Trust Me

by Lesley Pearse

  Chapter Ten

  1954

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible that you’ve been here four years,’ Sister Ruth said as she took the last pin from her lips and put it in the hem of Dulcie’s dress.

  Dulcie was standing on a chair, out on the veranda by the schoolroom. She’d made the blue cotton dress herself with instruction from Sister, in preparation for leaving to work on a farm in a place called Salmon Gums, hundreds of miles away down at the bottom of Western Australia.

  Although the dress was only a simple short-sleeved style with a full gathered skirt, very like the St Vincent uniform, Dulcie was just pleased to have a new dress that wasn’t green, and the white ricrac trimming on the neckline and sleeves made it look a bit more grown-up.

  In four years the only real change in her appearance was that she’d grown to five feet four. She was still thin, still had the same uniform hair-style as all the girls, and the childish dress hid that she was developing a young woman’s body. Yet despite the unflattering hair-style and clothes, she was pretty. Her big blue eyes, peaches-and-cream complexion, and the warmth of her wide smile made her so. Yet even though some of the kindlier Sisters often remarked between themselves that she would grow into a beauty, such things never reached Dulcie’s ears, and she considered herself plain.

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ Dulcie said hesitantly. Sister Ruth had always been the most decent of the Sisters, and in the last eighteen months she’d come to see her as a woman rather than just a nun, and discovered she was as much a victim of circumstance as she was herself.

  Sister Ruth’s dark eyes twinkled as she took Dulcie’s hand to help her down from the chair. ‘I shall miss you too,’ she said. ‘There isn’t anyone else I can talk to about books or England. May isn’t made of the same stuff as you at all.’

  Dulcie hadn’t realized for some time that Sister Ruth was English, for she’d been sent out to Australia with the Sisters of Mercy back in the thirties, and she’d picked up the Australian accent. One day when they were working alone together in the kitchen, Sister Ruth had spoken of London, and it transpired that she’d spent her childhood in Lewisham.

  To find they were both from South London created a bond between them and they enjoyed sharing memories of places like Blackheath and Greenwich Park. As their friendship became closer, Sister Ruth admitted that becoming a nun wasn’t so much her choice or a true calling as the result of a fear of the outside world.

  Her father was killed in the Great War, and her mother, unable to cope alone with six children, put Ruth and her two sisters in a Catholic orphanage, keeping only the boys. Ruth said she was twelve at the time, a timid, sickly child, and when she reached fourteen and had the choice of either leaving to go into service or staying at the orphanage to help with the younger children, she chose the latter because it seemed safer. Eventually she was persuaded by her Mother Superior to take Holy Orders herself.

  ‘Will you keep an eye on May for me?’ Dulcie asked. She was due to leave in three days’ time, and although she had a great many fears about leaving St Vincent’s, losing touch with May was the biggest. Maybe she and her sister weren’t as close as they had been when they were little, but all they had in the world was each other. Just the thought of not seeing May each day made Dulcie’s stomach churn with anxiety.

  She had made May promise that in three years’ time, when she was fifteen, she would let Dulcie know where she was being sent to work. Dulcie would be free to move on from her job then, and it was her hope that she could find a new one somewhere near May, and that eventually they could make a home somewhere together.

  ‘You just stop fretting about your sister,’ Sister Ruth chuckled. ‘You know as well as I do that she’s more than capable of looking after herself, she can charm the birds out of the trees.’

  Dulcie frowned. Everyone had always said that about May right since she was tiny. She was charming, funny, vivacious and self-confident, but there was a dark side to her that few people were aware of. She was deceitful, cunning, greedy and wilful, and Dulcie was afraid that free from her restraining influence, and without her to cover up some of her misdeeds, she might get herself into serious trouble. There had been many more incidents like the one with the tin of toffees over the years and someone was always punished, but Dulcie had been certain in most cases that May was the real culprit.

