Amy's Children (8 page)

Everyone found something else to do with their eyes.

John telephoned Amy at Lincoln Knitwear to tell her of Peter's death. It was only three months after Peter and Amy had been to Bondi and she hadn't seen him again. She received a censored letter from him, so that she was unaware he was soon to leave training camp to embark for New Guinea in a contingent of soldiers to back up forces fighting to hold Milne Bay.

The Australian victory there, the first against the Japanese for nearly a year, cheered those at home.

“Our brave, wonderful boys,” said wet-eyed women, openly reading newspapers over the shoulders of others in trams.

 

It had caused a stir at Lincoln Knitwear when Miss Sheldon joined the Land Army. Goodness me, Amy said to herself, wondering if Miss Sheldon had any idea of what was ahead of her. How would she go behind a plough, hoeing long rows of potatoes, or feeding butting bull calves? Amy looked at her standing by Lance Yates when he made the announcement (as he did on news of the Milne Bay victory). She was in an apricot silk suit patterned with green swirls and spots and her nails were polished on her strong freckled hands. I might be surprised though, Amy thought, her eyes on the hands lightly holding silk elbows.

When everyone had gone back to their desks Lance told Amy she would be moving into the main office, and part of her new job would be to oversee the work of the other half-dozen girls.

“Oh, Mr Yates!” Amy cried out, her hands flying to her cheeks, causing Lance to frown and cock his head towards the doorway, for he wanted Jean Sheldon out of the way before this announcement was made.

His young nephew Victor, exempt from service in the armed forces because of acute bronchial trouble, was to take over from Miss Sheldon. Amy was to be next in charge, the chief invoice clerk (no more typing labels) with a desk outside Victor's office facing the others. A junior would be employed to operate the switchboard and do Amy's former duties.

“An eighteen-year-old,” Lance said with a smile, “like you were when you came.”

Amy blushed and began to think wildly and fearfully. Perhaps Miss Sheldon would go on the land down south where Amy came from, taking the place of boys enlisted from there, and discover Amy had been married and had three children. She would pass the word back to Lance Yates and it would mean the end of Amy's job, and who else would give her one? She felt sure she would be dismissed without a reference for being such a cheat.

She was in such miserable contemplation of this that she almost missed hearing Lance when he said she would get a rise in pay. Oh that was wonderful! Forgetting her former fears she plunged into a dream of moving into a better place with a real kitchen, equipped with a sink and a proper stove. There was another dream she could also pursue now. She would like to rent a whole house and let a couple of the rooms. In some cases this involved an outlay of only a few shillings a week, the remainder of the rent being covered by the tenants' contributions. She realized she could not ask much, perhaps eight shillings a room, since people would have to have their own furniture. All she had for herself was the little cane chest of drawers. She thought of it sitting in an otherwise empty house and had to stop herself from smiling. But when Lance Yates had left for the back stairs which led to the factory she put her head back and laughed, then popped the little headpiece on, for the board had flashed a warning light.

Lance was not hurrying down the stairs. Listening to Amy's laugh, he felt jealous that he was not sharing it, so was close enough to hear her scream, and come running back.

The headpiece was flung down and she was standing holding her face with both hands.

“Only a cousin though,” said one of the girls, pulling her mouth down at the corners and inclining her head towards Miss Sheldon as if it was she who was in need of the greater sympathy. Poor old Sheldon, thought the girl, she held the floor there for a while and then little Miss Fowler took it. The girl felt moved to bring a glass of water and place it beside Miss Sheldon's bookkeeping.

“Poor boy,” said Miss Sheldon between sips. “His poor, poor parents.” Miss Fowler, who had been allowed to go home, was pointedly excluded. Lance sat at the switchboard himself for the last half hour of the working day, opening his mail there. He looked down with a rare feeling of tenderness on some things Amy kept on a shelf under the counter, near the stacked unused labels—a little mirror in a pink celluloid stand and a tumbler with a comb and some hair slides. She had hemmed a piece of towelling and sewn a loop of tape to the corner to hang it from a nail. There was a piece of soap on what looked like a saucer from a child's teaset. He thought they were like a child's playthings, all of them, and Amy was like a little girl playing at being grown up. He felt cheered, a sense of familiarity deepened; the dead soldier was only a cousin, not a lover. And Miss Sheldon was leaving.

