Brother Sister Soldier Cousin

by Phyllis Johnston

  The dog barks, the door opens, and Helen’s life changes.

  Brother Harry is home from fighting in Egypt – just for a while. He’s a breath of fresh air in the midst of food rationing and twice-a-day milking. He teaches 13-year-old Helen to drive, and to fire the rifle, just in case…

  But Dad’s heart is wonky, and sister Jess is an ice-queen. Then Harry lets slip that Helen’s not actually who she thinks she is.

  For Helen it’s a dizzying job, finding the wisdom, courage and humour to ‘grit up’ and get on with it.

  An extraordinary story evoking one girl’s irrepressible spirit.

  Brother Sister Soldier Cousin

  by Phyllis Johnston

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  EXCITEMENT FIZZED THROUGH ME WHEN I THOUGHT OF it. Harry was coming home from the Desert War. His letter read, We have done Rommel in. See you in a few weeks.

  He didn’t know what ship he would be on or when it would arrive.

  For a week Mum and I spring-cleaned the house and used saved dried fruit to bake a fruitcake, Harry’s favourite, Mum said. Every day she sang in her wobbly soprano voice, “There’s a boy coming home on leave… There’s a boy coming home on leave…”

  Dad scythed the lawn’s long grass, pruned shrubs and painted the garden gate white. Now it was May and every day we hoped this would be the day. If a car came up the road, we ran to the front bedroom, just in case it stopped and Harry got out. I was ten when he went to be a soldier in North Africa and remembered clutching his back as we rode on his Norton motor bike.

  When Harry had turned eighteen in January 1940, he joined the army. As a farmer, he was allowed to stay out of the war, but Harry said he would feel ashamed not fighting. Mum wept and thought Harry would die. Dad had fought in the First World War and still had shrapnel in his right leg, and said he didn’t want his son fighting in the trenches.

  Three months before he left, Jess our sister who was two years older than Harry, started training to be a nurse, so Mum had to help Dad with the milking and farm work.

  In the twilight I fetched a bucket of coal. The full moon looked as thin as tissue paper and frost had settled on the grass. Back inside, Dad carved the roast hogget as I set the table. Mum had just brought the warmed dinner plates to the table when outside the back door Tip-dog barked frantically. A male voice spoke to him.

  Mum threw up her hands, crying, “Harry! Harry!” and darted to the back door, snatching it open. A soldier stood in the porch and she flung her arms around him.

  “Son, son …”

  Dad brushed tears from his cheeks as he went out to shake Harry’s hand, then he hugged him. Tip-dog stood on his hind legs, barking and slobbering over Harry.

  His face was older, different to his framed photograph above the fireplace, and I felt a guilty niggle. It was shameful to forget your own brother’s face when he was fighting with millions of others for world peace. Their arms around one another, Mum, Harry and Dad squashed through the door with Tip following.

  Harry dumped his kit bag on the floor and sniffed the air. “Roast hogget,” he said. “I haven’t tasted decent hogget since I left.” He stared down at me with blue eyes like Mum’s, and a smile like Dad’s. “Little Lenny? Lenny our luggage tag?”

  My face went hot and I felt as if Harry had stuck a pin in me. I was nearly grown up and loathed my childish nickname, Lenny the luggage tag, the afterthought of the family.

  “My name is Helen,” I said.

  Harry put his bristly cheek to my face and hugged me against his khaki shoulder that smelled of dust and sweat. “Yoo-hoo, Helen. Miss Helen, eh? Our baby has grown up.” The next thing he’d remember changing my diapers. “How’s old Ginger? I heard him snuffling in the home paddock.”

  “Ginger doesn’t gallop now, just trots,” I said.

  Harry took off his jacket, threw it on the settee, and sat on the form at the table.

  Mum put one hand on his shoulder and stroked his brown hair with the other. “Oh, it’s wonderful to see you, son,” she said. “I thought you would never come home.”

  “Now, Pearl,” Dad said gruffly. “That desert battle is won.”

