‘Of course I would.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
An advantage of the telephone: no one could see you cross your fingers.
It was growing dark. She watched the sea until she could see it no more. She undressed, washed and went to bed. Her head was still aching but less so than earlier. She lay, eyes closed, in the darkness where nightmares stalked.
Never mind the dolphins, the mackerel and whiskery prawns. Never mind her longing to die where she had lived. The family, deserving or not, took priority. Nothing else mattered because, without that, there was nothing.
She remembered how important that had been to her during the long years of the Second World War, when she had seen despair and desolation everywhere she looked.
1939
CHAPTER 33
Marrek had told Marina about the reef two hundred yards or so offshore, a rocky shelf running parallel with the coast that had seen the deaths of many ships in its time. Mostly it was hidden by the waves, but during spring tides, when the sea went out so far it looked almost as though it had gone for good, the upper portion of the shelf was exposed.
There was good fishing there and during the calmer days of spring and summer, when Jory was away, Marina liked to take their little boat out to the reef, drop anchor and put a line over the side in the hope of catching their supper or maybe, if her luck was in, several suppers. Blue and jack mackerel were there in some numbers, even marlin and small tuna, on occasion. Billfish like marlin were too much for her gear to handle but the others made good eating so it was worth the risk. Risk there undeniably was. The weather could change in an instant and a westerly swell, in a boat not much bigger than a matchbox, was not to be sneezed at, while the tide could come in as quickly as it went out, turning the calm waters between the reef and the shore into a race. That was partly why she did it. The element of risk drew her as seductively as the fish she hoped to catch. In a world that—according to the wireless—seemed headed for catastrophe, it was good to get out there when she could, alone under an empty sky, with the warm sun setting fire to the waves and the spring turning the grey landscape green, and pretend that nothing in the world existed beyond their own strip of land, Trevelyan land, lying between the Manacles Reef—another echo of Cornwall—and the high ground of the Wombat Ridge. Because this, now, was her home and would remain so as long as she lived.
She had come to love this remote place, which on the day of her arrival had seemed so grim and menacing. There would always be violent gales, tempestuous seas and torrential rain, but she had learnt to see beyond them, as she had learnt to see beyond Marrek’s belligerent ways. And this morning, to round out the pleasures of the day, she was hauling in fish like there was no tomorrow.
She was safe here.
There was a taste and smell to weather, signs that in the two years since her arrival she had learnt to read: a sudden dip or rise in temperature signalling a coming change; cirrus clouds high up, streaking the western sky, a guarantee that a gale was on its way; the hint of steel in a rising wind as the harbinger of storm; a change in the slant and colour of waves announcing that the tide was on the turn.
At eleven o’clock Marina saw the first signs: a darkening of the blue, a flicker of white on the wave caps as the tide turned and the sea began its return journey to the land. She hauled in the anchor and, her strong arms drawing steadily on the oars, returned to the shore. Before she came to Noamunga she’d never been in a boat but within days of her arrival had found she had an aptitude for it.
She ran the boat’s prow up the shingle, jumped out and shoved it up the bank and housed it, with oars and anchor, in the little shed beside the house. She closed and secured the shed door and went back to the water’s edge. Conscious of the first breath of the rising wind, she retrieved her basket of fish and walked up the slope and into the house. She took a sharp knife; one by one, she gutted the fish and emptied their entrails into a bucket. She threaded fishing line through their gills and hung them from a horizontal pole in the tiny alcove off the kitchen where the breeze through the half-opened shutters would keep them cool. Only in times of storm were those shutters ever closed.
She washed and dried her hands and went into the living room where Marrek was sitting with the wireless on the table by his chair. The wireless was playing a succession of popular tunes: ‘These Foolish Things’, ‘Deep Purple’, ‘Moonlight Serenade’. All the world, it seemed, was waiting, but with the time difference between Europe and Australia it was likely they’d have to wait a good deal longer before they knew for certain whether it was to be war or not.
Marrek was staring at the sky through the window. ‘Weather’s on the blink,’ he said.
‘No news?’
She had to ask, although she knew what the answer would be.
‘Middle of the night over there,’ he said. ‘Catch much?’
‘Enough to last us a few days.’
Marrek continued to watch the sky, where the first flecks of cloud were thickening fast.
‘Full gale. Be with us by teatime, I reckon,’ he said. He sat silently for a minute, still watching the sky, then said: ‘I had a younger brother. Rupe. Jory ever tell you that?’ No, he hadn’t told her. ‘Twelve years younger’n me. Sixteen when he joined up. Lied to them. Told them he was eighteen. Wanted to see the world, he said. Wanted a bit of adventure.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Blew him to bits on the Somme. Still over there, what’s left of him. The bits. They said there wasn’t enough to fill a shoebox.’ He scowled at the weather. ‘Now it looks like the bastards are at it again. Dunno what the world’s coming to, I really don’t.’
‘Maybe it won’t come to anything.’
‘She’s coming, all right. I can smell her. Same’s I can smell that gale. Likely they’ll both arrive together.’
