The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  But here at the bonfire, no, he was not his normal self. Beth Hardy had asked him if he thought, as a Quaker, he should attend a celebration of torment. Here in the hooting crowd, with Tojo burning like a torch, he was full of regret.

  He next saw Beth a couple of days later down in the hardware store buying lubricating oil for, as she said, ‘the printer’. She not only smiled at Wes, but gave him a light sisterly hug. ‘I’m so glad I ran into you, Wes, because I think you might be able to help me with some printing.’ ‘Printing?’

  ‘Posters I want to put up around the shire, the Eureka Youth League. Dad got me an old press that Dizzy Hall scavenged from the tip. You can only print one poster at a time. But I can’t get the ink right. You’re so clever about things like that. Could you come over and help me out?’

  ‘Of course, Beth. When?’

  ‘Do you think this afternoon? Say three?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  He made his way to Beth’s place by driving his father’s ute along the firebreak then down to Cartwright’s Track. He could hear from fifty yards off a shouting match underway, women’s voices. Probably Gus and Maud, both famously noisy. On the back veranda the three Hardy dogs, still haunted by the fireworks, emerged from their kennels to implore a pat and a kind word.

  It was Bob Hardy who answered Wes’s second knock.

  ‘Wes, handsome Wes. What, back for more?’ ‘Beth asked me to help out with her printing press.’

  ‘Could say a glutton for punishment, could say as game as Ned Kelly. She’s out in the barn printing a world history of Red Joe and his comrades. Come back for a beer when you’re done Wesley. Or when she’s done. Shouldn’t be long.’

  Wes eased the barn door open and called to Beth, who was at the bench, occupied with a roller and a tray of ink. Hardy’s tractor and his red Dodge flatbed took up the space beside the bench. Half a dozen chickens had perched themselves on the tractor to study Beth while she worked. The less curious birds, fifty or more, preferred their coop at the back of the barn, keeping up a muted chorus of chicken contentment. Beth looked up from her task and smiled. The illumination of a bare overhead light bulb brought out all the features of impatience in her expression. She had bunched her long hair on the top of her head with a green ribbon.

  ‘Wes, thanks so much. I know you’re busy with your house. But this damned thing!’

  ‘I wanted to tell you that you were right,’ Wes said, inside the barn now. ‘I went to the bonfire, but I shouldn’t. It was in my head, what you told me.’

  Beth looked baffled. The roller she held in her hand remained poised above the ink tray.

  ‘What I told you? What did I tell you? I didn’t tell you anything.’

  ‘You said I oughtn’t go. Quakers oughtn’t go, you said.’

  ‘Did I? Well, I should mind my own business. Sorry.’

  ‘No, no. You were right. So how can I help?’

  ‘This,’ she said. With ink-stained fingers, she indicated a square of thick brown linoleum into which lettering and a picture had been carved. The lettering read: Sheepskins for Russia and the picture showed a smiling sheep. The smaller lettering under the sheep read: Winter in Leningrad! Brrr! You can help our Comrades in the Soviet Union by sending a shilling postal order to the address below. Each shilling helps!

  ‘I’m printing posters,’ said Beth. ‘I’ll put them up around town. It’s important.’

  Wes peered closer at the linocut. ‘Your sheep’s happy about giving up its skin?’

  Beth, ignoring the comment, held up one of the printed posters on ten-by-twelve-inch cartridge. It was a mess, the lettering barely legible.

  ‘The ink’s too thick,’ Wes said. ‘Thin it with some turps.’

  By trial and error the right consistency for the ink was found and a perfect poster printed. And another. Finally twenty, all the sheets of cartridge Beth had on hand. ‘Wes, I’m so grateful.’ Over the hour of cooperative engagement with the task, Wes asked about the Eureka Youth League, whether he should join up. Also, what was a ‘communist’ anyway? Beth stated by rote the aims of the Communist Party of Australia, but then added immediately that communism wouldn’t suit him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re not Christians, Wes, not anything.’

  ‘I can keep quiet about God.’

  Beth said that wouldn’t be fair to him, or to his family. ‘Being a Quaker’s in your blood, Wes. You can’t just forget it and replace it with communism. It has to be your life.’

