The Sparrows of Edward Street Read online

  *

  My younger sister, Margaret Rose, the maiden all forlorn, dragging through the dust of the Camp as though on her way to be shot, was born just after the Great Depression. I was born slap-bang towards the end of it. That would have been expected! The arrival of another beak to feed would have been a miracle of birth with very mixed feelings. The Depression must have been a terrible time. There were so many people out of work, so many men looking like skeletons in fat men’s suits queuing for food scraps and poor jobs and their wives and children skinny to the bones. But we’d been lucky. Father Sparrow had managed somehow with his motor engines and his Sunday icecreams on the beach, and every now and then he’d been able to sell a piece of terracotta at a market. When we were a little older our mother managed to find a part-time job washing bottles for a brewery. She’d kept the first bottle she’d ever washed.

  ‘I kept the first bottle, loves. We had a washed bottle for a family heirloom. I thought it was funny at the time. Isn’t that awful?’

  ‘No, it’s not awful,’ I said. ‘Heirlooms don’t have to be grand. I think it’s funny too. Where is it?’

  ‘Oh, I lost it years ago.’

  My sister was named after one of the Royal English princesses, but we called her Rosy. ‘Colonial Rosy.’ I only escaped being Elizabeth because of my mother’s love for music, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

  When Rosy was very young passers-by practically curtsied when they saw her. She really was the spitting image of the younger princess, blue-eyed and fair-skinned. Peaches and cream–skinned, so we were told by one and all, but when she was old enough to understand I told her she looked more like plums and custard! I wasn’t sorry. It was the time of an epidemic of princess names . . . Elizabeths and Margaret Roses were listed almost daily in the birth notices, as though something had gone wrong at the printing works.

  Young ‘Colonial Royals’ were made to sit up straight in front of the wireless and practise Royal vowels like a ‘times table’. I, of course, couldn’t be bothered. I thought our Sparrow tweets were good enough – probably better than most. But I had to admit that the real English princesses spoke very nicely. For a family of foreigners I thought the Royals spoke very good English.

  Despite Rosy being so admired, I thought I wasn’t bad-looking, but in a different way.

  I considered that my dark hair and eyes added a bit of mystery to the family, and I said so. I could have been anything from a dirt ditch peasant to the orphan of gypsys. I’d once even suspected that I’d been the result of one of the Duke of Windsor’s seeds he was rumoured to have spread around when he visited the Colonies, but Hanora ruined the whole thing one day by showing me a photo taken soon after my birth in the ward of a very ordinary public hospital. In the photograph Hanora held me up proudly, like a prize squash. I could have been a cheap doll with no neck, and the hospital ward could not have been less regal. But at least sitting up straight had never been a problem – my spine had grown up and down like a back-board, as though it had been glued at birth.

  My tastes and dreams were far more exotic than Rosy could ever have imagined. I’d studied books of astronomy with their glorious pictures of galaxies and endless space. I’d read the dictionary for fun. I fell in and out of love. The storyteller Scheherazade became my heroine; I thrived on the mysteries of the East. From our classroom windows I imagined Rosy saw nothing but a playground and the bubblers while I saw the African jungle as far as the falls, and while Rosy watched the train line and the weather, I sat on an elephant and stalked Bengal tigers.

  The dark brick depot building, across the road and opposite the window, had become for me a grand villa with its own art gallery and a dozen bedrooms and more than one toilet and gardens full of birds. Mostly peacocks and doves.

  I dreamed of the music of Russia and Rimsky-Korsakov. R-K’s music of Scheherazade became my secret anthem. And for some reason I’d adopted a lucky number. It was 19. I couldn’t possibly say why.

  My school days were for dreams, but when I’d left them at the age of twelve and a half and had suddenly been transformed into a woman of almost fifteen with the breasts I had developed when I was eleven, I began my true education. I’d had to put my age up, of course, to the minimum for a working ‘junior’. I was an old work-hand by the time Colonial Rosy joined the force, but while I’d begun as a filing clerk, Rosy became apprenticed to an expensive milliner with a French name.

