Dulcie held May’s hand tightly as they waited in the queue. May had annoyed her a great deal on the journey, she’d been so full of herself, but just the thought of being separated from her permanently terrified her. It was so hot too, and there was no sign now of the nice younger men and women who’d taken care of them on the ship, just older, severe-looking people who spoke really strangely, to keep them in line.
‘I’m so hot,’ May bleated. ‘I want a drink.’
‘I expect they’ll give us one in a minute,’ Dulcie replied absentmindedly, busy connecting fingerprinting with convicts.
‘If they don’t get me a drink now I shall scream,’ May retorted.
Dulcie was instantly alarmed. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said. ‘You know what happened on the first night at the Sacred Heart, and that was all because you made a big fuss.’
When May whimpered with fright, Dulcie felt bad at reminding her of that night, for clearly whatever had happened to her nearly two years ago still had the power to frighten her. ‘I’ll ask someone nicely when I get a chance,’ she said quickly and cuddled May. ‘Now, just be patient.’
Through the open side of the shed Dulcie could see a hive of activity, men carting luggage on trolleys, huge wooden containers being unloaded from the ship’s hold on to the wharf by cranes. There were so many families, not just the ones that had been on the
Maloja
but from other huge ships too. They stood in tight little bunches by their luggage, many of the women held small children and babies in their arms, with bigger children around them, and mostly they looked as anxious as she felt. She wondered where they were all going. Did they have places to stay? Or were they in much the same predicament as her and May, just waiting to be told where to go?
The queue shuffled forward very slowly, but at last it was their turn to approach the table at which sat two men and a woman.
‘Names!’ one of the men barked at them. Dulcie told him and he sifted through a pile of forms until he found theirs. The second man reached out to grab Dulcie’s hand, pushed her index finger on to the ink pad, then squeezing it tightly rolled it carefully on to the bottom of the form, leaving a clear imprint. Then it was May’s turn.
‘May we have a drink of water, please?’ Dulcie asked, her voice shaking with nervousness.
‘You’ll all get one before long,’ the woman said, giving Dulcie a steely-eyed look as she handed her the form. ‘Take that over there,’ she added, pointing in the direction of another table at which two women sat.
Dulcie picked up her case and, telling May to come with her, did as she was told. Again they had to give their names, ages and which home they’d come from in England. Dulcie felt even more nervous as the two women had a whispered consultation as they looked at a large ledger. It seemed to Dulcie they were trying to decide where to send them, for there were several columns, some having just a few names, others far more. She thought she heard one of the women say ‘only room for one there’ and her heart nearly stopped with fright that they might separate them.
‘St Vincent’s in Perth,’ the older of the two said finally, and to Dulcie’s relief she put both their names in the same column. She wrote St Vincent’s on their forms, and handed them back to Dulcie. ‘You can go out to the refreshment stand now,’ she said. ‘That’s out through the door at the side.’ She pointed it out. ‘Don’t lose the forms, you’ll need to hand them in to the Sister in charge.’
It was cooler outside the shed. A large table was laid out in the shade of the building with sandwiches, cakes and glasses of orange squash. Several smiling nuns were greeting each of the girls in turn, passing out refreshments. As Dulcie and May were directed to put their suitcases down and sit on a blanket, and saw the four girls from the Sacred Heart were there already, along with several others from the ship, Dulcie’s spirits lifted a little.
‘Where are you two going?’ Carol called out to her.
‘St Vincent’s,’ Dulcie replied. ‘What about you?’
Carol said she, Janet, Alice and Pauline were going to a place called St Joseph’s, and they wished Dulcie and May were going there too. As more girls came to sit down on the blanket everyone chattered about where they were going, and although there were several girls still very upset at being separated from their brothers, the cold drinks, and finding themselves amongst friends, helped to cheer them all up.
A little later, all the girls were lined up for a photograph. The smallest ones, including May, were placed in front, and each one of them was given a teddy bear. The photographer told them jokes to make them laugh, and as the nuns watching were all smiling, the last of the children’s anxieties were dispelled, and the happy moment was caught on film.
