Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  Back at home Mick and I were enjoying every moment. A Tiger Moth plane had flown over, quite low! We had seen a photographer lean out! We were in the news!

  The land at the back of our house fell away so sharply that our back yard was actually sixteen feet lower than our rose garden. When the floods came, Mum opened the gates and let our animals in. We had six cows and now they climbed up and made themselves at home near our wash-house. Each time we went to the lavatory we had to move a milking cow out of the way. The poultry came up here too; roosters, hens, chickens and ducks perched in the shrubs and on the rose bushes. The Victorian Railways gave an annual award for the best garden at a fettler’s home and this rose garden had won the prize two years running. Now it looked indescribably funny with poor bedraggled hens skulking among the buds and roosters with their wet tail feathers dangling in the Cecil Brunner archway.

  Without a break for a rest when the danger had passed the gang must get the line ready for trains to resume. Mrs Yates, the station-mistress from Caldermeade, and her husband came down on their trike and we set off with ours to survey the damage. We got as far as the bridge I had fallen over. It was too dangerous to take the pull-trikes further than that on the swinging rails, so I stayed there with my gammy leg and the others walked on, the men prodding with long sticks and noting rails twisted and bent.

  There was a hillock near me which was all that was left of a canal bank, and it was moving with living things. Snakes, lizards and rabbits were there, all cheek by jowl, their ancient feuds forgotten in their common fear. Then I screamed. A snake was swimmng directly for the line, its head cocked up like a periscope. Old Nip came bounding back to me, jumping from sleeper to sleeper, leant out over the water and neatly bit its head off. The snake threshed for a moment then sank beneath the muddy waste. Nip began to look for more amusement of a similar kind and scampered round barking happily as he peered into the water where eddies and floating sticks deceived him. The Yateses had a dog, a small thing, a ‘snivelling lap dog’ as Dad would have called it had it belonged to anyone other than a friend. This fool dog became excited at Nip’s barking and fell into the water and disappeared immediately.

  I called for the adults and they formed a chain with Dad out at the extreme end, shoulder deep in the moving water. He leant down to where the wire fence should be and caught hold of the little dog and dragged it free. Almost as soon as it hit the air it was sick and began its infernal yapping again.

  A lavatory sailed by on its back, the door hanging off its hinges as it circled ponderously in the current.

  ‘Look at the dike,’ Dad called. We laughed. After it floated a small box like a miniature of the privy.

  ‘It’s a toy,’ I told Dad. ‘I know!’ Dad waded out after it – after all, he could get no wetter than he was – and brought it in. It was a toy sewing machine and he oiled and cleaned it for me and it went for years.

  I was spoilt. I had everything. Mick had everything she wanted too, but she was not conceited. I was because I considered I had more than she had, and what is more that I was entitled to more because I had Mum and Dad. Although no one ever mentioned it and she and I were treated the same as one another, I thought of it often. They were mine. I thought poor, poor Mickie.

  Of course she did have brothers. Jack and Bob came to visit us at Monomeith. Jack was in an orphanage. He had been in one orphanage or another since his father died all those years ago. He had no conception of life as lived by people in ordinary homes, nor did he know anything of worldly things. He told us, with the cruelty of youth, of the hardships of the orphanage where a handful of nuns cared for 150 abandoned children.

  ‘Those nuns are mean. When they take us to town they only give us threepence each to spend.’

  Mum wondered aloud how much scraping the nuns had to do to give that treat to all those children in those times.

  Bob was better off. He also was in an orphanage, but during the school holiday periods he could earn his keep on the farm of the people who owned the property where his father had pitched his tent before the family broke up. Thus Bob had a base. Though the boys and Mickie hadn’t been together since they were infants they fell into the warp and weft of each other’s lives. Bob was friendly to me, Jack loved me, but Mick was their sister.

  ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ Mum consoled me. Yes, I thought then, that is how it should be. How few years were to pass before I knew how false that old wives’ tale was. How few years before Mum was to repeat that remark so fearfully.

