Because he was so small and undeveloped for his age, Frank Gold, though nearly thirteen, had been admitted as a patient at the Golden Age. It was agreed, unanimously, at the IDB (Infectious Diseases Branch of the Royal Perth Hospital) that it really wasn’t suitable for him to stay amongst adult patients. Also, his parents were New Australians who both worked, and had no other family members to help with his care. He needed the nurturing atmosphere of the Golden Age, and supervision with schoolwork. Arrangements were made almost immediately, and he was delivered there by ambulance that same afternoon. 

Elsa Briggs was twelve and a half, but her mother had a little baby and couldn’t look after her at home. The other patients were younger, from all over the state: from Wiluna in the desert, from Broome up the coast, from Rawlinna, a siding on the Trans-Australia line. Nowhere, it seemed, was too remote for the polio virus to find you. 

‘The Golden Age’ had been built as a pub at the turn of the century, in Leederville, five minutes’ walk from the railway station, two stops out from the city center. It stood alone, bounded by four flat roads, like an island, which in its present incarnation seemed to symbolize its apartness, a natural quarantine. Three of the roads were lined with modest suburban houses, each one drawn back behind a stretch of dry lawn, a porch and front windows sealed by venetian blinds. Along the fourth road the two-story WA Wire Netting Factory pounded and throbbed twenty-four hours a day. Some considered that this wasn’t a suitable location for a hospital. But the children found the noise soothing and loved the lights shining all night through their windows. 

The pub had been bought by the Health Department in 1949 and converted into The Golden Age Children’s Polio Convalescent Home, to service the years of the great epidemics. Inside, with its ramps and bars and walkways, its schoolteacher, trained nurses and full-time physiotherapist, it was a modern treatment center, which could accommodate up to fourteen children, some from the country, some who could not be cared for at home. 

Outside, rearing up above the dusty, treeless crossroads, it still looked like a country pub. Brick, two story, the wide upstairs balcony shaded the verandah beneath. It had thick walls for coolness, long alcoved windows, a sheltering iron roof like a hat pulled down low. Wheelchairs rolled easily along the wide, shadowy passageways, over the old polished jarrah boards. The very plainness and familiarity of its exterior seemed to proclaim its function, to give fair shelter and homely comfort. A watering hole. 

The name, inherited, could be considered tactless by some, even cruelly ironic. These children were impaired as no one could ever wish a child to be. But perhaps because of its former role, its solid and generous air, it was a cheerful place. The children were no longer sick, but in need of help to find their way back into the world. 

The staff and parents were well pleased with the Golden Age. Its rooms were spacious, cool and high-ceilinged. The children were surrounded by faces shining with hope and encouragement. Even Ida Gold (known as Princess Ida to the staff), though never slow to find fault, had to admit that she was grateful for the haven it provided. 

The children enjoyed the benevolence of the attention. Here, they were not a worry or a burden to make their mothers sigh with weariness. They felt different – exclusive, like a family – from the day kids, who lived at home and arrived by ambulance for schoolwork and therapy. All through the morning, children came and went between the schoolroom and the New Treatment Centre. 

As for Frank, he was a new boy again, working out how to be himself. He was desperate to be normal. Finding his feet, this time, meant learning how to walk. He resolved to behave well because he didn’t want another expulsion. 

Also, in bed at night, and sometimes in the day when it was quiet, he could hear the distant whistle and hooting of the trains pulling in and out of the Leederville station, which always reassured him. 

Above all, he didn’t want to leave Elsa. 

A line ran through his head, which might be the start of a poem. 

Your bed was empty today when I looked for you. Why? 

Polio had taken his legs, but given him his vocation: poet. 

Elsa 

Elsa was with Rayma Colley in the Babies Room. The thin wail had wafted across the corridor in the afternoon stillness and seeped into Elsa’s head. Finally she’d left her bed and wheeled her way to Rayma’s cot. 

‘Stop that,’ she whispered to Rayma, peering through the bars of the cot. Her tone was firm. Elsa was not senti- mental about babies. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t had a younger sister to look after. The first thing to do was to stop the crying. She put a finger in her own mouth, puffed her cheeks and pulled the finger out with a pop. Rayma paused, mid-wail. Her little dark face was wet, her eyes swollen. 

You had to make them think of something else. 

‘Come on,’ Elsa said. She lowered the bars at the side of the cot, reached across and undid Rayma’s splints. By leaning onto the mattress for support, she was able to drag the little girl to her and pull her onto her lap. Hiccups juddered the tiny body.

Tucking her chin over Rayma’s shoulder to hold her, Elsa rolled over to the window. She lifted one of the long white curtains and pulled it around the wheelchair so that she and Rayma were screened off from the rest of the room. All their world now was the view, shaded by the verandah, the slice of empty road and the houses along it, a scene as remote to them as the other side of the world. 

