Unforgettable Journeys: Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea, Running Wild and Dear Olly

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Aunty Megs may have been the kindest person in the world, but she could be firm – we soon discovered that. She was appalled when it became clear – as of course it very soon did – that neither Marty nor I had been to school, and so neither of us could read properly nor write. So from then on she’d sit us down every morning at the kitchen table and teach us, regular as clockwork. I won’t pretend that either of us were willing pupils – we just wanted to be outside messing around, climbing trees, riding Big Black Jack, making camps, talking to Henry or Poogly or trying to cheer up poor old Barnaby. It took hours sometimes to get an ee-aw out of Barnaby. An ee-aw we reckoned was as good as a laugh, so we always stayed with him till we got one. And when it rained we’d far prefer to be out with Aunty Megs in her big garden shed where she made her model boats, where we’d make them with her – she taught us that too.

But lessons, she said, had to come first. We didn’t argue with her, not because we were ever even remotely frightened of her, but because both of us knew that she always had our best interests at heart. She made no secret of her affection for us, nor her wish to give us the best upbringing she could. “One day,” she told us, “you’ll have to leave here and go out into the big world out there and earn your living like everyone else. To do that you need to learn. The more you learn now, the more interesting your life will be.” So the two of us buckled down to our lessons, often reluctantly perhaps, but without protest.

As part of her teaching Aunty Megs told us stories, tales she’d learned from the bushmen, folk tales from England. She’d read us legends. By the stove in the evenings she’d read us a novel, a chapter a night, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (we asked for that again and again). There were the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, Little House on the Prairie and Heidi. She loved Heidi, and she was going to read it to us, she said, even though she knew it was a girl’s book. But our favourites were the William books by Richmal Crompton. Sometimes she’d be laughing so much she couldn’t go on. (Later when we could read properly, we read a bit of one of them to Barnaby, but he didn’t find it funny at all. Not a single ee-aw.)

But most of all Aunty Megs loved poetry. It was Mick, she said, who had given her a love for the sound of words. He’d read to her often, usually poems about the sea. Sea Fever and Cargoes, and The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, which always made us giggle, and Mick’s favourite – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She’d sit back in her chair and read them to us, and every time her words would take us again down to the sea. Fifty years or more later I still love all of them, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the one I love best. I know it by heart, start to finish. Every time I read it, and I read it often, I can hear her voice in my head. She wrote her own poems too she told us, but that she did in private, and however much we badgered her to read them to us, she never did. “My poems are like a diary,” she said, “and for no one’s eyes but mine.”

Aunty Megs was an intensely private person. You always knew when you’d asked one question too many, like when Marty was looking at the photo on the mantelpiece of Mick in his sailor’s uniform holding the hand of a little boy. When he asked her who he was, she didn’t reply. When he asked once more, she said. “No one you know, and no one I know either.” And the sudden coldness in her voice made it very clear she was going to say nothing more about it. We always thought it must have been her son of course, but we never dared to ask her ever again.

There really was so much that was wonderful at Aunty Megs’, so much that changed my life. For a start we’d found a mother, and maybe as a result Marty and I became like real brothers there. We learned together how to build boats, only model ones maybe, but these model boats were the beginning of our lifetime love affair with the sea. We’d listen to Aunty Megs reading her sea poems, and talk long into the night about how we were both going to go to sea and be sailors like Mick had been. And I learned The Ancient Mariner by heart and recited it for Aunty Megs on her birthday. She listened with her eyes closed, and when they opened after I’d finished they were full of tears and full of love. Marty said it wasn’t bad, but that I’d made a mistake and left out a verse. So I threw the cushion at him and he threw one at me. We both missed, and then all three of us were laughing. Henry came bustling in then to see what the noise was all about, took one look at us, decided we were mad, picked up the cushion, turned and walked right out again. I was happier in that moment than I’d ever been in all my life, happy as Larry.

Scrambled Eggs and Baked Beans (#ulink_aa09d657-c798-5b38-9e09-df01df7f09c0)

We’d been living at the Ark for about four or five years when Aunty Megs had her accident. Marty and I had been swimming in the river. We did that most days, when the weather was right, if there was enough water in the river. Swimming was something else Aunty Megs had taught us. “Almost as important as poetry,” she’d say. “Best exercise there is. Could save your life one day too!”

We came wandering back up to the house, but when we called for Aunty Megs she wasn’t there. A quick look at the empty compound told us what she was doing and where she was. She’d gone off on one of her rides into the bush, hoping to release some of her little fellows, her family of animals. Normally she’d be gone for an hour or two, no more. But after several hours there was still no sign of her. We decided we shouldn’t wait any longer, that we had to go out looking for her.

I was leading Big Black Jack out of the paddock when we saw her horse come galloping riderless down the track from the hills. We didn’t waste any time then, but rode back up the way her horse had come, calling for Aunty Megs as we went. We knew roughly where it was she usually went to release her animals – the same area she’d found us all those years before. So that’s where we headed now, both of us on Big Black Jack, Aunty Megs’ horse following along behind. After a while we heard her singing, singing out loud – later she told us the singing helped to take her mind off her pain.

