Loving Daughters Read Free Page A

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    Violet’s scheme was to turn her two front rooms, one a sitting room and the other the bedroom she and Ned shared, into wards for a maximum of six cases. One of the other smaller rooms also opening off the hall would be the labour ward, and the opposite one would take most of the sitting room furniture and double as a waiting room. She and Ned could make a room for themselves at the end of the front verandah, already partly closed in and presently sheltering some broken furniture and empty tea chests that held their wedding china while Ned was at war.
    The tea chests (and Violet) were housed at Honeysuckle while Ned was away. Violet had her uses there, nursing Nellie through her last illness, then sharing the housework with Enid and later Una when both left boarding school. She was restless without nursing work, for there were few confinements with the men away at war. She tried the patience of Enid, who as young as eighteen was eager to be in full control of the Honeysuckle household. Violet constantly gave advice on cooking and cleaning, although she was slapdash in most culinary skills. She criticized Enid’s plans for her garden, causing Enid to go behind the locked door of her bedroom to write to a Sydney nursery for seeds and seedlings, and make sketches of beds and borders. Violet talked at length about enlisting as a nurse and following Ned to England and later to France. (Enid often wished she would, but was too well brought up by Nellie to say so.) It was soon too late anyway, for Ned’s eye was shot out and he was invalided home before the war ended.
    Violet and Ned named their cottage Albert Lane after the site of that skirmish with the Germans. It was the first built in Wyndham in many years and was Violet’s idea, she being passionately opposed to their moving onto Ned’s farm, Halloween, where there were suitable share farmers named Hoopers. Let them stay and Ned go there and potter about as the mood took him. A new house was just the thing to rehabilitate him. It was directly opposite the new war memorial too, of which Violet was greatly in favour (then) although part of Wyndham opposed it. Save the money, many said, and rename the public hall, which was next door, the Wyndham War Memorial Hall. Violet threatened to give a piece of her tongue to the source of this proposal, and Ned’s good eye watered liberally and his glass one took on a drowned look as well. His hands, growing pale and weak looking, clutched at his knees, for he was either on the kitchen couch or a verandah chair, as if the hands were shouting the words working inside his throat.
    But when the pink and grey marble monument was finally up, enclosed with a metal chain suspended from smaller pillars, Violet had less enthusiasm for it than Ned. He would sit on the verandah recounting the opposition to it, now blamed on Eric Power, who in Ned’s few trembling words had never heard the crack of a bullet, or lived for weeks on end in wet and rancid clothes, but was most of the time at home in a feather bed, the fruits of which were ten children, considered by Eric to be the superior war effort.
    By this time Violet was ready to defend Eric. Sitting near Ned, sewing a dress, biting at a thread impatiently and trying to decide whether to carry on or bundle it up and take it to Una to fix, she informed him, not for the first time, that Eric Power had tried to enlist but was discovered to have flat feet.
    Violet kept fowls and ducks in pens not far from the back door. She had in the beginning a modest dream of killing and cleaning the poultry with Ned’s help and sending it off for sale to guest houses in the seaside towns of Pambula and Merimbula. She was enthused by the arrival of new life, yellow and tender and fluffy.
    But the ducks grew old and scruffy, and the pens dry and brown like the sad-eyed occupants, and Ned seemed to wither too, standing staring at them through the sagging wire. After a while, the