The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘Of course it’s me,’ Tilly replied sulkily. ‘I’m sodding wet and freezing cold so I bloody well hope there’s some hot water left.’

  ‘Tilly! Tilly!’

  Mary appeared from the hallway and rushed Tilly, rivulets of mascara forming long lines on her cheeks. ‘This just came. Twenty minutes ago. It’s good news, Tilly. The best news. Look!’ Mary was at her side, her chest heaving with sobs and laughter all at once. Tilly wiped the raindrops from her forehead and her eyes with the forearm of her jacket. It happened so quickly. The flicker of hope that it was news about Archie, the glance to Mary’s face to see those hopes dashed, and then a crushing weight against Tilly’s chest.

  Mary thrust the telegram at Tilly, who took in the typed words and what they meant.

  ‘“L/Cpl Albert Smith is in the 2/10th Australian General Hospital in Singapore”,’ she read aloud.

  ‘He’s coming home, Tilly. Isn’t it a miracle?’

  Mary threw her arms around Tilly and held on for dear life. Tilly felt only the purest joy for her dear friend, who had never given up hope that Bert would survive, that he would one day walk through the front door of the flat, throw off his slouch hat and sweep his wife into his arms with a kiss that would last for weeks. Tilly was thrilled for her, deliriously thrilled. But at the same time as laughter and words of congratulations fell from her lips, the leaden sensation in her chest grew heavier.

  Archie was still a ghost. It was almost two weeks since the war had ended and she’d not heard a word. Cooper had tried, she had tried, but nothing. ‘Be patient, Mrs Galloway,’ she’d been told when she’d begged the army for more news. ‘Do you know how many men were taken prisoner? More than thirty thousand. And there are camps everywhere: Japan and Borneo and Malaya and New Guinea, and in Italy and Germany. The Japs and the Germans moved them around willy-nilly and they’re not being especially helpful in giving us those records. Something to do with losing. We’re doing all we can. It’s only been a fortnight. We’ll be in touch.’

  No one had been in touch.

  Every day, Tilly had pored over the lists of names printed in the papers that had been compiled by George Cooper and the other war correspondents in the field. They were no longer reliant on the defence forces to supply them with information and were talking directly to soldiers and freed prisoners themselves, taking the names of the living and the dead. Archie’s name hadn’t yet appeared on any of them. Tilly’s feelings of dread at all the possibilities grew worse every day as she read, chilled to the core, the news reports of the appalling cruelty inflicted on prisoners of the Japanese. The stories grew more detailed now that the army’s censors had put down their knives and pens. The truth was finally being revealed. Six hundred Australians had died at Sandakan in Borneo in just six months. They’d been whipped, beaten, starved, worked to death. Every day, the newspapers had been filled with more horrors. The atrocities of the Nazis at Belsen. The murder of Jewish people in gas chambers. It seemed as if the world had descended into hell.

  How lucky was Mary that Bert was coming home from all that horror.

  ‘I knew he would come home to me. I just knew he would.’ Mary released herself from Tilly’s embrace and wiped her eyes with her sodden handkerchief.

  ‘You never gave up, Mary. That has to count for something.’ The two women shared a silent acknowledgement of all they had endured, that which they’d shared and that which had been too painful to articulate, the kind of heartbreak that could only be relieved by sobbing alone at night, in their own bedrooms, when the not-knowing had become too much to bear for both of them.

  ‘When’s the big date then? When’s he coming home exactly?’

  ‘It doesn’t say, but it can’t be long, can it? If Bert’s in hospital they’re probably giving him a once-over to make sure he doesn’t bring any of those horrible tropical diseases back home. Malaria and the like. That’s all it can be. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I bet he’s just bursting to get home to see you.’

  Mary nodded and smiled but when her bottom lip wobbled, she launched into Tilly’s arms again, her body racked with heaving and happy sobs.

  ‘There, there, Mary. You’re allowed to cry. I can’t think of a better reason.’

  ‘I’m so happy, Tilly. So happy.’

