Dulcie could only smile. In the same year Bruce and Betty got the farm she was born 12,000 miles away. Who would have thought that sixteen years later they would be brought together by the same policeman who witnessed that will?
Bruce had told her that the war, which came so soon after getting the farm, was the turn in his and Betty’s fortunes, for suddenly the prices for beef, lamb, wool and cereals shot up. He had said jubilantly that he’d never looked back, and when he finally got the new house finished three years ago, all his dreams were fulfilled. Dulcie couldn’t help but feel her dreams were about to come true too.
The following morning at eight Dulcie was ready to leave, her suitcase in the car, Sergeant Collins behind the wheel, but Mrs Collins was delaying them setting off by fussing around Dulcie and giving her advice.
‘Now, make sure you come and visit us whenever you come into town,’ she said yet again. ‘Once you can drive Bruce’s car, you bring Betty down here too. And look after that pretty hair and your lovely English skin. Now, are you sure you’ve got everything?’
‘I’ve got an awful lot more than I came with,’ Dulcie giggled. Her suitcase barely closed over the two new dresses she and Molly had made together, and some old clothes of their daughters they’d given her to work in. There was a box of books on the back seat of the car, a bag of oddments of fabric to give to Betty for her patchwork, and now Mrs Collins was pressing a box of sweets into her hands too.
Molly caught Dulcie’s face between her two chubby hands. ‘I wish I could keep you here,’ she said, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘It will be lonely without you. But there’ll always be a place for you here if you need it, and don’t you be a stranger to us.’
‘She’s only going a few miles up the road, Molly,’ Sergeant Collins said impatiently from inside the car. ‘Anyone would think she was going to Queensland.’
Dulcie hurriedly kissed Mrs Collins and got into the car. She felt choked up with all the kindness and affection, and somehow just thanking them for letting her stay with them didn’t cover what she truly felt.
A month later Betty stood watching Dulcie take a beef and onion pie out of the oven.
‘You’re a good little cook,’ Betty said, looking appreciatively at the golden-brown pastry. Dulcie had decorated it with leaves the way she’d seen her granny do. ‘I’ll be able to be a lady of leisure soon, just sit in my chair and ring a bell when I want something.’
Dulcie laughed. Betty’s legs might be bad but she had an energetic spirit that wouldn’t allow her to sit down all day. ‘I can’t see you doing that for long,’ she said. ‘Besides, you’ve still got a lot to teach me, I still can’t make gravy like you do.’
Dulcie could hardly believe her change in fortune. Working for Bruce and Betty wasn’t a job to her, but a joy, for they appreciated everything she did for them. It wasn’t even hard work. The house was easy to clean, they had constant hot water, and even a washing-machine with an electric wringer. Preparing and cooking meals was a delight, for the men’s eyes lit up when she put the food in front of them and they savoured every mouthful.
But best of all was that she was treated like one of their family. For the first few mealtimes Dulcie had suffered agonies of shyness, and she could barely eat her own meal with so many eyes upon her, let alone speak. But maybe Bruce and Betty sensed this, for they gradually drew her into conversations, and bit by bit she found herself less self-conscious.
Bruce, John, Ross and the third hand, Bob, were as different to the men at the Masters’ place as cows to sheep. None of them viewed women as lesser beings, if anything they placed them on a pedestal as amazing creatures who had skills they could never master.
Bruce and John were the talkers. Reminiscences, gossip, discussions on current affairs flowed effortlessly from them. Ross and Bob were naturally quiet men who enjoyed listening rather than taking an active part in conversation.
John Withers, the man who had picked her up the day she ran away, was in his late thirties. She had remembered him as being handsome, but now she’d got to know him better it wasn’t just his looks, the sparkly blue eyes, strong features and blond hair which appealed to her, she found he had a lovely easy-going nature too. He had vast experience gleaned from work on cattle and sheep stations all over Australia and told stories about characters he’d met that had them all laughing. He had been on active service in Burma during the war, and on his discharge in Sydney it was his intention to go up to Kimberley to find work as a stockman. One of his favourite anecdotes was how at that time he’d fallen in with a bunch of other men who had the idea of pooling their resources and buying a jeep, so they could travel all over Australia picking up work as they went. Two of them were insistent on heading towards Western Australia, and by the time they’d broken down twice in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain, John had had enough of their bright ideas, and parted company with them at Kalgoorlie. Bruce was in town collecting some spare parts for his tractor, and they met and got talking in a pub. Bruce offered him a few weeks’ work clearing land, and John accepted it because he was broke. That was in 1946 and he was still here ten years later.
