Can My Pony Come Too?

by Rosemary Esmonde Peterswald

  Most evenings we went to the brothers for a barbeque, something we hadn’t experienced before. Afterwards we would attend Benediction. If we were lucky a film would follow. For years, until Brother Celsius died, our family kept in touch with the brothers, a couple of them coming to visit us. Eugene even went back there for school holidays once, glad to see a few of the boys he’d befriended.

  My father busied himself whilst he searched for a job and a house for us all to live in together. He chopped wood for the fires, boiled water in the boiler for our baths, and tidied up the yard and surrounds. Through it all my parents remained optimistic when we were around; though every now and then I could sense the desolation in them both.

  Ireland doesn’t have snakes. Morriset certainly did. It’s a well-known fact that St Patrick put his crook into the ground in Ireland, with it coming out in New Zealand. Hence the myth goes – he eradicated snakes in these two fortunate countries.

  Australia was not to be so lucky.

  I never put my foot outside the bed without first checking to make sure there were no snakes underneath. I slept with the pillow over my head in case they joined me there. It was a long way from Drominagh and Clonmoylan in more ways than one.

  Yet, for us children, the advantages of living in Australia were becoming more and more apparent. Even at this time of year the sun was hot and we could run around with little on. When we visited the Frost family we picnicked in their rambling garden and swam in the lake where we’d jump off a huge rubber tyre hanging from a weeping willow, in the process getting dreadfully sunburnt, long before sunscreen was the norm.

  ‘If I hadn’t had Knobs and Doreen,’ my mother told me, ‘I don’t think I would have survived.’

  The milkman picked us up each morning in his battered white truck to take us to the one-teacher primary school, with a Seventh Day Adventist teacher at Bonells Bay. Dibs, at fifteen, was the oldest in the school and of course she and Gill should have been in high school, but there wasn’t one. As it was, we all shared the one bright and sunny classroom, sitting at penknife-engraved wooden lift-top desks. On the few days I attended I found this a good arrangement, for I could see the rest of the family at a glance, which curtailed my homesickness for my parents.

  Like my mother, one of my greatest disappointments was that there didn’t appear to be many horses tied up to the railings in the schoolyard. In fact there were none and my mother glossed over this promise she’d airily made to us back in Ireland.

  ‘Perhaps it was an old brochure I was looking at,’ she said. ‘For I certainly saw horses tied up outside a school.’

  Was Australia that desperate for migrants that the brochures had to lie? I wondered.

  ‘When the Frosts travelled down to Sydney for a day or so, which they did from time to time,’ she told me recently, ‘we were able to stay in their house. Needless to say I thought this was bliss, as I could have a bath and the lavatory was inside.’

  Living here at Bonells Bay was all very well. But my father had no job – and no prospect of one. Eugene couldn’t spend the rest of his life living with the disadvantaged boys at St John of God, much as he seemed to be enjoying it, nor could we all live in this tiny house forever, with Dibs and Gill continuing their education in a one-teacher primary school. Feelers were put out to the Catholic Church throughout Australia. One day, after many decades of the rosary and novenas had been said by all the family to help with our search, a job was finally found. A house too. Not in Bonells Bay. But in the small community of Reidsdale many miles away to the south.

  We were all sad to leave the Frosts, our new school friends, and the St John of God brothers; but at that stage we had no option.

  Chapter 12

  Irish Bush Family at Reidsdale

  Reidsdale, a few miles south of the country town of Braidwood, was a tiny farming community at the head of the Araluen Valley on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The Kennedys, an elderly couple who ran the post office, were retiring to Sydney and someone was needed urgently to replace them. We were the answer. The idea was that my mother would run the post office and telephone exchange and my father would work for Marcus Lyons who owned the surrounding land.

  My father, mother, Viv and I arrived first in the Holden ute loaded up to the hilt. We looked not unlike the tinkers we’d left behind in Ireland, despite my mother’s delicate pink floral dress and my father’s dapper hat. Dibs, Gill and Eugene were to follow later with the Frosts.