Marina sat down in a chair beside him. Spindle legs and hard seat but a chair, of sorts. Together they waited. There was a breathlessness in the air. Waiting. Dreading. Knowing, yet refusing to accept it.
The clock ticked; the minutes passed.
Maybe there would be a last-minute reprieve. There was a saying, wasn’t there? Hope keeps the boat afloat? They would continue to hope, to keep the boat afloat, until eleven o’clock England time, when they, and the world, would know.
Until at last they heard the prime minister of Australia. Sombre, measured tones, and the waiting, the doubting and hoping, were over. Now they knew.
Marrek reached out a hand and switched off the wireless. They stared at each other. Both were bursting with words but unable to say anything, because there was nothing to say. Now it had started. They could hope only for a speedy end, but the road ahead was dark.
Hope keeps the boat afloat. Now the boat had sunk. Restlessly Marina stood and went to the outside door. She pushed it open against the force of the strong wind that, as Marrek had predicted, had arrived at the same time as the prime minister’s announcement.
Wind-borne wind, wind-borne war. And, when the clouds parted, would death be waiting amid the stars?
Coatless, she went out. The wind was cold but that didn’t trouble her. Hair wild about her head, she walked to the rock promontory below the house. In the darkness she stared at the seas flinging themselves against the land. It stood firm against the assault. She saw the turmoil of broken water, felt the spray that drenched her again and again. She sensed the strength of the land and how it would not allow the sea to prevail against it. The land’s strength comforted her because she saw it as a symbol that right, too, would prevail, that Australia would prevail, and that all, after the coming months or years of conflict, would come right at last.
CHAPTER 34
Jory came home five days after war was declared.
‘Thank God!’
Already there were rumours of U-boats operating off the Australian coast. Of German raiders hunting for fishing trawlers. Using cannon and machine guns against the helpless crew. Some kind
of German battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, was said to be operating off the South American coast. A long way away, certainly, but who knew where it might pop up next?
Nobody knew anything; everybody knew something. Or had heard something. Or suspected something. Nebulous, always, but when it came to building public confidence it was as dangerous as spider silk.
In Boulders, despair fought with excitement on every street corner. People old enough to remember the last war couldn’t believe it was happening again, while blokes from all over queued outside the recruitment office, eager to be the first to kick shit out of the Hun.
At the newsagency, the papers sold out fast. They told you nothing that was worth knowing but people bought them, just the same; what they didn’t know scared them a lot more than what they did, so they bought the papers in the hope of discovering some titbit of information—anything—that might shed light on what was happening in the world.
To help things along, Alice Chan told everyone horror stories of what was going on in China. There was a place called Nanking.
‘The Japs have murdered almost the whole population,’ she said. ‘Tens of thousands dead. Rape, too. Old, young, makes no difference. No woman safe.’
‘How d’you know that?’ asked Lainie Walsh, who would question the Second Coming if she were still around at the time.
‘Cousins. Many cousins. They write and tell me.’
She had family in Hong Kong, so naturally she was concerned.
‘But Hong Kong’s British,’ Marina said. ‘There’ll be no trouble there, surely?’
In any case the Japanese were not in the war.
‘Not yet,’ Alice said. ‘Who knows what tomorrow brings?’
A regular cheerful Charlie, that one. But the German threat was real. Or might become so at any moment.
‘They’re giving us guns,’ Jory said. ‘Just in case.’
‘That’s something.’
But how would a fishing boat go in a stoush with a battleship?
At least Jory was in a reserved occupation, as feeding the nation was a priority. Every time he put to sea she had to wonder whether she’d ever see him again, but then she always had.
Weeks passed; months. Life pretended to be normal but was not. Letters came from blokes who’d been sent overseas, but the way the censors hacked them about there wasn’t any useful information in them. I love you, Maeve, might bring comfort to Maeve but said nothing about how the war was going. While the gung-ho wireless was useless when it came to real news.
One item was trumpeted loudly enough. By Christmas one of the potential dangers had been eliminated. Or so they were told. The Admiral Graf Spee had blown herself up somewhere in South America. Or so they were told. In any case the news, if it was news, was soon forgotten.
Who knew what to believe anymore?
1940
CHAPTER 35
The absence of news meant that many people had begun to wonder whether there was anything going on at all. Even the rumour-mongers had nothing to feed on and, more and more, there was a phrase on everybody’s lips: The Phony War. Some talked like they’d been cheated—paid to see a fight but there’s no one in the ring, as fat Merv Gallagher, the ugliest man in Boulders, put it—but to Marina and those who thought like her it was good news. Time to bring the blokes home and forget about the bloody war. Although Marina knew well that was not how things were going to work out.
Nor did they. Halfway through 1940, it was as if the ceiling had fallen in, over there. Belgium, Holland, Norway. Between one bulletin and the next, the bloody Krauts, as people were calling them, were everywhere. Not Chinese cities, like Nanking, which no one had ever heard of, but places like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, hammered from the air. Now there was a new word to take the place of the Phony War: Blitzkrieg. France was next, with a new place name to add to those most people knew already: Dunkirk. The Poms on the run, lucky to get away, by the sounds of it, and France …
France was gone, and Germany was master of Europe, or most of it.