Betty told Dulcie in confidence that John was a bit of a ladies’ man, with two or three different ones scattered around. She laughingly said she thought he’d only leave now if they found out about one another and it got too hot for him.
Bob Banks was forty-five, and until his mother died a couple of years ago, had remained living with her in Esperance. He had never married, and Dulcie thought this was probably because of his unprepossessing appearance. He had bad teeth, sticking-out ears, scarcely any hair, pitted skin and very bandy legs. His father had been the town blacksmith, and from what Bruce told her, a giant brute of a man who made his only son’s life a misery because of his gentle nature and weaker constitution. Bob shut down the forge when his father died, and scraped a living for himself and his mother by being the town’s odd-job man and mechanic. Turned down for active service during the war, he came to work for Bruce who was finding it hard to get any help, then when his mother died, finally came here to live.
Ross intrigued Dulcie the most. If she hadn’t felt his sympathy to her that day a year earlier in Salmon Gums, or got to know the story of how he was found here in the barn sick and starving, she might have thought him snooty. When he did speak to her it was usually to make rather boastful statements about all the things he could do. He
was
a bit of a marvel for someone of only nineteen – he could bricklay, mend vehicles and knew a great deal about animals – but it was very odd that he never spoke of where he learned all these things, and she knew from Bruce it wasn’t all from here.
She remembered him as being just a gangly, thin boy on that first meeting, but he had become a man and, although still slender, his body rippled with muscle. While he had lovely tawny eyes, good features and curly dark auburn hair, he couldn’t be described as handsome, for there seemed to be something missing. It struck Dulcie one day that he had a great deal in common with the half-wild cats that hung around the barns. They were very appreciative when she took them out a few scraps of meat, sometimes they even let her stroke them. But mostly they were on their guard, watching her from a distance, aloof and perhaps a little afraid.
Bruce couldn’t praise Ross enough, he said he worked tirelessly, he had an instinctive way with animals and he was hungry for knowledge. But even he said that he couldn’t quite reach the lad, adding that unless someone managed that, he felt Ross was destined to end up like Bob, a man who had nothing in his life but work.
It was one of Dulcie’s jobs to clean out the men’s bunkhouse once a week and change the sheets on their beds. The bunkhouse had been purpose-built for the men and consisted of one large room with their three beds, a smaller one which was only used by shearers when they were called in, a minuscule kitchen where they could make tea and coffee and a shower room.
The first time Dulcie went to clean it, she was surprised by how few personal possessions the men had. Bob had the most – framed family photographs, a piano accordion, a rack of pipes, books and a couple of old blue and white ginger jars he said his grandfather had brought back from China. John had a beautiful saddle, one picture of his family up in North Queensland tacked to the wall, a biscuit tin with horses on the lid which she assumed held old letters and sentimental souvenirs, and a couple of guns, but Ross had nothing other than his clothes.
Ross’s lack of personal possessions baffled Dulcie. It was quite understandable that he’d had nothing from his childhood on his arrival here – after all she had nothing more than the now crumpled wedding photograph of Susan and her husband and the little keepsakes from the Sisters when she left St Vincent’s. Yet Ross had been living here for three years, and she would have thought in that time he would have acquired a few items, if only to give him some feeling of homeliness and permanence. With the money she’d earned up at the Masters’ place she had bought herself a little needlework box, a diary, a frame to put Susan’s picture in, and a teddy-bear nightdress case to put on her bed. But then maybe men didn’t have the same nest-building instincts.
She had been told by John that having sheets on their beds was a luxury he’d never come across until he came here to work. He said in most places the bunkhouse was a filthy tin shed, the shower a tank outside you stood underneath and pulled a bit of string to get sluiced down. ‘I must be getting old,’ he said, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘I’ve got to like a decent place to kip, the good tucker, and a boss that don’t drive you into the ground.’