  ‘Your eyes and hair and the rest of you are obviously from my side of the family, I’m afraid, love,’ our mother, Hanora, had once said to me in an apologetic way, as though she’d passed on some terminal disease, but I didn’t mind a bit. In fact I was grateful. I’d never wanted to look like an English rose. I never could have looked like an English rose.

  Hanora had said once that she was a bit concerned about my endless pretences and asked if I would like to see my birth certificate, and I remember saying no, that it was probably all lies. I told her that I preferred to arrange the creation of me myself. Looking back, I must have been pretty painful for Hanora and everyone else to cope with. I must have been like a heavily decorated Christmas tree, all flashing lights and bells, seven days a week.

  Rosy just ignored me as much as she could and lived in her sort of ‘praise be to she’ world.

  The Camp

  The November day of our flight from the flat and the arrival at the Housing Commission Camp had been cloudy and humid. The forecast had been for ‘Unusually warm temperatures with clearing showers, fine later’. Over our heads was a patch of blue shining through a hole in the forecast, so the ‘fine later’ must have come early.

  After we left the bus and took in the mind-numbing panorama of the Camp, the thought occurred to me that, as bad as it all appeared to be, I might have been over-reacting – after all, it was supposed to be spring and I’d hoped to find something good about it all. I’d been sure I’d find something good; but the earth we scuffed through had nothing to do with any spring I had known. A woman with a briefcase had got off the bus with us. She must have seen the expression in our eyes.

  ‘That’s the Housing Commission Camp. Awful, isn’t it? I hear they’re ice boxes in winter and ovens in summer. I don’t envy the poor things – glad not to be in their shoes.’ I wondered why she hadn’t noticed our cases and bed rolls. I wondered why she thought we were not going to live there. I was sure she’d not meant to be unkind. She left us with a finger wave and then a look of regret at saying anything at all, and crossed to the proper side of the fork in the road, where I imagined her proper house must have been situated. She might have worked in a bank or a law firm. Her hair was nicely bobbed. She could afford gabardine and her gloves were good quality.

  But we were Camp-bound and it was spring! Unbelievably spring! The tall eucalypts that had forested behind our flat had been new-leafed and scented with fresh oil when we left. There was not a tree in sight here in the Camp.

  It should have been a fine and ripening day all over the place – even all over this place. New juices should have been dripping down the leaves of trees and onto the chins of peach buds. Even in this place there should have been flowerbeds bursting into colour and Disney bluebirds spinning over the trees like tops, tweeting love songs and winding in and out of branches while bee swarms crashed into hives with the weight of pollen. But of all the springs I’d known – of all the springs that had surrounded our former flat, of all the sweet seasons of lilac and privet hedges all in sneezing bloom and the scent of freesias growing wild – I’d have to say that this spring day had only dirt under its feet, dust in its eyes and no blooms of any kind, let alone wild freesias.

  The air was as heavy as wet towels. Dust was the colour of dust. And we watched as the theatre of this day lifted a grubby curtain to a drama of faded hopes. It could have been a mirage of doom, but it was real enough. Even for me it was starkly real. My image-painting eyes had a lot of work to do, I thought.

  This place, the Camp, had its own dismal se
ason. It was its own world. From somewhere came the smell of boiled cabbage and burnt flesh and wood fire. From somewhere a door slammed on an argument and a man hawked and spat from a window. Walt Disney would have had nothing to do with this place. Walt Disney would have slashed his wrists if he’d been sent to it, and if there’d been bluebirds singing love songs they would have been shot.

  Despite the gloomy silence, we walked as straight as we could in our little single file of Sparrows, dressed as well as the bottom end of poverty allowed, Hanora in oyster-grey with a blouse she’d made and a bolero jacket given to her. When we’d lived in the flat Hanora had managed to buy a second-hand Wertheim sewing machine. She was very clever with scraps of fabric. The machine had a wheel that had to be turned by hand, but it worked very well. She even managed to wear a hat that Rosy had made from scraps Madame, as she called her boss, had given her, a smart ‘pill box’ with a grey feather.

