A Rose for the Anzac Boys
Page 19
But he made a full recovery, thank goodness, and by the time you get this we will be married and on our way east again. I gather that when the money for a dig comes through you have to move quickly, and I HAVE been moving quickly, trying to get a tropical kit ready, or whatever one calls a kit for Mesopotamia. No big wedding, just the family and some of the household and Ethel of course and some of Gavin’s chums in the local church. I suppose Wilkins will cry again, the old dear, and pretend he isn’t.
I do so wish you could be with us, but there simply isn’t time. We will be thinking of you so very much, so if you smelled the scent of wedding cake among your mountains a few weeks ago, then that was us.
Gavin doesn’t mind about my face. Or rather he minds the pain behind it. But he says that none of us came out of the war unscathed. He couldn’t cope with a wife untouched by it all. So somehow my face is right, it fits with what’s happened to our lives. His colleagues seem to cope with it too, which is the main thing, and at least out there one won’t have to meet lots of staring strangers. There’ll just be us and the villagers, and all the glories of Babylon, at least those we can dig up. It’s funny. You wanted me to have sunlight and your wide horizons. Well, I’m getting them, just not the ones you planned.
Be happy for me, darling. As happy as your loving friend,
Anne, soon to be
Mrs Gavin Ridgeway
Deepdene
Yorkshire
February 1920
Dearest Midge,
Well old girl, I’ve sold the blessed bike. A lorry ran into me when neither of us were expecting it. I got off with a broken collarbone but the old bike was a goner and Da had pink kittens and threatened to cut off my allowance. Our George went more boringly on and on about the dangers of women’s rights than ever. Our George is making the perfect wholesale grocer. His soul is made of cocoa.
We had a spiffing demonstration outside Parliament House the other day, but the press is getting tired of this chaining ourselves to the railings lark. We’ll have to think of something more newsworthy pretty soon. Tattooing ‘Votes for Women’ on the old Prime Minister’s head strikes me as a good one, don’t you think? It’s all right for you out in the colonies, lass; you’ve got your votes, but we back home need help!
Look here, Midge, don’t you think you should come back and join us? You can’t be happy out there playing tennis among those sheep. Come and set up house with us in London. There is so much that needs doing here. We need all the hands we can get.
You remember Dimpy—Moira Garrington-Ffoote? Dimps was a VAD out in Malta and then up our way; one brother caught it at Flanders and the other was gassed; coughing his lungs up in Oxford these days, poor blighter. Dimps has set up a school and soup kitchen for the children in the East End, and we want to get a library going too. Do you realise there are children who have never seen a book in their whole lives? Or eaten more than bread and scrape for dinner? Sorry—I didn’t mean to preach to you of all people! But we need you here! Dimps and I plan to take a house in London. There’ll be plenty of room for three, or more when we get the volunteers, and…
Midge put the letter down and looked out the window. Behind her Harry’s rose picture glowed on the wall, above the mantelpiece with Tim’s and Dougie’s photos, and the miniatures of the three of them Mum had asked to be painted a few months before she died.
Out the window the mountains reached for the sky; a peak of snow trembled gold as the sunlight faded. She could hear Dougie’s voice over near the shearing sheds, yelling some order to the men, then the scrape, scrape, scrape of his crutch on the gravel path. Dougie managed to get most places by himself these days. He even managed to drive, pressing the clutch down with a stick to help his new foot.
Dougie had needed her on the ship home; needed her for the first few months at Glen Donal, when the pain of a leg long gone still woke him screaming.
But a month ago Dougie had become engaged to Sylvia Malcolm from Mount Albert. A nice girl, Sylvia; Midge liked her, though it was hard to find much to talk about. The last thing Dougie needed now, as he rebuilt his life, was a sister interfering in the running of his farm. A sister who remembered the days of his agony and the childishness that came with pain.
Dougie’s eyes still wore shadows. Every man who’d made it home had shadows. She supposed her face had shadows of its own. And the silence of Tim’s voice still echoed through the house, across the paddocks, never mentioned by his brother or his sister, always felt.
Her heart still burned like a sliver of ice had lodged in it when she thought of Tim. Every stair and cupboard at Glen Donal spoke of Tim. The shelf with the old monkey that they’d shared; the banisters they’d raced each other down. The cribs still up in the attic, one his, one hers.
She supposed Dougie’s babies would sleep in them one day now.
Tim, she whispered, and pretended she heard a whisper back. ‘Sis? Sis…Sis…’
But it wasn’t Tim. It was the wind in the willow trees, the swish of Mrs Campbell’s broom. Smiling may you go, and smiling come again, she thought.
Oh Tim…
Ghosts, she thought. There are too many ghosts here. The ghosts of our childhood, the children laughing by the stream. The ghosts of Ernie the snigger, dead at Gallipoli, Jock the breaker lost in the mud at Ypres, Will who rode the one-eyed pony that everybody said was mad…
She lifted Ethel’s letter again. Was that the answer? Become a suffragette back in England rather than a maiden aunt listening to her ghosts at Glen Donal? But England was the past. It had never been her heart’s country. Even the blood-fed soil of France held more of her soul these days than the green fields of England. She got up, and began to pace the room. Was she lost too, then, ‘missing in action’, a ghost herself, all meaning taken from her life with the loss of Tim and all her dreams? Surely there had to be something more she could do with her life; something with meaning; something with a purpose as strong as Dougie’s as he hauled his maimed body across the paddocks, reclaiming a future that France had nearly torn away.
