The Most Beautiful Place in the World - short story (fiction)

Thursday  July 7th  1932

The cold pressed heavy and constant over the world in which Lillian existed.

She could never get warm.  The cold gnawed at her body like a incessant tooth-ache.  She could not shake free of it. She layered clothes over her skeletal frame.  The many layers made her feel like a cabbage:  Three jumpers, a thick cotton skirt over a wool petticoat, two pairs of long socks, leather boots, her favourite cloche hat, gloves, and a thin coat.  The clothes were thread bare and the coat was almost useless.  Although, Lillian liked the hat.  It made her feel almost ‘middle-class’ again. The way she had felt two years earlier when she and her husband, John, were living in their comfortable blue-stone villa in a middle-class suburb of Adelaide .

John had then been working as a chartered accountant with a large city firm, while she had kept the house and cared for their young son, George. Things had been so different. She had felt safe and certain about life.  She and John had been happy.  She’d even found time to paint.

During her privileged childhood her parents had paid for a private art tutor and later, when she’d attended the prestigious Walford Girl’s College, she’d received a further five years of art-lessons.  Painting was her passion. Although, she never painted for pleasure now.

She dug around the few possession she still owned until she found what she was looking for. Home was now a shelter beside the River Torrens in the centre of the city.  Since the Depression began, in October 1929, the banks of the river had become dotted with a growing colony of shanties.

The ‘shanties’ were crude shelters made from whatever materials could be scavenged locally:  Scraps of corrugated iron, hessian, wood, and cardboard. The shanties grew like bacteria on an agar-plate, spreading outward from the river: Ugly, smelly, noxious, and unwanted by the clean and civilised inhabitants of the city.  The unemployed homeless squatting around the city in the shanties were a disgrace and an embarrassment to polite society.  And Lillian felt ashamed to be a part of such a useless group.

She was glad that her snobbish parents couldn’t see her now.  They’d disowned her when she married John. She’d married ‘beneath her station in life,’ they’d told her. They could never forgive her for going against their wishes. She recalled their final words: ‘You’ll be sorry!’ She wondered now whether they were right.  Maybe ‘love’ wasn’t enough.

Lillian had no calendar but she knew the date.  It was Thursday July 7th 1932. It was her son George’s fourth birthday.  She felt so terribly sad and inadequate, as a mother, in that on his birthday she couldn’t be with him. The visiting-hours at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital were strictly on Mondays and Fridays only.  It was Thursday.  She wished that she could sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him, kiss his cheek, and hug him.

Another month.  Maybe two. That’s how long the doctors thought that he’d need to stay in the hospital. She’d taken him there six weeks earlier with gastroenteritis. Infections were endemic in the shanties related to the poor sanitation, unsafe water, and malnutrition.  The persistent cold didn’t help either. When the doctors had examined George they’d found a myriad of other health problems: Chronic ear infections, scabies, failure-to-thrive , and early rickets.

How could she have let her child’s health get to this? What kind of  thoughtless and inadequate mother was she?

She decided that if she couldn’t see her son on his birthday, she would buy him a present and give it to him the following day:  A little car, possibly ... or a ball.

She looked down at the small object, wrapped in a cotton handkerchief, which she now held in her hand.  She’d hidden it away when they’d been evicted from their home.  The bank had forced them to sell everything they owned to repay their debts. However, she’d managed to keep a few small pieces of jewellery. They were nothing terribly expensive. She’d sewn them into the lining of her coat. The Government Sustenance rations were food coupons.  If cash was ever needed she had her small pieces of jewellery to pawn. The item she held, an amethyst brooch, was the last of her worldly possessions worth any money.  She would pawn it for her son.

Lillian put the small wrapped object into her handbag and looked into her husband’s shaving mirror to check that she looked presentable for a trip to the city stores:  Her short dark hair was tidy and pulled to one side with a clip. Her pale skin was clean - although she realised that she had aged a lot over the last two years.  She was still only 28, but her face appeared gaunt and grey, and there were lines etched more deeply into her forehead. She noticed the sadness and hopelessness in her brown eyes.  She had tried to appear happy, especially for her son.  She wondered how long her eyes had betrayed her charade.

‘Where are you going?’ her husband, a blonde and handsome young man in his early 30’s demanded as he entered the shelter. He was returning from the river where he’d washed and had a yarn with a few of the other blokes from the shanties. Lillian detected anger in his tone. He seemed angry a lot of the time these days. Conversations often turned into rows.  She couldn’t cope with another argument.  Not now.

