tea-coloured water, seeing the rounded stones and the little fish flickering away. Esme and Lois didn’t swim, not really, because they wanted to keep their hair dry. They bobbed up and down in the shallow part, only their heads showing. Nance couldn’t be bothered. But they’ll see, Esme said. You know, the shape of your…you know. Oh, let them! Nance said. Nothing much to see, is there?
A dozen went on to the Leaving at Tamworth High that year: ten boys, plus Una Dowe and Nance Russell. Nance knew that Una was cleverer than she was but old Dowe didn’t believe in education for girls and there was no money, so Una was only allowed to go on if she had a job. She had to rush out of school every afternoon to work in the kitchen at the hospital. At least I get a decent feed, she said.
There weren’t enough going on to the Leaving to have a choice of subjects. They all did English, Latin, French, Maths, Modern History and Botany. But there was no proper teaching for the senior class. Mr Crisp got them started with Macbeth but then his promotion to principal came through and he left for Sydney. The new English teacher was marking time till he retired and his idea of teaching was to make them copy passages while he popped out for a smoke. The Maths teacher left and there was no replacement for six months. They had five French teachers in a year. The Botany teacher was really a History teacher and admitted in a weak moment that he was reading the textbook every night to stay a page ahead of the class.
In the final year everyone put their names down for a Teachers’ College scholarship. Nance didn’t know if she wanted to be a teacher, but for a girl there was only that or nursing. She thought Dolly would be pleased but she exploded. Over her dead body Nance was going to be a teacher! She didn’t say what she did want for her daughter, and Nance didn’t ask. You didn’t argue with Dolly when she had one of her rages on.
At the Leaving, Nance got five Bs and a Lower Pass in Botany. That meant she’d matriculated, though barely. The university would accept her. She’d have liked to go, study History and English and more French. But what was the point of thinking about it? You couldn’t do anything with History and English except teach, and Dolly wouldn’t have that.
Una had a place at the Teachers’ College, but no scholarship. Have to go nursing, she said, matter-of-fact. That’s the way it is. Had my chance.
Dolly had been talking to the pharmacy man from down the road and he’d told her Nance should do pharmacy. It was a real profession, higher up than being a teacher. It was nearly like being a doctor. Everyone called the pharmacist Dr Cohen, and he wore a white coat and had a doctor’s grave manner. But medicine was an expensive five-year degree whereas pharmacy was an apprenticeship. Three years of apprenticeship, and a few university courses at the same time. For the daughter of pub-keepers, that put pharmacy up the ladder but not out of reach.
And pharmacy was good for a girl. A woman teacher only got half what a man did, and had to leave if she got married. A woman pharmacist got the same as a man and, if she wanted to go on working after she married, she could.
Nance didn’t think she wanted to do pharmacy. Fiddling around with smelly things in bottles, standing in a stuffy shop all day listening to people go on about their bunions. But she could see it was as good as done in Dolly’s mind. Dolly got Bert to go down to Sydney to see Dr Pattinson of Washington Soul’s, to find out about being an apprentice. Not his offsider, mind, Dolly said. You want something done, you go to the butcher, not the maggots on the block!
He came back saying Washington Soul’s didn’t take any girl apprentices, though a girl might get in with a small chemist somewhere. Good, Nance thought, that doesn’t sound likely. Then a man came to stay at the pub, a commercial traveller in pharmacy lines, silver-tongued, buttering up Mrs Russell. Turned out he knew a man named Stevens in Sydney. Enmore, not far from the university. He was looking for an apprentice, wouldn’t mind a girl.
My word, Nance, Bert boomed down the table at her, carving into the leg of mutton. You’ve fallen on your feet there, my girl!
No! was Nance’s thought, but how could she say that with her mother at one end of the table smiling for once, and her father at the other thinking everything was settled? And what better idea did she have to put in its place?
Something else stopped her from saying no: it might turn out all right. Tamworth was a narrow world. When you stood up on the top of the hill behind the town you could feel you knew every single person who lived there. It was as small as that, the grid of streets that naked. Up there with Una and Wade one day she’d declaimed to the warm breeze blowing off the plain:
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The others had laughed, and yes, she’d said it as a joke. There was a private joke behind the public one, though: she meant it. In her own small way she might be like Cortez, and find a world bigger than a dusty country town that rode on the sheep’s back.
THREE
BY THE middle of March 1930 Nance’s suitcase was under the second bed in the room of her friend from St George, Maggie Glendon, at Bondi. Sydney felt like home. Nance loved the feel of the sea breeze, it was like the best days at Cronulla. Sun glinted off cars and gleamed along tram tracks. Seen from the bustle of Bondi, sleepy old Tamworth was a good place to have left.
The Glendons’ flat was round the back of a liver-coloured brick block where the stairs always smelled of potatoes being boiled to death, but that was all right because it was near the beach, and everyone welcomed her. She and Maggie shared a cramped bedroom like sisters. Maggie had had to leave school when her father died. Now she worked in Hosiery at David Jones. She’d have loved to do something more than a dead-end job but there was no money. Mrs Glendon was a timid woman who seemed overwhelmed by widowhood. Maggie’s brother Wal was a cheerful fellow, had left school at fourteen, had a job on the trams.
The first day of lectures Nance got the bus through the city and out to the university, proud of the heavy bag of books over her shoulder. Other than some of her teachers, she’d never known anyone who’d gone to the university, and here she was walking between the sandstone gateposts!
At nine o’clock the professor came into the lecture hall, black gown billowing around his long legs. She opened her notebook, uncapped her pen, and got ready to become a pharmacist.
Botany was more or less familiar: The Structure of Life Processes in Green Plants, Principles of Classification, Floral Biology. But Chemistry was a foreign language. Empirical, Molecular and Structural Formulae. Gravimetric Determination of Phosphoric Acid. The Calibration of Pipettes.
Among eighty men, six women were doing Chemistry and Botany. They were expected to sit together in the front row. There was a Mavis who she got a bit friendly with, and a clever young woman named Marjorie. She’d have liked to go to lunch with them and ask them what a covalent bond was, but the minute classes were over she had to race for the tram so she’d be at the shop on Enmore Road by one o’clock. Mr Stevens would be at the door with his watch in his hand. He’d tell her again that a master could dismiss an apprentice for tardiness.
The pharmacy was cramped and airless and full of the noise of traffic. The cars roared and beeped, the trams screamed going round into Stanmore Road. The dispensary was a dark corner under the stairs. In rows, with their gilt-lettered labels, the pharmacy bottles looked a bit grand. It was only when you shook the stuff out that you could see it was nothing but dried-up leaves,
