Alone on a Wide Wide Sea Read online

  I was hot and dusty and thirsty on that bus, and I thought the journey would never end, but I was happy. I was happy to have arrived, happy not to be sea-sick any more. Tired though we were, we were buoyed up by the excitement of it all. This was a new adventure in a new world. We were on a bus ride into wonderland and we were loving it, every single moment of it.

  Evening was coming on by the time we got to Cooper’s Station, but we could still see enough. We could see it was a place on its own, way out in the bush, and we could tell it was a farm. I mean you could smell it straightaway, the moment we clambered down off the bus. There were huge sheds all around, and you could hear cattle moving and shifting around inside. And from further away in the gloom there was the sound of a running creek, and ducks quacking raucously. A gramophone record was playing from the nearby farmhouse, which had a tin roof and a verandah all around it. I thought at first that was where we’d all be living, but we were led past it, carrying our suitcases, down a dirt track and into a compound with a fence all around. In the centre of this was a long wooden shed with steps at one end and a verandah.

  “Your new home,” the man told us, opening the door. I didn’t take much notice of him, not then. I was too busy looking around me. The gramophone needle got stuck as I stood there. I can never think of Cooper’s Station without that stuttering snatch of a hymn repeating itself remorselessly in my head, “What a friend we have in Jesus, have in Jesus, have in Jesus, have in Jesus”. I wasn’t to know it then, but it was the eerie overture that heralded the darkest years of my life.

  Cooper’s Station and Piggy Bacon and God’s Work

  I think it was from the moment they first shut us in the dormitory block at Cooper’s Station, and we heard the door bolted behind us, that I have hated walls about me and locked doors. I never lock the doors of my house even now – never. Ever since Cooper’s Station, doors and walls have made me feel like a prisoner. I was about to find out, as we all were, not what it was like to be a prisoner, but what it was to be a prisoner. Worse still we were slaves too.

  I’ve had a lot of time to think things over since. I’m still angry about Cooper’s Station, about what they did to us there. But we weren’t the first. Two hundred years or so before we were sent out from England to Australia, others had made the same journey we did. They had come in chains in the stinking bowels of transport ships. We may have come in a beautiful ship, with pillar-box-red funnels and an orchestra, but we were prisoners just like them. And they must have very soon discovered, as we did, that you weren’t just a prisoner, you were a slave as well, and that when you’re a slave they don’t just take away your freedom, they take away everything else as well because they own you. They own you body and soul. And the soul, we were about to find out, was particularly important to our owners.

  I can’t pretend I had any understanding of all this then, lying there clutching my lucky key in the sweltering darkness of the dormitory during my first night at Cooper’s Station, but I knew already that the dream had died. Marty lay in the bunk next to me, stunned to silence like the rest of us. He cried that night, the only time I ever heard Marty cry. I knew now this brand-new country we had come to was not a paradise after all. It was, as we were soon to discover, a hell on earth – a hell specially devised for children by Mr Bacon, Piggy Bacon we called him, who was to be our gaoler, slave-master, preacher and brand-new father, all in one.

  I can honestly say that Piggy Bacon was the only person in all my life that I ever wanted to kill. But to be fair to him, he did at least tell it to us straight. That first morning at Cooper’s Station, after washing from the buckets lined up out on the verandah, after our breakfast of lukewarm, lumpy porridge, he told us exactly why we were there. We were all gathered there shivering outside the dormitory block. Mrs Bacon was at his side in her blue dungarees and flowery apron, tiny alongside his great bulk. He was a great thickset bull of a man, red-faced with short, cropped ginger hair and a clipped ginger moustache, and little pink eyes – even his eyelashes were ginger. He always seemed to me like a man on fire and about to explode. His vast stomach looked as if it was only just held in by his checked shirt and broad belt, a belt every one of us would have good cause to fear as the months passed. He wore knee-length boots which he’d whack irritably from time to time with the stick he used to carry – the same stick he would use for punctuating his speeches – speeches which, like this one,always turned into sermons. Sometimes he’d carry a whip for cracking at the dogs, at the cattle or the horses, or us if he felt like it. Stick or whip, it didn’t matter to us – we came to fear both just as much.

