The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  She waited among the crowd while the barges motored towards that first Catalina, while they were loaded with their precious cargo. When, ten minutes later, the boats returned to the wharf, a roar went up around her that was almost deafening.

  Her pencil flew over the next page in her notebook.

  Fourteen heroes on each barge were met with rousing cheers. From Changi to the calm peaceful waters of Rose Bay. Clean khaki uniforms. Smiling healthy faces. Met by Major General EC Plant and Colonel H Walker.

  A sailor threw a rope and lashed it around one of the wharf posts and a minute later the first soldiers set foot back on Australian soil.

  Tilly scribbled in her notebook. How impressed they must be with this welcome.

  She looked to the gangplank as the first former POWs stepped off onto the wharf.

  Almost four years in Japanese captivity. Against all odds, they look healthy. Fresh new uniforms. Too big for them. Smiling. Eyes bright, Clean-shaven. Tanned. Strode with strength and purpose. Greeted by hearty handshakes and waves.

  Peter was staring down the lens of his camera. He was right there on the gangplank. Seeing up close what she should be seeing for herself.

  After handshakes and the official welcome, the soldiers were ushered into the terminal building on the base. The crowd around Tilly was expectant, jittery.

  ‘I think that was Robert. Did you see him, Mum?’ a woman called.

  ‘I don’t know, love. I think so.’

  Peter headed out of the gate and greeted her with a wave. ‘Tilly. Fancy meeting you here.’

  ‘Did you get your shots, Pete?’

  He grinned. ‘Don’t I always?’

  ‘Listen, the diggers’ families are waiting at Concord. We should head over there. If we can get through the traffic. New South Head Road is blocked with people.’

  ‘All in hand.’ Peter reached into the pocket of his trousers and jangled his car keys.

  It was an hour before the returned prisoners of war and the group of dignitaries left Rose Bay. They boarded a red-and-cream double-decker bus sporting a calico banner draped across the top of it which read 8 Div. AIF PRISONERS OF WAR FROM SINGAPORE.

  Police cars led the procession and Peter nudged his car into the cavalcade right behind the bus. The huge crowds made the journey very slow going, which gave Peter every opportunity to grip the steering wheel with his knees and shoot out the car window. As the conga line crawled up along New South Head Road, he snapped the surging crowd, seeing the detail others didn’t: a sobbing wife, a beaming father, a mother and siblings with a sign held aloft saying Welcome home boys.

  Police on foot along the route warned onlookers to keep out of the line of traffic but their warnings to the assembled crowds were of little use as the buses inched past Rose Bay’s crowded footpaths. In Kings Cross, people showered the buses with confetti and torn paper from the flats looking over Darlinghurst Road and children waved little paper Union Jacks. Cars that had been forced to pull over because of the surging crowds tooted their horns in celebration not annoyance. As the convoy approached the city, throngs of people lined Queens Square and Macquarie Street. At Martin Place, Tilly heard someone shout, ‘Good on you, lads.’ Then ‘Well done,’ and ‘Glad you’re back’.

  From the buses, the bronzed diggers waved new handkerchiefs through the open windows. On Parramatta Road, houses were decorated with Union Jacks, children waved excitedly from front yards and people of all ages waited on their verandahs to pay tribute to the men from Singapore. Tilly heard them all say it, the words falling from in the air around her like the torn paper had on VP Day: ‘They’re home.’ She wrote all the details in her notebook, already working on the story in her head, what the lead sentence would be and the details she would include for colour.

  At Concord, the returned soldiers were welcomed by hospital staff and members of the Red Cross before they were engulfed in the embraces of their loved ones. Watching on, Tilly’s mind was in a thousand places as she wrote everything down. In one corner of the large reception room, a young soldier was swept up in the arms of four women, who Tilly took to be his three sisters and his mother. Every single member of the family began to sob. An older soldier announced to anyone who would listen that he’d served in both wars but his proudest moment was being able to hold his three-year-old granddaughter for the first time. His wife had rushed over to Tilly and instructed, ‘Write that down and put that in the paper, won’t you, that my husband is home?’

