Ruby of Kettle Farm (8 page)

My great-grandfather on my father's side was a farmer in Somerset, England. In 1856 he emigrated to South Australia, making his home in a beautiful place called Eden Valley. One of his nine children was my grandfather. He was a farmer, too, and so was my father. My brother and I grew up on the family farm. Its paddocks and orchards, its gum trees and its winding creek were our playground.

I loved the little local school I went to for seven years, but when I was twelve I had to leave home to go to a different school. Unlike Ruby, who moves from the city to the country, I moved from the country to the city. I live in the city now, but I still think of Eden Valley as home.

Living on the Edge

During the Great Depression dozens of Adelaide's unemployed and homeless men set up camp along the banks of the River Torrens, living in tents or in huts made from wood, bags, canvas and corrugated iron. This photo, which shows some of those riverbank homes partly submerged by floodwaters, is dated 3 September 1931.

Here's a sneak peek at Meet Grace

I
T
must be the longest day this winter, Grace thought, and all I've found are a few bits of coal and a piece of rope.

Grace waded towards the riverbank, wiggling her toes into the mud, feeling for anything that had washed in with the tide or fallen from a boat or barge to put in her kettle. That was her job as a mudlark – to search the bottom of the Thames for things to sell. She shivered.

A dirty fog hung over the water, draping everything in grey. The other mudlarks looked like shadows as they waded through the river. Grace felt the water cold against her legs – the tide was on its way in and her dress floated around her like a tent. She knew that soon she would have to get out of the river, but her kettle was only half full.

‘Please let there be something more,' she said to herself, her teeth chattering, ‘some copper nails or a piece of driftwood.'

Grace looked across the river at a forest of masts. It was the same view she saw every day. Sails of every size billowed beneath the winter clouds. Barges filled with coal and iron held anchor, ready to be unloaded on the shore. Longboats cut slowly through the water carrying fruit and meat to distant parts of London, and busy workboats ferried people up and down the river.

Ouch! Grace gasped when she felt a sharp pain in the bottom of her foot. She bent down and searched around in the mud until she touched something that felt like metal – cold and smooth. She pulled it up. Grace wiped it clean with a corner of her dress and turned it over in her hand, unable to believe it was real. It was an iron hammer, with no rust on its head, and no chips in its sturdy wooden handle. It was the most valuable thing she had ever found – worth as much on the street as a silver watch, she was sure.

‘A hammer – a fine hammer,' she whispered. ‘Uncle Ord will be so pleased.'

‘Oi! What you find?' Someone shouted at Grace and she quickly dropped her hands beneath the water.

A figure waded towards her through the fog. It was Joe Bean. He was no older than Grace, but he was the leader of a gang of mudlarks that lived under Blackfriar's Bridge. Grace had always been good at staying out of their way; she kept her head down so she wouldn't be noticed, or she worked in the parts of the river where Joe and his boys didn't often go. They were thieves, and they didn't think twice about stealing from the barges and from the other mudlarks who worked on their own. If any of the mudlarks ever had money from things they'd sold, Joe Bean would try to take it from them. And Grace knew that if he saw the hammer, he would snatch it from her and take it straight to the marine shop to sell for himself.

‘I got nothing!' Grace shouted back.

‘I saw something in your hand just then – something shiny. Give me a look what you got!'

Grace's heart pounded; she couldn't let Joe see her prize. With a hammer like this to sell, maybe Uncle Ord would be happy with her, instead of angry. He would be proud that she was clever enough to find something so valuable. They could keep the coal Grace had found and light a fire in the hearth – she imagined warming her numb toes and heating up a cinnamon bun on the end of a toasting fork. There'd be enough food for a week!

Grace waded into the shallows, but Joe Bean was close now. ‘Well?' he said. ‘Don't make me call the boys to look you over.'

Grace shook her head, too nervous to speak. She held the hammer with one hand behind her back. She had never stood up to Joe Bean before, but then she had never found anything as precious as a hammer.

Joe moved towards her. ‘Show me!'

‘No.' Grace's voice quavered.

Joe grabbed her arm and tried to pull it from behind her back. Grace fell back into the river, dropping her kettle into the mud. Water splashed up around them as they struggled.

‘No!' she shouted.

Joe Bean had his hand on the hammer. It was slipping from her grasp. Grace gritted her teeth and with all her strength, she wrenched it from him. Joe fell back into the water and Grace held the hammer high over him.

‘I said no, Joe Bean! The hammer is mine! You go away and leave me alone!' Her voice trembled as Joe crawled like a crab through the mud, his eyes wide with surprise. The sharp iron claws on the hammer's head glinted.

Grace picked up her kettle and ran, knocking straight into a group of sailors clambering out of a rowboat onto shore.

‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?' one of them said. ‘A handful of rags like you?' She could smell whiskey on his breath.

The other sailors laughed at her.

Grace picked herself up and pushed her way past. When she turned around, Joe Bean was lost in the crowd somewhere behind them. Grace hurried higher onto the shore where the crowd thickened, pushing past mudlarks and boatmen, coal whippers, and costermongers selling dried fish and oysters. She breathed a sigh of relief, shoving her way through groups of people waiting for workboats and others lining up to buy fresh fish from the colliers to sell at the market.

Grace gripped the hammer tight and headed home, slowly now and limping. Her foot stung against the cold cobblestones as she dodged the open drains of sewage and the piles of garbage that lined the narrow crowded streets. She stopped to inspect her wound. The cut wasn't deep – only bloody.

Grace shivered. It was when she got out of the water that she most felt the cold. The wind cut straight through her. It doesn't matter this time, though, she thought. I'm safe from Joe Bean and I still have my hammer.

