‘Mind you, you looked a bit like Medusa,’ she added, laughing.
Ha, I thought. I’ve seen you with rags across your forehead trying to make little kiss-me curls, so don’t pretend you’ve got perfect hair.
Martha was in a remembering mood. ‘Look at us now, Nell. I don’t think you’ve had a new dress since then. Just hand-me-downs. I swear sometimes you can almost see through them, the cloth is so worn. We’ve become grey and patched. And we’ve forgotten what bright skies and laughing crowds can do.’
Martha was right. It’s as if the family were a bit like Dad, getting wearier and wearier and hungrier and hungrier as the war went on.
Jack said it was horrible being a telegraph boy seeing curtains twitch at windows as you rode past and knowing that they all hoped you weren’t coming to them.
THE TRAIN RATTLED INTO MIDLAND STATION AND edged up to the platform. Me and Dad put our windows down and leaned out to see if anyone was getting on. No one came to our carriage and Dad winked at me. I almost smiled but I remembered in time how resolute and steadfast I was and just stared back at him before pulling my head in. I think I heard him sigh before the guard’s whistle and the chugging of the train as it pulled away from the platform smothered all sounds.
‘Looks like the works are getting back up to full strength,’ said Pa, nodding towards the railway workshops. ‘Good to see things getting back to normal.’
‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘Normalcy was what we’ve all been looking for since the war ended. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly little signs of it started up. People were moving back into houses, or what was left of them, even before the armistice. Patching first, then after a few months a new roof, doors rehung … little things that added up.
‘Food was short but old men and young boys were getting the land ready for the spring planting … Though, I reckon, there’ll be some land they won’t be able to work for years, if ever, it’s so soured. But, yes, it’s good to see things getting back to normal.
‘The army started moving us back towards Blighty, Mons first. We were billited out again. I must have been with the Voosts for nearly three weeks.’
Dad turned to me.
‘They had a daughter, Anneka. Your age, Nell. Nice girl. Every time I looked at her I was glad you hadn’t had to grow up like she had. No kid should be frightened in her own home. You’d have been on holidays when Anneka went back to school. They were late, but it had taken time to sort it out after the last battle moved on. She went clattering off in her clogs in a coat made from a blanket. The school was a bit battered and the desks were rickety old tables scrounged from around the town but it was a start.
‘And, you won’t believe this, Nell, but I went back to school too. Boarding school, no less. The army was offering all sorts of courses – to keep the younger blokes occupied and out of mischief, I think – so I took a class in motor mechanics. There’s nothing hard to it once you get the principle of its working. And we’d dug enough trucks out of the mud to have some idea of that.’
Won’t Billy be impressed when he hears that Dad knows all about motor cars. Billy and Jack have a plan to become mechanics when Billy leaves school and Jack can get away from the Post Office. They began by wanting to work in a garage but every time they talk about it their ideas grow a bit. Last time we were down at the lake the plan had grown to owning a garage and lots of trucks. They’d hire men to drive the ones they couldn’t drive themselves.
‘Horses will be obsolete,’ says Billy.
I’ve told Jack he mustn’t say that to Pa. Pa knows about cars and trucks but he loves Bessie and he wouldn’t sell her off for anything. When she’s too old to work, Pa says, he’ll organise a nice paddock somewhere and she and he can doze in the sun.
Jack and Billy and me are best friends. Whenever we can, we walk up past the school and down the hill to the lake. We sit on the end of the little jetty watching any boats that are out sailing. Sometimes we catch tortoises, but Jack always makes sure we put them back even though we could get thruppence for each one from the Chinaman.
I told Pa about them making soup from tortoises and pulled a face.
‘Now, Nellie,’ he said. ‘Don’t go making assumptions. Have you tried tortoise soup?’
I giggled. ‘Of course not. Who’d eat tortoises?’
‘Obviously, Chinamen,’ said Pa, ‘and I bet you’d eat tortoises if you were starving. Have you ever wondered about what Chinamen would make of things like spotted dick?’