  Mrs Bacon smiled the same fixed nervous smile that day that I so often saw afterwards. We didn’t know the reason she was nervous, not then. She seemed shrunk inside her dungarees – I think she always wore the same blue dungarees, only the aprons changed. I sensed from the first that Mrs Bacon was frightened, that she was hiding something. Her face was drained of all colour. I never in my life saw a woman look more weary. She stood there, her eyes downcast, as Piggy Bacon told us all the whys and wherefores, the do’s and don’ts of Cooper’s Station.

  “You can count yourselves very lucky,” he began, “that Mrs Bacon and I have taken you in. No one else would, you know. We did it out of the kindness of our hearts, didn’t we, Mrs Bacon? Out of the kindness of our hearts, that’s what it was. You are the little ones no one else wanted. You are the little ones thrown out of the nest, rejected and with no home to go to, no one to look after you, no one even to feed you. But we will, won’t we, Mrs Bacon? We will feed you and house you, we will clothe you and teach you about hard work and the ways of God. What more could a child ever want? Mrs Bacon and I are God fearin’ folk, Christian folk. We were brought up to know our duty. ‘Suffer little children to come unto me,’ the good Lord said. So we are doing his will, and this we shall train you to do as well. A child is born sinful and must be bent to the will of God. That is now our task.

  “So we have offered to take you in, at our own expense mind, out of good Christian charity. We have built you this home for your shelter – your shelter from the storm of life. You will help us make a garden of Eden, a paradise out of this wilderness. Mrs Bacon and I will be like a mother and father to you, won’t we, Mrs Bacon? And your training in the ways of the Lord will begin right now. There will be no swearing, no idleness – I promise you, you will be kept too busy ever to be idle. You will work to earn your keep. And you will work because the Devil makes work for idle hands. If you work we shall feed you well. If you work well you may play for one hour at the end of each day, the last hour before sundown.

  “Look out there!” he roared suddenly, waving his stick towards the horizon. “Look! Do you see? Nothing. Nothing but wilderness as far as the eye can see, and that nothing goes on for miles and miles north, south, east and west. So don’t you ever think of running off. You’d go round in circles out there. You’d die of thirst, be shrivelled up by the sun. The snakes would bite you, the crocs would eat you up, or the dingo dogs would tear you to pieces. And even if you survived all that, the black fellows would soon find you – they always do what I say – and they’d just bring you right back here to Cooper’s Station. Isn’t that right, Mrs Bacon?”

  Mrs Bacon did not respond. She just stayed there beside him, eyes still lowered, while he ranted on.

  When she thought he’d finished she walked away towards the farmhouse, followed closely by her dun-coloured dog, a furtive frightened creature like his mistress, who slunk along behind her, his tail between his legs. But Piggy Bacon had not finished, not quite. He glared after her, and then slapped his boot with his stick. “It’s God’s work we’re doing,” he said. “God’s work. Always remember that.”

  And so to God’s work we went.

  Suffer Little Children

  Piggy Bacon kept his promise to us faithfully: he did indeed always keep us too busy ever to be idle. From that day on anything that needed doing on the farm we children did it. We were the s
laves that tried to carve his paradise out of the wilderness for him. The work was either smelly or back-breaking and often both at the same time. There were thirty milk cows and their calves and a hundred bullocks or more on that station. We fed them, watered them, drove them,cleaned up after them. And before long we were milking the cows too. I ached from my fingers to my shoulders with the work of it. Then there were Piggy Bacon’s chickens – he had hundreds of them – and his pigs and his horses too.

