For the first time in her life, she flouted the rules and danced at rousing ceilidhs, held in the smoky, gas-lit third-class saloon. Clara had practically dragged her to the first one and Kitty had sat primly on the sidelines as she watched her friend enjoy dance after dance to the lively Celtic band. She was soon persuaded to join in, and found herself whirled from one young man to another, all of whom behaved like perfect gentlemen.
She’d also warmed towards Mrs McCrombie, who, after a whisky or three at cocktail hour, displayed a wicked sense of humour as she told raucous jokes that would surely have given her father a heart attack. It was during one of these evenings that Mrs McCrombie confided her nerves at seeing her younger sister again.
‘I haven’t seen Edith since she was eighteen, not much older than you, my dear, when she left for Australia to marry dear Stefan. She’s almost fifteen years younger than me – her arrival was rather a shock to Papa.’ Mrs McCrombie gave a smirk and then burped discreetly. ‘She looks nothing at all like me either,’ Mrs McCrombie added as she gestured for a waiter to top up her glass. ‘And I suppose you know that your father was quite the ladies’ man when my family knew him in those days.’
‘Really? Goodness,’ Kitty replied neutrally, hoping Mrs McCrombie would elaborate, but her patron’s attention had already been claimed by the ship’s band starting up and the conversation was not pursued.
As they approached Port Colombo in Ceylon, the good ship Orient was tossed about in heavy seas. Kitty remained upright, tending to both Mrs McCrombie and Clara, as they turned green and took to their beds. She mused that seasickness was indeed the greatest social leveller as no amount of wealth could prevent it. Passengers of all classes were at the mercy of the choppy waves, and the ship’s stewards were kept busy handing out ginger infusions, which supposedly settled the stomach. Kitty could not stop Mrs McCrombie pouring generous measures of whisky into her medicinal drinks, claiming that ‘Nothing will stop the awful spinning, so I might as well run with it, my dear.’
As they crossed the vast Indian Ocean, the continent of Australia like a promised land before them, Kitty experienced a heat stronger than she could ever have imagined. She sat with Mrs McCrombie on the promenade deck – the best place to catch a breeze – with a book from the ship’s library and pondered how she had acquired an identity all of her own. No longer was she just the Reverend McBride’s daughter, but a capable woman who had the best sea legs George the steward had ever known on a woman, and was quite able to stand on them without the protection of her mother and father.
As she looked up at the cloudless skies, the horror of what she had discovered before she had left was thankfully receding further into the distance along with Scotland. When Mrs McCrombie announced they were only a week away from their destination, Kitty experienced a stomach roll that had nothing to do with the movement of the ship. This was Darwin’s land – the land of a man who did not hide behind God to explain his own motives or beliefs, but celebrated the power and creativity of nature. The best and worst of it in all its beauty, rawness and cruelty, laid bare for all to see. Nature was honest, without bigotry or hypocrisy.
If she could find an accurate metaphor for how she currently felt, Kitty decided it would be akin to Mrs McCrombie shrugging off her too-tight corsets and deciding to breathe again.
*
Most of the passengers were on deck the morning that the Orient was close to a first sighting of Australia’s coastline. Excitement and trepidation were palpable as everyone craned their necks to see what, for so many on board, would be their home and the start of a new life.
As the coastline came into view, a strange hush descended on deck. Sandwiched between the blue of the sea and the shimmering sky lay a thin, red-coloured strip of earth.
‘Quite flat, ain’t it?’ Clara said with a shrug. ‘No ’ills I can see.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Kitty dreamily, hardly able to believe she was actually seeing with her own eyes what had previously appeared as an unreachable blob in an atlas.
As the ship drew into the port of Fremantle and berthed in the harbour, cheering broke out. It appeared to Kitty even larger than the Port of London, where they had originally embarked, and she marvelled at the impossibly tall passenger and cargo ships that lobbied for space at the quayside, and the crowds of all creeds and colours going about their business beneath her.
‘Golly-gosh!’ Clara threw her arms around Kitty. ‘We’ve actually gone and made it to Australia! ’Ow’s that then?’
Kitty watched the disembarking passengers walk down the gangplank clutching their worldly goods and their children to them. A few were met by friends or relatives, but most stood on the dock looking dazed and confused in the bright sunshine, until they were rounded up and led off by an official. Kitty admired each and every one of them for their courage to leave a life in the country of their birth to make a new and better one here.
‘A rough old crowd, from what I could see,’ said Mrs McCrombie over a luncheon of lamb chops in the dining room. ‘But then, Australia was initially populated by the dregs of society, shipped from England. Convicts and criminals, the lot of them. Except for Adelaide, of course, which was built to a plan to encourage the more . . . genteel amongst us to make a life there. Edith tells me it’s a good, God-fearing town.’ She cocked her ear nervously as the unfamiliar twang of Australian voices floated up through the open windows, fanning herself violently as beads of perspiration appeared on her forehead. ‘One can only hope that the temperature in Adelaide will be cooler than it is here,’ she continued. ‘Good Lord, no wonder the natives run about with no clothes on. The heat is quite unbearable.’
After lunch, Mrs McCrombie went to her cabin for a nap and Kitty wandered back onto the deck, fascinated by the cattle still being led off the boat. Most of them looked emaciated and bewildered as they stumbled down the gangplank. ‘So far from the fresh green fields of home,’ she whispered to herself.
The following morning, the ship set off again, with Adelaide as its next stop. The two days before their arrival were spent packing Mrs McCrombie’s extensive wardrobe back into her trunks.
‘Perhaps you can come and visit me in Sydney when I’m settled in? It can’t be that far between the towns, can it? It looked close on the map,’ Clara commented over their last lunch together on board.
Kitty asked George the steward later that night whether this might be possible, and he chuckled at her ignorance.
‘I’d reckon that in a straight line, it’s over seven hundred miles between Adelaide and Sydney. And even then, you’d have to see off tribes of blacks carrying spears, let alone the ’roos, and snakes and spiders that can kill you with one bite. Did you look on the map, Miss McBride, and wonder why there’s no towns in the interior of Australia? No white human can survive for long in the Outback.’
When Kitty settled down to sleep for her last night on board, she sent up a prayer.
‘Please, Lord, I don’t mind snakes or kangaroos, or even savages, but please don’t have me cooked alive in a pot!’
*