The Sparrows of Edward Street Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE SPARROWS OF EDWARD STREET

  ‘The Sparrows of Edward Street is a funny and heartbreaking novel distinguished by the voice of an assured storyteller.’

  Weekend Australian

  ‘Stead writes with a wicked sense of humour. The voice of her heroine, Aria Sparrow, is flirty and naughty . . . Stead’s sympathetic attitude to the working-class families who struggled in those years is reminiscent of Ruth Park’s writing.’

  Saturday Age

  ‘There’s post-war tragedy, humiliation and illness in the camp, but Aria brings to it humour and lots of heart.’

  Good Reading

  ‘This vibrantly written novel invokes a memorable cast of characters as it catches the pathos and humour of a neglected chapter from Sydney’s history.’

  Sunday Canberra Times

  ‘Aria Sparrow is an Australian original, at once hard-boiled and delightful. The Sparrows of Edward Street is one of those rare books that make you look at the world differently.’

  Courier-Mail

  ‘Stead writes with her customary humour and lightness of touch.’

  Australian Book Review

  ‘This is a coming-of-age novel of an already worldly child. I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in a while.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘This sometimes sad, sometimes funny story is full of charming characters.’

  Herald Sun

  Elizabeth Stead is Sydney-born and the niece of acclaimed novelist Christina Stead. From childhood, Elizabeth was greatly inspired by her grandfather David George Stead, pioneer naturalist, conservationist and storyteller. Elizabeth has published short fiction and four previous novels, The Fishcastle, The Different World of Fin Starling, The Book of Tides and The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles. The Sparrows of Edward Street is her fifth novel.

  For bookclub notes, visit www.uqp.com.au

  The Sparrows of Edward Street is dedicated to the survivors of a New South Wales Housing Commission Camp. Their true grit and strength in the presence of fear and hardship remains an inspiration.

  November 1948

  It was an early afternoon and on the barren earth by a bus stop stood three sparrows. If there had been a photograph of the scene it might have been captioned:

  Here stands a flock of sparrows, if you can call it a flock. Just three in a row, stock-still, wide-eyed and grounded, not pecking, not even at the bird scraps near their feet. Unusual for this species of bird.

  The forecast for that particular day was for warm to hot conditions. In the air would be the smell of depression, burnt kindling, hot iron and ruined cabbages. The tears of the youngest sparrow would shortly cause the death of flowers.

  Spring to Summer – the Beginning

  The bus had stopped on the lower side of the fork in the road.

  I was vaguely aware that it was already past noon. I was not sure of the exact time – I imagined a clock had simply moved its hands as clocks do, but at that moment I had little interest in their direction.

  There can be an unusual quality to days. There has always been an unusual quality to mine, and this day had been no exception, but I have always made what I can of them. My outlook has been fairly buoyant – but I must confess that much of my life has been a pretence and still is, for that matter: a stage drama for the unwary; changing scenes and images that have led to strange places in my mind. I believe, however, that I have remained sufficiently grounded not to be fooled by a starkly real world, if that world had in its mind to play games. I have made life the way I wanted it to be and I don’t give a hoot what people think. I am different.

  And so it was that without much trouble my imagination had begun to work as soon as we stepped off the bus on the lower, dusty side of the fork in the road. Nothing is so hideous it can’t be brightened. Nothing!

  We three stood silent at the bus stop with our suitcases and bed rolls, one of us challenged and two wide-eyed with anxiety as we stared at rows and rows of corrugated iron huts. One of the huts was to become our home, but for how long we had no idea. It was the day after we’d been evicted from a flat. Chucked out! I turned to my young sister, who was wild-eyed with disbelief, and said: ‘Rosy, it’s no use standing there like something sick. And look at your tears dripping all over the place. Lift up your chin, girl.’

  We stood with our hair flying in the fart of dust and exhaust fumes the bus left behind. ‘Will you look at that, Rosy! Do you think it’s blowing a raspberry at us, Rosy? Do you think it’s sticking its tongue out of its arse, Rosy? Come on! Cheer up! You’re fifteen, for goodness sakes!’

