The Cherry Picker's Daughter

by Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert

  9

  Going home to the Island

  Happiness! We’re back on the Island in our house. Now, I can play with my toys and my dolls. I tell the house I’m glad to be home. I’m sure the house is happy we’re home, too. It’s okay in the tent but you wouldn’t wanna live in one for the rest of your life.

  I’m getting big now, just like the other kids, and that means it’s school time. They still boss me around and tease me but they look after me when they take me to school and back. As we walk there, they say, if anyone gives me a hard time, I gotta tell them and they will take care of the other kids and make them stop. I’m so happy I got this big sister and these big brothers that look after me; I wouldn’t want them not to be my family. I feel safe and protected by my Mob.

  At the school, I got lotsa friends, too, as well as cousins. There’s a group of us kids that hang out together: there’s Dottie and Denise Whiting, Keith Brandy and Ally Coe, Johnny Huckle and Loretta Sloane and a few more, too. All us Aboriginal kids play together.

  When Mummy dresses us girls for school, we gotta look good, the boys, too, but us girls especially. She makes sure we’re all clean and tidy and neat with our uniform. We gotta have our shoes and socks on; we wouldn’t be game to go to school with no shoes on. Our uniform has to be pressed every Sunday and the boys have gotta polish all our shoes.

  Mummy puts bobby pins in me and Lynnie’s hair. The pins hurt our heads and we hate them. We know there’s not much sense telling Mummy we don’t want them in our hair—she’d make us wear them anyway. We wait till we get down the gutters and take them out and hide them under a rock.

  We go to school with our hair flying everywhere, a mess, but we don’t care. We get the bobby pins on the way home and slip them back into our hair, trying to remember exactly how Mummy stuck them in that morning. Every day, she shoves them in and, every day, we take them right out again.

  We always gotta look good: our faces washed, shoes and socks on, clothes ironed. We don’t give nobody any reason to talk about us. In my mind, I still can’t fully understand the reasons why. I’m still too young to know that being taken away by the Welfare is a constant risk.

  It’s the weekend so we head down the gutters. It’s our secret place, our playground, our hiding spot. It’s the whole world to us. We plant our favourite things in the gutters under the rocks but we gotta make sure the rivers not gonna come up first. One time, Paddy hid some pound notes down there, under a big rock, but the river came up during the night and washed them away! He swore all the next day. It was a good thing Mummy didn’t hear him or he would’ve copped it. She was very strong on us not swearing. It was another way to draw attention to us and our whole lives had to be about not drawing white people’s attention to our family.

  10

  ‘Your mother’s dead’

  I like school. I reckon it’s pretty good; I got lotsa friends and cousins. And at recess, you get a bottle of milk and an apple. The teacher said an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and one day, I went home and told Mummy. She reckoned that was true.

  Another day, it’s recess and I’m hanging around with a group of kids playing hopscotch. One of the girls didn’t like me beating her. She couldn’t jump as far as me and so she started yelling at me.

  ‘Your mother’s dead, your mother’s dead.’

  I scream at her and tell them Mummy’s at work.

  ‘She’s not dead, she’s working!’

  They tell me, ‘No, not her, your other mother’. I don’t understand. Then, somebody says, ‘Your real mother’s dead—your father killed her’. I call them liars and run away. I don’t want to listen no more. I run away to the girls’ toilets, trying to stop crying, but tears slowly run down my cheeks. I wonder why they would be so mean and tell me such lies but, somehow, I know it’s true. Deep down, I know they’re not lying. My heart tries not to break and my mind tries not to think.

  I don’t want another mother. I only want Mummy. She’s my mother. I sit on the toilet, sobbing. In my childish mind, I somehow know that I really did have another mother who is now dead, but in my make-believe, there was this other mother who died saving us kids in the war. The story I tell myself goes like this:

  She died while she was trying to get away from the bombs, trying to save our lives. She was even trying to save me and all the other kids, passing us down to Mummy before it was her turn to go down into the bomb shelter. I can see her so clearly. Her hair like mine, she’s wearing a real pretty white dress with little tiny flowers on it and petticoats underneath.

