by Nevil Shute
Jennifer said, “How did you know me, Mrs. Dorman?”
Jane said, “You’ve got a look of your grandmother about you, my Aunt Ethel. I knew you right away.”
Then there were introductions, and enquiries about the passage, and business of the luggage. The Dormans had brought both utilities to the pier-head and Tim Archer was sitting in the Chevrolet below. Presently Jennifer was passing through the Customs, and then her suitcases and trunk were down in the new Ford utility, and she was free into Australia.
She drove to the hotel with Jack and Jane Dorman, Angela following behind in the old Chevrolet with Tim. In a blur of first impressions the width of the streets and the great number of motor-cars impressed Jennifer most; whatever else Melbourne might be, it was a beautifully laid-out city, and obviously a very prosperous one. The Dormans had engaged a room for her at the Windsor for a couple of nights; she found herself whisked up into this, and then they all had lunch together, except for Tim Archer, who had started back for Merrijig in the old utility.
Jennifer decided that it was easier to submit until the hospitality of these kind strangers had exhausted its first impetus; she felt that it would be rude and ungenerous to battle against it now. Angela disappeared after lunch upon her own affairs, and Jane and Jack Dorman took Jennifer out to the new Ford utility. They all sat together in the wide seat and started out on a long drive up into the Dandenong mountains, clothed in trees finer and taller than any that Jennifer had seen in England. At the outset she protested diffidently at the waste of their time in making this outing for her, but she was quickly told about the newness of the car and made to realise that her host would certainly have done that anyway that afternoon for his own pleasure. Indeed, the fun that Jack Dorman was getting out of his new possession was so evident that Jennifer relaxed, content to enjoy herself.
By the time they got back to Melbourne she was dazed with new impressions. By common consent they spent the evening quietly in the hotel. Jennifer was tired, and at Leonora the Dormans were in the habit of getting up at six in the morning and going to bed soon after nine each night. So for a while after dinner Jennifer sat talking quietly with Jane Dorman in a corner of the lounge of the hotel, while Jack smoked a cigar and read the Herald.
The girl said presently, “I’d like to take a little time tomorrow looking for a room or a small flat to live in here. It’s terribly nice of you to ask me up to Leonora, and I’d love to go back with you for a week, but after that I’ll have to come back here and take a job. I thought I’d better see about that tomorrow.”
Jane said, “I know just how you feel. We’ll get you fixed up with somewhere nice to live before we go back home. I don’t think you ought to be in too much of a hurry to start work, though. The temperature was over a hundred the day before yesterday, in the city here. It’s the worst time of the year for anybody coming out from England, and you’re bound to feel it more than we do. You’d be much more comfortable if you stay with us at Leonora for a month, and start work in the autumn. It’s much cooler out there.”
The girl said awkwardly, “I think I ought to start earning something sooner than that, even if it is a bit hot.” The austerities of England were still strong in her; to relax and rest was somehow vaguely disgraceful. “I’m living on your money as it is,” she said.
The older woman said evenly, “You’re doing nothing of the sort, my dear. When we sent that money to Aunt Ethel we gave it to her. That was the end of it, so far as we were concerned.”
The girl said, “I’m sorry — I oughtn’t to have said that. But I would rather start earning my own living fairly soon. I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful, when you’ve been so very kind. But I’ve got to paddle my own canoe sometime, and the sooner I start the better.”
“I know,” said Jane. “So long as you know that we should love to have you for as long as you can stay with us. None of our children are home now; Angie will be coming up at the end of the week, but she won’t stay longer than ten days. It’s dull for young people up at Merrijig, of course — nothing ever happens there.”
“I think I’d find it rather interesting,” said Jennifer. “If I stayed up there too long with you, I might not want to come back to the city at all.”
Jane glanced at her curiously. “Have you ever lived in the country, at home?”
The girl laughed. “No,” she said frankly. “I’ve always lived in towns — in Leicester, and then in London. I don’t really know what living in the country’s like. I suppose that’s why I’m interested in it.”
