Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  Mr Schmidt looked up the programme to see when the French lessons were broadcast. I sat staring at the radio. The voice was speaking slowly, loudly, but I had no idea what it was saying. The other kids giggled at the alien sound of the voice, but naturally I didn’t, I was a scholar! And I was learning French! The truth of the matter is that as time went by I learnt to read and write the language a little, but to this day I can neither ‘hear’ nor speak it, this being the fault, I believe, of learning by eye and not at all by ear.

  Learning at an advanced stage by correspondence is not easy. The teacher helped me when he could, but his first consideration must be to his eight school curriculum grades, and sometimes weeks would pass and he’d not be able to spare time for me. The great benefit of doing the lessons in a schoolroom was the time-table and the enforced silence which one could not get in one’s own home. A drawback to the whole scheme was the mailing of work for corrections. This week’s work might not be returned until the week after next, by which time I’d be busy with a different problem and would have no interest in the work I’d done so long ago, not even to look at the corrections.

  Because of the drawbacks of this system of learning I was told that an extra year of study would be added onto my time before I could take the Leaving for matriculation. Correspondence education is not the best means of gaining knowledge, but when there is nothing else it is the very best.

  At home there was a quickening too: the courting of Kathleen-cum-Mick had begun. From being all gangly legs and uncontrolled arms and ungainly body she had become quite beautiful with a perfect figure. Even the long, tight, cotton ‘bodies’ that Mum encased us in could not conceal Mick’s curves. The boys of the town were quick to notice this.

  At the next Waaia Race Ball she wore her first evening gown, red velvet, plain with a square neckline. I couldn’t take my eyes from her, neither could half the men in the hall. Towards the end of the evening the son of our local MP approached Mum and said, ‘Mrs Smith, will you give me permission to walk Kathleen home?’

  Mum tried to rise to the occasion, but all she eventually thought of was, ‘You’ll have to ask her father.’

  Dad naturally said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. It’s up to her mother.’ The poor boy shuttled backwards and forwards between the pair of them. Eventually Mum agreed.

  No doubt the boy didn’t know it, but this permission meant merely that he could walk home with the bunch of us in the midst of whom was Kathleen-cum-Mick. I, the young sister, could not have been any inducement to romance either because I glued myself to the young couple in case I missed anything. This was my first experience of courting. I need not have been so anxious.

  The courting of Kathleen was on with a vengeance from that night onwards. Knowing of the hospitality of Mum and Dad, young bloods would stroll along ostensibly for a ‘yarn’ or a game of tennis. Some Sunday nights there were three suitors sitting side by side at the tea table or singing together round the piano.

  Not that Mick did much to encourage them. She had no pretensions. We could all get our Irish up in this household – all except sanguine Dad, that is – but when Mick cut loose she was a tornado. More dangerous even than her temper was her ability to rouse others.

  ‘She’ll die with her boots on,’ was Dad’s comment the day her brother Jack tried to hit her with a log of wood. It was Saturday. Jack was building me a shelter in which to keep my private things down the yard, using four red-gum sleepers for the corner posts. I coaxed him to come looking for mushrooms across the paddocks and while he was gone Mick cut through the sleepers. We heard the axe as we were coming home.

  ‘That’s my sleeper,’ Jack shouted immediately. He knew Mickie.

  By the time I reached home they had nearly exhausted themselves. Mick had seen him coming and had dropped the axe and run. He picked up the end of the sleeper and ran after her. Had he caught her he could have brained her with one blow of that mighty weapon, but our Mick was fleet. I walked past them into the house. I didn’t know what else to do. This apparent disregard steadied them, and soon Mick ran inside too and Jack satisfied himself by threatening her from the door: ‘If you so much as show your face!’

  The son of the MP arrived in full courting rig one night to find Jack hitting Mick’s head intently on the kitchen floor. She had taken his kerosene tin of bath water off the top of the stove and tipped it out.

  I was often driven quite strongly mad by her teasing. Mum and Dad were away on the Casey on a Saturday inspection trip and we were supposed to have the breakfast dishes done by their return.

