CHAPTER 17

The Hodgesons were very kind to Ruthy. Sister Hodgeson asked her to call them Aunty Ada and Uncle Ken, but she was so used to hearing them called Brother and Sister Hodgeson by Mum and Dad she just couldn’t do it.

Sister Hodgeson sat down with her on the first night with them and made a list of all of Ruthy’s favourite foods, the games she liked to play and the books she preferred to read. She was allowed to watch television with them for the whole evening if she wished and stayed up half an hour later each night than we were allowed at home. She was allocated a seat of her own in the television room, and a rug and pillow on it to snuggle up if she wanted to. Next to it was a small side table just for her, that always had a drink and treat on it. When she went to bed, they both came into her room with a chair and took turns reading a story to her.

They bought her new clothes, new books and five new exercise books. For the first three weeks after Mum left, she turned up at Sunday school with a new outfit on each time. This freaked Caleb out, who said they must think she belonged to them now, but Ruthy told him not to be stupid. It was just that they had never had a kid of their own and they were enjoying playing happy families.

Mum had put Ruthy’s biscuit tin with all of her notebooks in the case she packed for her. That was wise of Mum, because it might have been the last straw for Ruthy if she hadn’t been able to keep writing in them, and she liked to take old ones out and review what had happened in the past, but we all had to have a good think about the fact Mum seemed to know the secret location for all of our precious things.

Brother Hodgeson made a special wooden pencil box and carved Ruthy’s name on the side of it. Sister Hodgeson filled it up with all sorts of pens. I was particularly jealous of the set of pencils they gave her, with the most wonderful range of rainbow colours. They took her on outings after school and on Saturdays. She went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the movies, during which she was allowed to eat popcorn and a choc-top ice-cream. Sister Hodgeson hugged her quite a bit.

Ruthy said at first this was fine. She was the centre of attention and nothing she said or did made either of them cross – not that Ruthy caused grief at home anyway as a rule. But after a while she found it a bit smothering. She felt like a little doll they wanted to play with. She was paraded in front of their friends like a wind-up toy. She grew tired of been chucked under the chin and asked to sit on the knees of all their old friends. She particularly disliked it when they took her to visit Sister Hodgeson’s father in the rest home. His legs were very bony and she kept slipping off them when they put her on his knee. He liked to pick his nose, and sometimes did it the whole way through a visit. He flicked little bits of goobies all over the room, and Ruthy constantly panicked that one would flick on to her and she would scream or faint. He liked to force her mouth open so he could look at her teeth. Sometimes he put his fingers in her mouth and counted them over and over. This made the Hodgesons laugh, but not Ruthy. She told me she was sorely tempted to clamp her teeth shut on his yellow, gnarly fingers, but thought she’d better not. They were so fragile she imagined they would snap off in her mouth and she might accidentally swallow one of them. This might lead to her being taken by ambulance – or police car, given biting off old people’s fingers was probably an offence – to the Royal Adelaide Hospital to have them surgically removed from her stomach so they could be sown back on. We agreed this would not be worth the pleasure of biting him.

Her second least-favourite person to visit was a mutual friend of the Hodgesons’ and Aunty Maisie called Sister Everude. Well, you can already guess the jokes about that name, but the sad thing was they weren’t really jokes because she was rude. She would look at you for a minute and then pass judgement.

‘Dorcas Wilson. Your hair is too long. It’s dangerous. It will get caught up in machinery and scalp you. Then you’ll be a little bald girl. How would you like that?’ Or ‘Dorcas Wilson. Don’t slouch like that. Pull those shoulders back. You don’t do justice to what God’s given you, girl, and that’s disrespectful to the Lord. If you were my girl, I’d strap a back straightener to your waist.’

As well as saying rude things, Sister Everude made chicory essence coffee, which is just about the most disgusting thing in the world you can drink. When Ruthy visited her with the Hodgesons, she insisted Ruthy have a mug full of the nasty stuff. Mr Hodgeson realised she hated it and took her cup to the sink and tipped it out when Sister Everude wasn’t looking. He would turn and wink to show they were part of a conspiracy.

