The Infinite Air (3 page)

‘There’s a hole in the middle of Australia,’ John said.

‘Oh, that’s not far away, someone will find it soon I expect.’ It was Harold’s habit to contradict nearly everything his brother said. He never ‘played’ with John, the way his mother hoped. The distance in their years had opened up, so that John and Jean seemed more of an age than the two brothers. Harold let Jean trace her finger across the Nile. ‘You couldn’t go there,’ he said, ‘too many crocodiles, and besides, girls can’t be explorers.’ After a while he got bored with the younger children’s company and went to his room, taking the atlas with him. He was a boy who often got tired, or that was what Nellie said, although there was something worried in her tone.

One day, Jean managed to open the front gate, and escape down
the road on her own. It was Harold who found her, amid the panic that ensued in the household when her disappearance was discovered.

‘I was going off to explore,’ she said. ‘It sounded really interesting.’ Harold grabbed her fiercely by the arm and dragged her back along the street, Jean yowling like a stray cat.

‘Trust you to get me in trouble,’ he said, as he handed Jean back to their mother.

Nellie looked the situation over, dismissing Harold with a wave of her hand, barely a thank you. ‘Now stop that noise, Jean,’ she said. ‘We’re British. British people don’t cry.’

Jean and John created their own diversions. Nellie had a tin cabin trunk that she had used to transport her belongings from the South Island before she met Fred. It had come all the way from Scotland when her mother was a new bride, just seventeen years of age. Her name was Mary Anne Shaw and she married a military man called John Blackmore. Nellie spoke of her parents and her eight brothers and sisters with pride, although the family had dispersed since she was a girl, and she had lost track of most of them by then. But Mary Anne’s cabin trunk had been given to her, and now she filled it with an assortment of her and Fred’s old clothes, his raincoats and
worn-out
dentist smocks, a baggy pair of trousers, a tie on which he had spilled tomato soup that his wife had failed to remove, a shapeless trilby that had sailed off his head and landed in the lake when he was trout fishing; old petticoats and some dresses Nellie had discarded after a season or two of wear because the fashion had changed, a pair of green velvet dancing shoes with one broken heel, a rope of beads.

These were the children’s dress-up clothes. ‘Don’t be shy,’ Nellie cried. ‘I was never shy about what I wore when I was a girl. Do you know, for a dare, I once rode a man’s bicycle down the main street of Invercargill, wearing a pair of serge bloomers? My brothers were horrified but people laughed and cheered. They thought it was hilarious.’

John was nine when Jean turned four, but he still loved the game. He dressed his sister up in his mother’s cast-off finery, even though
the skirts trailed along behind her, and she tripped on their hems. John put on his father’s clothes, playing the part of a young man taking a girl to a dance, bowing low to her, and offering his arm, and they would skip along together. One day John said that, just for a change, she could put on their father’s clothes and he would wear a dress. He put on the old ball gown, gathering up the skirts as far as he could, telling Jean to play the father’s role, while he was the mother. It was while John was swinging the rope of Nellie’s beads in one hand that Harold entered the room. He stood there with an odd smirk on his face. That evening at dinner, he told his parents what he had seen.

There was an uneasy silence in the room. Fred said, ‘Nellie, don’t you think John is a little old for dressing up?’ Nellie hesitated for a moment. ‘I think the children should be allowed to express their personalities however they wish really. Men play all sorts of roles on the stage. Imagine Gilbert and Sullivan if the men could not wear frills at their wrists.’

‘Trust you not to listen to Father,’ Harold said, full of vehemence.

‘I played the fool a little myself when I was a girl,’ Nellie said.

‘No wonder they shipped you out,’ said Fred, not amused.

‘Oh Fred, where’s your sense of humour?’

Fred had merely shrugged and changed the subject. Later that evening he stood up and put his hat on. He was, he said, going for a walk by the lake.

Did Jean imagine it, or did her mother mutter the name Mrs Hardcastle under her breath? Harold, who was angry, said so, but his mother turned away as if she hadn’t heard him.