  ‘You do the dishes, I want to read,’ Mick ordered me, hauling out her Peg’s Paper from its hiding place under the cushion on Mum’s chair.

  ‘I want to read,’ I complained. I had The Wind in the Willows.

  ‘You wash up or I’ll get rid of these.’ They were the gifts I’d prepared for Mum’s birthday the following day, a card I’d painted and a handkerchief sachet made from a piece of material from the scrap bag.

  I knew she meant what she said but I tried to bluff it out. I picked up my book. Mick leant over and carefully pushed the card under the hot soapy water in the wash-up dish, and as it disappeared the water coloured with paints as they ran. I hit out at her and as I watched it her little finger split in two its entire length and lay open. I still held the carving knife I had been washing when Mum left.

  We were both so surprised we did nothing for a bit, then I got bandages and bound the two pieces tightly together. I cuddled her and she was laughing and I was crying. When Mum returned we told her Mick had ‘nicked’ it on a knife as she washed up, so it wasn’t examined until the following day and by then it had begun to heal so well that it was left as it was and Mick to this day has a little finger with a ridge.

  Mum used to say that she couldn’t understand these rages against Mick . . . until the day Mick came in rubbing a lump on her head, and a bewildered Mum holding the tin dipper in her hand followed her.

  ‘I don’t know what made me do it,’ Mum said over and over again. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  The rest of the household knew just how she felt, except Dad, but then he was never put out by anything.

  Some of Mick’s suitors were a little more than bewildered by our goings on, but no concessions were made, they would see us as we were and Mick, too, because none of us knew how to be any different.

  Mick led all her suitors a merry dance. She teased them all as mercilessly as she had us until the boy I shall call Bob came along.

  Bob had been forced to leave high school when his parents could no longer afford to keep him there. He had worked his way from Numurkah up the shearing route to Queensland and by his twentieth birthday had worked his way back again.

  Dad was holding gymnasium practice for footballers in the big wheat shed, bringing to bear the training he had received during World War I in the Royal Australian Navy. Mum provided supper for the men, cooking two to three dozen meat pies and a kerosene tin full of coffee for them. One night Bob came down to help carry the coffee.

  ‘This is my daughter,’ Mum introduced Mick. Bob looked at her, beautiful, flushed from the heat of the cooking, her red-gold hair tied in a ribbon. She ignored him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bob. ‘A real country girl.’

  Kathleen-cum-Mick had met her match.

  DAD! DAD!

  This year summer came in with a blast like an open oven door. Swaggies limped by, sweat staining the backs of their shirts where the swag rubbed. Often before they came up to the house seeking hot water for their billies they would rest for a time under the shade of the big gum in our horse paddock where Sylvia and I had met the day we played swaggies. One said to my mother as she boiled water for his billy, ‘You can trace my footsteps from here to Cunnamulla, missus. There’s not been a breath of wind nor a drop of rain for twelve months to wipe them out.’ Birds came in wearily to rest in the drooping greenery of our pepper-corn trees. On Sundays when we must study our ca
techisms we would sit under those trees and the birds would nosey down to see what we were doing. Now they perched listlessly, their chattering only half the volume it was in the days of rain showers. The only breeze we got was an occasional willy-willy that swirled the red dust round covering everything and creeping in everywhere. That Christmas a small freak shower came out of the blue cloudless sky and disappeared within minutes leaving the sky blue and cloudless as before, and the only thing to prove to us that it had rained was Bob’s red shirt. He had been out walking with Mick when the shower surprised them and he had put his jacket over her head and they ran for home, he in his white shirt. By the time they got in the door his shirt was red as rust. We had seen this phenomenon before and called it ‘red rain’; it was caused by moisture falling through the thick blanket of red dust that was perpetually above our land.

  January continued hot. The stillness and heat were sombre. The rail men made inspection runs back along the line after each steam train passed to ensure that no errant spark could start a fire. The wheat was golden and tinder-dry. The grass on the side of the line was the same. The men were trying to burn it off, working mostly at night.

  For four days in succession the thermometer read 105 in the shade. On that fourth day Dad lay on the track with his broken face resting on the rail that now seared flesh, his poor shattered body exposed to this killing heat. Five hours passed before his unconscious body was found.