Someone Ruthy didn’t mind visiting was a very old lady in the rest home. Her name was Sister Ida Rose, and the Hodgesons visited her because she was on their list for a welfare visit. Ruthy said they would take her into the room, sing out hello to Ida Rose, and then leave Ruthy alone with her while they joined other welfare visitors in the tearoom for a good old natter. Apparently there was more tea drinking, cake eating and gossiping between the welfare visitors than actually sitting with the people on their lists.

Ida Rose was a tiny little woman propped up in bed with lots of pillows. She had silvery hair and beautiful soft pink skin. She smelled of talcum powder and roses. Although she was fairly blind, her hearing was top notch, so Ruthy could have conversations with her. She asked Ruthy all sorts of questions about who she was and what she liked to do. Ruthy said they were good questions, not the silly sort most grownups asked you like ‘Do you like school?’ and ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Ida Rose asked questions such as ‘What do you think of the fact that women can’t hold office in our meeting?’ or ‘Have you had much to do with computers and what do you think of them?’ She only spoke about herself if Ruthy asked her a question, but when asked, she would tell the truth and wouldn’t do a child’s version of the answer.

Ruthy asked her what it was like to be very old, and was she scared of dying. Ida Rose told Ruthy you sort of sink into being old without really noticing, and because it happens gradually you get used to it. She said the best thing about it was not having much to worry about except whether they’d put too much salt in the soup. The worst thing about it was that bits of you stopped working properly, you had to let strangers wash you and wipe your bottom, and you forgot bits of who you were sometimes. She said all we really had in life was the story of who we were that lived in our minds, and for some old people, even those stories slipped away. It was like watching your favourite movie with some scenes removed.

She wasn’t afraid of dying. She knew a lot about it because she had been a nurse in a palliative care hospital when she was a working person. She said bits of your brain start to die so you don’t really know what’s going on anyway. She told Ruthy the last sense you lose is your hearing, and so you should always talk to a dying person because that may be the last link they have to this world. Likewise, you should be careful what you talk about in their room when they are on their way out, because you think they can’t hear, but they might be able to, and some people’s last moments were awful because stupid staff or family members would say mean things about them that might be their last sounds on earth. She also told Ruthy she wasn’t worried about dying because many times during her life she’d wished she was dead. She suffered badly from depression, which was considered a weakness or a lack of faith in our church, and she had often wished she could just go to sleep and never wake up.

‘Living’s not for everyone, Ruthy. Living’s not for everyone. And loneliness is everything it’s cracked up to be,’ she said. Ruthy told me she filled up many pages in her notebook with Ida Rose stories and wisdom. I was pretty sure I’d like Ida Rose too. I made a list of questions I would like to ask her and passed them on to Ruthy in the hope she might try some out on the dear old lady.

Isn’t it unfair that only Christadelphians will have a chance to live eternal life? And given there’s not many of us, how was God thinking we’d get around to saving everyone anyway?
Why does God think you should stay with your husband or wife for your whole life? What if your husband gets a weeping ulcer like King Henry VIII and it stinks constantly? What if he grows mean? What if you love animals and he won’t let you ever have any?
Why are some sins considered worse than others? If Jesus was without sin, but then he did a little sin, he would no longer be sinless, regardless of the size of it, so how does the order of sins work, and why isn’t there a list in the Bible of different ones with different penalties by them? I find it very hard to believe that Jesus didn’t at least take the last egg sandwich at the Sunday school lunch even if someone else would have liked it.
Why can’t girls do things in our church? What was God thinking when he put all that stuff in about women being quiet and covering their heads and obeying blokes? Is God a bit biased to boys, and if so, why is that?
What do you think would have happened if God had been a girl?
Can you please tell Ruthy quite a bit more about when you suffered from depression. What exactly does it look like? Could it possibly be the same as head days and cross days? Did you yell at people you loved when you had depression? Is it children’s behaviour that causes it? When you wanted to die when you had it, did you ever consider getting on a plane instead? Can children cure depression in people if they behave extremely well and refuse to have pets? If you don’t have depression now, what was the magic thing that made it go away?

