Washerwoman's Dream Read online

  There was plenty of work to be had and for the first time in her life Winifred knew that she would earn a proper wage for what she did. That knowledge gave her a lot of satisfaction. She swept and dusted, made beds, took cups of tea to the men in the morning, learning to evade their groping hands, emptied chamber pots as she had done years before for Mother Sybil, served meals and washed up. It was a clean, well-run hotel and the men left tips in their saucer when they had finished eating. She began to save money, having little to spend it on once she had bought herself some new clothes, a hairbrush and mirror, a pair of good leather shoes, some stockings, some chemises and drawers and a knitted woollen shawl for when the evenings got cool.

  Mostly she kept to herself, walking along Main Street to one of the market gardens on the edge of the dam where she chose the vegetables for lunch, stopping to chat to an old Chinaman. In broken English he talked about his family in China, to whom he sent money every month, and she learnt how he had come to Australia hoping to find gold, only to discover that Chinese were not allowed on the goldfields. They could not work at other trades — they were not allowed to become a member of a trade union because of their race. He missed his family and she sympathised with him, though she could never bring herself to speak of her own situation and how she yearned to see her children. He would follow her to the gate and call out, ‘Goodbye, missy.’ Once he gave her a pot of preserved ginger as a gift. She did not know why, except that he said, ‘Special day,’ and she thought it might be his wedding anniversary or someone’s birthday.

  Sometimes when the weather had cooled in the late afternoon and the hotel wasn’t busy, she would go for long walks, but always by herself, afraid to trust any of the men she met. To the north and north-west of the town was plain country, and to the south, hilly, scrub country with sandalwood, ooline and mulga trees. She would watch the kangaroos and wallabies grazing quietly until a sudden movement sent them leaping away. And there were flocks of bright birds that swooped in to eat the grass seeds and others that chased insects in mid-flight. Other times she walked to the top of one of the hills and stood facing the Downs, trying to imagine that she could see her children. She would talk to them as if they were there, telling them how much she missed them and that she still loved them. Later, she would dream of holding them in her arms. When she woke she would weep bitterly, until it was time to get up and make early morning tea.

  Mrs Dawkins never commented on Winifred’s tear-stained face, though she was always gentle with her in the mornings, until later in the day when the hotel got busy. Then her temper would flare and she would begin to scold if Winifred was slow making the beds or took too long fetching the vegetables from the market garden. ‘For heaven’s sake, woman, get a move on. Otherwise the customers will go somewhere else and then we’ll both be out in the street.’ But later she would make it up to Winifred by pressing a ten-shilling note into her hand and saying, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  * * *

  Two years had passed and Winifred felt more settled, as if she had never lived anywhere else. The hard work and the company of the men in the bar diverted her mind from her grief over her children, and though she did not intend to stay at the hotel forever, she had no immediate plans to leave. Occasionally Michael Flanagan turned up on his way through, and he would play the tin whistle in the bar while the men sang and danced an Irish jig, clumping around in their clodhoppers until the two women collapsed with laughter.

  It was during a quiet time in the hotel that Winifred began to write again.

  12 January 1911. For once I know the date. I managed to get a notebook and a pencil and now I can write. It’s been a long while since I’ve put pencil to paper. The urge to scribble left me but now it’s coming back.

  Sometimes I have no idea of the date or the day of the month. I go into the bar and look at the calendar. Or I ask one of the men. Sometimes they look at me as if I’m daft. But the days go by so quickly and there’s always so much to do that I just fall into bed exhausted.

  Yet I can never go back. Not after what happened. Sometimes I cry, and it helps, but it won’t change things or bring back my children. Today is a glorious day. Mrs Dawkins told me to stay in bed. She brought me a cup of tea and some toast and honey. She said, ‘You’ve earned a rest.’ It’s true. I was run off my feet over Christmas, so many men came in for a week, men without homes or families.