‘Out,’ she replied. ‘I’m going out, John.’

She felt tears well under her lids.  She wiped her face with her coat sleeve and left . Mud soaked through the holes in her boots.  The wind was biting cold and her face burned as she plodded through the drizzling rain.

She hadn’t walked far along King William Road when a bubbly female voice interrupted her thoughts.

‘Lillian!  Is that you?  Yes it is!  Lillian Bartlett!  I haven’t seen you for years!’

Lillian looked up to see a tall blonde woman standing immediately in front of her.  The woman wore an expensive silk drop-waist frock , a smart wool coat, silk stockings, high-heeled shoes and a beautiful cloche hat. She was motioning to a driver in a late model Cadillac to stay parked where he was.

‘Hello, Mildred. How are you?’ Lillian smiled at the woman she recognised. She was an old school friend from Walford College.

‘Oh, what a treat to see you!’ the blonde woman continued excitedly.  ‘It’s been so long.  And you’ll never guess where I’m going right now! Guess!  No, you never will so I’ll tell you.  I’m off to an Old Scholars Bridge Day.  Lillian, if you’re not going anywhere awfully important - won’t you come along?  Life is such a bore these days. Don’t you think? Although, those Charity-ball things are a lot of fun. We get to have all the fun at the balls - and the poor people get a bit of pocket-money.  It's a win-win thing! She laughed. Then, looking at Lillian as if for the first time, she  abruptly stopped laughing and looked away awkwardly. A long silence followed before the blonde woman turned to leave. ‘Well, better go, Lillian. You look ... busy. Toodles, darling!’
 
'Goodbye,' Lillian replied softly as she watched the woman and the car with the driver disappear into a world so far from her own. Two vastly different worlds juxtaposed.

She continued on her way to the pawn brokers, where she exchanged the brooch for a few shillings, and then she walked to the Myer Department store in Rundle street.

The store was warm and dry when she entered.  It was a modern and glamorous place filled with the beautiful fragrances of roses and lavender. She had been present in the shop for only a few moments when a young shop-assistant approached her. The woman addressed her sharply, ‘I think you might need to leave, Madam!’ The woman grabbed her by the elbow and began to turn her to face the exit. ‘We only serve paying customers here,’ she continued. ‘There’s a soup-kitchen further up the road .’

Lillian couldn’t believe the words she was hearing.  Was it really so obvious that she was a homeless. She looked down and realised that she had traipsed mud over the clean tiled floor.  But her son.  She had money.  She was a “paying customer”.

‘I HAVE RIGHT TO BE HERE!  I HAVE MONEY!’ She hardly recognised her own voice.  She sounded hysterical.  The day was turning into a horrible nightmare.  The manager, a middle-aged man wearing a grey three-piece suit was summoned. He stood before her like an angry school principle: ‘What seems to be the problem?’

Before the young sales assistant could speak Lillian took the money from her handbag and held it out in her shaking palm.  ‘I have money!’ she spoke defiantly.  ‘I have money! I have a right ...'

She was shaking and she knew that she had made a spectacle of herself.  Other shoppers were milling about pointing and muttering between themselves. ‘Very well,’ the manager replied.  ‘Just hurry up, buy what you want, and leave. You’re upsetting the staff and the other customers’.  He then turned and left.


Lillian quickly bought a little tin car then she rushed home. However, arriving home she realised that her shelter had been ransacked and the food provisions were gone!  She had been robbed. She thought about the hours she’d spent in queues the previous day, at the Dole Office then the Ration depot.  All gone.  Nothing to eat. What would John say?  What if George were home?  How could she have fed him?

She slumped to the floor, buried her face in her hands, and cried. The tears wouldn't stop.  She'd bottled her feelings for so long.  She'd pushed her misery aside and refused to acknowledge it - until now. And now - like a crumbling dam no longer capable of holding back a  reservoir of painful emotions - her despair rushed to the surface.  The power and fury of her feelings overwhelmed her.  But she no longer had the energy to fight back.

