by John Marsden
We left on a convoy of buses, on a Tuesday morning. It was a wonderful moment. The people who couldn’t get onto this first convoy gave us a huge send-off, cheering and clapping and throwing flowers. As the buses started up everyone sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’. That song had never meant much to me before. It always seemed like such an oldies’ song. But to hear it that morning, from people who had been through so much together, who had suffered in this war for so long, brought the tears to my eyes.
Then they sang the Maori Farewell as we headed out of the gates, and I bawled.
It seemed that now the war was over I could let go a little. I had the window seat, next to Mum on the aisle, and I rested my head against her and let the tears run onto her sleeve, in a steady flow, like a quiet spring. In my head I was going, ‘Fi, Homer, Lee, Kevin, Gavin’, in no particular order. I remember hearing once that when someone close to you dies, it’s like you’ve had a limb amputated. It never grows back, it never gets fixed, but after a while you learn to live with three limbs instead of four.
I didn’t know where that left me though. All the friends I’d lost, it was like I didn’t have any arms or any legs.
But under that grief something else was stirring. I wasn’t yet ready to look at it, but I guess I did have a sense that my life would go on. For better or worse I had survived. Maybe that was the main reason I was crying, because I had survived.
We went home via Stratton. At that point the buses were going to split up and go in different directions, but everyone on our bus was from Wirrawee, so that’s where we headed. We knew already that Wirrawee had been included in the area handed back under the peace treaty. That was the good news. The bad news was that Wirrawee was on the very edge of the reclaimed territory, so we didn’t know how much of the countryside would be returned. In other words, we didn’t know whether our property was on the right side of the new border or the wrong side.
I was again amazed at the damage we saw as we rolled along. Time and time again we had to make major detours because of destroyed bridges or roads with huge craters in them or unexploded bombs. But that was nothing compared to what we found in Stratton. I’d seen more damage in Stratton every time I’d gone there, but now there was virtually nothing left. Street after street was a mess of rubble. Hardly a building was left standing. Only in the outer suburbs were there occasional streets that were reasonably intact. I didn’t think there was much chance Grandma’s house had survived.
I couldn’t help wondering how much of this damage was indirectly—and sometimes directly—the result of what Homer, Lee, Fi, Kevin, Gavin and I had done. It was frightening, horrifying—and exhilarating. I sat in silence storing out the window.
I’ll never forget the homecoming to Wirrawee. By the time we arrived we were all tired and hungry and fed up. But we still managed to raise a cheer as we went past the 60 k’s sign. Everyone crowded to the windows to have a look. Most of them hadn’t seen Wirrawee in over a year.
As we pulled up outside the Post Office a few people started coming out of houses to see what was going on. A day earlier these houses had been occupied by our enemies. The colonists had been evacuated already, no doubt complaining bitterly as they went, no doubt feeling hard done by and victimised. The few prisoners left in the Wirrawee Showground had been released at the same time. They’d wasted no time reoccupying their homes and farms. It was these people who came into the street now, wondering about the big bus pulling up in the centre of town.
Before we got to Wirrawee if you asked anyone on that bus how they felt about a party you’d have got a poor response. But when we arrived something possessed us. A charge ran through the bus, through the crowd. For one night we forgot the war, forgot the suffering, the deprivations, even the friends and family we’d lost. Sometimes you’ve got to give yourself credit just for enduring. And we had endured.
Mum and I at least had something very specific to celebrate. Our property was confirmed as being in the returned territory. We were right on the edge, right on the border of the two new countries that now had to exist side by side, where for over two hundred years there had been only one, but for now we were happy enough with that. We didn’t want to think too much about the problems it would bring.
Just after dawn, as people sat around fires that had been lit in the middle of the main street, still talking, still reminiscing, still asking each other questions that no-one could answer, we heard another big vehicle grinding its way towards us, coming down the hill.
‘It’s a bus,’ someone yelled. ‘Another bus.’
We all jumped up and ran to the end of the street, if only to stop the bus rolling straight into our fires. Sure enough it was another load of ‘returnees’. And waving to us from a window near the back, with unshaven face and dark-rimmed eyes, was my father.
‘What are you bludgers doing? I thought you’d be home, getting a killer in.’
They were his first words. Typical.
He and Mum hugged, then it was my turn. He’s never been a good hugger, my dad, but he put up with me, rocking me backwards and forwards like we were in some sort of slow waltz. I clung to him like a little baby. Eventually we separated again, but not by much. I kept one hand resting on his back, using the other to wipe my eyes.
He already knew most of Mum’s news, having been kept in touch by the people transferred from one place to another. It had been a pretty good grapevine, carrying news backwards and forwards across the country.
Just an hour later came the next bus. It brought a problem I knew I’d have to face eventually, but which I’d pushed firmly to the back of my mind. Not just pushed it firmly to the back of my mind but locked it in, sealed the door with cement, and thrown away the key.
Homer’s mum was on that bus.
I didn’t even see her until a couple of minutes after I’d hugged some other people. Then I saw Dad bringing her over.
Not for the first time in the war my nerve failed me. I clung to my mother.
‘Mum, please, I can’t face her on my own.’
