by Robbi Neal
George said, ‘Hmmm.’ He stood up now he was dressed and tapped his baton against his hand and said, ‘I’m just going to chat with Davo two doors down while you get some grub up. Can I borrow your brolly?’
George asked Davo if management was at fault. He hoped to God they were — he really wanted to get the greedy buggers. They sat on two upturned milk crates on Davo’s front verandah out of the rain, which still poured down in torrents, and had a smoke and stared out into the narrow street.
Davo thought for a while and finally said, ‘Young Colin had been going down shafts he knew to be dangerous, to places other sensible men wouldn’t go. For this to happen on the very day of her wedding, most likely at the very moment she was pronounced married, I reckon he willed the earth to keep him down there in the black where he couldn’t see or feel nothing. The boy was like a son to me, George, and that is my honest opinion, mate.’
George went back up to Number 9, shook the rainwater off the umbrella and flicked it off his shoulders onto the kitchen floor, making Beatrix scowl. He told her what Davo said and sat down to the afternoon tea she had laid out on the table — drop scones and oat biscuits. It would have been sponge cake and date loaf if there wasn’t a war on.
Beatrix said, ‘Well, Georgie, I have to agree with Davo, not that I’m an expert on mines or anything, but what I do know is human behaviour, and some things are just too much for anybody, even a strapping young lad. Some things just make life seem not worth living.’
Monday, 9 November 1914, when there is a fine account in the paper.
Gracie went out in the rain in her nightdress and grabbed the papers from the front lawn and went back inside with them. She wiped the wet grass off her feet on the doormat and shook her hair.
‘I got them,’ she called, ‘before they were ruined.’
She had both The Star and The Courier. She went into the kitchen where Edie and Paul were sitting at the table. She plonked into a chair and opened the first paper.
‘Careful,’ said Edie, ‘you’ve got it in the milk jug.’
‘Oh,’ laughed Gracie and she shook the soggy corner so that drops splattered over the table. Then she tore through the pages of The Star and found the wedding page. She hoped beyond hope that Beth’s wedding wasn’t written up with her name in it. But luck wasn’t on her side.
‘Read it aloud,’ said Papa.
She looked at Edie.
‘Go on,’ said Edie.
‘Yes, let’s hear it,’ agreed Papa.
So Gracie pushed her chair back and stood up and read the words slowly as nine year olds do.
A Patriotic Dedication, reported by Clarence Watty
A quiet but otherwise interesting wedding was celebrated at Dawson Street Baptist church on Saturday morning at 10 a.m. when Captain Theodore Wilson Hooley of the Australian Armed Forces married Elisabeth Mary Crowe of Webster Street. The bride entered the church to the strains of the ‘Wedding March’ on the arm of her employer, Mister Paul Cottingham, who gave her away. The church had been prettily decorated for the occasion by Mister Cottingham’s two daughters.
The bride had made her dress out of the colours of the flags of the Allies. The bodice was royal blue, and panels of the dress imitated the Australian flag and the Union Jack alternately. A novel feature was a floral ‘V’ she carried as her bouquet, expressing all our hopes for the future and as a compliment to the bridegroom.
The flower girl, Miss Gracie Cottingham, also of Webster Street, was dressed in a replica of the bride’s attire, completed by a bow appliquéd with the stars from the Southern Cross tied around the bodice. The presents were numerous and included a cheque from Mister Cottingham. The bride’s present to the groom was a signet ring. The groom’s present to the bride was an aquamarine necklet. The groom and bride left for the train station amid showers of confetti before the groom left to join his battalion and made ready to leave for the front the next day.
‘Well, it only took her three years but she got him,’ said Paul. Gracie saw him look at Edie and whisper, ‘Did you wish it was you?’
Gracie was suddenly still. She knew she was hearing an adult conversation and that more was being said behind the words. Paul and Edie both looked at her, as if suddenly remembering she was there, and she smiled at them both.
