Tilly had been assigned the task of investigating the high cost and low quality of women’s post-war clothing. Mrs Freeman had directed her to the investigation one morning after Kitty Darling had regaled the women in the office with her tale of the cost of a two-piece wine-coloured linen suit she’d seen in a Pitt Street store: ‘Six guineas, I tell you. And of the most inferior quality you can imagine.’ Tilly had made it more than obvious that it had been quite a while since she’d shopped for much of anything and would barely know the difference between a bargain and a rip-off but Mrs Freeman wasn’t for turning.
‘Before you raise your eyebrows at me in protest, Tilly,’ Mrs Freeman started with a wry grin.
‘Oh, but I wasn’t,’ Tilly replied quickly. Mrs Freeman had clearly noticed the look of rising indignation on her face.
‘Yes, you were. I saw them moving. This is a story that will catch our readers’ attention and you know it.’ She leant over Tilly’s desk. ‘Women have endured, Tilly. They’ve gone without. They’ve made do. And by god, they’ve mended. They’ve unpicked and knitted again and again. They’ve used the same old threadbare bath towels for the entire war until they’re as absorbent as a piece of cardboard. They’ve remodelled and sewn until their fingers have bled.’ Mrs Freeman inspected her own. ‘Or at least I have. And now, finally clothing rationing is coming to an end and factories are gearing up production to cater for an enormous, Australia-wide pent-up demand for clothing, and what do women find? Expensive, second-rate tat.’
Tilly picked up her notebook and pencil and tucked them inside her handbag, which she looped over her shoulder.
‘Head down to Castlereagh Street and to the shops further down Pitt and see what you can discover. And keep in mind our readers, women on average incomes. How are they supposed to afford these spiralling prices? Think of the women you grew up with in Millers Point, Tilly. Write this one for them.’
Mrs Freeman knew exactly where Tilly’s soft spot was. Right alongside her bleeding heart. She inspected flimsy morning dresses for a pound—which she could have sworn were only eight shillings and eleven a few years before—and poor quality crepe dresses which looked like sacks if she was honest, and cost an exorbitant seventy-nine shillings and eleven. Browsing the racks, asking surreptitious questions of shop assistants who responded as if she wasn’t the first woman to flinch when she spotted the price tickets, set Tilly thinking about her own wardrobe. Even before the war, before marrying Archie, Tilly hadn’t been able to afford fancy outfits or new kid gloves every season or the latest summer hats. Not on a secretary’s wage.
Archie’s army pay had been deposited into a bank account to create a nest egg for a home loan deposit, so it was still sitting there untouched. What little money she had saved had been invested in war bonds. And anyway, it had seemed entirely frivolous and unpatriotic, actually, to crave new clothes and shoes and luxuries during the war. She had recycled everything she possibly could to leach the last possible ounce of wear out of every item she owned. Her mother had mended frayed collars and cuffs, added underarm patches to dresses whose seams had begun to fray from sweat and stretching, and darned more rips than Tilly could count. Tilly and Mary had assiduously washed their rayons in cold water—never hot—and removed their wedding rings when they’d soaked them so as not to catch anything and create a run. They’d ironed marocain when the fabric was damp and shantung when it was bone dry. And they’d never, ever soaked or boiled their woollens, nor rubbed or twisted them while rinsing. The rules had been exhausting.
And every day, Tilly had gone into the office to find Kitty Darling looking just as fresh and glamorous as could be. Tilly’s suspicion was that Kitty’s wardrobe had already been extensive before the war and that she’d managed to be creative throughout with her outfit rotation. Or how else was it that she never seemed to wear the same ensemble twice?
As she admired the clothes hanging on the racks in one of the big department stores in Pitt Street, Tilly let herself imagine, for a moment, what she might choose if she were in the market for something new. Would it be one of the short-sleeved two-piece linen suits? They would be perfect for summer, with bare legs on a hot and humid Sydney day, she reasoned, since the practice of eschewing stockings had become more common during the war. And if a society lady scoffed at her, did she really care? Or would it be a two-piece blue-and-red slack suit she’d admired or even a crepe afternoon dress that she might wear away from work, something new for the weekends?
She didn’t fight the thought, for the first time, that she would like to wear something new, something Cooper hadn’t seen her in already. Perhaps he might notice something different about her and maybe even comment about how lovely she looked. It would be quite nice to hear such a compliment from a man. It had been a long time since she’d felt really attractive to anyone. Of course there had been whistles in the street from young men being facetious and from soldiers and sailors and airmen roaming in groups looking for a woman to dance with and hold and kiss and more. But they whistled and called to any woman under forty, so she hadn’t taken any of that seriously at all. She wanted to feel the way she used to feel when Archie looked at her, as if he couldn’t bear not to be holding her, as if he was fighting an irresistible urge to kiss her. She wanted to feel loved and comforted and safe in someone’s embrace. She wanted to feel desired and she wanted to feel desire herself.
