by Wendy Orr
You’ll like him, and I know he’ll like you—he likes beautiful women.
Because of course they know what an audacious thing they’ve done, tying themselves to the phantom of love at first sight, with fate determined to thwart all their attempts at meeting—leaves rearranged, aircraft stuck out in distant places for a night, a motorbike bought in high hopes then borrowed and broken. Now the intensity of the letters fills the gaps, the tentative getting-to-know of a more leisurely romance.
Do I tell you too much? Ruth asks. I write to you each day as a schoolgirl confides in her diary, or a nun in her prayer. Do you feel overwhelmed?
I feel honoured, says Bill, though I don’t much like the thought of you as a nun.
Letters to Bill are not the only ones Ruth writes. Finally, she has written to her parents. I must know what Mama meant, and understand who my parents are, if you are not. Determined not to pollute her new life with the messiness of the past, she decides not to mention Bill until this is cleared up.
16 August 1944
My dear Ruth
I read your letter with some surprise. I am pleased to say that your mother was not in the house when the post came, and I do not intend to inform her of its contents.
You remain, as you always have been, our daughter. Your Mama made a slip of the tongue, which she sincerely regrets, in referring to your, let us say, Darwinian forebears. Biology, while a fascinating science, is surely the least interesting component of what makes up an individual; although we use the term breeding, what we in fact mean is upbringing and your upbringing, my dear, is pure Townsend. I cannot conceive of what possible good it could do to bring to light any earlier sordid history.
I do not think there needs to be any further reference to this subject.
I trust that you will be able to return home for another leave soon, as your Mama would very much like to see you. The flying bombs are proving a trial for her nerves, having been quite constant since early June. At least in the Blitz one knew that a cloudy night would bring some respite, but now one never knows when the next bomb will arrive. One must also admit that the peculiarity of the noise, and the interminable silence between the engine cutting out and the bomb landing, is rather unnerving.
Your Mama watches the post anxiously for a letter, so I would ask you to be so good as to send her one soon, but I repeat, without reference to the questions in your latest.
With best wishes,
Papa
And because duty is a habit, Ruth writes to her mother the following day and continues to do so regularly—and if the letters give away nothing of herself, at least they don’t contain any embarrassing questions.
But questions are all that fill her mind.
I have to know, she tells Bill. I want it all sorted out before I tell them we’re getting married.
Digging through the haze of scrambled memories, Ruth arrives at one that is distinct amongst early recollections by not being attached to a family story or photograph. True or not, it is her own.
She is standing, holding a woman’s hand, at the front gate of an unfamiliar grey stone house with small windows. It is cold but not raining; it could be autumn. This is where her new Mummy and Daddy live. The woman has told her this, although Ruth can never hear the voice.
The woman’s coat is heavy, rough, a muddy brown that the adult Ruth has always hated; perhaps this explains it. Or perhaps it’s simply aesthetic. She can’t see the face—she is, after all, very small. The hand, the coat, are at her own level. But she can’t picture the hand either.
Her mother? Someone from an orphanage? An image she’s conjured up to fill a gap?
Tomorrow, if there are no disasters on the farm, no sudden fusions of tractor motors or cows, awkward in pregnancy, cast on channel banks, Ian will go to the river. In times of need or reflection he’s always found himself at the Murray’s side, and tomorrow, having woken alone, he’ll feel the weight of their separation and the need to replenish himself for the coming season. And because he is human, with the usual burdens of thinking and feeling, he might reflect on the impermanence of life.
The river, home of ancient and more recent tales, is a fitting place for it. It’s peaceful now, biding its time over the winter months to digest its prey; last summer it took more than its ordinary share of sacrifice. As in war there is occasional collateral damage: the oncoming drivers wiped out by a broadsiding ute in the dust; the parents caught in the current of rescue when children step into sudden depths. But in further imitation of war, the river’s favourites are the boys, youths on the verge of adulthood; some years it takes more of the region’s young men than Vietnam did in seven. Filled with alcohol or bravado or plain bad luck, they swim too far, are caught in unseen currents or unsuspected snags, dive onto shifted sandbars or drifted logs, plunge cars down perilous embankments.
