I pushed the pages aside. I looked up to meet Clementina’s pale face. We both knew what Gracie’s news meant. Fewer boats would mean no farlins, no teams. The girls would remain in the villages where they had come from, and would not be leaving for the season every year. Their lives, changed forever, now forever the same.

October 1974

October 1974

Dearest lambsie, weeks have gone by since I wrote about Steven. Kathryn is pleased, I think, that she’s not seen me scribbling in my book. If only she knew it’s not the same one, that I have two others in the kist put away for you already! Ach, she’s very good to me, your mother, and so busy with her work, all those beautiful figures she does. I don’t like to upset her—not too much, anyway, not if I can help it. But some things—well, she can be unreasonable. Whyever it is that she gets so fretful when I go to town on the bus, I canna imagine. Clementina says your Unty Jessie is the same. Kathryn keeps wanting me to promise I’ll not go off on my own, but I forget. And I don’t see what there is to be fretting about, no.

She has come up with a new way for me to remember things: a board stuck on the fridge door. I’m to write things on it with a marker pen, and she writes things for me, too. Lists. I’ve always liked lists. Ticking things off, knowing you’ve done what it was once in your mind to do.

I’ve written a list on the inside cover of this book: the things I still must tell you, lambsie. If I keep looking at the list, maybe I’ll not write so many other things, things that are not important.

12

Influenza, 1921

So this is the first thing on my list, lambsie.

In 1921, Anzac Day was not a national day of mourning, not in the way we know it these days. The newspapers retold the story of heroism, and there were parades and services. It was a day for grieving, aye, but a kind of mourning closer to the heart. Wounds still fresh.

A Monday, it was—what silly details you remember. Magnus was on the day shift.

Go if ye want, an’ whenever ye want. I’ll not be going with ye.

I put my hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it off.

What’s the point, Meggie? Whatever’s the point of any of it? Tell me that.

Clementina waved a pot of porridge as he shouldered his way through the kitchen but he grabbed the bicycle and left for Castlemaine, long before he needed to.

It’s all right, quinie, Clementina said, as if the one who needed comforting on this day was me. We all have our own way.