Sometimes I think Pa is very silly.
If the Leederville toughs are at the lake when we’re there and swagger over, Billy just smiles at them and says, ‘Wotcha’, and they leave us alone. Don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because Billy isn’t scared of them like I am. I’m pretty sure they’d set on Jack if Billy wasn’t there.
Looking at Jack and Billy together you wouldn’t think Jack was two years older. He’s a bit taller than Billy but Billy seems bigger, thicker. His hair falls down over his forehead, fair and silky. He smiles a lot and he looks straight at you, as if to say, what could be better than this.
Jack is always tired, and a bit unsure of himself. Mum cuts his hair and she usually gets it too short and a bit uneven. Jack’s dark like me and Mum’s haircutting makes his curls stand out in all directions. He looks like he needs fattening up and caring for.
We all work hard while Dad’s away, but when I look at Jack I think that perhaps he’s had more to do than Martha or me. He’s not happy at work, either. He didn’t want to leave school. He doesn’t like delivering telegrams and he doesn’t like his boss. When Jack told Mum he wanted to stay at school, she said he had to go to work because we needed the money. She takes all his pay from him. And when he comes home tired, Mum bullies him into helping, even when Pa says not to bother.
‘Leave him be,’ he says to Mum.
But she doesn’t.
Jack has been hoping that when Dad got back he’d let him go to night school to learn about engines and tooling. And, if he was really lucky, that Dad would let him leave the Post Office and apprentice him to a garage. He thinks it’s too late to go back to real school.
Perhaps there’s more chance of that now Dad’s been back to school himself. I wonder if he can make Mum let Jack leave work, though. Once she says something, that’s usually it!
THINGS CHANGED AFTER THE ARMISTICE. ‘THERE WAS,’ said Martha, ‘a lifting of worries; a feeling that after the years of making do as half a family, everything would come back to normal.’ All it needed was for the men to come home.
Mum wasn’t quite as prickly. She was upset when she heard that Dad had been in hospital again but she’d stopped jumping when the doorbell rang.
That was until she started worrying all over again.
I’d come in late from school to find Auntie Em sitting at the kitchen table, the afternoon paper in front of her. Mum was pouring tea.
‘Haven’t we had enough,’ she was saying, ‘without starting all the worries again. Imagine if Harry had been on that ship!’
‘Well, they think they can stop it spreading,’ said Auntie, looking down at the front page of the Daily News. ‘They got all the sick ones off the boat this afternoon and into Woodman’s Point. No one’s allowed near it. And all the nurses from the Wyreema went with them. Brave lasses to volunteer for that sort of work.’
Mum tutted. ‘No way to come home. And, you say the men didn’t even get to the war?’
‘No, they were still on the way over when the armistice was declared so they turned around at Cape Town and came home. Terrible waste,’ said Auntie running her finger down the page.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Well, one of the ships bringing the boys home is full of that new influenza,’ said Auntie. ‘Some of them have already died; others with it have been put into quarantine at Woodman’s and the rest of the soldiers are stuck on the ship waiting to see what happens next.’
What happened next was that the men started dying. T
hen, just before Christmas, one of the nurses died. But the influenza didn’t get out of the quarantine hospital and people stopped worrying.
We’d known about the influenza, of course. They’d been talking about it in the papers and just before the end of last year posters were put up everywhere and the boys from school dropped circulars into letterboxes telling people what to do if they caught it.
The silly thing about this ‘flu was that doctors couldn’t agree on how to treat it. They could only go on guesses and probably had their fingers crossed behind their backs when they suggested this or that treatment.
The West Australian was full of advice and, although there were no cases of flu here yet, Mum cut out each little bit of information.
‘I’ll just save these. You never know if they might come in handy,’ she’d said when the first reports appeared. She read everything that had the word ‘influenza’ in it; advertisements for ‘cures’, long, boring articles about the ‘flu and suggestions for what to do when you got it. She pasted every one into one of our old exercise books. You could see the writing between the bits of newspaper but that didn’t worry her.