  Tilly patted her back and then held Mary at arm’s length. ‘Look at me. I’ve gone and made you damp. Why don’t you put the kettle on while I change out of these wet clothes? Check the shopping. I have two eggs, a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, two very small pork chops from Alberto’s, a bottle of milk, a tomato and a cucumber if you fancy them. We’ll have a feast to celebrate Bert’s homecoming.’

  Mary reached for Tilly’s shoulders and spun her around towards the bathroom. ‘That sounds wonderful. It’s just what I need. And yes, to answer your earlier question, there’s plenty of hot water left. Go and have a bath first.’

  Tilly tugged off her still-damp tweed suit, rolled down her rayon stockings and padded to the bathroom in her dressing-gown. As she waited for the bath to fill, she smoothed Ponds cream over her face to remove her make-up, carefully avoiding the mirror above the sink. The black spots blooming behind the glass obscured her face anyway and she didn’t need to see her reflection to know how she appeared to the world. War weary.

  She tossed her stockings into the water and slipped in herself while it was still running. She breathed deep, letting the hot steam warm her from the inside, and watched the water level rise as it covered her hips, her knees, her breasts and her shoulders. The heat prickled her skin and she closed her eyes to the sensation of it coming alive one nerve ending at a time.

  There had been a loneliness she had never shared with Mary, because even though they were close, they had never shared details of the intimacies of their marriages. They’d shared almost everything else: deodorant cream, toothpaste, stockings if either of them had found a hole on the calf or ankle that couldn’t be hidden with a skirt or shoes. They’d shared their daydreams of children and a future, and of having rosier cheeks and longer eyelashes and shinier hair, of the teenage dreams of marrying a rich man and voyages to London and perhaps even seeing the dancers’ high kicks at the Moulin Rouge. But they had never talked about sex.

  On the day she’d married Archie, Tilly had been a blushing bride with wide innocent brown eyes and rouged cheeks. She still had the stick of red lipstick she’d worn that day, the lipstick they’d smudged over their lips that night, when they’d tentatively shared a bed for the first time as husband and wife, young and curious and scared and inexperienced, both of them. She’d understood nothing of sex, other than knowing it was her job to make her husband happy that night, so she’d spent all the coupons she’d saved to buy a new rayon nightgown from David Jones. When they’d both taken off their clothes and lain naked with each other under the sheets, she’d liked the warmth of his body next to hers. When he’d entered her, and thrust inside her, she’d remained completely still and waited and when he was finished, he’d kissed her and asked her if she needed to go and clean herself up, so she had, not knowing that this was expected of her. When she had wiped herself, she’d seen blood and felt stickiness and then they’d put on their nightgown and pyjamas and slept.

  Things had improved after that first time, as they had become more familiar with each other’s bodies and desires, but not long after Archie had left for the war and Tilly had spent the past four years untouched. For a time, she had remembered the heat of Archie’s body, the strength of his arms around her, the passionate way he kissed her every night when they returned home from work, what it felt like when he’d moved inside her, as if they were joined in ways other than at their intimate core. But those memories had worn away like the soles of Mary’s shoes.

  When Archie had enlisted, Tilly had vowed to herself that she wouldn’t use that red lipstick again until he was home, when he would be able to turn his eyes to her and everything in that red stain on her lips would signal, It’s me. I’m sti
ll here. I’ve not changed. I’m still the woman you married. I’m your bride. We can get on with our lives now. I’ve missed you and I love you more than ever.

  Archie had already missed three Christmases, four of her birthdays and four of his own. He’d missed his own father’s death from lung cancer and his mother’s stroke. His brother still wrote to Tilly asking for news and she had had to reply with a heavy heart that there was none.

  That Mary had sustained her faith was a mystery to Tilly. Is that why Archie was still missing? Had Tilly not prayed hard enough? Did God know, in his omnipotence, that Tilly had lost faith in him too, and had decided to reward only those who supplicated themselves to him? And if that were true, what kind of a God was that?

  After her bath, Tilly stood at her bedroom window, her short brown hair wrapped in her threadbare towel like a turban. She shivered in her chenille dressing-gown, her bare feet cold on the floorboards. She moved the net curtain aside and looked down over Orwell Street and the Roosevelt nightclub. It was doing brisk business. A queue snaked all the way to Macleay Street and shadows gathered on the balcony, despite the weather, glamorous figures backlit by the low lights from the inside, the ends of their cigarettes bright little sparks in the darkness. Sculpted topiary pot plants in a neat row on the street side provided both a buffer for those at risk of tumbling over the edge and discreet places for illicit conversations and liaisons.

