Amy's Children (2 page)

And we know, at the end of the book, that her struggle will continue. Kathleen's blind anger and disgust, infused with her own unique arrogance and self-interest, leaves them both vulnerable. Amy's choices are curtailed, and her only assistance will again be her hard-bitten family. At the same time, we believe in Amy's instinctive strength. The conclusion, in which she defines her relationship with each of her offspring, is moving and deeply ironic.

Amy is a wonderfully drawn character: someone who is, in the most complex sense, innately good; someone in whom we recognise our own unacknowledged fickle, driven selves. It is about time we had her back.

 

 

 

 

For my children

Ted Fowler left his wife Amy and the children when the youngest, another girl, was a few weeks old.

The infant was sickly. The Great Depression was in a much more robust state. Ted told Amy he was going to walk south to Eden where there was reported to be work on fishing boats.

Ted and Amy had been married for only three years.

The first child was born three months after the wedding. Eighteen months later there was another and fifteen months after that a third.

 

Amy's parents, Gus and May Scrivener, and her brothers Norman and Fred lived on their farm a couple of miles outside Diggers Creek where Ted and Amy had their first and only home.

Amy got herself with child at seventeen.

May's anger, disgust and disappointment were tempered just slightly by her liking for Ted. He had a way with his eyes of making May feel more Amy's age than her own, showing a willingness to fetch and carry for her at dances and cricket matches and picnics, most of which she organized.

Whether officially in charge or not, May tended to take the lead, impatient with those of lesser energy, and this, aided by the sharpness of her tongue, earned her a reputation for bossiness.

Diggers Creek, on the outskirts of the little town of Tilba Tilba, was a hamlet of school, post office, public hall, general store and All Souls Anglican Church.

Not all the Anglican souls of Diggers Creek attended the services conducted by a visiting minister from Tilba Tilba.

Sometimes all the pews were empty, and when this happened the sermons and the hymns were of necessity bypassed, and the minister said a few prayers, his eyes on the starlings' nests in the rafters above the altar. He was not discouraged by the sight, for the gaps letting in the birds grew wider each time he came to Diggers Creek. The time should not be too far off when the roof would cave in and there would be an end to the fruitless visits there.

But the church came to life (the starlings' nests swept ruthlessly away by May's broom) for Amy's wedding.

May and Amy went to Tilba Tilba to make the necessary arrangements. They talked with the minister around Amy's swollen belly, Amy believing her condition was not obvious to him and May half believing it too.

“A very nice man,” she said on the way home, indulging in a little dream that Amy married him, not Ted, in a bizarre turn of events in which Ted died suddenly (though painlessly), and Amy gained respectability which sealed forever the gossiping lips of Diggers Creek.

But the minister lost ground when the marriage ceremony was over and he told Amy and Ted he expected them back in the church for the child's christening.

“It was his job to do the joinin' and he was paid for that!” May said at the house afterwards. (She had paid the ten shillings marriage fee without Gus knowing.)

Everyone at the wedding breakfast was impressed by her optimism and good spirits. With an apron over her brown crepe dress, she was setting food out on a long table on the back veranda shaded by a grapevine.

For Ted was out of work and Gus not speaking to him or Amy. He refused to go to the wedding and was now digging a new garden by the back fence, visible to the wedding guests through the grapevines. The round country faces expressed neither concern nor surprise at the spectacle of the spade flashing silver when it parted from the black earth, and Gus's old working coat flying halfway up his back with his constant bending and straightening.

May's words brought a degree of comfort to the wedding guests. Many, though of Anglican faith, went to church only for weddings and funerals, and were pleased to hear a dark side of the minister's character exposed. They could now dismiss any feelings of guilt occasioned by their wayward habits and get on with the fun of the breakfast.

“The joinin' had been well and truly done, anyway,” one whispered to another, sneaking a look at Amy's belly from a fresh angle.

May's mood changed when the guests were gone. She was left with the cleaning up, for Amy went immediately to her bedroom, throwing off her wedding dress and following it with her pants, since Ted came in after her and shut the door.

May went into a fury of rattling plates and cups and flinging off the cloth from the table, dodging about, using her knees to send the chairs skittering across the boards, half encouraged, half infuriated at the sight of Gus outside, spading with an energy threatening to outstrip hers.

“Everything left to me!” she cried aloud, feeling an urge to break the quiet of the house, for the boys had gone to bring in the cows for the afternoon milking.

“No movement from in there!” She raised the broom she had seized and aimed it like a gun at the front of the house where Ted and Amy were. “Bang, bang, bang! Then sleep it off. Bang, bang, bang! There we go for a dozen more!”

She flung the broom away at last, like a child worn out with temper, abandoning all hope of attention, and went and sat by the kitchen door to watch Gus, who seemed shrunken now beside the great mound of weeds and grass and bruised and tangled vines.

“Well he might!” May said. “There'll be extra mouths to fill and if it doesn't come from the ground or out of a tree, there's nowhere else and nothing else but to go hungry!”

Her eye caught the leftover food from the wedding feast—a ruin of corned beef, firm in the centre, the outside shredded, as if it had been cooked with a ball of string, and half a very yellow cake, iced in strong pink. A pile of rock cakes was pressed against the cut side of the cake.

The Scriveners would have that for tea. The food and the cleaned-up kitchen and veranda pleased May, and her expression had softened by the time Ted came from the bedroom, trying to look innocent of the act of removing his clothes and putting them on again. May ran her eyes over him and Ted's eyes followed for a check on buttons.