“It can be very dull in the country,” Jane said. “Long periods of doing nothing but the daily work a woman has to do, cooking and washing and cleaning the house. No one but your husband and the men to talk to, and only the radio to listen to. But ... I don’t know. I wouldn’t like to live anywhere else.”
Jennifer thought about this for a minute. Then she asked, “How many sheep have you got?”
Jane looked up in surprise. “I don’t quite know — about three thousand, I think. Jack, how many sheep are there on Leonora?”
He looked up from his paper. “Three thousand five hundred and sixty, unless someone’s been along and pinched some of ’em.”
“Then there’s the beef cattle,” Jane Dorman said. “About two hundred Herefords.”
“Two hundred and six,” said Mr. Dorman, and returned to his paper.
“I suppose you sell a lot of them for meat,” said Jennifer.
“Sell about six or seven hundred fat lambs every year,” Jane replied, “and a good few ewes. But most of the money comes from the wool clip, of course.”
“I wasn’t thinking so much about the money,” the girl replied. “It must be rather fun raising so much food.”
“Fun?”
“Don’t you feel pleased at being able to turn out such a lot of meat?”
Jane smiled. “I never thought about it. Send them to market and that’s the end, so far as we’re concerned, except to bank the cheque when it comes in.”
“It seems such a good thing to be doing,” said the girl.
Jane Dorman glanced at her curiously. It was the first time that she had heard it suggested that there was any ethical value in the work that she and Jack had spent their lives in. In the early years they had been looked down upon as country hicks, unable to make a living in the city and so compelled to live upon the land; in those hard days between the wars when wool was one and six a pound nobody had cared whether they lived or starved. In recent years with wool ten times the price, they had been abused as profiteers. In neither time had anyone suggested in her hearing that their work had any social value. Jennifer, she thought, came to Australia with a fresh outlook; it would be interesting to find out what it was.
She asked, “How are things at home now, in regard to food? What’s it really like, for ordinary people?”
Jennifer said, “It’s quite all right — there’s really heaps of food. Of course, it’s not like it is here, or on the ship. But there’s heaps to eat in England.”
“Not meat, is there?”
“No. Meat is a bit scarce.”
“When you say scarce, Jennie, what does that mean? One hears such different stories. One day you see a picture of a week’s ration of meat in England about the size of a matchbox, and then someone like you comes along and says it’s quite all right. Can you get a steak?”
“Oh no — not what you’d call a steak.”
“What about restaurants? You can’t go in and order a grilled steak?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so. You might at the Dorchester or some hotel like that that ordinary people can’t afford to go to. I’d never tasted a grilled steak till I got on the ship.”
“Never tasted a grilled steak?”
“No. Even if you could get the steak, I don’t think you’d cook it that way, because of wasting the fat.”
Jane asked, “But what do you cook when you go out on a picnic?”
T
he question rather stumped the English girl. “I don’t know,” she said, and laughed. “Not that, anyway.”
“You eat a lot of fish, don’t you?”
Jennifer nodded. “A lot. Do you get much fish here?”
“Not much fresh fish. I don’t think we’ve got the fishing fleets that you’ve got at home. We get a lot of kippers and things like that.”
“Like the English kippers? Herrings?”
“They are the English kippers,” Jane said. “Scotch, rather. They all seem to come from Aberdeen.”
“Do you get those out here?”
“Why, yes. You can buy kippers all over Australia.”
“They’re getting very scarce at home,” the girl said. “I remember when I was a schoolgirl, in the war, the kippers were awfully good. But it’s very difficult to get a kipper now at home.”
“Funny,” Jane said. “We’ve had lots of them out here for the last two or three years. It always makes me feel very near home when we have kippers for breakfast.”
The girl asked, “Have you ever been home since you came out here?”
Jane shook her head. “Jack suggested we should go home on a trip a few months ago,” she said. “But I don’t know. All the people that I’d want to see are dead or gone away — it’s over thirty years since I left home. And everything seems to have changed so much — I don’t know that I’d want to see it now. Our old house is a school. It used to be so lovely; I don’t want to see it as a school.”
