The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  Tilly’s mother had told Tilly the green-and-white tweed fabric of her suit matched her pale skin and her brown hair. Elsie had always believed there to be a hint of auburn in her first-born’s hair, but Tilly had never seen it. ‘That’s the Irish coming out in you,’ Elsie had said proudly, having lost the red in her own hair to white-grey decades before.

  Tilly’s mother had expertly whipped the fabric into a two-piece skirt suit that had served Tilly well during the war. But at that moment, she looked at it through Mrs Swanston’s eyes. The jacket hung loose now and there was a small ink stain at approximately the left thigh area of her skirt, which Tilly had convinced herself could only be seen upon very close inspection. The round necked fine knit she wore underneath the jacket had been white once but now, no matter how determinedly Tilly soaked it in Lux soap flakes, had transformed into the colour of wartime tea. Everything Tilly owned was old, worn, patched. She had grown out of the habit of desiring new things, believing it to be frivolous and wasteful. She had absorbed the make-do-and-mend ethos of the war, which encouraged women to get the last possible ounce of wear out of clothes and household items. Women had become obsessed with preserving their garments, learning to darn and patch, and changing out of work clothes the minute they walked in the door to preserve them as long as possible. Women had become scrubbers, menders, darners, knitters and purveyors of methods to remove grease stains with an iron and blotting paper and, most seriously, to fight the war against the moth menace. Once each month, women were advised to beat, brush and shake out their clothes, particularly woollen items, and especially over winter into spring, when the grubs were hatching. When rubber was so scarce, a corset had become one of a woman’s prized possessions and women had been advised to never let them get too dirty, to wash them frequently and that it was best, if you possibly could, to have at least two, so they could be worn alternately. Tilly had warmed most of all to the advice about dishes: that they should be left on the draining board to dry naturally so as to avoid wear on tea towels. Tilly had been all for avoiding wear on tea towels.

  ‘Now, Mrs Swanston,’ Tilly asked, attempting to divert the proprietress’s attention from the ink stain on her skirt to more serious matters. ‘I take it then that you’re very pleased that Mr Chifley’s government has lifted the styling restrictions on clothing manufacture?’

  ‘Oh, my goodness, yes. It’s all been rather drab since 1942. There have been too many uniforms out on the streets and this fashion for the austerity styles? I couldn’t do it myself. Where’s the style in an army or airforce auxiliary uniform, I ask you?’

  ‘They were practical,’ Tilly offered. ‘For all those women who were working in factories and offices and the like.’

  Mrs Swanston sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose they were. And here,’ she jabbed at Tilly’s notepad. ‘It’s not just women who’ll be rejoicing. My husband is a tailor and he can’t wait to put pocket flaps back on men’s suits. And double cuffs! But I’m not sure he can do double-breasted suits and jackets just yet and, of course, there are still restrictions on the number of buttons one may use, which is a terrible pity. But this is a wonderful step in the right direction. We’ll be back to pre-war business in no time.’

  ‘But there’s no indication as yet that clothing rationing will be removed until the worldwide cotton shortage is over. What’s your view on that?’

  ‘I expect a certain level of frustration among mothers, having to continue patching sheets and postponing buying a particular dress they may have long coveted.’ Mrs Swanston glanced around at her racks, making no secret of her profound regret that her frocks might have to wait a little longer to find their perfect owner. ‘But I suppose we should be thankful the war is over and that we haven’t experienced half the hardships that our cousins in England have had to endure. I’m sure that with a little care, mothers and their children will still look neat. Even if they aren’t wearing the latest fashions.’

  Tilly bit her tongue. ‘I’m sure that with winter approaching in the northern hemisphere, all those millions of people who are struggling for their basic necessities, such as food to put on the table and a warm place to live, might need cotton more than we do right now.’

  A flush rose in Mrs Swanston’s cheeks. ‘Of course.’

  Tilly’s pencil flew over the page of her notebook. ‘Mr Chifley said the clothing, textile and knitted goods trades made a greater contribution to victory than is possibly realised. What do you say to that?’