Such a fine line between good luck and bad, between a moment’s adrenalin rush and irrevocable change: a brain rewired after concussion, a body unwired by snap of spine. Fragile creatures, humans, and nature hasn’t heard of the end of corporal—or capital—punishment.
Nevertheless, even for Jane, who hasn’t grown up camping every summer along the crowded banks, who hasn’t built her first sandcastles on the white beaches or learned to water-ski behind spraying speedboats, the river’s solace outweighs it random tragedies. In the early days, when the ugliness of flat treeless paddocks pressed heavily on her soul, she could find beauty in the river’s grassy slopes and white sand, gazing up at the gums’ topmost branches till she was dizzy and calmed. It was there that she first heard a kookaburra and saw a koala, initiations as special to her as Ian’s childhood and less savoury adolescent memories. She had realised that if this sort of natural beauty existed on the river banks less than a kilometre from the house, there must be a means of recreating it, to some extent, on the farm, and specifically, on the domestic dam just down the laneway from her garden.
She had started all wrong, of course, but in 1970 one didn’t have to be a recently introduced specimen oneself to miss the significance of indigenous vegetation. Willow cuttings from the trees on the main channel were set to fringe the edges of the dam, and in a few short years, willows growing as they do, appeared in the twilight as elegant as a Japanese print. Ducks landed on the dam’s surface, and one year a pair of black swans stayed for most of the winter. When Ian installed a bore to pump cleaner water for the house and dairy, he’d agreed to leave the dam as it was instead of bulldozing it in as their neighbours were doing.
Within another ten years, when it could no longer be denied that, contrary to popular wisdom, willow roots in the long run caused more damage to waterways than they solved, as well as offering nothing to the birds Jane wanted to tempt, Ian agreed to chop down the willows and drag them off for a winter bonfire. Jane had already begun to plant the first of her rows of native trees along fence lines: ‘You’ll appreciate this one day,’ she would tell the cows as she dug, mulching around the tiny sprigs, juice-carton tree guards against rabbits and a fence against cattle, but the cows rarely listened. The bulls especially seemed to view each tree guard as a challenge, smashing their way through double rows of electric fencing to charge any sapling poking its head above the long grass.
Despite the hazards of bulls and frosts, the majority of her plantings had survived and the proportions increased each year with her learning. By the time she replanted the dam she had read widely, talked to the Department of Conservation and knew exactly what she wanted. For trees and shrubs she used Eucalyptus camaldulensis, Callistemon sieberi, Acacia retinoides, Melaleuca parvistaminea, the sonorous names suddenly as familiar as maple and spruce, and underplanted them with the delightfully named billy buttons and native bluebell. Later still, she added native grasses and water plants at the dam’s edge, water ribbons and yellow rush lilies. The birds came, from tiny blue wrens to gaudy rosellas, more species than she’d known the region supported. Nothing in her life had ever come to fruition so exactly as she
’d dreamed.
‘Jane’s oasis,’ Ian teased with perhaps a deeper truth than he realised, because it was as much an oasis of Jane’s soul as a physical haven for the birds. And if she rarely sat there for the quiet times that she had imagined, usually finding some new task to occupy her, there was a gift of tranquillity in simply knowing it was there.
It was the beginning, too, of the path that led her to EcoFarm and the study of the Gundanna Lagoon.
The Lyons teashop outside Paddington Station is crowded and Ruth is seated with strangers, a dejected-looking woman in the seat where she’d hoped Bill would be. Her hands are clammy as she orders a third pot of tea; the train from Oxford is late.
The men at the next table are having a vociferous discussion about a gas main that exploded earlier that morning. ‘I’m telling you, there’s something going on here we’re not being told. That’s the third in two days.’
‘One in Chiswick the day before that. It took out four houses and made a bloody big hole in the street, my daughter said. Worse than a buzz bomb.’