  I laid out cutlery for Harry. The table looked smaller with him sitting there. Mum went to put on her second-best dress and lipstick as Dad served the hogget and vegetables, only taking his eyes off Harry to place the leg bone, which was usually mine, on his plate.

  Harry poured gravy over his meat then looked at me. “Ginger never used to go past the school gate; he wouldn’t budge.”

  “He’s a determined horse,” I replied.

  “I’ve met camels as stubborn as Ginger.”

  Dad sat down. “Was it bad, son? In the desert?”

  “Dust, heat. Flies in your food, diving into your drink.” Harry put his elbows on the table. “People here look better off, better dressed. In Cairo we read English newspapers. Some English cities are badly bombed and the people are strictly rationed, but you’ll know that.”

  “We save our petrol coupons,” I told him. “Mum rode Ginger to First Aid lessons.”

  Mum passed Harry more meat. “Tea, butter and sugar are rationed,” she said, “and clothing.”

  “Butterfat prices are steady, though,” Dad said. “But at a lower price, to help Mother England.”

  Tip, lying on the floor with his nose between his paws, stared adoringly at Harry, who scratched the top of his head. “My Tip-dog knew me. Couldn’t see me in the dark, but knew my smell.”

  Tip barked, once. Another stab of guilt shot through me. Tip was more sensitive than I was. I remembered little about Harry.

  Mum said, “Ruby is acting the part of a man in a vaudeville theatre in Wellington, and serves cups of tea to servicemen.”

  Harry raised his eyebrows. “Aunt Ruby, eh? Doing her bit for the war?”

  Mum’s sister had visited us for a week in April. “To help you darlings celebrate the end of Harry’s war,” she said. “You must be just over the moon.”

  Ruby was an actress and before the war had worked in theatre in Sydney, Australia. She wore perfume, scarlet lipstick, a long string of amber beads, and smart clothes. She brought me presents: a butterfly brooch, red, white and blue hair ribbons, and twice sent material for Mum to make me a dress. In April she had asked me how many boyfriends I had.

  Mum had looked cross. “Helen is too young for such questions!” she said. “Such nonsense!”

  Ruby batted her eyelashes at me. “I could allure admirers when I was thirteen,” she said. I felt stupid and dull because I wasn’t beautiful enough to attract boys. I didn’t want to “allure” the ones in Te Miro, and my eyelashes weren’t long and thick like Ruby’s.

  Dad put the remaining meat in the safe while Mum and I stacked the plates and cutlery in the sink and left them unwashed, to talk with Harry. The living room felt special, like Christmas time after presents were opened and everyone was pleased to have given gifts people liked.

  Harry tipped up his kitbag and spilled his toiletries, smelly socks and underclothes on the table. He had a New Zealand ration book, a worn neck-tag with a number on that he wore in the army, and he unwrapped two objects from a dirty singlet.

  “This is from Cairo,” h
e said, handing Mum and Dad a small, carved black box inlaid with gemstones.

  “How beautiful,” Mum exclaimed, turning it in her hands and looking pleased.

  He gave me a little brass camel, that was either laughing or braying. It was heavy to hold and I loved it immediately.

  Harry, hitch-hiking to us, had visited Jess for half an hour at Waikato Hospital in Hamilton. She was on duty but the ward sister gave her permission to take a lunch break, and he gave Jess a brass vase.

  Harry looked at Mum. “Did you know Jess is in love with a Marine? A Yank. Madly in love, by the sound of it.”

  Mum gasped. “Jessica hasn’t written a word of this.”

  “Lieutenant Herman Newland, otherwise known as Hank,” Harry said. “The perfect man, according to Jess.”

  Dad frowned. “We’re thankful the United States Marines are holding the Japs off New Zealand,” he growled, “but I don’t want a Yank courting my daughter.”

  The newspapers gave accounts of off-duty American Marines and New Zealand soldiers fighting in Wellington and Auckland. They hurt each other and smashed windows.

  Jess hadn’t planned to marry anyone and was dedicated to nursing. She said that when she finished her training in six months she would go to England or Europe and nurse soldiers. After the war she planned to try for a position as matron at a private hospital.

