Hear the Train Blow Page 4

  Waaia was not on any map. We had to go there before we knew where it was. We didn’t even know how to pronounce it. The day we arrived the station phone rang. Mum answered and said, ‘Mrs Smith speaking.’

  The caller asked, ‘What station is that?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ answered the new station-mistress. ‘I can spell it but I can’t say it.’ (It is pronounced Way-eye.)

  Here life became a settled thing. We stayed for two years in Waaia, then moved away for eighteen months and back again for another two years, so it was the place where we spent more of our lives than anywhere else.

  Waaia was north of Shepparton in the Goulburn Valley. For most of the year there was not much rail traffic. On the five weekdays the ‘Beetle’ came through, an old bus-shaped, petrol-consuming passenger coach on rail wheels painted black and yellow in stripes. This brought our mail and daily paper and arrived at 2 p.m., went to the end of the line at Picola, turned, and passed Waaia on the way back towards Melbourne at 4 p.m. Once a week a steam engine hauled a goods train through. This was during the winter and early spring; but come mid-summer and Waaia station really hummed! The tiny one-pub, one-store town was in the centre of a wheat-growing area and was the dispatch station for hundreds of thousands of bushels of wheat each year. Those days Mum would go up to the little station building at 8 a.m. and might not be able to come back down to the house until 6 p.m. Somehow, in between all this she still managed to continue turning out the meals for us that made us the best-fed children in the district. Apart from allotting trucks and departure dates she had to direct where the wheat stacks should be erected in the station grounds. Each buyer had his own stacks. There was a huge wheat shed at the far end of the station yard for ‘holding’ bags of grain – in those days there were no silos in that area – but the great bulk of wheat was in stacks in the yard.

  At 6 p.m. the big gates into the railway yard were closed and padlocked for the night. Each morning at 8 a.m. they were unlocked. In the busy part of the year this became my job. The first morning I did this I thought nothing more wonderful could happen to me in my life, and now, many years later, I’m not sure I wasn’t right.

  While Mum went up to the station and began sorting out her way-bills and adjusting the date stamp I went skip-hopping down between the rails, jumping from sleeper to sleeper to where the wagons waited with their loads outside the gate. Already the sun was hot, glaring down from a cloudless blue sky, reflecting back from the golden, dusty land. As far as could be seen along the dirt road wagons were lined up. There were a few trucks, but mostly they were horse-drawn wagons. The drivers squatted in the shade of the wheels yarning, chewing wheat stalks to keep them off the cigarettes. It was not yet 8. Swinging the big keys in my hand I stepped over the cattle grid at the crossing and walked on to the road and looked down the long line of wagons. Some horses snuffled into their nosebags; others, unhitched, were being led up to the water trough for a drink – a man wouldn’t move his wagon away from the gate: if he lost his place in the queue it could easily wreck his chance of getting a second and perhaps even a third load in that day before the gate closed at night. It was preferable to go through the tedious process of unhitching the team and leading them back to water. Young Roy Tweddle, who was only fifteen years old, was coming down the road with four horses so unhitched. His father had one of the best properties in the wheat belt and if his wagon wasn’t first in line of a morning it was never further back than second or third.

  Across the road opposite the gate stood the Waaia Hotel. It was strategically placed, for the heat and the dust and the long wait in the queue all through the day for a place on the weighbridge made a man thirsty. On a long stool on the verandah sat Yorky, the hotel ‘boots’. He would sit there all day, only going inside for meals. It was said of him that the most useful thing he did for his keep was to whistle, a thing he did exquisitely. On his breast, its faded ribbon now almost colourless, he wore the Khedive Star with three bars. He told me he had been up the Nile in the epic venture to relieve Gordon besieged in Khartoum. Now he spent his days watching the wagons roll by, taking a beer when it was offered him, and whistling, always whistling. He never ceased.

