A Rose for the Anzac Boys (17 page)

It is funny. Sometimes these days it is as though Australia and all in it have vanished and only here is real. There is no use writing to people in a dream land. But you are real and I can write to you. I know it sounds all very stupid. I hope that you will understand. Sometimes we are all so tired here I don’t think there is one of us who makes sense.

I think we will be going up the line again soon. I am giving this to a cobber who’s working as an orderly. He got a splinter of wood blown through his foot, the lucky blighter, so won’t be going with us. If I don’t come through he will send this to you. I want to thank you for your friendship. The only good things we have any more are dreams and hope, and you gave me both for a while.

I tried to think of home the other day, but for the first time it wasn’t there. It was like something has sliced it from my memory.

Or maybe it was never there and I imagined the whole thing—the sheep, the way the fences stretch across the grass. All the colour has gone from the world. There’s no green now. Just mud and blood.

Pay no attention to me, Miss Macpherson. I am tired, that’s all. I hope you find your way back to your place in New Zealand. I really do. If there is any good left in the world it must be there. When you get back among the trees and sheep and wide free sky think of me sometimes. I cannot tell you what your letters have meant to me. It’s funny, but when I started this letter my pencil almost wrote Rose instead of your real name. I hope you don’t mind but that is how I think of you, the one beautiful thing in all this war.

Yours truly, always,

Harry Harrison

If I don’t come through he will send this to you.

No!

She wanted to scream. Instead she stuffed her fist into her mouth so she didn’t cry out, alarm the other passengers, the stewardess, Dougie in his cabin next door.

The sense of loss struck her like a blow. To the world outside she and Harry had been from two different worlds. But they had understood each other in a way she had never felt before, even with Tim.

You hardly knew him, she told herself. Just like you hardly knew Gordon.

But it wasn’t true.

There had been a bond, however unlike any romance she had ever read. She had been happy when she thought
of him; had felt safe, even with the sound of shells rumbling all around, when he was near.

He had been through so much, and had survived to smile. What had they put the man through in the last few months to write to her like that?

She should have been there for him, as she had been for Dougie. But she hadn’t. Had no right to be, had no way to be. And that loss froze her heart.

She let the letter fall to her lap. The sounds of departure filtered through the window: engine noise, the ship vibrating, the squawk of a seagull far above.

How had he died? Where had he died?

She picked up the second letter, stared at the unfamiliar writing for a moment, then tore it open.

Dear Miss Macpherson,

Please excuse me writting to you like this we have never met but Harry told me a lot about you so I thought I should write now becaus you wont have herd.

Harry court it a week ago but you are not to worry he is not dead the captain told us this morning after parade.

Miss Macpherson it was like this, we was in the trench and theer was this noise and the world exploded and it was dark I couldnt breethe. Then I felt hands grab my ankles and someone pull me out. It was a shell that had landed on the side of the trench burrying us all but not me so much just some cuts and a bruzed face. I yelled Harry is in there but allready they were digging him out with their hands and pannekins and everything they had becaus Harry is a right good cove and I don’t think there is
one of us he hasnt done something for even giving me his ciggyrettes and wanting nothing in return not like some I could name.

Everyone was digging even Captain Sanders. His hands were all red and bleeding after from scraping at them rocks. There was Harrys arm and it twiched and Bluey yelled he is alive and we scraped where his face should be and thank God he was face uprite becaus we could get his mouth clear and he gave a coff and started to breethe while we dug out the rest of him.

Miss he looked crook as a chook when we dug him out his head bashed on one side and bleeding and a broking arm but they can fix that allright no worries it was his head that was really crook. Bluey and I carried him to the casuallty statin and they put his head in a brase and tied him down so he couldn’t move it round becaus he was trying to scream by then I reckkon he didn’t know where he was or that we had got him out. And then he went real quiet which I reckkon was good becaus it stopped him moving and the ambullance took him then miss and that is the last I saw of him.

