A Woman of Courage

by J. H. Fletcher

  1

  A time of fear, of being lost. She knows no one and nothing. She understands nothing. She has no idea what is happening to her or why. She goes where she is taken. There are other children. She does not know them. She does not speak.

  A girl, bigger than she is, speaks to her. ‘Hello.’

  She eyes her suspiciously and does not answer. She is wearing her little coat with the buttons. She clutches the bear she’s had all her life. They are hers. They, the little frock and her hat, are all she has.

  A big hand, not unkind but determined, tries to take the bear from her. She makes a protesting noise, clutching it tight. She hears two grown-ups talking.

  ‘We’d best get rid of that filthy thing.’

  ‘Leave it.’

  ‘But it’s unhygienic.’

  ‘Leave it, I said.’

  She goes on a train. She does not know what it is. She has never been on a train before or even seen one – not knowingly, anyway. It smells different. It is noisy, like all this new swaying unfamiliar world. Part of her wonders when she will be going home; another part thinks that Mum and Grandma and the house and sleeping in her bed and waking up in the morning to the familiar light through the familiar curtains have all gone and will never be coming back.

  After the swaying rattling train there is a stern-faced building behind a low box hedge. The building is of brown brick with lines of windows on either side of a central door. Inside the building are long dark echoing corridors with rooms containing many beds in rows, many children Hilary does not know. Shadow-like she stands in the corner of the room and looks about her. The children are not her friends. She clutches her bear. The bear is her only friend. She does not want to stay here. She decides she will walk home.

  She gets fifty yards before she is caught and brought back. She looks up into the red face of the woman who caught her and now lifts her, feet dangling, and shakes her in furious hands. The woman’s thin-lipped mouth is round and red with rage.

  ‘Where you think you’re going? Running away? Don’t you dare try that trick on me! Getting me in trouble! You get back indoors now!’

  And carries her back inside the brown brick building and sets her down, sending her on her way with a clip around the head for company.

  Eighteen months later she tries again. She is five now so gets further but the result is the same. The hard hand stings.

  ‘Nasty little brat! Bundle of trouble, that’s what you are!’

  That’s it. She does not give up but desists. For now. Maybe the chance will come again, maybe not. If it does she will take it. In the meantime she waits. Time passes.

  2

  Hilary was nine when she was befriended by Miss Anderson, a student teacher. Miss Anderson, very hot on causes, believed her role was to unearth and nurture hidden talent. She thought she had discovered something in Hilary the other teachers had not: a sense of curiosity and a will to accept challenge.

  ‘That one will take on the world, in time,’ Miss Anderson told a friend. ‘And win too, I wouldn’t wonder.’

  She showed Hilary a moth-eaten book containing a picture of an ancient map with funny, old-fashioned writing.

  ‘See what you can make of that.’

  Hilary was up to the challenge, although it took some time. That was another of her qualities, Miss Anderson thought. When she wanted something she worried at it until she found the answer.

  When Hilary had deciphered the archaic writing she took the book back to the student teacher.

  ‘Have you worked it out?’

  ‘It says: Here be dragons.’

  ‘Well done!’

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘In the old days there were unexplored parts of the world. When the people who drew the maps didn’t know a particular area that was what they used to write.’

  Hilary pondered, frowning. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Because they thought unknown places might contain dangers: savages and wild beasts.’

  ‘That’s just an excuse, isn’t it? Like they’re saying the reason they don’t know something is because it’s too dangerous to find out.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’d like to go to those places,’ Hilary said. ‘But, miss…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are there really dragons?’

  ‘Of course there are.’

  ‘With fire coming out of their mouths?’

  ‘Maybe. Who knows?’

  ‘Cor! You think I’ll ever get to see them?’

  ‘I think if you make up your mind you’ll be capable of doing anything you want.’

  3

  ‘Brand!’

  ‘Yes, miss?’

