The Man on the Headland Read online

  As soon as I was out of hospital I received a request from Sydney to lead a deputation to ask for better treatment for conscientious objectors. I drove a borrowed car to Canberra to interview the legislators.

  The deputation called on Bishop Burgmann on the way down. He asked why I had come when I still found difficulty in standing up for long.

  “Someone had to drive and my husband thought I should.”

  “Do you always do what your husband tells you?”

  “Usually. It saves the trouble of thinking.”

  “Edna,” the Bishop called to his wife, “I want you to listen to this.”

  Standing about Parliament House made me feel as though my inside was full of fish-hooks. I saw the Prime Minister but all he would talk about was my books. We interviewed ministers who were tremendously kind and helpful. The bill to provide better treatment for conscientious objectors was later tossed out in the Senate when only a few hoary conservatives had stayed awake for it.

  We called in to report to the Bishop on the way back. I was anxious to catch my train, which left Sydney at two in the morning. “There’s no rush,” the Bishop objected. “You can average sixty all the way.”

  Without averaging sixty I caught my train. Thanks to our interest in conscientious objectors and to Roddy’s starting a co-operative among the miners, the town became convinced that we must be German spies with a secret radio transmitter in the chimney, and when we didn’t return after the holidays the rumour went round that we had been removed to a concentration camp.

  We were in Laurieton. We had got our own way at last. And by the most despicable means. We had used influence. There was at this time a most unconventional Minister for Education, who heard from a friend in Head Office what we were about. He said at once that if Kylie wanted to write a book about—what was the place?—of course Rodd should have it. He simply said, “Let there be Rodds at Laurieton”, and there were. Head Office was furious and rightly so.

  Roddy went back to the town we were deserting to superintend the removal of our battered furniture. He claimed I was not well enough to go with him, but he had never forgotten a previous move when I packed up all his first editions and sent them to the auction by mistake.

  At Maitland two days later he flung himself into the train going north, just as it left the platform. I was encouraging him to run faster. Once before I had seen him miss a train when the Greeks at a cafe had been f arewelling him with milk-shakes and we had to wait three days for another train.

  As soon as he had recovered his breath he said, “Wait till I tell you—there really was a ghost. I saw it. I was sleeping on the floor of the empty house when I woke up and went to the window. A dark figure was coming up the side path by the roses. And when I looked again it just wasn’t there.”

  “It was probably someone snooping to see what they could steal. Forget it. Think of the peace and quiet—this little peaceful place at last!”

  Chapter III

  THE CHARMING DEFERENCE of George Webber, the mailman, first made us aware of the role we were to play in Laurieton. In the Hunter Valley teachers had no social standing. But George, huge and handsome, indicated we were royalty, of an unnatural fragility to be delivered undamaged. Years before, the little town had had a famous headmaster who had taught George and his generation, and the populace hoped that the new headmaster would be such another. The parents wanted their children to have what they wistfully called “a chance in life”.

  Other passengers might squeeze into the overloaded service car as best they could or even stand on the running board, but the new schoolmaster and his wife must have the best seat beside the driver. Later, I stood on the running board myself in a sweep of wind and moonlight letting the tourists have the seat, because by then George was our friend. But that first evening, twisting between the holes in the road around Left-hand Lake, we were more formal. George would stop at an isolated house and a child would run to the gate while he bestowed naked strings of saveloys.

  “What is this, George?” I asked at last. “Does it always happen or is it just a Friday special?”

  George gave me an uncertain look. Perhaps I might complain that he was delivering sausages from his wife’s cafe? At the cafe he disembarked his passengers, at the post office his mail, and then we were driven on to his mother’s house where all was arranged for us to stay until our furniture arrived. For years dear old Mrs Webber and I used to bake our Christmas cakes together. I would do the beating and stirring and she supervised the cooking in her oven. Her face was all little pink cushions of kindness, and her natural sweetness somehow flavoured the cakes.

  Next morning the drama of Laurieton—there was always some stirring action in progress—unfolded with a rescue from a shipwreck. Up the estuary in procession came the snapper boats towing a steamer that had gone ashore, and there was excited peering through binoculars. We were too tired to take it in. We only wanted to see the school.

  The main street frayed out when it reached the rise at the foot of the Big Brother and we crossed a little valley by a footpath behind the church through an orchard and a tangle of ferns and wild raspberries. There were deep ditches with plank bridges and we wondered about these until we realized later that Laurieton often had the highest rainfall in the State.

  The school and its accompanying residence stood in a park-like expanse rimmed with huge trees in what we came to see was the social centre of the town. The school had been painted rust-colour and was ornamented with a board which read, “Erected in 1883”, not a vintage year for schools. On the opposite corner was the Community Hall, of hand-cut red mahogany, constructed by Uncle Johnny Longworth, the owner of the timber mill. On the diagonal corner was the Church of England donated by Uncle Johnny, who was also churchwarden. Opposite the schoolhouse, on the road running down to the post office and the punt, were the houses of the Longworth family.

