The Road from Coorain (12 page)

As the train pulled out and gathered speed, my mother and I
stood at the door waving. We both choked with tears a little as we passed the system of points just outside the station where the train always slowed a little. Once my father, too preoccupied with giving advice to his sons to notice the time, had been obliged to jump from the moving train at that point.

Yet in counterpoint to my grief was overwhelming relief. It was true that we had been cast out from our paradise. But that paradise had become literally purgatorial for us. My mother had seen the product of fifteen years of unremitting labor disappear. She had lost a partnership of work and love which had made her utterly fulfilled. Without it she was at sea. I felt that my heart was permanently frozen with grief by what had happened to both my parents. I feared even greater disasters were we to remain at Coorain. I had lost my sense of trust in a benign providence, and feared the fates. My brother Bob had taken to reading me his favorite Shakespeare plays while home on his last vacation, and I had been transfixed by the line from
King Lear:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,/ They kill us for their sport.” I did not understand the nature of the ecological disaster which had transformed my world, or that we ourselves had been agents as well as participants in our own catastrophe. I just knew that we had been defeated by the fury of the elements, a fury that I could not see we had earned. In the life that lay ahead, I knew I must serve as my father’s agent in the family and muster the energy to deal with such further disasters as might befall us. For the moment, we were down on our luck and had to begin all over again.

T
HE FAMILIAR TRAIN
journey to Sydney was unusually trancelike as we traveled away from Coorain for good. My mother and I seemed disconnected from time and space, moving between worlds. The Silver City Comet quickly left behind the heat and the shimmering red light of the Western Division. Its cars hummed with efficient air-conditioning machinery. Its seats, upholstered in light blue, and its wide windows covering the whole upper half of its streamlined carriages, combined to suggest movement to a new world. Such mundane belongings as suitcases were stored in racks in the vestibule to each car. Just as the lines of the train suggested effortless ease, the passengers also seemed to be moving easily, uncluttered by such intractable things as baggage and parcels. My mother and I, aware of psychic baggage, sat silently, struggling with the conflicting emotions of relief, grief, and fear, emotions we were well schooled not to discuss.

The train’s windows presented a striking panorama of Australian life. At first, nothing was visible but open plains with pitiful railroad workers’ settlements crouched beside the railway line. The train stopped to dispense mail to them, and in this emergency caused by the drought, supplies of water. We who rode in comfort looked out at the ragged children and tired women who inhabited the burlap and tin shacks, as though we were
comfortable spectators of the action in a Dickens novel, the forlorn waifs gazing in upon us merely signs of some other person’s social imagination. Much later, at Sydney University, I learned about the social scientist’s concept of social distance. To me it always recalled the cool carriages and the hot plains, the desolate shacks, and the uplifted faces of the undernourished children.

As the day wore on we came to more substantial railway stations, with signs of solid-looking towns behind them. Once we passed the line of rainfall where wheat could be grown, silos dominated the horizon, and the homesteads came closer together. Later we crossed substantial watercourses, and saw towns with solid-looking buildings, and such signs of civic pride as schools and churches. As the afternoon progressed toward sunset, the sun’s rays drew new colors from the earth and etched new shapes in relief. Now the fields of wheat shone, green or bleached gold, a strange and romantic sign of plenty after the arid plains. On past journeys, I had looked condescendingly at wheat farms and their inhabitants. Now I looked with fresh curiosity. Who was behind the walls of the homesteads? What was life like there? Was it easier to survive drought here?

Finally, after five to six hours’ travel, we came to the town of Parkes, to a substantial railway terminal with several platforms and a commotion of steam trains and people illuminated in unfamiliar electric light. Here, as always, we were flustered by an unaccustomed sense of hurry because there was less than an hour to eat quickly in the dining room and see the luggage transferred to the Forbes Mail, an express train for Sydney. It was a steam-powered, red-plush-upholstered, and red-carpeted train which recalled the grand aspirations of train travel before the automobile. Its sleeping compartments glittered with polished brass, and smelled of freshly laundered linen. We children always fought to climb the green velvet ladder which carried one to the upper berth where we could lie dreaming and waking as the train
labored all night over the mountains, and brought us twelve hours later to the outskirts of Sydney.

Those night train journeys had their own mystery because of the clicking of the rails, the shafts of light pouring through the shutters of the sleeping compartment as we passed stations, and the slamming of doors when the train stopped to take on passengers. In the morning there was the odd sight of green landscape, trees, grass, banks of streams—and an entirely different palette of colors, as though during the night we had journeyed to another country. Usually I slept soundly, registering the unaccustomed sounds and images only faintly. This time I lay awake and listened, opened the shutters and scanned unknown platforms, and wondered about the future.

By seven the next morning we stood in the lurching corridors gazing out at the intimidating sight of crowded city streets, slums with ramshackle houses, more substantial suburbs with brick houses and prim gardens, all marked with the soot the trains dispensed evenhandedly on poverty and respectability alike. Most startling were the factories, acres of roofs, gleaming lights, and burgeoning steam. We were in time to see the hordes of workers entering for the morning shift. The confluence of machinery, steam power, and people led me to shudder inwardly because of a sudden sense of primitive energy which I feared. Beyond the factories, the train gathered speed, hooted importantly, and rushed into Sydney’s Central Station, to a platform so long one couldn’t see the end of it, crowded with people, porters, luggage carts, and shouting newsboys.

