The Schoolmaster's Daughter

by Jackie French

  ‘Usual way, I reckon.’ Jamie nodded at the shed furthest away. ‘That’s for the women and children.’

  Hannah stared at it. Just up the hill was the Harris ballroom, where ladies and gentlemen had danced on voting day. But down here people lived like this.

  It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. But here it was . . .

  ‘Come on,’ said Jamie urgently. ‘We don’t want to be seen here. Sometimes the foremen let the women with babies come back early.’

  He shut the door and hurried back past the gardens. Hannah hitched up her skirts and tried to follow him, but he was going too fast.

  ‘Wait!’ she called.

  He slowed down, but didn’t stop till they were in the patch of scrub and hidden again.

  ‘Well, now you know,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen me in a proper house, using a knife and fork. But that ain’t who I am really.’

  ‘You’re still you,’ protested Hannah.

  ‘Not according to the law. That’s what Ma meant back there when she said she wouldn’t be around forever. There’s no proof I’m her son, no proof I even exist. When Ma dies Mr Harris’ll buy the farm from the government because there’s no one else for her to leave it to.’

  ‘I . . . I can’t believe Mr Harris would do this. He’s been so kind!’

  Jamie gave a snort of laughter. ‘Yes, to people like you. He calls the men who work here “boys”! You know what the “boys” and women live on? A pound of salted kangaroo meat a day, a loaf of bread — only half that for a woman — a bit of molasses and a pint of tea. The horses do the ploughing, but the work’s so hard they have to change horses every few rows. But the people are kept working from dawn till dusk, in the summer sun and the rain, with two short breaks and a whipping if they don’t get back to work. A five-man team has to cut at least eighteen tons of cane in a day. If they drop from exhaustion, and a whipping doesn’t get them up, they’re left there to rot for all the foremen care.’

  ‘But can’t they get other jobs?’ Hannah asked. It wouldn’t be hard to get away from those falling-down sheds.

  ‘No. They’re under contract. If they try to leave to get another job, it’s whipping or prison or both. Most newcomers die after a few years. Not enough food — they can’t even work their gardens except on Sundays. And no doctors or hospital for them if they get sick. Why bother? Plenty more where we came from.’

  Hannah shook her head, trying to take it all in.

  ‘Don’t believe me?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘I . . . I don’t think you’re lying.’ But it couldn’t be as bad as that, she thought, despite the squalor of the sheds.

  Jamie seemed to guess what she was thinking. ‘Come and look at this then.’

  He jogged through the scrub to another paddock. Horses gazed at them curiously, then bent their heads to the grass again. One end of the paddock looked freshly dug, as if ready to plant new crops.

  ‘Tell me where to dig,’ Jamie said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Point to a spot and I’ll dig there. Any spot around here.’

  What was he doing? He didn’t even have a spade.

  Hannah pointed to a patch of the freshly tilled ground. ‘That bit.’

  Jamie kneeled and began to dig with his hands, like a dog. About half a yard down he stopped and pulled something up. It looked like a bone in a rag of dirty serge.

  ‘No!’ Hannah backed away. Then she was running, back through the vegetables, past the cane.

  Jamie grabbed her shoulder. She shuddered, thinking where that hand had been, and fought him off. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  He let go. ‘Don’t tell Mum. Please. She’d give me curry if she knew I’d brought you here. She goes up there on Sunday afternoons, when the foremen ain’t about, and takes the women food. She lets the men come through our place on Sundays too, so they can fish. Reckon even more would die if they didn’t have fish and what they can grow.’

  ‘Mr Harris can’t know about . . . about all that . . .’

  ‘Of course he knows. He knows everything that happens around here.’

  Of course he did, thought Hannah dazedly. That was how he had grown rich. How he could afford to build the school and equip the schoolmaster’s house and give the picnics and parties, the fireworks . . .

  Jamie looked down at his trousers and his dirt-stained hands. ‘I need to wash. The creek’s just down here.’

