‘There isn’t any
home
here any more,’ Dulcie said. ‘None of our aunts or uncles write to us. Granny’s gone, there’s no reason to want to come back, except Daddy, and he could come there too when he gets out of prison.’
The nun looked very thoughtful, fingering the material of her habit. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.
Dulcie knew the interview had come to an end, and to say anything more might even irritate the old lady. She knelt down, kissed the ring on her hand and thanked her.
‘You are a bright and capable girl,’ the old lady said, patting Dulcie’s bent head. ‘I believe you will do well in life, wherever that takes you. After dinner take May up to Sister Grace, she will give her some ointment for her sore legs. I will tell the other Sisters that there will be no outside play this afternoon.’
Dulcie’s heart soared with happiness. To be praised and to be allowed to stay indoors was almost as good as being told they could definitely go to Australia.
‘Thank you, Mother,’ she said breathlessly.
Chapter Eight
‘Carol Trueman, Janet Phillips, Dulcie and May Taylor, Pauline Dwight and Alice Field, all sit down and wait,’ Sister Margaret announced after dinner. ‘The rest of you will go outside as usual.’
It was the end of July, school had broken up for the summer holidays just the day before, no one had had any time yet to do anything wrong. The named girls all looked at each other in consternation, but they didn’t dare speak, Sister Teresa was standing in the doorway just waiting to pounce.
Once all the other girls had gone upstairs, Sister Margaret told them they were to follow her up to Mother Superior’s room. ‘It’s about Australia,’ she said crisply, but whether this was intended to cheer or dismay them they couldn’t tell, for her face was as blank as Sister Teresa’s book of kindnesses.
Back at the end of January twelve girls had been selected by Mother Superior to go to Australia, including these six. In February they were all taken to Australia House in the Strand for an intelligence test and a medical. But since then they had been told nothing more, not even whether they’d passed the tests.
As they made their way up the stairs, Dulcie decided to herself that this group consisted of all the failures, for aside from her and May having a father, Pauline Dwight had a mother and Alice Field had a grandmother who visited her. None of the remaining six girls at present outside had anyone. She supposed Mother was going to break the bad news first, then call in the ones who were successful.
She wasn’t really disappointed, not after all this time. Besides, just after the tests, Dulcie had written to Susan about what moving to Australia meant to her. Mother Superior tore the letter up and told her to rewrite it without the part about Australia. Her words were,
‘There’s no point in telling someone something which might not happen.’
Mother Superior was sitting in her usual chair, a rug over her knees. She’d been poorly for months now, Dulcie couldn’t remember when she last came down to the dining-room, or even into the playroom.
‘Sit down on the floor,’ she said. ‘Sister Margaret, you take the chair by the window.’
The girls sat down and crossed their legs, pulling their summer dresses over their knees the way the Sisters always insisted on.
‘I’m very pleased to be able to tell you girls that you will all be sailing on the SS
Maloja
to Australia on August the twelfth,’ Mother Superior said.
For a moment there was a stunned silence. It was a subject they had talked about many, many times, before and after the selection of the twelve girls. But in recent months, because they’d been told nothing more, they’d put it aside. Dulcie knew that most of them, like her, were so used to being let down that they’d almost expected to be.
Carol broke the silence. ‘Whoopee,’ she shouted, and everyone joined in.
Mother Superior gave a faint smile. ‘That’s enough noise, I have important things to tell you.’
None of them could really believe what they were hearing. Sister Margaret was going to take them to the children’s outfitters that very afternoon to buy them new clothes and shoes. On the morning of the twelfth they would be taken to Tilbury Docks in Essex by train, and the ship would be sailing on the evening tide, along with around another hundred boys and girls from orphanages around London. ‘The voyage takes around six weeks,’ Mother went on. ‘None of the Sisters from the Sacred Heart will be accompanying you, but there will be other Sisters to take care of you. Each one of you has been chosen because we believe you will benefit from this wonderful opportunity, so don’t let me or yourselves down by behaving badly. Now, are there any questions?’
