Oddfellows

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  About the Book

  On 1 January 1915, ramifications from the First World War, raging half a world away, were felt in Broken Hill, Australia, when in a terrifying guerrilla-style military operation, four citizens were killed and seven wounded.

  It was the annual picnic day in Broken Hill and a thousand citizens were dressed for fun when the only enemy attack to occur on Australian soil during World War I took them by surprise. Nicholas Shakespeare has unearthed this little known piece of Australian history and turned it into a story for our time.

  A tremendous and captivating writer The Independent

  One of our best and truest novelists The Times

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  To M. B.

  One

  It’s a little before 10 am on New Year’s Day 1915, and the sun strikes broadside the picnickers waiting at Sulphide Street station. Hats and parasols give faint protection to the 1239 men, women and children who sit or stand in the open ore-wagons, clutching spiky handles of wicker hampers, mopping temples, pointing.

  The thermometer registers 101 in the shade.

  Since August, many of the same faces have been seeing off volunteers to join the Commonwealth Expeditionary Forces. Now it’s their turn to board a train from this station, with ‘Broken Hill’ painted in black on a white board.

  Dressed in freshly laundered summer clothes, the last passengers hurry along the platform and clamber into the trucks which the Silverton Tramway Company has hosed out for them.

  Four trucks away from the locomotive that is being stoked up, Mrs Rasp, a podgy, flat-faced woman whose masculine features remind some of the Prime Minister, tells Mrs Kneeshaw in a breathless voice about the letter she has received from her son Reginald.

  His infantry squad has arrived in Egypt!

  ‘He says the canal is only 100 yards wide … and there’s hardly a tree for miles. You’d think you were outside Broken Hill …’ She wipes a trickle of sweat from the bridge of her big nose, and resumes, fanning her face. ‘… They are near the place where the Children of Israel were supposed to have crossed the Red Sea.’ Her straw hat shimmers at the news; she has bought it for the picnic outing at her favourite drapery store in Argent Street.

  Mrs Rasp is floury-white, large and shapeless, like her thoughts, and the shapeless things she says. A captain of the League of the Helping Hand, she has that inattention to the opinions of others that one often associates with a double-barrelled name. Her round head cranes forward beneath its halo of cream straw. ‘He wants me to send him a balaclava sleeping cap, as he’s likely to be exposed to severe cold during the European winter.’ She is anxious not to lose Mrs Kneeshaw’s attention.

  Seated quietly opposite in a rose silk dress, Mrs Kneeshaw shields her screwed-up eyes with a flattened hand and says nothing.

  Since September, Winifred Kneeshaw has managed the Red Cross Society tea-room in Argent Street. She is an elegant woman who has completed her training with the local Red Cross Society and gained her certificate for proficiency in ambulance work – afterwards, she will say that she didn’t expect to be called upon so soon to use her knowledge. She finds it hard in this heat to focus on Reginald Rasp in Egypt.

  This is a day to forget absent ones. To set aside unwelcome thoughts of war. In a moment, the whistle will shriek, and the train will steam out of the station, ferrying its cheerful cargo not to Adelaide, and from there across the Indian Ocean to Suez – but fourteen miles north-west, along the narrow gauge line to Silverton.

  New Year’s Day is Manchester Unity Day, and the friendly society’s picnic, organised by the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, the greatest gathering of the year in Broken Hill. Today is for those left behind, so far as Mrs Kneeshaw behind her screening fingers is concerned. An opportunity for everyone to draw together and to show their sense of communality after one of the most testing periods in the town’s history.

  For sixteen years, the metals mined from Broken Hill have been railroaded to Port Pirie and shipped to the Saxon city of Freiberg, ‘the Mecca of ores’, to make bullets for the Kaiser’s guns. But Australia is at war with Germany. For the fifth successive month, the conical heaps of zinc and lead concentrates have piled up untouched. Abandoned, like the German Club in Delamore Street.

