Sarah Thornhill. Kate Grenville
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heard that a lot. Never looked back.
That made it a place with no grannies and no grandpas. No aunties, no uncles. No past.
Pa started a boatman on the Thames. Then he was sent out, what for I never knew. Eighteen-oh-six, Alexander transport. I was a pestering sort of child but that was all he’d ever say, sitting in the armchair smiling away at nothing and smoothing the nap of the velvet.
Thornhills was in a big way. Three hundred acres of good riverfront land and you had to go all the way up the river to Windsor before you saw a house grand as ours. Pa had got his start in the old Hope, carrying other men’s grain and meat down the river to Sydney. Given that away, now he had his own corn and wheat, beef and hogs, and let other men do the carting of them.
But still a boatman at heart. Always a couple of skiffs down at the jetty, and when they put in the new road to the north he saw an opening, got a punt going. A shilling for a man, half a crown for a man on a horse, sixpence a head for cattle. Where you had people you needed an inn, so he built the Ferryman’s Arms, had George Wheeler run it for him.
I never saw Pa lift an axe or carry a stick of firewood and he had other men now to do the rowing for him. Done enough work for any man’s lifetime, he’d say. Of a morning he’d eat his breakfast, light his pipe, go out to where the men were standing with their hoes and spades. Jemmy Katter, Bob Dodd, Dickie Parson, three or four others. Assigned from Government, serving their time like he’d done. Sent out from London the most of them, never seen a spade in their lives before.
He’d set them to chipping between the corn rows, mucking out the hog-pens. Fill his pipe and stand watching them work. Point and call out if he thought they wasn’t doing it right.
He made them call him sir. A flogging if they forgot.
When you done as well as Pa had, no one said sent out or worn the broad arrow. Now he was what they called an old colonist. Still plenty of folk who wouldn’t put their feet under the same table as an emancipist or invite him into their house. As far as some people went, sent out meant tainted for all time. You and your children and your children’s children. But for other folk, money had a way of blunting the hard shapes of the past. Dressing it up in different words.
Pa was Mr Thornhill of Thornhill’s Point now, but he had some habits that were from before. Of an afternoon he’d get a bit of bread and go out on the verandah. Sit on a hard bench beside the window—didn’t want a cushion—with the bread and a glass of rum-and-water beside him on the sill. He’d put his telescope up to his eye and look down the river where you’d see the boats from Sydney come round the last spur into Thornhill’s Reach. Sliding up fast if the tide was with them, or having to get out the oars if it was sucking back out to sea. Other times he’d swing it round the other way, to the reedy place where the First Branch wound down from among the hills. But mostly he’d look straight across the river up at the line of bush along the top of the cliffs. Nothing up there, only rocks and trees and sky, but he’d sit by the hour watching, the leather worn through to the brass where his hand clamped round it.
~
I was born in the year eighteen-sixteen, Sarah Thornhill, named after my mother. She was Sarah but always called Sal. I was the baby of the family, why I was called Dolly.
Never liked Dolly. Never wanted to be a doll.
Next above me was Mary, nearly three years older and never let me forget it. Got the side of the bed near the fire. Pushed ahead when we went up the stairs. You know, silly things, but they matter when you’re little.
I had three brothers too, all of them older.
Johnny was two years above Mary. Always with a scheme in his head. Got a lot of lemons once and rigged up a thing to get the juice. Begged some sugar from Ma, set up a stall down at the punt, made a shilling or two.
Bub was two years again above him. Even as a boy Bub was like an old man, sober and slow. Never went anywhere without a hoe and if he saw a thistle he’d stop and grub it out. It was him got the lemons for Johnny. Him got the hiding for it, too.
The oldest of us was Will. Fifteen when I was born and already out on the boats doing a man’s work. Will was away more than he was home. Up and down the coast with the cedar. Over to New Zealand for the seals. Be away so long I’d think he was never coming back, half a year or more.
Captain Thornhill, people called him, though he was really only Will Thornhill who’d worked his way up. Never got his papers, nothing like that. Didn’t read, see. None of us did.
Pa had no time for learning. Could sign his name but often said how a few acres and a flock of sheep was a better gift to your children than anything you’d get out of a book. When he needed something on paper he got old Loveday at Beckett’s Reach to do it for him. Loveday had come free, could of done all right, but drank it all away in his miserable leaky hut. See, Pa would say. Old Loveday’s not got the taint, but tell me this, you rather have his life or mine?
It was never spoke of, but Ma was not really our mother.
I had a few memories, sharp little pictures, of another mother. Will in the kitchen doorway and me sitting on the edge of the table working away at the peas in a pod while this other mother magicked them open down their backbone one by one with her thumbnail, the peas popping out into the blue-striped bowl with the grey chip on the edge. She sat puffing away on her pipe, doing the peas without having to look. The picture was so sharp it even had a smell, baccy and peas together. She’d take the pipe out of her mouth and sing, tuneless and wavery. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clement’s, she’d sing. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of Saint Martin’s.
Will with his hands under my armpits, hoisting me in the air, the underside of the shingles swinging round, the pod clutched tight in my fist while the kitchen rolled up and down and under and over, and then I was back on the table with my mouth open, would I cry or laugh I didn’t know, and Will was clattering at the stove, shouting and joking, head way up near the beams, and my mother with the peas all fallen in her pinny lap and not caring.
Then they brought me into a dark room, summer outside but all the curtains drawn across and the shutters closed, someone leading me by the hand over to the high bed where my mother lay, but I was frightened and shy, she was sweaty, her hair in strings, her cheeks sunk in, and her hand on the coverlet waxy and bony.
Whoever was with me, I could feel their hand at my back, pushing, they wanted me to kiss the yellow face on the pillow. Her eyes slid sideways at me, she was smiling, but her lips were so white and dry and her face nothing but wrinkled skin sliding over the bone. I pulled back, how could I kiss such a thing! Her hand crawled towards me over the coverlet and she touched me on the shoulder, top of the head, shoulder again, then the hand fell back and they let me go away.
Like a dream, that first mother melted away and there was another person we called Ma.
Pa had no stories but Ma had enough for the both of them. Turned over the places and names and dates like coins in her hand, counted and re-counted them for the pleasure of it. Her Daddy was in the sugar trade and she grew up in a house at Brixton-Hill, on the north side, that’s the superior side. A husband something in the army, she was Margaret Grant. Come free to New South Wales along with him. Then he died.
I come up the river to help your pa, she’d say. Your mother too sick to care for a houseful of children. Then by and by we was wed.
I loved how neat it was, the way she told it, then and now stitched up tight.
Ma had a scurrying way with her, tilting forward from the waist like a hen in a hurry. Always putting something to rights. She never forgot the stain Pa carried. But the way she saw it, it was a wife’s job to hide it, even if she couldn’t wash it out.
She had a headful of all the things you did so no one would know you had the taint. Elbows off the table, remember Dolly, she’d say, and a well-bred person leaves a scrap on their plate. She’d be running after us with our bonnets when we went outside, did we want to