The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘It’s really over, Tilly,’ Mary cried. ‘It really is peace. I can hardly believe it, can you?’

  ‘I can and I do.’

  ‘Everyone in Sydney’s heading out to the streets. Come and see. Can’t you hear it?’ Mary grabbed Tilly’s hand and pulled her across the floor to the windows. Pitt Street was already overflowing with people, wave after wave of them, and from their vantage point they saw hats and Union Jacks and the Stars and Stripes fluttering above people’s heads. Shreds of paper were falling from the sky in intermittent bursts and they swirled and spun in the blustery sunshine of that Sydney winter day.

  ‘Our dear boys will be coming home now, Tilly.’ Mary’s arm was around Tilly and she squeezed her tight.

  Tilly nodded, overcome.

  And then Mary’s tears became laughter and joy. ‘Bugger this for a joke. No one in their right mind will be wanting to call in a classified ad today. Let’s get out there and celebrate, too. Because we deserve it, don’t you think?’

  The most important story of her career was unfolding all around her. A surge of adrenaline set her trembling. It took Tilly half a minute to grab her hat, her jacket and her reporter’s notebook, and race Mary to the stairs.

  She had never in her life seen crowds so enormous. Was it possible that every single person in Sydney had marched into the street for the victory celebrations? There were soldiers and sailors, American and Australian and English, and girls in their navy WAAAF uniforms walking arm in arm, striding towards peace and their hopes for a brighter future. Women kissed policemen. Horses pulled carts filled with revellers, and became skittish as they were daubed with lipstick, the word ‘victory’ smudged into their coats. Any vehicle that made it through the crowds was soon swamped with pedestrians hitching rides on its running boards. Schoolchildren in short pants and hand-knitted jumpers darted in and out of the crowds and people burst into spontaneous song everywhere she looked, dancing the hokey-pokey and forming conga lines to the music blaring from any nearby wireless.

  At the Cenotaph in Martin Place, there were tears of joy and sombre prayers and the laying of flowers to honour the war dead. Young women with flags poked into their hats like sprays of flowers marched alongside soldiers. Every piece of paper people could get their hands on high up in office buildings—including telephone books and old posters—had been shredded and was being thrown out of wide open windows, paving the streets bright white. Outside the Ministry of Munitions in Castlereagh Street, a group of men in suits stood in foot-high piles of shredded paper, grabbing great handfuls of it and throwing it into the air like hay. On Campbell Street Tilly walked through clouds of smoke wafting from fireworks and crackers let off by the Chinese community, and laughed in joyful surprise when she stumbled upon a thirty-foot long paper dragon worming its way through the throng, lit up by Catherine wheels. In Elizabeth Street, a smart-looking man whirled with his hat in his hand, and seemed to float on air as he danced, as weightless as Fred Astaire, the road under his feet strewn with paper.

  And the sheer roaring noise of it, the laughing, shouting, crying-with-joy sound of it, was like waves, bouncing off the city’s sandstone buildings and echoing down one street and up another, the vibrations so powerful Tilly wondered if they had created whitecaps in the water down at Circular Quay.

  The sight and sound of pure jubilation, such a gleeful communal outpouring of joy, made her cry too, and Tilly had let herself enjoy the moment, her tears washing away her fears for just a little while.

  Chapter Two

  When Tilly had finally battled her way through the crowds and made it back to her desk, she sat with her fingers poised over the keys of her typewriter for a moment. She was suddenly nervous with the pressure to do justice to the freshly minted peace; and filled with pride that she had been a witness to such an historic day. She took a deep breath and began, recounting every moment she’d witnessed out on the streets, the tips of her fingers growing numb as she slammed the keys on the old Remington, the words flying onto the page as she took time to fully describe everything she’d seen and experienced in a way that would honour the day and the sacrifices people had made and the futures they had put on hold.

  And when she turned the platen knob and pulled her final paragraphs from the typewriter, a hovering copyboy scurried upstairs with the pages in his inky hands to take them to one of the mole-like subeditors whose task it was to combine them with all of the other reports that were set to fill the victory edition of the next day’s paper.