But like I was saying Captain Sanders says that Harry is in England he’s got his Blighty One so he won’t be comming back which means that he is safe and he deservs it if any of us do for all that he has done and Captain Sanders says that his head will be all right too they say so miss you are not to worry if you dont hear from him which Bluey said that you mite do but Bluey isnt one for writting becaus he left school when he was eight and the teacher was a
[a word crossed out, as though the writer had thought better of it and left a blank instead].

Well that is all Miss. I hope you are well and that your brother is better too he is well out of it thats all I can say.

I remain,

Yours sincerelly

and faithfully, David Gerald Carter,

Private

She shut her eyes briefly. It was as though her heart was finally beating again. Two letters, one of death and one of life.

One more letter still to read. It, too, had been readdressed, had come a crooked way to find her.

Her hands trembled as she tore it open.

21 March 1918

Dear Miss Macpherson,

Harry Harrison said to write this to you. He said you wouldn’t like it but you has a right to know. I am not a good writer miss but I will do my best.

I was with your brother right up until the end. That is right Miss, I saw Tim killed there was no mistaking it. I was in the trench at Gallipoli with him and a shell hit us and it caved in. They dug me out miss but Tim caught it I mean he was still under there. I saw his face Miss then another shell hit us and we had to leave so I reckon he got buried a second time. But he was dead the first time. It would have been quick Miss Macpherson he would not have felt no pain so don’t you fret about that none.

I am sorry you did not know till now Miss. I reckon they need to
tell families more but what can you say so much happened there I suppose we will never know the half of it even those who were there. Harry says to say hello he is writing to you too. He is a good mate miss the best there is.

Yours respectfully,

Private A. O’ Bryrne

Midge put the letter down. Pain? Of course Tim had suffered pain. Had any letter written to a dead man’s loved ones ever said ‘He died in agony’?

But she’d been there. She knew.

Had she always really known? Was that why she’d been so determined it wasn’t so, in spite of all the evidence? For her body felt no shock. She had thought that Tim’s loss would feel like a hand had been cut off. But she felt…what?

Not enough pain, she thought. Suddenly she longed for pain. But it wouldn’t come. Instead, she knew, the loss would tear at her, nibble at her, every day that she lived and he did not.

So that was it. The end. Hope gone, plans gone. Tim vanished with so many like him.

‘Smiling may you go, and smiling come again.’

Tim, she thought. My darling Tim. Tim of the laughter, Tim with his plans. Three children, tobogganing over the grass. One gone, one crippled. One who had to carry on.

It’s not fair! she thought. I want my brother back! I want my Tim! I want the years we might have shared together.

And now? She bit her lip. What a silly question. You carried on.

Slowly she opened the small bag marked
Wanted On Voyage
. She took out the precious picture of the roses that Harry had given her so long ago. Once again she traced the lines of the flowers with her fingertips. Then she wrapped it in its paper once again.

It was over. It was time to take Dougie home. Help him run Glen Donal, help him cope without his leg. It was so much easier, she thought, just to go where you were needed than to plan for any other life.

She glanced out the porthole. The ship had sailed while she’d been reading, slipping away from the wharf with none of the cheers and streamers of peacetime. There was grey sea there now, ruffled by wind and the wallow of the ship.

England was behind them. England and the war and all its horror. There was nothing she could do for Harry now. She couldn’t even write to him till they made port, had no way to find out his address. Tomorrow, she thought, Glen Donal will be closer still. Tomorrow and tomorrow, and then we will be there, with no echo of the guns around us.

And Harry? He was safe now too. He would marry a nurse, perhaps, as he convalesced in England, or one of the girls who waited back home in Biscuit Creek. He was out of the war at last. He and she could both go back to their own worlds. Somehow she knew there would be no more letters from Harry now.

He will get home, she thought, to his sheep and his fences and his family.

We have both survived. We are free.

Glen Donal

New Zealand

24 November 1918

Dearest Ethel,

So the war is over. It is hard to believe it here, at the back of beyond as you call it. But it is hard to believe in the world outside at all sometimes. Even our time in France seems like a dream.

