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  Wakefield Press

  Lainie Anderson has been a weekly columnist with Adelaide’s Sunday Mail since 2007, and previously worked at the Herald Sun in Melbourne and The Times in London. In 2017 she travelled to nine countries on a Churchill Fellowship to gauge the significance of the pioneering 1919 flight from England to Australia and the Vickers Vimy aircraft now housed at Adelaide Airport. Lainie is South Australia’s Epic Flight Centenary 2019 program ambassador.

  Wakefield Press

  16 Rose Street

  Mile End

  South Australia 5031

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2019

  This edition published 2020

  Copyright © Lainie Anderson, 2019

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, Wakefield Press

  Edited by Jo Case, Wakefield Press

  ISBN 978 1 74305 715 5

  For Max

  Chapter 1

  ADELAIDE, 1968

  Beer is my friend. Everyone’s my friend at the Hilton pub on South Road. I’m 78. Old and lonely and shrinking. But when I drink, I’m young Wally Shiers again, and the world’s at my feet. I drink and I talk. The regulars gather round, because January in Adelaide is stinking hot, the bar is cool and I always shout the Friday beers when I tell my tale. ‘Start from the beginning, Wal,’ they say, like this old cracked record could start anywhere else. They wait while I dab behind my glasses and silently give thanks that this story is mine to tell. And when glistening beers are cradled in strong hands around me, I rub the precious watch under my shirt sleeve and 50 years are gone, just like that.

  NARRANDERA, 1914

  At first I thought the kid was throwing rocks.

  I quickened my pace, called out ‘Oi!’. He stopped and turned to face me.

  Not a sound. Not a soul around. Houses all closed up and hushed. You know those days? When the heat is like a hand holding everything down?

  Then he took off, a flash of blonde hair.

  When I reached the house, I stopped and leaned my overnight bag against the fence.

  Jeez, what a mess, especially the window. The kid wasn’t throwing rocks. He was throwing eggs—and it’s amazing how three or four eggs can splatter.

  In the distance, there was cheering from the cricket match over on Cadell Street. The Narrandera boys must have got a wicket. It took me back to twilight as a kid, playing street cricket in the dust with my older brothers and their mates. So many fielders, dozens of them dotted down the road, and me way out back behind the wickie, desperate for a loose ball so I could have a throw. When the light was almost gone and someone’s Mum yelled ‘Inside!’ my brothers would let me face the final over. And whoever had the ball would hurtle in like he was going to bowl the nastiest, fastest ball ever, and at the last minute he’d throw underarm and I always got a run. Always.

  At the end of the day, there’s only ever family. Remember that.

  I stared down the empty road for a good long while. Then back at the house, expecting the front door to open. Willing it to open, really, so I could dob in the kid and be on my way to the cricket and then the pub and cold beer and banter with the boys.

  Nothing. When the flies started to settle it was time to move, one way or the other, and I knew I couldn’t leave it like that.

  It was cooler on the porch, but the egg was already drying in yellow gobs against the red brick. I found a spot on the door frame that wasn’t sticky and knocked as loudly as I could, wobbling the wet egg on the rattling fly-wire. I could smell the lavender hedge lining the verandah and eucalyptus sweating from the huge gum out back. I picked absentmindedly at a drop of yolk on the wire, flicked it over the lavender. I licked the flesh of my thumb and rubbed at another bit. Waiting. Listening for sounds of life inside. From the branch of a bottlebrush, a magpie watched, beak open to the heat.

  A whistle sounded way down the river and I imagined the Murrumbidgee washing over me, waking me up. I thought I’d miss the red dust when I left the mine in Broken Hill, but the Riverina suited me fine. Same open sky overhead, richer soil underfoot—if you were looking to grow stuff, that is, and not dig stuff out. I planned on growing stuff one day.

  I looked back out to the road. Stared up at the sky. Not a cloud. For days it had been the same. Bit weird for November.

  Nothing. Damn.

