ABOUT THE BOOK
World War II is over and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer; he’s seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour’s daughter Beth Hardy.
Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and in any case her devotion is to the cause. Beth’s ideals will exact a ruinously high price. But Wes will not stop loving her. This is the story of their journey through the catastrophic mid-twentieth century—from summer in Almond Tree to Moscow’s bitter winter and back again—to find a way of being together.
To Jacinta Mackay, Audie Hillman, Harry Hillman and Ruben Barylak
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
Chapter 1
HE SAW HER for the first time since returning from the war out on Cartwright’s Track. He’d hitched a lift home with Nat Fish. She was walking. He didn’t get Trout to stop for her because she was almost home but he waved, and she waved back. She was two years older since he’d last seen her, and her fair hair was longer, and in her green summer dress she seemed more a full-grown woman. They were friends, he and Beth, if friendship were applied in a broad way. He had always chatted with her down at the Almond Tree shops, where she’d run a stall each week selling donated odds and ends—jams, teddy bears, potted plants—to help support the strugglers of the town. The commitment to charity must have come down to her from her mum, Lillian, who knitted jumpers for pensioners. It didn’t show up in her other daughters. Gus and Maud, both older than Beth, were more devoted to marathon arguments with their husbands and Franny, the second youngest, to marathon flirtation.
Wes had admired Beth for her kindness. As one of the small Almond Tree community of Quakers, he saw in her far less self-absorption than among his brethren in the faith. She considered herself a Marxist—she’d told him before he went away to war.
‘Are you, then?’
‘Well, not officially. You don’t get a placard or anything. But Di Porter’s been coaching me.’
‘Di from the high school?’
‘She used to be. Now she writes to me from the city.’
She said this in an embarrassed way, as if it might seem a type of boast for a young woman from a country town to claim membership of a cadre in a massive worldwide movement. All the same, as shy as she was about it, she didn’t make a secret of her Marxism: that would be a betrayal of convictions. She was ridiculed, as she knew she would be. But not by Wes.
Now, when Beth waved to him she smiled, and the smile roused something in him he’d never experienced before: attraction to a woman. It was as if, by bits and pieces, certain vital components had been patiently accumulating in his heart, waiting their opportunity to be connected.
The smile; its welcoming quality: a bolt.
∼
What next? A shower and shave; clean shirt and trousers; give your boots a bit of a birthday. Go and see the young woman in question, show that you like her. Hope that she also likes you. All going well, maybe the pictures. Or bonfire night, which was tomorrow. Beth might enjoy coming to the bonfire night with him.
He called in the next day at the Hardy farm off Cartwright Track with a bunch of beach daisies and tinsel lilies. Hardy ran a dairy herd of three hundred with a contract down the rail line that gave him the money he needed to extend his shack north, south, east and west for his four daughters. Gus and Maud, being older, had been given boys’ work and roared about the farm on old Nortons from the age of ten and eleven, doing tasks they kept up after they married, shouting at the Ayrshires and whistling up the dogs. Hardy ran sheep as well, a thousand, and bred angora rabbits galore, the special province of Franny, second youngest to Beth.
Wes was directed down to the paddock of granite outcrops where Hardy was looking for a headstone. The grave he intended to mark was not for a human but for a horse called Kildare which had given up the ghost after a legendary life that included two Almond Tree Cups and a swim of a mile across Scullin Reservoir. Other horses had died over the years; they were picked up by Denny Christian from the abattoir and on-sold to a pet food factory off the highway at Maccleworth. Only Killy merited a burial.
Wes found Hardy at work with a set of cold chisels and a mason’s hammer, attempting to knock a chunk off a boulder the size of an elephant. Wes, like most Quaker males, had been trained in masonry and carpentry and, although not yet a master like his father, knew what to do with a cold chisel. He handed Hardy the tinsel lilies and daisies and had a block free of the boulder in ten minutes.
Hardy gave the bouquet a shake. ‘What am I supposed to do with these?’
‘For Beth.’
‘What’s Beth supposed to do with them?’
Wes lifted his shoulders. ‘Stick them in a vase.’
Hardy nodded. ‘She’ll be reading,’ he said. ‘The collected works of Red Joe Stalin. Can try the flowers if you like. This is courtship, is it? Romance?’
‘That sort of thing.’
Hardy handed Wes the bouquet and picked up his tools. ‘Stay for a cuppa? Then you can try your luck with the professor.’
Bob Hardy wished Wes all the luck in the world. Of all his daughters, he loved Beth the most, and while he admired her intellect, hated the idea of losing her to the university in the city. He wished she would see in Wes the makings of a decent sort of husband. The army was over for him, nothing to impede him settling down. As Bob knew from chatting with Wes’s father Marcus at the shopping centre, he’d come back from the islands with bullet holes in his shoulder and left thigh, now healed, and a medical discharge issued by a surgeon who’d judged he’d never walk again. Twenty-one, tall and cheerful, he’d started to build a place of his own on a patch he’d purchased from Neddy Gosling above the high-water mark of the river. Strolling back to the house with Wes, Bob imagined Beth giving up university, marrying Wes, raising three or four kids.
