Heritage (12 page)

‘I really am late, Pietro.' It was the first time she'd attempted his name. She'd been too inhibited before – it was so Italian-sounding and she knew she'd get it wrong. But it didn't matter now if she got it wrong, she wanted desperately to put him at ease.

Saying his name, however, was not enough. ‘Yes.' His response was polite; it was plain he didn't believe her.

Then Violet heard herself say, ‘There's a dance at Dalgety Town Hall the Saturday after next, why don't you come along? Do you like to dance?'

‘I like to dance very much.' His smile was tentative, but hopeful.

Marvelling at her audacity, Violet continued, ‘I'm going with Trish and Mick. Trish and Mick work at the store, you would have seen them there.' He nodded. ‘Well, Mick's got a car and he's driving us, I'm sure he wouldn't mind if you came too.' She had no right to make such an offer, she realised. Mick might well not wish for another passenger; after all, he didn't even know Pietro.

‘No, is all right, thank you. I go with my friends Lucky and Peggy.' Pietro couldn't wipe the grin from his face. ‘Lucky and Peggy, too, like very much to dance.' Confidence restored, he offered her his arm. ‘I can walk you to the shop?' he asked.

She hesitated for only a moment. What the heck, why not? she thought. Let her be late for once – Trish and Mick sometimes took a full hour for lunch when Mr Halliday wasn't there, so why shouldn't she? Besides, she was interested in hearing about Lucky and Peggy. She accepted his arm. The Aussies never offered their arm, and it was such a stylish thing to do.

‘I've met Lucky,' she said as, arms linked, they walked up the slope towards the street. ‘He's been into the store with Miss Minchin a couple of times, he's very nice.'

‘Yes, Peggy, she is his girlfriend. And Lucky, he is my very best friend,' Pietro announced proudly. Anyone would be proud to have Lucky as his best friend.

Violet felt the vaguest sense of shock at the term ‘girlfriend'. ‘Girlfriend' inferred that Miss Minchin and Lucky were a couple and, although she'd seen them together on several occasions, she had never considered them a couple. She'd simply been pleased that Miss Minchin, whose social life seemed to revolve around ladies' committees, had a friend. She'd ignored the whispers that it was not proper Peggy Minchin be seen with
that man
, assuming the criticism was due to the fact that
that man
was a German. What was wrong with Miss Minchin having a friend who was a German? she'd wondered.

‘One bloke is as good – or as bad – as another, Vi,' her father had said when the New Australians had first come to the area. ‘It's not up to us to judge a person because they look or speak a bit different from us. Even the Germans,' he'd said. ‘The war is over, and we've got to let bygones be bygones.' It was one of the reasons why everyone said her father was a fine man, she'd thought at the time.

She now wondered briefly whether there might be another set of rules when it came to a ‘couple'. Could that perhaps be the reason for her father's sudden disapproval of Miss Minchin? Violet was confused, both by the possibility of her father's double standards and by the thought of Miss Minchin being someone's girlfriend.

‘G'day Vi.'

‘Hello, Hazel.' She returned the greeting of the middle-aged woman passing by, a friend of her Auntie Maureen's. It was all too much to think about right now, Violet decided, she'd think about it later. But she noticed Hazel's look at her arm curled through Pietro's. Well, let Hazel talk, she thought, let them all talk. There was nothing wrong with accepting someone's arm.

‘I'll see you at the dance,' she said as they arrived at the shopfront, ‘Saturday after next.'

‘Yes.'

‘Goodbye, Pietro.' She said his name easily, without any inhibition, and as he smiled she noticed that he didn't flick back his hair.

‘Goodbye, Violetta.'

She walked into the shop, and for the rest of the afternoon she thought about so many things, but mainly how handsome he was when he smiled.

 

‘You keep your hands off our women, you dirty Wog bastard!'

As the Aussie staggered past, punching wildly, the Pole stepped neatly to one side. He'd agreed to come out into the street rather than cause disruption at the dance, although he had no idea what he'd done wrong.

The night air stung with the spiky chill of autumn, and puffs of steam came out of men's mouths as they gathered in the dim street. The nearby pub afforded no light, although the chinks beneath its doors and the soft glow through its windows signalled there was action in the back bar. The men could see plainly enough, though, by the light which poured through the open front doors of the Dalgety Municipal Hall opposite, where a local band from Cooma thumped out ‘The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B' with surprising expertise.

