To Love a Sunburnt Country

by Jackie French

  ‘What do you think will happen?’

  He swallowed a mouthful of his toast, signalled to the waiter. ‘Coffee, if you please. Ah, yes, that’s the ticket,’ as something more resembling thick black tar than coffee was poured into his cup. ‘Hot and black, that’s the way to drink it. I imagine old Percival is going to surrender, that’s what’s going to happen. Surrender to a force less than half the size of the Allies. The Japanese adapt to the terrain. The British haven’t learnt how to.’

  She put her toast down on her plate. ‘So Japan will win the war?’ Japanese masters of Australia, of Overflow, of Drinkwater. I’d die before I let that happen, she thought, and so would Michael. And Dad and Mum and the Thompsons. We wouldn’t run, as we’ve done here. We’d stand and fight.

  Somehow she must get back —

  ‘Oh, no.’ Mr Harding took another bite of toast, swallowed. ‘Japan will lose.’

  ‘But you said —’

  ‘Said the British haven’t learnt how to adapt … yet. But they will. Look at the Great War. No real tactics till the last two years, and then we whipped them. But it’s not going to be Britain who saves Australia this time. We’ll need to do it ourselves, with Yankee help.’

  ‘But the American fleet, their planes have been destroyed …’

  ‘As most of ours have been lost in the Middle East too. Don’t underestimate the Yanks. They have what Japan doesn’t.’

  She thought he meant courage. But he continued, ‘Natural resources. Oil. Iron. Factories. They’ll be making new planes and ships already, while every ship, every plane that Japan loses means one more lost to them for good. And we,’ he meant Australia now, ‘have food.’

  ‘How does that help?’

  ‘Takes food to fuel an army. Japan doesn’t even send rations with its troops. They can hardly grow enough for themselves on those small islands — they’re mostly mountains. The Japanese armies have to live off the land wherever they are, a land disrupted by war. They can manage that in China, in Thailand, even here. But they won’t find it so easy in Papua or the islands, or north Australia for that matter. America has its cornfields, we have our wheat and meat. We’ll win. But it won’t be soon.’

  She thought of the sheep at home, the eggs from the chooks, the paddock of pumpkins Dad put in each spring, the Lees’ market garden. Could those really make a difference and win a war? Did this old man know what he was talking about, more than the generals in command?

  Yes, she thought. Like Gentleman Once, who’d predicted all this.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  She meant, was he too waiting for a ship to take him back to Australia. But the grey eyes twinkled at her. ‘Put on my uniform and go to work. Not supposed to be in civilian dress, but I always spill marmalade at breakfast. Can’t do a good day’s work without a decent breakfast.’

  She looked. Yes, there was a spot of yellow marmalade on his tie. He wiped it off with a finger, licked it, grinned again at his own bad manners, then stood up.

  He must be one of the very intelligence officers he had talked about, she realised. She wondered why he had told her so much. She met his eyes, and saw the steel. Not a kind old gentleman. Well, yes, he was, but not just that. Anger simmered deep inside him, despite his words, seeing a battle being lost that might have been won.

  ‘You eat up, my girl. You’re going to need it. And get yourself on a ship out of here.’

  ‘We have passages booked for us. I don’t know when we sail though, or even the name of the ship.’

  ‘Captains keep information like that close to their chests. You just get yourself down to the Shipping Office every day and see what’s happening. Make sure your name is on the list and make sure it stays on the list.’

  ‘Please …’ He was about to go. ‘If … if the Japanese take Singapore before we can get out, what will happen to us?’

  ‘You’ll be interned as enemy aliens. Anyone in the military becomes a prisoner of war — unless they know the islands well enough to get to Batavia from here.’ There was something in his face that said he knew those islands very well indeed. ‘If you have the bad luck to be taken prisoner, you might be exchanged for Japanese prisoners after a while, but I doubt it — Japan hasn’t signed the Geneva Convention.’

  She hadn’t heard of that; didn’t want to waste his time asking what it was. His face was sombre now.

