Sian: A New Australian

by D. Luckett

  The ship was leaving from London and we’d have to go there first. I didn’t know how far that was. Newport was as far as I’d ever been in my life. So I just nodded when they told me.

  And I never knew what Olive told Da, or even if she told Da at all. But early on one Monday morning in November, we were out of the house before it even started getting light. We had two big steamer trunks. Ellis had ordered a four-wheeler cart to take us to the station and we caught the early train to Newport. At Newport we changed trains to the London Express. And then, after hours of watching the countryside go past, London.

  Mr Hall, at school, had been to London. He said it was the biggest city in the world, the capital of the Empire. It seemed like it went on forever. The train went through it for miles before it got to Paddington Station. There’s not just one train station in London, you know, there’s lots.

  I’d thought that our village was smoky and sooty, and so it was, but that was nothing to London. London air was gritty with coal smoke. I don’t know how the people stand it. There’s no hills in sight, just more buildings.

  We’d been on the train most of the day and we’d had tea on it too – they brought it around on a trolley. It was already getting dark by the time we got to the station but we had to go on to where the ship was waiting. That took hours and we had to hurry to get there before it sailed, Ellis said.

  I was asleep on Olive’s lap by the time we got there but I woke up. We had to walk up a long wooden bridge to the ship and then down some steep narrow stairs and through a corridor with doors along it.

  The man who went with us opened one of the doors. Inside was a room not even as big as the one upstairs in Caradog Street. This was a cabin. There were three beds, one on top of another, and one that pulled out from the wall. I went straight to sleep in it.

  By the time I woke up, why, the ship had sailed, and we had sailed, too. We were gone.

  At first we went slowly down the river and the land got further and further away and the smoke from all the chimneys got less and less. Then we were out on the sea and the ship started to toss. The sea was rough and green. Olive was green too, the first day, and for days afterwards.

  Yes, days. Olive told me we were going for a cruise. I’d read about going on a ship, see. We’d listen to the band playing, walk on the deck, take the sea air, that sort of thing. But there wasn’t a band and there was only a small bit of deck to walk on and the water sometimes splashed over it when the ship went through a big wave.

  We sailed on all day and then the next day, and the next. So I started to ask, when are we going back?

  Olive and Ellis just looked at each other. Finally they told me that we weren’t going back. We were going to Australia.

  ‘It’s a lovely, sunny, warm place,’ said Olive. Then she choked and had to go outside. It was raining. The ship was tossing about. I watched her go. ‘Is Olive very ill?’ I asked Ellis. ‘Is she going to …?’

  ‘No, no. It’s just seasickness,’ said Ellis. ‘She’ll come right in a day or two. But listen, Sian, we’re going to Australia because things are so much better there. We’re going to live there. We’re not going back home for a long, long time.’

  ‘But … what about Da? What about the others?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll write to them,’ said Ellis. Then he looked away.

  They didn’t tell me, I thought. I’d been got around same as they’d got around Da. ‘I want to go back home,’ I said.

  Ellis closed his eyes. ‘I knew we should have told you,’ he said to himself, like. ‘I told Olive …’ he began. Then he shook his head, opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, Sian. We can’t go back home for ever so long but I tell you what, if you really don’t like Australia when we get there, I’ll send you back as soon as I can pay the fare. I promise. But if you go back home, you’ll have to go on your own. See, we’re going out to Australia because life is better there and I think it will be better for you too. But if you’d really rather live at home with your da and the others, all right, I’ll send you back.’ He sighed. ‘I knew we should have told you. But that’s the best I can do for now. Please, for Olive’s sake, give it a try.’ He looked across at the door. ‘She was so upset the last time your da got so angry with you when he … you know … and so was I.’

  Not as upset as I was, I thought. But I remembered what it was like, at home. Back in the house in Caradog Street, not even a bed of my own. Even in the cabin in the ship I had a bed to myself. And it would be back to Da and his belt. I thought about that. Da wouldn’t be pleased with Olive going to Australia. If I went home, he’d ask me why I hadn’t told him and he might not believe me when I said I hadn’t known. I knew what he’d do if he thought I was lying to him.

