He left in the morning, my wee cooper boy. He reported for duty and left for training at Blackboy Hill. A month later, he left again, on a troopship from the wharf at Fremantle.

I waved goodbye, one woman in a weeping crowd of hundreds, and I tried to feel proud of Magnus Tulloch. I did not want him to go, I didn’t think it was the right thing, that there was any right thing about war. But aye, I tried to be proud. Not because he had no choice but because he did.

July 1974

July 1974

I was watching the news on TV not so long ago. Pictures of our young people being shipped off to Vietnam. All these years later and still we were losing them to war. Perhaps it was even worse, because of that lottery business. Their number was called. They went.

Your mother started crying once when we were watching together, and I knew what she was thinking—any mother would know. That if you had been a boy, lambsie, it could have been you going. Just like in the second war when lads I knew signed up, I would think: That could have been Steven.

There, I’ve written his name. My Steven. It would upset your mother if she read it. But something is scratching away at my memory, lambsie—maybe it’s being old, maybe this disease—but I am afraid that if I don’t write it down it will become one of the things that just disappears. And it’s only now, now that I’m old, that I understand: if we don’t speak the names of our dead, it’s as though they never were.

Sometimes I wonder about my own brothers. Did they go to war? Did they join the navy with other northern fishermen? Die in enemy oceans or survive to have sons, daughters, of their own? Did they return changed, awake to the world beyond the village, or would it have always been the old ways for them, the fears we grew up with?

I don’t want to remember them at all, but when I canna push those thoughts away I also wonder this: Did they ever think of Kitta? Did they ever speak our sister’s name?

9

Clementina and I managed it all between us: the children, the rent, the cooking and shopping, the firewood and the dunny cans. The grief.

I tried to keep to myself the fear of what Magnus Tulloch might be doing at every moment of the day, a gallop in my blood that I kept checked, unspoken. But Clementina shared that too, with stray touches on my arm, my shoulder, to remind me she knew.