It amused us in later years to hear Mum describe this night. She spoke of Dad’s description of sea battles and experiences as ‘accurate to the last detail’, but dismissed his escapades on shore as ‘ramblings’.
Five weeks after he was carried in Dad opened his one remaining eye and said, ‘Hello, Birdie. How long have I been here?’ For answer she laid her head beside his and thanked God over and over again.
All the while he had been unconscious little had been done to mend his broken body. At first they waited for him to die. Then it was all they could do to keep him alive. Now the Railways Department at their own expense sent up a Melbourne specialist. This man examined him and thought it might be worth an attempt to get him to Melbourne for a series of operations.
‘But I can promise nothing, Mrs Smith. If he lives he may be insane. He has received more than the limit of injuries the human body can take. By all medical law he should not be alive.’
We never found the cause of the accident. All we knew was that he had been coming home early in the afternoon to have a rest before going back in the cool of the evening to burn off dry grass. He had only travelled five miles from the gang. The fettlers believed that an elderly woman who lived beside the track had put her cows on the line to graze and that Dad had hit one. They examined the cows, but none were marked. There was no sign of any other living thing on the line.
Dad admitted to a liking for speed. He once set his inspection motor in a race against Fred Jorgenson’s T Model Ford for nine miles and beat him home. But had the accident been caused by speed then, by the fettlers’ reckoning and the later inquiry, the trike would not have been much damaged. It would merely have jumped the line. His trike was shattered to small pieces, and he was shattered too, yet his dog was unmarked. It has remained a mystery.
As soon as Dad could be moved a guard’s van was shunted into the siding; the fettlers carried him in on a stretcher, secured it firmly and set up a chair for Mum. These big, strong, brown men looked down at the ravaged face and said, ‘You’ll be right as rain, Albert. They’ll have you back in no time.’ ‘It’s an old dog for a hard road, you know.’
The engine-driver looked in and said, ‘We’ll take it easy, mate, you’ll be right.’ Then the steam whistle blew on the engine and the train began to jolt slowly forward. There is a corny, melodramatic old song that reminds me of that journey. It begins, ‘As the train rolled onwards, a mother sat in tears, dreaming of the happiness of all the bygone years . . .’ Disc jockeys ride it with their wisecracks today, but it can send my thoughts to love, gentleness, hope and trust as quickly as can Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. The pioneers of the American backwoods had troubles, hopes and fears like those of the pioneers of the Australian bush, and this accounts to a great degree for the adoption by us of much of their folk music.
Dad stayed in hospital in Melbourne for six months and came home walking, sane and with two sighted eyes. His absent eye was discovered undamaged beneath his cheek bone. To us he looked wonderful. Like the lovers in the enchanted cottage who could not see one another’s defects we were so happy to be together again that we didn’t notice any change in his looks.
KINDNESS AND COURAGE
There was change we did notice. Dad couldn’t work. The Railways Department allowed Mum to stay on as station-mistress. Her wage was fifteen shillings a week with the house rent-free. She tried to keep out of debt. The piano was still being paid off.
‘Let it go,’ the relatives urged her. ‘Why put yourself in debt for her?’ That was me.
‘We’ll manage,’ Mum said.
She received plenty of advice, but not much of the only help that was any good at the time – £ s d.
There was an auction sale at Marvels’ place one day and she sent me over with some things she packed up. We were desperately in need of money then. Dad needed to have food that cost much; there was no cheap way to feed such a sick man. Mum thought she would get about thirty shillings for the box of goods at the sale. When I returned to the auctioneer that night he handed me 1s 9d. The walk home to Mum was long.
It seemed ironical that those who gave practical help never gave a word of advice along with it.
That Christmas, though things were thin, Mum never let us know about it. The puddings were cooked and threepences and sixpences put in them, poultry was killed and cooked and enough cakes were baked to fill a cream can. The bath was the storage place for two dozen bottles of home-made ginger beer, and the Coolgardie safe had jellies and custards setting within. Mrs Beswick from the hotel regularly brought tempting dishes for Dad, most of which he was unable to eat, so we had these stored away too. The strangest gifts came from the most unexpected people.
