Blue Smoke (18 page)

But perhaps, as far as the twins were concerned, the most interesting part of their Aunty Ri’s ensemble was the young, dark-skinned man at her side. He was tall, smartly dressed, rather good-looking, and seemed very protective of her.

Riria raised a black-gloved hand in greeting as she came towards them. ‘Kia ora, tamariki, kei te pehea koutou?’

Bonnie and Leila stood to receive the kisses Riria always planted on their cheeks.

‘Hello, Aunty, we’re fine,’ They chorused in unison.

‘You are both looking lovely as usual, I see,’ Riria added as her young companion pulled a chair out for her. ‘Sit down, sit down. This is my mokopuna, Hemi, Rose’s youngest son. He has errands to run for me so cannot stay.’

She smiled slightly as she noted the crestfallen expressions on the girls’ faces. Hemi nodded to them, then gave his grandmother a peck on the cheek. The three women watched him go.

‘He is such a good boy, Hemi,’ Riria noted, ‘especially to his old Nanny. Always does what he is told and never gets up to mischief.’

She regarded Bonnie and Leila thoughtfully while they gazed back at her, eyes wide with innocence.

‘And how are you finding working at the air force base?’ she went on. ‘Your uniforms are very smart.’

‘Oh, it’s no end of fun, Aunty,’ Leila replied. ‘We march everywhere and salute until our arms nearly drop off and spend ages trying to get our hats to sit just right.’

‘Really? And this is going to help us win the war?’

‘Of course not, but our work will. We’re both in the SWO’s office — that’s Station Warrant Officer to civilians — and we type and file and duplicate and rush around with messages and memos and organise leave passes and records. According to the SWO, we’re “essential cogs in the wheels of the machine that is our nation’s magnificent air force”.’

‘And do you enjoy it?’

Bonnie said, ‘Yes, we really do, don’t we?’ as Leila nodded enthusiastically. ‘When we first joined and saw the barracks and had a few mess dinners and found out about all the rules we’d have to learn, we thought, oh dear, what have we let ourselves in for? But now it’s almost like second nature. And we really feel we’re doing something useful for the war effort, and it’s the most wonderful feeling. Well, barrack cleaning and laundry and parades aren’t
that
much fun, but the rest is.’

Leila added, ‘We’re not too keen on the handicraft classes our supervisor keeps trying to push us into when we’ve time off, but some of the other girls enjoy them. And there’s basketball and hockey and PT for the more active types. But it’s all great fun and
we’ve met loads of nice girls. It’s all a bit like school really.’

Riria was pleased and relieved to see that the twins really did seem to be happy in what they were doing; in her experience contented and satisfied people were less likely to go looking for trouble.

‘And what of the social life?’ she asked casually.

‘Oh, that’s marvellous, too,’ Leila replied. ‘There are occasional dances on the base, and leave to go off base, although we haven’t had an overnight leave yet because we haven’t been there long enough. We’ve been to a couple of dances here in town too, at the Peter Pan.’

‘Oh, yes, Hemi tells me that the Peter Pan is the place to go.’ Riria fished. ‘And I imagine there are plenty of gallant young airmen to escort you to all of these dances?’

The girls glanced at each other and burst out laughing as if their aunt had just said something unbearably funny.

‘There are plenty of airmen, Aunty Ri,’ Bonnie said, ‘but I don’t know if you could call them gallant! They seem to think that every girl joined up for the sole purpose of sewing buttons back onto airmen’s jackets and making them cups of tea because they’re too busy doing vitally important, top secret work. Especially the pilots! Really, just because they can coax an old crate into the air they think they’re God’s gift to women!’

‘And are they not?’

‘No, of course they’re not. They’re just ordinary New Zealand lads with wings sewn on their uniforms. What we do is just as valuable, even if it isn’t as exciting. They’re good lads, but that’s all they are.’

‘So there is no one special, for either of you?’

The girls shook their heads in unison, and Riria gave a small internal sigh of relief. Their mother, it seemed, had nothing to worry about, at the moment any way.

‘Well, children, I am here for you if you need help with anything.’

