White Feathers (16 page)

But there was a little more to it than that. Joseph’s stump was extremely tender and his prosthesis had to be remodelled several times to reduce irritation of the scar tissue. The surgeon had stressed how important it was that the surface of the stump not break down, because if it did the artificial limb could not be worn. Joseph complied wholeheartedly, taking extra care of the area.

What was left of his right leg was ugly now, withered, bereft and foreign-looking, and he felt a vicious pang of regret every time he looked at it, although his thigh muscles hadn’t atrophied as much as those of many fellow amputees. But once the prosthesis had been refitted, and he was beginning to master its use without the need for a cane, his optimism returned. The artificial leg felt as if it weighed a ton, however, and the harness attaching it was just as unwieldy, fastening around his waist, then over both shoulders and buckling again across his back. Apart from giving him something to walk on, its only other advantage was that its weight was building up his thigh muscle again. Joseph complained it was worse than full field kit, but as Eru pointed out at least once a day — in an effort, Joseph suspected, to reassure himself — there
was no point moping or grizzling about something that could not be changed.

A snow-blanketed Christmas came and went, and a few weeks into the new year Joseph was informed that he could expect to be sent home to New Zealand within a month. A representative from the Repatriation Department visited the hospital at the end of January and all men earmarked for going home were ordered to attend his lecture in the hospital’s dining room.

The envoy, a short, nervous-looking man in a three-piece worsted suit, talked earnestly about ‘increasing the functional activity of the individual’, and the benefits of training convalescent veterans to ‘strengthen them for suitable tasks in civilian life’ so that they could effectively ‘re-enter the workaday world’. The ‘final stage of recovery and restoration’ would take place in one of the numerous military hospitals or convalescent homes in New Zealand — and here he rattled off a list of who would go where, according to which part of the country they called home — before veterans would go on to a programme of suitable vocational training.

He talked about cabinet-making and basketry, leather-working and schoolteaching, upholstering and small business loans, and tailoring and motor mechanics. He discussed jobs that sounded so thoroughly alien to most of his audience that a profound and disbelieving silence descended over the room and he looked up from his notes to see if anyone was still there.

Joseph glanced at the faces of his neighbours, most of whom appeared as incredulous as he imagined he did. Basketry? But they were labourers, many of them, wanderers. Farm hands, drovers, builders’ mates, odd-jobbers, some of them fishermen, others hunters. Most of them knew they wouldn’t be going back to that, not with missing or useless limbs, but how could they settle to something like bloody
basketry
?

And this was only a fraction of the information they all craved.
Earning a living would be important, but would any woman love them now with their scarred bodies and faces, their nightmares and private, unspoken horrors? Would their children know them, or even want to? Would they be seen as heroes or as the ones who didn’t make it and had to come home early? Had they been missed, had what they done
counted
, had they paid too big a price? And, most of all, what would everyone at home expect of them?

Joseph shook his head, grateful that at least something was being done for the veterans, especially the badly mutilated and the mentally unbalanced, but knowing that none of this would be for him.

He was a drover; nothing would turn him away from that. Or from Erin.

Part Two

The Murdoch Children at War

1916–1918

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Kenmore, May 1916

A
ndrew’s lips were pressed into a thin, grim line and his face was white except for an isolated smudge of angry colour high on each cheek.

‘Over my dead body you will!’ he exploded, spittle flying. ‘This family’s given
enough
! There’s no need for you to go as well!’ He lunged out of his chair, strode angrily to the French doors and gazed unseeingly at his immaculate gardens. He spun around to face Ian again. ‘It’s all a bloody great adventure to you, isn’t it? Have you any idea what it will do to your mother, having you away as well?’

Ian sat still and waited patiently; he had anticipated this.

Andrew, hurt and frightened, was still winding himself up. ‘First Joseph, home with a
leg
missing, in case you hadn’t noticed, Ian. A
leg
! Then Erin, torpedoed and nearly drowned, Keely at some hospital putting up with God knows what filth and disease and horror day after day, James in bloody France, and Thomas not able to set foot outside his front door without someone accusing him of cowardice! And finally,
finally
, it’s driven even him away!’ He returned to his chair and collapsed into it, deflated. ‘He could have done an enormous amount of good work here, for the war effort
and for the veterans, if people had just left him alone.’ He sat in silence for a moment, then looked wearily over at his youngest son. ‘Is that what’s behind all this? That bloody feather? Fear of what other people might think?’

‘No,’ Ian replied calmly. ‘I don’t give a toss what anyone else thinks.’

And that was true. Over the past two years Ian had matured into a broad-shouldered, impressive-looking young man, although his freckles and tousled blond hair seemed destined to lend him a perpetually boyish air. At the age of twenty he was self-assured and gregarious, and had lost little of his happy-go-lucky outlook and infectious enthusiasm. Unlike Keely he wasn’t usually headstrong, and he didn’t have either James’s need for order and justice or Thomas’s soul-deep sensitivity, but he had of late discovered within himself a driving need to establish who, and what, he was.

The anonymous white feather he’d received in the post last week hadn’t bothered him at all, however, because he agreed with the sentiment behind it: only concern for his parents had stopped him enlisting until now.

But he was restless. He had mastered and befriended the stroppiest horses on the station, mustered across the high country for more gruelling hours in the saddle than anyone else, swum the deepest rivers in full flood, and bedded the most interesting and alluring girls in the district, both from within his own social class and beneath it (although he had never shared these particular victories with his parents), but none of this was enough. He needed to prove himself on a grander scale, and going to war seemed the only way of doing it.