We found her out in the open beyond the trees, sitting with her back up against a rock, her family of animals scattered all around her. She was holding her arm tight to her chest, and had a nasty gash down one side of her face. There was so much blood all over her. Her shirt was soaked with it, both hands and her neck. She smiled up at us. “Am I glad to see you,” she said. “Don’t worry about the blood. Got plenty more where that came from. Just get me up and take me home, there’s good boys.”

She was already too weak to walk very far, so we knew that somehow we had to get her on to her horse. It wasn’t at all easy. We had to find the right tree stump to use as a mounting block, then help her up into the saddle. I could see her shoulder was paining her dreadfully. I led the way on Big Black Jack while Marty rode up behind Aunty Megs, holding her steady in the saddle all the way home. Then I rode on into town for the doctor. It turned out she needed a dozen stitches in her face and that she’d broken her collar bone. He put a sling on her, and told her also that she’d lost a lot of blood and had to rest up for a while, a month at least, maybe more. She said, “Phooey.”

The doctor stood there then, wagging his finger. “Don’t you phooey me, Megs Molloy,” he told her. “This is serious. You’re to keep that sling on and stay still. These boys of yours’ll look after you. You stay put, you hear me? Doctor’s orders.” And then he turned to us. “And if she tries to get up and go off looking for her little animals, you have my permission to lock her in.” I think he was only partly joking.

Marty and I took him at his word. Now we were looking after Aunty Megs, which made a change. We made a deal with her. You tell us what to do and we’ll do it, we said. But she had to stay put, stay still, rest as the doctor had told her. She agreed, reluctantly. So that’s what happened. She only had to tell us what to do for a few days until we got into some kind of routine. After that we just got on with it. We took turns at everything we didn’t much like doing – which was mostly the cooking and the washing up and the laundry.

Aunty Megs taught me from her sofa how to make scrambled egg on toast. She was very detailed and specific in her instructions. She allowed no deviation. Beat the eggs, bit of salt, bit of pepper, some milk. You had to spread the butter on the toast, keep it warm. Then you cooked the eggs, and the eggs had to be cooked just right, not for too long or they’d go all lumpy and tasteless. I did it better than Marty who always forgot the toast and burnt it. I still cook the meanest scrambled eggs in the world all these years later. It’s still my favourite meal. During Aunty Megs’ convalescence scrambled eggs alternated regularly with baked beans, or bubble and squeak, or corned beef hash. And we could fry bacon too. Poor Aunty Megs. Thinking back, it wasn’t the best of diets for a patient, any patient. But she never grumbled. She laughed about it instead and told us in the nicest possible way that neither of us should ever take up a career in catering.

Outside though Marty and I really came into our own. We did everything that Aunty Megs had done. There was no time any more for swimming or fishing or climbing trees. Most mornings we’d go off, as she had done, up to the main road, searching for any surviving orphans. We fed those we had in the compound, and every so often we rode off into the bush, the animal cavalcade following behind, hoping one or two might stay up there. We milked the cows and the goats, fed the hens, took pot-shots with Aunty Megs’ gun at any dingoes that came too close. We even learned to be brave with the geese, and to keep Henry out of the house – we were only partially successful in that. We learned to cope. And, to be honest, we liked it, every moment of it, even the laundry and the shopping.

We’d ride off once a week into town, one of us on Big Black Jack, the other on Aunty Megs’ horse. We took it in turns to ride Big Black Jack because neither of us much liked Aunty Megs’ horse. He was easily spooked, a bit nervous too, and not only by kangaroos either, but by just about everything. Whenever I rode him into town I felt the same as he did, always on edge, always twitchy. I could never forget that it was his fault Aunty Megs was lying there with a broken collar bone. He’d heard something rustling in the trees, she told us, and he’d reared up in sudden terror – that’s how it had happened. I could never forget that, so I could never trust him.

Then there were the visitors who came to call, usually for tea. Aunty Megs didn’t like these visits any more than we did. She swore she’d never fall off a horse again, nor ever get ill. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people. She did. But the trouble was they clearly liked her more than she liked them. Now she was incapacitated, they came visiting all too often and there was nothing much she could do about it.

When the vicar turned up, she didn’t like it one bit, and didn’t trouble to hide her feelings either. I was there when he came. She was pretty blunt with him. “I’m not at death’s door yet,” she told him. “Just broken a collar bone, that’s all. No need for the last rites.” He wasn’t amused and went off quite quickly after that. And Marty and I didn’t like the intrusion of these visitors much either. We felt that some of them were checking up on us to see if we were looking after her properly. They’d bring baskets of food, and all of them, without exception, would ask if there was anything they could do to help. We loved it when Aunty Megs told them that her boys were looking after her wonderfully, that everything was just fine.

