Washerwoman's Dream Read online

  Other times he was serious when he talked about how an Italian man called Galileo had discovered that the world went round the sun by looking through a telescope at the way the stars moved. ‘The Church didn’t want to know. People believed that the sun went round the world, that the world was the most important thing and the sun was just there to give it light. They threatened to burn Galileo at the stake. So he said he’d made a mistake, even though he knew what he’d said was true. Poor Galileo. He found out that man is no more important than a drop of water in the ocean.’

  Winifred didn’t get much chance to talk to Sister Angela and Sister Beatrice. They were kept busy caring for the sick. Once Sister Angela delivered a baby while Sister Beatrice held the candle and the rest of the passengers stayed on deck. Sister Beatrice brought the baby up to show them while the mother rested below. Winifred looked at the red-faced little scrap of humanity and had a sudden longing to take it in her arms. She wondered why her mother had never had another child. She would have liked a little sister, but then she thought of the little dead baby she had seen lying on the bed like a wax doll and Mrs Watkins crying because she had no money and had to go to the parish and bury it in a pauper’s grave. When she asked her father about it he said, ‘Sometimes it’s for the best. Mr Watkins is out of work and there’s no money for milk.’

  Looking at the tiny baby in Sister Beatrice’s arms Winifred was glad that it had survived. She thought that perhaps with Sister Angela and Sister Beatrice praying for it, the baby would stay alive until they reached Australia. And by then, she thought, it would be big enough not to need their prayers.

  * * *

  They were so long at sea that after a while Winifred felt she had known no other life. She revelled in the high seas, the waves that dashed against the portholes and smashed over the lower deck in rough weather. She was absorbing new sights and sounds with each successive day as she travelled further and further away from England and her old life.

  Life at sea fell into a regular pattern. When the child wasn’t writing in her book or talking to Mr Smithers, she went for walks with her father, watching the sailors swabbing the decks and polishing the brass railings. Sometimes she saw flying fish, or a palm tree on a distant island, or schools of porpoises diving around the ship. When the cook emptied food scraps over the stern there would be flocks of seagulls screeching above the water and often a great albatross following for miles.

  Sometimes on dark nights the waves would be tipped with mysterious blue lights that danced along the water, the stars hidden by dark cloud until the moon rose out of the ocean in an orange glow. As it rose higher the sea would turn silver. To the child these nights were magic, nights when she could imagine mermaids rising out of the water, singing around the ship as it ploughed its way through the deep southern waters.

  For the first time in her life Winifred felt free. The sea air suited her, her cheeks coloured and her face filled out. But most of all the attention of old Mr Smithers had given her a sense of self-worth she had never had before. She was sorry when the ship docked at Cape Town because Mr Smithers was leaving to visit his son. He had changed into a light suit of cream tussore silk, which he told her he had bought in India. ‘Wild silk,’ he said. ‘From silkworms in the wild … not as fine as Chinese silk but it washes well and is very cool in summer.’

  When he said goodbye he took her by the hand, then bent and kissed her on the cheek. ‘There may not be a school where you’re going. You can learn just as much from books. And if there’s no books, read the book of life.’ With that he bowed to her and shook her father’s hand.

  Winifred stayed where she was, watching him as he walked down the gangplank. He turned at the bottom and waved and she waved back, a lump in her throat because she knew she would never see him again. Then he was gone.

  Later she went ashore with her father. The sight of so many black people frightened her and she clung to his arm as they strolled through the market buying bananas, fresh dates and a coconut to take back to the ship. For the first time she tasted sugarcane juice, watching as an old man squashed long sticks of cane through a mangle, the green juice trickling into a jug. The sweet syrup tingled on her tongue as she drank from a tin mug.

  Back on board she watched as the coal-lumpers shovelled coal and long lines of coloured men bowed under huge baskets of fresh victuals, which they stowed in the hold while the overseer yelled at them in a language she did not understand.

  There was a happier spirit among the passengers after the boat sailed. Perhaps it was because they had had the chance to walk on dry land and buy some fresh food. And also because they had weathered the worst part of the voyage. Wilfred seemed more like his old self, as if he had put his grief behind him and was determined to make a success of his life without Louisa. However, a blight was cast over the steerage passengers when a woman died of fever a few days out of Cape Town.