  I walked around the back of the house. Hens rushed to the door of their coop, expecting to be fed. No such luck, ladies, cluck all you like. The tank was cool to touch, half-filled with water. I soaked my head under the tap, replaced my hat and then filled an old metal bucket. Whistling softly, I headed back to the front of the house.

  ‘Hello? Can we help you?’

  Coming through the garden gate, shielding their eyes from the glare, were two women with wide-brimmed sun hats. Mother and daughter maybe.

  I put down the bucket and raised my palms. Funny how you can feel guilty when you’ve done nothing wrong. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Some kid threw eggs at your house. I was just getting water from your tank to clean it off. Hope you don’t mind. Sorry, I’m Wally. Wally Shiers.’ I was babbling. Embarrassed. For me. For them.

  Their eyes moved from me to the porch, and I realised they hadn’t noticed the egg. Too shocked by some random bloke in their yard, I s’pose.

  The older woman said something and I noticed a slight German accent. Now the egg made sense.

  They stood there, taking it in. The mess. The meaning. The meanness of it all.

  I could feel my wet hair steaming under my hat, sun burning the back of my neck. Poor women. They were tiny things too, neither of them more than five foot.

  Finally the younger woman squared her shoulders and put an arm around her mother’s back.

  ‘Just some silly boy, Mother,’ she said, head down, guiding her mum to the front door. ‘Fred will be home soon. Let’s get you out of this heat. I’m sure poor Mr Shy-ers is thirsty. Why don’t we fix him a nice cool drink and he can be on his way.’

  She returned with a glass of water. Slice of lemon. Light pink glass.

  ‘Thank you Mr Shy-ers,’ she said, surveying the splatter with pressed lips and anxious eyes. ‘It was very kind of you.’

  She had a nice way of saying Shiers. All ‘shy’ with a soft ‘ers’ on the end.

  ‘Don’t mind giving you a hand,’ I said, staring into the glass between sips. ‘We’ll get it cleaned off in no time.’

  We worked silently, for the most part, her on one side of the porch and me on the other, both careful not to meet at the bucket in the middle.

  ‘I’m Helena Alford,’ she said at last. ‘Can’t believe you’re helping me scrub egg off our porch and you don’t even know my name.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Miss Alford,’ I said, allowing myself a quick glance. She was about my age, maybe a bit younger. And gee, she was little. I wondered how far her brown hair would fall down her back if she let it loose from that bun.

  Silence again. The smell of grass drying, dying already. Her mother’s soft footsteps on the floorboards inside.

  ‘Father was born in Germany,’ she said a while later, without breaking the circular rhythm of her arm or shifting her gaze. ‘Decades ago. Didn’t even call it Germany back then.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. Poor things. Bloody kid.

  ‘He’s passed away now,’ she said. ‘Today I’m almost glad.’ Her voice caught and I stole a glance, panicked she might be crying. She was biting her upper lip, wiping damp hair from her forehea
d with the back of a doll-like wrist.

  I shook my head in sympathy. What do you say to that?

  And I was disappointed when it was done. Almost thanked her for having me. Hadn’t spent any real time alone in a woman’s presence for years—forever really, if I didn’t count my sisters.

  I was fixing to leave, shy and stupid, when her mother stepped out onto the porch and asked me to lunch the following day.

  ‘It would be nice to thank you properly,’ she said. All soft skin and smile lines, like some older women get. ‘You’ll meet our Fred. I’m sure you’ll like him.’

  ‘I might even make a sponge,’ Helena said then, her face brightening for the first time. ‘Show you the proper way to use eggs.’

  I’m not kidding—the sponge was the best thing I’d ever tasted. Icing sugar dusted on top, thin layer of strawberry jam in the middle. It was all I could do not to ask for thirds. Fred was just a year older than me and worked on one of the farms over in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. I was doing some electrical work on the new homes out there, so we knew a few lads in common. That was good, broke the ice.

