Amy's Children

by Olga Masters

  She always ran up the stairs to her office although she was usually early, and when she closed the flap at one end of the counter shutting her inside, she felt like a proud home owner closing her door on the outside world.

  She would start rattling her old typewriter at once, for the factory began operating half an hour before the office. Waiting for her there would be a stack of paper sheets filled out by the forewoman. From these Amy typed her labels. She was often excited by something new.

  “Royal blue/white polo neck”, or “burnt orange contrast basque, cuffs”, were enough to make her decide to fly down to the bottom floor at midday when the machines stopped and the presses ceased their great steamy sighing, and the women, still at their places, were eating sandwiches and reading from paperback novels, very tattered. They had so little time for lunch it was hardly worthwhile moving away.

  Amy replenished the stock sold to the public, although she believed there could be a better turnover.

  “Help me make a decent notice for Lincoln’s front door,” Amy said to Peter one Saturday afternoon, and checking Daphne’s whereabouts (she was in the vegetable garden) he put aside his homework.

  “‘Seconds for Sale’,” said Amy, quoting the existing notice. “You would think they were selling time not clothes!”

  Together they printed in bold letters an invitation to inspect top quality goods at greatly reduced prices. Some with Tiny Flaws, Peter printed in the smallest letters he could make.

  “That will show just how tiny they are,” Amy said. She pulled her head smartly away from touching his at the sound of Daphne’s feet on the back path, and he scrambled back to the table and his books.

  Amy repaired some of the flaws. Lance Yates found her in her lunch hour mending a cuff where the wool was unravelled. The sight brightened his yellowish eyes, spilling a trickle of oily light over Amy’s bent figure. She was intent on her stitches so did not see.

  “We are not selling so much because we ask for cash,” she said.

  She felt sorry for the people coming in, fingering the clothes hungrily but without enough money to buy. They asked sometimes for them to be put aside on a deposit of a shilling or two. Lance Yates was adamant that there were to be cash transactions only.

  “They will pay a bit off then leave it for six months and the day after we hang it up and sell it they’ll be in for it.

  “Besides,” and tilting his head back, he quickly checked that the main office could not hear, “you have enough to do here without keeping track of other people’s stuff.”

  His next words made Amy even happier.

  He was having the switchboard moved to Amy’s counter for her to operate it.

  The board was proving a distraction in the main office. There was a tendency to halt pens and typewriters when other than routine calls came in. Too often June Carter, combining invoicing with operation of the switchboard, tried to handle complaints instead of passing them on immediately to Miss Sheldon. Lance was rarely in the office, but mostly supervising pressing operations, for which he had a fetish, standing over the presser and sending her into a lather of perspiration rivalling the steam flying from the machine.

  Miss Jean Sheldon was twenty-nine, abandoned by a former lover, and making a determined bid for Lance’s attention, though he was married with a son.

  The girls in the office observed Lance’s eye for Amy, and Miss Sheldon’s jealous one aimed in the same direction.

  Those who disliked Miss Sheldon (nearly all) were gratified (though grudgingly) by this development, and warmed to Amy when she seemed unaffected by Lance’s attention.

  They did not fail to observe the unnecessary trips Miss Sheldon made to the “front” as it was called, in case Amy got the idea she was not under Miss Sheldon’s supervision. When Lance gave Amy an instruction Miss Sheldon often repeated it, wording it differently.

  After Lance told Amy she was to operate the switchboard Miss Sheldon came to Amy with lifted chin. I always think of our old ginger cat the way that fur is coated on her face, thought Amy. Miss Sheldon ordered Amy to spend an hour a day for a week practising taking calls and putting others through to the factory.

  “Yes, Miss Sheldon,” Amy said. “What time tomorrow?”

  “I didn’t say tomorrow.” Miss Sheldon had permanent creases between her reddish eyebrows. One flared up before the other, Amy always noticed.

  “But Mr Yates did,” Amy said.

