Soldier on the Hill

by French, Jackie

  Out the classroom door, the siren still wailing up above, over the verandah, a quick dart to grab their school case, then down the steps, across the beaten dust playground, pounded by a thousand hard bare feet over the years, with the gullies that grew deeper every rain.

  Joey automatically glanced at the sky. But there was nothing there. This was just a practice, like every other air raid warning since he’d been at Biscuit Creek.

  The air raid trenches were at the bottom of the playground, on the other side from the dunnies. (Just as well, someone had muttered, or who knew what might seep down.)

  The trenches were about four feet wide, and perhaps six feet deep. There were six of them. They’d been dug perhaps a month or two before Joey had arrived — long enough for them to accumulate about two inches of water at the bottom, in spite of the drought.

  Joey clambered down the entrance to the third trench and stuck his school case in the mud, then sat on it. Mum complained that every time they came down here his case was filthy and that the water was rotting the bottom. But how would she like to sit in mud?

  The trench filled up behind him. He could vaguely hear muffled murmurs from the other trenches. The last kid trailed in and the shelter was full.

  Nothing happened.

  Joey looked at the sky again. What would it be like, he wondered, if suddenly a plane did fly across. An enemy plane, with its big red spot below. If it dropped bombs on Biscuit Creek or strafed the playground; if they came out to see the town destroyed, just like the towns on the newsreels, and all Aunt Lallie’s street was flattened and he ran home to find that Mum …

  No. He wouldn’t think about that. He wouldn’t. The sky was clear. It would stay clear, too. One Aussie was worth a hundred Nip soldiers any day, and the Yanks could probably fight as well. They’d never let them come as far as here.

  ‘Miss! Is it really an invasion this time or just practice?’

  ‘Just practice, I think. But you never know. You know what to do, don’t you? You just sit here quietly till the siren goes again.’

  ‘Miss, what will happen when the Japs invade?’

  ‘I don’t —’

  ‘My Dad says they’ll bayonet the lot of us. He says —’

  ‘Children, children, the Japanese aren’t going to invade.’

  ‘Then why do we have to do the drill, Miss?’

  ‘Just in case. Now —’ The siren bleated once again. Miss Pringle took a deep breath. ‘All right, children, that’s enough now. Stand up and file out.’

  ‘Miss! Miss! I can hear an aeroplane!’

  ‘No, you can’t, Sam Feehan.’

  ‘But Miss, it might be the Japs!’

  Joey grinned. Sam would do anything to get out of maths. The longer he kept Miss Pringle talking …

  ‘That’s enough from you, Sam. Now single file outside. Myrtle, will you take the lead please.’

  ‘Hey, did you hear about Lee Chong’s cow? It was hit by lightning in the storm last Saturday. It was just lying there in the paddock all swollen up with this great black mark …’

  ‘Swap you a baked beetle for a worm sandwich …’

  ‘… got a letter from Uncle Steven, and he says the Japs are …’

  ‘I don’t like baked beans …’

  ‘… going to lend me his cricket bat because …’

  ‘… and when the Japs invade Stan’s going to be a guerilla up in the hills. He says he’s practicing …’

  ‘… wish she’d give me spaghetti sometime …’

  The talk washed over him, a sudden burst of noise after the silence of the classroom.

  The benches for lunch were under the main school building. At least it was cool down here, thought Joey, though he’d bet it would be windy in winter. Maybe everyone ate outside then.

  Out by the doorway the swill bucket heaved and bubbled. Everyone had to leave their scraps there when they’d finished. Bob Hinchcliffe collected it each Wednesday afternoon to give to his pigs. But by Monday every week it was bubbling.

  What made it bubble, wondered Joey. Maybe it was fermenting and the pigs’d all get drunk. He tried to imagine a drunk pig, lumping around its sty and hiccupping, or sitting blearily in the sun like old Port and Water down in town.

  Joey opened his sandwiches. Apple and date spread again, and a piece of sponge cake with passionfruit icing and mock cream (Mum had made two when she made that one for Joe) and an orange, with the peel already cut so he just had to pull it off in one long spiral.

  ‘Hey, Joey?’

  Joey looked up. It was Gladys Cooper, one of Myrtle’s offsiders.

