St Vincent’s wasn’t quite such a harsh place now, not compared with how it had been for her as a new girl. The food had improved in the last two years, new books and equipment had been bought for the school, the Sisters weren’t quite so obsessed with breaking up friendships, and on several occasions the girls had even been taken in a truck to a beach for a picnic. Yet the punishments were every bit as cruel. Only a few days ago two eight-year-olds who had recently arrived from England had tried to run away. They were picked up within a few hours and brought back to be caned and have their heads shaved. Dulcie couldn’t understand how anyone could treat homesick children so badly.
Yet now that she was leaving she found herself getting a little sentimental. The painted mural of the Virgin Mary on the veranda outside the schoolroom, the balustrade they dared each other to balance on like tightrope-walkers, both looked dear to her. She would never again hear the sound of chanted multiplication tables or run out into the paddock when the first autumn rain came.
She smiled to herself, amused that she had found anything she’d miss. Soon she would be seeing ordinary people, quite different to the patronizing do-gooders who came here to tut over the poor motherless children and hand out a few sweets. Her new life wouldn’t be dominated by prayers and the constant reminders of sin. She would see pubs on her way through Perth, ordinary houses where families lived. There would be shops, ladies wearing makeup and high heels, mothers pushing prams, all that stuff she remembered from England.
Yet as Sonia had said three years ago, it was scary to leave. There was no way of knowing if this job was going to be a good one, or a worse nightmare, for Reverend Mother had picked it for her, and however nice she was to May, she’d always been mean to Dulcie.
Just last September an old girl called Mary came back to visit St Vincent’s. Dulcie hadn’t known her, for Mary had left here before she arrived. But because Dulcie was the oldest girl they had talked, and Mary told her that the sheep station she was sent to when she was fifteen worked her so hard she thought she would die of it. She warned Dulcie that Australians in the main ridiculed Poms, and saw all kids from orphanages as slave labour, there to be abused in every way. She talked about one of the station hands trying to have his way with her all the time. She warned Dulcie never to allow herself to be alone with any man, and to scream loudly and keep her legs clamped tight together if one caught hold of her. That had frightened Dulcie badly for a while, and it was still in her mind now. She wondered if just clamping your legs together was enough to prevent a man from raping you.
Dulcie tried not to think about her mother, father or Susan now, yet now and again she would have a vivid flash of them, as clear as if it had all happened last year. She often wondered if her father and Susan ever thought about her and May, and why they had just abandoned them. But it was only Granny she liked to remember, imagining her sitting on her stool on the doorstep when it was hot, chatting to her neighbours, the way she used to smack her lips when she had her nightly glass of stout. Funny, unimportant little pictures that came out of nowhere, and she’d hear her voice, smell that old lady smell, and feel the warmth and comfort of her arms.
May never spoke of any of them any more, she seemed to have forgotten it all entirely. Dulcie wished it could be that way with her too, but those teasing memories remained, often catching her unawares. Maybe they always would.
Dulcie looked through the gates for old times’ sake. When she first came here she used to do this every time she was sent out on weeding duty, sometimes even considering running away. There had been nothing but St Vincent’s in the lane then, but a year ago they’d started to build houses along it. She thought they looked very grand, with their posh verandas and big gardens, even if they were all on one floor, not proper two-storey ones like back home. Sister Ruth confessed she’d chatted to one of the new owners and got a tour of inspection, and had been astounded that they had two bathrooms, a washing-machine with an electric wringer, and the first television she’d ever seen.
Dulcie sighed as she turned away to go back and find the other girls. She hadn’t ever seen a television either, but she imagined it was a bit like going to the pictures in your own living-room. She wondered if there would be a cinema in Salmon Gums.
There was a hotel in Salmon Gums, a big, quite splendid-looking building, but it was closed, along with the post office and two shops. The road going through Salmon Gums was just a gravel one, and when Dulcie found no one waiting to meet her she had walked a little way along it to see a school, still closed for the holidays, a yard with a couple of grain silos and a hall which appeared to be used for film shows, but she hadn’t seen a single person apart from the station master when she got off the train, and even he had disappeared now.
