All at once the terrible beating Dulcie had received from Reverend Mother so long ago came back to her as though it was yesterday. She remembered only too well from her own experiences, and those of other girls, that the woman was cruel and vengeful. She’d often thought the main reason she’d singled out May as her little pet was to make a rift between them. Perhaps when Sergeant Collins telephoned her it made her really angry and so she had taken her revenge by holding back her letters.
The more Dulcie thought about it, the more likely this became. Letters were the only link between the sisters, and if they stopped completely, when May left St Vincent’s, she wouldn’t know where to find Dulcie.
But what could she do? She doubted getting Sergeant Collins to intervene on her behalf would achieve anything. Reverend Mother might even take it out on May. Dulcie shuddered, she knew there were a hundred and one ways the Sisters could make May’s remaining time with them a misery.
Over the following few days Dulcie kept mulling this problem over in her mind. She thought of telling Ross about it and asking if he had any ideas what to do, but he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid being alone with her. This worried her too, she thought by sharing secrets that they’d become friends, but maybe he was wishing he’d never told her anything.
All the talk around the table at dinner was now of the approaching harvest. Like last year with the Masters, Bruce and his men were watching the weather, hoping there’d be no more rain while the wheat and barley fully ripened. Their crops looked good, the machinery had all been overhauled ready to start, it was just a case of waiting until it was ready.
Bruce and Betty went into Esperance to visit some friends late one afternoon, leaving Dulcie to see to the evening meal for John, Bob and Ross. It was a very subdued meal without Bruce to lead the conversation, and as soon as the men had finished eating they left the house, John saying he thought he might go down to the pub.
Dulcie saw him drive off in his battered old car, and she thought she saw Ross in the passenger seat. Once she’d finished the washing up she went to sit out on the veranda to watch the sun go down. So it was a surprise to see Ross suddenly appear in front of her.
‘I thought you went with John,’ she said.
‘That was Bob,’ he said. ‘I said I’d stay and look after things.’
She knew he really meant her and this made her smile because it wasn’t scary to be here alone, the dogs were in the yard and she felt perfectly safe. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘I was just going to make some.’
‘Okay.’ He nodded and sat down on the veranda steps.
When Dulcie came out with the tea he was gazing intently up at the sky. The sun was just about to disappear over the horizon and the sky was pink and orange. ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ she said, handing him his tea and sitting down beside him.
‘Umm,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s going to be a hot day tomorrow.’
‘I’m glad you came over,’ she said after a little while. ‘I was afraid you were wishing you hadn’t told me all that the other day.’
‘I’m not very good at talking, especially to sheilas,’ he said gruffly, looking straight ahead. ‘Anyway, I thought you’d gone into a blue ‘cos you told me that about your dad.’
Dulcie explained a little of how it had churned her all up. Ross went on to tell her he had been in another orphanage, called Clontarf, in Perth, since he was seven, and he remembered a lot of British migrant children being brought there. ‘I suppose we were cruel, ‘cos we used to laugh at the Pom kids whinging when they got burnt in the sun and ‘cos they’d had their shoes taken away. But we were used to it and anyway that’s the way it was there.’
Dulcie knew exactly what he meant. She hadn’t forgotten the names the Australian orphans called her and the other English children at first, or the lack of sympathy from everyone. But she also remembered a year or so later watching more English girls arrive and thinking how drippy they were. She didn’t think she was very sympathetic either.
‘Was Clontarf a bad place too?’ she asked.
He gave her a sideways odd sort of look. ‘Yeah, and Castledare, the place before that, but I’d never known there was a different way of treating kids. The Brothers told us we were worthless lumps of shit right from when we were old enough to know what that meant. The work, punishments, horrible food, being cold in the winter and burning in the summer, that was just the way it was. It’s only since I got here that I found out that not all kids get treated like that. But if Clontarf was bad, Bindoon was a hundred times worse. They told us we were going to a farm, packed us off on a truck like they was taking us off for a holiday. When we got there all we could see for miles and miles was bush, and in the middle of it, an orphanage only half completed. We’d been taken there to finish building it.’