  ‘When your father thought we were all to live at Nimmitabel he’d scrounged a few pieces of furniture. This was ceremoniously brought out of storage and installed in our new house,’ my mother told me one day at Cloneen, as we looked over some old photos.

  Reidsdale’s close-knit community of dairy farmers ran a co-operative cheese factory. It was rich country with the people nearly all of Irish descent. Such names as Maher, Hickey, Lyons and Thompson were the norm – in fact, the place was known as ‘Irish Corner’. But even they found this family of Irish migrants somewhat of a novelty.

  Despite our situation, appearances needed to be kept up. So with much care on Sunday morning we all dressed in our very best to attend Mass at the small chapel on the hill – my father in a dark suit; Viv and I in our new smocked floral pink dresses, which my mother had whipped up on a second-hand sewing machine she’d found in Morisset; Dibs and Gill in crisp white shirts and full skirts; Eugene with tie and long socks; my mother in a smart tweed suit and a green wide-brimmed woollen hat with a gold donkey brooch on the side. I thought how elegant and beautiful she looked against the farmer’s wives, if not slightly out of place. The other families were friendly, doing their best to make us feel welcome, gently badgered into this from the pulpit by the local curate, Monsignor McKenna, a formidable Australian of Irish descent with a soft spot for the only Irish migrant family he’d encountered while serving in his expansive parish. With a great flourish of his ornate robes, he welcomed us into their midst, begging the locals to be kind to us, as we were so far away from home.

  ‘This enthusiastic enveloping into the fold embarrassed your father and me no end,’ my mother said.

  Father O’Brien, a jovial young priest with a thatch of carrot hair, a gentle brogue, and who hailed from Tullamore in the heart of Ireland, was Monsignor McKenna’s offsider, coming to Reidsdale every two weeks to conduct mass. His main claim to fame was that he once had played hurly for Ireland and was still a great sportsman. Over those early years in Australia he became almost part of our family. I suspect he was as homesick for his homeland as we were. And, despite being a priest, was somewhat charmed by the beautiful Dibs, as most men were.

  I went to visit him not long ago in a retirement home in Narooma on the New South Wales South Coast. He was just as jovial as I recalled. Over a cup of tea we reminisced about old times. I’d not seen him for forty-five years. Sadly, not long after my visit, he died when on a trip home to Ireland to catch up with his family. I think he must have realised his time was near, for shortly before my visit he’d posted Dibs a photograph taken at the Irish Embassy in the 1950s of himself and Dibs (looking divine in a navy blue dress with white flowers embroidered on the collar) talking to an elderly lady smoking a cigarette and wearing a white beret. I feel he’d cherished it all his life and wanted Dibs to have it.

  Mass at Reidsdale was a social occasion with at least a good half hour put aside afterwards for gossip, tea, and home-cooked scones and cakes. Up near the church was the tennis court – an overgrown paddock with a high fence, a few scraggly white lines and a net of sorts in the middle. From memory even Father O’Brien used to join in when we played with tattered wooden racquets. He also played hurly with us, bestowing us each with a new stick he’d lovingly carved out of pieces of wood he’d scavenged in the countryside.

  The Reidsdale Post Office, sited on a narrow dusty gravel road, was not a luxurious structure by any means. A steel gate led up a long potholed lane between paddocks sporting clumps of thistles and long wi
spy tusks of grass where sheep and cattle grazed. At the bottom of one paddock was a creek overhung with weeping willows, while right in the centre of the front paddock a lone apple tree stood.

  ‘On the way to the school bus, we’d pick an apple off the tree for our lunchbox,’ Dibs assures me.

