The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘I know what my mother would say,’ she muttered under her breath.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Bloody Menzies.’

  ‘Bloody Menzies,’ Cooper repeated, shaking his head and tut-tutting in a dramatic fashion.

  ‘And I can’t say I disagree with her, even though as a reporter I’m not supposed to have an opinion, am I? How ridiculous,’ she huffed. ‘How can I not have an opinion on what’s happening in the world? What sort of a person would it make me if I didn’t care about injustice and cruelty and barbarism?’

  Cooper butted out his cigarette.

  ‘Now he’s blaming the unions for standing by the Indonesians and putting black bans on all those ships. Imagine what it’s been like for them? Colonised by the Dutch for three-hundred-and-fifty years and then invaded by the Japanese. And when the war’s over we expect them to welcome back the Dutch with open arms?’

  Judging by the smirk on his face, Cooper wasn’t inclined to answer her.

  ‘What?’ she demanded with a smile.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You think I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve, don’t you?’

  ‘No comment, Mrs Galloway.’

  Tilly chuckled, and the freedom of wanting to laugh, finally, warmed her, as if that day’s sunshine had seeped into her bones and lit a fire deep inside. And when her laughter caused Cooper’s smile to widen into a grin, when he chuckled back at her, she felt even better.

  How had he known? She needed this. Tilly was only beginning to realise that she’d not only shut herself away for the past few weeks, but for far longer than that. Slowly, as the months and years had gone on, she’d withdrawn from the world for fear of what it might force her to confront. And that sheltering, that hibernating, hadn’t protected her heart or her husband. The world had happened anyway. All she’d done was pull her head in, like a turtle, and hide, but the world had still been waiting for her all along when she finally emerged from that shell.

  Cooper had always been the one to knock on that shell to urge her out of it. With postcards, with phone calls, with a sandwich for lunch at Circular Quay, with a story every now and then. And he was doing the same thing today. When they’d sat down to order, they’d barely spent five minutes talking about their colleagues before lapsing into this comfortable togetherness. They were simply, and effortlessly, two colleagues with two newspapers whiling away a sunny Saturday. Two bowls of spaghetti bolognese with parmesan cheese and two glasses of chianti were on the way, as was a blossoming sense of equanimity in her. If all it took was a bowl of spaghetti and a glass of red wine, she wished she’d done it years ago. There was no doubt in her mind that the minute she was alone her grief would flood back again and drown her, but for now, for this moment, she could enjoy the sun and the company and the wine and not be consumed by the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

  ‘He’s positioning himself for the election, isn’t he? Menzies.’

  ‘Of course he is. He knows full well what happened to Churchill back in July. Winnie went into the general election thinking the war had won it for him.’

  ‘And Labour won by a landslide and Clement Attlee is in Number Ten.’

  ‘And guess who handed him that victory on a platter?’

  ‘Who?’ Tilly asked.

  ‘Returned soldiers and their families. Attlee promised homes for heroes and the National Health Service and social security. Is it any wonder he won? Two million homes were destroyed during the Blitz and in the years after. People want to get on with their lives and how the hell can they do that if they haven’t anywhere to live? Attlee got it right, I’d say.’

  ‘They obviously trusted Churchill with the war but not with much else.’

  Cooper dropped his paper onto the table. ‘Menzies clearly thinks the same might happen here, that the wartime government will be ditched in favour of new blood. That’s why he’s going after the unions and the communists so hard. He’s the only one to preserve the new world order, and all that. Bloody cynical if you ask me.’

  ‘Did you know that he’s calling for unions to be forced to hand over lists of all their members? That’ll mean he’ll get my name and yours, Cooper, and that of every other member of the Australian Journalists Association.’

  ‘So much for freedom of the press,’ Cooper said.

  ‘What are we becoming in this country? Didn’t we just fight a war for our freedom? For freedom of the press, of association, of people to rise up against tyranny? Isn’t this what Archie died for?’ A lump closed Tilly’s throat and swallowed half her words.

  Cooper held her gaze. His expression of kind concern was so familiar now.

