by John Marsden
When it did finish we wasted no time getting on our way again. It seemed like a good time to be moving. A lot of people wouldn’t be rushing outside yet. We made good progress for a while.
But for all that, our arrival in Doncaster Crescent came well after sunset. We’d had to slow right down again. It was frustrating, teeth-grinding stuff. As soon as we got into the settled areas the streets were busy. It was nothing like before the war, but it was hectic enough. This could have been New York, compared to what we were used to. People were hurrying along the streets, stepping around the piles of bomb rubble and litter. No-one looked happy. They seemed keen to get somewhere else. I saw no smiles. There was something almost furtive about the way they scurried past. We didn’t go in any areas where there’d been heavy bombing or recent bombing, but every street seemed to have suffered damage at some time.
The vehicles were all driven by soldiers, like they were on official business. Most of them were trucks, and most were in convoys of six or eight. There mightn’t have been much petrol available for social trips.
So the trip to West Stratton took forever, and every metre was riddled with anxiety. We had to wait for ages for clear breaks, when we could make a quick thirty or forty metres to the next bit of cover. I felt like my head was a garden sprinkler, turning round and round all the time, to the left, to the right, ahead, behind. It was physically tiring but worse than that, it was emotionally draining. None of us even spoke to each other after the air raid. We were concentrating so hard, nerves at hair-trigger tension.
As I’d hoped, and half expected though, West Stratton itself was different. It was too far from the CBD for enemy soldiers. It seemed deserted, and the power was off.
Only when we were approaching the house did I at last allow myself the luxury of thinking about my grandmother. I had a strong sense by then that she was no longer alive. I just felt that her spirit, which had filled the house for so many years, was gone.
In fact one of the impressive things about my Grandma was that her frail body had a spirit strong enough to fill this big old house. I swear, you could go to the furthest corner of the top storey and you’d feel her presence. It was like she was in every room, walking every corridor, popping up at every corner. I think Mum was quite relieved when Grandma moved off the farm and into Stratton. I don’t know if the farm was big enough for both of them.
We got into the garden and I tiptoed up the steps to the front door. The flower garden was so overgrown that I found myself feeling glad Grandma wasn’t there to see it. Then I told myself off for feeling glad that she wasn’t there. Then I explained to myself that I was just trying to make myself feel better because she wasn’t there, so that made it OK.
I exhaust myself sometimes, thinking like this. It makes life so complicated.
It was hard to walk along the verandah without every board creaking. The timber in the house was getting old. I took one step every ten seconds, praying I wouldn’t wake a sleeping soldier, imagining him leaping out at me with his gun drawn. I peeped through window after window, but it was impossible to see anything. The darkness was so complete, the stillness so total.
I had to assume the place was empty. All I could hope was that somewhere deep in the pantry would be a can of baked beans or a jar of marmalade. Grandma was a good cook, but the one thing she could never manage was jam. Her jams were famous in our family for being too hard: we called them concrete and made lots of jokes about breaking our teeth when we ate them. But now, yes, a jar of Grandma’s concrete would be very welcome.
I went back to the others, who were waiting in the furthest corner of the garden. In the dim light they looked thin and pale and unhappy. I knew a lot of that was lack of energy from lack of food, and I promised myself that as soon as we were settled in the house I’d get food. I didn’t know how, but I knew I had to do something.
‘It looks OK,’ I whispered. ‘There’s no-one there. Let’s go round the back. It’ll be easier to get in.’
With the power off I wasn’t worried about the security system. The back-up battery would have died months ago. But I thought the kitchen door would be weaker than the sturdy dark oak door at the front. I led them to it. Kevin kept walking on my heels, and I had to bite my lip to stop myself turning on him and yelling, ‘For God’s sakes, Kevin, can’t you look where you’re going?’ I guess I was as tired as the others.