  Jess was a good-looking Miss Efficient, an icicle, cold and sharp, with her rolled blonde hair, sapphire-blue eyes, long legs and small waist. I’d never have an eighteen-inch waist; I was brown-eyed with dark brown hair that Mum said came from Grandma Wellwood. I knew I wasn’t good-looking like Jess. She had something called sex appeal that happened when you were older. I didn’t think I would ever have sex appeal.

  Once, when I was with her at the train station, a soldier wolf-whistled Jess. “Hubba, hubba,” he called. “Hubba-ding, darling.”

  I giggled but Jess looked haughty and ignored him.

  “My firstborn,” Mum said, going soppy over the framed photograph of Jess in a white uniform with three blue stripes below the shoulder.

  When she came home, Jess bossed me as she would a probationer nurse. “Lenny! You are old enough to do all the ironing for Mum now she is milking cows again.”

  “I press my gym frock, iron my blouses, the hankies, the tea-towels!”

  “Child’s play, Lenny. At your age I could cook, clean, do the family washing and all the ironing.”

  I would go into my bedroom and shut the door. Bossy Jess whipped out orders but I wouldn’t listen if she wasn’t going to listen to me, especially about my name. For a year now, I had insisted on my proper name being used. Mum and Dad tried to call me Helen, but Jess and the kids at school still called me Len or Lenny. Jess liked the shortened version of her name, Jessica, but Mum was the only one who called her that, and Jess at least sounded female, not like Lenny.

  The year before, I had read the Greek legend about Helen of Troy. I thrilled to my namesake, Helen. She was the most beautiful woman in Greece, married to King Menelaus of Sparta, and taken by Paris to Troy. There was a ten-year war because the Trojans wouldn’t let Helen go. I was named after Grandmother Wellwood and Mum said she loved her name, too. Grandmother Wellwood named her daughters after jewels and Mum liked her name, Pearl.

  Mum was pleased when I was born seven years after Harry because she had thought she couldn’t have any more children. The term “luggage tag” was a family joke, ha ha. It wasn’t a joke for me. In baby talk, learning to speak, I had called myself Lenny. It’s awful how nicknames — like glue — stick.

  Tip suddenly stood up, alert and bristling, gave a snarl, and paced to the door.

  “Let Tip out, Len … er … Helen,” Dad said. “He’s heard a rat in the washhouse.”

  I opened the door and Tip dashed outside, barking, scaring rats and the birds asleep in the orchard. Dad switched on the radio on its special shelf, and looked serious as Big Ben’s chimes rolled out over the radio waves.

  “Here is the news,” said an English voice. “Allied shipping was heavily bombed in Malta …”

  I tiptoed into the kitchen, softly closed the door, and plugged the kettle in to make tea. I cut four slices of Harry’s fruitcake. Dad and Mum would stop farm work — even visitors stopped talking and listened — for the World News at noon and nine p.m. When Harry was away, Dad and Mum leaned with their arms on top of the radio, draped like curtains each side of it, for that was the nearest they could get to Harry. Dad was the only one allowed to touch the radio knob and tune out the static, but they listened from their chairs, now Harry was home.

  The kettle boiled and I warmed the brown china teapot, put three teaspoons of tea leaves into it, poured boiling water over them, and arranged the fruitcake and four cups and saucers on a tray à la Jess. She had been scolded as a probationer for her habit of not using a tray, and was told that a hospital nurse never carried cups of tea or food by hand. When Jess said that our long-drop lavatory was unhygienic and Dad should build a flush toilet under the tank-stand, he said that when the war was over, cement and toilet fittings would be available, and a plumber to do it.

  Harry talked of their generals, and said they’d still be fighting back and forth across the desert if Monty had not been put in charge. Tiny was Major General Bernard Freyberg, in charge of Harry’s division. Monty was Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery who at the end of the Desert War was in charge of the allied battle for North Africa. I would have loved to ask Tiny and Monty what they thought of their nicknames. Perhaps they needed them because they each had the same Christian name. It made me feel better about Lenny; if Generals had nicknames, no one could escape.