  ‘Did you know Hitler banned trade unions? He managed to get people to think they were un-German. His thugs beat unionists to death, tortured them, sent them to Dachau. Thousands were murdered.’

  If Cooper had been concentrating on the words on the page before him, he’d suddenly lost all interest. He was watching her, transfixed, as if she was breaking some momentous news that had frozen him to the spot, as if he was caught in the surprise of it before rushing to a telephone to hastily dictate a few paragraphs of copy for the late edition. Tilly felt a shot of energy surge from her feet to the hairs on her head. He rested one elbow on the table, the cigarette between his fingers burning, as if he’d forgotten he’d just lit it.

  ‘Do you know what my father and all those other workers are striking for?’ Her tone hardened as she grew more confident in her argument.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The Trades and Labour Council is negotiating for power workers to have a forty-hour, five-day week on shiftwork, with a two shilling allowance for afternoon and night shifts, with no overall cut to the pay they earnt for working forty-four hours a week during the war.’

  ‘Greedy bastards,’ Cooper responded wryly.

  ‘Every public servant worked long hours, five-and-a-half days a week and sometimes two evenings as well. Every second Saturday they worked all day. It was all for the king. And they didn’t get an extra pound for it. In the munitions factories, those women worked twelve-hour shifts six days a week.’

  ‘Not any more they don’t.’

  ‘That’s right. They’ve all been let go. Don’t you think they deserve something for putting in for all those years? It’s a just reward for working all those extra hours during the war for no extra pay, don’t you think? And you probably don’t know what it’s been like since you’re flitting all over the globe all the time, with all your expenses covered by the paper, but the cost of living went through the roof during the war. No one’s had a pay rise for years.’

  Tilly felt her cheeks redden and was sure it was from her exhortations and not his penetrating gaze.

  ‘There she is. The commie’s daughter.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’

  Cooper chuckled. ‘Nothing in the slightest from where I sit. I was thinking that you sound just like him.’

  Tilly sat back, surprised at his observation. ‘I do?’

  ‘You can take the gal out of Millers Point—’ he grinned ‘—but you can’t take the Millers Point out of the gal.’

  ‘Why would I want to? I’m proud of who I am and where I came from. I’m proud of my father and all the men like him who fight for what’s fair and right, who fight for the right to be alive and healthy at the end of a working day. And I’m proud of women like my mother who hold those communities together on the smell of an oily rag and their own labours, day in, day out.’

  Cooper sat back. Any trace of the wry, world-weary war correspondent had disappeared from his countenance. His shoulders rose and fell on a sigh and he lifted his cigarette from his lips to stub it out in the ashtray on the table.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s good to see the fight back in you, Mrs Galloway.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The day before Tilly returned to work at the newspaper to begin her new job on the women’s pages, the other sho
e finally dropped.

  Another pink telegram arrived and she accepted it with gracious thanks and a small tip. She went to her bedroom and sat on her bed. She stared at her name typed there. Then, she read it.

  Regret to inform you that L/CPL AH Galloway became missing on July 1st 1942 and is now for official purposes presumed to be dead.

  Accordingly, his payments from the army had ceased.

  Tilly sat on her bed in the quiet of her room and read it ten times over before folding it neatly and slipping it back into its envelope. Then she put it with all Archie’s letters from Melbourne and Bonegilla and then his last as a prisoner of war, sealed the old biscuit tin in which she kept them, and tucked it into her wooden chest. She had already accepted her husband was dead so this final piece of the puzzle couldn’t make her feel sadder or more bereft. It only added to the weight of the burden she would bear for the remainder of her life, as permanent as a scar which might one day fade but would forever live on her skin.

  She ended the final night of her bereavement leave on her own in the home she had only shared with Archie for two nights, when he’d come back up to Sydney in readiness to leave Australia. He had never been imprinted on it. She didn’t have memories of him sitting on the settee reading or at the kitchen table eating toast for breakfast. She didn’t remember him in her bed, his hair roughened by restless sleep, the sheets and blankets half tossed onto the floor. Those memories were from Bondi and a lifetime ago.