  ‘I wish you had left here months ago. I spent a year of the last war as a prisoner of war in Germany. If worst comes to the worst, Miss Clancy, remember this. We’ll win. Not by next Christmas: not for years. But we have the resources, and they don’t. We’ll win in the end. All you need to do is survive, and you’ll get home again. Can you remember that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think you will.’ He looked across the dining room. ‘And now, if I’m not mistaken, that is your sister-in-law, who is going to give you a stern telling-off for talking to strange men. Good morning, Miss Clancy. And good luck.’

  ‘Good luck to you too.’

  She stood as Moira approached, Gavin in her arms. Moira accepted Mr Harding’s polite nod with a slight inclination of her own, then waited till he was out of earshot. ‘Nancy! What on earth were you doing talking to a strange man?’

  Just what Mr Harding said she’d say, thought Nancy. Was he correct about everything else too?

  ‘The hotel is crowded. I couldn’t have a table to myself. And it would have been extremely rude not to make conversation with the person who allowed me to share his.’

  ‘Then you should have waited till I came down.’

  There was no point arguing. Nancy reached over and lifted Gavin from Moira’s arms. ‘They have porridge! I’ll give Gavin some while you have breakfast. You’ll feel better when you’ve eaten.’

  The waiter appeared at the table, proffered a menu. Moira took it. Her face brightened. ‘Porridge — two servings, please, one for the baby. Oh, devilled kidneys.’

  ‘I am afraid, madam, that we have no kidneys today.’

  Nancy suppressed a smile at the thought of all of the Raffles’s guests and staff suddenly minus their kidneys.

  ‘The devilled fowl is particularly good this morning.’

  ‘I will have that then. And a pot of tea now, if you please.’ Her eyes raked Nancy, gave grudging approval to dress, stockings, shoes and hair, lingered on the lack of lipstick.

  ‘I’ll go down to the P&O Office straight after breakfast.’ Nancy took a breath. ‘You need to have the bags packed in case we have to sail straight away.’

  She waited for argument. It didn’t come. Moira nodded. ‘I’ll be ready. Ah, thank you,’ to the waiter bringing their porridge; she bestowed a smile on another who brought fresh tea and handed Nancy a teaspoon to feed Gavin. ‘I’m not stupid, my dear. If … when … Ben manages to get to Singapore, he’ll be evacuated with the army, just like at Dunkirk. Civilians like us would just get in the way. Oh, you’ve got porridge on your dress already!’ She reached over and wiped off the spot, then tied a damask napkin around Gavin as a bib.

  Nancy fed Gavin another spoonful, smiled as he gulped it down. Despite their flight the day before, despite Mr Harding’s words, a strange sense of peace enveloped her. In a few weeks’ time she’d be at Overflow, maybe even before Michael had to go back to school. Mum and Dad and Gran. The river and the hills. And paddocks that stretched across the plain — wonderful wide paddocks where she’d be moving sheep, dagging them, carting hay, back in her working clothes.

  And if Moira tried any nonsense, Mum and Gran would deal with her.

  Chapter 11

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 19 January 1942

  Subscribe to the Hundred-Million-Pound AUSTERITY LOAN

  Advance subscription may be made now.

  Interest accrues from date of subscription.

  OR BUY NATION WAR SAVINGS BONDS AND SAVINGS CERTIFICATES.

  DRINKWATER, 24 JANUARY 1942

  MICHAEL

  ‘Michael, just the pe
rson I need.’

  Michael looked up from the kitchen table, where he’d been devouring a late lunch of cold mutton and last night’s potatoes after mending the fences in the hill paddocks, and thinking of Nancy. A few weeks more and she’d be back in Australia, safe. Or as safe as the rest of the country …

  He stood up politely as Blue McAlpine strode into the kitchen. Red hair as bright as a bushfire, and a bushfire’s energy harnessed into a slim-skirted suit of bronze linen with a matching blouse of bronze and green chrysanthemums. She looked like what she was: a successful businesswoman, though her biscuits were now reserved for the armed forces, and wife of the local doctor, now with the AIF. She did not look like a retired circus mermaid.

  Blue inspected him, much as he suspected she inspected the conveyor belt at the biscuit factory she owned with her circus friend, Mah, now married to Drinkwater’s manager. ‘You’re filthy.’