But my mum started trembling so badly I knew I’d been wrong to even ask her. And then Mrs Yannos saw our faces and she started to tremble too. She put both her hands up to the side of her head and pulled on her hair as if she was demented.
She cried: ‘Ellie, Ellie, what are you going to tell me?’
I just shook my head, staring at her. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t say the awful words.
Mrs Yannos went completely off her head. She sat on the edge of the footpath, feet in the drain, sobbing and hitting herself, then she keeled over and lay on the grass, sobbing.
In a way though it helped me find some strength. To see her in such a state was so bad that I pulled myself together, rather than give way like she had.
We tried to get her up, but she wouldn’t be lifted, so in the end Dad and I sat beside her, hugging, with me stroking her.
It brought everything home to me again, just when I was hoping it might gradually go away. I’d hoped time might heal a few things, but I knew that morning there was no hope of that.
Without my friends, I would always be alone.
The day was pretty bad in most ways. Everything was a shambles. There were arguments all the time, and total confusion in every area. For instance, we wanted, naturally, to get out to our place and see its condition. We were determined to sleep there that night. But we didn’t have a vehicle, and the vehicles in town were in hot demand. It was one o’clock in the afternoon before we managed to hijack a Mitsubishi Triton one-tonner and even then we had to agree to take eight people in the back, and drop them off at various places along the route. Not that we minded of course, but it was frustrating. Everyone was tired and crabby, and no-one could agree on anything. We didn’t know yet that this was going to be the pattern of the next few months, but I suppose if we’d stopped to think about it we could have worked it out.
We didn’t get home until right on dark, not just because we had to drop people at different places,
but because at each farm we got out and sympathised and gave advice and made optimistic comments. It was a long process, and because we were at the end of the road there was no-one left to do it for us. So we arrived home alone, and any comfort we needed we had to provide for ourselves.
I don’t want to be a whinger, and the fact is that our place was in pretty good shape. Whoever had lived there, and left just twenty-four hours before, had taken pride in the house and done their best. But somehow you can’t bear to walk into your own home and see so much changed. Little things and big things. The fridge in a different part of the kitchen. Dad’s office turned into a bedroom. All the books dumped in a shed out the back.
And of course heaps of stuff had gone. Basically, anything of any value. We’d expected that, so the shock maybe wasn’t so bad. God it hurt though, when you suddenly realised another precious belonging couldn’t be found. I didn’t mind about stuff like videos and CDs and TVs. ‘Never cry over anything that can’t cry over you,’ Dad said. I knew the jewellery would have gone, but it still upset me. And then there were the odds and ends that were nowhere to be found, even though with some of them you had no idea why they would be stolen. For instance, my photo album, my bookends that Fi had given me, my mask that I made in Year 8. I was proud of that mask.
Maybe they just got chucked out.
Mind you, we’d gained a few things too. There was a new table-tennis table in the dining room, and quite a lot of food in the pantry, and most amazingly, a brand-new header in the barn that we figured we’d have to give back when we worked out where it was looted from.
I’d thought that when we got home we’d go hammer and tongs to put everything back together, to get it all into good shape; not just the house and the sheds, but the property itself. But it didn’t quite happen like that. I guess we were a bit shell-shocked. Mum and Dad argued a lot, usually about something totally trivial. Mum spent hours sitting in the vegie garden, just staring at the mountains. She took it for granted that I’d do the housework, whereas, like I said, I’d always taken it for granted that once the war was over she’d look after me. I didn’t complain but I wasn’t happy about it, and I did a pretty sloppy job. With Dad wandering around the paddocks and Mum sitting in the vegie garden having her Great Depression, I don’t know whether they even noticed that I was doing most of the work. I thought it was so unfair. There I was, still limping, still a mess on the outside and an even bigger mess on the inside, and there were my parents lost in their own worlds.
Of course there were lots of good moments, especially the times when we were nice to each other again, when we hugged or sat side by side holding hands or walked together or talked about the stuff we’d seen. At those times I could believe that eventually we’d get back to the way things used to be.
When there was any time to stop and think—and I didn’t want any time to stop and think so I made sure there wasn’t much—I was amazed at the changes in me. Even little things. After a couple of days the first TV station came back on air, and it only operated between five pm and nine pm, but I started watching the news every night. Partly because I thought I’d better start taking an interest in all that political stuff, partly because there was nothing else on, but also because each day important announcements were made. The only trouble with that was, you couldn’t rely on the announcements. On Tuesday night they announced that schools would reopen in ten days; on Thursday they said, ‘Sorry, we don’t know when they’ll open’. On Saturday they said fighting had flared up in one of the border territories; Sunday they admitted it was a mistake.
The day after that, the Monday, the first people from the United Nations War Crimes Commission arrived and announced they’d be calling for people to come forward to give evidence. I wondered if anyone would ask me about Colonel Long. I certainly wasn’t going out of my way to look for him.
The biggest immediate change was the resettlement. It had to be done, and it had to be done quickly. Twenty million people had to fit into an area that used to have six million. We knew we’d lose most of the farm; the question was how much, and which parts. We were pretty confident we’d keep enough to be viable, because obviously farms and farmers were going to be needed more than ever, and Dad’s experience would be worth a bit. But the freedom I’d once had, to roam across the paddocks on the motorbike, or to go skinny-dipping in the dams: well, I could kiss that goodbye.
