The Sparrows of Edward Street

by Elizabeth Stead

  *

  Somehow Hanora had managed to light the fuel stove. It would have been an act of great courage, and I congratulated her.

  When Rosy and I returned to 19B there was a glow from the stove top. There was an extra warmth in the hut that we could have done without, but we did not complain. The stove gave the corrugated iron a shadowed softness for a while and in a strange way a true settler’s feel to 19B Edward that was almost welcoming. Well, not completely, but almost.

  ‘Aren’t I clever, loves? I feel like a pioneer.’ Hanora was pleased with herself. ‘If this place wasn’t corrugated iron it could be a log cabin with a stew pot on the stove top and biscuits in the oven and that everlasting coffee in a pot you see in westerns. I’ll have to make myself an apron, and, Aria, you will show me how to make biscuits so I can have flour to the elbows.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen those women in western pictures riding in covered wagons for hundreds of miles, and they were tough as leather and about six feet tall with muscles. You’re too small and pretty to be like that. I don’t think you’d make much of a pioneer.’

  ‘Thank you, love, that was sweet of you.’

  While Rosy and I had been exploring and shopping Hanora had added even more colour. A glass of the yellow flowers we called ‘railway flowers’, because they grew wild by the tracks, stood, protected by a doily, on the cocktail cabinet. Books were still piled in no particular order along the timber struts, and were supported here and there with bookends of stones she had found. They made a colourful display.

  Hanora’s passion was her collection of books. She loved the look of them, the feel of their paper; she loved the smell of them, particularly the old paperbacks. She collected as many as she was able from second-hand shops and open markets on Saturdays. She saved and loved them as though they’d been abandoned at birth. Recently, she had begun to put them into some order, but the project had been slowed down by her reading and re-reading them. When she finished John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for the second time, she said: ‘I remember those Depression years as if they were yesterday, love. I don’t know how we scraped by, but I remember we ate a lot of tomatoes – I think I’ve told you there was a glut of tomatoes. You were both babies through the worst of it. You both were. But you must read this book. It explains what it was like. In The Grapes of Wrath everybody loses their farms and the dispossessed have to travel in piled-up old utes and drive for weeks looking for work. It must have been terrible for those poor people to be so down and out, terrible! Living in tents with potatoes boiled in river water and pebbles, and nothing else for a stew. Terrible!’

  It had not once occurred to her that we had been, and in a way still were, in exactly the same state, except for the utes, the tents and the river water.

  Hanora had put the wing-back chair at a certain angle on the old ‘Gyppo’ rug, and on one side of it stood the black and chrome smoker’s stand. On the other side stood the record player with some of its records stacked against the wall for the time being.

  The cocktail cabinet, totally out of place but determined to make a point with its mirrors and glasses and roll-out doors and chrome shelves and not a bottle in sight, stood on the opposite side of the room. The cocktail cabinet and the fuel stove regarded each other as one alien might regard another, with suspicion and a readiness to protect their territory, but I was pretty sure the stove would win. After all, a corrugated-iron hut was iron-stove territory, whereas the cocktail cabinet? . . . Well, it was something frivolous and unnecessary from a world where the lights worked and there were carpets wall to wall on the floors, and white bathrooms and two toilets – and possibly even a bidet. A cocktail cabinet was something that should have been near a grand piano, with Bette Davis in something slinky opening it for the shaker and martini glasses.

  Hanora was pleased with the simple lamb’s fry and bacon dinner, and I’d soon cooked up a delicious smell of frying because Hanora had found an onion. I have always thought that an onion makes all the difference! She was an expert scavenger. Even Rosy came out of our cell to sniff the pan.

  There only remained the problem of the bathroom.

  The dark, tin place at the back of the hut.

  As dark and forbidding as something under the stairs, forever locked and full of dangers.

