Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  During the afternoon another cave-in immediately above them nearly trapped the men who were digging, and the police ordered them away until the overhang could be shored up. By now it was too late. The second fall had brought down piles of rubble on top of the great pile on the body of Bluey, who they now knew must be dead. Still they worked on through the night. Lanterns swung from forked sticks stuck in the rubble and car headlights blazed on them. When daylight came they began to work in relays.

  It was 10 a.m. when the flat-topped truck came rumbling down the main street with the last shift on board. Sitting round the outside edge of the tray, with their legs in heavy boots dangling over the side, cigarettes hanging off their lips, the men formed a barricade hiding the tarpaulin-covered mound in the centre of the tray.

  They placed Bluey in a clean stable at the hotel until the inquest and then they buried him, and all the boys of the town turned up to walk behind the old hearse because they had nothing else to do. They were out of work again now the quarry had closed.

  Bob had made furniture for the expected baby, a cot and a tiny table and chair all fashioned from packing cases with the rough wood sandpapered so smooth you could rub your hand over it and it felt like silk. But my sister wanted a pram.

  ‘And,’ she warned, ‘I don’t expect to push a packing case on wheels up the street either! I want a proper pram, a bought pram.’

  So Bob left home and said he wasn’t coming back until he had enough money for a bought pram.

  ‘I’m going rabbiting,’ he announced. He took Whacko the dog, Dad’s bike and some borrowed traps and disappeared for three weeks. All that was visible when he returned was his face grinning in triumph; the rest of him was rabbit skins, bike and all, skins strung inside out on wire frames.

  They went up to town the next day, Bob with his skins bound tightly in a bundle, Mick to wait at the post office until he returned with the money. Then they would buy the pram. We watched them go, laughing like the kids they were, Bob teasing Mickie that he could not walk with his arm around her waist any more because she no longer had a waist, and she laughingly threatening to box his ears. After they had gone a little way they held hands. They looked good. Their happiness in one another and the whole world around them that day came back to us watching them go up the road to buy the pram.

  I had not truly seen the face of the Depression until I saw those two coming home that day. The Depression was something that had happened to other people, not us, I thought. But its ugly face came down that road with those two who didn’t look like kids any more. Bob didn’t hold Mickie’s hand, they didn’t even walk side by side. Instead, Bob strode out, hands in pockets, intent it seemed on the straggly gums at the roadside. Mickie was walking a few paces ahead of him, striding out a little faster than him, even though she was pregnant, and she was whistling. She looked ‘brassy’, as we used to call cheap girls then. Mum and Dad and I stood at the kitchen window watching them come.

  ‘What does that girl think she’s up to?’ Mum said disapprovingly, and she pushed up the window to tell my sister to behave herself. Dad stopped her.

  ‘Leave them alone,’ he said. ‘Come away from the window. Don’t let them know we’ve been watching for them.’ Dad knew what had happened.

  ‘I reckon the dealers wouldn’t buy Bob’s skins. I thought they mightn’t. He had them pegged out wrongly.’ Buyers could pick and choose in a period when it seemed that every second man in creation was out rabbiting.

  I don’t think Bob ever mentioned those skins to anyone. Mick didn’t either. He went to the council chambers the next day and signed the form to go on the dole. He had never done that before. It was as though he had come to the end of a long passage-way of hope and found there was nothing there after all his striving.

  They moved from our house and took a tiny cottage out of town. Mum begged them to stay, at least until the baby was born, but Bob said, ‘We’ve got to face it, Mum. We’ve got to make it or break it alone.’

  He was resigned, but resignation and unbounded optimism can go hand in hand when you’re young – along with high spirits. The high spirits of him and a score of other young dole boys in the town bubbled up in April of that year, 1939, when they crept out at midnight and decorated the war memorial on Anzac eve with cabbages they stole from the priest’s garden.

  ‘I don’t see what the caterwaulin’s all about,’ the old Irishman said the next day when the ‘desecration’ was being decried all over town.