No one was willing to speculate who might be next, but London was on everybody’s mind.
There’ll always be an England …
‘Better bloody hope so,’ said Marrek, who until then had never had a good word to say.
1941
CHAPTER 36
There was more information now. Aussie pilots had been involved in what people were calling the Battle of Britain, where they’d helped the RAF stop the Luftwaffe in its tracks. London and other cities had taken a hell of a pounding, but with the Germans no longer having mastery of the air it began to look as though the threatened invasion of Britain might not take place after all.
Aussie troops were getting stuck in all over the Middle East, too. Mixed results: triumph in Libya, with names previously unknown, like Tobruk and Benghazi, becoming household words; catastrophe in Crete. There was talk of Damascus, which Marina was almost sure was mentioned in the Bible, but there was no answer to the one question on everybody’s lips. Were they winning the war or losing it? Nobody knew.
One day at the end of winter Jory came home and said he was going to join the navy.
‘What?’
‘They’re calling for volunteers. What I’m doing feels too much like a cop-out. All the blokes who are fighting, I’d like to do more than catch mackerel.’
The last thing Marina wanted to hear. ‘The country needs food. The PM said so.’
‘Sure it does. But older blokes can do that. I’d like to see some action before it’s over.’
All the blokes want to be heroes, one of her friends in Boulders had said.
More fool them, she’d said.
Now this.
‘I don’t know what gets into you lot,’ Marina told him.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You want to die, or what?’
Jory laughed. ‘Haven’t you heard? I’m bulletproof.’
She’d never asked a favour from Marrek in her life; she did so now.
‘Talk him out of it, for God’s sake.’
But Marrek wouldn’t. ‘Let him do what he’s got to do.’
Bloody men … There were days when Marina could have fed the lot of them to the sharks.
She tried every trick in the book.
Reason: ‘Where would the country be if every fisherman decided to join up?’
Emotion: ‘You can’t love me. If you cared how I feel, you’d never do it.’
Blackmail: ‘Don’t blame me if you come back and find I’ve done a runner.’
Nothing did any good.
Jory held her hands in his weathered fisherman’s hands, scarred by a hundred cuts.
‘I care very much how you feel. Given the choice, I wouldn’t go to sea at all. I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. I’ll love you till I die. Given the choice, I’d spend every minute of my life with you. But there’s times a man can’t turn his back. Not if he wants to face himself in the mirror.’
She knew it was true; she saw it in his eyes, heard it in his voice. She knew how hard it was for a man like Jory Trevelyan to put his feelings on show, even for her. Her heart gushed warmth. She would have liked that heat to enfold them both in its arms forever.
‘We never wed,’ he said. ‘But might have done.’
She could not see where he was going with this new line of argument. ‘And so?’
‘If we had, you’d have had to swear an oath to obey me. Now you’re trying to stop me doing what I have to do. What have you got to say to that?’
‘Nothing, Jory. Except that I don’t want you to join the navy.’
They both laughed and Marina knew, with renewed warmth, that she was more securely married than if she’d had a hundred wedding rings on her finger.
He held her close, then closer, squeezing her tight, then kissed her hard and led her to the bed.
At the last moment, bodies united, eyes locked, souls in harmony, she found space between her sighs to say:
�
�I could always run away with Merv Gallagher.’
Jory paused, laughing so hard it almost spoiled the moment.
But did not.
Jory Trevelyan was accepted into the navy. He reported for training and in due course was posted aboard HMAS Scimitar, a Leander class light cruiser bought from the Poms before the war. A week later they put to sea. There was no one to see anybody off; in war, love or even friendship had no place.
Back at Noamunga, Marina thought of their last night together. He’d been off in the morning and their lovemaking had been more dirge than celebration, yet that had made it all the more important because who knew when they’d be able to do it again? If they’d ever do it again? She drew him into her as deeply as she could, imprisoning him until at last she felt the spasm, heard the sigh, recognised the slow collapse of the man’s body as the life force left him. Her body had not responded but that was unimportant. What mattered was that together they had placed their seal upon both present and future in affirmation that, together or apart, they were and always would be one.
The next day, after he had gone, she knelt by the side of the bed and prayed. She’d never been into prayer and it didn’t come easily but she did her best, a jumble of disjointed words that were nevertheless heartfelt: that Jory would survive, that they would all survive; most of all, that their love would survive the endless traumas they would now face, that they should be reunited when the fighting was done, that they should be happy, all of them so happy …
Thoughts and words ran away from her, a confusion of sounds and tears, of clenched fists and clenched eyelids, beseeching the comfort of assurance from a being who might not exist.
‘Save him.’ That, above all. ‘Save us all. Save our marriage.’
Fearful that what she had said might sound like a series of orders—to the Almighty!—she hastily qualified what she’d said.
‘I beg you humbly to grant my request. Please, God, please. If it is your wish. Amen.’
Stars Over the Southern Ocean Page 21