  Mrs Swanston puffed out her peacock bosom. ‘I’m very proud of all we’ve done and all that the women of Australia have done. Yes, it was hard at times but people took the austerity restrictions to heart, for the most part, without complaint.’ Mrs Swanston leant close and lowered her voice. ‘And it hasn’t been announced yet but I’ve heard that we’ll get lace from England by the end of the year. We haven’t had baby lace since the beginning of the war. And wool for knitting and crocheting!’

  Tilly’s mother would definitely be pleased by that news. ‘Will Sydney ladies be wearing a wider range of styles by summertime, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, yes, most definitely. Skirts will be flowing and they’ll be longer, too. I can’t wait to see cap sleeves for spring and summer, with all the delightful trimmings we’ve gone so long without. Ruffles and dirndl skirts and coat styles. All that fabric, Mrs Galloway! We’ll embrace the feminine again.’ She paused, lowered her voice. ‘We’ll soon have some new nightwear and lingerie. Now women can get back to the feminine things in life. Looking pretty for their husbands, for instance.’

  Tilly didn’t take the bait. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Swanston. I do sincerely appreciate your time.’

  ‘I’m just so glad it’s all over, aren’t you?’

  The change in tone in Mrs Swanston’s voice caught Tilly off guard. She paused and then asked softly, ‘Is someone in your family serving?’

  Mrs Swanston tugged a pin from the pincushion on her wrist and pushed it back in, over and over. ‘My son-inlaw. He lost a leg in Malaya. He’s been back twelve months now. He and my daughter have two little boys. They were so scared to see him after so long away. I had to hem all the left legs in his trousers.’ Her voice drifted off and she found a stoic smile. ‘But we got on. At least he came home. What about you, Mrs Galloway?’

  ‘No.’ The word slipped out of Tilly’s mouth before she could stop it. She couldn’t bear to have another conversation about Archie, and her lie was another attempt at self-preservation. ‘My husband’s in a reserved occupation. Shipping.’ Oh, how the lie continued, so easy, so seamlessly, and she felt such a rumble of shame in her heart.

  ‘You’re lucky, then.’

  ‘Yes, we are. But my dearest friend Mary’s husband is about to come home. He was a prisoner in Changi, in Singapore.’

  ‘That’s a blessing from God right there. Wish her all the very best.’

  ‘I certainly will.’

  Tilly stepped onto the footpath and lit up a cigarette. Her cheeks flamed with shame. It hadn’t been the first time she’d pretended to a stranger that Archie didn’t exist. It had become easier than the truth. So many times since April 1941 she had tried to forget him as a way of holding herself up, a way of not tumbling into that rabbit hole of grief that she feared would subsume her. Other times, she imagined that he’d walked onto the ship and simply disappeared into thin air. In that version, he’d never been captured. He’d walked up the gangplank and had become a missionary in deepest, darkest Africa. Or perhaps he was in a monastery in Tibet, having vowed to be silent forever. And it was all so foolish, she knew, but did it make any more sense than thinking about what might really have happened to him?

  All those letters she’d written to him—faithfully, cheerily—every week for four bloody years, in which she’d lied, too, pretending that she was fine and dandy. She’d filled those pages with useless, utterly frivolous rubbish to stop herself from writing the truth. Had he received anything she’d sent to the Red Cross for him? The fruit cake eve
ry Christmas her mother had helped her bake? The new handkerchiefs she’d embroidered with his initials? The mints? The clippings from the Daily Herald featuring her stories? Had any of those things stopped him from going mad?

  As each day passed, the newspapers and the radio broadcasts had revealed new and horrific revelations from liberated prisoner camps and she’d read them and listened with a growing sense of dread. Of course our boys had been courageous and brave. Their pride had never faltered and their unquenchable spirit had carried them through the ugliest tortures men had ever known. Tilly believed the reports of sickness and starvation among the POWs because she’d seen it in the faces and the ill-fitting uniforms of the men who’d arrived at Rose Bay on the Catalinas. It was beri-beri and malaria and other tropical diseases whose names she’d forgotten, but she suspected it was more than that, something that had taken the light from their eyes.

