The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘Yes, Mr Kleinmann. We’re just getting to it now,’ she would say through gritted teeth.

  He was in his seventies if he was a day and Tilly had imagined he had only become air-raid warden because he was the only one left standing when the local defence committee had asked people to volunteer for the position. He was a little hunched over, he shuffled when he walked and he wore glasses with thick lenses. She had glimpsed gnarled knuckles too, and wondered if it was arthritis that made him so cranky with the world.

  But the women were both good citizens who wanted to stay safe, so they’d dutifully drawn Elsie’s curtains closed and stuffed every possible gap with newspaper. It was fortunate they had a ready supply.

  Most of those brownout restrictions had been lifted by July 1943, when the tide was turning and the Japanese were on the run in the Pacific. Tilly and Mary had celebrated the Minister for Home Security’s announcement by pulling down those horrid blackout curtains and ceremonially burning them in a forty-four gallon drum in the laneway behind their block of flats. The ugly grey things had been blankets that had once warmed the coal lumpers and seamen who boarded at Tilly’s parents’ house in Argyle Place. No matter how often they’d been aired by the breezes warming the city, they’d continued to reek of tobacco and exotic travels and coal dust.

  As Tilly hopped off Thursday morning’s early bus to Millers Point, walked down Argyle Street past the Garrison Church and crossed the verge into Argyle Place, she wondered if there would ever be a good time to tell her mother about the curtains. She decided to think on it a little longer.

  The streets bore witness to the celebrations of the day and night before. Cigarette butts were strewn like confetti and shredded newspapers had been blown by the wind into tree canopies and fences, wrapped around the wrought-iron posts as if they’d been glued there. Chairs had been left out on footpaths and it seemed at least one person was still asleep on the verandah of number thirty-five, a shapeless lump covered with an overcoat. Tilly paused a moment for proof of life and was relieved to hear a snoring snuffle.

  At the gate to her family’s terrace, she paused before going downstairs, taking a moment, as she always did, to look north past the Moreton Bay figs and the London plane trees to the bridge in the near distance. The street curved left and it was a trick of the eye, she knew, but it had always seemed to her as if she could walk to the end of Argyle Street and step directly on to the bridge’s arches and cross right over to the other side of the harbour.

  Tilly had been ten years old when construction had begun on the bridge and almost eighteen when it finished in 1932. During those years, every second house on the peninsula was filled with someone working for Dorman Long and Co, the British firm that had built the bridge: engineers, boilermakers, blacksmiths, painters, ironworkers and riveters. One of the McCartney boys, Bill from down the street, had scored a job as a riveter. He’d been blinded in one eye when a red-hot rivet had been tossed at his face instead of into the steel bucket he was holding for the express purpose of catching it. Some of the stonemasons working on the project had travelled all the way from Italy to help create the masterpiece and they’d all lived together in a house on Hickson Road. It was the first time Tilly had heard anyone speaking Italian and it had sounded mysterious and exotic.

  When the bridge officially opened, everyone in Argyle Place, including half-blind Bill McCartney, went down to The Rocks in a big convoy to watch the proceedings and marvel at what had been created out of thin air.

  Tilly pushed open the wrought-iron gate, skipped down the flight of steps to the kitchen and swung open the back door to find her mother at the sink, elbow high in suds and breakfast dishes.

  Elsie turned and gasped as she hurriedly dried her arms on her apron. ‘Tilly! It’s over, love. I can’t believe it.’

  Tilly opened her arms and swept her mother up in a warm and familiar embrace. That morning’s paper, tucked under her arm, fluttered to the ground at Tilly’s feet.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful news, Mum?’ Tilly didn’t let go of her mother for the longest time. In the comfort of her embrace, she remembered every skinned knee, every splinter, every heartbreak, the joy of Archie’s proposal, the nerves of her wedding day, her pride the day he’d enlisted and the unutterable dread of every day of his captivity. Her mother had comforted her through all of it.

  ‘He’ll be coming home now, won’t he? Archie and Martha’s Colin? He’ll be sailing home any day now. The boys will be over the moon, they’ve missed their father so much. He won’t recognise them, I bet, what with how much they’ve grown. I bet Bernard’s nearly as tall as his father now.’