But that was nonsense. She wouldn’t be marrying anyone. Could he blame her? Maud and Gus lived with their husbands under the vastly extended Hardy roof and nothing in their domestic habits acted as an enticement to marriage. All the luck in the world, but he had to concede that he was going to lose his daughter to the university. And to politics, of course.
Fetched from a region of the indoors, Beth appeared in the kitchen doorway dressed in what would normally adorn a scarecrow of the fields�
�a faded brown twill shirt left unbuttoned at the cuffs, and a bunchy blue woollen skirt. Wes stood to show courtesy but Bob gestured for him to sit down.
‘Wes! How lovely to see you.’ And a smile full of warmth.
‘What are the flowers for?’
‘You.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Friendly gesture.’
Beth chuckled, not quite at Wes’s expense. ‘Wes, were you going to ask me out? You were, weren’t you?’
‘Thought you might like to come to the bonfire tonight, Beth.’
‘You and me?’
Beth’s mum had just put down a pot of tea on the table, cups and saucers, sugar and a jug of milk. And some shortbread biscuits. She was humming the wedding march from Parsifal, satirically.
‘Mum, could you put these flowers somewhere? In a vase.’
Beth waited until Wes had taken a few sips of tea before enclosing one of his hands in both of hers. ‘Wes, you’re a lovely man, but I’m going to university in the city. I’d barely see you. And in all honesty, I don’t want a boyfriend. I have politics. The Eureka Youth League takes up all of my spare hours. Do you see? You’d be wasting your time.’
‘This is going well,’ said Lillian.
Bob Hardy, leaning against the wall, was looking at his feet, shaking his head.
‘And in any case, Wes, I never go to bonfire night. It’s to celebrate the torture of a human being with fire. It gives me the creeps.’
Bob Hardy allowed a snort of laughter to escape.
‘Hadn’t thought of it that way,’ said Wes, rubbing the back of his head. His dark curls had returned after his army haircut.
‘Well, you might. As a Quaker. Does that sound pompous? Sorry.’
Wes plunged in again. ‘Your dad here says you’ve been reading.’
‘Nothing escapes Dad’s attention.’
‘The Life and Times of Red Joe Stalin,’ said Bob Hardy. ‘That’d be right, professor? She says that Red Joe clobbered the Germans on behalf of the working man.’
‘Dad, I said nothing of the sort. I simply said that if the Soviet Union hadn’t defeated the Germans, the Allies would have lost the war. Just common knowledge.’
‘Want to make your way with the professor, Wesley, better get yourself a big red flag.’
Beth said: ‘Dad, give me a break. You don’t have to find fault with everything I say.’
Franny called from outdoors: ‘Casey, you mongrel! Let it go!’ Lillian raced to the back door.
‘Just be Casey with a rabbit,’ said Bob Hardy. ‘Get out of their hutch, the buggers. Want to persist with my lovely daughter, Wesley? No shame in backing off.’
Wes nodded and took a last sip of his tea. ‘No, Bob. Beth has been clear.’
Beth said: ‘I’m sorry I disappointed you, Wes. I truly am.’
As Wes stood, he glimpsed through the window above the kitchen sink Franny, long hair flowing, in pursuit of a dog with a huge white bundle of rabbit between its jaws. Behind Franny came Lillian.
Chapter 2
THE CUNNINGHAMS were one of three families of Quakers in the Almond Tree shire, all neighbours on the stretch of country that ran down from the hills to the river west of Chinese Town. They were known, the Quakers, more for painstaking carpentry and care of the land than for their peculiar doctrines. Their fences were split rail instead of barbed wire, each joint fitting perfectly, the posts fashioned into hexagons with an adze and sanded as smooth as a table surface. The three homesteads were clad in hand-cut lengths of ash weatherboard. The roofs had higher gables than any other dwellings in the shire, meant to accommodate an attic space, and were shingled in oblongs of red gum cut and sanded as if prizes were being awarded for regularity of shape. The Quakers were orchardists. Bing cherries and apple varieties. The rows of trees ran as straight as if drawn with a T-square from the pasture hills to the highway, screened by big, branchy cypresses. The fruit the Quakers produced was superior to any other harvest in the valley, and its abundance as great as a biblical prophecy. Other orchardists in the valley, some of them, had adopted a theory first proposed by Mick Coverdale who grew cider Gravensteins on the old flood plain past Rubicon.
‘Quaker spells,’ said Mick. ‘From the Egyptians.’