I thought I’d just start with my first six questions and see what happened from there.

All three of us agreed that living with other people was a bit weird, because every family and every house seemed to have its own strangeness about it. Ruthy said the Hodgesons were pretty clean generally, but not as fussy as Mum, and that Mr Hodgeson missed the toilet bowl quite a lot and left bits of beard in the sink when he shaved. Ruthy had taken to tearing off bits of toilet paper and covering the seat and the floor where her feet would touch the ground before she sat down. This had resulted in her completely blocking the toilet one night so nothing would flush, and Brother Hodgeson had to kneel down with a big rubber plunger to unblock it. He didn’t get cross though, which was quite relieving, and Ruthy was secretly glad he had to kneel on his own urine dribbles to fix it, because this seemed a bit like justice.

We kids would meet in the ladies’ toilets at the meeting on Sundays to swap stories, and sometimes Ruthy cried, which made me cry, and we both wished we could just go home and it would be like it used to be.

Aunty Maisie caught us crying one Sunday, and issued an ultimatum that we were not to speak to each other during the week because I upset the little ones. This meant we had to save everything up for small pieces of time on Sundays and had to find hidey places to meet where we wouldn’t be overheard. The best place was behind the store shed in the carpark, and all three of us would run there when we got a chance to see if one of the others was free.

Ruthy’s other big problem, besides the bathroom situation, was her writing. It was lovely at first to be given books and pens, but the Hodgesons nagged her to read her notebooks to them. This was definitely not allowed. We had a big rule that no one ever opened Ruthy’s notebooks, and even I didn’t disobey, although to be honest that was largely because I just wasn’t that interested. She started to worry that they snuck in and read them when she was asleep or playing outside. This became a constant worry for her.

She decided to set a test to see if she was right. The first thing she did was to find a hiding place for her notebooks. This wasn’t an easy thing to do in a house you don’t know, because it was hard to work out what the Hodgesons might use regularly.

She wasn’t going to school, so she couldn’t ask a friend to look after them for her. In the end, I asked Anne King if she would care for Ruthy’s books, and she said of course she would. Ruthy and I agreed she was trustworthy. We met behind the store shed one Sunday for the handover, and Anne offered to cut her wrist a bit if Ruthy wanted to do the same to make a blood oath, but Ruthy said that was okay, she trusted her. I find a bit of blood quite interesting, but it makes Ruthy queasy.

Ruthy kept one book as her real notebook, and one that would be her test one. She found a loose panel in her wardrobe she could put the real one in and left the test one under her pillow. At first in the pretend one she wrote just ordinary accounts of what was happening. This was to set the scene of the crime and to give us time to work out our strategy for the trap.

We invited Anne King to join us behind the store shed between the Memorial Meeting and Sunday school to work out what Ruthy should write as bait. Each of us agreed to think hard about it all week and to come up with at least three good ideas. Here are the ideas we pooled.

Caleb’s list:

– Brother Hodgeson smells like poo

– Brother Hodgeson breaks wind all the time

– Brother Hodgeson is a big burper

We said thank you very much to Caleb, because he had tried very hard, but we didn’t think any of these would get the reaction we were seeking. Caleb said he didn’t mind. But he was pretty sure his points would be right anyway because Brother Hodgeson had the look of a burper.

Anne’s list:

– Sister Hodgeson’s cooking is making Ruthy ill

– There are hundreds of cockroaches living under the bathroom carpet

– Ruthy would like to watch Bandstand with Mr Brian Henderson

We agreed that the Bandstand idea should be on the short list, because they seemed so eager to please Ruthy. They didn’t watch it, and if they suddenly turned it on or asked if she’d like to see it, we knew we’d be on to something.