The attractive colonial-style pub and the ugly squat stone building with DMH proudly inscribed above its door were the only two buildings of any note in Dalgety. Apart from a number of cottages and a small shop, there was nothing else. But as a river-crossing town on a major stock route, Dalgety's pub and its old town hall saw a great deal of action. Tonight was no exception.

The Aussie lunged, and missed, again. Among the dozen or so men, several were trying to reason with their drunken mate while the others, although not bent on violence, looked at the Pole with venomous dislike.

‘Take it easy, Ken,' one said.

‘Jesus, give it a rest, Kenny,' said another. ‘He was just dancing, there's nothing wrong with that.'

‘Nuthin' wrong! He's trying to pinch our women like all the rest of the bastards.' A number of the men were clearly in agreement. ‘Come 'ere, you Wog prick, and fight!' As he once more lurched forward, a friend grabbed his arm.

‘C'mon, mate, we'll take you home.'

The well-meaning interference caught Ken off-balance and he sprawled heavily, face down, on the rough gravel road.

‘Oh shit!' He scrambled to his knees, a hand to his bloodied nose. ‘Oh shit.'

Sergeant Merv Pritchard watched from the shadows of the Buckley's Crossing pub. Well, hopefully that'd put an end to it, he thought. He hadn't wanted to intervene unless it was absolutely necessary. No point in locking up Ken just for causing a disturbance. He was only like this when the grog was in him, and the Pole could obviously handle himself. Good of the bloke to step outside when he'd done nothing wrong, of course, but then that was the generally accepted rule. No fights inside. Even a bar brawl, it was understood, was to adjourn to the street.

Being a cop in the Snowy Mountains required a great degree of diplomacy, Merv had found. You couldn't afford to throw your weight around needlessly, even if you had the muscle to do so. And big Merv Pritchard had more than enough muscle to down any bloke foolish enough to take him on. But the ten-man force stationed at Cooma was also required to police the smaller outlying towns and the mountain camps and, in such a male-dominated society, it would have been asking for trouble to come on too heavy. The whole area was a potential tinderbox of violence, and the coppers found it wiser to turn a blind eye to many an activity which elsewhere would have attracted police attention. Particularly gambling. The men needed to gamble, the coppers realised; it was their major form of entertainment. So the raids staged on the SP betting racket run out of the sports club in Cooma were purely for show, orchestrated well in advance and designed to cause minimal bother for all concerned. And the two-up games at the mountain camps, and the boxing matches and card games in which big money changed hands, were ignored unless violence came into play.

The coppers were also well aware that the men needed women, so a blind eye was turned to prostitution as well, so long as the girls weren't too ostentatious. If prostitutes set themselves up discreetly in town for the several days of their stay and arrived and left the camps under the cover of darkness, they, too, were ignored for the most part. It was the pimps the coppers came down on hardest – they didn't like the pimps, turning up with their caravans, a queue of men stretching for hundreds of yards waiting their turn. The pimps were the scum of the earth.

And as for the brawls … Well, you had to turn a blind eye to most of the brawls, Merv thought, watching Ken's mates haul him to his feet. Men needed to get it out of their system. Strange, though, that it was the Aussies who caused the majority of the problems. The Aussies and the Paddies – the Irish, too, liked a bit of a stir. Jesus, you'd expect the Europeans'd be the ones to cause the trouble, wouldn't you? But apart from the Yugoslavs, there was little to worry about. And even when the Serbs and the Croats had a go at each other they didn't match the antagonism of the Aussies. Funny about that, he thought for the umpteenth time.

