Hills End Page 9

  Frances looked back into the south, and going uphill it was just the same. ‘This is awful,’ she said. ‘Perhaps even the bridge at the crossing is down.’

  That wasn’t an idle fancy because the river was roaring so much they could hear it above the rain. In two or three places they could see it, swirling high above its banks, thick with mud and rubbish and scum, all fouled up with tangled trees. It looked like some evil red monster writhing.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ whimpered Harvey.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ said Frances.

  ‘We can’t use the road,’ said Adrian. ‘It’ll be safer in the bush.’

  ‘We can’t go through the bush either. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘You know,’ said Maisie quietly, ‘if the road was like this yesterday, no one will be in the town at all. They wouldn’t have been able to get back.’

  ‘Yeah…And I’ll bet the bridge has gone. It took four months to build that bridge. I know, because my dad told me. He had to get engineers up from the city, specially.’

  ‘Four months?’ wailed Gussie. ‘Four whole months?’

  ‘That’s what it took ’em to build it; but they built it from both sides, stupid. Just because it took ’em four months to build, it doesn’t mean we’ve got to wait four more months until they get here.’

  ‘How long did it take them to put the road through, Adrian?’

  Adrian hadn’t thought of that. ‘I think the Government did it, but I think dad said there’d been a track out this way for sixty or seventy years. Maybe no one made the road. Maybe it sort of grew up.’

  ‘I’m glad the road’s gone,’ Frances said suddenly.

  ‘What?’ shrieked Paul.

  ‘It means that nothing has happened to our families. It means that they’re just not here because they couldn’t get here, as Maisie said.’

  Paul suddenly felt that awful weight that had been bowing him down disappear like magic. And he wasn’t the only one. There were wide smiles everywhere, and Maisie and Gussie hugged each other, and Harvey started dancing up and down, and Adrian let out a great whoop of joy.

  ‘But there’s something else,’ Frances said. ‘Butch, Miss Godwin, Mr Tobias—surely Mr Tobias could have got out to us on a tractor or a bulldozer.’

  Paul snorted. ‘Girls! How could anyone drive through this? They couldn’t get a ’dozer up here until the ground dries, and a tractor wouldn’t get ten yards. It’d turn over.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Adrian. ‘That’s silly, Frances. We couldn’t even get through the bush on foot. Maybe they are trying to reach us, anyway. They could be out at the bluff now. We might have passed them. I’ll bet that’s what happened. While we’ve been trying to get through the bush, they’ve been trying to get through the bush, too.’

  Paul grunted. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Easily enough. We’ve been up and down and all over the place. We might have missed them by a hundred yards or missed them by a mile. Golly, the way things are Butch and Miss Godwin mightn’t have got back to the township until this morning. I reckon things are going to be all right. I do, you know. Things are beginning to make sense.’

  ‘Even the aeroplane?’ said Frances.

  ‘Of course. Why not? Adrian’s dad would have organized it. Probably the mob was held up at Stanley. Golly, perhaps even the picnic was washed out! The storm might have gone for miles. Adrian’s dad would have asked the Air Force to see if we were all right. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Your dad was an officer in the Air Force. He’d know the right people to ask, wouldn’t he, Adrian?’

  Adrian shrugged his shoulders with importance. ‘Sure he would. My dad knows everyone. He even knows a Cabinet Minister.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Paul. ‘We’ve got all worked up over nothing.’

  ‘I wish I could feel the same way,’ said Frances. ‘It seems to fit together too easily.’

  ‘Now who’s not facing facts? They’re good facts, so you won’t believe them.’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe them. I’d like to, very much.’

  Adrian suddenly had a wonderful idea. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘As soon as we get home we can call up the Flying Doctor Service on the wireless. Then we’ll know for sure.’

  ‘Can you work the wireless?’

  ‘Of course I can. I can even send S.O.S. in morse code. What say we send an S.O.S.? Gee, we’d be in all the newspapers then.’