  Apart from the toilet, not one of us had tackled the basics of our bathroom ‘fittings’. I must say, as I have said before, that in its favour was the fact that it was, no matter how basic, our own bathroom and our own toilet – not something to be shared with any of Mr Kellog’s tenants, or Mr Kellog’s peeping eyes. Not in its favour was everything else. We were not sure how to use the chip heater over the bath, and frankly we had become afraid of it. Even me, for a while. Rosy said that when she went to the toilet she felt it was staring at her the whole time! We stood in the bath and washed all over with cold water, and Hanora boiled the kettle for washing our hair. It was perfectly all right to bathe this way when the weather was warm, but it would certainly not be all right during winter.

  We had not yet visited the communal laundry. We did our washing in cold water and Sunlight soap and dried it anywhere we could. But Hanora had been brave enough to fuel the stove, so I thought the time had come to attack the chip heater. Rosy and Hanora were desperate for a hot bath. At least I was able to shower at the studio, but of course we couldn’t all arrive there with towels and shower caps.

  ‘I’ll work out the bath heater,’ I said. ‘I’m dashed if the bloody thing is going to get the better of me!’

  ‘We’ll be brave too and have a bath tomorrow, loves.’

  ‘I don’t mind cold water,’ said Rosy.

  ‘We have to use hot sooner or later, for goodness sakes.’ I had the sense to say ‘Think of winter.’

  ‘Where is the laundry?’ Rosy asked.

  ‘It’s the big block behind our huts, at the end of Edward, near the ’phone box. There are several laundries at the end of blocks. We all share it, loves. I think we have allotted days, I’m not sure.’

  ‘That’s where all the latest gossip is. Mr Sparkle told me.’

  After we’d eaten, Hanora slid a record onto the player and turned up the volume. It was a recording of Hungarian dances. She waved a scarf above her head and weaved in and around the main cell of our hovel. The rhythm was irresistibly toe-tapping. Rosy and I clapped and stamped in time to the music until the moment was shattered by something banging against the iron wall.

  ‘Turn that bloody noise down!’ The deep and loud female voice might have been no further away than the wing chair. It was a terrible voice, as rough as the metal it cut through.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry,’ Hanora called back, confused and upset to have lost the mood and our privacy. ‘I had no idea we could hear each other so clearly.’ And she lowered the volume of the music.

  ‘I liked that, Mum,’ said another, younger voice, muffled.

  ‘And me too,’ said a male, older. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

  ‘Oh, go bag your heads!’

  A door was slammed and then another.

  The younger voice said: ‘Oooooo!’

  ‘Serves you right!’ said the tin-cutter.

  ‘I had no idea there were people next door,’ I whispered. ‘I thought next door was vacant.’

  ‘They’re new, love.’

  ‘What a voice!’

  ‘They’d probably be able to hear a pin drop in here.’

  ‘And the bathroom! They must be able to hear us when we go to the toilet!’ Rosy’s face flushed red. I have often wondered if she’d been aware of Mr Kellog’s peeping through the yellow pebbled window when she was on the toilet at the flat. I think she must have been, as young as she was. I think she must have been aware and it had left a scar. ‘There’s absolutely no privacy in this place!’

  ‘Not a lot, it would seem,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well, loves. We’ll just have to adjust.’

  ‘But they sound awful! Fancy having to
live next to something like that. I thought I could smell things. We’ll have to say something. We can’t cope with that.’

  ‘Oh, Rosy! Edward Street is not exclusively ours. For heaven’s sake, stop acting the drama queen!’

  ‘I’ll call on them,’ said Hanora. ‘I think that would be best.’

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t go alone, Mother; she sounds as though she might have a shotgun. She sounds like a – a hillbilly,’ said Rosy. ‘Take Aria with you.’

  ‘Having someone next door was always going to happen,’ I said. ‘Remember how close the Snows were to us in the flat?’

  ‘That was different, Aria! Mrs Snow gave cake-icing lessons.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Rose!’