We celebrated with champagne, and the next day Mrs Campbell and I spent cooking and cooking and cooking and we had all the men and the families up at the shearing shed for a slapup afternoon tea, scones and sponge cake and ginger cake and lemonade and beer. The children put up Christmas decorations, streamers and Father Christmases, which is the best we can do for flags and bunting at short notice. Dougie made a speech and a very good one,
thanking everyone who stayed behind and kept the place going. They also serve who shear the daggy sheep bums, but in fact he put it well and I think even meant it.

What was the Armistice like in France? And what will you do now? I couldn’t help thinking of you all as I stood there with my glass of shandy making small talk with old Mrs Cameron and the Fraser ladies. Did you all dance on the railway platform? But I suppose you had to be hard at work even after the Armistice, with so many men to go home. I felt a bit useless here, to tell the truth, despite the heroic baking.

Things flow on here just as I always imagined. We had a good lambing this year. The rabbits have bred up since the men were away and there was a landslip on the hills in one of the far paddocks. But all that news is important only to us and can’t mean a thing to you over there.

Well, I’d better go. We’re off to a tennis party after church. I have a new tennis dress, a most fashionable one with a dropped waist. Suddenly, as soon as we heard the war was over, I felt so dowdy, and Miss Davies has my measurements so she got a dressmaker down in Christchurch to make me up some clothes. There are ribbons and ruches and ruffles and other up-to-the-minute items that I have never heard of before, but Miss Davies assures me are all the rage. Miss Davies found someone to restring my racquet too.

Dougie is even playing tennis, can you imagine? He doesn’t do much footwork, but he’s awfully good at lunging and his serves are terrific. He looks very handsome in his whites. He is much in demand at mixed doubles, and not just because there are fewer men here now. So many never came home at all, but lots of other men
have stayed in the cities. You can’t blame them wanting higher wages and more comforts after what they’ve been through.

Goodbye, old thing. I miss you lots. Don’t forget your loving friend,

Midge

1st London General

Hospital

8 December 1918

Dear Miss Macpherson,

Excuse a stranger writing to you. We met so briefly in France and England you may not remember me. But after so many years of hearing Eulalie read out your letters it is as though I have known you too. Your aunt was very dear to me. Please forgive any familiarity.

By now you should have received the official telegram, but I know telegrams can go astray. If this letter then is a shock to you, please forgive that too.

I was with your aunt at the hospital when she died this morning. It was an easy death, compared to most. This new influenza strikes one down almost before you know that you are ill. Even yesterday your aunt seemed well, though tired as we all have been for so long. She collapsed on her rounds last night, and I was with her till the end. But I think I have told you that already. Forgive me, my dear. This letter is not as clear as it should be. But I did not want to delay writing.

My dear Miss Macpherson—or may I call you Margery? Because that is how all your aunt’s friends have thought of you these many years. Your aunt was a woman to be proud of.

Her last words were of you and your brother. ‘Give them my love’ she said and then, ‘Tell Margery to carry on’. I do not quite know what she meant by that, but perhaps you do.

I hope, my dear, that one day we may meet again, in memory of your dearest aunt.

I remain,

Yours sincerely,

Sister Alicia Atkins

13 May 1919

Dearest Midge,

I am getting married.

I know this will be a shock to you. It is to me.

You know, I used to dream that one day a blind convalescent would come here. I’d nurse him and he would fall in love with me, unable to see my face. A beauty and the beast but in reverse, with me the ugly one, and him unknowing. A nice obscure man, with a lovely manor house and lots of slobbery dogs, who didn’t need a wife to show off to the world.

Well, I got Gavin instead. He’s not what I expected, Midge. He’s not what Mummy expected either. He’s an archaeologist, though he was only on one dig out in Mesopotamia before the war took us all. He was in the Australian Light Horse out there too
—not with our lot;a colonial, just like you, though he studied at Oxford—and came here to recuperate from appendicitis, of all things. As he says, to escape the entire war without a scratch then end up with appendicitis is something for the record books.

