Dresses of Red and Gold Read online

  ROBIN KLEIN is an award-winning author of more than seventy books for children and young adults, several of which have been adapted for television, stage and film.

  Robin was born in the small town of Kempsey in New South Wales in 1936, one of nine children. She went to Newcastle Girls’ High, left school at the age of fifteen and had her first story published at sixteen. She worked as a tea lady, a telephonist, a bookshop assistant, a photography teacher, a nurse, a library assistant, a painter, a potter and a copper enameller. She married and had four children.

  Robin’s first book, a verse picture book called The Giraffe in Pepperell Street, was published in 1978, and she became a full-time writer in 1981. In 1982, Thing won the CBCA Junior Fiction Book of the Year, and in 1983 Penny Pollard’s Diary was highly commended in the same award. Robin won her second CBCA award, for Came Back to Show You I Could Fly, in 1990. And All in the Blue Unclouded Weather, the first book in her Melling sisters trilogy, won the New South Wales State Literary Awards Children’s Book of the Year in 1992.

  Robin said of her writing process, ‘I can do up to about fifteen drafts. I start off making a master sheet of everything I want to say and a basic outline of the plot. Then I work straight onto the machine, not worrying particularly about typing mistakes or errors. I just want to get the ideas down before I’ve lost them. And after that, it’s just a process of going through and rewriting.’

  In 1991, Robin won the Dromkeen Medal for services to Australian children’s and young adult literature. Due to illness, she no longer writes.

  FIONA WOOD is the author of three young adult novels: Wildlife and Cloudwish, which both won the CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers, and Six Impossible Things. Fiona lives in Melbourne.

  SELECT TITLES BY ROBIN KLEIN

  The Giraffe in Pepperell Street

  Thing

  Penny Pollard’s Diary

  People Might Hear You

  Hating Alison Ashley

  Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left

  Boss of the Pool

  Don’t Tell Lucy

  Laurie Loved Me Best

  Honoured Guest

  Came Back to Show You I Could Fly

  All in the Blue Unclouded Weather

  Seeing Things

  Turn Right for Zyrgon

  The Sky in Silver Lace

  The Listmaker

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Slender Means and Big Ideas by Fiona Wood

  Dresses of Red and Gold

  Bogeyman

  A Gift from the Rajah

  Wolf on the Fold

  Bridesmaid

  Glamour Girl

  Lilith’s Curse

  An Act of Luminous Goodness

  Treasure Hunt

  Dresses of Red and Gold

  Moving On

  Slender Means and Big Ideas

  by Fiona Wood

  IF you have ever been infuriated by a bossy, patronising older sister, or terrified wondering who or what is making that noise outside during a power blackout on a stormy night, or just so annoyed by the biggest show-off in your class, you will find, perhaps unexpectedly, that you have a whole lot in common with Robin Klein’s characters from the 1940s, the Melling sisters.

  First published in 1992, Dresses of Red and Gold is the second volume of the Melling sisters trilogy. Each chapter is a complete episode, making for a book that can be happily dipped in and out of.

  In Klein’s portrait of a working-class family, set in Australia in the years following the Second World War, Heather, Cathy and Vivienne continue small-town life in Wilgawa, following older sister Grace’s departure to work and live in the ‘beautiful, beautiful city’, and their father’s increasingly frequent stints away from home, looking for work. Their mother remains vague, capable, irritable and brusquely affectionate. The girls’ cousin, ‘that appalling Isobel’ is still ‘a skitey loudmouth’ and an outrageous liar.

  Poverty and misfortune are favourite conditions in children’s fiction. It is satisfying seeing characters overcoming seemingly insurmountable difficulties. From fairy tales to books such as Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children, impoverished circumstances, or even a downturn in fortune for a family, always hooked me into a story as a young reader; I was prompted to ask what I would do, and how I would cope, if that happened to me.

