Where the Queens all Strayed Read online

  barbara hanrahan

  where the queens all strayed

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  To Jo Steele

  Have you ever been down to my countree?

  it was full of smiling queens:

  They had flaxen hair, they were white and fair,

  but they never reached their teens.

  Their shoes were small and their dreams were tall:

  wonderful frocks were worn;

  But the queens all strayed from the place we played

  in the land where I was born.

  John Shaw Neilson

  1

  We hadn’t always lived at Fern Gully. Once there’d been a house at Prospect, by the hotel. Father had been a tram driver. He’d come home with his kit-bag, whistling every night; the smell of beer wasn’t melancholy then. He’d been different—smiling a lot; he didn’t spend the day with the sad look on his face. Even his beard seemed curlier. But the house at Prospect was before the accident. Father hadn’t been lame when a tram in the distance meant you might see him—a hero as good as Uncle Will.

  One day they’d carried him home and there was blood on his great-coat and Doctor said he might lose the leg. Mother started to cry, and Meg and I were afraid. She’d never cried so much before. Not even when the news came that Uncle had died in South Africa. But Father’s leg going lame made Mother strong. She’d dried her eyes and taken charge. The house at Prospect was sold, and Mother’s past began to merge with the present.

  We climbed on top of a Hill & Co. coach and drove past the market-gardens and orangeries of Payneham and Athelstone. Meg and I perched beside the driver on his box. It was lovely being up so high, swinging along, the horses’ hoofs beating out a message. There was so much to see. We drove along the banks of the Torrens, and one of Mother’s best stories was all about that. “Once,” it began, “the river had a better name. The Aborigines called it Karra Wirra Pari, which means River of the Red Gum Forest …”

  We drove into the Hills. There were gum-trees and, at intervals, houses. Ladies in their gardens stopped hanging out washing and shaking the crumbs from tablecloths to wave. The driver jiggled his reins, and looked proud as he told us that the passing of the coach was the great event of the ladies’ days. “Good gracious,” they’d say, “there’s the coach, and the fire not alight”, or “Pussy not fed”, or “the kettle not on the boil”.

  The road kept zigzagging. There were sharp rises and steep descents. I clung to Meg and worried that the driver might lose a rein, and the horses bolt. One dangerous declivity was known as Breakneck Cutting.

  Soon the country changed. It was gentler, almost English. There were paddocks and orchards and farms. Mother’s eyes shone. Though Father disregarded the view, and concentrated on his leg as if he felt a pain, she ignored him. She looked about her and smiled. She had grown up in the Hills; she loved them.

  So often Mother told stories of the pioneers. How they’d come to a new country, and everything was strange. To feel safe they’d thought of home. The kangaroo grass might have been corn; the Adelaide plains, nicely wooded, resembled a gentleman’s park. They missed the old things so much that they sent to India for slips of apple- and pear-tree. Granma had come to South Australia with a root of rhubarb wrapped in moss. She placed it in a box with her shoes, the leather of which kept it moist.

  Mother had been a pioneer at Prospect. She was permanently homesick. Instead of transplanting rhubarb, she’d summoned up the Hills with words.

  She said they were more like England than any other place in the state. As well as tea-tree and wattle there were ivy bushes and oak-trees, hedges of sweet-brier and monthly roses. The highest and most central point in the Hills was Mount Lofty. The Mount was Elysium. Up there were ribbon gardening and marble statues and the dwellings of fashionable society. Each mansion was surrounded by plants that would have died on the plains in summer. There were rhododendrons, camellias, even strawberries. In winter it was known for snow to fall.

  The horses made spanking time, and soon we came to Fern Gully. Its name was something of a misnomer. The town did not lie in the gully, but on its adjacent slopes. Whatever may have been the case formerly, fern was not conspicuous among its vegetation.

  The first thing that arrested attention was a patriotic memorial close to the Post Office. On it was Uncle Will’s name. In Fern Gully, Uncle was famous. As Trooper William Jones of the Australian Bushmen’s Corps he’d died in action against De Wet’s guerrilla forces in South Africa. His horse and he were felled by the same bullet; but only Uncle was a hero, entitled to that sturdy pebble-dash obelisk.

  Mother leaned forward to point out the different churches. The Baptist with the field below it where stood a circle of fourteen oak-trees, the Methodist with its imposing manse, the Anglican that boasted a baptismal font made from best English Bath-stone. There were shops and little houses with names like the houses had at Prospect: Globe Villa, The Wattles.

  Then it was time to climb down, for the coach had stopped. We had reached the lane where Granma lived. My legs were trembly from sitting so long; I wanted to go to the lavatory. I felt sad as the driver waved goodbye, for he’d turned into a friend.

  Our luggage had been sent on ahead, so there was only Mother’s basket to carry. Father and Meg shared its handles. I held Mother’s hand and had to run to keep up, she set off down the lane at such a pace.

  I began to feel excited again. The lane was part of the adventure, part of Mother’s past. Walking down it was like walking into a series of her stories.