  ‘Pack up your things, you lucky girl. You’re off on an adventure.’

  Hilary had learnt to be cautious of Miss Trimble.

  ‘What sort of adventure, miss?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  She and a lot of other kids were taken first on the train to another place. It was much nicer than the Middlemore Home but they weren’t there long and afterwards she remembered little about it, just a nurse in a white coat poking her about. She remembered what happened next, though. Again the train. Then…

  ‘Cor!’

  It was a big boat with two funnels.

  ‘We going on that?’

  ‘You certainly are.’

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘Across the ocean. All the way to Australia.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘The other side of the world. But you’ll like it there. Lots of sunshine. Oranges growing…’

  ‘Will we be able to pick them?’

  ‘As many as you can eat. Come along now.’

  4

  There were lessons on board, just like in a real school. When she got the chance Hilary escaped to the deck and looked out at the ocean. Every day they had to sing a hymn at the morning service, the boys on one side of the room, the girls on the other. Hilary looked around at the faces – some scared, some lonely, some cheeky with you-can’t-do-nuthin-to-me looks. Like her, none of them knew where they were going.

  ‘Thy seas are found around us…’

  One of the little ones thought it was Icy frowns around us but Katy was only five so you had to make allowances.

  ‘Miss…’ A boy with his hand up.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The seas and the ocean? Are they the same thing?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid! Of course they are.’

  ‘Only asking.’

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  Miss Hammett was a nasty little thing.

  The ocean gave Hilary a funny feeling. It was so big, so mysterious. No way to know what might be out there. Miss Anderson’s face floated in her memory. She’d been kind – one of the few. But Miss Anderson was gone. Everything she’d ever known was gone. Here be dragons… Right. There were days she was scared but mostly she was thinking, Here we go again. It seemed that all her life she had been moved on. She began to wonder whether she’d ever been a real person at all, but one thing cheered her up and kept her going.

  At the home they’d told her Mum was dead. Killed in an air raid – that’s what they said. Hilary didn’t believe that. She could see Mum’s face now. She stood beside her on the Ormonde’s deck. Together they watched the sea and the smoke blowing back from the ship’s funnels. Mum’s fingers were warm, wrapped around Hilary’s hand. At night she came to her in her bunk amid all the other kids. Hilary smelt her clean-Mum smell; saw her eyes shining in the darkness. Her smile. How could she be dead?

  One of these days I shall find her, she told herself. In the meantime… She tried to think of herself as a heroine setting out into the world to do wonderful things. Here be dragons…

  ‘I’ll kill them,’ Hilary told Mum that night in the swaying darkness, the sounds of the sleeping children all around them. ‘You see if I don’t.’

  5

  The land was flat and featureless
, barely breaking the sea’s horizon, but later there were cliffs with sand dunes beyond them, and the dunes glowed red and gold and copper in the sunlight. Not a tree, not a moving thing, no sign of life at all.

  Hilary hung on the rail, watching. There it is, she thought. At last. She felt apprehension – yes – but also excitement. A new place. A new life. I’ll fight, if I have to. I’ll be OK.

  There were people all around them when they came ashore. People shouting, rushing this way and that. Confusion.

  ‘Where are we?’

  Wherever it was, it was very different from the empty land Hilary had watched from the Ormonde’s deck.

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Where in Australia?’

  ‘Station Pier Melbourne, you stupid child,’ nasty Miss Hammett said. ‘How many times have I got to tell you?’

  ‘Is this where we’re going?’ Looking around at the docks, the warehouses, the people.

  ‘You are going to the Lady Northcote Farm School in Bacchus Marsh.’

  ‘Is it nice?’

  ‘You’ll find out, won’t you? When you get there.’

  6

  ‘We’ll have no messin’,’ Captain Barnstable said. ‘That’s the first lesson you got to learn. Any messin’, you’re looking at trouble. Get it?’ And slammed his big stick on the surface of his desk with a wallop that made the children jump.