Ruthy’s list:

– Aunty Maisie says Sister Hodgeson is vain and a terrible cook

– Aunty Maisie says she wants to pick Ruthy up from the Hodgesons’ and keep her at Aunty Maisie’s place because the Hodgesons are spoiling her

– Aunty Maisie is going to make Ruthy leave behind all the clothes and presents the Hodgesons have given her when it’s time to go home

We congratulated Ruthy for this set. It was clever to use Aunty Maisie, who was like a Christadelphian army general, to lure the Hodgesons into a trap. The trouble was, even if they were brave enough to mention any of these ideas to Aunty Maisie, it might all be kept from us, so we might not know what effect we had had.

I waited patiently until we’d worked through all the other lists because, as Dad used to say, you’re not a leader if there’s no one following you. In the past, when the others had refused to participate in my plays, or to do marching drills to the records in the backyard, Dad had said my problem was that I just ran very fast in front of people rather than taking them with me. He said I had to work more on my psychology. I had to walk back to where people were, take them by the hand and lead them to the new place, listening to them first to work out what story would work for them, instead of just imposing my view.

So I decided I would hear everyone else’s ideas first, respectfully discuss them, and then drop mine, which would be the winning one, right at the end. That way everyone would have had a turn, even though it would be a bit of a waste of time. I only had the one thing on my list, but I knew it was a beauty.

My list:

– Write that you are planning to run away

Because Caleb was a runner, and everyone knew about it, I thought they’d believe this one easily. And there is no way the Hodgesons would want anyone else to know Ruthy had scarpered while they were caring for her.

There was a unanimous chorus of yes from the trio of fellow conspirators, and we spent the rest of our meeting discussing exactly what Ruthy should write. Caleb insisted we give the mission a code name. The three of us didn’t think this was a good idea but went along with it given we had clearly rejected all his bodily functions suggestions for Brother Hodgeson. We called it operation Fly Away. We also gave in to using a code suggested by Caleb. ‘The pigeons are pooing’ would mean there was a problem, and ‘the cat’s had kittens’ would mean it was going well.

Caleb’s advice would turn out to be useful.

During Sunday school, instead of writing notes about what the teacher was saying as Ruthy usually liked to do, she drafted her letter so we could hear it before we disbanded for the week. We all ran to the usual spot as soon as the last prayer was over, even though we would get into trouble for holding up the adults who wanted to take us straight home.

Here is what Ruthy planned to write.

I am so lonesome for Dorcas and Caleb and Mr Driver next door. I am forbidden to ring them during the week and it is breaking my heart. None of us have been allowed to ring Mr Driver, and I am very worried about him because he is an old, old man with a wooden leg from the war, and might have fallen in his shed and hit his head. I have nightmares about him calling for help with no one able to hear him. In my dreams I hear him wail: ‘Ruthy! Ruthy! Come to my aid, my angel!’ I have undertaken the research about how to get back to check on him. If I take the number 19 bus into Grenfell Street in the city, and walk along until I see the sign for the number 23 that will take me to St Bernards Road, I think I can find my way home from there. I plan to leave next Friday morning after Brother Hodgeson leaves for bowls. I will slip out the back door when Sister Hodgeson isn’t looking. I can’t bear the worry any longer.

I thought the bit about ‘come to my aid, my angel’ was bunging it on a bit thick, but otherwise this was a work of art. For the first time in ages, it was almost fun to go our separate ways, operation Fly Away in train.

We were all desperate for a report. Anne King rang me on Wednesday night, and I was allowed to take the call because she was a King girl. I told her I hadn’t heard anything, of course, and she should ring Ruthy.

She rang back an hour later to say that Ruthy couldn’t say much because she was being overheard, but she sounded very happy and said ‘the cat has had kittens’. We tried to work out a way to tell Caleb, but even Anne King was scared to ring because Aunty Maisie would answer. She came up with the brilliant idea that she could ring and ask Aunty Maisie if she would like a kitten because they had a spare one from a new litter. We knew Aunty Maisie hated cats, but with a bit of luck Caleb would hear about the call and know that things were going to plan.

