I did not enjoy my time at the Roystons’ and I’m pretty sure they didn’t enjoy having me there either.
The Royston family was made up of Brother Royston, who I called Uncle Paul; Sister Royston, who I called Aunty Jean; Peter, who was seventeen and used to be in the same Sunday school class as my brother Daniel; Helen, who was thirteen and in the first year of Grange High School; and Maudie, who was twelve and in the final year of Grange Primary.
They lived in a cream brick house in what was called a seaside suburb, but their house was near a very boring, busy main road and you couldn’t even walk to the ocean, so I think they must have been very disappointed if that’s why they bought it. It had no front yard to speak of, just dry grass that Peter had to mow when it was growing, but it was already so hot when I went to stay that it was just short yellow sticks of weeds and straw. The backyard had a big shed in it but it wasn’t that interesting and mainly just had their car and a few tools in it.
There was also a very old caravan that had no wheels and smelled of cat’s wee when you went into it, which Aunty Jean told me not to do. I went into the shed to have a good look around one day, and Aunty Jean yelled at me to get out before she took the stick to the back of my legs, so I didn’t chance a rummage around again. The back garden also had no flowers or shrubs or lawn or furniture except for a broken wooden table with two benches either side. Sister Royston said those who loved God and spent their time at the meeting all weekend had no time for fripperies like gardens. She said garden beds were a sign of materialism and vanity. When I said, ‘Didn’t God make the flowers and tell us to consider the lilies of the field?’, she said He did, and I could go and look for lilies in fields any time I liked and consider them there.
This was one of probably a thousand things I said in the weeks I stayed with them that I wished I hadn’t.
Aunty Jean was scary. She was enormously tall and very fat, but not that floppy kind of fat. She seemed so firm that I often wanted to poke her to see if she was as hard as she looked. I saw some strange underwear on the line one day that made me suspect she bound herself up with elastic all-in-ones to pretend she had a shape. Someone should have told her it wasn’t working, and she should just let go and breathe. Although, perhaps if she did, she would unfold into a huge wobbly jelly.
Aunty Jean’s favourite expression was grumpy. She was a great friend of my Aunty Maisie, and it seemed to me that if you liked Aunty Maisie, you had to end up looking a bit like her to stay in her club. This, I was sure, was a club to which I never wished to belong.
Aunty Jean had three chins, and the main one under her mouth had lots of thick grey and white bristles on it, and some hairs that were so long they curled up. She had the most enormous blackheads I’ve ever seen. Caleb called them The Pocks of Poo. I had to try not to keep looking at them because they were sort of fascinating. She looked very old but Mum said that she was only a few years older than her and she only looked that way because she was one of those matrons who refused to dye her hair and immediately moved to flat shoes and shapeless flowery dresses when she turned forty. Mum said that’s what happened to most women over forty in our church meeting, and there was no need for it because there wasn’t a commandment that said ‘Thou shalt look like an old bag of potatoes when you leave your thirties’.
Before the union exams, I had made Aunty Jean cross one Sunday by calling out across the church’s middle hall, ‘Aunty Jean, your teeth look very beautiful and shiny today.’ She stomped over to me and grabbed me by the elbow and shook me so hard my teeth sort of chattered independently in my mouth.
She said, ‘You dreadful child. You know fine well they are new and false. What a mean thing to say out loud.’ I honestly hadn’t realised they were false, and just kept saying, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ but she stayed cross with me. So I was a bit surprised they had agreed to take me in. I had asked Dad on the way to the Roystons’ if I couldn’t go and stay with my best friend Anne King, but Dad said the Kings were going on a big trip as soon as school finished and so it wouldn’t work out. I said I didn’t think that was right because Anne would have told me but Dad said it was going to be a surprise for her and I shouldn’t tell her. Dad should have known not telling Anne was going to be a big challenge right there.
