Through careful observation the girls discovered that the Sisters over in the convent all went to the chapel at seven in the evening, and it was easy to slip through the back door into their storeroom and help themselves to bread, fruit and cheese, which they smuggled into the dormitory to share with the other girls.
No
suspicion fell on any of the girls’ heads as there was so much food there, and they were careful not to take too much at any one time.
Together they found ways of making the cleaning work easier and even fun, and after supper they organized games out in the paddock which lifted everyone’s spirits. In more thoughtful moments Dulcie felt a little ashamed that she was constantly using her mind to outwit the Sisters, when perhaps she should be helping the younger girls with reading and spelling. But as Sonia pointed out on these occasions, a bit of extra food, affection and happiness went a great deal further than a reading lesson.
But on Sonia’s last evening at St Vincent’s all Dulcie could think about was how she was going to fill the hole in her life that her friend would leave. Supper time tonight had been bittersweet, for although Sister Ruth had made a special cake and shared it out among the girls, and Sonia had received some little presents from the Sisters, making it almost like a party, there were many sad faces.
Dulcie was waiting out on the veranda by the schoolroom when Sonia joined her. She had been sent over to the convent after supper to say goodbye to Father Murphy and receive his blessing. The Junior girls had just been sent to bed, and the rest of the girls were playing rounders in the paddock.
‘What was the blessing like?’ Dulcie asked, trying hard to sound jolly.
‘Hardly worth going for,’ Sonia grinned. ‘The old bastard made me kneel down, put his fat hand on my head and prayed that I’d keep my faith, work hard and remember all the kindness showed to me here. I thought to myself that I could put all the kindness showed to me in this bag and still have room.’
Sonia was holding in her hands a small calico bag, embroidered with poppies, which Sister Ruth had made for her as a going-away present.
Dulcie laughed. Such cynicism was typical of her friend. ‘Well, it is a very pretty bag,’ she said appreciatively. ‘I hope she makes me one when I leave.’
‘It’s the only present I want to keep,’ Sonia said, pulling a face. ‘Everything else reminds me of things I’d sooner forget.’ She upturned the bag beside Dulcie and spilled out the contents. ‘Look!’ she said, holding up a small square of towelling. ‘That’s from Sister Anne, it’s a sanitary towel, and she’s damn well done such huge blanket stitch round it that it’s going to be like wearing sackcloth.’
Dulcie had no real idea what a sanitary towel was. The older girls often mentioned them, but she’d never liked to ask what they were for.
‘This one,’ Sonia went on, holding up a pin cushion, ‘is from Sister Joan, that’s going to remind me of all the times she hit me with a hairbrush.’
‘What on earth’s that?’ Dulcie pointed to a tiny cone made of card and decorated with ribbons.
Sonia put it on her head. ‘A very small dunce’s cap,’ she giggled. ‘That’s from Sister Agatha, she’s been telling me I’m stupid since I was five. The old crow said it is for hanging on a dressing table and putting hairpins in. It’s going to make me feel dumb for the rest of my life.’
Dulcie laughed, because she sensed that Sonia was actually touched to be given presents and all the scoffing was just bravado.
‘Are you glad to be going?’ she asked.
‘Don’t know really.’ Sonia’s grin vanished. ‘I’ve hated it here for so long, but now I really can go it’s scary. They might be even meaner to me at the sheep station.’
‘But you can always leave if they are,’ Dulcie said. ‘You could go to Perth and get a job there.’
Sonia gave her a strange look. ‘Do you know how far away things are from one another in Australia?’ she asked.
‘It’s only about twenty miles to Perth from here,’ Dulcie said. She’d picked that up from Sister Ruth.
‘Well, the sheep station is five hundred miles from here,’ Sonia said. ‘That’s a long way to walk. Besides, you have to stay until you are eighteen, or you get picked up by the police and taken to the reformatory.’
Dulcie’s eyes widened. The reformatory was the Sisters’ favourite threat and she knew the girls that got sent there had to work in a laundry which was like hell.
‘I didn’t know you couldn’t leave until you were eighteen,’ she gasped.
‘Neither did I, not until Mother told me. Evil cow, she said it like she hoped I’d run away and get taken there. Anyway, even if I could get to Perth, what sort of job could I do there? I don’t read good like you do.’