No one could think of anything to ask, all they could do was look at each other and grin. So Mother Superior dismissed them and told them to wait in the hall until Sister Margaret was ready to take them to the outfitters.
‘Are we really going to get
new
clothes and shoes?’ May whispered to Dulcie once they were out in the hall. Her eyes looked like two big glass marbles, almost popping out of her head.
‘I think so,’ Dulcie whispered back gleefully. She was so excited she felt she could burst, and even if she did feel sorry for the other six girls who presumably wouldn’t be going, she couldn’t think about them now. ‘But just you behave yourself this afternoon, I wouldn’t put it past them to suddenly say they’ve changed their minds if anyone plays up,’ she said warningly.
It wasn’t until they were going out through the orchard that Dulcie remembered Susan. She had written earlier in the month to say she had a baby boy called Edward, and she was hoping to come to stay with her parents in London at the end of August for a short holiday, during which she’d come to visit them. It was only the third letter they’d got this year, and it seemed forever since they had last seen her. Dulcie really wished they could see her before they left, for now she might never, ever see her again. Then there was her father.
Stricken with a sudden fear, Dulcie moved up to Sister Margaret’s side. Next to Sister Grace she was the nicest of the nuns, and she didn’t usually refuse to answer questions.
‘Sister,’ Dulcie asked hesitantly. ‘Does our daddy know we are going?’
‘Why, of course he does.’ Sister pinched her cheek playfully. ‘He’d have been asked for his permission.’
‘He didn’t mind, then?’ Dulcie wasn’t sure she liked the idea that he’d said they could go just like that.
Sister looked down at her. She had a red face, May had once said it looked like a tomato, and ever since ‘Tomato Face’ had been the nickname the girls called her in private. ‘I expect he thinks you’ll have a much better life out there,’ she said, her blue eyes smiling. ‘You will too, Dulcie. I wish I could go with you. Did you know they only chose the nicest, cleverest girls?’
Any lingering doubts or anxieties were soon swept away by the new clothes. Three cotton dresses, two nightdresses, a cardigan, shoes, socks, underwear and a swimsuit each. As they walked home again, each carrying their own bag of clothing, Sister Margaret told them that they each had a shiny new suitcase too, because they’d been delivered to the convent during the previous week.
Three weeks later Dulcie stood at the bows of the SS
Maloja,
her face turned up to the afternoon sun. She liked the warm wind pulling at her hair, the salty taste it left on her lips, but most of all she loved the emptiness of the ocean and the way that up in the bows she could hear nothing of the perpetual noise of the ship and its passengers, only the gentle sound of the water parting to let the ship glide through.
For the first few days the sea had frightened her, she had been nervous of going anywhere near the rails for fear a huge wave would sweep her away down into its depths. The vastness of it made her feel so very small and insignificant, the motion had made her queasy. But gradually she’d got used to it and now she loved it, for somehow that very vastness seemed to make the past seem less important.
The time had gone so fast after they knew they were leaving the convent for good – it seemed like a blink of an eye and they were on the ship. The tiny cabin she shared with her sister and four other girls was airless and cramped, yet she liked it. It was an adventure finding her way along narrow passageways and up steep, polished wood companionways, never being entirely certain that she was going the right way. She adored all the jolly stewards who pinched her cheeks and said she had lovely eyes, they made her feel special. And never in her life had she had such huge meals, or even seen some of the things they dished up in the dining-room. She supposed this was how the rich lived all the time – snowy white tablecloths, silver cutlery, eating exotic things like prawns, curry, spaghetti and risotto. She tried almost everything, just to see what they were like, but her favourite things were chicken and fruit, and sometimes she ate so much she felt she might burst.
It was like a wonderful dream which just went on and on. Although there were over a hundred children on the ship, from all over England and Ireland too, there were very few grown-ups with them, just four nuns and a few young men and women who were going out to live in Australia too, and they didn’t care much what the children got up to. So mostly they could do what they liked, haring around on the upper decks, playing quoits, cricket, or swimming in the small pool on the top deck. It was only when the other adult passengers complained about the noise they made that any effort was made to organize proper games or lessons.