  As my father said at the time, ‘“House” was too grand a name to put on our new home.’ The ceilings were rusted iron covered in spider webs, with tree branches protruding through the open crevices; the floors were unpainted wood with a few bits of torn lino here and there. None of the windows closed properly, only half the doors were in place and the plaster, stained brown with rain water, was peeling off the walls in most of the rooms. Perched on a raised hill to the rear of the building was an outside dunny. Apart from the terror of a red back spider biting my behind, it was a frightening walk to relieve oneself in the middle of the night. What’s more, with the coldest winter the district was experiencing in years, most of the ground was covered in a deep white frost, so it was an excruciating chilly and slippery hike up there as well. We’d never in our wildest dreams imagined Australia being as cold as this; however, it wasn’t long before we realised that our new country was a land of harsh extremes.

  The only bath we had was a large tin tub we filled with water from the boiler, taking it in turns to wash ourselves by the fire inside. This was much easier when my father and Eugene were away, as modesty prevailed when they were in residence.

  My father ingeniously set up a laundry tub outside under a gumtree, placing a couple of pipes into the ground to take the water, together with the dregs from the kitchen sink, some yards down the hill. Most of us shared the same bedroom and all the rooms opened onto each other and then onto the verandah – a style more suited to the tropics, not to the intense cold of our first Australian winter.

  ‘Viv,’ my mother told me, ‘for some reason slept on a wire mattress on top of a disused bath tub to the side of the fire in the sitting room.’

  Eugene slept on the verandah with his dog, Padraig, known as Porky, a brown Scottie mix, whom Viv had found in our first week in Australia at Morisset. In all the years he was with us he never let anyone, apart from the family, pat him. Possibly realising he and Eugene were two males up against four bossy sisters he appointed himself Eugene’s guardian and protected him with his life. Later in Canberra, if Eugene was having a bath in the one and only bathroom, he’d sit on his pyjamas outside the door and growl at any of us who went past; and if we should have the audacity to knock on the door and tell his master to hurry up we were almost eaten alive.

  The bats at Reidsdale were scary to say the least, sweeping down from the rafters like fighter jets about to drop a lethal bomb. Once again I slept with my head under the pillow, not just hiding from snakes this time. There were also many nights when it was hard to sleep for the sound of rats chewing on the woodwork.

  ‘Do you remember the possum,’ my mother asked me recently, ‘a ferocious-looking beast clinging to the top of the bedroom door with a small baby in its pouch? There was no moving it no matter how hard we tried. We couldn’t shut the door and had to go to bed with it there. Every time we went near the door it hissed and hit out with its claws. Your father and Eugene were away, so it lived in the house like this for days, until finally, thank God, it took off.’

  To begin with we all went to St Bede’s Good Samaritan Convent in Braidwood, catching the school bus about a mile away over the river, past the Lyons’ stately farmhouse and up a steep hill. We mostly walked to the bus stop where we met up with a group of the local children. I hate to admit it, but we used to sit nails in the middle of the road, getting hugely excited when the bus driver, Mr Thompson, an elderly man of eternal patience, found he had a flat tyre a few miles further on, whereupon we’d all sit smugly watching him valiantly change the tyre with the help of one of the older boys.

  Other times the bus would just break down on its own accord and it wasn’t unusual for us to arrive at school close to lunchtime. The floor of the bus was riddled with holes, a bit like sitting on a cheese grater with the gravel road whizzing past underneath. I would curl my legs up under me as I was terrified a snake would wriggle up a hole when we stopped.

  I was miserable at the convent, as apart from anything else the nuns seemed to have an avid aversion to Viv and me. We were forever being berated for our supposed misbehaviour; or being hit with a strap around our legs, or with a feather duster hard across the knuckles. Why we were not accepted was difficult to understand. Perhaps it was our accents (if we’d had broad Irish accents it might have been better), or perhaps they were not used to having new students at their school, let alone so many all at once. Or was it that the priests had made too much fuss of us? My mother suspected this was the case. Most of the pupils came from families who’d lived in the area all their lives. Suddenly this number of ‘foreign’ new students with all the attention being showered on them by the priests was more than the poor nuns could cope with.

  Recently Viv told me: ‘The nuns were always telling me I was dense.’ This was anything but the truth; however, like me, Viv had never really been to a proper school before, apart from Bonells Bay, and the odd day at Shragh, and she was probably lacking in certain skills.