  Wherever Tilly looked, there was another joyous reunion and fresh tears. She went from group to group, asking for names and rank and suburbs for her story. Peter snapped away at her side.

  It wasn’t long before a nurse announced that the men needed their rest. ‘We expect they’ll all be ready to go home tomorrow or the next day,’ she said. ‘And be assured we’ll be in contact with families.’

  As the soldiers filed out with last waves, there was another burst of applause and then quiet sobs, peppered with excited conversations about what would be prepared for dinner when Clarrie came home or what Francis would think of the new curtains in the living room or how much taller young Dudley had grown since his uncle had been away.

  Tilly tucked her notebook and her pencil into her handbag and followed Peter back to the car parked by the sisters’ quarters off the main entrance. Above them, the Union Jack, the Red Cross and the Australian flag fluttered in the mild September breeze.

  ‘You got everything you need?’ Peter asked Tilly as he started the car.

  She nodded stiffly and they drove back to the office.

  When Tilly woke the next morning, she singed her toast, drank her tea so fast that she burnt her tongue and hurried out the door. She flew down the stairs and along the footpath to the newsagent on Macleay Street and flipped open the newspaper to see her story. It was still a thrill. Peter’s photographs had perfectly captured the joy Tilly had seen in the faces of those welcoming their boys home. How could she have possibly conveyed to them how lucky they were? She read each paragraph of her story and at the end, there was a teaser to page six: ‘Full list of returned troops’. She flicked hurriedly to the page to see all the names of those who’d flown in the day before on the Catalinas. Each and every one of the men was from the AIF’s 8th Division, who had all been prisoners of war since Singapore had fallen in February 1942.

  A middle-aged man with a newspaper open in his hands bumped into Tilly and quickly apologised, proffering the paper to her as if to explain. ‘Sorry, love. It’s my nephew. His name’s right here in the paper. He’s home.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Tilly said and a great wave of grief threatened to knock her off her feet. ‘You must be over the moon.’

  ‘I am. Most definitely. I’m taking this home to show the wife. Have a good day.’

  Tilly knew that readers all over Sydney would be poring over that same list to study each name, from NX76242, COLLIS. Captain. CH, to SX10422, DOWNER. Gunner. AR.

  A pain in Tilly’s chest cut hard and fast. Her grief was like a knife: sometimes a stab, other times a slash.

  She closed the paper and lifted her gaze to the distance. ‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ she murmured to herself and tried not to be overcome by the terror that with every passing day there was less and less hope.

  Chapter Nine

  Tilly’s fingers hovered over the stiff keys of her typewriter. She’d lost the thread of her sentence and was trying to snatch it back but it had gone. It had been happening more and more lately, this forgetfulness. The mystery of not knowing about Archie seemed to be eating her up from the inside, feeding on her waking hours as well as her sleeping ones, gnawing away at her capacity to take one step and then another. Some days, even when the sky was clear and blue and warm, she felt as if she existed in a Sydney winter fog.

  She sat back, lit a cigarette and found a distraction in the windows overlooking Pitt Street. The rain had begun just after she’d arrived at work and hadn’t let up, a great bucketing spring downpour that
had filled gutters in a flash, flooded city street corners and rendered umbrellas useless. The windows’ dirty faces were streaked, like faces with running mascara.

  Tilly felt alone and increasingly isolated from all the celebrations happening around her. She hadn’t had her happy reunion or miraculous story of survival, nor could she think about funerals and memorials. Mary’s news about Bert’s imminent return had created a perceptible distance between the two friends. Neither had acknowledged it, of course, but it was in every conversation and look they exchanged. There was a lightness to Mary now that made Tilly grieve even more for her own circumstances. And worst of all, she could not give voice to her envy, her sadness, her grief, because her friend was so happy. How selfish was it to bring Mary back down with her, to that dark place, when Mary had just been freed from her captivity.

  Tilly dropped her head into her hands and tried to breathe. Her world was so close to being unbearable she didn’t know how she could hang on for one more day.