  ‘Sorry. I planned to go out again after lunch.’

  ‘Anything urgent?’

  ‘Just inspecting the rest of the fences.’

  ‘Good. I need a hand getting Sheba on the truck for the War Bonds parade.’

  Sheba was an elephant, retired from the Magnifico Family Circus, which had sheltered Blue, then a runaway teenager, and Mah, a homeless orphan. Now the women were married to the McAlpine brothers. Michael looked sideways at Blue and grinned. Blue McAlpine as a mermaid seemed as impossible as the extremely proper Mah McAlpine as a magician’s assistant, with her brother in a top hat sawing her in half nightly for audiences around the country.

  Blue raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s that grin for?’

  ‘Wishing I’d seen you as a mermaid,’ he said frankly.

  Blue laughed. ‘You’ll get your chance. I’m going to be in costume for the parade this afternoon. So’s Mah.’

  ‘That’d be worth seeing.’

  She looked at him mock sternly. ‘You weren’t planning on watching our parade?’

  He wondered how to say politely that mending fences was more important than watching parades, especially now when so many men had left for war. That he had more urgent things to think of than watching an elephant, even if it carried two young women in revealing costumes.

  ‘I don’t have any money to invest in War Bonds. It’d be wasted on me. I doubt there’s anyone in Gibber’s Creek who hasn’t put anything they have to spare into War Bonds already either.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Blue.

  ‘What is the point then?’

  ‘Morale. Makes us feel we are all in this together, not each one with our own worries. Stops us brooding. Gives us things to do.’

  Like knitting army socks, he thought, making camouflage netting twice a week at the Town Hall, Red Cross meetings and collecting ivory and saucepans and paper for the war effort, and the hundreds of other jobs women across Australia dedicated their few free hours to, after the demands of family and the factory work many had taken up to keep the country going with so many men away.

  He looked at the woman in front of him, at the shadows under her eyes, the mouth that was a little too firmly smiling. ‘Have you heard from Dr McAlpine?’

  ‘A letter from him yesterday.’ Her voice was carefully light. ‘But you know what the post is like. All I know is that he was well when he wrote it.’

  Nor would Dr McAlpine have been able to tell his wife where he was, or if he had, the censor would have blacked it out. But he had told her on his last leave that he was headed for Malaya. At least, he thought, Nancy is headed home. She might have boarded the ship already. Even his father didn’t know when the ship that his agent had managed to book berths on for Nancy and her sister-in-law would sail.

  ‘Any news of Nancy?’ It was as if Blue had guessed his thoughts.

  He blinked. He hadn’t been aware that their … attachment … was so well known. But it was impossible to keep a secret in a place like Gibber’s Creek.

  ‘Dad got a cable to say Nancy and Moira had arrived safely in Singapore.’ He flushed. The cable had ended, THANK YOU EXCLAMATION MARK PLEASE GIVE MY LOVE TO MICHAEL STOP NANCY. Which meant that everyone at the Post Office, from the postmistress to the delivery boy, knew that Nancy Clancy had sent her love to Michael Thompson. By now the whole district would be gossiping.

  But Nancy had used the word ‘love’, just as he had done. That was worth a bit of gossip.

  ‘Nancy’ll be right,’ said Blue seriously. ‘The Japanese have more to worry about just now than torpedoing passenger ships.’

  He nodded. That was what his mother had said the previous night. His father, however, had said nothing. His father’s silence worried him.

  ‘Come on,’ said Blue McAlpine. ‘Elephant.’

  None of the fellows at school had quite believed his family had an elephant in their river paddock, even when someone (Michael suspected Jim) posted him a photograph of Sheba inscribed To Michael. Love always, Sheba and he’d opened it with everyone gawking and laughing. He wondered if he’d have time to get Dad’s camera and take a photograph of the Mrs McAlpines riding her this afternoon.

  Sheba stood at the edge of the river, hosing herself down in the midday heat. A rack of hay stood nearby — even the river paddock didn’t have enough grass for an elephant. Her small and mildewed teddy bear — Blue and Mah presented her with a new one each Christmas — sat on the hay, regarding the sheep in the next paddock.

