‘Break a leg,’ said May, waving her fairy godmother wand. ‘I don’t know why people say that,’ she added, ‘but I think it’s bad luck to say “good luck”.’
Bob and Clive carried a cardboard fireplace, painted to look like bricks, on to the stage. And then Mr Miller was announcing ‘a two-act play written and performed by our talented Grade Seven girls and boys’.
The curtains swished open again. Ruby, pretending to sweep the floor in front of the cardboard fireplace, was dazzled by the bright stage lights. Beyond them, in the shadows, was the audience. She couldn’t see Mother and Dad now, but thinking of them both out there watching her made her so happy she forgot to be nervous.
Cinderella was a hit. The audience laughed in all the right places, and everyone loved it when Ruby appeared in the second act in her beautiful pink dress. When it was all over, there were three curtain calls. Ruby held hands in the line of her classmates – Bob, Clive, Colin, Iris, Betty, Lorna, Doris, Eric and Cynthia. And May. They all bowed. The applause lasted for ages.
Then the hall lights went on. Ruby just had time to see that Dad was chatting to Mr and Mrs West before she went backstage with the others to change.
‘I’ll never wear my Cinderella dress again,’ she said to May. ‘But I know someone who should.’
When she was in her ordinary clothes again, she searched through the crowd until she found Josie. ‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘It’s too big for you now, but one day you’ll be able to wear it, and then you can be a real fairy princess.’ She pushed the dress into her arms.
Josie gazed at the silky bundle, and her pale face grew pinker and pinker.
‘That’s real nice of you, Ruby,’ said Mrs West. ‘You’re a lucky girl, Josie. What do you say?’
Josie looked up at Ruby with shining eyes. ‘Ta,’ she said.
At the prize-giving, special book prizes were given to May, as top senior girl, and Eric, as top senior boy. Bob was awarded the woodwork prize, and Lorna the prize for needlework. All the Grade Sevens who had sat for the Qualifying Certificate exam received their certificates, a handshake and a ‘Well done!’ from Mr Miller.
‘You’ll get your certificate next year,’ Ruby told Cynthia. ‘I know you will.’
‘Maybe,’ Cynthia said. ‘When we get to Mount Gambier I’ll have to find someone who’ll boss me around like you did.’ She gave Ruby a hug. ‘I’ll miss you.’
‘You could always write to me,’ said Ruby.
Cynthia grinned, and this time she didn’t cover her mouth as she usually did. ‘I just might.’
A Christmas tree decorated with coloured streamers and tinsel had been put up at the foot of the stage. Next to it, holding a bulging sack, stood Father Christmas in a false white beard. Ruby listened as the children’s names were called out, starting with the babies. One by one they went up to receive their presents – puzzles and board games, spinning tops and hairbrushes, bird whistles and bead bracelets. Every Grade Seven girl was given a box of embroidered handkerchiefs, and every Grade Seven boy was given a pocketknife.
Afterwards Ruby, May and Bee joined the rest of the family, and everyone had a rather warm cool drink and a rather melted ice-cream.
‘It’s hard to believe we’re leaving primary school,’ said May. ‘I’ll miss it so much.’
‘I’ll miss it too,’ Ruby said. She was silent for a moment, remembering something her form mistress, Miss Fraser, had said to her at the start of the year. There is no night so dark that the morning never comes. The sun will always rise. Always.
She licked up the last drop of ice-cream. ‘It’s been an awfully strange year, hasn’t it, May? Some of it was horrible and some of it was marvellous. But I know that from now on everything is going to be utterly, utterly perfect.’
My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a farmer in Somerset, England. In 1856 he emigrated to South Australia, making his home in a beautiful place called Eden Valley. One of his nine children was my grandfather. He was a farmer, too, and so was my father. My brother and I grew up on the family farm. Its paddocks and orchards, its gum trees and its winding creek were our playground.
I loved the little local school I went to for seven years, but when I was twelve I had to leave home to go to a different school. Unlike Ruby, who moves from the city to the country, I moved from the country to the city. I live in the city now, but I still think of Eden Valley as home.