  Mornings were spent mostly refilling the wash buckets from the pump, shovelling muck, wheeling it out to the dung heap from the calf sheds, or spreading it on the paddocks. And always the flies found you, every fly in Australia. They were all around you, in your eyes, in your hair, up your nose even, and they were biting ones too. And if you swallowed one – and you often did – you’d try to retch it up, but you never could. We couldn’t escape them any more than the animals could.

  Lunch was soup and bread brought to our long trestle table in the dormitory and ladled out into our bowls by Mrs Bacon, who scarcely ever spoke to us. We lived on soup and bread in that place. Then in the afternoons we’d be set to clearing the paddocks of stones, or we’d be fetching and carrying water to the troughs, and blocks of salt too. These buckets almost pulled my arms out of my sockets they were so heavy. You had to fill them right up too, because if ever Piggy Bacon caught you carrying a half-empty bucket you were in big trouble, and trouble always meant the strap. So we filled them up full to the brim every time. And when all the water-carrying was done, we’d be digging up weeds or filling in potholes in the tracks, or pulling out tree roots, all of us straining together on the ropes.

  Our hands blistered, our feet blistered. Bites and sores festered. None of that mattered to Piggy Bacon. Once one job was done there was always another waiting. We worked hard because he’d stop our food just like that if we didn’t. We worked hard because he’d strap us if we didn’t. We worked hard because if we didn’t he’d cancel our evening playtime and make us work an hour extra at the end of the day. I so longed for that hour off – we all did – and we hated to miss it. That promise of an hour’s playtime was what kept me going when every bone in my body ached with tiredness.

  Feeding up the animals was the last task of the day, the only work I really enjoyed. Chickens, cows, pigs, horses – it didn’t matter – I loved to see them come running when they saw us with our sacks of feed. I loved to watch them loving it. But the milking I never liked. My fingers couldn’t cope. They swelled easily and I couldn’t sleep afterwards for the pain. Marty and I – we always tried to be in the same work party – would feed a few by hand if we could, if Piggy Bacon wasn’t around to catch us. The chickens tickled you when they pecked the corn out of your hand, and the horses’ noses felt warm and soft as they snuffled up their feed – you had to watch out in case they snuffled up your fingers as well.

  There was one horse in particular Marty and I loved more than all the others. He was huge, a giant of a horse, shining black all over except for one white sock. Big Black Jack he was called, and whenever we were lucky enough to get to feed him, Marty and I made sure he had all the food and water he needed, and then some. I’d crouch there by his bucket, watching him drink deep, listening to his slurping, laughing at his dribbling when he lifted his head out of the bucket. I’d sing London Bridge is Falling Down to him, and he’d like that. He was Piggy Bacon’s plough-horse, and Piggy treated him just as he treated us, worked him to the bone, till his head hung down with exhaustion. Horses, I discovered, when they’re tired or sad, sigh just like people do. Big Black Jack used to do that often. We’d look one another in the eye and I’d know just how he felt and he’d know just how I felt too.

  Whatever job we were doing, whenever we were out on the farm, we could be sure Piggy Bacon would turn up sooner or later. He would appear suddenly, out of nowhere. He only ever came for one reason, and that was to pick on someone for something. Each time I hoped and prayed it was someone else he’d pick on. But sooner or later my turn would come around. We either weren’t working fast enough, or hard enough. A water bucket wasn’t full enough, or he’d find a field stone we hadn’t picked up – any excuse would do. He wouldn’t strap us there and then. Instead he’d tell us how many whacks the particular crime merited and then give us all day to think about it. That was the torture of it, the waiting.

  The punishment parade would take place in the evening outside the dormitory hut just before supper and before we were locked in for the night. He’d call you out in front of the others and then pronounce sentence on you just like a judge. And you’d stand there, hand outstretched, trembling and tearful. It happened to all of us, and often. No one escaped it. But Marty got it more than most, and you could see that when Piggy Bacon strapped Marty he did it with real venom. There was a good reason for that: Marty’s look.

