The Forgotten Pearl (23 page)

We do lots of activities and work to keep busy: craft, gardening, sport and music. I like to draw pictures of dragons and Naga maidens swimming in their palaces deep under the sea. I thought you might like one of my pictures.

I have a new brother and a new sister. We all live together in an iron hut. It is freezing in winter and sometimes the babies get sick. In summer it is
very hot. The guards are kind to us but we can't ever leave the camp. One day I hope to swim in the sea again. My grandmother says when we are free she will teach me to swim like a Naga maiden.

Yours sincerely,

Shinju Murata

October 18, 1945

Internment Camp 4

Tatura, Victoria

Dear Mrs Trehearne and Miss Poppy,

Thank you so much for your letter and your kind reference. We pray it will make a difference and the authorities will let us stay. I'm told it may be many months before we know. They say that the Australian people are very angry with the Japanese and that life will be hard for us here. But Australia is our home. I hope Shinju and the other children will be able to grow up here in a land of peace.

I'm glad that Miss Poppy enjoyed the letter and drawing from Shinju. Thank you so much for sending the parcel of books and art supplies for her, along with the toys and clothes for all the children. Shinju was so excited when the huge parcel arrived. They were the first real presents she has
received since we came here four years ago.

I will let you know as soon as we have any news about whether we will be allowed to stay.

Yours sincerely,

Asami Murata

22

Homecoming

It was late November 1945 when their ship chugged into Darwin Harbour. Poppy and Bryony stood by the rails, straining to catch a glimpse of their hometown – their first for nearly four years. Honey was lying on the deck, one fluffy ear cocked while she slept, her muzzle now grey about the whiskers.

The early summer heat was still and oppressive, building up to the wet season. Poppy couldn't believe how lethargic it made her feel and how much she had teased Maude when her friend complained constantly about the heat.

‘Look,' she cried, ‘there's Government House and the jetty.'

‘At last – we're nearly there,' Bryony added. ‘I can't wait to get home.'

Bryony and Poppy flung their arms around each other, performing a little jig of excitement. Honey woke up with all the noise and woofed with pleasure. Cecilia, Mark and
Edward came over from the bench where they had been sitting to get a better view.

‘The Japs sure did a thorough job on those ships, didn't they?' Edward pointed to the rusty wrecks still littering the harbour.

It seemed to take forever for the ship to dock and the passengers to be allowed to disembark at the new jetty. Edward had had a prosthetic leg fitted in Sydney, and he was still a little wobbly on the moving gangway. They gathered all their baggage and hailed a taxi to drive them the short distance home.

The family approached Myilly Point with mounting apprehension. Darwin still looked like a war zone. They saw skeletons of bombed-out houses, mounds of debris and rubble overgrown with brown grass. On the side of the road was the scorched wreckage of a crashed fighter plane.

The taxi pulled up outside the Trehearnes' home on Myilly Point.

‘Good luck – and welcome home.' The driver took his coins and reversed away, leaving them surrounded by a pile of luggage.

The house looked like it had been abandoned for decades. The corrugated roof was riddled with machine-gun bullets. The main water tank was empty and turned over on its side. The garden was overgrown with long, dry grass and littered with empty petrol drums. The back door had been kicked in, and was now hanging from one broken hinge.

‘Oh,' croaked Cecilia, her hand held to her throat.

They climbed the steps to the verandah slowly and peered inside. Everything was gone. Every room was
empty. The furniture, books, pictures, curtains, rugs, clothes, saucepans, refrigerator, shelving – everything had been taken.

Cecilia collapsed to the floor. Poppy and Bryony huddled beside her, shocked and distressed.

‘It's all gone,' Cecilia cried, her bitter tears welling up and overflowing. ‘Everything we owned.'

Mark rubbed Cecilia's shoulders soothingly. ‘We heard there was looting,' he admitted, his voice hoarse. ‘First the shipwrecked sailors made camps, using what they could find, then the army took over and requisitioned what it needed. Then we heard that some of those left behind just helped themselves to what they wanted and sent it back to Adelaide and Melbourne by truck. There was no one here to stop them.'