  He was a funny bloke, ruddy face with messy brown hair and piercing blue eyes that always looked interested in what you had to say. Loved talking about cars and aircraft almost as much as I did—we’d barely had time to sit down before he was showing me his collection of Flight magazines, including quite a few copies I hadn’t already read. He was positive the magician Harry Houdini had been the first man to fly over Australian soil in 1910, but I knew for a fact that a South Australian by the name of Custance had beaten Houdini by a day. By the time lunch was on the table, I was calling him Freddy Houdini and he was calling me Wally Custard, and I knew we were going to be best mates.

  The house was pretty recent, Federation style. Their father John Alford had been a big landowner and builder and had done very well for himself. A couple of blokes I’d asked that morning had heard of him. You could tell they weren’t poor, but they weren’t too posh either. Church of England, so nothing silly. I’d been brought up C of E, too. The Alford’s dining table had a lace cloth on it and Helena kept smoothing it down with open palms as she listened to me and Fred talk. She had light freckles on the back of her hands.

  ‘You gonna enlist, Wally Custard?’ Fred asked.

  I knew it would come eventually.

  ‘You can’t ask him that,’ said Helena.

  I put down my knife and fork, glanced at the roast lamb on my plate. ‘That’s okay. Fair question. I’ll go if I have to, if I’m needed. Rather keep out of it for now, though. I’m trying to save up for a block out Leeton way. Seems there’s plenty enough blokes lining up to fight. How about you, Freddy Houdini?’

  ‘Same,’ he said. ‘Put a bullet in the Hun if I have to. And actually, I’d make a good spy with my bits of Deutsch.’

  Helena threw her mother an exasperated look, but you could tell she adored Fred. They both did.

  Later the three of us walked down to the irrigation channel. Fred wasn’t silly, he wandered off a bit, skimming rocks as Helena and I sat on the bank, staring at the water. Corellas were making a racket in the gums.

  ‘So you’re buying a block,’ she said ages later, still staring at the water. ‘You think you’ll stay?’

  I picked a blade of grass and started splitting it as I watched her out the corner of my eye. ‘Can’t see why not.’

  She smiled ever so slightly at the river, and I noticed a tiny dimple in her right cheek.

  We both knew.

  It was a couple of weeks before our first kiss. Didn’t rush things in those days. We were in her backyard, putting the chickens away one Sunday afternoon a few hours before I caught the train home. I was bent over, sort of half-running around the backyard, mustering up the chooks all silly-like. Helena’s beaming face was bathed in sunlight. I looked back at the house to see no one was watching, cupped her chin in my hand and kissed her on the lips. Then she pulled me behind the tank and kissed me back. That was that.

  SYDNEY, 1915

  Any idiot can fall in love. The tricky stuff comes after.

  I bought the block in Leeton in early 1915—had enough for a down-payment because prices dropped after war broke out. Then I heard about a bloke in Sydney almost giving away a shipment of fruit trees. It felt like it was meant to be.

  So there I was, just before Easter, in the second-class carriage of the overnight train to Sydney, reaching through the open sash window to hold Helena’s hand. She was on the platform, looking towards the front of the train, waiting for the signal while we chatted softly about everything and nothing. We’d spent a lot of time together over summer and were fitting together nicely. I didn’t like the idea of leaving her and the Riverina, even just for a night or two. Made me anxious. Made me stupid.

  ‘Guess what,’ I said, the idea hitting me just as the whistle blew and the train creaked into motion. ‘You know what I’m going to do when I get back?’

  ‘Plant orange trees with me?’ she asked, as our fingertips were pulled apart.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said, raising my voice as the train chugged away. I was leaning out of the window now to see her face as I said it: ‘But I’m going to ask you to marry me, too!’

  I can still see her face—the blue eyes round with confusion and delight and a hint of something else.

  I fell back into my seat, laughing.

  ‘You’re a sly dog,’ said the bloke opposite. ‘How’d a fella like you win a girl like her, anyhow?’

  I stopped, stared blankly out the window, Narrandera disappearing behind us in the dusk. Jesus, what had I done? Was it anger I’d seen in her eyes? Reluctance? Disappointment? And what the bloody hell was I doing, asking the most important question of my life as a train rolled away? To this day, I still can’t believe I did it.

