Scattered to the Winds

Joy Thomas

Description

‘Scattered to the Winds’ pursues Gee as she navigates her way through a life packed with secrets. This life entwines with her husband Alfred, an Irish sailor Michael and Dennis, a small town lad from the wheatbelt of Western Australia. Set towards the end of the Second World War. It ranges from Fremantle to areas of the Pacific war zone and back to Fremantle. It continues to the “Golden West’s” Wheatbelt region after the war is over.
Gee has a secret. It isn’t a secret about death and dire consequences. Yes, she has a secret in fact she has more than one, but it’s about fighting for her own existence, realising the futility of her love and of surviving a life that resulted in a woman needing to leave her children behind. Did the circumstances force her into this decision or did she decide it was the best for all? Choices or fate. I have no idea. Recollections of her own childhood defined a difficult woman to know. She had learnt early on how to manipulate any circumstances to her advantage in which she found herself. Running from her memories and never facing her choices enabled her to move on to make a new life. Over the time she changed her name, her age, her look, but her personality and her loud laugh stayed the same.
With Gee never truly finding a sense of peace.

Sujets

• Historical
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669832621
• Langue: English

Extrait

SCATTERED TO THE WINDS










Joy Thomas



Copyright © 2022 by Joy Thomas.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022920264
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-3264-5
Softcover
978-1-6698-3263-8
eBook
978-1-6698-3262-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover photo Joy Thomas




Rev. date: 11/14/2022




Xlibris
AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)
www.Xlibris.com.au
847718



CONTENTS
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 1993: Dennis
Chapter 2 1915: Georgina
Chapter 3 1944: Michael
Chapter 4 Gee Meets Michael
Chapter 5 Air-Raid Practice
Chapter 6 Fire
Chapter 7 Letters from home
Chapter 8 Grace
Chapter 9 Office
Chapter 10 House in Queens Park
Chapter 11 Easter Races
Chapter 12 Leaving Port
Chapter 13 You Have Mail
Chapter 14 Alfred
Chapter 15 Subic Bay
Chapter 16 Dennis
Chapter 17 Gee’s Holiday
Chapter 18 Michael’s VP Day
Chapter 19 POWs
Chapter 20 Michael Leaving
Chapter 21 Alfred Returns
Chapter 22 Michael Returns
Chapter 23 Gee
Chapter 24 Michael
Chapter 25 Gee
Chapter 26 Dennis
Chapter 27 Gee and Mary
Chapter 28 Marriage
Chapter 29 Honeymoon
Chapter 30 1991: Banbridge
Chapter 31 1991: Carlisle



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A big thankyou to those who encouraged me to continue. In particular Wayne Morgan who had the dubious task of wading through the first few drafts and Penny Foulks for reading my final copy and wanting more.
#
In memory of my aunt, whose life was uncovered after my uncle’s death.
In memory of the Irish sailor whose name may have been Michael.
In memory of my uncle who lived in blind faith that all was right with his world.
#
Though based on fact, it is a work of fiction.
World War2 events were researched on Wikipedia sites.
The characters, personalities and life around these events are fictionalised.