  The creeping loneliness was what hurt the most. She was inside her own head most of the time and the thoughts whirring around in it were things she could never say to anyone. A woman who worked with words was censoring herself with every sentence, every conversation and every interaction with the people around her. She had lied for years, saying, ‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you. No news as yet but I’m keeping up hope. His last letter said the Japanese were treating him well so I expect he’ll come back with a suntan. No, I’m not worried. Archie is strong and courageous.’

  Who needed a censor’s pen when one could so easily censor oneself?

  Tilly had been away from the newsroom reporting on the closure of the Bathurst Arms Factory. It had supplied machine guns, Bren lights and Vickers, during the war but it had just been announced that it would be closing by the end of 1945. The one hundred and four women who’d gone to work there every day had been given a week’s notice that they were now redundant. Men were employed there too but they were being kept on and would be gradually let go by the end of the year.

  Tilly had arranged with the authorities to be there in the factory when the women were told they were being discharged. They’d been called together in the lunch room and when it had sunk in, they’d gathered around the piano and sung ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and cried and hugged each other.

  There was a rumour that the factory might soon be transformed from wartime production to making peacetime consumer goods—refrigerators, handcuffs and golf club heads—which caused a great deal of laughter and questions from the women about how many golf heads Australia would ever need, but that gossip lasted as long as the plates of sandwiches. By the end of the next week, every woman there would be clocking off for the final time, released into a world that had changed for them forever. They hadn’t said it but Tilly recognised that particular combination of joy and sadness in their forlorn smiles and their tears because she was feeling it, too. These women had had a taste of independence, of the freedom of their own pay packet and of the kind of camaraderie that comes with growing to know the people you work alongside. They’d shared cakes on birthdays, contributed a knitted blanket or a hat or booties (in yellow to play it safe) to layettes for the impending arrival of a child. They’d come together for birthdays and hastily arranged weddings to soldiers who were unexpectedly on leave for just a week, and yes, they’d grieved for each other at funerals, too. What would all those women do now for work and for money and for friends?

  Tilly read the slug line she’d typed at the top of her page, the few words that gave an editor an idea of the story.

  Bathurst munitions plant to close.

  It was crisp. To the point. George Cooper would have approved of that economy. But reading it over, she realised it only told part of the story. She lifted her fingers to the keys and typed.

  Women no longer needed.

  She flicked the carriage return lever to a fresh line.

  Women free to return home to domestic life.

  And then, another line.

  Women now unemployed in Bathurst.

  Tilly yanked out the copy paper and screwed it up into a ball.

  ‘Tilly!’ Dear Agatha walked towards her, her face white. ‘Take a look at this.’ It was that afternoon’s Sun, which had just hit the newsstands. The rival paper often got the scoop on stories if they happened late overnight or early morning, after the Daily Herald had already gone to press. ‘I can’t believe it, can you?’ She poked page three and before Tilly could make any sense of the story, Dear Agatha read the headline out loud.

  ‘“Massacre of Nurses on Banka Beach.”’

  ‘Which nurses?’ From her desk across the room, Kitty Darling lifted her head. Her red lipstick was perfectly applied on her cupid’s bow mouth, which was pinched together at hearing the news. She stood and walked over to Tilly’s desk.

  ‘From the Vyner Brooke,’ Tilly said. Tilly, Dear Agatha and Kitty leant in close to read the story. Tilly’s pulse began to race as she absorbed the harrowing details. ‘It’s been kept secret all this time,’ she whispered, hardly able to believe it herself. ‘The nurses who survived the sinking in February ’42 were shot on Banka beach.’

  Dear Agatha gasped. ‘I thought the survivors were found in South Sumatra? It was in the paper last week.’

  ‘Were they?’ There had been so much bad news that Tilly had to work hard to remember the good.

  ‘“Twenty of them were shot by the Japanese”,’ Kitty read out loud. ‘The Japanese lined them up on the beach and shot them all. One survived. Sister Vivian Bullwinkel. And then she was captured too. Everyone’s kept it secret until now. Her story has only been revealed because the war is over. She was told that if word got out that she’d survived, she’d be executed too. “Of the fifty-three AIF nurses rescued from the Vyner Brooke, twenty-one were murdered on the beach and eight others died in the prison camps.”’

