Wind in the Wires
Authors: Joy Dettman
About Wind in the Wires
The wind is whispering in Woody Creek . . . Change is in the air.
It’s 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged – kicking and screaming – into the swinging sixties.
Jenny’s daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother’s hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met.
A mistake from Cara’s teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white wedding and happily ever after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man.
But life for the Morrison girls has never been easy, and once the sisters are in each other’s lives, long-buried secrets are bound to be unearthed, the dramatic consequences of which no-one could have predicted . . .
C
ONTENTS
My heartfelt thankyou to Emma who tolerates my idiosyncrasies and to my readers who supply the fuel which keeps my nose to the grindstone
P
REVIOUSLY IN
WOODY CREEK
Gertrude Foote (Granny)
, town midwife and small property owner, was once wed to
Archie Foote.
She is the mother of
Amber
and grandmother of
Sissy
and
Jenny Morrison.
Vern Hooper
, farmer, sawmill boss and leading Woody Creek citizen, is
Gertrude’s
half-cousin and her long-term lover. He has three offspring,
Lorna, Margaret
and
Jim
, a childhood friend of
Jenny.
George Macdonald
, mill owner and farmer, and his wife,
Maisy
, are the parents of eight daughters and identical hell-raising twin sons,
Bernie and Macka.
When a drunken prank goes badly awry,
Jenny
, a schoolgirl, is found to be with child. For her good name’s sake, a hurried wedding is arranged by
Amber
and
Norman Morrison
together with the parents of the twins.
Jenny
has other ideas. Fifteen, alone, afraid, her childhood dream of becoming a famous singer ripped from her by the twins and
Margot’s
birth, Jenny escapes to Melbourne, where she meets
Laurie Morgan
, a redhead who looks like Clark Gable. He is kind. He takes care of her, buys her pretty thing – and takes advantage of her confused innocence.
Georgie
is conceived.
Jenny
returns to the ever dependable
Gertrude
, her life in tatters. The town has lost respect for her, as she has for herself. When she learns that
Sissy
is engaged to
Jim Hooper
, it may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Jim
is
Jenny’s
friend and one of the few in town who still looks on her as the girl she had once been.
By accident or design, their friendship develops into much more. Then
Jim
breaks his engagement and joins the army. Seven months later,
Jimmy
is born.
Jenny
is eighteen and the mother of three illegitimate children,
Margot, Georgie
and
Jimmy.
She vows to never again become pregnant.
Vern
learns of his grandson and is determined to claim the infant.
Jim
hasn’t been back to Woody Creek.
Jenny
won’t reply to his letters. His family tell him he has a son and he wants to see him before he is sent overseas. To escape
Vern’s
threats of court,
Jenny
flees to Sydney and to
Jim
with their ten-month-old son, her tiny
Georgie
left in
Gertrude’s
care.
Elsie
, a light-skinned aboriginal who calls
Gertrude
‘Mum’, lives with her husband
Harry Hall
on Gertrude’s land. They have the care of several children: their own,
Elsie’s
niece and nephew, and
Margot
, who
Jenny
has had little to do with.
Vern
and his daughters refuse to contemplate a marriage between
Jenny
and
Jim.
He has bought her a wedding ring. She has taken his name at the Sydney boarding house, but at eighteen will require
Norman’s
permission to marry. Since Georgie’s birth, she has had no contact with
Norman, Amber
or
Sissy.
In Sydney, she is singing again at clubs and parties, and when Jim is reported missing in action, she takes on day work at a clothing factory where she meets
Lila
, also married and a mother. Jenny is living an exemplary life, waiting for news of
Jim.
Come New Year’s Eve, 1943, she is in the club pianist’s car, on her way home, when disaster strikes in the shape of five drunken American sailors.
Ten months later,
Jenny
leaves
Amberley
, a comfortable boarding house, to return to a life of constant labour on Gertrude’s small property and to live in
Gertrude’s
two-and-a-half-room hut. She carries with her a guilty secret.
Gertrude
must never know a third daughter was born to
Jenny
–
Cara Jeanette
, given at birth to Amberley’s childless landlady,
Myrtle Norris
and her husband
Robert
, a high-school principal.