All the same, when summer came, the children were sent outside more often. Nellie insisted that Harold accompany John and Jean on picnics, even though he had turned thirteen and he resisted the company of the children as much as he could. His parents didn’t always know where he was, and in the evenings, if he were late home, they would exchange anxious looks. It was after one of these late nights that he had agreed with reluctance to a picnic at the lake. Nellie was tired, she had said. Or was she? Jean was too small to know what
was really wrong with her mother that day, just that she needed to lie down in a darkened room.

There was a suffocating quality about the air as Harold and John set off with Jean, accompanied by strict instructions from Nellie for the boys to look after their sister. They went to the lake carrying a picnic basket containing sandwiches and crusts of bread in a separate paper bag to feed to the ducks and swans gathered at the water’s edge. When they had eaten, Harold suggested that they walk on along the shore to the place they called Sulphur Point, which lay behind the bath house. People came down here to do secret things, he said. When John asked what things these might be, Harold was mysterious and elusive. ‘Things,’ he said. They might see things going on. They walked along to where a scrubby plantation jutted out into the lake, and bands of rough yellow mineral encroached on pools of water in the rocks. This was further than they had ever been, but Harold was intent on leading them on.

John said, ‘I think we should go back.’ He was ten, and beginning to act in a more grown-up fashion.

Earlier, they had fed all their crusts to the birds. Now a group of swans emerged from the water and began to circle the trio.

‘They’ve followed us,’ John said in a small frightened voice. ‘They want more bread.’

One of the swans arched its neck and raised its wings, beating them fiercely as it approached Jean. The bird’s hard beak was extended, as if aiming straight for her eyes.

She screamed, putting her hands up to defend herself, while John ran towards her, waving his arms up and down. Harold stood still, shaking in an odd way as if he were helpless, unable to move. Then Jean pulled herself together, shouted for the swan to go away and put her fingers straight out in front of her. The creature stopped in its tracks, wings hovering in the air for some seconds, before folding them away and drawing its long neck back into the cushion of its breast.

A moment or two later it was gone. Now that the danger had passed, Jean gave one or two shocked sobs, John’s arm around her
shoulder. Harold seemed to recover himself and stuck his hands in his pockets.

‘So what do you want to do now, cry baby?’ Harold demanded.

‘Home,’ Jean said. She didn’t know where her bravado had come from, but she was still afraid, whether of the bird, or her brother, she couldn’t be sure.

‘Play mothers and fathers?’ Harold said, a strange smile playing at the edge of his mouth.

John said no, that wasn’t what they wanted to do, his voice low and urgent.

‘I could be father today,’ Harold said, laughing now.

John and Jean had fallen silent. She saw the shadow of the swan’s wing again, lifted against the heavy clouded light, like a dark cape. When they got to the house, John ran in, calling out to their mother that Jean had been brave. But the house was quiet, and Nellie wasn’t there. The two younger children sat in silence in the front room until she returned, though neither could have explained the sense of dread they felt. Nothing more had happened, except that they had walked home and then Harold had left, and somehow this felt as if it were their fault. He stayed away until nearly midnight. Nellie came home but she and Fred were not speaking to each other. In the morning, their father took his strap to his eldest son, his strong arms coming down with thwacks that could be heard all over the house. Whether Harold’s misdemeanours were related to Nellie’s malaise was impossible to tell. The explosive word ‘frigging’ hovered in the air, but Jean didn’t know what it meant.

Frigging. That was Harold’s problem. He’d been trying to frig around with housemaids at the Prince’s Gate Hotel. And him only thirteen, the manager said when he returned the Battens’ son to them. He didn’t know what the girls saw in the kid, the way they egged him on. Too cocky for his own good.

Fred frigged around, too. Like father, like son, Nellie shouted. She had caught Fred frigging with a patient on the floor of his surgery on a Friday afternoon.

‘More services rendered?’ she said when they got home, her voice as bitter as aloe.