The back garden was the vegetable section. For the first time I realised it might have vegetables self-seeded from last year. Well, I could cope with a vegetarian diet for a while. The way I felt right now I’d eat stewed gum leaves. I’d eat tree bark or crickets or compost. I’d eat the pickles from a Big Mac, that’s how serious things were.
From my glimpse of the veggie garden as I led the others past it, I thought it still looked quite neat. Better than the front anyway.
The back door used to have a panel of glass in it. Not any more. I took a quick look through the square where the glass used to be, but again it was too dark to see. I wasn’t too worried by now. The place was obviously deserted. I jiggled the door handle up and down. It felt like the tongue was only just in the socket, as though one good shove would open it. I put my shoulder to it and gave a good shove, but it didn’t move. ‘Come on,’ said an impatient voice behind me. But I didn’t like to be too brutal: it seemed impolite in my grandmother’s house. Then something hard was pressed into my hand. Looking down I saw a trowel. I’d used that trowel before, to help Dad put in the concrete path through the vegetable garden. But I took it now and shoved it into the door, using it as a lever. The damage we’d done at the school, as part of our practice for breaking into Tozers’, stood me in good stead. I heard the splintering crunch of the door giving way.
I pushed it right open and took a nervous step inside. At that exact moment I heard a whooshing noise. Something flashed past my hand so fast and so close that it pinched my skin in passing, and crashed against the wall next to me. Fi, who was right behind, screamed and backed away. I think she knocked down Kevin, who was behind her. It sounded like dominoes. But most of my attention was on the kitchen. I still hadn’t moved, except to jerk my hand away from the wall, and even that was pure reflex. Then, getting my senses back, I did move, crouching fast.
From the next room, the breakfast room, I heard rushing feet, like hail on a galvanised-iron roof. A moment later the shatter of breaking glass echoed from the other side of the house.
I crouched there in shock. For an instant I’d thought Grandma was still in the house. But I was so sure she must have died. I’d been mentally saying goodbye to her for the last half an hour, trying to get used to a new world where she wasn’t around. Then I thought it might have been a ghost. But not many ghosts would be this active.
I felt around on the ground. I soon touched the thing that had so nearly hit my hand. It was a poker, long and heavy. I picked it up, grimacing as I did so. I was lucky it hadn’t smashed every bone in my hand. I was lucky it hadn’t hit me in the face.
I tiptoed forward. My feet scrunched on something broken. Behind me I heard the others following, equally cautious. It was reassuring to know they were there. But I wished we could have had some light.
The house was empty. It took us twenty minutes to prove it, but at last we were convinced we had it to ourselves. There’d been a lot of damage though. It looked intact from the outside, but the inside was a mess: broken plates, smashed furniture, Grandma’s clothes scattered around. The toilet full of the stuff toilets are usually filled with. It was the kind of mess kids would leave. Someone had been using my grandmother’s house for a camping ground.
Getting through the house in the dark was an obstacle course. I hit my shins about ten times.
Back in the kitchen we worked out a plan of action. We made the big decision, to stay in the house. I wanted to, so I could clean it up, and protect it. The others agreed because they were too wrecked to go looking for another place. Whoever was camping there was more scared of us t
han we were of them, that was one consolation. We got an arsenal of weapons together, anything we could find, pokers, walking sticks, knives. And we worked out how to barricade the doors. If these people came back they’d have a fight on their hands.
We didn’t muck around with theories about what was going on in Stratton. That could come later. We elected Fi and Kevin to check out the vegetable garden. Lee and Homer and I volunteered ourselves to go out into the mean dark streets and see what we could find. The three of us would start together, but if necessary we’d split up and meet back at the house in an hour.
So off we went. I still felt hungry but the need for action helped me overcome my hunger pangs. The night was even colder than the day, and the street really did feel mean and dark. We walked along silently, keeping to the shadows of the fencelines. We didn’t know where to start looking for food. Lee suggested breaking into another house. That seemed dangerous, and unlikely to produce much, but no-one had a better idea. We decided to check out a few streets first and if nothing looked promising we’d pick a house and bust in.
