Trust Me

by Lesley Pearse

  Yet once Ross started he couldn’t stop, the humiliations and cruelty flowed out in a torrent. He told her about the top man, Brother Keaney, who hit them over the head with his stick for the slightest misdemeanour, how he humiliated the boys by giving them Irish girls’ names, Bridget and Biddy-Anne. Of Brothers armed with leather straps, sometimes with metal slotted into them, who went among the boys as they were working, hitting them. There was no school, just work all the time. He said how they had no underclothes, just shorts and a shirt, how boys would rummage through the pig swill because they were so hungry. The boys who wet their beds were forced to wear a kind of sacking dress to shame them further. He described the main administration building as looking like a palace with mock marble floors and columns, domes and spires, how they’d built Stations of the Cross along the main drive, and how in his opinion Brother Keaney was a madman.

  Dulcie watched Ross as he was talking. It was growing dark, but his eyes burned with rage and his mouth kept twisting up in a sinister sneer as he recalled it all.

  She began to cry then and Ross put his hand on her arm. ‘I wish I hadn’t told you about all this now,’ he said. He fell silent for a minute or two, his hand still on her arm. Then all at once his free hand gently touched her cheek with the softest of caresses. ‘Still, I reckon knowing you were crying over me makes it worth it.’

  Dulcie went inside after that, but Ross’s words stayed with her. In some strange way they seemed to illustrate everything he’d lacked in his miserable childhood. However bad it was at the Sacred Heart, St Vincent’s, and at the Masters’, however forlorn and abandoned she’d felt, she had the knowledge of what love was inside her, clear pictures of family life tucked away in her mind. She knew what kisses, hugs and endearments were, but for Ross they must be as unfamiliar as a park had been to him. Yet he knew what tears were, he’d just never experienced anyone crying for him.

  The day before they started harvesting all the men lingered longer over supper and Betty and Dulcie had finished washing up by the time they got up from the table. Betty asked if anyone would like a cup of tea, and when Dulcie said she fancied taking hers out on the veranda, Ross asked if she’d mind if he joined her. Since their last talk he’d been much less curt with her, he’d even brought a bunch of wild flowers round for her which made Betty claim he was sweet on her, and perhaps this was why everyone else opted for having their tea inside.

  Dulcie was a bit embarrassed that they were outside while everyone else was indoors, but she enjoyed watching the sun go down, and besides, she still wanted to ask Ross’s opinion about May and the letters.

  ‘I was just thinking the other night, you must have been sixteen when you ran away from Bindoon,’ she said after some brief general conversation. ‘Why were you still there? Surely you could have left for a job somewhere at fifteen?’

  He looked a bit embarrassed. ‘On the time I ran away previous to that, I got hauled up in court,’ he said. ‘By that time they’d started sending delinquent boys to Bindoon, not just orphans, to, like, give them farm training and stuff. Just another way for the Brothers to get slave labour. Anyway, they sent me back there to stay till I was eighteen.’

  ‘What, just for running away?’

  He looked a bit shifty. ‘I got caught stealing some food. Well, I had to, I was starving.’

  Dulcie smiled and told him how she and Sonia used to steal from the Sisters’ storeroom.

  ‘Good job you didn’t get caught,’ he grinned. ‘I don’t suppose they go much easier on girls than boys. By the time I left Bindoon we had some blokes there that were twenty. If they were any good at carpentry, plastering or anything useful, they didn’t let them go.’

  Suddenly Dulcie understood better why Ross was so reluctant to talk about where he’d come from. If he’d been ordered by the court to stay at Bindoon till he was eighteen, running away again amounted to much the same as breaking out of prison. Under the circumstances she thought she might have remained silent too.

  So she changed the subject and told him about May, and her anxiety about the letters. ‘Do you think Reverend Mother isn’t giving them to her to spite me?’

  He nodded. ‘I wouldn’t put it past any nun. The Sisters of Mercy are just as bad as the Christian Brothers in my book. There were some of them at Castledare where I started off. I was only a baby, about a year old, when I was sent there with my two older brothers. I was six when they were sent off somewhere else. No one would ever tell me where they went, they spanked me every time I asked. To this day I don’t know where my brothers are, or why we got put in an orphanage in the first place. That’s how much they care about families.’

