Alone on a Wide Wide Sea (9 page)

It turned out that Henry didn’t just pinch hats and socks, he’d steal just about anything that he fancied. So we never left our clothes lying around, nor shoes, nor towels. Aunty Megs told us to shoo him out of the house whenever he came in; but somehow, sooner or later, he’d always find a way back in again. And Aunty Megs was right, he did smell. If he was in the house we’d smell him before we saw him, and the stink of him lingered long in the air after we’d put
him out. But we loved him all the same, just as Aunty Megs did. I think it was because of the way he looked up at you. His eyes said: “OK, so I stink. OK, so I’m a thief. But nobody’s perfect, are they? So give me a break, will you? Deep down you know you love me, everyone does.”

Feeding Henry his bottle of milk was the chore that was never a chore. Marty and I would often squabble over which of us should do this last task of the day. Whoever won would sit on the verandah steps right above Henry’s hole. He’d climb up on to your lap, roll over on his back and wait for it. Aunty Megs said he’d just never grown up, that she’d tried and tried to break him of the habit, but he’d hang around her feet making her feel so guilty that she couldn’t resist him. So Henry still got his milk, and it had to be out of a bottle.

We did have tasks at the Ark. We milked the cows, and the goats – learned to make butter and cheese too. We chopped wood, we fed the hens, got chased by the geese when we tried to shut them up in case the dingoes came in the night. But now it was work we wanted to do, because we wanted to help out, and because both of us loved being with Aunty Megs. Our hands blistered, our backs ached, but we didn’t mind. Every morning she’d take us down to
the main road a mile or so away, and we’d walk along the verges, one of us on the right, one of us on the left, looking for any casualties. Most days we’d find something but more often than not they’d be dead already. But from time to time we’d get lucky.

I remember the first time I discovered a joey crouched trembling by the side of his dead mother. I couldn’t contain my excitement, and yelled for Aunty Megs, who came running over to pick him up. She was very strict about handling them. She never allowed us to feed them or handle them. If they were very small she’d keep them for a while in a box by the stove in the kitchen. We could crouch over them and look, but not touch. But as soon as they were old enough they’d live outside in the compound with the others. Marty and I would spend hours out there watching through the wire, but Aunty Megs was the only one allowed in. And she never talked to them, never stroked them. She just fed them.

She’d never let us come with her either when she went off for her rides into the bush, the orphan animals, her “little fellows,” trailing behind her. If we came, she said, we’d only confuse them. There was no point in saving them at all, she insisted, unless they could be returned back into the wild
again successfully. She made it perfectly clear that this wasn’t an exercise in sentimentality, wasn’t just to make herself feel good. It was to give them a second chance of life, a chance they all deserved. It was a chance everyone deserved, she said, animals and people alike.

Aunty Megs had a station wagon she kept in the farm shed, which was half hen-house and half garage. And because the hens liked sitting on the station wagon it was just about the messiest car I’ve ever seen in my life. But we loved it. Going into town, ten or so miles away, was a real treat. She often sang when she was driving. She used to sing a lot – it made her feel happy, she said. She’d teach us all her songs, and we’d sing along, all three of us making a dreadful racket, but we loved it. She knew all the words and all the verses of
London Bridge is Falling Down
, which was more than I did before I met her.

We didn’t go into town often, just once a week or so. She’d stride down the street in her straw hat, and we’d follow along behind. Everyone knew her and she knew everyone. They were all rather curious about us at first. She didn’t explain who we were or where we’d come from. She just said we were her “boys” and that was that. And it was true. We were her children, and she was our mother – the
only mother we’d ever known anyway.

It was on the first of those trips into town that she took us into the police station. She’d been thinking, she told us on the drive in, and it was time someone did something about it. She wouldn’t say anything else. She led us up to the desk and said we had to tell the sergeant right there and then all about Cooper’s Station, everything we’d told her. So we did. The policeman wrote it all down and shook his head a lot while doing it. Aunty Megs told us sometime later that the place had been closed down, that all the children had been found other homes to go to. I was pleased about that, cockahoop that Piggy wouldn’t be beating any more children. But most of all I was very sad for Ida. I remember feeling that I really didn’t want to know anything to do with that place, I wanted to forget all about it. Just the name, Cooper’s Station, was enough to make me think about it, and I didn’t want to have to think about it ever again.

