The True Story of Maddie Bright Read online

  Praise for Swimming Home

  ‘This is an excellent book on so many levels, the story is captivating, and the social history of athletic women and how they were viewed at the times was very interesting … Highly recommended.’

  —Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Swimming Home is the beautiful story of two fiercely strong and determined women in their own right … Five stars.’

  —Mrs B’s Book Reviews

  ‘MacColl succeeds in bringing all the various places to life, whether it is humid Australia, murky London or exuberant New York. A highly engaging read.’

  —Historical Novel Society

  Praise for In Falling Snow

  ‘As Iris recalls her wartime experience, she draws the reader deep into her past, eventually revealing the tragic secret that has shaped the rest of her life … an evocative and intriguing tale that encapsulates the horrors of war and the powerful legacy of love.’

  —Australian Bookseller and Publisher

  ‘At once chilling yet strangely beautiful. The book touches on the contributions made by a group of pioneering women who succeed despite society’s bias toward their gender; the strong friendships that develop, particularly between Iris and ambulance driver Violet Heron; Iris’ increasing love for medicine and her involvement with a man she meets during the war; the men and boys whose lives are sacrificed for a cause many of them don’t identify with or understand; and the far-reaching effects of the war on the generations that follow … MacColl’s narrative is fortified by impeccable research and her innate ability to create a powerful bond between readers and characters. Well done.’

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  The True Story of Maddie Bright is Mary-Rose MacColl’s sixth novel. Her first novel No Safe Place was runner-up in the 1995 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. Her first non-fiction book The Birth Wars was a finalist in the 2009 Walkley Awards. Swimming Home, her recent novel about the first women to swim the English Channel, won the People’s Choice Award at the 2016 Queensland Literary Awards. It followed In Falling Snow about the hospital established by Scottish women doctors in an old abbey near Paris in World War I. Mary-Rose MacColl’s most recent book is For a Girl, which tells a story from her own young life. It was shortlisted in the 2017 Queensland Literary awards and the Victorian Premier’s Literary awards.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are sometimes based on historical events, but are used fictitiously.

  First published in 2019

  Copyright © Mary-Rose MacColl 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76029 524 0

  eISBN 978 1 76087 111 6

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Lisa White

  Cover photographs: ©Rekha Arcangel / Arcangel Images and Shutterstock

  To Bluey Joshua and Olive Rose

  My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.

  Japanese proverb

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ON WRITING

  From Winter Skies by M.A. Bright:

  London, 1921

  There she is on the stone bench that circles the fountain in the centre of the square where she’s been sitting since early afternoon, watching and waiting as the church in front of her fades into darkness. The only illumination now is from that lamp on the side of the rectory, right where the nurse at the Sally Ann had told her it would be.

  It’s April, unseasonably cold; of course it is. The baby in her arms does not stir. Of course he doesn’t.

  ‘Fatigue,’ the nurse had said. ‘You’re both suffering from fatigue. Are you getting enough rest?’

  She’d almost laughed. Even then, she hadn’t slept in—how long was it? She was too hungry to sleep. When had she last eaten? the nurse asked. She didn’t know that either.

  ‘I’m worried about the baby,’ she said quietly. ‘The baby,’ she repeated when the nurse appeared not to hear.

  ‘Oh, nowt to worry there,’ the nurse said, sniffing dismissively. ‘He’ll suck the marrow from your bones before he’ll go without. Lusty, that one.’

  The nurse smiled but her smile was without kindness, as if she’d sucked on the marrow of a lemon and was trying to see the funny side of it. ‘You’ll perish long before he does, dearie, and keep producing milk until the end.’

  That was the funny side of it.

  A missing tooth at the lower front might have been the reason the nurse whistled on her esses. It might have been what made the smile look bitter. Perhaps underneath was a soul seeking the light.

  ‘But you can’t stay here with a bairn. You must know that, a lass like you.’

  A lass like her.

  ‘You’ll find it easily enough. They keep the lamp burning all through the night.’

  And there it was.

  It’s one hard thing. That’s what the nurse had said, her steely blue eyes. ‘It’s one hard thing and then it’s over.’

  She was shivering now. The mist that had gathered around them with the darkness had collected itself into a light rain. She wrapped her shawl more tightly about the child as she stared at the lamp.

  She stood suddenly, awkwardly, as if her mind had made itself up and ordered her body to follow, resistance taking up residence in the large muscles of her legs as she bade them walk. Above the lighted window was a shallow awning that didn’t quite shield them from the rain, and under the awning a window box shaped like a half a wheel. It housed a tiny crib lined with soft straw over which was a blanket. Someone had crocheted a blanket of little squares in different colours backed with thick wool. Someone had cared enough to do that.