  ‘But someone must know,’ Dulcie said. ‘They do keep records. I used to sneak a look at Reverend Mother’s papers on her desk and whenever a new girl came there was always a file with stuff about where she came from. I tried to find mine once, but I didn’t have any luck, I think it must have been in the cabinet which was always locked.’

  ‘I tried all that sniffing around too,’ Ross said with a grin. ‘If I was sent in to clean Brother Keaney’s study I used to give it a right going over.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Not about me. But I saw some letters for other boys once, a big pile of them, mostly for the Maltese boys that came to Australia like you did. I didn’t dare nick them, but I wished I had afterwards, ‘cos those poor little sods never got them.’

  He told her how sorry he felt for those poor kids. He said they weren’t orphans and that their parents had sent them willingly, believing they were going to get a good education and go on to be engineers and craftsmen. ‘They never had one lesson after they got there,’ he said. ‘I just hope some of them get back to Malta one day and tell their families what went on.’

  Dulcie felt crushed now. All the time she’d been at St Vincent’s she’d imagined that she was just unlucky to end up in a bad place. But Pat had suffered, and Ross too, and it seemed most, if not all, orphanages were run in much the same way. If this was the case there must be thousands of girls like her and boys like Ross, all with questions about their background or relatives that no one would answer.

  ‘What can I do about May?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe you could go back and visit St Vincent’s,’ he suggested. ‘Bruce and Betty drive up there sometimes to visit her family, they’d take you with them. The Sisters couldn’t very well refuse to let you see May, not if Betty was with you.’

  Dulcie beamed. ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’

  That night as she lay in bed she felt elated. The harvest wouldn’t be completed until nearly Christmas. She doubted Bruce and Betty would want to make such a long drive during the hot months, but maybe in March or April they’d feel like going. That wasn’t so very long to wait. Then it would be only a year until May was fifteen and able to leave St Vincent’s.

  Her last thoughts as she fell asleep were of the reunion with her sister. She imagined walking up the drive to the convent and May coming running to meet her. She was asleep even before the imagined embrace.

  Part Two

  1956–1963

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was April of 1956 when Bruce and Betty took Dulcie with them to Perth to stay with Joan, Betty’s younger sister, for a short holiday. Joan’s home was in Subiaco, quite close to the city centre, and Betty’s other sister and brother and their families lived nearby too.

  In the ten months Dulcie had worked for them she had blossomed. With Betty’s encouragement in all things from cooking to gardening, her confidence had grown. Reading newspapers and books and listening to the wireless had given her a far better idea of what was going on in the world. Yet after sleepy little Esperance with its gravel roads, Perth was huge, bewildering and very exciting.

  The streets were so busy with cars and buses, so many people jostling in the wonderful department stores, and such a huge array of clothes to spend her money on. Yet it was the phenomenon dubbed ‘teenagers’ she’d read ab
out in the press that impressed her most. Back in Esperance, girls and boys of that age were called ‘young people’ or ‘kids’ and there was no sign that anyone considered them to be an important group. Here in Perth there were milk bars with juke-boxes, something she’d only ever seen in American films at the picture house in Esperance, and these places appeared to have been designed purely for these ‘teenagers’.

  She was too bashful to go into one, but she loitered by the windows as if waiting for someone and just looked. The girls had mid-calf-length dresses, wide belts cinching in their waistline, and wedge-heeled shoes. Most had far longer hair than hers, waving on to their shoulders, they all seemed to be smoking, and the few that wore hats favoured the kind that looked like a wide band of feathers. Later she heard ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ by Carl Perkins wafting out of the doorway of a record shop, and looking inside she saw dozens of teenagers just hanging around tapping their feet as they listened to the music.