‘No,’ said Edie. ‘What do I want with the worry of a man away at war?’ She was lost in Gracie’s smile, which always filled her with a sense of being in the right place. Then she got up and put more water in the kettle and while she was turned away from them she took her notebook out of her pocket and wrote:
Ninth November Fourteen
Plan — Help Theo at war.
Twenty-Six
The Comfort Pack
Wednesday, 26 May 1915, when love is sent across the sea.
The first list of Gallipoli casualties appeared in the Ballarat papers on the third of May 1915. From then on the lists of dead boys grew longer each day. The attack on the Turks on the fifth of May was a disaster, as were the attacks on the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth of May and all the other days of May and the lists of dead boys continued to grow longer and the advertisements urging more young men to go and die also grew. Mining reports of new shafts sunk and good stone quarried and advertisements for new fabrics were jammed in tiny spaces between all the news of the war. Buy war bonds the ads cried. Send little luxuries to the front. Send your sons to the front. Women were encouraged to keep knitting, buy buttons, hold fetes and pack up comfort packs to send to the soldiers. Germans were notified that they must attend the police station to register their details, including their date of birth, current address and occupation. The Royal Agricultural Show was suspended but Dame Nellie Melba sang at the Coliseum Theatre in South Street with all proceeds to the Red Cross and the trams waited to take the concertgoers home afterwards.
Notices of the dead, missing and injured were printed in thin, neat columns, sometimes with a photo and an obituary — a young man from Box Hill, another from Fitzroy, two from Hampton. Soon the local papers didn’t have room for the dead boys from far away and gave preference to local lads. The pages were filled to the brim with notices of boys from town and the surrounding areas — a lad from Sebastopol who was ruck on the football team, a captain from Garibaldi with a baby, a chap from Black Hill who was youth leader at the Methodist church. Heroes to the last. Crisp, clean words suggesting tidy, painless deaths.
Everyone thought the war would be over quickly — by Christmas, the experts had said, and the boys would be back home in no time. Mothers comforted themselves with this thought; they dreamt of their sons walking in the door and laughing about what a good lark it had all been and how the government had let them see Europe for free. Everyone agreed God was on their side, just ask Reverend Whitlock or Father O’Malley. But now Christmas had come and gone and the war drove on like an insatiable beast.
The town had not seen one bullet, one bomb, one Turk in his weird little hat, but the town would never be the same again.
Every day Edie scoured the newspapers to make sure Theo’s name wasn’t there, and in Ligar Street Beth and Lilly did the same. When it wasn’t there Edie thanked God for answering her prayers and Beth and Lilly hugged each other and Lilly put on the kettle and got out the biscuits.
Lilly and Beth had finished their dinner and cleared away the dishes and now Lilly was putting together a package for Theo as she had done every week of the six months he had been away. She had the box up on the kitchen table and Beth was sitting at the end of the table knitting green socks for the soldiers who were going to face a cold northern winter.
Lilly picked up the string to tie up the box and asked, ‘Have you got a note you want to pop in, Beth, before I tie this up?’
Beth became flustered, her cheeks went pink and her ball of wool rolled off the table onto the floor. In fact, Beth looked as if she had been caught off guard in an embarrassing situation, which didn’t make any sense to Lilly at all.
‘Of course
,’ Beth stammered, picking up the ball of green wool from the floor. She dropped her needles onto the table and the ball of wool rolled onto the linoleum again where it remained as Beth disappeared into her room. Lilly had assumed Beth and Theo would write to each other regularly, growing their love through words, but as it was always she who collected the mail she couldn’t help but notice that Theo only wrote to both of them, Dear Mum and Beth, and she wrote long letters back with much love always from Beth and Mum.
She could only wonder why her request had made Beth so uncomfortable. Maybe it was the distance, and she thought of when Peter had gone away to cure himself and how she had been devastated and closed herself off from the pain in her soul so she could keep doing daily tasks like cooking for Theo when all she wanted to do was crawl inside herself and wait until he came back. We all have different ways, she thought, maybe Beth and Theo didn’t know how to bridge the physical space between them and needed some motherly help. Lilly looked at the box filled with a fruitcake soused in whisky so it wouldn’t go off, Anzac biscuits made without eggs for the same reason, a jar of apricot jam, a pair of socks, a woollen beanie and a woollen vest for warmth that she had knitted for Theo and thought he could hide under his uniform. She was trying to think if there was anything she had forgotten to put in when Beth came back with a sealed envelope.