“Not too much of that from now on,” May said. “It could bring on a miscarriage.” Even Ted nearly smiled, since a miscarriage was what they had hoped for. And May snapped the door shut on the dresser and her secret dream for a natural end to the pregnancy.

She had thought the wedding a big enough hurdle to overcome.

“We'll get this over and done with first,” she said to anyone within earshot. Now there were hurdles, she could see, of even greater height. Ted was without regular work, there was no money for furniture if they found a place to rent, and Gus was intolerant of having them under his roof.

She tucked a chair smartly under the table, resisting an impulse to sit, surprising Ted who was expecting an extension of the homily on restricting intercourse (which he would not do whatever she said).

She charged down to join Gus, who had by this time dug a width of earth like a giant chocolate bar by the back paling fence. There was little else to the Scriveners' backyard—a few ragged rosebushes with tough whitish coloured grass wrapped around the roots, a scarred and thorny lemon tree and a peach, the trunk grey and scaly like the skin of an alligator.

May stooped and shook dirt from the grass as the sods left Gus's spade. She was there to berate him, but the earth in her hands was soothing. The thought of the new vegetable crop was soothing too, and its nearness to the kitchen, for their pumpkins and beans were normally grown between the furrows in the corn paddock. But Gus's digging had been inspired solely by his contempt for the wedding, and she was not ready to offer outright forgiveness.

“You humiliated me as usual,” she told him, taking a rake to drag together some heaps of grass and weeds. “A wedding for your own daughter and you don't come near it!”

Gus decided to stop for a smoke now that work was in progress without him. He took his tobacco from a rail of the fence, and with his legs apart and his head down he stuck a paper to his bottom lip and rubbed the tobacco in the palm of his hand. He was pleased with his digging, getting a good look at it for the first time. His face took on a contented look as if everything else had been placed on a closed shelf of his mind, and the new garden was all that mattered.

May began to stroke the ground clean of the weeds left behind in the first rake. The short grass was like hair being combed, the ground seemed to purr under the strokes, fine strands clinging to the teeth of the rake as hair does to a comb.

“Roll yourself one,” Gus said, handing May his tobacco. He sniffed with a cocked nose towards the house. “You'd need something calmin' after that rort.”

May sat on the ground, lifting her knees, her dress over them in tent fashion.

She watched the shreds of yellow-green tobacco turn into a little golden-brown mould, tipping it then onto the paper. Everything connected with rolling a smoke was a joy—pinching out the stray ends of tobacco from the tight little roll, wetting the one end, then lighting the other just on the tip, a perfect light, not blazing halfway down the paper, not even scorching it, a sensuous feeling holding it between two fingers, then taking the first draught of smoke, all but peace leaving her mind as the smoke left her mouth, moving sensuously too, putting a frail screen between her and Gus.

Ted crossed the veranda, jumping to the ground without using the steps, and walked jauntily up to them. “Hullo, Mum and Dad!”

“Pass me back that tobacco, May,” Gus said.

Amy and the children moved in with Gus and May when Ted left.

There was hardly any furniture for Amy to worry about. Food and rent for their small grey house next to the Diggers Creek Post Office accounted for the little Ted earned when he got a few months' work with a road gang after Kathleen was born. Patricia came next and then the baby Lesley.

May said it might have been different, Ted might have stayed if the child had been a boy, and Amy, blaming herself, did the best she could and gave her the male-sounding name of Lesley.

Amy sat a lot of the time on the edge of the veranda, nursing the restless whimpering infant and looking out for Ted to return.

One day she went inside, trailed by Kathleen and Patricia, and still with the baby in her arms, pushed the furniture together for Norman or Fred to come and collect it in the farm truck and return it to the Scriveners, for the stretcher beds, food safe, table and two chairs had been roped for a dozen years to the rafters of the corn shed. They were discarded from the farmhouse to make room for furniture inherited when May's parents died and their possessions were divided between May and her sister Daphne.

Amy put the yelling baby on one of the stretchers while she rolled up the mattress on the other, the blankets and sheets inside. She then told Kathleen to sit on the floor with her legs stretched out, and laid the baby across them while she did the same with the other bed. The baby yelled on while she packed her one tablecloth and few face and tea-towels among the groceries in the food safe, and bound a piece of rope around the safe to stop the door flying open.

She put the kettle, two saucepans, a frying pan and a tea caddy in an old butter box. The box was one Kathleen and Patricia pushed around the floor pretending it was a dolls' pram. Sometimes it was a car or train carriage pulled by a rope bound to two nails Amy hammered in the corners where the wood joined.

Kathleen's eyes widened and her face paled at this misuse of her plaything. But any protest would have been drowned by the screams of the baby. So she pressed her lips together and relieved her feelings with a wild rocking of her body, hoping this might quieten the child as well. But Lesley screamed on, with a vein throbbing alarmingly in her thin little neck.

Amy hoisted the two old suitcases that held their clothing onto the table and packed a billycan with wrung-out wet napkins for Kathleen to carry. After she'd put some clean napkins in an old leather bag she flung over her shoulder, she took the baby and they were ready to go.

She had no free hand so she closed the front door with her foot. Kathleen gave her free hand to Patricia and turned her sturdy little body around when they were on the road to look back on the house, pretty sure she was not going to live there any more.

The legs of the little girls miraculously held out until the last half mile, when Kathleen had to take both basket and billycan and Amy had to take Patricia on her hip.

Gus and May were in amiable conversation over the dinner table when they walked in. It was clear to them what had happened, and Kathleen made it clearer by hooking the handle of the billycan over the tap, as had been the practice at their place.