  ‘How do you stand it?’ whispered Hannah.

  ‘I go down to the beach,’ said Jamie simply. ‘I sit on the sand and I watch the waves, and I know that somewhere out there the same sea is rolling waves onto Dad’s island and other islands too, places where a man is free no matter what colour his skin is.’

  Suddenly Hannah’s terror of the waves seemed very small compared to all that Jamie had known. ‘Do you want to go to the beach now?’ she asked.

  He watched her. ‘Yes. But not if your memories will frighten you.’

  She felt like a butterfly who had struggled out of its cocoon only to see ugliness. Suddenly she needed to see beauty too. ‘I want to go to the beach.’

  Because maybe, possibly, the waves might wash away her memory of a bone rotting in rags, on top of a grave that must hold hundreds more.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE BEACH

  The beach at Pirate’s Cove looked totally different, and exactly the same. There was the overhang where they had sheltered; the rocks, uncovered once more by the tide, with their clusters of oysters; the rock pools where they had drunk rainwater. But the waves today were tame, rolling and rushing. The tide was out, leaving a long stretch of sand with the foam-flecked high-tide mark almost at the top of the beach.

  It was a place of sunlight. It suddenly seemed so clean after the desperate poverty of the shed, the horror of the body-filled stretch of land, the knowledge that Mr Harris — the man who provided their house, the school and probably even Papa’s salary, the kind man who’d had Angus driven to the train — was responsible for all that anguish.

  Here on the beach there had been anguish too. But there was no greed or malice in a storm. It simply was, and then it died away. But Mr Harris knew exactly what he was doing up on his hilltop, making money as his slaves laboured below.

  ‘May as well set the fishing net now,’ said Jamie, breaking into Hannah’s thoughts. ‘The lower the tide, the easier it is.’

  ‘Don’t you just throw the net out?’

  ‘And hope a fish swims into it? No.’ He trod up the beach into the scrub, then emerged with his arms full of netting covered in small stones. ‘This used to be Dad’s net, though I’ve repaired it so often I suppose it’s mostly mine now. Watch.’

  He clambered onto the rocks, tied a rope at one end of the net to a tall thin boulder, then jumped into the water. Hannah gave a small yell of shock. But the water was only waist high. Jamie pulled at the net, all of it underwater now except for another rope at the end he was holding. Within a few minutes he was back on the beach, the rope and the end of the still slack net in his hands.

  ‘What now?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘We wait. Don’t have to wait here though, not if I weigh the other end down. The stones will keep the bottom of the net on the sand. At high tide, when I see a school of fish I begin to pull the net — slowly, so as not to spook them — till they’re sort of herded into the crevice over there. Then I just have to leap in and haul the net up.’

  ‘What if there aren’t any fish there?’

  ‘Almost always are. It’s the sandbank, see? There’s only one good channel for the fish to swim through, so any fish around always head for it. Of course the channel moves around a bit, so I have to move the net, but you can see how it changes by looking for coarse sand and shells and things on the beach — the water flows swifter through the channel so drops more things opposite it on the beach.’

  ‘Did your dad teach you this?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘Pretty much. I was young when he died, too young to net by m
yself. But I remembered. And every time I cast the net I sort of hear him guiding me. High tide’s best for most fish — not all though. And after a storm, or when it’s overcast, the fish move to the shore — but sharks follow a big school of fish so you need to watch for their fins. Dolphins too, but they won’t hurt you — they just want to eat and play. And you never know how the rip will change after a storm, and there can be freak waves too. I don’t ever cast the net too wide after a storm.’

  It was strange, and wonderful too, to hear Jamie talk so much. ‘Have you ever been chased by a shark?’

  He grinned, still waist deep in water, and counted off his arms and legs. ‘One, two, three, four . . . no, still got them all, so can’t have met a shark so far. Seen their fins but. And dolphins lots of times. They like this bay.’