Cara
may well be Jenny’s secret for life, but to
Myrtle
and
Robert
she is a cherished only child.
Vern Hooper
and his daughters haven’t given up. They will not have their son and brother wed to a little trollop who can’t keep her pants on. They allow
Jenny
to believe that
Jim
is dead, and again threaten to take her son.
Ray King
wants to marry Jenny. She doesn’t love him, but he has a house in the city, and to have any chance at life, her children need to have a father.
Then
Amber Morrison
, who has never been quite sane, murders her stationmaster husband
Norman
in his bed. For twenty-one years,
Jenny
has believed
Norman
to be her father. The night of his funeral, she learns the truth of her birth.
Archie Foote
, singer, poet, physician and Gertrude’s philandering husband, is her natural father.
Juliana Conti
, an Italian woman who died in childbirth, is her mother.
She tells
Ray King
she will marry him but will never have another child. He wants her, not children. He doesn’t want her children. The marriage has little chance of success. She loved
Jim Hooper.
She promised him when they said goodbye never to remove his ring. When she marries Ray, she moves
Jim’s
ring to her right hand.
The war has been over for months when she learns that
Jim
is alive and in a Melbourne hospital. She takes
Jimmy
there to meet his father, but
Jim
, a prisoner of the Japanese for two years, has lost a leg and some say his sight and his mind. He does not appear to recognise, or even see, her.
After a violent episode,
Jenny
leaves
Ray
and once again returns to
Gertrude.
Vern Hooper
is growing old and infirm, and still has only the one grandson, who he will not allow to be raised as a bastard in Woody Creek.
He gains custody of six-year-old
Jimmy
, and before
Vern’s
death,
Jimmy
is adopted by
Margaret Hooper
and her husband
Bernard.
Ray
has formed an association with
Florence
, a young and inexperienced girl. She has two children to him,
Raelene
and the retarded
Donny.
In 1951,
Ray
comes to Woody Creek with his two motherless babies, where
Jenny
, still mourning the loss of her beloved son to the Hoopers, finds a focus in
Ray’s
babies. A relationship is forged, though never again as husband and wife.
Jenny
cares for
Donny
, and grows to love the doll-like
Raelene.
In 1958
Gertrude
dies, then less than a week later,
Ray
is crushed beneath logs at a mill. Unable to manage the now seven-year-old
Donny
alone,
Jenny
delivers him to a Melbourne home for disabled children then finds employment in Frankston, with
Vroni
, an old friend.
Charlie White
, the elderly town grocer, has a daughter
Hilda.
He hasn’t seen or heard from her in many years. He is known as the meanest man in town, though not by
Georgie
, who has been working for him since she turned fourteen. The
Fulton family
are
Charlie’s
long-term tenants and good neighbours.
Miss Blunt
, the town draper and dressmaker, is another of
Charlie’s
tenants. He owns half-a-dozen rental properties in Woody Creek.
Jack Thompson
, the young constable, is falling in love with
Georgie
, who in 1958 is eighteen and a stunningly beautiful redhead.
Teddy Hall
, middle son of
Elsie
and
Harry
, is involved in an odd relationship with
Margot
, a plain and frumpish girl.
Back in Melbourne,
Florence
,
Raelene
and
Donny’s
natural mother, sees
Ray’s
death notice in a newspaper. She contacts
Jenny
, stating that
Ray
stole her children and that she wants to see her daughter.
Against her better judgement,
Jenny
takes
Raelene
to the city to meet
Florence
and her husband
Clarrie.
She chooses the wrong day. It is the Saturday of the football grand final. Flinders Street station is crowded. She sees a familiar head, well above the crowd. It can’t be Jim? She calls his name, and he turns, and
Jenny
runs to him.
P
ART
O
NE
T
HE
O
LD
H
OUSE
T
rees of the walnut family were once an important component of the vast temperate forests of Asia and North-eastern America. The walnut’s dense clusters of flowers are inconspicuous, the meat of its hard shelled nut highly nutritious, but it is for its timber the tree is valued and used extensively in cabinet making.