  She almost decided to take the tram home to get there quicker with her news. But she reminded herself she had no rise in salary to warrant such extravagance. Her concession to the occasion was to bound along, darting around people coming towards her. They will think me mad, she told herself, not minding at all.

  Peter was often hanging over the front gate waiting for her. Sometimes John, washed and with his hair combed after his work among the bricks, sat on the step and waited too. But tonight an early gloom had settled over the house and little front garden, and their absence made it darker still. Even the light in the front glass seemed dimmer than usual.

  “I’m home!” Amy called going down the hall. Daphne, setting the table, lifted her eyes then lowered them. She looks like Mum when I told her I was leaving, Amy thought, unhappy that she seemed to have brought the outside chill in with her.

  Dudley did not look up from a sheet of paper he was studying, and Peter on the couch had his knees drawn up and his chin on them and was staring ahead under his floppy hair, making her feel she should wave her arms to have him notice her. John’s grin was like a flag raised.

  Amy slipped into her room to hang her bag on a brass hook, one of four attached to a piece of carved wood found under the house when they were looking for flat boxes to plant tomato and lettuce seeds. John had fixed it to her wall and helped her polish the hooks, and Peter had watched from the end of her bed.

  Daphne had called them out sharply when Dudley asked silently, with his head cocked to one side, for an explanation of the talk and laughter.

  Now Daphne was making the same gesture towards the paper Dudley held. Isn’t it strange, Amy thought, that people married to each other, though so different, do the same kind of things? She wondered briefly if she had adopted any of Ted’s habits. I don’t think so, she assured herself.

  “A nice old school report there!” Daphne cried. Peter drew his legs up even higher.

  “Put your feet on the floor!” she shouted, slapping a fork down hard.

  Amy knew the report to be the results of the trial examination pending the major one three or four months off.

  “Only fifty-five for geography,” John said.

  Amy wanted to laugh.

  It didn’t seem such a big issue to her, not enough to paint such acute unhappiness on Peter’s face. “Pooh!” she said, and his eyes met hers gratefully. “It’s not the big one!”

  Peter’s shoulders went back as if he would be ready for the big one. Daphne slapped down another fork. “He didn’t study for that exam! Is he goin’ to study for the next one?” The cutlery jumped and screwed itself about and Daphne straightened it, her face dark, as if someone else was responsible.

  Amy took plates from the dresser to warm them on the rack above the stove.

  “I was just about to do that,” Daphne said.

  9

  Amy was in a place of her own in Stanmore when war broke out in Europe in September 1939.

  Similar to those she passed on her way to Coxes in Annandale, it was also within walking distance of Lincolns so she could save on tram fares. The closed-in balcony was her living area, but she had to go into the bedroom for water, as the only tap was over a handbasin there. Amy filled her small round tin dish and carried it to the balcony to wash her cup and plate. She used as little hot water as possible, for the gas meter had to be kept fed. Her one extravagance was to bake a mutton chop and a potato in her tiny oven.

  Peter visited her one Saturday and she halved her dinner, with much laughter, serving it on her two bread and butter
plates. She had an apple pie which she started to cut down the middle then decided she didn’t want anything sweet and put it on a saucer at his place.

  He was at Teachers’ College, the one attached to Sydney University, and his scholarship gave him fifty pounds a year, much of which was given to Daphne for board.

  “I nearly got a job Friday nights and Saturday mornings at Coles but there were too many after it,” he said, taking very small bites so that he would not finish too far ahead of her. “But the lady said I would most likely get the next vacancy—if there is one.”

  That would be something I would like, Amy thought, a job in charge of people. She saw herself immaculate in a tailored suit going down the counters in Coles, looking severely on the staff whether they were serving or not, frowning more deeply if she had to straighten goods in fixtures.

  No, I don’t think I’d like that so much, Amy decided, thinking of her corner at Lincolns. She had a swift vision of it waiting for her. Come and be cosy here, it seemed to say. She smiled and Peter saw.

