Either one merrily trudged a pathway mile, and then caught a North Shore cable tram to the point where the Ferry boat leaves for the Circular Quay, or one entrusted one’s life and well-being to a vehicle that might have been a Noah’s Ark, or a bathing machine, or a convict van.
In ancient days it used to run between Shoalhaven and Moss-Vale, as its red painted sides still bore witness, but travellers in those parts did better for themselves, so they brought it here, and charged sixpence each way for the twenty-five minutes’ journey. Now there is a combination of the railway; pressure was brought to bear, and the New South Wales Government finished in a hurry [p 15] ]a work that had dragged on till people despaired of its completion. The line winds down towards the chimneys and smoke of ‘The Shore’; one has glimpses from the train of blue bright bays and white sails moored boats, and a broken wharf or two waiting to catch the artist’s eye. Then it skirts along the harbour, close to the water, in a semi-circular sweep, and makes an eye-sore. Two years ago, Lavender Bay was beautiful.
But about the Red Road. Just at the top of one of the elevations, there was a big stone house standing in the middle of an orange and lemon orchard. Dot’s mother lived here by herself.
A mile and a half away down the road there was a weather-board cottage in a garden running over with flowers. Larrie and Dot lived here, and the baby of course. They had been going up to ‘mother’s’ the afternoon they quarrelled about carrying the child; they always went on Sundays.
Very often Dot went on Mondays too, [p 16] ]that was the day Peggie, her aide-de-camp, made the cottage unsavoury with soap-suds. Tuesday nights they always had dinner up at the house, Peggie never had time to cook on Tuesdays, there were so many of Dot’s dresses and Larrie’s shirts, and baby’s multitudinous garments to be finely ironed.
On Thursdays and Saturdays the mother used to come down to the cottage and put it straight, and help poor Peggie, and bring a new knitted jacket or bootees or a hood or pinafore for baby.
The house was a big lonely place for such a little woman. She was even smaller than Dot. She had a tiny fragile figure, and a tiny face, brown and shrivelled with Australian suns. Her eyes were very big and pathetic, something like Dot’s in wistful moments, and her mouth with its infinitude of lines, was very sweet.
After her eyes, her brooch was the first thing that invited notice. It was one of those large, very old-fashioned ones with a miniature set on the front of it. Dot had [p 17] ]begged her to cease wearing it; ‘It isn’t good taste,’ she had said once vexedly, ‘keep it in a drawer;’ but the mother would not lay it aside even though it was the only thing in which she had ever thwarted Dot in her life.
When she went to bed she pinned it on her night-gown, when she dressed in the morning she fastened her collar with it. A hundred times a day her fingers strayed to it. In her sleep her hand stole up and closed upon it.
The miniature was of a very young man in the old fashioned naval uniform that used to be worn forty years ago. He had the correct miniature smile, but the eyes were well done and you could see his brow had been splendid. He was Dot’s father, dead sixteen years ago; it was the only likeness he had ever had taken.