerchief. None of the British girls ever got any letters from home, not even ones who had come over a year ago, and every one of them was upset by this.

  Dulcie suspected that letters did arrive but just weren’t given out, for the Sisters were mistresses of deceit. Shoes, socks and hair ribbons were handed out for Mass on Sundays and when visitors called. Teddy bears and dolls were put on to beds then whisked away the moment the visitors had left. Lovely dinners were produced, the tables covered with a cloth, even sweets dished out at these times, but the moment the gates clanged shut again it was back to the normal sparse fare.

  Dulcie could remember sobbing with the pain of blisters and cuts on her bare feet when she first arrived here, but she got no treatment, not even a shred of sympathy. Maybe her heart had now become as callused as her feet, because she’d even grown used to the Sisters’ mania for breaking up close friendships between the girls.

  Why anyone could consider friendship something sinister, or want to keep sisters apart, she didn’t know. Perhaps they thought that mere orphans weren’t entitled to any kind of affection, not even from their own kind. But when Dulcie was punished by having to crawl on all-fours up and down the gravel drive for two whole hours in blazing sunshine, just for being caught in May’s dormitory giving her a goodnight kiss, she decided that the Sisters were mad as well as cruel and heartless. Try as they might, however, the Sisters couldn’t stamp out friendship, it flourished ever more vigorously as the girls learned to be as deceitful as the nuns.

  Dulcie had often felt angry at the strict and often senseless rules at the Sacred Heart, but here new rules were invented overnight and the severity of the punishment for breaking them was according to the whim of whoever caught the wrongdoer. The Sisters at the Scared Heart did at least respond if a child was ill or hurt. Here they ignored it.

  If a girl got a splinter, an older girl dug it out. If anyone felt ill, she looked to friends for comfort. One girl had a bad stomach ache, and all the Sisters gave her was castor oil. Her pain got worse and worse over a week until she was screaming with it, and when they did eventually call the doctor he had to take her to hospital, having discovered that she had appendicitis.

  So loyalty to one another thrived under cover. Tale-telling to the Sisters was almost unheard of, the older girls did their best to mother the little ones, the clever ones helped those who were slow, and when someone got a severe punishment, she had all the girls’ sympathy.

  Yet Dulcie found herself isolated, for she always seemed to fall between two stools: too bright to be in need of help with schoolwork, too well able to look after herself to need protection, too old to play with the little ones, too young to be included in the Senior girls’ conversations. May had found a niche for herself in her Junior dormitory by being daring and funny, she even seemed to be able to charm a couple of the Sisters, but Dulcie couldn’t turn to her for company, not without risking finding herself in trouble. She missed the London accents, girls like Beryl who had so many stories about her family and old neighbours. Almost all the girls here had nothing to talk about but St Vincent’s, they knew nothing else.

  So when Dulcie had free time, more often than not she spent it alone. She would find herself thinking about England, wondering how her father and Susan were. She’d written to them both as soon as she got here, but neither of them replied. Reverend Mother wouldn’t allow her to write again, she said that it was a waste of a stamp to persist when it was clear people had lost interest in her.

  Dulcie often thought about Duncan too. She hoped his orphanage was better than this one and that he still thought about her and all the good times they’d had together.

  Hearing Sister Anne’s footsteps on the gravel, she leaped inside, took the wet cloth and jumped up on the stool to wipe the shelf over. As the Sister came into the laundry she was just lifting up a pot to put it back.

  Sister Anne ran her finger along the shelf and nodded. ‘That’s better, why couldn’t you have done it like that in the first place? Put the pots back now and then go and help in the kitchen.’

  Dulcie waited until the woman had left, then poked out her tongue again. ‘Miserable old crow,’ she muttered. ‘I hate you.’

  It was just a few weeks later, in February, just before supper, that Reverend Mother called all the girls into the largest of the two schoolrooms. This was a very unusual occurrence as she rarely came over to the school buildings. Although her role in the convent was much the same as Mother Superior’s at the Sacred Heart, she was much younger, the older girls reckoned only in her late forties. Stories about her abounded, she was said to be from a wealthy family in Perth, and she’d joined the Sisters of Mercy after being jilted by her fiancé. She intrigued all the older girls for there was a clearly defined difference between her and the rest of the Sisters. She had a cultured voice, a smooth, glowing complexion, and beautiful dark eyes. She had an elegant, brisk walk, and even if her body was shrouded by her black habit, it hinted at being a shapely one.

  But this faint aura of glamour didn’t strike any admiration into the girls’ hearts, for they were all very afraid of her. She had a vicious temper and the sharpest tongue, and many of the older girls who had to help out inside the convent with the elderly and sick Sisters there had witnessed her striking these old women. She was known to have special favourites among the girls too, singling them out for piano lessons, trips into town and extra food. For some reason Dulcie couldn’t quite understand, these favourites were never envied, but pitied.

  Mother certainly had more contact with the outside world than anyone else in the convent – almost every day the girls saw her drive off in her black Holden. Sometimes
she stayed away for several days, and it was believed she went to supervise another orphanage and to give advice at the girls’ reformatory.

  When the girls were summoned, they immediately anticipated trouble, for if Mother just had some ordinary news for them, she would have come in and told them all over supper. So as they scurried into the schoolroom they were nervously smoothing down their hair and checking for unfastened buttons.

  ‘Stand up in lines,’ Mother shouted harshly as they came spilling in.

  The tables were always stacked on top of each other every afternoon for the floor to be swept, and not being able to sit down on the floor was a further indication she was very angry about something. They quickly slipped into four rows, the youngest right at the front. Dulcie was in the third row, May in the second, the fourth being the oldest girls. Everyone was completely silent.

  Mother folded her arms across her habit, tucking her hands into her sleeves, and walked back and forward for a few moments, her dark eyes scanning the girls. She certainly had a terrifying way about her – just one glance in a child’s direction was enough to make them quake, and if her eyes lingered on them for more than a second or two they often began to cry.

  ‘We have a thief in our midst,’ she said at length. ‘One of you has had the audacity to go into my office and steal a tin of toffees.’

  A faint gasp from the girls broke the silence, for they all knew exactly what she was referring to. A visitor to St Vincent’s had brought a big tin of toffees at Christmas. Everyone was given one in front of the visitor. The tin was then put in Mother’s office on the ground floor of the convent. It had sat since then on a small table in clear view of anyone passing the window, and many of the bolder girls who were sent over to the convent to clean made jokes about slipping in there to help themselves to a handful.