To Love a Sunburnt Country Read online

Moira nodded again.

  Jodhpurs, not a dress … no, jodhpurs were too pale, too easily seen if they had to retreat into the jungle. It would have to be a dress, the green one with blue flowers. Sandshoes would be sensible, or plimsolls as Moira called them, but Moira would have a fit if she wore sandshoes on a train, even if the entire Japanese Army was attacking. Low-heeled shoes then, and stockings, which meant a suspender belt and more time, but the train conductor probably wouldn’t let a ‘mem’ on the wretched train in this country if she wasn’t wearing stockings, or at least not in a first-class carriage.

  She thrust a change of clothes into her haversack, hesitated, then shoved in more, including the blue spotted voile dress she had described to Michael. She had recently discovered the joy of clothes, even if sometimes they were a nuisance. If only one didn’t have to wear stockings with dresses, and horrors, gloves.

  She threw a pair of stockings into the bag too. If they had to run, she could ditch her clothes, and just carry Gavin’s things: a mosquito net, nighties, booties, blankets, nappies. The local women didn’t bother with nappies for their babies, just held them out at the right time. Less washing, of course, but it did mean you had to be careful where you stepped …

  Ben had insisted they keep more cash in the house the last few months, in case the local bank closed and businesses stopped taking cheques or money orders.

  She reached to stuff the banknotes in her pockets, realised dresses didn’t have pockets and swore; remembered she was no longer droving and trying not to swear; thrust the notes down into the brassiere that Moira insisted she wear, which would make the bl— wretched thing even hotter and gave her a bust like Bette Davis. The notes would probably get wet with sweat. No, horses sweated: men perspired; ladies glowed. Ladies be b— blowed.

  What else? Water. A Thermos and one of the water bags Ben used to take out into the plantation, slowly seeping moisture to keep it cool, like a Coolgardie safe. Food …

  The kitchen was in the hut across the compound, next to the garage, so that the cooking wouldn’t heat up the bungalow, nor fill it with cooking smells of onion, garlic and cabbage, as well as the local spices Ben and Moira seemed to love and she still found peculiar, not at all like Mum’s curried eggs, and sometimes too spicy to eat. She slipped to the door, listened … the chirp of some strange frog or insect. She’d had no chance to learn the night sounds here, with Ben away so much, and no one else seemed to know what they were. No sound of humans except the click of Moira’s heels on the wooden floor.

  She should have told Moira to take her shoes off, though if no one had heard them moving and talking by now, hopefully no one would.

  She crept across the compound, haversack in one hand, water bag in the other. The air smelt of chickens and yesterday afternoon’s rain, and the ever-present rotting scent of the jungle, so that she longed for the clean dry air of home. Another hour until dawn.

  She tiptoed into the kitchen, swore, mentally, which didn’t count and also made no noise. Of course Moira had the larder keys. The larder held wine and rum and whisky, powdered milk, canned turtle soup, tinned peas: expensive staples of colonial life, things that might be worthwhile to steal.

  She opened the food safe instead, took out bread and most of a fruitcake to nestle on top of her clothes in the haversack. Back home, she thought wistfully, there was always the remnants of a roast leg or shoulder of mutton, or stuffed rolled ribs. But people rarely ate cold meat here, except chicken at picnics. Meat rotted fast. She looked around, added half a dozen mangoes from a basket, a pineapple and, as an afterthought, a fruit knife.

  Time to run.

  Gear in the car. Back to the house for Moira’s suitcases — three of them, despite Nancy’s insistence on only one. Moira stood, neatly dressed, gloved and hatted, Gavin in her arms, wearing a long white nightgown with a white lace cap that Nancy privately thought made him look sissy.

  He blinked up at her, still too small for his age but no longer fragile, with Gran’s dark eyes, and hers and Ben’s, and grinned, a pure joy grin, entirely his own. ‘Gooruk?’ he crowed, as if delighted to be out of his cot, heading out into the night. He waved one tiny fist.

  She grinned back, unable to help it, then whispered, ‘Out to the car. Be quiet.’