It was about this time though that I first began to notice a change in Marty. He’d grown up a lot recently. He’d always been a lot taller than me, but now he seemed much older too. Until now I’d hardly noticed the four-year difference between us. But I did now. He was becoming the man of the house. Marty would sit with Aunty Megs for hours on end, listening to the stories of how her family and Mick’s had come over to Australia from Ireland a century before, driven out by the potato famine, she said. They had found this valley and settled here. Marty loved looking through Aunty Megs’ photograph albums with her too. He wanted to hear about Mick in particular, and she loved to talk about him too.

I remember sitting there watching them, and feeling a little jealous of Marty for the first time. Marty seemed to be able to talk to her in a way I couldn’t. He wasn’t just one of her “boys,” he was becoming more of a friend. And she still treated me more like a boy, like a child. Up to now that had been fine, but suddenly it wasn’t. Sometimes I couldn’t bear to sit there and watch them, and I’d go off to bed early. It made me feel very alone again. I’d sulk about it from time to time, but with Marty I could never sulk for long. He wouldn’t let you. One way or another he’d talk me round, get me smiling again.

Once we were alone in our room at night he would be the same old Marty again. We’d share our deepest secrets in the dark. We’d talk into the early morning sometimes. It was during one of those long nights that Marty told me his worst fear, which then became my worst fear too.

“D’you know what I think, Arthur?” he said. “Sometimes I think this is our real home, that we really are her children, that we’ll be able to stay here for ever. Then I think: but we’re not her children, are we? We’re like her family of animals out there, her little fellows, her orphans. We’re orphans too, aren’t we? She hasn’t said anything, but sometimes I think she wants us to go, just like she wants them to go. That boy in the photo with Mick. He’s her real son. She won’t say anything about him. But he must have gone, and when he went he didn’t come back, did he? But I don’t want to go, not ever. I feel like I’m a part of her proper family, that you’re my brother, that Mick’s my real father too. I’m going to be just like him one day. I am.”

Then he added, “You’ve still got that lucky key of yours?” I had, though I didn’t wear it any more – maybe because I thought I didn’t need to. For some time I’d been keeping it in the drawer in my bedside table. I’d look at it from time to time, but it no longer seemed quite so important to me as it had been at Cooper’s Station. I must have thought that I couldn’t get any luckier anyway, so I just didn’t need it any more. As for the cross Piggy Bacon had made us wear, I must have lost it. But I can’t remember how or where. Marty chucked his in the river one day and I wondered then if he was throwing away his luck, our luck.

From that night on I couldn’t get out of my head what Marty had said about Aunty Megs wanting us to leave one day. When we were alone, the two of us talked about nothing else. We decided to wait until Aunty Megs was up and about again, and then we’d ask her. But even after her shoulder was better and things were back to normal again, and she was doing the cooking and we were eating something else besides scrambled eggs and baked beans, we still kept putting it off. In the end we put it off for good. The truth is, I think, that neither of us really wanted to know the answer because we feared too much what it might be. It was to be another couple of years before we found out, and then we didn’t have to ask her. Aunty Megs wasn’t one to beat about the bush. When she told us, she told us straight.

“You’re my Boys, Aren’t You?” (#ulink_099e0145-3e95-53a6-a43e-3d76f08f2510)

Aunty Megs had been quiet for a few days. She was like that. There’d be times when she seemed very preoccupied. She wouldn’t sing. She’d sit alone on the verandah and read her poetry. She’d go for long rides. Marty said it was because she was missing Mick. And it was true that when his birthday came round or the anniversary of his death, that’s when she went most noticeably quiet. But this time there was a difference. There was a nervousness about her we’d never seen before. It was almost as if she was avoiding us.

In retrospect, of course, we should have guessed what was coming, but we didn’t. I put it down to Henry. Henry had gone missing a couple of days before. We weren’t that worried, because Henry was always going off on walkabout into the bush, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. He always came back. I’d just been outside to see if he was down his hole. I came in for supper and was washing my hands in the sink. “He’s not back, Aunty,” I said.

“Well, maybe he’s gone for good this time,” Aunty Megs was serving up as she talked. “Maybe Henry’s finally decided it’s the right time for him to go. ‘Bout time too, I’d say.” She took a deep breath before she spoke again. “Well, I reckon this is as good a time as any to tell you boys.”

“Tell us what?” I asked, sitting down at the table. My plate was piled high in front of me with tatty pie – Aunty Megs’ meat and potato pie with crusty pastry. I was longing to get at it, but we always had to wait till everyone was served. Aunty Megs was very strict about such things. “I’ve been writing letters,” she went on, “to a friend of mine in Sydney – an old friend of Mick’s from the navy, Freddie Dodds. It’s taken a while, but now it’s all set up.” Up until now she hadn’t been looking at us, but now she was. “I decided to wait till you were both old enough, till you were both ready, and now I reckon you are. Freddie says you can start work in a couple of weeks’ time.”

My appetite for tatty pie had suddenly gone. Now we knew. Our worst fears were about to be realised.