Almost ruefully, Leila said, ‘Thank you, Aunty, but it’s going to take someone a lot more glamorous than our boys in blue to sweep us off our feet.’

Kenmore, March 1942

H
ow is Duncan getting on, have you heard?’

Kepa placed a cup of tea on the small wicker table next to Tamar’s verandah chair, then sat down himself. It was a sultry, stifling afternoon and the concern wasn’t that it would rain, but that it would not. The paddocks were dry and almost bare in places, and a good downpour to break up the hard, parched earth would be more than a blessing.

‘Quite well, apparently,’ Tamar replied as she inspected the almond biscuits on her saucer. Keely really was becoming quite an accomplished cook these days. ‘James and Lucy had a letter about a week ago, and he’s out of the hospital now, although apparently he has to go back fairly regularly to make sure his skin grafts are holding up.’

‘So he is quite fit again?’

‘Well, reasonably, or so he says. He can’t go back to actual flying of course, because of his eyesight, but the RAF have given him a position on the ground helping train new fighter pilots.’

‘Mmm,’ said Kepa, who had always been fond of Duncan and admired the boy’s mettle. ‘How has he taken to that, I wonder?’

‘Not well, initially. I had a letter from him myself at the time,
you know, and he seemed very disappointed that he would not be flying again. I think he’d hoped that his eyesight might improve, but it hasn’t. But the only other possibilities were a desk job somewhere, or an honourable discharge, neither of which he would even contemplate.’

‘No, I could not see Duncan behind a desk, not while there is a war on.’

‘Quite. But he says in his latest letter to James and Lucy that he’s finding this new work really quite satisfying. He feels he’s making a difference, and I suppose for Duncan that really is the main thing, isn’t it?’

Kepa nodded and helped himself to a biscuit. ‘And this young lady of his?’

‘Claire? Apparently they’re still planning to marry. She’s still working at the hospital so they’re apart a lot of the time, but she sounds a real treasure. She must be made of extremely stern stuff to do that sort of work, and then happily take on a man who will possibly have problems of one sort or another for the rest of his days. But she loves him, and that makes anything possible, doesn’t it? Duncan seems to be absolutely head over heels about her.’

‘Good. He will need a good woman. And what of Liam?’

‘Well, the last time we heard from him he was still going on sorties with Bomber Command “somewhere over Germany”, but he sounded cheerful enough. Although he did mention that he hadn’t heard from Evie for several months, and wondered if I could telephone her in Palmerston North to find out whether she’s all right.’

‘And have you?’

‘Twice now, in the evening, but it seems she’s out rather a lot.’

Kepa didn’t dare look Tamar in the eye because he knew very well the disapproval he would see there.

She rushed on, as if to override any uninvited thoughts she might be having about Liam’s wife.

‘And Drew is floating about on a Royal Navy battleship somewhere, so it’s very difficult to ever know where he is. James and Lucy haven’t heard anything from him for a while, so we’re hoping he wasn’t involved in the fall of Singapore. But I’m sure we would have heard officially if anything had happened to him,’ she added, more to reassure herself than anyone else. ‘Robert, on the other hand, has written numerous letters.’

‘I know, I have received four already myself. Fiji seems to suit him, although he was not very pleased when he was sent there originally, was he?’

‘No, he wanted to go to North Africa. But James seems to think the Pacific will become the latest battleground now that Japan has come into the war, and if that’s the case then I’m sure Robert won’t be left to languish in Fiji much longer.’

‘I doubt that they are “languishing”, my dear.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean. He wants to be in the thick of it.’ Tamar fanned her face with her hand. ‘My God, I wish it would
rain
. Do you really think the Japanese will come this far?’

Kepa shrugged. There had been two sightings of Japanese submarine-launched planes over Wellington and Auckland recently, which had done nothing at all to allay public fears that New Zealand was about to be attacked.

‘I cannot say, Tamar, and neither can you, so do not worry about it.’

Tamar hated it when Kepa was so relentlessly calm and philosophical, but he was probably right. He usually was.

‘Did you stop in at Erin and Joseph’s on your way here?’ she asked, bringing her tea cup to her lips.

‘Yes, I stayed for half an hour and had a beer with Joseph.’