  She had of course heard rock and roll music on the wireless, and read about Elvis Presley in magazines because many churchmen were saying he was a bad influence on the young. But none of that had appeared relevant to her until now. All at once it took on a new light – this was her generation, one that didn’t dress or behave like their parents and had an entirely new taste in music. The more she looked around her, the more evidence she got that her age group were valued consumers. She saw teen bras, teen handbags, dress shops exclusively for the young where they sold Capri pants, pin-up girl sweaters and the wide belts she’d seen so many girls wearing.

  She bought herself a pink spotted dress with a wide white piqué collar and a fashionable longer-length gored skirt, and a belt to go with it. She would have been happy to spend her entire holiday just looking in shops and watching people, but Bruce and Betty wanted to show her the sights of Perth.

  They took her to vast King’s Park, reminiscing about their courtship, for a boat ride down the wide Swan River, and to Cottesloe beach where Betty had spent so much time as a young girl. But today they were on their way to St Vincent’s to see May.

  Since early this morning Dulcie had been suffering from butterflies in her stomach. However much she wanted to see May, she was nervous of what this impromptu visit might throw up. May might not be pleased to see her, Reverend Mother could be nasty, and she was afraid that all the ghosts of the past would come back to haunt her again.

  As they turned into the road approaching the convent, Dulcie leaned forward from her position in the back seat. ‘That’s it,’ she exclaimed, pointing to the building at the far end of the road.

  ‘But it’s lovely,’ Betty said in some surprise.

  As Dulcie had so seldom come out of St Vincent’s during her time there, the outside view of it now took her back to the first time she saw it on her arrival. It was lovely, with the golden-red of the brickwork, the fancy design around each of the gothic arches on the ground floor, and the matching windows on the chapel attached to it. Recent rain had revived the lawn after the hot summer, the pines and the Moreton Bay fig tree looked even taller and more majestic than she remembered. To anyone approaching it for the first time it looked so serene. Only the arched sign above the gate which said St Vincent’s Orphanage gave any hint that children lived here too.

  ‘That’s only the convent and the chapel,’ Dulcie said quickly. ‘The orphanage buildings are all hidden, they aren’t so lovely.’

  Her heart was racing faster as Bruce got out of the car to open the gate. He looked almost comic wearing a suit and tie, for the jacket was too tight across his shoulders, the sleeves and trouser legs just a little too short. There was no mistaking what he was, city men didn’t have such craggy, weather-beaten faces, or such broad shoulders. Yet if the Sisters jumped to the conclusion that he was just another ignorant bushman who held nuns in awe, they’d be in for a shock. Bruce was nobody’s fool.

  Dulcie took a small mirror out of her handbag to check her appearance as Bruce drove in up the drive. She’d had her hair cut again just before leaving Esperance, and with her new dress and white court shoes with a two-inch heel she felt she looked sophisticated enough to impress May. She was tempted to put on the lipstick she’d bought just yesterday, but Reverend Mother might just see it as a sign she had become fast.

  ‘We’ll stay with you for as long as you want us to,’ Betty said as they all got out of the car. She looked very attractive too in a pale green dress and a matching hat, but then Betty always dressed well, even at home. ‘If you want us to disappear, ask me what time we are expected back for tea. We’ll make some excuse then and wait out here for you.’

  Bruce moved closer to Dulcie and picked a loose hair off her collar. ‘Don’t let Reverend Mother make you nervous,’ he said, his blue eyes gentle with understanding about what this visit meant to her. ‘We won’t stand any nonsense from her, so neither must you.’

  Dulcie rang the convent bell, glancing over towards the orphanage building as she waited. They had timed their arrival purposely, so they couldn’t be fobbed off with excuses like May was in school and couldn’t be brought out to see them. It was almost four now, and the bell for the end of lessons would ring any minute.

  The door was opened by Sister Agatha and her eyes widened in surprise. ‘Dulcie!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh my goodness, how grown-up you look!’

  Dulcie had no bitter memories of this Sister – while she was never exactly kind, she wasn’t cruel either, just a fat old nun who wheezed when she tried to hurry. Yet all the same she immediately felt very small and cowed, just the way she’d always been in any Sister’s presence.

