It was mid-morning before she woke to find the sun shining on her tent. She poked her head out of the opening and Ayesha came hurrying over with a mug of tea.
The bey returned after lunch with a spotted deer he had shot. ‘There are so many more people to be fed. Our supplies will run out if I do not supplement them.’
Winifred watched while one of the men skinned the beast, before pegging the pelt out on the ground and covering it with salt. Later the bey came over to where she was sitting in the shade, writing. ‘John and Harish have gone towards Peshawar disguised as peasants.’
Winifred put down her pencil and turned her attention to what he was saying. ‘They hope to make contact with Amanullah. We want him to return to Bombay where it will be safer. We are not sure of the whereabouts of the queen. She is in grave danger. If she should fall into Baccha Sakao’s hands it would be a disaster.’ His voice dropped. ‘Do not speak of this to the others. We do not know who we can trust. We will let them think that we are staying here to rest, and that John and Harish have gone exploring in the mountains.’
A week later John and Harish returned with the news that the queen was in Amritsar. The bey was jubilant and hurried to tell Winifred, ‘We have found the queen.’ Winifred thought back to when she had last seen her, pale and downcast, her pregnancy showing, and she realised she must be very close to giving birth.
‘How is she?’
‘I do not know. She has sought sanctuary in Amritsar with some of her ladies. They are in purdah.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘We must go to her and try to persuade her to travel to Bombay where Amanullah can join her. Once she is well enough to travel, they must go to Europe. While they are in India they will never be safe.’
* * *
It was Winifred who made the first contact with the queen’s entourage, wearing a heavy black burqa and bearing a letter from the bey. A few days later they caught the train to Bombay with the queen and her ladies, travelling in a private carriage. At first the bey insisted the women remain veiled for safety. The queen had discarded her silk sari and jewels and was wearing the coarse homespun garments of a peasant woman. Covered in the voluminous black burqa with only her eyes visible, there was nothing to identify this woman as the beautiful young queen who had been the toast of Europe such a short time ago.
Winifred found the burqa unbearably hot. She could not see properly out of the slits for eyes, and the sweat poured from her body. She was so hot that she could barely tolerate it. She felt angry thinking that men had such power over women that they could order them to hide their faces and imprison their bodies so that they almost suffocated. It was because she had defied the old men and discarded the veil that the queen had been forced to go into hiding. Winifred suffered the heavy black garment as long as she could, until, despite the bey’s protests, she flung it from her and helped the queen to do the same.
‘She may be recognised,’ the bey said.
Winifred produced her gun. ‘I will use this if I must.’
The bey put his hand on hers. ‘If there is any fighting then it is up to the men. Praise Allah it will not be necessary. Cover yourselves when we stop at a station.’
It was a long journey and Winifred passed the time by listening to the queen talk of her trip to Europe. ‘Once everything seemed possible. For the first time in my life I showed my face to the world. I saw women doing things I have never dreamed of —’ Queen Souriya stopped abruptly as a labour pain gripped her.
The contractions became more frequent and Winifred remained by the queen’s side, watching as the royal ladies sponged her face. Though she was in pain the queen did not groan or cry out. Winifred was not sure whether it was the pain of leaving her country or the pain of childbirth that Souriya found hardest to bear. She had lost her country, her money, her position of privilege.
Winifred could understand. She knew what it was to lose everything.
Stretcher-bearers met the train. With her ladies and Dr John da Silva and the bey in attendance, the queen was taken to St John’s Hospital where a baby girl, Indiah, was born.
Bebe Feroza was at the station and she escorted Winifred back to the da Silva residence to be reunited with her children. The first question they asked was, ‘When are we going home?’ Winifred hugged them. ‘Very soon,’ she promised.
A few days later Bebe Feroza took Winifred by car to visit the hospital. The matron came out to where they were waiting, holding the newborn child in her arms. ‘The queen has refused all visitors,’ she said. ‘Last night her husband, the king, arrived. When he bent to kiss her I heard her say, “I would rather have stayed where I belonged and been buried in the soil I loved, than be forced to run like a pariah dog.” Then she turned her face to the wall. Now she refuses to speak to him. He is heartbroken.’
Winifred held out her arms and took the child, looking down at the tiny face that was so like the queen’s. When she handed the baby back her eyes were full of tears. She was crying for the queen, for the girl child, for the weary women whose lives had crossed hers, and for those whose present hope had vanished in that far place beyond the Khyber Pass.
29
RECONCILIATION
WINIFRED HAD NOT YET DONE with India. The idea of finding Ali’s grave had nagged at her ever since that night when she first thought of it, as she lay in her tent on the mountainside, listening to the call of the koel. Now, with the bey’s help, what had seemed an impossible dream had become a reality.
Cow-dust hour had come and gone. The other women in black yashmaks, who had been in the graveyard pulling up weeds and laying fresh flowers on the graves while their children hopped around like sparrows, had left when they heard the call to prayer. The red bantam chickens that pecked among the weeds had roosted on the high stone wall.