  The train got me into Sydney Central around eight o’clock the following morning. It had been a night of little sleep and much anxiety, and I was wholly unprepared for the punch in the face that was Australia’s biggest city.

  Away from the quiet banks of the rolling Murrumbidgee, it was suddenly clear that Australia was at war. Impatient. Unsettled. Itching for action.

  I’d never felt so out of place, so obviously an outsider. The city was rowdy with strong chiselled lads in Australian Imperial Force uniforms, all shaking hands and slapping backs and bending over adoring sweethearts.

  ‘Hey mate, you signing up?’

  If I heard it once that morning, I heard it a dozen times. With each new query, I offered a friendly wink and carried on my way to the meeting point with my nurseryman, stomach churning and desperate to return to Narrandera and its 180 degrees of soothing, open sky. Can you imagine how stupid I felt, shopping for orange trees while every other bloke my age was headed to fight the Hun?

  And then it happened—my run-in with the Sydney copper.

  ‘Oi, young feller,’ the officer said. I’m not joking, the bloke was nearly seven foot—tall as a tree. Dark stubble, brooding eyes, black hair greying at the temples.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ I said, distracted, dishevelled and decidedly little in the shadow of this hulking man. ‘I’m just on my way to buy orange trees. Train’s leaving this afternoon.’ I must have sounded like a lunatic.

  ‘Never mind that, son,’ he said, shoving a postcard at me. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, with his accusatory finger and bushy moustache was staring out from the card in my hand.

  ‘I thought we already had too many volunteers,’ I said, knowing immediately what it meant. ‘What do you need me for?’

  ‘Don’t take it personally, lad,’ the officer said. ‘You can never sign up enough men in a voluntary force—got to get you all trained up as ready reinforcements.’

  ‘But I’ve already got a job,’ I said. I wasn’t upending a life that was just beginning because I’d met a random old copper in the street. And you couldn’t be forced into a volunteer army. ‘I’m an electrician
out with the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme. We’re growing food for blokes at the Front.’

  He rested a giant mitt on my shoulder and for a second I thought I’d convinced him. ‘Listen son, it’s normal to be scared,’ he said, tightening his grip ever so slightly and allowing a hint of contempt to enter his voice. ‘The bigger lads will look out for you.’

  ‘Fear’s not stopping me,’ I said, meeting his gaze. I was no coward. I was five foot four inches, the shortest man in most rooms, shorter even than Charlie Chaplin if you can believe that. But there’s no height limit on courage. I’d stood up to bullies like him all my life, and I knew there was only one way to loosen his grip and end the conversation: I jollied him along, played the charmer and said what he wanted to hear.

  ‘Good lad,’ he said, but I was already out of earshot, putting maximum distance between us.

  When I’d gone a few blocks I found a bench in a sad, dusty little Sydney park and sat for a while to collect my thoughts, away from the jostling crowds and bragging soldiers.

  I didn’t want to enlist. I suppose that sounds lily-livered, but good things were happening for me. I’d just branched out with my own sparky business. I’d bought the block. Me and Helena had plans. And her mother treated me like a son. My own mum had died years back and I didn’t realise how much I missed her until Mrs Alford gave me one of her little lady’s bear hugs. I wanted to be an electrician with a Riverina fruit block. I wanted to be a husband, a dad, with little people running around my legs.

  A bloke about my age slumped down on the bench beside me and put his head in his hands, just as I’d done a half-hour before.

  ‘Looks like you ran into the same copper I did,’ I said. ‘Did he tell you to enlist, too?’

  The bloke looked puzzled and pointed to his coat lapel and a brass badge no more than an inch wide. Surrounding the Australian Coat of Arms were the words ‘Volunteered for active service. Medically unfit’.

  ‘They knocked me back,’ he said. ‘That’s the second time now. Reckon my heart and lungs aren’t up to the job. I had TB as a kid.’ He stared into the distance for a moment, then snapped himself out of it. ‘They’ll get desperate soon enough, then they’ll take me.’