Beneath the Southern Cross (40 page)

 

By the time Kathleen and Otto had fought through the crowds to a vantage point from which they could see the official platform, the speaker from the Women's Peace Army was addressing the rally.

‘A vote against conscription is a vote for peace,' Susan Kendle proclaimed. Nellie Putman and her band of women booed loudly, but Susan ignored them. ‘We must not send more of our men to their slaughter!' Through the megaphone, her voice rang out clearly across the expanse of the Domain. ‘We should be bringing them home, not sending them to their deaths!'

Susan was walking a fine line. There were many present who, despite being anticonscription, were not antiwar, and there were mutterings of disapproval from many amongst the crowd. Kathleen, however, strongly agreed with the woman. At the outset she'd tried to convince herself that Robbie was risking his life for a noble cause, and she'd done what she could to make herself feel useful, collecting for the War Chest fund and joining one of the innumerable sewing and knitting circles which provided clothing for the troops.

Before Robbie's death, Kathleen had found the work fulfilling. The knowledge that, in her own way, she was serving her country had made her feel closer to her son. But although she worked even harder after his death, joining the Red Cross Society whose contribution was paramount to the war effort, she no longer believed that she was serving her country. She worked in order to distract herself. She no longer believed in the war.

The woman was right, Kathleen thought, and she wanted to applaud both her views and her boldness. She had never before thought to enquire about the woman's name, now she wanted to know. She edged her way through to one of the nearby policemen.

‘Who is the speaker?' she yelled above the din.

‘Susan Kendle,' the policeman yelled back. ‘A troublemaker.' The police regarded Susan as an agitator with the potential to incite a riot. ‘You'd think at her age and with her money she'd have something better to do with her time, wouldn't you?'

Kathleen stared at the policeman. ‘Kendle?' she asked.

‘Kendle and Streatham,' he shouted louder over the babble of the crowd. ‘Her old daddy's a millionaire.'

Kathleen edged her way back to Otto. Susan Kendle. Good heavens above. All these years she had been admiring Charles Kendle's daughter. What would Paddy O'Shea have to say about that?

Kathleen had been eighteen when her father had died and, like her mother, she was convinced that Charles Kendle had killed him. ‘Or if not,' Dotty had always insisted, ‘he ordered it done.'

The crowd was starting to get angry. Several people were pushing and shoving at the platform, which was rocking dangerously; the policemen were disengaging their batons and calling for order. Otto took Kathleen's arm.

The sins of the fathers, Kathleen thought, and she looked back
over her shoulder as Otto protectively cleared a way for her through the mob. All so much water under the bridge now.

‘Stop the killing on the Western Front!' Susan bellowed. Fist raised, she continued to denounce the war, even as the police moved in.

Kathleen thought she'd like to meet Susan Kendle one day. Not to talk of the past—the woman wouldn't even know who she was—but to tell Susan Kendle that she was right. Right in every word she said. It was a senseless war.

On 28 October, 1916, 1,160,033 Australians voted against conscription and 1,087,557 voted for. Soldiers, including those on active service, voted 72,399 for conscription and 58,894 against.

The immediate result of the referendum was a split in the Labor Party. Prime Minister Billy Hughes stormed out of a Labor parliamentary meeting exclaiming ‘let all who support me follow me', and twenty-three of the sixty-five members did.

Abandoning his past allies, Hughes formed a new party, the National Labor Party, a coalition of his followers and his former political opponents, and, in 1917, the National Labor Party came into power. In December of that year, the indomitable and dogmatic Hughes forced yet another conscription referendum upon the people.

The Commonwealth Government issued lurid posters portraying the ‘Hun' as a bestial creature who, if he was not shooting soldiers, was murdering grandmothers and babies. The press, too, hounded the people. ‘Remember,' the newspapers said, ‘that every No vote is a vote to dishonour Australia, a vote to tarnish the glory that has been won by the Anzacs.'

But, as they had done the previous year, a majority of Australians voted no. And, thistime, not only because they wished for freedom of choice; it was nearly 1918 and Australia was thoroughly war-weary.

 

Kathleen knew there was something going on. She'd known ever since the New Year's Eve party down at the docks.