A few days before Christmas an old Indian hawker who used to camp in our paddock arrived.
‘Your man still bad?’ he asked Mum. She nodded to the distance, where Dad wandered painfully alone.
‘You give me five bob for a good cardigan to keep him warm,’ he said, unable to resist making some sort of sale but ready to lose heavily on the deal. It was a beautiful cardigan, thick and warm and worth twenty-five shillings in the shops.
The Chinese market gardener with the old horse nodding in front of his cart came the same as usual.
‘Melly Clissmus, missus,’ he beamed, handing Mum the traditional jar of ginger in syrup. Then he turned to us girls. ‘Melly Clissmus, missee,’ he wished each of us, and pushed a large parcel into our arms.
‘Hopee Mister Smith better soon. Tell him melly Clissmus too.’ And smiling from ear to ear he drove off.
‘But I want vegetables,’ Mum called.
‘Melly Clissmus,’ he carolled back, his round, yellow face poked out the side of the moving wagon.
Our vegetables were in the parcel he had given Mick, and there was fruit in the parcel I held. There was everything we could have wished for: lettuces, new carrots, new potatoes, spring onions, parsley, mint, green peas, marrow, asparagus and tomatoes, apples, bananas and a big red watermelon.
‘Holy Father in heaven bless that little yellow man,’ Mum prayed that night, and we all said, ‘Amen’, and Dad who didn’t pray said, ‘Too right!’
For some time now we had had no visits from the swagmen. They gave our place a wide berth. On Christmas Eve a man went by just before sundown, heading for the wheat shed, his back bowed in the heat beneath his bluey. Dad saw him and went in to confer with Mum.
‘Take this to him and tell him to have a Christmas drink to wash the dust down,’ Dad said to me and sent me off. I went up the line after the swaggie and called out. I told him what Dad had said. He flipped the two shilling piece in the air reflectively.
‘It wouldn’t be half bad,’ he said. Then, ‘How is your dad, girlie? Any better?’ I told him yes, that he might be able to work soon.
‘Then I’ll have a drink and like it all the better because it came from Albert Smith,’ he said. I nearly burst with pride. As I scampered off home he called, ‘And tell your Mum God bless her too.’ I’d never heard such talk outside my own home!
‘Well,’ said Dad when I told him the swagmen knew he had been ill. ‘Can you beat that? Word must have gone up the track.’
THE CONVENTUAL LIFE
I had not been confirmed in the Church and as I was twelve years old the time was ripe for this ‘giving of the Holy Ghost’. This ceremony was so important and we were so far from religious instruction that it was decided I should be cared for at the convent in Numurkah and attend classes there. This came to be one of the happiest periods of my life.
The convent at Numurkah was not a boarding school but merely a large house wherein lived the nuns who taught at the day school there. I had a wonderful time with them and I think they had the same with me.
Mum and Mickie drove off home and left me alone in the little bare room that was to be mine until the day of confirmation. A narrow bed, single, the first I had ever slept in, a wardrobe of my own, a window of ripple glass and a bare board floor. A
s I stood contemplating the isolation, the wonder and terror of having a room of my own, there came a knock on my door. No one had ever knocked on my door before. An elderly nun came in.
‘We thought perhaps you’d like to be alone to unpack,’ she said, a little nervously perhaps. I wondered if they were as unsure of me as I was of them. What to do with a little girl in their spare bedroom was exercising their thoughts already.
‘You don’t want to unpack?’
‘Not much.’ I didn’t know what to do with unpacking. On our annual holiday trips we always left our clothes in our suitcases. Besides, Mum was diffident about the clothes I had. She had knitted me a dress of heavy silk, there was another dress she had made me from a wine-coloured coat she had been given, and a cotton dress. I had black stockings, the black boots that I wore to strengthen my ankles and which were still ‘wearing out’, two nightdresses (one new), two pairs of fleecy-lined pants, and singlets. And of course a hat with a big brim to keep the sun off my face. I had never been without a hat in my life.