  There were the remains of the oldest wattle and daub hut in the district. Once a gentleman lived there who’d lost one of his hands in a winnower, and wore a metal stump into which he screwed a hook for use when gardening, and a dinner fork for service when at meals. He was a dedicated gardener: Mother recalled the hook as having a high degree of polish.

  Even the trees were old friends. The blue gum twined with mistletoe; the red gum that was the home of laughing jacks and rosella parrots. We passed the patch of stringybarks where you found Dutch orchids, and the prickly acacias where Jenny Wren built her nest.

  We came to the shiny green hedge that was called the squeaker hedge, because its leaves did for a whistle if you folded them in halves and blew hard. Beyond the hedge was Lizzie Potter’s house. It was as curious as I remembered from the last time we’d visited Granma: made of silvery tin that shone in the sun, and set about with
sunflowers and cockleshell borders. I’d never seen it, but I knew there was a grape-vine at the back of the house with a stem as thick as a lady’s waist. Though best of all, apparently, was Lizzie herself. I took Mother’s word for it that she rivalled any fairy-tale witch.

  We halted beside another hedge—this time of shrubby wormwood. And now Mother seemed to have strayed into one of the stories, too. She had a part to play that was nothing to do with Father and Meg and me. We might have been no relation. She shook free of my hand and ran ahead of us towards a house shaded by creepers and a corrugated-iron verandah. Under the verandah stood a fat lady, dressed in black because of Uncle Will.

  And then it was funny, for it appeared Mother had made a mistake; had run into the wrong story, muddled another’s childhood with her own. When she reached the verandah the fat lady dodged her arms. Mother ended up hugging bridesmaid’s fern and morning glory.

  Gran loved us, Mother assured, but I found it hard to believe. All the way to Fern Gully on the coach, and walking along the lane, I’d imagined us coming nearer to nicely bestowing a favour. Our arrival would be just the thing to cheer an old lady’s lonely days. It was always like that in the books Meg got for Sunday School prizes. It had been something like that when we’d visited Granma twice a year. She’d let me look in the box that was full of mementoes of Uncle. I saw the silver leaf he’d sent from Table Mountain, the indelible pencil scored by his teeth. I was Gran’s favourite, because my name—Thea—was short for Dorothy, which was hers. She cut me a second slice of marble cake, and the goodbye kiss I received was wetter than Meg’s. She played at perfect grandmother as she sent us back to Prospect laden with eggs and honey and rhubarb.

  When you saw her every day she was different. Everything else was, too. The eggs didn’t taste so good when you had to collect them in the morning before school, yourself … in winter it was cold; always, you were scared of the spiteful hen that pecked. And bees stung, and though the story of the rhubarb’s coming was romantic, Meg said she saw a black snake by the patch. Cross her heart—though Granma swore at her and said she was a city-bred fool.

  Old ladies weren’t meant to swear, but Granma did. She said bloody cow and bugger and took God’s name in vain. Mother looked nervous when one of the temper fits was coming. Father could disappear to have a smoke behind the fowl-house, but not she.

  Perhaps the most disconcerting thing was that Mother kept telling her stories. Even after Granma snipped the buttons from Meg’s new Dorothy bolero she could tuck me into bed and tell of a gentle Gran in bias-cut flounces … they ran up her skirt from hem to waist, so that when she walked she rippled. Mother swore the story to be true, but I didn’t believe her. Granma could never have been like that. She could never have made a jelly with a lot of isinglass and a little water, then rode in a buggy with it wrapped in wet cloth, on her lap … for the party was thirty miles away and there was no ice.

  I scorned Mother’s stories as much as I hated Gran. Both of the actions hurt. Though they’d both betrayed me—one by lying, the other by loving falsely—I felt that if I kept scorning, yet went on savouring the stories and enjoying the marble cake that was still a part of tea-time, I somehow did the betraying myself. Though, with regard to Granma, there was more than merely cake to savour. She didn’t have the fits all the time. In between, she could be all right. I helped her peel the potatoes, and she showed me how you saved the skins cut thick at the eyes for planting. Together we spread the wet sheets on top of the scented bushes in the garden to dry.

  Doing those things it was easy to believe she’d been young and pretty and nice. Sometimes when she was like that, her eyes looked bewildered. I waited in vain for her mouth to come open and tell the secret: why there was another Granma who was different.

  Perhaps she was mad; perhaps it was something to do with Uncle Will’s dying, and that of Granpa before him. Or being lonely for too long before we came, or realizing that you could even die yourself. All the time we lived with her, Gran was two people. Really, I both loved and hated her. It would have been easier if she’d been nasty all the time. I wondered why I cried myself to sleep.

  One morning after a particularly bad fit the night before—she’d smashed Mother’s crystal scent bottle, and set fire to the fringes of the rug—we found her dead in bed. It hadn’t been a peaceful dying. Granma’s contorted face showed she’d even tussled with Death.

  I missed her, but things improved. Gran lay in the cemetery by the Recreation Ground, and Mother’s stories came into their own. There was no longer any awkward reality to mock the fabled pioneer lady who carried a jelly on her lap, and had a rhubarb root sprouting from her shoe.