  ‘I know.’ Moira sounded irritated, but at least she didn’t object. If they were not at war, Moira was going to be very annoyed indeed. She settled into the passenger’s seat, Gavin in her arms.

  Nancy cranked the engine, wishing Ben had bought a newer car, had insisted his wife go to Australia two years ago, had married anyone but Moira. She stopped herself from thinking that, heard the engine catch, flung herself into the driver’s seat and wished, at the very least, that Ben had bought a car with a roof, not an open tourer. Did a car roof stop bullets?

  All her life, except the year she had spent droving to Charters Towers and back, she had known the land and people around her so well that tomorrow was almost as clear as yesterday.

  Now she knew nothing, nothing that mattered, like how much power Japanese bullets had. Shotgun pellets passed through the shed wall at home, when she and Granddad had used it for target practice. When he had thrown up an old tin can and she had shot it down with his .22, the bullet had pierced it. She thrust away the image of a bullet like that spearing into Gavin. A baby was the most precious thing in all the world, Gran said. And Gavin, darling Gavin, with his gummy smile and tiny toes, the most precious of them all.

  Must keep him safe.

  The car lurched forwards.

  ‘You’ve forgotten to turn the lights on.’

  ‘Shh! I don’t need lights. People can see lights.’

  ‘They can hear the engine,’ said Moira, reasonably, and in a whisper.

  ‘You can see lights further than you can hear an engine.’ Out on the plains you could see a fire fifty miles away, a tiny star through the dark sky of the trees. But trees move. The night sky didn’t, except for the slow turn of stars that guided you back home …

  Home, where they should all be now. She couldn’t think of Overflow. Not yet. The car backfired, making her wince, then slid out of the compound, down the avenue of palm trees, out onto the thin white line of road.

  ‘Ben would have let us know if the Japanese had invaded.’ Moira’s voice was once more too loud. Gavin stirred in her arms. He pulled off his hat and began to chew it.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Sent a telegram. Or a messenger, if he couldn’t come himself.’

  Nancy gritted her teeth. ‘He might be … busy … now.’

  The car lurched over a bump. She wrestled with the wheel. She could drive. Just. Three lessons from that nice lieutenant, laughing ones, after picnics up on the hill. Why hadn’t Ben let them know? Sent a telegram, a message. Or was he …?

  Dead? No. If the Japanese had invaded tonight, there might have been no way to get a message through.

  B— blast Moira. Moira should have left Malaya two years ago, when the war with Germany began. For the hundredth time Nancy wished she’d never even come to Malaya. Homesickness was so strong she could taste it: the glow of hot earth after rain, dogs that smelt of sheep, the pong a wombat left, lingering over the soil for days, air that seeped sweet and dry into your lungs. She had almost written to Dad asking for him to book her a passage home time after time. But she couldn’t leave Moira, threatened with miscarriage. Could never leave Gavin with war with Japan brewing and his mother unwilling to accept the danger. Darling Gavin so incredibly tiny at first, his red face shocked and disapproving of the world he’d been thrust into. There were things you sometimes had to do for love, like swallow your longing for grey-green trees and water with a tang of rock, not earth and leaves, for Michael and her family.

  She glanced at Gavin, dribble soaking his hat. She’d never guessed you could feel so much love for something so small, a whole new person suddenly appearing in the world.

  ‘I still don’t think —’ Moira’s voice rose again.

  �
��Shh! If there’s nothing wrong when we get to the station, we’ll go back again. Be home in time for breakfast.’

  ‘What are we going to eat while we wait for the train? If you think I’m going to buy food from the native hawkers —’

  ‘I brought food from the kitchen.’ Nancy suddenly realised that Moira would turn up her nose at food from a haversack; might even refuse to accompany her if she carried it. Well, a haversack was practical, easier to carry than a suitcase. If …

  She shut her mind to the ‘if’. It was possible to think of herself carrying Gavin, slipping away from the Japanese through the jungle. Add Moira to the image and it became ridiculous.

  She remembered how Moira had turned up her nose nearly a year earlier when she, Nancy, Moira’s sister-in-law, arrived carrying the haversack, instead of a lady’s leather suitcase, suitably embossed with her initials. Moira’s slightly-too-darkfor-polite-society sister-in-law.