  ‘May I see May?’ she asked. ‘This is Mr and Mrs French who I work for. We came to Perth unexpectedly, so we couldn’t arrange a visit in advance.’

  As she nervously introduced Bruce and Betty to the Sister, she saw the old nun looked flustered. Dulcie guessed what was running through the woman’s mind. Whenever visitors were expected the shoes and hair ribbons were dished out, soft toys and dolls placed on the children’s beds, even special food put out in the kitchen. Sister Agatha probably realized there was no time now for such preparations.

  The school bell rang loudly, instantly breaking the tranquillity of the place. There was the sound of a hundred chairs scraping backwards, and footsteps on the wooden boards outside the classrooms.

  ‘Dulcie knows the way, we’ll just go and find May ourselves,’ Bruce said. ‘No need to trouble yourself.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.’ Sister Agatha began to wring her hands. ‘Reverend Mother is most particular that she sees all visitors first.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Bruce grinned. ‘Just take us to her then. My wife and I have been longing to meet May, Dulcie’s told us so much about her, and this place.’

  A look of consternation flitted across the old nun’s face. Dulcie thought it was lucky she had opened the door rather than one of the others. Sister Agatha was slow-witted, any of the others were capable of coming up with a first-class excuse for why it wasn’t convenient now.

  Bruce was across the threshold immediately without waiting to be asked in, Dulcie and Betty stepped after him and they followed the nun down the corridor. Once Sister Agatha had knocked on Reverend Mother’s study door and got a reply, she couldn’t make out the woman wasn’t there because they’d hear everything.

  ‘Wait here,’ Agatha said in a trembling voice. ‘I’ll just see if she’s available.’

  The moment Agatha was at the study door, Bruce began to walk down the corridor too, beckoning for Betty and Dulcie to follow.

  Agatha looked panic-stricken when she saw them coming, but by then Reverend Mother had called out for her to come in.

  ‘It’s Dulcie Taylor and Mr and Mrs French, they want to see May,’ she said.

  Before Reverend Mother got a chance to make any reply, Bruce was at the door and walking in.

  ‘G’day, Reverend Mother,’ he said. ‘My wife and I are just up from Esperance for a visit and we’ve brought youn
g Dulcie to see her sister. We thought it would be a good time now, school’s over and it’s not tea-time yet.’

  If Dulcie hadn’t been so scared she might have burst into laughter. Bruce was nothing like the usual male visitors here. They were always fawning little men, dragged reluctantly along by their do-gooding wives. The force of Bruce’s expansive personality filled the small room, just as his shoulders filled the doorway, and although Reverend Mother was tall, she had to look up to him.

  ‘It is usual, Mr French, to make an appointment first,’ she said, her voice like ice.

  ‘I’m not a usual sort of bloke,’ Bruce grinned. ‘Farmers don’t go in for appointments, and anyway one little girl seeing her sister can’t interfere with anything, can it?’

  The head nun looked shaken, but she composed herself quickly.

  ‘Dulcie!’ she exclaimed, as if seeing the prodigal daughter in front of her. ‘How lovely to see you again. What a young lady of fashion you’ve become!’

  ‘She’s as bright as a button too,’ Bruce butted in. ‘Best thing we ever did was take her on. Don’t know what we’d do without her now.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear that,’ Reverend Mother said. ‘I hope your wife agrees with that glowing testimony?’

  Dulcie had a sharp and sudden memory of this same woman beating her until she thought she was going to die. She’d looked at her then with child’s eyes, seeing a tall, handsome woman, and often pondered on why if she was cruel she wasn’t ugly too, for those things went together in her mind.

  Now, as an adult, Dulcie found she was neither as tall nor as handsome as she remembered. She was just another nun on the wrong side of forty with piercing dark eyes and a sallow skin. Yet even more pleasing was to see that this time it was she who looked frightened. Not of Dulcie maybe, she still looked at her in the same disdainful way she always had, but of Bruce.

  ‘I more than agree with my husband’s views,’ Betty said. ‘I can’t begin to tell you what Dulcie means to us both. You must have been very sorry when she left here?’