  As the big gate swung open the lead wagon rolled forward. Behind it, Roy Tweddle called ‘Hup!’ and the call was taken up man after man back along the road – ‘Hup!’ – and the day had begun.

  I hooked the gate back to its fastening post and stood on the lower rung and watched them roll by, the smell of the golden, warm grain settling all round me. As the wagons hesitated on the weighbridge the buyers went along and stabbed long brass sample tubes into the bags to test for quality. Farther up the yard the lumpers were trailing across to the stacks. Chella Valenti the Italian was already there starting up the motor on an elevator. Big Bill Martin roared past me on his motor-bike. These were big men and strong. Bill Martin could carry three bags at a time on his motor-bike for a stunt, one across his shoulders, one in front of him and one on the handle-bars.

  Dad and the gang were going by on the rail tracks on the Casey Jones. Here in summer the great danger was fire while the wheat crops were huge, tall, dry tinder-beds. Wheat then was much taller than today’s compact crop. A spark from an engine, a carelessly thrown cigarette butt, even a piece of glass could start a holocaust that would engulf the whole district. Each morning the gang patrolled the whole length of their section till they met up with the gang at the end of the next section south. Now as they went the long sticks of their fire-beaters stuck out behind the motor. Dad saw me and gave his usual thumb-in-the-air wave.

  Back at the house Mickie had let the chooks out and now they scattered across the line to feed on the free wheat about the stacks. Slowly I walked home. At the first stack wheat was already going up the elevator to the lumpers. Their dress was uniform; sandshoes slit open at the sides for ventilation and to allow the wheat to slip out, dungaree trousers, bare chest with head and shoulders covered by a sack turned hood-shaped to protect the skin from the sandpaper-like bags of grain. To leave all this and sit in school! I thought of wagging it as Mickie occasionally did, but I didn’t have the courage.

  THE BEST YEARS

  No matter how often we had to go to a new school, that first day was always frightening. We were on guard. We had both already been to several schools and knew we had to be ready for almost anything. At Waaia we got on better than anywhere else. When the twenty-odd pupils had marched in and sat down the teacher sized Mickie and me up where we stood by his desk holding our slates and lunch bags. We, in turn, sized him up. Would he be a shouter, a strap man, a kind but useless teacher, a martinet, a weeper? We had had them all. Schoolmasters at an early age – this one was twenty years old – they must teach eight grades, with an average of six subjects to each class, with no one to refer to should they strike trouble. This responsibility developed big personalities or worried them to uselessness.

  This man didn’t hurry us, he let us take our time. After a while we were satisfied and returned his grin.

  ‘Are you any good at anything?’ he asked Mick. Honest Mick said, no, she wasn’t.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘No good worrying about something we can’t mend.’ Mickie grinned from ear to ear. They were friends.

  I was in the third grade. Moving from school to school did not trouble me as it did some children; instead, the different methods of teaching seemed to me to stimulate application. The only drawback to being two grades ahead of others of my age was that I was associated with children of a greater age emotionally than mine – to say nothing of size. There were two others in grade three. Boys. Ted Jorgenson and Alan Thornton. We sat in a long desk that held six children. To my right were two grade-two kids, to my left the two grade-three boys and beside them a lone grade-four girl, a big girl who had been in grade four for two years and was already fourteen years old and technically able to leave school.

  I hated those long seats. For one thing you couldn’t spread; for another, sitting with
children bigger than yourself you were apt to get ‘the treatment’. At playtime this first day at Waaia the boys on either side of me played an old trick. Instead of filing out they stayed seated, pretending to be busy with their slates. I therefore couldn’t get out. I attempted to stand up to climb over the back of the seat and found I was anchored by my long curls to the back-rest. It is very difficult to undo your hair from that position. The teacher had seen none of this, or so I thought. He was busy at the blackboard with his back to us. I looked up, thinking to call out to him, and while I looked his arm came out behind him and picked up a ruler from his desk. As he turned he aimed it straight at Ted Jorgenson’s head, from which it bounced and hit the floor. To Pete Marvel on the other side of me he said, ‘You’ll get the inkwell if you don’t move quick.’