The grave-keeper had brought her tea, asking, ‘Are you all right, mem-sahib?’, recognising her Englishness — even though she had dressed in her shalwar kameez with a chador to cover her face.
She thanked him for his kindness and settled down to watch over her husband’s grave, which she had covered with field flowers she had gathered on the way.
The grave-keeper stood there, uncertain. ‘Mem-sahib, there may be wild dogs.’
‘If they come I will drive them away,’ she said as she pointed to the stick she had brought with her.
‘It will be dark, mem-sahib.’
‘I am not afraid of the dark.’
He stayed, not knowing what to do, and then he cupped one hand to his forehead and bowed, and said, ‘Bismallah, mem-sahib.’
She watched as he walked towards his hut where he had tethered his cow. His lantern cast a circle of light on the stony ground.
Earlier she had watched the setting sun bathe the fields of millet in apricot light, until they turned to mauve. And as the sun set lower the fields had deepened into blackness, as if a curtain had been drawn. In the distance a dog howled and another returned the call.
The birds that had been chattering in the peepul tree that leaned over the cemetery finally settled. In the still night air she saw the cooking fires in the villages go out one by one. The smell of spices and curry still hung in the air and was carried on a little breeze that had sprung up when the sun had gone down.
The grave-keeper’s cow, which grazed in the cemetery during the day, had stopped its lowing. She could see its outline where it lay tethered beside the grave-keeper’s hut. She heard him talking to it when he came outside, and then the steady stream as he relieved himself, grunting and spitting before he returned to his hut and blew out the lantern.
She thought, ‘When the world has gone to sleep, Ali will come to me and take me in his arms once more. We will lie together by the embers of the camp fire as we once did while our children slept.’
In the soft darkness she knelt beside his grave, holding the ends of the tattered turban that Ali’s brother had placed there so long ago.
As the night deepened the breeze streng
thened and she pulled her chador tighter. Her heart was overflowing with sorrow. A koel began to call, the sound filling the air — the lonely, desolate call of the koel which always sounded to her like a lost soul. She felt her heart melting, her eyes overflowing with tears. She laid herself full length on the grave, as if it was the body of her dead husband. ‘Oh Ali. Oh Ali. Why did you have to leave me?’
She began to cry, crying until her chador was wet with tears, crying until she had no more tears. And then she fell asleep, the flowers cushioning her body on the hard ground.
She woke towards dawn, stiff with cold. A rooster on the stone wall began to crow. And quite close by another answered until there was a chorus going backwards and forwards across the fields. The birds in the peepul tree stirred, and the grave-keeper’s cow moved restlessly.
Winifred rose, looking down at the crushed flowers and the once gold and yellow turban which had begun to disintegrate. One day it would be carried away by the wind. Perhaps some bird would gather the tiny fragments of cloth in its beak and line a nest to make a soft place for its young.
She could hear the grave-keeper stirring, and she rose and pulled her chador closer to hide her face. She did not look back as she walked out the gate. She did not understand how it had happened. She had come empty but now she was filled.
PART SIX
30
RETURN OF THE WASHERWOMAN
WINIFRED’S DREAM ENDED, AS DREAMS do, when she returned to Oodnadatta with her family in August 1929. But her life would never be quite the same. India had taken possession of her soul.
The carpet of Aladdin is not always woven tapestry, indeed its forms are myriad. A piece of torn rag, an old garment, a broken crock, sometimes a show, or a gorgeous sunset, even a strange accent is enough to transport one in less than an instant of time to the northernmost end, if there be one … of this whirling globe. In my case the carpet today was a tiny rosebud against an open window, through which a snarling mob of camels can be seen. I gave but one glance, one tiny breath of that dainty rose floated to me and hey presto! I was far away. My carpet carried me to India, right away to Lahore in the distant Punjab, and the days when I made the great pilgrimage which all good Mahommedans hope to make before they die … Arabian Days, the Adelaide Register 27 November 1927
Winifred called at the Register office on her way home from India and left with a contract to write a weekly serial under the title of ‘Star Dust and Soap Bubbles’. She was introduced to readers on 24 August 1929 with the words:
Winifred is no ordinary washerwoman. She has talked with kings and been on the Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca. Read her adventures every week, and you will find more stardust than soap bubbles in it.
Her Indian connection; ‘Arabian Days’, the story of her trip to Mecca; the appointment as secretary to the Khalifat in Australia; and the invitation to become the governess to the royal family of Afghanistan had lifted Winifred above the common herd. She had gained mystique. Now she reinvented herself as a pioneer woman of the Australian outback by creating a folk hero known as Winifred the Washerwoman. She began her series with the words:
My little iron hut stands four square, with a tiny gabled roof. Its windows have no glass, so require no cleaning. Their shutters are of iron, hung with leather hinges. It has two doors, that give entrance front and back. Inside, my castle is divided into small rooms with the aid of hessian partitions. The windows and the walls are snowy white. No boards are there on my floor, just sweet-smelling earth, with a few white goat-skins scattered here and there.
