once, but it was never forgotten.
At Rothsay the heart of the house was a big kitchen with an enormous wooden table and a stove always warm. Her father would leave his boots, heavy with black mud, at the door and pad into the house in his socks. He’d ruffle her hair with a big hard farmer’s hand, take her on his knee. Her mother seemed always to be scolding. Always her voice high and angry, a piece of wire cutting through the room. The child’s own name came to be an accusation. Nance! Nance!
Outside it was the paddocks, sky everywhere you looked, and a lovely long flowing of days. Sheep in one paddock, cows in another, and the rest ploughed ground with wheat coming up green and tender. Down the hill was the river, the still pool with trees hanging over the bank where a platypus rippled along the surface at dusk, and the place at the end of the pool where the water mumbled over the rocks.
Frank was eighteen months older, like another self, but stronger, faster, cleverer. He killed a snake that would have bitten her, made up stories about pirates, built a cubby for them where they could get away from Dolly. The sounds were different when you were in there, the sun different when it came through the holes and lay along the dirt in bright bars. The peaceful feeling, in there with Frank, safe and quiet. Max appeared after a few years, a new brother. He was only a bundle of clothes with a red-cheeked face, of no interest.
And always the weather like another person, leaning over the household. Rain so thick you couldn’t see the shed from the house, and the river turning from a quiet creature lying between its banks to something dimpled and dangerous, rising over the paddocks, the new wheat under the water, trees up to their knees in it and the sheep crying together on a little island. It was frightening, because the grown-ups were frightened. Was the house going to float away? Then the sun blazing again and the water drying up, the river shrinking into a chain of pools, and all the new wheat shrivelling.
Between the floods and the droughts, Nance was five before she saw wheat ready to harvest, each stalk swaying with the weight of the ear, the field rippling gold in the breeze. They woke to a day so hot and still the air was like something solid. All morning a cloud gathered on the horizon and by afternoon it filled the sky, dark with a dangerous green underbelly like a bruise. Then one great blast of wind, and the hail starting all at once, like someone spilling peas out of a colander. Nance saw the white things bouncing off the dirt, the ground writhing under them. Ran out to pick one up, felt them hitting her back, her head, a mean little pain like spite. She picked up a gnarled piece of ice and ran back with it, put it in her mouth, but it tasted of nothing but dirt. Her mother shouting, screaming, for once not at her. Nance could hardly hear her, the roar of the hail on the roof too much even for her mother’s scream. Under it the rumble of her father’s voice with a note in it she hadn’t heard before. Nance looked where they were looking and saw the wheat paddock flinching under the hail, all the stems bowing down, the waving paddock flattening before her eyes into muddy straw.
She and Frank lay that night in their little room listening to their mother and father argue in the kitchen. Seven years! their mother kept shouting. Seven bloody years and not a single bloody bag taken off! Rain or drought or the bloody grasshoppers! Now the bloody hail! Bert rumbling something, Dolly cutting over him. No, Bert, that’s it! We’re going!
Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were roused out of bed in the dark. Bert sat her on the edge of the kitchen table and put on her shoes. Then lifted her into the buggy, Frank’s arm around her to keep her safe, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her mother shouting back towards the house, Goodbye, Rothsay, I hope I never see you again!
They went first to Sydney, to a grocery shop in Wahroonga on the northern outskirts. Bert served in the shop and they lived in the rooms above it, breathing the smell of all the things they sold: tea and bacon, rounds of cheese, boiled sweets, sultanas, biscuits. Adora Cream Wafers! They’d never had them before.
The rich people came down in their carriages. Bert sliced the wire through the cheese, weighed the sugar out into brown paper bags, flipped the rashers of bacon out of the box. He’d be buttering up the customers, Nance heard them laughing along with him. They called him Mr Russell. Oh, Mr Russell, you are a card! She leaned out the window and heard a woman in the quiet street call out to another, Oh, Bert Russell, salt of the earth, isn’t he!
Then there was a boarding house, Beach House at Newport, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. It was just Dolly and the children. Bert stayed on in the shop and joined them for the weekends. Newport Public School had stern Mr Barnes, who pounced on Nance to spell indeed. It was the strap if you made a mistake, and she couldn’t think how to put the letters together, but Frank rescued her, whispering from behind. Well done, Nance, Mr Barnes said, and the praise was sweet, almost as sweet as having a brother as kind as Frank.
Then they were gone, off to the Crown Hotel in Camden, a village a little way south of Sydney. There was another school, but Nance had hardly started before Dolly told her one night that she would be going in the train tomorrow to Currabubula, to stop with her Auntie Rose’s family for a while. That was the way her mother was. Restless, irritable, turning from one thing to another and never saying why.
Being without Frank was lonely, but Auntie Rose was kind and loving. She was more a mother to Nance than Dolly had ever been. They sat together on the back step in the sun of a morning and Auntie Rose slipped each hank of Nance’s hair through her fingers to be smoothed away into the plait. Auntie Rose was Dolly’s older sister. She’d never been to school. She could write her name but that was all. Uncle Ted didn’t own any land, he was a labourer, ploughing or shearing on other people’s farms.
Auntie Rose worked from before dawn, when she got up to milk the cow, to last thing at night, when she put the yeast bottle by the fire ready for the next day’s bread. It would still be dark outside when Nance woke up hearing her riddling out the stove. She’d turn over, coil herself back into the bedclothes. Auntie Rose would come in and wake everyone for school later but there’d be no rousing, no scolding. The kitchen would be warm, the fire busy in the stove, and there’d be a good smell of breakfast cooking.
When they all got home from school Auntie Rose had made the butter, fed the skim milk to the pig, worked in the vegetable garden. She mended everyone’s clothes on the Singer, turned sheets sides to middle, made aprons and working clothes. Made her own soap, her own boot polish, saved the feathers from the Sunday-lunch chook to make pillows. She bought hardly anything. Sugar, flour, tea: that was about it. Hair ribbons. Red crepe paper to make a costume when Nance was Little Red Riding Hood at school.
At the weekends the children went cray-bobbing in the creek, played jacks in the dust, fossicked for the broken pieces of china they called chainies. Behind the pub was a good place to find them, where someone long ago must have thrown their rubbish. Nance liked the blue-and-white ones best. It was her great-granny Davis who’d started the pub, so the chainies had probably been her teacups and dinner plates.
The school was one room, with a house at the back where the teacher Mr Keating lived. A playground lumpy with tussocks of grass where they played croquet at lunchtime, smelly privies down the back, and next door a paddock where the children who rode in to school, like little Ernie Ranclaud, tied up their ponies.
In the morning they lined up and Mr Keating marched them into the school with a tune on his fiddle. Every week they had to learn some poetry off by heart. It was usually the big girls and boys he called on, but there came a day when he pointed to Nance. Luckily she’d learned her verse, stood up in her place, and it was as if the words themselves were taking her by the hand and pulling her along.
Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting,