  The next day everyone assembled on deck while the captain read from the Book of Common Prayer. The body, sewn into a piece of canvas, had been placed on a wooden trestle. Beside it was a bunch of red lilies someone had brought on board from Cape Town.

  When they began to sing ‘Abide with Me’ Winifred became conscious that her father was crying. She wondered why. Winifred didn’t think he’d ever spoken to the dead woman. She’d seen the woman’s son before. Now he was standing by his mother’s body wearing a black armband. He was about her own age. She didn’t like boys, they were bullies and she’d always kept away from them at school. But she felt sorry for this boy, who began to sob as they lowered his mother’s body over the side, while the captain said, ‘Lord, we commend her body to the deep.’

  As the body splashed into the water someone threw the lilies after it. The flowers floated but the body went straight down into the deep. Winifred wondered about the deep. She liked to imagine that underneath the sea was a wonderful cave, lined with mother of pearl, where the King and Queen of the Sea lived, surrounded by mermaids. Now she wasn’t so sure. She thought about the bodies of drowned sailors and the body of the boy’s mother. There had been seals around the ship as they left Cape Town, and a great flock of pelicans. All sorts of creatures lived in the sea. She wondered if the body would lie there in its canvas shroud forever, or whether it would be eaten by fish.

  The boy was still standing forlornly leaning over the rail when everyone else had left. Winifred watched him for a while. Mr Smithers had told her that the boy’s stepfather was in New South Wales. The boy and his mother had been on their way to start a new life.

  Winifred went up to the boy and touched him on the shoulder. When he turned around she could see his face all red and swollen from crying. ‘My mother’s dead too,’ she said, and the thought made her feel sad until she realised it wasn’t true.

  The boy looked at her. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Oh, a long time ago, when I was eight.’

  ‘What’s it like not having a mother?’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘What did she die of?’

  ‘Oh, she was drowned.’ In her mind’s eye Winifred could see her mother’s body in its violet dress being sucked into a whirlpool, drawn deeper and deeper into the water until only her head was visible. Then it, too, disappeared. A few daffodils floated, until one by one they vanished and the surface of the water was smooth again, as if nothing had disturbed it. The picture was so real that she almost convinced herself. For the first time she realised how easy it was to tell lies.

  6

  WILD CATTLE COUNTRY

  IF WILFRED OATEN HARBOURED DOUBTS about the future when he saw the land he had been allocated in Queensland, he made light of them in a letter he wrote to his sister in Taunton, England, soon after his arrival in Australia. His land was at Boonarga, on the summit of the Darling Downs.

  1st Day of March 1891

  My dear Clare

  We have arrived safely at our destination for which we thank God. The voyage was tolerable though steerage was very
crowded & we were heartily sick of salt beef & biscuits by the time we got to Brisbane. There is no school here for Winifred, more’s the pity. There were two nuns on board who took an interest in the child but they are going further north. They were kind to me when I was ill.

  I have to tell you that Louisa did not make the trip, for which I was sorry. But it’s in the past now & there is just Winifred and myself. You wouldn’t recognise us, we are the colour of walnuts & Winifred is growing so quickly that the clothes we brought from England are almost too small. It is the custom here to make clothes out of sugar and flourbags. I expect we will come to that soon, though I am no needlewoman.

  I have a piece of land. The Government Land Agent met us in his buggy & drove us here. I must say that at first I was not happy with what he offered. There is a plant growing here called prickly pear. They tell us it has yellow flowers & I believe you can eat the fruit. But so far we have not seen any. It is like a forest, so thick that it strangles everything else except a few belah and ironbarks & some brigalow scrub. But the agent assures me that it is easy to remove. You chop it & burn it.

  I must tell you that the agent was surprised to find that I only had a small daughter to help. He told me that I needed a few strong lads — there’s no hope of that now. I have put out an enquiry for brother William. If I can get him to come and manage the farm then I can go out to work and earn some money. We need a lot of things. We couldn’t take much on board, only bare essentials. We are sleeping rough on the hard ground with blankets. The mosquitoes drive us mad. I think it’s our English skin. Here they burn cow-dung. They say it helps. As soon as I get a patch cleared I’ll build a hut.