‘That didn’t take long,’ said Lilly sadly, hoping that Beth would have written pages and pages to Theo.
‘Not much of a writer,’ said Beth crisply.
‘You should put on lipstick and kiss it,’ said Lilly.
‘Really Mum!’ squealed Beth and the two of them giggled. ‘I don’t have any pots of lipstick.’
‘No — no neither do I,’ said Lilly, wishing she did have such a thing, it might make her feel brighter in these dark times. ‘I have a beetroot though.’
So Beth pressed her lips to half a beetroot and then to the letter, leaving a crimson print on the envelope and she held it with the tips of her fingertips like a tainted thing and let it flutter into the box. Lilly quickly tied up the box to keep the beetroot kiss from escaping.
‘Paul was grumbling again today,’ Beth said as she lifted the box onto the floor. ‘“It isn’t right to employ a married woman and if you must keep working for us, Beth, you will only do so Monday to Friday,”’ she mimicked Paul’s voice.
‘Well, I like having you around on Saturdays and Sundays,’ said Lilly. ‘And you needn’t work at all if you don’t want to. Theo and I are quite capable of supporting you.’
‘So you keep saying, Mum, but working keeps me sane.’
‘Well, as long as you’re happy, dear.’ Lilly thought how lonely she would have been if Beth hadn’t come to live with her and she wondered if Theo had married Beth just so she would have company while he was away. Maybe he had and Beth knew and that was why they didn’t write to each other. She scolded herself and quickly pushed the thought from her mind. That would be a terrible reason for her son to marry. Cross at thinking such a thing, she grabbed a lemon biscuit to push the thought away and instead turned her mind to Maud Blackmarsh.
‘You’ve done a world of good for that girl, Lilly,’ Maud had said to her earlier in the day as she peered over the fence into Lilly’s place as if looking for a secret.
Lilly looked around her garden but couldn’t see anything that hadn’t been there before.
Not finding any secrets, Maud had stared pointedly at Lilly’s house. Lilly had got Theo to paint it a lovely cheery yellow some years back.
‘Are you going to repaint that house?’ she asked, not hiding her distaste.
‘Not while there’s a war on, dearie,’ Lilly said and walked inside, leaving Maud standing at the fence.
Lilly glanced at Beth, sitting up the end of the table again, the click-clack of her knitting needles making a soft comforting rhythm. The girl had grown, her breasts now fell soft and round, her stomach and hips spread out with generous friendliness. She was no longer the slip of a girl she had been when she married. She was what a wife should be: a safe place, a solid woman to come home to, able to make a man feel that his life was grounded and secure.
She thought her Theo would be happy to see Beth filled out. Beth had needed new dresses as her old ones became too tight, so Lilly had sewed them for her. Beth said, ‘Geez, Mum, no one has made dresses for me since I was little’ and then had given her a hug, which made Lilly feel that she really had gained a daughter. The two of them got into a groove of living together. Lilly did the cooking and when Beth got home from her work in Webster Street Lilly would make sure to have something ready and waiting on the stove, and when Beth had eaten the mains there would always be something sweet to top it off, like some pineapple cake or honey joy biscuits. After dinner they would sit in the lounge room near Theo’s piano and knit socks, scarves and balaclavas for the soldiers or make comfort packages to send to the men with tinned delicacies that wouldn’t rot on the long journey to the other side of the world, like condensed milk, tea — anything that they imagined the men wouldn’t be able to buy from stores at the front. And every week Lilly made a special care package for Theo filled with her cooking.
Sunday, 30 May 1915, the day before the Australian Imperial Forces change the rules to accept shorter men.
