What’s that you’re writing there? Anna lived in the world but she also lived in her head, and if she withdrew too often, books were snatched from her hands, fingers were snapped before her eyes, voices scolded: Daydreamer. What are you thinking? What are you writing? When Anna voyaged, wearing her various costumes, everyone said: Wake up in there. They said: Play with your cousins. They said: It’s bad manners. They wanted her to be engaged—if only they knew that she was engaged. When, in a caprice of love, her mother posted ‘Kip’, by Anna Tolley, 8, Pandowie, to the children’s pages of the Sunday Mail, Anna took her writing underground. What was she writing? She was writing a letter to June, her penfriend in England. June was her cover story. June also became an unwanted obligation. Anna didn’t like June. She didn’t like writing to her. She could picture June’s weak eyes, her mother’s perm, her father washing his Morris in his shirtsleeves and braces. They had little to communicate to one another once Anna had evoked Isonville and June the Holly Hill Estate, Leeds. June’s letters caused Anna to mince around the house: Oh, Mummy, Hugo is ever such a horrid little boy. Kids from Texas were never listed among those seeking pen-pals, only Junes from Leeds. Anna loved two men and she hurt them sorely with her pen—Lockie, who’d described for her how the dawn broke over the South China Sea, and her father, who’d had her in his thoughts as he watched his sheep die on the verges of the sunken road. If the editors of the student rag hadn’t been so offhand with Anna, it might not have happened. Their approach with her was: You can clean the paste-up bench, maybe review the odd film, so Anna submitted a thousand words attacking conscription and the Anzac myth, and they led with it in the next issue. She posted a copy to Lockie and the silence stretched between them. She posted a copy home and heard bewilderment and offence. Anna was saying Look at me, wanting Lockie and her father to see that she was someone special, not someone they could fob off with automatic or absent-minded love. She was saying Look at me, unaware that they would always look at her. Then the boys from home began to die and her pen dried up. She fled the country. She recovered her voice, but it was slow, slow. It was a halting, fragmentary, pen-slashed voice: Dear Mum and Dad, Taken off the plane at Frankfurt—very security conscious—suppose you can’t blame them—opened my camera case gingerly—expecting a bomb?—most unnerving—why me?—travelling with two Kiwis and they weren’t hassled—must have the eyes of a fanatic. When she married Sam Jaeger, her father-in-law, blind to who she was, urged her to write to the papers, to businessmen, to bishops and MPs. He stood in her kitchen and boomed: Dear Chief Commissioner. We, the undersigned, are strongly in favour of a more energetic police action to put down the anti-Springbok rabble once and for all. We won’t be sorry to see a few police batons in action, if that’s what it takes. Totalitarian forces like these seek, through infiltration and subversion, to destroy the values of our Christian way of life and sacrifice our freedom on the altar of atheistic materialism. Sign at the bottom, girlie. Carl Hartwig offered her two days a week at the Chronicle, proofreading, writing up the Strawberry Fete, the Red Cross Flower Show, the dusty April field days, the Copper Festival, hatching, matching, dispatching. Her income helped to tide the family over when there were no odd jobs for Sam in the district. All these years later, Anna is still writing about fetes and weddings for the Chronicle, but Carl Hartwig is also giving her space for feature articles and local history, based on material she’s been collecting for the 150th Jubilee book. It’s going to be an opinionated book, and some of her opinions are finding their way into her weekly column.
Sir: The residents of Pandowie and district do not agree with Mrs Jaeger as stated in The Chronicle on April 4 that ‘Pandowie is dying’. We are of the opinion that a newspaper report should be interesting and informative, based on fact and worthwhile news, but her article was neither interesting nor informative. The townspeople are not all old, as she suggests, and even though family farms are falling into the hands of the big concerns, and landholders in the area, of which Mrs Jaeger’s husband is one, are getting fewer in number, community groups such as the CWA and school welfare are still able to accommodate 1200 people for lunch during Merino stud field days in April of each year. The Pandowie Red Cross flower show is renowned as one of the best in the mid-north. Pessimistic criticism of this nature is not welcomed by people who are proud of their heritage and working to maintain a town which has survived for 150 years and will thrive for many more to come.
Anna and Sam have received a letter from the bank in which a faceless suit-and-tie has written: We regret to advise you. How dare they? Sam wants to know. He flicks the letter with the backs of his fingers and blinks away the tears. We bank with them for twenty years and they let us know by letter? They can’t even talk it over with us first? As Anna’s eyesight fades, as she begins to miss grease spots on the benchtops, she will put away her stamps and envelopes in favour of the telephone. Every home will be blessed with gadgets that make writing redundant and she’ll talk to her daughter and her granddaughter on a flickering screen. She will continue to mark appointments on the calendar and fasten messages to the refrigerator door, but she won’t see what her granddaughter sees, handwriting that unravels as Anna approaches the grave.