‘I hope there’s no-one else lying in wait with pokers,’ I whispered.
I had a strong feeling a couple of times that there were people around. I don’t trust my instincts too much but several times I stopped and signalled the others, convinced someone was following us. The neighbourhood that previously seemed so lifeless now had a different atmosphere. Maybe the later it got, the more things started to happen. It felt spooky, like some weird and unhealthy presence.
As for food, well, we didn’t have any brilliant ideas. ‘Food doesn’t grow on trees you know,’ Homer whispered at one point, which I later realised was his attempt at a joke. I was too tired to get it, let alone laugh.
We passed a big park, but it looked too sinister to go in.
After nearly an hour that was totally fruitless – oh, I just made a joke myself, not much better than Homer’s – we chose a house to raid. It was no different from any others in West Stratton, which was probably a good reason for picking it. It was brick veneer with a little verandah, a brick wall at the front, garage at one side, circular garden at the other. Boring but nicely solid. We tiptoed around the back. Even after being attacked with a poker we didn’t take a lot of precautions. There was something about all these places that screamed ‘unoccupied’, although of course that hadn’t proved true at Grandma’s place.
It did in this one though. The back door was completely smashed in, or to be accurate, smashed down. It lay on the kitchen floor. I felt strange when I saw it there. I knew why. It was because the house looked so solid from the front. So reliable, safe, secure. Just from looking at it, you felt you knew its life history, and the story of its owners. They’d be steady, responsible people. He’d work in an office and collect wine and drive a Magna and be into gardening in a big way; she’d be a doctor’s receptionist and make nice salads and listen to Paul Simon and attend all the school council meetings.
Then you go round the back and you find the kitchen door on the floor and it makes you wonder about everything.
We went in, but again too many people had been here before us. Cupboards and drawers were opened and a few things tossed around, but it wasn’t as bad as Grandma’s. Only in the main bedroom had there been a thorough search. I guess it’s where most people hide their valuables.
There was no food, just a few disgusting piles of mould in the kitchen.
We gave it up and retraced our steps to Grandma’s. Fi and Kevin were sitting at the kitchen table chopping up potatoes in the dark. Better still was some broccoli which we promptly crunched into, while Fi gave a quick summary of the state of the veggie garden.
‘The potatoes were Kevin’s idea,’ she said, beaming at him like a mother with a kid who’s just learnt to count to ten. ‘There’s only new little potato plants growing, but Kevin said if we dug we might find some from last season, and they should be OK to eat. And look, we got quite a lot.’
We all beamed at Kevin then, like he’d learnt to count to a hundred. He didn’t beam back, but his mouth twisted into an expression you could pretend was a smile.
I munched on some more broccoli as Fi continued.
‘The trouble is, everything’s so young. It’s too early in the season. But there’s quite a lot of stuff growing. Pumpkins and lettuce and zucchini. We’ll get a better idea in the morning, when we can see properly.’
‘Are you planning to cook the spuds?’ Homer asked. I could imagine what he thought of raw vegetables for a diet.
‘Well, what does everyone think? We could light a fire in the dining room fireplace and turn it into a barbecue. We had a quick look and it seems OK.’
‘It should be safe enough,’ Homer said. ‘We just have to be careful not to make smoke.’
‘What about the smell?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know about you guys but I can smell a wood fire a kilometre from a house. We don’t want our visitors to come back.’
‘Well, the dining room’s in the middle of this house,’ Fi said. ‘So that might cut the smell down.’
I wasn’t convinced.
‘Those people won’t come back,’ Homer said. ‘Why should they? There’s hundreds of places they can pick from. They don’t want any grief.’
I thought, ‘There are hundreds of places we could pick from too,’ but I didn’t say it, because I felt quite emotional being in Grandma’s house again.
Lee asked: ‘Is there any food in the pantry?’
‘Oh, do you know, we completely forgot to look.’