Edie was reading an article calling for more boys and men to fight for freedom. The rules for enlistment were to be changed starting tomorrow. Now you could enlist from the ages of eighteen to forty-five and you only had to be five feet two inches tall. ‘The war needs you. Wives — let your man defend your honour,’ she read out to Paul. He was writing on a pad of paper in his lap. His hair was greying and his brow more furrowed but he still insisted on righting wrongs when he could.
‘Hmmm,’ said Paul, ‘five and a half thousand boys. That’s how many are needed each month alone to replace the dead. Spring Street is talking about holding a referendum next year on conscription. How can we force boys to walk head on into death?’
‘I don’t know, Papa,’ said Edie, ‘but I will do what I can to help the ones who have gone,’ thinking of the one solider she wanted to help most. She folded up the paper and put it in the basket. ‘Well, Papa, I am going to leave you to your speech because I’m going to go on with my own little project for the boys.’ She walked down the hallway past the portraits of those who had gone before that inevitably filled her bones with the sureness of death, and felt as if she had eaten something rotten. She held her breath for a moment, her arms clasped tight across her chest, hoping and praying that Theo was safe.
Gracie was already in the kitchen, sitting at the table writing. The kitchen had become a packing room. There were three towers of cardboard boxes piled four and five high. One tower was empty boxes that wobbled and threatened to fall over, the second tower was boxes that sat heavy and firm on top of each other, full of brown glass jars that Edie had bought from the grocer. The third tower was filled boxes, glued, tied up and addressed, ready to be sent to the Comforts Fund, who would then send them on to the soldiers. Edie, Paul, Gracie and Beth when she was there, had to manoeuvre around the boxes to get to the stove or the pantry, but no one complained because it was all for the war and their sacrifice of a kitchen was nothing compared to the sacrifice of women who gave their sons and husbands.
Edie squeezed sideways between the table and the boxes until she got to the other end of the table. She took a cardboard box from the top of the empty box tower and put it on table. Then she reached for a newspaper from the pile that sat under the table and scrunched up the sheets of newspaper to make a nest on the bottom of the box. Next she took the top box from the tower of glued boxes, sat it on a kitchen chair and opened it, sliding a knife under the flap to unseal it. She put the box on the floor at her feet and took out a jar of Bovril. The brown glass jar was round and bulbous at the bottom like an onion, with a short neck shut tight with a screw-on lid. The words Bovril Limited 8oz were embossed in the glass like braille. Edie shut her eyes and ran her fingers ov
er the raised letters that felt like scars on the smooth glass. She rolled the jar up in two sheets of paper in one direction and then two sheets of paper in the opposite direction and laid the jar with its protective newspaper in the carton on the nest of scrunched paper. She kept going until she had filled the carton with twenty-four jars of Bovril facing each other head to head, in four layers of six jars, and then she took the pot of glue from the stove and pasted the flaps of the box down. She cut a good length of string, strung it right around the box several times in both directions and tied it tight. Finally she took a sheet of plain brown paper and a pen and wrote To the Australian Comforts Fund, Ballarat City Branch and glued it to the top of the box. She heaved the box into her arms and carried it to join its brothers, the tied-up boxes, all filled with jars of Bovril. Then she started a new carton, another twenty-four jars to be sent to the men at the front.
‘Who are you writing to, Gracie?’ Edie asked as she scrunched up paper for the bottom of the new box.
‘To Queen Mary. I’m telling her about your boxes of Bovril. But this is the third time. I want my writing to be neat.’
‘Well, as long as she can read it I expect that is all that will matter. Can you pass me some newspapers from under the table and save my old back from bending over again?’ She wasn’t going to ruin Gracie’s fun by telling her that her letter would most likely never even get to the Queen. Hardly any letters were getting across the oceans, let alone a letter to the Queen. If it did get all the way to the Queen no doubt it would be read by one of her many aides who in all likelihood would toss it out.
‘Gracie, you need to do it without all the bouncing. I’ve told you before if you keep bouncing every time you move you will bring all the boxes tumbling to the floor. They might even crash on top of you.’