  “How did you go on the switchboard?” he asked as if he had the same vision.

  “Oh, I’m always wondering who will ring next!” Amy cried.

  “I might ring you up,” Peter said. “Would they mind?”

  “You haven’t got the phone on, have you?” She felt a jealous pang at missing out on such a momentous event, wondering where they would install it.

  “No, from a box.”

  After that they talked about the possibility of war, for Peter had listened to Hitler’s speech on the wireless the previous night and he thought England would come into it straight away.

  “Then us.” He looked at his hands, sliding the palms one against the other. She thought of them holding a gun.

  “You wouldn’t go though before finishing your teaching course?”

  “I don’t know.” He got up and took his plates and looked around wondering what to do with them, since there was no sink or bench. She brought the dish, feeling sad her place was not better equipped but not sure this was the cause of her change of mood.

  “Germany will round up all the young ones,” he said, pleased to find where the tea-towel hung. Amy had boiled the kettle for their tea and poured the rest over their plates.

  “I could walk all the way home with you,” she said when they were crossing the park. But she knew by his silence he didn’t want that.

  He wrote to her the following week.

  I felt very mean not asking you to walk back to our place. But Mum says a lot about you deserting (that’s her word) your children. Don’t worry, she is guilty about asking you to leave. People are so strange. (Not you.) Classes are a bit of a bore. It’s hard to settle down with so much going on. If I enlist I will tell you first.

  Love from Peter.

  When she put the letter down on the little cane dressing-table she got a picture of his face over the tea-towel very serious, but with blood running from the forehead into the corner of his eye and down to the corner of his mouth, opened in astonishment that something was happening to him: he didn’t know what.

  She turned away quickly so that she wouldn’t see him fall.

  10

  Peter died halfway through 1942 when Australia was at war with Japan. Daphne refused to allow him to enlist during the war in Europe.

  “No son of mine is goin’ to fight for that mob,” she said, meaning the English.

  Stinkin’ Poms, she called them. She and May had lost their only brother in the Great War more than twenty years earlier.

  Peter brought up the subject of enlisting on a Saturday afternoon, watching Daphne hoeing between two rows of young silver beet.

  He was seated on the same apple tree stump where he had been the time he threw the marble down Amy’s dress. Everything reminds me of her, he thought. Even the war. Perhaps I just want to go to war to fight for her.

  He was still part mesmerized by the memory of her fishing the marble from the front of her dress. That vision gave way to another—Amy in the blouse she wore the day he went to her place and ate dinner with her.

  The blouse was silky, deep blue with full sleeves, something new she’d bought. He wanted to ask her if she remembered the marble when she leaned over him with his plate, giggling at the little serve. But there she was distracting him with that column of thick cream poured into the opening for her neck. It was even lovelier than he remembered. He needed to concentrate on his chop, hoping his face did not show the heat that came there.

  She was so smartly dressed in spite of being home from work, so different from the women he saw on his way up the stairs. The unfamiliar male tread brought tousled heads through doorways, old kimonos clutched to slack bosoms.

  Amy had stood well back from the washing-up dish to keep her cream skirt free of splashes, and afterwards she went to the little cane dressing-table to put something from a jar on her hands and comb her hair. She is perfect, he thought. Perfect. Why is it, in a way, I wish she wasn’t?

  He wanted Amy there hoeing, and began to hate his mother and think how ugly she was. Ashamed, he got up and went inside and shut himself in his room. John no longer shared it; he’d moved in where Amy used to be. It looked so different now with John’s old clay-covered boots lying on their sides on the floor, and the bureau he took from his old room littered on top with dogeared paperbacks and comic books. Peter hated looking in there.

