AFTER TEA, DAD AND HARRY WENT TO CHECK THE HERD for cows calving. Sitting in Dad’s place at the table, I started my letter. At the other end, Mum ironed tablecloths and shirts.
“Give Ruby our love,” she said.
I bent closer over the writing pad. I was not going to send their love. This was strictly my letter and I had lots of questions to be answered.
Dear Ruby,
I couldn’t call her Mum; it didn’t feel right. Even if Mum hadn’t given birth to me, I didn’t want to call Mum Pearl, or anything else but Mum.
Mum and Dad have told me you are my mother and Mum is my aunt. This feels queer to me and I can’t stop feeling you are still my aunt if you know what I mean?
It was difficult to explain. Mum was always there and Ruby visited once a year.
Why didn’t you keep me? Who is my father? I know he was already married. I want to know his name.
Would he like me? Did he know about me?
I want to write to him and if you have his address I would like it. Does he know I was born? He should be told now if he doesn’t know. What does he look like and what colour are his eyes?
I blotted the writing and dipped the nib of the pen in the ink bottle.
“Do I have brothers and sisters?”
Mum plonked the iron down hard on a farm shirt. “I don’t know. We never met your natural father.”
She was fibbing. Her face flushed, then went expressionless like when she met people she didn’t approve of. I would have bet my ten shilling note that Mum and Dad knew a lot about my father.
Do I have brothers and sisters? It would be good to know that.
It would be better than good — it would be exciting. Would they like me? Would I look like them? I might pronounce “e” differently to them.
I hope you don’t feel awful as I did when I was told you are my mother. At times I wish I didn’t know because there is a lot to think about. Mum and Dad told me at afternoon tea. Half the herd have calved and we are very busy. Harry goes back to camp at the end of the week.
I am,
Yours Faithfully,
Love, Helen Forbes.
I wrote my name because I couldn’t write your daughter. I didn’t feel it. I blotted the writing again, addressed an envelope, stamped it, put my letter inside, licked the gum on the envelope flap and sealed it.
Dad and Harry took off their oilskins in the back porch.
“Mabel had a sturdy bull calf. We’ll keep it,” Dad said, sinking into his chair with a sigh. “Like Winston, it’s black. A true Hereford.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “By George I’m weary tonight.”
“No fate worse than death for this bull calf, eh, sister cousin?” Harry teased. Mum frowned. She didn’t like Harry joking about my adoption. I threw two un-ironed tea towels at him. Harry didn’t pretend like Mum that everything was normal. My life had turned like a kaleidoscope. What was normal before appeared skewed. Dad patted my shoulder when he passed me, and Mum worked on as though the chore of telling me about my true parents could be tidied away and not spoken of again.
I might go on eating, talking, being Helen, but inside I felt as though I was on an ice floe in the Antarctic, or suspended in air, like the men coming down on the hay-making grab from a high haystack. In the mirror I looked at my arms, legs, face. They hadn’t changed but inside me I didn’t know who I was. Who am I? I asked the girl staring back from the mirror. My parents were not my parents, but an aunt and uncle; my once brother and sister were really cousins yet they still felt like my family. It was as bad as that song on the radio George Formby sang, strumming his tinny ukulele, of a family so mixed up someone was his own grandpa.
“Don’t tell Barbara, Mr Moore, or anyone, about Ruby and your birth.” Mum’s eyes bored into mine, impressing the seriousness of it until I felt wobbly inside. “Your birth is a very personal matter, Helen. Tell a single person and it will go around the district.”
Riding Ginger to school, I told him of Ruby and my upside-down life. “It’s the same, Ginger, but it’s not.”
Ginger’s ears went wide and straight up.
“Everything has changed, it feels funny.”
Ginger whinnied, shook his head and chewed his bit.
I lay along his neck. His mane needed brushing and smelt of sweat. “You are my only constant, Ginger.” I hoped Ginger knew what that meant. It was in The New Zealand Women’s Weekly and sounded noble, like something Helen of Troy would say.