‘The one I passed yesterday was being guarded by American soldiers. That’s what put the wind up me—why would a squad of Yanks be guarding an exploded gasometer? The government must think we’re idiots to believe that—I tell you, we’re looking at Hitler’s new surprise!’
Ruth has other things to think about than the likelihood of exploding gas mains. It’s nearly three months since she’s seen Bill, and she’s beginning to wonder if she’ll recognise him. Beginning to wonder if those intimate, intense letters have led them into a terrible mistake; whether the written word is all that binds them and face to face the magic will die. It seems impossible that they could recapture that feeling of certainty and delight from those two fleeting nights; her stomach is churning with the fear that nothing exists outside her own imagination.
Then her heart skips, as if it recognises him before her eyes have time to do so: taller than the crowd and quite oblivious to it because he’s seen her now and is intent on nothing but reaching her. Holding her.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ says the waitress, ‘but people need to get past.’
I should feel embarrassed, Ruth thinks, but I can’t be bothered.
Bill doesn’t want tea, doesn’t want to stay in this stuffy, clammy shop; he propels her out and down the street, she takes his arm, they’re decorous, respectable, but shoulders touch and sometimes hips and the warmth of his body is singing to her.
‘I’ve booked into my hotel,’ he says, gazing across from the bus stop as if fascinated by the peculiar shape of the bomb hole in the pavement there, ‘for two nights.’
‘My parents are only expecting me for one.’
‘But your leave is for two.’
‘Have you got a suggestion?’
‘Well . . . I did mention, when I was booking in, that my wife might be able to join me at some stage.’
‘Wise man,’ she says lightly, as though emotion is not threatening to choke her, as though her eyes are not dancing with laughter and fire. ‘I like wise men.’
Bill thinks that as he should probably try not to be more than three hours late to meet his future in-laws, he would be wiser still not to dwell on this promise in public. Especially squashed into this crowded bus, Ruth against his chest, reaching for the overhead strap. Think of her parents, that’ll cool him down—‘What have you told them?’
‘That I’m bringing home a very dear friend whom I want them to meet.’
‘Did you mention that the dear friend was a man?’
She’s laughing again; she can’t help it, she should be nervous but it’s such an extraordinary relief, Bill’s here in flesh and blood, oh very much in flesh, one flesh is what they’ll be and it can’t be too soon, because the man from the letters, the man in her dreams and the man beside her are all the same, all gloriously true, and she loves them all. ‘I think they’ll realise.’
Bill decides it’s silly to worry if she’s not. Although he’s still not looking forward to it—she’s said nothing to make him think that they’ll welcome a colonial son-in-law, or have anything in common. Her father imports lumber (timber Ruth calls it), maybe they can talk about wood or trees; he does at least know a little about that, though snigging a few logs out of the woods isn’t quite the end of the business that her father will be interested in.
I’m glad I’m an officer, he thinks suddenly, and for the first time. He suspects that it will make it infinitely easier to face the Townsends.
Not that he’s good at making it easy. Faced with the subtle condescension of protective middle-class parents, he knows he’ll become the colonial, making mistakes with grammar and cups of tea. The more he feels he is being patronised, the more he’ll play country hick. (Add a hint of Anglo-Canadian snobbery and he’ll be speaking with Grandpère’s accent which, given the scattered childhood phrases and nursery rhymes that is all his French consists of, endears him to neither French nor English Canadians.)
‘How about I just drop to my knees on the doorstep and say, “Please, sir, I want to marry your daughter.”?’—a bit louder than he’d intended. The woman across the aisle is too polite to turn, but her mouth twitches.
‘Perhaps you could wait till we get inside.’
He can see the tension beginning behind the teasing smile, and his arm tightens around her. ‘If it’s too bad,’ he whispers, ‘you can come straight back to the hotel with me. And if they don’t like it you’ll soon be on the other side of the world and you won’t ever have to see them again.’