  ‘Myrtle says we’re forming a committee to start a vegetable garden down past the playground, and maybe flowers, too, that we can sell to raise money for the Red Cross, and she wondered if you’d like to be on it?’ said Gladys all in one breath. She gasped at the end of it. Gladys had a narrow nose and long buck teeth and always breathed noisily through her mouth.

  ‘Er … okay,’ said Joey.

  ‘See you then,’ said Gladys. She dashed off to ask the next contender. Bill Pearson, Joey noticed. Bill had never said much to him but he seemed harmless enough.

  ‘Well, I think we ought to grow petunias,’ said Lizzy Baker. ‘They look pretty and —’

  ‘You can’t plant petunias now,’ Joey pointed out. ‘They’d never flower before winter and the frost’d cut them.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Joey shrugged. ‘Mum always had flowers and that up in Sydney. And she worked for a bit in a flower shop, too.’

  ‘Well, what do you think we should plant?’ demanded Garry Hutchins.

  Joey considered. ‘Primulas,’ he said. ‘And maybe pansies … Even if they don’t flower before winter we could still sell pots of seedlings for people to put in their gardens in spring. Or keep them till spring and let people buy flowering pots.’

  Someone murmured approval. Joey found himself remembering other flowers. ‘Sweet peas can go in now. Everyone loves bunches of sweet peas. Oh — and we could also plant some poppies cause they make good cut flowers for late winter. And … and maybe in spring we could go out into the hills and cut wattle and bring it back and sell posies on Saturday morning in town?’

  Myrtle made a note in her exercise book. ‘All right, pansies and primulas, sweet peas and poppies and wattle. Now how about the vegies?’

  ‘No beetroot,’ said Bill. ‘I hate beetroot. How about potatoes? Hey, Joey, what do you think?’

  It was great to be able to ride home instead of walking, thought Joey, as the red bike sped down the street. Not that walking home would be so bad now. He could have walked with Bill or Graham or Garry … ‘Hey Myrt?’ he yelled.

  Myrtle stopped and looked around. She was in the middle of her group of friends as usual. ‘Hi Joey,’ she said.

  ‘You want a ride?’

  ‘On your bike?’ Myrtle absently fished out her hanky and blew her nose.

  ‘No, in an aeroplane. Of course on my bike. You can dink on the back again,’ he offered generously.

  Myrtle hesitated. ‘Go on Myrt,’ said someone. ‘It’s too hot to walk.’ She giggled. ‘You can give me a ride if Myrtle doesn’t want to,’ she suggested.

  Myrtle shot her a look. She tucked her skirts up. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You know where the bakery is?’

  ‘Sure thing. Here, stick your bag up in the basket with mine.’

  The wind blew past them as they flashed down the street, past the oval and the Memorial Hall with its bowling green down the back, past houses with neat fences (the gardens not quite as neat, perhaps, as they were before so many men had gone away), round the corner into the main street.

  It was wider than the streets were in Sydney and strangely quiet; no clanking trams or buses. Just dogs lifting their legs outside the shops, a stroller down by Mutton’s the Drapers, a couple of old men chatting by the bank. Had it been busier, he wondered, before the war? Or had it always looked like Sunday afternoon …

  ‘
Hey, you want to come to Joe’s again?’ Joey called over the wind. ‘I promised I’d take him some bread and butter and stuff.’

  Myrtle considered. ‘All right,’ she yelled. ‘But I’d better let them know at home. Mum might want me to work in the shop. Turn down that lane. No, that one there. It goes down behind the bakery.’

  Gleeson’s Bakery was an old stone building. Mr Gleeson’s grandfather had built it and the brick oven, too, in the old days at the peak of the gold rush, when the town had three baker’s shops and four times the population.

  ‘We live up top,’ said Myrtle, pointing to a set of outside stairs running up the side of the building. ‘Those are storerooms down the back for the flour and stuff, and then all the rest is the bakery except for the shop out front.’

  ‘It must be great to live right over the shop,’ said Joey. ‘All those smells.’

  Myrtle shrugged. ‘It gets a bit much sometimes,’ she said. ‘Like you’re living in a fog of baking bread. The sugar sort of seeps into your skin, too. Come on, through here. I’ll just dump my case in the storeroom and we can pop down the front and see Mum. We’d better not go upstairs. Dad’ll still be asleep.’

  ‘What? Now?’ asked Joey, startled.