  Suddenly Hannah liked it too. It had been angry the last time she was here. Now it was gentle and generous. She sat on the sand above the high-tide mark, feeling its warmth through her skirt, grateful for the shade of her hat. The waves snickered gently, as if they knew a joke she didn’t, curling up, then back, not even trying to reach her. She let the turquoise sea and the blue sky seep into her. For a while she didn’t think at all, just watched Jamie duck under the water to spread the base of his net, spluttering up to drag it a bit further, then down again. He’d tied on what looked like leathery balloons that floated on top of the water.

  ‘What are those?’ she asked when his head popped up again. His curly hair had gone straight now it was wet.

  ‘Pig’s bladders. You soak them in water then dry them out, then soak them again, and you can blow them up so they float.’

  ‘Erk.’

  He grinned again. ‘Well, you asked. Some of Dad’s friends used to come down to show me things like that.’

  ‘Don’t they come any more?’

  ‘They can’t. They’re dead.’

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry.’

  He shrugged, sending water dripping. ‘Not your fault.’

  She thought of the week her family had spent at the Harris Plantation House; the house they lived in now, paid for by Harris sugar; even Mrs Murphy’s wages, which would be more than six pounds a year despite her being a woman. But Jamie had ducked under the water again without waiting for a reply.

  The water flowed in and out, the waves more a gurgle than a crash, the sandbar protecting the cove from the full force of the waves except in a storm. Gradually the memory of the day and night she and Mama and Angus and the other women had spent here slid away. Even her worry about Angus rested in a corner of her mind, no longer nibbling at her, as there was nothing she could do, nor any hope of news before tomorrow. There was just today’s sunlight, and the high creaking of the gulls, and a small darting bird that never stayed still long enough to see it closely.

  Her thoughts flowed in and out like the waves. How Mama wasn’t really teaching her anything she could not have learned herself, but wanted her to be curious and learn. How Papa could make even boring things interesting and show you why you needed to know them, but wanted her to be satisfied with crumbs of knowledge, never seeing the entire loaf. How Jamie was the most interesting person in Port Harris now he was actually speaking to her, but who was also the one person she could not talk about having as her friend.

  At last he waded out of the water, secured the rope at the end of the net to a tree trunk, then sat beside her, though not too close. They sat there for a while, not talking.

  ‘What do you want to do when you’re older?’ she asked eventually.

  It was the question adults always asked boys when they had no other conversation. They never asked girls, because of course a girl would want to marry and have children, unless she was too ugly for anyone to ask her. Somehow Hannah couldn’t see Jamie being content to catch fish and sell butter for the rest of his life, especially as the farm might never be his.

  ‘Doesn’t matter what I want. Can’t ever get it.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘What is it? To work in an office, like your mother wants you to do?’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t want to be in an office neither, even if someone would hire me, not stuck at a desk all day. The best I can hope for is that if I can write a good hand and speak more like you and your ma I can convince a court to let me have the farm. I could clear more land, put in a different crop.’ He gave the grin that came so easily now. ‘Your ma says there’s going to be a new parliament for the whole country, down in Melbourne. They’re going to make new laws, better laws. Maybe I’ll write the new parliament a letter asking them to give me a birth certificate, and to let the Islander men go free once they’ve done their three years. Then some of them can work with me and I’ll pay them more than six pounds on the never-never.’

  ‘What will you grow?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t much care as long as it makes money. Something everyone else isn’t growing, so the big growers can’t force the small ones out by cutting prices. Has to be something someone will buy from me to sell on to the customers. No use me or any of the Island men trying to set up a stall in the market. They’d beat us to pulp the first morning we tried.’

  ‘How about selling fish to shops?’

  The grin returned once more. ‘There’s always fish. Might even get myself a boat one day. That’s what I’d really like — to travel to different places. You can go places in a boat. But the only kind of boat I could ever get would be one I’d make myself, and I couldn’t travel far in that. What about you?’