But he made a full recovery, thank goodness, and by the time you get this we will be married and on our way east again. I gather that when the money for a dig comes through you have to move quickly, and I HAVE been moving quickly, trying to get a tropical kit ready, or whatever one calls a kit for Mesopotamia. No big wedding, just the family and some of the household and Ethel of course and some of Gavin’s chums in the local church. I suppose Wilkins will cry again, the old dear, and pretend he isn’t.

I do so wish you could be with us, but there simply isn’t time. We will be thinking of you so very much, so if you smelled the scent of wedding cake among your mountains a few weeks ago, then that was us.

Gavin doesn’t mind about my face. Or rather he minds the pain behind it. But he says that none of us came out of the war unscathed. He couldn’t cope with a wife untouched by it all. So somehow my face is right, it fits with what’s happened to our lives. His colleagues seem to cope with it too, which is the main thing, and at least out there one won’t have to meet lots of staring strangers. There’ll just be us and the villagers, and all the glories of Babylon, at least those we can dig up. It’s funny. You wanted me to have sunlight and your wide horizons. Well, I’m getting them, just not the ones you planned.

Be happy for me, darling. As happy as your loving friend,

Anne, soon to be

Mrs Gavin Ridgeway

Deepdene

Yorkshire

February 1920

Dearest Midge,

Well old girl, I’ve sold the blessed bike. A lorry ran into me when neither of us were expecting it. I got off with a broken collarbone but the old bike was a goner and Da had pink kittens and threatened to cut off my allowance. Our George went more boringly on and on about the dangers of women’s rights than ever. Our George is making the perfect wholesale grocer. His soul is made of cocoa.

We had a spiffing demonstration outside Parliament House the other day, but the press is getting tired of this chaining ourselves to the railings lark. We’ll have to think of something more newsworthy pretty soon. Tattooing ‘Votes for Women’ on the old Prime Minister’s head strikes me as a good one, don’t you think? It’s all right for you out in the colonies, lass; you’ve got your votes, but we back home need help!

Look here, Midge, don’t you think you should come back and join us? You can’t be happy out there playing tennis among those sheep. Come and set up house with us in London. There is so much that needs doing here. We need all the hands we can get.

You remember Dimpy—Moira Garrington-Ffoote? Dimps was a VAD out in Malta and then up our way; one brother caught it at Flanders and the other was gassed; coughing his lungs up in Oxford these days, poor blighter. Dimps has set up a school and
soup kitchen for the children in the East End, and we want to get a library going too. Do you realise there are children who have never seen a book in their whole lives? Or eaten more than bread and scrape for dinner? Sorry—I didn’t mean to preach to you of all people! But we need you here! Dimps and I plan to take a house in London. There’ll be plenty of room for three, or more when we get the volunteers, and…

Midge put the letter down and looked out the window. Behind her Harry’s rose picture glowed on the wall, above the mantelpiece with Tim’s and Dougie’s photos, and the miniatures of the three of them Mum had asked to be painted a few months before she died.

Out the window the mountains reached for the sky; a peak of snow trembled gold as the sunlight faded. She could hear Dougie’s voice over near the shearing sheds, yelling some order to the men, then the scrape, scrape, scrape of his crutch on the gravel path. Dougie managed to get most places by himself these days. He even managed to drive, pressing the clutch down with a stick to help his new foot.

Dougie had needed her on the ship home; needed her for the first few months at Glen Donal, when the pain of a leg long gone still woke him screaming.

But a month ago Dougie had become engaged to Sylvia Malcolm from Mount Albert. A nice girl, Sylvia; Midge liked her, though it was hard to find much to talk about. The last thing Dougie needed now, as he rebuilt his life, was a sister interfering in the running of his farm. A sister
who remembered the days of his agony and the childishness that came with pain.

Dougie’s eyes still wore shadows. Every man who’d made it home had shadows. She supposed her face had shadows of its own. And the silence of Tim’s voice still echoed through the house, across the paddocks, never mentioned by his brother or his sister, always felt.

Her heart still burned like a sliver of ice had lodged in it when she thought of Tim. Every stair and cupboard at Glen Donal spoke of Tim. The shelf with the old monkey that they’d shared; the banisters they’d raced each other down. The cribs still up in the attic, one his, one hers.