  The school residence had been built for the famous Mr Debenham, who had lived there for twenty-eight years and had thirteen children. It fitted us the way an outsize in overcoats would fit a midget. In front there were four bedrooms with the usual wide verandas and a living-room. Then down four steps was a passage with an afterthought of bathroom and a lofty wing which had either been a church or the original schoolhouse. It was divided into laundry, pantry, breakfast-room, kitchen. In the rain—and it started to rain next day—a stream of water gushed from the stove and flowed across the kitchen floor and out of the back door.

  The residence had been cleaned for us and an interesting pattern of footprints showed in a light layer of mud. Mrs Webber’s daughter, Allie Bell, big and blonde as her brother George, came to do my cleaning until I was stronger. She sniffed when she saw the footprints, knowing which of her nieces had made them. She was a meticulous housekeeper, but I more appreciated her devilish sense of humour.

  Great camphor-laurel trees shaded the house. There was a thicket of Chinese elms in which bantams perched, a bush-house full of ferns to which I added all kinds of rarities. There were clumps of perfumed pink lilies growing in the grass, naked ladies on tall red stems. Beside the veranda, running wild, were two sorts of cucumber, a little prickly mottled porcupine of a cucumber, good for salads, and a swollen great Germanic cucumber for pickling. There were tobacco plants by the tank, and old gentlemen would come in when tobacco was scarce to beg the leaves. Down at the end of the yard —which seemed to stretch for about a quarter of a mile—a periwinkle had escaped from a rockery and swarmed over an ever-enlarging territory towards the broken-down fowl-house. We were dazzled with these discoveries and wished only to explore and savour them.

  It had not occurred to us that by moving to the coast we would become more directly involved in the war, but our first task was to arrange blackout curtains for the enormous windows of the kitchen-church facing the sea. The night we moved in an ancient man came galloping up from the coast-watchers on the headland, swearing a light was showing from the back of the residence. We were brusque with th
e old fool; we crushed him. Then while we were showing him his error we found a fanlight, so high in the rafters above the back door we had not known it existed.

  The snapper-boat men had been reporting appearances of a submarine to the local defence authorities and had been told that what they saw was a whale. This appealed to their sense of humour because their eyesight was so keen they could pick out the white fleck of the flag above their fish-trap from a thousand white-flecked waves. Also they were acquainted with whales. When they were ordered to take a dinghy out to sea to escape if their boats were sunk they had to lie on the grass to laugh. Anyone with good enough aim to pick off a snapper boat could also hit a dinghy.

  The Returned Soldiers’ League was busy with plans against a Japanese landing. An air-raid shelter was to be constructed in the school playground and the children drilled to march into it. As the country was supplied with mountains that could swallow a regiment in one fold—the Comboyne Range was only ten miles away—the children would have all gone elsewhere, but the indispensable step for all town gatherings was taken. A barrel of beer rolled into our yard the first week-end that it was not raining. The population assembled about the beer-barrel and veterans of World War I went into conference.

  Allie Bell and I had our own plan of defence. My part would be to stand at the back gate with cups of tea. “And besides me, Allie, you will be standing wearing my black nightdress. That should hold them!”

  Allie touched her yellow curls. “I hear they like blondes,” she said. She was at least the size of two Japanese, or maybe three, taking her all round.

  Mr Hoschke, who in World War I had caught pneumonia in France guarding horses that some mad veteran of the Boer War had imported for a cavalry charge, was now planning our bomb refuge. It was a replica of the best and deepest trench ever dug on French soil. It zigzagged. It was protected from cross-fire by rifles. There were redoubts for infantrymen. It was floored with duck-boards, lined with pit-props, roofed. There were sandbags piled on top and it looked as though some immense animal had been burrowing.

  The air force roaming up and down the coast used it as a landmark and practised strafing it. The children, drilled to a hair, could assemble and march into that trench five minutes after the planes had passed over and were far up the coast. In the rain it formed a natural reservoir of yellow mud and water, and no threats of punishment could keep the boys out of it. The trench took two week-ends to dig and five years for the headmaster and bigger boys to dismantle and fill it in. The headmaster’s face when it saw it was as interesting a study as the trench.

  Not to be outdone, the women of the town were there, pasting every window in the school with strips of linen soaked in evil-smelling glue. When one of the buildings was pulled down years later we had still not managed to remove the anti-shatter device. And we’d tried everything.

  Then there was the first-aid class of which I was, undeservedly, the star. My reputation arose when Allie Bell and a stout, dark friend took me oystering to the Hope—a salt lagoon where the coastguards’ houses lay between the surf and the sea-wall. This lake had been the original river entrance, but when the breakwater was constructed the river was given a new channel between stone walls half a mile long. The Hope was cut off to one side and was occupied by black swans.

  On the way back along the breakwater Allie’s friend put her foot on a loose boulder and rolled down to the water’s edge, gashing her leg and dislocating her ankle. Without thinking I pushed the hideously protruding ankle-bone back into place, bound the cut under the knee with my scarf and ran to the nearest houses at Dunbogan for a boat. The man who rowed the boat thought it was all a great joke and had a most flirtatious conversation with Allie’s friend.