  The material poverty of the Melling family’s circumstances makes the modern-day life of an equivalent family look luxurious by comparison. Clothes, usually homemade, are passed along from sister to sister until they’re threadbare, toast is spread with pan drippings, not butter, dolls made from wooden pegs are treasured, and there is no money for non-essentials such as piano lessons or real coffee. Treats are infrequent special occasions. At home, children are slapped, threatened, bullied and insulted, without a thought to injured self-esteem or resilience.

  Robin Klein manages to flavour even dire struggles with humour. In ‘An Act of Luminous Goodness’, Vivienne imagines being the single-handed saviour of the impoverished Gathin family (‘…there’s only one word to describe you, Vivienne Melling—you’re a saint!’). Klein offers us a very human and relatable Vivienne, as she wavers between altruism and selfishness, and concludes that saintliness is not ‘all it was cracked up to be’.

  Living in a small community—‘the most boring little place in the whole world’, according to Grace—calls for constant resourcefulness and improvisation, never more so than in finding romance. In ‘A Gift from the Rajah’, Heather is inspired to participate in the parish Home Visiting Scheme by the thought of Mr Everett’s approval, imagining him holding her hand ‘a fraction longer than usual when she volunteered’. A fanciful story from the parishioner she visits prompts further romantic imaginings that see Heather travelling to India, ‘helping thousands of suffering people’ and, naturally, attracting the attention of a young rajah.

  Klein shows us the gaps between what is wished for and what is actually on offer in a way that will be familiar to every teenage reader who longs to escape the confines of reality, believing that there must be something better out there.

  Allowing children to be bored is a popular piece of parenting advice these days—an antidote to over-scheduled childhoods, a stimulant to imagination, something that is never lacking in the lives of the Melling sisters. The girls imagine vivid and improbable futures. Games are original and funny: ‘Isobel, Heather and Vivienne were posted around the paddock using Heather’s semaphore flags to send insulting messages of a personal nature to each other’. Even their plans for retribution are inventive: ‘I’m going to fill a bucket with chook poo and keep it up the tree for ammunition.’

  The Melling sisters’ father is a mixed blessing in their lives. Klein uses the character to illuminate the girls’ varying stages of maturity. While Grace finds him unreliable and unacceptably vulgar, Cathy still trusts him sufficiently to ask his help in saving her pride following her lies about a lavish birthday party, in ‘Treasure Hunt’. He is shown to the reader as child-like himself in ‘Wolf on the Fold’ when he, no less than the girls, squirms under the scrutiny and housekeeping rigours of Aunt Ivy, who arrives uninvited when the girls’ mother is called away from home.

  Perhaps my favourite aspect of the book is the portrayal of power play, sniping and jostling for advantage between the siblings and their cousin; it all rings very true. In ‘Bridesmaid’, Vivienne jealously longs for the glamorous title role. The honour has been given to an unappreciative Cathy, goddaughter of the bride. Vivienne is not even wanted by her mother as a lowly decorations assistant: ‘Stop breathing down my neck, it’s like standing next to a llama!’

 
; When Vivienne tries the bridesmaid dress on—imagining herself as a chestnut-haired princess—she’s caught out, called a ‘wicked little hussy’ and smacked. Undaunted, she plays every advantage in her continued attempts to get her own way. It reminded me of a thousand small battles with my own siblings, and the importance of an occasional victory.

  Klein does not hesitate to push her characters—and us—into moments of excruciating discomfort. One example of this is Vivienne’s confronting exposure to the Half-Man at the Easter Show at question time the ‘silence was gluey with embarrassment’, and afterwards Vivienne feels ‘diminished by private shame’. Another, in ‘Glamour Girl’, is Isobel’s desperate attempt to retain her role as class sophisticate in the face of stiff competition from new girl, Paulette Makepiece. Robin Klein has Isobel write herself a letter, read it silently in class—ensuring she is noticed—tear it up and eat it, knowing that it will be thought to be a love letter. But even extreme measures such as this, and claiming Ginger Rogers as a cousin, are no longer sufficient with the arrival of a popular new girl, and we prickle with discomfort at Isobel’s growing desperation to regain her status.