  Yes, indeed. I did know what he’d do. Ouch.

  Ellis had reminded me of Olive. She was still being sick. ‘Is Olive all right?’ I asked again.

  Ellis held out a hand to me. The ship was moving from side to side and up and down. We had to hold on to each other. ‘Let’s go and see,’ he said.

  We found Olive on the deck, by the rail. She was holding on to it and she was staring at the sea and then she was sick again.

  Lucky for me I didn’t feel green and liked being on the ship. I didn’t have to do anything. No housework, no picking coal, not even school. We walked on the deck, Ellis and me, and he bought me a book to write in. It had stiff covers so you could write in it on your lap and the pages tore out, if you wanted. I could write letters or just write down what was happening each day. And best of all the book had a map in it showing the way from Britain to Australia. Australia was enormous and Britain was tiny. Wales – why, you could hardly see it at all.

  It’s a funny thing, you know, how you just get used to new things. On a ship you eat your meals – breakfast, dinner, tea and supper – in a saloon, and we didn’t have to cook ourselves. Everyone sits around the table and we ate different things every day. Well, mostly. Breakfast was the same but I had a whole boiled egg to myself – fancy that! And toast with marmalade. And there was a different soup for supper every night, and boiled beef or mutton, and all the potatoes you wanted. And pudding. Rice pudding or jam roly-poly, or suet pudding with currants. And custard.

  Ellis said I’d be getting fat.

  By the time I’d been on the ship for a week it felt like I’d been there forever.

  All the time it got warmer. Ellis said I should ask the steward where we were and mark it on the map in the book every day. The first three days we were far from land and I couldn’t see anything but the sea, with waves like hills, but green and laced with foam.

  But then we came into sight of land again and when I woke up the next morning we were in calm blue water and the sun came out. Now it was nice to walk on the deck and other people sat in canvas chairs to take the air. Olive could eat her breakfast and she didn’t look so pale.

  I wanted to go and look at the other decks and the rest of the ship but Ellis said I wasn’t allowed. We were second-class passengers so we only had that bit of deck and a cabin and the saloon. The decks above us were for first-class passengers. Rich people.

  After ten days the ship stopped in Suez where it was hot. There the sun wasn’t at all like the sun at home. At home, when you saw the sun, it was golden-yellow, like the yolk of an egg. We sailed out of the Suez Canal and down the long Red Sea, with Africa on one side and Arabia on the other, and the sun was white-hot, in a deep bright sky. It made you feel as if you were looking right through that sky and seeing forever and ever.

  It was lovely to have that sun. I had never seen sea that sparkled, as if each wave was covered with jewels. Sometimes the ship threw a spray of water back as far as our deck and that was tingly and fresh. Sometimes fish would jump out of the water and fly, yes, really fly, skimming over the waves.

  It was all new, all strange. And I found out that I liked new, strange things. I’d never known that I did. I suppose it was because I’d never had new and strange thin
gs happen before.

  The ship stopped for two days at a city called Colombo. They had to take on more coal for the engines. Welsh coal, I heard. Ellis said the land was an island called Ceylon and that tea came from there. It was the greenest place I’d ever seen. And I saw an elephant! I’d only ever seen them in pictures, and pictures don’t tell you about how they curl up their trunks and that they set their feet down carefully, as if they don’t want to break anything.

  The people were brown and spoke a different language. Ellis bought bananas and coconuts and a fruit called mango from people who came up beside the ship in boats. You could throw a rope down with some money tied up in a hanky and they’d send up a basket made of palm leaves, with the fruit in it. It was my first taste of mango. Ellis said that there was a story that it was the very same fruit that Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden.

  I had always thought it was a daft thing to do, disobeying God over a piece of fruit, but that was before I tasted a mango. If that was the fruit, I can see why they did it.

  Then we sailed away again. It was two more weeks on a blue ocean that seemed to go on forever. But it ended at last and we came to Australia.

