‘I don’t know how it happened,’ the sawmiller said. ‘Never struck a man so good with the saw. Took to it like a duck to water. And he had to slip under it just before knock-off.’
‘I suppose he earned his day’s pay first?’ Dad asked. When the owner nodded Dad said, ‘Well, no one can say he isn’t a trier.’ He didn’t oppose the marriage any longer.
Bob made only one slip that I know of about that accident. When the compensation money arrived he said, ‘I thought it was £110 for the loss of a finger.’
‘No,’ Dad said dryly. ‘You read the wrong section. Loss of the little finger only earns you £90.’ It was enough for them to get married on and they stretched it out and it lasted them a long time.
When Mick turned nineteen Mum gave a party for her in the Waaia hall. No invitations were sent out, word was merely spread around that it was on. Eighty people turned up; some from outlying areas who couldn’t get in sent gifts. There was a trestle table piled high with presents. Fettlers came and sleeper-cutters and wheat-buyers and farmers and retired people and the Aboriginal girl who worked at the hotel. Waaia had missed out on the division the Depression had brought to other places. There was no working class here, no gentry.
At the party Dad announced the engagement of Mick and Bob. Great shouts went up, cheers and good wishes.
‘Gooda lucka,’ called Chella Valenti, the wheat-lumper from southern Italy.
‘We wish you both the best of luck,’ said Mrs Tweddle, who would have been gentry anywhere else. Waaia was a wonderful place to live, all right.
Before the evening ended old Bill Leaf stopped the accordion-player to announce that there would be a kitchen tea in three weeks’ time. ‘Same place, same music.’ And so it came to pass. They all rolled up again with gifts three weeks later and, as before, those who couldn’t get in sent gifts – sets of saucepans, kitchen scales, cutlery, crockery, crystal, napery and cheques. They sang ‘For they are jolly good fellows’ to Bob and Mick and made speeches about both of them and about Mum and Dad. Speeches about Mick! The last speeches about her that I’d heard were to the effect that she’d come to a sticky end if she didn’t give up riding crazy horses. Now it seemed she wasn’t that same girl any more. She was a young lady and the men placed a chair for her when she wished to sit and held her coat for her. It was all very bewildering, and a little stab of self-pity came as I thought of myself as having been betrayed, deserted: Mick had gone over to the enemy, the adult world.
We went down to Gippsland for the wedding. On the way down Kevin was returned to his parents and I stayed with them for a time. Settling down in the Big Smoke, Melbourne, was an adventure of a different kind and Kevin and I went into it ‘boots and all’, as his grandfather said when we carted buckets of manure from a nearby dairy that used horses to pull their carts, and tipped it on the tiny pocket-handkerchief garden in front of the house. A policeman actually crossed the street one day to see what the smell was.
Kevin’s father, whose neck had been broken when he arrived in the city, had been in plaster for half a year and only now was beginning to move around. Mrs Young had her dressmaking salon in the city. To teach us to find our way about Melbourne she suggested we should bring her lunch in each day using Kevin’s bicycle for transport. We took it in turns ‘dinking’ one another and in a very short while knew all the short cuts, the back streets and the excitement of South Melbourne. But we were still bushwhackers to the backbone and after we’d been down in the city a full month, trying hard to lose our hayseeds, I said one night to Kevin when we were going to our bedrooms, ‘Have you got the matches?’ and he replied, ‘I haven’t even got the candle.’ The electricity-conscious household loved telling this story.
Mick was married from Grandmother Adams’s house with me as bridesmaid and Mick’s brother Jack as best man. The ceremony was simple, the wedding breakfast was simple, too, held in the big kitchen at Grandmother’s house with the big Adams family gathered round. Grandmother bustled about, her plump little figure dainty and sweetly dressed, her white hair bunned on top, singing in her unaffected, pure voice, ‘The Old Bullock Dray’. We all felt for a moment the nostalgia that had set her to singing that old bush song. She had been ‘shown the bush’ by her man all those long years ago when she’d accepted his invitation to ‘step up and take possession of the old bullock dray.’
