Delia stared at Anne for a shocked second and then held out her hands to Barbara. “I’ve been so afraid about Kit. Ever since Father …”
She sat down dazedly and brushed her hair back from her forehead. “What shall we do about Evelyn?” she asked.
On the spur of the moment Barbara said, “You’d better tell her, Deel. You’re closer to her than we are.”
So when Evelyn, then twelve, came up the steps, Barbara led Anne from the kitchen. They could hear the little girl crying and Anne said, “I don’t like leaving Evelyn with Delia.”
“Why not?”
“The less Deel has to do with the child the better.”
“I agree,” Barbara said. “But Delia needs us very much right now.”
“There’s no good worrying about Delia,” Anne said. “She’s lost.”
“Oh, Anne! How rotten! Even to think that.”
“Wait,” Anne said. “You’ll see.”
To her surprise Barbara caught Anne by the shoulders and whispered harshly, “Look here! Delia is going to be married in this house. You and I are going to be nice to Cobber Phil and make him think he’s one of us. It’s our only chance to save Delia … from … well, from becoming a very unpleasant person.”
It was hard for the Nevilles to stomach Cobber Phil. He sucked his teeth, laughed at his own stories and called Anne “old girl.” He was the kind of New Zealander who made the girls regret their ancestors had left England. With no knowledge of English ways and no command of the English tongue, he leaned back in Captain Neville’s old chair, plopped his feet on the ottoman and offered free advice to Lord Wavell as to the conduct of desert warfare.
Now even euphemisms were surrendered. Anne stormed one night after Cobber Phil had advised her how to knit socks, “The only reason I tolerate that boor, Barbara, is to keep my sister off the streets.” This time Barbara did not argue back.
There was considerable relief, therefore, when Cobber Phil was drafted and sent to garrison duty in Singapore. “A fine spot for him,” Anne said when the ferry had left. “He’s so far from the fighting he can’t do anybody any harm.” She did, however, comment on a fact that she was sure Barbara, too, had noticed. Delia seemed to be as pleased as the rest that her husband was finally off to war.
As a gesture Anne brought home a cheap little map of the Pacific and a very bright red pin which indicated the Cobber in Singapore. He sent illiterate letters reporting that “the Chinese girls who came down from Shanghai are very immortal.” Delia laughed and said, “That Cobber!” She said she was happy he’d drawn Singapore instead of Africa.
For it was now that the New Zealand armies started the great oscillating battle across the desert. The pins in Barbara’s map moved with sickening speed toward Alexandria, then with bounding fervor back toward Tobruk, and in one such surging battle Mark Forbes was killed.
When the news reached Ferrymead, Barbara was half-alerted for it, but she found that no one could be totally brave when such information was afoot. It was, actually, more than she could bear. At first she tried behaving normally with her sisters, but it was no use. She threw her hands over her eyes and cried, “I hardly knew him.” Her grief embarrassed Anne, who excused herself and went back to the store. It was Delia who took over. She led Barbara to a sofa and covered her with an afghan. Then she sent Evelyn to school and returned to kneel by her sister.
“You’d better get to your job,” Barbara warned.
“I’m chucking the job,” Delia said, straightening the afghan.
“You’re what?”
“Don’t get excited, Babs. It’s just that Christchurch … It seems so awful.”
“I know.”
“The men all away. Dying in places you’ve never heard of.”
“It’s all for a purpose,” Barbara insisted. “Daddy was no fool.” She paused and added, “Neither was Kit … nor Mark.”
“Did you lie awake at night … wondering?”
“Of course I did, Deel!”
“You never liked Cobber Phil much, did you? I mean you and Anne?”
“We didn’t know him well,” Barbara evaded.
“I didn’t know him, either. Lately I’ve discovered that I hardly feel married at all.”
Barbara was frightened. Quickly she said, “When Cobber comes home all that will change. He’ll live here with us …”
“Hell have to,” Delia confessed. “He’ll never keep a job very long.”
