by D. Luckett
We didn’t tell anyone. Not a word. I had to spend time later, when I got home, using kerosene on ticks that were digging into my legs.
I had certainly learned something. In Darwin you can be chased by something that wants to eat you.
As the wet went on, in the Goks’ garden the weeds sprang up so fast you could almost see them growing, and Mae and I would pull them out. If we did enough Mr Gok would give us a mango. Yes, the mangoes were ripe and the trees were weighed down with fruit.
I didn’t want to write back to Gwynnie and I was putting it off. But in the wet season there weren’t many ships taking mail anyway because of the cyclones. Mae said they were called typhoons in Chinese.
I thought I knew about storms. We had plenty in Wales. And in Darwin, in the wet, we’d get thunderstorms often enough and they were big and loud, with forks of lightning and great rolling masses of purple cloud, but Mae said they were nothing to a real typhoon. ‘You just wait till you see one,’ she said, pulling up a weed and throwing it on the pile. ‘Then you’ll know all about it.’
As she said that a blink of lightning went off like a firecracker, somewhere out over the sea, a split of white light against blue-black boiling clouds. You could almost hear the fizz.
I looked at the sky over the sea, at the clouds rearing up like mountains over a plain. The day was hot and very, very steamy but soon the rain would come tumbling out of the sky. In Wales the clouds were grey, or maybe white, high in a summer sky but the sky between the hills was narrow, like seeing it through a window, and the air was sooty and smoky, as if the window was dirty. Here the sky went on forever, and it was all colours – blue, gold and red and yellow and violet. And the clouds weren’t just grey or white here. They could be as black as a coal pit, or dark blue, or purple, or coppery-gold.
On Sunday Ellis and I walked over to Miss Alberts’ place for tea. We ate under the trellis on her front porch, fanning ourselves and watching the clouds come up from the sea. Soon it would be raining, I thought.
I heard footsteps coming up the path behind me. It was Mr Alberts, the councillor, walking fast. Miss Alberts rose. He hurried up, saw us outside sitting under the trellis and came in, taking off his hat.
He nodded to us but spoke to Miss Alberts. ‘Daughter –’
Miss Alberts waved a hand at us and at the tea table. ‘I believe you know Mr Williams, Father. Mr Williams is the foreman at the dock works. We were just having tea. Will you take a cup?’
Mr Alberts gave Ellis and me a glance. ‘Thank you, but no. I can’t stay. I came to warn you. The glass is dropping fast. There’s a cyclone brewing. Best make ready. Bring everything inside that you can. Chain down your roof, that sort of thing.’
Miss Alberts’ brows went up. ‘Cyclone? When?’
‘Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps in two or three days. Or perhaps it won’t come at all. You know how it is with cyclones. You can never tell.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Miss Alberts looked at us. ‘Well. I’d better be about it and no doubt you need to do the same.’
Ellis stood up. ‘Come along, Sian,’ he said. ‘I think the house and the kitchen will stand most things but Mr Alberts is right – we must tie the roofs down.’ He nodded to Mr Alberts and said ‘Good day to you, sir,’ but Mr Alberts had already turned his back and was hurrying away down the path.
‘I should apologise for my father’s bad manners,’ said Miss Alberts. ‘He doesn’t like me living like this, in my own house, and still less my having gentlemen callers.’
Ellis was watching as Mr Alberts hurried away. ‘Or worse,’ he said, ‘callers who are not gentlemen at all.’
‘If that’s what he thinks, he thinks wrongly,’ said Miss Alberts. ‘I only ever ask ladies and gentlemen to call. And as I told Mr Gok, if my father doesn’t like it, he will just have to put up with it.’
She walked us to the road and Ellis shook her hand, raising his hat. ‘Good day, Sian,’ she said. ‘Good day to you, Mr Williams. Until next Sunday.’ She looked up at the sky. The clouds were sweeping in fast. ‘If we’re all still here by then.’
Ellis got some heavy ropes from the dock works, the sort that were used for tying ships up to the wharf, and we spent the rest of the day driving pointed steel stakes deep into the ground to tie the roof down. He made shutters for the windows too and we tied them into place with wire.