  Men were tanned. Women protected their skin from the sun. Her brown skin was not just from heritage, but sun-kissed from a year in the saddle, after she’d bunked off from school to go to Queensland droving. Add brown eyes to her brown skin … Twice she had heard whispers from the oh-so-proper English ladies. ‘She’s not Eurasian, is she? Anglo-Indian?’ And then the reassuring, ‘Australian. A large property I hear. Too much sun, I expect: so unfortunate.’ Money, and the prestige of a large property, meant a tan might be forgiven. But she saw the query linger in the eyes of her hostesses nonetheless.

  Being Eurasian here was as great an impediment as being Aboriginal in her own country. Mine, she thought. My land. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel. For a second she wanted to leap from the car, track the Japanese soldiers she’d seen like she’d track a snake back home, plunge their own bayonets into them.

  She didn’t. She couldn’t. Couldn’t track in this damn jungle where the ground was littered with old leaves and unfamiliar smells. Couldn’t take on six men by herself. Two, maybe three, if they were smaller than her and she took them by surprise. She’d managed to get rid of those two shearers up past Nyngan, smashing a rock into the nose of one and a foot in the kidneys of another, just like Granddad had shown her, enough to leave them doubled over and gasping and her running.

  But the shearers hadn’t had bayonets. Her duty now was to get Moira and Gavin to safety; and to warn others, if warning was needed, that war was on these shores. To get home to Overflow, then do whatever was needed there …

  She wondered if she’d broken the shearer’s nose. She hoped so.

  Moira dozed on the leather seat beside her, Gavin asleep again in her arms. The car shivered through the darkness. Three lessons weren’t quite enough for even Nancy of the Overflow to learn to drive. But they had stayed on the track, had missed a pig — or possibly the pig had missed them.

  The sky gathered its greyness up from the horizon. The moon had gone, that bright full moon that had lit the way along the track. Nancy thought of moonlit rides through the timber shadows back home. Had the Japanese used the full moon too, to show them where to go? Not just the soldiers like the ones she had seen, but the pilots of the planes too?

  A far-off drone whispered across the too-still air. For a moment she thought it was a plane. But it was the cicadas, waking with the sun, the first hard golden rays bringing forth a buzzing that became a roar as the sunlight flooded across the jungle top.

  Daylight smudged the world. The black wall of the jungle turned into trees. The car lurched on a larger bump than usual.

  Nancy grasped the wheel more firmly. Perhaps the nightmare of the past few hours would vanish with the light. Perhaps when they got to the station they’d find that the Japanese had already been captured, had only been a handful of paratroopers drifting down beneath their domed parachutes, just as she’d seen in the Movietone News at the picture theatre down in Kuala Lumpur, about the invasion of Denmark.

  But Denmark was at the other end of the world, where the war with Germany was. It was so hard to truly believe in war here. War was for real countries, like England and those in Europe. Malaya, Thailand, Australia floated in the southern seas, forever untouched by war. She frowned.

  Or had they been? She had never learnt the history of this part of the world at school. Schools taught English history, with just enough European to make sense of English wars, like with Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo and the Kaiser in the Great War.

  She had not even learnt the history of her own land, except for the First Fleet, the early governors and the crossing of the Blue Mountains. Only Gran had given her that, on their Sunday afternoon walks, her small hand in Gran’s big-knuckled black one — stories that she only later realised were history too, far-off stories, some older than humanity, of rock and ancestor animals and water.

  And tales of only a few generations before too, of Gran’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, of battles with the white men who were her relatives on Granddad’s side, and Mum’s. Her ancestors fighting her ancestors.

  Had there been wars in Malaya, ones she had never heard about? The sultans had troops. If they needed troops, perhaps there had been wars. Maybe many wars …

  War could be here too. It was.

  Daylight glowed up from the horizon. The sky turned hot, clear blue. Monkeys chattered above them, and once she saw a flash through the trees that might have been a tiger but that she told herself was more probably jungle flowers that the movement of the car made flicker.