When Archie had sailed away, she’d longed for him as any wife would but had had no choice but to sublimate those sexual feelings. What was the use of wanting him in that way when she reached for him and he wasn’t there? She had thought of herself as a tree still in the grips of its winter dormancy. Her leaves had fallen, her seeds were a long way away from germinating, she was alive but not growing. It was her survival mechanism too, to keep herself going until spring when new life might burst from her. But spring had never come and she was still in the stasis of her own enforced winter. She had conserved everything—her hopes, her future plans, her sexual desires—and for the first time in a long time, standing in a dress shop in Pitt Street, she felt the stirrings of wanting to be loved again; of that primal urge to be skin on skin with someone, to feel hands on her, a body on hers, lips on her mouth and her neck and her breasts, and to feel enveloped by someone.
She bought the two-piece wine linen suit, even though the quality was clearly not up to Kitty Darling’s standards, went back to the newsroom and wrote her story.
When it appeared in the newspaper, she was proud to see her first by-line as a reporter for the women’s pages. BY TILLY GALLOWAY it said, all in caps, under the main headline. She had officially arrived and tried not to feel hollow about the place she’d landed. The men upstairs would no doubt be having a good old laugh about it.
As the weeks flew by towards Christmas, Vera Maxwell continued to test the resolve of her colleagues with a constant array of delicious Christmas cakes. It was a point of pride with her that nothing ever appeared in her pages without her quality testing it herself, much to the delight and dismay of her colleagues.
‘If I eat any more Christmas pudding I’ll never fit into my corset again,’ Dear Agatha had said with a satisfied moan. She’d been busy with a flood of letters from nervous mothers concerned that their flighty daughters were exhibiting far too much independence for their liking, from wives worried for their returned husbands’ nerves, and from women who were having problems with their mothers-in-law now that their husbands were back.
In the first week of December, a telegram came from Cooper telling Tilly he would be back in Sydney in time for Christmas. She’d almost jumped on the spot with glee at hearing the news. She hadn’t planned to, hadn’t expected she would, but she had missed him terribly. When she read a headline about the latest fighting in Batavia or post-war reparations she wanted to discuss them with him. When she sat in a dark theatre eating sweets, she’d turned to the seat next to her expecting him to be there and jolted with sad surprise that he wasn’t.
Mary a
nd Bert continued to ride the waves of their daily turmoil, which rose and fell according to his moods. Tilly tried not to hear any of it—the rows, Bert’s nightly midnight vomiting, the stomping and the sullen silences, loaded and heavy. What alternative did she have? Housing was in such short supply that newly married couples were sleeping on camp beds on verandahs behind canvas blinds in one or other of their family’s homes, and returned prisoners were sharing bedrooms with their teenaged brothers. Every day, whatever accommodation was available was being snapped up almost before Mary could take the details for the classified advertisements section, and what was available became the object of under-the-counter bidding wars.
In that part of her life, at least, she was firmly stuck.
As Christmas week approached, all Tilly wanted this year, because this year meant so much, was a celebration with her loved ones, with those who had known Archie. It would be the end of a terrible year and a terrible war and perhaps, she allowed herself to feel a flicker of hope, the beginning of a new story in her life.
And everything was going according to her plan until Martha’s husband Colin sent a letter announcing he was leaving her.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The news dropped like a bomb. Martha, Tilly and their mother Elsie sat at the kitchen table at the house on Argyle Place staring at the letter as if it might explode like a hand grenade.
In the backyard, Martha’s three rambunctious boys were supposed to be collecting eggs from the chickens, shooshed outside quickly when Elsie had spotted the look of pale shock on her daughter’s face, but were instead chasing them and throwing them into the air as if they were encouraging them to fly free.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Tilly whispered.
‘You and me both,’ Elsie muttered.
Martha held the letter in her hands and it shook so violently Tilly could barely make out Colin’s scrawled hand. She grabbed it from Martha.
Martha,
I am in Brisbane now, discharged from the navy. I’m sorry to tell you this way but I’ve met someone else and I wish to marry her. I’ll not be coming back to Sydney. I hope you’ll agree to a divorce so I can get on with things.
Colin
‘He wants to get on with things?’ Martha cried out. ‘We’ve been waiting … I’ve been waiting all this time for that lousy sod and he ups and leaves me for a Brisbane girl?’
‘And what about his sons?’ Elsie asked, disgust dripping from every syllable. ‘What are they going to do for a father now? I’m sorry, Martha, I know you married him, but in my mind, he’s nothing but … a damn, no-good piece of … well, I won’t say the rest out loud. The boys.’
At the mention of the boys, the three women looked out to the yard. Tilly and Martha had never played in it when they were children because the streets had been their playground, where there was always a billycart in need of a push or a hopscotch game underway or pirates in need of swashbuckling. The backyard was where the washing was done in the copper, where the ominous mangle threatened, where the chooks scratched and where vegetables stretched up tall to meet the afternoon sun setting in the west. On washing days—always Mondays—lines were strung from fence to fence and white sheets that had been boiled and soaked flapped in the breeze like sails until they were crisp. Stone walls separated them from their neighbours on either side, and there was a wooden fence at the rear with a gate into the back lane. Beyond the back fence and the laneway, terrace houses just like theirs loomed over their backyard, mirror images of each other, with slate-tiled roofs and squat chimneys with terracotta chimney pots on each. Tilly had taught Martha to count by peering over the back fence and up at those pots. One, two, three, four.