  Tilly laughed. ‘Mum, he’s only ten years old.’

  ‘But I swear those boys are growing like topsy. Faster than you and your sister ever did. Well, your sister at least. And Brian’s lost his baby teeth. And Terry, he’s not the little one Colin left, is he? Eight years old and as cheeky as a monkey, that one.’

  ‘He’ll be home just in time for cricket season. They’ll be thrilled.’

  ‘Won’t they? And Archie. Your poor Archie. The Japs will be releasing all those prisoners now, won’t they? They’ve got to. They’ve surrendered. Our troops will be going in to all the camps and freeing them all, I’m sure of it. That’s what they were saying on the wireless. Did you listen to the wireless last night, Tilly? Chifley announced it. Oh, if only Curtin had lived to see the day. Imagine. The worries about the war killed him, as sure as I’m standing here. Just like that Roosevelt.’

  Tilly let her mother talk as she had no answers to her rapid-fire questions. Would Archie come home now? She had hoped too much and despaired even more and neither state of mind had given her the answer she craved.

  ‘Oh, look at me.’ Elsie tugged a handkerchief from the pocket of her clean white apron. ‘I don’t know if I’ve stopped crying since we heard the news. The whole street came out, did you know that? All the ships down at the wharves were blasting their sirens all day and night and Frank from two doors down stood right out front here in the middle of the road with his squeezebox and your father sang “The Internationale”.’

  ‘Of course he did.’ Tilly chuckled as she picked up the paper from the floor.

  Elsie laughed through her happy tears. ‘He might start up again if you ask him.’

  Tilly had adored listening to her father sing. He was so good he might have been a vaudevillian, if his life had taken a different direction, if he’d been born someone else or somewhere else. He’d had the matinee good looks for it and he could dance, too. He’d been quite the catch when Elsie had noticed him in the crowd at a musical extravaganza at the Tivoli Theatre in 1914. Wylie Watson and Celia Gold had entertained the audience with their slapstick, but Stan had made Elsie’s heart sing and they’d married a month later.

  Elsie reached for cups and saucers sitting neatly on the shelf by the fireplace. ‘Hitler hated that song, you know, “The Internationale”.’

  Tilly was puzzled. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  Elsie began to sing. ‘“So comrades, come rally, and the last fight let us face. The Internationale unites the human race.” Hitler didn’t want people to join together and fight tyranny, did he? He hated organised labour and he hated socialists. And when they turned up at his Nazi rallies to sing that song in protest, he’d send the stormtroopers to kick their heads in. That’s what he did to workers, Tilly.’

  The lyrics of the song drifted back to Tilly, as familiar to her as the fairy tales her mother had told her when she was a child, tucked up with Martha in the single bed they shared in the attic upstairs. ‘“On tyrants only we’ll make war. The soldiers too will take strike action, they’ll break ranks and fight no more.”’

  ‘Precisely.’ Elsie huffed and her chest puffed out in pride. ‘Well, then. That’s a turnabout for the books, isn’t it? Me telling my smart young daughter something she doesn’t know. Why don’t you put that in that newspaper of yours next time it takes a crack at your father and the union?�
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  ‘Mum,’ Tilly sighed. ‘Not today. Please?’

  Elsie planted her fists on her hips. ‘It still gets my goat that they said our boys down in Port Kembla sabotaged the war effort. They fought Hitler and Hirohito and Mussolini as much as any other man. Who tried to stop that pig iron being loaded into ships for Japan back in ’38? It was the union boys, that’s who. What was to stop it all coming back as bombs and guns and ships? But the bosses from BHP didn’t care and neither did that attorney general, that Menzies.’

  In Tilly’s parents’ house, his name was always through gritted teeth.

  ‘But we remember who was on our side. That’s right. The Chinese right here in Sydney. They sent fruit and veg and even money, what little they had, to make sure those strikers’ kids were fed. They knew what the Japs were up to. They’d seen it with their own eyes back in ’37.’

  Tilly didn’t want to think about Japanese bombs and guns and ships and her mother quickly realised when she was met with silence.