  The luxury of lying back in clean white sheets and a soft pillow filled with feathers, white curtains at the windows and a view across the acacias to the distant mountains. In the mornings the trees are festooned with green and red parrots and I close my eyes and imagine that I am in Arabia. Then at night the birds squabble and squeak as they fight for a place on a branch. I have to laugh watching them … not that I get much time to stop and stare. I like to look across to the mountains. It’s a long way off. Too far to walk.

  I like to imagine that I’m there all by myself in a little white tent. No beds to make, no sheets to wash, no washing-up, no cooking or cleaning. Just me sitting quietly writing stories for myself. I am the queen of the mountain, with kangaroos and possums as my subjects. I live on nuts and berries and drink from a waterfall that flows down the mountain like a fine veil, crystal drops dancing in the sunlight as it sparkles against the side of the cliff.

  22 February 1911. For the first time this morning I didn’t cry when I woke up. I feel as if part of me is healing. I’m tired — so tired. So much washing to do here at the hotel. My hands are red raw by the end of the day. I rub mutton fat and sugar on them. And my legs ache — the veins. Some days I’m so tired that all I want to do is to lie down with my legs wrapped in wet towels. Yet I found myself singing the other day, a silly song the men were singing in the bar called ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Someone came in with an accordion and played all night. It was like a party. Even though I’d been up since dawn I joined in. I don’t drink but there were some sore heads in the morning. Rusty, the rouseabout, hosed down the verandah — but the smell of vomit! Still, it was good for business. Mrs Dawkins gave me an extra pound. And some of the men gave me tips. I’m saving money. I won’t have to stay here forever.

  30 March 1911. Nights here are strangely quiet once the drovers have left. I think of the nights as velvet. The days are like gauze with a fine film of dust that shimmers in the heat. The sun sets very quickly. The birds quieten down and the night noises take over. A horse whinnies, an owl hoots and sometimes I hear the beating of its wings as it swoops through the air to seize a mouse. Then there are the dingoes that howl to the moon. Everything is white in the moonlight and the stars disappear. I try to pretend that it’s snowing outside so that I can snuggle under the sheet and get back to sleep. The air is so hot, without a whisper of a breeze — except the mozzies fanning the air. I tried sleeping under a net but I found I couldn’t breathe and even so one found it couldn’t live without me and had a fine feed. I was covered in red welts when I woke.

  Now I burn cow dung in an empty jam tin — it keeps them away. Sometimes my hair reeks of it when I go into the bar, but I don’t care. I’ve no time for men. They want to dance with me, ask me to go for a walk or a ride on the back of their horse. But I know where that will lead. I don’t want to get caught again. Still, they’re good to me. I got so many tips over Christmas and Michael Flanagan gave me a piece of opal potch. You can see the fire in it if you turn it to the light. He said it wasn’t worth much — just a keepsake. I put it in the box under my bed. I’ve saved almost fifty pounds.

  1 August 1912. Sometimes I write a letter to my children but I never hear back. The first time I wrote, the page was wet with tears. I didn’t write again for a long while after that, but I don’t want them to forget me. I wonder if they ever see my letters. Sometimes I think I might just as well walk to the creek and put a letter in an empty lemonade bottle, seal it with a marble, pull the wire tight around the neck and toss it in when the water’s high. A fanciful thought. I don’t think Hamburg Cre
ek meets up with the creeks on the Downs. It would be funny if it did and the lemonade bottle bobbed up in the creek near Evergreen.

  15 November 1912. It’s my birthday today and I’m thirty. Almost middle-aged. I don’t know why I remembered. No one else ever did, except Aunt Liddy. She made me a cake once. That was when they were living with us. I wonder where she is now. Uncle Bill kept us apart. She told me she wanted to come when Fred was born, but he wouldn’t let her. Still, she was there when I had Winnie.

  I wrote a letter to little Winnie to let her know I still love her. I wrote to Peter on his birthday too. I sent him a copy of Huckleberry Finn which one of the men left in the bar. But that was three months ago and no word. I keep hoping. Charles was so angry with me for leaving. I can’t understand why. It’s not as if he ever loved me. Once I thought he did. It was just because I was lonely. I was weak and foolish. I needed someone.