Georgie Morrison found that piece of information while glancing through her new set of encyclopaedias – near new, she’d found them in a box at the tip while dropping off a load of shop rubbish. Georgie wasn’t proud – or not about her reading material; she owned shelves full of second-hand books.
In their natural habitat walnut trees reach great heights and girths
, the encyclopaedia said. Granny’s tree was no giant of its breed. Planted by her father, along with a dozen more, he may have dreamt fine dreams of furnishing his mansion with a walnut cabinet and table. Who knows what a dead man dreamt? One tree had survived to maturity. No mansion had ever risen on his acres.
For most of Georgie’s life the midsummer sun had set each night behind that tree, its dense canopy of green doing what it could to protect the western wall of Granny’s house from the worst of summer’s ire. Its limbs were naked in July of 1958, when she’d packed her earthly bags – but if there was a place out there behind the walnut tree, behind the sunset, then as sure as that tree produced its annual bags of walnuts, Granny was up there milking her heavenly goats and thanking God she hadn’t lived long enough to see the abomination Bernie Macdonald and his working bee had made of her cosy little home.
Her kitchen hadn’t survived the onslaught. Its small window, which for eighty-odd years had offered morning light to that long and narrow room, was gone. The timber floor had been replaced by cement – and not enough depth of cement. Already it was crazed by cracks. The green curtain, hung for Georgie’s lifetime in the lean-to doorway, was gone, as was the lean-to. A door had been hung in the green curtain’s space. It refused to close.
That long room no longer served as a kitchen. It had donated its iron chimney and stove to the new kitchen. A dark place now, a connection now, forcing three groups of unrelated rooms into a marriage from hell.
The door which refused to close gave entrance to a brand-new laundry and bathroom, their floors eighteen inches higher than the cement floor. Continue through and one more step up and you entered the old bathroom, which had made the transformation to third bedroom, a walk-through bedroom, and Georgie’s preferred entrance to Ray’s old bedroom, now a newly baptised kitchen. Split-level homes might become the latest fad in a year or two. That house, a hotchpotch of many levels, was before its time.
Shakey Lewis had been more or less responsible for the design. A champion footballer in his heyday, a builder too, though a lot of water had passed under the old bridge since then. It was well known in town that he couldn’t name a hammer until the pub opened, that he shook too hard to hit a nail on the head before midday. By midafternoon Shakey was at his best; he’d designed the new kitchen in the afternoon, and given what he’d had to work with, he’d made a reasonable job of it – apart from his addition of a pair of large second-hand windows, set into its west wall, perfectly positioned to look December’s afternoon sun in the eye. Then he’d positioned a new stainless steel sink beneath those windows, perfectly positioned to reflect the sun’s glare.
Today its dazzle was blinding and no curtain to draw against the glare. No Jenny to sew the curtain. The night of Ray’s funeral she’d delivered Donny to Melbourne and signed him into the care of strangers at a home for retarded children. He was Ray’s son, not Jenny’s. Ray had been able to handle him, Jenny couldn’t, not alone.
Christmas Day tomorrow and that cloudless sky didn’t bode well for the roast chicken and steamed pudding dinner. The chooks who had donated their lives to Christmas could have been the lucky ones. Today, their sisters were panting in the shade. The bitumen newly crowning Forest Road was melting. A paddock away from it, Georgie could smell the tar.
They’d done a lot of work on that road since the floods of July – or since a Melbourne blow-in had opened his caravan park for business. Charlie White, grocer and Georgie’s employer, swore the caravan park’s owner had bribed the council to bitumen that road and erect a sign where two roads forked.
Forest Road
,
Caravan Park. 4 Miles
, it read.
Forest Road? It was a wending, winding bush track that had found a vocation, that’s all. It would never be marked on road maps. It didn’t go anywhere. Woody Creek was barely a flyspeck dot on Georgie’s new road map of Victoria – which she’d use when she could afford to buy her own ute.
The old ones had named the town for the creek that twisted through a red gum forest like a snake with a belly ache. Forest Road twisted at its side – a busy track since the caravan park opened for business.