  Wes was fascinated by her commitment. Christianity notwithstanding, he had never had a solid commitment to any emphatic belief. In New Guinea, he had found it impossible to identify anything that gave the soldiers on his own side, the Australian side, a moral advantage over the Japanese. The Australians, with their mocking way of dealing with war and bloodletting, their satirical smiles, their shrugs, never seemed wholly serious about anything, while the Japanese appeared driven by stoicism and insanity. The Japanese prisoner who had shot him and the nurse had gravely surrendered the pistol, holding it flat in his two palms like an offering.

  Better, of course, if the Australians won the war, but winning a war, should that make you proud? A stitcher attached to the 2/11th Battalion, a West Australian called Bluey Cook, superficial sutures, took pleasure in setting him moral dilemmas: ‘What would you do if a Jap was about to bayonet your dad and you were sitting behind a Vickers? You’d give the Jap a burst, right?’ Bluey Cook had only a muddled idea of what Quakers were on about, but he made up for ignorance with persistence. ‘You don’t want nothing to do with transfusions, but you give ’em to our blokes, you give ’em to the Japs. How does that go down with your archbishop?’

  All that Wes could say he believed was that it was wrong to murder, and war was murder. It had been instilled in him by his mother, Daisy, although it seemed so obvious to him that it may simply have been his temperament, regardless of instruction. At the same time, that Jap with the bayonet—yes, he would have pulled the trigger on the Vickers. And he had actually fired a Vickers. Thrilling.

  He left Beth to her project, declined the beer with Bob Hardy. He was glad Beth had been so candid with him about the boyfriend stuff, which was nonsense. And relieved that he felt no impulse to pester her about it. She was going to university, a much more worthwhile ambition than hooking up with him. He would finish the house. One fine day, he’d find someone he could share it with.

  But on the drive home, no more than ten minutes on the dirt track, he decided to give up on girlfriends altogether. He’d been to war, had shovelled the limbs and guts of hundreds of men, Australian and Japanese, into canvas bags and he’d given a fair try to observing Quaker love. Neither had taught him anything about life. He’d build the house, live there alone, grow cherries, honour God in whatever fashion, teach himself to cook. And that would do. Also read. Maybe Karl Marx. He recalled volunteering to go out in New Guinea and fetch back stray Japanese bodies. His real object was to detour past a particular green pool on the cove and gaze at it. Beth’s eyes were the same green; you could lose yourself in their shimmer. The green was of a quality he’d seen only in that cove near Wewak, a small cove, clear to the white sand on the bottom. The creatures of the sea, bright fish, small squid, entered the cove through a narrow opening and dawdled in the warm waters. An enchantment to watch the sea creatures loitering in the green waters of the cove.

  Later in his Almond Tree life, casting about for reading material that might mean something to him, he had taken up reading poetry and had come across one by D. H. Lawrence about a hot day in Sicily and a snake. A current developed between Wes and the poet. The man in the poem had thrown a piece of wood at a snake, forcing the creature to wriggle quickly and disappear down a hole in the ground. The man was disappointed in himself; he should have gazed at the beauty of the golden snake without interfering. ‘I had missed my chance with one of the lords of Life,’ he said. Wes had seen hundreds of snakes around Almond Tree, especially out b
y the billabongs on the flood plain, red-bellied black snakes a yard long and more, also tigers, browns, copperheads. He had stepped on them in unaware moments, bare feet, the fat girth of the creature moving against his sole. He had never thought of a snake as a lord of life. Then he did. That was poetry. Beth’s eyes, their colour, the life that swam into them like bright creatures into the Wewak cove—that was poetry.

  He barely glimpsed her again before she left for the city in February.

  Chapter 3

  BETH’S CURIOSITY about politics had been roused by Di Porter’s classes on the industrial revolution, dwelling on the conditions of factory work in the English mills. Also, an incidental reference to remedies, such as the October Revolution in Russia. It all went over the heads of the second form pupils, except for Beth. At the age of fourteen, she had developed a sense of justice that coiled itself in her breast like a spring. She had concluded all by herself that the world could not go on in the way it had, the small number of haves and the masses of have-nots. But where her convictions came from was a mystery. Her family environment was more characterised by anarchy than anything else, four bickering girls with only eight years between them. Nevertheless, Beth came to Di Porter at the end of the second class on the mills with an enquiry: ‘Mrs Porter, what is Red October?’