  When he took me in his arms and said he loved me, I believed him. When anyone comes this way from the Downs I ask about the family, hoping for some news. I’ve heard nothing since I left. I’d just like to know that my children are alive and well, especially my darling Peter. He was always my favourite. He used to put his arms around me and hug me. Little Winnie was too young to remember me. And she had her grandmother — that hausfrau. I think she hated me because I was British. Fred and Jack. I wonder how they turned out. Jack was a bit too much like his father. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll walk into the bar one day and I won’t know them.

  10 July 1913. I dreamed of home last night. That I walked across the cornfield and in the back door. The family were seated around the long bark table — Vater Carl at one end and Mutter Barbara at the other. He had his stockwhip by his plate so that he could lash out if anyone spoke out of turn. His gun was in the corner by the door. There were fourteen plates set. As I stood there I was conscious of heads turning and fourteen pairs of eyes staring at me. I was hungry and there was an enormous loaf of black bread on the table. I leaned across to take a slice but Vater Carl said, ‘Nein. We have fourteen mouths to feed already. In this house you have to earn your brot.’ I wanted to explain that I was expecting a child — Charles’s child, but then I woke and found I was crying.

  I never wanted to be like Mutter Barbara. Twelve children and one that died. She wanted me to be the same. She hated me from the first. Blamed me for what I did to her son. It was what he did to me. I was glad when I woke. The dream unsettled me.

  1 September 1913. There’s no meaning in my life. Every morning I get up at five o’clock to light the fire. I carry cups of tea to all the rooms, listen to men grunting and breaking wind, smell their foul breath from drinking too much, dodge their hands when they try to drag me down to the bed. I’ve had enough of men to last me for life.

  I’m saving a little money. Perhaps one day I can escape.

  24 December 1914. I washed up for fifty today. So many men came in for Christmas. They slept out in the yard, on the verandah, every room was full. Yesterday the cook had a fight with Mrs Dawkins and left on the train. She promised me another pound a week if I can manage until they get another cook. I’ve never cooked for so many before. I was up to my neck in flour, and the heat from the stove. It’s hard not to let the meat spoil. Someone said it was 140 degrees. I had to scrape the maggots off the mutton before I cooked it.

  It’s a luxury to go to bed at night. Clean white sheets and a soft pillow filled with down and a clean woollen blanket — when I think of the cornsacks we used at Evergreen. And no husband to come home drunk.

  Winifred often wondered how a refined Englishwoman like Mrs Dawkins came to be running a hotel. Even after so many years Winifred felt that she did not know her well enough to ask personal questions. Though the two women often talked as they worked, it was always general conversation about men who came into the hotel, or whether it would be a good drying day for the washing, or what to cook for lunch the next day. At night when the work was done Mrs Dawkins would retire to her private quarters. All Winifred knew about her was that she had relatives or friends in England because she wrote letters which she asked Winifred to post. It was not until her employer received a cable from England that Winifred heard the full story.

  The two women were at the clothes line unpegging the sheets, which Winifred had risen at dawn to boil up in the fuel copper, stirring the clothes with a pot stick until the sweat poured down her face and from under her armpits. While Winifred had been busy in the washhouse, Mrs Dawkins had been flat out in the kitchen, cooking for a team of drovers who were heading out west after having a few days in town over Christmas and New Year.

  It had been a busy time, with the men carousing in the bar till the early hours and the two women almost run off their feet. Business had been brisk, and the men had been generous with tips, but now the two women were looking forward to a break. There was still work to be done, though. The rooms had to be thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom, cobwebs removed with a long-handled broom, brass doorknobs polished, windows cleaned and windowsills wiped down, wooden floors scrubbed, mattresses aired and sulphur burned in treacle tins to fumigate rooms against bedbugs and fleas.

  The rouseabout helped with the heavy work, lugging the mattresses out to the backyard, climbing a ladder to polish the top-storey windows, mending the wooden railing to the front steps, replacing rotting wall timbers, touching up the paintwork in time for the next onslaught at Easter.