‘Oh,’ she said this day, ‘young people have everything nowadays. When I was married you thought nothing of it if you had to sleep under the old bullock dray while you were waiting for your man to build your house.’ Now she owned three cottages and land and was presiding over a table groaning with food, surrounded by her large family, most of whom had done well for themselves. I admired everything about this woman. She was the true pioneer, I knew. It was a pity that we were unable to communicate with one another. She never knew of my admiration; if she had any feeling for me beyond asperity I never knew it.
On our return from the church we changed our clothes. I had for my ‘best’ dress that white cotton I’d worn for the sports the year before when I’d won the egg and spoon race. To make it long enough for this year Mum had sewn a strip of material eight inches deep around the bottom. To relieve its starkness I tied a navy scarf with white spots around my neck. When she saw this, my grandmother spoke from her end of the table: ‘That scarf makes you look very common, I must say.’
Tears blurred my sight, but I wouldn’t let her humiliate me. I was too pig-headed for that.
‘You’re so anxious always to point out how common I am that I don’t like to disappoint you,’ I retorted. Inside I was sobbing. The wedding was all so lovely, the setting of the little cottage was perfect with its tecoma-covered walls; at the back, in an old shed almost hidden with flowers and creepers gone wild, the wedding gifts were displayed. I loved Mick. I thought I would never see a lovelier bride. Love, love, love. It was everywhere, but I knew one place where there was none for me. I tried not to let my unhappiness show by appearing nonchalant, uncaring, brazen. This led to reprimands from my aunts, all except aunt Anastasia Therese, that utterly fair person who never purposely hurt anyone. She called me Jeanne.
‘Jeanne,’ she told me, ‘if you find you have inherited something no one in our family can understand, don’t be afraid of it or try to suppress it. Don’t worry about what people say. Be proud, never be afraid.’ I couldn’t understand her but I appreciated her kindness.
SCRIM WALLS
It took a long time to get into bed at Grandmother Adams’s. At home we dropped our clothes where we pulled them off and jumped in between the sheets that smelt of sunshine and ripening wheat crops, cuddled each other’s backs to warm up and were asleep immediately. At Grandmother’s it was different. Her bedroom was the most rarefied female room I’ve seen. I doubt that any man had set foot inside it. I was ten years old when Grandfather died and in all that time the two had occupied separate bedrooms. I once heard Grandmother reprimand my sister for flippantly showing her new husband some of her lingerie gifts.
‘I’ve borne your grandfather ten children,’ Grandmother said, ‘and he’s never so much as seen me in my petticoat.’
The very air in the room seemed to belie the presence of man on earth. I only once entered another room so rare, and that was at the convent; but here, in place of the simplicity of the convent room, was such a myriad of gew-gaws and lacy, frilly coverlets that there was virtually no part of the furniture, floor or walls on view. Starched white linen edged with lace covered everything even to the seat of the commode. Yet the room seemed, for all its accessories, strangely big and empty and cold after our warm, noisy, painted, cluttered-up room at home. Here we folded our clothes carefully and placed them in the sachets that had contained nightdresses by day and folded the many other gadget-holders and covers, and it all took time and during this time there invariably built up a sense of irrelation. It was like being an expatriate who has left behind him a warm, fruitful land and slowly finds that his new home is frigid,
barren.
The only benefit of lying in this big, cold bed was that you could hear all the talk from the kitchen through the scrim walls, made of hessian covered with wallpaper. What I hadn’t learned from the Marvels I picked up through those walls, because the grown-ups mostly talked of things that they could not mention when ‘little pitchers have big ears’ were around.