  Dad picked up a piece of fruitcake. “With the United States of America in the war, it should be finished in months,” he said.

  “It’ll take more than a year to finish Hitler off,” Harry said. “That’s why our division is going on to Europe.”

  I kissed Mum and Dad goodnight and waved at Harry. I didn’t want to kiss him. I hoped he didn’t mind but one bristly hug was enough.

  “Thanks for the camel. What shall I call him?”

  Harry gazed into the fire. “Ahmed, call him Ahmed,” he said slowly. “We had a drink of sweet tea with a nomad camel driver. ‘Ahmed,’ he kept shouting and patting his chest. He probably saved our lives. We were lost, two of us with a truckload of ammo, heading into the Germans. Ahmed put us right. That night they were at us again.”

  I supposed “they” were German or Italian soldiers.

  The herd was in the home paddock and their poo smell filled my bedroom. The cows’ pink tongues tore at grass and sounded like cotton sheets ripping. In the milking shed, with one side open to the sky, their smell was bearable, but in my bedroom? Phew! Dad said a dairy farmer’s daughter should be used to it. Never. Mum and Jess said fresh air was healthy, but I thought it was unhealthy to inhale that smell all night, and closed the window. The smell still lingered so I sniffed the box of lilac soap Jess had given me for Christmas, that I was keeping for a special occasion.

  I put Ahmed on the windowsill where I could see him. He was braying, not laughing — like the camels in a war film we’d seen last year. Dust had swirled around lines of trucks, and camel drivers called in their language to the camels whose hoarse braying sounded like engines in trouble.

  Ahmed would come to school and meet Barbara, my best friend. Her birthday was next week, while mine was on the fourteenth of October. Since we had started school at six during the depression, we would be fourteen when we went to high school next year. Barbara lived one farm up from the end of the road that passed the school, and could walk to the junction to catch the bus. I would have to ride Ginger, but how would I get him to pass the primary school? Dad said he’d leave Mum to finish milking, come in the car to the school gate, and whack Ginger on his rump with a stick and force him on to the junction. He said Ginger would soon drop the habit of stopping but I didn’t want my horse beaten and said that if need be
I would leave him in the primary school paddock and walk the three miles on to the school bus. Then I overheard Dad tell Mum that he’d asked the Globe Auction Mart in town to phone him when the next second-hand lady’s bicycle came up for sale.

  “For Lenny,” he said. “We wouldn’t get an imported bicycle now for love or money.”

  I nearly burst out of the passage, then it occurred to me that such a huge gift would be kept for a birthday or Christmas present, so I tiptoed back to my bedroom. I couldn’t help overhearing conversations if the door to the living room was open.

  Barbara had arrived at school two years earlier and it was marvellous to have a girl near my own age, instead of only younger girls. Her life story was like a novel. She lived with her mother who had run the “Hoopla” stall in a circus. At six, Barbara had started training as an acrobat (and would later teach me to do cartwheels). A clown fell in love with her mother, but her mother didn’t like him so they left the circus and lived in a hotel in Queen Street, Auckland. Barbara couldn’t remember its name, but her mother was the barmaid, and another man fell in love with her and again she didn’t like him, so they moved to another boarding house while her mother worked in a Chinese laundry, serving the customers. Then they lived on a farm, then her mother worked in George Courts in the ladies’ lingerie, but one day she didn’t come home to the little flat she and Barbara rented.

  “That’s awful,” I said. “Was she dead?”

  Barbara blinked twice. “No … she went away.”

  “But why? Who looked after you?”

  “A granny came and now I live with people I call Aunty and Uncle. I’m sick of doing housework and hate cows, but my mum will come and get me soon, I know.”

  “When?” I would miss Barbara.

  “When I’ve finished high school and can work my own way.”

  Harry and Mum’s voices murmured through the wall. Harry’s bed had been made with fresh sheets every two weeks while we were waiting for him. Jess slept there on her days off, but now she would be sharing my bedroom. Jess would talk at me, telling me rules for my life. Sometimes it was like having two mothers.