  As an apprentice, Rosy was paid hardly anything, but Madame allowed her girls to take home ‘mistakes’ to practise on. They were never to say where they came from. I quite looked forward to a ‘mistake’. Sometimes it was a matter of a flowerhead looking the wrong way or a tiny tear in the silk, and Rosy made them look brand new. My favourite ‘mistake’ had been a close-fitting silk concoction of lily-of-the-valley. It suited me so well I was wolf whistled all the way past a building site the first time I wore it. I thanked them for the compliment. I looked upon building sites as the full-length mirror I did not own.

  ‘Hanora looks very nice in her “mistake”, Rosy,’ I said as cheerfully as I could, but with little hope. ‘Remember the one you made me that got all the whistles?’

  ‘That had nothing to do with the hat, and you know it!’ Rosy tried, but she had crumbled, her eyes and nose dripping everywhere like a leaking tap.

  ‘Well, there was a bit of me there, I suppose.’

  ‘I just wish we weren’t here!’

  ‘There’s a fairy godmother lurking, is there, Rosy Posy?’

  ‘You can be a terrible bitch when you want to, Aria!’

  ‘I’m not sorry.’

  Rosy finally crushed what was left of the watery, bleeding flower stems to death.

  ‘I’ll say a prayer for the death of flowers, if you like,’ I said. ‘And maybe write a sorrowful ditty . . .’

  ‘Aria,’ Hanora cautioned with a finger to her lips, by now smudged red by heat and dabbing. She looked like a vampire after a hit, I thought. Rosy clutched the jonquils as though they were a lifeline.

  ‘Rosy, let them go.’

  ‘I can’t help it, Aria. I can’t. That woman was right. This is an awful place. This is truly the bottom of the ladder. It’s an awful time to be alive.’ Her tears dripped brine all over the dead petals and turned them brown.

  ‘For goodness sakess, stop feeling sorry for yourself, Margaret Rose!’

  ‘She’s right, Rosy. No use crying, love.’ Hanora looked at her poor, sobbing girl with a mixture of impatience and pity. ‘You’ll see – this will be an experience we’ll remember all our lives, and we will make it a good experience. We have to! We will! Aria, can you at least manage her bed roll? We must get on with it.’

  Hanora and I disliked misfortune as intensely as anyone, but Rosy, drifting as she did on her higher cloud, was truly insulted by it.

  ‘Think of us as war refugees struggling for freedom, Rosy!’ I said. ‘I’ll run up a flag!’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Aria!’ Rosy sobbed.

  *

  There were deep dusty breaths sucked in as we wandered through Corrugated-Iron Hell looking for 19B Edward Street. I carried more than my share of luggage while Rosy picked her way through the dust with her dead posy like a British Royal visiting the London plague too late. Hanora trailed at the rear.

  ‘We should be looking for prison cell number 19! It might as well be,’ said Rosy. ‘It’s terrible! Terrible!’

  ‘Stop your sniffing, Rosy! It is bloody, and it’s not going to be easy, but it’s not going to be forever. I agree with Hanora – we will make it an experience to remember, and bloody well make the best of it, so stop dripping all over the place and help. Even Colonial Royals are supposed to be in control of their emotions, so shut up!’

  ‘Shut up yourself, Aria. And why can’t you call our mother Mother, like normal people?’

  ‘Because I’m not normal people.’

  *

  To describe our future home was not difficult. It was part of a disused military camp – a small section of one of dozens of rows of corrugated-iron huts, eight hundred, as a matter of fact, I later learned – that had been divided into units.

  The New South Wales Government’s Housing Commission had converted the section into a holding camp for the homeless and destitute until public housing could be found. I expect I should have been grateful for the shelter, but I wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t the fault of the government, but I thought it was bloody to be forced to live in such a place and I was not sorry for the thought. I did not tell the others how I felt at that moment. Things were bad enough.

  ‘Better than nothing. Better than nothing,’ Hanora sing-songed while we looked for our ‘unit’. ‘Better than nothing, loves.’ Rosy and I were silent Sparrows, hearing only Hanora’s mantra and hardly breathing for the dust.

