No Man's Land by A.J. Fitzwater

Author:A.J. Fitzwater
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Paper Road Press
Published: 2020-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

6.

Christmas, 1942.

The best present Tea could receive was relief from the strange pain. It didn’t entirely dissipate – lingering in her skin as a scratchy memory, exacerbated by the oncoming heat like a rash – but further medicine came in a letter from the front. Robbie could not write about what he’d been through, due to censorship rules, but it was enough to know he was safe, alive, and grumbling about sunburn.

Spring lambing had bled into a brittle summer, the grass turning brown almost overnight. The heat radiated from the hard North Otago soil and crunching grass, brush fires hiding in wait. The hot Nor’wester blasted the senses and pushed dust into everything. The dogs barked at nothing, putting Izzy on edge. Sometimes she’d crawl into her dogskin at night to share a blanket in the dog runs to keep them quiet. A dangerous thing to do, but Izzy told Tea she’d had plenty of experience slipping in and out of form near other people, and the MacGregors were creatures of habit.

The sheer weight of the work never let up. The girls went to bed exhausted every night. Though Tea groaned to Izzy about her aches and pains, excessive expectations from the boss, and the sharp tongue and eye of Mrs MacGregor, a growing sense of achievement pervaded her discomfort. She was doing something!

Underneath it all, water seethed. Even when she was dead tired from a day of fencing, dagging, hoeing, chopping, riding, docking and dipping, mucking, wool sales, counting feed, manipulating heavy ploughs head-down in the wind, fertilising, fixing, and generally making do, even when the Nor’wester blasted around the edges of the cottage and she tried to read her books and letters by lamplight, she strained to touch the hiss of the creek.

A low-level itch took up in her hands that had nothing to do with trimming gorse or pulling Old Man’s Beard. She too used the cover of dark to pull at her new skin, taking sips of lukewarm water from a chipped cup and practising flipping scales up and down her forearms. It didn’t always happen. She could never tell when her whaiwhaiā would respond, whether the water would take or give. The weather and her weariness had nothing to do with it. Frustration was a constant friend.

The early morning Christmas Eve train back to Dunedin was packed with girls in wool uniforms too thick for the enclosed space, gritty wind rocking the carriages. Tea’s full uniform had arrived in November, and unwrapping the brown paper package had felt as much like early Christmas as Robbie’s letter. The jauntiness of her pinned hat brim made her hold her head up. Some other girls had to look twice at the Land Service epaulet, and Tea bit her lip to manage her grin. The name had only changed recently, as if Land ‘Army’ was too strident for girls. Though the chocolate brown uniform didn’t sport as many gleaming buttons and badges as the other corps, its refined lines brought her close to feeling a kinship with other girls that she hadn’t before.

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