To Love a Sunburnt Country

by Jackie French

  ‘Which orphans?’

  ‘Darling, does it matter?’ She shrugged. ‘Belgian. No, British Navy orphans. Now isn’t that worth two tickets? Only two pounds each and I promise you a dance. Two dances. Do you still have those wonderful Christmas parties at Drinkwater? They say everybody goes. I’d love to come to one of them.’

  ‘Yes. We still have them. You must come one time.’

  The words were automatic, because that is what you said when people asked for invitations. But the parties she was thinking of did not exist, not just in these war-straitened times but ever. While the neighbouring squatters came to Mum and Dad’s party, so did everyone else: factory workers, station hands, shearers sleeping in their swags in the men’s quarters, young women crammed in makeshift beds upstairs, and boys in tents down by the river, sometimes even rolled in blankets in the hall.

  He felt at once desperately homesick but, just as desperately, not wanting to be home, the world where his parents had dictated he remain a schoolboy. At this party, at least, he was a young man, though he was embarrassed by his lack of uniform.

  ‘Come on, bedrooms are this way,’ said Skimmer.

  ‘Help yourselves to drinkies,’ said Eva, as she turned back towards the doorway and the music. ‘There’s a buffet in the dining room too.’

  Two hours later the house was even more crowded, the music louder; his head was buzzing with the noise and two drinks of what he knew hadn’t been whisky. He had eaten, but not enough: oyster patties, a prune wrapped in bacon, asparagus vol-au-vents, crustless ham sandwiches, rich after the austerity of school and even the rationing back home. Drinkwater’s house cows gave them more butter than the ration allowed and the hens gave eggs, but not black-market ham or bacon or the luxury of oysters so far inland.

  Michael sat awkwardly on a sofa. At the other end a young Yank lieutenant gazed soulfully into the eyes of a girl who was perhaps eighteen. ‘I’m going north tomorrow. You’re not the kind of dame that would let a fellow be alone on his last night in Sydney, are you?’

  The girl giggled. An older girl in a hennaed pompadour, her lipstick smudged, leant over the back of the sofa. ‘Don’t believe him, honey. He’s a shiny bum over at headquarters. Tells the world how the Yanks are winning the war.’

  The lieutenant grinned. ‘Got to keep the Corn Belt interested. But we do admit you fellers give us a hand too …’

  ‘Michael, darling, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’

  She hadn’t. He’d last seen Eva jiving with an RN captain over by the gramophone. There was no sign of him now.

  ‘All alone?’

  He nodded. Skimmer had vanished somewhere with a girl in green.

  Eva reached out a hand and pulled Michael to his feet. ‘Dance?’

  ‘I’m no good at it. Not jitterbugging anyway.’

  She smiled from under her eyelashes. ‘I’ll put on a slow one just for you. Come on, drink up.’

  He heard someone mutter behind them, ‘The Drinkwater property. Father’s making a fortune in military contracts too.’ He swallowed the liquid in his glass, then wished he hadn’t. Black-market rotgut could send you blind. Or kill you. But he didn’t know how to refuse. ‘Who were you dancing with?’

  ‘Jealous? Captain Mulholland. He’s on the ship that brought out German POWs from England.’

  And that is classified information, he thought, not knowing if it would be useful to the enemy or not. But it wasn’t for either of them to judge. His father had impressed on him the need for security. In a war where you were outnumbered and poorly equipped, knowledge could win a war. Nor had he been jealous, just trying to make conversation.

  Eva paused at the pile of records by the gramophone.

  Michael tried another topic. ‘I thought the Manpower regulations meant that all unmarried women have to have a job. Though I’m sure your War Bonds work is wonderful.’

  Her smile was all lipstick and straight white teeth. ‘I’m on the payroll of Daddy’s factory. Secretary.’

  ‘Really?’ He couldn’t imagine those long nails typing.

  ‘Darling, I’ve never even seen the blasted factory. But what can one do? Every girl I know has to do something like that, or be hauled into some ghastly munitions factory. Seriously, can you see me in munitions?’

