by Wendy Orr
‘You’ll need a library next,’ Bill says, coming into the parlour as she swims through her sea of books.
‘The trunk room,’ says Ruth. ‘We don’t ever use it.’
The trunk room is a gabled cubbyhole at the top of the stairs. The ceilings slope wildly; it’s papered with the odds and ends of wallpaper from every other room in the house, some many paperings ago; the window is of leaded glass, bubbled with imperfections.
‘That’ll never make a library!’
‘It’s exactly what I want.’ She strips off the old wallpaper and chooses one bright with yellow flowers, papering it herself despite Bill’s advice and the toddlers’ help. Bill planes shelves from seasoned maple; she sands and oils, and by the time Rick is born, early the following November, has a room entirely her own.
Louise’s two sons were born in Germany, where Hank had been posted soon after their marriage. They bought a large black Mercedes to see the Europe Hank had missed in Colditz; postcards arrived from Towers Eiffel to Leaning, cathedrals and castles.
But eventually Hank decided he’d had enough of air force life, found a job with a mining company and moved back to Cape Breton. The August after the iceberg visit, which years later will inspire Jane’s trip to the Corso del Palio, Ruth took the children to visit again. It was the time of the pit ponies’ annual holiday: long days of sunshine and fresh air, bucking, frisking and freedom.
‘They shouldn’t have to go back down the mines!’ Jane protested. ‘It’s not fair!’
‘It’s their job,’ explained Ruth, who could not think of a worse nightmare than subterranean darkness and had to remind herself that it wasn’t so long since children younger than Rick had worked in worse conditions than these ponies.
Jane was twelve years old and not interested in comparisons of history. Carefully noting a map to work out the route, she simply plotted to steal the friendliest pony and ride it home to freedom. Once it was safely established on the farm, her parents could not be cruel enough to send it back to slavery. The only flaw she could see, presuming that the miners wouldn’t object to the well-intentioned theft, was why Ruth wouldn’t notice her missing on the day’s tour of Louisbourg. Eventually she had to admit that even the attraction of ruined ramparts made this unlikely.
The pit ponies went back to work; Ruth and the children went back to the Valley, and in December Bold Brennan arrived.
There’d been horses on the farm all Jane’s life: Lady, the unimaginatively named big bay mare that had been Bill’s before he went to war, over twenty now but still willing to amble passively with a small child or unseat experienced riders who mistook her gentleness for docility. Merry Legs, a dapple grey Shetland with the appealing face and appalling nature of her breed, had arrived when Jane was six, her foal unexpectedly on a misty June morning shortly after. Misdemeanour—father unknown, known as Miss D—grew taller and sweeter than her mother, but Jane had outgrown her by twelve, and the pony was gentle enough for Rick. Mike, who was not particularly interested in riding, preferred the battle with Merry when he did.
There hadn’t been a horse for the sleigh for several years, not since George’s black gelding that had fetched the doctor for Jane, but that was not why she chose Brennan. He became hers because he was a challenge (and she was, after all, her mother’s daughter), and because she often felt so small and insignificant that there was something powerfully appealing about being mounted on a tall horse’s back. But the main reason was simply that he was the first horse she looked at, and rejecting him would have meant remaining horseless another day.
Bold Brennan was about five years old; seventeen hands of raw-boned roan; the carefully clipped feathers which grew silkily and quickly around his fetlocks suggested Clydesdale, but he’d managed to inherit a full degree of artistic temperament from some hotter blooded ancestor. ‘If he were a woman,’ Ruth always claimed, ‘you could see him wringing his hands.’
The first sight of him, forlorn and muddy in a dealer’s corral, was unprepossessing. ‘He’s awful ugly,’ said Bill, ‘and the size of him—you’d be better off with something neater you could use for pony club.’ But the promise had been made: the decision was Jane’s.
