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  War’s End

  ePub ISBN 9781742745718

  A Woolshed Press book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Woolshed Press in 2008

  Copyright © Victoria Bowen 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Woolshed Press is a trademark of Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

  www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Bowen, Victoria.

  War’s end.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 366 2 (pbk.).

  A823.4

  Cover illustration, cover and internal design by Stella Danalis, Peripheral Vision Design

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: A strange place

  Chapter 2: Waiting

  Chapter 3: Betrayal

  Chapter 4: Pa

  Chapter 5: Homeward bound

  Chapter 6: Armistice Day

  Chapter 7: France

  Chapter 8: Celebrating

  Chapter 9: Jack and Billy

  Chapter 10: Christmas and influenza

  Chapter 11: Summer holidays

  Chapter 12: Work and roses

  Chapter 13: School

  Chapter 14: Two houses

  Chapter 15: Finally on the way

  Chapter 16: Millie and Martha

  Chapter 17: Drudgery

  Chapter 18: The best laid plans

  Chapter 19: Saving Jack

  Chapter 20: Albany

  Chapter 21: The Death Train

  Chapter 22: Relief

  Chapter 23: Pa is angry

  Chapter 24: Dad is still in Albany

  Chapter 25: Recovery

  Chapter 26: Homecoming

  Chapter 27: Pa and Dad each have something to tell

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  THE WALLS OF TIMBER SLATS AND THE CORRUGATED TIN roof kept the gusting wind and light showers out but tendrils of cold air found their way up through the floorboards and batted away the warmth put out by the small fire at the end of the room. The single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling tried its best to keep the wintry grey at bay but only managed to spread a few sickly yellow yards before petering out. The girl sitting on an old wooden kitchen chair by the window should have been by the fire, but she had chosen the cold and the sight of a cleared area of bare ground with gum trees guarding its edges. Olive green leaves drooped under the weight of water trickling down them to fall onto the decaying leaves and bark of past years scattered beneath.

  They suited Nell’s mood.

  Her feet were hooked over the rung that joined the two front legs of the chair together and her mother wouldn’t have approved of that, or of the fact that she was doing nothing. Nell was just sitting, not reading, not sewing, and, if her mother could have seen into her head, not even thinking.

  Nell was waiting for her father.

  Hours before she had stripped her bed of its sheets and the pillow of its case. She had rolled the thin grey mattress into a bundle at one end of the iron bedstead. Two old army blankets and a ticking pillow sat on top of them.

  It was more than a week since she’d moved to the spare room from the ward. How long she’d been in that strange regimented room, she was unsure.

  She couldn’t remember leaving home or arriving there, though she did remember the first urge to wake up as a vaguely felt coming back into herself. It wasn’t the sharp, sudden, open-the-eyes wake-up she was used to with Martha shaking her to get her up and moving. It was more a gradual understanding that it was time, that she’d been asleep long enough.

  Before she opened her eyes the room formed around her. It was a world filled with strange noises and tantalising almost-familiar smells: wind-stirred trees rustled outside, gasps and long heaving breaths rasped inside. A quiet constant muttering in a rhythm like one of Mr Watson’s Sunday readings kept, like him, on and on. The mixed-up smell of carbolic, lavender, wood smoke, floor polish and chicken broth hung on the cold air and were almost like home. But this was not home. This bed was scratchy, narrow and bumpy. And it was not her bedroom.

  Nell opened her eyes to darkness. The air against her face was cold and she had no wish to move from the warm hollow she’d shaped in the mattress. The pillow under her head was lumpy and slightly damp. At one end of the room a stove, its flue rising into the gloom of the roof, was a black and yellow flickering shape against the shadows of the room. A steady glow of light came from one end of a line of beds opposite her. On her side of the room, Nell was one of a matching line of bumps precisely spaced and all looking the same.

  The light came from behind a screen and in a shadow theatre Nell could see the silhouette of a figure looming over a bed.

  The muttering stopped and it was as if a comfort had been withdrawn. In the little black and white play the figure lifted an arm up from the bed, folded it down again; then it did the same with the other arm. For a few moments the shape disappeared down behind the bed and the litany began again. Moments of blurred activity followed its end, before a ghostly white, faceless shape came out from behind the screen carrying a hurricane lamp before it. It floated down the room stopping at each bed on either side of the room and, as it neared her, Nell quickly closed her eyes.

  The next thing she knew someone was stroking her forehead, wiping her hair back from her face with a washer that smelled of lavender. Her hair? Her hair had gone. Her head was unnaturally light.

  A gentle voice urged her to wake up. It was morning, it said. Time to wake up, it said. Across the room the screen had gone and the bed behind it was empty. The ghost was sitting by her bed. Nell shuddered, blinked, then looked more carefully. It was a woman swathed in white like those mummies from Egypt that ran amok and killed people in the penny dreadfuls Jack read, only these eyes had life to them and didn’t look the least bit threatening.