  He had been home late before, but this night he wasn’t ten minutes overdue when Mum began to fidget. ‘Go and see if your father’s trike’s in the shed,’ she said to me. No, there was no sign of him. ‘You might just look up the line and see if he’s coming.’ But he wasn’t coming. In a while, ‘Go and put your ear to the rail. See if you can hear anything.’ There was no sound or vibration in that blistering, mirage-washed heat. ‘He isn’t coming,’ I reported.

  Mum set our tea for us and left to walk a few miles of the track in case he had broken down. It was too late to phone Nathalia or Picola railway stations, in the direction from which he should be travelling home. The stations would be closed and the phones could not be heard from the houses. It was 8 p.m. when Mum came back, alone. We sensed the despair in her. ‘It’s nearly dark. He should be home.’ She sent us girls to the hotel to tell them there that Dad wasn’t home. ‘Then he’s in trouble,’ Dalton Beswick said. ‘I’ll get the truck cranked up. Get your mother and we’ll look for him.’

  His truck, the one on which the stolen wheat had supposedly been transported, was a 1924 model and Mick and I stood on the tray at the back, hanging onto the top of the cabin while Mum sat in front with Dalton. The road ran level with the rail track and he steered the truck with one hand and beamed a flashlight across on the rails with the other. Six miles further on the headlights of a car approached us. ‘That’s them,’ said Mum. ‘Who?’ ‘They’ve found him,’ she replied with certainty. ‘Pull up.’ She walked across to the other car as it came abreast of us, and the driver guessed who she would be. ‘Hop in, Mrs Smith,’ he said. Then he got out and came across to Dalton. ‘Take her kids home,’ he said. ‘He won’t go for an hour or so yet, so she mightn’t be home till morning.’

  ‘As bad as that?’ Dalton asked.

  ‘They’re putting the pieces of his trike into sugar-bags.’

  Dalton knew we heard. He sat us in the front of the truck with him. He did things on the way home in an attempt to make us forget what we had heard. He sang, whistled, drove fast, drove slow, silly things to keep our numbed thoughts from that solid iron and hardwood motor-trike that was now fragmented and bundled into sugar-bags. At the hotel he put us to bed and made lumpy cocoa. ‘You don’t want to worry,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to worry.’ But he was only seventeen and he was crying too, so he put the lamp out and left us.

  All the next day Mick and I had no word. I had never communicated easily, neither had she. Now we couldn’t ask if he were still alive and no one thought to tell us. I prayed and Mick prayed and when we finished our gentle pleading entreaties I continued savagely in silence: ‘If You kill him I’ll kill You.’

  DAD . . .

  He was still alive four days later. They said he must die this night. Mick and I were taken to see him late in the hot silent afternoon. Nathalia had opened a Bush Nursing Hospital to take him in and provided a nursing sister. There, in the dimness of the blind-drawn room, he lay on the tarpaulin on which he’d been carried from the track. The wise bush nurse knew that to move him further would be to precipitate the death that was merely biding its time. Some of his clothes she had cut from him, others had become embedded in his torn flesh, cemented there by dried blood. He was black from the blood and sunburn. Our mother was sitting beside his bed: in that way we recognised him. One eye was closed, the other had disappeared and the gaping socket showed. There was a clean white sheet over him, but thick woollen blankets above that to counter the shivers of shock. I stared, trying to see the father who had called me Jeanie-weanie-cat’s-eyes and Paddy-the-next-best-thing. As I looked he moaned like an animal with his mouth only half open and rolled his blackened head. I cried out and ran from the room. Mick had kissed him. I wished I had.