‘You could work in a shop or a factory,’ Dulcie said, thinking of jobs she remembered girls and women doing back home in England. ‘You could be a nurse, you’re good when people feel poorly.’
‘I hardly know what a shop is. I’ve never been in one,’ Sonia replied, her face darkening. ‘Don’t even know what a factory is, ‘cept they make things. I don’t wanna be a nurse, that’s like being a nun. It’s different for you, Dulcie, you know about stuff like that, you’ve seen it. I haven’t. The only two places I’ve ever been to is here, and the place before I was five. I’ve never been on a train, a bus, I don’t know anything.’
‘I don’t even know about men,’ Sonia went on. ‘All we get to see here is the priest and the Abo that cuts the grass. Sister Ruth tried to explain stuff to me about men, ‘cos there’ll be lots on the station, but I reckon she don’t know much herself, she said I wasn’t to let them try on any funny stuff, whatcha think that means?’
Dulcie didn’t answer immediately. Gus, the Aborigine man who cut the grass, was nice, he often brought a few sweets in to give to the kids, he smiled all the time, even the Sisters liked him because he was so helpful. Yet she knew perfectly well he wasn’t representative of all males. She remembered her granny’s sarcastic comments about men – she had mostly felt they weren’t to be trusted.
Aside from her own father and Duncan, Dulcie had hardly given the male sex a thought since she’d been here, and she racked her brain to think of what Sister Ruth might have meant by ‘funny stuff’.
‘Well, men can give you babies,’ she said eventually.
‘I know that, but that’s when you’re married,’ Sonia giggled.
‘You can have babies without being married,’ Dulcie said, remembering what a girl back at the Sacred Heart had told her not long before she left for Australia. ‘But if you do it when you aren’t married you get called a tart or a whore.’
Sonia giggled at Dulcie using such words. ‘You know everything,’ she said admiringly. ‘I won’t try and find out then. But come on now, let’s go and see who’s winning at the rounders.’
It was much later that night, when once again Dulcie couldn’t sleep for the heat, that she remembered she and Sonia hadn’t even talked about whether they’d ever see each other again. Perhaps that was because they knew they wouldn’t. It was bad enough here sometimes, but at least they all had one another. What would it be like to be sent out to work and not know one person anywhere?
Dulcie imagined the map of Australia hanging up in the schoolroom, and recalled that Sister Ruth had made a dot on it to show them all where Sonia was going. It looked such a little way away, but if it was five hundred miles, just how big was the whole country?
Her last thought before she fell asleep was how ignorant she was. All the other girls thought she knew so much, but she didn’t, not really. Her world was limited to the area inside the fences of St Vincent’s, what the Sisters told her, the few books she’d read, and the voyage from England to here. It didn’t amount to much.
Chapter Ten
1954
‘It doesn’t seem possible that you’ve been here four years,’ Sister Ruth said as she took the last pin from her lips and put it in the hem of Dulcie’s dress.
Dulcie was standing on a chair, out on the veranda by the schoolroom. She’d made the blue cotton dress herself with instruction from Sister, in preparation for leaving to work on a farm in a place called Salmon Gums, hundreds of miles away down at the bottom of Western Australia.
Although the dress was only a simple short-sleeved style with a full gathered skirt, very like the St Vincent uniform, Dulcie was just pleased to have a new dress that wasn’t green, and the white ricrac trimming on the neckline and sleeves made it look a bit more grown-up.
In four years the only real change in her appearance was that she’d grown to five feet four. She was still thin, still had the same uniform hair-style as all the girls, and the childish dress hid that she was developing a young woman’s body. Yet despite the unflattering hair-style and clothes, she was pretty. Her big blue eyes, peaches-and-cream complexion, and the warmth of her wide smile made her so. Yet even though some of the kindlier Sisters often remarked between themselves that she would grow into a beauty, such things never reached Dulcie’s ears, and she considered herself plain.
‘I’m going to miss you,’ Dulcie said hesitantly. Sister Ruth had always been the most decent of the Sisters, and in the last eighteen months she’d come to see her as a woman rather than just a nun, and discovered she was as much a victim of circumstance as she was herself.
Sister Ruth’s dark eyes twinkled as she took Dulcie’s hand to help her down from the chair. ‘I shall miss you too,’ she said. ‘There isn’t anyone else I can talk to about books or England. May isn’t made of the same stuff as you at all.’