  There are great distances between neighbours. A Scotsman, McNab, called on us. He brought over a batch of scones which we ate for supper. I think he got word of us from the local store. He’s got ten children and drives a buggy. So far I have no means of transport except shank’s pony. The land agent dropped us off at a general store run by a widow, Mrs Dobson. I got a few supplies. We had a five- mile walk back to our land. It was very trying in the heat & and not much shade, except under the prickly pear. We were afraid to sit down for fear of snakes. I bought a billy can & she filled it with water from her well. I was hoping for a natural spring or a well on our land. As it is Winifred has to walk down a track to the creek to fetch back what she can carry. I read Tennyson to her at night by the light of a candle. She likes to make up stories. She’s very like what you were at her age.

  I often think of us sitting round the table at home, with a loaf of Mother’s bread on the table & a pot of damson jam & a pat of butter. It was a good life & on Sunday in our pew in the old stone church listening to Father reading the lesson. He had a beautiful voice. I like to think he would be proud of me. This is a far cry from Bath. Just the same, a man can get ahead if he works. There is a sense of freedom & wide open spaces & everyone is equal.

  I yearn for news of home, so write to me care of Dobson’s at Dalby. It’ll find its way to me. I’ll send this letter with Winifred when she goes to McNab’s tomorrow to get some fresh meat. He’ll drop it off when he goes into town.

  Give my best to everyone at home and let me know if you have news of William,

  Your loving brother, Wilfred

  It was a strangely isolated life for a child born in the midst of a big city, her ears attuned to the buzz of the street, the raised voices of neighbours quarrelling, the cries of hawkers, the rattle of horse trams and the occasional wail of a train whistle carried on the wind.

  Now, their closest neighbours, the McNabs, were miles down the road, shorter if you knew your way across the bush track that led past the creek.

  The child had hung back shyly when Mr McNab had poked his head into the clearing her father had cut in the prickly pear, to where they were lying in their blankets in a state of lethargy, still tired after the effort of getting to their land. Her father had risen and taken the outstretched hand of this tall, raw-boned man who stood like a giant beside him. McNab wore moleskin leggings and a leather waistcoat over a grey flannel undershirt. On his head was a battered broad-brimmed hat, and in his hand a stick almost as thick as his forearm. ‘Ye always need a stout stick when ye go into the bush,’ he said as he laid it at his feet.

  The two men squatted by the side of the road while the child listened to the sound of their voices from the shelter of the clearing, until her father called, ‘Winifred, fetch Mr McNab a mug of water.’

  She was conscious of the man’s eyes on her when she handed him a tin mug with a splash of water in the bottom. ‘The billy can’s empty,’ she said.

  ‘Ye best go down to the creek. Ye can do yer washing there … hae a bath. Collect yer drinking water.’ He turned to her father, ‘Do ye nay have any sons?’

  ‘No, only my daughter here.’

  ‘Well then, mon, I pity ye. This country needs strong men. Me, I got ten bonny lads. O’course blind Billy canna do much since he got stung in the eyes by bees. ’Twas his own fault, pokin’ the hive with a stick. Still, he can milk the cows … long as someone sets the pail right.’ He drained the tin mug in one gulp and put it on the ground.

  Wilfred was silent, listening to the Scotsman’s voice as he droned on. He did not need to be reminded of the difficulty facing him without anyone to help clear the land and build a hut.

  ‘We be humpin’ and clearin’ the pear day in and day out. The accursed spikes git in yer hair, in yer clothes, in yer blankets. Burnin’s no good. It just comes up again. I knowed folks who walked off their land, left everything they owned. Even their plates and cups, tea still in the pot.’ He leaned forward until the brim of his hat was almost touching Wilfred’s face. ‘The prickly pear started growing through the floor … if they’d stayed much longer it woulda strangled ’em in their beds.’