There was laughter and chickens squawking but Elsie was too shocked at the news about Colin to hop up and warn the boys to settle down and leave the chooks alone or they wouldn’t lay and then what would they have for breakfast tomorrow. Her shoulders slumped.
Tilly read the letter over, still trying to grasp the enormity of the revelations contained in those four brief and pitiless sentences. Colin wanted to get on with things. How lucky for him that it seemed so easy.
Martha’s nostrils flared and she spoke in a voice that Tilly barely recognised. ‘How could he do this to me again?’
Tilly and her mother exchanged shocked glances. ‘What are you talking about, Martha? You’re saying he’s done this before?’ Tilly asked.
Martha tossed the letter at the table and strode to the window, which looked out and up over the steps to the street. The dim light caught her features in stark relief. She suddenly looked older than her twenty-eight years, worn, hollowed out.
‘Of course he’s done this before. He’s a bloke, isn’t he? He was always running after anything in a skirt. And he thought I hadn’t twigged, or he just didn’t give a fig.’ She turned her tear-streaked cheeks to the boys, to check that they were still out of earshot. ‘He’s been a right skirt chaser since the day we married.’
Tilly was absolutely floored.
‘You’re surprised, Tilly?’
‘I’m gobsmacked, actually. You never let on. You never said a thing. Did you know, Mum?’
‘Of course I didn’t.’
Martha scoffed angrily and wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. ‘What good would have come from telling you, Tilly, or Mum? I married him. It was my problem. My burden to bear.’
‘You could have left him,’ Tilly said indignantly. ‘Divorced him.’
‘To go where and survive on what, fresh air? My measly wage doesn’t even pay the rent much less put food in those boys’ mouths.’
‘I would have helped you,’ Tilly insisted.
‘Why should it be your job? A husband should support his family. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ Martha broke off and gazed into the distance. ‘I haven’t seen any of his army pay for a month, either. He’d always send me some, minus what he didn’t need for cigarettes and a drink.’ Martha began to cry and hugged her arms around her waist. ‘I thought there must have been some mix-up with the navy, being the end of the war and all. He’s probably spent it on an engagement ring for whoever she is.’
‘I’d ring his neck if he walked in the door right now—’ Elsie broke off, shuddering. ‘And your father would do worse.’
Tilly knew her father was in no fit state to do any harm to anybody.
‘Damn him to hell,’ Martha cried. ‘And he’s too gutless to even come home and face the music. This has never meant anything!’ She thrust her left ring finger in the air as a new fiancée might display her new ring.
‘Come and sit down, Martha,’ Elsie implored. ‘You mustn’t let the boys see you upset.’
The boys were still teasing the chickens, playing happily and innocently. Colin had been gone so long, would they even remember him if he walked in the door? The war had taken him from them already so what had changed? They’d been forced to grow up without him anyway and, in that sense, their world would continue, with their mother at the centre of it, with their grandmother an orbiting moon, and an aunt who needed to do more for them. There were so many fatherless children now, so many children who were confronted with strangers in uniform whom everyone said was their father, so many who might one day wish their father hadn’t come back from the war at all. It was another cruel twist that Brian, Bernard and Terry had a father who still lived but who didn’t appear to want to father them.
Tilly’s thoughts swirled and came to a sudden stop on something Martha had said. ‘If you haven’t seen any of Colin’s pay for a month, how have you been paying the rent? How are you feeding the boys?’
‘We pay … I pay … a month in advance, so I was good until today. Come Monday I’m in arrears and knowing my landlord he’ll be knocking at the front door as soon as he realises I’m short. I’m sure he’s got a queue of people waiting to take the place from under me, knowing how bad the housing is these days.’ Martha looked at her sister with wide, scared eyes. ‘I don’t know what we’re going
to do.’
Tilly went to her and led her back to the table. How had two sisters who’d started the war with happy families and such high hopes ended up like this?
‘What are you talking about?’ Elsie huffed. ‘You’ll come home here. That’s all there is to it. Take the two attic rooms and the beds. I know those boys of yours are growing like topsy but they’ll have to make do with three in a bed. Top to tail should do it. They come to me after school anyway so nothing much will change. And if that husband of yours decides to show his face around here I’ll knock his block off with my broom.’
And with a nod, and a choked sob from Martha, the house on Argyle Place was to once again open its arms to the lost.
When Archie had enlisted, Tilly had resisted her mother’s urging to move back home. She hadn’t wanted to return to a life she had left behind. She was going to be a reporter and her life was to be dictated by deadlines, not by the wharves that had dictated her father’s—and therefore her family’s—every waking moment since he’d turned thirteen years old and humped his first bag of wheat. Going home would have felt like going backwards and, besides that, she wanted to have a place of her own so that when Archie was home on leave they could have all the privacy that a married couple desired. Tilly had shared a room with her sister right up until she’d married Archie and had ever since that day become greedy and protective of that privacy.
The Women’s Pages Page 26