  ‘After all, they were my cabbages, and I’m not complaining. If it gave the boys a bit of fun, surely they get little enough of it.’

  I wonder if any of the citizens of that little town ever look at the new names on the ugly little stone memorial and remember the boys who prematurely decorated their own tombstone that year with cabbages. Bob’s name is there now and Gus Schramm’s too, and numbered among the other names are most of the lads who drew the dole with Bob in those other hungry years.

  THE LAST DANCE

  In June 1939 there was to be a debutante ball. Mum was working for its success. There was to be a sit-down turkey and ham supper, a Melbourne dance band, a bishop for the debs to be presented to, and a real ‘Lady’ to do the presenting.

  I had never seen a presentation of debutantes. I hoped I could go, short dress and all. I decided to work on Dad.

  ‘It would be the first time I’ve ever been to such a dance,’ I said.

  ‘It might be the last,’ Dad said. He was preoccupied with world news.

  Mum looked at me reflectively. ‘It would be a pity if you never had a chance to wear a long dress,’ she said.

  And so while I was still a child I was presented to the Bishop of Ballarat. Next in age to me was a girl of eighteen. Most of the others were in their twenties. And, as Dad had predicted, it was to be my last chance to take part in this insane but delightful ceremony.

  The other debs couldn’t dance well. Some of them had had lessons for a few weeks before the ball. None of them knew that I had been taught by the best dancers the bush had bred, and I’m sure they all hated me very much as the evening wore on and the best dancers in the hall swooped down on me. The boys from the New Mayfair Dance Band would of course recognise my partners – all the gun shearers were in town for the big ball.

  Never did I know such a night: the music, the dancing, my first long dress, the flowers, the attention. All too soon the band played ‘Goodnight, sweetheart’, the last quickstep; it was always, ‘Goodnight, sweetheart, goodnight’.

  It was the evening of Sunday, 3 September. We sat in front of the fire listening to the radio. The old wireless with the big flower-like trumpet had gone; this was the latest model. But we had never listened so intently, not even when we listened to our first broadcast back in the old days.

  All afternoon Dad had sat in the house waiting for this. He said abruptly when we began to fool, ‘Keep quiet!’ Mick and Bob were visiting and we sobered, hearing Dad severe one of the few times in our lives. Then the message came through. The static crackled but the words were clear. We were at war.

  Not one of us spoke until after the playing of ‘God Save the King’ had ended. They had never done that before. In a play or speech, whenever he heard the call ‘Three cheers for the King!’ Dad would grin and we knew he was thinking of his navy days when the traditional lower-deck reply was ‘Bugger the King!’ Now he stood for the playing of the anthem, leaning on the mantelpiece, looking into the fire so that it would not seem affected.

  I was growing up and life was now, not later, and right now there was to be a Sunday dance in the church hall and Dad had promised to take me for a short while. Now there was no doubting by the way he stood that we were not going.

  Mickie broke the silence: ‘They’d never take married men.’

  Bob sat on the arm of her chair. ‘It’s a job,’ he said, his voice serious, but his eyes betraying him. All the boredom, the lethargy and despondency had gone. They scintillated with excitement.

&
nbsp; Bob and his mates were standing at the street corner the following day when the newspaper truck came in. They had heard the announcement on the radio, but this was different. The written word was the seal to the statement and there it was, on the poster on the side of the truck. One word. War.

  Within a month there was hardly a young man left in the town. The boys were all ‘jumping the rattler’ in one direction now: Bob and his mates were on their way to the city to enlist.

  Many of Australia’s Sixth Division men had been on the dole. That’s the way Bob and the boys like him got their first really permanent job.

  In my own private world that I had thought was all the world I had been muddling on. Now there was no need for decisions. I was sheathed with patriotism. I had heard the band play and like the soldier who had spoken at that Anzac Day commemoration which I had been thrashed for attending, I had fallen in behind the music. I would go to this war. Even to bob and float in the little whorls and eddies on the perimeter of this holocaust would be adventure enough to make my nameless, faceless fears insignificant.