  Australia wasn’t green like Ceylon. It was two weeks before Christmas, and it was brown. All I could see were low hills covered with prickle bushes and twisted trees. It said in my book that there were lots of sheep in Australia but I didn’t see a single one. And no kangaroos, either.

  We stayed for two days in Fremantle and then we sailed on. I liked the ship and the sea and I would have been happy to sail on forever but I couldn’t do that. There wasn’t enough world. The map showed that we were crossing the Great Australian Bight. The sea grew green again and so did Olive. But it wasn’t for long.

  And so we came to Sydney. And this was where we were going to live.

  I was used to living with Ellis and Olive by then. I wrote letters to Da and my brothers and sisters but it was already like they were in a different world. Sydney was all new. All strange and different.

  When we went ashore from the ship the first thing we had to do was to find a place to live. We found a boarding house but it wasn’t very clean. Ellis walked around the city and came back looking cheerful. There was plenty of work about, he said. He’d go in with his tools as soon as they were unpacked.

  ‘We need to find a house, quick smart, and no mistake,’ said Olive. She looked about at the room we had and sniffed. It had peeling wallpaper and the window was dirty.

  Looking out of that window, dirty or not, I saw that Sydney was as big as London, but not quite so smoky and sooty. The weather was warm, so people didn’t need fires all the time, I supposed. Olive told me it was summer here. Fancy! Christmas in summer! And such a warm summer, sunny every day. At home you could go weeks and never see the sun but here it shone all day long.

  You could see the harbour from our window. The water sparkled, just the same as it had when we were on the ship, and there were more boats than you could count coming and going on the harbour. And busy streets. We walked out and around for a while. Olive was looking at houses, she said – although she looked at a lot of shops too. Ellis unpacked his tools and went off on the tram. He found work on a building site that very day.

  There was a school nearby but it was just about to finish for the Christmas holidays so they said I could start next year.

  I wrote to Da and the others again. Letters took an awful long time to get there though. If I put a letter in the post – and it cost sixpence for a stamp – it wouldn’t get there before I started school.

  So I went with Olive while she looked at houses. They weren’t like the ones at home where houses were side-by-side and built one against the other, and where they always had an upstairs. Here some houses were like that but most had a fence between each one and the next and they didn’t have an upstairs at all.

  We finally found a house in a place called Glebe, not far from the tram line. It had two front bedrooms and a kitchen and a proper laundry with a copper. Ellis got work on city building sites and he said it was all right but he had to find a new job after each one finished.

  The O’Grady family lived nearly opposite and I played hopscotch and skippy with Denise. There were the Kerslakes further up but Mary Kerslake was stuck-up. The weather was warm every day and you didn’t have to pick coal – there wasn’t a pit, anyway. There was just the sun and the park and if you walked down to the harbour you could watch the boats. We could walk there on Sunday and sit on the grass to eat ice-cream.

  Then the holidays ended and I had to go back to school. Back home, school was a classroom with desks all in a row and benches behind, and twenty children went there, all in the same room. But Glebe Infants’ School was a tall brick building with many classrooms. I was in the fifth class and my teacher was Mr Wright. He had a ruler and a cane as well. The whole class were all my own age. Well, except Johnnie Carmichael. He was bigger because he’d been kept down twice. He said this was the last year he’d be there because he didn’t like school. Well, I wouldn’t either if I got the cane as often as he did. I kept out of his way and sat next to Denise O’Grady. She came from Ireland.

  But you couldn’t keep away from Johnnie Carmichael all the time. One day I was having lunch, sitting on one of the benches by the wall of the school. The boys were kicking a rag football around and Johnnie kicked it under the bench we were sitting on. He came and stood in front of me.

  ‘Giz the foopall,’ he said.

  Now, what was I supposed to make of that? I just looked up at him in surprise.

  He laughed. ‘Jeez, you’re stupid. Give me the football.’

  So I pulled it out and threw it to him. He just let it drop by his feet and kicked it away. ‘Why ja talk so funny?’ he asked. ‘Where ja come frum, anyway?’

