Thornwood House (43 page)

Lulu is lying here beside me in a shady patch, kicking her little legs on the blanket I laid out for her, gurgling up into the sunny trees. I’ve been telling her the names of all the birds: whip-birds, butcher-birds, flycatchers, and whistlers. Though she’s only four months old, she peers up at me with her big wise eyes and I’m convinced she understands every word.

All is well at the Jarmans’, though I confess they are part of the reason I like escaping up here. It’s an hour’s walk pushing Lulu’s pram (then another twenty minutes to carry her up the gully track), but worth the trouble. Don’t get me wrong, the Jarmans are kind. While I sweep or do laundry or churn butter or scrub potatoes or run errands, Ellen hovers around Lulu, watching and fussing over her. She and Klaus adore our little girl, which is a good thing, isn’t it?

And yet there are times when I get a touch of the green-eyed monster about me. In particular, those times when Lulu’s smile seems brighter, her eyes more alight, her giggles chirpier because Ellen is near. And then Klaus comes home and tickles her under the chin and makes her twitter with glee, and young Cleve puts his two cents in, brushing her hair, or telling her stories, or tickling her ears until she’s cooing like a baby dove. Meanwhile I’m stuck with the mop and broom or milking pail, watching from the wings, imagining I could happily strangle the lot of them (but not my Lulu, of course!).

So I bring Lulu up here to our magical glade, and tell her stories about the birds and lizards, and the flowers that emerge from the warming earth. I tell her about the Bunyip who dances in the shallows of the creek far below, and about the wise spirits watching over us from inside the trees . . . and I spin stories about her brave daddy who’s gone to war and how happy we’ll be when he returns.

And you will return, dear Samuel, I know you will; there’s no doubt in my mind or my heart about that.

24 April, 1943

Darling, don’t be alarmed but I had a bit of a spill yesterday.

I’m all right, it was a stupid thing, I was overtired and not paying attention – anyhow, last night after tea I was scrubbing the back steps when my worn-out old shoes slipped on a soapy tread and I went tumbling, landing in an ungainly heap on the path below.

I wasn’t hurt, just a few scrapes along the shin – and, of course, a severe dent in my dignity – but as I sat a moment to catch my breath, a cry came from indoors, followed by a mad scuffling. Before I could get to my feet, young Cleve burst out clutching a bottle of mercurochrome and oversized roll of sticking plaster. I protested, but he’s a stubborn little fellow. While he dabbed my barked shin with a cotton wad, he took great pains to tell me he was learning First Aid in the Cadets.

‘Aren’t you rather young to be a Cadet?’ I teased, knowing the entry age was sixteen.

‘I’m tall for my age,’ he said loftily, then had to confess: ‘Dad lets me tag along to the weekend camps at Amberley. I’m not enlisted yet, but I do everything the older chaps do. We’re learning Morse code and tons of other terrific stuff – identifying aircraft, that’s my favourite. As soon as I’m old enough, I’m going to enlist as a pilot.’

I swear, Samuel, the boy is ten going on forty, such a little old professor, interested in everything and quite the know-it-all – in fact he reminds me of a certain handsome young doctor I used to know! Cleve’s also a diligent collector of glass bottles and bald tyres and tin cans, and does the rounds once a week cadging old newspapers – all to be re-used in a variety of ways for the war effort. A couple of years back he started helping his father at the post office, sorting mail before and after school, and on top of that he still finds time to help me around the house, picking up after Lulu, drying the dinner dishes, chopping wood, and feeding the hens – making himself quite indispensable.

Honestly, Samuel, if I only had half that boy’s industriousness . . . and a quarter of his energy! It’s just a shame Ellen seems to think so lowly of him – going cranky on him for the slightest slipups, nagging and criticising his appearance. I’ve even seen her humiliate the poor child in front of her Red Cross cronies. I do feel sorry for him at times. He doesn’t appear to have any friends of his own, which might explain his dedication to filling his every waking hour with chores.

Anyway, his enthusiasm is touching, and it was so very kind of him to help me after my soapsud calamity – but his comment about the RAAF made me sad. I only hope that by the time Cleve is old enough to enlist, this wretched war is long behind us.

21 May, 1943

Hello Darling, did you get my Easter parcel? I know you’ll love the photos of Lulu, and you’ll be able to use or barter the cigarettes and soap and box of Anzac biscuits. My baking skills are wretchedly inadequate and young Cleve declared the biscuits akin to gnawing on shoe leather but I posted them anyway. Perhaps where you are, you’ll be glad of them? This time I’m sending socks, hand-knitted, only marginally better than the biscuits, I’m afraid.