  I sit there quiet. All of a sudden, I feel nothing. Only the feeling that she’s dead.

  My mind is a jumble, just like my heart. They musta got it wrong, got me mixed up with someone else. The teacher finds me in the toilet, crying. I just wanna go home. They send for Lynnie to come and quieten me, but she can’t.

  I tell her between my sobs, ‘I wanna go home, I want Mummy!’

  She takes me with her to her classroom but I can’t stop crying so they let her take me home. She takes me up to where Mummy’s working as a cook. Lynnie tells her she had to bring me home from school as I was crying real bad. She tells her to take me home and look after me. When Mummy comes back from work, I tell her.

  ‘I don’t want to go to school anymore.’

  ‘You gotta go to school. Everyone has to go.’

  ‘But Mummy, the kids don’t like me.’

  ‘Don’t worry about them.’

  My mind screams inside but I don’t say nothing to Mummy. I keep telling myself my mother died in an air raid in the war. My father didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have a father who would be so bad as to kill somebody. I try to smile and pretend to be happy.

  When I lie in my bed at night, I can’t sleep. Images run through my head. I picture her in my mind going into a tunnel down in the dirt.

  I see her starting to climb down the ladder. She’s stepping in, being real careful not to slip or fall. She makes sure we’re all down into the air raid shelter. I can just see her. She stands. The lid is covered with branches so the baddies can’t see it, and then, nothing. SHE’S GONE.

  She died. Daddy fought in the war. So did Uncle Raymond, Uncle Paddy and Uncle Athol. I tell myself, ‘No, she died in the war’. That’s what I’ll tell them kids, too, if they say those terrible things again. A mother that died in the war. I will say she was a hero. She saved people and that’s why she died.

  I don’t wanna have a mother who is dead or a father who killed her, but in my heart, I know. There are things in my family I’m not allowed to hear, not allowed to know. When the grown-ups are talking, we gotta go outside. We know they’re gonna talk about things that’s real important.

  Mummy makes sure we don’t know grown-up things. She reckons we should be kids for as long as we can. She’d have told them all—my bigger brothers and sisters and all our family—she would’ve said they weren’t allowed to talk about these things to us.

  I go back to school. I try to stay away from those terrible kids but it’s hard since we all play together. Soon they don’t say nothing about dead people or people dying. After a while, all the memories of other mothers and fathers are gone from my six-year-old head.

  11

  Living at the cemetery

  It’s that time of year. The river’s up again so we go back to making our bridge with our rocks and walking through water every day for the kids to get to school. Splashing and playing around, we chase each other to see who can get the best rocks first. I’m getting bigger and I can pick up larger ones now, and I’m real proud of myself. Each day, we add a few more rocks. Each of us kids pray that the river doesn’t flood this year so we don’t have to leave the Island and camp in the tent in town.

  It doesn’t take long, though, before the river is rushing over our little bridge. I’m too big now to get on Mummy’s shoulder. She tried to put me up there but I was too heavy. Last time, I’m sure I felt her body crumble a little bit when I got on top. She
tried to take a few steps but just couldn’t. She had to put me down. Now, I gotta wade across like the other kids. There’s a belt around her waist and she makes me hook my hand in and then she tightens the belt over it. Wrapping her hand around mine, she hangs on tight making sure my other hand doesn’t slip outta hers.

  She goes back and brings the others over. Then, we all play cockatoo again while we all get dressed before heading up Bathurst Street into the town.

  Days go past and soon the river’s too high so it’s time for us to move off the Island. Us kids moan and groan about going back to the silos and the train tracks. We’re all tired of the train rattling down the tracks and blowing its whistle. Mummy looks for somewhere else; no matter where it is, we know, eventually, we will be back on the Island real soon.