Barbara wasn’t at school. I longed to tell her my news, but she didn’t come, and though Mum had said not to tell her, I just had to. Barbara would understand how I was feeling, because she lived with an aunt and uncle instead of her mother.
Barbara’s aunt came at playtime in her grubby cowshed frock and gumboots. She talked to Mr Moore and Miss Cristal. Playtime went on for ages. A weak sun shone as I turned and turned my end of the skipping rope. Mary Smithson turned the other end and both Primer and Standard girls skipped until they were puffed. Still the bell didn’t go. I played hopscotch with the others and wondered what Aunt was saying and when Barbara was coming back.
When we were finally back in the classroom, I saw Barbara’s inkwell had gone and I lifted her desk lid. Her desk was empty.
“Barbara has moved to Auckland,” Mr Moore said.
I felt my mouth open.
“Last night … er … she was collected. Barbara’s aunt and uncle couldn’t keep her any longer. They are too busy now it’s spring.”
“We never said goodbye.” My face felt hot.
Mr Moore rustled some papers together. “Yes. Well, Barbara’s leaving will be a blow for you, Helen. Perhaps she will write to you.”
“Did her aunt leave her new address?”
“She does not know her new address.”
Mr Moore set an algebra equation on the board. Bob Brown passed over a note:
The No-Party girl has gone no-where.
He sniggered under his breath. The Wormy boys had called her that every day. She had ignored them and, though it must have hurt her, she just shrugged. Had she wanted to leave Te Miro because of the non-party? She never spoke of her disappointment or embarrassment, but to me her empty desk and seat gaped like a missing tooth. Our plan of going to high school together vanished, and now that I was the only girl in Standard Six, there was no one to confide in. I didn’t feel close to Mary Smithson who was two years younger than me.
During the afternoon, while Mr Moore and the others played rounders, I went to Miss Cristal’s room to help Primers Two and Three read. Connie Brown was a slow reader and together we pronounced words phonetically. As we read, I wondered where Barbara was now. With her mother? Perhaps walking up Queen Street, saying, “This beats farm life.” Going into a milkbar for ice-cream. I had never seen a milkbar but Barbara knew all the flavours of ice-creams, milkshakes, brands of chocolate and lollies.
Miss Cristal took over Connie’s reading and I helped Primer One draw crayon pictures of farm scenes. Would I ever see Barbara again? Not unless I could get her address. I wanted to bawl, but of course I couldn’t. I had a family which felt like a true family, even though it wasn’t mine. I supposed I was lucky, not like a refugee in films: homeless and alone, trudging along a road with thousands of other people.
At home-time, the sun shone without warmth, and water lay in the paddocks. Ginger plodded and though I dug my heels hard into his sides he wouldn’t pick up speed. In books people said, “Walk on,” to a horse with a carriage, and the horse would take off smartly. I could say, “Walk on,” to Ginger all day, but his pace wouldn’t alter.
Barbara had gone as quick as a puff of wind. I no longer needed to hide my feelings from her about the non-party fiasco. But when the Japs came, who would I have to join the partisans with? She had loved Ahmed and missed him as much as I did. I still wondered who had stolen him. The apples were finished until next year. What else might the thief steal?
“Write to me, Barbara,” I said aloud to the wind. Those words might fly on the air and jog her to write to me.
Harry was getting the cows in and Mum and Dad were drinking tea.
I threw my school bag on the form. “Barbara has left school, left Te Miro.”
Mum raised her eyebrows. “Has she gone back to her mother?”
“I don’t know where she has gone. She talked once of having a granny.”
Dad pursed his lips together. “Foster children often call their carers by relatives’ names.
“Not only foster children!” It came out of my mouth like a rifle shot, though I hadn’t meant to say my thoughts aloud.
Mum jumped up from the table and ran into her bedroom.
Dad looked stern. “Lenny, Lenny,” he said. “Don’t make a meal of your adoption, or make a drama of it. You’re our daughter. Pearl is upset that you know of it before you’re fully grown, and she’s upset with Harry that he pushed us to tell you.”