  It was the same look he’d used on that officious man on the dockside the first day we landed in Australia. The thing was that Marty would never be cowed. He would look Piggy Bacon straight in the eye, and that always set Piggy Bacon into one of his terrible rages. The rest of us kept our heads down, just tried to keep out of trouble. Marty fought back with silent defiance. And he didn’t cry out like I did, like the rest of us did, when we were strapped – he wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He just stood there unflinching, his jaw set, his eyes stoney, no tears, no trembling. And to add insult to injury, he’d say thank you afterwards too, his voice as stony as his stare. I’d like to say we all took heart from that, but we didn’t. We admired him though – everyone did. But he wasn’t the only one who fought back. We soon had another hero to admire, a most unlikely hero too – Wes Snarkey.

  Wes Snarkey’s Revenge

  Neither Marty nor I had ever much liked Wes, and Wes made it quite obvious he didn’t much like us either. I could never forget how he and his cronies had tormented me almost every night on the ship, and I’m sure he could not forget how Marty had come to my defence and humiliated him on the deck that day. That must still have rankled with him. So the result was that we hardly ever spoke. In fact he hardly ever spoke to anyone during those first months at Cooper’s Station. In the dormitory, at the line of wash buckets on the verandah, eating at the long trestle table, out at work on the farm, he kept himself to himself. Even at evening playtime when we’d all be kicking a football around, he’d sit there on his own, gazing out at nothing. Of all of us Wes Snarkey was the only loner. But then one day I found out that he wasn’t really a loner at all. He had a friend – a best friend.

  Time and again Piggy Bacon had strapped him for wandering away from his work. No one knew where he went and he didn’t tell anyone. One moment he’d be there digging a ditch alongside you, the next he’d be gone. Strapping Wes didn’t stop him from sneaking off, so I knew that whatever he was doing, wherever he was going, must have been really important to him. We were mucking out the pigs one day when I noticed he’d gone off again. I made quite sure Piggy Bacon wasn’t about, and went looking for him. I found him by Big Black Jack’s paddock. I crouched down behind the trunk of a fallen gum tree and watched him. He was standing by the fence, feeding Big Black Jack with some bread crusts, and he was talking to him as if he was a real person, not a horse at all. I was close enough to see everything, and to hear everything too.

  Wes was telling him about a horse he’d known in England, in Leeds, a milkman’s horse, a piebald mare she was, and how every morning he’d sit on the wall of the orphanage in the early morning and wait for her to come, how he’d save his bread crusts to feed her, how one day the milkman had let him sit on her, and they’d gone off down the street, how it was the best day of his life. “Will you let me ride you one day, Jack?” he whispered, smoothing his neck. “Would you? I could ride you out of here and we’d never come back.”

  I must have shifted then or maybe it was a gust of wind that rustled the pile of dead leaves where I was crouching. Whatever it was, Wes turned around and saw me there. We stared at one another,
not speaking. I could see he had tears in his eyes, and on his face too. He brushed them away hurriedly with the back of his hand then ran off before I could say anything. And I was going to say something. I was going to say that I liked Big Black Jack too, that we could be friends now if he wanted.

  As it happened it was only a few days later that Wes Snarkey became everyone’s friend, and that was on account of Piggy Bacon and his whip. Down near the creek, which was dried up for most of the year, there was an old tree stump we couldn’t pull out. We’d been digging around it, and trying to pull it out for a whole day. With all of us hauling on the ropes, and even with Piggy Bacon lending a hand himself – and that hardly ever happened – we still couldn’t shift it. So in the end Piggy Bacon harnessed up Big Black Jack and got him to do the job instead. But no matter how hard Jack strained at the ropes, the stump would not budge. Piggy Bacon shouted at him, but it did no good. Big Black Jack was doing all he could, we could see that. Piggy Bacon took a stick to him then, and whacked him again and again. He was bellowing at him.

  “Useless bag of bones! Lazy devil! You good-for-nothing, you!” Then Piggy Bacon used his whip on him. In a frenzy of fury and frustration he whipped him till he bled. That was when Wes Snarkey went for Piggy Bacon.