It was late afternoon and swelteringly hot even in the shade of a tree, and the clock viewed through the post-office window showed she had been waiting for over an hour. Her feet were throbbing in the tight new shoes she’d been given when she left St Vincent’s and she was hungry, thirsty, dirty and exhausted.
She idly picked at the SS
Maloja
luggage label stuck on the suitcase beside her. While the label itself brought back many good memories of the long, exciting voyage, it was also a sharp reminder that she and all the children who set out so eagerly from England had been cheated and lied to. The case held even less than she’d left England with – her old St Vincent’s striped uniform dress, a cardigan, two nightdresses and two sets of underwear. There were a few presents from the Sisters, an embroidered bag from Sister Ruth, very like the one she had made Sonia, a tablet of scented soap from Sister Grace, and little handmade presents from some of her friends. Yet two days ago as she packed these little treasures and the five shillings she’d been given as pocket money for the trip into the embroidered bag, she had been so confident about her future. Even when Sister Ruth left her on Perth station after buying her a ticket to Salmon Gums, she’d felt excited and happy just to be let out of St Vincent’s.
But all that confidence and excitement soon left her during the long and awful journey here. She had nothing but a shilling left now, and no one anywhere to turn to. If Mr Masters didn’t arrive to collect her, she had no idea what she was going to do. She hunched her knees up under her dress, leaned forward on to them and sobbed.
The train had left Perth at seven in the evening and travelled on through that night to Coolgardie, for the connection to Salmon Gums. It was impossible to sleep on the hard seats and she had spent most of the time scared out of her wits by the other passengers, mostly male and many of them very drunk.
She had had the idea that once beyond Coolgardie the countryside would lose its desert-like appearance and become green and lush, like farmland she remembered in England. It was a bitter disappointment to see nothing more than miles and miles of stony, dry ground with sparse clumps of scorched grass and weary-looking gum trees. Whenever the train stopped at a small halt she would see a few houses, but they were mainly little more than wooden huts with tin roofs, at best like the prefabs she remembered back home after the war. Chickens pecked about by some of them, and now and again she saw a few sheep. In one place called Norseman she saw a man on a tractor hauling a heavy-looking chain across ground close to the railway. It appeared to be a way of clearing the ground of the big stones and old tree stumps, and just the vast area he had yet to clear made her heart sink further because it looked such an impossible place to attempt to grow anything.
When finally she got to Salmon Gums, there was no one waiting for her.
The sound of a car engine made Dulcie look up. A black pick-up truck was coming up the road, a cloud of red dust billowing around it. She hoped this was Mr Masters, so she gave her face a quick wipe with her hanky and stood up.
The truck stopped right by her. The driver had protruding teeth and a broad-brimmed leather hat. He didn’t get out, and looked her up and down before speaking.
‘You the kid from the orphanage?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, picking up her case. ‘Dulcie Taylor. Are you Mr Masters?’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Just come to get you. Get in.’
Dulcie was hardly seated before he swung the truck round in the middle of the road and drove off in the direction he’d come.
The road was a wide gravel one, but before long the man turned off it into a narrower, far more pitted one lined with gum trees. Between the trees Dulcie could see sheep grazing.
‘How far is it?’ she ventured. The land was so flat and the sun so bright she felt she was viewing infinity and she couldn’t see a house anywhere.
‘Twenty miles maybe,’ came the grunted reply.
The man stank, not just of sweat but as though he’d been wearing his checked shirt and stained trousers for years without washing them, and he smoked continuously. Dulcie sensed he didn’t like women, so she didn’t dare ask him anything else.