  ‘Wales,’ I said. ‘I come from Wales.’

  ‘Yeah? Where zat? Some ploice in Ireland, like Dinny, here?’

  ‘No. It’s the place this state is named after. New South Wales, isn’t it?’

  He laughed again. ‘New South Wales, isn’t it? Jeez, you talk funny.’

  ‘Not as funny as you,’ I said.

  His face changed. ‘Take that back. You’re the one talks funny.’ He took a step forward. ‘Take it back, or I’ll …’

  ‘You’ll do what, Carmichael?’ That was Mr Wright, coming up behind him.

  Johnnie looked around. ‘Nothin’,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Did you mean to say, Nothing, sir, Carmichael?’

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ said Johnnie. ‘I wasn’t doin’ nothin’.’

  ‘How true, Carmichael, how very true. Indeed, you were not doing nothing. You were doing something. But to make sure it’s a fairly harmless thing, you can go and do it over there.’ He pointed to the other side of the playground. ‘Go on, now.’

  Johnnie gave me a look but he went. Mr Wright watched him go, looked at me, seemed to be about to say something but then walked on, his hands behind his back.

  Well, of course that wasn’t the end of it, was it? Johnnie took to walking me home. From the other side of the street, calling out things like ‘Taffy!’ or ‘Any coal today?’ and laughing.

  I kept quiet. If he got tired of it, maybe he’d stop. I didn’t say anything to Ellis or Olive, either. Perhaps I should have. But something else happened.

  It was nearly the end of the first term, a few weeks before the Easter holiday.

  Ellis came in that day and hung up his coat and hat before he came into the kitchen. The newspaper was in his hand. ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked Olive, tapping it.

  Well, of course she hadn’t. She’d been on her knees scrubbing floors most of the day, to get the house into a state where it was fit to be seen, she said. I didn’t know who was going to see it, mind. But I was helping her.

  The day had been very warm, too. Olive pushed her hair back on her brow and went on peeling potatoes for tea, while I did the onions. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s about Port
Darwin. They’re letting out contracts for the wharves and government works there. Skilled men are wanted.’ He smoothed the paper out and read from it. ‘Three years, they say. Steady work at four pounds a week, transport, room and board, with a signed contract.’

  ‘Four pounds a week? Three years?’ Olive was doing sums in her head. She was very quick, that way. ‘Why, there’s more than enough to buy a house of our own!’

  ‘And to set me up in my own joinery. Be my own master. But it’s in Port Darwin,’ said Ellis.

  ‘Why … where’s that?’

  ‘It’s in the Northern Territory. Sian, have you got that book there? The one with the map of Australia in it?’

  I went and got it. Ellis looked at the map but there was no ‘Port Darwin’ marked on it. ‘Well, that’s the Northern Territory, anyway,’ he said, pointing. It was the left hand hump on the top of Australia, with a couple of lines on either side of it running down to the middle of the map and squared off at the bottom, like with a ruler. ‘If it’s a port, it has to be on the sea, I suppose. On the north coast. Well, somewhere on it.’

  Olive and Ellis sat and looked at one another for a while. ‘I could be working here for years before we could even put any money down on a house,’ said Ellis. Olive said nothing. ‘And as for working for myself …’ he went on.

  I remembered what Olive had said once about Ellis. Not just that he had a trade and a bit put by but that he had ambition too.

  He was nodding but it wasn’t to us. It was to himself. ‘I don’t want to be working for a master, on wages my whole life,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Olive. Sometimes that meant yes but most often it meant no.

  We had our tea. Olive lit the gas but it was hot so we sat outside. Verandah was a new word I’d just learned. At home the front door opened straight onto the street. Here there was a covered place outside, and a bit of a front yard. You could sit in the cool for a while before you went to bed. It was nice. We couldn’t see the water from where we were but a breeze came whispering up from the harbour and the stars came out one by one. I looked up at them and they seemed closer and brighter than the ones in Wales.