  Di had a portrait of Vladimir Lenin displayed on the wall of her kitchen next to the Kelvinator, and a second portrait of Joseph Stalin beside the door that led into the living room. A guest of sometime past had written in a speech balloon that grew from Lenin’s lips: ‘Kiss me, I’m hard.’ Stalin’s speech balloon read: ‘I’m yours for a rouble.’ Di Porter hadn’t thought it necessary to erase the irreverent messages, even when urged to do so by Beth, whose piety was more pronounced than Di’s. ‘Not so solemn, Beth. A little levity can’t hurt.’

  Di had come to Australia from Cambridge in 1931 to marry Beau Porter, a Melbourne boy, reading Economics at King’s. The two had met in Cambridge while Di was at Girton reading History, both socialists who considered a long lecture at the Fabian Society followed by a meeting of the Constituency Working Group a grand night out. When they first set eyes on each other at a Labour Club picnic, she thought Beau the most handsome man on earth. More than that, his smile and gestures expressed a freedom that did not exist among Englishmen, even socialists, who were more class conscious in their way than the nobility.

  On a plaid blanket on the banks of the Cam she plied him with questions about his homeland, surprised at her lack of interest in Australia up to this point considering she now found everything he said beguiling. Beau loved Australia; that was what so engaged her. She did not know anyone who could speak of his love for his homeland, her homeland without a great deal of passionate ranting. Nobody loved England, particularly, except John of Gaunt. When she spoke about her own life, her political coming-of-age at eighteen during the General Strike of 1926, buttering bread for unionists on the picket lines, he listened as enthralled as if she were reciting battle scenes from the Iliad. Her father, a librarian at the London School of Economics, and her mother, a paediatrician, were both socialists, but not so you’d notice. They held their daughter, their only child, somewhat in awe. Their usual response to any decision of their daughter’s was immediate acquiescence, and so it was when Di told her parents about Beau and said she would probably marry him after graduation. But Beau’s father, who ran a printing works back in Australia, in Collingwood, was forced to call Beau home in the aftermath of the stockmarket crash. Beau’s older brother, Horry, a barrister, took no interest in the business. While Beau left within a week, it was agreed that Di would stay on at Girton until the completion of her degree and join him in six months.

  She married Beau six months later at Melbourne Town Hall on her twenty-third birthday and spent what would normally have been her honeymoon toiling in the printing works. She did everything from setting type to knocking on the doors of businesses up and down Smith Street spruiking for contracts in her musical Wycombe Abbey accent. The stale winds of the Depression blighted all her efforts, and those of Beau. Her father-in-law, Lou, a union supporter all his life, was a dithering wreck after letting thirty workers go, and Beau, too, was ailing, a mystery complaint that caused dizziness, aching joints and sudden collapse. The medical consensus, not offered with much conviction, was that Beau would benefit from rest and clean country air. Di took him to Almond Tree, where his family kept a cottage on two acres, usually only visited at Christmas, and devotedly nursed him back to health. It was during the two years of her husband’s convalescence that Di took on teaching at Almond Tree High and came to meet all the Hardy girls, Beth most memorably, intense but cheerful, too, enquiring, a curiosity.

  Di raised twin girls in a terrace in Fitzroy, a short walk from the printing works. The business recovered, the printers who’d been let go returned over the space of six years, Beau’s degree remained uncompleted. The works were left in Beau’s hands in 1939 when his father succumbed to a heart condition that had niggled away for years. Embarrassingly for a socialist, Beau revealed a gift for profit based on economy of production and the Porter-Nolan Printing Works was written up as a model of efficiency. Lou’s wife Joy retired to the Almond Tree cottage with a set of Everyman classics and a scheme to write letters to world leaders warning of the rise of fascism in Germany. Horry said she’d lost her marbles. Di spent a day each weekend at Almond Tree with the twins, correcting the diction of her mother-in-law’s letters to Stalin, Roosevelt, King George VI, and tutoring Beth Hardy, at her insistence, in the political philosophy of Karl Marx.

  Now Beth was off to university herself, and as Bob Hardy watched Beth packing in her room he was sobbing all down his stubbled cheeks. Beth heard the moist, gurgling sounds and looked up in alarm.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ll miss you, honey.’

  ‘Oh, that. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Yeah, well. You know.’

  Beth reminded herself that tears like this were, after all, sincere, and set aside the packing to console her father. She put her arms around him and patted his back.