The nuns were filing down the corridor to their chapel for prayers.
‘Take a book out into the sun,’ the Mother Superior said. ‘Roll your stockings down. Have a sun-bake.’ I could scarcely believe my ears. Read? Sun-bake? I thought it would be prayers non-stop. I’d never lain in the sun. My Irish colouring that Mum was so proud of would be ruined. I dragged a chair to the middle of the lawn, forgot to wear my broad-brimmed hat, rolled my stockings down, reached out and took the book nearest in the pile the nuns had left out for me, and abandoned myself.
Two weeks later when my mother came to fit me with the white silk dress she was making for the ceremony she took one look at me and shrieked.
‘You look like an Indian!’
She was furious. ‘How can you wear white with a face as black as that!’ I had resurrected the black stockings when I knew she was coming, so she was spared the sight of my ‘black’ legs. And as she couldn’t see inside me she didn’t know that I was as ‘black’ inside as out. I had eaten, devoured, chewed up, swallowed and digested three books: Daddy Long Legs, These Old Shades and Myself When Young. And more was in store; the nuns had borrowed a whole stock of books for me from their students. Far from having to hide books, here they were thrust on me. I read every spare minute and I had plenty.
‘A most intelligent little girl,’ the nuns told the priest when he called to see how I was getting along. ‘Reads all day.’ Rarely can starvation have been mistaken for intelligence as it was here.
The ordered days were a delight. At 6 a.m. a nun would come into my room and touch my cheek, begin a prayer and leave the room when my sleepy voice took over from her. The nuns filed down the corridor to their chapel for prayers, smiling at me as they passed. Out in a vestibule on a tray a glass of warm milk awaited me before a radiator, my book lay on the table ready for me to read until breakfast was served.
I had long curls still and there was much fussing about them. I was too busy with my reading to take much notice, but one day I took a look in the hand mirror in the bathroom and was surprised at the smart hair-do I’d been given. This hand mirror surprised me too. Like most people outside a convent I had the dimmest ideas of conventual life. Certainly the nuns didn’t primp and just as certainly they were the neatest women alive and needed a mirror occasionally to see to this neatness. They used sweet-scented toilet soap, and talc powder, and one nun there who taught piano used a skin perfume that was delicious as you sat beside her playing. They were ultra-feminine or, more exactly, completely feminine: all the masculinity a woman is born with had been dissolved. Their every movement, gesture and word was womanly, graceful, gentle, not only in the impression gained by the eye and ear but in the aura that surrounded them.
Yet they weren’t precious. One night I heard a loud squealing noise. I leapt out of bed. Another scream. I ran out in my nightie. There on the enclosed verandah four nuns were playing table tennis with an outfit they had been given that day. They played with gusto; one was very good and had played before, the rest were having a great time in a hit and giggle sort of way. Another time one was playing tennis with me. I ran up, pretending to jump the net and ducked under it at the last minute. She ran up, hitched up her skirt and sailed clear over the top.
In the daytime they wore the habit one usually sees them in. For bed they wore a long white shift and a white cap frilled all round the edge. The young ones looked nice in this. The older women looked like little gnomes with wisps of grey hair fluttering out from under their caps. I’d thought their heads were shaven and was very surprised to find some of them had quite long hair. I blundered into the bathroom one Saturday and found one nun cutting another’s hair that was down past her ears and as black as mine in colour. She just hacked away happily until it was shorter and said, ‘How’s that?’ The other sister felt it with her hands and said, ‘That feels fine, thank you, sister,’ and replaced the several layers of cloth on which to pin the outer veil.
Their life was ordered from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. There was no fear of insecurity of body or soul for them. No lonely old age ahead or the worry of finding and keeping employment. Most of all, they knew where they were going just as surely as most of us do not know. I loved them then, I envy them now.
At last confirmation day was upon me. The night before I’d had a bath, washed my hair and gone into the chapel to pray and had put on the light and startled out of their wits the six nuns who were praying there in the dark. Hot with embarrassment I knelt there, not knowing whether to turn off the light or leave it on. Old Mother Superior solved that by coming to me and putting her arm round my shoulders.