“I’m not making a drama of it!” Dad was being unfair. “It feels funny, very queer, that I’m your daughter, but not.”
Dad poured tea into Mum’s tea cup. “I know, girl,” he growled. “We’ve given our youth to caring for and raising you and Jess and Harry. And that was natural and right, so do not think badly of us.” He looked me in the eye. “Okay?”
I felt uncomfortable. Dad was rarely direct or stern with me. My cheeks went hot. I shook my head, yes.
“And what Ruby is thinking, I wouldn’t care to guess. We should have told you as a toddler. I said then that you’d have accepted your adoption as normal, but Pearl insisted we do what the doctor advised.” He handed me the cupful of tea. “Take this to Mum.”
Mum was brushing her hair so savagely I thought the old wooden brush would break. I put the cup of tea on the dressing table and we eyed each other in the mirror. I was slightly taller than Mum and didn’t look like her.
“If you want, you can call us Pearl and Henry.”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, yes, Helen. At the time, we tried to do the right thing for you and Ruby,” she sniffed. “But now, with you so shocked …”
“Tell me the truth. About my father.”
“He had two girls. I don’t know their names. They would be grown up now.”
I was suddenly thrilled. I knew my heart couldn’t jump, but it felt as though it had leapt.
“I’ve got half-sisters!”
Mum took a sip of tea. “We never saw his photograph. Ruby said he was the love of her life.”
“I hope she replies soon to my letter!”
“So do I, Helen.”
Mum still wrote to Jess on Sunday nights but Jess hadn’t answered Mum’s letters or phoned. Mum and Dad knew she had graduated and they had not been asked to the ceremony. Harry said Mum looked expectant, then sad, each time she opened the mailbox and there was no letter from Jess.
Mum decided to phone her and we waited, unmoving, as she put through a toll call to the Nurse’s Home. An off-duty nurse answered and went to find Jess but she was not in her room and the nurse said she did not know whether Jess was on duty or not.
“Go to Hamilton and see her,” Harry said.
“We haven’t enough petrol coupons to travel to Hamilton,” Dad said. “With you going back to camp, it’s too late. If one of us went by train we wouldn’t be back in time for milking.”
“I’ll stop home from school. I’ll help milk,” I said.
Mum shook her head. “Jess will come home in her own good time.”
“Sometimes,” Harry sighed as I backed the Ford out, “Mum and Dad are as slow to move as Ginger.”
I drove down the road to the Smithson’s gateway.
“All you need is practice. Use the paddock to keep your driving up.”
Sadness swept over me. “I wish you didn’t have to go back to the war, Harry cousin.” After his three years away, I knew him again now.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “And don’t worry about being adopted. You’re our girl. Full stop.”
In the morning Ginger and I walked to the cowshed. He nudged Harry’s neck, as Harry stroked his nose. Harry and I hugged. I didn’t mind his bristles now and when he kissed me on the cheek, I kissed him back. He smelt like Dad.
“You’re my big little sister cousin,” he grinned. “Don’t forget that.”
I climbed the rail and slid onto Ginger’s back. Harry carried a calf under each arm and walked with us to the roadside pen. I wanted to howl and my throat felt blocked as though a plum was in it.
Tears came in my eyes. I swallowed hard. “Goodbye, brother cousin. Will I see you again, before you sail to Europe?”
“It depends on the army,” he said. He patted Ginger’s neck and waved me off. Before I turned the bend in the road I looked back through blurring tears.
Harry stood by the calf pen and waved again and I waved back. How had I lost the present Harry brought home especially for me? I wished I hadn’t been so careless with Ahmed.
“It’s not fair, Ginger, that Harry has to go to war,” I sniffed.
Ginger chewed in a gargled way around his bit. Hm-grm-mno.
Lessons dragged that day. The stupid FJC boys annoyed me like summer flies, flicking paper balls and pen nibs at me. I wanted to swat them away.