  To my already numerous occupations were added first-aid and home-nursing lectures and four hours a week working as nurses’ aide in the local hospital. I had joined the VADs and must have a first-aid and a home-nursing certificate as well as one hundred hours’ nursing experience before I could enlist. I liked the hospital training although it consisted mainly of ‘Shut your eyes and tip’, advice from the training sister on the task which was for the next three years to be almost my entire contribution to the war effort – emptying pans and bottles.

  Before I left for my first posting my two grandmothers had died. Granny Smith, to quote her son, the prodigal Ted, ‘died of cantankerousness’.

  It was a cold, frosty winter and one morning she insisted on going down the outside stairs, ‘for a breath of fresh air’, as she said. She was warned that the steps were iced over, but as soon as she found herself alone took her stick and went out. She was lying on the ground when they came in answer to her cry, her hip fractured. The ninety-six-year-old bone wouldn’t mend. She lingered a little time in hospital.

  ‘She won’t let us take her corsets off,’ matron told Mum when she arrived. She was old and crippled, but all the strong young nurses couldn’t wrest the old lace-ups from her.

  ‘Why won’t you let the nurses take your corsets, Gran?’ Mum asked.

  The old lady beckoned her close to her lips and whispered, ‘I’ve got my money sewn up in them.’

  ‘You’re just a mean old Scotswoman,’ Mum teased her.

  ‘I’m not mean, Birdie,’ Gran said. ‘I’m canny.’

  She allowed Mum to take off her corsets on condition she placed them under her pillow.

  When she was going Mum asked, ‘Can I leave you some silver to buy some fruit, Gran?’

  ‘I don’t want any fruit,’ she said. ‘But you can leave the silver if you like.’ She laughed a lot over that. ‘Remember what I used to tell Jeanie. Take what you’re offered and look around for more.’ And she chuckled again. The following day she died.

  Grandmother Adams took a stroke and lay for a weary time dying in her trim white bed. I spent some time in the house when she was dying. As she fought for life I began to see the battle she had fought all her life, the battle for what she thought was right and moral. In her way she had tried to avenge what she considered were wrongs.

  Perhaps we all do a bit of that, unaware that the battleground of life is not laid out with the opponents facing one another. It is more a vague, ephemeral, unfenced arena that has no boundaries; we can’t recognise the enemy and great clouds roll over, preventing us from seeing clearly; a field in which the most we can hope to do is parry the thrusts as they come at us through the swirling mists that, often as not, hide the hand that holds the weapon.

  As I watched Grandmother Adams silently battling there on the narrow white bed I lost my fear of her, and an understanding akin to love came in its place. She neither spoke nor opened her eyes. There was no way of telling if she were conscious. She could neither eat nor drink. One day the doctor came to examine her and he drew the bedclothes down and raised her nightdress to use the stethoscope on her heart. With the faintest of movements her tiny hands pushed the gown down, modestly covering her body. Then she folded her hands again with the rosary beads clasped in her fingers. Sometimes we found the beads had been moved along as though she followed the prayers constantly being chanted in her room.

  Her sister-in-law, my great-aunt Anastasia Byrnes, herself quite an old lady, had been with her all the time of her dying. When the time came that it must end she placed Grandmother’s left hand in the brown shroud she had had ready in the dresser in her bedroom for many years. In the other hand she placed a lighted candle. It was an hour of sombre dignity. My great-aunt Anastasia sat there until the end, bridging the gulf between life and death. When Grandmother breathed no more the candle was extinguished.

  Within a short time of one another, these, my two grandmothers, were lowered into the soil where grew neither the thistle nor the shamrock, yet soil that was richer for their having laboured over it.

  One obvious snag to my enlisting was my age or, to be more precise, my lack of age. This was overcome quite simply by coaxing Mum to sign the permission for me to join up and filling in the details later, in private.