  ‘I’ll be all right, Dad.’

  ‘Remember,’ said Bob Hardy, ‘you’ve got as much right to be there as anyone else. Being at the university.’

  Beth had no need for reassurance.

  Chapter 4

  PATTY CUNNINGHAM was writing to Beth Hardy on a green pad of the sort nurses carried to record a doctor’s directions. She used a fountain pen which may have been the fanciest in Japan—a gold-plated Mont Blanc won in a game of fifty-two-card draw from a surgeon in Bougainville. The ink she was forced to use was an inferior brand that clogged the nib and had to be watered down, so that the script on the paper varied in its register from stark black to the grey of a pigeon’s plumage. She wrote with the pad on her knees and with the intense concentration of one who had to battle every second to remain awake.

  Patty, at twenty-four the second oldest of the Cunningham girls, had gone straight from her noncombatant role as a nurse in Bougainville to volunteer nursing with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Hiroshima. On her third day in her Hiroshima quarters, she gave herself time to write to Beth, whom she loved, before falling asleep. Strictly speaking, she was still on duty but after forty hours on her feet in the wards, she’d been allowed a six-hour break. No such thing as a nurses’ dormitory in Hiroshima. On her arrival two days earlier, Patty had been assigned a tent that housed four, not the worst accommodation she’d known, brand new canvas fitted with Perspex windows and small holland blinds that rolled down. Compared to Bougainville, it was Paris.

  The three other nurses were all away at the hospital—they’d arrived a week earlier. Their humble personal odds and ends were left on upturned dried-apricot crates beside their camp beds: framed photographs, notebooks, a small cactus-like plant in a squat little vase. The Australian nurses in the Japanese hospital did not wear the traditional uniform of belted dress but rather army-issue khaki trouser
s and blouse and peaked cap. Preferred by every nurse.

  ‘Off to the big smoke, baby girl!’ she began, and then included a story of Beth as a five-year-old sitting on her haunches to study a tiger snake, and how this convinced Patty that the Hardy girl’s curiosity was fearless.

  And look you are fearless! All these big babies scared of the commies, but not you! Good on you, Bethy! And now after Queens you’re staying with Di Porter, Red Di. Isn’t that good? She can keep building you up to become the first Aussie Stalin. Only darling, try not to murder a couple of million peasants, if you can possibly avoid it. I hear from Mum that my little brother Wes is gaga about you. You could do worse, once you graduate. Believe me, you could. I have the rank of lieutenant and for some reason this attracts every randy surgeon in the place, except for the Japs, who are extremely respectful. I get slobbered on every working day. The nursing here is bloody awful, Bethy, dear God, an atomic bomb doesn’t leave much behind, including the Japanese people. Frightful injuries, but your big grown-up friend does her best.

  Like the Japanese woman who had been harboured by her daughter for months and who was finally carried to the hospital with such awful burns that her entire chest was lifted off in one piece from her neck to her navel, her organs on display like an anatomy lesson. Others whose eyes had been melted in their face when they turned their gaze to the blast. Burns all over bodies like the bubbles in boiling porridge. Patty didn’t mention these horrors. ‘My stint ends in three months. I wasn’t discharged at Bougainville, so I’m officially still in the corps as a volunteer. You know what a volunteer is, don’t you? A dogsbody, and a mongrel one at that.’

  Patty didn’t explain why she’d volunteered for Hiroshima. It wasn’t clear even to her. Other than the faces of the Japanese POWs, which troubled her. It wasn’t the shame of being a captive she saw there. Most had not the least vestige of shame. More a mask-like blankness, which may have been what was left of shame once it was exhausted. Those who were full of shame had died months ago by swallowing stones and metal fragments they picked up in the compound, stuffing them down their throats with a stick. The ones who were left couldn’t be bothered. They wanted to go home to Japan. Defeat, wounds, the English voices all around them that made the sounds of crows cawing, all that they wanted was to see their homeland, as if it were the only conceivable destination for their trammelled souls, the only possible solace. When Patty treated the POWs in the Bougainville compound, they reached for her hand and implored in English: ‘Japan. To go. Japan.’ They did not know that the cities they longed for were rubble. One POW said: ‘To go. Hiroshima. I please.’ An orderly overheard and laughed. ‘All gone, my yellow friend.’