The Golden Day
ALSO BY
U
RSULA
D
UBOSARSKY
The Red Shoe
Theodora’s Gift
Abyssinia
The Game of the Goose
Black Sails,White Sails
The First Book of Samuel
The
Golden Day
U
RSULA
D
UBOSARSKY
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use quoted material: excerpt from the song ‘Joy is like the Rain’ (1966) by permission of the author, Miriam Therese Winter; extract from Ancient History 3U HSC Examination Paper, © Board of Studies NSW for and on behalf of the Crown in rights of the State of New South Wales, 1976.
First published in 2011
Copyright © text, Ursula Dubosarsky
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web:
www.allenandunwin.com
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74237 471 0
Teachers’ notes available from
www.allenandunwin.com
Cover and text design and typesetting by Zoë Sadokierski
Cover image by Zoë Sadokierski
Set in 12.5pt Perpetua by Zoë Sadokierski
Printed and bound in Australia in February 2011 by Griffin Press, 168 Cross Keys Rd, Salisbury South, South Australia 5106
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated with great affection
to my own class of 1978
Fear it has faded and the night:
The bells all peal the hour of nine:
The schoolgirls hastening through the light
Touch the unknowable Divine…
Get thou behind me Shadow-Death!
Oh ye Eternities delay!
Morning is with me and the breath
Of schoolgirls hastening down the way.
—‘Schoolgirls Hastening’
J
OHN
S
HAW
N
EILSON
CONTENTS
The chapter titles in this novel are taken from
paintings and drawings by Charles Blackman.
‘Let It All Hang Out’
T
HE
H
OMBRES
T
HE YEAR BEGAN
with the hanging of one man, and ended with the drowning of another. But every year people die and their ghosts roam in the public gardens, hiding behind the grey, dark statues like wild cats, their tiny footsteps and secret breathing muffled by the sound of falling water in the fountains and the quiet ponds.
‘Today, girls,’ said Miss Renshaw, ‘we shall go out into the beautiful garden and think about death.’
The little girls sat in rows as the bell for morning classes tolled. Their teacher paused gravely. They gazed up at her, their striped ties neat around their necks, their hair combed.
‘I have to tell you something barbaric has happened today,’ said Miss Renshaw, in a low, intent voice. ‘At eight o’clock this morning a man was hanged.’
Hanged! Miss Renshaw had a folded newspaper in her hand. She hit it against the blackboard. The dust rose and the little girls jumped in their seats.
‘In Melbourne!’
In Melbourne! They did not really even know where Melbourne was. Melbourne was like a far-off Italian city to them; it was Florence or Venice, a southern city of gold and flowers. But now they knew it was cruel and shadowy, filled with murderers and criminals and state assassins. In Melbourne there was a prison with a high wall and behind it in a courtyard stood a gallows, and a man named Ronald Ryan had been hanged at eight o’clock that morning.
Hanged… Who knew what else went on in Melbourne? That’s what Cubby said. But Icara, who had been to Melbourne with her father on a train that took all night, shook her head.
‘It’s not like that,’ she said. ‘It’s just like here, only there aren’t so many palm trees.’
Trust Icara to notice something peculiar like palm trees when people were being cut down on the street and carried away and hanged, thought Cubby.
Miss Renshaw beckoned at the little girls to leave their seats and come forward. They gathered around her, their long white socks pulled up to their knees.
‘What did he do, Miss Renshaw?’ asked Bethany, the smallest girl in the class. She had small legs and small hands and a very small head. But her eyes were luminously large. ‘The man who was hanged?’
‘We won’t worry about that now,’ said Miss Renshaw, avoiding Bethany’s alarming stare. ‘Whatever he did, I ask you, is it right to take a man and hang him, coldly, at eight o’clock in the morning?’
It did seem a particularly wicked thing to do, the little girls agreed, especially in the morning, on such a warm and lovely day when everything in it was so alive. Better to hang a person at night, when it was already sad and dark.
Miss Renshaw banged the newspaper again, on the desk this time. The little girls huddled backwards.
‘So today, girls, we will go outside into the beautiful garden, and think about death.’
Miss Renshaw was nuts, that’s what Cubby’s mother said. Still, you’ve got to do what she says, Cubby. Remember she’s the teacher.
‘But what if she tells us to jump in the river seven times to cure us of leprosy?’ wondered Cubby, thinking of the Bible story that one of the senior prefects, Amanda, had read out loud in chapel.
And Eli’sha sent a messenger to him, saying, ‘Go and wash in
the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and
you shall be clean!’
Up rose the voice of Amanda like smoke from behind the wooden eagle upon which the large Revised Standard Version of the Bible was laid out. Amanda’s name meant ‘fit-to-be-loved’ in Latin; Miss Renshaw had told them so. She was fit-to-beloved, with her long, fair plaits as thick as the rope that the deckhands threw to tie the ferry to the wharf on the trip home from school. Everyone admired Amanda, and not only for her hair.
‘Well, one step at a time,’ said Cubby’s mother. ‘Let’s wait and see if you get leprosy first.’
Now Miss Renshaw stepped forward, leaving the newspaper on the desk. Miss Renshaw was tall, noble and strong. Her hair was red and springy. She was like a lion. She stood at the classroom door, waiting while the little girls found their broad-brimmed, blue-banded hats, in preparation for leaving the safety of the school grounds.
Theirs was a very small class. There were only eleven of them, like eleven sisters all the same age in a large family. Cubby, Icara, Martine, Bethany, Georgina, Cynthia, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Elizabeth and silent Deirdre. Because it was such a very small class, they had a very small classroom, which was perched right at the top of the school. Up four flights of stairs, way up in the sky, like a colony of little birds nesting on a cliff, blown about by wind with the high, airy sounds of the city coming up the hill in the ocean breeze.
‘Girls!’ called out Miss Renshaw, smoothing her springy hair as they ran to tumble down the stairs, sixty-seven steps in total. ‘Hold hands and do not run.’
Cubby grabbed Icara’s hand, just as she had on the very first day she had arrived at the school, terrified and alone. Cubby preferred Icara to Martine or Georgina or Cynthia or Bethany or Deirdre or Elizabeth or Elizabeth or Elizabeth or Elizabeth, although the last Elizabeth wasn’t so bad, she had a little brother who couldn’t walk and had to go to a special school on a special bus and once Cubby had been to her house when her little brother was home and they had pushed him around the garden in his wheelchair and how he had laughed! as he threw back his thin neck, laughing out loud like a kookaburra.