The House at Evelyn's Pond Read online

  WENDY ORR was born in Edmonton, Canada in 1953, and spent her childhood in Canada, France, and the USA. On finishing high school she travelled to England, where she studied occupational therapy and met her husband Tom. They moved to Australia, had a son and daughter and bought a dairy farm.

  Wendy’s first book, Amanda’s Dinosaur, was published in 1988. She has since written 22 children’s and young adult novels, and in 1991 gave up occupational therapy to write full time. This is her first adult novel.

  Wendy and her husband live in the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne, Australia.

  First published in 2001

  Copyright © Wendy Orr 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:   (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax:    (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email:  [email protected]

  Web:    www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Orr, Wendy

   The house at Evelyn’s Pond.

    ISBN 1 86508 544 8.

  eISBN 978 1 74115 151 0

    I. Title.

  A823.3

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  For Tom, always and forever

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to:

  My parents for five years of answering countless questions, interviewing friends and checking references, and a lifetime of believing in me.

  Bert Miechel, Murray Pullar, Jack Ritchie, Ian Waterlow and Jack Wellington, who so generously shared their time and stories to create Bill, Ruth and Fred’s war experiences.

  David Colwell and the Remembering Project, who helped steer me through selecting Bill and Ruth’s war services; the elders of Tom Holloway’s WWII memories site and the women of the Air Transport Auxiliary who wrote about their experiences in print or cyberspace.

  Alan Bailey, Myrtle Balzer, Ed Coleman, Frances Guinchard, Howard Hardy, Evelyn Pond and Della Stanley for their stories of the Annapolis Valley, from childhood memories to Teachers College training, and to Irene Griffin for sharing her arrival there as a war bride.

  The many friends who shared a story or information to create Jane’s life after leaving Canada: Lyn Armstrong, Veronique Froelich, Lyn and Andrew McClelland, Rosalind Price, Jenny Reid, Chris Sutton, Raynor Thomas, Anne Witney and Shirley Woelfell.

  For Ruth’s last trip, thanks to Tom McCormack of the White Waltham Airfield, who not only answered questions but offered to take me flying; Pat Smith, Mary Backhouse and Bob Draper for Ruth’s Literary Tour, and John Tempest for explaining the funeral and legal details.

  Samantha Coker-Godson, for allowing me to appropriate her acupuncture dream.

  Roy Vickers for permission to describe his gallery.

  The interlibrary loan officer of the Murray Valley Regional Library and the Cobram staff for their patience and help, and the many friends and strangers who answered questions, loaned books and let me discuss my characters with them.

  And especially: my trusted first readers, who loved and criticised: Pamela Freeman, Debbie Golvan, Kathy Harris and Kerry Millard, and my editor Julia Stiles, whose skill and perception made the cuts almost bloodless and the additions a delight.

  Emergency or not, it seems poor planning to embark on a thirty-six hour trip—she’s added it up, counting the waits—without a book. By most people’s terms, if not her own, Jane is a reader: four from the library as well as the book group selection every month, with extras at Christmas and birthdays. Books from her mother, who will want to know what she has read on the plane; once she’s asked about the flight itself, Ruth will say, ‘What did you read?’

  Would have said.

  Their last phone call, the Sunday before her mother left Halifax on her charter flight—a ‘blue-rinse tour,’ she’d described it, a literary tour of England—Ruth had discussed, not how she felt about returning to her birthplace after fifty-two years in Canada, but what she was reading: ‘ . . . new author, absolutely brilliant—I’ll mail it to you when I get back.’

  ‘I thought you’d be getting into the mood, Pride and Prejudice and all that.’

  ‘In fact I did read Wives and Daughters again the other day—I’m more fond of Elizabeth Gaskell than I used to be—but I don’t think one needs to swot for a holiday!’

  ‘And you’re looking forward to seeing Mary?’ (‘The one person in England whom I have any real desire to see again,’ Ruth had described her.)

  ‘Very much. Some trepidation about the tour, I admit.’

  ‘I wish . . .’

  ‘I know, my dear, so do I. Never mind—enforced sociability will be good for me, might curb my crabbit old woman tendencies. As for the reading, I’m taking a few old favourites, one for each region. Oxford is the difficulty—selecting something relevant without absolutely wallowing in nostalgia.’

  Nostalgia is precisely what Jane can’t risk now. It’s not so much the shame of breaking down amongst strangers, it’s the fear of the unknown. She simply doesn’t know whether, when the news has finished percolating through to her brain, she’s going to be strong enough, smart enough, to do what has to be done. How can anyone know until it happens? There are no rehearsals for the end of a mother’s life.

  On a hazy Chelsea morning, Rupert Bear is ready to embark on another bold flying adventure. He loads his friends into the balloon basket, but the teddy playing Edward Trunk takes too much room and is unceremoniously plunked onto the windowsill. ‘You can watch us in the sky,’ says Rupert, ‘and wave.’ He drags a chair over to reach the catch and open the window; then, balancing the basket on the ledge with one hand, scrambles up beside it.

  Nanny, who’s only left the nursery for a moment, opens the door to see Ruth framed in the second-floor window. A precarious basket of toys balances beside her.