  The bus driver had grinned in a certain way when he left us before rattling on, as if it amused him to leave us on the brink of something so awful. He must have done it many times before.

  *

  The slums – the huts we’d stared at, unblinking, not quite believing – looked like pictures I had seen of concentration camps in Europe and Asia, but this wasn’t Poland or Germany or anywhere else; it was Sydney, Australia, and it was bloody hard to believe that what we were seeing was real. I dared not say what was in my mind – I sensed that things were bad enough.

  There were huts and huts in slumming rows. Hundreds of them. I’d had no idea of the existence of a Housing Commission Camp before that day: rows and rows of huts as far as our eyes could see, all iron and fibro and rough timber, with windows mostly pulled shut. I imagined the windows were kept closed against no view at all, perhaps to keep despair locked inside.

  The huts were raised off the ground and there were splintered wooden steps leading to their doors. They had pitched roofs of corrugated asbestos and tin and tar, with flues sticking out of them, some at odd angles. Some blew a puff of smoke. On the bare ground around the base of each hut, where odd clumps of dying grasses struggled, the wind was spiralling wind willies of dust and paper scraps, cigarette butts, assorted debris. Blowflies, trying to be exotic, looped the loop through the dirt. I thought that barbed wire would have completed the picture, but I did not say what was in my mind. Of course I could have been mistaken. It may have been an illusion. I glanced at our mother. She stood, brave and trembling, on the other side of Rosy. She had the appearance of a very small virgin tied to a stake and waiting for someone to turn up on a horse.

  A tight, tense and silent three we were, standing in our straight line.

  Three birds in a row. Three birds on a wire of tension, beaks shut tight for the moment.

  *

  ‘This is punishment for not believing in God! You should have sung in that church choir when they wanted you to, Aria!’ Rosy half-cried, half-sobbed to me. Her eyes were as red and veined as a dead chook’s. ‘People in churches don’t have to live in places like this! People in churches have houses!’

  ‘What nonsense! Be quiet, Rose.’ Our mother’s words struggled through a handkerchief, damp as a dish rag. She tried very hard not to ruin her make up.

  ‘They could have at least painted the huts. Maybe even in different colours,’ I said, picturing technicolour slums. ‘They all look exactly the same. If we came here in pitch darkness we’d never find our way. We’d better buy torches.’

  ‘A good idea, love. But paint’s a different matter. There’s no money for paint, so they say,’ said our mother. ‘The Housing Commission has enough trouble finding accommodation of any sort, they say, let alone painted. I don’t think you realise how difficult it is to find housing. We really are lucky to have a roof over our heads at such short notice.’

  ‘Well, I’ll jolly well get some paint for the inside of our hut – somehow,’ I said. ‘I’ll make ours look like a rainbow after a storm.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up, Aria!’
cried Rosy. Already downtrodden, defeated Rosy. She’d given in and had already buried herself in the dust bowl under our feet. The bus wheels had powdered her face with spits of ochre and the clear streams of her tears made patterns down her cheeks.

  ‘Please don’t quarrel now, loves,’ said our mother. ‘Let’s get on with it.’ But I looked hard at Rosy and thought: Oh, Rosy, please, please try to think rainbows. Try to think colour. Borrow my eyes if you must.

  *

  There was a bunch of flowers, untrimmed and straggly and tied with a bit of string. They had been bought on the way, to brighten things up in whichever hut was to be ours.

  I thought Rose held the stems too tightly, and I told her so.

  ‘You’re strangling them from the feet up, Rosy.’

  ‘Leave me alone!’

  Rosy was tied tight as a knot inside and out, and looked very anxious. Her eyes moved quick and nervous as a bird’s. They swung from one side to the other as though they were on ball bearings, watching for the appearance from the slum shadows of criminals, aliens, armed foreigners and possibly even an anti-Christ in this strange, other world. Rosy Sparrow’s very own ‘gateway to hell’.

