Australian outback

When I reached the start of the teenage years, I discovered all these wonderful love stories in the magazines my mother bought.  These could only be bought in the larger towns, which were about a 40km distance from our farm.  Many a time I was sent into the cafe to see if the new Woman, Woman's Weekly, Woman and Home and Woman's Own had arrived.  There would be great disappointment if they were late, or we had come too early.

The best of all the magazines was the Woman's Weekly, which had numerous stories set in the Australian outback.  Usually some rugged, widowed sheep farmer, advertising either for a housekeeper, or a governess for his children.  Very often the respondent was a star-crossed nursing sister, getting over a broken relationship, and wanting a bit of a change in her surroundings.

As soon as I arrived back from boarding school, I would dive under the table next to my mother's bed in order to check through the magazines, putting them in sequence, so as to have a nice, long, uninterrupted read, once I got around to it.  This I might add, was done surreptitiously, and not without a certain amount of guilt.  What did my mother think of my sudden interest in romantic stories?

I can remember one freezing day in July, getting dressed in my warmest clothes, taking a blanket, an orange and a pile of Woman's Weeklies, and making my way, accompanied by an icy wind, to the back camp behind our new house.   The large pile of leaves from the recently threshed mealies, afforded a small amount of protection from the Antarctic blast.  Wrapping the blanket around myself and burrowing into the leaves, I contentedly sucked the juice from my softened orange, and settled down to read the final chapter of yet another exciting outback story.

I lost count of how many times I read the last sentence, but with each reading, the thrill I felt never diminished, "and the two shadows melted into one."  I still remember it after all these years, only now with great amusement as to how little I needed to keep me happy in those days.  I literally fed off that sentence for years.  "and the two shadows melted into one."