After some discussion with Pa she agreed to stop cutting out the advertisements from chemists. ‘Some,’ Pa said, ‘might save a man from the moon, but I doubt they’d do much good for a normal person.’
We had been prepared and it looked as if we’d beaten the influenza at Woodman’s even though more people and nurses had died there.
Still, it was a better Christmas than the others.
Pa and Jack went out along the old plank road and came back with a really big tree.
‘I’ve had my eye on that one for a while,’ said Pa.
Pa gets his wood in big blocks from Mr Abbot and cuts it up into the right sizes for stoves and fireplaces, but every so often he goes out into the bush himself to get smaller pieces. And that’s where he found the tree. It was not like the ones you see in pictures but it had needles instead of real leaves, and after we’d wrapped paper chains around it, it looked, as Pa said, ‘Most handsome’.
Christmas dinner was better too. Mum had saved some of our dried sultanas and currants so we had a real pudding again with custard and four thruppences in it. By a good piece of luck, Mary, Martha, Jack and me each got one. Jack’ll buy a comic, Martha’s saving hers, and I’m going to buy as much sherbert as I can to share with Billy. Mary didn’t say what she’d do with hers. She just sucked it clean and wrapped it in her hankie.
It was hot. The kitchen was boiling and the sitting room not much better. But we sat with our paper hats on and ate so much we could hardly move. For the first time in a long while we weren’t moping around wondering what Dad was doing – well, Mum was a bit, but it wasn’t a worried wondering. We had posted our presents even though we didn’t know where Dad’d be.
‘The army should be able to track him down,’ joked Pa.
I don’t know what Mum sent apart from a fruit cake but I made him a handkerchief with his initials embroidered in one corner. Jack sent him the leather tobacco bag he’d made in manual arts before he had to leave school, and Martha saved up and bought a note-book and filled it with flowers she’d pressed. Next to each flower she wrote its special name and the name we call it, where she’d picked it and when. She must have been working on it all year. I thought it was the job of men to send flowers, but Pa said it was a real bit of home for Dad.
‘He’ll be so proud of you all,’ said Mum as she put each parcel into a box, wrapped it up in brown paper and tied it up with string ready for Jack to take into the post office.
Then we settled into the summer holidays. Except for Jack who had to go to work.
IT WAS THE BEST SUMMER HOLIDAY FOR YEARS. HOT and lazy. Pa and Mum got up even earlier so Mum could cook before it became too hot. Then she’d bank the fire down, building it up a couple of times in the day to boil the kettle for tea. We seemed to eat nothing but corned beef and salad. Boring old lettuce. Pity Pa grew it so well. The milko came even earlier than usual and it was my job to rush out as soon as I heard him and bring the milk in. Even in the cooler safe it was a bit dodgy by evening.
When Mum was happy that we’d finished what needed doing, the rest of the day was our own. Martha set up a deck chair under the lemon tree. ‘It’s coolish,’ she said, ‘and at least I don’t stick to the chair.’
Pa’s wood round was small because people only needed wood for ovens in summer and he started taking time in the afternoon to read too. Mum sometimes even had an afternoon nap. Billy came around most days and we played checkers or just stretched out on the floor in the passage and read bits and pieces.
Jack had to go to work but Mum finally realised he was exhausted. Cycling in the heat in his uniform knocked him out and by the time he came home he wanted nothing more than to sit in the slight breeze on the front verandah, and for once Mum let him do that.
After a week of sleepless nights, Pa and Jack dragged Dad’s old tent and some camp beds from the shed. The canvas had a small rip in it but that didn’t matter, it wasn’t going to rain. They set it up near the clothesline and Jack, Martha and me slept in it every night. Mum said she didn’t want to tempt the mosquitoes and Pa thought he was too old to change beds.
‘Come on, Martha. You know I can’t go without you. Better than staying at home sweating.’
‘Perspiring,’ said Martha not even looking up from her book. ‘You know Mum doesn’t like you saying “sweating”.’