Edward stood by the window, gazing out at the view. ‘I fought and gave up years of my life in a stinking hellhole so they could do this to us?' His voice was low and angry.

‘What will we do?' asked Bryony. ‘We've come all this way for nothing.'

Cecilia looked up at her family gathered around her. She wiped the tears from her face and stood up, squaring her shoulders. ‘We start again,' she announced. ‘We work and we clean our house and we fix what's been broken. I am having Christmas with my beautiful family – in my home – and
nothing
is going to stop me.'

Poppy laughed through her tears. ‘That's the spirit, Mum. We didn't let the war beat us, so we're not going to give up now.'

Mark gave Cecilia a hug. ‘Okay, boss,' he joked. ‘Where do we start?'

Cecilia looked around at the filthy room and ticked the list off on her fingers. ‘Well, first we need a nice cup of hot tea – so we need water, a fire, some timber and a spade.'

‘Why a spade?' asked Edward, intrigued.

‘Because I buried a box full of my best china and silver under the house, and we'll need some teacups.'

Everyone laughed, suddenly feeling much better, and set off to scrounge whatever they could find that might be useful. Honey accompanied Poppy, exploring all the old, familiar scents with her nose.

While Poppy was on her way to fetch a bucket of water from the remaining tank at the back of the shed, she paused beside the filled-in trench where Daisy and Charlie were buried. She gathered a big pile of hot-pink bougainvillea and laid it on the mound, saying a silent prayer for them. Honey pawed at the ground and whined.

‘I know, Honey,' Poppy whispered. ‘I miss them too.'

When Phoebe arrived home a week later, the house had been scrubbed from end to end. Edward and Mark had made furniture from wooden crates, flour sacks, recycled building materials and iron camp beds from the abandoned army barracks. The cooking was done over an open fire in a cut-down fuel drum, while the house water tank had been righted and repaired to catch the first of the early rains.

Cecilia and Bryony had scoured the stores in Darwin for basic supplies. Mark bought a bolt of unbleached calico that the girls sewed into curtains. When the house was in order, they had started on the vegetable garden – weeding, hoeing, digging and planting.

It wasn't their gracious home from before the war, but it was a start.

On a warm morning in early December, Poppy was scything the overgrown grass in the garden. She was wearing a pair of Edward's army shorts pulled in tightly with a belt and an old, ragged shirt belonging to her father. Her hair was tied up with a scrap of calico. On her forearm shone the thin, silvery-pink scar of the shrapnel wound from the day the first bombs fell.

The scything was hot, heavy work, but it was rewarding as the garden was gradually transformed.

Honey snoozed in the freshly cut grass, occasionally cocking an eyebrow to check on Poppy's progress. Poppy was sweeping the scythe in large semicircles under the frangipani tree when she sensed someone behind her. Honey jumped to her feet, tail wagging furiously.

‘Hello, Midget.'

Poppy dropped her scythe and swung around. ‘Jack!'

She rushed forward to hug him, then checked herself, feeling self-conscious. She hadn't seen Jack for three and a half years, not since he went off to war, and now here she was – sweaty, dirty and dressed in rags. She swept the piece of calico off her head, wiped it over her face, then quickly fluffed out her hair.

‘Jack, how are you? When did you get back? Are you all right?'

She quickly scanned him, checking for missing limbs or injuries. Jack looked just the same as ever – tall and fit,
tanned and healthy, fair hair swept back off his forehead, blue eyes dancing with laughter.

‘Glad to see you're still a hoyden, Miss Midget,' joked Jack. ‘I thought all those years in Sydney might have turned you into a glamour puss.'

Poppy swiped at him with her calico rag. ‘Don't be mean,' she protested. ‘I'm not a hoyden. I'm just working hard, unlike
some
.'

‘Aren't you going to invite me to take a seat?' asked Jack, motioning to the freshly mown grass under the frangipani tree. ‘Is that any way to welcome home a poor, exhausted Aussie digger, who's spent his youth fighting for his country?'