  He still remembered the excitement of coming home from school to find an elephant by the river. She had lived in a paddock by the factory for a while, but had terrified delivery boys on their bicycles, peering inquisitively over the fence and helping herself to their packages. She had been at Moura next, the farmhouse that had been his grandfather’s, but which for some reason his mother had wanted Blue and Dr McAlpine to live in. But the Moura paddock had proved too small, and the company of wombats and wallabies not enough to occupy an elephant used to admiring crowds.

  So Sheba and her beloved teddy bear had come back to Drinkwater, to be admired — or at least respected — by the neighbouring sheep, where she could watch the comings and goings of the small village that was Drinkwater: the main house, the shearers’ quarters, the workers’ cottages, Andy McAlpine’s more substantial house, the horseyards and the sheep pens and cattleyards.

  He and Jim had tried to ride her, of course, even though their mother had forbidden it. Sheba had kindly but firmly pushed them away with her trunk each time they’d tried. Would she really let Blue and Mah on her back now?

  The old elephant saw Blue and gave a welcoming trumpet. She plodded up the hill, pausing only to grab the teddy bear with her trunk. She held it out to Blue.

  Blue took it, offering a handful of carrots in return. The elephant conveyed them to her mouth, crunching, eyeing them both as though to say, ‘What’s happening now?’

  ‘Show time again, old girl,’ said Blue softly. She held out an apple. The elephant munched it. ‘But just me and Mah on your back today. Not Gertrude.’

  ‘Who’s Gertrude?’

  Blue smiled reminiscently. ‘She was the best trapeze artist and acrobat I’ve ever seen. Mah and I had acts that just looked impressive. But Gertrude was the real thing.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  Blue grinned. ‘Did you see To Love and To Serve?’

  Michael nodded. The movie had been on at the Gibber’s Creek picture theatre for a week.

  ‘The girl who captures the German spy ring? That’s Gertrude.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘That was Gillie O’Gold. She’s American.’

  ‘Gertrude used to be a harem dancer one minute and one of the Boldini Brothers the next,’ said Blue dryly. ‘She could turn herself into whoever she wanted to be. Just like Fred. But Gertrude wanted to be a star.’ She looked at Michael assessingly. ‘You’re too big to fit into a Boldini Brother costume, but you’re about the same size as Fred.’

  ‘Fred?’ he asked warily.

  ‘Mah’s brother. He was the circus magician.
’ Blue’s smile changed, almost wistful now. ‘And a harem dancer when he had to be. Fred was a magician in other ways too sometimes.’

  ‘Did Fred go to Hollywood as well?’

  ‘No.’ Her tone made it clear no more would be said about Fred. ‘You’ll make a fine magician.’

  ‘I don’t know the first thing about being a magician.’

  ‘Nothing to it,’ she said airily. ‘Just march in front of Sheba and keep pulling bunches of flowers out of your top hat. And smile. Don’t forget to smile.’

  ‘Look, Mrs McAlpine —’

  ‘Call me Blue. And it’s for a good cause.’

  She’s not talking about raising money for the war effort, thought Michael, or not entirely. This was a woman who must be as anguished about her husband as he was for Nancy. More — for she had the loss of years of closeness while his bond with Nancy had only just been glimpsed. But today they’d give themselves and their neighbours something fabulous and funny to think about instead. Doing their bit.

  Blue lifted her hand, and stroked Sheba’s leathery neck. ‘Come on, old girl,’ she said softly. ‘Time for the Big Galah.’

  Three hours later Michael found himself, somehow, dressed in a frayed dinner jacket and black silk-lined cloak, only slightly moth eaten, pulling fake flowers from a top hat and marching in front of an elephant, draped in gold and green, carrying a small grubby teddy bear in her trunk. On her back sat the doctor’s wife and factory manager, now a mermaid in a sequined tail, blonde wig and what looked like nothing else but was, in fact, a tight flesh-coloured top down to her wrists. Mah McAlpine flashed surprisingly shapely legs under a ballerina’s skirt, with spangled wings on her back. Her wig was blonde as well.