“Freddie Dodds runs a boatyard, makes boats just like we do in the shed, only bigger of course, the real thing. He wants to take you on as apprentices. It’s all fixed up. A proper paid job in the yard and a place for you to live.”

While she was talking Henry nudged the door open, and came wandering in. None of us paid him any attention. “I’m not going to ask you what you think,” Aunty Megs said. “But I am going to tell you why I’m doing this. If I’ve learned anything in this life, I’ve learned that you can’t cling on. After Mick died, after I did my crying, I had to let him go. With all those animals out there in the compound, I mustn’t hang on to them. They’re not mine. They have a life to live out there. And you’re not mine either. I have to let you go. You have a life to live.”

Marty was on his feet, upset like I’d never seen him before. “But we’re not dead. And we’re not a couple of bloody joeys either. This place, it’s our home. I don’t want to go to Sydney. I don’t want to go at all.”

Aunty Megs went to him then, and put her arms round him and held him. “Do you think I want you to go?” she said. “Do you think I want to be here on my own? You’re my boys, aren’t you? The Ark is your home, always will be. It’ll be here for you whenever you want to come back, and I’ll be here too. I’m your mother, aren’t I?” She turned to me then. “Don’t just sit there, come and give your old mother a hug too.” The hugging helped stem the tears after a while, but then the numbing reality set in. We were going. In a couple of weeks we’d be leaving home, leaving Aunty Megs.

We lived out those weeks as if every day was our last. They passed in a blur of riding and fishing and swimming. We groomed Big Black Jack every day till his coat glistened as never before. Henry was fed his bottle several times a day, spoiled rotten even more than usual. And all the while Aunty Megs was growing quieter and quieter. We so hoped she would weaken and let us stay, but she remained resolute. Every night she was darning or mending something. She couldn’t have her boys going to Sydney looking like a couple of raggedy scarecrows, she said. And,while she was doing it, and because we knew she loved us to do it, we recited poems for her. Marty did The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, always his favourite because it had a rollicking rhythm and a gruesome twist to it at the end which we all loved. And I’d do my party piece, The Ancient Mariner.

The last time I did it, she looked up at me and said: “Thank you, Arthur dear, I shan’t forget it.” I haven’t forgotten it either. She came into our room on the last evening, and put a book in each of our suitcases – mine was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marty’s, The Yarn of the Nancy Bell. I have them by me now, as I am writing this. They are still my most treasured books.

Out of a leather shoelace I made a new tie for my lucky key that night, and hung it around my neck. I wasn’t at all sure I really believed in that kind of thing any more. At fifteen it seemed to me it might be a bit of a childish superstition, but I wasn’t sure enough of myself to abandon it. Besides, the key was my last link to my sister, to the Kitty I remembered, or imagined. Memory or imagination? Already I couldn’t be at all sure that Kitty had ever existed. Only the key told me she had. And the key had been lucky for us. Hadn’t it brought us to Aunty Megs all those years before? So I kept my key. And I’m glad I did, very glad indeed.

The last I saw of Aunty Megs she was holding her straw hat on her head and standing there, disappearing into the cloud of dust left behind by the bus. For Marty and me this was the first time we’d been on a bus since the day we first arrived in Australia ten years before. Then we were leaving Sydney. Now we were going back. As I remember Marty said just about the same thing to me that he’d said then. “We’ll be all right.”

We sat silent the whole way, neither of us believing this was happening. Both of us knew we were leaving our childhood behind us for ever. It felt just like we were heading off into the bush again, into the unknown.

Together we might have been, but each of us felt very alone on that journey. When I felt the tears welling inside me, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking of Henry’s horrible hat hole, or trying to get an ee-aw out of Barnaby. But sooner or later I’d think of Aunty Megs, and the moment that happened I’d be overwhelmed by a sadness I’d never felt before, a sadness so painful it gnawed at my stomach. I’ve only got to think about her even now, and I can feel the same pang, faint perhaps now like a distant echo, but still there. That’s how much I loved her, loved our glowing time with her.

Freddie Dodds (#ulink_f2d2d9bb-7d78-55c8-a84d-615b704f373b)

Memory is a great and powerful magician. It plays tricks on you that you simply can’t understand, no matter how hard you try to work them out. In my case it obliterated my early beginnings almost entirely, the lucky key around my neck being the only clue that I’d even had a beginning at all. And of my sister Kitty, the memory magician left me nothing but a shadowy phantom, which became more shadowy with every passing year. Yet I can remember the nightmare years of Cooper’s Station and Piggy Bacon as if they all happened yesterday. But fortunately for my sanity, those healing, life-affirming years with Aunty Megs and Marty at the Ark are even more vivid to me than the nightmare time that preceded them.