  ‘I just wish we could borrow some of Reggie’s cool weather,’ Mrs Kneeshaw murmurs, and pulls up the corner of her dress and wipes her eye, revealing to Mr Dowter, sitting straight as in a pew beside Mrs Rasp, a flash of white petticoat.

  Not wishing to draw attention by too immediately averting his gaze, Clarence Dowter goes on staring with pursed lips and a wooden expression in the direction of Mrs Kneeshaw’s exposed underclothes. He is the town’s Sanitary Inspector, and has agreed to officiate this afternoon as umpire in the women’s seventy-five-yard race at the picnic ground. He is a short, mournful-looking Irishman with a downturned mouth, a forehead dented like his homburg hat, a mop of blue-black hair that competes oddly with his sparse, much fairer beard, and small grey eyes that miss nothing. In the raging sun, his hollowed-out face seems on the verge of melting. Head cocked at an angle, he taps his cigarette on a silver case, and, after an interval which he decides is long enough, shifts his glance to Mrs Lakovsky’s latest baby.

  ‘Don’t go tiring yourself, mate!’

  Mrs Rasp twists with her mouth open to see who it is that Roy Sleath, the policeman’s son, is trying to grab the attention of.

  It’s not hard to recognise the young man who leaps agilely aboard, clasping a bulging brown paper bag: he is of the more athletic type of Broken Hill miner, all elbows, with sandy hair and sharp nose.

  ‘Hey, Ollie, over here!’

  Waving down Roy’s incitements, he stops in front of Lizzie Filwell, a pale fourteen-year-old with dark brown hair and a prematurely corrugated forehead, and opens her hand. To the girl’s obvious delight, he drops a yellow peach into it. He chats with her parents, sitting on either side of her, glances quickly around, and vanishes from view, then reappears, erect, in front of Roy, and chucks him under the chin, before moving on.

  For Lizzie’s elder sister Rosalind, seated in the same wagon, the day promises something momentous.

  Rosalind Filwell wears a white skirt to her ankles, which, like her hands and feet, she wants to be more dainty than they are, and a pomegranate-pink felt hat fringed with a muslin veil to fend off the sun and the flies. Her abundant black hair is tied into a French knot above her oval face. Her deep-set hazel eyes cast their own shadow, so that according to the angle of her face she can seem attractive or plain. When they fix on Oliver Goodmore, the man pushing his way towards her, she looks tired.

  One month shy of her twenty-second birthday, Rosalind is certain that Oliver intends to use the pretext of the afternoon’s events – the picnics under the pepper trees, the distribution of dolls and lollies, the running events (where he is expected to shine) – to escort her at some point along the dried creek-bed, there being no strong breeze or dust, and propose.

  She knows this because her best friend, Mary Brodribb, who waved to her just now from the adjacent truck, personally helped Oliver to select the engagement ring in Harvey’s jewellery store.

  But is this what Rosalind wants?

  She looks up at him in his low-neck flannel shirt and narrow-brimmed hat, with the sun striking his unprotected chin, and his squinting face sm
iles down at her. His ticket says second class, but from everything in his manner he feels in first.

  He throws a leg over the wooden plank which Mrs Rasp has earlier dusted with her fan, and holds out his paper bag. ‘Hey, Ros, put these in your hamper, will you, because I’ll probably drop them, knowing me.’

  Her hands occupied in packing away his peaches and apples, he reaches out to touch Rosalind’s cheek with a thick index finger, which has a crescent of dirt she cannot avoid observing.

  ‘Did you sort out Tom’s motorbike?’

  He doesn’t answer her, still puzzled by something.

  ‘I was looking for you over there,’ and squeezes in beside her on the temporary wooden bench. ‘I reckoned you’d be with Lizzie.’

  Two

  Rosalind had risen early, woken by a dog. She lay in bed and listened to the howl rising and falling. A harmless noise by day, the cry swept through her like the phantom of her brother’s voice, and in the small hot bedroom whipped her thoughts into a mob of skittish anxieties that gathered her off on drumming hooves.

