A Rose for the Anzac Boys (18 page)

’Neath the War’s dark curse

Stands a Red Cross nurse

She’s the rose of no-man’s-land

And suddenly Harry speaks up. He was smiling too. Miss it had been so long since I saw my boy smile. He says I knew a Rose but she wasn’t with the Red Cross. And we all stared because like I told you, miss, Harry has never said a single word since he come home. I said who is she Harry? And he said like I should have known, She’s Rose Macpherson of Glen Donal in New Zealand. And then he said I hear the guns still all the time. Rose would understand. I said what about the guns Harry? And he said,
Can’t speak over the guns. Rose knows. And that is all he said. He stopped smiling Miss. He went away again.

Miss, Harry is my only boy there was another and a girl but they died of the polio so you see, miss, Harry is all I have and next door too their boys died at Gallipoli all three of them and they was relying on Harry to keep their place going as well. So if you can tell us why Harry can’t speak or how we can help him I would be much obliged and Harry’s dad and the Martins who are next door.

I remain yours faithfully,

Mrs Ellen Harrison

Wentworth Hotel

Sydney

10 April 1920

Dear Ethel,

I suppose you think I’m bonkers. But I’m not, you know. It’s just that for the first time since the war I have a glimpse of something that is worth doing.

Not that I know how much I will be able to do at Moura. If, as I suspect, Harry Harrison is suffering from a combination of shell shock and hearing loss—the noise of the guns his mother spoke about does sound like the symptoms of so many young men driven deaf by the years in the trenches—then I can at least offer some suggestions and reassurance to his parents, and possibly to Harry too. And as you and I know so well, how can anyone
understand who wasn’t there? How does that song go? When they ask us, what are we going to tell them…

Well, I was there, and so was Harry. I can’t talk about those days to Dougie—he just wants to forget. So seeing Harry, helping him, may give me a little peace as well.

But it’s more than that. As you guessed, I’ve been bored sick. There was something in Harry’s mother’s appeal about everyone on both farms relying on him that got to me. Yes, I know shell shock, but I know sheep too. Maybe I can help there as well. Dougie snaps if I so much as make a suggestion at Glen Donal.

Dear friend, don’t misunderstand, but I have come to realise that I’m not a nurse, or a suffragette. I’m a sheep farmer. It’s in my blood. Perhaps these people need help so much that they’ll forget I wear skirts, not trousers…

She sent a telegram to say when she was arriving; not a letter, in case the mail was slow. She bought new clothes in Sydney—including a low-waisted dress, with a pink sash across the hips—not just to look her best but to say ‘My life is new now too’. All she wore was new, except for Lallie’s locket. She always wore that now. She left the hotel before first light, the gas lamps lining the streets still flaring into the city dark, the road still damp with night and dew.

The car was a Ford, familiar but strange as well. The leather smelled new and felt soft. It had been extravagant buying a new car, when she might use it for so little time,
slinking back home a failure. But the salesman had said they’d buy it back from her and it would work out cheaper than hiring. Dougie had accepted she had earned the right to do what she liked with her money now, even though she still wasn’t quite twenty-one.

Two punctures in the first four hours, and the radiator boiled on the slope they called the Razorback. But that was nothing after driving an ambulance in France. She had her puncture repair kit, and there was petrol available. She only had to use the jerry cans in the back once, all the way to Goulburn.

Out from Goulburn the grass looked thin; the trees stunted too. Strange trees, with stranger twists and poor drab tops, like they were panting for more soil or rain. Was this what Moura would be like? She shivered. Impossible to think of living here after Glen Donal. This land could never speak to her heart.

She turned from the main road onto another. The land began to rise. Almost indiscernibly at first, the engine hardly labouring. But the air changed; the sweet unmistakable smell of cold and hills.

The trees were taller here, thick-trunked and sturdy, carrying their green heads with pride. They still looked odd. But perhaps you could grow to love them, she thought. Maybe there was a generosity in this soil too.

She stopped when her watch said it was lunchtime. She spread the blanket on the grass beside the road and sat down to force herself to eat and drink, just as she had for all those years in France. A picnic basket and thermos had
come with the car, as though to tempt you to buy it with the thought of picnics by the roadside.

The hotel had filled the basket with sandwiches, even wrapped them in a damp damask napkin to keep them fresh. Ham and pickle, tomato and cheese, the bread well buttered so it didn’t go soggy; roast beef and cucumber. A thermos of tea, with milk and sugar added, just as she liked it. Three slices of fruit cake in another napkin. How many napkins did they give away to wealthy guests each year, she wondered.

To her surprise she found herself finishing even the cake. She hadn’t realised she was hungry.

She glanced at her wristwatch again. It was new, a Christmas present from Dougie. A thoughtful present to a much-loved sister.

Had she really been naive enough to think Dougie would let his little sister help run Glen Donal?

It was time to go. Another two hours to get to Biscuit Creek, then another half-hour to Moura, she thought.

The way grew steeper. A river ran below her, a thin mirror over the sand, edged with the prints of cows and piles of dung. Then cleared land again. A mob of ’roos bounced across the road in front of her, hardly glancing at the car. Laughter bubbled up; impossible not to laugh at creatures so ridiculous.

Biscuit Creek Township was bigger than she’d expected. English trees lined the streets, dappled with autumn leaves, like home. A bank, two cafés, even a dress shop and a jeweller’s as well as the stock and station agency, the
saddlery, the funeral parlour, the baker’s. No garage, but she had enough petrol in the jerry cans. She stopped at the blacksmith’s to ask directions. The man looked curiously at the car, and even more curiously at her. But he was polite and helpful.