I was born and grew up in Italy, a beautiful country to visit, but also a difficult country to live in for new generations.
In 2006, I packed up my suitcase and I left Italy with the man I love. We bet on Australia. I didn’t know much about Australia before coming – I was just looking for new opportunities, I guess.
And I liked it right from the beginning! Australian people are resourceful, open-minded and always with a smile on their faces. I think all Australians keep in their blood a bit of the pioneer heritage, regardless of their own birthplace.
Here I began a new life and now I’m doing what I always dreamed of: I illustrate stories. Here is the place where I’d like to live and to grow up my children, in a country that doesn’t fear the future.
In 1931 most medical conditions were treated at home with simple remedies: Vaseline for burns, aspirin (Aspro or Koo-Roo powders) for pain, iodine for cuts and grazes, Indian Root Pills ‘to cleanse the blood’, castor oil or syrup of figs for constipation, and hospital brandy for almost anything. Cod liver oil was the standard tonic for growing children.
There were no antibiotics. If you had tonsillitis, you gargled salty water and hoped you’d feel better soon. It was quite usual for children to have their infected tonsils surgically removed. (Doctors sometimes even took out healthy tonsils, just in case.) The antibiotic penicillin had been discovered in 1928, but it wasn’t much used until the late 1940s.
Schools were regularly hit by mass outbreaks of infectious diseases like chickenpox, measles, rubella and mumps. There was nothing to prevent these outbreaks, or the even more serious disease polio, although there had been limited vaccination against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus since the 1920s. A combined vaccination against these three potential killers wasn’t introduced until 1953.
There was no fluoride in the water or in toothpaste, and almost everybody had decayed teeth. You soothed a painful tooth with clove oil, or wrapped a hot brick in a towel and pressed it against your face. In country areas, particularly, many teenagers had false teeth. Girls were encouraged to have their teeth pulled out and replaced with shiny white dentures. This promised them a film-star smile, and as a bonus their future husbands would be saved from expensive dental bills.
Living on the Edge
During the Great Depression dozens of Adelaide’s unemployed and homeless men set up camp along the banks of the River Torrens, living in tents or in huts made from wood, bags, canvas and corrugated iron. This photo, which shows some of those riverbank homes partly submerged by floodwaters, is dated 3 September 1931.
Here’s a sneak peek at Meet Grace
IT must be the longest day this winter, Grace thought, and all I’ve found are a few bits of coal and a piece of rope.
Grace waded towards the riverbank, wiggling her toes into the mud, feeling for anything that had washed in with the tide or fallen from a boat or barge to put in her kettle. That was her job as a mudlark – to search the bottom of the Thames for things to sell. She shivered.
A dirty fog hung over the water, draping everything in grey. The other mudlarks looked like shadows as they waded through the river. Grace felt the water cold against her legs – the tide was on its way in and her dress floated around her like a tent. She knew that soon she would have to get out of the river, but her kettle was only half full.
‘Please let there be something more,’ she said to herself, her teeth chattering, ‘some copper nails or a piece of driftwood.’
Grace looked across the river at a forest of masts. It was the same view she saw every day. S
ails of every size billowed beneath the winter clouds. Barges filled with coal and iron held anchor, ready to be unloaded on the shore. Longboats cut slowly through the water carrying fruit and meat to distant parts of London, and busy workboats ferried people up and down the river.
Ouch! Grace gasped when she felt a sharp pain in the bottom of her foot. She bent down and searched around in the mud until she touched something that felt like metal – cold and smooth. She pulled it up. Grace wiped it clean with a corner of her dress and turned it over in her hand, unable to believe it was real. It was an iron hammer, with no rust on its head, and no chips in its sturdy wooden handle. It was the most valuable thing she had ever found – worth as much on the street as a silver watch, she was sure.
‘A hammer – a fine hammer,’ she whispered. ‘Uncle Ord will be so pleased.’
‘Oi! What you find?’ Someone shouted at Grace and she quickly dropped her hands beneath the water.