“Lincoln Knitwear!” he said brightly into the mouthpiece, his hand poised ready to flick the appropriate switch.

Amy started for home then turned and ran the opposite way to go to the Coxes. The September afternoon was dying, the grass in the park thicker now with the coming of spring, and waving about as if looking for Peter's feet, for that was where they had walked when he visited her. Daphne can't be angry with me now, she told herself hurrying, wondering why she couldn't cry. It wasn't my fault Peter went to war.

Mrs Cousins was with Daphne and Dudley, both sitting on chairs at the kitchen table, whereas John's was pushed away from it. The couch looked terribly empty, Amy thought.

“Take heart,” Mrs Cousins was saying. “You lost him but he helped thousands of us to live.”

She didn't think that up herself, Amy thought. She's heard it somewhere.

Dudley had an elbow on the table and his face on his hand. He changed elbows when Amy came in as if this was his way of greeting her. There had been other callers Amy could see, for there was a packet of tea on the table as well as a plate of scones, covered with a piece of mosquito netting embroidered in the corners, and some tomatoes, which made Amy think of the vegetable garden out the back, hoping for an opportunity to see it.

Daphne's tears flowed afresh at the sight of Amy. “I got no word from him,” she said. Did you, asked the drowned eyes and piteous mouth. Amy shook her head. She will think me terrible for not crying, Amy thought.

She went to the bench covering the washtubs where there was a piece of steak, two onions and some carrots and the big cutting knife she remembered. She rolled up her sleeves and put a frying pan over the gas flame as in the old days when she often made the braised steak.

The doorbell rang and Daphne wept afresh. “Tell whoever it is to go away,” she sobbed. John went swiftly down the hall. He is not so clumsy now, Amy noticed, hardly able to hear his tread. He came back with a small packet of tea, one quarter of a pound. He did not say who brought it, but Dudley's face asked, or rather the eyelids over his mud grey eyes, not such a different colour to the rest of his face, lifted and fell.

“Mrs Thompson,” said John with reluctance and Amy thought he was quite sensitive now, a good son, and they were lucky to have him. Daphne dropped her head on her arms on the table. “Hers is safe!”

“Did the Thompson boy join up?” Amy murmured to Mrs Cousins.

“Four from this street,” Mrs Cousins did not disguise the pride in her voice. Thank God I had girls, she said silently. Except for young Ernie, only eleven and unlikely to be caught up in it.

“It's a cruel and terrible time,” she said, standing and touching Daphne's hair. She went out swiftly by the back door, her feet gentle on the steps, not thudding as you would expect from such a big woman.

“Come on,” said Amy, bending over Daphne with her hands between her knees, as if Daphne were a child to be coaxed out of a mood.

“Where?” Daphne blew her nose. “Where can I go where he isn't?”

“Just to your room. To put on that mauve dress he liked you in.”

Daphne put her hands to her throat and squeezed it.

“John will set the table and we'll have tea,” Amy said.

Dudley stood and half turned to the hallway as if habit dictated he go and turn the wireless on. Daphne, likewise prompted by habit, checked the boiling potatoes and simmering braise with a glance before she allowed Amy to guide her, an arm about her waist, to her bedroom.

Amy brought a jug of warm water and filled the china basin on the washstand. She took a fresh towel from the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. Daphne sighed in its folds and Amy knew there was a little pleasure there. Vigorously she rubbed the parts of Daphne's hair that were damp from her wash. When she combed it Daphne closed her eyes and tears ran through her lids and over her cheeks.

“Your hair is even thicker than Mum's,” Amy murmured, ashamed that she could not become infected by Daphne's tears.

Why, oh why, she asked herself, catching a glimpse of her dry, bright eyes in the mirror.

She went home after tea, walking swiftly all the way, taking her usual care as she crossed the park to avoid the shapes of men lurking under the trees away from the lights, dimmed as wartime precautions. Great shadows lay on the grass and stars were visible far up in the sky. No cloud and too cool to rain she thought, keeping from childhood the bushman's weather signs.