In Chatham Square a line of fishmongers stood at a long scaling table. They ran their knives down the backs of freshly caught fish, cutting out the guts and tossing them to the ground, staining the cobblestones a purplish red. The smell of fish filled the air. The women sang as they worked, their arms moving in time to the rhythm of their song.

Grace stopped to listen. She liked singing, never mind who was doing it; sailors or fishmongers or butchers selling ham hocks, even her drunken uncle and his sailor friends. The only thing Uncle Ord had ever told her about her mother was that she liked to sing. I wish I could remember the songs, Grace often thought. I wish I could remember her voice.

Grace kept walking, humming the fish-mongers' tune. She had never known her father, and her mother had died when she was very small. When Grace tried to remember her mother, she could recall the feeling of warm arms around her; but the memory wasn't enough to keep her alive without a roof over her head in the long cold winters. Uncle Ord always reminded her of that. ‘You're lucky to have me, Grace! You'd be on the street without your uncle to take care of things. You are an
orphan
after all!' He said the word as though it were a curse word – the very worst thing you could be.

Uncle Ord had lost his wife and his only son to an illness called consumption, and he missed them a lot. He'd lost his sister too – Grace's mother – and that was how he got stuck with Grace. She knew that every day, just by being alive, she reminded him that his son was not.

Grace climbed the steps that ran up by Blackfriar's Bridge and crossed into Water Lane, hobbling to keep weight off her foot. Her wet skirt slapped against her legs, stinging her skin. The fog was in the streets too, hanging like low-slung spider webs. Crowds of people pushing carts ready for the night markets were coming down in the opposite direction.

Two of the girls who lived next door came running up behind Grace, giggling together. Grace pressed back against the stone wall as they shoved their noisy way past her. She wished she had a sister, or a friend to share things with. It never mattered how hungry they were, or how cold, the girls were always playing and laughing with each other.

Ma Honeywell, their mother, stopped when she saw Grace and gave her cheek a playful pinch. She had eleven children, most of them girls, though she could never find half of them.

‘Hello, luv,' she said, smiling. ‘How was business today?'

Ma Honeywell always asked the same question, only today Grace could give her a different answer. ‘Good,' she said, smiling back. ‘Very good! My uncle will be happy!'

‘That'd be a sight for sore eyes. You better get home, luv, and give him what you got!' Ma Honeywell patted Grace's arm, then turned and walked on. She was on her way to the alehouse, where she would drink so much gin that later she wouldn't remember who Grace was at all.

Grace continued up the steps, imagining what it would be like when Uncle Ord saw the hammer. ‘Well done, Grace,' he would say. She could almost feel the heat from the fire and taste the toasted cinnamon bun.

‘Uncle Ord!' she called, as she pushed in the door of their lodgings.

Her uncle was sitting in his chair in front of the empty hearth with his sore leg up on the table.

Uncle Ord used to be a sailor until his leg was caught in a loop of rope that lifted him into the air and snapped his knee-bone. ‘I was hanging upside down like a side of ham in a butcher's shop!' he told Johnny Dugs, the rag shop man. Uncle Ord and Johnny Dugs laughed as if it were a joke, but Grace knew that it was not. Uncle Ord couldn't be a sailor after that. He wasn't good for anything, he said, but ‘selling the rubbish from the bottom of that stinking river.'

Grace tipped out the contents of her kettle. Wet coal tumbled across the table beside Uncle Ord's leg. Without turning around to look at her, he growled, ‘Is that all?'

Grace carefully placed the hammer on the table beside the coal. Uncle Ord picked it up and swung around to her, his eyes hard.

‘Where'd you find this?' he snarled. ‘You little thief!'

Grace jumped back. ‘I never stole it. I stood on it,' she stammered.

She lifted her foot to show him the cut. But Uncle Ord didn't look, he smacked his hand down onto the table, making Grace jump.

‘You bring the runners to this house and they put me in chains, I'll kill you!'

‘I never stole it, Uncle!' Grace protested, but she could tell he wasn't listening. ‘I never stole nothing! It was Joe Bean tried to steal from me. There won't be no runners coming for you.'

Uncle Ord stroked the sharp claws of the hammer with his tobacco-stained fingers.

‘They hanged a boy smaller than you down at the Newgate gallows yesterday. He stole a pair of boots worth a lot less than this here hammer. He was so small they had to weigh him down with stones so he'd drop right when he stepped off the platform.'

Grace shuddered. She had never wanted to see a hanging, but most people didn't feel that way – they flocked to see an execution as if it were a circus show. Even her uncle's stories frightened her.

‘Please, Uncle, I found the hammer in the river, I swear.' Grace could feel her eyes welling with tears. She wiped them away; if Uncle Ord saw her cry he would curse her and say she was a useless girl.

‘A thief and a liar,' he said. ‘Get out of my sight and give me some peace.'

Grace went back out the front door and sat on the step.

Uncle Ord isn't proud of me for finding the hammer, she thought. He's angry at me for bringing something so valuable home.

For the first time, Grace realised that it didn't matter what she brought her uncle – she could carry half a barge into the house – it wouldn't make him happy. Nothing Grace found in the river could bring back his son, or fix his sore leg and make him a sailor again.

Grace picked at the mud drying on her knees and ankles. She should have let Joe Bean take the hammer – what difference did it make? When it was time for her to get back in the mud tomorrow she knew she would have to face Joe Bean and he would be very angry. She wouldn't have the hammer and she wouldn't have any money for him either. And the other boys from the gang were sure to be with him this time.

Grace sighed. She tore off a strip from the hem of her dress and, using it as a rag, she cleaned the dirt from her wound. She tied the rag tightly around her foot to make a bandage.

‘There now,' she said. ‘Let's go to Fleet Street and see the horses.' Just thinking about horses helped Grace forget her troubles.