  But apparently I had done something very clever without thinking. It was agreed that the first-aid equipment should be kept at the school. I always cringed at the possibility that I might be expected to use the catgut in a jar of alcohol to stitch someone up. Bearers would appear at the door on occasion with some broken-limbed sufferer to watch me put on splints while someone else went for a car to take the victim to doctor and hospital thirty-five miles away at Port Macquarie. The doctor came usually once a week to see patients in a gloomy annex to the Community Hall.

  Putting on splints was not as worrying as coming home and finding a trail of blood leading up to the back door and then away again. Or having a breathless message: “Come quick! The butcher was drunk again and he’s chopped his hand with the cleaver.” With supreme cunning I managed to use sticking-plaster instead of the needles and catgut to repair the butcher. When I nearly chopped one finger off myself with a reaping hook I treated the cut in the same way and, although the bone was showing, the finger was as good as ever.

  The class in first-aid never did receive its certificates because the examiner was drunk both nights that we waited for him. The class disbanded.

  To add to the effect of an abandoned batdefield at the school workmen arrived and began to tear down the church-kitchen. They tramped cheerfully on the roof while I typed. Walls crashed down around me. We could not ever find out if this was revenge on the part of Head Office or whether the Building Branch, interested by the scandal of Roddy’s appointment, had turned up the files and found that repairs to the residence had been ordered twenty years earlier and never carried out.

  By that time the first wave of visitors who stayed overnight or for a couple of weeks as the fancy took them had begun to arrive. There were also what we called Ruin-lookers who acted on the principle of the English peer who told the poet, “Seeing there are no ruins in your country, Mr Longfellow, I thought I would visit you.”

  Roddy tiptoed back to bed at dawn once—the lavatory was an isolated structure and the path through wet grass was favoured by enormous spiders that constructed webs the size of a fishing net—and said he had circled round by the side veranda where a Ruin-looker was occupying a stretcher amid displaced household furniture and rolls of linoleum.

  “I am always suspicious,” Roddy said, “of a man who sits up writing poetry before sunrise with nothing on but a holy medal.” It was this Ruin-looker, when he and I were riding out to the beach, who told me that we were not alone. “Theresa is always with me,” he volunteered. It turned out the invisible Theresa was a character in his novel.

  “Theresa is always with me,” Roddy would murmur when he found me digging the vegetable garden instead of typing.

  Roddy himself joined the walking wounded. The doctor talked knowledgeably about golf to my father when they paid us a simultaneous visit. He was more interested in my father’s handicap and never did explain why Roddy had keeled over in a dead faint. Later, a specialist explained that he had seen plenty of cases like it. The heart was not affected but the nerves of the heart were. It was by and large the result of extreme physical exertion.

  Roddy and the bigger boys had been constructing cement paths across the muddy waste from the school gates to the school. The children walked long distances round the foot of the mountain, up from the satellite villages of North Haven and Dunbogan on either side of the channel. They came in boats down the lake. When tempests blew up and the wind and the current were so strong that the punt couldn’t take the Dunbogan children across the river, a snapper boat would put in at the wharf and Roddy would see the children safely aboard.

  They used to sit all day in the freezing schoolhouse with wet feet until we found out, then a row of socks drying in front of the school fire while they worked was not uncommon. The Department refused to provide cement paths through the quagmire leading from the gates so the teacher and boys built them.

  They also repaired the swimming pool near the mill. Roddy was most adroit at pile-driving. Every child learnt to swim. It was a fishing town, yet this was quite a novelty. In a long, straggling line they would set off, climbing stiles and fences, circling round the mill dam. As the girls were supposed to be chaperoned I had many a reluctant swim in the weedy baths until Roddy enlisted the help of Peg Sloc
ombe, who loved to swim.

  The workmen whom the Building Branch had forgotten continued to pull the house down and hated to leave. Every man of them was a keen fisherman so the job took as long as possible. Also they knew that Manpower was going to seize them as soon as the job was finished. While they were all away fishing someone stole the new bath which was lying in the back yard. Timbers and roofing mysteriously vanished.

  Then there was a frightful row between a building inspector and the foreman and they all packed their tools and went away, leaving me still cooking in the front bedroom. When after what seemed years a couple came back and replaced my charming church by a small kitchen, bathroom and back veranda, we thought we could settle to that peace which had vanished like some distant, laughable dream.

  Chapter IV

  ERNIE, in the bright early morning, waited for Sam to bring the punt across, and while he waited admired the Macgregors’ garden in a slip of land between their oyster lease and the punt wharf. This tiny allotment was right on the edge of the mangroves and the beds were built up full of seaweed, the weatherboard shack held together with vines and climbing pumpkins. There was a kind of arbour of tomatoes. Lettuce the size of cauliflowers with complicated frills, white onions the size of plates, were grown by the two quiet elderly bachelors. Not an inch of space was wasted, not a weed was there. If a plant in the back row showed signs of laziness a Macgregor would advance on it with a hoe and that plant sat up and improved.

  As Ernie regarded the Macgregor garden dim landowning ancestors stirred in his blood. It was then he formed the ambition to one day grow onions equal to the Macgregors’. Of course he never did, but the poison of agriculture had entered his mind, hitherto more occupied with politics, horse-riding and mining.