TRANSIT CAMP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 528, 5 August 1949, Page 14

TRANSIT CAMP

Written for "The Listener" by

ELIZABETH

SPENCER

S$ Bob Young turns into the transit camp he is whistling and slapping his rolled-up paper against his thigh. It is evening. A blue mist swathes the willow trees and already tiny beads of moisture are forming on the fernlike tips of the macrocarpa leaves. Twenty fingers of smoke, from 20 dover stoves, point straight upwards into the motionless air, and from 20 identical kitchens, comes the clatter of dishes and the hot tantalizing smell of food. It is very cold and thin strips of yellow show beneath the drawn blinds, the closed doors. Only from the communal lavatories the

light streams forth un- Patatss jes Oe shuttered, staining the gravel paths with great squares of gold. At number 4, Murphy’s cat rises up from the milk-box and gives a short mew of greeting, arching his back to Bob’s caressing hand. At number 10, Mrs. Howard has put her tea-towels out to bleach on the privet hedge. Very white, very ghostly they look, glimmering there in the dusk, Going to be 4 stinger to-night, Bob tells himself and leaves the path for a moment to rustle his feet in the stiffening grass. At number 17, he can hear old man Watson shouting at his kids. Bob grins .. one over the eight again! At number 19, still whistling, he swings in through the gap in the hedge. He is home, But at number 19 to-day has been a bad day. At the sound of that gay, ‘care-free whistling, Evelyn Young turns her flushed, angry face towards the door. Tears prick and sting against her eyelids. It’s all very well for him. . , . How would he like to be stuck here all day, with no room to swing a cat, with Peter’s cough, cough, cough, and the baby forever crawling towards that wretched dover stove? She watches, sullen, while he hangs up his hat, pinches Peter’s cheek, rumples the baby’s hair, then sinks with a long contented sigh into the big chair. "How’s things, Ev?" he says, opening the paper, sinking deeper. But Evelyn does not trust herself to speak. She snatches the baby from the floor, whisks her into her chair. Ties the feeder, angrily ties the feeder, not seeing the tender white nape, the tiny ears, the charming point of flaxen hair. Bang, bang, goes the baby’s spoon, cough, cough, goes Peter, playing jeeps on the littered floor. And, men, shrieks the angry voice in Evelyn Young, men, | men, it’s all very well for men. Automatically she picks up a spoon, fills it with cereal, thrusts it into the little red mouth, scoops off the#surplus with the pointed upper-lip. And when;

at last, the little mouth stays shut, absently she coaxes: "Open wide . . + down the hatch .. . what a clever girl!" Néw the milk in the plastic cup! Bit with one generous sweep of a chubby pink arm it is over. It drips to a thick white pool on the rug. It’s his fault, shrills the voice, sitting there doing nothing. Why can’t he help me? Why can’t he give me a hand? "Mum, mum, mum," chants the baby. "Mummy spilt the milk," chants Peter. [? is past eight .o’clock. The children are in bed. In the narrow, unlined rooms of an army hut, in cot and crib they lie, among the crowded suit-cases and half-empty crates which are the symbols of hope in every transit camp. Their button noses, peeping above the blankets, grow pinker as the chill blue mist leaves the willow trees and drifts silently through the open windows, Out in the small living-room iit is quiet now. The napkins swing On a string line above the glowing stove, Bob lies sprawled full-length on the chesterfield, a "Reader’s Digest" face downs wards on his chest. He snores, a gentle fluted snore, not worth waking him for. Evelyn is darning, weaving her thoughts in and out, in and out, across the bright blue darning-egg. Her raging inner voice is still, lulled by the brief peace of evening. Only deep down inside her, anger has left a residue of resentment. Why, she wonders, must women’s days be filled with an endless monotony of tasks, mechanical, fruitless, needing no brain, no special capacity? Why must sheer dogweariness turn a loving mother into an impatient: shrew? Was it always so? Did her great-great-grandmother, kneading her bread, trimming her candles, sometimes hate her womanhood and raise (continued on next page)

fcontinued from previous page) het voice in anger against her children and her man? Or had wider education and greater emancipation cost the modetn woman some fount of grace and patience which kept her female forbears maternal and serene? [N and out, in and out go her thoughts "until, as thoughts always do, they leave the general and come back to the particular, Twelve months they have been here now; 12 months of hoping evety day that word will come and they will get their house. Twelve months of sidling through four small rooms filled*to capacity with goods and chattels. Bob says if they don’t get a house soon they will both be walking like crabs for the rest of their lives, Summer with the heat of the stove within, the heat of the sun without, Winter with the hot living-room, the freezing bedrooms. Bathing the children in front of the fite, cartying water . . . waiting, waiting. _Evelyn finishes a last; tiny hole in the toe of a sock. Now for a cup of tea and-oh, exquisite peace-a little read. Supper is over. They have rinsed the dishes, set the breakfast table. "Brrr," says Bob, coming in: from the frosty night, rubbing his hands, pulling up his collar. "I knew it was going to be a stinger. Come on Mrs. Young, get a move on. Let’s hit the hay." And as he passes her, very gently his cold fresh fingers pinch her cheek. When he has gone Evelyn opens the door. The moon is up... full up. The trafsit camp is flooded in silver light. A million diamonds of frost sparkle on evéety blade of grass; the willows and the macrocarpas are etched in black; the army huts huddle darkly beneath their gleaming roofs, and here and there a feathery wisp of smoke climbs belatedly into the pallid sky. Slowly, silently now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon, whispers Evelyn, and a great longing comes to her to walk away from her cluttered life. To walk off by herself down the silver pathway, through the dark trees, to some wide, enchanted, peaceful world. But even as the longing is born she is drawn back into the house. Drawn back by her children with their button noses showing pink above the blankets; drawn back by her husband, a large. hump in the big bed, snoring again and on a deeper note.