As well as this the turmoil surrounding the abdication of King Amanullah and his queen was still hot news. The Register reported on 24 September 1929:
Cable message states that the sister of ex-King Amanullah had headed a revolt in Afghanistan. Winifred the Washerwoman, who was in the Khyber Pass during the recent Afghan revolution, sends the following interesting facts from the washtub.
Zerah, the sister of ex-King Amanullah, is a middle-aged woman of very forceful personality. I have often heard it said that she ought to have been the man of the family. Very small and frail, yet one word from her will carry more weight than a sentence from the others.
Next to the gracious Souriya, I think the abdication hurt her most. She often pleaded it would be better to die in their own land by the hands of the rebels than be buried afar off in what she called, and I know you will forgive me, lands unholy and accursed.
I am not surprised that she is trying to arouse the people for vengeance. Her little hand is so tiny, scarce bigger than a child’s, but I know if she would only get near enough to Baccha she would do her utmost to place her little jewelled knife in his heart or die in the attempt.
She has cause enough and to spare for such feelings. Her poor husband was fortunate in that he met death at the usurper’s hands, but her son walks blinded and mutilated, a shattered wreck of his manhood barely nine months ago.
Dear to her also was her now mutilated sister, Nadir Khan’s wife, whose daughter has been taken as the wife of Baccha. Yes, she had ample reason. If only someone would find me the money I would go myself and lead these women out. I would make Baccha weep tears of blood before he mutilated these innocents.
The saga continued with a further report on 18 October 1929 that Nadir Khan had defeated the usurper, Baccha Sakao. On 22 October he was driven from Kabul, but after his flight there was a gruesome discovery. The decomposed bodies of the princes of Amanullah’s family were found in a locked room. Kabul was described as being ‘derelict, poverty stricken and threatened with famine’. Baccha Sakao did not escape. He was captured and brought to the city for justice. King Amanullah and his queen made no attempt to regain the throne but went into exile in Italy.
* * *
The Register folded in February 1931 and the Chronicle, which was part of the Advertiser group, took over Winifred’s ‘Star Dust and Soap Bubbles’ series, offering her a second series which she called ‘The Tales of Sapphire Bill’. It was written in the persona of a ‘big-gun drover’. The real identity of the author was not revealed, ‘Otherwise I would have been sued, a million times over,’ Winifred said. Soon after it was first published ‘The Tales of Sapphire Bill’ had top billing in the Saturday edition. For the next nine years she contributed two stories a week.
With an assured income from her writing, Winifred rented the Anna Creek shack in Oodnadatta, a house that belonged to Anna Creek Station, built in the days when the staff travelled to town to meet the train. The house still stands in Billy Goat Lane, behind the dusty main road that runs through the town.
When her son Yusef turned seventeen she had him taught to drive and with her children went to Adelaide, where she took out a hawker’s licence and bought an old car. She called on Lloyd Dumas, her editor at the Chronicle, who gave her a credit reference to enable her to buy a stock of marked-down items such as buttons, which they sewed on cards, needles, thread and trimmings, which she and her son hawked around the outlying stations. She set up her headquarters at Beltana, where many of the Afghans from Oodnadatta had settled, and left her two younger children in the care of friends and the local schoolmaster. She kept up her writing, sitting on the running board of the car with her small typewriter.
Her hawking days and her writing came to a halt with World War II. Because of the shortage of paper, the Chronicle confined itself to essential news. With her daughter, Winifred went to Tennant Creek Mines, where Winifred ran a mess for the workers. Pansy began studying singing and went on to become a successful country and western singer. Winifred’s sons were independent by this time. Yusef joined the RAAF. Rhamat, who had been trained in wireless operations with the assistance of Lloyd Dumas, found work in that field.
Winifred was welcomed back to the Chronicle at the end of war, with a billboard proclaiming the return of ‘Adelaide’s foremost humorist’. But times had changed. The Chronicle became more of a stock and station journal and Winifred’s stories were eventually dropped.
She moved to Alice Springs, and in a street that now bears her name, started the Silver Crescent Poultry Farm on land leased from her former employer in Oodnadatta, Lycurgus Underwood. It was here that she received a letter from Winifred, her daughter from her first marriage, and now a married woman herself. Alarmed that the secret of her marriage to Charles would come out, she wrote back, asking her daughter not to contact her again. She was terrified that the children of her relationship with Ali would find out that she had been married before and that she had another family.
But secrets will out. When her first husband, Charles Steger, died on 4 October 1952, her eldest son, Fred, travelled to Alice Springs to break the news to the mother he had not seen for almost forty-three years.
She sold her poultry farm and travelled to Queensland to try to pick up where she had left off. It was not easy, because the children she had left behind, and who had remained young in her memory, were now adults with children of their own. Two of her sons, Peter and Jack, had no interest in meeting her at all.
Peter was four when his mother left home and he remembered little about her. Life was hard for him and his siblings — when Peter was eight his father belted him so badly that he still bore the scars. He ran away and was picked up by an inspector of police who took him home and raised him as his own son. Peter, however, did not bear a grudge against his father. After Charles suffered brain damage as the result of an accident with a horse, he gave him a home until Charles’s death and also buried him.
Washerwoman's Dream Page 40