On the last day, after nearly six weeks at sea, Dulcie had grown tired of playing hide-and-seek, chase and all those games which involved so much running around and shouting. She wanted to be quiet, to curl up with a book, or just watch the sea and the birds in solitude. That seemed funny to her, just as it had felt funny when she finally came to say goodbye to everyone at the Sacred Heart. She’d hated it there, yet when she went into the orchard for one last look around, she had begun to cry because it all looked so dear and beautiful. She had remembered how it looked back in the spring when the blossom was out. On the way to school they used to grab a handful and toss the petals over each other pretending it was confetti. Then there had been all those wonderful days there last summer, when at last the Sisters let them go into the orchard to play, when they had lain on the warm grass, eating the fallen fruit, and telling each other stories about what they were going to do when they were grown up.
‘I won’t ever know what happens to them,’ she said aloud.
‘What happens to who?’
Dulcie turned sharply in surprise at hearing a boy’s voice behind her. She would have been very embarrassed at being caught out talking to herself by any of the other boys, but it was only Duncan, one of the boys from Manchester, and she liked him. Like her he was small and blond, in fact one of the stewards had thought he was her brother. He was eleven, with the skinniest legs she’d ever seen, and a crop of freckles which seemed to grow every day.
She explained what she’d been thinking about.
‘I don’t much care about the other boys I knew,’ Duncan said with a shrug. ‘But sometimes I wonder what will happen if my mum comes back for me and I’m not there.’
The first day on ship, one of the young women who were supposed to keep an eye on them had encouraged each of them to tell the other children a bit about themselves. Duncan had been one of the first to speak, he said he didn’t have a dad and his mum had put him in the home saying she’d be back for him, but she’d never come.
‘They’d tell her where you’d gone and she’d come after you,’ Dulcie said. ‘But maybe we’ll have such a great life in Australia that we won’t care any more about the people who have made us sad.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Duncan said forcefully. ‘Grown-ups are so two-faced. They go on about being kind and generous, but they aren’t, not to kids like us. We’re told not to be bullies, yet they bully us. We’re told we mustn’t tell lies, but the nuns do it all the time. I’ve never met one grown-up who gave a toss about me, my feelings or even if I was hungry or cold. I don’t suppose it’s going to be much better in Australia either.’
‘Of course it will,’ Dulcie said quickly. ‘They picked us all to go there because we were nice kids.’
‘Did they?’ He gave her a sharp look. ‘I reckon they just wanted to get rid of us, like we were a load of rubbish that has to be dumped somewhere. No one wants rubbish on their own doorstep, so they send us to the other side of the world.’
‘That’s silly, Duncan.’ She laughed. ‘They were kind people who arranged all this, they want us to have a better life than we had in England.’
‘I wish I could believe it the way you do. I reckon we’re just like the convicts they used to send out there,’ he said, and a lone tear trickled down his cheek.
The next day, as Dulcie and May waited in a queue in a tin shed at Fremantle Docks and saw the children up ahead were being fingerprinted, Duncan’s words on the deck came back to Dulcie.
Everything had looked so wonderful just a couple of hours earlier. As the ship came in to dock, a band was playing, people were waving and cheering. Fremantle didn’t look very special, just a lot of sheds and miles of concrete wharf, but the sea sparkled in the sunshine, and all those bright faces, the music and the cheering were very welcoming. The stewards and even the other passengers hugged and kissed all the children, wishing them all the best for the future. Dulcie felt so excited she could hardly manage to walk down the gangway.
But they’d only just set foot in Australia when the boys were separated from the girls and marched off in different directions. She felt bad enough that she wasn’t even give a chance to say goodbye properly to her friends like Duncan, but far worse was to see brothers and sisters who had been together in orphanages back in England torn away from one another. No explanation was made, or any assurances given that they’d see one another again soon. All of them were crying, some even screaming, and a nun went amongst the girls and shook and slapped some of them to shut them up.