‘Excuse me, poor exhausted Aussie digger, would you care to take a seat?' Poppy plopped down under the tree, glad for the chance to take a break. Jack moved the scythe and sat down beside her.

Jack looked at her, now serious. ‘I'm glad to see a flash of the old Poppy. It's been a long time. I thought you might have forgotten me.'

‘
Forgotten
you?' demanded Poppy. ‘You're the one who stopped writing.'

Jack had the grace to look discomfited. ‘Your letters seemed so full of your schoolwork and friends – it was such a distant world from the one I was fighting in up in New Guinea,' confessed Jack. ‘Then my brother died, and that was terrible. I was just too sick and tired of it all to write. There didn't seem to be anything to say.'

Poppy touched his hand. ‘I'm sorry.'

They sat in silence for a moment. Honey pawed Jack's arm, begging for a pat. Jack obliged and scratched her between the eyes. Honey woofed with pleasure.

‘Well, to answer your questions, I was demobbed in October, so I came straight back to Alexandra Downs,' Jack said. ‘We fared better down there than you did here because we were a long way from the bombing, plus we had a manager to keep an eye on the place. Mum and Dad moved back a few months ago, so the house was still intact. I had to come to Darwin to deliver a mob of cattle to the meatworks, and I heard in town that you were back, so I thought I'd just pop by to see how you all were.'

Poppy asked Jack about his family, and he said his dad had recovered from his operation and was back running the station. His mum was devastated after the loss of her son, but was thrilled to have her other two home safely.

‘But what about
your
family?' asked Jack. ‘I heard your brother had a rough time?'

Poppy nodded, her eyes growing misty. ‘He's up and down but getting better,' Poppy explained. ‘Working on the house has really given him a project to throw himself into, and he's good with tools. He lost his leg in the last weeks of the war, so he had to have a lot of rehabilitation in Sydney. He was emaciated when he first came back – they'd all been starved and terribly mistreated. He told me he had several bones broken from beatings, not that he likes to talk about it much.'

Jack winced. ‘I've heard it was absolutely dreadful – he's lucky to be alive. And your sister Phoebe? She's just arrived back in Darwin?'

‘Phoebe went overseas as a nurse, firstly to New Guinea, but then she got really sick,' Poppy explained. ‘She caught malaria and dengue fever and had to come home for a few months to recover. Mum nursed her – she was desperately
ill and terribly sad. She had fallen in love with an American soldier who was killed up in New Guinea.'

Poppy paused and picked up a frangipani blossom, which she spun between her fingers.

‘Then, when the Japanese surrendered, they needed nurses experienced in tropical medicine to go up and look after the rescued prisoners of war at the medical camps in Singapore,' Poppy continued. ‘Phoebe went in a flash – she says it was heartbreaking, seeing all these British, American, New Zealand and Australian soldiers reduced to shuffling skeletons. Many of them couldn't walk up the gangway to get on the ships home.'

‘I saw some of them when the ships came into Darwin a few weeks ago,' Jack said. ‘It'll take the poor blokes a long time to get over the horror of it all. But you should have seen the joy on their faces when they set foot on Aussie soil for the first time in years. It was indescribable.'

The two lapsed into silence, lost in thought.

‘Do you still see Maude?' asked Jack. ‘Last time you wrote, you were still living at the Tibbets's place in Manly.'

Poppy's face lit up. ‘Maude is great. She's studying art at university and having a marvellous time. All the boys think she's gorgeous.'

Jack pulled a battered piece of paper out of his wallet. ‘I have this photo of you and Maude that I took in Manly that day I first came to Sydney,' Jack confessed. ‘I carried it with me all through the jungles of New Guinea. It used to remind me why I was up there fighting.'

The photo was dog-eared and soiled from so much handling. It showed Maude and Poppy as fourteen-year-old
girls, their hair salty and windblown, arms around each other, laughing into the camera.

Poppy felt a wrench in her stomach. Jack had carried a photo of Maude in his wallet all through the war. He had obviously looked at it often. Was Jack sweet on Maude?

‘We look so young and carefree then,' said Poppy wistfully. ‘That was a wonderful day – at least until you were nearly beaten up by the American.'