“Don’t you have big paddocks there?”
“Is it paddocks? Sure, we don’t have them at all. Little green fields we do be having—always green.”
“It must look different from Australia—in summer, at all events,” I said. “I’d like to see it, Julia.”
She glanced at me, for the first time.
“Would you, now? There’s not many Australians says that: they do be pokin’ fun at a person’s country, as often as not. Maybe ’tis yourself is pokin’ fun too?”
“Indeed, I’m not,” I said hastily. “My grandmother was Irish, and though she died when I was a little girl, I can remember ever so many things that she used to tell us about Ireland. My father said she was always homesick for it.”
“And you’d be that all your life, till you got back there,” said Julia. She looked full at me now, and I could see the home-sickness in her eyes.
“Well, I’m homesick myself, Julia, so I can imagine how you feel,” I said. She wasn’t much older than I—and just then I felt very young. “My home is only a little flat in a Melbourne suburb, but it seems millions of miles away!”
“Yerra, then, I suppose it might,” said Julia, half under her breath. “An’ you only a shlip of a gerrl, f’r all you’re that tall!”
“And I’m scared of my job, Julia,” I said desperately. “I think it’s a bit too big for me.”