by JH Fletcher
Catastrophe.
FIFTEEN
Ruth was on leave, had come to spend it at the home that would never quite be home again.
The fact that she had gone to the war had created a distance between her and her father that time had not healed. They remained friendly; he greeted her whenever she got a weekend pass from the military hospital where she had been posted on her return from Burma; he always made a point of asking about her experiences of the wider world in which they both knew he had no interest. But.
Ruth wished it might have been otherwise but wasted no time on futile regrets. They were as they were. Mutual tolerance was perhaps all they could hope for; it was almost enough.
Back in 1942 Ruth had thought that returning home would bring her peace; had found instead a complacent ignorance that had made her want to scream at people for being so cut off from reality, for claiming to know what they did not.
‘I’ve been there!’ She could have hurled the words into their faces. ‘I know what war is!’
But saw that it was useless and was glad when her period of leave was over.
Her mother wrote once a week, a stiff and awkward letter listing the local news that was all Mary Ballard had to tell her daughter. How old Mrs Millican had lost her ration book and the drama she’d had to get a new one. How Syd Morel and a host of other entertainers had held a concert to raise money for the Memorial Avenue in Kapunda. How the CWA had heard someone called Miss Waddy give a talk about Canada. How Len Doherty had been killed in the fighting north of Australia.
Ruth came home whenever she could, which at the beginning was seldom enough, a lot more frequently as time passed. By the end of 1944 she was able to get away for a day or two almost every month.
The highlight of her visits was meeting up again with Patty Clark. She had taken to Patty from their first meeting when they had stood with their backs to the Institute’s wall and watched as the blokes got stuck into each other about who knew what. Patty had stayed in the district all through the war, giving Ruth’s father a hand at Mindowie. Bob Ballard had been bitterly opposed to having a woman, a stranger at that, work on his farm but had surrendered in the end when he found he had no other choice. Perhaps to the surprise of both, it had worked well.
‘I’ve known worse,’ Bob had confided. Which from him was the ultimate in compliments.
It was an opinion that had strengthened with the passing years. Patty was good with the sheep. Even the unpleasant jobs, the docking and crutching, she handled without a murmur. Good with the horses, too. And with the machinery.
‘At this rate he’ll be leaving you the farm in his will,’ Ruth told her.
Patty laughed. ‘I’ve told Johnno I want to settle down here when the war’s over,’ she confided. ‘You can keep the city, far as I’m concerned.’
At least she knew where Johnno was, a driver behind the lines in New Guinea. She hadn’t seen him for two years and there was not a day when she did not want him and wait for him. She’d had plenty of offers but refused them all, even one from an American sergeant whose company had been billeted in the district for a few weeks.
‘I’m a fool,’ she told Ruth. ‘Johnno won’t be keeping it in his pants, not if I know him, but I can’t help that. It’s the way I am.’
Not all news had been good. There’d been a letter from the authorities. The Red Cross had advised that the Vogels’ son, Private Peter Vogel, had died while a prisoner of the Japanese in Changi prison. His death was much regretted.
The local paper talked about the ultimate sacrifice for king and country. Ruth remembered her flight through the Burma jungle, the rumours she’d heard of how the Japanese treated their prisoners, and wondered how Peter, young and healthy, had come to die.
The loss of her son destroyed Laura Vogel, the gush and twitter dying as though strangled in her throat. Now she spent days sitting alone in the sitting room of that narrowly frowning house, her eyes staring at the wall. At memories. Perhaps at nothing.
Ruth tried to see her whenever time and the skimpy petrol ration permitted. It was a thankless task. Laura seldom spoke, seemed barely to listen to Ruth’s news, yet Ruth persisted. It maintained contact between the two families and that was important. Laura was her father’s sister; Dorrie’s sister, too, however incredible that might seem. They were of one blood. They had to support each other as far as they could.
Of Dougie and Richard Ruth had heard nothing, had no idea whether they were alive or dead. No word of Franz either but that was to be expected.
Ruth had gone to see Dorrie when she had first got back from Burma, the wounds of that experience still fresh. Had run to her as she had never run to her own mother, seeking comfort not only from Dorrie but from the hill country in which Dorrie lived.
She had stood in Dorrie’s garden and looked up at the sweep of hill and undergrowth, the green majestic march of the trees.
‘I’ve come back,’ she told them, ‘as I said I would.’
Yet found that something was missing.
‘When I was here before I felt I was one with the trees,’ she said to Dorrie. ‘Now it’s different.’
‘They’re the same trees.’
Which was clearly true. Yet her feelings were true, too. Standing in Dorrie’s garden before going overseas she had felt that a door had opened between herself and the forest. Understanding and empathy had flowed through it, they had been part of the one life force. Now the door was shut. After all, they were only trees.
She thought, I have been exiled, even from this.
She was two weeks short of her twenty-seventh birthday and the war seemed destined to go on forever.
When the Germans had surrendered back in May everyone had thought it was the beginning of the end at last. Ruth had gone to the Digger’s Ball at the Memorial Hall, packed with people celebrating the end of the fighting. Yet still the Japanese had hung on.