But what you
want
to think about isn’t necessarily what you
do
think about. The truth is that the memories of all that happened at Cooper’s Station have come back to haunt me all my life, even during those happy, happy years we spent with Aunty Megs. They were happy because I was as
close then as I’ve ever been to carefree. I know when I read what I’ve just written that it sounds as if I’m wallowing in nostalgia, making an idyll of the Ark. It’s difficult not to. After Cooper’s Station anything would have seemed like heaven on earth.

Aunty Megs may have been the kindest person in the world, but she could be firm – we soon discovered that. She was appalled when it became clear – as of course it very soon did – that neither Marty nor I had been to school, and so neither of us could read properly nor write. So from then on she’d sit us down every morning at the kitchen table and teach us, regular as clockwork. I won’t pretend that either of us were willing pupils – we just wanted to be outside messing around, climbing trees, riding Big Black Jack, making camps, talking to Henry or Poogly or trying to cheer up poor old Barnaby. It took hours sometimes to get an
ee-aw
out of Barnaby. An
ee-aw
we reckoned was as good as a laugh, so we always stayed with him till we got one. And when it rained we’d far prefer to be out with Aunty Megs in her big garden shed where she made her model boats, where we’d make them with her – she taught us that too.

But lessons, she said, had to come first. We didn’t argue
with her, not because we were ever even remotely frightened of her, but because both of us knew that she always had our best interests at heart. She made no secret of her affection for us, nor her wish to give us the best upbringing she could. “One day,” she told us, “you’ll have to leave here and go out into the big world out there and earn your living like everyone else. To do that you need to learn. The more you learn now, the more interesting your life will be.” So the two of us buckled down to our lessons, often reluctantly perhaps, but without protest.

As part of her teaching Aunty Megs told us stories, tales she’d learned from the bushmen, folk tales from England. She’d read us legends. By the stove in the evenings she’d read us a novel, a chapter a night,
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson (we asked for that again and again). There were the
Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling,
Little House on the Prairie
and
Heidi
. She loved
Heidi
, and she was going to read it to us, she said, even though she knew it was a girl’s book. But our favourites were the
William
books by Richmal Crompton. Sometimes she’d be laughing so much she couldn’t go on. (Later when we could read properly, we read a bit of one of them to Barnaby, but he didn’t find it funny at all. Not a single
ee-aw
.)

But most of all Aunty Megs loved poetry. It was Mick, she said, who had given her a love for the sound of words. He’d read to her often, usually poems about the sea.
Sea Fever
and
Cargoes
, and
The Yarn of the Nancy Bell
, which always made us giggle, and Mick’s favourite –
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. She’d sit back in her chair and read them to us, and every time her words would take us again down to the sea. Fifty years or more later I still love all of them, and
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
is the one I love best. I know it by heart, start to finish. Every time I read it, and I read it often, I can hear her voice in my head. She wrote her own poems too she told us, but that she did in private, and however much we badgered her to read them to us, she never did. “My poems are like a diary,” she said, “and for no one’s eyes but mine.”

Aunty Megs was an intensely private person. You always knew when you’d asked one question too many, like when Marty was looking at the photo on the mantelpiece of Mick in his sailor’s uniform holding the hand of a little boy. When he asked her who he was, she didn’t reply. When he asked once more, she said. “No one you know, and no one I know either.” And the sudden coldness in her voice made it very clear she was going to say nothing more about it. We always
thought it must have been her son of course, but we never dared to ask her ever again.

There really was so much that was wonderful at Aunty Megs’, so much that changed my life. For a start we’d found a mother, and maybe as a result Marty and I became like real brothers there. We learned together how to build boats, only model ones maybe, but these model boats were the beginning of our lifetime love affair with the sea. We’d listen to Aunty Megs reading her sea poems, and talk long into the night about how we were both going to go to sea and be sailors like Mick had been. And I learned
The Ancient Mariner
by heart and recited it for Aunty Megs on her birthday. She listened with her eyes closed, and when they opened after I’d finished they were full of tears and full of love. Marty said it wasn’t bad, but that I’d made a mistake and left out a verse. So I threw the cushion at him and he threw one at me. We both missed, and then all three of us were laughing. Henry came bustling in then to see what the noise was all about, took one look at us, decided we were mad, picked up the cushion, turned and walked right out again. I was happier in that moment than I’d ever been in all my life, happy as Larry.