She passed Lincoln Knitwear, shrunken in the dark, the brass plate on the doorway sending out one small brave shaft of light. She hadn't thought about her new job there at all since she'd left for the Coxes! That surprised and pleased her. She saw it as a token of mourning to compensate for the absence of tears.

But inside her room when she turned on the light and the little chest of drawers leapt at her, she dropped on her knees before it and howled with the cane edge cutting into her face.

After that Amy went regularly to the Coxes. Dear Peter, she said to herself, quite often too, you are responsible for this. Thank you.

John was a big help when she moved into a house in the nearby suburb of Petersham. She scanned the columns of newspapers advertising houses and flats to let for weeks before the move, spending Saturdays inspecting them. This one was in Crystal Street off Parramatta Road, and she could walk from there both to Coxes and Lincoln Knitwear. It was on a narrow block with a patch of garden in front and an overgrown, neglected backyard.

I'll have you looking a lot different soon, Amy said to herself, pulling at the wild growth of convolvulus over the lavatory. A climbing rose that hadn't been pruned in years, once intended to cover a side fence, swooped the wrong way like a clown pretending to have lost his way on a stage.

Here I am making my second vegetable garden in Sydney, Amy thought one day three weeks after moving in, and looked around as if she might find a stump and Peter sitting there with his books. John was pulling grass away from the fence, showing the bottom of the palings like stained teeth.

“I'll plant wallflowers on either side of the path to the whats-is!” Amy called, pointing her fork at the lavatory. She drove the fork into the ground with great energy, anxious for a feel of the soil, thinking of a row of potatoes, remembering how Gus used to say potatoes did well in new ground.

John made a heap of the grass pulled from the fence and dumped it onto the path, and began pulling the convolvulus from the lavatory as if he was carrying out a wish of Amy's.

She was glad there were no flowers on the vine, the blue might have been the blue of Peter's eyes, pleading with her to let him live.

John had energy to spare to help Amy at weekends. His job with a building contractor for the Department of Education was lighter now with all building supplies diverted to the war effort, and no new schools going up. There was only maintenance work like repairing concrete paths and roof leaks and replacing broken windows.

 

John missed bricklaying. He sometimes used to draw a circle of admiring schoolchildren.

“It never comes out crooked,” a boy said once, dividing his reverence between a wall and John.

John used his trowel to flick away some surplus mortar, as a chef would flick icing from his decorated cake.

A teacher standing a little way off clapped his hands to tell the boy he was out of bounds. The boy backed, still with his eyes on John's hands, following the trowel as it smoothed the filling between the bricks. John rose when he was done, putting his head to one side and not looking at the boy, though caught in the power of the boy's admiration, holding it but not acknowledging it.

The teacher called sharply, “Here, boy!” and the boy turned. This made the teacher turn away, and then the boy turned back and raised a hand to his forehead in a salute. John caught up the next brick and saluted with it.

 

He went with Amy to auction sales to buy a bed, a wardrobe, a kitchen table and some chairs for her house.

Reluctantly Amy closed off the main room downstairs which had a window opening onto the front garden and was obviously intended as a sitting room. Amy could not afford furniture for that. A smaller room, also on the ground floor, became her bedroom.

She let the two rooms upstairs to two maiden sisters in their sixties. The Misses Wheatley shared a bedroom and used the other as their sitting room, paying Amy fifteen shillings a week. There was a bathroom between the two rooms at the top of the stairs which was shared with Amy. Amy paid the landlord one pound seven shillings a week so she needed to find no more than at her other place, although she had to put money aside each week to meet electricity and gas accounts. The Misses Wheatley cooked their meals in Amy's kitchen and ate at a corner of her table, or carried a tray to their sitting room and sat by their window to look down towards Parramatta Road where the trams screeched along and people hurried in packs to work. They reminded Miss Heather Wheatley of sheep on their property back at Dubbo, the way they jammed together as if they needed each other's support to be carried along to whatever awaited them.