And the next day the sky went wild.
I had never seen such a sky in all my life. The sun rose crimson among purple clouds but then the clouds smothered it, like water closing over a drowning man. The whole sky was moving, the colour of a bruise and lit from behind, all glowing like a fire.
The wind picked up. And more, and more, and more, until it was a raging torrent of air and you couldn’t face it. You had to turn away to breathe. You couldn’t stay outside in that. It would pick you up and blow you away.
Then the rain started, at first no heavier than usual, but it got harder and harder, until it was coming down in torrents and sheets, solid, like a river falling out of the sky with the wind picking it up and throwing it against everything. Drops as hard as bullets.
Some of the houses fell down and sheets of iron flew whirling down the streets like leaves. But these were leaves made of shining sharp metal that would cut you in half if you got in their way. We sat at the table in the front room and listened to the house frames creaking in the wind.
But Ellis Williams had built those house frames and he had built them to last, with proper joints and thick steel bolts, not just nails. They held. Out in the kitchen, the flywire let the blast through, except that twigs and whole branches broken off trees tore through it, leaving gaping holes. The house and the kitchen stood up to it. It didn’t carry the house away, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.
We listened to the wind screaming in the trees and the branches thrashing. All we could do was wait for it to end. Some people had dug holes and they huddled in them like soldiers in a battle.
The wind rose to a shriek but in a million different voices, every branch, every leaf, every thrashing stem on every shrub adding its own note, like all the singers in all the choirs in all the world suddenly gone mad, and every one, every singer, all howling at the top of their lungs.
Then I heard a splitting crack, even over all the noise, and I thought that the house was crashing down. But it was only the tree outside. It broke like a match and I dived under the table, to huddle there, my knees pulled up and nothing to do but wail and cry.
As I crouched, my hands covering my face, an arm came around my shoulders.
Ellis and I sat under our table, the table that he had made, in the house that he had built, and we listened to the storm.
Finally it passed. The worst of it was just after noon that Monday. The wind turned right around and blew the other way but by dusk it was starting to die down. We had a cold supper and went to bed as the rain roared on the roof.
Oh, that was a real cyclone, and no mistake. But Darwin was lucky that time. It was frightening but we didn’t die of it. Most of the town was still standing afterwards and people said that we didn’t get the worst of it. It felt bad enough to me and I didn’t want to see another. Once will do nicely, thank you.
After the cyclone it was as if the world had been made all over again, bright, shining, everything polished and gleaming like a new penny.
I walked over to Mae’s place through streets that were littered with torn branches and odd bits of this and that. I couldn’t cross the creek – it was a rushing torrent. I wasn’t so silly as to try and wade through that. It would wash me away in a moment. So I had to go around by the bridge through streets that were more puddle than road. I had to go around pools of muddy water like lakes, trees blown over and rubbish everywhere. You couldn’t climb over the wire fences because piles of branches and tangled brush were fetched up against them. Some of the bigger posts had held although they were all bent over but many hadn’t, so there were tangles of wire as well, their ends s
ticking up, still wailing softly in the wind, like people crying.
But the frogs were calling and everything – sky, stars, clouds, birds – shone like jewels. Just like the horse and cart brooch in my drawer at home. Home in our little house with the kitchen outside.
Home.
When I came to Mae’s place at last I saw what had happened to the garden.
All her hard work had gone for nothing.
Mae and Mr Gok were standing just where the mango tree had been planted. It was just a stick now. The leaves had been torn off and scattered. The top had snapped off too and the rest had been half-cut through by something flying past, so it drooped, broken and bent. Tears were running down Mae’s face. Their garden was ruined.
Some of the vegetables were still there. But only some. The beans and peas had been flattened. The cabbages were covered with mud and the rain had started streams that had torn the soil away from their roots. Everywhere, everything that had been so neat was flung about, muddied, torn and washed away.