‘Look,’ she instructed Rayma, pointing upwards. The afternoon whiteness had taken on a steely cast, a thin, ragged cloud flitted across their view. The sea breeze must be in. During the long days in hospital, the sky passing across the high window in the Isolation Ward had become Elsa’s backyard, her freedom, her picture show. Watched, the sky slowed itself to a silent, endless semaphore of shapes and colours, as if it were signalling a message. She was amazed at how she had neglected it in all her years free to roam, with the sun on her face, the wind past her ears. 

‘Your mother looks at the sky and she thinks of you,’ she said to Rayma. She spoke firmly, looking into Rayma’s big, frightened eyes. For of course it was her mother whom Rayma cried for. It always was. In the Isolation Ward, Elsa had listened all day for her mother’s cloppity footsteps down the corridor, hurrying in her old orthopaedic shoes to find her, waving to her through the glass panel, smiling, trying not to look sad. 

And because the sky had become so important, the two – mother and sky – grew to be entwined in Elsa’s thoughts. When she looked at the sky she thought of her mother, and it seemed to be telling her that some feelings would never change and never die. If her mother didn’t come, the sky also told her that each person was alone and the world went on, no matter what was happening to you. 

When at last she’d left the Isolation Ward and her parents were allowed to sit by her bed, they looked smaller to her, aged by the terror they had suffered, old, shrunken, ill-at- ease. 

Something had happened to her which she didn’t yet understand. As if she’d gone away and come back distant from everybody. 

Rayma had to learn to be alone. Without your mother, you had to think. 

It was like letting go of a hand, jumping off the high board, walking by yourself to school. Once you’d done it, you were never afraid of it again. 

All the kids could identify their mothers’ footsteps. They all longed for their mothers, except Frank Gold, who said he’d rather his father came. 

Sometimes even now in the Golden Age, after her mother visited, Elsa had the funny feeling that there was another mother waiting for her, blurred, gentle, beautiful as an angel, with an angel’s perfect understanding. 

Cockatoos 

Black cockatoos flew over the stout brick chimneys of the Golden Age as the children ate their dinners – macaroni cheese – on trays, in their beds. They heard their cries and looked towards the windows but could not see the large black birds swirling and dispersing over the Netting Factory and across the railway line. Bathed and combed, the children were content to eat in silence. Whether they came from the suburbs or the country, they knew the sound as homely, comforting, a good omen, predicting rain. 

The Golds heard them as they passed over the roof of their house in North Perth, two stops by train from the Golden Age and a mile’s walk up Fitzgerald Street. Meyer was in his tiny front yard, smoking and watering his vegetable patch. The cockatoos were heading for the park opposite and the nuts in the pine trees. They sounded like a hundred little wheels that needed oiling, Meyer thought. 

At the kitchen table, Ida, also smoking, thought the cries were melancholy, harsh, echoing into emptiness, an Australian sound. 

She and Meyer had wanted to go to America. They waited for months in Vienna to hear from a cousin of Meyer’s father who’d migrated to New York in his youth. Finally, at the end of ’46, a sponsorship was offered from Western Australia. In Vienna they were living in a dormitory with only a curtain between them and fifty other people. Some had been there for years. So they accepted. When at last they landed in Fremantle, Ida wanted to get straight back onto the ship. 

Every day, Ida found something that proved their voyage had been ill-fated. If she missed a bus, it was because they should never have come here. Once, after a visit to see Frank, they’d sat at the kitchen table drinking brandy. Ida talked of the old days, when she used to catch the train and bribe the commandant of the work camp to give Meyer a food parcel. One day in a street in Buda, dressed like an old peasant woman with a scarf across her face, holding Frank by the hand, she had come across Meyer’s brother, Gyuri, a butcher, who was carving up the carcass of a frozen horse surrounded by a silent waiting crowd. He told her he’d had word that Meyer was alive. 

But here they were, in a free, democratic country, and they were gutted, feeble, shell-shocked. Frank had been a resilient little fellow, he’d survived cellars, ceilings, bombing, near starvation. Then they came here. 

‘Ida,’ Meyer said. ‘Polio is in every country in the world.’ 

‘Play the piano,’ he said. She didn’t answer. The reason they’d rented this little half-house was the piano in the dining room. They’d paid for the piano tuner themselves. But ever since Frank fell sick, Ida hadn’t touched it. 

‘Why, Ida?’ Meyer asked. He never dreamt how much he’d miss the driven sound of Ida’s scales, daily, over and over, a morning carillon. 

She shook her head. 

He knew the reason. Once, before they were engaged, flushed and heightened after her final, stunning performance at the Academy, she’d admitted to him shyly that although she was anti-religion, she sometimes believed that her gift, in its insistence, its surprisingness, came from God. Playing was a sort of conversation, she said, embarrassed. 

It was what was most mysterious about her, most alluring, and, in her daily struggle to be equal to it, most endearing. 

Now she was a bird who refused to sing.
‘Go to bed,’ he said. ‘You are tired.’
But she shook her head. If she was tired, the dreams were worse. She poured herself another glass of brandy.