‘Young boys! Building an orphanage!’ Dulcie said incredulously. ‘I can’t believe it!’
‘We couldn’t believe it either,’ he said shaking his head. ‘We’d always done bush-clearing, building and farm work at Clontarf, but not on such a vast scale as this. Boys built the whole of Bindoon, right from scratch, dug the foundations, mixed the mortar, hauled up the bricks, the lot. I was told the huge underground water tank was dug out and built by the first boys that went there, they were conned into thinking it was a swimming pool! Those poor devils had to sleep in tents too.’
He paused for a moment, and when Dulcie looked at him she could see he was trembling with rage. ‘We had to shin up and down scaffolding, push wheelbarrows nearly as big as us, we got burns on our bare feet from the lime in it, but the Brothers didn’t sodding well care, they had boots. The stones for the building came out of the bush, ruddy great boulders dug and hauled out by us. There was a Spanish architect, the Brothers were the overseers, but we were the labourers, like little ants building a nest, and if we stopped work for a minute, complained or did anything wrong, we got beaten.’
He paused briefly, and Dulcie noticed he was clenching and unclenching his fists.
‘Bruce showed me a book once about how the Japs treated the soldiers in the prison camps over there,’ he went on. ‘I guess he was shocked I didn’t react, but why should I? That’s how it was for us too, only we were just kids. We had to learn to live with torn, bruised and burnt feet, with being hungry all the time. I’ve seen boys fall off scaffolding and even envied them when they got thrown on to the back of a truck to be taken to hospital because however much pain they were in, for a few days they’d get looked after and fed.’
Dulcie was astounded at this sudden and lengthy outpouring of his rage. It was difficult to believe him, but then surely no one could make up something quite so outrageous.
Yet once Ross started he couldn’t stop, the humiliations and cruelty flowed out in a torrent. He told her about the top man, Brother Keaney, who hit them over the head with his stick for the slightest misdemeanour, how he humiliated the boys by giving them Irish girls’ names, Bridget and Biddy-Anne. Of Brothers armed with leather straps, sometimes with metal slotted into them, who went among the boys as they were working, hitting them. There was no school, just work all the time. He said how they had no underclothes, just shorts and a shirt, how boys would rummage through the pig swill because they were so hungry. The boys who wet their beds were forced to wear a kind of sacking dress to shame them further. He described the main administration building as looking like a palace with mock marble floors and columns, domes and spires, how they’d built Stations of the Cross along the main drive, and how in his opinion Brother Keaney was a madman.
Dulcie watched Ross as he was talking. It was growing dark, but his eyes burned with rage and his mouth kept twisting up in a sinister sneer as he recalled it all.
She began to cry then and Ross put his hand on her arm. ‘I wish I hadn’t told you about all this now,’ he said. He fell silent for a minute or two, his hand still on her arm. Then all at once his free hand gently touched her cheek with the softest of caresses. ‘Still, I reckon knowing you were crying over me makes it worth it.’
Dulcie went inside after that, but Ross’s words stayed with her. In some strange way they seemed to illustrate everything he’d lacked in his miserable childhood. However bad it was at the Sacred Heart, St Vincent’s, and at the Masters’, however forlorn and abandoned she’d felt, she had the knowledge of what love was inside her, clear pictures of family life tucked away in her mind. She knew what kisses, hugs and endearments were, but for Ross they must be as unfamiliar as a park had been to him. Yet he knew what tears were, he’d just never experienced anyone crying for him.
The day before they started harvesting all the men lingered longer over supper and Betty and Dulcie had finished washing up by the time they got up from the table. Betty asked if anyone would like a cup of tea, and when Dulcie said she fancied taking hers out on the veranda, Ross asked if she’d mind if he joined her. Since their last talk he’d been much less curt with her, he’d even brought a bunch of wild flowers round for her which made Betty claim he was sweet on her, and perhaps this was why everyone else opted for having their tea inside.
Dulcie was a bit embarrassed that they were outside while everyone else was indoors, but she enjoyed watching the sun go down, and besides, she still wanted to ask Ross’s opinion about May and the letters.