  Elsie nudged her in the side. ‘But today’s a day for celebrating. Isn’t it?’

  Tilly smiled, glad of the change of subject. ‘I wish I’d been here to hear him sing.’

  ‘Your father’s no Bing Crosby any more.’ Elsie laughed. ‘But he did all right for an old bloke.’

  It was only natural that Stan had followed in the footsteps of his father and his two older brothers by becoming a watersider. Working the wharves and the ships was the business of the men of The Rocks and Millers Point, all born within spitting distance of the wharves along Hickson Road, who’d grown up being woken by ships’ horns instead of alarm clocks. Stan had run the streets of the peninsula as a child until he was old enough to work. He’d been the tallest and strongest fourteen-year-old in the whole of Sydney, according to his father, and it soon became his turn to try his luck among the adults who gathered along that stretch of Hickson Road, the Hungry Mile as it was called by men desperate for work and their anxious families. The work was shift by shift and day by day, a cruel lottery of you, you and you as the men from the stevedoring companies stood at the gates like lords with an arm outstretched, casting their scrutinising eyes over the crowds of men, self-satisfied with the luxury of choosing only those who looked strong enough and tough enough to haul and heave and hunger until a boat was loaded and out, even if it took twenty-four straight hours.

  Stan had been a bull, one of the strong ones, standing head and shoulders above the rest. During Tilly’s childhood, her father had seemed like a giant. Tall, strong and as tanned as a Bondi lifesaver, his shoulders were broad from work and his forearms were like hams. He could haul Tilly and Martha up onto his shoulders, one in each arm, in a deft move that left them giggling and breathless and he’d carry them down Argyle Place all the way to the Cut. Tilly had felt like a princess atop a prancing pony.

  But that couldn’t last forever. It was said that Australia was built on the sheep’s back, but Tilly knew it was really built on the backs of men like her father. He’d spent his working life crouched in the bows of ships hand shovelling soda ash and superphosphate and coal and sulphur with a bare face, the sulphur clouding in a yellow fog, his eyes burnt by the acrid stench. When sulphur caught fire, the holds of ships became pits of poisonous smoke. He’d humped two hundred pound bags of wheat across his shoulders, his lungs clogging with wheat dust as thick as a Sydney fog. He’d worked shirtless in the heat on the docks and then almost frozen down in the holds of ships where all he’d had to keep himself warm was scraps of hessian tied around his shoes, while frostbite had claimed other men’s toes and fingers. He’d lugged wet animal hides imported from South America that were rotten and oozing with maggots. Asbestos and fibreglass wool had given men like her father severe skin rashes, which he’d scratched at until the skin was raw, and at other times bone dust had made him vomit blood for days.

  The work was tough, dangerous and it broke good, hardworking, healthy men in their droves. The watersiders were treated no better than the horses harnessed to pull carts along the docks. They were meat, not men, to the stevedores and the international shipping companies.

  And by his mid-fifties, Stan was mutton.

  ‘If I was a greyhound, they would’ve put me down by now.’ Tilly knew his mantra by heart.

  ‘None of that talk now, Stan,’ Tilly’s mother would always reply. ‘We can’t afford to bury your bones.’

  Tilly’s father had had a cough for two years that he couldn’t shake and more than once his doctor had told him that his twin maladies of arthritis and high blood pressure meant he would qualify for a disability card so he could be relieved of some of the heavier work on the wharves. But her father had been too proud. Being a wharfie and a union man was built into him as fundamentally as a hull on any of the ships he loaded. And anyway, any man who turned up for work half broken had Buckley’s and none of getting a shift on the wharves. That’s the way it had always been, until the war had stolen away the youngest and the fittest.

  There were heavy footsteps on the narrow wooden stairs leading up to the ground floor and Tilly heard in the slow and limping rhythm that one leg bore more weight than the other. Her father was shuffling now, more than striding.

  ‘“So comrades, come rally…”’ His voice echoed down the stairwell, thin and breathless.

  ‘Any excuse,’ Elsie grinned. ‘I told you.’ And Tilly saw by the expression in her face, that she tried to hide from her daughter by turning away to fuss at the sink, that her mother heard the rasp in his voice and the weakness in his lungs.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Hello, Tilly girl.’