  Once, in the flat, I had nailed a photograph of a Spanish bullfighter to the wall that separated us from the Snows, and the nail had gone straight through and murdered the cuckoo in the clock in their kitchen.

  ‘At least the wall is thicker here.’

  From that moment we tried to keep the sounds in our cells as low as gossip between cathedral pews.

  ‘This is no way to live, Mother.’

  ‘I know, love, but we’ll work something out.’

  *

  Hanora and I knocked on our neighbour’s door at six o’clock the following evening, and interrupted a loud family quarrel. It was a while before the door was flung open by a woman as rough as her voice sounded. It was difficult to tell her age – somewhere between forty and death. Peroxided hair knotted all over the place and a grubby egg-stained pinny over a dumpy body in a bad dress. Nicotine had dyed her mouth and fingers, and she had a scowl for a face. Even her eyes had scowl marks in them. She had scowl lines everywhere, a face of noughts and crosses.

  ‘Yes?!’

  ‘We’re from next door. We’re in 19B. My name is Hanora Sparrow and this is my daughter Aria.’

  ‘And?!’

  ‘We thought you might like to come in for a cup of tea. We’re sorry if the music was too loud for you the other night.’

  ‘Who is it, Mum?’

  ‘Never you mind, Carol. Get on with your bloody homework.’

  ‘You’re all welcome to come.’ Hanora, I could see, was nervous.

  ‘How old is your daughter?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifteen going on eight! Right, Carol? That’d be about right, wouldn’t it, Carol? Fifteen going on eight? We’re going to Greybridge next week. We’re moving in with his mother. The hospital told us she hasn’t got that long and the sooner the better as far as I’m concerned – at least we’ll get the house. I’ll be glad to get out of this dump! Not that Greybridge is that much better, being behind a car yard and on the main road, but you know what I mean. I don’t know how long you lot think you’re going to last in this place. And I don’t drink tea, so ta ta . . .’

  And in the Edward Street theatre next door to 19B a door slammed and a sackcloth curtain came down on the shortest play in history. Nobody clapped because there was nobody there . . . only us.

  ‘There’s no answer to that, is there?’

  ‘No,’ said Hanora. ‘I wish I had a brandy.’

  ‘Where is Greybridge?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  When we opened our door, our side of the iron wall suddenly seemed as comforting as mother’s milk.

  ‘What are they like?’ asked Rosy.

  ‘Don’t ask. But if you really want to know, they’re all armed to the teeth and wearing prison clothes.’

  ‘Oh, God! Where are you going, Aria?’

  ‘The laundry. It’s about time I used it and heard what’s going on in the Camp – and I’ve got a news flash!’

  The Camp – December

  Of all the Decembers I had known when we’d lived in the flat, when there was usually a whiff of bush smoke, ferns growing along the banks of the creek in the moist clean lush of the gully and the creek behind the flats, and there were maidenhair ferns and green lilies and yabbies and the sound of whipbirds in the high gums and blackberries looking ripe enough for tarts and sparrows calling for their crumbs . . . Oh, my memories, Rosy, my memories. This place surely cannot be under the same sun.

  Christmas was only weeks away, and Christmas was close to my birthday, but I had more or less put thoughts of a birthday celebration aside – it just didn’t seem to be the right time or place. I did, however, think it might be fun to have a party of some kind. The Camp was full to its cell doors of people we hadn’t met, and I wondered if an informal ‘drop-in’ party would be a good idea. It would be a great way to get to know the inmates in our area.

  While Rosy continued to pretend she did not live anywhere near the Camp, and even tried to make herself invisible by hiding her head in a book in the bus – a bit like Mr Biddle – and not raising it until she’d reached the train station, I got to know as many of our neighbours as I could. I can’t honestly say it was out of anything more than sheer curiosity.

  I was curious to know how and why so many people in this place were in the same boat as us. In fact at one stage I’d begun to think of the Camp as an ‘ark’, a sort of parallel universe separated from everything else by the fork in the road and its boundaries of poverty and despair.