  The Hills became home. The years passed, and it seemed a dream that we’d ever lived at Prospect, where Father had whistled and woken regularly with a smile on his face. For though she was under the earth, and in winter hemmed in by an extra layer of nettles and grass, a little of Granma’s power lingered on. When she’d been taken with one of the tempers she’d usually vented her rage on Father. “He’s not good enough,” she’d cry. “They only lived at Bowden, by the gasworks.” And she said he drank like a fish, that he’d a hide as thick as a rhino’s. She said he was living off her money—wrapping apples, now and then, didn’t count. Why hadn’t he been man enough to get killed in South Africa like Will? “Bugger his leg,” she’d say when Mother tried to defend him.

  I knew what she said wasn’t true. Bowden didn’t matter … but it did. There was a gasworks; there was a boot factory and a tannery and a bottle works, too. Bowden was common. Father gave Meg the book of sacred solos that had been his mother’s, and she got rid of the horrid address: “Fourth Street, Bowden” with fierce black strokes of her pen.

  And he sensed all the nasty secret untrue things we judged him with. And each year he became quieter. What Meg did hurt the most. Everyone knew he loved her best.

  2

  Once Meg had been merely my older sister; someone familiar, whom I took for granted. She was nice enough, but ordinary; I didn’t notice her much. Then one day I was twelve and she was seventeen. She put her hair up, and I looked at her properly, and found I didn’t know her. Overnight, it seemed, she’d turned into a stranger who did all the things the Ladies’ Page of the Observer advised: whitened her neck with a cut lemon dipped in toilet borax, rubbed in dainty Russian skin food every night. Hands were the great test of breeding, so she wore a pair of gloves to bed. She read novels called The Gaiety of Fatma and A Gamble With Life. She knew the masculine Gibson Girl to be out of fashion; that the “restful” type was the girl of today.

  Because of Meg our life changed. She made Mother buy Cashmere Bouquet soap instead of Pears, for the ad vowed Madame Bernhardt said it was exquisite, par excellence the toilet soap of the refined. All sorts of things became as common as Bowden. Father had to change his tobacco from Yankee Doodle to Irish Civil; the sauce bottle wasn’t allowed on the table.

  She demanded an underskirt festooned with real Torchon lace, and a bead necklet from the Feather Shop in Melbourne. She debated should it be lessons at the Adelaide Shorthand and Business Training Academy, or the School of Design on North Terrace. She decided on the latter as being more genteel. Twice a week she took the morning coach in, to study repoussé work and artistic anatomy. She started to talk silly. She said things about the thrush’s liquid melody and the perfume of the golden wattle. The apple blossom down by the jam factory made her feel choky. When the choir sang “Out on the Rocks” at morning service she had tears in her eyes.

  Probably the tears had something to do with Teddy Teakle; likewise feeling choky, when confronted by Teakle apple-trees.

  One day Teddy would own those trees, and acres of others as well. The jam factory would be his, too. No wonder Meg’s eyes were liquid in church. She looked better than ever like that, and she knew Teddy was watching, swivelling his head in the Teakle pew across the aisle. When it was time for a hymn, she
sang with ardour and poppy cheeks, holding her head high to show off the dimple in her chin and give her nose a chance of more tilt. It was all right to flirt—as long as you did it ladylike, and kept on singing for Jesus.

  Teddy’s father talked a lot of his old Welsh mother who’d walked miles to the fair with a box of eggs on her head and a poultry basket on her arm, the while knitting a pair of stockings. He boasted of being a self-made man, who’d started off poor in the wood-carting business, and by dint of great energy and toil had purchased land at Fern Gully. He’d cleared it bit by bit, planting it first with trees that eventually bore the Cleopatras, Rome Beautys, and Jonathans he’d taken a chance on exporting to England. The apples paved the way for the plums and cherries and apricots that led on to the jam factory, and the familiar Teakle tin banded with Great Exhibition medals that graced self-respecting larders throughout the state.

  But though Mr Teakle was a man of the people, he took care to see his only son stayed unrelated. Mrs Teakle, who’d come from modest Gully stock herself, had obligingly died giving birth. Teddy had been sent off early to a boarding school in the city.

  He grew up to be a figure of romance. The jam factory was down in a hollow. When it was summer and school holidays came, the Gully Road was a favourite route for girls of initiative out on a ramble. In the old days, when Meg was still ordinary and not playing at proper young lady, we’d take a turn there ourselves to be entertained.

  I thought the girls beautiful, coming towards us from town like a troupe of angels, all in their best, all in white—white dresses, hats, and sunshades—set off nicely by the trees so green and the sky so blue. When they came to Teakle’s they bent over the hedge at the side of the road, pretending to look for roses; or someone was sure to discover a pebble in her shoe, or someone else to complain of stitch. You could tell by their giggles or sighs if they’d sighted him or not. Usually they hadn’t. Their shoulders drooped as they went back to town.