Dougie had come home again. But was Glen Donal still home for her?
The paddocks and the mountains still stirred her soul. But Tim’s absence cut her like a knife. And Ethel was right. After the last four years it was hard to make do with the routines of roast lamb and tennis parties.
Suddenly she remembered Lallie, her voice harsh with weariness, the beat of the shells drumming across the fields. ‘Tell Midge to carry on,’ she’d said. Should she become a nurse? Take up Aunt Lallie’s cape and veil? She’d had enough of wounds and bedpans. That was the past. That was Lallie’s life, not hers. Lallie would never have meant her to stand in her shadow. It had been Lallie who’d urged her to make her own life, not live someone else’s. There had to be something more.
Suddenly she noticed her name on another letter, half hidden under the envelopes for Dougie on the salver. The paper was thin and cheap. When she picked it up she saw that the address had been written and rewritten many times across the front; not surprising, as the sender had addressed it simply to ‘Miss Rose Macpherson, Glen Donal, New Zealand’.
It was a miracle, she thought, picking it up, that it had found its way here at all.
Rose…Surely Harry wouldn’t be writing to her after all these years? And he’d always used her real name before. Besides, it wasn’t his writing. It looked like a woman’s hand, the copperplate slow and careful, as though it had been drafted once then copied to look perfect, each word blotted carefully before the ink could run.
Moura
Biscuit Creek
New South Wales
Australia
Dear Miss Rose Macpherson,
I am sorry to be writing to you out of the blue like this when we have never spoke but I am Harry’s mum. Well, Miss Macpherson, you see it is like this.
I know you met my Harry in France when you was working there. I didn’t know they had girls in the army. I know you must be brave though if you done that so
maybe you won’t mind me writing to you like this. Maybe after all you must of seen you will understand.
Perhaps you didn’t know that Harry was wounded over there. In the head it was. The doctors said he should be all right now but, miss, he isn’t. He doesn’t speak at all most days, not at all no matter what you say.
It’s not like he is really sick his appetite is good and he works all day fencing, mostly off with the dogs. He smiles at the dogs sometimes but that is all. He has never even smiled at me, his Mum. I can stand that Miss Macpherson. I could have stood it if he’d been killed though in a way it would of killed me too. But I can not stand seeing my boy unhappy. Not just unhappy Miss. Most times its like he isn’t even there. Well, Miss Macpherson, you are wondering why I am writing to you about this but it was yesterday Harry’s dad harnessed up the sulky to see Lewis’s new radio. They got it sent from Sydney special and we took Harry too in case it did him good. I don’t know if you have radios in New Zealand but they play songs so it sounds just like the piano and singers were in the room and they played this song called ‘The Rose of No-Man’s-Land’. It was all about you nurses over in France where you were with my Harry. I remember some of the words. They stuck by me even though I only heard them the once.
’Neath the War’s dark curse
Stands a Red Cross nurse
She’s the rose of no-man’s-land
And suddenly Harry speaks up. He was smiling too. Miss it had been so long since I saw my boy smile. He says I knew a Rose but she wasn’t with the Red Cross. And we all stared because like I told you, miss, Harry has never said a single word since he come home. I said who is she Harry? And he said like I should have known, She’s Rose Macpherson of Glen Donal in New Zealand. And then he said I hear the guns still all the time. Rose would understand. I said what about the guns Harry? And he said, Can’t speak over the guns. Rose knows. And that is all he said. He stopped smiling Miss. He went away again.
Miss, Harry is my only boy there was another and a girl but they died of the polio so you see, miss, Harry is all I have and next door too their boys died at Gallipoli all three of them and they was relying on Harry to keep their place going as well. So if you can tell us why Harry can’t speak or how we can help him I would be much obliged and Harry’s dad and the Martins who are next door.
I remain yours faithfully,
Mrs Ellen Harrison
Chapter 19
Wentworth Hotel
Sydney
10 April 1920
Dear Ethel,
I suppose you think I’m bonkers. But I’m not, you know. It’s just that for the first time since the war I have a glimpse of something that is worth doing.
Not that I know how much I will be able to do at Moura. If, as I suspect, Harry Harrison is suffering from a combination of shell shock and hearing loss—the noise of the guns his mother spoke about does sound like the symptoms of so many young men driven deaf by the years in the trenches—then I can at least offer some suggestions and reassurance to his parents, and possibly to Harry too. And as you and I know so well, how can anyone understand who wasn’t there? How does that song go? When they ask us, what are we going to tell them…
Well, I was there, and so was Harry. I can’t talk about those days to Dougie—he just wants to forget. So seeing Harry, helping him, may give me a little peace as well.