Her tears continued until she could cry no more.  And then, as her  swollen eyes scanned the mess of objects strewn about the floor of the shanty, her attention focused on a painting lying beside her.  It was one of her more recent dark, lonely landscapes:  A storm over the Willunga cliffs, south of Adelaide.  It gave her an idea.  She jotted a short note for her husband, grabbed one of her son’s lovely pencil drawings, and she left.  She had a few shillings remaining in her handbag.  That would cover the train-fare.  She could walk the rest of the way.

Almost two hours later she arrived at her destination.  The clouds were dark and threatened rain.  The ocean waves crashed on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. She sat on the grass and looked out to sea. This would solve everything. The hospital would find George a better home with a better mother.  John would be free to leave. She would tie him to misery no longer.

She looked to the horizon and noticed a lovely yellow glow beyond the cold raging sea. She was a painter and she noticed colours. The soft light on the horizon looked so warm and peaceful.

She stood and took a step forward.  The cold didn’t touch her now.  She felt numb. She took another step forward, and then another, and then, just as she stepped forward again, a powerful arm grabbed her around the waist and threw her back onto the grass.  A heavy figure of a man had his arms around her.  He was sobbing.

‘Lillian!’ It was her husband John’s voice.  ‘Lillian, what in God’s name are you thinking?’

‘How ... How are you here?’ she whispered, confused.

‘I came home early.  I had news. A job! It's permanent. Accounting. I thought you'd be pleased. I wanted to tell you, Lil. I was so happy. But ... your letter.  The painting of the cliffs. I knew. I just knew ... A mate drove. Thank God I was in time!’

Lilian heard some of what he said.  She let him hold her.  She needed to lean on someone.  She could feel the cold wind again cutting through her wet clothes.  He wrapped his coat around her.  ‘The food was stolen,’ she whispered.

‘And that was why you did this, Lillian?!’ He pulled away from her and looked into her desperate brown eyes. ‘Our neighbours knew and they’d already replaced what was stolen from their own rations. You were never alone. You are loved so dearly by so many.’  He hugged her again and held her close.


Saturday July 7th 1934

Lillian carried the birthday cake into the dining-room of their lovely new Californian bungalow.  A cosy fire warmed the room and the children at the birthday-party gathered around the table to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to George. John carried their little girl, Doris, now aged 14 months, over to the table to watch her brother blow out his six candles. 

As the children ran out to play again, Lillian stopped her son and handed him a little present the size of a bread-board and wrapped in brown paper. ‘I made this for you, dear.’

‘Another present!  You already gave me lots of toys, Mummy!’

‘This is a painting. It’s a picture of the most beautiful place in the world.’

‘Wow!’ her son replied as he ripped off the wrapping, eyes wide in anticipation.  He looked at the canvas for a moment and shook his head.  He laughed.  ‘No it’s not, Mummy! It’s just a painting of our family!’

‘You’ll understand what I mean when you’re older, dear.’ She hugged him and kissed his cheek. He then ran off to play with his friends. She smiled.  She was exactly where she wanted to be in her life: The most beautiful place.

The Last Goodbye - short story (based on true events)

Within the room, there was an unmistakable foreboding of death.

It was a small room, set just off from a large ward in the Adelaide Children's Hospital.  A single bed sat in the centre.  And within the bed, under starched white sheets and a white cotton blanket, lay a child struggling to breathe.

The child was 12 years of age and the doctors anticipated she would probably die some time during the night. For this reason, and against the usual strict  hospital visiting-hours policy - the child's mother  had been permitted to stay with her daughter through the night.

The woman sat on a wooden chair beside the bed.  She was slim and aged in her early-forties. She wore a cotton frock, a woollen cardigan, silk stockings and  low-heeled shoes. Her auburn hair was pulled up into a loose bun. Her handbag lay abandoned on the floor at her feet.  She clutched a handkerchief in one hand and her daughter's damp hot fingers in the other.

The stillness of the room was disrupted only by the child’s regular gasps for air, the ticking of a clock on the wall, and the intermittent soft mutterings of the woman.  Her voice was low-pitched and pleading as she searched her daughter’s pale face. At intervals a nurse would appear in the room - expertly giving the child medication, through a line connected to her arm, or taking observations - and then, just as quietly she would disappear again, back into the bowels of the hospital.

The ticking of the clock marked the time intervals to an uncertain future.  Listening to the clock, the woman’s thoughts became consumed with the notion of time and change and sadness.  She thought back to the last time she could remember feeling happy.  She knew it immediately.  It was four years earlier in April of 1943.