  It seemed as full tonight as it had been in 1943 on the night it opened. Mary and Tilly had looked across at it from their eyrie, queues full of American troops enticed by the titular nod to their president and the opportunity to take Australian girls somewhere fancy and American. In the end, and despite widespread fears about the Japanese, the only foreign troops to invade Australia had been the Americans, with their smart uniforms and their silk stockings and their big smiles and polite manners and their bulging wallets. Tilly had had plenty of invitations from Americans to walk through that narrow door, but she’d declined every one. She let herself regret it sometimes, for a moment or two, when she realised how much she missed dancing and the musicians who seamlessly turned individual notes into jazz and swing tunes, and for the many lonely nights when she missed being held in someone’s arms.

  The last time she’d danced with a man she’d been a long way from home and a million miles away from the life she’d created with Archie. George Cooper had held her close in an Officers’ Mess on a steamy night in Darwin back in February 1943. Tilly had tried not to think about it too much in the two-and-a-half years since. She had had far too much else to worry about without letting confusion and guilt have their own seats in the front row of her life.

  Tilly still sported her towel turban when she joined Mary in the kitchen. A pot of tea was brewing, Mary had created a Scandinavian-style smorgasbord and the pork chops were sizzling on the stove.

  ‘This looks delicious,’ Tilly said hungrily.

  ‘Tuck in,’ Mary replied. ‘I’ll be a minute.’ She sat at the table, her elbows propped, her chin in her hands and her eyes closed. At first glance, Tilly thought Mary was praying, but her hands weren’t pressed together in silent repose. Her palms cupped her cheeks and her middle fingers were massaging tiny circles at the outside corners of her eyes.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Tilly giggled.

  Mary’s eyelids fluttered open for a moment and then lowered again. ‘I’m massaging away the wrinkles. I was so much younger when Bert left. He still thinks the twenty-six-year-old me is the one he’ll find when he comes home, not this wrinkled old woman.’ It wasn’t just the passing of the years that had lined their faces and hollowed their cheeks. There had been too many sleepless nights and too much worry.

  ‘Oh, Mary. Don’t be ridiculous. Bert will still love you. Even if you look like a wrinkled-up old prune.’

  Mary dropped her hands and laughed, the joy lighting up her face in a way that ridiculous finger massages never would. ‘I’m just nervous. And excited. Aren’t you, Tilly, at the thought that Archie will be home soon? Because I know he will.’

  Tilly couldn’t describe what she was feeling. Not to Mary. ‘I’m nervous and excited. Of course I am.’ She found a smile, more to cheer Mary than to reflect the state of her own heart.

  ‘To the end of the war,’ Mary said.

  ‘Hear, hear. And to our husbands.’

  They clinked their teacups against one another’s.

  Tilly sighed. ‘I wish this was some kind of fancy French champagne. The kind they’re probably drinking across the road right now.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s had French champagne at all during the war. You’ll have to make do with Great Western.’

  ‘Then Great Western it shall have to be for Bert’s welcome home party. Tell me everything. What do you have planned?’ Tilly lifted her cup and wrapped her fingers around it. She’d needed to feel the warmth of it. She was so cold deep down that the bath on its own hadn’t defrosted her. She blew across her milky brew, watching the waves in it.

  ‘How did you know that’s what I’ve been thinking about?’

  ‘That and your wrinkles, obviously.’ Tilly reached across the table and covered Mary’s hand with hers. ‘I know you, Mary Smith. Bert deserves to have the biggest party he’s ever seen. As do you. I’ll help you organise everything. I could ask my mother to make a cake or two. I’m sure she’d love to. We’ll get some beer and sherry. What if we make a banner and string it over the fireplace so it’s the first thing he sees when he comes home?’

  Mary clapped her hands together and beamed. ‘That would be marvellous! It could say Welcome Home Bert in huge letters.’ Mary traced an arc in the air and formed the letters with an index finger.

