Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  ‘That doll stays home here, Margot,’ Jenny said. May as well have spoken to the door. Georgie left Jenny’s side and ran after her sister.

  She could run! She caught up to Margot and pushed her.

  ‘Naughty girl,’ Gertrude chastised as she ran to retrieve the muddy screamer. Georgie retrieved the doll. ‘You’re bigger than your sister and you mustn’t push her.’

  ‘She’s six, and Jenny said.’

  ‘Jenny said the doll was to stay inside, so stop your bawling, Margot. You disobeyed me so you deserved to land in the mud,’ Jenny said, taking charge of that kid, stripping off her muddy clothes.

  ‘She’s not the one you should be scolding.’

  ‘Georgie was obeying me, and you sympathising with Margot is only encouraging her to disobey me the next time, Granny.’

  ‘You lean towards —’

  ‘Don’t say it — and anyway, someone has to. Over there . . .’ She signalled with the back of her hand towards Elsie’s house. ‘They all do their fair share of leaning towards the other one.’

  Jenny washed Margot, dressed her in her nightgown and told her to wear it until she learned to do as she was told, and that if she didn’t stop her bawling about a bit of mud, she’d wear it to school, too. Margot stood at the door and bellowed louder while Jenny washed the doll’s clothes and Georgie sat at the table watching and having her turn with the doll.

  ‘You’re rewarding bad behaviour.’

  ‘I’m rewarding respect for something beautiful. She was saving the doll’s life the only way she knew how. Its head would have been off by now. Elsie’s kids would have had its eyes out just to see how they worked, and you know it. I’ve been pussyfooting around you-know-who ever since I came home, bending over backwards in trying to do the right thing and getting nowhere fast. All I’m doing by making allowances is creating another spoiled brat like Sissy.’

  ‘Why is Sissy a brat?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘She eats too much. Stop your bawling, Margot, or you can go to bed until you learn to obey me.’

  ‘If you’d been here when they were growing —’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t here, and Georgie doesn’t hold it against me.’

  IS HITLER DEAD?

  Elsie came skating across the paddock in May, and Gertrude ran to meet her, afraid for Joey, afraid one of the kids was injured.

  ‘I just heard it on the news, Mum. They’re saying that Hitler is dead. They said he’s been killed in action.’

  People all over the word would remember what they were doing the day they heard that piece of news. Jenny was cutting vegies for her chicken soup.

  The vegies waited long to be cut while the women sat around Elsie’s wireless, listening for confirmation of that madman’s death, and speaking of Joey, who was fighting up north.

  ‘If Hitler is dead, it’s over, isn’t it, Mum?’

  ‘It’s over in Europe,’ Gertrude said.

  But was he dead? No confirmation came that day.

  The Melbourne newspapers came in on the train at ten, and by ten the following morning, a crowd was waiting at the newsagent’s. Jenny waited with them. She got her hands on a copy of the Sun, and stood with others reading the front page. Which posed the same question they’d heard yesterday on the wireless.

  IS HITLER DEAD?

  If there was one man on earth that half the world wished dead it was Adolf Hitler. Tales of atrocities had been filtering back as the Russians and the Allies made their way through war-torn Germany. The Nazis had lost the war months back but their maniac leader refused to surrender.

  Prominent military observers emphasised that the report of Hitler’s death was subject to many interpretations. The obituary notice on German radio may have been a screen for his escape. There can be no certainty that Hitler is dead until the body is produced and fingerprints checked.

  The emergence of Admiral Doenitz as the new head of state will at the most only briefly delay the collapse of the Reich. It is widely believed that Admiral Doenitz cannot command sufficient army support to continue the struggle.

  Confirmation of Hitler’s death didn’t come, not positively, but on 7 May, the news came through that Germany had surrendered.

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Fank God,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Thank, not fank,’ Georgie said. ‘You have to poke your tongue out and blow.’

  Teach one kid a new trick and she’ll teach the rest — if they want to learn.

  ‘George Macdonald was saying that the twins are somewhere in Germany,’ Harry said that night. ‘He reckons they haven’t got a scratch on them.’

