The very few Māori girls Tea had known before Izzy – at school, down at the shops, or the groups that stuck together as they left the factories – kept to themselves. The girls at school had whispered about them, the size of their noses, the black thickness of their hair, their drab clothes. Did they take their cottons off and put on their grass skirts as soon as they got home? Did they really run around taunting men with their bare chests, wild eyes, and long, sticking-out tongues?
Tea had often assessed the angle of her jaw, the wideness of her nostrils. Was her nose as big as theirs? Izzy could pass easily as white. Tan, but not too tan, stout, but still slim, like a good, healthy Kiwi girl.
Mum met Tea at the train station. Moments after she greeted her, she was annoyed by the venting steam engine, the excited voices bouncing off stone, and the temperature being so high for early morning. Not much had changed for Tea’s mother in the months she’d been away.
The walk up the hill didn’t steal Tea’s breath like it used to, and she was glad for the firm, sensible grip of her uniform shoes. Mum said nothing about her sharp ensemble, instead chattering about letters from Robbie. Had Tea received any she would like to share?
Christmas Day came and went in blessed quiet, with the small piece of lamb Mrs MacGregor had given her roasting in the range. Without Robbie there to supervise, the tree sat forgotten in the bay window, paper chains haphazardly looped. The quiet of prayer in between the thunder of the church organ, fewer people in between the concrete walls to soak up the sound. Mum smiling at her gift of handmade doilies, while Tea didn’t quite know what to make of the package of lacy handkerchiefs she gave her.
Tea had saved up all her rations for chocolate, but the doilies had been a last-minute decision. They were a little clumsy after months of not touching hook and cotton. Frilly wasn’t Grant or Izzy’s style. She gave them the chocolate instead.
After the bottle of cooking sherry made an appearance, Mum’s words came out as clipped as the holes in Robbie’s letters. They read and shared, but beyond a cheeky mention about Robbie ‘purchasing a pair of lady’s silk stockings’ which Mum claimed not to understand with an uncharacteristic blush, there was nothing they could discover of his whereabouts. And that suited Mum fine. To her, Robbie was safe, well behind the lines, building bridges or laying train tracks. Working hard like a good boy should.
The ache in Tea’s fingers told her otherwise.
The ache was covered up the next day as she plunged her hands into buckets of hot water and clenched her fingers around rag and scrubbing brush. The next part of her Christmas present, Mum explained, was a tea party with all her church friends and their girls before they headed back to base. Tea couldn’t think of anything worse to do on her last day of furlough.
“You need to get those elbows into some proper, decent work,” Mum said as Tea set to on the living room floor. “I can’t imagine what you’ll do out there with all that time on your hands once you’ve finished the gardening, pickling, and bottling.”
Tea had to bite her lips shut over a retort about where Christmas dinner had come from.
The next day, the teacups rattled with talk of likely service lads and the mock cream shivered with whispers of station bicycles. Izzy had explained the term to a shocked Tea. “But the farmer tends to go to the girls’ cottage, not the other way round as townies seem to think,” Izzy said, her eyes narrow and dark. Tea didn’t want to ask what she meant. When Izzy sounded angry, you didn’t want to get in the way.
The girls in snappy Women’s Royal Naval Service or Auxiliary Air Force blue smiled at Tea, pleasant enough in the sight of their mothers, but Tea found herself more often than not with a plate of scones or the teapot in her hands, doing the rounds. The implication was easy to infer: the girls in blue had attained some higher status than someone in simple land brown. Meat and wool, vegetables and fruit were important to keep the country going, but Land Girls were not invited to march or wave a flag. It was in their name: service.
Tea smiled, murmured Grant’s name in appropriate places, served scones, and kept her stocking seams straight. And when her edges were raw, when the heat became too much, she reached out to the slither of the nearby stream and drew on its gentle strength.
By the end of furlough, she was proud not to have slipped into her eelskin once, not even in her dreams.
Her joy at wearing her uniform in public dissipated the moment she arrived back at the farm and Mrs MacGregor had her back in work clothes. There was fruit rotting on the trees while she had lolly-gagged in the city.
So much for her life being more than jam jars and big pots of stewed fruit.
From sickly sweet to sweetness – Izzy and Grant, delighted at their Christmas gifts, had saved the chocolate to share.
The winds of December became the long dry heat of January, cicadas shrieking from dawn to dusk. Sunburn gave way to a smattering of freckles. A change to her skin that was normal and real. Mum had said a work-day face would be a hard sell to a potential husband after the war, but the word ‘husband’ didn’t send a frisson through Tea like it had a year ago. She didn’t know why. She didn’t want to.
The few days back in the city had shown Tea how little she had come to mind the grit and muck. Her biceps and thighs had taken on a solidity she took secret pleasure in, measuring them with her fingers in the dark. They kept her upright and going with purpose. Sometimes she thought she caught Izzy staring at her muscles, like the way Izzy had looked at her that strange night up at the mustering hut, but when she looked again those dark eyes were elsewhere.
Her thoughts about her father, the ones she thought she had put away after Christmas, jumbled together when caught off guard by a casual reminder from the MacGregors. Mr MacGregor groused about “some mowree caught stealing” on another farm, and Mrs MacGregor complained about “that lazy wah-hee-knee at the shop”. They pronounced place names with a hard smack or swallow: “Tie-ree”, “Why-koo-white”, “Carry-tane”, “Om-ah-roo” – quite unlike Izzy’s rolling roundness spoken in private.
Tea had been lulled by the gentle push of water from the creek and her strengthening flesh, so these reminders of what her skin, her whaiwhaiā, could take away from her were like punches. She practised only in the dark or in the shade of the creek. The eels mouthed against her fingers – come in, the water’ssss fine – and her scales flickered oily and sleek, the boil in her blood like low-banked coals.
*
Summer ebbed and flowed into autumn with the crackle of brush fires and the clipped, cheerful-serious tones of the BBC. Mr MacGregor let the girls listen to the wireless when he was out at Home Guard or farmer’s association meetings, or after dinner if they remained absolutely quiet with their sewing. Izzy found it hard to remain so still, but at least managed to stay for a full bulletin or play, for Tea’s sake. Tea couldn’t parse much of what the news reader said, and often excused herself due to weariness. Place names like Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, she had to look up in her atlas, but she could draw no shape or meaning that she couldn’t get out of the shivers and spasms from her arm and the growing restlessness of the water.