I’m guessing now of course, but for me I think maybe it’s partly at least a question of intensity. During those periods of my early life, maybe before I built up my protective wall around me as most of us do as we get older, I felt everything so strongly, so deeply. Good, bad or ugly, it stays with me. But that still doesn’t explain why so much that has happened since those early years has been lost in a haze, that I seem to have forgotten as much as I’ve remembered. It’s as if time itself had taken its time during my childhood, but once I got off that bus in Sydney it picked up speed, and from then on it was a roller coaster of a ride, and a bumpy one too, that brought me from then to now, leaving me with only fleeting moments of clarity, the highs and the lows, with so much in between, but lost to me for ever.

Freddie Dodds was there to meet us off the bus in Sydney. He drove us to the boatyard down at Newcastle. Mr Dodds – I never heard anyone call him Freddie except Aunty Megs – was the most silent person I ever knew. He wasn’t unfriendly. On the contrary, he smiled a great deal, and he wasn’t ever off-hand or cold. He just didn’t say much, not to us, not to anyone. But he was a kind man through and through, and he ran his boatyard like a kindly ship’s captain. He was the sort of captain that led by example, not by shouting at people. Everyone knew what they had to do and how to do it, and that included Marty and me.

We started out as general dogsbodies, sweeping up, fetching and carrying, making tea – we made an awful lot of tea. And we were nightwatchmen too. That was mostly because of where we lived. It paid our rent.

Marty and I lived on a boat just down the creek from the boatyard, a stone’s throw, no more. It wasn’t much of a place, a bit of an old wreck really, a forty-five foot yacht built in the 1940s that had seen better days, and was falling apart and beyond repair. But we didn’t mind. It was home. We had a place of our own and we loved it.

No Worries she was called, and the name was perfect for her. And she was perfect for us too. We’d sit up there on deck in the evenings, the two of us, a cooling breeze coming in off the water, and up above us a sky full of stars. I’ve loved stars ever since. Down below we were as snug as a couple of bugs in a rug. Seventh heaven. What’s more we were earning money. Not much, but it made us feel good, made us feel suddenly grown up. But however grown up we may have felt, we both missed Aunty Megs and the Ark, and Barnaby and Big Black Jack and Poogly and Henry. How we laughed about Henry.

The other blokes in the yard didn’t treat us like that of course. To them we were just a couple of kids, particularly me, because I still looked like a kid. One or two of them would try to give me a hard time to begin with, but Marty was a good six feet tall now and big with it. He kept an eye out for me, they could see that. So they’d rib me a little from time to time, but that’s all it ever was. We soon settled in and became part of the place. I became a bit of a mascot, I think.

We’d hardly ever see Mr Dodds. He’d be up in his office designing the boats. The place was full of his model boats, mostly yachts, and we’d only ever go up there to collect our money at the end of the week, or to pick up a letter from Aunty Megs perhaps. She didn’t write often, but when she did her letters were full of news about Henry and Barnaby. It seemed now like news from another world.

It was while we were up there one day that he saw us looking at the models of the yachts he’d made. “Megs tells me you can make models too,” he said. And he showed us a design he was working on. “Do you think you can make this up for me?”

“Course,” said Marty at once. I thought he was mad. We hadn’t got a clue how to work from a design. We’d always had Aunty Megs alongside us in the shed back home. Now we were on our own. I didn’t think we could do it. But we did. We learned fast because we had to. After work we’d sit down together at the map table in No Worries, and make the model of Mr Dodds’ latest design. Eighth heaven now!

One way or another I’ve lived on boats more or less ever since, with a few prolonged and mostly unpleasant interruptions. I don’t know what it is, why I love living on boats so much. Perhaps I just feel safe, like I am a part of the boat and she’s a part of me. And I love the sound of the sea, the lapping of water above me, the movement below me, the clapping of the mast in the wind, and the birds. I love the birds. Ever since No Worries, I’ve woken up to the sound of seabirds. I could do without gulls mind. Dirty beggars. They always chose to park themselves on No Worries. There were dozens of boats all around to choose from and they always chose ours. And they didn’t just leave littlemessages. Oh no! Marty didn’t like cleaning up after them, so I had to do it. I didn’t much like Marty while I was doing that, and I’ve hated gulls ever since.

But if I think about it, and I often have, my love of the sea must go back to Aunty Megs, and to Mick, her husband. He’d been a sailor. He’d built model boats. Then she did it because he had. Then we did it because she did it. She taught us all that poetry of the sea too, gave us our books, The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, and The Ancient Mariner, which we both knew by heart. So it’s hardly surprising, I suppose, that Marty and I took to the sea like ducks to water.

Luckily Mr Dodds liked that first model we made. So we did the next one for him after that, and very soon we found ourselves working alongside all the other blokes in the boat-building shed, not dogsbodies any more, but like them, boat-builders proper.

Each of Mr Dodds’ boats was a real marvel to me. They were mostly yachts, thirty-to-forty footers. You’d see her first as a sketch on his desk, then developed on the drawing board. Marty and I would make the model, and the next thing you knew – it took months, but it never felt like it – the next thing you knew, there she was in the water. A miracle every time it happened, a man-made miracle, that’s what it was. For me it was like giving birth – as close as I ever got anyway! And Marty and I, and all the blokes in the yard, we were all so proud of them, like they were our children.