  She laid him on the straw and p
ut the blanket on top. He didn’t cry, even though the rain was still falling and the awning was not keeping them dry.

  She bent over to wipe a droplet of water from his cheek with her thumb. He only looked at her, big eyes filled with that light, brightest in babies and the dying, the inner light that ebbs and flows with the passing of years.

  Years they would not pass together.

  ‘We don’t always know the right thing,’ she said, her voice surprisingly true.

  The rain was more like sleet now; she mustn’t tarry. Quickly, she started turning the handle, her fingers numb with the cold.

  The wheel creaked and began to turn inwards. The baby stirred a moment and then settled, eyes closing. As she wound the handle and the crib moved slowly away from her, she felt the rush of cold in her belly, a cold that would never now altogether leave her.

  Away from her, towards his life.

  He raised a hand, just an involuntary gesture, but she took it as a wave, that little hand, those tiniest of fingernails she already knew so completely.

  Her last view was of the shawl, her only shawl, a brilliant blue, disappearing into the church, and a second empty crib that came around from inside to stand ready, a different eiderdown in this one, no crocheted blanket.

  Empty.

  She walked away and did not look back.

  It was a morning, the second day or the third; she couldn’t be sure. On the first night, the nurse had welcomed her back at the Sally Ann as if none of it had happened. But time had become solid now, her arms which felt heavy, her breasts which ached or stung and leaked milk when she thought of him, that little hand waving, those light blue eyes.

  She must get on. She was dressed and ready to go down to Harley Street, where there was a typing job. She stuffed strips torn from the bottom of her petticoat into her bras, just in case. She would get the job and go to the church and say she could take him now. Now that she’d slept, eaten, and the madness had left her. Her body knows.

  He is hers. She is his.

  She will have to hurry because her milk will dry up and she’ll not get it back. Once she has the job, she is sure they’ll accept her with a child. Of course they will.

  She walked into the dining room. The newspaper was on the table. The headline.

  ANOTHER BABE PERISHES!

  She took in great gulps of the text without breath.

  A second baby has died in the ‘foundling’ wheel at St John of God Church. The church, the only London establishment to have retained such a contraption, is now the subject of an official investigation, Police Sergeant Harold Forth said earlier today.

  ‘Mark my words: there is nothing safe about these so-called foundling wheels,’ Sergeant Forth said.

  The babe didn’t stand a chance, Sergeant Forth said. ‘The cold. It was just too cold for a little one.

  ‘He was well cared-for,’ the sergeant said. ‘He had a blue silk shawl around him, expensive looking, but it wasn’t warm enough.’

  According to Rector Martin Somerset, the bell installed to warn churchmen of a baby’s arrival had failed to ring and the chute through which the baby was placed had failed to close.

  ‘The little tyke just gave up,’ Rector Somerset said.

  She put the paper back down on the counter, smoothed the creases she’d accidentally made in it.

  She couldn’t remember what she was doing, why she was standing there at all. The world was moving slowly around her, herself not moving.

  One of the other women was behind her. ‘Come on, slow coach,’ she said. ‘Haven’t got all day to read.’

  She turned. She would remember the woman’s face for the rest of her life, cheeks like little cherries, stupid brown eyes like a cow. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. And then she fainted.

  ONE

  Brisbane, 1981

  I HEARD A THUMP THAT AT FIRST I TOOK FOR A POSSUM in the ceiling. They remind me of my brothers when we were children in this house, pounding across the wooden floors, screaming at one another over some game or claim. At night I might hear one fall from the jacaranda branches onto the roof—a possum not a brother now—with a thud you’d think would kill any living creature, and yet I know they survive because after the thud there’s a pause, and then the scurry of feet. I should do something about them, get the possum man to set traps, but I don’t have the heart. I still miss my brothers.

  Ed from across the road says they bring fleas. The possums again, not my brothers, who are all dead, boisterous noisy boys, gone too soon. Only me now. Women live longer. It’s not necessarily better.

  I heard the noise again, louder, and realised it wasn’t a possum. It was the front door, someone pounding now on the door with what I took for impatience, which irritated me mightily. My hearing’s not as good as it used to be. It can’t be Ed, I thought. Too early in the day for Ed, and Ed would never be impatient with me.