If Peter Royston had shown any interest in knights, I might have considered marrying him. Although I didn’t like boys that much, I sometimes got a bit goofy around him and said mad things I didn’t intend. Once I had made a paper fortune-teller, one of those things where you fold up the paper into triangles and make them go in and out with your fingers. Anne called them chatterboxes. When I had asked it who I would marry, it had said Peter. I told Anne this, but she pointed out I had written all the names in it, and had written his name five times, so there was a good chance it was going to give me the name I wanted. But I was pretty sure there was some magic going on there and refused to accept her doubt.
Peter didn’t pay a lot of attention to me but we had to eat dinner together every night, so I got to see him then. I combed my hair before I went to the table, which I didn’t do at home, but when Helen asked me what I was doing I said my mum always required us to straighten our clothes and comb our hair before ‘being summoned to dine’. This wasn’t true. I was usually screamed at to get to the table, threatened if I didn’t hurry up, criticised for looking like a rag and bone man’s assistant and smacked for being so grubby. But Mum would have liked us to smarten up for tea, so it was sort of right, and Helen and Maudie were very impressed.
I found myself telling stories over dinner about all sorts of amazing things, but Peter kept snorting and saying, ‘That’s just not true. You are a little liar.’ Uncle Paul would just make pushing down motions with his hand and say, ‘Bring it down, Peter, bring it down.’ Aunty Jean cuffed him on the head and said not to be rude to guests, but then said, ‘Dorcas, you shouldn’t tell fibs.’ The problem was when I was telling the story I believed it was true.
For example, I was absolutely positive that not long before my visit a whole family was found living in the belly of a whale. When the whale swallowed pirate ships and such like, all the bits floated in and the family was a bit like a clan from the book about the Borrowers by Miss Mary Norton. The Borrowers were tiny people who turned everyday things into useful objects, and they would have turned all the flotsam and jetsam into household items to make their stay in the whale cosier. Peter said that was an out-and-out lie, and I insisted he was wrong and it was in a newspaper, or else how would I know the term flotsam and jetsam, but he said Ruthy would have taught me those words because everyone knew she was the brains in our family. If he kept this up, I thought, he was going to have a hard time of it when he proposed to me.
Mum always said Helen turned dowdy at eight. I sort of knew what she meant. She was as skinny as Aunty Jean was round, and short like Uncle Paul. She wore knitted grey tights all year round that were baggy around her ankles. Her grey glasses had thick, coke-bottle bottoms in them, which gave her a slightly scary owl quality when she looked at you, because they made her eyes too big for her face. Her sturdy black shoes had a strap across them and she wore very bulky jumpers in winter and large crocheted tops she made for herself in summer. Mum used to say that Helen must have hunted through the rubbish tips to find the wool she used to make her tops, because it was always of the ugliest possible shade and other people must have thrown it out. She didn’t seem to be comfortable with herself and was always hitching her tops down as though to cover bits she wasn’t that keen on.
She was quite a nice girl, but rather too godly for me. She never seemed to do anything wrong and was always polite and kind, and read her Bible every day and crocheted rugs for poor people in Africa. I asked her once why poor people in Africa would need those rugs, given it was very hot, but she said the Christadelphian missionaries asked for them and they would know best.
Maudie was okay. I neither liked nor disliked her because she was a sort of blancmange. She was pale and thin with mousey brown curly hair that seemed to be falling out, a bit like a man going bald. You could see her bright pink scalp between the curls. She wore clothes that were far too big for her; usually long box-pleated skirts that were higher up at the back than the front, and little jumpers with things like cats and fairies stitched on to them. The best word for her was beige, I thought. She was an all-round beige person.
I sensed all the girls in the Royston family saw me as a bit ungodly, and somehow dangerous. I stayed on the top bunk in the two-bunk room Maudie and Helen shared. There was only room for a tiny desk under the window between the bunk beds, and the girls had a roster to share it to do homework and Bible study. They offered to change the roster to give me a space, but I wasn’t one for homework and decided if I couldn’t go to my own school, I wouldn’t bother too much anyway.
By far the nicest person in the family was Uncle Paul. He was a tiny, very thin man who walked with a crooked back, bent over quite a long way. Brian Dirk and Bruce Munsford at the meeting were often rude about him. They did Quasimodo impersonations behind his back and walked around saying they couldn’t remember his name, but his face rang a bell.