  ‘I think I’d rather talk in ordinary language,’ said Paul, ‘and be sure they got the message straight. But the blooming old wireless isn’t much good. The time when Mrs Matheson thought she had appendicitis your dad couldn’t even get through. Couldn’t even ask the doctor what to do for her.’

  ‘It was only indigestion. She’d eaten too much.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference. The wireless wouldn’t work.’

  ‘Goodness!’ said Frances. ‘Talk, talk, talk!’

  ‘Too right,’ said Harvey. ‘Let’s go home. I’m hungry and I know there’s a dirty big pie in our fridge.’ A sharp frown suddenly lined Harvey’s forehead. ‘Buzz! He’s tied up at his kennel. He wouldn’t have had anything to eat since yesterday. Ooh, I hope Mr Tobias remembered.’

  ‘Of course Mr Tobias would remember,’ said Adrian. ‘He’s got a dog himself. He wouldn’t have forgotten the dogs. But let’s go, eh? And it looks as though we’ll have to stick to the bank above the road. And it’s gettin’ late. It’s twenty to five. If it’s hard to get through we might be caught in the dark. You don’t want to get caught in the dark, do you?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Harvey. ‘Not with that pie in the fridge.’

  They weren’t caught in the dark. In less than ten minutes the schoolhouse came into view. There always had been a clearing through there, that opened back on the magnificent vista so loved by Miss Godwin. The clearing hadn’t gone. It was wider than ever. The howling wind had torn through it, uprooting trees and snapping others like sticks. One had fallen across the schoolhouse, and crushed it like a tin can.

  Someone gave a frightened cry, because above the schoolhouse, dimly visible through the rain, but stark for all that, was Miss Godwin’s cottage. The roof and two walls had gone. It looked like a ruin from a bombed city.

  Gussie shivered. ‘Poor Miss Godwin!’

  ‘Golly!’ Paul squared himself and thrust out his jaw. ‘It looks bad. But come on, everyone.’

  They hurried across the tangle of the clearing, and the open ground was almost denuded of soil. It looked as though it had been swilled with a fire-hose. In places the runaway soil had piled up against ledges of rock like sand-drifts. It was mud, with texture fine as silk, and very dangerous. They had to keep clear, because immediately their feet touched it they began to sink.

  Then, into view, came Hills End, and the rain beat down upon the children.

  Their home town was beneath them, in the valley, and they were overcome with horror.

  It was Frances who cried out a heartbroken sob, and started running, stumbling, slipping, down the long hill towards the township, and the others followed.

  9

  The First Sight

  Hills End was half drowned. The great River Magnus submerged the flats and had even reached the mill and the McLeods’ home. Part of the mill still stood, but the timber racks were down, scores of great logs had disappeared, a bulldozer was three feet deep in mud, the chimney stack was a grotesque heap of bricks, and the office had vanished. The mill was the life of Hills End. Now there was no reason for Hills End to go on living.

  The main street was a battleground in which the town had tried to fight the storm and had lost. It was a battleground littered with ruins, with tangled roofing iron, shattered cement sheets, weatherboards, rafters, and sections of walls. Something crazy had smashed through the town, determined to destroy everything. That was how it looked. That was how it seemed.

  The children ran into the main street, frightened, apparently forgetting that they were drenched and should have sou
ght shelter. Perhaps for those first few minutes they couldn’t see any shelter, for everything seemed to be broken or uprooted or undermined by the still hurrying runnels of water that crisscrossed the road and every path and every area of open ground.

  They were bewildered. They had run into the town, but felt at first that they couldn’t run any farther. It would have seemed like rushing into a sick-room, with a clatter of feet and a slamming of doors.

  They couldn’t believe that this desolate place was the township they had grown up in. This, incredibly, was the place they had walked away from yesterday into the brilliant sunshine of a hot morning. They couldn’t believe that the hall, that building in which they had had so much fun, had stood there, where now only a few stumps in the ground and a decapitated chimney remained standing.