‘You're not going out again,' she said. Aggie had been out every Saturday night for the past three months.

‘Just a gang of us going to the dance hall,' she answered petulantly. ‘I'm allowed to have a bit of fun, aren't I?'

But Kathleen knew Aggie wasn't going to the dance hall. The dance hall didn't sell grog. Neither did the pubs for that matter, not at night any more. That was another change the war had brought about. Early closing. The ‘sixo'clock swill' now saw workers head from their offices and factories straight to the pubs to pour as much alcohol down their throats as they could and then stagger home well before the sun had set. So how come Aggie was getting in after ten o'clock, the worse for wear and stinking of cheap grog?

Kathleen had caught her out twice. ‘Just a little drink at a friend's place' had been the girl's defensive response, but Kathleen had known better. And the other times, when Aggie's heavy-footed clumping in the downstairs rooms had woken her, Kathleen had known that the girl was drunk again.

So when Aggie brazenly said she was leaving, Kathleen was not at all surprised.

‘You've met someone,' she said. It was not a question.

‘What if I have?' Aggie's tone was belligerent. ‘Why should I pretend to be a widow for the rest of my life? We weren't even married, when all's said and done.'

Kathleen bent over the large tin tub on the back porch table and concentrated on the washing. As usual Aggie had been careful with her timing, she thought as she scrubbed at the heels of Otto's woollen socks. Sunday morning, Otto was at church. Aggie was scared of Otto.

‘So where are you going?' she asked, trying to sound indifferent. The prospect of Aggiedisappearing from her life was neither here nor there, but her heart pounded at the thought of losing Robbie's child. She looked at little Caroline playing in the small courtyard with the wooden building bricks Otto had made for her. The little girl was two and a half years old now, a good-natured child, happy in her own company, and Kathleen adored her.

‘He loves me.' Aggie's pert chin was tilted defiantly, as if she dared Kathleen to differ. ‘He wants to marry me.'

‘I'm sure he does and I hope you'll be happy.' Kathleen squeezed the socks dry, dumped them into the wicker basket and started on the collar of one of Otto's work shirts. ‘So where are you going?'

‘He's got a good job too, he works at Vicars Woollen Mills.'

‘You'll be living in Sydney then,' Kathleen said, relieved. Vicars Woollen Mills was in Marrickville.

‘Yes. Near the factory.'

‘Well, that's good, I'll be able to visit Caroline.' Kathleen relaxed. ‘And when she gets bigger she can come and see me,' she said, squeezing Otto's shirt dry and placing it in the wicker basket with the rest of the washing.

‘Leo doesn't want the baby.'

Kathleen had picked up the tub of dirty washing water and was about to tip it down the drain beside the porch. Now she stood embracing the tub and stared disbelievingly at Aggie.

Aggie had anticipated Kathleen's contempt. She'd even considered leaving without telling her, but she had a begrudging respect for the older woman and she wanted Kathleen to understand. ‘Men don't want a woman with a child,' she said.

The tub was heavy. Kathleen tipped the water over the side of the porch and into the drain.

‘I have to find a husband, Kathleen.'

Kathleen turned to face her. ‘You'd give up your little girl?'

‘It's all right for you,' Aggie whined. How dare Kathleen act so self-righteous and judgemental; she hadn't been brought up by a slut of a mother and dumped in a charity school for the destitute. ‘You've had it easy all your life, you've got a husband and a house, it's all right for you.'

Kathleen filled the tub with fresh water from the tap by the porch. There was no need to comment. And why bother to judge the girl when Aggie was bestowing upon her the greatest gift possible? The gift of her own son's child.

Aggie took Kathleen's silence as censure. ‘My mother wasn't a widow,' she said. She'd tell Kathleen at least part of the truth. ‘My mother was a whore.'

Kathleen stopped rinsing the clothes and gave the girl her full attention.

‘I swore I'd never end up like her,' Aggiesaid. ‘I swore I'd never sell myself, all I wanted was a kind man who'd make a good husband. Then I met Robbie.' She sniffed tearfully. ‘We would have been happy. It's not fair.' It wasn't fair either, Aggie thought. All her well-laid plans had come to naught.