  Every day, another house she passed had been decorated almost overnight with Australian flags and the Union Jack and coloured bunting, with welcome home banners strung from verandah posts and balconies, and the scent of freshly baked biscuits wafting through open windows as she passed by. Another family was preparing a welcome celebration and she wanted to hate them for it.

  Every night, families were keeping vigils at the wireless, listening to the ABC broadcasting from Singapore with names of released POWs. And every night, another family was able to hear the voice of a loved one, the voice they might have forgotten except for in their dreams over the past five years, and they would rejoice.

  If only she was able to share in the tremendous relief of those thousands of next of kin.

  She crossed Pitt Street and when she stepped out of the lift on the second floor, she found herself in the midst of another celebration and she faltered. Cookery editor Vera Maxwell was sobbing in the arms of Dear Agatha, and Maggie and Frances were hovering, with smiles and tears. They must have heard the lift bell because each woman turned towards Tilly. She registered shock and joy in their faces.

  Tilly looked at each of them in turn. ‘What is it?’

  Archie. Archie. Archie. It was all she could think. Did they have news? Had they seen the list of names that was going to appear in tomorrow’s paper? A surge of adrenaline sent her head throbbing.

  Maggie motioned for Tilly to join them. ‘It’s good news, Tilly, although you might not think it, looking at us.’

  And suddenly her friends were not looking at her but at Vera.

  It wasn’t Archie. The good news wasn’t for her.

  Tilly set her handbag and notebook on her desk and quickly went to Vera, who looked up with more than relief in her eyes.

  ‘He’s alive, Tilly. He was found on an island in New Guinea. I don’t even know the name of it.’

  ‘Rodney? But …’ Tilly struggled to make sense of the news. ‘But he was listed as missing. All this time he’s been alive?’

  All Vera could do was nod and shake her head in a confused rhythm of disbelief and joy. ‘Yes. That’s all I know. Oh, Tilly.’ The two women held each other and the others stepped back. They knew that Vera and Tilly shared something they could never understand but when Tilly’s tears flowed, Kitty and Dear Agatha swooped in too.

  Chapter Eleven

  Across the road from their apartment building, Mary and Tilly sighed wistfully and pressed their noses up against the curved windows of the French perfumerie.

  ‘Do you think I should?’ Mary asked.

  It was Saturday morning and the two women were on their weekly window shopping expedition. Over the years, they’d developed a comforting routine of activities to fill their days and help take their minds off the war and their missing husbands. On Monday nights they knitted. Elsie always seemed to have found a moth-eaten old jumper that she unravelled and turned into balls of wool ready for reimagining into something else for someone, an orphan perhaps or a widow’s child, a returned soldier with no wife or mother to knit for him. On Tuesday evening they had wrapped bandages for the Red Cross, although that work had recently come to an end. On Wednesday night they often saw a picture, usually something of the action-adventure variety and absolutely positively nothing war related. On Thursday nights they liked listening to Mr and Mrs North—Jerry and Pam, the laughing sleuths—who were billed on 2GB as radio’s gayest, most adventurous pair. Each week, they wise-cracked their way through blood-chilling drama and Tilly and Mary loved their riotous adventures in crime. Who didn’t need a laugh during the war? On Friday nights after work they walked to Repin’s on George Street for a treat of Vienna-style coffee with whipped cream on top. It was so much fancier than a regular brewed coffee or the tea they could make themselves at home, and it always felt like a wonderful way to cap off a working week.

  On Saturdays they walked into the city to moan in good humour about the meagre window displays in David Jones and Foy’s. They couldn’t remember the last time there had been new fashions to swoon over or new hats to covet. Sometimes they tried on shoes they didn’t ever plan to buy or slipped new handbags over the crooks of their elbows to admire the way they looked on each other.

  It was all a game of make-believe and they were like two young girls playing with clothes from a treasure box. They had been young when the war had begun, on the brink of starting families of their own, but all that had been put aside, tucked away in their own treasure boxes, preserved for the day their husbands came home and their interrupted lives could begin again.