  As Christmas neared I alone waited for Santa Claus. The others were too old for such things, they said. I, too, was too old, but I was reluctant to give up this last link with the world of make-believe, and the rest of the family encouraged me to hang up my stocking for the last time.

  One night from my bed I heard Paddy Einsedel talking to Mum and Dad in the lounge while they played cards. Old Paddy was saying what a good rider I was.

  ‘I’ve got a nice little horse that would suit her ladyship,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it to you for her Santa Claus.’

  I rolled over. I had heard enough. A horse of my own! When Christmas morning dawned I followed the string tied to the head of my bed. Everyone tagged along behind me: Dad, Mum, Mick and her two brothers. Round the house the string went and round the house we pursued it, through the rose garden, over the buddleia bush and then out the back gate where it ended . . . tied to the handle-bars of a shiny new bicycle. They all waited for my cry of joy. I untied the string, turned the bike to face downhill, gave it a push and ran inside the house. My horse, my lovely, moving, shining, living, striding horse. I wouldn’t cry, I wouldn’t let them see me cry. Never would they see me cry. I waited an hour, but no one came.

  God, then I did cry. Mum and Dad were hard pressed for money. They’d helped too many people, pay was £4 a week. Mick and I were the best fed and the best dressed at every school we went to. Where had they got the money for it? I knew how they were struggling to keep payments up on the piano. The bike must have been purchased the same way. For me. And then – Oh God, I wanted to go to them, but I couldn’t. The weight on my heart was hurting me. The pain would ease if I went to them. If our arms were round one another it would go. They knew me and loved me and would forgive me. But I couldn’t go; I didn’t go.

  Mick came in to get ready for church. She said she hated me.

  ‘I don’t bloody well care,’ I said. She hit me hard for that, across the head.

  I felt better. ‘Bloody, hell, damn.’

  Jack crept in. He’d brought the bike back. ‘There’s not a mark on it. Come and I’ll teach you to ride.’

  ‘Can you ride?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, but I’ll learn. I’ll get a bike when I get a job. Yes, I’ll get a job and I’ll live here and you and I will ride into Kooweerup to the pictures.’ And so it happened that Mum was mother to one more.

  ‘Come and look at us!’ Jack would yell to Mum and Dad, knowing it was what I wanted to yell. Then we’d show off, he and I. One-leg riding, no-leg riding with both feet on the handle-bars, duo riding with arms round each other’s shoulders; then we’d ride hell for leather to within a yard of my parents and spring off backwards from the seat bringing the bike to a standstill. Hey! And I wouldn’t look at Mum’s eyes because I knew that they’d tell me that she had forgiven me.

  I was at the ‘awkward age’, an aptly named period of clumsy manoeuvres more of the mind than the body, an urgent awareness of the world and everything in it coupled with an inability to articulate. Paddy Einsedel the horse-breeder was one of the few people who could approach a child at that age as an equal, on a level of comprehension. One Saturday I watched him leaving for the races at Caulfield. I had saved two shillings to spend on our annual holiday.

  ‘Give it to me and I’ll win you a ten bob note,’ he suggested. I handed it over immediately and that night when he got off the train he handed me a ten shilling note and my own two shillings back. Waltzing Lily had come home at five to
one.

  Paddy named his horses after people who worked for him. His best filly, Waltzing Lily, was named after Lily Walters, his housemaid. One night the housekeeper had caught Lily creeping in late from a dance and in the morning hauled her in front of Paddy.

  ‘What were you doing to that hour?’ he asked.

  ‘Waltzing,’ answered the girl.

  ‘Waltzing,’ the old man said with a reminiscent smile. ‘Waltzing Lily.’ When the next filly was born its name was registered as just that. Bicycle Nelly was named after Lily’s sister, who used to ride home to Nar Nar Goon each weekend; Black Alec, the great colt, after Alec the chauffeur, who appeared one day covered in grease.

  There was little in the way of entertainment at this place, certainly none of the social life Waaia had. Because of this I looked forward to Anzac Day when, as the teacher at school had told us, there would be some kind of celebration. We could, if we were permitted, wear our fathers’ ribbons and war medals. The engine-driver nodded his head in approval that morning as I crossed the platform to the guard’s van with the medals clanking on their long, vivid ribbons across my breast.

