Burning for Revenge Read Free Page A

trouble. No one particularly objected to anything, except Kevin, who objected to everything. All we had was this strong feeling that we should get back out there and be useful.
    I don't know about the others but I'd started blocking out fears about danger and death. Seeing so many people die, including some of my own friends, had made me feel weird about my own life. I'd moved gradually into a different state of thinking, where I didn't dream much about the future. Maybe that had happened to all of us and that's why we didn't do a lot of planning.
    I think I'd started to believe I wouldn't survive the war. One of the slogans people chucked around a lot in peacetime was "Live for the day." It's like in sport, "Take it one match at a time." Unconsciously we'd started doing that now. I'd never lived that way before the war; I hadn't liked the idea at all. It wasn't a good way to farm. "Live as though you'll die tomorrow, but farm as though you'll live forever." Everything you planted, everything you built, had to be for the long term. No good sticking up a fence that would fall down in a year or two. We'd dig a hole a metre deep for a corner post but that wouldn't suit Dad. "Better go down another foot. Be on the safe side."
    "You mean thirty centimetres," I'd tease him.
    We'd never hold back from planting an oak tree just because it wouldn't come to maturity for fifty years. "I won't live to see this full-grown," Dad would say.
Then he'd plant it anyway. He grumbled at the way the nurseries advertised everything as "rapid growth," "quick growing," "instant." He thought that was a bad approach to life.

    Now I had to face the possibility that I wouldn't live to see those oak trees full-grown either. I was living the way we never had, the way I'd been taught from the cradle not to live, the way every instinct in my body told me not to live. But it was hard to stick to my parents' ideas in the face of the deaths of Robyn and Come and Chris. Their deaths, the deaths of all the other people I'd seen or heard about, and the disappearance of the twelve New Zealand soldiers had been working on me slowly and steadily. Eating away like a creek at a gully. Like footrot in sheep. Like cancer.
    So I left Hell with the others, feeling pessimistic, wondering if Id ever see it again. And with no real plans. If I could find Mum, I'd be happy. I didn't think beyond that. I didn't know if I'd live beyond that. But at the same time I knew we had to keep fighting. We were well past the point where we sat around debating if it was morally OK to fight and kill. We'd gone so far down that road, there was no turning back. We had to go on to the end, no matter what it might be, trusting it would work out OK. Some of our earlier talks about fighting seemed naive to me now.
    On and up we climbed. The storm had come through here with a vengeance. Fallen trees cut the track in three separate places. I had this little game with myself, that the three trees represented Robyn and Come and Chris, and that if we found any more it would mean some of us would die.
    Well, we didn't cross any more on the track out of Hell, but on the way up to Wombegonoo we came to two others. As I climbed over the splintered limbs, the broken branches and the crushed leaves—the trees were very close to each other—I couldn't help wondering if they meant anything. Were they symbolic, or was I just being stupid? In English we'd done so much stuff on symbols. We'd given Ms. Jenkins such a tough time about them. "Oh come on Miss," we'd say, "don't tell us the author meant it that way! I bet if he were here he'd say, 'I don't know what you're talking about. I was just writing a story.'"

    There was a bit in
To Kill a Mockingbird
where Jem stops Scout from killing a roly-poly, whatever that is, and Ms. Jenkins said the roly-poly was a symbol of Tom Robinson, but I don't know; it seemed a bit far-fetched to me.
    On the top of Wombegonoo a strong fresh wind was blowing. It had