“That’s what everybody says,” the girl replied, “that England used to be so much nicer. Of course, I only know it as it is now.”
“Old people have always talked like that, I suppose,” said Jane. “And yet, I think there’s something in it this time.”
There was a silence, and then Jennifer said, “Have you been doing a lot of shopping since you came down here?”
“Oh, my dear. Do you know anything about pictures?”
Jennifer knew absolutely nothing about pictures, but she listened with interest to the results of the picture hunt to date. She went to bed early with the Dormans, thinking that these were simple and unaffected people that she was beginning to like rather well.
She went shopping with them next day, feeling rather shabby as she walked with them on a round of the best shops. Jane wanted to buy a wrist-watch for Jack Dorman to commemorate their holiday, and they all went into a shop that Jennifer alone would never have dreamed of entering, and looked at watches; finally Jane bought a gold self-winding wrist-watch for her husband for ninety-two guineas, and never turned a hair. Clothes did not appear to appeal to Jane very much— “I so seldom go anywhere, Jenny” — but shoes were another matter, and she bought thirty-eight pounds’ worth in half an hour. Jack left them while this was going on, and they went on to Myer’s and bought a new refrigerator for a hundred and twenty pounds and a mass of miscellaneous kitchen gadgets and equipment for fifty-three pounds eighteen shillings and sixpence. “We get down to Melbourne so seldom,” Jane said happily.
Jennifer wandered after her relation in a daze; she had never spent a morning like that before. Jack caught up with them as they were having morning coffee and said that he’d sometimes thought that Jane should have a car of her own and not use the station utilities, and he’d found a Morris Minor that had only done a thousand miles and was a bargain at a hundred quid above list price, and would Jane like to come and look at it? They went and looked at it and bought it, and then they had lunch and started on the curtain materials and carpets. “The homestead is so shabby,” Jane remarked. “I don’t know what you’ll think of it, coming from England. I must brighten it up a little.”
By tea-time they were all dead tired, and they had spent about thirteen hundred and sixty pounds. Jennifer felt with all her instincts that the Dormans must be crazy, and then she reminded herself of the letter to Aunt Ethel and the statement that the wool cheque had been twenty-two thousand pounds, and thought perhaps that goings-on like this were normal to Australia. After all, Australia was on the other side of the world and so all Australians, and she herself, must now be walking upside down relative to England, so it was reasonable that all their standards should be upside down as well.
“We don’t always go on like this,” said Jane. “In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever done it before.” Later that evening she showed Jennifer a gold and blue enamel dressing-table set that Jack had bought for her all by himself, and had presented to her rather sheepishly.
Jennifer felt that surely there must be something wrong in spending so much money; her upbringing in the austerities of England insisted that this must be so. The queer thing was that here it all seemed natural and right. The Dormans had worked for thirty years without much recompense and now had won through to their reward; in spite of the violation of all her traditions Jennifer was pleased for them, and pleased with a country that allowed rewards like that. She had been brought up in the belief that money spent by the rich came out of the pockets of the poor, and she had never seriously questioned that. But in Australia, it seemed, there were very few poor people, if any. In her two days in the country she had seen great placards at the railway stations appealing for boys of nineteen to work as railway porters at twelve pounds a week, and she had seen sufficient of the prices in the cheaper shops to realise that such boys would be much better off than she had been when working for the Ministry of Pensions in England. It was all very difficult and very puzzling, and she fell asleep that night with a queer feeling of guilty enjoyment in Australia.
They took things a little more easily next day, and bought nothing but an English grandfather clock for a hundred and eighty guineas, because it was just like one that Jane remembered in her English home, thirty years before. They took delivery of the little Morris before lunch and Jane drove it to Toorak to show it to Angela, and after lunch they all drove out in the two cars, Jane driving the Morris with Angela beside her and Jack Dorman following with Jennifer in the new Ford utility to pick up the pieces if Jane hit anything. They followed the shore of Port Phillip Bay in the hot sunshine nearly to Mornington, and had tea in a café, a Devonshire tea with splits and jam and a great bowl of clotted cream with a yellow crust. They were back in the city in time for drinks before dinner, and then to the theatre to see Sonia Dresdel in A Message for Margaret.