  This was the hall, lying in the silted street. This scattered timber and iron, these broken chairs, these soggy hymn-books and crushed pulpit, this tattered picture screen and this ruined projector half buried in mud—these things were the hall. And over everything, like Nature’s net, were laid the millions of twigs and leaves that had been blasted from the trees of the forest.

  Paul, looking round him, knew beyond any shadow of doubt that no one had walked this way before them, not Butch, not Miss Godwin, not Mr Tobias. They would have gathered up the hymn-books and the heavy pulpit Bible; they would have carried the projector to shelter; they would have dragged from the mud the big coloured picture of Queen Elizabeth.

  No one had been here. Not even Mr Tobias.

  ‘I was right!’ That was Frances crying out. ‘I knew I was right. I knew it. Everything did fit together too easily. I told you so. I told you so.’

  ‘Ease up, Frances.’ Paul shook her, because once he had seen his father shake Gussie when she had been terribly upset. ‘Frances,’ he said sharply, ‘don’t!’

  Adrian broke in. ‘We’ve got to get out of the rain. We’ll try the store. It’s still got its roof on, anyway.’

  Paul dragged Frances along the street, and she tried to shake him off, but he wouldn’t let go, and the others were there, too, scrambling over the debris towards the community shop on the far side of the road. The roof was on all right, but the windows at the front were blown in and the door was hanging from one hinge. It must have slammed a hundred times because it was split from top to bottom, and it was such a heavy door that Adrian couldn’t force it open enough to allow their entry. Even with Maisie and Gussie helping he couldn’t shift it. Then he saw why; honey was all over the step, honey and about a million ants. The big honey barrel that always stood behind the door must have fallen and jammed against it.

  ‘That’s torn it! Now what?’

  ‘Round the back,’ yelped Harvey. ‘We’ll get in there.’

  ‘Are you blind or something? How do we get past that tree? Fly?’

  Frances stood back, much calmer now, ashamed that she had given way. She had been trying so hard to set an example. Perhaps that was why her nerve had broken. She had been fighting against herself for too long. She wondered what all the fuss was about. Who needed a door? The shop front was blown in. They were just as upset as she was or they would have seen it. They were all half silly. They were still thudding against the door, every silly one of them, when she picked up a piece of wood from the road and proceeded to knock the broken glass out of the window.

  ‘Frances!’ howled Adrian. ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘The window’s broken already. What does it matter?’

  She climbed carefully over the shattered glass, through the litter of the window display, and the rest followed like sheep.

  ‘It’s dark in here,’ she said. ‘You’d better switch the light on, Adrian.’

  ‘There won’t be any light. All the wires are down.’

  ‘And the engine’s not going, either,’ said Paul.

  Adrian tried the switch and there certainly wasn’t any light.

  ‘The shop’s in a mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘Terrible. Mr Matheson will throw a fit. Everything’s saturated.’

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ said Frances. ‘This’ll never do. We’ll all catch our deaths of cold.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Paul. ‘We’ll be lucky to find anything better. I know for a fact the roof is off Adrian’s place. I saw it. And your place is flooded, Frances. We saw that, too. To tell the truth I don’t think I saw a house that’d keep out the rain. It’s no good being silly, Frances. Hills End has taken an awful beating.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ said Frances sullenly. ‘I don’t care if it is flooded.’

  ‘And I want to go home, too,’ sobbed Gussie.

  ‘And I want to go home to get me pie.’

  ‘You and your blooming pie!’

  ‘Well, I’m hungry.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’ said Adrian.

  ‘I think we ought to go home,’ said Maisie. ‘We’ve got to get dry clothes and we might find that one of our houses is all right—or someone else’s house. If we’ve got to find a roof it doesn’t matter whose roof it is. Why don’t we all go home, everyone, and report back here in a quarter of an hour, and then we can decide?’

  ‘Maisie and her six heads again,’ grumbled Paul. He felt rather foolish that he hadn’t thought of it himself, since Maisie was just eleven years old and he was nearly fourteen.

  Adrian grunted. ‘Sounds all right. Anyone think of anything better?’