But their real father was Mr Dodds of course. I learned more about boats from Mr Dodds than I ever did from anyone else in all my life. There was never anything flash or fancy about his boats. They weren’t built for speed or looks. They were built to sail. And that’s the other thing I learned from Freddie Dodds. He didn’t just teach us how to build boats, he told us how to sail them too. And that was to change my life for ever, and Marty’s too.

One January Night (#ulink_93e681c3-c029-59ed-a15e-ceeff43313c6)

I suppose there were about a dozen of us working in Mr Dodds’ boatyard, including Marty and me, and by and large we were a pretty close-knit team. One or two came and went, but for the most part, people liked it and stayed. And that was largely because Mr Dodds treated everyone right. The money wasn’t great – you could certainly earn more elsewhere in the fancier boatyards – but with Mr Dodds you got to build the whole boat, and best of all you got to sail it too. We had job satisfaction – that’s what they call it these days.

Once a boat was finished, Mr Dodds would ask two or three of us to take her out on sea-trials. He would often come along too. Everyone got his chance, but not everyone wanted to do it. Marty and I did though. Any opportunity to go out on sea-trials, and we’d take it. We were seasick of course, but after a while we’d find our sea legs and our sea stomachs, and once we’d settled into it, it was raw excitement – hard work we discovered – but always a pure pleasure.

So, thanks to Mr Dodds, both of us got to know boats from the keel up, from the inside out. We built them and we sailed them too. And when we sailed we learned from Mr Dodds how to sail in harmony with the wind and the sea. He told us once that it was living at sea, surviving at sea, that taught him all he knew about boat-building. You have to understand the sea, he said, to listen to her, to look out for her moods, to get to know her and respect her and love her. Only then can you build boats that feel at home on the sea.

Every time we went out on a new boat with Mr Dodds, I learned that each boat we built was different, had a personality of her own. Once she’s in the water she becomes a living creature, a unique creature. You ride her like you ride a horse. You have to know all her little quirks and fancies and fears, how she likes to ride the waves, how she likes to dance with the sea. That’s what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don’t tell her. You have to remember always that she’s the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.

I’m not sure how much Mr Dodds ever actually told us of all this. He was just about as monosyllabic out at sea as he was back in the boatyard. But one way or another we picked up his sailing philosophy and his boat-building philosophy, and it’s stayed with me ever since. Everything I learned from him about the sea, about boats, has proved right. He was my sailing mentor, my tutor of the sea, a fine man and a fine seaman. The best.

He must have thought well of Marty and me too, because after about two or three years – Marty would have been about twenty-one by now, and I was seventeen – he called us up into his office and told us he thought we were ready to do one or two longer trips now, and on our own, just the two of us. We were young, he said, but he’d taught us well,he’d prepared us. A lot of the others didn’t want to do the long trips – most of them had families to go home to. From now on he didn’t just want us to trial his boats, he wanted us to deliver his boats to their new owners. As a result, Marty and I went all over – across to Hobart, up to the Whit Sunday Islands, and three times over to New Zealand.

It was on one of those New Zealand trips, to Auckland, that Marty first put an idea into my head, an idea that’s been there ever since. We were sailing just off Dunedin. “You know what?” he said. “If we wanted we could keep going all the way to England. We could go and find your sister. You could find Kitty.”

We never did, of course. But the idea stayed with me. Meanwhile, I was being paid for what I loved doing best, and I was doing it with my best friend on earth. Ninth heaven now. The two of us were becoming sailors through and through. And about that time, and partly because of the sailing I think, I stopped thinking of Marty as my elder brother, my bigger brother. The age difference between us that had meant so much at one time, and even set us apart a little for a while when we were younger, all but disappeared. On board the boats there was no skipper. We worked alongside each other, with each other, not younger and older brothers any more, but more like twins. We seemed to know instinctively what the other was thinking, what he was about to do. Our world had been the sea world for so long now. We’d shared so much. We’d been shaped by the same teacher.

Once a year for a couple of weeks’ holiday we’d go back home to Aunty Megs, usually at Christmas. Sadly Henry wasn’t around any more, but Barnaby was. Donkeys live longer than wombats. Barnaby still wouldn’t ee-aw however much we tried to make him. We’d sit on the verandah the three of us together, and watch the sun go down, and we’d tell her all about the places we’d been and the boats we’d sailed. And on our last night we would all three of us recite The Ancient Mariner, for a few verses each until we finished it. When we had to leave at the end of the holidays, we never wanted it to end. We never wanted to come away.

Then one January night just after we’d come back from staying with Aunty Megs, our world turned upside down. We’d have both been in our early twenties by then. One way or another, it’s been upside down most of my life ever since.