  ‘Well, he doesn’t get to bed till about six in the morning, and he’s usually up by now to set the bread rising. It takes about eight hours to rise. He had to go to Stevenson’s this morning to get some eggs. So he’d have got to bed late.’

  ‘How long does it take for the bread to cook?’

  ‘’Bout an hour, but the oven only does about one hundred and forty loaves each time. He lights the oven about eight o’clock at night. It takes two hours for the oven to heat up, then Dad rakes the coals out and cleans it and puts the bread in. Then after the bread’s done he has to do the fancy breads, then the pies and then the scones, then the sponges.’ Myrtle counted off on her fingers. ‘It takes all night to get everything cooked. Then, last of all, he sticks the meringues in before he goes to bed, while it’s all cooling, and Mum hauls them out in the afternoon.’

  ‘He must use a heck of a lot of wood.’

  ‘Only one lot each time. The oven’s got a big dome of sand on the top and that keeps the heat in.’ Myrtle opened the door to the storeroom. It was dark and it took a moment for Joey’s eyes to adjust.

  ‘Watch out for the kero tins,’ said Myrtle, weaving her way through the flour sacks. ‘I’m always tripping over them.’

  ‘What’s in them?’

  ‘Dripping. Dad puts it in the bread. The butcher fills them up for him.’

  ‘Doesn’t it taste of kero?’

  ‘Only the last two inches. That’s pretty stinky. Dad doesn’t use that.’

  ‘Gosh, it’s fascinating.’

  Myrtle shrugged. She met Joey’s eyes for a moment in the dimness. ‘I hate it,’ she declared suddenly. ‘I never see Dad like normal fathers. And since the boys went away I never see Mum either. She’s always in the shop or decorating the cakes or rolling the lamingtons. It’s like I don’t exist half the time. They’re either working, or worrying about Fred and Terry. I mean not that I don’t worry about them too … but sometimes, I think, they’d only really notice me if I was away at war too, doing something important.’

  ‘So, that’s why you do all the committee stuff?’ said Joey slowly.

  ‘Yes. No. I mean it’s important isn’t it? We’ve all got to help with the war effort. Oh, I don’t know. How would you like to be called Myrtle and be as tall as me?’

  ‘You’re not too tall,’ said Joey startled.

  ‘Well, I used to be. Everyone’s sort of catching up now. I felt like an emu a couple of years ago. Oh, come on, I’m talking nonsense. I don’t know why I’m going on like this. Maybe because you’re a stranger. I mean you used to be. I couldn’t talk like this to anyone else round here. Come on, let’s go see Mum.’

  The shop smelt of hot sugar and hotter crumbs. Mrs Gleeson was knitting at the counter above the sticky buns. She wore the two-star brooch of a mother with two sons overseas.

  ‘Hello, Mum, this is Joey. He wants to buy some bread and butter for Mr Reardon. And can I ride out to Mr Reardon’s with him?’

  Mrs Gleeson wiped her hands on her apron. She was much older than Mum, thought Joey, years older even than Aunt Lallie.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Gleeson,’ he said politely.

  ‘So you’re Feemie’s lad,’ said Mrs Gleeson. ‘You say hello to your Mum for me, tell her to pop into the shop some time when it’s quiet — just after lunch is a good time — and we’ll catch up. Yes love, you pop off if you’d like to. There’ll only be three men and a dog if we’re lucky between now and five.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s a shame about poor Joe Reardon. What will he have, do you think? A couple of high tops, maybe, and a pat of butter. No, don’t pay me now. Tell him I’ll put it on the slate and he can send the money in at the end of the month. Here, you take him one of these from me.’

  She reached down and pulled out an apple tea cake. ‘To my way of thinking he was wounded for his country just the same as any of our boys overseas. When I think of something like that happening to our Fred or Terry … Here, and you’d better take one of these each, too, keep the wolf from the door till tea-time.’

  Joey took the neenish tart gratefully. Mum never bought any cakes, and as for Aunt Lallie — ‘I’d be ashamed to have shop-bought cake in the house,’ she’d said once in Joey’s hearing, ‘as though I didn’t have time to feed my family properly myself. And who knows what’s in them, all that margarine and stuff. Though Gleeson’s bread’s good, I’ll say that for them. But you can’t tell me a shop-bought sponge is as light as one of mine, and not real cream in them either.’