  Tilly went to her father and they held each other gently, lovingly. He smelt like soap and shaving cream and his cheeks were cool and smooth.

  ‘I hear you were annoying all the neighbours with your singing last night during the victory celebrations,’ she said into the warm and worn shoulder of his hand-knitted cardigan.

  ‘Me?’ Stan wheezed as he laughed. ‘It was that Frank Thomas from two doors down with his squeezebox. He scared all the dogs in the street. Howled all night, they did.’

  Tilly had always found comfort in this house, even if her father’s name would never be on the title, even if the kitchen table wobbled and the chairs didn’t match, if the carpet runner in the hallway was threadbare, if the settee in the living room was already wearing through its second reupholstering. During the storm of her life during the war, it had been a place of refuge and a reminder of where she had come from, the streets that had helped raise her, and the politics of her parents and all their friends, which had guided her and helped her understand the world. The kitchen table was the centre of it all. When she’d won the position working for Mr Sinclair at the Daily Herald, Elsie had sewn her a dropped waist knee-length maroon wool ensemble with a matching cloche hat right here but her parents had given her something much more useful. At that very spot, she had learnt about all the vicissitudes of fortune, of the ongoing and seemingly interminable struggles of ordinary people and their battles to simply live a decent, ordinary life. She had learnt it because they had lived it.

  ‘Do you want breakfast, Tilly? The porridge is all gone, but there’s fruit cake if you’re hungry. Eat some even if you’re not. You’re looking far too scrawny for my liking. Like a racetrack greyhound, you are. Did you get any sleep last night? I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if the answer is no. I don’t think anyone in Sydney got a wink.’

  ‘Not much,’ Tilly replied. ‘I didn’t get home until past midnight. I was right in the thick of everything.’

  ‘Was that yes to a cuppa?’ Elsie asked, distracted.

  Tilly checked the time. ‘A quick one, Mum. I just wanted to stop by for a tick. I’m reporting on the big victory parade today. There’ll be forty bands marching through the city and the RSL says there’ll be more than one hundred thousand servicemen and women taking part. We hear there’s going to be a one hundred and one gun salute. If anyone is still sleeping af
ter last night, that’s sure to get them out of bed.’

  Stan smiled at his daughter with teary eyes and covered her fingers with one of his big, callused hands. ‘Any day now, love. He’ll be home.’ And with such economy, her father had seen through her jittery rambling.

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’ Tilly unfolded the newspaper and turned it so her father could read the front page. ‘It says so right here in my own newspaper so it must be true. Hospital ships are ready and waiting to go into Singapore to get our boys from the prisoners of war camps.’

  ‘That’s bloody good news.’

  ‘He’ll be home before Christmas. Won’t that be a miracle?’ Elsie said. ‘And that’s not long now, is it? You two will be able to get on with things. Put this whole war behind you and start again. You didn’t have much of a married life before he went off, did you?’

  ‘No, not really.’ Tilly shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable at the idea that the hard-fought victory was only about her. ‘But I was hardly alone in that, was I? Everyone’s lives were turned upside-down. Not just me. Martha and Colin and the boys. Mary. Every second person I know. Half of Sydney. The rest of the country. The whole world. We’re no different.’

  Elsie focussed on a spot in the distance as she spoke again. ‘Archie will have his war pay all saved up, won’t he? And you’ll be able to get one of those soldier’s loans. Imagine that. You and Archie with a home of your own. A proper backyard with a vegetable garden and plenty of room for children to play. Fresh air. And they can all have a bedroom of their own and a front yard with a tree and some roses.’

  Tilly had had this conversation with her mother a thousand times before, about Archie’s return, about children and what that future would look like. How on earth could Tilly raise the elephant in the room when it would crush her mother’s hopes for her eldest daughter? And how would her mother react at the knowledge that Tilly’s hopes for his safe return had faded like curtains in the summer sun; that her loyalty to Archie had been tested during his long absence? Tilly knew that three hearts in her family would shatter if Archie never returned so she pretended, held on to that thin skerrick of hope, for her mother’s sake as well as her own.