  Tilly leant back in her chair, lit another cigarette and surveyed the empty desks all around her. When she and Mary had raced out into the streets earlier that day, the other women had followed in a happy convoy and they hadn’t returned. Courts and crimes and advice and fashion and cookery stories wouldn’t find a place in the paper tomorrow among all the stories about the official end of the war.

  When the war had broken out in September 1939, Tilly had been secretary to the newspaper’s editor, Rex Sinclair. If she had written about her trajectory and put someone else in the story, she might not believe it had ever happened, that a waterside worker’s daughter from Millers Point had found herself in such a position at Sydney’s bestselling daily newspaper.

  She would have headlined it ‘Girl From Wrong Side Of Tracks Makes Good’.

  She’d been a smart girl, dux of her primary school, soared through her leaving certificate at high school and then finished top of the class at her secretarial college with the fastest and most accurate typing speed and excellent shorthand. She’d been recommended to Mr Sinclair by her shorthand teacher, who knew how important it was in the newspaper business, and when Mr Sinclair had discovered she hailed from Millers Point, his eyes had sparkled and he’d offered her the job, after a quick shorthand exercise to settle his mind that he’d made the right call. She had passed with one hundred per cent accuracy. She would be forever grateful to the bootmaker’s son who had given a young girl an opportunity others might not have been afforded. He had opened a door to another world, one she had never imagined in a thousand years would be open to someone like her, a young woman with little else to recommend her but her intelligence and her dreams.

  She had learnt so much working for Mr Sinclair, sitting at a desk outside his office up on the prestigious third floor where he had a view over every desk and therefore every man in the newsroom. From her perch, she had grown to know him, the newspaper and the city. She’d learnt when he was pondering a decision by the way he strode in circles around his oak desk and when to avoid him when he was about to roar at a reporter or a subeditor or, by phone, the typesetters. She had reminded him to put on a tie when the Chairman of the Board Robert Fowles swept in, a man who barely ever cast an eye in her direction. The chairman always sported a pristine gun-metal grey homburg and a greatcoat about his shoulders, as if he had just led a battle on the Western Front. He was delivered to Pitt Street in his shining black Wolseley by his driver, inevitably to share his views on the paper’s coverage of some such issue or other, usually industrial unrest among the perverted communists working on the waterfront or down in the coal mines. Tilly had observed that there always seemed to be shouting from behind closed doors when the chairman visited.

  Then there were the section editors shuffling past her desk for editorial meetings, who appeared harried and aged, because they were. Their daily editing challenge, to keep stories short, had become more pressing than ever with newsprint in such short supply during the war years. Every so often, the father of chapel—the printers’ union’s senior delegate—would emerge from the incessant roaring clickety-clack of the typesetting machines on the printing floor to raise the concerns of his brothers over one problem or another downstairs. There would also often be shouting when he visited, too.

  The editor of the women’s pages, the ever elegant and unruffled Mrs Dorothy Freeman, whose office was down on the second floor, had a regular weekly appointment with Mr Sinclair and they would always have tea and scones because
Mrs Freeman liked them and Mr Sinclair believed it was important to keep her happy. He was well aware of the newspaper’s imperative to attract women readers so advertisers would be enticed to buy space to sell rayon stockings and cigarettes and make-up and antacid powders and children’s summer sandals and dress patterns and satin nightgowns for six shillings and eleven coupons.

  Tilly had become familiar with all the managerial routines of a daily newspaper, including the weekly editorial conferences and daily editorial councils. She knew everyone and took it upon herself to remind Mr Sinclair about Peter McDougall’s sick wife and to arrange a delivery of flowers; to purchase something from the gift registry at David Jones for the upcoming marriage of Dorothy from Sales.