‘How did they seem to you?’

Kepa reached for another biscuit and examined it closely while he considered his reply. ‘Erin is more like her old self these days. It has been almost a year now; I think that they are over the worst of it.’

‘Is there a time limit to accepting the loss of a son? I still think of Ian almost every day.’

‘But do you remember Ian’s death, or do you remember Ian as he was when he was alive?’

‘When he was alive, of course.’

‘Then you have not lost him at all, have you? And we have not lost Billy, as long as we remember him.’

Tamar sighed in acquiescence, and they sat in companionable silence for several minutes. The brooding clouds were swelling above them, but still there was not a single drop of the longed-for rain.

‘Did you talk to Ana?’ she asked eventually.

‘Briefly. She seems very excited by the prospect of this land army business.’

‘Oh, we’ve heard about nothing else, ever since she found out she’d been accepted. It’s a shame, though, that the land army girls aren’t permitted to work for relatives. We could have paid her for all the months and months she’s been working here.’

‘Still, it is only about thirty miles away; she will not be too far from us.’

‘No, and I’m sure she’ll be a great help to this farmer she’s going to.’

‘Of course she will. She is our grand child, after all,’ Kepa said proudly. ‘What was the man’s name?’

‘Leonard. Jack Leonard.’

‘Do you know of him?’

Tamar shook her head. ‘The farm must be fairly small. It is a sheep farm, though.’

‘Well, Ana has always been a very mature child, and extremely capable. I am sure this Jack Leonard will be very grateful to have her working for him.’

Ana wasn’t so sure about that. At her interview with the Women’s War Service Auxiliary recruiting committee she had been warned about ‘rural conservatism’ and, in a veiled sort of way, of the potential for unwanted attentions from employers, and even more obliquely of the reception she might receive as a part-Maori girl. She had not, of course, told her mother and father about this, in case they worried or, even worse, stopped her, and besides she was sure she could manage both problems should they arise.

She checked her watch; she was due at the Leonard farm by three o’clock this afternoon. The National Service Department was liable for paying her transport costs, but when she’d discovered that they would not pay for her horse, she’d decided to ride the distance cross-country. Mako, a very fine seventeen-hand bay gelding she had owned and ridden almost every day for the last two years, was her pride and joy and she could not even contemplate a job on a new farm without him.

It had been a pleasant journey so far, and last night she’d stayed at the home of an old school friend, which had been a nice interlude. But she was looking forward to getting settled and sorting out the gear she’d been issued as a member of the new Women’s Land Service. Crammed into a saddlebag behind her she had gumboots (her own, because the WWSA had run out owing to the rubber shortage) and an extra pair of leather work boots to match the ones she was wearing, trousers, overalls, socks, work shirts, a woollen jersey, two pairs of leather gloves, her underthings and her personal toiletries. In front of her saddle she’d rolled and tied her leather jerkin and her oilskin coat and leggings.

Mr Leonard was a widower, which was both good and bad as far as Ana was concerned. Good, because it meant that there would be no Mrs Leonard watching her suspiciously through binoculars all day in case she ‘fraternised’ with Mr Leonard, an unfortunate situation already experienced and recounted by a land girl Ana had recently met, and bad because Mr Leonard might have ideas about Ana as a replacement for the late Mrs Leonard. He also had a son, who had been over seas since 1940, but his farm labourers had deserted him one by one until there was only Mr Leonard left to run the place by himself. With the continuing, and ever louder, call for primary producers to increase production, he’d evidently finally been compelled to contact the district manpower office to ask for help.

That help was Ana. The WWSA had promised that at least one other girl would be sent to join her as soon as it could be arranged, but that as the numbers joining the Land Service were still low she could be on her own for several months. Ana didn’t mind that, she was quite happy with her own company, but she did wonder if the work might be too much for just one farmer and a land girl, especially when shearing time came around.