Only the previous week the news had been full of stories of what they called the ultimate weapon, a bomb that had wiped out two of Japan’s largest cities. Once again people had said the war couldn’t last yet still nothing had happened and now the papers were forecasting gloomily that an invasion of Japan would take years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Ruth had been to see Laura, had sat alone with her in her cold house and chatted to her about the trivial things that had happened since her last visit — how she’d gone with some of her mates to a re-run of Here Comes Kelly, how one of the sisters had become engaged to a digger who’d been one of her patients, how Ruth had started to write a book based on what had happened to her overseas.
When at last she got away she strolled up the hill to the main street. It was a warm, sunny day, too warm for August, and she was in no hurry to go home. She had suggested that Laura should come with her but Laura, predictably, had refused. So Ruth strolled alone past Rawady’s Cafe and the Sir John Franklin Hotel, enjoying the warmth of the unseasonable sun on her back, until she came to the turning leading to the old mine. She went that way, remembering what she knew of its history and the men who had found copper and built wealth both for the town and themselves. Dutton, Bagot, Lang. Walter Lang had been a German, she recalled. There were countless people of German blood in South Australia. Yet she knew of only one who had fought for the other side.
Why? she asked the remains of the old buildings, the gaping shafts, the grey piles of weathered stone. Knowing why, understanding and even forgiving, yes, but regretting it so bitterly. If Franz were alive, which seemed unlikely, he would never be able to come home, would he?
She turned and walked back, leaving the ghosts of the miners to their century-old vigil. At the edge of the town, in front of one of the buildings, a cat had brought her kittens out into the sunlight and now lay while they romped and pounced about her. Ruth watched them for a while before walking on. Life … She longed for the war to be over so that she could get on with her own life.
God knew what direction it would take. She had
put all decisions off until the fighting was over. For all she knew she might get a phone call tomorrow ordering her to join an invasion force sailing to Japan. A fortnight later she might be dead, as Peter was dead, as Dougie and Richard and Franz might be dead. Three men who might have had an influence on her life, whom she would probably never see again.
She saw a gush of white smoke over Hawkes’ roof, followed a moment later by the sound of the works whistle. She stopped, staring. Why should the whistle be blowing so early in the morning shift?
She walked on, breath tight in her throat, heart pounding with the barely-felt beginnings of hope.
Surely it couldn’t be …?
There were bells. The churches were ringing their bells. Up and down the street people were coming out of homes, shops, looking at each other, no one daring to hope but hoping all the same. The fire station’s siren began its long, joyous blare. Ruth was running, running.
It was. Oh, it was. Thank God.
She ran into a woman she had never met before. Middle-aged, portly, dignified. Eyes blurred by tears, laughing, crying, they clung to each other, swinging themselves round and round. Everywhere people were doing the same.
The war was over.
She ran back down the hill to Laura’s house. Had to. She banged on the knocker. Presently her aunt came.
‘The war, Auntie. The war’s over.’
‘Ah.’ Laura’s expression did not change. ‘That’s good. Thank you for telling me.’
The door shut. Quietly. For some, for how many, victory had come too late.
Now decisions could be delayed no longer.
‘At least you’ve got a job,’ her father said. ‘Always plenty of openings for a nurse.’
Ruth did not intend to make a career out of nursing. She wanted to write but was not sure how she was going to live while she did it.
‘Some rich man,’ Patty told her, ‘that’s what you need. Someone to keep you in luxury while your inspiration gets to work.’
Patty was great on inspiration. Ruth, on the other hand, had never known what it was. Ideas, feelings, came out of work. So she would work. As for rich men … She didn’t know any, knew no one at all who might want to marry her. Or even keep her. In that respect nothing had changed since the start of the war.
One thing she did know. She was not going to marry Dougie.
Two weeks after the Japs had surrendered she had heard from him. He had lost a bit of weight, he wrote, but was all right. Had survived, at least. Three and a half years in Changi had killed lots but not Dougie. Dougie was coming home. He was an orphan but was going first to see his aunt in Parramatta. Then he would come to Mindowie. To see Ruth.
She sat on the verandah looking out across the valley at the distant hills and thinking about Dougie’s letter. Once again, in the middle of September, it was green. It seemed appropriate that she should be sitting here, in the same spot she had been six years earlier when Larry Coogan had brought her the news that the government had turned down the Hirschmanns’ application to come to Australia. The Hirschmanns, from whom she had never heard again. Gone, like so many millions, into the night.
Dougie’s letter made Ruth uneasy.
What had he said to her, a lifetime ago, beneath the white stone walls of the Malacca fort?
I’m not giving you up. Not now, not ever.
By his letter he still felt the same.
I can’t, Ruth thought. I don’t love him. I never loved him. It was the war, the feeling that we might all be dead in the morning. No way am I going to throw my life away on someone I don’t love. Don’t even know, for heaven’s sake. My life is too important for that. So is his. Whatever he may want to do with it. I don’t even know that, she thought. The whole thing is impossible.
One evening, out of nowhere, he phoned her.