One night I heard Grandmother telling Mum about some neighbours. ‘The daughter – well, she looked about fourteen and she had a miscarriage and the mother left home because of course as you might have guessed with a family where there’d been a divorce it was the father’s, what more could you expect? And the father he fed the pigs . . .’ I put my head under the blankets so as not to hear what was fed the pigs and then I lifted them so I could hear. Yes, the police had come and the people had moved.
These were the first people I had heard of who had been divorced, and the image the telling had impressed on my mind would have satisfied the most fanatical bigot. There was a lot to be learnt through those walls. I had heard enough through many nights of listening to know why Edna Ringer wore grey to her wedding.
‘It was a nice little wedding,’ Grandmother reported. ‘She wore grey, of course.’ Of course. Edna was a ‘fallen woman’. She had had a child out of wedlock some years before when she was a young girl. The child was now in a foster home.
Dolly Sharp didn’t wear grey. ‘Rolled up to the church in a white dress as brazen as you like, veil and all. She must think we have short memories.’ Some examples of this line of thought were so extreme that the sins of the mother could be visited on the daughter in the matter of a wedding dress.
‘Margie wore an almost blue dress, not quite grey, quite a nice little outfit.’ Her husband was disappointed that she had not worn white.
‘They had to tell him and he took it like a man. "I’ll marry her just the same," he said when they told him she was illegitimate.’
Another time they were talking about a young married woman who had had much difficulty at the time of the birth of her first child after marriage.
‘Doctor found that she had stitches there. They’d been left in since the time she’d had a baby before marriage to teach her a lesson.’ The aunt I didn’t care for was talking.
‘I think she got what she deserved.’
Because babies and allied subjects were taboo to most children in my circle until after marriage I didn’t consider the morals involved in these sentiments, nor did I then recognise the fact that it is invariably the one with the most skeletons in the cupboard who shouts loudest about the mishaps of others and is the most unforgiving.
Most nights as the women talked there were sounds of cooking as a background, recipes being read aloud from Grandmother’s hand-written recipe book, suggestions for improvements, the flip-flip of an egg whisk, the flop-flop of a hand beating sugar and shortening to cream in a big earthenware dish, the crunch of walnuts being shelled and the laughter as eyes ran with tears from the onions being peeled before they were pickled. Then the rattle of teacups.
A few nights after Mick’s wedding they were making melon jam. I’d helped cut up the big, yellow, green-splotched melons before I went to bed. The big black seeds flew in all directions as we levered them out with the point of a knife. Such seeds are surprisingly slippery on a lino-covered floor, and when I was leaving the room to go to bed I slipped over on them. Grandmother laughed. I very stupidly took offence at being laughed at and stormed out without wishing anyone good night. I went to bed and lay there trying to think of a way I could go out and say good night without making it look like an apology for my behaviour.
They were talking about the melons, at least Mum was. She seemed to be talking feverishly, trying not to let Grandmother get a word in.
Eventually, ‘Does she know?’ Grandmother said, firmly. ‘Have you told her?’
‘No,’ Mum replied.
‘Well, you should tell her. She’s getting far too big for her boots. She doesn’t know her place.’
‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’
‘I do. She’ll turn out an upstart like her father if you don’t watch out. You mark my words.’
‘There’ll be time enough later to tell her.’
‘Tell her now.’
Mum said loudly, ‘I won’t. She’s mine.’
‘Don’t be silly. She’ll find out sooner or later that she’s nothing to either of you.’
‘She won’t!’ Mum was running outside and she shouted, ‘She won’t!’
My eyes were so wide open I couldn’t focus properly on the shafts of moonlight coming in through the lace curtains. When Mum came to join me in the bed she put her arm around me. I pushed it off and moved away, lying stiff and motionless on the extreme edge of the bed, as far away from her as I could get.
In a while she whispered, ‘Are you awake, Jeanie?’
There was no reply. Jeanie wasn’t able to do as she wished any more. She had been swallowed up and was only a small part of the stranger who lay dry-eyed, numb, cold as stone in the bed.
Had anyone called out, ‘Where’s Jeanie?’ I could have answered truthfully, ‘She’s not here.’