The dealer had no saddle; Bill hoisted himself across the prominent backbone to see that the horse did not object to his weight, and the animal moved freely around the corral with no obvious vices. Then Jane, her eyes shining, was given a leg-up. Twice around the ring and she headed out the gate and up the hill, where the horse, on being urged to speed up from a trot, simply lengthened his stride, his body settling lower as the legs flashed long, straight and smooth as a canter, the most extraordinary ride Jane had ever had. At the top of the hill she turned him, intending to descend slowly as Bill had drilled her, but the horse promptly bolted, raising his Roman nose so high that it was impossible for a small twelve year old to rein it down or in. In the end there was nothing to do but clamp knees to his sides and arms to his neck. At the entrance to the corral he swerved and they continued to gallop around the flat lands at the foot of the hill until suddenly he had run himself out and Jane was able to rein him in with a semblance of control.
Ruth’s face was white, Bill’s grim. The dealer looked depressed.
‘Cool!’ Jane breathed, sliding off the sweat-streaked animal and offering him a sugarlump from her pocket. Which Brennan may or may not have known he did not deserve but accepted anyway.
‘At least our parents, ’ Ruth said later to Bill, ‘never saw us learning to fly!’
Forty years later, sorting out the collection of coats in the shed, Jane will find a sugarlump in the pocket of her farm parka. Brennan had stepped happily into the horse trailer that took him to his new home, the second winter of teachers’ college; he hadn’t needed sugar to coax him, and she’d kissed him on the nose and fled without remembering to give it to him. Another small betrayal, she thinks; life seems to be full of them once you start remembering.
Ruth’s horse, Lochinvar, is a gift from Bill in the spring after Brennan’s arrival: an elegant, mostly standardbred chestnut. Ruth isn’t a proficient rider, but Bill thinks she needs a challenge now that Rick has started school, and a horse is easier to provide than an aeroplane. Absorbed by the challenges of farming, he doesn’t miss flying the way she does, and the memories of a navigator on a hulking great flying boat or transport are not of the same freedom as a pilot of smaller craft.
‘I mind not flying,’ Ruth said once, out of the blue, or maybe because of the clarity of the blue that day, when Jane was chasing butterflies and Mike was asleep in the baby carriage in the shade. ‘I wouldn’t change anything, but wouldn’t it be lovely just to fly again?’ He’d thought of a horse then, but if Ruth does something she has to do it well, and he’s waited for the time to be right.
‘You’ve been planning this for that long, for eight years?’ Ruth asks, as overwhelmed by this as by the totally unexpected gift. And if she’s had any doubts about learning to ride, they evaporate into that same bright sky.
Lochie was as perfect for Ruth as Brennan was unsuitable for Jane (leaving Ruth and Bill with another twist of parental guilt as well as a change of heart about free choice of gifts); he was lively but beautifully schooled and totally without vice. Ruth suggested that Jane might use him as well, but Jane was loyal, and stubborn. She and Brennan started pony club that summer and by the time he’d trotted the nine miles there, he was generally quite well behaved, bolting only rarely on the way home.
However, as Bill had predicted, he was never a pony club horse. In addition to the usual startles at loud noises or unexpected movements, he was terrified of running water, the smell of pigs, the sound of frogs and the sight of small fences. His awkward frame was not made for bucking, but he occasionally reared and was a consummate shier—like a sideways Superman, he could have leapt wide buildings in a single bound. This ability stood him in good stead when confronted with the miniature fences of their first gymkhana. ‘You could step over them,’ Jane whisp
ered in a burst of realism. ‘You don’t even have to jump.’
Brennan jumped. Sideways. A refusal that would have more than cleared the eighteen-inch post and rail if it had been placed in that direction, and then, beautifully, classically, right out of the ring, over the four-foot fence and the six-foot spectators. ‘Duck!’ screamed the instructor, and Jane, in that frozen instant of time while her horse seemed suspended in midair, looked down at the white faces and realised she’d been disqualified.
She didn’t rejoin pony club the next summer. Instead she turned to long-distance trail riding, endurance tests with negligible audiences, much better suited to a rangy, skittish horse.