  The three books deal with ideas around growing up, growing in self-knowledge and growing away from the family. Klein gives her characters numerous revelations and insights to illustrate such growth. Heather realises that one reason their mother wants Grace to return home from the city is so that she can contribute board to the struggling household, and the final episode of Dresses of Red and Gold, ‘Moving On’, hints at further downturns in fortune and the unforgiving winter of the third volume of the trilogy, The Sky in Silver Lace, at the end of which an austere spring arrives.

  The Melling sisters books are a delight, evoking with warmth and humour the post-war world of hope and possibility, expressed through the dreams and aspirations of four girls of slender means and big ideas.

  The characters—resourceful, tough, funny and irreverent—embody a romantic notion of how childhood might have been experienced in a less regulated time. In this trilogy, Klein reminds her readers to value freedom and independence in childhood, and implicitly tells us that human worth does not depend on material circumstances, a particularly relevant message for readers at a time when our appetite for disposable manufactured goods continues to threaten our planet.

  Dresses of Red and Gold

  For Alison Aprhys

  Bogeyman

  ‘What a lot of rubbish! People in uniform all look exactly alike in snapshots,’ said Heather Melling, who felt obliged to squelch from time to time because of being the eldest. ‘It was probably just a stray soldier from another unit wandered in.’

  ‘He stepped on a land mine and got blown to smithereens,’ Isobel repeated, unsquelched. ‘But later on when all the fighting was over they took a group photo, and when they printed it—there he was! Looking over someone’s shoulder in the back row and giving the victory sign—except he was a bit fuzzy around the edges…’

  ‘So would you be if you’d stepped on a mine.’

  ‘It happens to be true, because I read about it in a magazine. It was this bloke, all right, come back from the dead to be in the photo with his mates.’

  ‘Don’t talk about creepy things when we’re here all by ourselves,’ Vivienne pleaded, but as she was the youngest, nobody took the slightest notice.

  ‘There’s another thing I read in a magazine. It was in England, everyone woke up in the morning and found these enormous footprints in the snow. They travelled in a dead straight line all across the countryside, only they didn’t go around things, they went right over. Even over church roofs and steeples, mile after mile of footprints—then they just sort of petered out in the middle of nowhere. People said they were cloven.’

  ‘Cloven—you mean like cows? Cows can’t get up on church roofs.’

  ‘Cows aren’t the only ones who’ve got cloven hooves. Or horns, either, for that matter…’

  Vivienne poked the fire to make it crackle and to distract herself from Isobel. It wasn’t a good time to be telling weird stories with the autumn wind moaning around the old house and throwing handfuls of splintery rain against the windows. The ceiling light flickered, and she glanced at the mantelpiece to make sure the emergency candle and box of matches were in place. Mum couldn’t be relied upon to supervise that; during the last power failure they’d found a banana absent-mindedly wedged into the candlestick. A loose sheet of iron on the roof clattered, and she thought of cloven hooves, but tugged her mind resolutely away to concentrate on the toast. Toast made in front of the living-room fire and spread with bacon dripping always tasted wonderful, specially with cocoa.

  ‘Hey, I just thought—wouldn’t it be spooky if you poured a mug of cocoa, then turned your back for a minute and when you turned around the mug was empty?’ Isobel said.

  ‘Not in this house it wouldn’t, that sort of thing happens quite often,’ Cathy said. ‘I’ll tell you something really spooky, though, that serial on the wireless where they kept hearing a voice croaking, “Water…water…” You should have seen Viv—she was too scared to go down the back at night while it was on. So we had to go with her—even when it turned out the voice was only a parrot trapped in an air vent…If you’re not eating that last slice of toast, chuck it over here.’

  ‘Toast and bacon dripping,’ Isobel grumbled. ‘You never have anything elegant to eat at your house. If I’d known you were only having this for supper I’d have stayed home and practised my Spanish dancing.’

  ‘You weren’t even invited in the first place, Isobel Dion—you just showed up!’ Heather said indignantly. ‘I’m not even sure I should be letting you, with Dad up the bush and Mum stopping the night at Aunty Cessie’s and neither of them here to say if you can or not.’