Dulcie hadn’t realized for some time that Sister Ruth was English, for she’d been sent out to Australia with the Sisters of Mercy back in the thirties, and she’d picked up the Australian accent. One day when they were working alone together in the kitchen, Sister Ruth had spoken of London, and it transpired that she’d spent her childhood in Lewisham.
To find they were both from South London created a bond between them and they enjoyed sharing memories of places like Blackheath and Greenwich Park. As their friendship became closer, Sister Ruth admitted that becoming a nun wasn’t so much her choice or a true calling as the result of a fear of the outside world.
Her father was killed in the Great War, and her mother, unable to cope alone with six children, put Ruth and her two sisters in a Catholic orphanage, keeping only the boys. Ruth said she was twelve at the time, a timid, sickly child, and when she reached fourteen and had the choice of either leaving to go into service or staying at the orphanage to help with the younger children, she chose the latter because it seemed safer. Eventually she was persuaded by her Mother Superior to take Holy Orders herself.
‘Will you keep an eye on May for me?’ Dulcie asked. She was due to leave in three days’ time, and although she had a great many fears about leaving St Vincent’s, losing touch with May was the biggest. Maybe she and her sister weren’t as close as they had been when they were little, but all they had in the world was each other. Just the thought of not seeing May each day made Dulcie’s stomach churn with anxiety.
She had made May promise that in three years’ time, when she was fifteen, she would let Dulcie know where she was being sent to work. Dulcie would be free to move on from her job then, and it was her hope that she could find a new one somewhere near May, and that eventually they could make a home somewhere together.
‘You just stop fretting about your sister,’ Sister Ruth chuckled. ‘You know as well as I do that she’s more than capable of looking after herself, she can charm the birds out of the trees.’
Dulcie frowned. Everyone had always said that about May right since she was tiny. She
was
charming, funny, vivacious and self-confident, but there was a dark side to her that few people were aware of. She was deceitful, cunning, greedy and wilful, and Dulcie was afraid that free from her restraining influence, and without her to cover up some of her misdeeds, she might get herself into serious trouble. There had been many more incidents like the one with the tin of toffees over the years and someone was always punished, but Dulcie had been certain in most cases that May was the real culprit.
May led a charmed life at St Vincent’s, for she’d learnt to wind most of the Sisters around her little finger. Her cheeky, expressive face with those big, innocent-looking blue eyes had even captivated Reverend Mother, and she often took May to town with her in her car.
Almost every time May returned from one of these trips, she had something – a toy, a book, a bottle of scent – and though she always claimed they’d been given to her, Dulcie was sure she’d stolen them. Yet even more worrying was the way her sister played people off against one another. She started whispers to smear someone’s character or cause trouble so cleverly that no one but Dulcie ever realized she was the perpetrator. It was as though she had to be the top dog at all costs, and if she couldn’t be that with just her natural charm, she’d destroy the competition.
‘What is it about May that worries you so much, Dulcie?’ Sister Ruth asked, concerned by her frown.
‘Because I know she isn’t all she seems,’ Dulcie blurted out. Out of loyalty she would never have admitted such a thing to anyone else, but she had learnt she could trust Sister Ruth with confidences.
The nun put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘I know she isn’t,’ she said softly. ‘May is one of those people who will go through life taking exactly what she wants, by fair means or foul. I know you love her, but you are not responsible for her, and my advice to you now is that you should forget about her, do the best you can at your job, make a life for yourself.’
Dulcie was shocked to hear gentle Sister Ruth say such a thing. ‘I can’t forget her, she’s my sister!’
‘I know I’m right, Dulcie,’ Sister Ruth insisted. ‘So take my advice, dear, and look out for yourself. That’s what May will do.’
On Dulcie’s last afternoon at St Vincent’s she was excused schoolwork and chores, and while the other girls were still in the classrooms she wandered around mentally saying goodbye to everything. She was surprised that she felt a little sad, for almost everywhere she looked there were far more bad memories than good. The gravel path where she was forced to crawl, the laundry room, schoolroom, convent and indeed the dormitories, were all tainted with recollections of pain, humiliation and cruelty. As she walked along the verandas she couldn’t even count the splinters she’d got in her feet before they became as hard as car tyres. She could almost hear herself crying at night with fear, hunger and loneliness. Yet she had survived it, learnt to outwit the meaner Sisters, and even managed to find some happiness.