A figure waded towards her through the fog. It was Joe Bean. He was no older than Grace, but he was the leader of a gang of mudlarks that lived under Blackfriar’s Bridge. Grace had always been good at staying out of their way; she kept her head down so she wouldn’t be noticed, or she worked in the parts of the river where Joe and his boys didn’t often go. They were thieves, and they didn’t think twice about stealing from the barges and from the other mudlarks who worked on their own. If any of the mudlarks ever had money from things they’d sold, Joe Bean would try to take it from them. And Grace knew that if he saw the hammer, he would snatch it from her and take it straight to the marine shop to sell for himself.
‘I got nothing!’ Grace shouted back.
‘I saw something in your hand just then – something shiny. Give me a look what you got!’
Grace’s heart pounded; she couldn’t let Joe see her prize. With a hammer like this to sell, maybe Uncle Ord would be happy with her, instead of angry. He would be proud that she was clever enough to find something so valuable. They could keep the coal Grace had found and light a fire in the hearth – she imagined warming her numb toes and heating up a cinnamon bun on the end of a toasting fork. There’d be enough food for a week!
Grace waded into the shallows, but Joe Bean was close now. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Don’t make me call the boys to look you over.’
Grace shook her head, too nervous to speak. She held the hammer with one hand behind her back. She had never stood up to Joe Bean before, but then she had never found anything as precious as a hammer.
Joe moved towards her. ‘Show me!’
‘No.’ Grace’s voice quavered.
Joe grabbed her arm and tried to pull it from behind her back. Grace fell back into the river, dropping her kettle into the mud. Water splashed up around them as they struggled.
‘No!’ she shouted.
Joe Bean had his hand on the hammer. It was slipping from her grasp. Grace gritted her teeth and with all her strength, she wrenched it from him. Joe fell back into the water and Grace held the hammer high over him.
‘I said no, Joe Bean! The hammer is mine! You go away and leave me alone!’ Her voice trembled as Joe crawled like a crab through the mud, his eyes wide with surprise. The sharp iron claws on the hammer’s head glinted.
Grace picked up her kettle and ran, knocking straight into a group of sailors clambering out of a rowboat onto shore.
‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ one of them said. ‘A handful of rags like you?’ She could smell whiskey on his breath.
The other sailors laughed at her.
Grace picked herself up and pushed her way past. When she turned around, Joe Bean was lost in the crowd somewhere behind them. Grace hurried higher onto the shore where the crowd thickened, pushing past mudlarks and boatmen, coal whippers, and costermongers selling dried fish and oysters. She breathed a sigh of relief, shoving her way through groups of people waiting for workboats and others lining up to buy fresh fish from the colliers to sell at the market.
Grace gripped the hammer tight and headed home, slowly now and limping. Her foot stung against the cold cobblestones as she dodged the open drains of sewage and the piles of garbage that lined the narrow crowded streets. She stopped to inspect her wound. The cut wasn’t deep – only bloody.
Grace shivered. It was when she got out of the water that she most felt the cold. The wind cut straight through her. It doesn’t matter this time, though, she thought. I’m safe from Joe Bean and I still have my hammer.
In Chatham Square a line of fishmongers stood at a long scaling table. They ran their knives down the backs of freshly caught fish, cutting out the guts and tossing them to the ground, staining the cobblestones a purplish red. The smell of fish filled the air. The women sang as they worked, their arms moving in time to the rhythm of their song.
Grace stopped to listen. She liked singing, never mind who was doing it; sailors or fishmongers or butchers selling ham hocks, even her drunken uncle and his sailor friends. The only thing Uncle Ord had ever told her about her mother was that she liked to sing. I wish I could remember the songs, Grace often thought. I wish I could remember her voice.
Grace kept walking, humming the fish-mongers’ tune. She had never known her father, and her mother had died when she was very small. When Grace tried to remember her mother, she could recall the feeling of warm arms around her; but the memory wasn’t enough to keep her alive without a roof over her head in the long cold winters. Uncle Ord always reminded her of that. ‘You’re lucky to have me, Grace! You’d be on the street without your uncle to take care of things. You are an orphan after all!’ He said the word as though it were a curse word – the very worst thing you could be.