CHAPTER 1
1993: Dennis
The phone’s ring was loud and insistent, yelling at Holly through the front door as she fumbled with her collection of keys to find the correct key. Pushing the door open with her shoulder, she dropped her load of books; sidestepped Max, the small black dog; and dashed to grab the receiver before it stopped and that damn answering machine took over.
‘Good afternoon, Miss. I’m hoping to speak to a Holly Jackson?’
‘That’s me,’ she replied and discovered that she was talking to a police officer from the other side of the Swan River. They had found him, her uncle Dennis, and wanted someone to identify the body, and Holly’s note on his fridge made her that someone. What other body would be there? He was the only scrawny old bloke who lived there. Holly had left her name and number on a large, tatty piece of yellowed notepaper, which was all she could find at the time, and had taped it to his fridge.
‘For emergencies’, she had said.
‘If you need anything’, she had said.
‘Now don’t forget it’s there,’ she had said, putting it there after her aunt Gee had died and knowing full well he wouldn’t ring.
Driving east towards Carlisle through the Perth afternoon traffic, Holly, feeling guilty, had wondered about his last moments, picturing him sitting in his favourite chair. Maybe he was sitting at the kitchen table, the only two spots in the place that were uncluttered. He had to have a smile on his face no matter where he was. Holly couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t have a smile on his face or a laugh just bubbling away under the surface.
He was a tall – or had been – upright, and cheeky bloke, always up for a joke and a beer. Often, hanging unsteadily out the side of his mouth was his pipe or a rollie, bobbing around until he was ready to light up. These thin, perfectly formed white tobacco cylinders were made by rolling the tobacco between his nicotine-stained hands, placing the scraggly tobacco mix in the middle of a sheet of thin white cigarette paper, and then rolling it all between his fingers before licking left to right along the long edge of the paper with the tip of his tongue to glue it together with his spit; he then stored it in his tobacco tin.
Last time Holly had visited, it had been his chewed pipe suspended from his lips. Just like his father’s it bounced around, with the ash and tobacco spilling out as he laughed or avoided answering questions by only using singular syllables as his entire vocabulary, ‘no’ or ‘yes’ or just a nod and a grunt, followed by a chuckle.
In the confines of her vehicle memories of their shared yesterdays flitted through, snapshots; not quite fully formed of Christmas holidays where her uncle Dennis’ usual greeting was by rubbing his stubbly chin all over the kids’ faces. They would collapse in laughter and then try to escape before there was another bout of stubbly rubbing. He spent his semi-sober moments playing cricket with all the kids out the back near the woodpile at Auntie Nan and Uncle Digby’s farm or anywhere along the beach if Christmas was at Holly’s place.
Uncle Dennis always played. ‘How’s that?’ he’d yell; then in his next breath, he’d shout, ‘Not out!’ He picked up the younger kids and ran with them to the crease, which was just a line drawn in the sand. The wickets? Well, they could be a forty-four-gallon drum or a couple of kerosene tins or from a new cricket set that Father Christmas had left for one of them under the Christmas tree to discover. Uncle Dennis was always running around like one of the kids, pretending he couldn’t catch or throw, rolling on the ground, and all the time flexing his muscles and showing off to her aunt Gee.
That was before they had vanished from their small country wheatbelt town east of Perth. They took their caged galahs and vanished. Upped and left, no note, nothing, just drove away and never returned.
One of Aunt Gee’s close friends, the elderly local vet who moved into their house, happily told anyone who asked, or even if they didn’t ask, that he was given the deeds to the house with a big thank-you hug from Gee. ‘She just handed them to me, you know, in this yellow envelope.’ No indication that he knew where they had gone. He had quickly moved in with his large extended family, kids and grandkids, and avoided any questions about Dennis and Gee. ‘No, no idea. She never told me.’
Holly’s mum, Elsie, was surprised when she found out that they had disappeared. ‘Didn’t think Dennis would ever leave that place. Almost kept the pub going by himself,’ Elsie laughed sardonically.
Holly giggled at the memory of cracked china and broken glass as her mother’s resentment took over as she couldn’t talk to her brother. ‘Why didn’t they keep in touch? It’s all because of that woman.’ Elsie blamed Aunt Gee. Possibly, that woman blamed not just Elsie but also the whole family, or maybe she didn’t care what anyone else thought. ‘It’s that woman he’s married to, something funny there. We don’t know anything about her. Do we? Bet she’s the reason they didn’t have any kids, why they ran away, she would have made him do it, poor bugger,’ was Elsie’s assumption. ‘Dennis doesn’t just jump when she asks.’
The search that ensued was relentless, with the endless checking of phone books and the electoral rolls. Elsie rang up anyone who might remotely be Uncle Dennis. Any name with Brown, Dennis, D. and G. Brown, or D. Brown and even just G. Brown. Nothing turned up until finally Holly’s dad, Andy, looking to upgrade his kombi, stumbled across them at a used-car sales yard in Welshpool. It was Aunt Gee’s distinctive offbeat, heavy smoker’s laugh that alerted him. They were almost unrecognisable. Aunt Gee had aged greatly while Uncle Dennis looked like a shadow of himself; he had lost his sports physique and gained a belly that was soft and flabby. Still not wanting to join in, it became a bit of a game in the family to see who could wangle them to come to any family get-togethers. Gee and Dennis had made it to a couple of birthday bashes but definitely no Christmas celebrations or even Andy’s funeral.
After the thirty-minute drive from the coast along the freeway, through the city, over the Narrows Bridge and along Shepperton Road, Holly pulled her yellow Mini into the driveway of the corner duplex unit. She was welcomed by cats glaring hopefully at her. There were moggies yowling everywhere, all shapes, sizes, and colours, far too numerous to count. Several scraggy, long-legged, and unkempt kittens played and skittered away from one another. Some raced to greet her; even more stared out from under the now defunct, flat-tyred vintage Holden in the carport. They were hiding behind the house in the lean-to and peeking out of the pile of logs