“We will go on with our study of the Napoleonic war,” Mr Moore said.
“Hooray!” The boys ran to the store room to get the wooden swords and axes they’d made. They were blunt and couldn’t hurt anyone but we were forbidden to touch each other with them and if that happened, we were kept inside doing extra maths.
Today it was my turn to be Napoleon and my French troops were Standards Three and Five. Donny Fromm was a Russian general and Fred Wormy the Duke of Wellington. Their troops were Standards Two and Four. We filed outside to the playground map and found Russia; in our last session, fighting had stopped outside Moscow. We recited battle names and countries as Mr Moore pointed to them, then we fought to get Moscow. My troops had burnt the countryside behind them and now entered Moscow triumphantly. I, Napoleon, would be victorious for a while.
“Charge!” I yelled, and rushed the Duke of Wellington. We were the same height. Whip, whap, his sword thudded, and jarred my arm as I bashed it with mine. The Russian general rushed up and hacked at my sword with his axe. Mary Smithson howled because Bob Brown struck her arm.
Mr Moore’s whistle shrilled. We stopped fighting.
“Bob, inside. Do the sums on the board,” Mr Moore said.
Bob slunk off and the battle started again.
Mr Moore told us about Napoleon’s eventual defeat by Russia, and we went inside to write an essay on what soldiers might feel in battle.
I dipped my pen nib in the inkwell and looked out the window. The lower pane was painted, but grey clouds showed in the top, unpainted pane. Where are you, Barbara? She loved the Napoleonic wars and we had stood back to back, yelling, whooshing our swords in front of us and fighting strongly together.
Mum was milking the cows again. I set the table and saw there was cold hogget for tea. I scrubbed and peeled vegetables, filled the pots, turned them on low and went to feed the calves. Fifteen percent of them had been kept as replacements for the herd. Mum chased two wild heifers that were to be milked for the first time. They shook off their teat cups, kicked off their legs ropes, smashed their body rope and jumped backwards out of the bail, running around the yard and trying to climb the rails.
Mum herded them back towards the bails. Dad limped about, arms wide to help. The heifers skittered and slid over the yard into the bails, their hides covered in muck. It was like a Wild West show! Dad leant against them and tied them up.
Mum leaned over, hands on knees. “I can still run. Tap-dancing stood me in good stead,” she puffed.
Several times a day, a mean voice spoke inside my head. I felt offended with Ruby, curious about my Australian father, and mad at Mum and Dad. A grizzling, whining anger came to me when I thought of my birth.
The first calves born were eating grass now and there were only a few more cows to calve. Feeding the calves was easier; the weather was warmer, the fruit trees in bud and birds nesting. I missed Harry and the way he challenged Mum and Dad with new ideas.
The BBC World News said the Americans were still battling the Japanese and it seemed they would never be defeated. Harry wrote a letter from camp and said he was settled in and would write before he left New Zealand. Mr Moore said the Allies were winning the war and that it would be over next year. Mum and Dad listened to the war news sitting in their chairs, not draped each side of the radio. They were positive the Japanese wouldn’t invade, but I couldn’t forget Mike and Harry talking about the Japs coming, and partisan groups.
“Harry and Mike are seasoned soldiers,” Dad said. “They could only foresee an invasion, but the American Marines are holding the Japs off our shores.”
Every day I ran up the house path and looked for a letter from Ruby or perhaps Barbara. No letters came addressed to me. One day I smouldered on my unanswered letter until after tea, then I accused Mum and Dad of keeping Ruby’s letter from me.
“Girl, that’s a nasty accusation.” Dad said. “Your adoption might still be painful for Ruby. Perhaps she doesn’t want to answer your questions.”
Mum glared at me. “What have you been reading? Where did you get the idea that we would keep mail from you?”
I closed my eyelids to slits and glared back. Weeks earlier I had finished reading Caddie Woodlawn and no one in their family hid mail. But they wouldn’t, because when the steamer came up-river with mail, it was an exciting event and everyone was there to collect it.