I’m pretty sure Uncle Paul knew about this but he never complained or punished them. I would have stuck a knife in their bike tyres at least. He was very clever, and although he worked as a clerk somewhere and didn’t make much money, everyone at church said he was a genius and if he had been a worldly person, which he wasn’t, he would have been a great professor or scientist or something equally important.
But the story was he devoted his brain to the study of Revelations and had written two books about it that were printed by the church and even sold in the big book cupboard in the entrance hall of our meeting. I thought he would only read Bible things, but he read all kinds of interesting books. He told me he was very fond of insects and showed me a collection of books on his shelves about them. Many had fascinating drawings or photos blown up so you could see all their bits and pieces, and he told me stories about them I could have listened to for the longest time. I told him one day I wished he had been one of my teachers at school because he made everything sound so interesting. He kindly said he wished he had been one of my teachers, because he would have been lucky to have an excellent learner in his class. No one had ever called me that before, so I was pretty chuffed and rolled those words around and around in my head for a long time later, particularly when things were a bit dark.
Lots of little bad things and five very big bad things happened during my stay with the Roystons.
The first very bad thing was that I hated, hated, hated Maudie’s school. Because it was nearly the end of the year, everyone had already made friends, and there were no friend spaces available anywhere. I missed Venita and Maynard and hoped someone would explain to them why I had suddenly disappeared. I wondered who they would be friends with now, and whether they wouldn’t need me anymore when I went back next year. I thought about writing a letter to Maynard, but I realised I didn’t know his address. I asked if I could look in the Roystons’ telephone directory to find it but they said they didn’t keep one – all the numbers they needed were in the list of church members that were copied and distributed at the beginning of each year.
My temporary teacher seemed okay but didn’t try very hard to help me fit in, and largely left me alone. She seemed perpetually exhausted. Sometimes she set us work and rested her forehead on the desk at the front of the room. One day she didn’t even look up when the bell sounded; she just lifted her right hand and waved us all away. Her name was Gloria Gizzard, and I wondered to what extent an ugly name had contributed to a tired life.
I spent the breaks by myself, although for the first couple of days Maudie and her friend Susan came to find me. But I could tell Susan wasn’t that keen about being friends with me and by the end of the first week they gave up. Maudie walked to school with me, but I walked home by myself.
I spent a fair amount of time in the library. The librarian was nice, although not as good as Mrs Sandicock at Rostrevor Primary. They had three books on knights I hadn’t seen before, so that was a bit of a highlight. I asked if I could see a telephone book, but she said they didn’t keep them in the library and I wasn’t allowed to go into the staffroom. One lunchtime I decided to go and look in a phone booth I had seen on the way to school. I took a pencil and a piece of paper so I could write down addresses. I would look up Maynard’s address, the Hodgesons’ address and Aunty Maisie’s address so I could at least write people letters and let them know where they could reach me.
I didn’t know you weren’t allowed to leave the school yard without permission, although I should have realised that when I was the only one to walk out of the front gates. I must have taken a lot longer to walk to the box and find all the names than I realised because when I returned to school, everyone was back in class. There were three prefects walking around the grounds, pretending, as I found out later, to be looking for me, but really they were just having an extended lunchtime and giggling together.
One saw me and pointed and they all ran towards me calling out my name, which was a bit unnerving. They marched me to the head’s office. I kept twisting and pulling myself away from them, but they were treating me like an escaped prisoner they’d found, and each of them was hanging on to a handful of my shirt or skirt. I must have started yelling at them and pushing back, because the note that went home to Aunty Jean said I had been violent and abusive, having run away from school. None of this was true of course, but no one believed me. I wasn’t planning on giving Aunty Jean the note, but they were smarter at Grange Primary than at Rostrevor and sent a copy of it home with Maudie.
The headmistress asked me a pile of questions that made it clear she had already made up her mind about what had happened and asked me to turn out my pockets. She took my note with the addresses and phone numbers away. She had tried to ring Aunty Jean, but luckily I knew she had gone to ladies’ Bible class that day, so I thought I would be safe. I didn’t know then about the duplicate note with Maudie.