‘You’ll get your death of cold in here after a hot bath,’ she said. ‘Come and I’ll tuck you into your bed.’
‘But I haven’t said my rosary.’
‘Say it in bed then.’
Mum would never believe me if I told her that!
Dad was to be confirmed this day too. Since his recovery he had learnt of the prayer and help of Catholics towards his recovery. He knew Mum prayed for his conversion. So this day Archbishop Mannix was to tap both of us on the cheek to remind us of the blows we must take for Christ and the strength we would need to follow Him.
How Mum must have scraped and done without herself to do this for me . . . a white silk dress, white stockings and black patent leather shoes with big silver buckles, white tulle veil and coronet of flowers. When the sponsor stood behind me, her hand on my shoulder, I was asked the name of the patron saint I had chosen. Because I’d been away from home no one had remembered to prepare me for this.
‘Bridget,’ I said, without hesitation, my mother’s real name. Dad chose James, the name of his father, James Adam Smith.
To save him from appearing with us children, Dad was confirmed when the congregation had left the church. The Archbishop, who even then in the 1930s was known as ‘old’ Archbishop Mannix, came out of the sacristy and down to the altar rails. I knelt beside Dad. His face had healed well but the scars were fiery and the eye that had been thought lost was wild. He shook badly and held onto the wooden rail. His hand was near mine and our little fingers touched. I loved him very much. The Archbishop offered his hand first to Dad and then to me to kiss the great ring which was his seal of authority, blessed us and left us kneeling there together.
LAUGHTER AND TEARS
Mick was to be married. It surprised me every time I looked at her. She had been riding double on the harness horse with me two years ago. Now she was a svelte young beauty, belle of the ball wherever she went. Young men admired her, courted her. The transition was too sudden for me. I surreptitiously watched her going out for a walk with her ‘young man’, fully expecting to see her any minute tuck her dress in her bloomers and hurdle over the post-and-rail fence; but no, she stood demurely to one side while the ‘young man’ let down the rail. It seemed to me that all the adventure that had been our life was ebbing swiftly away and that soon I too might
be standing, hobbled by convention, waiting for a hand alien to our ways to let down the sliprail.
Mick hadn’t chosen any of the acceptable young men who had jobs. She was going to marry Bob, the only one of her suitors who didn’t have work – Bob, who could give her back just as much fight as she gave him. At first he had met with opposition from my family. He got around Mum with his good manners and respect for the elderly, two points by which Mum judged character. Dad was harder to get around; he had seen the effects of the Depression on men of good character.
‘No man on the dole is immune to its rot,’ he said. ‘It destroys them all, the good and the bad.’
Mum once said, ‘When it’s all over and there are jobs for everyone then no one will be any the worse off for having been on the dole.’
‘No man,’ Dad said, ‘who has ever been on the dole will ever again be the man he once was.’
‘There’s not enough work to keep a man alive,’ Dad told Bob when he spoke for Mick. ‘How do you expect to keep a wife as well?’
Bob quickly answered that on all jobs preference was given to married men.
‘Have you got anything in kitty?’
‘Nothing,’ said Bob. ‘But give me the green light and I’ll change that.’
He had always got odd jobs because he was willing and strong. A day here, a day there, doing anything and everything, but the money he made would never add up to much. Shortly after this conversation with Dad, Bob had two days’ work offered him on a saw bench in the railway yard near us cutting up condemned red-gum sleepers for firewood. From our end of the yard we could hear the big circular saw screaming all day. On the second day, just before knock-off time, the screaming stopped suddenly and in its place came a great booming like the tolling of a resonant bell. We ran outside and there was the sawmiller striking hell out of the big saw with an iron bolt to attract attention. Sitting in the sawdust at his feet was Bob, his hand held high in the air and blood streaming down his arm. His little finger was gone except for a few pieces of skin holding it to his hand, and they cut those off and drove him to Numurkah to the doctor.
Hear the Train Blow Page 15