Four Fires (6 page)

When Tommy was confronted with the prospect of fatherhood, he Pointed out that he needed the permission of his company commander to marry and several weeks later reported that the big brass had put

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e kybosh on a young soldier marrying because he'd got some girl up e duff. Tommy even showed Nancy's old man his application for Permission to marry with a rubber stamp over it that read 'Permission used. The old bloke was too ignorant to know that these

aplication forms with rubber stamp intact could be purchased for two in the sly in any military training establishment. But when war

was declared in 1939 Tommy must have had a sudden softening of the heart, thinking that perhaps he might be killed without offspring, the Maloney name in Yankalillee extinguished forever (not necessarily a bad thing). He'd come to see Nancy on her parents"farm, begging her to give Sarah his name and promising that should he return from the war he would marry her.

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'Wait for me, Nancy, our little daughter will be

well looked after when I return.' It was about as close as he ever got to saying anything that might vaguely be taken as romantic.

However, Nancy wasn't very good at waiting. She thinks Mike, who is fourteen, was begat by an Italian who worked on her old man's dairy farm and who later, when Italy declared war on us, became a prisoner of war. The government said he could continue to work on the farm, only now he was an enemy alien. So Nancy couldn't be said to have been consorting with the enemy because Mike happened before his father was the enemy. Although, she's not absolutely dead certain about the Italian. 'There were dances and things,' she explains offhand, but then she'll add, 'It must have been the Eyetalian, Mike's the musical and artistic one with the dark hair, isn't he?'

Bozo's next, who at thirteen doesn't quite make the correct Tommy chronology either. Mum's certain he is the result of a red-hot fling with a Yank marine that lasted only four days but one she never forgot. She was in Sydney because of the death of her Auntie Molly. Her father had come down bad with rheumatic fever and her mum had to take care of him on the dairy farm as well as run the place and take care of Sarah and Mike, who was just eighteen months old, so Nancy was sent to Sydney by train to attend the funeral and pack up her auntie's and put her cottage on the market.

This was in 1941 before the Americans were in the war, but it so happened that the American cruiser Portland from the US Asiatic Fleet was in Circular Quay on a diplomatic visit and Nancy, with just about every young girl in town, went down to the dockside visit the ship. She must have been a pretty good-looking sort because the sailors and the marines on board could have picked anyone they wanted, but this marine sergeant in his full dress uniform took one look at Nancy and said, Hi ya, good lookin, what's cookin, and that was that''

Nancy took him by the arm and straight home to her dead auntie's cottage though they didn't do a lot of cooking but made love instead. He returned every day for the four days the cruiser was in town to do

the same. His name was Sergeant Bozonik, although she is never quite sure of the exact spelling, possibly because the cruiser sailed away early on the fifth morning without leaving a forwarding address and without him saying goodbye. The only thing she knew about Sergeant Bozonik was that he'd been the welterweight champion of the US

Asiatic Fleet and came from Idaho. But Nancy must have liked him a fair bit because she named Bozo after him even though he'd done the dirty on her.

But Nancy's not quite through yet. Although I'm a true Maloney, I'm not Tommy's son. It seems in 1943 Tommy's cousin visits from
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Darwin where he's been in the military hospital. Earlier, he's fought in New Guinea and was wounded and repatriated to Darwin where he spends four months in hospital and then is given home leave before rejoining his regiment. He visits his folk in Gippsland and maybe he gets bored or something because he decides to visit Mr Baloney. Well, he hears all about Tommy's daughter from them and decides to have a look for himself, see how Tommy's little girl is getting on, and finds Mike has mysteriously joined the Maloney clan and that Nancy's a pretty good sort and not married to Tommy.

Nancy explains it like this, 'Well, he was quite a decent sort of a bloke and he took me dancing and I suppose, having seen little Mike about, he reckoned he might be in with a bit of a chance.' Nancy laughs, 'It was all over with the Eyetalian, I couldn't fraternise with the enemy now, could I? With Tommy's cousin, Sean, I reckoned it was sort of, you know, keepin' things in the family and doing me bit for the war effort at the same time. Poor sod, wounded for King and country and in need of a bit of a cuddle and me alone again. So next thing it's Maloney number two on the way, same rotten blood, different bloke.'