‘Pa says “sweating” is a good honest word.’
‘Pa’s a man and he’s allowed to sweat. Mum seems to think she can make you into a lady so you can perspire and not sweat. Though, I think,’ she went on, ‘a real lady only blushes.’
‘That’s silly. I don’t mind being like Pa. Anyway Mum’s sweating like mad in the kitchen now.’
‘Yes,’ said Martha putting her book down, ‘and we should see if she needs help.’
But Mum said we could go to the swimming baths and even suggested that the next day we go earlier to miss the real heat of the day.
It took well over an hour by the time we caught the train to Claremont and walked all the way down to the river. The last bit on the long jetty out into the river was a relief. Inside the baths the breeze was coming up from the water and through the floorboards in the little changing cubicles cooling us even more.
Martha did a neat dive into the deep end and came up in the middle of the baths. She’d not worn her stockings and her legs shone through the green, gently lapping water.
‘Come on, Nell,’ she called, turning on her back. ‘It’s wonderful.’
When I started down the ladder she went on, ‘Surely they’ve taught you to dive already.’
I shook my head and Martha breaststroked over to me. ‘Back up, Nell, and let me up. How about we practise diving for a bit.’
It was not a question.
Luckily the water was high and the drop not too far, because Martha made me curl my toes around the wooden slats at the edge of the pool, put my arms out over my head, bend down and fall over her outstretched arm. She kept me at it for an hour before she went back into the water for a swim. I went into the shallow end to catch some jellyfish.
Lunch was a sandwich from home and a lemon squash from the kiosk.
‘That was an absolutely bonzer day,’ I said as we waited for the train.
‘It’s debatable if you count the walk after,’ said Martha. The heat radiated up from the platform and we both squinted into the sun. ‘No, really, Nellie, it was a lovely day.’
We went twice a week for three weeks. After my diving lesson Martha would swim next to me as I breaststroked my way across the pool. It was like having Mum there. No sympathy for a stinging belly flop, just a ‘Come on, give it another try’. Or if I got tired halfway across the pool, Martha made me float on my back until I was ready to go on. ‘Pull me along, Martha,’ I’d say. ‘No,’ Martha always answered, ‘you can make it on your own.’
‘Nell�
��s doing well, Pa,’ Martha announced at the end of the month. ‘She can dive like a champion and she can swim three widths of the pool.’
‘Time to celebrate, then,’ said Pa. ‘How about a trip to the beach?’
On Saturday, I was up early in the dawn cool of the back garden, taking Martha’s and my bathers and towels off the line and squashing them into a string bag. Mum, on her way to empty her pot into the lavatory, paused. ‘Nell, it’s ages before we go. Go back to bed for a while. Or go and do some weeding or something in the garden.’
I rolled my eyes. Mum’s rule that you must always be either doing or properly resting was tiresome. ‘I’ll be in the garden,’ I called out as Mum disappeared into the lav.
I sang ‘Onward Christian soldiers marching off to war …’ as I moved down the row of lettuces plucking snails from the leaves and putting them into a bucket to take up to the chooks later.
Pa put his head out the kitchen window. He was holding his first cup of tea for the day and I knew that Mum would be sitting quietly at the kitchen table having hers. ‘Are you converting the snails or singing them to their doom?’ he asked.
I laughed. ‘It just popped into my head, Pa. It’s a good tune.’
‘That it is,’ said Pa before turning back into the kitchen. ‘What do you need for the sandwiches, Liz?’
Mum murmured something and Pa came to the window again. ‘The radishes are ready, Nell. Pull enough for us to eat today and choose the best cucumber and three or four tomatoes.’
Mum’s voice floated out the window. ‘A couple of bunches of grapes would be good.’
Two hours later, Mum was taking cupcakes out of the oven when Billy arrived to see Jack.
‘Well, Billy my lad,’ said Pa, ‘would you be interested in a trip to the beach? We’re hoping to catch the ten o’clock train. Can your mum and dad do without you for the day?’
War's End Page 4