As they drove along in silence Dulcie felt panic rising inside her. Back at St Vincent’s she’d been the cleverest girl there. Even Reverend Mother in one of her rare nice moments had complimented her on her thirst for knowledge and allowed her to borrow books from the convent library, an honour it was said that few other girls had been given. But now, alone with this smelly, sullen man, she could see that the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens had neither prepared her nor would help her in any way in this vast empty place. Even
A Town Like Alice
by Nevil Shute, which was at least contemporary and set mainly in Australia, had given her a false impression of the outback. She had devoured that book, imagining herself as the English girl who meets the brave Australian soldier out in Malaya and subsequently tracks him down to Australia. But now as they bumped along this hot, dusty road, she was reminded that the English girl in the book had been rich and middle-class, not a little penniless ex-orphanage girl, and she began to cry again.
‘Christ almighty, don’t start blubbing on me,’ the man said suddenly, making her start.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and sniffed back her tears. ‘I’m just scared.’
He gave her a sideways glance. ‘You’re a bit small and skinny,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to stand up for yerself with the Masters or they’ll work you to death.’
That was the last thing Dulcie wanted to hear but she bit back further tears. ‘How many other people work for them?’ she asked, trying to control the quiver in her voice.
‘Three of us clearing the ground right now.’
Dulcie remembered the man on the tractor and her heart sank even further. She had imagined a farm to be like the ones back in England, pretty orchards with sheep grazing under the trees, fields of waving golden wheat and a pond with ducks. ‘You mean it’s not a real farm yet?’
‘They only got the land a couple of years ago,’ he said, swatting away a fly from his eyes. ‘We got a mob of sheep, and chooks, but can’t grow nothing till we’ve got the land cleared and dug the dams.’
Dulcie was puzzled. You
built
dams across rivers, not dug them. What did he mean?
She took a chance and asked him.
‘To catch the rain of course,’ he said, looking sideways at her as if she was stupid.
Dulcie explained what a dam was to her.
‘Oh, we ain’t got no rivers or wells out here,’ he said. ‘All we get is the rain, and there ain’t much of that, so we have to save what we can.’
He went on to say how they dug a big hole then waited for rain to fill it up.
Dulcie couldn’t possibly imagine how that would serve any useful purpose, for surely all the water would evaporate in the sun, or disappear back into the ground. But she said nothing, after all she knew nothing of farming.
He turned off the long straight track later, and then she saw a sign with a name on it as if it led to a farm. This happened again later too, but in neither case did she see a house. Then they slowed down and turned at a sign which said ‘Masters’.
‘Is this it?’ she asked. All the way here, behind the gum trees which lined the track, the land had been at least partially cleared. But this part was real bush – trees, boulders and sparse clumps of grass just like she’d seen earlier today from the train window.
‘Yup, this is Masters’ place,’ he said, tipping his hat back and lighting up yet another cigarette. ‘Four thousand acres.’
Acres meant little to Dulcie, but she remembered being told once that the big cattle stations up in the Northern Territory could be 200,000 acres or more, so she supposed this was small by Australian standards.
Finally she saw a barn in the distance and she assumed the house was there too, though hidden by the trees surrounding it. Dejected as she was, she leaned forward to catch her first sight of it, but as the man drove the truck in between two dense bushes, and she saw it, her heart plummeted.
The house wasn’t much better than a shack made of wooden shingle, with a veranda all around it and a tin roof. The shingles were just grey wood, so old and weather-beaten that many of them were warped. The veranda posts looked as though you could lean on them and they’d collapse. But for a washing-line with a few shirts and trousers hanging on it to dry at the side of the house, she might have thought it had been abandoned.
‘Go on round the back and knock on the door,’ the man said. ‘Don’t mind the dogs, they won’t hurt you.’ He leaped out of the truck and disappeared into thick bushes before she could say anything.
The dogs he mentioned came running round from the back of the house as Dulcie got out gingerly. One was a dark russet colour, the other black, and they looked capable of eating her alive. But they didn’t bark or come running up to her, just stood there looking curiously at her.
Dulcie’s whole being wanted to walk away from there, she knew without even setting foot in the house or meeting the owners that this was going to be misery far beyond the level of St Vincent’s. Worse still, she had a feeling that Mother had known what it would be like and had sent her purposely.