“Not receiving a reply from Ruby, it’s a thought I could naturally have.” I stopped slitting my eyes which was quite difficult to do.
Dad shook his finger at me. “You just have to wait, as Pearl and I do for a letter from Jess.”
There was a knock on the back door. Wide-eyed, we looked at each other. It couldn’t be Jess because she would have walked in. Dad went and opened the door. A policeman stood in the porch, the light shining on his badge.
“Charlie Burge,” Dad said. “Come in. Come in.”
“No, no …” Mum whispered.
I froze. Harry had died. The police or the vicar came to tell country people of a death.
Sergeant Burge put his hands up as though he was being arrested. “Now, Mrs Forbes. You know I haven’t come with news from the war.”
White-faced, Mum stood by the table. Dad gestured to his chair for Sergeant Burge to sit down. He was a big man who towered over Dad and the chair looked small as he eased himself into it. He took his hat off, put it on his knee and smoothed down his grey and black hair. We stared and waited.
“Is your son here?”
Dad spoke gruffly. “He is somewhere in the King Country. We don’t know where.”
Harry wasn’t in camp! So he’d gone to Mike’s hideout, after all. No wonder Mum and Dad had been relaxed about him — except for Mum’s instinctive reaction when the sergeant turned up.
“Harry has fought enough battles,” Mum cried. “The North African campaigners should be discharged.”
Sergeant Burge looked at Dad. “This is desertion. You know that, Henry. Harry could be shot.”
“They should have shipped the division on to Europe,” Dad said hoarsely. “Not given them leave at home.”
“If it is any consolation, thousands of men did not want to go back to camp,” Sergeant Burge said, “and hundreds haven’t. The police have the job of rounding them up.”
“The government, the army,” Mum cried, “rounding our sons up, when they know how defenceless we are against the Japanese.”
“Mrs Forbes, the official order at the moment is to take them back to camp.”
“Just like cattle!” Mum trembled. “Off to the works!”
Dad patted her arm. “Pearl, Pearl. Charlie doesn’t make the decisions.”
“They’ve got to go back to camp,” Sergeant Burge said. “And let the army and government sort it.”
“Harry has gone bush. In the King Country,” Dad said again. “We didn’t want to know details. We could tell no lies that way.”
Sergeant Burge stood up. “I’ll put that in my report.”
“Would you like a cup of tea, Charlie?” Dad said.
“No, thank you. I’m on to another family tonight.”
I was glad Sergeant Burge wasn’t stopping for a cup of tea. He seemed an enemy and I would have felt like spitting in the tea as I made it. Would he have clapped handcuffs on Harry if he’d been here? It was chill-making to know Harry and Mike were being hunted like criminals. Dad walked Charlie to his car on the road and Mum knelt by the fire, shivering.
I sat beside her on the mat. “You told me you had a letter from Harry, written from camp. Why did you tell me lies?” They would never treat me as a grown-up
Mum looked into the fire. “If you didn’t know, Helen, you couldn’t lie.”
Or I couldn’t tell anyone and let the district know. They didn’t trust me. I was really their niece, a second-hand daughter.
“Harry didn’t want you mixed up with this decision. He knew the police could come and ask us questions.”
“Harry should have trusted me! I’d go through torture rather than tell the police anything.”
“Oh, Helen,” Mum said. “Don’t make a drama of it.”
She thought I was like Ruby. Well, that wasn’t fair… But then, perhaps I was. Like Ruby, I had to stick up for myself.
“It is a drama, when police appear in the night and talk of Harry as a deserter.”
Mum didn’t reply. She turned on the radio and we listened to jaunty music introducing Dad and Dave. It was a humorous programme but I couldn’t smile. Mum started making cocoa and opened the last jar of plum jam as I toasted bread on the embers. The tangy taste of Damson plums was a change from honey but the tartness on our tongues couldn’t push away our concern for Harry. It hung in the living room like an invisible mist.