  ‘Hello, Nell,’ said the mummy. ‘You’re going to be fine now.’

  Nell was in a long room that had a temporary feel to it. Timber painted a sickly green lined the walls and ceiling. The floor was scrubbed and oiled and shone with someone’s hard daily work. Tall thin windows, their top hoppers slightly opened, punctured the wall opposite. Light bulbs topped with green tin chinaman’s hats reached down from the ceiling in as neat a line as the beds themselves with their matching tight grey covers all ending at precisely the
same height above the thin, white-painted iron legs. Through the window opposite Nell could see the sky and the roof of an unpainted wooden hut. She wondered if someone inside it was looking back at her.

  For a long time Nell dozed, dreamed of despair, woke, sipped water or broth and dozed again. Gradually she stayed awake longer and, as she did, she spent more time trying to remember how she had come to this place.

  Nurses, those creatures draped in white, their heads and faces covered leaving only a slit to see through, moved around the ward with an economical efficiency. There were a number of them coming and going but two in particular seemed to have her in their care. There was Nurse Penny, with her gentle hands and soulful, wide eyes, who surely must be beautiful behind her mask, who held Nell’s head up from the pillow and wiped the perspiration from the back of her neck and always chatted as she spooned soup down Nell’s throat mixing food and news together. ‘Mrs McBride was going to make it after all. They had despaired of her and now she was sitting up managing a little broth … Nurse Penny’s sister’s cat had just birthed six kittens … they were adorable … Amy’s mum was coming today to take her home …’ The news came blurred through her mask but it was kindly meant. It was Nurse Penny who told Nell she was at Blackboy Hill, in the old army camp where the men had trained before sailing off to the war. Nell could understand that. And she knew where Blackboy Hill was. What she didn’t know was how she’d got there.

  Then there was Sister Matthews, whose eyes above the mask were certainly not soulful, and who, a week after Nell opened her eyes, insisted Nell get out of bed to use a chamber pot rather than a bedpan and sent her to sit at the nurses’ desk by the stove while she got on with changing the sheets. If it wasn’t raining, and if Sister Matthews wasn’t too busy, she’d help Nell into the wheelchair and whisk her down the duckboards to the latrines.

  Hospitals, at least hospitals run by old army nurses, Nell learned, had latrines, not dunnies.

  ‘Come on, Nell,’ Sister Matthews would say when Nell asked for the pot. ‘What about a ride instead? Let’s get some fresh air.’

  Sister Matthews called their trip past the kitchen and the old huts ‘The Dash’, and the cold air that caught Nell’s breath was a welcome change from the fuggy air in the ward with its rows of coughing, choking women. Sister Matthews said she enjoyed stretching her legs as she all-but-ran the long trek to the latrines, the wheels of the old wicker wheelchair clacking over the boards.

  Sister Matthews expected Nell to be up and about. At first it was walking slowly and carefully down the ward filling up the water glasses on each bedside locker. Then it was following the nurses as they made the beds, helping stuff the dirty sheets into the great laundry bags that had to be dragged down to the door to be picked up by the wardsman. Soon, Sister Matthews got into the habit of looking up to see who was calling for her and, if she thought they were not in any real need, she’d send Nell to see what they wanted. So Nell found herself fetching and carrying and often listening. Mrs McCrae was the worst. She couldn’t find a good thing to say about the hospital. Dreary, cold, not properly equipped and, ‘Fancy someone like me having to expectorate into an old jam tin!’

  ‘What’s expectorate?’ Nell asked Sister Matthews later that day.

  ‘Spitting,’ she answered. ‘You know, when you need to get the phlegm off your chest. If you don’t when you’ve got the flu, you could drown in it.’

  She looked up at Nell’s face wrinkled in disgust. ‘Not drown as in going under water and drowning, ninny. Drown as in your lungs fill up with the stuff and there’s no space left for air.’

  ‘What brought that up?’ Sister Matthews went on. And then she glanced down the ward and leaned towards Nell. ‘Mrs McCrae having another moan, is she? You’d think she’d be grateful to be alive and able to “expectorate”, wouldn’t you?’

  It was Sister Matthews who told Nell she’d come on the train, sent by the doctor to the isolation hospital to be looked after. Nell understood that, but who had let the doctor in and let him send her away?

  The last thing Nell could remember was Martha holding her as she gasped for breath and tried to throw off the blanket. It really was too hot and Martha’s dabbing at her with a damp flannel didn’t help at all. But Nell suspected there may have been someone else, someone she didn’t know.

  The night nurse, who didn’t even rate a name, never stopped for a chat. She sat at her desk, looking up at regular intervals and moving silently down the corridor to check on noises. Nell didn’t get to know her.