  No matter how hard she searched now, she couldn’t remember his voice. And that meant that his jokes and his stories and his words of love for her, the wedding vows which he stumbled over in church, the dreams he’d admitted to, of children and a long life together, were gone too. It was all just so tremendously sad. Her new life was beckoning her forward and she had no other choice but to take that leap. Not only had she bundled up Archie’s clothes into parcels for donating to the Salvation Army, but she’d also packed away her dreams for a life that was now lost.

  She would have to find new dreams to reach for. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

  There were flowers on Tilly’s desk when she returned to the newspaper in that last week of October. She saw them as soon as she opened the door from the stairwell to the women’s newsroom. There were snow-white carnations, deep lipstick-red roses with verdant forest-green leaves and snipped thorns, and a tall bunch of calla lilies so top heavy they threatened to topple over under their own weight.

  Her desk wasn’t as she remembered it. The overflowing ashtray, which she wouldn’t need any longer anyway, had disappeared. Her pile of notebooks filled with shorthand, blunt pencils and piles of newspapers and telex cables had been arranged into neat piles. To the left of her typewriter sat a stack of copy paper neatly interleaved with fresh carbons. And unless she was imagining things, a new maroon leather chair waited behind her desk.

  The sight cheered her enough for a smile to tug at the corners of her mouth. She had wondered if she’d lost that muscle memory and realised how pleasant an emotion it was to smile and not worry that she would be judged for it. Her bereavement leave had passed slowly; the days had tugged at her like a child on her mother’s coat, dragging her back, stopping that step forward to the next day and the next. Mary and Bert’s problems were stifling and the only bright spot had been Cooper insisting she leave the house. Two days before, after they’d had lunch in Darlinghurst, he’d dragged her all over the city. They’d taken a ferry to Manly and licked vanilla ice-cream on the beach before dipping their toes into the warm water and commiserating with each other that neither of them had their swimsuits because the warm day would have been perfect for it. They’d come back into the city and after a bite to eat they’d playfully argued about which film they should see. In the end they’d compromised and sat through National Velvet with Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney at the St James on Elizabeth Street precisely because it wasn’t about the war.

  They’d taken a long time to walk home, talking all the way about the thrilling Grand National steeplechase scene at the end of the film and Cooper had kissed her on the cheek at the door to her building before turning and whistling his way home to his flat in Darlinghurst.

  Cooper didn’t talk to her about Archie, which was a relief. At home, everything was a reminder of what she and Mary had lost in their different ways. At Argyle Place, her mother’s tears and her father’s stoic silence were unending.

  Her work would have to be her new safe haven. She was to make a life of her own now and she needed this. She’d missed the clatter of keys and the always-brewing pot of tea on Vera’s desk, not to mention her cakes. She’d missed the clouds from Maggie’s Woodbines and Frances’s precise way of conducting a conversation, and surely Dear Agatha would have some useful advice for the not-so-newly widowed.

  Tilly set her handbag on her desk and bent to smell the roses. If there was a scent, she couldn’t detect it. Her senses of smell and taste had deserted her since she’d heard about Archie. The complicated mix of body and mind, survival and grief, had stolen things from her, as if she no longer needed those two pleasures in life because she was already half dead.

  ‘Tilly.’

  She looked over her shoulder. Mrs Freeman, Vera, Maggie, Frances, Dear Agatha and Kitty were standing as one.

  ‘Welcome back.’ Vera stepped forward, proffering a date loaf on a pretty china plate. The slices were perfectly cylindrical, as golden as freshly dried fruit and spread with thick pats of pale yellow.

  ‘Oh, my,’ Tilly gasped. ‘Is that real butter?’

  Vera sniffed and smiled. ‘We each contributed some of our rations.’

  ‘Thank you all. It’s very kind of you.’

  One by one, her other colleagues came to her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Tilly,’ Kitty Darling whispered in her ear as she hugged Tilly tight. ‘The bloody war.’