‘Ruthie …’
For a few seconds she did not know who it was. The voice was thin and tentative, not at all the cocky, self-confident cheerfulness that she remembered, the air that said I shall take on the world, you see if I don’t, and I shall win. It had been his greatest, perhaps his only, charm.
No hint of it now.
With sinking heart she asked, ‘Where are you?’
‘In Parramatta.’
‘When did you get back?’
All the futile questions.
‘A week ago. Ruthie —’
‘Yes?’
‘I want to see you.’
Now he was here, or nearly, this unknown man with the wispy voice that Ruth recognised not at all, and she had to go to the station to meet him.
She drove into town, stood on the platform looking down the track and wondering what was coming down the line to meet her.
There were plenty of others waiting. Mrs McInerney, of whose three boys one, Frank, had survived.
She saw Ruth, smiled. ‘Waiting for someone, dear?’ Someone special, her tone implied. Her dicky-bird eyes watched, brightly.
‘Only a friend.’ Ruth’s tone denied significance.
But Mrs McInerney was not to be excluded. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘Someone I met in Malaya.’
Her inquisitor was delighted at being handed such promising fuel for gossip. ‘I always think that wartime friendships are the best.’
‘And you?’ Ruth asked, determined to counterattack.
But Frank, it seemed, was still overseas. ‘Just my cousin from Adelaide, dear.’
And then the tiniest pinhead growing, growing, whistling at the crossing, growing still more, clanking, hissing, brakes screeching, steam gushing; the train was there. Doors were thrown open. Soldiers twice the men they had been jumped down in a clatter of boots. A glorious hullabaloo, cries, shouts, as families were reunited. Bodies flung themselves, embraced, arms around necks. Babies were thrust screaming into the faces of strangers. Round-eyed children smiled uneasily at unfamiliar men claiming to be their fathers.
Ruth stood, looking to and fro. No one she knew. A man, tentative, with a wincing, lurching walk, a scarecrow on whom the new suit hung like rags. Eyes too large in the white, starved face. He came towards her.
Oh no, she thought.
Dougie.
Words jumbled, tripping over her teeth as she tried to fill the silence.
You’re looking well.
What was the journey like?
How was your aunt?
On and on, while she carried his suitcase to the car, loaded it and them inside, drove out of the yard and through the little town towards Mindowie. Which had become, suddenly, a sanctuary.
The imprint in her memory of that first impression, the warped and struggling walk, the strained face, the dog-like eyes. He has come here to carry on where we left off. To claim the future that he said he wanted with me.
I’m not giving you up …
For the first time she felt horror and guilt because of it.
It’s impossible, out of the question. I must tell him.
How can I? Seeing the way he is. How can I say no?
Her parents were shaken. Patty, too.
‘Dear God, Ruth, what they done to him, eh?’
Next day Ruth asked him the same question.
‘They were bastards, Ruthie.’ Horrified, speechless, she watched tears running down his cheeks. ‘They did things … I don’t want to think about it.’
But did, all the time.
She came to, believing she had dreamt the screams echoing in the night. Realised she had not, was running down the corridor before she knew she was awake.
Her father, shadowed eyes, face grey with sleep, stood in the doorway of her parents’ room. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ll see to him.’
And did so, cradling him in her arms, frightened, helpless, while he wept and raved. Grew, eventually, still.
‘I was there,’ he cried, ‘there again.’
She tried to leave him but he clung to her and she could not. She was cold. She lay under the covers with him, her arms clasped
to comfort him. He moved. His hands scrabbled desperately at her, at her breasts and thighs. At the fragments, she suspected, of what had been his life. Before.
So for a few minutes she permitted him, the thin fingers bruising her breasts, delving painfully between her legs. Could, eventually, bear it no longer.
‘No.’ Softly, kissing him.
‘Please —’
She could not. ‘No.’
It was as though he had not heard her, his movements becoming more agitated.
‘Dougie … Dougie, stop it. Stop it!’
He paused only long enough to gasp, ‘If you only knew how I’ve longed for this moment …’
Ruth was angry now; a little afraid, too, perhaps. ‘Will you stop it at once!’
And still he would not, seemed incapable of stopping what he was trying more and more frantically to do. Until at last she used force against him, found that in his weakened state it was easy to shove him away. They lay apart, gasping, hearts pounding, until normality returned.
I must go back to my own bed, Ruth thought, but found that she was too weak to move.
Slowly she became aware of a sound, rusty and creaking, realised that Dougie was weeping inconsolably. She froze. None of the men she knew cried. Now, for the second time since he arrived, he was weeping. A man destroyed by suffering.
Ruth turned to him, no longer afraid of what he might do, willing to accept even that if it would help to cure him, not even afraid how bitterly he might come to resent her for having acknowledged his distress. What mattered was to restore him, if she could, to at least a semblance of the man he had been before the war had cast its blight over them all.
For the first time she realised that the war had not ended in the blast of Hawkes’ whistle, the frenzied dance with a total stranger in Kapunda’s main street. The war was here, in this bed, in her life. It would not go away for a long time. It might never go away at all.
‘There.’ She cradled him, rocking, her own tears mingling with his. Beneath her hands his body was so thin, ribs protruding like rails. ‘You are safe now. Safe.’