“That’s all right!” Barbara insisted. “He’s a lot of fun. And the family’s got to stick together.” She held Delia’s delicately beautiful head in her arms, and for a moment the two girls recaptured the old fellowship they had known as youngsters, when they sailed small boats on the estuary while Anne stood on shore nervously predicting catastrophe.
Delia said, “You were right. I see it now. Cobber Phil’s a ridiculous man. How could I ever have married him?”
Barbara asked, “Are you taking a new job?”
“Yes.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m going to Wellington. The Navy Office.”
“But Deel! Wellington! Why?”
“Because I can’t bear Christchurch another day.”
“Darling, listen carefully. It’s when times are bad that we must stick with our friends. It’s not a good idea … you in Wellington … alone.”
“Pretty soon the Manpower Commission is going to freeze us in our jobs. I won’t be frozen in Christchurch. I won’t!”
Barbara rose on one elbow and placed her arm about Deel. “What has happened?” she asked soberly.
Delia started to cry into the crook of her sister’s arm. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s the terrible loneliness of Christchurch. Of all New Zealand. A country without men. You walk down Colombo Street after tea. All women. Nothing but Kit’s sheilas. It’s like suspending life for two years. And it’ll go on and on.”
Barbara relaxed her hold and sank back upon the sofa. What Deel had said was true. A nation without men. They had slipped away quietly at first, the professionals like her father, then the willing young heroes like her brother, next the gallant ones like Mark, and finally even the ne’er-do wells like Cobber Phil. They had been sucked out of the valleys and the seaports, leaving behind a civilization that was ugly and barren. It was a brave civilization—chin up, old girl—but it was barren.
Barbara contemplated her next remark for a long time. It might sever Delia from the family permanently. On the other hand, it might be just the word of caution that would save the girl. “Deel,” she said cautiously, “I think you’re going to Wellington because there’ll be men there. Deel, you’re terribly attractive. Do be careful, darling.”
Delia rose from the floor, brushed off her dress and said nothing. She was twenty, not so tall as Anne, nor so rounded as Barbara. She had naturally blonde hair which she wore short about her exquisitely molded head. Her very thin lips were parted in a hesitant smile which showed her very white teeth. But Barbara noticed only how translucent Delia’s skin was, how perilously near the surface her blood vessels were. Impulsively Barbara rose from the sofa and embraced her sister. “Deel,” she whispered, “do be careful. With so many of us dead, you are the one person left …”
But before Delia could escape Christchurch the entire Pacific exploded with the terrifying abruptness of Pearl Harbor. At first there was a flush of joy when it was realized that at last America had to join the battle, assuring ultimate victory. But this elation changed to a cold and creeping fear when it became apparent that Japan was going to conquer, almost unopposed, the islands north of New Zealand. Day by day, with horrible speed, like a spider dashing down upon its prey, the Japanese swept south, almost to the gates of New Zealand.
Singapore fell, and word crept home that thousands of men had been slaughtered or forced into jungle labor gangs where they died without medicine. The Government officially informed Delia that Cobber Phil was missing.
Anne said, “Most missing men … t
hat is, if they aren’t at sea … Well, anyway, most missing men turn up safe, Deel.”
Barbara, who knew that Cobber’s disappearance might be a boon to her sister, elected to say nothing, but then was astonished at her callousness and said, “I think Cobber will be all right. I think hell be back here with us some day.”
There now seemed to be always that aching pain in the kitchen at Ferrymead as the Japs came closer and closer. There was a special agony in New Zealand at this time because of the fact that her defenselessness had been caused by her own gallantry. Captain Harry Neville’s Nestor might have helped oppose the Jap fleet, but it had sunk in the South Atlantic, protecting England. Mark Forbes might have helped defend Auckland, but he had died in the desert defending Alexandria. Kit was dead in Norway and even the Cobber was lost in Singapore, defending God knows what. At home there was nothing. Nothing.