  On Sundays, Mary went to church and Tilly slept in before having lunch at her parents’ house with her sister, Martha, and Martha’s three boys. If there was a watersider out of work, or a widow in need of a meal and friendship, they would find a place around the kitchen table at Argyle Place too.

  And then on Monday, the working week began all over again.

  It had been best to keep busy. Tilly had found it had been the only way to stop her thinking about Archie every waking minute. There had to be some respite from the fear and the gut-wrenching dread, and by keeping busy and draining her energy dry she might, just might, fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow each night. Because the alternative—lying awake all night, heart pounding, thoughts racing about where Archie was and what had happened to him—had been no way to survive the war with her sanity intact. She had learnt early on in his captivity that letting those thoughts get the better of her was a clear route to going mad with grief.

  Tilly still found herself waking slowly, asleep and then awake with each blink, and in that restful half-slumber, she would forget for just a moment. After all the years of waiting, it was the same every day. With her pillow soft under her cheek and the air already warm with the promise of a sunny Sydney day, the world was right again and she would find herself reaching an arm out behind her to feel for Archie. They were the best of days and the worst.

  The glass bottles on display in the perfumerie window caught the light and seemed to glitter.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mary dithered. ‘You know that every spare penny I have goes straight into the bank for a home of our own. And Bert’s pay, of course. It’s a nice little nest egg now.’ She sighed. ‘If one day, by some miracle, there are any homes to actually buy.’

  ‘Don’t even hesitate,’ Tilly said adamantly and jabbed her friend with an elbow as if to shock her out of her malaise. ‘Bert’s coming home. What better reason do you need to splash out a little? Think of all the times you’ve gone without during the war. Treat yourself. Not that I think you’ll need a fancy eau de cologne when it comes to Bert. You could smell like Bon Ami and I’m sure he won’t be able to keep his hands off you.’

  Mary laughed. ‘Do you think they’re really French?’

  Tilly narrowed her eyes and studied the labels. There might be room for a little scepticism when it came to the advertising in the shop. She had wondered, more than once, how on earth this little place in Potts Point had managed to come across authentic French perfume during the war when couture houses had been closed for the dura
tion. ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘“Jean Didier”. That sounds French, doesn’t it?’ Mary peered close through the rounded curve of glass at the corner. ‘Look. There are sixteen different bouquets.’

  An elegant display of larger bottles sparkled on glass shelves, artfully arranged next to framed photographs of sophisticated models with impossibly long necks and Veronica Lake hair. ‘Which one shall I choose? Red Rose? Gardenia? Five O’Clock? Soir de Chene? Oh, it’s two and six per dram and you have to bring your own bottle. I still have something or other in mine. It seems a pity to waste that, don’t you think?’

  Tilly pointed. ‘I think you should go for Temptation.’

  Mary tugged Tilly’s arm and burst out laughing.

  ‘If only there was Long Time No See.’ Tilly laughed. ‘Wouldn’t that be perfect?’

  Tilly and Mary walked along Orwell Street and then Victoria, ambling past frock shops, dressmakers, dry cleaners and dyers. Tilly had had a pale yellow cotton frock dyed navy blue the year before and it had done well enough to see her through another season. The streets were busy in the sunshine and the women of the city were on parade in wide-brimmed straw hats with white gloves, in floral dresses that seemed to announce that spring had finally arrived and new sandals for the warmer weather.

  ‘You know, Tilly,’ Mary started. ‘I think I’m going to chuck in the Classified Advertisements department.’

  Of course Mary would. The war was over. Her husband was coming home. She could start the life she’d been waiting for. But the news, entirely expected after all, caught Tilly off guard and she tried hard to hide the disappointment she felt at the idea that any day now she would lose her dear friend. When she’d felt confident that Archie would come back, she had never gone that next step and imagined quitting her job. She loved being a reporter and her unconventional rise to the reporting ranks made her appreciate it even more. Just like tens of thousands of Australian women, the war had created opportunities for Tilly that she would never in a million years have had and didn’t want to let go. There would always be news, she knew, and as long as there was news the papers would need someone to write it.