Frigging was what got people into trouble, what broke families up. In time this is what would happen to them, in yet another town, Fred and Nellie living in different houses, Harold gone, disappeared abroad, taking his atlas with him. But by then, John would have gone, too. At least Jean and Nellie would be together.

That is how it would be. Jean and Nellie.

CHAPTER 3

AT FIRST, THE FAMILY LIVED IN AUCKLAND,
Rotorua firmly behind them. If Nellie missed the old life of horse riding and theatre, she didn’t say so. The Battens had stepped up in the world as Fred moved into the London Dental Institute to become a dental surgeon rather than just a plain dentist. They rented a house in Parnell, with a garden that had a large pepper tree at its centre. After they left Rotorua, for that brief time when Fred and Nellie still believed they could forgive and forget, Jean thought of herself as content. Nellie and Fred joined a rowing club again; the boys went to school. Her father made a swing for Jean, attaching it to the pepper tree. They were happy, they said. Happy. This is what families are. The past is just that, a place where we lived when we were young and foolish.

Harold was enrolled at Auckland Grammar School, a great opportunity for him, his parents said. It was next best thing to a private school. Parents fought to have their sons enrolled there. It had a grand brand-new Spanish-mission-style reception area, and the school motto ‘Per Angusta ad Augusta’, which meant ‘Through Difficulties to Greatness’, appealed to Nellie in particular. Harold didn’t find school easy. Here, he would be understood, she was sure.

Jean started school at Melmerley College, a private school for up-and-coming young ladies, housed in an enormous building in Parnell. She wore a navy blue gym-slip, black stockings and a wide straw boater hat kept on by an elastic band under her chin. She learns very quickly, her teachers told Nellie, noting in her first report how well organised Jean was, always having her pencils sharpened, and her desk neat as a pin. John, who was going to a state school, but would
be enrolled at King’s College as soon as a place came up, was a Boy Scout now, and in the evenings when it got dark he would take Jean outside and show her how to signal Morse code with his torch. Short long, that’s A, three shorts, that’s an S and so through the alphabet; then he would flick a message out that might say, ‘Batten calling from Parnell’, his fingers flying so fast on the button that she couldn’t keep up with what he was doing. Over the weeks that followed, whenever John was out, she crept into his room and found his semaphore book, then studied it in her room. One night she asked John to lend her the torch. ‘Jean Batten here, Jean Batten calling from Auckland.’

‘How did you do that?’ he asked in wonder. When she didn’t reply, he grabbed the torch from her. ‘You monster, you’ve been in my room, haven’t you?’ And Jean, laughing and exultant, rolled away in the grass, crying, ‘Beat you.’

John jumped up and ran into the house to tell his mother that Jean had been sneaking around, looking at his things. But when the crime was described to her, Nellie seemed pleased with Jean, not angry at all.

Fred worried about the swing he had improvised in the back yard, suspended from the branch of the pepper tree. Jean swung higher and higher, becoming increasingly reckless. He implored her to let him replace the swing with something stronger, but she told him, ‘I’d rather use this one. It’s lighter, don’t you see, and the angle is just right.’

When he appealed to Nellie, she said that Jean was a tomboy right now, and she thought she would continue whatever they said. Fred threatened to remove the swing, but Jean took little notice. The sensation of soaring towards the sky was so exhilarating that she couldn’t stop, even when she glanced down and the earth seemed a long way away. She simply waited until Fred was out of sight and resumed her aerial games.

Still, in spite of her dismissive tone to Fred, Nellie kept an anxious eye out the kitchen window.

There was talk of war in the air, but nobody believed it would happen.

Fred still took part in army manoeuvres, on stints of duty for his Taranaki regiment, but what was happening in Europe was so far away from New Zealand, it was impossible to think that anything could make a difference in Auckland. Then the Austrian ruler, Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife were assassinated, and all of a sudden the torch was lit, the proclamation made. Britain was at war, and so was New Zealand. ‘There’s nothing for it,’ Nellie cried, her eyes blazing. ‘Of course we should follow the mother country.’ Fred was standing very tall by the breakfast table, his fists clenching and unclenching.