  With great presence of mind Nanny does not shriek the child’s name. Her traitorous heart is the only noise as she tiptoes across the floor and, with a quiet movement that feels like a lunging dive, slips her arms around the small body.

  Edward Trunk, aka Bear, lurches headfirst into the garden bed below, flattening two yellow and one pink antirrhinums. Nanny, with her struggling charge clutched tight against her, collapses into the chair as she kisses, smacks, and kisses again. Ruth goes on screaming for Bear.

  ‘That’s where you’d have ended up in another moment!’ snaps Nanny. ‘Then you’d have been sorry!’

  ‘Wouldn’t!’ shouts the four year old, who till the end of her life will have difficulty admitting being wrong. ‘We were going flying!’

  ‘I should have gone to live w
ith my sister like I was going to,’ Nanny mutters. ‘Your father was never this much trouble when he was young!’

  Ruth stops bellowing. ‘Tell me a story about when Papa was a little boy,’ she begs. She doesn’t believe these stories but is fascinated by the unlikely thought that Papa, his sisters and brother were once children and Nanny a girl, ‘pretty though I say it myself—I could have married when I left your grandfather’s house, but it wasn’t to be; I went to Mrs Bartholomew when she had her first and was there ten years . . .’

  Ruth fades out until she hears the magic words, ‘Then your Papa asked me to come and look after you, and you know the rest.’

  ‘I was born and I was a tiny little baby and you came to be my Nanny.’ Though there is a satisfying feeling that this is not necessarily the end of the story. It could also be a beginning.

  ‘That’s enough stories,’ Nanny says briskly. ‘Now, if you can be a good girl, we’ll go and rescue Bear.’

  She doesn’t think it necessary to mention the escapade to the child’s parents, but is relieved a few weeks later when The Times returns to favour and the Daily Express—and Rupert Bear with it—are banished from the Townsend household.

  Although that’s the last time Ruth attempts to fly off a windowsill, her childhood is always lived from one story to another. Thin armed and gangly legged, dark and sprite-lively, she is Peter challenging Hook, Kim waiting for the Great Game, Lorna Doone watching for John Ridd. Anyone except a cherished only child of elderly parents: father in the City; mother in the house and garden organising the daily, the cook and the gardener; Nanny, too much of a fixture to leave when her charge goes to school, pottering about as needed. But Ruth is waiting for her true life of adventure and romance to whisk her away from the staidly pretty streets of Chelsea.

  However, not everyone is content to wait for adventure to come to them, and one May morning when Ruth is eleven, a twenty-seven year old typist from Hull flies out of Croydon Airport and across the world to Australia. Her twenty days doesn’t beat the record, but Amy Johnson is the first woman to fly the route alone, and the world’s press sees her as an antidote to the grim years of depression: a flash of light and hope. She becomes a heroine.

  It’s the first current event Ruth becomes aware of and she throws herself into it with passion, following the reports in her father’s Times, spending pocket money on the Daily Express to start an Amy Johnson scrapbook with pictures of Amy as a child, Amy as an aviatrix, the green Gipsy Moth Jason. Nightmares of gaping whale jaws follow the ‘GIRL FLIER’S FIGHT FOR LIFE’ headline: ‘SIX FEET ABOVE SHARK-INFESTED SEAS’, and ecstasy four days later at the ‘poor little typist’s’ victorious landing. On the August night that ‘Our Amy’ arrives in London, waving royally to rapturous crowds from Croydon to Park Lane, Nanny sits up late with her knitting, casually barring the door against girls who intend to run away to see their idols face to face.

  The scrapbook continues, and though she begins to cheat, adding pictures of other aviators and aircraft, the Gipsy Moth and its young pilot remain her favourite. (For some time, however, Ruth believes that being a typist is a prerequisite for learning to fly, and studies anything to do with typewriters as assiduously as the article in her mother’s Woman’s Magazine on the practicalities of garaging an aeroplane at home.)

  Life nonetheless continues on its normal course. Her mother does not rush out and buy a little plane with folding wings; Ruth takes a train to boarding school instead of a plane to Australia. She also grows taller, grows breasts and surprising urges, and is sent to Switzerland to finishing school. It is 1935. The school is not especially posh; there are no princesses or duke’s daughters, though it’s as dull and regimented as her parents could wish and the girls do learn a little stilted French in spite of the forbidden whispered English. But Madame has a problem: due to unforeseen circumstances she has accepted three more girls than the dormitories can hold. Ruth will be boarding in the village—although Madame assures that the Le Blancs’ Calvinist eye will be just as watchful as her own. Ruth can take the toboggan down the hill in the evening and walk up again next morning after petit déjeuner.

  This is Ruth’s first snow, not melting London sleet but real snow heaped on the ground, fresh and glowing in the moonlight. ‘Sit—comme ça,’ says Madame, bundling her onto the sled. ‘Remember you are a young lady. The path will take you straight to the village.’