  He lay on the bed, averting his eyes from the table Daphne had bought him, spread with his books. He should be studying but he wanted to hold the feel of Amy’s silk shoulder rubbing his as they walked through the park. He hated himself for his cowardly act in not allowing her to come right home with him. She might have been re-established as a regular visitor.

  Daphne approved of Peter’s enlisting when Japan came into the war even though he was through college and teaching in a school at Bondi.

  He telephoned Amy to tell her he had been to Victoria Barracks that morning and signed up for military service, and he would go back to teaching a class of eight-year-olds in the afternoon. He thought (providing he passed his medical) he would start training pretty soon at a camp in Liverpool. He was told that he might not have the rank of private for too long with his higher education.

  “I want to get stuck into the fighting though,” he told Amy, his voice from the phone booth sounding as if he were speaking from inside an empty petrol drum. She stored this away in her mind to tell him when she saw him, hoping she could imitate the hollow ring his words had and make him laugh. She couldn’t say much at the switchboard, particularly with Miss Sheldon tending to behave as if she had not yet mastered the art of operating it, and checking on her more than ever.

  “Little she knows but I don’t want the greasy-skinned thing within a bull’s roar of me,” Amy muttered to herself one day after both Lance and Miss Sheldon had paid unnecessary visits. The phrase was one borrowed from May and Daphne.

  Lance had removed the rack of clothes and taken down the sign from the front door. He didn’t want her burdened with clothing coupons, which had been introduced with wartime rationing, and the factory was making long johns for servicemen, khaki jumpers and greatcoats, and fewer civilian things. Amy was glad. She felt guilty whenever she saw the great piles of children’s clothes on the factory tables, or read details of their manufacture from invoices. She had sent home two or three parcels to May, unhappy that she was no longer familiar with the girls’ measurements, imagining May’s scorn if they couldn’t be worn. It was more than a year now since she had sent anything.

  May and Daphne exchanged more letters than May and Amy. Amy did not know what excuses Daphne used when she had moved out of the Coxes. She thought about asking Peter what Daphne said about her, or what references there were to her in May’s letters, or for fresh news of the little girls, but her time with Peter was always so short it seemed a shame to spoil it with any unpleasant topic.

  On his last leave from training he got away from the house in Annandale as soon
as he could and took Amy to Bondi. She smiled when she heard, remembering her mind picture of Bondi Beach when she was at the hotel, thinking how much better it was seeing it with Peter. He wanted to show her the school where he taught and show her where shells had fallen, for it was only a week after the attack by Japanese submarines on Sydney Harbour, and people were taking the trams to walk about the streets in the wild wintry weather, disappointed that everything looked much the same as when they’d seen it last. A few air raid wardens in caps with badges were standing about, looking as if they would like to be questioned but daring anyone to have such gall.

  Amy was proud of Peter and clung to his arm, and imagined people thinking look at that nice young soldier and his pretty girlfriend. She did not look older than him, she was sure. Her cheeks were pink with the cold and she knew the tip of her nose was pink too, but her hair did not blow about too much, since it was bound with a navy blue ribbon matching a navy jumper bought cheaply from Lincoln Knitwear because the seams did not meet properly under one arm. Sitting on her bed with her ankles crossed she had darned the hole so neatly no one could possibly detect it.

  She had a deep green blazer over the jumper and a navy skirt with pleats that flew out when she turned quickly. He took her into a cafe for tea and toast. It was a long time since she had eaten properly made toast. In her room she had a wire and metal contraption comprising two sides that clapped together with the bread between them. When held over a gas flame the result was usually scorched bread not toast, and no matter how much care was taken there was always a burnt taste.

  The toast the waitress served was beautifully brown, the melting butter putting a shine on the finger lengths stacked on the plate so neatly she hated disturbing it. The waitress looked with great tenderness at Peter. “Oh no,” she said, shocked when he offered threepence more than the cost of the meal.

  “I don’t have anything much to spend my pay on,” he apologized to Amy when her eyes fell on a roll of pound notes thicker than she had ever seen.