City or country: which was better? Sandra enjoyed the family’s occasional visits to Sydney on school holidays. It was a long drive from their home in Curradeen but in-between dreamily watching the countryside slide by, she played ‘I spy’ or the number plate game with her younger sister Prue. They’d stay in Bronte with her father’s unmarried sister, Aunt Meredith, and go by tram into town to shop, her mother dressed up in a new suit, hat and gloves. On their last visit, Sandra wore her red patent flatties and matching clutch purse and felt very smart.
She tapped a pencil against her teeth, and pondered how to begin the essay. She loved the atmosphere of the city centre, trams noisily bustling up and down to Circular Quay; the mirror and shine of David Jones department store: gilded lights and marble floors, the surprise of a pianist dressed in tuxedo playing melodic tunes on a gleaming grand piano; hushed fitting rooms where they tried on new winter topcoats, women in black dresses gliding about, arms full of garments.
Aunt Meredith took them to Rowe Street, the narrow lane lined with coffee lounges, studios for artists and decorators, and fashionable shops like Henriette Lamotte where the milliner displayed elegant and expensive hats from Paris. In the Strand Arcade, with its fancy balconies and glass roof, they pressed their noses to shop windows that glistened with trays of antique jewellery, babushkas, chocolates, sugared almonds, nuts and sweets of every description; a second-hand bookshop with shelves to the ceiling: Sandra breathed the smell of the old leather-bound books, weighed them in her hand, their fragile pages edged with gilt – inside the cover of one, inscribed in purple ink: To Hilda May from your dear friend, Mrs Watts, 1898 – that was almost as old as the arcade!
Or Paddy’s Market in Chinatown, people crowded around stalls of everything you could think of: Chinese silken dresses, duffle coats, felt hats, straw hats, every kind of bag and baggage; buckets of flowers, bins of vegetables, chooks and ducks and fluffy yellow chickens, finches twittering in little cages. Even glass tanks of goldfish. And so many cinemas and coffee shops ... better than Saturday afternoons in Curradeen with only a milk bar and the roller skating rink open, or a matinee at the one and only cinema.
As Sandra watched the masses edge towards the exits in the stuffy underground stations, she wondered what it would be like to live in the city. She knew one day she’d need to go there to study. Cars hurried along the streets, zoomed around corners. Sometimes a screech of brakes, a horn blast or a voice yelling Look where ya goin’ ya mug! Then the brightness tarnished, the grit in your eyes on a windy day was horrid. And the faces ... so many people enclosed in their own little world, marching up and down the pavement – like in Henry Lawson’s poem, except all his people were unemployed and miserable.
So for a while yet the country town was Sandra’s choice as the best place to live: crisp, clean air on sunny mornings with frost shining on the grass and picnics by the river – easy to get around with nothing very far from anything else. In five minutes you could be at your best friend’s house, the milk bar, or the roller-skating rink. Or you could cycle far out of town to where the tar met the dirt road, going as fast or as slow as you liked and wherever you liked, free as a bird.
– Don’t be home too late!
Yes, it was better to grow up in the bush. Ponies’ hooves shot flints as they picked their way along the mountain trails, the wind tossing manes and tails. They were chasing a mob of wild bush horses, the bay filly beneath her flying across the ground, hardly touching, wings on her hooves. Nick smiled beside her, cheeks flushed, brown hair blown back from his face, hands firm on the reins, knees gripping, leaning forward into a gallop as they came to the steepest drops. The other riders fell back, leaving Nick the only one, the bravest one, shirt flapping as he disappeared into the distance.
Shaking aside the dream, Sandra modified the action a bit, and finished her essay. English drifted into Maths, a double period that kept the class busy, heads down for the full eighty minutes. Geography. Science. It was a relief when lunchtime came. Students queued for pies and cream buns at the tuck shop or competed for seats, the seniors spread about in little groups on the grass. Sandra and Emilia grabbed a bench by the horticulture shed where they ate their sandwiches and chatted by themselves.
‘Sandy, who do you like? Who is it?’ Emilia pestered. ‘I know there’s someone. Is it Geoffrey in our class? Or one of the Third Year boys?’
‘Maybe,’ Sandra grinned, going along with the regular lunchtime conversation. Then as her friend was about to exclaim triumphantly, she said: ‘No! Get off my back, Emmy. Why do I have to like anyone special? Just ’cause you’re mad about Tony.’ She was determined to keep her secret even from her best friend. She knew if Emilia found out, other girls would find out too. Poor old Emmy couldn’t keep a secret and her feelings would become public with all the usual teasing. School was like that. Everyone poked their nose into your business. If you were away one day they wanted to know why. If you said you went out, they wanted to know where. With a boy? Did you kiss him? Did you let him ... you know? But Sandra had never been out with a boy. Oh, it was awful how they busy-bodied and gossiped. Better to keep quiet, better no one knew, though she hoped, how she hoped that one day Nick would look at her and see she wasn’t just a little schoolgirl.
They strolled around the school, lingering to watch the ball games on the quadrangle where some of the older boys were keeping the ball from the juniors. Tony was there, holding the tennis ball up high, away from grabbing hands as he laughed down at them. Sandra thought it unlikely that the tall boy in Third Year had even noticed plump little Emmy.
‘Oh, isn’t he gorgeous?’ Emilia hugged herself and spun on her heel in a circle.
Sandra nudged her, ‘Stop it. You’re embarrassing.’
‘I can’t help it, he’s so cute.’ She grabbed Sandra’s arm. ‘Look. There’s Lofty and he’s coming this way.’
‘Googly eyes,’ Sandra muttered. ‘Hide in the library, quick.’
It was too late. Lofty blocked the path, hands in pockets and a big grin. His round spectacles glinted.
‘G’day.’ He hurried beside the girls, juvenile and knobby-kneed in his school shorts. ‘Where y’ going?’
‘This way!’ Sandra suddenly wheeled left through the library doors, almost knocking Emilia off-balance.
Lofty gave a cheeky wave and the girls stuck out their tongues. They peered after him from behind the shelves.
‘That was silly,’ Sandra said,
‘So? He’s silly.’
‘But poking out tongues like babies.’
‘He’s a creep. All the boys in our class are creeps.’
‘I s’pose they can’t help it. Remember when Lofty had to read that Mark Antony speech, Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, and his voice went all squeaky and everyone laughed?’
‘I remember, and you laughed too,’ Emilia said, then added, ‘Everyone knows he likes you.’
‘I don’t care, I don’t want a boyfriend. I want to be me and do what I like.’
‘I’d love it. Having a boyfriend, I mean. I wish Tony would ask me to go with him.’
‘Big deal. You want to stand around holding hands with nothing to do and nowhere to go.’
‘There’s the pictures. And school socials,’ Emilia protested.
‘Three times a year? No thanks. Look at Cathy and her boyfriend. What do they do, besides pash behind the tuck shop, showing off.’ She sounded fierce and Emilia was surprised.
‘Anyone would think you were jealous,’ she giggled as Sandra’s face reddened. ‘You don’t have to take it so serious. It’s not the end of our beautiful friendship.’
‘Oh,