  May led a charmed life at St Vincent’s, for she’d learnt to wind most of the Sisters around her little finger. Her cheeky, expressive face with those big, innocent-looking blue eyes had even captivated Reverend Mother, and she often took May to town with her in her car.

  Almost every time May returned from one of these trips, she had something – a toy, a book, a bottle of scent – and though she always claimed they’d been given to her, Dulcie was sure she’d stolen them. Yet even more worrying was the way her sister played people off against one another. She started whispers to smear someone’s character or cause trouble so cleverly that no one but Dulcie ever realized she was the perpetrator. It was as though she had to be the top dog at all costs, and if she couldn’t be that with just her natural charm, she’d destroy the competition.

  ‘What is it about May that worries you so much, Dulcie?’ Sister Ruth asked, concerned by her frown.

  ‘Because I know she isn’t all she seems,’ Dulcie blurted out. Out of loyalty she would never have admitted such a thing to anyone else, but she had learnt she could trust Sister Ruth with confidences.

  The nun put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘I know she isn’t,’ she said softly. ‘May is one of those people who will go through life taking exactly what she wants, by fair means or foul. I know you love her, but you are not responsible for her, and my advice to you now is that you should forget about her, do the best you can at your job, make a life for yourself.’

  Dulcie was shocked to hear gentle Sister Ruth say such a thing. ‘I can’t forget her, she’s my sister!’

  ‘I know I’m right, Dulcie,’ Sister Ruth insisted. ‘So take my advice, dear, and look out for yourself. That’s what May will do.’

  On Dulcie’s last afternoon at St Vincent’s she was excused schoolwork and chores, and while the other girls were still in the classrooms she wandered around mentally saying goodbye to everything. She was surprised that she felt a little sad, for almost everywhere she looked there were far more bad memories than good. The gravel path where she was forced to crawl, the laundry room, schoolroom, convent and indeed the dormitories, were all tainted with recollections of pain, humiliation and cruelty. As she walked along the verandas she couldn’t even count the splinters she’d got in her feet before they became as hard as car tyres. She could almost hear herself crying at night with fear, hunger and loneliness. Yet she had survived it, learnt to outwit the meaner Sisters, and even managed to find some happiness.

  St Vincent’s wasn’t quite such a harsh place now, not compared with how it had been for her as a new girl. The food had improved in the last two years, new books and equipment had been bought for the school, the Sisters weren’t quite so obsessed with breaking up friendships, and on several occasions the girls had even been taken in a truck to a beach for a picnic. Yet the punishments were every bit as cruel. Only a few days ago two eight-year-olds who had recently arrived from England had tried to run away. They were picked up within a few hours and brought back to be caned and have their heads shaved. Dulcie couldn’t understand how anyone could treat homesick children so badly.

  Yet now that she was leaving she found herself getting a little sentimental. The painted mural of the Virgin Mary on the veranda outside the schoolroom, the balustrade they dared each other to balance on like tightrope-walkers, both looked dear to her. She would never again hear the sound of chanted multiplication tables or run out into the paddock when the first autumn rain came.

  She smiled to herself, amused that she had found anything she’d miss. Soon she would be seeing ordinary people, quite different to the patronizing do-gooders who came here to
tut over the poor motherless children and hand out a few sweets. Her new life wouldn’t be dominated by prayers and the constant reminders of sin. She would see pubs on her way through Perth, ordinary houses where families lived. There would be shops, ladies wearing makeup and high heels, mothers pushing prams, all that stuff she remembered from England.

  Yet as Sonia had said three years ago, it was scary to leave. There was no way of knowing if this job was going to be a good one, or a worse nightmare, for Reverend Mother had picked it for her, and however nice she was to May, she’d always been mean to Dulcie.