On top of my duties in the Jarman household, I’ve begun working at the telephone exchange, night shifts while Lulu (soon a year old!) sleeps under Ellen’s watchful care. My shift finishes at ten o’clock and I wobble off home on my bicycle, dodging those blasted sandbags they’ve piled everywhere, ringing my bell so I don’t run anyone over, navigating through the streets by pure luck it sometimes seems. The town is pitch black at that hour, not a streetlamp lit, no glimmer from a single window. Motorcars are forbidden after dark unless the headlights are blinkered by a restrictive blackout device, and though occasionally I hear one in the distance, I never see more than a faint wash of light on the road. Who’d have thought that all the way out here in Magpie Creek we’d be worried about getting bombed? It’s true though, Samuel, ever since Darwin none of us feel safe anymore.

On the way back from town on Wednesday we heard that a Red Cross hospital ship, the
Centaur
, was torpedoed off the coast near Stradbroke Island. They say more than 250 soldiers and nurses were killed or drowned. We can scarcely believe it, all those lives lost, all those families stricken by the cruellest of blows. I swear the entire country has gone into shock.

Meanwhile, here at the Jarmans’ we are drifting along, mostly content. Although the other night Ellen let it slip that, in the unfortunate event of something happening to me – not that it will of course, she hastened to add – then she and Klaus would like to adopt Lulu. She seemed nervous when she said this, and I had the feeling that she wasn’t telling me everything.

I hid my distress by bringing out your mother’s beautiful ring and explaining that the moment you were back from service, we were going to be married. At this news, Ellen shed a tear and congratulated me . . . but again I sensed that her reaction was only the tip of the iceberg. It’s hard to explain, but I started remembering other little comments she’s made. ‘How young you are, Aylish,’ she says, affecting a frown of concern. ‘Only nineteen, and all alone. Why, it seems you’re barely more than a child yourself.’ Most recently she confessed that ‘Our dear little Lulu is a ray of sunshine in my otherwise overcast life.’

I do try to remember how kind she’s been, and how she saved me that day from the Bureau inspectors and their endless questions and forms. And I try to remember that, without my employment at the Jarmans’, I would be a defenceless target for the men who come with their pale sorry faces and Bible talk and official reasoning, and then drag away your children.

7 December, 1943

Dearest, I’ve been restless of late, driven by a strange feeling that time is running out. Ellen keeps telling me to slow down, to pace myself before exhaustion sets in – but I can’t.

I spring out of bed at piccaninny light, bathe and dress Lulu and get her fed – I’m lucky, she loves her food and never refuses a scrap of what I offer. It seems I’m always rushing around like a headless chook until it’s time to flop – cleaning up or polishing or sweeping or picking vegies, or mopping up spills or kissing skinned knees, or cooking huge pots of food or baking bread for the growing ranks of people staying with the Jarmans.

I never sit still. Even if I could, by some miracle, find a moment to put my feet up, I wouldn’t bother. There’s a time-bomb inside me ticking down the hours, counting off the seconds – to what end, I have no idea. I keep thinking back to that night at the settlers’ cabin, to our last night together. Samuel, do you remember how upset I was when I saw that pale face in the window? A ghost, I kept insisting. But I knew in my heart even then what I’d seen.

I’d seen death, Samuel. And death had seen me.

Ellen says it’s the war. Death and loss are always close. We laugh and sing and natter to each other, chirpy as wattlebirds, but beneath the veneer of cheerfulness flows an undercurrent of dread. Sometimes at night I lie awake and fancy I can hear the world groaning on its axis and quietly weeping. Whenever I shut my eyes, all I see is newsprint: page after page of names – the dead and missing, all those boys and so many women, never to return. Ellen’s right – the war has changed us all, and not always for the better.

This afternoon I left Lulu with Ellen and, hoping to dispel my dark mood, I rode my bike out to Stump Hill Road and climbed the hill to the gully. The day was warm and I found my feet taking me along the track to the homestead. The poor old house was overgrown with lantana and blackberry. It feels neglected since your father went to stay with his relatives in Warwick.

I’d planned to sneak up to the window and peer through, perhaps even take the spare key from the washhouse and let myself in. Remember, Samuel, how you always stalled whenever I asked to see inside the house? You said I belonged in the sun and shadows of the garden, a dark butterfly too delicate and wild to be trapped within the stifling confines of a great dusty old house . . .