  We were taken by truck from the school to the Lang Lang hall for a combined school service.

  This was the type of dramatic group I liked. We sang the Recessional and said the Lord’s Prayer. A town councillor made a long speech about what we owed to the soldiers who lay in Flanders fields, but we noticed he didn’t have any medals, and then another man told us about men going to fight for God, King and country and he didn’t have any medals either.

  There was another man sitting on the platform with the officials, but they didn’t ask him to speak so he pushed forward and spoke without being asked. He didn’t have any medals. He didn’t need any to show that he had been there. He had a hook where his hand used to be. He told us about the morning they leapt into the water before the dawn came up and waded in holding their rifles above their heads. He was nervous when he began, but as we sat quietly listening, wading, falling, struggling, seeing men die with him on that grey, explosive, violent morning, he gained poise.

  He hadn’t liked what the previous speakers had said about men fighting for God, King and country.

  ‘I didn’t think of God, King and country when I enlisted,’ he said. ‘I was seventeen years old. Any boy who can hear a military band and not fall in behind it might live a long time but he won’t have much fun.’

  He spoke simply, with no heroics, and used the great Australian adjective whenever he became distressed. He made that nation-crowning day leap out of the past and claim us. That day I looked for a second on Gallipoli, and patriotism stirred in me for the first time. I felt the reputation haloed about us that the deaths of these men and the buoyancy of their spirit had earned, a reputation that every Australian from that day on has been born with as his inheritance. Tears coursed down my cheeks as they have often coursed since that day, tears not of sorrow but of pride.

  At home Mum thrashed me and made me promise to confess my sin to the priest. I had been to a Protestant ceremony. I was a devout Catholic. The only literature I’d been permitted since I’d learnt to read was the catechism. I knew it by heart. Now I rebelled. I told the priest what I had done, but I added that had I known what the ceremony was I would still have gone.

  HOMETOWN

  Then we were on the wallaby again. Mum and Dad pored over the Gazette every time it arrived and laconically discussed the vacancies. Then one issue had the place we were all looking for: Waaia station was ‘up’ again.

  Waaia welcomed us back with sunshine and many friends waiting on the platform for our train to arrive.

  Dad said to the gang assembled to meet him, ‘Well, I’m back.’

  ‘About time,’ they said to him.

  There was a thin, nasty woman schoolteacher now, but even she couldn’t spoil that school. Ted Jorgenson and Alan Thornton were ready for me.

  ‘Are you as stupid as ever?’ they wanted to know. We were all in grade seven now.

  There was a mice plague in the district; we had never experienced one before. In a brief silence during our first meal we heard a whispering, as though the wind were stirring through the wheat crops. We went outside and listened. There was no wind. We walked out to the crop beyond our gate. There, running through the dry, golden stalks was a movement of brown as a million mice ran in battalions. It was awesome. We went back inside the house, afraid of what might meet us there. As it turned out we were little troubled by comparison with others. Our house was built behind the station platform, and the mice not being able to climb this hillock ran round it from their breeding places in the wheat stacks and converged well behind our house in the crops. We set traps, single, double and multiple types with four, six and even eight holes round the circular trap, and when the plague had ended we had only caught a hundred or so. The station also missed out, only a few documents in a seldom-used cupboard being eaten.

  Some people got a real going-over. The Marvels in particular.

  ‘We can’t complain,’ we raced home and told Mum after our first visit to the Marvels on our return. ‘Mice chew the hard parts off the feet of the Marvels while they sleep.’

  It was true. They showed us their feet, under the ball and heel particularly where hard calluses had grown because of going without shoes and never washing. The mice had nibbled deep until they bit raw flesh and wakened the sleepers.

  ‘I fixed them,’ big ‘Bull’ Marvel told us. ‘I set a trap.’

  This trap consisted of a kerosene tin a quarter full of water. On the top edge of this balanced a stick with a piece of cheese on the end of it, and when the mice ran out to the cheese the stick fell into the water taking the mice with it.