John was as easy to understand as he was to talk to. He held nothing back, he laughed at himself and the world, a happy man who had been something of an adventurer right from a young lad, eager to see the world and embrace new experience. Dulcie suspected he’d never saved a penny in his entire life and had been something of a hell-raiser too. He was good to be near, for despite his rough edges he had the soul of a gentleman, he never cursed in front of her and Betty, he wouldn’t come into the house when he was dirty or drunk, and he kept everyone entertained with his stories.
Dulcie would watch Ross sometimes when Bruce and John were talking, and saw that he idolized them both as he hung on their every word, his tawny eyes full of admiration. Yet he got on well with Bob too, she had observed them working together on an engine. Bob only spoke to instruct or point out things, and Ross said even less, but it was a companionable silence. Dulcie felt they had bonded together because they had miserable childhoods in common. She was determined that she was going to find out everything about Ross before long.
Bruce came in just as Dulcie was putting the vegetables in a dish. ‘Umm,’ he sniffed just outside the kitchen. ‘That smells beaut. I’m so hungry I could eat a raw kangaroo.’
‘That’s what you’ll get if you don’t hurry and clean up,’ Betty said, turning her head towards him and smiling. ‘I’ll be banging the gong any minute.’
Dulcie had discovered that the men’s habit of coming in to eat their meals all washed and in clean clothes was Betty’s doing and not typical of any other farm or station. She said that in most places the stockmen ate in a shed or outside. But although Betty had come from a poor family herself back in Perth, her mother had high standards, and Betty had taken them with her into her marriage. She was too caring and interested in her employees ever to contemplate feeding them outside her house, so she found her compromise by insisting on the code of cleanliness, and that they minded their manners. Bruce had laughingly told Dulcie that if they had no manners when they arrived, they soon learned them – for all her sweetness, Betty was a force to be reckoned with.
Ten minutes later everyone was sitting at the table tucking into the beef and onion pie with obvious delight.
‘You made this?’ John said, looking at Dulcie. ‘It’s beaut!’
‘It certainly is,’ Bruce said, grinning. ‘She’s not just a pretty face, is she?’
Dulcie blushed scarlet.
‘Did you learn to cook at the convent?’ Ross asked shyly.
Dulcie giggled. ‘Not really, that was like lessons in how
not
to cook, soup that was nearly all water, pastry like cardboard. I learned some good stuff from Pat, she was a good cook, then I tried recipes out of magazines. But pastry I suppose I learned from my gran back in England. She used to tell me stuff while she was making it.’
‘What’s England like?’ John asked. ‘I always wanted to go there.’
‘I only really know about London,’ Dulcie replied. ‘I don’t think you’d like that much, John, it’s just streets and streets full of houses. The roads are really busy with cars and buses. It’s noisy and dirty.’
‘But I’ve seen pictures of castles, quaint little villages, big lakes and mountains,’ he said in some surprise.
‘There is all that too,’ Dulcie said. ‘But I never got to see it, apart from a few pretty villages when we went out with Dad for the day sometimes. There’s lovely parks in London, though, we used to have one right near where I lived. That had a lake with lots of ducks.’
‘What’s a park?’ Ross said.
‘It’s like a huge garden that belongs to everyone,’ Dulcie said, shocked that he didn’t know about such an ordinary thing. ‘You must have them in the cities here too, there was King’s Park in Perth. Not that we ever got taken there.’
‘King’s Park is glorious,’ Betty chimed in. ‘We used to have picnics there when I was a child. Bruce and I used to go there too when we were courting.’
The couple looked at each other and smiled.
‘So parks are a good place to go with a sheila then?’ John said, raising one eyebrow suggestively.
Dulcie laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose they are, but where do men take their girlfriends down here?’
John leaned his elbow on the table and wiggled his fork at her, his eyes twinkling. ‘Well, it all depends what kind of sheila she is, Dulc. There’s some you might take in the saloon bar for a few bevies, there’s some you have to take dancing. I reckon with a sheila like you, though, a bloke would be best to think of a walk along the sea-front holding her hand.’