  She threw back the sheet and slipped out of bed. Her shadow followed her across the floorboards as she felt her way past the chamber pot which her father had bought at auction when Alderman Turbill moved to Adelaide, around the side-table that she had decorated with ribbons and fabrics and her own mirror – egg-shaped with a silver border from which dangled a spare handbag, inherited from her grandmother – to the window. Her first impulse after widening the latch – to gulp in the air. It had the whiff of saltbush, and was a reminder of how the night’s smells were stranger than the day’s, and had more in common with the baying that challenged her from beyond the mullock.

  Every time Rosalind looked out of the bedroom which she had shared with William until his death three years ago, and since then with her younger sister Lizzie – burbling to herself in her sleep in the parallel narrow bed – there, 600 yards away, loomed the mullock. It hung over the town like an enormous slouch hat, throwing out a long, unwelcome shadow.

  Ordinarily, the gigantic heap of tippings would have been a barrier to check Rosalind’s roving thoughts. But her thoughts were not obedient. She peered into the black shape that it cast, and felt a dizzying tug. As if the mullock was clutching out to unite her shadow with its own.

  Rosalind had climbed it often enough in daylight – with Oliver, and before that with William. From the top, Broken Hill could clearly be seen in miniature below.

  She saw herself gazing down through the smoking shaft-heads: on her parents’ bungalow in Rakow Street, the yard with the dairy cows and wrecked buggy, over the galvanised rooftops and humpies of North Broken Hill, over the water-tanks perched on angle-iron towers as if ready to stride off, over the dust cloud raised by a string of camels, across a red sandy loam covered with saltbush and bluebush, mile after mile, to Silverton. This was the extent and bound of her world, sandwiched between the Umberumberka Creek in Silverton, where dawn was appearing over the dry and dreary tableland in – what had he called it? – two bullock hides of light, and the slag-heap that frowned over every street.

  Her idea of the universe was indeed wretched. The only break in the drip-drip of the days was the train.

  Sydney was a distance of 1446 miles by railway, and it cost as much to travel there by train – on a roundabout route through Adelaide, Melbourne and Albury – as to London by ship. Most likely, she would live to see the ocean only in a mirage.

  Rosalind’s shadow on the striped wallpaper showed the nightdress pulling tight across her breasts.

  She had felt rebellious since William was taken away. His death made her afraid of everything and nothing.

  Her fingers squeezed the latch till they hurt. All these stupid questions about who she was going to marry. Come to your senses, Rosalind. And her whispered words in the dark produced a shudder in the bed behind.

  Suddenly, she wanted to vanish. Not to be here, in this room, with her shadow on the wall and Lizzie moaning, as she always did when her bladder was full – Rosalind had already woken her sister twice and helped her onto the chamber pot.

  In their grief, their parents seemed to have forgotten Lizzie’s complications. She had become Rosalind’s responsibility. But however much Rosalind loved her little sister, she longed to leave.

  If she could change place with one of those stars.

  Like them, Rosalind felt fully formed. She knew her mind. She knew everything came hard, what the price of everything was in Stack & Tyndall’s drapery store, where she stood behind the counter. She could envisage her future with Oliver. It did not need much imagining. Even Lizzie could have drawn it in one of her episodes of normality.

  She moved and her shadow moved. Other women kept telling her that she had a good figure. Rosalind dared not contemplate what that meant.

  Still gripping the latch, she leaned forward, tossed by another thought: his rough fingers touching her, thudding into her every night.

  Her thoughts bucked and she held on tight. It was terrible to be in this state of disarray.

  The stars glittered in the water-trough outside the Freiberg Arms Hotel and on the railway behind. Her eyes picked out the iron tracks and followed them – past the garden fences, towards the Picton sale-yard. The rails curved beside the trench containing the wooden stave water-pipe to Silverton.