  We were told later by established inmates that the Minister for Housing occasionally visited the Camp, and crowed about it, with his thumbs stuck in his top pockets like a country mayor, with his wife beside him, regally dressed to shame the women. There would be cameras flashing and recorders recording during one of his electioneering, stone-laying, dead-gum-tree-planting, slippery-dipping for the kindy visits.

  ‘This would be pure luxury to folk in some parts of the world. This government does not turn its back on the homeless.’

  ‘He gets to big-note himself here,’ we were told.

  I didn’t think the inmates would have felt any better for the Minister’s ego visits, and as for ‘pure luxury’ . . . Well, I thought I’d better not say what was in my mind but I could picture the scene . . . ‘I have much pleasure in laying this plaque – opening this cell block – planting this sapling – kicking this dust – christening this iron wall – naming this street of slums after me and you can kiss my arse for it!’

  But we were new to it, and I had to believe that Hanora was right. It had to be better than nothing at all, and I wished I was not so angry about it. I wondered, however, if Rosy would ever become reconciled.

  Our temporary housing was nothing but beggars’ rows in beggars’ dirt lanes the Housing Commission called ‘streets’, with grand names like Edward, Windsor, Churchill and Bradman. Almost regal. A slap in the face to people they thought knew no better.

  We skirted around a dried puddle of sick, and I wondered if wrapping up in newspaper on a park bench might have been better than this. At least there’d be fresh air and maybe grass under it. This place had nothing but trampled dirt sprayed with salty tears and dirt-poor smells and misery for welcome mats. There was a sense of gloom hanging over it like an isolated storm cloud. But I did not say what was in my mind. I did not say, because I was already dreaming of changes, rearrangements and colour.

  Oh, yes, Rosy! There’ll be changes! There’ll be rebels’ plans inside our cells. We’ll become leaders of a movement. A flag will be raised! Oh, Rosy! Try to dream colour. Please try to dream colour . . .

  I sensed more limpet eyes stuck to us, but to our fronts this time instead of our backs when we’d walked away from the flat. There was not a soul to be seen. A small dog slept under a hut; a hopscotch game had been carved into a harder patch of ground; and we heard the mournful call of crows in the distance.

  ‘I expect we could try to plant one.’ A vague remark. A small, optional design etched upon my already blueprinted mind.

  ‘Plant what?’

  ‘A tree.’

  ‘What sort of tree, love?’

  ‘I think a gum. It’s like a desert here. Maybe a lemo
n-scented gum – they smell so nice. They do grow very tall, though.’

  ‘Good idea, love. We could try – and with any luck we won’t be here long enough to be worried about its height. Fingers crossed.’

  ‘You could sit under it on the deck chair and read and sunbake.’

  ‘Lovely!’

  ‘Why don’t you shut up about gum trees? Why doesn’t everybody shut up?!’

  ‘Rosy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother, but where is Edward Street? I can’t stand much more of this.’

  ‘You’re standing in it, love,’ said Hanora.

  ‘19 B must be at the end of this block,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’

  ‘God doesn’t give a hoot, Rosy, so you’ll just have to put up with it.’

  Clouds had gathered again in the Dickensian sky above Edward Street. Naturally, that was expected. And the ‘units’, which had appeared to be dark and forbidding on the outside with their sealed windows and mean flues sticking up, were even worse on the inside. That was to be expected, too.

  When Hanora unlocked the door to 19B the stored heat of the day bounced off the corrugated-iron walls like steam from a boiled kettle. The interior consisted of three cells: two for our beds, and one utility cell that contained a sink and a tap and a black iron wood-fuel stove that dared us to operate it. At the rear was a small, peculiar tin bathroom and toilet. At one end of the tin bath was a chip heater that for some reason seemed more of a threat than the stove. There was a vague smell of urine and other smells that were perhaps left over by the misery of previous tenants. The walls did not quite meet the roof, so that there was a constant draught. There was not one corner of the hut that gave a beam of comfort or joy. 19B Edward was nothing but a chook house too hot for chooks.

  ‘But a blank canvas!’ I said. ‘Just think what we could do with this.’

  Silence.

  ‘Why are we here?’ sobbed Rosy.

  ‘Because we are homeless, Rosy.’

  ‘Oh, Aria, but not really poor, like beggars?’