need is about another week, then it can piss down all it likes. Come to think of it, I’ll send Willie Thompson with them; more brawn and less brain will come in handy. He laughed again. ‘You’ll have the loser, the poser and the boozer on yer hands this arvo, Noel,’ he said lightly. Brinkley knew the older brothers called Lennie the loser, but he was not sure who earned the other titles.
The tractor burst into life; billowing clouds of thick black smoke as Ken sent the contraption moving along the rows of ripe wheat. ‘Is it my imagination, or does the bloody thing go faster and the crop yield more with Ken in the saddle?’ Brinkley mused.
CHAPTER TWO
Veronica Byrne sat on the verandah of her cottage listening to the tired cries coming from her one-year-old daughter, Jenny. The child was resisting her afternoon rest, but the small cries lacked determination and Veronica knew she would soon be asleep. She hoped so. She wanted to go and talk to the small ginger-haired man she could see working across the courtyard. She sat on an old day bed on the small verandah, watching Jenny squirm under her insect net in the afternoon heat.
As she waited, she let her mind drift back over the years that had led her to this wonderful place. She had been an only child, not spoiled or overindulged as only children are apt to be, but much loved by her parents. They had wanted several children, but after Veronica was born her mother was unable to have any more. The love and devotion she had reserved for a big family therefore became concentrated on her single offspring.
Her father was a country boy at heart who was somehow forced to live near the city because that was where the good jobs were. They had lived in a rented cottage on the outskirts of town, where the city met the bush. Fortunately his job as a commercial traveller took him back frequently to the bush he loved. Before she was old enough to attend school, Veronica and her mother would often accompany him on his country rounds. She loved the nomadic life, sleeping in different hotels, or sometimes in a rough camp in their tent. When she was old enough to go to school, she still enjoyed the country visits during the school holidays. While her classmates headed off to the seaside, she went with her parents in the big brown van, pedalling her father’s goods to the bush towns and farms. She did not envy her friends at all. She loved touring about the country with her parents.
She thought of how different, how brief, her life would have been if she had joined her parents on that last trip. But her final senior exams were looming and she had stayed in the city with friends. To keep the trip short and to ensure they would be back for Veronica’s graduation from high school, her father’s employer arranged for him to do his rounds in a chartered aircraft. He had been a pilot during the war and he was an accomplished aviator. That was why it had come as such a shock to learn that the plane had crashed in a storm near Goondiwindi, in the west of the state, killing both her parents instantly.
Had it not been for her and her exams, they would have done the rounds in the van as usual. She still carried an unreasonable burden of guilt over the accident; she was like that by nature, often blaming herself unfairly, feeling responsible for someone, or feeling their pain more intensely than they felt it themselves.
Suddenly she was seventeen years old and alone in the world. She was beautiful, and like many truly beautiful women, she seemed unconscious of the power of her beauty. She was aware of her looks, but she did not flaunt them, never allowing the constant stream of praise from people to turn her head. Apart from her beauty Veronica had also been academically brilliant at school. Her study record and her bright personality endeared her to people, and she was soon able to find work in a bank, a coveted occupation at the time.
Refusing any help from charitable well-wishers, she remained in the small cottage where her family had lived for years. She wanted to surround herself with the furniture and household items that her parents had accumulated; the presence of these familiar things seemed to soften the blow of her loss, cushioning her grief. Her father’s estate was not large by the Symons’s standards, but she was far from being destitute.
Her father was only in his late thirties when he died and he had not gathered too many material possessions. Perhaps the war had something to do with his lack of wealth as well; one did not grow rich on the five bob a day that was paid to servicemen during the war. She was, however, happy with the inheritance. The personal items would always remind her of her parents and the love they had shared, and there was quite a tidy sum of money as well to see her started on the rest of her life.
Her father had saved 400 pounds towards the farm he longed to own. He often talked about how he needed 500 quid to qualify for a soldier’s grant of land. She had cried when she saw how close he had come to his goal. He also had some life insurance valued at about 500 pounds. All things considered, she was quite well off.
She had met the man who was now her husband, Derwent Byrne, when she was sixteen. He was not the academic type and had dropped out of school early, largely because his domineering father wanted his son as cheap labour on his small farm. But Derwent had resisted the will of his father, finding work in a local factory instead, and living anywhere he could find a bed whenever his father flew into a rage and ordered him off the farm.
Derwent kept contact with his ex-fellow pupils as he belonged to a band that frequently played the music of the day for high school dances. She had been attracted to his dark good looks at once. When she went out with him and found that he did not appear shallow like other boys she had dated, she was sure she was in love.
He had not seemed to be sexually aggressive like the others either; he seemed gentle, even shy when they were alone together. He was happy to sit on the verandah of the cottage after dinner and play his guitar, singing in his clear sweet voice. Her father had approved of Derwent as well, an important consideration for Veronica. Her father was her hero and mentor. If he approved of anything, then it also gained her approval as well.
Derwent became as one of the family, spending most of his free time at Veronica’s house. He rode an old beaten up motorcycle and worked as a labourer at the local brick factory, and this rough persona somehow added to his appeal. She became the envy of her friends because of Derwent. His slightly outsider status made him very popular with everyone, especially the females. Somehow the popularity seemed almost lost on him. He only had eyes for Veronica.
When her parents were killed Derwent asked her to marry him and she never considered if love or sympathy had motivated him because she had always assumed they would marry one day. She accepted without hesitation, although she was only just over seventeen and he was twenty-one. Most people married quite young then, so nobody thought much of their liaison. Derwent moved into the cottage on their wedding night. He could not get time off from his job for a traditional honeymoon and she was committed to the bank, at least until her father’s estate was finalised.
The wedding had been very small, just Derwent’s surly and reluctant parents, a few of his relatives and some of her school chums. Derwent’s family was large, though most of his siblings had grown up and left home to escape the clutches of their father. To Veronica’s surprise, the family was not close as she expected a large family to be; perhaps the poverty stricken life they had lived under the stern hand of the father had set them apart. Derwent’s father was a simple but demanding man; and he liked to smoke and drink, indulging his habits at the expense of his wife and children who lived in almost primitive conditions on their small farm.
In the end Derwent lived intermittently on the family farm, depending on how well he was getting on with his father at any particular time, and then only to please his rather oppressed and unhappy mother. It seemed to Veronica that Derwent was keen to get away from his parents, and that they were just as keen to see him gone. He clearly loved his mother and she him, but his continued