Merv kept his eye on the Pole as Ken was dragged away. He was pleased to see one or two of the men apologise. ‘Sorry, mate,' he heard one of them say. But most of the others gave the Pole a dirty look as if it had all been his fault. When they'd shuffled off, he saw the Pole adjust his jacket and run a hand through his hair, preparing to return to the dance. Merv would have liked to have congratulated the man on his behaviour, but he decided against it. He'd seen the Pole's acceptance of the situation. The Pole was a fit young man with the knowledge that he could defend himself against a drunk, but he had suffered Ken's attempt to bully him as if it were his lot in life. As if it were something he was meant to endure. And Merv knew that this was the sort of man who would fear him if he were to step out of the darkness. He'd seen it often before, the panic in a man's face when confronted by a uniform. A uniform was a reminder of a police state, or perhaps of something far worse, some hideous war experience beyond Merv's comprehension. Unlike the Aussies, always quick to buck at authority and to whom a uniform could be like a red rag to a bull, Merv had found there were many New Australians who envisaged a policeman only as a persecutor. It was this element which required the greatest diplomacy of all, big Merv Pritchard thought as he watched the Pole walk back in to the dance.

Merv lit up a smoke. He could hear the murmur of men behind him in the pub. The odd guffaw of laughter, quickly stifled. It was ludicrous. They knew he was out here in the dark keeping watch on the dance and the general proceedings, and he knew they were in there drinking illegally. It was nine o'clock – they'd been illegally drinking for three hours, but Merv didn't anticipate trouble. They'd be taking it easy by now, aware that there was no rush. It was the six o'clock swill that did it. Ever since the wowsers had forced early closing way back in 1915, men had been schooled to pour beer down their throats as fast as was humanly possible before the bars shut at six pm. It was why Ken, falling-down drunk as he usually was by six, especially on payday, had set out to pick a fight at the dance. It was why men went home and bashed up their wives. That was the aspect of police work that Merv hated the most. Domestic violence was a bastard to deal with, and in his opinion the six o'clock swill had a hell of a lot to do with it. There was talk of a change in the legislation, a call for later licensing laws and, as far as Merv was concerned, the sooner it came the better. In the meantime, the pubs managed to cheat. They had ‘cockatoos' on the lookout, there was a secret knock on the door, a back room was reserved for after-hours drinking, and on it went. Yet another area the cops turned a blind eye to.

He glanced across at the town hall. A pretty girl had stepped outside. It was Vi Campbell, he realised. Jeez, who would have thought she'd turn into such a looker? And a bloke was with her. Handsome young bugger – Italian by the looks of it. Christ alive, she'd taken him by the hand! She was leading him down towards the river at the back of the town hall. Merv hoped there wouldn't be any shenanigans – Jesus, what the hell would Cam have to say about that? He ground his cigarette butt out with the heel of his boot. Bit of a turn-up for the books, he thought; he'd never considered Vi that sort of girl. Despite her looks, she was still a baby at heart, an innocent young kid. At least that's what he'd thought. Oh well, it was none of his business.

 

The night, though chilly, was clear and windless, and the light of the moon shone on the still, black water ahead as Violet and Pietro walked hand in hand down the rough track without talking.

‘The Snowy River,' Pietro said when they arrived at the open grassy banks where graceful willows dipped their branches to the water's edge. ‘She is so beautiful.' He had adopted Lucky's habit of referring to the river always in the feminine.

‘Yes,' Violet agreed, and she slipped her hand out of his under the pretext of huddling her coat more firmly about her, although she wasn't really cold. It had seemed perfectly natural to take his hand as they'd left the hall; after all, he hadn't known where they were going. ‘This way,' she'd said, when they'd decided to get away from the unpleasantness that had pervaded the dance. Now, standing alone hand in hand, she hoped he hadn't found her too forward.

‘You are cold?' he asked anxiously, and he started taking off his own coat.

‘No, Pietro,' she laughed, her self-consciousness forgotten, ‘don't you dare give me your coat, I'd feel terrible.'

Why would she feel terrible? he wondered, still poised with his coat half off.

‘I'm not cold,' she insisted as she saw him hesitate. ‘Honest, I'm not!'

‘Very good.' He shrugged his coat back over his shoulders and they stood in silence once more, looking at the river.

‘Does that happen very often?' Violet asked after a moment or so.

‘What?' he queried. He knew what she was referring to, but he wanted to buy a little time, to come up with the sort of answer Lucky might have. He'd been taken aback himself by the man's aggression.
Think you're something, don't you, mate, in your fancy clobber?
That's what the drunken Aussie had hissed at him, and Pietro had again wondered why his fine wool suit should receive such criticism, just as it had in Sydney.
Well, you can go back to your own country, all of you Wogs, we don't want you here,
the Aussie had muttered before disappearing into the crowd.