  The school was next to the Waaia recreation ground, a great paddock containing a fine football field, cricket oval, two tennis courts, a basketball court and a rounders field. There was vigour in the little one-pub, one-store town. We could use all these playing fields; indeed a wooden stile was built over the school fence to make access easier. As well, our own school ground was a quarter of a mile long and had basketball and tennis courts. Though I was useless at all sports this extravagant abundance didn’t upset me. After all, one has to be bad not to gain a place in a team where there are only nineteen children in the school. Using every girl we had we still must impress boys to get a basketball team and opposition. And in turn, the boys press-ganged us girls in eight-a-side football and cricket. My sister Mickie was one of the best footballers in the school.

  There was an old, gnarled pepper-corn tree in the grounds. All pepper-corn trees are easy to climb, having natural footholds in the trunks, and very sit-onable branches, but this was the most inviting I ever saw. A girl could sit there half the day reading if she got on the right side of the teacher and finished her work early. I was not allowed to read at home so had to think of ruses whereby I could read at school. I decided to start right away. Among the four books in the cupboard in the school was Peter Pan and Wendy. When I’d completed the next lesson I held my slate over the book and began to read. I’d never read anything like it! It was wonderful! But Ted Jorgenson kept disturbing me, fidgeting and spreading his elbows as he picked at a capsule in the palm of his hand with his pen nib. When I retaliated by elbowing him he jabbed me with the pen. Then he took out a pocketknife and began prying into the capsule with that. Now I didn’t like to prod him, he might just as quickly give me a touch with the point of the knife.

  I decided to take my book out to the tree. I stood up to ask permission to leave the room and slid out the end of the seat. The kids who had let me out still hadn’t had time to slide back in when there was a loud explosion behind us, and turning back I saw Ted Jorgenson looking in bewilderment at his hand where three severed fingers hung down and blood ran in a pool on the desk. Pieces of the casing of the detonator lay on the seat where they had fallen. My slate was shattered on the desk.

  The young teacher came calmly across the room and held his arm round the boy. ‘Maisie,’ he said to the grade-four girl I had thought not so bright. ‘Get the first-aid kit and stay behind to help me. Alex, harness your horse and bring your cart round to the door. The rest of you get your hats and go home.’

  I went straight home, carefully by-passing the station where I could see Mum busy behind the counter. She would not expect me until 4 p.m., and the return of the ‘Beetle’ at that time would warn me.

  There was nowhere in the house to hide a book. I went round to the wash-house where the copper and the bath and wash-troughs were, but Mick was there hiding some Peg’s Papers she had swapped at school. She was always getting caught with Peg’s Paper, True Confessions and the like, so I knew that this was not a safe place. There was only one place left, so I went down the yard, closed the door and sat down and sped so far away with the Darling family that I didn’t hear the train come or go, nothing at all, until my mother called me. Then I hid the book in the place I’d decided on and went out. Mick was emerging from the wash-house. Mum was very suspicious. Late that afternoon before the sun set Mum suddenly screamed from the back yard. We ran out to see her backing out from the lavatory. I felt sick. She must have found it. She would take it away. Oh no, no, no, don’t make me have to swear not to read it again. I’d sworn before on the cross on the rosary beads, and when I did I’d never go back on whatever I’d promised. I never felt faint with distress. Instead, my inside seemed to turn purple like the mouth of a blue-tongued lizard. I wouldn’t swear! No one would take that book. I raged down the yard.

  Mum heard me coming. ‘Stand back,’ she called. ‘It’s coming out now.’ Her arm swung back then down, thwack! swishing the piece of fencing wire she held down on the back of the brown snake that had been in the outhouse. Dad was coming through the gate on his way home from work and she carried the snake on a stick up to show him. I ran in and put my hand down the lining that came only halfway up the lavatory wall. There it was, safe and untouched. I sat on the seat in pleasure and excitement to rest, just holding the book in my hand. Next thing I knew there was a commotion outside. Where was I?