  Gavin gave a small sharp cry. Moira opened her eyes. ‘There, there, precious.’ She looked about and opened her dress discreetly, draped a scarf over her shoulder and bosom, and began to feed him. ‘Are we there yet?’

  ‘About a mile from the main road.’

  Moira peered at a hut through the trees. ‘See? Nothing’s happening.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Bup erp,’ said Gavin conversationally. He’d been babbling baby sounds for the last few weeks.

  The car passed another hut. A child waved from the garden, picking bananas for breakfast. A woman in bright native cloth swept a compound with a twig broom. Normal. Quiet.

  For the first time since leaving the plantation, Nancy wondered if she really had dreamt the soldiers. Sometimes under the ceiling of stars her dreams had been so vivid she’d expected to be still in them when she opened her eyes. Dreams of her grandfather holding her close as they rode across the ridges; her mother’s voice laughing as she read a story by her bed. Mum read them a story every night, right up until the day Nancy had left home. She had almost hoped Mum would start again when she got back. She hadn’t.

  Moira reached for her handbag with her free hand. ‘This is insane. I must look a mess! What if the Commissioner’s wife sees me like this? I don’t even have any lipstick on …’

  ‘If the Japs have invaded, it won’t matter.’

  Moira hunted through her handbag. She tried to hold a mirror steady, as well as Gavin and her lipstick. ‘Things like lipstick always matter. It’s called keeping up appearances. If we English don’t maintain our standards, how can we expect the natives to respect us?’

  With force, thought Nancy, thinking of the pistol at the Commissioner’s belt, the rifle Ben took even for a day’s work on the plantation, the shotguns lined up in their rack in the study.

  She should have taken the guns. Now the Japanese would get them. Or the servants, the men of the plantation. Please, she thought, take the guns before the Japanese find them. Hide them, if you can’t use them now. If the Japanese do take your land, you can break free …

  Could they? Would they? She tried to think of any land that had been conquered and had won its freedom back. The English ruled Malaya. The English had taken her grandmother’s land. Her grandfather’s ancestors had killed her grandmother’s ancestors. Yet they had loved each other, and deeply …

  Japan needed rubber. Malaya had rubber. Japan needed iron. Australia had iron. You need iron to fight a war. Gentleman Once had told her that, the old boozer up ne
ar Charters Towers. She’d sipped warm lemonade while the men drank their beer and Gentleman Once had sounded off, calling Prime Minister Menzies ‘Pig Iron Bob’ because he’d sold Australian iron to Japan. If they don’t have iron, they can’t make planes and ships, he’d said. Sell it to them and they’ll build them.

  ‘So we shouldn’t sell it to them then, eh, Gentleman?’ asked one of the drovers.

  The old man had looked owlishly over his whisky. ‘If we don’t sell our iron to the Japanese, they’ll take it. The next war will be in the Pacific. Not Europe. You mark my words. We took this country because there were more of us than them. Well, there are more Japanese than Aussies …’

  They’d laughed, ‘One Aussie is a match for twenty Japanese,’ and started talking about the odds on the favourite for the next week’s Cup. By dusk the old man was slumped against the bar. Bluey and Ringer had carried him home.

  But his words had lingered, like the echoes of the kookaburras’ morning call — if you listened closely, you could still hear the laughter through even the midday sunlight. And over the last year as the Japanese moved closer, and closer still, from China down through Thailand, the words had become a constant whisper.

  Gentleman Once had been wrong and right. The next war — this war — had begun in both Europe and in Asia, as Germany invaded country after country, as Japan invaded China and surged south. Had war between the British Empire and Japan really come now?

  There were only six soldiers, Nancy thought. Maybe they weren’t invaders at all, just Japanese, like the barber in the village, who had decided to wear uniforms for some reason. Or Chinese like Ah Mee. Could she really tell Japanese from Chinese in the dark? They might have put on uniforms for a joke, or a festival to frighten devils.

  And the bayonets?

  The car turned the last corner. The road lay before them, but they could not see it.

  For what had been a road was now a torrent of crawling, jogging humanity — juggling luggage, babies, bundles, pigs, hens in bamboo cages. Wide-eyed children, men with bloodied faces: a river of terror heading south.