  ‘But will they take girls so young?’ my mother asked. I was nearly seventeen.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I assured her. ‘Look at the civilian hospitals. They had me training there.’

  And then I was off, heading for Spencer Street, weighted down with the accoutrements of that war I’d not given a moment’s thought to except as its being a vehicle by which I might escape from the turmoil in my mind. My peace did not come in a flash, a moment of light like the opening of a third eye. Rather, confidence stole back into me in its own sweet, meandering time. But this day saw the beginning of it as we jostled on that crowded platform.

  We were not a homogeneous group yet; we hadn’t rid ourselves of the secret life each of us had left behind, but we had one binding thing in common: we belonged to Australia, to the very soil of Australia. Half the population still lived in rural areas, the bush; the other half, though urban, was rural-minded, knew that the country still rode on the sheep’s back, that our wealth came from what our land and our men made together. Whatever we were, the soil had made us. In the first world war and now this one, Australia had sent away armies notorious for their lack of discipline but famous for the bush-bred initiative that makes formal discipline unnecessary.

  We were all here on this train, every one of us, but the drift to the cities had already begun and Australia would never see the likes of us again. If patriotism was only sheathed on me until that day it commenced now to grip my marrow.

  ‘Do you know Spencer Street railway station?’ the kindly matron had asked. Surely. It was my stamping ground, the city arena where we’d swaggered in pride in being bush-bred. Mothers soothe a fretful child with play-talk: ‘Hear the train blow, love?’ imitating the whistle of a steam engine. But me, I’d heard the real train blow, and spent a childhood steeped in the essence of all those things that condense and issue forth from the banshee-like wail of roaring, rushing engines. I’d slept twelve feet from the rails, heard the wheels crunch by like nailed boots crossing my bedroom floor, listened to the whistle shrieking and fading past our many outback homes, houses made into homes because wherever Mum and Dad got off the wallaby was home to us.

  I’d shared in the camaraderie of people working hard and playing with gusto. Others may speak of the ‘working class’. We were aristocrats. We had a whole town turn out to bid us farewell.

  ‘Three cheers for Albert and family,’ they’d called. I’d seen the passing parade crystal clear, because that’s the way my parents had seen it – yes, my parents, for if the love and the lack of humbug in my life had taught me one thing it was to recognise the value of people, places and things. Now I began to see that there
was no dilemma. If others wanted to weigh themselves down with whispers and aged feuds, that was their burden, not mine. I’d had everything. None could have had better.

  EPILOGUE

  Dad lived until February 1980, loving, lively, witty, gentle, dignified, tough of body – working with his pick and shovel on the roads of Buln Buln Shire until he was seventy-five years of age. Mum lived until her ninety-third year and we buried the dear lady near her birthplace in Buln Buln. Miss Mickie is still very funny and still doesn’t give a damn for anybody.

  Mr Schmidt, my old teacher from Waaia, wrote to me before he died. ‘I heard there was a book,’ he said. ‘I left the school and began to run and in the newspaper shop in the little town I was in I said, "I want the book" and they knew what it was, because they had read it. And I told them I knew you’d do it. I’ve got my notes of those days to prove I always knew it.’

  Nuns, now elderly, who encouraged me in such abandoned liberties when I was foisted on them, have written. ‘I laughed and laughed,’ wrote one nun, ‘at your thinking we were all bald!’ Another said, ‘We pray for you here in our little chapel at Numurkah.’ (I wasn’t too sure about that, but Mum said that though you may not see any good it does, you just think of the harm it might have saved you from.)

  Joe Page, the Penshurst fettler, telephoned when Dad died. ‘What can I do to help? I owe a lot to your father. He gave me a job in the Depression, took me into his gang. Rescued me and mine. What can I do?’ Old Constable Golding when he came to my parents’ Diamond Wedding in 1979 asked ‘And have your outlines improved?’ of the shorthand he’d taught me forty years before. And listening to Mum and the old man talking I learnt that it was he who bought my first typewriter that set me up as a small-town tycoon.