  The dour instructions don’t breathe a hint of the exhilaration of adrenalin and fear, of the extraordinary flying freedom, cheeks burning, eyes watering, breath catching in the cold. Around a bend the toboggan skids sideways, tumbling her into the deep and untouched whiteness—virgin in virgin snow, thinks Ruth, reading aloud from the book of her life. Sprawled on her back, she’s alone in this new world of mountains, dark trees and cloudless spangled sky—stars as they are meant to be seen, undimmed by the dull glow that is London at night; she can almost feel the world turning. Snow to cool her burning face, snow on her tongue, snow to taste, to drink, to roll in . . . She is Artemis, goddess of mountains, her life finally a little closer to the story she weaves of it.

  At Sydney airport, pacing the endless blue-carpeted corridors, Jane chooses the comfort of calculations. Ian would not have stood sentimentally at the window to watch her plane leave Melbourne: give him fifteen minutes between departure lounge and carpark, two and a half hours’ drive . . . by the time she’s finished a rather stale glass of fresh orange juice in the cheerless lounge, he will be home.

  If she could be sure of his exact moment of arrival she’d call. Already it seems another era since she left, as if she’s been floating in time as well as space; she needs the grounding of his voice. But standing at a pay phone to hear her own answer message is more likely to bring visions of twisted freeway wrecks than comfort—she knows the way her mind works. Better to imagine the more likely truth. He’ll have changed into overalls and gumboots, not trusting nineteen year old Jason, Sue’s son next door, to check the cows as they should be checked. By now, with the first boarding call to Jakarta and Singapore, he’ll be walking around chilly paddocks with the susurrus of chewing cuds and bovine breath, quietly peering at hindquarters or investigating signs of suspicious restlessness. August, the height of calving, is not a good time to be away.

  All being well, no calves to pull or the vet to phone for a caesar, no cows paralysed from pressure of a too-large head, he’ll return to the house, make a cup of tea, maybe a sandwich for early lunch, and go back to sleep. It was midnight before they’d gone to bed, two-thirty when they got up—more than enough excuse for a nap.

  Then his own tea to get when he comes in tonight—no preparing dishes for the freezer as she had last time, no stocking the shelves. His mother will have him over for meals, make a casserole or two and a cake, and Sue, busy as she is herself, will help out in the same way. Neighbours always cosset a man left on his own. Women left temporarily alone are presumed, and often truly, to enjoy the solitude and temporary relief from routines of caring and so are rarely invited out. However, at this time of year Ian is likely to be too tired to accept invitations, preferring to make himself a steak sandwich—his only culinary endeavour—at whatever time he makes it in for the night.

  ‘He’s fifty-six,’ she reminds herself, ‘old enough to look after himself for a couple of weeks!’

  It’s difficult not to worry. Twenty cows are in milk already, standing lonely in that big dairy twice a day, the five heifers amongst them twitchy and nervous at the unaccustomed liberties taken with their bodies. Ian is good with animals and careful of being kicked, but the best stockman can get in the way of a crazed heifer’s hoof. In the next three weeks thirty more heifers and one hundred and forty older cows will join the herd. Pray for small-headed calves, nose down for easy delivery and no cold southern winds to shiver the babies and fever the mothers. Most years she’d add a wish against cold rain, but the irrigation farmers in south-eastern Australia are now entering the second year of drought and getti
ng wet is the least of their problems.

  Child and adult, Jane has spent most of her life on farms—latitude and topography aside, there’s not that much difference between the Annapolis and Goulburn valleys—but she feels a spurt of anger now, anger so violent it leaves her momentarily nauseated, at lives held constantly to ransom by the sheer caprice of the weather.

  ‘If we’d just had rain I could have met Mom in London.’ Pointless to think, impossible not to. They’d planned it for nearly two years, since the demise of Ruth’s last dachshund. ‘I’m too old to replace him,’ she’d said, ‘it wouldn’t be fair, and it will leave me freer for travel.’ As well as visiting cousin Mary, they’d have rented a car for an itinerary of missed historic sites, a little nostalgia, a touch of laying ghosts to rest. Then El Niño had intervened, terrifying Ian into thoughts of barren land and bankruptcy, and Ruth had gone with her busful of genteel Nova Scotian ladies.

  The irony, of course, being that now Jane will meet her in London after all, though meet isn’t quite the right word; with a trip home thrown in for bonus, though home isn’t quite the right word now either. The money that had been inaccessible for fun is suddenly available and acceptable for misery.

  On a rainy September day in 1936 Ruth goes up to Oxford to read English, and Beryl Markham, carrying a sprig of Scottish heather and Amy Johnson’s husband’s lucky watch, sets off on the first solo flight from England to New York. For Ruth it adds a further frisson to the drama of her own journey—women, it seems, can do anything men can and sometimes do it first. The later news that the aviatrix, while successfully navigating the North Atlantic, has ended her flight ignominiously in the mud of a Cape Breton bog seems less significant. Nova Scotia does not seem likely ever to cross Ruth’s horizons; flying remains a dream.

  But a rapidly approaching dream in the person of Miles Ashby.

  Miles, standing on the steps of the Bodleian Library in an instant that remains forever framed in Ruth’s memory, is dark and wiry with a thin, intense face, an inexhaustible, restless energy and an air of natural leadership. He is on his way to the Flying Club. It is inevitable that she will fall in love with him.