  Seriously, he couldn’t.

  He wanted to ask, ‘Do your parents know about this party? Do they know you live like this?’

  As though she sensed his thoughts, she said gaily, ‘Live for the moment, darling. That’s what this war has taught us.’

  She selected a record, dropped it onto the turntable. The music softened; it was Irving Berlin’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’.

  Somehow he was holding her and they were dancing. Eva murmured the words just below his ear, her own cheek on his shoulder. The whispers, the music, the scent of her all swam together.

  Other couples swayed about them. Older, assured men who were doing something, even if it was just writing dispatches at headquarters, girls who were … well, at any rate, they weren’t working as the women he knew were used to doing, even in peacetime. Except at pleasure.

  And this was pleasant, though curiously remote as well. Eva was soft and smelt of gardenias and face powder and the scent of woman, even more intoxicating than whatever had been in his glass. Her silk legs rubbed against his … Nancy was far away …

  Nancy. He pulled back. Eva pushed herself closer again. ‘The song’s not over yet.’

  His head buzzed with whatever he had drunk. He couldn’t embarrass her by leaving. Didn’t want to go. For Nancy was far away and the world was too uncertain. Yesterday and tomorrow might be hard, but here tonight a young woman whispered in his ear, ‘… a private party. Just you and me. Somewhere quiet …’ He felt light and somehow not here at all. Quiet. That’s what he needed. He let her take his hand again and lead him down the corridor, into a room. It wasn’t until she pulled off her dress in one smooth move that he realised it was her bedroom, pink silk and white lace.

  She wore brief silk French-cut knickers, a matching brassiere, a silk suspender belt holding up her stockings. He could see a hint of white flesh under the brassiere. The rest of her skin was tanned, almost polished, the tan from a beach. Nancy’s tan had formed a V, from her shirt, the tops of her arms in her mother’s old party dress far paler than her forearms.

  Nancy. He broke away.

  ‘Lover, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Sorry. I’m going to be sick.’

  It was no lie. He staggered down to a bathroom, vomited neatly twice, then sat on the cool of the bathroom floor till his head steadied.

  He had been half afraid Eva would follow him, but perhaps she was put off by the sound of retching. When he went outside the corridor was empty.

  He found his bedroom again, picked up his bag, headed for the kitchen, through a small throng of uniforms examining bottles and labels, then out the service entrance, down the steps, through the lobby and into the cool and blessed night.

  He walked. The streets were so dark he could almost imagine he was home. But above him planes roared, heading to Richmond, and the beams of searchlights tore up the high dark sky. The music faded behind him. An army lorry passed, and then a taxi.

  He should have hailed it; gone to a hotel. He had money; didn’t need to be back at school till Monday night. Instead he walked, almost instinctively, towards the light, the rattle of trams. Far off he heard the faint roar of an electric train.

  He was there before he realised where he had come. Bayswater Road, Kings Cross. Suddenly it was night no longer. Light spilled into the road. So did people, the pavement as crowded at midnight as during the day.

  Men lounged in doorways: American, Australian, British, New Zealand uniforms. Sailors in striped vests and pompommed hats gazed at women swaying their hips, smiling or too carefully ignoring the stares, women in clothes like Eva’s but shorter, tighter, hair a little brighter, rouge as well as lipstick and strangely dark eyelashes, like film stars
’, hair piled high, flowers pinned to their shoulders, and again the overpowering scent of gardenias and frangipani.

  Shops were open even now, ham and beef shops whose smell made him queasy again; plate-glass windows with spotlit dummies in silk dresses; flower shops, their baskets spilling out onto the footpath.

  Taxis hooted, crawling in a steady stream, passengers sitting, or leaping out and thrusting money at the driver while the taxi still moved, others crowding in. A police car inched among them, its loudspeakers booming out some vice squad warning impossible to make out among the noise.

  He glanced down a dark laneway. A couple gasped and grappled. He forced his eyes away; his legs kept going.

  Was this truly Australia? Was this the price of war too? Not just the men lost, the families torn apart, Mum working in the paddocks like she was twenty again, Dad’s shadowed eyes at the factory.