The Quakers called themselves the Society of Friends but were happy to go by the more common label. They had come to Almond Tree in 1880 from Tasmania, where there were plenty of Friends, to establish a presence in central Victoria, where there were few. It was the 1880 contingent that had built the houses with shingled roofs and planted the apples and cherries. It was not the custom of the Almond Tree Quakers to go about converting Catholics and Anglicans and atheists to their austere faith, and the three families—Cunninghams, Trents and Farebrothers—had never become four, or more. They held their meetings in their homes, except for the London Annual Meeting, as it was known, held not in London but in Melbourne. They steered clear of local politics, did not run for shire office, but in 1916 George Fox Farebrother spoke at the Mechanics Hall during a debate on conscription. He said that the Society of Friends opposed violence as a means of settling disputes in all places, at all times. This whole non-violence business came as a surprise to most of those in the hall—a big crowd—and was taken as an insult to the many Australian volunteers who had died at Gallipoli and in France and Belgium. George Farebrother endured the shouts of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Mongrel!’ in stoic silence before finishing with, ‘That’s all I have to say.’
In the end, the Friends families were not especially doctrinaire. Four Almond Hill Quakers volunteered for non-combatant roles in the Great War without causing much of a fuss, and two of the Trent girls served as nurses in France. And the Cunninghams gave their blessing to Wes when he took on a non-combatant role in the 6th Division, bearing the wounded away from the battle at Wewak in New Guinea. It was a Japanese POW with an uncompromising sense of duty who had shot Wes in the hospital of a holding camp—a Webley pistol, wrested from an officer—as well as a nurse. The Quakers had prayed for the Japanese soldier on the day he was hanged—as they thought. The soldier had been executed by firing squad several weeks before prayers began.
Wes had returned to Almond Tree with a fixed plan to marry, raise children and avoid battlefields. If a man fell out of an apple tree and broke his neck, rotten luck. But a man’s flesh ploughed open by a 58 mm Arisaka cartridge was a disaster. When he’d waved to Beth a few days back, he’d thought: ‘Oh, that’s Beth Hardy, all grown up.’ He should see if he could meet up with her again. He had more to discuss with her after the war. There was Charlotte Brontë, many others. Recovering in hospital at Moresby, he’d been given the job of military censor, something he could handle on his back. A big canvas bag of books had been sent to the troops by a charity in Melbourne. Wes was to assess a share of the books for any possible pro-Japanese sentiment before they were made available to the patients; classic novels, Lone Star westerns. Wes’s home schooling under Mrs Farebrother hadn’t exposed him to the classics, but he read them with enthusiasm. When he took his bouquet to Beth Hardy, he thought that famous books might give the two of them something lively to talk about. Thought, perhaps twice, and fleetingly, of Beth Hardy’s brow deeply engaged by something by a Brontë sister.
He was influenced by Beth’s criticism of bonfire night and stayed home until seven in the evening. But in the end the habit of years prevailed and he dragged some old timbers and a farm gate that the termites had made a mess of to the site of the bonfire on Paddock Reserve.
Three weeks from summer and it was barely dusk at seven-fifteen. The bonfire wouldn’t be lit until seven-thirty, but fireworks were already exploding over Paddock Reserve, the red tissue paper the tom thumbs came wrapped in lay scattered everywhere. Half of the families of Almond Tree had been attracted to the bonfire, some thousands, all those with kids, and more families arriving at the same time as Wes. Like Wes, they hauled fuel for the bonfire, items of ruined furniture, garden waste, piles of newspapers, an anci
ent single-bed horsehair mattress, a tall wooden wardrobe with its two mirrors intact reflecting the Southern Cross. At its base, the bonfire covered the space of a smallish dwelling, tapering as it reached up into the evening sky. Wes had arrived to add his timber to the heap just as Ern Masters from the fire brigade was scaling a ladder to attach the guy to the top. The guy was a stuffed figure representing General Hideki Tojo with a yellow face, a black moustache and round spectacles. The crowd pressed in as Ern tied the general to the tall stake around which the bonfire had been built. ‘That’s for Darwin, you evil bastard!’
A match was dropped into the kerosene-soaked base of the bonfire while Ern Masters was still at the top of the ladder.
‘Better get a wriggle on, Ern!’
Ern could see the humour. He stayed where he was, waving a handkerchief as the flames scaled the sides of the construction. ‘Mother, Mother, don’t let me cook!’ Then hurtled back down and heaved the ladder away from the flames.
The fire seemed to change its mood and for a few minutes, dwindled and sulked. Then it found fuel that pleased it and burst skywards striving for the figure of Tojo. The crowd kept as close to the heat as possible before being forced back. As the flames reached Tojo, the crowd in festive mood sang a raucous chorus of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. The cloudless evening sky was illuminated in all the patterns of the Milky Way.
Wes was the only Quaker at the bonfire. His brothers and sisters in the faith sensed without being told that nothing good could come of watching a figure incinerated on a heap of debris, but they never rebuked Wes for dragging fuel to the bonfire each year. The abiding policy of the Quakers of Almond Tree was to permit Friends and non-Friends alike to come to their own conclusions about the burning of effigies, and everything else in human experience. This was not so much a belief of the broad Quaker movement as an expression of the benign temperament of George Fox Farebrother. Wes, since childhood the most cheerful of humans, enjoyed all spectacles of laughter and hijinks and never had a word to say against rituals of any sort. He was told by his army comrades that the natives of New Guinea ate each other and was fascinated.
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