  ‘Hitler thought he was seeing double and aimed between them,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Old Macdonald had a farm .. .’Jimmy sang.

  ‘He’s got your voice,’ Harry said.

  ‘He gets everything,’ Georgie said. ‘And Margot, too. Why did she get two fathers and not me?’

  ‘She didn’t,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Joany said twins,’ Georgie said. She knew all about twins now. The kids at school said she and Margot were twins because they wore the same blue overcoats, the same matching pixie bonnets, the same dark green cardigans. They said they were bastards, too.

  ‘What’s basards, Jenny?’

  ‘A word you don’t ever say.’

  ‘The kids at school say it.’

  ‘Only stupid kids. Are you stupid?’

  ‘I can read.’

  She could. She was barely five years old, and wilful, and Jenny loved her wilfulness. In little Georgie, she saw the child she might have been.

  She tried to like Margot, tried to seek out things in her to like. Elsie and Maisy said she could sing, but would that kid sing for Jenny, sing with Jenny? Not on your life. And if she could, she’d probably got it from her fathers. They could hold a tune.

  She wondered what Cara Jeanette had got from her fathers. Wondered if Captain Robert Norris had survived the war. Wondered if Myrtle had sold Amberley. If Billy-Bob’s boat had been among the boats sunk by the Japs’ kamikaze pilots. Wondered if she dared to claim his watch. It kept such good time.

  She made the decision to claim it one night. They were sitting around the stove, Jenny telling stories about Sydney; the tale of Mrs Collins’s singed hair always made the kids laugh. She told them about little Wilfred, the leprechaun with magic fingers who could play any tune ever written. Then she told the tale of the fat black Labrador on the Sydney beach one summer morning, how he’d dropped a watch at her feet, wanting her to play fetch with him.

  She brought the watch out later to show the kids the indentations in the gold where the dog had tried to chew his metal bone. Showed them the inscription and told Georgie to read it.

  ‘Billy-Bob from Mom and Dad. Who’s Billy-Bob, Jenny?’

  ‘A boy who lost his watch on a beach,’ Jenny said. That wasn’t a lie. ‘He must have been a Yankee. Australians don’t have such funny names. The Yanks all had funny names: Hank and Chuck, Whitworth and Link, Billy-Bob . . .’

  The kids laughed at those names and their laughter was healing.

  She told them then of an old schoolteacher with a wooden leg who had used four pegs to hang his shirts on the clothes line, how he’d used two pegs to hang each sock. They laughed at that, too. They knew how precious Granny’s pegs were — there were never enough of them.

  The newsagent sold Jenny a leather watchband, and with a watch on her wrist, she was never late, never early when picking the kids up from school. Time ticked no faster. The winter of ’45 was long.

  She had a confrontation with Vern on a freezing Friday when she came in from school with the girls and found his car in the yard, found him sitting at the table, Jimmy on his lap. She nodded, though she didn’t want to. She told the girls to say good afternoon to Jimmy’s grandfather. And he looked at them the way he might have looked at a nest of flea-infested rats with rabies.

  Vern needed to see those kids clothed in rags, needed to see them blue with the cold, n
ot pink cheeked and dressed up like the town toffs in matching overcoats and bonnets. He lived for the day he’d come down here and see that girl with her belly sticking out.

  She’d clad herself in grey trousers and blue sweater. Flat bellied, bright eyed, windblown and beautiful — and why couldn’t she pick up with some wife-bashing, child-abusing, drunken bastard of a man?

  ‘You must be seen to be doing the right thing, Mr Hooper,’ his fool of a solicitor kept saying. ‘A girl with her history will make a mistake, Mr Hooper.’

  He paid her money each week for Jimmy’s keep, and resented her spending it to clothe George Macdonald’s granddaughter and that redhead, father unknown. He resented Jimmy wriggling to get down from his lap. Tried to hold onto him. Had to let him go to her.

  He’d bided his time in going after that boy, and where had that got him?

  Vern watched her take the girls’ coats off, hang them behind the door, watched her pouring mugs of milk, handing those kids two biscuits each — and he’d done enough of biding his time.