  I was terribly irritated by her, but I suppose I could not blame my sister for being so agitated. She did not cope well with a poor life overturned. Rosy had never coped well with life overturned, or life in general for that matter. She was like some sparrows I have observed, craving crumbs near a human’s boot, desperate and hungry but afraid to strike all at the same time. As sparrows go, she had never been as quick as she could be, not as quick as our mother, and certainly not as quick as me. She’d never had to be, I supposed – she was always the favoured chick in the nest.

  I have already stated that for how long this place was to be our home we had no idea. The New South Wales Government Housing Commission told us they had no idea either. We were simply to go on a waiting list for something slightly better. I thought the whole place looked bloody awful, but I kept the thought to myself.

  The rows of huts were bad enough on the outside and we expected the insides to be just as bad – dark and forbidding – but we thought we were prepared for it, and I suppose Rosy considered the flowers, trembling in her fist with every sob, were to act as a sort of exorcism, if you like. They’d been rescued from a florist’s bin that morning, sold to us for threepence, and were half dead as it was. Rosy was in a state about them, but I couldn’t have cared less. They were the sort of jonquils that smelt like cat’s pee.

  While we walked into the camp, slow, on leaden nightmare feet that root a dreamer to the ground when all she wants to do is to run the other way, I glanced at the darting eyes of my sister, and the wide, dark and quick eyes of my mother, and they reminded me briefly of my favourite bird – sparrows. Brave, scavenging little creatures, soft as a nestling’s fluff to the naked eye, but sly as crows and with the hearts of savages behind their baby brown eyes and soft feathers. I have always loved them.

  In the yard behind the flat we’d lived in before we’d been thrown out (it was hard to believe that had been only yesterday!), I’d fed crumbs to sparrows. I’d saved the crumbs in an old saucer. I would have liked to study the sparrow as a ‘twitcher’ might. I’d like to have been a town ‘twitcher’, watching gutters full of sparrows, standing under their weaver nests with a spy glass and watching every move they made, but I’d been made to leave school earlier than I could have imagined and peck my way quickly into a job, so I am far from being an expert on the subject. I did once try to write a play about sparrows, but I could not get the essential points across.

  Apart from being weaver birds brought into Australia to kill parasites and then doing nothing of the kind except becoming parasites themselves, it is possible not much more is known about sparrows, certainly not what is inside their dear little scheming skulls.

  Anyone with a basic knowledge of the real world will have observed how quickly sparrows had found human leftovers preferable to parasites . . . bread crusts, cake crumbs, old pies and the rest of it. There is obviously no comparison between an exhausting hunt for parasites on the wing and a dropped sandwich lying dead as a doornail on the footpath outside a ham and beef shop. The sparrow is far from being a stupid bird. And no matter the dangers, a normal sparrow will return again and again until the last crumb is harvested.

  I believe the nature of sparrows, and indeed the nature of any scavenger, is a furious determination to take advantage of a free lunch and peck the bloody marrow out of it, leaving its provider with very little of nothing – or nothing at all! There is a dark and devious side to the sparrow and creatures with similar brains on this earth . . . I include myself, of course . . . I think that’s why I love them so much, these little sly balls of fury wrapped in feathers begging to be stroked, but watch yourself if you do! You will understand my interest when I tell you that Sparrow is also our family name.

  We are Hanora, Margaret Rose and Aria Sparrow, and I think we share many of the birds’ characteristics . . . I know I do. I am even in the habit of waking at sparrow’s fart, ready to peck whatever I can out of a new day.

  *

  ‘I know you’re dreaming again, Aria, I can tell,’ said Rosy. ‘Can you stop long enough to help me with my bed roll?!’

  ‘No. I have my own to carry.’

  ‘But I’m holding the flowers.’

  ‘Chuck the bloody things; they’re like something left over from a gravestone vase and they stink.’