Ruth doesn’t hear the words so never knows that he regrets them for the rest of his life. The bus stops around the corner from Savernake Street, but they’re aware of something wrong even before they see the blockade and the queue of emergency vehicles leaving from the other end. A pall of brick dust and smoke hangs low in the sky; the smell is choking. There are guards, not American this time, but Ruth sprints past them and leaves Bill to explain it’s her home, her parents, and the guards let him follow. The windows in every house from the corner are cracked and broken; shards of glass, vegetation, bricks and unimaginable debris litter the road. Her run slows to a scramble as the litter turns to mounds; she is kicking her way through glass, climbing over chunks of masonry and timber. Now whole windows, doors, walls, are missing; half of number 44, the front wall of 39. Shattered rooms inside are humiliatingly nude and instantly sordid, family intimacy on display.
A yawning crater, filling with filth and water, is all that remains of numbers 40 and 42.
Ruth registers the scene as a series of disconnected snapshots, as if she’s observing from somewhere outside herself; there are almost titles on these cliched scenes of tragedy.
The house is as completely demolished as if it has never existed; as if Ruth has imagined it, along with her childhood, her parents; herself. ‘Ruins of a Chelsea home’, although ruin suggests something recognisable, something dignified, and this mound of rubble—bricks shattered and scattered, match-splinters of wood no longer distinguishable as front door, Queen Anne table or tapestry frame, surreally twisted metal and shards of glass glinting in the afternoon sun, scrap of fabric, unlikely flag in the pattern of her winter nightgown, waving from what once might have been a roof beam—is neither recognisable nor dignified. Rescue workers are picking their way through the rubble, methodically and hopelessly; Ruth is unable to understand what they could be searching for.
The frame switches to a tall, slim young woman, smartly dressed in a pale blue dress from Oxford days, the matching hat—concession to her parents—perched on waving brown hair; silk stockings and black pumps. She leans against the shoulder of a taller, fairer man in RCAF uniform. They’re both healthy, young and attractive; it could be a wedding photograph or an advertisement, until you notice the holocaust behind them, the shock written clear across the man’s face, his arms supporting and protecting the sagging girl, his head bent to hers as if to whisper. In this sharp-edged image only the girl’s face is out of fo
cus.
There is one simply entitled ‘Grief’: Mr James from number 39, in a statued freeze, crossed arms and a vacant face staring at the missing portion of his house while Mrs Hutchinson, unnoticed, pats him on the shoulder as if he were one of her terriers.
Impressions after that are jumbled: Mrs Hutchinson’s face moving slowly towards her, chalky-grey with dust and shock; a thought frozen like a sentence in time: If I leave now, I won’t have to hear what she’s going to say. The layer of mind below that already knows the truth. A confusion of mumbles—asking about Mrs James, Mrs James who was not badly hurt but in hospital with her injured grandchild, a baby with a leg gone and the daughter-in-law that Ruth has never met, dead. Mrs Hutchinson still talking, more news, of people not suffering, didn’t hear anything till it happened, no warning at all, just a crash and a terrible boom, never heard a noise like it before, ears are still ringing, never even time to be afraid, they wouldn’t have known what hit them and Ruth really ought to have a cup of tea before she does what has to be done. And she, Ruth, unable, unwilling to understand what has to be done or why, swimming through the words, cold and detached, wishing she could go to sleep, go to some other place so this will all make sense when she returns.
Bill’s voice the only clear auditory memory in this jumble, as if her mind has set up a wall that only one specific timbre can breach: ‘She’s trying to tell you that your parents are dead.’
On a black and white screen a man named Armstrong walks—bounces—leaps—across the moon. He repeats the performance on the evening news, the weekly round-up, countless news clips ever after. Ruth and Bill, earthbound for twenty-four years without ceasing to yearn for the skies, watch them all, including a documentary on the history of rocket flight. The first rockets, the commentator drones in the measured tones peculiar to documentaries, were developed by the Germans during the Second World War and launched as the ultimate terror weapon, although in fact too late to change the course of the war and ineffective anyway, in that only two thousand seven hundred Londoners were killed by the five hundred and seventeen bombs that reached the city. Old footage is shown of an imploding cinema in Antwerp and the splintered ruins of an unspecified London house. Vergeltunsgwaffen, they were called: vengeance weapons.