‘Well, if that isn’t it, then
why
?’ persisted his father, knowing full well that the reasons were more or less irrelevant, and wondering how many fathers had asked their sons the same pointless question.

Ian stared back at him with compassion, sensing Andrew’s disappointment and fear.

‘Because I can,’ he replied simply. ‘Because I’m old enough, because it’s expected of me, but mostly because I want to.’ He pulled determinedly at a loose thread on the cuff of his faded work shirt. ‘I’ll never know if I don’t, Da.’ Another pause. ‘And I have to know.’

Grimly, Andrew responded, ‘Aye, well,
I
don’t expect it of you and I won’t give you my permission. Or my blessing.’

‘I’m sorry, Da, but I don’t need either.’

‘I’ll say you’re needed here to work on the station. I’ll say you’re indispensable.’ Andrew felt childish and somehow shamed at saying this, but his despair at the prospect of losing the last and youngest of his children to the war had blinkered him against rational argument of any sort. And it was true: Ian was needed to help run Kenmore.

Ian, more perturbed by his father’s uncharacteristic demonstration of guile than by the anger that had preceded it, said, ‘Conscription’s coming in soon. Surely it would be better for me to volunteer now and get the unit I want, rather than wait and be shunted any old where?’

He felt terribly guilty saying this: he had already secretly enlisted and was due at Trentham for training in less than a week’s time. He’d considered joining the Mounted Rifles, because of the horses, but there was talk that the brigade was bound for the Sinai Peninsula and he wanted to fight wherever the New Zealand Division — and therefore James and Thomas — was, and that was France. So he’d signed on as an infantryman, despite his equestrian experience, and would be leaving, with or without his parents’ endorsement, in a day or so.

‘It’s infantry they’ll be wanting, Ian. You’ve had no other specific training so you’ll end up with them whether you want to or not.’

Ian nodded. ‘Infantry would be all right.’

‘So then why don’t you wait until conscription comes in? There’s a chance you might not even be called up.’

‘Because, Da, I want to go now.’

Andrew could see there was no point trying to reason with his son while the boy was in such an obstinate mood, so he stamped outside to find Tamar.

She was in the courtyard at the back of the house, repotting plants. She was wearing gloves, an old shirt and a pair of his work pants, and had managed to smear a streak of dirt across her cheek; he took out his handkerchief and wiped her face clean.

‘I’ve been talking to Ian,’ he said glumly.

Alerted by his tone, Tamar put her trowel down on the potting table. ‘What about?’

‘This enlisting business.’

She waited for him to go on.

‘He says he wants to go, and that he’d rather volunteer than be conscripted.’ Andrew inspected his now grubby handkerchief before stuffing it back into his pocket. ‘I must admit I agree with him on that one — better to get the unit you want if you have to go at all. Not that I told him that, of course, but if he waits his name might not even come up.’

‘Was it that feather?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I suspect this has been on his mind since Joseph came home. And Thomas joining up — Thomas, who’s so opposed to the war — was probably the last straw. I know he isn’t fighting, but he’s still over there. I think Ian feels left out.’ Andrew shook his head sadly and his face crumpled for a moment. ‘I just can’t make the boy see sense, Tamar. I’m afraid he’ll just run off.’

Tamar sat down on an overturned flower pot and pulled her gloves off. ‘Has he said that?’

‘No, but he did point out he doesn’t need our permission to enlist.’

‘Yes, well, he hasn’t needed that for a while, has he?’

‘No, but he seems a lot more serious about it this time.’

‘Ian is very seldom serious about anything, dear,’ Tamar observed benignly.

‘He is when it comes to proving himself. He might always do it with a joke and a smile on his face, but you can’t deny there’s something driving the boy.’

Tamar said nothing because privately she agreed. Especially of late, and particularly since Thomas had gone away. Poor Thomas, who had rung them out of the blue one day to tell them he’d enlisted in the New Zealand Medical Corps as a stretcher bearer. Because of his medical training he’d been accepted immediately, despite his openly declared status as a conscientious objector and his refusal to carry arms, and had been sent over seas only a month later, headed, everyone assumed, for France.

She absently pulled an errant weed from between the cobblestones at her feet. If Ian went, then all her precious children would have been sucked into the maelstrom. Although she had a deep and unshakeable conviction that each would return, she’d been profoundly distressed by what had happened to Joseph; he was her firstborn, a vital and dynamic young man so like his father, and he had come home shockingly maimed. He was adapting to his disability quite well, riding again already and determined to return to droving, but she fancied she could see through his optimistic words and demeanour to the pain and disillusionment locked inside.

The news that he intended to marry Erin had been received with utter delight in all quarters, and not least of all by Jeannie and Lachie who had grown very fond of Joseph over the years, and they were all looking forward to their daughter’s return home,
although now she was in France and God only knew how long for. Their marriage would symbolise a new start for the family, something positive to help them all put this upheaval and turmoil behind them, and there would no doubt be babies who would grow up with all Tamar’s other grand children to become the generation that would live in peace, well beyond any shadow of war.

She looked up at Andrew and asked quietly, ‘Do you think he
will
run off?’

But before he could answer, Lucy came out of the house, squinting against the sun as she held a wriggling, grizzling Duncan in her arms. He was almost fifteen months old now, the image of his father with his rich brown hair and blue eyes, and just as prickly when crossed.