  ‘I’ve never had a neenish tart,’ said Joey, as they walked along the bakery to the bike again.

  ‘You get sick of them after a while,’ said Myrtle. ‘Lamingtons, custard tarts, lemon tarts, snail cakes, jam tarts, melting moments, sunbeams, macaroons … though Dad’s not making macaroons now, it’s too hard to get enough coconut. He keeps it all for the lamingtons. He says if the shortages get any worse he might have to give up on the fruit cakes, too. Hey, can I have a go on the bike once we’re out of town?’

  ‘All right,’ said Joey unwillingly. ‘As long as you don’t run it into anything or … er, excuse me.’

  The man on the footpath looked up at him blearily. ‘What you want laddie? Eh?’ His breath stank, and his face was shrivelled, as though something other than age had dried it out. His nose was flat and red, not pink like Myrtle’s, more like a beetroot colour and beetroot shape as well.

  ‘Er, nothing,’ said Joey nervously. ‘We were just wheeling the bike out.’

  The drunk dragged himself to his feet, his hand against the wall. He looked Joey up and down. ‘Why aren’t you in uniform, eh? You tell me that?’

  ‘I’m not old enough,’ said Joey. ‘Sir,’ he added, because even if old Port and Water was a drunk he was still older than Grandad.

  ‘What you say? You say you’re not old enough? Coward’s excuse.’ Port and Water lurched against the bakery wall, then righted himself. ‘When the call comes everybody has to answer it! Every man jack of them! When your … when your country calls!’

  Joey glanced at Myrtle. It seemed rude to just push past.

  ‘I remember in the last war,’ muttered Port and Water. ‘You remember the last war, me lad?’

  ‘No,’ said Joey. ‘I wasn’t born then.’

  Port and Water ignored him.

  ‘I was a sergeant,’ said Port and Water. ‘That’s why I drink, you know that? Things I saw. I was in France and Gallipoli. I was at the … Where was it now? The Somme, that’s it. I was at the bleeding Somme. Can you say that, me lad?’ He peered into Joey’s face. His breath smelt like the pigs’ bin at school. Joey could see his teeth, mostly brown or rotten, surrounded by the grey stubble on his cheeks. ‘Yes, I was at the Somme,’ repeated Port and Water.

&nbs
p; ‘What the … what’s going on here?’ Mrs Gleeson marched out of the shop. ‘Now you stop annoying the children.’ She took his arm firmly. ‘Come on, I’ve kept a couple of sausage rolls just for you. If I don’t feed him he never eats at all,’ she explained over her shoulder to Myrtle and Joey. ‘Now come on, you can sit down outside the back of the bakery and eat your dinner. You’ll feel better then. Hop off quickly,’ she said to Myrtle and Joey, ‘before he gets going again.’

  ‘That was nice of your Mum,’ called Joey, as the bike flew down the street again.

  ‘She’s always doing things like that,’ yelled Myrtle. ‘Back in the Depression Dad’d harness the horse and cart every week and take all the leftovers down to the susso camp — pies and cake and bread. Mum always says he deliberately made too much so there’d be plenty for everyone. Hey, you know something about old Port and Water?’

  ‘No, what?’ yelled Joey.

  ‘He was never in the last war at all. The army wouldn’t take him. He spent the war on a bar stool down at the Royal Mail. Hey, go right here, you dingbat. You’ll miss the turn-off.’

  chapter nineteen

  The Locked Room

  * * *

  From the Biscuit Creek Gazette, 1942

  TEA RATION! FINDING SUBSTITUTES!

  Necessity is the mother of invention runs an old saw. Housewives, too, are making determined efforts to find substitutes for tea and coffee. A Gunnedah woman claims good results with wheat roasted in the oven and ground in a Beatrix wheat grinder. This provided an excellent substitute for coffee, she declared, after boiling water was poured on the mixture and a drop of vanilla was added for taste.

  Ripe kurrajong seeds have been claimed by a city woman as the equal of tea, though the taste is said to resemble that of coffee. Tea-tree, which grows prolifically in coastal areas, used to be popular among bushmen as a substitute for tea.

  * * *

  Meg was sleeping in the poplar shade and Joe was skinning rabbits, his hat by his side, as they rode up. Joe grabbed his hat as soon as he heard them coming, automatically slipping his scarred hand into his pocket at the same time.