City campers might like roughing it, but they liked their grog cold, liked to plug in their caravan’s refrigerator and flick a switch. More bribery, Charlie said. Light poles now ran alongside Granny’s front fence, and a month back the electricity company had fixed a meter box onto the wall beside the front door, beside Jenny’s tin plate plaque, beside the house name, painted by Georgie on a length of leftover floorboard:
The Abortion.
Flick a light switch and a globe lit up to highlight that painted board. Flick those switches indoors and naked light globes displayed every flaw.
No globe necessary at six o’clock, or not today. Outside those twin kitchen windows, the sun clung to the sky like an aggressive kid clinging to his weary mother’s teat. The new kitchen was white hot – and white. Three four-gallon tins of paint donated to the fundraising committee, intent on rehousing the widow of Ray King, had been slapped onto that kitchen. Its walls were white, its ceiling, its cupboards, its doors were white.
There was plenty of cupboard space, unmatched, donated units, forced by Shakey Lewis’s screw and nail into one before being wed into a unit by white paint – and a red gum bench top. In some not too distant year, those boards would warp and crack, though not today. Today that bench gleamed red, offering some relief from white.
As did Granny’s old black stove, set midway down the southern wall. During its many years of life that stove had rarely seen the light of day. Georgie had never noticed the pattern on its oven door. It was on display now, as was the battered kitchen table, and Granny’s old dresser, which in some future year may be classified a genuine antique. Today it only admitted its age.
The kerosene refrigerator, purchased five years ago, didn’t flinch from the light. It stood opposite the stove, beside the bathroom door, a block of green, its burning wick adding heat and the odour of kerosene to the kitchen.
Plenty of space in that room, space enough to seat a crowd, and only Georgie in it – until Margot entered in search of her comb.
‘Did you move my comb from the bathroom?’
‘Nope.’
Margot would only use one comb, white, coarse toothed, purchased for her by Maisy Macdonald, her grandmother.
Bloodless, squat, chunky, born of rape to fifteen-year-old Jenny, then deserted by her. For the first year of Margot’s life, Elsie and Harry had raised her. She still spent most of her time with them, on the far side of the goat paddock.
Today her white hair hung limp, still damp from the shower. She’d turn twenty in April. She might have been fifteen or thirty. There was something lacking in Margot. Always the runt of Jenny’s litter of three, her growth spurt had begun late and ended prematurely. She had the Macdonalds’ height, though less of it. She had Bernie and Macka Macdonald’s stumpy hands, their broad jaws and pale purple eyes. Never pleasant eyes to look into, Margot’s were less so today. She was excited.
Georgie wasn’t. She’d agreed to go to Molliston with Jack Thompson, to stay overnight at his parents’ hotel and have Christmas dinner with them tomorrow. Didn’t want to go. Couldn’t get out of it now.
‘Okay. I’m off then,’ she said and walked out to Charlie’s old ute.
*
Margot watched the dust and feathers fly as Georgie drove up the track to the open boundary gate, then she walked through the house to continue her search for her comb.
The best part of the renovation was the east side. The working bee men had moved half of a farmhouse to the site, a sitting room, a tiny passage, bedroom and a veranda. Those two rooms were furnished like other houses, the sitting room with a couch and matching chairs, stored for years in the Macdonalds’ shed. Ray’s bedroom suite was in Margot’s bedroom. It was supposed to be Jenny’s room – if she ever came back. She wasn’t getting it. Its door had a key.
Margot loved looking at the house from the east side. It looked like a proper house; it even had a cane chair on the veranda.
No one approached from the east side, or entered via the east side door – not by day. Teddy Hall crept in that way by night then locked the bedroom door behind him. He and Margot did what they liked in that bedroom. And tonight they’d have all night to do what they liked in it.
The first time Teddy had done it Margot hadn’t thought he’d be game enough to do it again, but only two days later she’d gone out to the shed to get wheat for the chooks and Teddy had walked in. There was no lock on the shed, no door on it, and it had been about half past five and still light.
‘What do you think you’re doing over here?’ she’d said.