  She knew that each morning a conga line of reporters would cross the reporters’ room and make a beeline for Mr Sinclair’s office, just as soon as they’d had their first smoko, to argue about why their yarn was bloody well buried on page eight, or to gossip about what the other papers in Sydney were covering and how those other blokes had missed the real story and no doubt been hoodwinked by some minister or other or the army or how they were down in the gutter again with the crooks and the spivs. That criticism was most usually levelled at the scandal sheet Truth, full of racing and adultery and crime when it appeared on newsstands every Sunday.

  The Daily Herald prided itself on the fact that it was Sydney’s newspaper of record and it would never lower itself to run those kinds of stories. Its reporters wore that pride as a badge of honour too. Which didn’t mean they didn’t pore over the Truth’s stories every Monday morning with gleeful sneers and sly winks, and place their racing bets according to the tips within its sports pages.

  Tilly had been like every other secretary in the place, a young woman simply dressed in a tweed suit with freshly applied lipstick and short hair neatly curled around her face and pinned back at the nape of her neck in a roll. Brown hair, brown eyes—although sometimes when she wanted to feel sophisticated she claimed them to be hazel—perhaps slightly taller than average but nothing out of the box.

  Until the day she witnessed a robbery at a pharmacy on Castlereagh Street during her lunch break. She’d been having a quick lunch at Repin’s Coffee Inn with Dorothy from Sales to hear all about Dorothy’s honeymoon at Thirroul and had just finished her cup of coffee and a toasted fried egg sandwich when she’d heard screams and had seen the shop assistant bolt into the street shouting, ‘Help’ at the top of her lungs.

  She had rushed straight over, asked the panicked shop assistant if she was hurt, instructed Shirley to fetch her a cup of tea from Repin’s and waited with her while the police arrived. When they did, Tilly passed on a description to the officers (the assailant was short, blond, wore a flat cap over his short hair, sported brown trousers and a dark grey overcoat, and had a limp), and then listened on as they questioned the poor woman, who by this stage needed to be sent to hospital on account of a nervous attack.

  When she explained to Mr Sinclair the reason for her tardiness in returning from lunch, he’d listened transfixed. For years, she’d listened intently to the reporters from the newsroom selling stories to their editor, as they fought their colleagues for prominence on the news pages, so she could learn everything she possibly could about the news business. When she found herself in the position to pitch one of her own, she was well-versed in how to sell it. She infused the robbery with all the drama and fear one might expect from a street stick-up, and when she’d finished, Mr Sinclair had leant back in his chair, thrown her a smile and nodded. ‘That’s quite a story, Tilly.’

  And as she’d walked back to her desk that day, feeling six feet tall, she knew that his smile and his nod of approval meant more than he would ever give away.

  Tilly had been waiting for a chance to prove herself, to show that she could do more than take appointments and answer phone calls, and she’d known in that moment that she had met the challenge with flying colours. She had for some years, perhaps ten, known full well that she was wasted as his secretary, but it wasn’t the done thing to go around pointing out how smart you were in the company of copyboys related to the senior newsmen. She didn’t have those connections and she was a woman, two strikes against her from the very beginning.

  When the Federal Government had removed journalists from the reserved occupations list in February 1942, a flurry of patriotism and careerism exploded in the newsroom, and the newspaper soon had its own manpower crisis on its hands. A week after the robbery on Castlereagh Street, two reporters up and enlisted with the AIF and another two abandoned the Sydney newsroom for the excitement and danger of London and the glamour of war reporting, forcing Mr Sinclair to urgently fix the gaping hole in his reporting staff. He had emerged from his office one afternoon, after a rather loud row on the telephone, looked around the newsroom with a resigned stare and when his eyes met Tilly’s he’d pointed at her and said, ‘You’ll do.’

  She’d leapt to her feet, knocking over a cup of tea. In that moment, she hadn’t cared a jot where it had spilled. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. Think you can handle it?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ Tilly had declared.

  A chorus of jeers rose from the men in the newsroom, who’d been hanging on every word, always on the lookout for newsroom gossip to trade at the Sydney Journalists’ Club, a place Tilly and her colleagues were not allowed to join on account of their sex. Information was power and there was always a tussle to have the latest, the juiciest, the freshest; and that game of reputation-building and influence-peddling was one only the men could play.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘Not the secretary, Sinclair. Surely you can do better than that.’