Mr Gok was staring around, slowly blinking, as if he was about to cry too. He lifted his sweat-stained hat and scratched his head with the same hand. The other hand held his hoe but he was only leaning on it. His shoulders were slumped and there was no hope left on his face.
Mae looked up at him. Then she wiped her sleeve across her eyes. She blinked and shook her head, sharp, like a dog shaking water off his coat.
Then she turned, picked up a stone and started driving in bamboo stakes to hold the beans up again.
I went and helped her. Mr Gok sighed, took up his hoe and began the work of clearing the rows again. Some of the crop could be saved.
The mango trees were broken and the ripening fruit had been torn off and smashed to pulp. If they were cut back right to the trunks, maybe they might grow again. So we cut and staked and tied up and wheeled the broken cuttings away and used a watering can to wash the mud off the plants, working together in the hot sun.
Some time later I heard footsteps behind me and turned, thinking it was Mae with the wheelbarrow for the cuttings I had made. But no. It was Ellis. He had his carpenter’s tools with him in a long box with a handle.
‘I thought you’d be at this,’ he said. ‘Well. That’s what friends do, isn’t it? Let’s make sure them battens you’re putting in are set proper.’ And he put down his tools, got out a saw, and set to work to make a strong framework to hold the staked plants. Mr Gok put down his hoe, walked five steps and held out a hand. Ellis put down his saw, shook Mr Gok’s hand and then went on with his work.
We worked all that afternoon. It was boiling hot and the air was like breathing steam, like you do from a kettle when you have a cold, but we saved everything that could be saved. Then we started replanting.
I was as red as one of Mr Gok’s beetroots by the time the sun was going down, and sweat was running down my face in streams. We drank from the bucket that Mr Gok brought from his well and he made us eat Chinese pickles as well. Mae said we should or we’d get cramp.
But at last the sun was starting to set and in the shadows and the breeze was the first faint hint of cool. I stood up and eased my back.
Miss Alberts came walking up the road. Her father the councillor was with her, stumping along like a man whose feet are sore. He didn’t look happy.
I saw that Miss Alberts looked red and hot as well for all her shady hat and parasol. She’d been working in the sun too. ‘Forgive me,’ said Miss Alberts. ‘I couldn’t come earlier – my own trellis, alas, is in splintered pieces and I had to pick it up and stack it …’
Her father talked over the top of her. ‘Daughter,’ he said, and Miss Alberts’ eyebrow – just one of them – went up. Then her father went on: ‘Ask your Chinaman …’
Miss Alberts’ face went hard and she replied shortly, ‘Mr Gok is not my Chinaman, Father.’
Mr Alberts waved a hand as if he was throwing something away. ‘Whatever he is, I need you to tell him that I’ll buy his vegetables for the store. We’ve had a telegram to say that ships will not be coming in until the end of the wet. One was nearly wrecked in the cyclone and had to turn back. So we will need his produce. So long as you say that it’s clean. He can deliver to …’
‘If you wish to make a business arrangement with Mr Gok, Father, here he is. Ask him yourself.’
Mr Alberts went even redder in the face than he had been. ‘I can’t do that. It does not become me to bargain with a –’
‘Does it not? And yet, Father, you have always told me that a lady does not concern herself with trade. Apparently you believe that ladies are not fit to transact business any more than they are fit to vote or work for their own living. Well, Father, for once I take you at your word. I am far too much the lady to engage in trade. Bargain with Mr Gok yourself. I find myself unable to. The very thought makes me feel quite faint.’ Miss Alberts took a fan from her purse and fluttered it in front of her face.
Mr Alberts jammed his hat back on. ‘I should have known what you would say. It’s all of a piece.’
‘Yes, indeed, Father,’ said Miss Alberts. ‘Quite so. Supporting myself. Living independently on my own. Voting. Treating Mr Gok as a human being. You’re right. It’s all of a piece. But if you want Mr Gok to supply you with fresh vegetables, you’ll have to ask him yourself.’
Her father’s mouth opened and closed. He looked as if he were about to refuse. He looked angry.
Miss Alberts turned to Mae’s father herself. ‘Mr Gok, good evening. Is there anything left? I could do with some fresh greens.’