In the winter between, she dragged out the sleigh and discovered another of Brennan’s fears. The first time they tried to harness him he reared in such terror that he nearly pierced himself on a shaft. Thinking of that deep-dropping trot, Jane decided that he’d started as a harness racer and been injured or frightened in an accident, which would have been a logical assumption in a horse with a less lengthy list of phobias. This one, however, was something that Bill could deal with; together he and Jane worked on getting the horse to accept the sight of the sleigh, the feel of the harness, to stand quietly in the shafts, until finally, in one of the last snow-covered days of winter, Brennan pulled the sleigh and two proud passengers down to Evelyn’s Pond and back without mishap. ‘Next year,’ Bill promised, ‘when he’s settled down, I’ll teach you to drive.’
Unlike his wife, Bill was a patient teacher: Brennan settled so well to the sleigh that once the snow fell he began to object to being saddled instead of harnessed, and Jane became one of the few North Americans of her generation to experience dashing through the snow with jingling bells rather than roaring skidoo. Which is why, although she’s never particularly enjoyed horse racing or gambling, she now sometimes persuades Ian to go to the trots in Yarralong, where the drivers in their light-wheeled sulkies hold hands on reins behind that same long flashing stride.
Every year around Anzac or Remembrance Days, when the papers publish stories of other fathers’ lives and wars, Ian planned to ask Fred more about his.
‘You’ll regret it if you don’t,’ Jane would agree.
Fred, scrawny as ever, frequently out of breath or caught by sudden spasms of pain, was ageing rapidly, as if years older than Dulcie, a generation older than Jane’s own parents.
But it’s easier to wonder than query. Like most of us, Fred preferred sharing humorous moments rather than tales of degradation and despair; facing slow, grim death is not something to be reduced to anecdote, or even, when that grip on survival is our own, to see as heroic.
When Ian did gather up his nerve to ask, his very desire to understand left him sounding formal and stilted, a junior reporter interviewing a stranger: ‘How long did you work on the railway? What was the jungle like?’ He couldn’t ask what he most wanted to know: the terrible details—were you beaten, were you tortured, is that why there were no babies after me, after the war? How did you survive? was the core. Would I be as strong?
Luckily Megan was too young for such niceties. ‘Poppie,’ she asked, at a Sunday lunch not long before her tenth Anzac Day, ‘were you in the war they’re talking about?’
‘One of them,’ said Fred.
‘Which side were you on?’
Fred laughed, Dulcie and Ian answered sharp and shocked; Jane wondered if the school ought to rethink its history program.
‘But you’ve never told us much about the war,’ Ian said later.
‘Not much to tell.’
‘Not much!’ For nearly forty years Dulcie had suffered through Fred’s nightmares, awake and asleep, but it wasn’t her story.
‘You wouldn’t want to know,’ said Fred.
Three months later, on Megan’s birthday, when cake had been eaten and presents unwrapped—rollerskates from her parents, a large doll from one set of grandparents, Anne of Green Gables from the other—Fred presented her with another gift. Dulcie caught Jane’s eye with an ‘absolutely no idea!’ shrug, and Megan unwrapped a notebook: Poppie in the Army.
‘I’m not much of a writer,’ Fred said gruffly, ‘so I did it with cartoons.’
Small figures—‘me’, ‘Jack’, ‘Corporal Butler’—parade outside their tents in the training camp at Trawool (where, twelve years later, Megan will attend a luxurious wedding and wonder why she knows the name); the Ile de France wends its way to the Middle East; a flea hops across the desert from a camel to the unsuspecting ‘me’, who on the following page is standing on a rock in front of a Red Cross hut—in the nuddy, the caption says—while a medico lances his flea boils and small girls giggle. ‘I closed my eyes so they couldn’t see me,’ Fred told Megan, and she giggled too.
There are battles with the French Foreign Legion, glamorous pyramids, mosques, and another ship, the Orestes, pointing towards Fremantle, with a question mark thought bubble of Dulcie and two babies, one pink, one blue. ‘That’s your dad,’ Fred explained. ‘The last letter I’d had from Gran said the baby would be coming soon. I reckoned soon was past and the baby must be there, but blow me if I could work out if it was a boy or a girl!’