‘I was just thinking the other night, you must have been sixteen when you ran away from Bindoon,’ she said after some brief general conversation. ‘Why were you still there? Surely you could have left for a job somewhere at fifteen?’
He looked a bit embarrassed. ‘On the time I ran away previous to that, I got hauled up in court,’ he said. ‘By that time they’d started sending delinquent boys to Bindoon, not just orphans, to, like, give them farm training and stuff. Just another way for the Brothers to get slave labour. Anyway, they sent me back there to stay till I was eighteen.’
‘What, just for running away?’
He looked a bit shifty. ‘I got caught stealing some food. Well, I had to, I was starving.’
Dulcie smiled and told him how she and Sonia used to steal from the Sisters’ storeroom.
‘Good job you didn’t get caught,’ he grinned. ‘I don’t suppose they go much easier on girls than boys. By the time I left Bindoon we had some blokes there that were twenty. If they were any good at carpentry, plastering or anything useful, they didn’t let them go.’
Suddenly Dulcie understood better why Ross was so reluctant to talk about where he’d come from. If he’d been ordered by the court to stay at Bindoon till he was eighteen, running away again amounted to much the same as breaking out of prison. Under the circumstances she thought she might have remained silent too.
So she changed the subject and told him about May, and her anxiety about the letters. ‘Do you think Reverend Mother isn’t giving them to her to spite me?’
He nodded. ‘I wouldn’t put it past any nun. The Sisters of Mercy are just as bad as the Christian Brothers in my book. There were some of them at Castledare where I started off. I was only a baby, about a year old, when I was sent there with my two older brothers. I was six when they were sent off somewhere else. No one would ever tell me where they went, they spanked me every time I asked. To this day I don’t know where my brothers are, or why we got put in an orphanage in the first place. That’s how much they care about families.’
‘But someone must know,’ Dulcie said. ‘They do keep records. I used to sneak a look at Reverend Mother’s papers on her desk and whenever a new girl came there was always a file with stuff about where she came from. I tried to find mine once, but I didn’t have any luck, I think it must have been in the cabinet which was always locked.’
‘I tried all that sniffing around too,’ Ross said with a grin. ‘If I was sent in to clean Brother Keaney’s study I used to give it a right going over.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Not about me. But I saw some letters for other boys once, a big pile of them, mostly for the Maltese boys that came to Australia like you did. I didn’t dare nick them, but I wished I had afterwards, ‘cos those poor little sods never got them.’
He told her how sorry he felt for those poor kids. He said they weren’t orphans and that their parents had sent them willingly, believing they were going to get a good education and go on to be engineers and craftsmen. ‘They never had one lesson after they got there,’ he said. ‘I just hope some of them get back to Malta one day and tell their families what went on.’
Dulcie felt crushed now. All the time she’d been at St Vincent’s she’d imagined that she was just unlucky to end up in a bad place. But Pat had suffered, and Ross too, and it seemed most, if not all, orphanages were run in much the same way. If this was the case there must be thousands of girls like her and boys like Ross, all with questions about their background or relatives that no one would answer.
‘What can I do about May?’ she asked.
‘Maybe you could go back and visit St Vincent’s,’ he suggested. ‘Bruce and Betty drive up there sometimes to visit her family, they’d take you with them. The Sisters couldn’t very well refuse to let you see May, not if Betty was with you.’
Dulcie beamed. ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’
That night as she lay in bed she felt elated. The harvest wouldn’t be completed until nearly Christmas. She doubted Bruce and Betty would want to make such a long drive during the hot months, but maybe in March or April they’d feel like going. That wasn’t so very long to wait. Then it would be only a year until May was fifteen and able to leave St Vincent’s.
Her last thoughts as she fell asleep were of the reunion with her sister. She imagined walking up the drive to the convent and May coming running to meet her. She was asleep even before the imagined embrace.
PART TWO
1956–1963
Chapter Fourteen
It was April of 1956 when Bruce and Betty took Dulcie with them to Perth to stay with Joan, Betty’s younger sister, for a short holiday. Joan’s home was in Subiaco, quite close to the city centre, and Betty’s other sister and brother and their families lived nearby too.