  ‘Trying to make silk purses out of sows’ ears doesn’t alter what they are,’ he said.

  ‘I dare say you’d be the authority on that, Mr Hooper. I’ll bet you’ve spent a fortune in your time,’ she said.

  ‘Jennifer!’

  ‘That boy is my grandson, and I’m telling you now that you won’t raise him as a bastard in this town.’

  ‘Some are born bastards. Some just grow old and become bastards,’Jenny said.

  ‘Jennifer!’ Gertrude repeated.

  ‘Don’t chastise me, Granny. He said it first.’

  ‘I didn’t grow to my age to listen to the two I love best in this world arguing in my kitchen. Take the kids over to Elsie.’

  ‘This is where I live. This is where his grandson lives. He can leave any time he likes.’

  In June, Germany was partitioned into four occupation zones, British and American, Russian and French. In June, Horrie Bull and his wife sold the hotel.

  Everyone knew their son was their grandson. Everyone knew that schoolkids have a pecking order. Like hens in a crowded pen, they’ll peck at the weak until they draw blood, then cackle while they bleed.

  The Bulls had the good sense to get that boy out of town before he started school — and they had money enough to do it. Money meant options. Those who had too little of the stuff had no options.

  By June’s end, the Yanks were throwing everything they had at the Japs. It was just a matter of time, the newspapers said. Just a matter of a few thousand more boys dying.

  Then, on 5 July, John Curtin, prime minister through most of the war years, died in his sleep. It didn’t seem fair that he’d been denied the end of that war.

  ‘He was only sixty! He was only a boy,’ Gertrude said.

  Only sixty! Sixty is very old when you’re twenty-one.

  ‘How old are you, Granny?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Amber must be going on fifty. You were in your late twenties when she was born.’

  ‘Stop your totalling up of my years and get that washing in before it’s blown to China.’

  ‘Have you ever been to China?’

  ‘Not China. I glimpsed Japan.’ She patted the ivory pins she still wore in her hair. ‘Your father bought them when his boat docked there.’

  ‘I’m not Amber, and when did he have a boat?’

  ‘He did a lot of ship doctoring — and you knew who I meant. You’ll have to start making allowances for me soon. I’m so old I’m losing my memory.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were old; I just asked how old you were.’

  ‘It’s still none of your business, my girl.’

  The winds were evil through July. They whipped Granny’s house. For hour after hour, July’s winds attempted to blow that old house from the face of the earth. It stood up to it better than Elsie’s. It whistled beneath Elsie’s house, rocked it.

  ‘We ought to build a new room on here — somewhere.’

  ‘Building costs money.’

  ‘If you’d admit your age, you’d be eligible for the old age pension.’

  ‘Keep your insults to yourself.’

  ‘You’ve got no income?’

  ‘My chooks keep pace with inflation.’

  There was time to observe when the winds kept them indoors, when wind-whipped rain thrashed the low roof, rattled the shutters, seeped in through gaps, when drafts seeped in and the curtains swayed and the only warmth came from the stove. There was time to notice the silver showing at Gertrude’s scalp when they sat close at night, when the thought of leaving the stove to go to their beds encouraged them to sit too late, when talk turned to the past, to the future, even to Sissy.

  ‘It’s weird how Sissy got your hair and I got Itchy-foot’s. It’s as if we both bypassed Norman and Amber. What was Grandma Cecelia’s hair like?’

  ‘Grey. Straight. Fine,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Does Sissy really look like her?’

  ‘The image, though your grandma was a lot broader when she died.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘She took a stroke at sixty.’

  ‘And I was born a few days later.’

  ‘The night of her funeral, as I recall.’

  For days the winds howled, hens with ruffled feathers unintentionally took flight across the yard, trees came down. One fell across the forest road and for two days the kids couldn’t go to school.

  Sending them to school in this weather was asking for trouble. Gertrude harnessed her horse into the old cart and drove them in on the Monday, and drove them home with the flu. Then Jenny caught it. Gertrude and Jimmy looked after them, until they too went down with it.