Her memory settled on a scene from that time:

She recalled sitting in her kitchen drinking a cup of tea. It was late in the afternoon and the western sun flooded the room in a warm golden light. Through the white lace-curtains she could see the autumn leaves on the four giant almond trees in the rear-garden. Their leaves were like captured sunshine - startingly beautiful against the blue sky. The beauty of the trees humbled the little flower beds growing beneath their bowers. An Irish-stew bubbled away happily on the stove - infusing the room, and the entire house, with the delicious aromas of cooking vegetables, herbs, and meat. 

A click from the back door and happy voices in the hall-way heralded the arrival of her two children: Ronny, then 18 , and Anne, eight.  Anne liked to wait for her brother at the bus stop each evening after he came home from work. That way she could chat with him all the way home. Ronny entered the kitchen first. He marched across the room, wrapped his arm around his mother’s shoulders, and kissed her cheek.

‘How many cups of tea is that?’ he asked playfully, winking at her.

‘Only two, dear,’ she replied, smiling. ‘Did you have a nice day?’

‘Great ... until Nucoms here tackled me at the bus stop!’ He turned to point his finger accusingly at his giggling sister who was skipping into the room carrying a pretty woollen cardigan.

‘He bought me a present, again!  Isn’t it lovely!’

‘Ronny!  You spoil her.  Your wages are for your study books and your ration stamps are meant for you to buy clothes for yourself’.

‘Well the cardigan didn’t fit me mum,’ he was making himself a cup of tea to enjoy with his mother. ‘And the blue did nothing for my eyes.’ He laughed and winked at his sister.

The memory left a smile on the woman’s face for a fleeting moment before she began to softly cry.  She released the hand of her daughter - resting it gently on the blanket.  She then wiped furiously at her eyes with her handkerchief and walked over to the window.  Darkness shrouded the city like a peaceful blanket.  The world was asleep.  Only the woman and the child were living a nightmare on this long night.

The woman gazed out at the street lights creating geometric patterns beyond the glass. A few cars were still out and about, despite the fact it was well past midnight. 

As she watched the night, another memory from the past bubbled to surface of her consciousness. The memory was from two years earlier. It was a hot December night in 1944 during the blackout. She couldn’t sleep. She’d received a letter from Ronny that day.  And, despite his cheerful words and his happy banter, she always felt upset and unsettled after receiving his correspondence.

He’d enlisted with the Royal Australian Air Force, in May of the previous year, soon after he turned 18. He'd passed the Aircrew Navigator course locally before he'd been sent to Britain to join the Royal Air Force.

She recalled holding his letter as she walked into the darkness of the front verandah. She had quietly closed the front screen-door, so as not to wake Anne or her husband, Fred, and, sitting in a wicker chair  she'd looked out into the darkness of the sleeping street.  The stars were so much brighter without the city lights. She wondered whether her son would be flying at that very moment in the wintry skies of Europe. She shuddered at the thought.  Her mind was constantly filled with dread and her heart with loneliness while he was gone.

She thought about her son’s letter. She carried it in her hand - like it was an extension, somehow, of him. He spoke of his bike rides into the English country-side. He told her about the other young men in the RAF.  He asked her to hug Anne for him. He used his nickname for her: ‘Nucoms’. Anne and Ronny wrote their own letters to each other every week - but they usually sent extra love to each other in her letters. Finally, the letter was finished with a short PS: 'Say Hi to Dad'. 

Ronny had always hoped that his father would one day love him. Sadly, he’d eventually lost hope that that would ever happen. It was nothing personal. His cool and distant father simply seemed incapable of loving anyone much.

The woman looked down at her watch.  It was now three in the morning.  She felt tired. So deeply tired. Anne had developed pneumonia only a few days earlier. Her decent towards death had been so terribly rapid.  The woman had barely slept since it began.

She sat down again beside her daughter.  She lifted the child’s limp hand and held it firmly.  It remained hot and clammy.  A shallow racing pulse was just palpable below the surface of the skin: the only sign of the furious war being fought within the child’s body.  As she lay so still, gasping for air, her immune system was fighting the invisible foe: billions of microscopic bacteria.  The doctors had told her that they were treating Anne with a new medicine called 'penicillin'.  It had been developed during the war by a team in Oxford University. Although, the leader of the team was a man born in Adelaide and a similar age to herself:  Howard Florey. 