  Paul sighed. ‘No one’s going to think of anything better. It’s what we should have done in the first place. But do be careful. Specially you, Harvey. Look out for broken glass and powerlines and holes, and no one had better try getting into a house that’s badly damaged. We don’t want accidents. If we can’t find dry clothes at home there’s a shopful here. We’re bound to find something that’s not wet. And something to eat, too. And lights. We’ll use the torches.’

  ‘We can’t take things out of the shop,’ growled Adrian. ‘That’d be stealing. That’s what they call looting.’

  ‘Ooh, yes!’ squealed Harvey. ‘Let’s go looting.’

  ‘Pipe down, Junior. No one’s going to loot anything. And it’s not stealing, Adrian. We’ve got to look after ourselves. If there’s a shop full of stuff here that means the difference between going cold and warm. I’m going to take it and we’ll worry about paying for it later. And first thing is to fit ourselves up with raincoats. Down the back. Let’s get ’em.’

  Frances sounded nervous. ‘I don’t think you should, Paul. Adrian said it’s looting and that’s what it is.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks.’

  ‘But it is, Paul. We’d get into terrible trouble.’

  ‘Golly! What’s wrong with you kids? Go cold when there are clothes? Go hungry when there’s food? Stacks of food—shelves of it. Everything we want.’

  Frances was getting her strength back. ‘I can’t believe it, Paul. You’re just a common thief.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Adrian. ‘Don’t get carried away, Frances. It’s not that bad. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like common sense to me. But I reckon we should do as Maisie said. Go home first. Then if we need things we’ll take them. How about that, Paul? Don’t take too much notice of Frances. She’s upset. Say we go home first?’

  ‘I’m not upset. I know what I’m saying.’

  ‘What do you say, Paul?’

  ‘All right, but I still reckon we ought to take the raincoats.’

  ‘But we won’t. We’ll wait.’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Righto.’

  Harvey heeded Paul’s warning to a degree. He watched out for holes and broken glass and powerlines, but he still managed to progress towards his home at a very healthy scamper. Apart from the Rickard property, which was naturally the largest because it pastured the cattle, his house was farthest from the centre of the township. It was exactly four hundred and twenty-one yards from the petrol pump at the store to the swing in Harvey’s garden. He knew, because once he had spent a whole Saturday measu
ring it with a foot ruler. It had been hard work because he had lost count three times and had had to go back to the start again.

  It was over the last hundred and fifty yards that the hill became steep and Harvey slowed to a walk. In fact, he began to feel that he wasn’t in a hurry after all. That big tree that his dad had always been going to cut down didn’t need to be cut down any more. It had been uprooted and had struck the side of the house where the refrigerator was, and Harvey was pretty sure that his pie would not be there any more. And then he thought of Buzz, the little black dog that was his very own. For years Buzz’s kennel had stood beside the step at the back door. He went weak all over and started hurrying again. He should have taken Buzz to the caves, but Miss Godwin didn’t like little dogs that snapped at her heels. Not too many people liked Buzz for that reason. He was too full of cheek. He never seemed to have grown up properly.

  He started calling for Buzz but his voice was too squeaky to carry far. And the path was getting very slippery and it seemed to have turned into a big gutter that at any other time would have been wonderful to play in, and the rain still beat down and the light of day was getting gloomier and the cloud seemed low enough to reach up and touch.

  Then he heard an answering bark.

  Little Harvey scrambled across the wreckage of his father’s garden and scarcely noticed that the kitchen and the dining-room were wide open to the weather. All he saw was the mountain of boughs and foliage that buried the kennel and he was about to struggle into it and burrow for his dog when all his blood seemed to flow into the ground through his feet. Only a few yards away, angrily tossing his ugly big head, was Rickard’s bull.

  * * *

  Frances had wanted so much to go home, but when she got there she wished she had stayed away. Her father was a keen vegetable grower and he had chosen the rich flats for his house. She couldn’t see his vegetables anywhere, or her mother’s flower garden either, and she couldn’t even get to the front door.