  Captain Barnstable was a scowl with whiskers, red and ferocious, and a button nose set between eyes the colour of slate.

  ‘You get along with me, we’ll be right. Any tricks and I’ll grind you to dust. Get it?’

  It made them wonder what they’d come to. They’d been told they were being taken to a place called Something-Marsh so Hilary had expected they’d be living in some kind of swamp. She couldn’t imagine it but there was nothing she could do but sit in the rattle-bang of a worn-out truck for what seemed like hours and try not to think.

  ‘If it’s a marsh there’ll be frogs,’ said a girl called Agnes. ‘I like frogs. I had a tadpole in a jam jar once. That grew into a frog.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘It escaped.’

  It was something to cling on to; certainly there wasn’t much else.

  If there were frogs there might be snakes, Hilary thought. Snakes were a different matter, but she didn’t say anything; Agnes was the nervous type, a year younger than she was, and it didn’t take much to set her off.

  The way things worked out it didn’t matter anyway because where they were taken wasn’t a marsh or a swamp or anything like that. It was a farm with grass and cows and a horse or two with cottages set well apart from each other, some for girls, others for boys. Captain Barnstable and a woman called Wilmot, who had scragged-back black hair turning grey and arms like hams, were in charge. They ordered them about all the time. The town called Bacchus Marsh was a few miles off and in any case was out of bounds.

  ‘There’s a lock-up there,’ mean-eyed Mrs Wilmot said. ‘Oldest in Australia. With rats. Catch you there, they’ll stick you in one of their cells.’

  With the rats? Agnes looked scared and no wonder. But the food at Northcote Farm wasn’t much and after a week or two they were that hungry that some of the kids were beginning to wonder whether it might be possible to eat rats.

  ‘Yuck!’ said some, especially the girls.

  But others weren’t so sure. ‘Better’n starving to death,’ said Cyril Dabbs, who was little and cocky and liked to make out he was tough.

  ‘More likely they’d eat you,’ said Bert Friend, who had no time for Cyril. ‘Course, they might be too fussy to do that.’

  Which led to words and then a free-for-all and after that, inevitably, to a leathering for the pair of them from Captain Barnstable.

  It was all beside the point anyway because the only time they got to themselves was Sunday afternoons and there was no time to get to Bacchus Marsh and back, even if they’d wanted.

  Some of the kids were taken there on a Sunday morning to go to church although mostly they had to go to a sort of chapel that had been rigged up in one of the cottages. The ones who’d seen Bacchus Marsh said there was nothing there worth seeing. Even the famous lock-up didn’t look like much but Hilary wanted to go anyway.

  ‘We’re not supposed to,’ Agnes said.

  ‘That’s why I want to do it,’ Hilary said.

  Mrs Wilmot liked to crack knuckles with a sharp-edged ruler. She had Hilary down as a bit of a rebel and was right.

  Girls weren’t supposed to go out unsupervised but one Sunday afternoon Hilary slipped away and nobody noticed. There were lots of trees with hills blue in the distance. No houses or proper roads or anything like that.

  At the end of a forested track she came to a deep gorge with a river, green and shining, at the bottom. She’d never seen anything like it. She stood and marvelled at this scented wonderland of colour: the deep gorge, the grey stone cliffs flecked with orange and brown lichen, with trees growing and the water shining far down; the combined scents of freshness and water and vegetation made her head spin. Not only her head was affected; she felt something close to pain deep inside her, as though a hard and protective layer was being peeled away from her heart. She had big-city memories, of London and Birmingham. Her rare trips to the country had been to a neat and tidy English world. She had never known anywhere like this existed and stared now as though her eyes might fall out. She couldn’t hang about too long or she’d be in trouble, yet knew that the images of tumbled rocks and water would stay with her forever. A sense of wonder and excitement had entered her life.