  Tilly didn’t need to turn to know who’d made the comment. She would know Donald Robinson’s voice anywhere. The senior reporter had always made a point of sauntering by her desk whenever he had a spare minute and perched himself there, waiting for her to engage in conversation. When she hadn’t, ignoring his smirks and his long stares at her breasts, he would respond in whispers and taunts. ‘Have a drink with me tonight, Tilly. You’re a very attractive girl. You know, I’ve been sitting behind my desk over there wondering if you’re wearing lingerie under that sensible suit. The fancy French kind. Are you?’

  She despised him.

  At the sound of his supercilious chuckling, Tilly had glared sharply in his direction. Robinson was leaning back in his chair, his feet on his desk crossed at the ankles, his head cupped in his hands. ‘She’ll never make a reporter, Sinclair. She doesn’t have what it takes. I mean, look at her. Who’ll take her seriously?’

  Mr Sinclair had turned his back on his male reporter and smiled at Tilly. ‘Make me proud, Tilly.’

  And just like that, she’d been promoted to a reporting position. She’d quickly packed up all her things and galloped downstairs to the women’s newsroom where Mrs Freeman already had a desk waiting for her. Tilly might have been the Daily Herald’s newest reporter but she was a woman reporter and no woman had ever had a desk up in the main newsroom and, according to the newsmen of the third floor, no woman ever would.

  The main newsroom had always been a male domain—except for the secretaries, of course—and the newspapermen liked it that way. Women reporters weren’t trusted up there, Tilly knew, from all her years spent overhearing the ways the men talked about the women reporters downstairs.

  ‘That’s one for the sob sisters,’ they would snigger at the merest suggestion that one of their colleagues should follow up a story with any hint of a woman’s angle in it. In effect, that meant that every story in which a woman featured, unless of course the story was about Tilly Devine or Kate Leigh and their sly grog-running years or their razor gangs. They were mysteriously the men’s stories to write.

  Relegated to the second floor, Tilly had learnt the ropes from the women around her. She’d shadowed Maggie Pritchard on the police round, covering break and enters, petty crime and the exploits of dodgy wartime con
men. She’d trailed along with Frances Langley, scurrying after her galloping strides, to the Monday morning magistrates’ court appearances of those caught up in too much weekend tomfoolery, drunkenness and violence.

  She’d covered everything during her twelve months as a general reporter on the paper, from city floods to state parliament’s question time. If a man in his cups fell into the harbour and drowned, she filed the story. And when, back in 1943, she’d been called into Mr Sinclair’s office and been told of the decision to appoint her the newspaper’s first woman war correspondent, she’d beamed with pride. And although he’d tried to hide it, because a newsman didn’t show such emotions, she’d seen the gleaming twinkle in his eye.

  ‘I won’t let you down, Mr Sinclair,’ Tilly had murmured into the lapel of his smoky suit jacket after she’d rounded his desk and thrown her arms around him.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he’d replied gruffly. ‘Don’t make me regret it.’ And while he huffed, Tilly had noticed she had been the first to release herself from their embrace.

  When Tilly had told her parents, her mother had cried too at the idea that her daughter was to be sent off to the war, but she needn’t have worried herself, as it turned out. Much to her frustration, Tilly had written about the war without ever leaving the country or interviewing a soldier.

  After three years working in the women’s newsroom and observing her colleagues, she knew them well. If there was a scent of Tosca Eau de Cologne in the air, she knew Dear Agatha was at work. The advice columnist sprayed it liberally at her neck and wrists while talking to herself as she typed answers to readers’ letters, attempting in the kindest way possible to solve their complicated life dilemmas in three neat paragraphs.

  ‘“While you may believe your new mother-in-law to be interfering, she is likely missing her son terribly and most keen to ensure he is comfortable in his new home and circumstances.’”