  The train was the only way out. Either that, or you plunged into the earth.

  In William’s day, she would have expected to see a long line of men walking like all miners in the world, heads lowered, ready to descend into darkness. This morning, Rakow Street stretched deserted and silent. The mines had been working half-time since August. The presence on the pavements, and in the bars and boarding-houses, of so many unemployed single men with no hope of work, save as soldiers, was unsettling. Miss Pollock had taught that the Aborigines named the district Willyama, meaning Youth. Once upon a time, this was a town of prospectors looking for lodes, and finding them. Now, there was nothing for a young person to do in Broken Hill, except die or leave. Or sail to Suez.

  Oliver was one of the fortunate ones, earning twenty-six shillings for three shifts a week. He was twenty-seven and had come from Melbourne ten years before, at the urging of his uncle, Clarence Dowter, to assist him in the laying of the water-pipe. He had stayed on, doing various jobs, until he was offered a position in the South Mine, working in the same team as her brother.

  Soon, he would be climbing out of bed in his rented room in Piper Street. Rosalind saw him soaping his nose and face, washing the smoke and fumes off him and his musty carbide smell, and putting on his suit for the Oddfellows’ picnic. And before he locked his door and strolled over to Tom Blows’s garage and then to Alf Fiddaman’s grocery store, slipping that gold-bound opal into the pocket of his flannel shirt.

  She felt a hostage to her parents’ expectations. Oliver was the life they wished for her. Rosalind’s mother in particular.

  Rosalind was lucky to have attracted an admirer, was her mother’s opinion. Emmy Filwell had lost her son to the mine; her youngest daughter to the water on her brain. With more girls than boys in Broken Hill, she wanted Rosalind settled.

  Encouraged by Mrs Filwell, steadily and persistently Oliver had been at her, trying to get her to say yes.

  What would William have thought?

  Oliver was with her brother in the South Mine on that November night, three years ago. They were popping rocks 825 feet below the surface, when William crawled away on his hands and knees, and Oliver heard him say, ‘I can’t find it along here,’ then heard a sound like something falling, and on crawling after him discovered that his mate had tumbled down a winze sixty feet deep, fracturing his skull.

  Oliver had helped to compose the lines they had put in the Barrier Miner:

  Do not ask us if we miss him,

  There is such a vacant place;

  Can we e’er forget his footsteps,

  And his dear, familiar face?

  He had never been able to
explain to her what, precisely, William had been looking for, in the dark, on his hands and knees.

  Oliver, called Ollie by all who knew him (but not by Rosalind), had her brother’s hands and fingernails. A practical man, with a box of second-hand tools, he could repair an electric motor with his eyes shut, or a radiator hose, or a blocked pipe beneath the sink, and in his spare time was vice-captain of the Broken Hill rugby team and secretary of the local rifle club.

  Who never hid his delight when he saw Rosalind.

  She enjoyed her power over him. Under pressure from her mother, she had started to put aside money that she earned from the drapery store towards their future together. Oliver Goodmore at least offered an escape from the morbidity of the Filwell household and the nagging responsibility of her sister.

  Oliver was good with Lizzie. He was natural with her, and patient, and never laughed when she was silly. Rosalind liked that.

  Then she saw in him a kindness that pleased her.

  He was different from his friends, who always had one too many. He had flashes of intelligence and tenderness, and was ready to help others. He was quite authoritarian, although he could hold that in check if he wanted to be nice. When he wanted to be nice, he gave her the full battery of his attention.

  Rosalind was thinking about this when there was a movement at the corner of Garnet Street. The street was not empty after all. She watched a thin horse lumber out of the mullock’s shadow, drawing behind it a white cart.

  The cart glistened like a patch of silver as it came creaking down the far side of the road. She craned forward. Two men were seated side by side under the canopy. They were dark-skinned, and beneath their open khaki coats wore red jackets, and on their heads white turbans. The tails of the turbans trailed over their shoulders.