The very worst thing about this was that Aunty Jean rang my dad and put me on the phone to him. I tried to explain I was just looking for addresses and phone numbers because we had left before I could get them, but this seemed to make Dad cross.
‘So this is all my fault, Dorcas, is it? Because I wouldn’t let you go to your own school after your mum left, you had to misbehave?’
‘No! Dad! I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m just saying this is why I had to leave school to go to a phone box to get all the details. I wanted to write some letters.’
‘Dorcas, you don’t even write to your brother Daniel, so why did you have to write to everyone else when you’ll see them soon enough?’
‘But I don’t know when I’ll see Maynard and I don’t get pocket money here because Aunty Jean said you didn’t leave any for me and they can’t subsidise me so I can’t ring. But Uncle Paul says he will give me stamps, and I want to make sure Maynard is still my friend next year.’
Nothing changed his mind about my motives or my guilt. Yet another grown-up had made a decision without knowing the facts. I knew my brother Daniel secretly wanted to be a lawyer, even though our church frowned on this and no one so far had become one. I decided I’d urge him on so he could take on cases like mine and sue for justice. Although hearing my dad’s voice was comforting, the fact he was so cross with me was not.
Luckily for me, Uncle Paul was listening to all of this from his little study room, and after the call he summoned me. There was almost no room for me to be in the space with him. It was more a cupboard than a study really, and I think it might have been made from half of the laundry. It had shelves that went from the floor to the ceiling all the way around, with a very small window on one side with his desk pushed up beneath the shelves. There were so many books crammed on the shelves they all sagged in the middle.
He asked me to tell him right from the beginning what had happened. And before I started he said, ‘Now, my dear Dorcas. You and I know you are a splendid teller of tales, a quality I much admire because I myself am a man of infinitesimal imagination. However, on this occasion, I would be most grateful if you would look hard at the words you are saying, and check that they match up perfectly with the events of the day. Is that a reasonable request?’
‘Right-o, Uncle Paul,’ I said. This meant I spoke quite slowly and screwed my eyes up a bit in the telling to make sure I did the matching thing he was seeking. I explained everything to him, including my fear that Maynard wouldn’t remember me, and that I needed to check that Ruthy and Caleb and Mr Driver were okay, although I knew Mr Driver’s details, so that wasn’t a problem. I explained that I didn’t write to Daniel because Ruthy did that for all of us, and he didn’t write back much anyway.
Uncle Paul listened very carefully. He looked at me the whole way through the story, a bit like the way Mrs Johnson and Mr Driver used to do. When I was finished, he said to leave it to him and he would make sure I had all the addresses and numbers I needed. He took me into the kitchen where, in the corner, was a little telephone table with a green Telecom phone on it. We didn’t have a phone that sat on a table anymore. Mum had asked Dad for an apricot-coloured one that hung on the wall. But I knew the Roystons wouldn’t want the latest phone, probably just on principle, but maybe because they were poorer than us.
He told me to sit down and get ready for some talking. He looked up the Christadelphian phone book, and he rang Aunty Maisie and asked her to put Caleb on the phone. I couldn’t believe my luck. Aunty Jean came into the kitchen and asked what was going on, and he just turned and gave her a look and she stormed out again. I have a feeling he didn’t use that look all that often, but when he did, Aunty Jean knew he meant it. There’s a bit in the Bible that says the man is the head of the family and wives have to obey their husbands. I didn’t really like this quote, but at that point in time I could see some benefits. After I’d spoken to Caleb, who was still very worried about the sacrifice thing, for a few minutes I hung up and wondered what I should do next. Uncle Paul came out of his little room and looked up another number. He rang the Hodgesons and asked them to put Ruthy on the phone.