In the Wirrawee area Fi’s mother got the job of dividing up the land. She was hardly in the best shape to do it but she said it’d take her mind off Fi a bit, so maybe it was a good idea, I don’t know. There was no way she could do it without making everybody unhappy. Each day her proposals were put up at the Post Office, so you could object if you wanted. I think she went too far with us, to show people that she wasn’t biased in our favour, or maybe even because she was mad that I hadn’t taken better care of Fi, or that I’d helped blow their house to smithereens. We ended up with only a couple of hectares of farmland—part of Nellie’s Paddock and part of Burnt Hut. Plus the wetlands, which we could only use if we drained, and just as we were considering doing that Fi’s mum slapped a preservation order on them so we couldn’t touch them. A covenant, it was called, which meant we still owned them legally, but we weren’t allowed to change them in any way.
As if that wasn’t bad enough they announced that people like us had to provide shelter and food to whoever was allocated the rest of our farm, while they started building their houses.
When I had a few hours free I got a lift into Wirrawee to try to track some people down. It was a long list. On top of it was my Stratton grandmother, who we’d been looking for since the first few hours of peace. We’d had no news of her at all, and Dad and Mum were frantic trying to find her. Then there were the New Zealand commandoes, Monique and Issa and Judy from Camp 23, Nell Ford and Mrs Slater, who we’d talked to in Wirrawee Hospital, Mrs Alexander, whose ride-on mower I’d destroyed . . .
The main ones for me though, apart from my grandmother, were Lee’s brothers and sisters, and Dr Muir. I was terribly worried about Dr Muir, because I didn’t know how he could possibly have escaped from the soldiers at the incinerator. I didn’t think I could stand it if I’d caused something terrible to happen to him.
I didn’t get far with my searches for the out-of-town people. I added my notices to the huge boards outside Tozer’s that were put up for exactly that purpose, and registered their names with the Red Cross office in Barker Street. But the Red Cross people were only interested in family reunions at that stage. Dad had already got them looking for Grandma, but they said it would be a week or two before they could look for friends.
They did tell me that Nell Ford had died in Wirrawee Hospital, about six months before the end of the war.
The good news was that Mrs Slater and Mrs Alexander were fine. Robyn’s parents were fine too, if you call moving and breathing fine. If that’s all there is. They were still functioning, but you felt that inside was bare and barren. Worst of all was the way Mr Mathers grabbed me and hugged me when I visited. He nearly broke my ribs. I could feel his desperation. I knew I couldn’t be Robyn. I had enough trouble being myself. And I knew I couldn’t take on two extra parents.
With stuff like that to deal with, I had very mixed feelings about going into Wirrawee. Every street I walked down, every park I passed, every shop and every corner reminded me of Robyn or Lee or Fi or one of the others. That roundabout was where Robyn fell off her bike and got a blood nose; that milk bar was where Homer and I nicked a packet of Stimorol and then, ashamed, took it back; that house was where Corrie bit Travis on the ear when we were in Grade 3 and he tried to kiss her at Simone’s birthday party. I felt like I was in a Luna Park of memories, surrounded on every side by the laughter and tears and cries and happy shouts of ghosts.
The other major problem about going into town was the number of people who wanted to stop and talk. I mean it had always been like that—if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread in Wirrawee you had to al
low half an hour minimum—and sometimes that had been annoying and sometimes it had been nice, but now it was embarrassing and ridiculous. I felt like a freak show.
It was a difficult time, and made much worse by the fact that I’d expected the end of the war to be some kind of paradise. No matter how many times during the fighting I’d told myself that life after the war would be different, and difficult, deep down I’d still kidded myself that we could return to normal. Better than normal: the longer the war went, the more I remembered life in the old days as being pretty much perfect.
Then a few things happened. The first was that I got news of the feral kids who had gone back to New Zealand with Ryan. It had been impossible to get any messages through to New Zealand, because the telephone lines were reserved for the military and for government business. When they were opened to civilians for three hours a day, you still couldn’t get through, because of the heavy demand, and the problems with lines and equipment damaged during the war. The Wirrawee Exchange didn’t seem to be a high priority.
I tried a few times, whenever I found myself near a phone, but in the end I only made it because of my powerful friends. I was in town again with Dad, trying to buy herbicide from the limited amounts available, when Heather from the Post Office ran down the street to catch me.
‘Oh Ellie,’ she puffed, ‘I wish you wouldn’t walk so fast. Oh, let me get my breath back.’
I waited, wondering what I’d done to deserve being chased down the street.
‘Oh,’ she said again, ‘I’m so glad I’ve caught you. There’s a very important military man in New Zealand, been trying all morning to get you. Says it’s urgent. Said he didn’t know you were free until last night, when he saw a newspaper article about you.’
‘Did you get his name?’ I asked, hoping against hope that it might be . . .
‘General Finley? Does that sound right?’
‘Colonel Finley? Seriously? Oh my God, I can’t believe it.’