  Old Nip was sitting on the verandah of the hospital. He had been with Dad at the time of the accident. When the men found Dad, Nip was standing guard keeping the crows from him, snapping and leaping at them as they came for flesh. One side of Dad’s face was lying on the rail, but the other side was exposed and this was clear of dirt and ants where Nip had been licking him in distress. The old dog had never bitten anyone in his life. Now he turned into a mad thing and like a wolf tried to savage the men when they lifted Dad onto the tarpaulin. It was impossible to remove the body with the dog raving as he was. One of the gang had to knock him out with a piece of the shattered trike and he was carried into Nathalia beside Dad. They took him to Waaia, but he found his way back to the hospital and sat whining outside and scratching on the door. He refused to eat. The fettlers tried to coax him away, but he wouldn’t budge. He was howling badly at night and the nursing sister was afraid that it distressed Mum as she sat waiting. This afternoon as we watched, the ganger came and threw a bag over him and carried him away as gently as if he were a child.

  ‘I’ll look after him for your Dad,’ he told us.

  Then the Catholic church bell began to ring. It was calling people to prayers for Dad as it did each evening. There was something terribly heart-hurting to hear that tinny little bell tinkling for Dad.

  As we waited to be taken back to Waaia the fettlers trooped up as they did daily to ask after him and bring a piece of ice. Ice was normally carried during the hot months by the ‘Beetle’ in the top of the canvas water bag strapped to the outside of the ugly little train. Now all that was left of it when they got to Nathalia was quickly wrapped in wet hessian by the guard and handed to the fettlers, who ran it up to the hospital.

  When his swollen tongue recovered he began to speak, rambling in the delirium of unconsciousness.

  ‘Creek water,’ he begged, and Mum rubbed pieces of the ice around his black lips and trickled iced milk down his throat. A bed had been moved to his room for Mum.

  One night he became wild and began to move in the bed. Mum, afraid he would harm his broken body, called the sister to come. The doctor came too. By then he was speaking, rambling they thought at first, but then as they understood what he was saying they stared in amazement. The doctor and nurse sat beside Mum on her bed and listened to him.

  Amid the thunder in his head he could hear the guns of Jutland as the great naval battle began. Then the noise abated and he was a young boy again going to sea for the first time, lonely, afraid. As the listeners stared at him he sailed through the oceans of the world, anchored off Rabaul and went ashore when war was declared, captured the German radio station and took prisoner-of-war all the personnel.

  ‘The captain said when we came back on board that we weren’t Jack-tars. He said we were Jacks-of-all-trades,’ he laughed, re
living his youth as he lay there blinded, done for.

  ‘There was one of our submarines came into Rabaul. We had only two – the AE1 and the AE2. I wanted to go on the AE1. My mate went on it. I got a fever and was put in our sick bay.’ His voice faltered. ‘Goodbye, AE1,’ he said, and great tears welled from his eye that hadn’t been lubricated for weeks.

  ‘Poor Jack. The winding sheet of steel.’ AE1 had sailed from the harbour and was never heard of again.

  ‘I wrote a poem about AE1,’ he said. (Mum found it later, carefully hidden among his private papers.)

  Then he sailed to the Panama Canal. ‘They were neutral. They wouldn’t let us through. We headed south. We went through the Straits of Magellan. There wasn’t much room. The charts weren’t much good. No ship as big as us had been there before. It was dark beneath the cliffs. That’s where Magellan’s men became afraid.’

  The three listeners heard of the war at sea, heard of his ship being out of sight of land for eighteen months, refuelling and revictualling at sea.

  ‘I had my seventeenth birthday and my eighteenth and didn’t see land in between,’ the broken man on the bed said.

  Then, ‘I was in hospital for a long time in London. When I began to walk round a Lord Someone asked would three Australian sailors like to be his guests for the evening. I went and two others. He took us to dinner first. I hadn’t tasted strong drink before and that night we had champagne. Then we went up into a balcony box in the theatre. His wife was with us but she was old. We leant over the edge of the box and saw some young girls sitting down below. One smiled at me so I climbed over the side and slid down a pillar and sat on her knee.’

  Later he fell in love with a famous singer and she with him.

  ‘I’ve got things she gave me at home,’ he said. (We found these too. Among them was a wallet with a notebook in which she had written the words of the song she had helped to make famous: ‘Dearest, the day is over, ended the dream divine, you must go back to your life, I must go back to mine.’ In a pocket of the wallet was a note from her begging to be allowed to join him in Australia.)