I'm born in December 1943. So I'm the only boy in the family who's a true-blue Maloney, which is a bit of a disappointment really as Nancy says, Mike and Bozo have probably got the better blood. My real dad, Tommy's cousin, went back to his regiment and was killed in New Guinea in 1944 so there's no knowing how he would have turned out.

But Nancy says he was a Maloney and you wouldn't want to take any bets, there'd never been a good one yet, so why now.

Then, of course, little Colleen is born, she's six years younger than me and the reason there's this big gap is because the first three years Tommy came back from the war he was that crook nothing happened.

Then he gets three years for robbery with possession of a firearm.

Him and Lenny Smith, a crim he'd met, were caught doing a warehouse which was storing those new electric jugs. They were all the rage at the time and everyone wanted one. Tommy, as I said before, never did houses, only industrial sites. 'You don't shit in yer own

backyard,' he'd say. But I think that the real reason was Nancy, who would, have beaten the crap out of him if he'd robbed someone whose garbage we collected.

But on this occasion with Lenny Smith, the police had been tipped off. With the cops closing in, Tommy's so-called real-good mate planted an old army service revolver he'd been carrying under his leather jacket in Tommy's burglar bag. Tommy said later that he didn't even know Lenny Smith was armed and the bloody thing turned out not even to be loaded. Himself, he never carried any-thing but a pinch bar and a few tools, glass-cutters, drills, hammer, hacksaw, all that sort of respectable and harmless burglar gear.

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There was a night watchman present on the property, even though he was pissed and snoring his head off at the time and was later dismissed for incompetence, Tommy was charged with armed robbery. Oliver Twist gave him a year for breaking and entering and then added a second helping, two years extra for possession of a firearm. He served two years and three months and got nine months off for good behaviour because of a bushfire he'd played a big part in diverting. He came home and did the job on Nancy that got us little Colleen exactly nine months later, so she is the only legitimate Maloney in the entire collection of kids.

One thing I'll say for Nancy, she was quite open about us all, including Tommy. When people who didn't know, which wasn't very many, asked about her husband, she'd simply say, 'My husband's in prison for burglary.' If they expressed their sympathy, she'd reply, 'He's better off up on the hill than in the bloody pub,' and leave whoever asked with egg on their face.

'There's nothing to hide,' she'd say. 'Better the truth than always having to live with a lie. God Himself knows that the first four of you were born out of wedlock, it's His and my business and nobody else's.'

She'd grin suddenly. 'Anyway, I reckon when I knock on the pearly gates He'll look the other way when He sees how good you lot all turned out. I only took Tommy in holy matrimony after he'd got fattened up a bit in the repat hospital in Heidelberg. I was broody at the time and we definitely did the deed right after he came back looking like a drover's dog, all prick and ribs.' She chuckled, suddenly remembering, 'It was like banging a bag of Bozo's dog bones, bloody good thing I'd developed a bit of upholstery in the meantime. Mole was still small when we were finally married by Father Dunstan seven years after Sarah was born. We christened Mole the selfsame day, killing two birds with one stone.' She gave Sarah one of her tender looks, 'I must say, darling, you made a lovely flower girl and I made you the prettiest pink dress.'

I remember we were all gathered around the old cane couch with its sagging cushions, Sarah was sitting on the one arm and Mike on the other, with Nancy filling up the remainder of the couch except for little Colleen who was squeezed in at the very end, her legs sticking out in front of her. The rest of us were sitting on the cement floor at Nancy's feet.

Sarah was working on an embroiderie anglaise coverlet and Mike was doing a garland of forget-me-nots on a christening robe, using bullion stitch, detached chain stitch and French knot. Mike was a champion embroiderer, much better than Nancy or Sarah, he could do rosebuds perfectly and rose leaves so you could see the little veins in the leaves.