Ruthy seemed to be having quite a nice time with them but was very homesick and cried for a while on the phone, which made me want to cry too, but I was worried if I did, Aunty Jean would say I couldn’t ring and upset her, so I sniffed all the snot up. After that call, Uncle Paul said he didn’t have the number for Daniel or for Maynard, but he would look them up at work and bring the numbers home the following night. I ran to him and gave him a hug, which wasn’t hard, because he wasn’t much bigger than me all bent over, and he patted me on the back and said I was welcome. He also told me to come to see him any time I was worried about something and we would problem-solve together, rather than me making up a solution by myself. This was such a reassuring idea that I hugged him again. I’m not sure how much he got hugged, because he really seemed to appreciate it. He kept forgetting to get the other two numbers and addresses, but I was sure eventually he would remember because he was a kind person. I didn’t nag him because I thought if Aunty Jean heard me, she would interfere. At least I had two numbers now and I had heard Caleb and Ruthy’s voices, which was better than only seeing them on Sundays.
The second very bad thing that happened was at Sunday school prize night. I got to see Dad on Sunday mornings at the Memorial Meeting, when all three of us sat next to him in a row. We were always so glad to see him that we didn’t play up and he told us he was very proud of us. If there was a communal lunch, he had lunch with us and then said goodbye as we got ready to go into Sunday school at 3 pm. He picked Caleb up from Sunday school at four and had dinner with Aunty Maisie, and that made Caleb very lucky because he got to see Dad for most of the day. I used to run out of the hall as soon as my class finished and wait on the pavement so I could see him before he took Caleb away. I tried to be brave and cheerful so I wouldn’t upset him. But I could feel my heart breaking and breaking and breaking when his car drove off, and sometimes I had to go into the girls’ toilets and cry a bit before I let the Roystons find me to go home.
I wanted to go into the Sunday night meeting so I could nurse his Bible and hymn book and sit with him, but Aunty Jean said I would be too tired for school on Monday and made me stay at home with Maudie and Helen. This caused me to be sad and bad-tempered and meant I often tried to pick a fight with them. They would just look at me in surprise and refuse to have an argument back. I suspect this is because they were more godly than me by quite a long way. I did wonder sometimes though if godly and boring went hand in hand. I didn’t want to be boring, so did that mean I would never be accepted into the Kingdom of God when Jesus came back and we all came up out of the dust of the earth to be judged?
The terrible bit was every Sunday I asked Dad if he could bring in our prize night dresses, and every Sunday he forgot. Eventually he put our dresses in the back of the station wagon, and somehow spilled oil all over mine. Ruthy’s was fine, and she got to wear it, and it was really lovely. Aunty Jean said I had to wear my usual Sunday school dress, even though even her girls had a new frock for prize night. I possibly had a bit of a tantrum about it, and she put me in the bedroom and told the other two to stay out of there until I learned to be less vain and more grateful.
It wasn’t really about having a new dress that upset me the most. It was that Mum had made that dress for me, and made it with polka dots on it, and hadn’t made it orange, and she hadn’t said goodbye to me but had finished my dress. I continued to be upset and sullen all day before the prize night, until Aunty Jean decided I couldn’t go at all for being so bad, and could stay home with Peter in my room. This threw me into a panic – not because I wouldn’t go on the stage in a new dress, but because I wouldn’t see my dad at all, and he would hear I had been badly behaved and would be very upset with me. I begged. I pleaded. I cried. I made promises. I couldn’t call on Uncle Paul for help because he had gone into Halifax Street early to hear the testimony of a boy called Iain Walters who wanted to be baptised. I didn’t get to go to prize night, and my Dad was so disappointed in my behaviour I thought he might not pick me up and take me home when Mum came back from Scotland. That night, I thought it was possible to die of sadness, but later I learned that it could get even worse.
The third very bad thing that happened was something Peter told me about Daniel. I was hanging around the door of his room one day after school, and he had told to go away and play with the other babies, which made me cross. For some reason I thought responding with ‘You’re the baby’ was a smart reply. I picked up a pen that had fallen out of his school bag near his door and threw it at him. He said he knew I was in love with him but he’d rather marry his mother’s old mop, even after she’d used it to wash the toilet floor, than an idiot like me. I felt the need to comment on the large number of zits covering his face, and I believe I called him Chokito features. I had apparently poked the bear too hard with this comment, and he came back at me in a fury. He rose from his chair, came over to the door and stood over me so his face was only an inch from mine. His breath was very stinky, and right there and then I decided the wedding was off. I didn’t flinch because that would show girls were weaker than boys.