Next morning Jane and Jennifer went out early in the little car to look for a boarding-house, and found one that they had had recommended in a suburb called St. Kilda, not far from the sea and about twenty minutes from the centre of the city in the tram. There was no room vacant for three weeks, which Jane Dorman considered to be a very good thing. Jennifer liked the look of the woman who kept it and bowed to the inevitable, and paid a deposit, and engaged the room. Jane and Jennifer drove back to the city and had their hair set, rather expensively.
“I’ll have to watch out how I spend my money,” the girl said a little ruefully. “You’re getting me into bad habits.”
“We don’t go on like this at home,” said Jane. “I think we must be a bit touched, the amount of money that we’ve spent in these few days. We’ve never done it before. Do your father and mother ever go mad like this?”
Jennifer shook her head, thinking of the hard economies her parents had to make. “I don’t think you could do it in England, even if you had the money,” she said. “There wouldn’t be the things to buy — not the cars, anyway.”
They went to the pictures that night and saw Gary Cooper; next day they left for Leonora. By a last-minute decision Angela came with them. The virtues of a utility became clear then to Jennifer, because Jack Dorman went out in the morning and loaded up the refrigerator and the grandfather clock and about a hundredweight of kitchen gear, and came back and took on board five suitcases and Jennifer’s trunk. At about eleven o’clock they were ready to start.
Jane Dorman was not a fast driver, and the Morris was new to her; it was evening when they came to Leonora after a slow drive through magnificent mountain and pa
storal country. Jennifer learned a good deal of Victoria as they drove; she was amazed at the brilliance of the birds. The robin was more brightly coloured than a bird had any right to be, and the red and blue parrots in the woods amazed her. Here birds, apparently, had few enemies and so no need of a protective colouring, and freed from that restraint they had let themselves go. Only the lyre bird, a sombre being with a long tail like a peacock, appeared to exercise a British discretion in colours. The rest of them, thought Jennifer, were frankly gaudy.
They saw wallabies at one point, hopping across a paddock at a distance from the road, and at another place a black and silver animal about the size of a large cat, with a bushy tail like a silver fox fur, ran across the road in front of them; she learned that this was a possum. She saw a good many rabbits, exactly like the English rabbit, and was told about their depredations and the methods that were used to keep their numbers down. The style of the small towns and villages through which they passed reminded her of movie pictures of the Middle West of the United States; the same wooden houses with wide verandas and tin roofs, the same wide streets, at one time cattle tracks. It was a gracious, pleasant country that they passed through on that drive, the grass becoming yellow in the midsummer sun, but a well-watered and a friendly country, all the same.
In the evening they came to Leonora homestead on the slopes of the Buller range above the bridge and school and hotel that was Merrijig. Jennifer was driving with Jane Dorman for the last part of the journey; she closed the last paddock gate and got back into the car, and Jane drove into the yard behind the homestead where the new Ford was already parked with Mario and Tim admiring it. They got out of the Morris, and stretched after the long journey. “Well, this is it,” said Jane. “Is it like what you thought it was going to be?”
Jennifer looked around her. All the buildings were severely practical, the walls of white-painted weatherboard, the roofs of corrugated iron painted with red oxide. There were numbers of great corrugated iron water tanks, cylindrical in form, disposed to catch the rain that fell upon the roofs, and there was another such tank high up on a wooden stand from which the house was supplied. The house itself had deep verandas on two sides and fly-wire doors, and screens on all the windows. Standing in the yard she had a wide view out over the basin of the Delatite, pastures and occasional woods, and behind that again the sun was setting behind a wooded mountain. It was very quiet and secure and peaceful in the evening light.