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he’d said, then he’d taken the basin from her hands and they’d done it on the bag of wheat and all the time he’d been doing it he’d tormented her.
‘Mum’s milking the goats. Why aren’t you yelling out for her, dobber?’
She hadn’t wanted to, that’s why. Nothing exciting had ever happened to her. Never in her life had she done one single thing that everyone hadn’t known about. No one knew about her and Teddy, and they never would either.
‘You’re like opening up one of those crates of donated junk Bernie Macdonald dumped down here,’ he’d said last Saturday night. ‘It looks like there’s nothing worth having in you, but dig down deep enough and you’re full of surprises, aren’t you?’
People who were addicted to drugs hated those drugs. Teddy said he was addicted to sex. She was too. She still hated him, but she took him anyway.
Perhaps in the dead of night Granny’s ghost stood at a window shaking her head at the goings-on in Ray’s double bed. Perhaps on the darkest nights when Margot heard a tap-tap-tap at the window, it was Granny, tapping out a ghostly warning. Margot had heeded few of her warnings.
*
Georgie had. She still missed Granny and knew that she continued to walk her land at night. Every time the light globe in the old kitchen had to be replaced, she knew Granny had been about. ‘Who needs their electric lights when we’ve got that old moon,’ she used to say.
Granny had never trusted electricity. Had never trusted cars either. She’d named anything faster than twenty miles an hour speeding. Georgie was behind the wheel of Jack’s car and touching fifty on straight sections of the road.
Until ten minutes ago she’d never driven further than the outskirts of Willama. Tonight Jack had let her drive through that town. They were out the other side now, and heading into territory unfamiliar to Georgie.
‘Did you go to the Willama high school, Jack?’
‘I was thirteen when the war ended,’ Jack Thompson said.
That war supplied timing for many things. Everyone said it – before the war, since the war. Georgie couldn’t remember it, other than the day it ended. She knew they’d still been fighting when Jenny had come home from Sydney with Jimmy. He’d been three at the time, so it must have been in 1944. She remembered staring at the big girl, who Granny had said was Georgie and Margot’s mother. She hadn’t looked like a mother.
Later she’d learnt that Jimmy had a father and he’d been killed in the war, which could have been the first time Georgie had asked about her own father. ‘He’s in Sydney,’ Jenny had said. He’d been in jail at the time. She hadn’t told her that.
‘Why did you join the cops, Jack?’
‘Dad was a cop,’ he said.
Probably locked up mine, Georgie thought, wondered what he’d think if he knew Jack was taking the daughter of Laurie Morgan, the redheaded water-pistol bandit, home to eat Christmas dinner.
For weeks she’d done her best to wriggle out of meeting his parents, and was beginning to wish she’d wriggled harder. But he’d taught her to drive, and they were mates – and her hanging around with him could have been saving him from a life sentence of Woody Creek. A few of the town girls gave him the eye – not that he was anything special to look at, he was single, that’s all, and single blokes were thin on the ground in Woody Creek. Most of them left school and left town.
‘Keep your eyes skinned for roos along this stretch,’ Jack warned. ‘They’re in plague proportions out here.’
She shouldn’t have been driving his cop car. He’d probably get into strife if someone dobbed on him, though he didn’t seem too worried about it.
Since he’d given her a licence in October, she’d been driving Charlie’s ’47 Ford ute around the town. He’d bought it cheap after his daughter left home with his sedan and a trailer load of his best furniture. No one would bother to steal his ute. About the best anyone could say for it was it had four wheels and a motor that usually went. The cop car was almost new; she loved driving it.
Jenny had said in one of her letters that she’d driven a car from Melbourne to Geelong when Georgie had been a peanut in her belly, that the sniff of petrol must have got into her bloodstream. It probably got into it before that. Laurie Morgan had stolen cars along with pretty much anything else.
Didn’t want to think about her water-pistol bandit tonight. Didn’t know why she was – except for Jack’s father being an ex-cop. If he’d been a cop in 1939 he could have helped in the arrest. Jenny had said that there’d been six or more police at the Geelong station when they’d caught Laurie.