  Mummy’s found a new place to pitch the tent! We pack our swag and head out. She doesn’t tell us where it is, saying it’s a surprise. This time, we’re going to live a heartbeat from the graves! Take a big step and you’re there; the graves are our neighbours. She’s found us a spot near the fence, kinda hidden from the road, with gum trees and bushes. My childish mind sees the graves hover over our tent, a skip and a jump for me to fall into when my bigger brothers and sister are teasing me but most likely it is positioned along the fence at the far end of the cemetery away from the graves. She puts us to work picking up the sticks and stones to clear a spot for the tent to go up. Quickly, we all jump in and give a hand and it’s done.

  The tea boxes and beds go in, and soon we are all set up again. We have the routine down pat: drape the tablecloth and tea towels over the boxes and no one would ever know. Paddy grabs the rope to make a divider up the middle of the tent for privacy between all of us. Mummy reminds us kids we always have to be dressed before dark as people can see our shadows and she doesn’t want anyone to see us putting our pyjamas on—otherwise, we have to do it in the dark.

  Walking through the graves, we go and fill up our water buckets from the tap. It’s the one that people use to fill up their flower vases to put on the graves. It’s a fair way from the tent. It’s Paddy and Kevin’s job to make sure our water buckets are full but us girls gotta take our turn carting the water, too. At dark, it’s really scary; we always try to make sure that we fill our water buckets before nightfall and we’re careful not to be disrespectful to the dead.

  As the night closes in, Mummy lights a candle and asks, ‘who wants to play cards?’ Shuffling the deck, she deals a hand to each of us; we all take a turn dealing. Playing for matches is great and, somehow, we all win. None of us ever realised Mummy cheated, making sure that we all had plenty of matches for the next day’s game. During the weekend, we play jacks, marbles and hide’n-go-seek when we are not at school.

  It’s not bad living at the cemetery. We walk around and read the headstones, and there’s some pretty ones with angels and things carved into them. Some of the graves are real bare and look so sad with not even a flower on them; they look lost and alone. A lot have got no crosses and some are even as flat as a pancake, and many are very old—they’re ancient.

  On Sundays, we gotta tend to our family’s graves and we help look after other people’s graves, too. Like the ones where, if the flowers have fallen off, we put them back in the vase and, standing it up, we make it look good. We know where most of our family are buried. There’s not too many of our Mob who has angels and headstones. Most of our family’s graves just have little white crosses and a lot of flowers.

  I feel sorry for the ones that look lost and lonely. They’re the graves that nobody loves anymore and are forgotten about. When I ask Mummy why they don’t get visitors, she tells me, ‘All their families might not be around anymore’. Even she feels sad for those ones. She tells us to pick some wildflowers and fill up the empty jars or the Sunshine milk tin and place them on the graves.

  On dusk, we run around finding sticks to put on our fire, the boys dragging back big, broken-down branches. Each night, we huddle around the fire as Mummy cooks our tucker and the heat glows on our faces. The fire is burning bright and we’re happy. We’re letting the spirits know we’re here; we’re being respectful.

  There’s no train whistle tooting here; it’s much quieter than beside the railway track. I reckon people think we’re mad to be living here and that’s why they don’t come near us, especially at night. All day, we hear the birds singing and, at night, we hear the night animals hooting and creeping around. When the wind is rustling the leaves from the trees, it’s really spooky. I pull the blanket right over my head and close my eyes real tight some nights.

  There’s no streetlight near us so, as night closes in, it’s pitch-black outside the tent, especially when the stars aren’t shining or the moon is covered with clouds. I’m happy we got our fire; we keep it stacked high with logs so it gives us plenty of light to see by.

  Some nights when we’re sitting outside around the fire, the boys and Lynnie chuck stones to make a noise to scare me. I turn my head to see where the noise has come from, straining my eyes to see if I can see anything white out there amongst the trees and the graves.

  ‘Look, Kerry, there’s something over there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there, look.’