  ‘Here,’ I called.

  ‘Oh dear God, what will she do next? Come out before you’re bitten to death!’

  Carefully I replaced the book down the lining and went out to where they waited for me in exasperation. To calm the air Dad asked me how I got on at school.

  ‘I’m about third in my class at the moment.’

  ‘How many in the class?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Splendid!’ he said. ‘You’ve only got to beat two more and you’ll be dux.’ The self-confidence of country children is rarely shaken; the competition is never such as to make them know failure.

  WE WERE ‘PATS’

  Going to church was as much a social event as a religious experience in the bush. There were few other places to which one could wear a pretty hat and a frilly dress. There was no Catholic church at Waaia. Ten miles down the line at Numurkah there was one and ten miles up the line at Nathalia was another, so church-going there was a sort of safari.

  Because it was not a simple matter for us to attend church we never took the services lightly, as one grown too familiar with them may. Each contact claimed our devout and painstaking attention, as the priest found out when I made my first communion.

  ‘How have you sinned against Almighty God?’ he asked me after I’d given the ritual appeal of ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned.’

  Without hesitating I told him, ‘I say bloody. Sometimes I’m worse and I say . . .’ His alacrity in preventing my revealing further the crimes that I had spent many hours spread over many weeks investigating and collating was disappointing. I was afraid I had misunderstood him.

  ‘When I’m mad I call my mother . . .’

  Again he leapt in.

  ‘No doubt she gives you a certain penance at the time,’ he said, dryly. (I didn’t tell him, but I would automatically put my hand out for the razor strop each time I let drop a ‘silencer’, as Dad called these words.)

  I said my penance and left the church. I had had the priest’s blessing. Oh the joy of a clean sheet, the stainless soul, and then a kid I hated, Paul Amery, clouted me over the side of the head as he ran by and I yelled out, ‘You b . . .’ and suddenly it dawned on me: today was only Friday and I had to last until Sunday when I would make my first communion in the state of grace. If I said b . . . even once I’d not be able to go to communion and everyone would know that the only reason for me to miss would be that I had sinned. And so began the long vigil. The great Australian adjective proved itself capable of being used as a noun, verb, conjunction, adverb, a whole sentence. By the time Sunday morning dawned I felt I was running one jump only ahead of the devil himself. Then they lowered the veil over my eyes, rose petals fluttered from the baskets for us small children to tread upon as we came two by two down the aisle, and our parents prayed and the organ played a
nd the voices called, ‘O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.’ I knew I had the best dress of all, white silk. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ recited the priest. And afterwards there were cream cakes and raspberry cordials that left red moustaches round our mouths, and women treating us with such deference as we’d never seen before. Then we floated home.

  There was only one other Catholic family at Waaia, the Youngs. The father was a wheat-buyer, the mother a London-trained dressmaker; their son Kevin was my age. Inevitably our two families became friends. Kevin shared the only real friendship I had during my childhood. I feel that the reason neither my sister nor I could have friends has no place in this book or on my tongue. She and I talk about it sometimes now, mostly in complaint to one another that we have too many friends and not enough time to ourselves. When we were young we were bitter. Now we are grown women with children of our own, with heart-hurts and disappointments already behind us like skins we have had to slough off to gain stability.

  I was lucky to be able to have Kevin. I was seven years old when I went to Waaia. He and I were friends until we were adults and he died. We were both musical, and what was termed ‘quick’ at school. We planned there at Waaia what we would do with our lives. I wrote then, I would always write. He would become a doctor. And so it came to pass. We talked out our plans there beside the wheat stacks long before we told anyone else. Such aspirations, we knew, would be considered freakish in our circumstances. When Kevin died, only three years after taking his degree and setting up in practice, the cool, clear candlelight of childhood was extinguished.