A Stolen Life by Antonio Buti

Author:Antonio Buti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

‘ALL SITTING AROUND, HAVING A FEED AND A CUPPA’

Hilda loves her brother Bruce. She wants to help him today, just as she remembers wanting to help him take his first baby steps such a long time ago. They were a family then—Tom, George, baby Bruce and her, with their mum and dad in their home at One Mile Camp. True, they lived in a shack, and it was made out of old bits of tin, but it was home for all that. She was Hilda Trevorrow then. Now, about to take the witness stand, the first of Bruce’s family to testify, she will introduce herself as Hilda Day.

Hilda Day, too, has known hardship and heartbreak. Her first baby, Debra, was born prematurely and with Down syndrome. Baby Debra did not want for love and Hilda and Robert soon adapted to the role of first-time parents with a little girl who had special needs. A little girl who knew instinctively that she belonged. They were family.

Family. Just one word, yet that one word conveys so much. Bruce’s personal day in court had ended yesterday with Burnside asking him, ‘Could you tell His Honour where you think you belong?’

‘Nowhere,’ was his response.

Hilda, as a witness in waiting, had not heard that poignant ending to Bruce’s testimony. She could not have foreseen that she would begin her day with equally moving poignancy.

‘Do you have a memory of Bruce when he was a baby?’ O’Connor puts the question.

‘Yes.’

O’Connor does not wear the prestigious ‘silk’ of her lead counsel, but she is experienced and intuitive, and knows which buttons to push.

‘Can you tell His Honour everything you can remember about him up until the time that you didn’t see him again?’

‘He was just our baby. I was teaching him to walk. That’s all I can remember.’

O’Connor has the answer she wants: ‘He was just our baby.’ The bitter censure of an egregious act of stealing a baby’s entitlement to family needs no express words.

She moves on. ‘At any time before Bruce left your family, do you recall your mum and dad having arguments or fights about anything?’ O’Connor had raised this question when she proofed Hilda as a witness before her appearance. Here, too, she knows the answer, but she wants Justice Gray to hear it from Hilda.

‘Yes, that’s when Jim Clarke came across from Victoria.’

That is it: the answer she needs. Now she has to tie its relevance down so firmly that the defence cannot loosen it. She needs to pre-empt what she knows will be an attempt by the Crown to allege that Thora had walked out on her family irresponsibly.

By this time, Hilda has been on the stand for a long time, during which she has had to recall for the court her own family hardships and heartaches. After Debra was born, Robert and she had four more children, a son (also named Robert), followed by three girls (Sonia, Karen and Angela). Robert Junior later developed an alcohol addiction and took his own life.

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