In the past when making these journeys, I had savored the panorama of the countryside, vaguely resented the discomfort of town clothes, and enjoyed the prospect of ice cream sundaes, being spoiled by my grandmother, uncle and aunt, seeing the ocean, riding on ferries in the Sydney Harbor and in trams. All had been punctuation points before returning home. Now there was no home to go to, and our arrival at the cheerful house my
uncle and aunt shared with my grandmother had a different flavor. We were objects of pity and concern, not just festive visitors.

There was a real question about where we would live. Sydney in the late stages of the 1939–1945 War was a city bursting at the seams. Few houses had been built during the Depression, and none during the war, while the city had become the staging point and recreation center for many thousands of American troops in the South Pacific. Wartime production had brought many from rural towns to the city, so that the resident population had risen by fifteen percent during the war years. There was a black market in housing, with large sums of money changing hands as key money whenever one found a vacant flat or house. Our hospitable relatives were prepared for a long visit, but my mother was characteristically determined to find a flat in the right suburb with the right school which I could immediately begin attending as a day student.

Within a week she had found and rented the upstairs portion of a graceful house in the seaside suburb of Mosman. There was a sizable double bedroom, a bathroom, a vast glassed-in balcony from which one looked across the Harbor to its entrance between North Head and South Head, and a living room which could serve as a bedroom for my brothers when they came home for a weekend away from school. Our meals, prepared in the kitchen below, were eaten looking out at the ocean, enjoying the passing parade of water traffic. In an era of rationing, furniture, carpets, linen, and curtains for the new flat were hard to come by. Brushing aside advice about the difficulty of furnishing a new dwelling, my resourceful mother attended several fire sales and equipped us inexpensively but royally with faded rose and blue Wilton rugs, some passably upholstered easy chairs, and wonderful faded flowery chintz curtains, all from another era. I loved the colors. We never saw such things in the west because the sun and the dust faded them too quickly. Now there was the intoxicating blue of the ocean, the rich designs of the rugs and curtains, and the
unfailing wonder of the garden, where everything was always green. The sudden comfort was overwhelming when contrasted with years of fighting the drought. Each garden and house on the street was an object of wonder to be examined and reexamined. Opposite our house was a large, white stucco house with enormous glassed-in verandas, an elegant sweep of velvety green lawn, and spring daffodils in bloom. I could not stop looking and watching for the creatures who lived in such a place.

Although the third term of the school year had begun, I was enrolled as a day student at Queenwood school, and before another week was past my mother delivered me there on a rainy morning. The gates opened onto a macadam-covered inner yard enclosed on three sides by buildings. On one side was a tennis court and gymnasium, on the second a low, cream brick building housing cloakrooms, and on the third side, a red brick classroom building approached by grey basalt steps. I found the small world inside the school gates alien and intimidating. Having never had a playmate, I did not know how to play. Never having known anyone my own age, I was uncertain about how to begin with thirty or so other eleven-year-olds.

The school yard with its busy ant heap of people skipping rope, throwing basketballs, shouting, and playing hopscotch reduced me to a paralysis of shyness. I had never seen tennis or basketball played, and had not the faintest notion of the rules. I was used to knowing better than most people what needed to be done. Here I was the veriest incompetent, not only in games, but in the classroom, where there were also rules to be learned. It did no good to ask why the rules obtained. Answers were not forthcoming. One ruled the margin in one’s book so; one set out mathematical exercises leaving two lines between calculations; one drew maps with a fine-tipped pen and India ink and in no other way. We memorized the provinces of Canada, and recited them starting in the east and traveling westward. I was used to learning very exact details of topography in order to find my way about a countryside with no signs and few landmarks, but when I asked why we listed
Canada’s provinces from east to west no one understood why I thought directions important.

The routines governing time were also puzzling. One just began studying one subject after everyone had been induced to sit still and be quiet, and suddenly a bell rang, the teacher departed, and we rushed into the gymnasium for an activity called physical exercise. This I could not fathom. I knew how to do hard physical labor, but I was bored by the calisthenics and too clumsy to play the games. The purpose of all the activity was clear to everyone but me, and no explanations were ever given. I could not arrive at the reasons why the first ten minutes of every morning were devoted to something called mental arithmetic. The teacher called out a problem every few seconds, to which we were meant to scribble an answer. Given time, I could arrive at the correct answer, but here speed was important, though no great matter hung on the outcome of the problem solving. I was not used to failing at anything, and resented the exercise both because it seemed foolish to me and because I could not do it well. On the other hand, because I read so much, I could excel at spelling bees. Our parents had taught us to be the best at everything we did, but the things we were supposed to excel in had always before had some practical purpose. Now I was introduced to competition as an end in itself.

When the bell rang for recess or lunch, my heart sank because I knew no one and had no subject of conversation remotely like the cheerful chatter which swirled around about weekend activities. Queenwood was a day school and there were no other girls from the bush there. It was painful when others talked happily about their fathers or boasted about the family fortunes. I couldn’t join in either, and became slowly aware that my family and life circumstances were unusual. I was always relieved when it rained and we ate lunch at our desks, for the rain freed me from steeling myself to speak to someone or from making myself walk up to join a group.

Each afternoon I was exhausted, not by the schoolwork, which
mostly seemed very easy, but by the stress of coping with so many people and trying to guess what the rules were for each new situation. I came alive on the walk home, a walk which could take forty minutes. The way wound along a pleasant street which skirted the side of a steep cliff for about half a mile. My route then proceeded by three steep flights of stairs zigzagging up the cliff face, to a point at the top where I could see the Harbor and smell the ocean. Then I climbed more gently along pretty suburban streets until I came to Stanton Road, traversed its easy incline to the very top of the hill, where number 42 stood set back in a garden filled with roses and honeysuckle. Most of my schoolmates lived in different directions, so that I relished my walk alone.