Mae said something to Mr Gok. He nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, Miss Alberts,’ he said in English.
Mr Alberts took his hat off again. ‘Very well. If I must, I must. What else have you? How much can you supply to the store? I need …’ They started talking, with Mae to help.
Ellis and I looked at each other. Ellis was smiling too. ‘Miss Alberts,’ he said, taking off his hat, ‘good evening to you. We must be getting home.’
‘Good evening, Mr Williams, Sian,’ Miss Alberts replied. Mae was talking to her father, telling him what Mr Alberts was asking. Miss Alberts had a twinkle in her eye. ‘You’ll be coming to tea next Sunday, I hope?’ she asked. ‘I shall need to consult you about replacing my trellis.’
‘Of course, Miss Alberts. A pleasure, as always,’ said Ellis. ‘Come along, Sian.’
When we got home we had a cold supper and then I wrote that letter, the one to Gwynnie. I told them all that I wanted to stay in Australia. In Darwin, really, but that I had a chance to go to grammar school. I told them about Darwin and, as I wrote, I remembered what this time of year was like back home. It was winter and I remembered how cold it was.
In Wales the days would be short and grey and the hills would be whitened with snow. The wind up there would be cutting. We used to call it a lazy wind. Too lazy to blow around you so it blew right through. It might even snow in the village though it would turn to slush by morning. Dirty slush with the coal dust mixed in with it.
Resting my writing hand I looked out through the screen door and just then a coloured bird flew past with a flash of wings. I didn’t know what sort of bird it was but I knew that I wanted to keep on seeing birds like that.
I knew that Da wasn’t going to like my letter. Gwynnie had thought that Ellis and I would just do as Da wanted and not even think about it. Well, our da would have to lump it, as Miss Alberts said about her da. I wondered what the rest, back home, would think of that. Gwynnie and Sal, or Madge. Or the boys. Maybe they should come to Australia too, I thought. But I didn’t think they would.
Well, anyway, by the time they got my letter and they could send one back, the wet season would be over. Then we’d see.
‘Oh, that’s so much better than the old trellis, Mr Williams,’ said Miss Alberts the next Sunday.
Miss Alberts had cleared the broken one away and cut the vines back where they’d been shredded in the storm but they were sprouting again already. Everything in Darwin gr
ows like mad in the wet season.
‘The timber is Australian cypress,’ said Ellis. ‘It’s light but quite tough. We use it for decking at the works. White ants don’t eat it. Don’t know why not but they don’t.’
‘It looks lovely, with that knotted grain. Thank you, Mr Williams,’ Miss Alberts said. ‘Please do come inside now, though. The sun is quite unbearable.’
I was watching them through the screen door but I put down my book when they came in. Miss Alberts took off her hat. ‘Tea?’ she asked.
I went back to my book while they talked for a long time. It was late in the afternoon, with the sun sinking, by the time Ellis got up to go.
We went home by way of Mae’s place.
‘Sian,’ said Ellis suddenly, ‘you like Miss Alberts, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s nice. She makes us work hard at school though.’
He just nodded and walked on.
When we got to Mr Gok’s I bought some greens and some gan shu, the sweet golden potato.
Mr Gok put them in my bag and said something to Mae.
Mae turned to me. ‘Father says he will put aside what you need each week,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to keep stock back for our regular customers. Mr Alberts is buying most of our produce for the store now. We’re starting some new beds and one of my cousins is coming to help.’
‘Is that so, then?’ asked Ellis. ‘Well, I’m glad that Mr Alberts has come to his right senses.’
Mae translated and Mr Gok said something in reply.
‘My father says there are many who don’t believe he has come to his senses,’ Mae said. ‘In fact, there are many who think he’s lost them.’
‘It’s surprising, Mr Gok, how many people can be wrong about something,’ said Ellis.
Mr Gok smiled and shook his head.
The Big Wet seemed to go on and on, raining all the time – and such rain! Rain in sheets and torrents, rain in buckets, rain that poured down like a waterfall.