  The plane trees rustled above him, scattering shadows across the footpath. A sailor clutched a girl against a trunk, mouth to mouth and hip to hip, so flagrant that he wondered if they were drunk, not to see the others on the footpath. He glanced around. It was as though he was the only one who saw.

  This is everyday to them, he thought. The grappling, the desperation. Eva’s words came back to him: ‘Live for the moment.’ Could he really blame them, these men who might have days or weeks left, or else were headed for a long life, blighted, blinded, legs blown off, like so many from the last war, living in pain and poverty. Women like Blue, a war spent working, waiting. Had she kissed Joseph like this, on his last leave when he came back from the Middle East, knowing he would be sent north after a brief home leave? And how would he have kissed Nancy, if he had known of the years that would part them, instead of weeks? But that was love. This was passion used like the ‘whisky’ back at the house, not for itself but to dull desperation.

  Down another alley a man leant against a dustbin, moaning into his mouth organ, while a couple jitterbugged, imagining brightness from the melancholy tune. Dance, he thought. Make sunlight from a shred of moon.

  A street, with dark houses, a sketch of gardens at the front. He turned, and went on walking. At last the sounds behind him ebbed. A baby cried, its mother hushing. A normal sound. Or was it? Where was that child’s father? Fighting overseas? Dead? Captured?

  For the first time in his life he felt that those of good heart might not always triumph. There had been a darkness in that Kings Cross light that he had never seen before; he hadn’t even seen the darkness in the world he knew either. For the first time he felt, not that Nancy was dead, but that he had lost the certainty that she was living.

  He walked. Hour upon hour. He walked.

  At last there was water, deep and black, shimmering and sliding in the starlight, only one streetlight faint behind him. He walked along the jetty, sat and looked at the blackness of the harbour, the million starlights of the shore now the blackout regulations had been eased. Almost possible to believe that two hundred years ago there’d been no Sydney here at all. But there’d have been campfires in place of these window lights, fires like Nancy had slept beside on the track to Charters Towers.

  He hadn’t forgotten her tonight. He was generous enough to himself to have known that he had neither been unfaithful to her, nor meant to be. His mistake had been in drinking when he did not want to drink; in accepting an invitation from Skimmer because Taylor’s brother had been killed a fortnight ago, and so he hadn’t wanted to intrude to stay at their place, as he usually did, when school breaks were too short for the journey home.

  He had not danced with Eva because he thought Nancy was dead. Nancy was alive and she was coming home and one day Australia would be free and they would be together. That was so much the foundation of his being that there was no questioning it.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The woman had nearly tripped over his bag in the darkness of the jetty. He stood up and moved it. ‘My fault. I’m sorry.’

  She smiled, accepting his apology. She was somewhere between his age and his mother’s, bundled in a shapeless coat and scarf. It must be later than he’d thought, if the first ferry was due.

  ‘Coming home from work?’ he asked. She looked tired.

  She shook her head. ‘Early shift.’

  Which meant a factory. He didn’t ask what they made. Loose lips sink ships. Instead he asked, suddenly lonely, ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  She stared. ‘Enjoy it? You’re joking. Two quid ten shillings a week for six days’ work and overtime and no pay rise neither, because we don’t come under the new regulations for working women. My hands got so cold last winter I nearly lost a finger. Girl down the bench next to me did.’

  ‘Can’t you get another job?’ Australia had changed, even in his lifetime, from a place where men queued, desperate for any work. Now even at Drinkwater one man … or woman … had to do the work of three.

  ‘Reserved occupation. Manpower won’t let me go.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It was inadequate, him sitting there in his good wool coat, straight from a school that, if not comfortable — comfort for some reason not being something that turned a boy into a man — was expensive and, he supposed, did in fact give the students the education and valuable business and political contacts for which it was well known.

  He caught the glimpse of her smile. ‘It’s not so bad. Mum minds the kids. Living with her I can save most of my pay, and my allotment too. Not that we have much choice. Not a room to be had in the whole city with the Yanks and Brits here. But Mum’s a wonder. Keeps us all going on the smell of an oily rag.’

