Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden Page B

quiet as they thought they were.
    It was hard being so dark, too. Hard not to
trip over stones, or tread on noisy sticks or, on one occasion,
bump into a garbage can.
    We got into
    Racecourse
Road
    , and felt a little safer, as there are so few
houses along there. Passing Mrs Alexander’s I stopped for a moment
to sniff at the big old roses that grew along her front fence. I
loved her garden. She had a party there every year, a Christmas
party. It had only been a few weeks since I’d been standing under
one of her apple trees, holding a plate of biscuits and telling
Steve I didn’t want to go with him any more. Now it felt like it’d
happened five years ago. It had been a hard thing to do, and Steve
being so nice about it made me feel worse. Maybe that’s why he was
so nice about it. Or was I just being cynical?
    I wondered where Steve was now, and Mrs
Alexander, and the Mathers and Mum and Dad and everybody. Could we
really have been attacked, invaded? I couldn’t imagine how they
would have felt, how they would have reacted. They must have been
so shocked, so stunned. Some of them would have tried to fight,
surely. Some of our friends were hardly the kind of people who
would lie down and take it if a bunch of soldiers came marching in
to take over their land and houses. Mr George for instance. A
building inspector came onto his land last year, to tell him he
couldn’t extend his shearing shed, and Mr George had been summonsed
for threatening him with a tyre lever. For that matter Dad was
pretty stubborn too. I just hoped there hadn’t been violence. I
hoped they’d been sensible.
    I stumbled along, thinking of Mum and Dad. Our
lives had always been so unaffected by the outside world. Oh, we’d
watched the News on TV and felt bad when they showed pictures of
wars and famines and floods. Occasionally I’d tried to imagine
being in the places of those people, but I couldn’t. Imagination
has its limits. But the only real impact the outside world had on
us was in wool and cattle prices. A couple of countries would sign
an agriculture treaty thousands of k’s away, on another continent,
and a year later we’d have to lay off a worker.
    But in spite of our isolation, our unglamorous
life, I loved being a rural. Other kids couldn’t wait to get away
to the city. It was like, the moment they finished school they’d be
at the bus depot with their bags packed. They wanted crowds and
noise and fast food stores and huge shopping centres. They wanted
adrenalin pumping through their veins. I liked those things, in
small doses, and I knew that in my life I’d like to spend good
lengths of time in the city. But I also knew where I most liked to
be, and that was out here, even if I did spend half my life
headfirst in a tractor engine, or pulling a lamb out of a
barbed-wire fence, or getting kicked black and blue by a heifer
when I got between her and her calf.
    At that stage I still hadn’t come to terms
with what had happened. That’s not surprising. We knew so little.
All we had were clues, guesses, surmises. For instance, I wouldn’t
allow myself to really consider the possibility that Mum or Dad –
or anyone else – had been injured or killed. I mean, I knew in my
logical mind that such things were logical outcomes of invasions
and fights and wars, but my logical mind was in a little box My
imagination was in another box entirely and I wasn’t letting one
transmit to the other. I guess you can’t really comprehend that
your parents will ever die. It’s like contemplating your own
death.
    My feelings were in another box again. During
that walk I was desperate to keep them sealed up.
    But I did let myself assume that my parents
were being held somewhere, against their will. I pictured them,
Dad, frustrated and angry, like a bull in a pen, refusing to accept
what had happened, refusing to accept anyone else’s authority. He
wouldn’t let himself begin to try to understand what was going on,
why these people had