  Gertrude was never unwell. In Jenny’s lifetime she couldn’t recall her grandmother taking to her bed ill. She was in bed for the best part of a week with the flu, her lungs creating their own wind storm, her cough in the night putting fear into Jenny. Fear of a future without Gertrude. Fear of the future.

  She wore trousers now, like Gertrude. Was she to become a second Gertrude, her life spent here, milking goats, feeding chooks, cleaning out chook pens and spreading barrow loads of stinking manure on garden beds?

  Jenny worked like a slave during the ten days of Gertrude’s illness while Lenny harnessed the horse to deliver the kids to school — which was excuse enough for him to retire from the classroom. He was thirteen, or near enough to it. He’d been repeating grade six, and he’d had enough of grade six.

  The new hotel owners came to town to place their stamp on the corner pub. They gave the old building a coat of paint and had a fancy brass plaque made and screwed over the front door. Erected in 1870.

  Gertrude, not getting about yet, but keeping her hands busy with knitting by the stove, spoke of the old days, of her parents, of when Amber was a girl.

  ‘How long has this house been standing, Granny?’

  ‘I arrived in the bedroom while my dad was hammering down the kitchen floor.’

  ‘How long after the hotel was built?’

  ‘I’m onto you, my girl.’ She was still coughing, had lost a little weight, but her mind was as sharp as a tack.

  Where there is a will there is a way. Jenny unwrapped Gertrude’s wedding dress. Her marriage lines were still wrapped with it, and the date of Gertrude’s birth made her heart turn over. Granny was all she had, and in August, she’d turn seventy-six.

  She rewrapped the wedding lines, and the gown, hid that knowledge away deep in the camphor wood trunk.

  Knowledge, like history can’t be buried. Far better to confront it, to deal with it.

  She stole one of Gertrude’s old tin plates and took it out to the shed, where with ancient hammer and rusty nail she hammered that date into metal, and when it was done, she found a sharper nail and hammered a nail-hole boarder. On Gertrude’s birthday, she nailed her plaque over the old front door.

  Ejected 2.8.1869.

  ‘You damn fool of a girl, take that thing do
wn.’

  ‘It gives your house character.’

  ‘You’ve ruined one of my good plates — and you’ve spelt it wrong.’

  ‘I spelt it right.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘You should have burnt your marriage lines.’

  The Yanks finished the war four days after Gertrude’s birthday. They dropped an experimental bomb on Hiroshima and turned the city and its people to ash.

  IT CAME BY PARACHUTE, the newspapers screamed.

  IT EXPLODED IN MIDAIR.

  WEAPON HAS EFFECT LIKE EARTHQUAKE.

  ATOMIC BOMB HAILED AS REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE AND WARFARE.

  The discovery of the atomic bomb is the greatest step forward ever made by man in his efforts to control nature. The bomb seems to have done what we expected. We know now that we can bottle it and release it. The next thing will be to discover how to harness it.

  Tens of thousands were disintegrated, burned, maimed by that bomb, but the Japs didn’t surrender, not that day. Three days later Russia declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria while the Yanks dropped another of their experimental bombs on Nagasaki — and let it be known they had a few more to test.

  The war ended on 14 August.

  For five years, eleven months and eleven days Australia had been at war. The day wirelesses and newspapers screamed peace, staid old Melbourne crowds danced in the street.

  Papers full of peace. Pages of photographs, tales told by pilots who’d flown over a prison camp and seen groups of Australian internees cheering below, a few waving hurriedly scribbled messages to those back home. Euphoric days, those first days of peace.

  Vern’s half-brother didn’t live to see it. His funeral announcement was at the back of one of those newspapers. His death had been expected. If Gertrude hadn’t been keeping an eye on the death columns for the announcement, she wouldn’t have known her sister-in-law, Victoria Foote, had died at the age of seventy-one.

  Howard Hooper’s name was in the same column. Like Vern he’d been her half-cousin, but so much younger. She’d barely known him as a boy and had seen him three times in the years since. Two weeks ago Vern and his daughters had gone down to Melbourne to be with him.