I pieced it together like a film with what Clementina told me and what the police said. And what I knew, just knew. I have replayed it so many times, lambsie. I will write it down for you the way I have been seeing it for all these years, and I will not spare you, or myself, not one thing will I spare, because this I need you to know.

~

In those miserying times, men would often knock on the door of the cottage. Some had armfuls of boronia to sell, picked in the bush south. Some would offer to chop wood or sweep the chimney, just for a place to sleep. Some came right out and asked for food or a cup of tea to warm them on their way. Depression made beggars of all manner of men.

When the stranger came to Mrs Laskon’s door, she had sized him up straight away. A worker, this one, you always can tell. And she gave him a job and a blanket and let him sleep by the copper in the laundry out back. It would take him a few days, he said, and he would do the job for board while he looked about Fremantle for work.

Clementina shook her head. There’s no work to be had, she muttered. She’s taking advantage of the desperate.

But it seemed to me that the man had a dignity bigger than desperate, and being unemployed and on the move with the legion of others doing the same was not going to make a dent in his sense of what was fair and what was not.

He said his name was Alfred but we could call him Digger because everybody did. Was it because he dug wells, or because he was in the war? I didn’t like to ask. If a man wanted to talk about the war, he would find some way to do it, but most of them didn’t. Clementina gave me a sideways glance and I could tell she was itching to come right out and ask was there a Mrs Digger—always she was looking for me. I frowned at her and instead she asked, D’ye have milk in your tea, then? And soon it was one question after another, Clementina, then Steven, all three of them with mugs of tea warming their fingers while Kathryn listened from the door. Always shy of anyone new, Kathryn was.

Since Hal had left and Jack Laing gone to the South West again for a month, Steven had lost his bearings a little. But the presence of the stranger cheered him. He began to brighten, drawn to the masculine in that powerful way of fatherless boys.

Can I help dig the well? he asked me. I’m twelve, I’m old enough. Digger says I can if you say.

God help me, lambsie, I didn’t see the harm.

~