A Woman of Courage by J.H. Fletcher Page A

Northcote Farm School in Bacchus Marsh.’
    â€˜Is it nice?’
    â€˜You’ll find out, won’t you? When you get there.’
    6
    â€˜We’ll have no messin’,’ Captain Barnstable said. ‘That’s the first lesson you got to learn. Any messin’, you’re looking at trouble. Get it?’ And slammed his big stick on the surface of his desk with a wallop that made the children jump.
    Captain Barnstable was a scowl with whiskers, red and ferocious, and a button nose set between eyes the colour of slate.
    â€˜You get along with me, we’ll be right. Any tricks and I’ll grind you to dust. Get it ?’
    It made them wonder what they’d come to. They’d been told they were being taken to a place called Something-Marsh so Hilary had expected they’d be living in some kind of swamp. She couldn’t imagine it but there was nothing she could do but sit in the rattle-bang of a worn-out truck for what seemed like hours and try not to think.
    â€˜If it’s a marsh there’ll be frogs,’ said a girl called Agnes. ‘I like frogs. I had a tadpole in a jam jar once. That grew into a frog.’
    â€˜What happened to it?’
    â€˜It escaped.’
    It was something to cling on to; certainly there wasn’t much else.
    If there were frogs there might be snakes, Hilary thought. Snakes were a different matter, but she didn’t say anything; Agnes was the nervous type, a year younger than she was, and it didn’t take much to set her off.
    The way things worked out it didn’t matter anyway because where they were taken wasn’t a marsh or a swamp or anything like that. It was a farm with grass and cows and a horse or two with cottages set well apart from each other, some for girls, others for boys. Captain Barnstable and a woman called Wilmot, who had scragged-back black hair turning grey and arms like hams, were in charge. They ordered them about all the time. The town called Bacchus Marsh was a few miles off and in any case was out of bounds.
    â€˜There’s a lock-up there,’ mean-eyed Mrs Wilmot said. ‘Oldest in Australia. With rats. Catch you there, they’ll stick you in one of their cells.’
    With the rats? Agnes looked scared and no wonder. But the food at Northcote Farm wasn’t much and after a week or two they were that hungry that some of the kids were beginning to wonder whether it might be possible to eat rats.
    â€˜Yuck!’ said some, especially the girls.
    But others weren’t so sure. ‘Better’n starving to death,’ said Cyril Dabbs, who was little and cocky and liked to make out he was tough.
    â€˜More likely they’d eat you,’ said Bert Friend, who had no time for Cyril. ‘Course, they might be too fussy to do that.’
    Which led to words and then a free-for-all and after that, inevitably, to a leathering for the pair of them from Captain Barnstable.
    It was all beside the point anyway because the only time they got to themselves was Sunday afternoons and there was no time to get to Bacchus Marsh and back, even if they’d wanted.
    Some of the kids were taken there on a Sunday morning to go to church although mostly they had to go to a sort of chapel that had been rigged up in one of the cottages. The ones who’d seen Bacchus Marsh said there was nothing there worth seeing. Even the famous lock-up didn’t look like much but Hilary wanted to go anyway.
    â€˜We’re not supposed to,’ Agnes said.
    â€˜That’s why I want to do it,’ Hilary said.
    Mrs Wilmot liked to crack knuckles with a sharp-edged ruler. She had Hilary down as a bit of a rebel and was right.
    Girls weren’t supposed to go out unsupervised but one Sunday afternoon Hilary slipped away and nobody noticed. There were lots of trees with hills blue in the distance. No houses or proper roads or anything like that.
    At the end of a forested track she came to a deep gorge