  She could, of course, have asked Matron who had sent her here, but Matron frightened Nell as much as she frightened the nurses. Matron knew everything. She walked down the ward at a starched, steady pace and saw all. She always asked how you were but did not encourage idle chat. Often a nurse who’d accompanied Matron to the door after her round would return grim-faced to the ward and determinedly set about an overlooked task.

  Yes, Matron would have known, but Nell couldn’t ask her.

  There was a doctor. He always appeared at the head of a hierarchical convoy, Matron one step behind him, then the ward sister. The nurses on duty lined up in spaces between the beds. Matron’s eye was even more piercing on the doctor’s visits and the nurses knew that it would be. You could tell when he was coming; every bedspread was tweaked, pillows were plumped up even more than usual, and playing cards, books, knitting, were put out of sight. The jugs and glasses of water on top of the bedside cabinets were moved to sit precisely in the centre of each one.

  It was the doctor who said that Nell was ready to go home.

  It was Matron who said that her father couldn’t get away just yet to come and pick her up.

  However, she went on to say, she shouldn’t still be in the ward with the sick. And they needed the bed.

  Matron said she could live in the spare room of the nurses’ quarters while she waited.

  ‘Be patient,’ she said.

  I MOVED INTO THE SPARE ROOM. NURSE PENNY AND Sister Mathews made a point of dropping in whenever they could and Matron included me on her rounds. At night after tea I was alone. There was no light from Martha’s lamp to grumble about. I missed Moggie landing on my bed in the morning. It was the signal for me to turn over so he could screw himself into the crook of my knee and dream of his night’s mousing.

  Matron sent two books over for me to read. I had already read the Sherlock Holmes one. Dad sent money home each year at Christmas and Jack and Pa would go into town to the big bookshop and choose a book for Mum to wrap up and put under the tree. Jack lets me read it after him. But I still like reading them again and again. The other book was something long and dull. Martha would have probably loved it, but when Sister Matthews brought me Seven Little Australians I read that instead. Nurse Penny told me Sister Matthews’ mother sent a whole lot of books into the camp for everyone to read, not just Sister Matthews but all the patients and the nurses and workers who were quarantined as well.

  If I had my druthers I’d be like Judy. Not dead, of course. But I’d like to be brave enough to stand up for myself, and be true to my convictions.

  I made the mistake of telling Sister Matthews about how I’d won the sewing prize at school last year. The next day Matron asked if I’d be up to helping them out with some mending. I realised I wasn’t up to being brave enough to stand up to her, so I began sewing that day.

  ‘Take your time,’ Nurse Penny said when she dropped the sheeting in. ‘There’s no hurrying getting better.’

  It was tiresome work, but no one was there to keep me at it so I could break off and read or just sit around when I felt like it. Once I added a little white rose to a top hem, although I wasn’t too sure why. Just to do something different, I suspect. To stop being bored with endless plain hems. And, too, I’d wanted to see if I was good enough to try that fancy sort of embroidery Auntie Em had shown me. Nurse Penny thought it was better than any she’d seen.

  Without her mask Nurse Penny wasn’t so much beautifu
l as kindly. She put that sheet on Mrs Milligan’s bed and pointed it out to her.

  ‘Look,’ she told me she’d said to Mrs Milligan. ‘Nell’s sent you a flower.’

  And for the first time since she’d been there, Mrs Milligan had smiled.

  ‘You’ve started something,’ Nurse Penny laughed. ‘They’ll all want one now.’

  So I added a little flower to every top sheet I hemmed or mended after that. And each flower was a little better than the last.

  I’d arrived at the hospital in my nightdress and had nothing else to wear. Nurse Penny wrote to her family and got a dressing gown, two dresses, some knickers, socks and a pair of shoes sent so I could walk outside.

  ‘My sister grew out of them quite some time ago,’ she explained. ‘They’ll do for around the camp.’

  When the time came to give them back, she waved them away. ‘Keep them,’ she said. ‘We have no one to pass them on to and you might.’

  The shoes were special. Nurse Penny called them boots but they weren’t like any boots I’d seen. They were made of the softest leather I’d ever felt and had little buttons to hold them close to my ankles. They had come with a little buttonhook to help do them up. I could have walked miles without them hurting and without having to bend down every so often to tie up my bootlaces.

  The dresses made me look like a little girl.

  I might be the shortest in our family, as well as the youngest, but I do not like looking like a little girl.

  Last Christmas I worked out that I would always be short by checking the birthday marks on the kitchen doorjamb. Martha who is 5 feet 8 inches now and Jack who is 5 feet 10 inches have always been taller than me at the same age. No matter how much I stretch as Pa slides the long kitchen knife across the top of my head and Mum adds the date, my name and age next to the mark he has notched, I am always inches below where their marks are.