  There were also chutneys, preserves and jams to be made from the summer fruits. The rouseabout trundled the wheelbarrow to the general store to collect a bag of sugar, while Mrs Dawkins brought the glass jars to the boil in the copper to sterilise them, and Winifred cut up the fruit.

  Now the women were in the laundry pulling the sheets into shape, walking towards each other as they stretched and tugged, before folding them and putting them in the linen closet.

  ‘I’ve had a cable from England. My sister Annie has died,’ Mrs Dawkins said.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Winifred took the folded sheet and put it on the table.

  ‘I won’t be able to go to her funeral. It would take me weeks to get home.’

  Winifred lifted another sheet out of the basket. ‘Where’s home?’ she asked as Mrs Dawkins took the other end and began to pull it into shape.

  ‘A little place called Makir, in Cornwall. I was the eldest of ten daughters. When my mother died, my father took it for granted that I would keep house.’

  ‘Was that hard?’

  ‘It wasn’t the life I wanted.’

  ‘And yet you ended up here.’ Winifred lifted another sheet off the line and put it in the basket.

  Mrs Dawkins leaned against the washtub and wiped the sweat from her face with a towel. ‘I had a friend, she married a man in the Indian Army. There were not enough eligible young men in our village. She invited me to India, introduced me a friend of her husband. By the end of the season I was engaged.’

  She sat down at the table and took a needle and cotton out of her workbasket, and threaded it and began to sew a patch on a worn sheet. ‘I went back to England. When he came home on furlough we were married.’

  Winifred held up a pillowslip to the light to see if it needed patching, ‘Did your father mind?’

  ‘Oh no. Annie took over when I went to India. He was glad to get rid of me. We were as poor as church mice. We used to turn our dresses when they faded. Remake our bonnets. Put newspaper in our shoes when the soles wore thin. Still, the bishop’s wife was kind. She gave me some piece goods and bed linen so that I didn’t go into the marriage a pauper.’

  ‘But why did you come to Australia?’

  ‘It was my husband’s dream. They used to buy horses from here for the Indian Army. He thought he could get rich if he could breed his own horses. So he shipped out of the army and we set sail. I thought it would be like being in India — card parties, balls, servants … It wasn’t like that at all. And Mr Dawkins knew nothing about horses except how to ride them.’


  She put down her needle and thread and gazed out the door to where the bees, with a loud humming sound, were clustered thickly on the acacia blossom. ‘We should get some good honey … We always had a beehive in the garden. Father used to rob the hive. Once he got so badly stung he was in bed for a week.’

  Winifred put the pillowslips on the ironing table. Then she sat down and began to sew a button on a blouse. She was only half listening to Mrs Dawkins, her mind going back to the Darling Downs. She thought it must be the acacia blossoms. They reminded her of Evergreen and how she used to pick them to put on the table. It seemed like a different life. Then she heard Mrs Dawkins say very quietly, ‘And then he shot himself.’

  Winifred stared at her, not sure what to say, then she stood up. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  ‘It’s all right. It happened a long time ago. You get over things. Just the same, a cup of tea would be nice. Cut some plum cake.’

  Winifred went into the kitchen, stoked up the fuel stove and came back a few minutes later with the teapot and cups and two slices of cake on a tray. ‘It must have been hard,’ she said.

  ‘It was. It was … It wasn’t just his dying. There were bills to pay, bills for feed going back years … his whisky. It was all right when he was alive, but when they thought I couldn’t pay they threatened to foreclose. And then where would I have been? That’s why I started the hotel.’

  Winifred sat slumped in her chair. She felt unbearably tired and still had a mountain of ironing to do. She’d be up till all hours. She felt sorry for Mrs Dawkins but it had all happened a long time ago. At least now she owned the hotel and had money.

  ‘If you only knew how I yearn for the sight of the sea. The fishing boats coming in … baskets of fresh mackerel and herring laid out on the beach. Our house looked over the churchyard where my mother was buried and my father alongside, a little brother and now Annie. In the spring there’s daffodils and jonquils. If I have to spend another summer here I’ll die of longing. As soon as I can I’ll sell out and go home.’