The days of that dreadful autumn were rainy, cold and dismal. Barbara tried her best—in the house of five women and no men—to keep spirits alive. She baked special goodies for their teas, instituted a program of reading each night at least four poems from The Oxford Book of English Verse, but the love lyrics were so lacerating to the heart that by common consent this was stopped. And week by week the Japs came closer.
The great tenseness of the time was broken by Delia’s abrupt departure for Wellington. She did not even bid her sisters good-bye, but fled the lonely cottage by the estuary.
And then titanic hope burst like a mighty spring flower all across New Zealand. The first Marine Division landed from America, and with it came astonishing stores of equipment, superb young men, and hope.
There had been in the entire history of the world nothing quite like this. To be sure, supporting armies had often landed on allied lands to help local forces, but never before had a strange army come to take the place of every available man. Never before had all the military population of a nation gone off to blazing foreign fields in support of a friend, only to have the enemy sneak down upon the undefended homeland.
An impassioned sigh of deliverance went up from New Zealand. They saw in the powerful and handsome FirstMarDiv the flower of American strength, comparable to the acme of New Zealand strength that had been the first to leave for Africa. It was always the finest men who left home in time of war, and New Zealand recognized this fact.
The Neville girls would never forget their first sight of the Americans. Evelyn, then fourteen and an increasingly lovely child, came bursting into the kitchen screaming, “You should see them!”
“Who?” Barbara asked quietly.
“The Yanks!”
Instinctively there was a catch in Barbara’s throat. Then, prosaically, she said, “Well it’s about time. They’ve been about it long enough.”
The two girls bundled their mother up so her feet would not freeze and then they slipped off to the city, where they found a convoy of military trucks in the central square. Lounging upon them were the tallest, cleanest-teethed, smilingest men Barbara had ever seen. Against her will tears came into her eyes and Evelyn teased, “You silly! What are you crying for? I think they’re cute!”
This chance remark was Barbara’s first warning. And when she looked up from drying her eyes to find that one of the Americans was making signs to Evelyn, she whisked her sister home and said, “Look here, young lady. There’ll be no making signs at soldiers.” Evelyn laughed at the warning but nevertheless appeared in the kitchen some time later with the startling news: “Four girls in Ferrymead are pregnant.”
“Evelyn! Where’d you pick up such language?”
“They’re pregnant,” Evelyn replied. “Do you suppose they’ll marry the Yanks?”
“No,” Barbara said simply. “That’s what so terrible about war, Evelyn. They don’t usually marry.”
Articles of complaint began to appear in the newspapers concerning the conduct of the American troops and one night Anne came home flushed and trembling. “A great oaf! Couldn’t even speak the language. Pestered me in the store and then grabbed me as I was leaving. Leered at me and said, ‘You and me would be terrific in the hay, baby.’ I’m going to call the police!”
“Please, Anne. This is war.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“No, it isn’t an excuse. But it is an explanation.”
“Barbara! Are you condoning these barbarians? Do you think New Zealand men are behaving like that in London?”
“Yes,” Barbara said firmly. “In a different way, perhaps, but yes.”
Anne’s disgust with the Americans became complete when word trickled back to Ferrymead that Delia was living with a Marine in Wellington, and soon Barbara became aware that a shocking change had taken place in New Zealand life. Daughters of impeccable families began to contract strange alliances with American soldiers. For more than thirty months there had been no men in the land, and here were dashing young fellows with free and easy ways and plenty of money. It was indeed more than average human beings could tolerate. Anne heard from a friend in Auckland that the New Zealand Government had made an arrangement with the American generals whereby mothers of illegitimate children would be paid allowances deducted officially from the father’s military pay. This callous decision shocked the nation and some older men even banded together and administered thrashings to individual Americans.
One night Anne said, “That delightful Kennery girl is going to have a baby. The world I know seems to be vanishing. Just a little while ago Daddy and Mums and all of us were a unit. Now the whole fiber of the nation is disintegrating. I wish the Americans would leave and never return.”