Harold looked gleeful, as if he could already see himself on his way to fight, no matter that he was still a school boy. He and Auckland Grammar didn’t agree on much; in fact the school would be more than ready to see the back of him. Nothing they could put their finger on, just that he was a disruptive influence in every class, and he had a menacing tongue. Some of the boys were afraid of him, and the ones who weren’t came off worse when they did resort to fists.

‘Thank God,’ Nellie said suddenly, ‘none of you will have to go.’

‘What sort of talk is that?’ Fred said, shaking his head vigorously.

‘I mean …’ Nellie’s voice trailed away. ‘It’s all very well, war, isn’t it? But I couldn’t bear to think of you going away.’

‘I’ll have to,’ Fred said. ‘It’s duty, Nellie. One does one’s duty.’

‘You’re too old, Fred. Don’t you see?’

Fred didn’t say a word, just turned and walked out the door.

The city began to empty of young men. Troops dressed in khaki marched through the streets, hemmed in on either side by cheering crowds. Fred was thirty-five, and nobody expected him to join up. Don’t be ridiculous, Fred, Nellie repeated whenever the subject was mentioned. Fighting was for the young and fit. Still, Nellie watched him anxiously for any sign of a sudden move.

For a while there was a run of young men getting their teeth fixed before they went overseas, paid for by their parents, or, more often than not, having all their teeth pulled and replaced with artificial ones so that they wouldn’t have trouble while they were away. Sometimes Jean was allowed into her father’s surgery when he was working in the
evenings making dentures. The porcelain teeth sat in rows in small flat containers, gleaming like polished fingernails. Fred would pick them out delicately between tweezers, fixing them one after another into the gum that would fit inside someone’s mouth. Jean liked to touch them, imagining the smile that they would make. Or the bite. ‘Can you make them sharp?’ she asked once, making both her parents laugh. After a while this work began to run out, as people gave their money to the war effort instead. There was a restlessness about her father, as if he would rather be anywhere but at the London Dental Institute in Queen Street. The first waves of men who had gone away were coming back now, arriving on hospital ships bearing the wounded and maimed, unrecognisable as the laughing boys who had left. Fred turned his face away, unable to look at them.

‘The Medical Corps are crying out for more hands,’ Fred said to Nellie, on one of these evenings when she had brought his dinner to the surgery, because he had had a sudden urgent order to fill, a rich woman who wanted new teeth before her daughter got married. It was 1916 and the war had already been in full swing for more than two years.

‘Fred, you can’t,’ Nellie said with exasperated patience. ‘Perhaps at the beginning of the war it might have been different.’

‘You told me then I was too old,’ Fred reminded her. ‘Everyone is getting older. I’m in good health.’

‘What would we do without you here?’

‘You’d manage,’ Fred said. ‘That’s what you’d do. You always have.’

‘Are you sure it isn’t that you just want to get away from us?’

Jean stayed very still, waiting to hear the words she dreaded. Finally, Fred said, ‘Nellie, you know you want the children to have good educations. We can’t afford that. They’ll have to go to ordinary schools like everyone else. At least the army means regular pay.’

‘You’ve enlisted, haven’t you?’ Nellie said, her voice dull.

When he agreed that, yes, this was so, she told him how much she loved him, that she didn’t know how her life would carry on if he didn’t come home. They seemed to have forgotten Jean standing
there, as they folded their arms around each other, and Nellie wept. ‘Buck up, old girl,’ he muttered, bent over her shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right, you’ll be splendid.’ Then he put down the teeth he had been creating, little neat teeth. ‘Someone else can finish those,’ he said. He gathered Jean and Nellie together, locking the door of the surgery behind them. They walked down Queen Street, along the wharves, rank with the smell of fishing boats and noisy with sailors on leave, and home. In the morning, he packed his kit and left for camp. He was being seconded for duty with the 3rd Auckland Regiment, retaining his Territorial captain’s rank.