  ‘Some mornings the tin is half full,’ Bull told us with pride.

  Over at the wheat stacks the damage was enormous. A mouse had only to nibble a hole in one bag to bring a whole stack down. What used to be a skyline of symmetrical blocks was now a drunken wave of collapsed stacks. Fires were smouldering all day beside the stacks burning the torn bags and dead mice.

  Nip and Whacko had a great time and never tired of pouncing playfully on the tiny creatures, but our cat after a few days of gluttony rarely bothered to cross the line.

  One Saturday Kevin and I made two shillings each. A wheat-buyer offered us this amount for a kerosene tin full of mice. Using a rubber-ended fly-swat we raced round thwacking the teeming things near a badly drilled wheat stack. It took a hard thwack to stun them, but once in the tin they couldn’t escape. When our tins were a quarter full we covered the mice with water and later tipped the lot into the middle of the fire. We tore round squealing and yelling and slipping over the wheat that lay in sour yellow piles where it had spilled from the bags. Instead of the clean, ripe smell of the fields it was now musty and sickening.

  For hours we danced about whacking without mercy. The only time we’d desist was when we came on a nest, and then we’d wait, sitting down to watch, while the frantic mother carried each of the naked, blind babies away to another dark hiding place.

  Mum complained that night that she could even smell mice at the table. It was little wonder. I had picked up many hundreds by the tail that afternoon. I felt sated, just like our cat.

  Louey Marsh, the new schoolteacher, couldn’t abide me; the feeling was mutual.

  I handed her an envelope Mum had given me containing my birth certificate on the first day I returned to the school.

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Patricia Jean Smith,’ I replied. ‘I am usually called Jean.’

  ‘Smith?’ she said, ‘Smith?’ looking down at the birth certificate in her hand. I had never seen this, it was always sealed by Mum before she handed it to me.

  ‘Smith?’ she asked again.

  A fear grabbed me and my heart shook. ‘Smith is my name, isn’t it?’ I appealed to the kids, who of course remembered me.

  ‘Yes,’ they chorused. ‘That’s her name.’

>   I was still standing in front of the teacher’s desk; she had not allotted me a place.

  ‘So this is the clever little girl?’ said this strange woman, attacking again. I was very frightened, but I stared straight back at her and said, ‘Yes.’

  She was extremely angry about that, and fear of her and rage at her battled within me. Goodness knows what she had been told about me.

  I had never met a teacher like this one. At Caldermeade we’d had a man who would chase the boys up and down the aisles between the desks lashing at them with a strap of leather as they ran. This woman was coldly, surely insanely, cruel. Not for her the temper of heat.

  I wrote a note on my slate later to Ted Jorgenson.

  ‘Is she always mad?’

  ‘Yes,’ he wrote back. ‘She takes a fit and hates a person. She hates anyone clever like Dorothy Fowler.’

  In a matter of hours I saw clear evidence of this when she went directly to the frail child and hit her across chilblain-covered legs. This girl had the worst chilblains I ever saw, and I saw plenty because many children seemed to suffer with them in those days. Mostly they occurred on the hands only, but Dorothy had them on her legs, and her poor feet were so swollen with them that they wouldn’t fit into shoes. To protect the broken sores her mother bound her feet into an old pair of felt slippers that had belonged to an adult.

  When the teacher hit her Dorothy just stood and stared, petrified. Big tears rolled silently down her cheeks.

  ‘Put out your hands,’ the teacher said.

  Instead of putting them out the girl lifted them dully in front of her eyes, the hands covered with fingerless mittens, the fingers sticking out of the ends like blue sausages, marbled, repulsive. Perhaps, as sometimes happens with bad chilblains, the pain was so intense that they were numb and dead.

  ‘Put out your hands,’ the woman said again. We were all watching, silent. Suddenly, quietly, Ted Jorgenson stood up.

  ‘I’ll take them,’ he said.

  It was the time-honoured rule that if an older child offered to take the cuts for a younger the offer must be accepted. Miss Marsh gave Ted ten of the best for his chivalry.