BLOOD AND WATER
Not for a year did Mum speak to me of the things my grandmother had ordered her to speak of. Then she began diffidently, her words becoming muddled.
‘I know,’ I interrupted her, ‘I know.’ I walked out the kitchen door. She followed me.
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve always known,’ I lied.
She didn’t speak of it again for a long time. Then, one day when I was cornered in the kitchen and couldn’t get past her without actually pushing her away:
‘Do you know who your parents are?’
‘Of course.’
‘You don’t.’
I stared at her insolently, hoping to stop her. But she wouldn’t stop.
‘Don’t you ever wonder?’
‘No.’ I had thought of it a little since that night, more in rage at their intrusion in my life and between Mum and Dad and me than from any desire to know them.
‘You see your mother occasionally. She is one of my sisters.’
I wasn’t interested. Mum thought this was a ruse, but it wasn’t. I just didn’t care.
‘Blood is thicker than water,’ Mum said. Fearfully she looked at me. ‘Sometimes I’ve wondered if you haven’t felt attracted to her rather than to me. It would be natural. Blood is thicker than water. Think of your aunts. Isn’t there one you feel kin to?’
No, there wasn’t. Suddenly: ‘Not Auntie . . .?’ I mentioned the one I was not particularly fond of.
‘No.’
Thank goodness!
‘She is one of my younger sisters.’
Good. It must be Aunt Sadie. I liked her tartness and incisive brain. She drove a semi-trailer in a trucking business with her husband.
So I tried to look casual. ‘Is it Aunt Sadie?’
No, it wasn’t. Mum was bewildered. ‘I was sure you would know your own mother,’ she said.
I longed to tell her not to be silly, that she was my mother. When she spoke the name of the woman who had borne me it moved me not at all.
‘Oh, her,’ I said.
‘She and your real father,’ Mum began, but I had heard enough and I pushed her aside and ran past her.
‘If you want to get rid of me then I’m big enough to go,’ I called back, cruelly, so she would realise she must say no more. She never mentioned it to me again. All I knew of my father were the barbed remarks I could remember from the past. I realised now that it was his decision not to spend the rest of his life with this family that made me, his child, the target for the barbs. I didn’t care what he had done, whether it had been right or wrong; my only regret was that I had to know of it at all.
It was this knowledge and the constant whispering and the knowing looks whenever learning, art, music or books were mentioned that ended my childhood and made me uncertain for so long, made me
look for love and affection when all the time I had it more than most will ever know. I remembered with hate the schoolteacher Louey Marsh hesitating over the name on my birth certificate: I had sensed something amiss that day; I was embarrassed when I thought of the kindness of that good man Kelly and his gang, at Nowingi, to the strange baby their mate had brought home; I thought of the many times I had been cruel and hurtful to Mum and Dad, taking for granted that I could hurt them because they were my parents; I thought of the times I’d complained to outsiders about Mum’s restrictions, been disloyal to her.
As for religion, I no longer was fettered by it. I had striven to learn liturgical Latin in an endeavour to more fully participate in the service. But now I recalled a remark my crabbed aunt had passed, ‘You and your fancy Latin. You’re not even entitled to be a Catholic.’ (He wasn’t; whispers made it clear that he was a Freemason.) Now I thought of that remark as a passport to freedom. I was not bound to anything. I was free. I felt so free I longed for the chains of belonging to bind me tight again; but it was too late. I had fallen too hard.
‘The bigger they are the harder they fall,’ Dad used to shout above the noise of the Casey Jones on our Saturday morning trips. All the wheels of all the trains on all the journeys we had made never sounded so loud as the turmoil within my head.
THE CUP OF KINDNESS
Dad began work again, but the heat of Waaia was too much for him and we must move to a cooler climate. This time we knew we were leaving Waaia forever. Mum went to her packing with a stolidity that was unusual in her.
Hear the Train Blow Page 16