  ‘Your husband’s in the army?’

  ‘Navy,’ she said with pride. Again he neither asked nor did she offer details. ‘We’re going to have ourselves a garage after the war. Out Frenchs Forest way maybe. He’s a real good mechanic. Fresh air for the kiddies. He says he’s going to make sure it’s not like it was after the last war, the men just tossed out on the scrap heap. I’m saving every halfpenny. It’ll be worth it in the end.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It will be worth it.’

  The waves lapped at the jetty, rocking them like a baby in a cradle. ‘I’m still at school,’ he offered at last. ‘I’m enlisting in a couple of months, as soon as I finish school.’

  ‘Good on you.’ She didn’t ask which service he’d enlist in. If he joined the regular forces like Jim had, he wouldn’t be sent on active service overseas till he was twenty-one. If he wanted more than office work or guard duty, he’d have to join the militia, the ‘Koalas’, never meant to be exported, now fighting in New Guinea.

  ‘You haven’t got the time, have you?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Quarter past five.’

  ‘Thank goodness. Thought I might have missed the ferry. Our clock at home is always on the blink. I like to get here a bit early. Only quiet time to think, what with factory work and the kids.’

  He stood. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean … You’re not catching the ferry?’

  ‘No.’ He’d get a taxi. Go to a hotel. Buy a bunch of flowers tomorrow, and take them to Taylor’s parents, to show his respect. They wouldn’t want a houseguest this weekend, but a visit was different. Taylor would probably want to talk too, away from eavesdroppers at school. A bloke couldn’t cry at school. Not openly. He had a feeling it might do Taylor good to cry with a friend. ‘I hope you buy your garage. Maybe one day I’ll be a customer.’

  He was suddenly conscious that the money in his pocket was more than five times her wages. What he would spend at the hotel this weekend might be enough even to lease a garage. How much did a garage cost? Would it insult her if he offered her money?

  She had given up so much already he suspected she might have given up pride at being helped by strangers too.

  He fumbled in his pocket for his wallet, drew out six five-pound notes. He held them out to her. ‘I hope you don’t mind. Please take it. I … needed … to talk to someone tonight.’

  She to
ok the notes between two gloved fingers. For a moment he thought she would let the wind take them, then she stuffed them into her big handbag, without counting them. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  He flushed. Money had severed the partnership of darkness, made him a ‘sir’. He wanted to say that she was the one who should be revered, not him. Not just because of her work, the children, keeping the worry she must feel about her husband tucked away, but because of her post-war dreams, as solid as his own. But he had no words to say it, or rather, had the words but too much embarrassment to let them out.

  He lifted his hat to her instead. ‘Good evening.’

  ‘It’s morning,’ she said, smiling at the grey-edged sky.

  ‘You’re right. It is.’ He walked along the jetty, the sea at his back, the greying ocean that … somehow, somewhere … connected him to Nancy.

  Chapter 47

  Gladys Ellis

  Parramatta, Sydney

  1 November 1944

  Councillor and Mrs Ellis

  Gladacres

  via Gibber’s Creek

  Dear Dad and Mum,

  Well, we have done our Land Army training and you wouldn’t believe it. The training lasted eleven days in a big old home. You could smell the mice as soon as you opened the door. The stove was a wretched old thing and we all had to take it in turns to cook breakfast and one girl couldn’t even make porridge or boil eggs. Then we were taken out and shown how to milk a cow on a wooden cow with a rubber glove for teats. I’ve told the other girls that if we ever do meet a cow when we are sent out, I’ll show them how to really do it, and how to dig as well. At training they just gave us a trowel and got us to dig weeds out of the flower garden! I think we are going to be sent to pick fruit though. I hope it is apples or peaches or cherries and not lemons or plums for prunes.

  Give my love to everyone at home. Tell Rodney if he borrows my saddle, I’ll clip him one.

  Your loving daughter,

  Gladys

  PULAU AYU PRISON CAMP, 1 NOVEMBER 1944

  NANCY