  Just last September an old girl called Mary came back to visit St Vincent’s. Dulcie hadn’t known her, for Mary had left here before she arrived. But because Dulcie was the oldest girl they had talked, and Mary told her that the sheep station she was sent to when she was fifteen worked her so hard she thought she would die of it. She warned Dulcie that Australians in the main ridiculed Poms, and saw all kids from orphanages as slave labour, there to be abused in every way. She talked about one of the station hands trying to have his way with her all the time. She warned Dulcie never to allow herself to be alone with any man, and to scream loudly and keep her legs clamped tight together if one caught hold of her. That had frightened Dulcie badly for a while, and it was still in her mind now. She wondered if just clamping your legs together was enough to prevent a man from raping you.

  Dulcie tried not to think about her mother, father or Susan now, yet now and again she would have a vivid flash of them, as clear as if it had all happened last year. She often wondered if her father and Susan ever thought about her and May, and why they had just abandoned them. But it was only Granny she liked to remember, imagining her sitting on her stool on the doorstep when it was hot, chatting to her neighbours, the way she used to smack her lips when she had her nightly glass of stout. Funny, unimportant little pictures that came out of nowhere, and she’d hear her voice, smell that old lady smell, and feel the warmth and comfort of her arms.

  May never spoke of any of them any more, she seemed to have forgotten it all entirely. Dulcie wished it could be that way with her too, but those teasing memories remained, often catching her unawares. Maybe they always would.

  Dulcie looked through the gates for old times’ sake. When she first came here she used to do this every time she was sent out on weeding duty, sometimes even considering running away. There had been nothing but St Vincent’s in the lane then, but a year ago they’d started to build houses along it. She thought they looked very grand, with their posh verandas and big gardens, even if they were all on one floor, not proper two-storey ones like back home. Sister Ruth confessed she’d chatted to one of the new owners and got a tour of inspection, and had been astounded that they had two bathrooms, a washing-machine with an electric wringer, and the first television she’d ever seen.

  Dulcie sighed as she turned away to go back and find the other girls. She hadn’t ever seen a television either, but she imagined it was a bit like going to the pictures in your own living-room. She wondered if there would be a cinema in Salmon Gums.

  There was a hotel in Salmon Gums, a big, quite splendid-looking building, but it was closed, along with the post office and two shops. The road going through Salmon Gums was just a gravel one, and when Dulcie found no one waiting to meet her she had walked a little way along it to see a school, still closed for the holidays, a yard with a couple of grain silos and a hall which appeared to be used for film shows, but she hadn’t seen a single person apart from the station master when she got off the train, and even he had disappeared now.

  It was late afternoon and swelteringly hot even in the shade of a tree, and the clock viewed through the post-office window showed she had been waiting for over an hour. Her feet were throbbing in the tight new shoes she’d been given when she left St Vincent’s and she was hungry, thirsty, dirty and exhausted.

  She idly picked at the SS Maloja luggage label stuck on the suitcase beside her. While the label itself brought back many good memories of the long, exciting voyage, it was also a sharp reminder that she and all the children who set out so eagerly from England had been cheated and lied to. The case held even less than she’d left England with – her old St Vincent’s striped uniform dress, a cardigan, two nightdresses and two sets of underwear. There were a few presents from the Sisters, an embroidered bag from Sister Ruth, very like the one she had made Sonia, a tablet of scented soap from Sister Grace, and little handmade presents from some of her friends. Yet two days ago as she packed these little treasures and the five shillings she’d been given as pocket money for the trip into the embroidered bag, she had been so confident about her future. Even when Sister Ruth left her on Perth station after buying her a ticket to Salmon Gums, she’d felt excited and happy just to be let out of St Vincent’s.

  But all that confidence and excitement soon left her during the long and awful journey here. She had nothing but a shilling left now, and no one anywhere to turn to. If Mr Masters didn’t arrive to collect her, she had no idea what she was going to do. She hunched her knees up under her dress, leaned forward on to them and sobbed.

  The train had left Perth at seven in the evening and travelled on through that night to Coolgardie, for the connection to Salmon Gums. It was impossible to sleep on the hard seats and she had spent most of the time scared out of her wits by the other passengers, mostly male and many of them very drunk.