  ‘Well, you can’t make me go home now, it would be like turfing someone out in a snowstorm…Did you ever read that whodunit where a lady gets murdered in a little garden summer-house and there’s been a snow blizzard, but—and here comes the creepy part—whoever did it never left any tracks!’

  ‘What was the stupid thing doing in a summer-house in the middle of a blizzard?’ Cathy asked. ‘She would have froze to death, anyhow, so the murderer just got in first. I can go one better than that—I read this story once where someone got stabbed with an icicle and the police never found the murder weapon because it melted!’

  ‘I wish you’d all talk about something else,’ Vivienne said. The wind seemed to be strengthening, probing all the chinks in the house, but the living-room was snug with its dancing fire and new window curtains. Mum had made them from an old mosquito net, sewing bobbles around the hems. Vivienne watched the rain silvering the panes behind the net, thinking how romantic autumn was. ‘“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…” ’ she whispered to herself.

  ‘Do you realise people going by can peer in through those net curtains?’ Isobel said. ‘I know you don’t get much traffic this far up Sawmill Road, but there’s always the chance of awful old swaggies looking for a free meal. Or escaped lunatics…though I guess that wouldn’t trouble you all that much. You’re used to your dad, so they’d just seem normal if they came knocking on the door.’

  ‘Knocking thrice,’ Cathy said. ‘That’s what they always say in books—knock thrice and enter. I used to think thrice was a person when I was little, “He knocked, Thrice, at the door, then entered”. I imagined him as this lurky figure in a grey robe with holes for eyes—that’s if he even had any. Thrice is a shuddery kind of word if you think about it…’

  Vivienne drew closer to the fire, wrapping both hands around the enamel mug for comfort. Cocoa wasn’t a shuddery word. Cocoa was associated with autumn gilding the trees in the hospital garden up the hill, hot rice pudding sprinkled with nutmeg, wearing shoes instead of running barefoot out into the early morning to fetch the cow…

  ‘Haggis was another word that used to scare me,’ Cathy said reminiscently. ‘I imagined it like a jackal thing scuttling about in the mi
st and kind of wailing—like this…’ The sound she made screeched horribly up a scale and down the other side, and the cat at Vivienne’s feet shot away under the table, hissing.

  ‘Did you know animals can see things humans can’t?’ Isobel asked, watching the cat with interest. ‘They’ve got special sight. We used to have this old ginger tom and he’d sort of freeze and stare off into the distance with his fur on end…only nothing was ever there!’

  ‘Bluey does that sometimes on the road up near Baroongal Flats,’ Cathy said. ‘He slinks along with his belly close to the ground and growls like crazy. Do you think maybe he’s seeing something invisible we can’t?’

  ‘Tripe,’ Heather said. ‘That road’s where Dad found him tied to a tree and starving for goodness knows how long and brought him home. Bluey just remembers someone was cruel to him there, that’s all.’

  Vivienne, rather wishing Bluey was home right then instead of keeping Dad company prospecting, glanced at the net curtains. Isobel was right—anyone passing by could look in at them gathered about the fireside, four girls all alone…Thrice could look in, things with cloven hooves…None of the others seemed troubled, however, and Isobel was offering to do Heather’s hair in a stunning new style she’d seen in a film. Vivienne was sent off to find hairpins and side combs, but hesitated at the dark reservoir of shadows beyond the hall archway.

  ‘What’s the matter—scared of the bogeyman?’ Isobel hooted.

  ‘She thinks they’re real,’ Cathy said.

  ‘What a sook! I gave up being scared of bogeymen when I was only five—I always reckoned they’d be scared stiff of me!’

  Vivienne, embarrassed into bravery, ventured up the hall into Grace’s room—although Heather hadn’t let them call it that since Grace had gone to live in the city to study dressmaking. She’d moved herself and her belongings into that front room before the taxi taking Grace to the station was barely out of the driveway. Vivienne found the combs, but while searching for the box of hairpins heard something outside bump against the weatherboards. The sound stopped and didn’t recur, but it was quite enough to send her scurrying back down the hall at a speed she had to disguise as diligence.