But it’s more than that. As you guessed, I’ve been bored sick. There was something in Harry’s mother’s appeal about everyone on both farms relying on him that got to me. Yes, I know shell shock, but I know sheep too. Maybe I can help there as well. Dougie snaps if I so much as make a suggestion at Glen Donal.
Dear friend, don’t misunderstand, but I have come to realise that I’m not a nurse, or a suffragette. I’m a sheep farmer. It’s in my blood. Perhaps these people need help so much that they’ll forget I wear skirts, not trousers…
She sent a telegram to say when she was arriving; not a letter, in case the mail was slow. She bought new clothes in Sydney—including a low-waisted dress, with a pink sash across the hips—not just to look her best but to say ‘My life is new now too’. All she wore was new, except for Lallie’s locket. She always wore that now. She left the hotel before first light, the gas lamps lining the streets still flaring into the city dark, the road still damp with night and dew.
The car was a Ford, familiar but strange as well. The leather smelled new and felt soft. It had been extravagant buying a new car, when she might use it for so little time, slinking back home a failure. But the salesman had said they’d buy it back from her and it would work out cheaper than hiring. Dougie had accepted she had earned the right to do what she liked with her money now, even though she still wasn’t quite twenty-one.
Two punctures in the first four hours, and the radiator boiled on the slope they called the Razorback. But that was nothing after driving an ambulance in France. She had her puncture repair kit, and there was petrol available. She only had to use the jerry cans in the back once, all the way to Goulburn.
Out from Goulburn the grass looked thin; the trees stunted too. Strange trees, with stranger twists and poor drab tops, like they were panting for more soil or rain. Was this what Moura would be like? She shivered. Impossible to think of living here after Glen Donal. This land could never speak to her heart.
She turned from the main road onto another. The land began to rise. Almost indiscernibly at first, the engine hardly labouring. But the air changed; the sweet unmistakable smell of cold and hills.
The trees were taller here, thick-trunked and sturdy, carrying their green heads with pride. They still looked odd. But perhaps you could grow to love them, she thought. Maybe there was a generosity in this soil too.
She stopped when her watch said it was lunchtime. She spread the blanket on the grass beside the road and sat down to force herself to eat and drink, just as she had for all those years in France. A picnic basket and thermos had come with the car, as though to tempt you to buy it with the thought of picnics by the roadside.
The hotel had filled the basket with sandwiches, even wrapped them in a damp damask napkin to keep them fresh. Ham and pickle, tomato and cheese, the bread well buttered so it didn’t go soggy; roast beef and cucumber. A thermos of tea, with milk and sugar added, just as she liked it. Three slices of fruit cake in another napkin. How many napkins did they give away to wealthy guests each year, she wondered.
To her surprise she found herself finishing even the cake. She hadn’t realised she was hungry.
She glanced at her wristwatch again. It was new, a Christmas present from Dougie. A thoughtful present to a much-loved sister.
Had she really been naive enough to think Dougie would let his little sister help run Glen Donal?
It was time to go. Another two hours to get to Biscuit Creek, then another half-hour to Moura, she thought.
The way grew steeper. A river ran below her, a thin mirror over the sand, edged with the prints of cows and piles of dung. Then cleared land again. A mob of ’roos bounced across the road in front of her, hardly glancing at the car. Laughter bubbled up; impossible not to laugh at creatures so ridiculous.
Biscuit Creek Township was bigger than she’d expected. English trees lined the streets, dappled with autumn leaves, like home. A bank, two cafés, even a dress shop and a jeweller’s as well as the stock and station agency, the saddlery, the funeral parlour, the baker’s. No garage, but she had enough petrol in the jerry cans. She stopped at the blacksmith’s to ask directions. The man looked curiously at the car, and even more curiously at her. But he was polite and helpful.
She tried to ignore the stares as she drove out of town.
Her skin began to prickle. It had all seemed so simple a month ago; even yesterday. Like the war, when you had to make decisions quickly, with no time to regret the ones that you got wrong. Running a canteen, nursing in France—did wisdom and experience in some areas really teach you how to cope in others? What was at the end of this long road?
A rabbit darted along the roadside, and then another. That was why the grass was so close clipped, she thought. Eaten back by rabbits, so many they were forced to feed by daylight too. Now she looked she could see rabbit holes, and the beginnings of erosion gullies where the creatures had eaten the roots of the grass, leaving the soil to blow and wash away. Had they tried ferrets, she wondered. If nothing was done this land would blow away, rabbit-eaten into dust, the men who could have cared for it lost in France, in Belgium, along the Turkish coast, or maimed like Dougie, Harry…
I’ll fight for you, she thought suddenly. Poor abandoned land. I can make you flourish. What about the new barbed wire? Could that help keep the rabbits down? And that ram, panting in the shade of the gum tree—his chest looked too skinny for him to father anything. A few Lincolns crossed with these merinos would mean fat lambs as well as wool, and lucerne down on those creek flats would do for silage…
Stop it, she told herself. Tomorrow you might be heading home, embarrassed. Or maybe sitting with a man whose mind was so destroyed that he could never recognise her. Perhaps he even had found another girl to smile at, in the months it had taken his mother’s letter to reach New Zealand, and for the journey here.