  She had had the idea that once beyond Coolgardie the countryside would lose its desert-like appearance and become green and lush, like farmland she remembered in England. It was a bitter disappointment to see nothing more than miles and miles of stony, dry ground with sparse clumps of scorched grass and weary-looking gum trees. Whenever the train stopped at a small halt she would see a few houses, but they were mainly little more than wooden huts with tin roofs, at best like the prefabs she remembered back home after the war. Chickens pecked about by some of them, and now and again she saw a few sheep. In one place called Norseman she saw a man on a tractor hauling a heavy-looking chain across ground close to the railway. It appeared to be a way of clearing the ground of the big stones and old tree stumps, and just the vast area he had yet to clear made her heart sink further because it looked such an impossible place to attempt to grow anything.

  When finally she got to Salmon Gums, there was no one waiting for her.

  The sound of a car engine made Dulcie look up. A black pick-up truck was coming up the road, a cloud of red dust billowing around it. She hoped this was Mr Masters, so she gave her face a quick wipe with her hanky and stood up.

  The truck stopped right by her. The driver had protruding teeth and a broad-brimmed leather hat. He didn’t get out, and looked her up and down before speaking.

  ‘You the kid from the orphanage?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, picking up her case. ‘Dulcie Taylor. Are you Mr Masters?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Just come to get you. Get in.’

  Dulcie was hardly seated before he swung the truck round in the middle of the road and drove off in the direction he’d come.

  The road was a wide gravel one, but before long the man turned off it into a narrower, far more pitted one lined with gum trees. Between the trees Dulcie could see sheep grazing.

  ‘How far is it?’ she ventured. The land was so flat and the sun so bright she felt she was viewing infinity and she couldn’t see a house anywhere.

  ‘Twenty miles maybe,’ came the grunted reply.

  The man stank, not just of sweat but as though he’d been wearing his checked shirt and stained trousers for years without washing them, and he smoked continuously. Dulcie sensed he didn’t like women, so she didn’t dare ask him anything else.

  As they drove along in silence Dulcie felt panic rising inside her. Back at St Vincent’s she’d been the cleverest girl there. Even Reverend Mother in one of her rare nice moments had complimented her on her thirst for knowledge and allowed her to borrow books from the convent library, an honour it
was said that few other girls had been given. But now, alone with this smelly, sullen man, she could see that the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens had neither prepared her nor would help her in any way in this vast empty place. Even A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, which was at least contemporary and set mainly in Australia, had given her a false impression of the outback. She had devoured that book, imagining herself as the English girl who meets the brave Australian soldier out in Malaya and subsequently tracks him down to Australia. But now as they bumped along this hot, dusty road, she was reminded that the English girl in the book had been rich and middle-class, not a little penniless ex-orphanage girl, and she began to cry again.

  ‘Christ almighty, don’t start blubbing on me,’ the man said suddenly, making her start.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and sniffed back her tears. ‘I’m just scared.’

  He gave her a sideways glance. ‘You’re a bit small and skinny,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to stand up for yerself with the Masters or they’ll work you to death.’

  That was the last thing Dulcie wanted to hear but she bit back further tears. ‘How many other people work for them?’ she asked, trying to control the quiver in her voice.

  ‘Three of us clearing the ground right now.’

  Dulcie remembered the man on the tractor and her heart sank even further. She had imagined a farm to be like the ones back in England, pretty orchards with sheep grazing under the trees, fields of waving golden wheat and a pond with ducks. ‘You mean it’s not a real farm yet?’

  ‘They only got the land a couple of years ago,’ he said, swatting away a fly from his eyes. ‘We got a mob of sheep, and chooks, but can’t grow nothing till we’ve got the land cleared and dug the dams.’

  Dulcie was puzzled. You built dams across rivers, not dug them. What did he mean?