  ‘Surely it’s not as bad as that.’ Wilfred stood, wondering where he could go to escape the sun. He could feel the heat boring into his back, and he took a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it around his bare neck. He thought McNab was exaggerating because he was a newcomer. As if he had read Wilfred’s mind the Scotsman got to his feet and took Wilfred by the arm. ‘I be telling ye the truth, mon. We lost some of our best land to it. Now we hae only one paddock under wheat and a few sheep in t’other … Aye, it was a bonny sight at first … tall grass up to yer shoulders. Ye could graze cattle … fields of wheat wavin’ in the wind … I thought I’d found heaven when we got here. But not any more. Now it’s the divil’s work.’

  He put his hand on Wilfred’s shoulder. ‘What will you do then? Ye canna stay here.’

  Winifred saw her father stiffen. ‘This is our land and this is where we stay.’

  ‘Ooh, aye. You’re game then. Send the wee lassie over with threepence. I’ll gie ye a bit of meat. The lads are killin’ a sheep.’

  * * *

  The sea voyage had acted as a barrier between the child’s old life and the new. She had had time to come to terms with her mother’s desertion and accept the fact that Louisa had gone from her life. Her father meant more to her, anyway. He had always been the one she had looked to for physical and moral support. But nothing had prepared her for her change in circumstances.

  The prickly pear formed high prison walls, so that all inside the prison was in perpetual gloom. Outside the prison walls the sun hit the dusty road with an unrelenting glare that made Winifred shade her eyes. In the heat of the day the almost deafening drone of insects rose with a shrill crescendo from the thicket; it fell away with a sudden hush as she approached, only to burst forth again the minute she stood still.

  As she listened to the raking call of the currawong, she longed for the familiar sound of blackbirds singing. Yet she was elated by glimpses of grey kangaroos and the sight of a koala crawling up the trunk of a gum with a baby on its back. She learned to keep her distance from the green stinging ants after she had brushed underneath a tree and been bitten, and she cast a wary eye at the large spiders that built their webs f
rom branch to branch, until she plucked up courage to break their webs with a stick so that she could pass underneath.

  Accustomed to the greyness of the English sky, the air smoke-laden from coal fires and the pea-souper fogs that hung in the air in winter like some deadly miasma, the clean air here was a surprise. The landscape was filled with strange trees — ironbark, yellow box, belah — so different from the English oaks, elms and larches.

  When night came to the bush it was like a shutter being drawn, an immediate and utter blackness. It was years before she rid herself of the feeling of terror once the sun went down.

  There was no sound of voices to break the silence, no street lamps to penetrate the gloom, only the blackness that surrounded them where they lay, with one sputtering candle to cast a feeble light.

  And with the night came clouds of mosquitoes, like an evil presence to torment the child and her father. In the stillness Winifred could hear dingoes howling in the distance and sometimes a rustling in the bushes and she imagined a snake slithering onto her blanket.

  ‘Them deaf adders now,’ Mrs Dobson had told her when they had stopped at her store in Dalby for a bag of flour and some sugar, a tin of treacle, a box of candles, some matches and a billy can, ‘once they bite you, you’re as good as dead.’

  It was the widow Dobson who told them to burn cow dung for the mosquitoes. She tried to sell them some citronella but Wilfred had said sharply, ‘Leave it … we’ll manage.’ Winifred knew that he was short of money. ‘We must buy only the bare essentials until the farm starts to produce,’ he had told her. His one luxury was a packet of tea and some tobacco twists for his pipe.

  The shopkeeper had offered Winifred a boiled lolly from a jar and the girl thought with longing of the spills of lollies that the man in the corner shop had given her when she lived in Lambeth. She chose a black and white striped humbug and popped it in her mouth. She tried to make it last forever while her father leaned on the counter listening to the woman gossiping. Winifred was not interested in long-winded descriptions of how to make damper on an open fire, and she only half heard the warning to keep the food on a table with the legs in tins of water because of the ants. She had not been able to conceive such things. She’d had no notion that the life of high adventure her father had talked of might be a myth. But that was before they had arrived at the property; surrounded by the prickly pear, the heat, the flies, the unrelenting isolation, it didn’t take long for Winifred to realise her father’s dream had been a false one.