Uncle Ord had lost his wife and his only son to an illness called consumption, and he missed them a lot. He’d lost his sister too – Grace’s mother – and that was how he got stuck with Grace. She knew that every day, just by being alive, she reminded him that his son was not.
Grace climbed the steps that ran up by Blackfriar’s Bridge and crossed into Water Lane, hobbling to keep weight off her foot. Her wet skirt slapped against her legs, stinging her skin. The fog was in the streets too, hanging like low-slung spider webs. Crowds of people pushing carts ready for the night markets were coming down in the opposite direction.
Two of the girls who lived next door came running up behind Grace, giggling together. Grace pressed back against the stone wall as they shoved their noisy way past her. She wished she had a sister, or a friend to share things with. It never mattered how hungry they were, or how cold, the girls were always playing and laughing with each other.
Ma Honeywell, their mother, stopped when she saw Grace and gave her cheek a playful pinch. She had eleven children, most of them girls, though she could never find half of them.
‘Hello, luv,’ she said, smiling. ‘How was business today?’
Ma Honeywell always asked the same question, only today Grace could give her a different answer. ‘Good,’ she said, smiling back. ‘Very good! My uncle will be happy!’
‘That’d be a sight for sore eyes. You better get home, luv, and give him what you got!’ Ma Honeywell patted Grace’s arm, then turned and walked on. She was on her way to the alehouse, where she would drink so much gin that later she wouldn’t remember who Grace was at all.
Grace continued up the steps, imagining what it would be like when Uncle Ord saw the hammer. ‘Well done, Grace,’ he would say. She could almost feel the heat from the fire and taste the toasted cinnamon bun.
‘Uncle Ord!’ she called, as she pushed in the door of their lodgings.
Her uncle was sitting in his chair in front of the empty hearth with his sore leg up on the table.
Uncle Ord used to be a sailor until his leg was caught in a loop of rope that lifted him into the air and snapped his knee-bone. ‘I was hanging upside down like a side of ham in a butcher’s shop!’ he told Johnny Dugs, the rag shop man. Uncle Ord and Johnny Dugs laughed as if it were a joke, but Grace knew that it was not. Uncle Ord co
uldn’t be a sailor after that. He wasn’t good for anything, he said, but ‘selling the rubbish from the bottom of that stinking river.’
Grace tipped out the contents of her kettle. Wet coal tumbled across the table beside Uncle Ord’s leg. Without turning around to look at her, he growled, ‘Is that all?’
Grace carefully placed the hammer on the table beside the coal. Uncle Ord picked it up and swung around to her, his eyes hard.
‘Where’d you find this?’ he snarled. ‘You little thief!’
Grace jumped back. ‘I never stole it. I stood on it,’ she stammered.
She lifted her foot to show him the cut. But Uncle Ord didn’t look, he smacked his hand down onto the table, making Grace jump.
‘You bring the runners to this house and they put me in chains, I’ll kill you!’
‘I never stole it, Uncle!’ Grace protested, but she could tell he wasn’t listening. ‘I never stole nothing! It was Joe Bean tried to steal from me. There won’t be no runners coming for you.’
Uncle Ord stroked the sharp claws of the hammer with his tobacco-stained fingers.
‘They hanged a boy smaller than you down at the Newgate gallows yesterday. He stole a pair of boots worth a lot less than this here hammer. He was so small they had to weigh him down with stones so he’d drop right when he stepped off the platform.’
Grace shuddered. She had never wanted to see a hanging, but most people didn’t feel that way – they flocked to see an execution as if it were a circus show. Even her uncle’s stories frightened her.
‘Please, Uncle, I found the hammer in the river, I swear.’ Grace could feel her eyes welling with tears. She wiped them away; if Uncle Ord saw her cry he would curse her and say she was a useless girl.
Ruby of Kettle Farm Page 6