That gave us a moment or two of excitement, as we rushed in, thinking maybe we’d find a treasure trove of goodies. It wasn’t quite that. There was half a bottle of vinegar, an unopened jar of chutney, half a jar of stale coffee and a packet of gelatine. And the spice rack, with most of its little bottles still nearly full, and Grandma’s so-familiar row of blue-and-white kitchen canisters. I opened each one: flour, no sugar, half a cup of rice, a few grains of castor sugar, quite a lot of salt, that was all. It was a depressing collection.
In the end we did cook the spuds. We were so low on energy and spirits that we thought we should take the risk. Fi and Lee went out in the street as sentries while Homer and I did the cooking. I’m not sure what we’d have done if Fi and Lee came sprinting in to say there was a patrol of enemy soldiers, or a gang of squatters, advancing on the house. I don’t think I could have left the spuds there for someone else. Maybe I’d have chased intruders away with the poker.
But we finally had a meal, and a hot one at that. Spuds and broccoli with salt and chutney, followed by coffee. Afterwards we trooped out to the back garden and tried to call New Zealand. I’d been excited every time I’d had a chance to think about this. It was our lifeline to the normal world, to sanity, to calm pipe-smoking Colonel Finley in his book-lined study in Wellington. And somehow every time we called, I expected magic and miracles. I’m not sure what kind exactly, or why I expected them. Maybe because it seemed so miraculous that we could call them on the radio in the first place.
Well, this time I sure got disappointed. We’d allowed ourselves six minutes to make the call, and as usual we didn’t stick to our own time limit. We tried for nearly twelve before Homer switched it off. All we got was different varieties of static again: loud, soft, whistling, crackly, humming, stormy. Maybe there was some problem with the weather. Maybe it was atmospheric disturbance. Worse still, maybe someone was on our wavelength. I was disappointed and relieved when silence again took over the chill night air.
Homer took first sentry and after we’d cleaned up a couple of bedrooms we found enough clean blankets and sheets in the linen press to make proper beds. It was a night of sheer luxury.
Chapter Fourteen
I gave Fi breakfast in bed: cold potatoes with chutney.
She took one look at the chutney and said: ‘Oh, you put chutney on it.’
‘But you like chutney.’
‘No I don’t. I didn’t have any l
ast night.’
Downstairs, Homer and Lee had done a bit more exploring. We already knew the toilet didn’t work, but surprisingly the water was still on, so we flushed the toilet with a few buckets of water from the sink, and put the bucket in there for the next person who used the dunny.
Kevin had at last found something he seemed to enjoy. Perhaps our encouragement the night before helped, but for whatever reason he was out in the garden digging for vegetables. He had quite a good little pile of spuds. Some were half ruined by a mouldy wetness and a lot were sprouting new growth, but some were fine and we could cut the bad bits off the others. Up the back of the garden were heaps of dead white canes with a bit of new growth at the base. I thought they might be Jerusalem artichokes, which are pretty boring, but they seemed like chocolate now. I gave Kevin the hint to check them out, and left him to it. I’ve never been keen on gardening, so with Kevin looking relatively happy I didn’t push my luck by hanging around.
Fi and Homer and I talked Lee into doing guard duty and we went up the hill at the back of West Stratton to see what was going on. It was dangerous moving through the suburbs in daylight again but we couldn’t afford to stay in one spot, slowly dying. We had to make things happen.
Stratton didn’t have a nice lookout like Wirrawee. It was about the only thing Wirrawee had that Stratton didn’t. But from the hill we thought we’d get a good enough view. It was a kilometre and a bit from Grandma’s, but it was in a different suburb. They called it Winchester Heights, and if that sounds pretentious, well, that’s the kind of area it was. Huge new houses each bigger and grander than the next. No interesting wild gardens or strange secret places or funny little outbuildings. A billion bricks and a million roof tiles had gone into building those houses, and I reckon they wasted the lot of them.