She pulled Mako up and dismounted; it was midday and she was starving. Leaving him in the shade of a tree to munch on a patch of nice green grass she sat down to eat her own lunch — sandwiches made with her friend’s mother’s homemade cheese and pickle, two apples and a thermos of tea. The heat up here in the foothills of the northern reaches of the Ruahine Range was intense, but tempered today with a welcome breeze. The Leonard farm was just south of the small settlement of Kereru. The holding was relatively small, compared with Kenmore anyway, and divided by a tributary of the Ngaruroro River, and Ana had been told that although much of the block had been cleared, there was plenty of bush still standing. She hoped she wasn’t
going to be expected to clear bush as well as attend to the day-to-day farm work.

It took her another three hours to reach her destination, and by the time she had she was parched, tired and a little saddle-sore. She found the letterbox, with ‘L and M Leonard’ written on it in black, hand-painted letters, and followed the long driveway through several small paddocks towards a cluster of tall trees some distance from the gravel road. She noticed as she went that several gates were off their hinges and that the wire in the fences could do with some tightening.

Beyond the trees she came to the homestead, a reasonable-sized house that had seen better days. The yard was part gravel, part grass and part bare earth, and what had obviously once been cultivated flower gardens were now sad little boxed areas of weed-infested soil. The house itself was in dire need of a good paint, the curtains at the windows faded and crooked, and the verandah at the front seemed to be on an angle to the rest of the building.

Ana dismounted and called out, ‘Hello, the house! Anybody home? Mr Leonard!’

When no one answered she looped Mako’s reins around the verandah rail and walked around the side of the house to find the back door. To the right was a cluster of ramshackle buildings — a couple of sheds, a pumphouse and an open-sided shelter — and beyond the house was an overgrown backyard. There was an expansive pig pen housing a sow and five or six porkers at the far end, not far from a lonely little building that could only be the outhouse, and a dozen chickens wandering around foraging in the dirt. Three or four cats eyed her dolefully from the shade of an overgrown hydrangea. Mr Leonard clearly also kept his dogs here, as she noted gnawed bones abandoned in the grass in front of several kennels that looked in better condition than the
homestead itself. She called out again, and when again there was no answer she stepped over a pile of boots at the back door and knocked loudly. She stood there for several minutes feeling silly and mildly annoyed — hadn’t he received the notification that she would be arriving today? — then decided that since the door was open she might as well go inside.

The back door led straight into the kitchen, which meant she had no time to prepare herself. The room was in a shambles and something in it stank horrendously. There were dirty dishes piled up in the sink, pots on the coal range still with food in them, and used cups and plates scattered across an oilcloth-covered kitchen table among half a loaf of bread, a saucer of melting butter, a bottle of fly killer and a dish of sliced meat curling up at the edges that Ana thought might be corned beef. The smell wasn’t coming from that, though, it was emanating in evil clouds from a bucket of slops on the floor next to the sink. The bucket was jammed with food scraps and crawling with buzzing flies and maggots. Ana, her shirt pulled up over her mouth and nose, stood staring at the mess and wondering when the bucket had last been emptied.

She didn’t hear the footsteps on the back porch until the owner of the feet was standing in the doorway.

‘What the hell are you doing in my house?!’

Ana jumped and turned at the same time, her foot slipping in something greasy on the floor. Confronting her was a man in his early fifties dressed in work boots and pants, his muscled, heavily tanned arms and shoulders bared in a grubby singlet, and a wide-brimmed hat pushed to the back of his head. His face, which might have been rather handsome once but certainly wasn’t now, was covered with three-day-old stubble that was grey, like his brutally short hair. From where she stood, Ana caught a definite whiff of old sweat.

‘Mr Leonard?’

‘Yes. Who the hell are you?’

Ana waited until her thudding heart was back where it should be. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Leonard, I called out before but I thought no one was home. I’m Ana Deane, from the Women’s Land Service. I believe you were expecting me today?’

Jack Leonard looked Ana up and down, from the dark curls around her pretty face to the toes of her size six work boots, and snorted in disgust.

‘Jesus Christ, I told them if I had to have a bloody female I at least wanted a decent-sized one! You’re nothing but a slip!’

This was the wrong thing to say to Ana; slip or not, she knew she could do the work required of her.

‘I think you’ll find, Mr Leonard, that I’m perfectly capable of managing myself on a sheep farm.’