  ‘I don’t think it’ll matter one bit what the banner says. Bert won’t see anything or anyone but you. You could be wearing a housecoat for all he’s going to care.’

  ‘A housecoat? Bite your tongue. I’ve already chosen my outfit. I’m going to wear my red dress. You know, the one with—’

  ‘The white trim on the matching jacket?’

  Mary nodded excitedly.

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Mary said. ‘I hardly know what to think, Tilly.’ Her voice grew quiet. ‘It’s as if I’ve been asleep for the longest time and I’ve woken up suddenly and the world has changed all around me and I can’t keep up with its spinning.’ Her eyes filled with exhausted tears. ‘How have we managed to go on for so long? How have we survived it all?’

  ‘All I know, dear Mary, is that we have.’

  ‘And it’s over for me and I feel so happy about that and I want you to feel this happiness I feel, Tilly. I’m wishing that for you more than anything.’

  They held each other’s gaze for the longest time.

  ‘When Archie and I were first married,’ Tilly said after a moment, ‘we went to Luna Park. I hadn’t been since it had opened in 1935 and Archie said it was about time. I’d thought it was a place for children, you see, but it was packed with people. Adults. Girls with soldiers on their arms, carrying prizes from the sideshow attractions. We had the most wonderful time, eating hot dogs and hot peanuts and forgetting about the war for just one night. Archie hadn’t wanted to, but I dragged him to the Big Dipper and we crowded into that wooden carriage and off it went.’ Tilly laughed at the memory. ‘I had no idea what to expect. I’d seen it from across the harbour and it looked high and slightly scary, but being up close? It was so much bigger than I thought. When you’re standing at the bottom of it with your ticket in your hand it seems as high as the flags fluttering on the top of the bridge. But Archie was with me and I didn’t want him to think I was a chicken, so I tried not to scream.’

  Mary listened intently, her smile familiar and comforting.

  ‘And it’s hard not to scream, I’m telling you, when the carriage crawls to the top and you can hear the mechanics underneath you whirring and catching and then you’re almost at the top and you stop for just a moment and then, whoosh. You
fly down into the dip and you’ve left your stomach on the other side and you’re hanging on and trying not to scream and inside you’re terrified but you can’t show it because you have to be brave. But Archie was beside me, one arm about my shoulders, the other holding my hand. And I knew I’d be safe.’ Tilly closed her eyes, afraid to tell the truth. ‘And that’s how I’ve felt ever since his last letter from Rabaul, Mary. I’ve been hanging on, trying not to scream every day. The difference is, Archie’s not beside me, one arm about my shoulders, keeping me safe. I’m still trapped on that rollercoaster.’

  Mary began to cry. ‘I’ve prayed for you, too, Tilly. You’ll get a telegram. I know you will.’

  Chapter Seven

  Tilly Galloway wore it as a badge of honour that she had been appointed the Daily Herald’s first official woman war correspondent, although, she thought begrudgingly, perhaps a badge of dishonour might have been more appropriate.

  Because the truth of it was she had never left Australian soil. The by-lines on the stories she’d written during her one and only war correspondents’ tour in February 1943 carried only the vaguest description ‘Somewhere in Australia’, for security reasons. And if she hadn’t argued with Mr Sinclair until she was almost blue in the face, she might not even have been given permission to go.

  That January, she’d heard from a colleague on the Daily Telegraph, whom she’d run into covering a shop fire in Elizabeth Street, that a women war correspondents’ tour was being planned. A group of journalists from other newspapers and the ABC had been pressuring the army to allow them to cover the real war. They were tired of being restricted to covering the women’s angle and stories from the home front. They’d been hounding the army since 1939 for permission to be sent overseas just like the male war correspondents—George Cooper, Damien Parer, George Johnston, Chester Wilmot and Osmar White. These women were serious reporters, as determined as the men to tell the truth about the war, to report the reality of Australia’s war effort, but the army had been fiercely opposed to the idea. They’d refused women reporters permission to accompany troops on manoeuvres or to be anywhere fighting men were. The excuses for the restriction had flown thick and fast: that women were natural gossips and would struggle to keep wartime secrets; that there wasn’t enough separate accommodation for them; that it was too dangerous at the front.