Thinking back, we should have read the signs. Just before Christmas, Mr Dodds had laid off a couple of the blokes, and he hadn’t been himself for some time. He’d been hiding away in his office, hardly showing himself. I thought he was probably just preoccupied with some new design – we all did. But there was no Christmas bonus that year, and no Christmas party in the boatshed either. We knew the boat business everywhere was going through a hard time, but we didn’t realise just how hard until that January night.

I was asleep on No Worries when it happened. Marty had gone out for his last nightwatchman’s check around the boatyard. It must have been about midnight, I guess. The two of us always took it in turns, and Marty was on duty that night. All you did was walk around the yard with a torch for half an hour. It was a routine neither of us liked much, but for doing it we were living on No Worries almost rent free, so we couldn’t complain.

The first I knew of it, Marty was shaking me awake. I could see the flames straightaway through the skylight. I thought at first it was the boat that was on fire. When we got up on deck of No Worries you could see the whole boatyard was on fire from end to end. By the time we got down there, the fire fighters were already there. There was nothing they could do, nothing anyone could do. Luckily there were no boats inside. They were all out on the apron or in the water. Marty kept saying over and over that he’d only been down there an hour before and checked the place. He couldn’t understand it. I saw Mr Dodds standing there still in his pyjama tops watching his whole world going up in flames before his eyes.

The police took Marty and me in and questioned us separately. I told them what I knew, which was nothing of course, except that each of us would go out last thing on alternate nights to check the boatyard, that we’d shared the nightwatchman duties for years and years. When they asked me whose turn it had been that night I told them that it had been Marty’s. It was only after I’d said it that I realised what they might be thinking. I regretted it at once. But it was too late.

They arrested Marty that night on suspicion of arson. They wouldn’t let me see him either. When I told Mr Dodds what the police had done, he just looked at me, then turned away without saying a word. It wasn’t at all the reaction I had been expecting. I’d never known him to be heartless before. I couldn’t understand it.

It turned out they were dead right about the arson, just wrong about Marty. I was wrong about Mr Dodds too,couldn’t have been more wrong. He walked into the police station the next morning, and confessed to it all. Brilliant designer and boat builder that he was, good and kind man that he was too, it seemed he had got himself into a serious financial mess. It was an insurance scam. The poor man was trying to save his shirt. But once he’d heard they’d arrested Marty, he couldn’t go through with it. Like I said, he was a good man. But they sent him to prison for seven years. Marty and I went to visit him, but they told us he didn’t want to see anyone. We never saw him again. We tried again and again but he refused to see us every time.

So that was the end of the boatyard, the end of the good times, the happy times. One night was all it took for our whole world to fall apart. That one night in a prison cell for Marty was a night he never got over. I never got over it either. I felt I had betrayed Marty, that I’d locked him in that police cell as sure as if I’d turned the key myself. I told him how bad I felt but he never blamed me. “Forget it,” he said. I couldn’t. Marty was never quite the same after that night. Nothing was.

An Orphan Just the Same (#ulink_69c3302f-8244-56eb-822d-08faca307d7e)

They let Marty and me live on for a while on No Worries. By day we’d be out looking for work in other boatyards. But times were hard. There was just no work to be had in any of the boatyards in Newcastle or Sydney, nor anywhere else so far as we could discover, and boat-building was all we could do. Letters came from Aunty Megs saying we could always come home for a while if we wanted to, that there was always a place for us there, and plenty of work too. I can’t believe how stupid we were not to have taken her up on her offer. I remember reading her letters over and over again, trying to decide whether to go. But for all sorts of reasons, Marty and I decided against it. He said, and at the time I thought he was right about it too, that you should never go back, that it’d be like giving up. And we both loved the sea, loved boats. We were determined to find work that kept us near the sea, or even on it preferably.

Those months we trudged the harbours and boatyards of Sydney looking for work took their toll on us both, but on Marty in particular. He was always the one who had kept me going through our most difficult times, ever since we were little. Now he just about gave up. I was the one who had to get him up in the morning when he wanted to just lie there. With every fruitless day, with every rejection, I watched him sinking deeper into the silence of despair. I tried to pull him out of it, to joke him out of it, tried to keep him positive. But it was no good.

Every night now he’d want to stay out drinking late. Time and again I had to drag him out of bars, and more than once he got into fights, usually over some girl. Drink did that to him. It didn’t make him happy; it made him angry. Money, the little we had saved, was fast running out. Worse, I could feel that the two of us were beginning to drift apart. Before we’d always done everything together. But now he’d go out in the evenings on his own. I could tell he didn’t want me around. We never fell out, not as such. He was just going his own way and there was nothing I could do about it.

There was one morning when I couldn’t get him out of bed no matter what I did. So I left him there and went off job hunting on my own. As usual I didn’t find anything, but I was gone all day. When I came back home to No Worries in the evening, Marty had gone. I thought he’d gone out drinking, that he’d be back later. Even when a couple of policemen came the next morning, early, and woke me up, I wasn’t that worried. I just thought he’d picked another fight and ended up in a police station for the night. I recognised one of the policemen – he’d interviewed me on the night of the fire.