Before he left New Zealand, Fred made arrangements for Harold to go to a boarding school in Wellington. It was for the best, they agreed, as they all saw Harold off on the night train that would bear him hundreds of miles away. A fresh start. John gripped Jean’s hand tightly, holding her back from the edge of the platform.

When Harold was on board, Jean heard Nellie murmur, ‘A relief,’ but there was something shaky about her voice. Steam billowed in their faces as the train snorted, heaving into life. The whistle blew and the guard said, ‘Stand back, please.’ If Harold minded, he wasn’t showing it. ‘It’ll be a lark,’ he’d said. He didn’t wave back to them standing there on the platform, just stared straight ahead. In his shiny new Wellington College blazer, he looked young and vulnerable, his hair cut very short back and sides, like a plucked chicken. For a moment, Jean had an odd feeling of remorse, as if it were she who had sent her brother away. The family had begun on their separate ways.

Next it was Fred leaving, only this time there were streamers to hold onto as the ship pulled out from the shore, and a brass band played, while the men on the decks of the ship tossed their lemon squeezers in the air. Nellie, who wore a particularly large navy hat, adorned with ostrich feathers, pulled the veil over her eyes.

Mail arrived from the other side of the world, two letters from London, the other from ‘Somewhere in France’. Nellie had bought them some maps of their own, and John and Jean traced lines across the world, working out the location of the cities from where the letters
were written. ‘All the way across the sea to Australia, and across the equator, right away up there,’ John said.

Harold came home for the May school holidays, and joined in these searches, just as he had when they were small, his yearning to be far away as strong as ever. In his first months at his new school Harold had been writing home saying he hoped the war would last forever because soon he would be old enough to join up and he could put this
b_____ school
behind him.

‘I’m going to London some day,’ Jean said. Her brothers thought this funny.

‘I’m not going back to Wellington,’ Harold said to his mother one morning, when the time for him to leave drew close. ‘I told you I was going to join up.’

‘Stop that nonsense,’ Nellie said. ‘You’re too young.’

‘Too old, too young, that’s all you ever think about,’ Harold said, venom in his voice. ‘There’re kids in the trenches who are fifteen. I know, I’ve heard about it. One of the boys in my house has a cousin in England and he ran away to the war.’

‘Yes, and they would have caught him and sent him home,’ Nellie said.

‘Oh no they didn’t.’

‘I knew I’d have this trouble with you when your father went away,’ Nellie said, her face red with exasperation. ‘He’s hardly gone and you’re trouble. I don’t know how he ever expected me to keep control of you.’ She was standing at the kitchen bench, peeling potatoes. Her hand lifted, holding the knife, as if she were about to strike her son.

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said. There was something about his face that reminded Jean of the day by the lake, when she had been challenged by the swan. She was eight now, and had forgotten about it until then, but the memory bubbled up unbidden.

‘Listen,’ Nellie said, as if exhausted with anger, even though they had been quarrelling for only a minute or so, ‘let’s all go down to the harbour this afternoon. We can look at the flying boats at the training school. They’re training pilots to serve with the Royal Flying Corps,
you know. They’ll go to France, just like your father.’

This seemed, temporarily, to appease Harold. The seaplanes and their pilots were a fast-growing Auckland legend. A youth called Malcolm MacGregor had made a name for himself doing crazy stunts and aerobatics, swooping low over the city’s buses and trains, as well as trying to knock the tops of church spires. He was known as ‘Mad Mac’. When interviewed, he said he was just letting off a bit of steam because he hadn’t been allowed to go to war on account of his age. Harold’s eyes lit up when he heard of these exploits.

A dozen young men lived in rough huts and tents, between the bush and the water, flying from morning until night. Mac had gone off to war, of age now. The trainees, handpicked by the Walsh brothers who ran the school, dazzled and burned with risk and daring. When the Battens reached the water’s edge, they saw small seaplanes skimming across the water, showering spray behind them before rising into the sky. Like seagulls, Jean thought. The spindly flying boats flew back, circling the bay, sun gleaming on their wings.