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,
With exactness grinds He all.
Good girl, Nance, Mr Keating said. You spoke that with real understanding.
One afternoon when Nance came home from school Auntie Rose said, Pet, your mother’s sent word, she’d like you back home. The words were out of Nance’s mouth before she could stop them: Auntie Rose, I wish you were my mother! Auntie Rose went on mixing the pastry, her wrists deft with the knife in the bowl, and when she’d turned the pastry out on the board and flattened it with the heel of her hand she said, Nance dear, you know I’d like that too. But your mum would miss you. She rolled for a minute, picked the pastry up and flipped it, looked across the table at Nance. You know, pet, she loves you.
No, she doesn’t, Nance wanted to say. Why does everyone have to pretend?
Auntie Rose rolled again, flipped again. You know, pet, she said, things didn’t work out for your mother the way she wanted. Course they don’t for most people. Some take it harder than others and your mother’s one that takes it hard. She can’t help it, pet, is what I’m saying.
There was only the comfortable crackle of the fire in the stove and the little hiss from where the kettle had a leak. Auntie Rose wasn’t going to say it, not straight out, but she was telling Nance she knew how difficult Dolly could be. Nance thought, It’s all right. It’s not just me.
Now come here, pet, Rose said, we’ll make some jam tarts. Get the glass, see? Put the edge in the flour so it won’t stick.
She took Nance’s hand, smoothed it over the pastry, so cool and silky. When you’re an old lady like me, she said, with children of your own, you’ll show them how to make a jam tart and you’ll say, My dear old Auntie Rose who loved me so much, she was the one showed me this.
Nance would have liked to take her chainies back to Sydney, but knew her mother would pounce on them. What’s this rubbish! She took them across the creek to a fold in the rocks