I was half-asleep when they told me, so I didn’t really understand, not at first. It was about Marty, they told me, and I had to come with them. I still couldn’t understand. “We’ve got a witness who saw it happen,” said the policeman I had met before, “someone who knew him. But all the same, we need you to come and take a look.”

Then they told it to me straight. Marty had been drunk. He’d been doing the dinghy dance, leaping from boat to boat in the harbour, messing around. He’d fallen in, and just never came up again. They’d tried to find him, but it was dark. Then this morning a body had been found. I’m still trying to believe it happened. Even now, all these years later, the shock of it and the pain of it goes through me every time I think of it.

They took me to see him in the hospital. It wasn’t Marty. It was just his body. I felt nothing then. I tried to feel something; I stayed there with him for hours. But you can’t feel emptiness. They brought me back to No Worries, and I found Aunty Megs sitting on her suitcase waiting for me. It was the strangest thing. She’d woken up a couple of nights before and had known at once that we needed her. When I told her, all she said was, “I’m too late then.”

There were just the two of us there for Marty’s funeral. We buried his ashes up on the hill where the bushmen had left us that day, where Aunty Megs had first found us. I recited a few verses from The Ancient Mariner, ending with the line I knew he loved most of all: “Alone on a wide, wide sea”. I’m glad I did that, because that poem is not just about a sea voyage, it’s about the journey through life, and about the loneliness of that journey. It was the right thing to read.

Aunty Megs took me in again. She took care of me all she could. But now there were two spirits in that house with us, Mick and Marty. She had photos of them on the mantelpiece, side by side. But they were omnipresent, particularly, I remember, when we were sitting in silence together as we often did of an evening.

So much was the same. But so much wasn’t. Henry’s hole was still there under the verandah steps, still full of his beloved hats. Barnaby wandered the paddock shadowing Big Black Jack. The two had clearly become quite inseparable. But Aunty Megs’ old horse had gone.

Aunty Megs and I still did everything the three of us had always done together. She didn’t have the cows any more, just one nanny goat for her milk. But we still went up to the main road to rescue the orphan marsupials, her little fellows. We still kept them in the compound, and from time to time we’d make the long journey up to Marty’s hill, as we called it now, to see if one or two of them would go back to the wild.

I had never been quite sure of Aunty Megs’ age, but she must have been about seventy-five or eighty by now, and I’d have been in my late twenties. As the years passed she stayed just as active in her mind, just as spirited. But as she said, her “poor old body doesn’t work like it should”. She didn’t go out walking much these days. Her legs pained her. She never said anything much about it, but I could see it. She moved more slowly, more stiffly.

But she could ride all day though, and it wouldn’t bother her a bit. On the contrary, she was happier up on a horse than anywhere else. She told me once that God had given her four legs to gallop with and a tail to whack the files with, that he’d just made a big mistake with the rest of the human race, that’s all. And gallop she did too. Nothing she liked better. She said it made her feel alive. And I knew what she meant, because that’s exactly how I’d felt out sailing with Marty on Mr Dodds’ boats, with the wind in my face, and the sails straining above me and the salt spray on my lips. My longing for the sea never left me.

Aunty Megs had a good quick end, the best you can have, the doctor said when he came. She’d gone out with her torch to check her family of animals in the compound as she always did in the late evening. I was sitting, stargazing on the verandah when she came back. She sat down beside me, and said she thought she smelt rain in the air. Then she fell silent. I thought she’d gone to sleep – she’d often do that out on the verandah on warm evenings. And in fact that’s just what she had done. She’d gone to sleep, but it was the long sleep, the final sleep.

The whole town came up to Marty’s hill the day she was buried, and there were dozens of bushmen there too. I don’t think I quite realised until then just how much she was loved. I put her ashes next to Marty’s, a photo of Mick with them. When everyone left I stayed up there and recited the whole of The Ancient Mariner for them both. As I walked away I felt like an orphan all over again, a grown-up one maybe, but an orphan just the same.

Things Fall Apart (#ulink_ac85581a-f081-5e17-bf09-b8e321704485)

If there’s one part of my life I’d like to forget entirely it was the next fifteen years or so. I suppose you could call them my years in the wilderness. I shan’t enjoy writing about them, but I’ve got to do it. Like it or not, I can’t just miss it out. Luckily for me, quite a lot of it is lost in a fog of forgetfulness. Perhaps that’s what happens sometimes. Perhaps it’s an automatic survival system that helps you muddle through. Maybe the memory just says: that’s enough. I’m overloading with pain here and I can’t cope, so I’m switching off. But it doesn’t switch off entirely. So you remember, but thankfully only dimly, through the fog. Sometimes, though, the fog does clear, and you see the icebergs all around. You can hear them groaning and grinding and you just want to sail through the field of icebergs and out the other side, or you just long for the fog again. I’ll tell you about the icebergs now. And like most icebergs are, they were unexpected and very unwelcome.