She supposed Dougie’s babies would sleep in them one day now.

Tim, she whispered, and pretended she heard a whisper back. ‘Sis? Sis…Sis…’

But it wasn’t Tim. It was the wind in the willow trees, the swish of Mrs Campbell’s broom. Smiling may you go, and smiling come again, she thought.

Oh Tim…

Ghosts, she thought. There are too many ghosts here. The ghosts of our childhood, the children laughing by the stream. The ghosts of Ernie the snigger, dead at Gallipoli, Jock the breaker lost in the mud at Ypres, Will who rode the one-eyed pony that everybody said was mad…

She lifted Ethel’s letter again. Was that the answer? Become a suffragette back in England rather than a maiden aunt listening to her ghosts at Glen Donal? But England was the past. It had never been her heart’s country. Even the
blood-fed soil of France held more of her soul these days than the green fields of England. She got up, and began to pace the room. Was she lost too, then, ‘missing in action’, a ghost herself, all meaning taken from her life with the loss of Tim and all her dreams? Surely there had to be something more she could do with her life; something with meaning; something with a purpose as strong as Dougie’s as he hauled his maimed body across the paddocks, reclaiming a future that France had nearly torn away.

Dougie had come home again. But was Glen Donal still home for her?

The paddocks and the mountains still stirred her soul. But Tim’s absence cut her like a knife. And Ethel was right. After the last four years it was hard to make do with the routines of roast lamb and tennis parties.

Suddenly she remembered Lallie, her voice harsh with weariness, the beat of the shells drumming across the fields. ‘Tell Midge to carry on,’ she’d said. Should she become a nurse? Take up Aunt Lallie’s cape and veil? She’d had enough of wounds and bedpans. That was the past. That was Lallie’s life, not hers. Lallie would never have meant her to stand in her shadow. It had been Lallie who’d urged her to make her own life, not live someone else’s. There had to be something more.

Suddenly she noticed her name on another letter, half hidden under the envelopes for Dougie on the salver. The paper was thin and cheap. When she picked it up she saw that the address had been written and rewritten many times across the front; not surprising, as the sender had
addressed it simply to ‘Miss Rose Macpherson, Glen Donal, New Zealand’.

It was a miracle, she thought, picking it up, that it had found its way here at all.

Rose…Surely Harry wouldn’t be writing to her after all these years? And he’d always used her real name before. Besides, it wasn’t his writing. It looked like a woman’s hand, the copperplate slow and careful, as though it had been drafted once then copied to look perfect, each word blotted carefully before the ink could run.

Moura

Biscuit Creek

New South Wales

Australia

Dear Miss Rose Macpherson,

I am sorry to be writing to you out of the blue like this when we have never spoke but I am Harry’s mum. Well, Miss Macpherson, you see it is like this.

I know you met my Harry in France when you was working there. I didn’t know they had girls in the army. I know you must be brave though if you done that so maybe you won’t mind me writing to you like this. Maybe after all you must of seen you will understand.

Perhaps you didn’t know that Harry was wounded over there. In the head it was. The doctors said he should be all right now but, miss, he isn’t. He doesn’t speak at all most days, not at all no matter what you say.

It’s not like he is really sick his appetite is good and he works all day fencing, mostly off with the dogs. He smiles at the dogs sometimes but that is all. He has never even smiled at me, his Mum. I can stand that Miss Macpherson. I could have stood it if he’d been killed though in a way it would of killed me too. But I can not stand seeing my boy unhappy. Not just unhappy Miss. Most times its like he isn’t even there. Well, Miss Macpherson, you are wondering why I am writing to you about this but it was yesterday Harry’s dad harnessed up the sulky to see Lewis’s new radio. They got it sent from Sydney special and we took Harry too in case it did him good. I don’t know if you have radios in New Zealand but they play songs so it sounds just like the piano and singers were in the room and they played this song called ‘The Rose of No-Man’s-Land’. It was all about you nurses over in France where you were with my Harry. I remember some of the words. They stuck by me even though I only heard them the once.