She tried to ignore the stares as she drove out of town.

Her skin began to prickle. It had all seemed so simple a month ago; even yesterday. Like the war, when you had to make decisions quickly, with no time to regret the ones that you got wrong. Running a canteen, nursing in France—did wisdom and experience in some areas really teach you how to cope in others? What was at the end of this long road?

It was almost like the roads of home, she thought, the dirt orange instead of white. The ruts were the same. Even the hills were the blue of home. She had expected more points of difference, foreignness. But so much was familiar. The scent of long-cropped grass, of sheep manure in hot paddocks. Even the broken-down fences, so like Glen Donal, where the fencers too had gone to war, leaving the wires to tangle and the posts to rot.

A rabbit darted along the roadside, and then another. That was why the grass was so close clipped, she thought. Eaten back by rabbits, so many they were forced to feed by daylight too. Now she looked she could see rabbit holes, and the beginnings of erosion gullies where the creatures had eaten the roots of the grass, leaving the soil to blow and wash away. Had they tried ferrets, she wondered. If nothing was done this land would blow away, rabbit-eaten into dust, the men who could have cared for it lost in
France, in Belgium, along the Turkish coast, or maimed like Dougie, Harry…

I’ll fight for you, she thought suddenly. Poor abandoned land. I can make you flourish. What about the new barbed wire? Could that help keep the rabbits down? And that ram, panting in the shade of the gum tree—his chest looked too skinny for him to father anything. A few Lincolns crossed with these merinos would mean fat lambs as well as wool, and lucerne down on those creek flats would do for silage…

Stop it, she told herself. Tomorrow you might be heading home, embarrassed. Or maybe sitting with a man whose mind was so destroyed that he could never recognise her. Perhaps he even had found another girl to smile at, in the months it had taken his mother’s letter to reach New Zealand, and for the journey here.

The road began to rise again. She could see the mountains now—not the white-tipped crags of home, rearing and soaring to the sky. These were gentler, rounder. But the scent in the breeze was the same: the old-tin smell of cold. The sky was the same too, that intense blue you only saw above the mountains. An eagle balanced on the sunlight, far above.

She could breathe here. There was space, just like at home. Space to dream.

What do you think, she asked her brother, and felt Tim smile in the back of her mind. All our plans, she whispered to him. You won’t be lost forever, Tim, if I can make our dreams work here.

Twenty minutes past town, the blacksmith had said. Trees drooped above the road, their dangling leaves like long slim fingers. Her heart thudded so hard she felt it would burst out of her skin. Yes, there was the house, about half a mile across the paddocks from the gate, small and unpainted with a corrugated-iron roof; a scatter of fruit trees out to one side and hens clucking on the other. But you could do something with it, she thought. Like leave it for the termites and build another house, a bigger, better one, up on that hill perhaps, for the view.

Money could do so much here. Money, and the experience of a larger, richer farm…

She turned into the gate, then slowed down as the car bumped along the track made by horse and carts, suddenly reluctant to arrive. Would they welcome her? Would there be scones, a Victoria sponge oozing red jam and the best china, a lace tablecloth perhaps, the silver teapot? Or had they just wanted advice? Had she only imagined the unspoken invitation in that pleading letter?

Perhaps what she’d thought she and Harry shared was an illusion, born in the strange world of war. Maybe this whole journey, she thought suddenly, was her own form of war sickness. Another ghost, conjured from her loneliness and loss.

The house looked larger close up, but just as plain. Someone had planted two camellias out the front, just starting to bloom, and a ramble of roses along the side fence, the roots holding the dust together into soil as they
hunted for some moisture. Even now, in autumn, softstemmed pink flowers poked their heads out of the tangle. The afternoon shadows were turning the grass from gold to purple.

And then she saw him. He was out the back of the house, by the plum trees and rhubarb patch, repairing the chook-yard fence. She wondered if he’d been told not to go far today, that a visitor was expected. He wore moleskins and a neat blue shirt. It was strange to see him out of uniform or pyjamas. But somehow the work clothes were familiar too, as though she knew them from decades in the future. His hair was longer. Two black and white dogs crouched at his heels as he slid the post into the hole, his gaze intent and certain.

Her heart clenched. She had planned so long for this moment. There he was, not her imagined Harry, but the real one.

Had she created a dream hero, from memory and roses?

One of the dogs got to its feet and began to bark.

He looked up then. He watched as she stopped the car, opened the door, began to walk across the dust to the gate.

What was he thinking? Did he even recognise her?

Her hands were shaking, from weariness as well as tension. She felt for the locket at her throat, to try to stop the trembling. Her knees felt like marshmallows. Suddenly, she wished she’d dressed differently, not in stockings and heels, the fashionable small hat, but with her hair pulled back and wisping across her face, in her apron with the stains.

His hand rested on the dog’s head to silence it. His face was still but suddenly…real…so she felt a shock of warmth all through her body, and thought ‘Why, this is love.’

Then all at once he smiled.

It was a smile of memory, a smile of kindness. The smile of the man who had said, so long ago, ‘I reckon sometimes you need someone to look after you too.’

He began to walk towards her. And then he stopped.

The world cracked for a frozen moment as she wondered if he had changed his mind. But he only stepped back and picked a flower from the tangle on the fence.

It was a rose. And as she watched he held it out to her.