More cakes and squash were handed round before the girls were divided up into the groups for each home they were going to. As Carol, Janet, Pauline and Alice were led away with their quite large party to a bus, everyone cheered loudly.
It was the St Vincent’s group that went next, just six in all – Dulcie, May, Susan, Mary and two seven-year-olds, Joan and Patty. As the nun led them round the side of the shed to where a car was waiting for them, another nun approached them and took the teddy bears from the three youngest girls’ arms.
May let out a howl of rage and tried to snatch hers back.
‘That’s enough of that,’ the nun said, slapping her hand. ‘They were only lent to you, they will be needed again.’
Dulcie dropped her case and went to May, for once in complete agreement with her sister’s anger. She looked up at the stern-faced nun and narrowed her eyes. ‘That was a mean thing to do,’ she hissed at her. ‘They all thought they were a present.’
The incident cast a pall over the car ride. The nun who would be driving them introduced herself as Sister Ruth. Dulcie and Mary sat in the front with her, the other four smaller girls in the back, the three younger ones sniffling, two suitcases which there hadn’t been room for in the boot stuffed down by their feet.
Sister Ruth seemed quite nice, she asked their names and told them it was just a short drive, but all the girls were so upset by the incident with the teddy bears that they didn’t even whisper to one another.
The Sister kept pointing things out to them, the wide Swan River, which she said was famous for its black swans, King’s Park which she said had beautiful exotic birds and huge old trees, but though Dulcie felt she ought to be looking out eagerly at the scenery, noting what was different to England, all she could think of was how hot it was and how dusty and strange the trees were. Even the pretty little bungalow-style houses with fancy lace-like iron work along the verandas and gardens crammed with strange-looking plants did nothing to cheer her, and all at once she felt tears welling up in her eyes.
It had been so wonderful on the ship that she had almost forgotten how horrible it could be at the Sacred Heart. Yet now as she looked down at her ink-stained finger and remembered how brothers and sisters had been cruelly separated and the teddy bears snatched back, she felt a sense of foreboding that maybe it was going to be even worse here.
Chapter Nine
‘You haven’t cleaned this, you lazy little beggar,’ Sister Anne said accusingly. She turned from examining a shelf which was at her own eye level, but way above Dulcie’s head, and in the same movement swiped out at the child with the thin leather strap she kept attached to her belt. It licked across Dulcie’s shoulder, the tip catching the back of her neck which was already red raw with sunburn. ‘Get those pots down and scrub it.’
‘Yes, Sister,’ Dulcie said, not even daring to put her hand on her neck to soothe the stinging. She certainly didn’t dare say she’d already scrubbed the shelf – in three months at St Vincent’s she had learnt never to answer back.
Dulcie’s appearance had changed dramatically since she got off the ship three months earlier. Plump rosy cheeks were now hollow, her complexion rough from constant burning and blistering in the sun. Her hair was cut exactly the same as every other girl’s here, straight across on a level with her ear lobes, parted on the right and held back from her forehead with a kirby grip. The green and white striped uniform dress hung limply for she’d grown painfully thin, and her feet were bare, the soles callused from the rough ground. Yet it was her eyes which exposed how she felt inside. Fearful, demoralized, and so very weary.
‘I shall be back,’ Sister Anne said ominously and waddled out of the laundry room to check someone else’s work.
Dulcie poked out her tongue at the nun’s retreating back, then picked up a stool and carried it back to beneath the shelf. The laundry room was little more than a shed at the back of the convent, and she had been sent in here after dinner to clean it. This involved scrubbing not only the stone floor but the two large sinks, draining boards and the rollers on the huge wringer, polishing up the copper and every other surface too. As the laundry was used every morning and water and soap suds made a great deal of mess, it was a formidable task even for an adult. Dulcie had been cleaning for three hours, alone and without a break, and it was now spotless. The shelf she had been accused of not cleaning properly was one where heavy old cooking pots were kept for boiling up small amounts of washing, like handkerchiefs or soiled bandages. She knew that it was perfectly clean, she’d even gone right into the corners with a small brush, but she’d made the mistake of allowing it to dry before Sister Anne inspected.