  ‘Aria!’ said Hanora.

  ‘I’m not sorry.’

  *

  Perhaps I should explain a little of what’s left of our family.

  There is no longer a father Sparrow. Father Sparrow is alas dead. He was run over on a city street by a Council van full of stray cats. It was peak hour, raining, and the traffic was heavy. The cats were on their way to be put down and father Sparrow had been on his way to buy a newspaper. We were young, Rosy and I, but I can remember the very large policeman giving us the news and Hanora crying and asking what she was supposed to do. And I remember thinking how weird it was that father Sparrow was put down and most of the cats escaped.

  Hanora told us that our father had been an unusual man in a fairly straight and boring way, but meant well. He was a motor mechanic and a communist, because his family had taken to the cause, but he’d had no real interest in the movement. Father Sparrow had been unsuitable for the war. He’d tried to enlist but failed the medicals, because of the problem he’d had all his life with his eyesight and his balance. He drove a motorcycle with a side car that mostly veered to the right, like everything else in his life, when I would have thought his politics would have had him veering to the left every time. To boost a poor income, he sold icecreams on a beach in the summer.

  Poor father Sparrow became a person of interest to the military for a while until it was revealed that his first and real love was sculpturing figures in terracotta. His terracotta figures were apparently whimsical, but naturally suffered because of his eyes. He had an exhibition in ‘The Crack in the Wall’ gallery and it had been the first and the last. His figures nearly always leant so dangerously to the right that a number fell over and broke, although one art critic, who possibly also had a disability of some kind, said he quite liked the ‘wind-blown effect’. For a motor mechanic, however, the eyes, it seemed, had not been a problem. He said with pride that he could work an engine blindfolded.

  Hanora, our mother, had been pretty and tiny (barely five feet tall) for as long as I’d known her. She had a terrific figure, fair skin and dark curly hair. Always a lively Sparrow, she seemed to have a switch that lit up a room as soon as she fluttered into it, and could charm anyone, young, old, male or female, even before she’d taken her ‘calm-me-downs’.

  Hanora had been born in Melbourne. She was the youngest of a large Jewish family. She’d hated her childhood and told us that during all of her early life she’d felt like a crushed Sao biscuit at the bottom of a tin of assorted creams. When sh
e was eighteen she was offered a job as a fan dancer in a nightclub. There’d been much wringing of hands and the family had cried that no decent Jewish girl would consider doing such a thing, but she’d said that it didn’t matter because if they’d ever listened to a word she’d said they would have known that she’d declared herself no longer a member of the Jewish faith or any other faith for that matter. She had become an atheist, and in an atmosphere of mass hysteria she left home.

  ‘You cannot imagine the fuss,’ she told us. ‘Everyone in St Kilda must have heard us. But I’d turned my back on religions long before my family knew. I had tried to talk about it but no one listened to anything I had to say.

  ‘After I left them I did miss my poor workhorse of a mother, but for some reason I can’t remember her eyes – isn’t that awful? I can’t remember her eyes. I hardly saw her eyes. She was always bent over a washtub or a sink or a stove. She was like a child’s favourite toy with the stuffing knocked out. I used to think that if my mother looked into a mirror there would be no reflection. But I did not miss the others and certainly not my father. A very strange man – sick, really. He’d had a sort of breakdown and had to have treatment. He was frightened of trams and hid in the wardrobe a lot. My rebellion was blamed, of course. My father insisted that I’d been born a Jew so there was an end to it! But I said that I’d been born nothing of the kind. I hadn’t been born a Sikh or a Hindu or a Catholic, or a Jew! I was born naked and howling and innocent. I declared that people should have a choice, not be branded like animals the minute they’re born, or even before! I don’t think they thought I had a brain in my head. I escaped to Sydney as soon as I could afford it, but as it happened, in the end, things didn’t turn out so well, did they, loves?’

  When she’d confessed those fragments of her life I assured her that I agreed with her every inch of the way. Rosy had been a bit young at the time.