And then, just as Anne’s antagonism threatened to become general, the Americans did leave. They headed north to a jungled island that would soon acquire an immortal connotation both in America and New Zealand: Guadalcanal.
There were few households in either the North or the South Island that did not know some American boy who now fought on that desolate island. When the casualties were posted they were read, sometimes, more eagerly in Auckland and Wellington than they were in New York or Dallas. Then, as the Yanks secured their foothold on Guadalcanal, the second American invasion of New Zealand began. In many ways it was worse than the first, for it was deeply emotional, more hopelessly confused.
From the feverish jungles of Guadalcanal, where there were no remedies for malaria, the sick and wounded were evacuated to New Zealand. Flyers who had been boldly aloft for five times the prescribed numbers of hours limped down to Wellington for rest and recuperation. To Christchurch and the cold valleys of the south came Americans who were simply worn out.
They bought with them an intolerable arrogance. Having fought a very dangerous war, they were sure no other soldiers from countries like New Zealand had ever done so. In bars they shouted, “You ought to be goddamned thankful we saved this godforsaken wreck of a country. Where were your men?” And from the jungles came Americans who had seen no woman for three months. They met New Zealand girls who had seen no men for three years, and if the girls were happy to see strangers who had saved the country from Japan, they were known as pigs. Bright, confused and hungry girls like Delia were pigs.
The burden of these insults fell very heavily on Anne. Americans would come in to buy underwear at one of her counters and they would say, “I want something frilly for my pig about this broad.” Then they would poke their fingers through the imitation silk and complain, “Why in the States you’d pay maybe twenty cents for junk like this.” At first Anne tried to explain that for nearly four years her country had been at war, that everything had been sent to England; but she stopped when the Americans asked, “Why should you send stuff to England? Why should you knuckle down to their king? Don’t you New Zealanders have any guts?”
Anne therefore felt a surge of patriotic joy when news reached Ferrymead that Cobber Phil was living. A prisoner in Malaya, he scrawled a naïve letter which he had smuggled through the lines: “Im all right. Left leg gone. No pain. Beat the yella bastids. Youre
Cobber.”
She said, “I’m going to take this to Delia. I’m fed up with Christchurch right now. Too many Yankee heroes.”
She left on the ferry one stormy night and was feeling battered about when she checked in at Delia’s hotel. She found the Prince George crowded with important-looking Americans and considered, for a moment, leaving, but instead she went up to Delia’s room.
It was quite unlike any Anne had seen in the stuffy Christchurch hotels. It was big and clean and modern, decorated in light colors. Delia was dressed in excellent new clothes and wore her hair long, with a ribbon in back.
The girls embraced with nervous uncertainty and Delia started to comb her hair. “Are you visiting in Wellington?” she asked casually, sitting on a big double bed which dominated the room.
“No. I brought some news.”
“For me?” Delia asked suspiciously.
“Yes.”
“From Singapore?”
“Yes.”
“Cobber! He’s alive!”
“Yes. Lost his left leg, but he’s alive.”
“Thank God!” the younger girl cried. “He’s a strange little guy, Anne, and you never liked him …”
“I’m growing to understand him,” Anne said quickly.
“I’ve prayed for that crazy little man every night,” Delia said.
“Cobber’s not so little,” Anne protested.
“Compared to the Yanks, he is.”
Anne sucked in her breath and went to the window. “We were thinking … Barbara and I, that is … We were thinking that now you might want to come home.”
“I can’t,” Delia said.
“But what about Cobber?”
“I think Cobber’d understand,” Delia said nervously.
“God, Deel! What’s happened to you?”
“I don’t think you would understand, Anne.”
The older girl felt dizzy and sat in an expensive armchair. She pressed her forehead to control herself and then said slowly, “You don’t seem like the same girl, Deel. I’ve never told Barbara, but word’s come to Christchurch that you’ve been living with Americans. Not just one. Different ones …”
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