  Maggie shook Tilly’s hand as her bottom lip trembled. ‘You’re brave, Tilly. Don’t ever forget that.’

  When Frances stepped up, Tilly opened her arms and held her tight. Frances had no words and Tilly respected her silence. What comfort were words anyway?

  Mrs Freeman finally came forward. ‘You’ve no doubt been through a very trying time. You have our most sincere condolences. We’ve been thinking about you every day.’

  ‘I do appreciate that, Mrs Freeman. And thank you, everyone, for the flowers. They were lovely.’

  Mrs Freeman reached for Tilly’s hand and squeezed it warmly. ‘We’re so pleased to have you working on the women’s pages, Tilly. You bring a great deal of talent to our ranks. And an extra staff member is never anything to be sneezed at, especially in these times. We’ll have plenty for you to do.’ Her editor lowered her voice. ‘When you’re ready, that is.’

  Tilly nodded her understanding.

  ‘We feel privileged to have a war correspondent officially working with us. The paper’s first woman, no less. You’ve blazed a trail, Tilly, where we hope others will follow.’

  Tilly struggled but found a smile. She wanted to be grateful that she still had a job to return to, that she had such understanding colleagues, but a new sense of failure bowled her over.

  ‘Who’s up for a cup of tea then?’ Dear Agatha asked nervously.

  Everyone waited for Tilly to respond.

  She pondered if scenes just like this had been played out in offices and workplaces all over the country as news filtered through about the missing, the presumed dead, the injured and the returned. Was there cake in those offices too? Was there an etiquette about cake when it came to grief?

  ‘I’m not fussed about the tea, but I’m dying to try a piece of your date slice, Vera.’ There was an audible sigh of relief from her colleagues and she knew they were trying to determine how much of the old Tilly was back. She still wasn’t sure, either.

  An hour later, Mrs Freeman approached Tilly’s desk. ‘I know it’s your first day back but I think the best way to deal with these things is to simply get you back
in the saddle. What do you think?’

  Tilly stood quickly, smoothed her hands over her tweed jacket, feeling a sudden urge to be prim. She had taken special care to ensure her freshly dry-cleaned suit was hung neatly, her shoes were polished and that her nails were carefully clipped and trim. She’d even slicked on a coat of the palest pink polish the night before. Her colleagues would be watching out of the corner of their eyes for any sign that she was letting herself go. If she became unkempt, if her hair wasn’t styled exactly as she’d always worn it, if her lips weren’t stained with lipstick, if her eyes weren’t bright, if there was a run in a stocking or if her shirts weren’t sparkling Lux white, they might think she was falling apart.

  ‘I agree completely.’ Yes, please. Send me out into the world again to speak to someone who has no clue about what I’ve been through. I’ll be able to pretend it never happened. Send me out into the world to write a story to help me forget my own.

  ‘Glad to hear it.’ Mrs Freeman passed Tilly a piece of paper with a name and an address on it. ‘This lady is going to be guest speaker on Wednesday night at a Red Cross function. She might be worth talking to.’

  Mrs Daphne Teale was a tall, gaunt woman with short grey hair and a cameo brooch at her neck. If Tilly had met her on the street, she might have guessed her to be a librarian, with spectacles to aid her poor vision, a symptom of much reading, and the bearer of a quiet voice trained for hushing.

  Tilly wondered if Mrs Teale had always looked so old. Sitting across from her in Sydney’s Red Cross office, fresh scones on the table and a steaming cup of tea between them, she bore the same sunken cheeks and pale visage that Tilly recognised in Cooper. The war not only harms its victims, but its perpetrators and its witnesses too.

  ‘Thank you for talking with me today, Mrs Teale.’

  The woman nodded. ‘I hope it helps. The Red Cross is still desperately trying to raise funds for refugees in Europe and in Asia, Mrs Galloway. It’s estimated that in Europe alone there are millions. We need to do more and desperately quickly, and we’re relying on Red Cross branches to continue their wartime fundraising effort. If your report is able to help in any way, it’s what must be done.’