  I turn my head to see, so miss seeing another stone thrown. They try to boss me around and tell me, ‘You’ve gotta go and see what it is’.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  Clinging to the chair I’m sitting on, they try to push me towards the noise. I don’t wanna go and see no spirits! I’m off the chair ready to run inside to Mummy but I feel a hand push me in the back, pushing me in the direction of the noise. I’m one step closer to a grave, one step closer to being near the spirits. I’m scared, deep down inside! There really might be spirits out there and they might decide to keep me, then I would have no family anymore! I scream out to Mummy! She comes from outta the tent and tells them to leave me alone.

  She tells me, ‘You don’t have to be scared of the dead ones, daught, only the live ones’.

  I don’t take much notice of the others now I know no spirit can take me away. Only the Welfare.

  Part Two

  12

  Back on the Island

  We’re heading home once again and this old house of ours looks better each time we come back from living in the tent. We’re all happy, back where we belong. One day, we catch brother Paddy smoking down in the gutters. He can make circles with the smoke. My eyes are wide as I watch him take a deep breath and move his mouth just right to make a perfect circle escape between his lips.

  Lynnie tells him, ‘We’re gonna tell Mummy’.

  He reckons, ‘No way’, and makes us smoke a cigarette.

  He tells us, ‘If we don’t do it properly the first time, we gotta do it again’.

  Lynnie, being the next eldest, has to go first.

  Paddy says, ‘Take a big breath. Draw back.’

  Then, it’s Kevin’s turn. I watch them each having a go drawing back on that smoke, only to end up coughing, with tears coming outta their eyes, and then Paddy passing the smoke to them again so they can have another go.

  It’s my turn. I take a draw but it’s not big enough, the smoke doesn’t make me cough the way it did with the other two. He makes me do it again. I take a big breath this time and smoke goes deep into my mouth all the way down to my lungs and I start choking, tears in my eyes. I can’t catch my breath. Lynnie is patting me on the back trying to get all that smoke outta my lungs. Tears are dripping outta my eyes.

  Paddy says, ‘Now we’ve all smoked, we can’t tell Mummy. Otherwise, we’ll all be in trouble.’

  It’s Saturday, the sun is shining and us four kids are allowed to go to the pictures, all by ourselves. The picture’s great: it’s Elvis. I love Elvis but I don’t like the lion that comes out and roars real loud, and you can see his big teeth. I don’t tell the others this, otherwise they’ll make my life a misery teasing me again.


  We walk home laughing and talking about Elvis, trying to remember his songs. We sing “ Love Me Tender” all the way home.

  We laugh and giggle about the show and the cartoons, all as happy as can be. We walk down to the end of the main street and start down the dirt track that leads us home to the Island. Mainly, we go to the matinee show, but as we get older, we’re allowed to go to the night shows. That’s good but frightening, too. At night, the gutters are scary. Scary, dark and noisy. Spirits live down there. At the end of the main street, there’s no streetlights—only the stars and the moon to guide us—but we know this road well. We start talking loud, making a noise to let the spirits know we’re coming home.

  As we get deeper down into the gutters, the bigger kids start singing, ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so’. I join in. We’re in the middle of the gutters now. Our voices are softer as we sing a song about the devil.

  The devil is a sly old fox and, if I catch him,

  I’ll put him in a box, lock the door

  and throw away the key for all the tricks he played on me.

  I’ll do it all for Jesus, I’ll do it all for Jesus,

  He’s done so much for me.

  There’s a rustling coming from over in that tree. The bigger kids start teasing me.

  ‘Oooooh, Kerry, you wanna watch out: they’re watchin’ you!’

  ‘They’re comin’ to get you. Listen, here they come.’

  A noise comes out loud from amongst the trees. I look and see shadows; shadows that appear as ghosts waiting to get me and take me away. The wind is blowing the branches and it really does sound like someone or something is standing there, waiting for the right moment to jump out and get me. The other kids start screaming out at the top of their lungs, pretending the ghost is right there, right beside me. They start running at the same time.