We’d been living at the Ark for about four or five years when Aunty Megs had her accident. Marty and I had been swimming in the river. We did that most days, when the weather was right, if there was enough water in the river. Swimming was something else Aunty Megs had taught us. “Almost as important as poetry,” she’d say. “Best exercise there is. Could save your life one day too!”

We came wandering back up to the house, but when we
called for Aunty Megs she wasn’t there. A quick look at the empty compound told us what she was doing and where she was. She’d gone off on one of her rides into the bush, hoping to release some of her little fellows, her family of animals. Normally she’d be gone for an hour or two, no more. But after several hours there was still no sign of her. We decided we shouldn’t wait any longer, that we had to go out looking for her.

I was leading Big Black Jack out of the paddock when we saw her horse come galloping riderless down the track from the hills. We didn’t waste any time then, but rode back up the way her horse had come, calling for Aunty Megs as we went. We knew roughly where it was she usually went to release her animals – the same area she’d found us all those years before. So that’s where we headed now, both of us on Big Black Jack, Aunty Megs’ horse following along behind. After a while we heard her singing, singing out loud – later she told us the singing helped to take her mind off her pain.

We found her out in the open beyond the trees, sitting with her back up against a rock, her family of animals scattered all around her. She was holding her arm tight to her chest, and had a nasty gash down one side of her face. There was so much blood all over her. Her shirt was soaked
with it, both hands and her neck. She smiled up at us. “Am I glad to see you,” she said. “Don’t worry about the blood. Got plenty more where that came from. Just get me up and take me home, there’s good boys.”

She was already too weak to walk very far, so we knew that somehow we had to get her on to her horse. It wasn’t at all easy. We had to find the right tree stump to use as a mounting block, then help her up into the saddle. I could see her shoulder was paining her dreadfully. I led the way on Big Black Jack while Marty rode up behind Aunty Megs, holding her steady in the saddle all the way home. Then I rode on into town for the doctor. It turned out she needed a dozen stitches in her face and that she’d broken her collar bone. He put a sling on her, and told her also that she’d lost a lot of blood and had to rest up for a while, a month at least, maybe more. She said, “Phooey.”

The doctor stood there then, wagging his finger. “Don’t you phooey me, Megs Molloy,” he told her. “This is serious. You’re to keep that sling on and stay still. These boys of yours’ll look after you. You stay put, you hear me? Doctor’s orders.” And then he turned to us. “And if she tries to get up and go off looking for her little animals, you have my permission to lock her in.” I think he was only partly joking.

Marty and I took him at his word. Now we were looking after Aunty Megs, which made a change. We made a deal with her. You tell us what to do and we’ll do it, we said. But she had to stay put, stay still, rest as the doctor had told her. She agreed, reluctantly. So that’s what happened. She only had to tell us what to do for a few days until we got into some kind of routine. After that we just got on with it. We took turns at everything we didn’t much like doing – which was mostly the cooking and the washing up and the laundry.

Aunty Megs taught me from her sofa how to make scrambled egg on toast. She was very detailed and specific in her instructions. She allowed no deviation. Beat the eggs, bit of salt, bit of pepper, some milk. You had to spread the butter on the toast, keep it warm. Then you cooked the eggs, and the eggs had to be cooked just right, not for too long or they’d go all lumpy and tasteless. I did it better than Marty who always forgot the toast and burnt it. I still cook the meanest scrambled eggs in the world all these years later. It’s still my favourite meal. During Aunty Megs’ convalescence scrambled eggs alternated regularly with baked beans, or bubble and squeak, or corned beef hash. And we could fry bacon too. Poor Aunty Megs. Thinking
back, it wasn’t the best of diets for a patient, any patient. But she never grumbled. She laughed about it instead and told us in the nicest possible way that neither of us should ever take up a career in catering.