Under Nancy and Sarah's names he'd win the blue ribbon every year at the Wangaratta, Albury and Wodonga Shows. At the Royal Melbourne Show the previous year he'd entered a design for a Quaker-style baby's
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bonnet, bib, booties and a summer blanket which Nancy had made in natural-coloured linen and Mike had embroidered. Nancy called it

'Bush Blossoms for Bonnet, Bib, Booties and Blanket', with all the 'b's lined up like that. Clever, eh?

We'd gone out and collected all these little wildflowers and Mike created this garland which was scattered over the whole ensemble. It took a long time and he used just about all the stitches available. We Maloney kids knew the twelve embroidery stitches off by heart, even little Colleen. It was a rhyme Nancy taught us, you had to say it very fast without becoming tongue-tied. Nancy said her mother taught it to her and her mother before her until way back time out of mind.

Wicked witches wear pretty britches

Made from silk with fancy stitches

Bullion, back stitch, crafty fishbone

Scattered from the knee to hipbone

With knots colonial all tight tied

Enough to send you glassy-eyed

Back stitch, hem stitch, lazy daisy

Stitches meant to send you crazy

Stem stitch, straight, fluffy feather

All those stitches worked together

Cretan, pistil, chain for hitches

Stitches for wicked witches' britches.

It was sort of our own 'If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers', you know the one? If you work it out, there's all twelve common embroidery stitches in the rhyme. Anyway, Mike used them all and then some.

Nancy said his design probably wouldn't get anything because it wasn't traditional. You know, rosebuds and forget-me-nots in fairy gardens or Beatrix Potter bunnies in Farmer Brown's vegie patch and all that dumb skit. She said it was the Royal Melbourne Show after all, and the Queen, who was English, might get all snotty if we did something Australian for a change. But she did add that this was the first woman in charge of the throne since Queen Victoria and she probably knew a bit more about embroidery.

So, for insurance, Mike and Sarah did an 'England's Cottage Garden' summer bonnet in Egyptian cotton. Mike did the bullionstitch roses, forget-me-nots and detached chain-stitch daisies and other cottage-garden flowers, all of which covered the top of the crown and stretched across the edge of the brim, and Sarah filled any remaining spaces with colonial knots and then she did the broderie
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anglaise that made up the remainder of the bonnet.

The Queen must have been in a good mood that year because Nancy was dead wrong. Mike got the blue ribbon in his section and also Best of Show for his 'Bush Blossoms for Bonnet, Bib, Booties and Blanket'. 'England's Cottage Garden' also won the baby-bonnet section.

Nancy said it was probably because the Queen was a young

woman of twenty-seven when she'd come to Australia last year and she'd probably seen some of our beautiful bush flowers. Nancy didn't care much for the English, but she said they'd got it right this time, Queen Elizabeth was very popular in Australia and seemed like a nice person despite her religion. From the way she said it, I was convinced the Queen had given us the prize herself. Anyway, Nancy said it was

the biggest thing that would happen in our lives and we were jolly well going to the presentation!

I can tell you, getting ready for the big day was quite a to do, we washed the Diamond T with disinfectant and polished it to within an inch of its life. Except it was never meant to be shiny because it was military paint, sort of green-brown with spots where the paint had worn off. It also had a fair few scratches, but it had never looked better since way back when Tommy first brought it home. We took blankets and cushions and put a mattress in the back for Nancy to sleep on at the showground. Bozo took his toolkit because the Diamond T hadn't travelled that far before, nor, for that matter, had us kids, except for Sarah, when she'd played hockey for Country Victoria Schools.

Anyway, we set out early, all high and hopeful, for Melbourne, Nancy driving with Sarah and Colleen in the front all squashed up and us on the mattress, comfortable as you can get, with Bozo's mutts, all of which had been dusted up with flea powder. I tell you what, we were that excited and proud. Nancy said it was a pity Tommy was on the hill and couldn't come with us. But I know we didn't agree with her, though of course we wouldn't have said so.

The Diamond T wasn't all that used to getting out of second gear and the hundred and thirty miles to Melbourne was going to take all day. About halfway, near Seymour, it started to rain and soon it was pissing down and the mattress got soaked through. We pushed the blankets and cushions under it and they only got a bit wet then dried out in the wind later. 'There goes Nancy's sleep,' Mike says. 'We didn't take the spoon out the sink.'