The problem for Anne, however, was that her body had been almost completely overwhelmed by the infection before the penicillin was started:  She had both septicemia and pneumonia, and her organs had started to shut down.  If she survived until the morning, the doctors had explained, she would live.  However, the chance of her surviving the night was determined to be less than 30%.

The woman prayed.  She muttered the words of every prayer she knew - and some she made up.  She begged God, whatever and whoever God was, to save her daughter. Please... Please...  The last word she repeated like a mantra - tears dripping from her jaw.

Again she recalled a moment from her past.  It was the moment that the world had stopped turning, the sun had stopped shining, and she had wished the earth could swallow her and bury her forever.  The memory was seared into her mind like a third-degree burn.  The wound wouldn't heal. She wouldn't let it. Instead it festered and tortured her every single day. Clutching her daughter’s hand, the woman dragged the details of the horrible memory to the surface of her consciousness: 

It was a Thursday morning on January 11th 1945. Almost two years earlier. She had just finished writing a long letter to her son and begun making  preserves in the kitchen. A knock at the front door interrupted her domestic activities.  Fred was at home, although he was sick in bed with a cold. So, removing her apron, she had answered the door. A thin young man in a grey suit stood on the verandah holding a telegram.  He held his hat in his hands and he pushed the folded paper towards her.  He said only one word:  ‘Sorry.’

Reluctantly, she had accepted it. She unfolded it and attempted to read the words which swam across the page in her shaking hands. She wiped the tears from her eyes with her sleeve - and tried again. She became aware that her husband was now standing beside her - reading as well.

442280  FLYING OFFICER R MITCHELL MISSING  STOP  REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON FLYING OFFICER RONALD MITCHELL IS MISSING AS A RESULT OF AIR OPERATIONS ...

Fred dropped to the floor sobbing.  She had never seen her husband shed a single tear in his life. But now. .. he rocked on the spot, his face buried in his hands. Sobbing. ‘I’m sorry, Ronny.  I'm so sorry.  I loved you ... '

She woke in hospital some hours later. The doctors told her that she had suffered a stroke.

The woman was now sobbing.  She looked into the face of her only surviving child and muttered desperate words again - although still only audible to herself and possibly the child: God, please let my child live.  I forgot ... I forgot that I lost one child not two.  I forgot to live for Anne.  I thought I had died with Ronnie. I am so sorry.  Please, God. Please don't take Anne from me ...

The woman fell asleep just before dawn. She hadn’t been asleep for long when she experienced the most vivid dream she’d ever had:

She found herself sitting in her kitchen having a cup of tea.  She was admiring the autumn leaves on the almond trees in the rear yard when her son, Ronny, walked into the room. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and he kissed her cheek. He then sat next to her and smiled. She felt the warmth of his love and she felt that he was at peace. He then spoke briefly: 

‘Nucoms will be alright. She'll recover. But Mum, you need to recover as well ... from your grief. It's not only Anne who's been so ill. You cannot live your life if you continue to mourn my death.  Crying for hours everyday changes nothing.  The past is over.  You must live in the present and be happy again - for Anne, as well as for yourself. I will love you forever.  I want you to remember the happy times we had. We can be thankful for all those happy years we got to be together.  There's no point being bitter and sad for the times we didn't get.  We can't change that. But we need to say goodbye.  Two years of suffering is more than enough, Mum.  Be happy now.  Anne is with you.  I'll be waiting for you.  And my love for you will never die.  Goodbye Mum.'

She reached out to him and hugged him and ,before he left her for the last time, she whispered to him: ‘Goodbye, my dear. I love you too.’

The dream finished and the woman woke.  As she opened her eyes she became aware that it was now morning.  Sunshine streamed through the window flooding the room with a warm golden light. She remembered the situation of her daughter and jerked her head up off the bed.  The doctors and nurses were standing at the end of the bed smiling and holding her daughter’s chart. 

‘Mum, you woke up!  Finally!’

The woman turned to see her daughter sitting up in bed smiling at her.  She reached for her hand. It was now cool and her daughter's pulse was slow and strong. She stood and hugged her daughter.  Tears of joy streaking her face and she remembered, for the first time in so many years, what it felt like to be truly happy.

‘Yes, I woke up dear.  I love you so much.  And, look what a beautiful morning this is.’