‘You’re going to go just the way of your brother, aren’t you? You’re all the same in your family. Too sure of yourselves by half. So sure everyone will adore you. Think you are all so good-looking and clever. Well, Daniel-boy wasn’t so clever when they found him with Esther Dangerfield with their pants down behind the kitchens at the interstate youth camp, was he?’ he sneered.
This was news to me. I felt the shock that came with instinctively knowing I had been told a truth. I knew Daniel had done something he shouldn’t have, and although we kids had tried to guess what it was, we didn’t really know. We had made lists to try to work it out, and these had included the following possible reasons: he stole money from the collection plates when he helped Dad tally the takings on Sunday morning; he kept saying he was going to be a lawyer, even though Christadelphians said you shouldn’t be because you might help a judge make a decision that was against God’s will; and he’d refused to go to Aunty Maisie’s for Christmas lunch because she made us eat her manky prawn cocktail.
We had agreed that we just couldn’t see Daniel stealing, and that the other two items didn’t seem bad enough to cause Mum and Dad to send him away. As Ruthy said, it was an enigma, which apparently is a thing wrapped in a thing that’s a mystery, or some such.
‘Well, at least Esther Dangerfield was the prettiest girl at the camp, and she liked my brother the best and I bet she didn’t like you,’ I said, not guessing until much later that this was an arrow straight to his heart.
‘Yeah. Well look where that got him,’ shouted Peter, who pushed me into the corridor and slammed the door. He barely spoke to me for the rest of my stay, and could hardly bear to look at me ever again.
The fourth very bad thing was the caravan. Every day the teacher made a long list of revision homework we should do for the exams. Although my school had told Dad the curriculum would be largely the same, I didn’t recognise much of the work we were revising in the classroom, and the homework may have been written in Zulu for all I could understand it. And I just couldn’t find the energy to do schoolwork when I got home. I would take my library books and sit on the top bunk and look through them until teatime, but homework just seemed a waste of time when I was so far behind.
Unfortunately, while my new temporary teacher barely had the energy to lift her head from the desk, she found the get up and go to write a note to Aunty Jean, again delivered through Maudie, to complain that I had not done a skerrick of homework since arriving at the school. Maudie had tried to be loyal and warned me she’d been given the letter, but I felt angry that I was even at her stupid school and just shrugged away the chance to fix the problem.
Aunty Jean was furious. I decided I would have to rely on the kindness of Uncle Paul to get me through this mess and waited in the driveway for his car to pull up from work. But Maudie came out to say her mum wanted to see me, and when I said I was waiting for her dad, she said there would be no point because he had gone to Keith for work and wouldn’t be home until Sunday morning.
What can she do to me that she hasn’t already done? I thought, as I walked in behind Maudie, feeling quite defiant. But once again I learned that grown-ups can surprise you and even nasty, bad-tempered women with no imaginations like Aunty Jean can make up new ways to make you sad. She grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me into the back garden. She threw open the door of the cat-wee-smelling old caravan, pushed me in and closed the door. Through the broken window I could just see her mean eyes and a sprinkling of the Pocks of Poo.
‘You can stay there until I see some homework out of you. Maudie will bring your school bag out. You won’t come in until I call you for dinner, and you’d better have some work to show me when I do.’
She trudged back inside, flattening any green shoot or little insect that foolishly tried to thrive in her pathway. I imagined being as small as a beetle, wondering why this giant had come to kill and crush her way through a tiny world. I hoped there were no Borrowers living anywhere near the Roystons, because contact with one of those enormous fleshy feet could mean the end of a whole family. I could imagine Mr Clock shaking his little fist at the enormous battleship of a human bean that was my Aunt Jean.
For the next few weeks, I was sent to the stinky, skanky, dirty, cobwebby prison that was the caravan. I hated it and was often a bit scared of it. I sat at the formica table and did as little as I could to suggest some progress. But when they called me for dinner, I put on an acting face for them. I would whistle as I walked to the back door, smile at Aunty Jean and hand over my work, which thankfully, after a night or two, she didn’t even look at, and say how much I loved the caravan and could I sleep out there and have my dinner there because it was so much fun.