A lot of old rot, now that I think back. What were you hiding from me, I wonder now? Or, perhaps it was me you were wanting to hide – in case your father arrived unannounced, or some society lady paid a surprise visit – ?

Forgive me, dearest, that was harsh. But I’m racked by loneliness, made bitter by your continuing silence. Horrid scenarios play over and over in my mind ’til I’m quite sure I’ve gone mad. Meanwhile, you’re far away and unable to defend yourself. If you were here . . . oh, Samuel, if only you were here!

Of course, I never made it into the house. The old arbour called to me, and I ran along the path to answer. I could have wept (I did weep, in fact) to see the state of it. The lovely old rose canes were infested with water shoots and choked by weeds, the bushes scabby with dead flowers, the precious hips (which we once brewed by the handful into sweet pink tea, do you remember?) now withered and turned black in the sun.

I lay in the arbour’s heart, sunk into the grass among the brittle deadfall of petals and thorny twigs. I shut my eyes against the brilliant sun, and you came to me then, behind my closed lids, and I swear you were standing right there before me, in the archway, every bit as real as you were the day I took your portrait.

Remember, it was soon after war broke out in ’39? Your father had hosted a Red Cross picnic in Thornwood’s rambling garden one sunny afternoon. I lugged Poppa’s Argus Rangefinder up the hill, taking portraits for a shilling donation to the War Fund. You slipped me a crisp pound note and beckoned me to the arbour, insisting that you be my first customer.

You looked so alive, smiling that crooked way you have, eyes only for me. And me feeling the first giddy threads of love beginning to tighten around my heart. How I loved you that day, Samuel . . . how I love you still.

Do you ever think of me, darling? Are there roses where you are – or is it all mud and darkness, blood and dread? Perhaps I’ll sing them to you anyway – fragrant buds and big heavy blooms, sweet-tasting hips, all bursting with tenderness and desire – and I’ll pray that if nothing else, at least they (and I) will be there in your dreams.

4 May, 1944

Darling Samuel,

This morning I woke late to find Lulu’s crib empty. I suffered a split second of giddy terror – as if that time-bomb had stopped ticking, with me poised in the silent lull before detonation – but then I heard her sweet giggling drifting from the kitchen.

I went out to find Ellen at the breakfast table with Lulu on her lap, and Cleve sitting beside them sharing a huge dish of scrambled eggs and fingers of buttery toast.

Ellen’s face was glowing, and Lulu’s too . . . but the most extraordinary thing of all was the transformation which had come over young Cleve. While I stood unseen in the doorway, Ellen extended her thin hand and stroked Cleve’s cheek. The boy visibly melted, his eyes went huge as a puppy’s, gazing at his mother with a sort of astonished gratitude. Of course, Ellen’s attention went back to Lulu, who was cramming great fistfuls of egg into her mouth, spilling most of it on her pretty frock – but Cleve . . . well, Cleve’s gaze remained transfixed on his mother.

I swear, Samuel, I’ve never seen such a look of pure, wild, hopeful love. I felt embarrassed to be witnessing such a thing. It seemed private, and Cleve’s response to his mother’s brief kindness was heart-rending. It was one of those tiny, deceptively trifling moments that a much older Cleve might look back on and remember as being a turning point in his life.

I should have been glad for him, but a feeling of desolation washed over me. My position in life had shifted. What I’d thought was real and solid became, in an eye-blink, as flimsy as spiderweb. Ellen and Cleve and my own precious Lulu were the picture of a happy, tight-knit little family sharing their moment of cosy togetherness; while I was the solitary outsider.

2 March, 1945

Samuel love, at last I have some good news to relate. Poppa is coming home! I had a letter from him yesterday, he says he’ll
arrive in Magpie Creek at the end of June. Of course, I wanted to rush back to Stump Hill Road and start preparing the house for him, but June is still a way off and so I must be patient.

Last night I showed Poppa’s letter to Ellen and told her my plan to return home. At first she acted pleased, but I could tell she was put out. She kept stalking about the room, throwing worried glances at me, asking Klaus over and over if Poppa’s letter sounded strange to him, and if the poor old soul (Poppa would be outraged to hear himself called that!) might in fact be too ill to return to Stump Hill Road after his ordeal in the internment camp, and too frail to tolerate the carryings on in the house of a rowdy three-year-old.