Read an extract from Mrs Hopkins - the final novel from Shirley Barrett.
Cockatoo Island,1841. A notorious school, a lively group of wayward girls, and an idealistic schoolmistress in way over her head.
Mrs Hopkins is a witty and poignant novel from acclaimed author and filmmaker Shirley Barrett
Read the first chapter below!
A small thin woman, hollow-eyed, sat clutching her Gladstone bag as the steamer Emu lurched fitfully over the waters. Rather than choosing to sit in the warm saloon as had most passengers given the inclement weather, she had elected instead to sit on one of the hard wooden benches on the front deck, and for this decision she was enduring a regular splattering of spray as the bow of the steamer lifted and fell upon the swell. Emerging from the cabin, the ticket collector eyed her balefully, for her unusual seating preference meant that he would now be forced to skate across the slick deck and receive his dousing, too.
‘Lover of Nature, are you?’ he asked in ill humour, propping himself against the railing to inspect the ticket she had offered him.
‘I don’t often go on boats,’ she responded, as if this was quite enough of an explanation.
The woman turned her face to him then with a wan smile, and he was surprised to see that in spite of the thinness of her features and the dark circles under her eyes, she was—with the dewy spray upon her cheeks, at least—quite moderately attractive.
‘What’s your business on Cockatoo Island?’ he asked as he handed her ticket back. ‘Nothing to do with Biloela, I hope?’
‘Why, yes, I’m the new School-Mistress there.’
The boat pitched forward heavily as if to offer its own dramatic punctuation to this pronouncement, and the ticket collector lost his footing altogether, falling clumsily onto the bench seat in front of her.
‘Then let me give you some advice,’ he said, once he had recovered himself. ‘Don’t get off. Stay on board. We do a round trip back to King Street, and I’ll see that you get back through the turnstiles.’
She cocked her head at an angle in faint reproval, though the smile remained upon her lips.
‘I’m not having you on,’ he said earnestly, clutching onto his cap for the breeze had picked up. ‘They’re most of them whores, the very rakings and scrapings of the streets and the gutters. I should know, for they’re always escaping. And when they do, they get on this boat and lift up their skirts and offer me anything in lieu of payment. As bold as you like! Some of them as young as twelve!’
The thin woman stopped smiling now, and her expression drew grave.
‘And the language they use when they realise that we’ve tipped off the Water Police!’ continued the ticket collector, raising his voice now to be heard above the wind. ‘I’ve served in the Merchant Navy, but what comes out of their mouths shocks even me, and I was a bleedin’ stoker, beg yer pardon! And the songs they sing, especially when they’re working up a riot—we can hear them from the wharf! Oh no, I’m deadly serious—it’s no place for a lady such as yourself.’
‘On the contrary,’ said the thin woman, ‘everything you have told me makes me feel that it is exactly the sort of place where I can prove myself most useful.’
She said all of this in a low voice, and most of it blew away on the wind. The ticket collector heard only the word ‘useful’, but caught the general gist from her demeanour. A church woman, he thought to himself. A do-gooder. Most likely a spinster. Well, she will learn her lesson soon enough.
‘Come and sit inside in the warmth at least,’ he urged. ‘It’s only ten minutes, and you’ll be thoroughly drenched if you stay out here.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but I like to feel the wind and the spray.’
Somewhat touched in the head as well, concluded the ticket collector. And not at all attractive really, now that he looked at her properly, with her hair plastered on her bony forehead like two dank curtains.
‘There it is anyway,’ he said, rising to his feet, for the boat had veered suddenly and the island now loomed into view. He lurched back towards the comfort of the cabin, clutching onto the railings to avoid another slip, leaving the do-gooder to gaze up at the grim, unwelcoming visage of her new home.
Cockatoo Island was not especially large, but it had about it a look both brooding and battle-scarred. Near its short wharf, which the Emu was now approaching, a capacious dry dock had been excavated, in which was currently suspended a battered-looking man-of-war. Beyond the three great masts of the marooned vessel rose a rockface of immense size, its precipice marked with sporadic bursts of plant life. Atop this escarpment, dimly discernible in the fading light, sat a cluster of squat and ugly sandstone buildings, built in haste thirty years ago to serve as convict barracks. In recent times, given the general unruliness of these inmates and the fact that one of them (Frederick Ward, in fact, alias ‘Captain Thunderbolt’) had proved capable of swimming the distance to Sydney, even while sporting leg-irons, the convicts had been moved to other accommodation. In their place had been installed eighty or so young girls, aged from eighteen months to eighteen years, rounded up off the streets where they had been found wandering, vagrant and destitute, unkempt and apparently uncared-for. It was these lost girls that the thin lady had come to instruct.
As the ticket officer opened the door of the saloon, he glanced back at the woman and saw her brace her shoulders stiffly against the movement of the boat. In fact, she was trying to summon within herself some courage, for doubt and fear had assailed her at the sight of what lay before her.
Mrs Hopkins
by Shirley Barrett
A witty and poignant final novel from acclaimed author and filmmaker Shirley Barrett about what destroys us, what sustains us, and what we carry from one world into the next.