This irritated Aunty Jean no end, but it didn’t fool Maudie, who kindly snuck out some cleaning rags and warm soapy water in jars for me to try to make at least a few spots clean enough to bear. Helen donated a poor African person’s crocheted rug for me to sit on, and wrote out the answers to some of my homework questions so I could copy them into my exercise book to maintain just enough peace for the last few weeks of school. I was managing it all pretty well, I thought, until one night after tea, when we were studying the Bible together, Aunty Jean made a point of reading 1 Timothy 2:9: ‘Likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire.’
Stupid Poo-head Peter, as I now referred to him in my head, sniggered, and he and his mother looked at each other in a knowing way.
‘My mum might wear fancy dresses and high heels, but our house is always clean, and she would be ashamed of the filthy caravan in your garden and I can’t wait to tell my Aunty Maisie about it because she’s a neat freak and will be very, very interested,’ I said, and I ran out of the room, down the back steps and into my prison, even though it was now quite dark and therefore extra scary.
It was Uncle Paul who coaxed me out and walked me to my room so I wouldn’t have to bear the wrath of the Bearded Boodlesnot, as I now referred to Aunty Jean in my head. Helen and Maudie were quite kind and suggested I just lay low for a few days, but that night I wasn’t sure I could take it much longer and planned to run away to Anne King’s house and explain I could just live in the empty house when they went on holidays.
The next morning, I knew my escape plans were hopeless, but Uncle Paul came into our bedroom with my school things out of the caravan and told me I wouldn’t be going down there again. This signalled an uneasy truce between me, the Bearded Boodlesnot and Poo-head Peter. It would seem my Aunty Maisie was good for something after all.
But the fifth very bad thing was very bad and definitely the worst. One night, we girls were all sitting on our beds talking. They were asking me what I thought about boys, and I noticed I had quite a few views to share with them about all sorts of things. Maudie and Helen were so quiet and meek they made a good audience, and I found I would talk and talk and talk and they would happily sit and listen. Maudie asked if I had ever kissed a boy, and I said no but that I did have someone ready to marry me whenever I said yes. They asked me about Teddy Edwards and it may be true that I coloured in a few things about him. I might have suggested that he was sixteen, and that his dad was very wealthy and drove a Rolls Royce. I might have advised them that he had his own plane and flew us to Melbourne for picnics sometimes. I could have described his house as having fifteen rooms with a butler. I might have described a crown he had made for our wedding with diamonds and pearls in it.
After we had discussed whether I should marry him or not, I asked them which part of themselves they would cover up if they were in the bath and the house caught on fire and they had to rush out to save their lives and they only had a small handtowel. Maudie said she would cover her chest up and Helen said she would cover her front bottom. I discussed the value of the back bottom cover-up for some time, but we agreed that front bottoms or bosoms would be the way to go because you could always sit down or back up to a wall to cover the back side. I hadn’t realised the door had opened a tiny bit and Aunty Jean was listening.
She rushed into the room, dragged me down from the top bunk, and smacked me hard on the backside. She said I was a vain and rebellious child, and she would not have me dragging her girls into sin and from the path of Light. She said it wasn’t surprising given the antics of my mother, with her fashionable dresses and orange hair and high heels and lipstick, and she wouldn’t be surprised if what they said was true, and that Mum and Dad were divorcing and Mum was never coming home again because she could not live The Way anymore. She waved a little key at me and I realised it was the key that could lock their Telecom green phone.
‘You will make no more calls from this house. You can see your brother and sister on Sundays. I will not reward this kind of behaviour.’ She triumphantly put the key down the front of her dress, and goodness knows she may as well have put it in the Cracks of Doom from The Lord of the Rings as between those two enormous melons.
But it wasn’t the key to the phone that upset me. It was what she said about Mum never coming home. Because these nasty words matched up with the words I heard in my nightmares at night. Jesus seemed to have decided to use Aunty Jean as the prophet of misery. Those words were out in the air now, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.