One Life. Kate Grenville

French teacher was full of innocent enthusiasm. She came in the first day and wrote on the board: With Every Language Learned, Man Gains a Soul. Some boy up the back guffawed. The teacher only lasted two weeks, ran out of class in tears one day and never came back.

      Esme told Nance there was no point in learning French, anyway. None of them was going to go to France, and if a French person came to Tamworth they could bloody well speak English. Still, the idea that you could gain a soul stayed with Nance. When it was her turn to read out a sentence in French, she felt her face changing around the new sounds. She did feel different. It wasn’t gaining a soul, exactly, but there was something.

      Mr Crisp their English teacher was older and knew how to keep order, even when he was teaching them something as sissy as poetry. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Yes, Nance thought, that was autumn. The apple tree in the backyard at the Cally, with the wasps in and out of the rotting windfalls and the sad smell of burning leaves, the low syrupy sun along the stubble of Ison’s paddock, the pale morning fog hanging over the Peel. Reading the poem was like having a conversation with this man, even though he was a hundred years dead and had never seen Ison’s paddock. He’d given words to ordinary things that they both knew, and turned them into slow beautiful music.

      The poem about Chapman’s Homer made the class restless. Bards in fealty to Apollo! What was that when it was at home? Mr Crisp raised his voice and stared down the ones at the back. Cortez was amazed at seeing the Pacific from a peak in Darien, he explained. But the poem was really about Keats being amazed by a poem. It was like seeing your reflection in the three-way mirror at home, Nance thought, because here she was, being amazed at a poem written by a man who was amazed at a poem.

      When Mr Crisp read poetry out loud, they could hear the little shake in his voice. Esme nudged Nance under the desk and smirked. Nance didn’t smirk back. She was astonished at the thought: Mr Crisp was feeling the same thing she did, a tenderness towards these words that had the power to make the world look different. It was like a secret handshake. You weren’t the only one.

      She was fourteen and it was the Intermediate year. It was easy to be top of the class, coasting along on what she’d learned at St George. She did so well in the exam that she got a prize, a leather-bound, gold-embossed Poetical Works of John Keats. Bert and Dolly were proud, but Nance thought more impressed by the quality of the leather than the success in the exam. Dolly riffled the pages so the gilt edges gleamed in an expensive way. Then she wrapped it in brown paper to keep it nice and put it in the glass-fronted bookcase.

      The day after Speech Day, Mr Crisp came to the Cally and talked with Dolly in the Ladies’ Lounge. Nance hung over the banister, right above them. She could see the bald spot on Mr Crisp’s head and Dolly’s crooked part. She heard Mr Crisp say, Mrs Russell, it would be an absolute tragedy if she doesn’t go on. She thought then she’d hear her mother’s voice going high and indignant but Mr Crisp kept talking, his voice a coaxing up-and-down, like a man breaking in a horse, Nance thought. A credit to you, she heard. You and Mr Russell both.

      Nance supposed going on to the Leaving would be all right. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she knew it wasn’t what Esme and Lois and the others were going to do: leave school and help at home or get a job in a shop, till someone came along to marry them. She’d be the first person in her family to stay at school for so long. Frank had done the Intermediate, like her, but he didn’t want to go on. Max was no scholar, didn’t even want to do the Intermediate.

      Nance knew she was never going to be beautiful, but once she knew not to do too well in class the boys liked her. She was lively, ready for a bit of fun, and she was exotic, the girl from the city. Wade Watson walked her home, Ray Brawne held her hand in the pictures, Tom Vidler kissed her after a dance. A handsomer boy than Tom Vidler or a bolder one than Ray Brawne might have got further. She didn’t know if she was glad or sorry they didn’t try. She’d have said no. Not that she thought it was wicked. It was that there was no way not to have a baby. She didn’t want to be hustled into marrying any of these boys.

      In summer they’d make up a party, half a dozen boys and girls, with Bert along to make it all right, and go down to the swimming hole. She loved the hot air hanging under the trees, the cicadas boring away into the afternoon, the silky feel of the water. She’d duck right under and swim along through the tea-coloured water, seeing the rounded stones and the little fish flickering away. Esme and Lois didn’t swim, not really, because they wanted to keep their hair dry. They bobbed up and down in the shallow part, only their heads showing. Nance couldn’t be bothered. But they’ll see, Esme said. You know, the shape of your…you know. Oh, let them! Nance said. Nothing much to see, is there?

      A dozen went on to the Leaving at Tamworth High that year: ten boys, plus Una Dowe and Nance Russell. Nance knew that Una was cleverer than she was but old Dowe didn’t believe in education for girls and there was no money, so Una was only allowed to go on if she had a job. She had to rush out of school every afternoon to work in the kitchen at the hospital. At least I get a decent feed, she said.

      There weren’t enough going on to the Leaving to have a choice of subjects. They all did English, Latin, French, Maths, Modern History and Botany. But there was no proper teaching for the senior class. Mr Crisp got them started with Macbeth but then his promotion to principal came through and he left for Sydney. The new English teacher was marking time till he retired and his idea of teaching was to make them copy passages while he popped out for a smoke. The Maths teacher left and there was no replacement for six months. They had five French teachers in a year. The Botany teacher was really a History teacher and admitted in a weak moment that he was reading the textbook every night to stay a page ahead of the class.

      In the final year everyone put their names down for a Teachers’ College scholarship. Nance didn’t know if she wanted to be a teacher, but for a girl there was only that or nursing. She thought Dolly would be pleased but she exploded. Over her dead body Nance was going to be a teacher! She didn’t say what she did want for her daughter, and Nance didn’t ask. You didn’t argue with Dolly when she had one of her rages on.

      At the Leaving, Nance got five Bs and a Lower Pass in Botany. That meant she’d matriculated, though barely. The university would accept her. She’d have liked to go, study History and English and more French. But what was the point of thinking about it? You couldn’t do anything with History and English except teach, and Dolly wouldn’t have that.

      Una had a place at the Teachers’ College, but no scholarship. Have to go nursing, she said, matter-of-fact. That’s the way it is. Had my chance.

      Dolly had been talking to the pharmacy man from down the road and he’d told her Nance should do pharmacy. It was a real profession, higher up than being a teacher. It was nearly like being a doctor. Everyone called the pharmacist Dr Cohen, and he wore a white coat and had a doctor’s grave manner. But medicine was an expensive five-year degree whereas pharmacy was an apprenticeship. Three years of apprenticeship, and a few university courses at the same time. For the daughter of pub-keepers, that put pharmacy up the ladder but not out of reach.

      And pharmacy was good for a girl. A woman teacher only got half what a man did, and had to leave if she got married. A woman pharmacist got the same as a man and, if she wanted to go on working after she married, she could.

      Nance didn’t think she wanted to do pharmacy. Fiddling around with smelly things in bottles, standing in a stuffy shop all day listening to people go on about their bunions. But she could see it was as good as done in Dolly’s mind. Dolly got Bert to go down to Sydney to see Dr Pattinson of Washington Soul’s, to find out about being an apprentice. Not his offsider, mind, Dolly said. You want something done, you go to the butcher, not the maggots on the block!

      He came back saying Washington Soul’s didn’t take any girl apprentices, though a girl might get in with a small chemist somewhere. Good, Nance thought, that doesn’t sound likely. Then a man came to stay at the pub, a commercial traveller in pharmacy lines, silver-tongued, buttering up Mrs Russell. Turned out he knew a man named Stevens in Sydney. Enmore, not far from the university. He was looking for an apprentice, wouldn’t mind a girl.

      My word, Nance, Bert boomed down the table at her,