  I had no wish to know the migrants, who were so well looked after. They didn’t seem to fit in, somehow, and I was pretty sure they had no wish to know us, especially the Poms. I was told they kept to themselves and created a resentment of sorts. But I have to say this was ‘laundry talk’. I had been told there was nothing more reliable than ‘laundry talk’, but I’m sure facts were bleached or dyed or embroidered a little to suit the mood of the gossip. A hole in a story was easily darned. I didn’t mind at all taking the washing to the laundry, where I could meet and listen and learn. Rosy, as usual, thought I was insane. Hanora scaled her opinions depending on her pill intake.

  I often wondered, for example, about another man, pale and fragile as old parchment, with patches of thin hair clinging to his scalp like a balding doll’s, who shuffled along Edward Street in an unblinking trance and went as far away from the huts as he could. When he reached his chosen spot near the far boundary he sat on the ground alone in the dusty grass for a very long time and shivered and rocked back and forth and wept. He hugged his knees almost to his chin, like a distressed child. I did wonder about that man. He was a sad sight. The saddest I’d known. Even sadder than Mr Biddle.

  I had noticed him on at least four occasions. For some reason I felt he’d needed to be left alone so I never interfered, and he was mostly left alone, apart from a few trouble-making, bored kids. I made inquiries.

  ‘That’s Tom Gardiner,’ one of the washerwomen told me, hushing her voice for some reason. ‘He got himself really messed up in the war. Finished up a POW of the Japs. Shellshocked, and God knows what else. What the Japs did was throw him into a pit full of dead bodies, thinking he was dead too, but maybe not caring whether he was or not. It was a common grave with lime! And that’s where Tom Gardiner was when he was spotted by an Aussie doctor who saw him twitch and had him dug out. That was a good while back, but he still cracks up every now and then. There’s nothing anybody can do. We just leave him alone until he goes back home. He lives with his wife. We hardly ever see her. She’d be halfway around the bend too, I reckon. You’d think the Commission would have given them somewhere to live by now, but I think they’re too busy sucking up to the Poms at the posh end of the Camp.’

  ‘Poor things. Poor man. What a disgusting thing to happen. How on earth do they cope?’

  ‘The best they can, I suppose. There’s a couple of others like him, but not as bad as Tom.’

  Talking about Tom Gardiner – just thinking about his horrors – brought the laundry to a reflective silence for a while. Women got on with their chores, maybe scrubbing a bit harder, with their heads down. A sort of gesture of respect, in a way, I thought.

  ‘Is it all right if I rinse a few things out by hand while I’m here?’

  ‘Go for your life, sweeti
e,’ said another washerwoman, with pegs holding her blouse together. This woman would have been good covered-wagon stock. She looked as strong as an ox. ‘But tell us where you got that voice of yours from.’ They were all wearing sturdy floral aprons with bibs and pockets full of pegs. ‘You got a bit of Pom in you, too? There’s a bit of la-de-da there.’

  ‘I’m certainly not a Pom! We Sparrows are Australians . . . Always have been . . . for generations! We are certainly not Poms!’

  ‘Sorry – then it must have been God who gave you the posh voice.’

  ‘And it wasn’t a god either! We don’t believe in them!’

  ‘That’ll be great news to Father Beale when he comes down here on the prowl to round us up on Saturdays so he can forgive our sins on Sundays.’ The women laughed and plunged their arms into the comfort of warm suds.

  In the laundry there were three huge coppers, three double tubs and three hand wringers. On the walls were notices, orders, personal messages, jokes, allotted days for our section and boxes and baskets of odds and ends people hoped to sell. Outside the laundry were clothes lines and old bricks, rubbish and paspalum grass. There was a ’phone box on the roadside just outside the fence. More often than not, I was told, the ’phone was out of order.

  ‘It’s the kids here. They’re bored out of their minds.’

  ‘I’ve met a few of them. I expect it’s hard to blame them,’ I said.