  Last night’s news has altogether discombobulated me. I keep seeing her in my mind’s eye, more helpless than the possums in my ceiling, more helpless even than my little boy brothers, in a trap of her own hapless making. After the letter last week, it’s almost too much to bear, too many signs all saying the same thing. I am too old for this. I want to die quietly in my sleep. It turns out this is quite a lot to ask of the Lord, who knows every hair on your head and could pluck them all out at once if the mood took him.

  Other than Ed, no one knocks on my door but religions and electricals, peddling wares or schemes for redemption, and it’s too early for either of them. They don’t tend to make such a racket either. I used to like the Pentecostals. Their prayer books have pictures and they don’t have a uniform. I joined them the year before last, but I didn’t know any of the songs, so I went back to the more ordinary Catholics whose songs have straightforward melodies. Even if you don’t know them at the start, you have them figured by the second verse.

  I live in a house that attracts a particular kind of religion, one whose followers are nutty for it. Last week, I had the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Latter-Day Saints on the same day, which is a record. Swindle is what religions specialise in, according to Ed. He is cynical. It won’t make life any easier, I want to tell him. Whereas believing in a hereafter, where my brothers and I, my parents, and others I’ve lost will be reunited, might be a comfort when I need one.

  ‘I’m coming!’ I called towards the door as gruffly as I could manage. I was in the kitchen at the back of the house, and although I’ve weaned myself from the walker, I’m still slow, ginger when I’m first on my feet, as if I broke my balance when I broke my dumb leg.

  The leg itself has healed entirely, the doctor told me when he sawed the cast off, stressing that word entirely, but perhaps next time I might ask the gardener to clear the leaves from the gutters rather than getting up on the roof myself. He was one of those doctors who’d have been pointing a finger at me if all his fingers hadn’t been on duty for the sawing. As it was, he was shaking his head, a smug smile stuck to his face like it was a regular visitor. He can’t be older than fifty, and he’s not my usual doctor, Dr McKellar, who would never be so condescending and would likely encourage me to get up on the roof if that’s what I felt like doing, which I did, obviously, or you wouldn’t have found me up there and I wouldn’t have fallen off. Not only that, the assumption I have a gardener is offensive to me.

  I felt like giving him a piece of my mind, the young doctor, but I refrained for the sake of ensuring he finished the job at hand without taking my leg off. It’s harder to assert your authority when the object of your irritability has an electrical saw in his hands.

  I passed the television in the sitting room. It had turned itself back on—something that should probably worry me—and there again was the picture: a willowy scrap of a girl arm in arm with what I could only describe as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Her suit was the worst of it, a sky blue two sizes too large, as if she’d only bought it that morning for the afternoon’s announcement and she had a false impression of her own
size in the world. It’s more innocent than wedding-white will be, the enormous jewel on her finger shown to the waiting horde like a brand on a heifer. They flashed back then to that other picture, the one that might frighten her, her skirt made see-through in the morning sun, her long legs exposed for all the world to gawk at. Of course it frightened her. That was the point.

  ‘Run!’ I shouted at the screen. ‘Scream your head off!’ But she couldn’t hear me and wouldn’t know what I was talking about if she could. That was all yet to find her.

  Helen. Is that who she reminds me of? Helen, whose adventurousness people mistook for sophistication, or some Machiavellian nature that was not Helen, not in any way. Is this what the world does to women who pretend to be worldly, buy suits two sizes too big? Cut them down to size, shrink them?

  I reached the front door just as the pounding resumed. ‘Lord save us, I’m coming!’ I called out again, exasperated now, for having reached the door, I had to negotiate the locks, three of them, and the chain bolt. Ed says if there were a fire in this house, I would burn before I could get myself out. Minutes, he tells me. These houses burn in minutes. I tell Ed I’d see it as an early but hardly premature cremation. He doesn’t find that funny, which I can well understand—he’s young yet—but when you get to my age, death looms, an unwelcome guest but a guest all the same, one your very living has invited. Your humour can’t help but be gallows. The gallows are what’s left.

  Forgiveness. I know I will be seeking forgiveness. That’s what I like about the Catholics, in addition to songs I know the tunes of. Forgiveness appears to be in plentiful supply. Ed doesn’t understand that.

  I’m still thinking of Ed and smiling when I open the door and when it’s not him, I’m confused momentarily. It’s not Ed. It’s a tall, strong young man with blue eyes and wavy blond hair parted on the left. Behind him is a perfect sky which frames those eyes. Sky eyes. I look again at his face, trying to work out if I’m supposed to know him.