Once again she clambered up on the stool, took the first pan and heaved it down, then the next. The stool wobbled precariously on the uneven floor, it was hard work getting up and down each time, sweat poured down her face, her damp dress and apron clung to her body, but finally she had all twelve pots down. Again she filled the bucket with water, picked up the bar of hard soap, and climbed back up to scrub.
Dulcie deeply regretted now that she’d ever expressed a desire to come to Australia. She hated St Vincent’s, it made the Sacred Heart look like paradise. She’d had school to go to there, and on the walk to and from it she could see shops, buses, cars and ordinary people, so she still felt like a human being.
Since the day she’d arrived here she hadn’t been out of the grounds once, and she had no idea what, if anything, lay beyond the scrubland they called ‘the Bush’ which surrounded St Vincent’s. While she knew she couldn’t be very far from Perth – she had after all seen for herself the big shops, the wide Swan River and King’s Park, and recalled it only took another fifteen or twenty minutes to reach here – she wouldn’t know in which direction to go once she’d reached the end of the dirt track which led to St Vincent’s gates.
Even the nuns who weren’t actually cruel couldn’t be described as kind. They had sour faces, as though they had forgotten how to laugh, smile or say anything pleasant. But she supposed as there were a hundred girls here, and a great deal of land, they hadn’t got much to smile about.
The heat was what wore her down – sometimes the intensity of the sunshine made her cross-eyed, and her head felt as if it might explode. Just ten minutes out in it, hanging up the washing, weeding or feeding the chickens, was enough to burn her fair skin – at night it was like trying to sleep lying on a hot stove. She might have been thoroughly miserable on icy days out in the playground at the Sacred Heart, and too cold in bed to sleep sometimes, but she found herself looking back on that longingly.
It was a lie that the food was better and more plentiful than in England. For breakfast they had something called Granuma which was horribly like semolina; at dinner they mostly got a kind of thick soup which didn’t taste of anything, boiled grey fish on Fridays, and only bread and marge for tea. She was hungry almost all the time.
Along with the hunger and heat, there was the work too. The day started at six, and the cleaning of the dormitories and washrooms, and sweeping and washing the verandas had to be completed by breakfast-time at eight. Then there was a service in the chapel, followed by lessons. Some girls, Dulcie included, were often called out of these for other tasks – laundry, polishing floors or out on the farm. After dinner there were more lessons, or chores which could range from weeding the gardens and drive to mending clothes and household linen. They might get an hour or two to play between tea and evening prayers, but quite often still more jobs were found.
It was real school that Dulcie missed most of all. She had loved everything about it, the smell of milk, chalk and polish, the little desks, collecting things for the nature table. She loved to learn, and whether that was geography, history or just doing sums and writing essays, she had enjoyed it.
The two schoolrooms here had only wooden forms and rickety scarred tables. There were no pictures on the walls, few books, and such things as painting, handicrafts or playing percussion instruments were unheard of. The hundred girls from five to fifteen were divided into two groups, and even though Dulcie had been put in the Senior group as soon as she reached her eleventh birthday in December, only two of the other forty-nine girls were as advanced as she was, and they were fourteen-year-olds.
The Sisters weren’t trained teachers, so the lessons were sketchy and very dull. Dulcie had been told by one of the oldest girls that no one in St Vincent’s ever got to sit examinations, and they would all be sent out to do domestic work when they were old enough, so there was little point in trying hard.
All the sisters really cared about was neat handwriting, spelling and multiplication tables. They took the view that that, and being able to cook, clean and sew, was all a girl needed. As Dulcie could already read, write and spell well and knew her tables backwards, she was a prime candidate for any extra domestic work around the school.
This was why she was cleaning the laundry that afternoon while most of the girls were having spelling and multiplication tests. It seemed grossly unfair to her that she should be given a job that amounted to a punishment when through her own efforts she had mastered the skills the other girls lacked. But to voice such thoughts was unthinkable.