  After that she went there when she could. To stand there, the only sound the wind and the calling of birds, was to enter into a special place. It reminded her of Miss Anderson and the funny-shaped words on the old map. Here be dragons.

  ‘Maybe they got real dragons down there,’ she told the trees that surrounded her, but if the trees knew they weren’t saying. It was exciting, though, to think of all the might-bes there were outside the confines of the farm.

  ‘One day I’ll get away from that place,’ she told the trees. ‘Then I’ll show them.’

  All the same, it wasn’t always easy to believe in a future. They’d been told that when they were fifteen they’d be sent away, the boys to do farm work, the girls to be domestics.

  ‘We got any choice?’

  Quick as quick, the ruler cracked her knuckles; Mrs Wilmot thought she was cheeky to ask such a thing. ‘Choices are not part of your future, Brand. You’ll go where you’re sent and be thankful for everything Northcote Farm has done for you.’

  Hilary thought differently. Like all the children, there were days when she felt abandoned, like she was being punished for something she hadn’t done. Yet something in her knew that she was different from the others. She didn’t know why, only that she had a force in her the other kids didn’t have. She was determined to prove to the world and herself that she was a survivor.

  Over the years her awareness of her strength became a forged weapon. She would survive – yes, but much more than that. She would triumph. Somehow; anyhow. People who looked down on her now would learn their mistake.

  She discovered a battered board game. Snakes and ladders. She traced the patterns, barely decipherable, on the board: the ladders leading her up and up, the snakes that did all they could to bring her crashing down again. She ground her thumb into the heads of the snakes.

  ‘I’ll show them!’ she said. ‘I’ll smash them to pieces. You’ll see.’

  7

  Hilary would not have known when her birthday was had Miss Anderson, back in England, not told her. Not that it made any difference: her fourteenth birthday on the thirtieth of December 1954, like all the earlier ones, passed unacknowledged by anyone.

  But at least I know, she thought. At least I know I’m real. In a dump like this, with no feeling of belonging to anyone or anything, that was important.

  She studied her reflection in a mirror in what Captain
Barnstable called the ablutions block. Her face looked much as it always had; if there were changes she couldn’t see them, but in the last year her body had certainly changed.

  She shared her secret with her reflection, leaning close so that her breath bloomed on the glass. ‘I am a woman,’ she said.

  Or getting there. She knew it and the boys did too. They weren’t allowed to mix with the boys at the farm – Captain Barnstable was hot on that – but at the state school down the road they could. Hilary had found she was good at sport and at the annual school sports meeting she had won the long jump and the hundred yard dash, the only Northcote pupil to win anything, and she had seen some of the older boys watching her. Not because she could run faster than the others, either.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that but supposed she would get used to it in time.

  The day after her birthday, the last day of 1954, thirteen-year-old Agnes came to her in tears and said she was dying.

  ‘What?’

  Babbling about blood.

  ‘Oh that… Maybe you’d better speak to Mrs Wilmot.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Told me to sort myself out.’

  Bloody cow, Hilary thought. I guess I’m gunna have to explain it to her myself. Somebody better do it.

  And did. She’d been lucky, having an older girl tell her about it a year ago. Now she passed the kindness on.

  Another year and I’m out of here. Can’t come soon enough for me. She remembered the snakes and ladders board and how she’d thought about the world back then. I’ll show them! I’ll smash them to pieces. You’ll see.

  8

  Five days after her fifteenth birthday, Captain Barnstable summoned Hilary to what he called his sanctum.

  In the years since Hilary’s arrival at the farm the captain’s nose had darkened from rose to purple and his hair was grey now instead of brown but his parade ground bark was as formidable as ever.

  ‘I am pleased to tell you, Brand, that we have found a fine situation for you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. If she’d learnt anything at Northcote it was how to keep her thoughts hidden from the world. It was a handy skill to have.

  ‘A farm at Koornalla. I know the owners personally. Fine people. Very fine people.’