  ‘You stupid girls,’ Gill remembers them berating us. ‘I thought coming from the land of Saints and Scholars you’d know more than this.’

  Recently Eugene told me they were kinder to him. He vividly remembers Sister Margaret Mary, a rough and ready stocky young nun trying valiantly to teach him and the other boys how to play rugby, tucking up her habit and showing them how to form a ruck. Gill also remembers her on the sidelines of the netball games against the public school, jumping up and down in excitement and bellowing at the top of her voice: ‘Bash ’em girls. Bash ’em.’

  Dear Gill laughed as she remembered this. ‘I thought she’d have a heart attack, but she was very good-natured and she did love Eugene. I think you and Viv were unlucky with the nuns you had, particularly Viv, who had a really vindictive one.’

  The school was housed in a stark brick building next to the church and facing onto a bitumen square. The classrooms were like an iceberg and I constantly had chilblains. Many a day I played truant, with my parents’ blessing. If this was what school was all about, I certainly didn’t want to be part of it.

  In later life I found some very kind nuns, but the Good Samaritan nun I had at Braidwood was not kind as I remember her. Maybe it was not her fault. Perhaps she was just part of a system that condoned such treatment. Spare the rod and spoil the child.

  Between the nuns and the conditions in our meagre home we all suffered from dreadful homesickness, particularly my mother alone all day in the post office, except when the local people came into collect their mail.

  ‘When you went to school and I was on my own, I often sat down and cried,’ she told me as we sipped a glass of wine by the warm fire in the living room overlooking the garden at Cloneen. ‘I think it was definitely worse for Dibs, Gill and Eugene than it was for you and Viv. They’d left school friends behind and were probably more aware of our situation.’ She furrowed her brow and gave a sad smile. ‘My heart went out to them. I remember Gill saying, when everyone was feeling particularly down in the dumps, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” She has always been the practical one. But I remember often thinking, what on earth have we done?’

  My mother wasn’t a whinger by any means, however, strongly setting her mind to making the best of things and running the post office efficiently.

  The actual post office consisted of a small room attached to the side of the house. Here she sat in front of one of those party-line switchboards wearing headphones and plugging in different colour cords to connect the calls. She also had to be there for the local people to collect their mail.

  ‘I remember that switchboard so well,’ I said to her. ‘You were more or less tied to it all day, weren’t you?’ Then I laughed. ‘I remember Viv and I listening in t
o a few of the customers’ conversations, much to your horror.’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, you two were devils. But you’re right about me being tied to the switchboard. No call could be put through unless I was there to connect it. I had to be nearby for hours on end until closing it down at night, unless your father or one of the older ones could be coerced into giving me a break.’

  For a moment we sat in silence reminiscing, with just the tick tock of the clock on the mantelpiece and Tassie, the canary I’d given her as a companion after my father died, chirping happily on the windowsill.

  ‘John O’Brien’s Around the Boree Log, particularly The Little Irish Mother, was my constant companion as I tried to learn about the Australian bush,’ she told me.

  Even today that slim volume sits by her bedside in Ireland, reminding her of a time when she was in her early forties with five children under sixteen and with no obvious prospects for a future in a new and strange land.

  ‘I love reading it even now,’ she said, picking the battered book up and opening the pages. ‘It takes me back in time. A time I thought I’d like to forget. But a time I’m grateful to now look back on.’ She laughed. ‘We were mad, weren’t we? But we survived. And look at you all now.’

  Recalling that time, I’m filled with the greatest admiration for the way she coped. For this life in Reidsdale was an enormous contrast to the life she’d recently known back in Ireland – a life of maids, governesses and gardeners. Although she hadn’t seen her father in years, at least her mother, sister and aunts were reasonably close by in Ireland. Here in Australia she had no-one, apart from the Frosts and us.

  My mother was not sure in later years why they had made the move to Australia but believed they had done the right thing as we had received a good education to equip us for our adult lives. Her only regret was that we all, except Viv, lived so far from Ireland, her home in her twilight years.