and admired the tone of the piano. Jim Anderson and Jack Crawford arrived with a dozen tennis racquets each. Nance was in awe: Wimbledon champions!
Fifty years after Mr King had told Dolly’s father to stand back, my man, the Kings were still out on Goonoo Goonoo Station, still the local aristocracy. The King girls came up from Sydney for the polo and they loved to scandalise the locals by wearing pants and smoking in the street. Oh, provincial with a capital P, Nance heard one of them say to the other, laughing, tossing her cigarette away without a glance as she got into the car behind the chauffeur.
Some well-to-do Maunder relatives, Dolly’s cousins, came to afternoon tea. Nance saw straight away how smooth and polished they were compared with her parents. Those cousins hadn’t gone to humble Currabubula Public School and sat in Grade Six until they were old enough to leave. They’d gone to the Dominican Sisters in Tamworth. Hearing their quiet well-spoken voices Nance thought, Is that why Mum kept trying me with the Catholics?
Dolly insisted on giving them a tour of the place. The Bridal Suite, everyone staring at the gold taffeta bedspread. The parlour where Florence Austral had sung. Dolly told them how much it cost to have the piano tuned. How someone had offered her twenty pounds apiece for the firedogs. The Maunder ladies said, Oh really, Dolly. Fancy that. Nance saw that her mother was the only one in the room who wasn’t embarrassed.
There were a few Russell relatives too. That was a surprise. Dolly had always said Bert was an only child and his mother was divorced, but here was Uncle Alan. He was a bookie, had a strong voice that filled the bar. His son was another Alan, a tall dark young man with a moustache like a film star and eyes so brown they were almost black. His daughter Rita was a Spanish-looking beauty with pale skin, brown eyes, straight black hair and red lips. Why didn’t I get those looks, Nance thought.
Bert was a man arrived at his dream. New dark suit, a lovely piece of cloth. He served in the bar, but there were plenty of workers to take over when he wanted to spend the afternoon in one of the big armchairs with a Western, or out in the backyard with the magpie he was teaching to come back to his fist.
Frank had grown into a tall young man. Nance thought him handsome, but Frank hated his big ears and kept to the side of family photos. He was out at Uncle Willie’s being a kind of jackaroo, because he wanted nothing more than to go on the land. Max was now a term boarder at a fancy school in nearby Armidale. He got on with the rich boys in a way Frank never had, because he was good at running, boxing, anything to do with a ball. Nance missed her friends from St George Girls’ High, but having everyone contented for once—they even had a dog, like a proper family!—made up for a lot.
Tamworth High was another government school and Nance thought it would be like St George, except with boys. She felt the difference, though, from the first day. It was back to classes that were too easy. No more algebra, no more plays in Latin. No one was too fussy about things like what homely meant. If you got the general drift, that was good enough. Most of the students couldn’t wait to leave. Every week another pupil in Nance’s class turned fourteen and there was another empty desk.
Being with boys gave the classroom a heavy unsettled feeling, like an undertow. Most of the teachers were men, and if you were on the girls’ side of the room it was hard to catch their eye. They think we’re all just going to get married, Una said. Don’t want to waste their time on us. The undertow could turn nasty if any of the girls beat the boys in a test.
Most of the teachers were fresh out of Teachers’ College, working through their country posting so they could apply for a transfer to Sydney. They didn’t know how to keep order. The new French teacher was full of innocent enthusiasm. She came in the first day and wrote on the board: With Every Language Learned, Man Gains a Soul. Some boy up the back guffawed. The teacher only lasted two weeks, ran out of class in tears one day and never came back.
Esme told Nance there was no point in learning French, anyway. None of them was going to go to France, and if a French person came to Tamworth they could bloody well speak English. Still, the idea that you could gain a soul stayed with Nance. When it was her turn to read out a sentence in French, she felt her face changing around the new sounds. She did feel different. It wasn’t gaining a soul, exactly, but there was something.
Mr Crisp their English teacher was older and knew how to keep order, even when he was teaching them something as sissy as poetry. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Yes, Nance thought, that was autumn. The apple tree in the backyard at the Cally, with the wasps in and out of the rotting windfalls and the sad smell of burning leaves, the low syrupy sun along the stubble of Ison’s paddock, the pale morning fog hanging over the Peel. Reading the poem was like having a conversation with this man, even though he was a hundred years dead and had never seen Ison’s paddock. He’d given words to ordinary things that they both knew, and turned them into slow beautiful music.
The poem about Chapman’s Homer made the class restless. Bards in fealty to Apollo! What was that when it was at home? Mr Crisp raised his voice and stared down the ones at the back. Cortez was amazed at seeing the Pacific from a peak in Darien, he explained. But the poem was really about Keats being amazed by a poem. It was like seeing your reflection in the three-way mirror at home, Nance thought, because here she was, being amazed at a poem written by a man who was amazed at a poem.
When Mr Crisp read poetry out loud, they could hear the little shake in his voice. Esme nudged Nance under the desk and smirked. Nance didn’t smirk back. She was astonished at the thought: Mr Crisp was feeling the same thing she did, a tenderness towards these words that had the power to make the world look different. It was like a secret handshake. You weren’t the only one.
She was fourteen and it was the Intermediate year. It was easy to be top of the class, coasting along on what she’d learned at St George. She did so well in the exam that she got a prize, a leather-bound, gold-embossed Poetical Works of John Keats. Bert and Dolly were proud, but Nance thought more impressed by the quality of the leather than the success in the exam. Dolly riffled the pages so the gilt edges gleamed in an expensive way. Then she wrapped it in brown paper to keep it nice and put it in the glass-fronted bookcase.
The day after Speech Day, Mr Crisp came to the Cally and talked with Dolly in the Ladies’ Lounge. Nance hung over the banister, right above them. She could see the bald spot on Mr Crisp’s head and Dolly’s crooked part. She heard Mr Crisp say, Mrs Russell, it would be an absolute tragedy if she doesn’t go on. She thought then she’d hear her mother’s voice going high and indignant but Mr Crisp kept talking, his voice a coaxing up-and-down, like a man breaking in a horse, Nance thought. A credit to you, she heard. You and Mr Russell both.
Nance supposed going on to the Leaving would be all right. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she knew it wasn’t what Esme and Lois and the others were going to do: leave school and help at home or get a job in a shop, till someone came along to marry them. She’d be the first person in her family to stay at school for so long. Frank had done the Intermediate, like her, but he didn’t want to go on. Max was no scholar, didn’t even want to do the Intermediate.
Nance knew she was never going to be beautiful, but once she knew not to do too well in class the boys liked her. She was lively, ready for a bit of fun, and she was exotic, the girl from the city. Wade Watson walked her home, Ray Brawne held her hand in the pictures, Tom Vidler kissed her after a dance. A handsomer boy than Tom Vidler or a bolder one than Ray Brawne might have got further. She didn’t know if she was glad or sorry they didn’t try. She’d have said no. Not that she thought it was wicked. It was that there was no way not to have a baby. She didn’t want to be hustled into marrying any of these boys.
In summer they’d make up a party, half a dozen boys and girls, with Bert along to make it all right, and go down to the swimming hole. She loved the hot air hanging under the trees, the cicadas boring away into the afternoon,