‘If Daddy was a girl,’ Megan began, starting her next month’s agonising ‘what if’ series, ‘he’d be my mum . . .’ She looked at Jane and changed tack. ‘Then you found out he was a boy!’
‘And my word, what a day when I got that letter! But it was some time coming, and I thought a bloke could go crazy wondering if the baby was born yet and what it was. So I made up his birthday—4 February, I said, but I was three days early, that was the day your Gran wished he’d been born. Then I thought, A bloke’s got to get to know his kid somehow! So every night when I lay down on my mat I said to myself, “Now I’m in Coburg again,” and I said goodnight to your Gran, and goodnight to a boy baby called Ian and a girl baby called Sandra. Every 4 February I wished them happy birthday, and in between I talked to the men who had kids and some of the doctors. “What do you reckon,” I’d ask, “about what a kid can do when it’s six months old, or one year old?” “Oh, it’ll be crawling,” they’d say, “and laughing, or starting to walk,” or whatever it was, and I’d think about Ian laughing, or Sandra learning to walk.’
‘What happened to Sandra?’
‘She never got born—I had to wait a long time for my little girl! It was queer when I found out, not saying goodnight to her any more, or happy birthday next time February came around.’
Megan clambered onto his lap, giving the others a chance to blink or surreptitiously wipe eyes.
‘But you should have seen your Poppie smile when that letter came! I still know it by heart: Ian is walking well now; he is a lively little chap and everyone says quite big for eighteen months. I carried the letter around with me all the time, till it was all holes from being folded and opened again; you have no idea how I read it! It’s a poor lookout when a bloke’s son is two and a half years old before he even knows it’s a boy, but that’s how it was.’
Megan, growing up on weekly letters from her other grandmother, stared accusingly at Dulcie. ‘Why didn’t you write before?’
‘Don’t you blame your poor Gran! Prisoners didn’t get much mail, it wasn’t her fault.’
‘You weren’t in prison!’ Megan squealed, but calmed on seeing the adults’ faces. ‘Were you very bad, Poppie?’
‘Must of been!’ said Fred. ‘Now let’s get on with this story or your dad’s cows will never get milked tonight.’
The ‘me’ is now on another ship, waving goodbye to his machine gun on the pier; mortars explode in jungle; friend Jack has shrapnel pulled ‘out of his bum,’ said Fred, with a wicked look at his grand-daughter, but though Megan knew he’d like her to giggle again, she’d caught her parents’ mood and was still. The pages Ian and Jane would study later—a prison camp in Java, a railway built through rock and jungle, a hospital hut with skeleton patients and staff, the dark tunnel of a mine—Fred turned as one, saying Megan was too
young for that now but he’d thought he might as well put it all in while he was at it.
That was the year Bill and Ruth came out for Christmas. The mothers now had Megan in common, and the fathers, as Grandpère would have said, ‘s’entendaient tres bien’. Their discussions diffused outwards from farming to geography, the differences in the night skies and on to astral navigation, although Ian wondered where on earth his father could have picked up his knowledge of the latter.
‘It was at the first POW camp in Java, Bandoeng. We had lectures from Laurens van der Post—you’ve heard of him?—and a bloke who talked about Odysseus and ancient Troy, marvellous stories he told, and a navigation school. I went along and learned about the pole star and rhumb lines and all sorts.’
‘On a long flight over the sea at night,’ Bill offered, ‘sometimes it was hard to believe that there was anything beneath you. I always thought I was luckier than the other fellows, because at least I had the stars.’
Fred nodded. ‘That’s exactly right. Not that I’d have fancied your job—solid ground below my feet, that’s my motto—but when things were bad in the camps, a bloke could see the stars and know that something somewhere made sense, even if nothing on earth did.’
‘Remember that day in Gallipoli?’ Ian asked in bed that night. ‘When I wondered where Dad had learned the Iliad and the Odyssey?’
‘And you didn’t guess at a prison school in the jungle!’
She was nearly asleep when he added, ‘They’re about men being away at war a long time and not getting home, aren’t they?’