We all met behind the shed as soon as possible the following Sunday, and Ruthy was ecstatic. She said the first thing that happened was that Sister Hodgeson asked her what she’d meant when she said the cat had kittens. This confirmed her theory that they were always listening to her on the phone. She said Anne King’s cat had given birth and they were all very excited about the dear little babies.

The next thing that happened was that all the money she had saved disappeared from her purse. She guessed this was so she didn’t have the bus fare on Friday morning. The third thing that happened was that the Hodgesons asked if there was anyone she hadn’t heard from for a time she would like them to call, and Ruthy said she would make a list for them. Finally, Mr Hodgeson stayed home from bowls on Friday morning, and when Ruthy decided to try opening the back door to see what happened, she found it locked for the very first time.

At first we were jubilant. We had proved that the scheming Hodgesons were untrustworthy, just as we expected. But after the excitement wore off, Anne King asked what would happen next.

Ruthy said one thing that would happen is she would have to be careful what she wrote even in her hidden book and would keep looking for new hiding places for it. But she admitted that the cost of being right was that her guardians now never let her out of their sight and were even more smothering than ever. We decided she had better write something about wondering why she had been so silly as to think she would run away when the Hodgesons were the best people ever, and hope this would create some ease. She agreed and later told us that after she’d done this there was a noticeable sense of relief about the house, but that they remained watchful.

The only other tricky thing about our campaign was that Aunty Maisie stomped up to Sister King the following Sunday asking what all this nonsense was about kittens. Anne’s mum asked Anne afterwards why she had rung Aunty Maisie and offered her a non-existent cat. Anne said none of the kids at Sunday school liked Aunty Maisie, and knew she was allergic to cats, and she did it as a dare. Anne’s mum said, ‘Well. I’m not sure that’s a nice thing to do, Anne, and I’d rather you didn’t do it again,’ but Anne said her mum gave her father a look that said, ‘Isn’t that a hoot?’ and that night when Anne listened at their door she heard them laughing about it. They said it was a brilliant idea and perhaps they’d sneak a couple of big cats into Aunty Maisie’s old Holden and let them piss all over it because nothing, absolutely nothing, gets that smell out of a car.

The best thing about Ruthy staying with the Hodgesons though, as far as I was concerned, was the message Ida Rose sent back to me. Ruthie had written it down carefully in her notebook, so she could relate the old woman’s thinking as accurately as possible. Ida had dictated a letter for me, which I thought showed she was a very serious and respectful person. Ruthy said Ida was very patient, saying a few words slowly in little bundles so Ruthy could get them all down.

Dear Dorcas,

Thank you for sending me an excellent set of questions. I hope you don’t mind, but I don’t always have a lot of breath, so I thought I’d spend it all on the answer to question number six. I suffered from depression most of my life. I use the word ‘suffered’ because it’s a good word to describe how you feel. Life seems desperate and hard and some days you can’t find any light in it. You feel very heavy inside and you don’t always have energy left over to deal with life’s problems or the people around you. I have a feeling from what your sister has told me that your question relates to your mother. If it does, it’s not your fault if she is depressed. It’s something that happens in the chemicals in your body, and it’s not due to naughty children or failing to pray.

Do you know much about the Dorcas of the Bible? She was a good person who helped other people. But did you know she was so good that when she died and they told Peter the Apostle about it, he came to see her body and brought her back to life?

Although it’s not your fault if your mum is very sad, remember Dorcas’s good works, and see if you can help your mother by helping others. Even if the value you bring is for other people and not your mother, she will appreciate it when she comes home and you are all together again, and it will make her proud and happier.

But did you know that Dorcas means gazelle? I think this might be appropriate for you, Dorcas. Gazelles are very adaptable, even if they are living in a desert. They can run very fast, and always keep their heads held high. They make different sounds to signal annoyance and danger. They do this to help keep others safe. So stay adaptable at the Roystons, even if it feels like a desert, keep your brother and sister safe as you have always done, and most of all, keep your head high like the gazelle you are.

Your friend in Jesus,

Ida Rose