RobbieO'Shea had not been the first man Aggie had seduced,
nor had he been the first man to whom she had surrendered her ‘virginity'. She'd had the deception down to a fine art by the time she'd met Robbie. Her mother had taught her the tricks when she was fifteen years old.

A young woman allowed a man to seduce her at the very end of her menstrual period, resulting in a small amount of blood left on the bedlinen. Men liked virgins, they paid more for virgins. And men were simple; they did not know that menstrual blood was a different colour. Aggie learned to angle her body slightly and feign pain as the man thrust into her. It was very easy, and Aggie was well remunerated with gifts. She never asked for money, she never considered herself a professional girl.

The refined manner which Aggie had assiduously acquired under the tutelage of the Christian workers at the Jubilee School had given her such an air of credibility that Robbie O'Shea, like the others before him, had been only too eager to accept the gift of her unquestioned virginity. But Robbie, unlike the others, had been eager, also, to accept the responsibility of such a gift. And the responsibility was marriage.

Aggie had told Kathleen the truth in one respect. Well tutored as she had been, she had never wished to follow her mother's path. When she had used the tricks her mother had taught her, it had always been with the prospect of gaining a husband. Once she had surrendered her ‘virginity', however, the men had soon lost interest. Not Robbie though, her plan had paid off with Robbie. They were to have been married. And then he'd been killed and she'd been left with a baby. It wasn't fair.

‘I would have been a good wife to him.' Aggie was weeping tears of self-pity by now. It was unfair of Kathleen not to sympathise with her. ‘You don't understand, it's not easy for someone like me. No man wants another man's baby.'

‘I understand, Aggie, of course you must find yourself a husband. I'll look after Caroline, and I'll do whatever I can to help you in your new life.'

‘Thank you, Kathleen.' Aggie sniffed back her tears gratefully. ‘You've been good to me, I'll never forget you.'

‘But that's exactly what I want you to do, my dear.' The girl had been about to embrace her, but stopped, puzzled, as Kathleen continued. ‘My granddaughter will be raised as an orphan. In time
she will be told that her mother is dead. You are never to see her again.'

Aggie was confused. Kathleen's words were so cruel, but her tone was not. In fact she sounded kind, even sympathetic.

‘But I do—' she started to protest.

‘No you don't, Aggie,' Kathleen gently interrupted. ‘You don't love your little girl. Those are my conditions. Do you accept them?'

Aggie knew it was a test. And she knew, just as Kathleen did, that it was a test she could not pass. She looked down at the toes of her shoes as she whispered, ‘Yes.'

 

The day after Caroline's third birthday there was a knock at the front door and Otto answered it.

‘Tim! Tim Kendall!' Kathleen heard her husband exclaim, ‘Come quick,
mijn duif
, Tim Kendall is back,' and she ran in from the kitchen, little Caroline at her side.

As she embraced him, tears in her eyes, all she could think was thank God one of them had come home.

Tim was leaning heavily on a cane. ‘It's nothing much,' he said when Kathleen started fussing. ‘If it'd happened earlier, they probably would have fixed me up and sent me back to the front. I wouldn't have put it past them. But the war'll be over soon so they sent me home instead. Soon all the boys'll be home. Well, all that's left, that is.' Tim didn't believe insmall talk any more. ‘I'm sorry about Johann and Robbie.'

‘We'll talk about Johann and Robbie as soon as you're sitting down and I've made you some tea,' Kathleen insisted, ushering him towards the sofa.

‘Go easy, Kathleen, not the front room,' Tim said. ‘A bloke who's a member of the family sits at the kitchen table.'

‘And a bloke who comes home from the war, he has a beer,' Otto said as they walked through to the kitchen, Caroline skipping along beside them.

Kathleen smiled. It had been years since she had seen Otto so animated.

‘So you're Caroline,' Tim said, sitting at the table while Otto fetched the beer from the icebox. ‘I knew your dad, we were best mates.'

‘What's the matter with your leg?'

‘It's just busted,' he said. ‘Be as good as new soon. The other one's all right though.' He lifted the little girl up onto his good knee and she sat there happily rocking backwards and forwards.