  ‘That is just dreadful,’ Tilly whispered.

  ‘“It’s been one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the prison camps,”’ Kitty continued. ‘“The cold-blooded murder of helpless, stranded girls, who had already given themselves up, seemed like …”’ She stopped, unable to continue and went back to her desk. Dear Agatha seemed unable to move.

  Tilly squeezed her eyes closed.

  If the Japanese could kill nurses in cold blood, what might they have done to Archie? Was it too much to ask to just want him home?

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Colour! Colour! Colour! That’s what I’m expecting now the war is over, Mrs Galloway. If I never see khaki again in my life it won’t be too soon.’

  Tilly glanced around the long and narrow dress shop on Pitt Street, situated on the ground floor of a sandstone building filled with bustling offices upstairs, and wondered for the tenth time why on earth was she here instead of Kitty Darling. That had been the exact question she’d asked the women’s editor Mrs Freeman that very morning when she’d been assigned the story.

  ‘She has a stomach flu, Tilly, and I need someone to fill in.’

  Tilly had never worked under the direction of Mrs Freeman, nor written stories for the women’s pages, and wasn’t about to start. Tilly belonged in general news. Serious news. Kitty Darling and Dear Agatha and Vera were the women’s pages reporters and Tilly knew she had to stand her ground, because one story would lead to another and then another and her newspaper career would come grinding to a halt in a miasma of charity lunches and fashion parades.

  She’d girded her loins. ‘While I have sympathy for Kitty, Mrs Freeman, I don’t believe it’s my role to cover fashion for the newspaper.’

  Mrs Freeman’s petite frame had been almost lost behind her enormous oak desk but Tilly couldn’t miss the intent of her stare over the top of her typewriter. ‘Mrs Galloway, you are a reporter, are you not?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tilly sensed where this was going and immediately began formulating a line of defence in her head.

  ‘And being a reporter involves reporting on newswo
rthy events, does it not?’

  ‘Of course,’ Tilly had replied, suddenly wondering if Mrs Freeman had been a lawyer in a past career. ‘I just don’t happen to believe that this is a newsworthy event.’

  Mrs Freeman had slumped behind her desk, her shoulders lowered in what suddenly looked like defeat.

  ‘Tilly. I can’t say I disagree with you. But I need help at the moment and you’re all I’ve got. I’ve been asking and asking for more staff, as you may well remember from your years working for Rex, so we can improve our coverage and do more important stories. The Weekly’s doing it so I can’t see why we can’t. But every single extra pound has gone to sending the men overseas to cover the war. So, please, humour me just this once? I’ll owe you.’

  The dress shop proprietress, Mrs Delia Swanston, looked Tilly over. ‘Can I tempt you with something while you’re here, Mrs Galloway? I have a delightful shirt-style dress in navy and white stripes with a buttoned waist that would suit you. I may have your size. And it’s a bargain, I might add. Only twenty-nine shillings eleven pence. With thirty coupons.’

  ‘Thank you, but no. I’m not here to purchase anything, Mrs Swanston. It’s strictly reporting duty for me today.’ Tilly glanced around the shop and found herself agreeing with Mrs Swanston about the lack of colour. The items did seem rather wan: pale yellows and pinks and baby blues. Winter frocks on the sale rack in the back of the store were in drab navy and maroon crepe, and tweed suits featured patterns of brown and white, and light and dark blue.

  Mrs Swanston’s own jacket and skirt were a royal purple and her shirt the whitest of white silk. An oval diamante brooch that shone like real diamonds was pinned to her lapel and her shoes were black velvet courts. A measuring tape hung from her neck like a doctor’s stethoscope and a pin cushion at her left wrist was studded with pins, as if a small echidna had fastened itself to her wristwatch. Having failed in her first attempt to sell a new frock to Tilly, she was clearly making no effort to hide her scrupulous inspection of Tilly’s outfit.