A Needle in the Heart Read Free

make their wives pregnant straight away and it wasn’t worth the risk of more mouths to feed. Queenie said not to worry about it, a girl’s place was at home. She set her to some tasks that would occupy her time, skills of her own that she had learnt in the native school when she was a child. Esme surprised her. She sewed the straightest seam you ever saw. She could run up a dress in a day and a half, complete with cloth buttons and cuffs.
    ‘People would pay good money for that,’ Queenie told Stick.
    ‘Well, get them paying,’ he said. This was what Esme did. She charged modest prices because that was all women could pay, those who could afford anything at all. A dress cost four shillings, two shillings and sixpence for straight skirts, three shillings for blouses. Sometimes, people put it across her, but only once. She found she liked the business side of things and learned how to say no to people who underpaid her. There was the school-teacher’s wife, for instance, who thanked Esme for the dress she had made, and given her a tin of shortcake to take home.
    Esme got on her bicycle without a word, and rode towards home, the wind whipping her hair which she still wore long and untamed. When she reached the railway line, she was still rehearsing in her head what she would say to the school-teacher’s wife the next time she came looking for a bargain. She got off the bike to wheel it over the tracks. Some girls were giggling wildly on the platform. A group of gangers were sitting smoking on an idling railway jigger pulled in on a loop. The girls called out, shouting their names after them. Esme pretended not to see any of this carry on, flicking her hair back from her face, her foot poised on a pedal, while a train from the south thundered through.
    Jim Moffit was riding in the guard van that day, on his way to a job.
     
    Esme never forgot the thrill of it, being singled out by Jim. Perhaps that’s what it was, the excitement of being chosen, when so often she had been passed over. He’d seen her standing there on the railway stationat Taumarunui among the group of girls. Like them, but different. She didn’t know he’d seen her and wanted her for himself. ‘Who’s that girl?’ he asked the men in the van. He told her this later on.
    ‘And what did they say?’
    ‘Just your name. That’s Esme McDavitt, that’s what they said.’
    ‘Was that all?’
    ‘Well, it was enough, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Nothing else?’
    ‘Not that I can think of. I said, “Does she live there? Will a letter find her?”’
    Jim Moffit wrote:
    Dear Mr McDavitt
    You do not know me although I have met some of your sons in the course of my work on the railways. I have something to ask you, but first I should tell you one or two things about myself. I am an Englishman who has been in this fair country of yours for some three years now. Times are very hard back home, in Birmingham, even worse than they are here. My mother, God rest her soul, was very keen for me to come to New Zealand to see whether I could make a better life for myself. I have been fortunate in finding work. I have a responsible job, I think because I was considered to have a quick brain as a child and got a reasonable education. I am one of the signallers who operate the train tablets. So my job is steady, more than most can say, even in these troubled times. I have an offer of a railway house if I should marry.
    Which brings me to the point of this letter. I am very desirous of making a closer acquaintance with your daughter Esme, with a view to marriage. I do promise you, sir, that my intentions towards her are entirely honourable.
    I am thirty-four years old but I do not see a dozen years making a great deal of difference as I am very healthy of body and mind. It’s a lonely life for a chap out here, despite the advantages, and I promise I would make her an excellent husband.
    Yours very truly
James Moffit
    His wild girl, snatched up from the side of the railway,