  ‘I thought I wanted to go to university.’ She waited for him to laugh, or ask what a university was, but he did neither. ‘But what I really love is just reading. All kinds of books: novels, history, poetry, even philosophy sometimes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said slowly. ‘An old man called Saint Augustine said once that life is like a book, but if you don’t travel you only read one page.’

  ‘I like that. Port Harris is just one page. But others will be different. Better.’

  ‘Or worse.’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe. But if I could visit other places at least I’d know.’

  ‘I think Saint Augustine was wrong,’ Hannah said. ‘I think you can travel in books. Not just one kind of book, or one subject — I don’t think you can understand the world with just one subject. People expect that if you go to university it’s to study just one thing. But I don’t want to be a doctor — even if people would go to a woman doctor — or a scientist. I want to know a bit of everything. Or a lot of everything.’

  ‘You’re doing pretty good so far.’

  She flushed. ‘Thanks.’

  And yet she hadn’t been, she realised. She had seen so little, despite all that she had read. She had only just discovered that her world had people kept in sheds and made to work like slaves until they died. And even worse, she realised, was that everyone pretended they weren’t there, though they must know who worked the cane fields. She’d never seen an Islander in Port Harris. Not at the market or in church, or on their walks along the waterfront. She had thought she knew the book of Port Harris, but she’d only known one page.

  She glanced back at Jamie. He had shown her the truth of himself today. It was time to be honest with him too.

  ‘I want to be a poet,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘That sounds a good thing to be.’ His tone was cautious.

  ‘It would be if I could write good poetry. Mine isn’t.’

  She waited for him to say politely that the poems she’d written about reading were good.

  Instead he said: ‘Don’t suppose you’d be much good at being a doctor or a scientist yet neither. Reckon you need to give yourself time to learn to be a poet.’

  It made sense, she realised. It really did make sense. Even if you’d been born a good runner, you still needed to practise to win a race. She needed to practise being a poet. Work out what made a poem good, because it wasn’t just about the best words in the best order. You could put down
the most wonderful words, but that didn’t mean they’d whisper to people for years and years after they’d been written . . .

  Jamie stood. ‘Mum’ll have lunch ready for us.’

  ‘What about your net?’

  ‘Don’t need to pull it in till the tide’s full. Hey, look at that.’ He bent to pick something out of the silty foam left from the last tide.

  Papa would have said ‘Only horses eat hay’. Hannah looked. It was a cameo brooch, green from the sea, but the pin at the back was still sharp, despite its rust.

  ‘It’s a pretty one,’ she said, relieved it looked much too old to have belonged to Mrs Talbot or Mrs Feehan. ‘Scrub it with toothpowder and it’ll look like new.’

  ‘You have it then.’

  ‘But your mum might like it . . . or you could sell it for pounds and pounds.’

  ‘And someone would ask where I stole it from.’

  He was probably right. But Papa — and Mama too — said that a girl should not accept jewellery from a young man, not unless they were engaged or married. But surely something given up by the sea didn’t count?

  ‘Tell you what,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll swap it for a poem if you write me one.’

  Which would mean it wouldn’t be a gift. Except . . . ‘It won’t be a good poem,’ she warned.

  ‘It’ll still take you longer to write it than it took me to find that brooch. And I’ll have a poem, written just for me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, slipping the cameo into the pocket she wore on her skirt now she no longer bothered with petticoats.

  Jamie grinned. ‘You never know what you’ll find on this beach. Found a bunch of castaways once. Weird lot of women with two scraggly kids.’

  She threw a shell at him. He grabbed it, laughed and threw it back at her. She reached for it and missed.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Mum’ll wonder what’s happened to us. Don’t tell her I took you up to Harrises’, will you? She worries.’

  ‘That Mr Harris will . . . kidnap you . . . and make you work there?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d do that as long as I behave myself. What’s one more to the likes of him? He’s got more than a dozen sheds like that.’