Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  From Monomeith railway siding we were only a few miles from Koo-wee-rup, a tiny town, but at least a town – which Monomeith was not. (Monomeith was only us.) At Koo-wee-rup I saw a musical, my first theatrical entertainment. Mum took me in on the railway ‘trike’ – in officialese a ‘manual tricycle’ – with her propelling by pushing and pulling the handbars (and sweating) and me sitting side-saddle on the back of the trolley. There was an element of danger here, because this line was busier than others we had lived on and men had to use manual power, not motors or a Casey Jones, to enable them to hear a steam train which may, because of some emergency, not have been scheduled. Outside Koo-wee-rup Mum pulled the trike off the rails and we set off on foot to the performance.

  The title of the musical was ‘Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie’, or something like that, and I recall the chorus sang ‘We’ll make hay while the sun shines, and make love when it rains’, which appears a little more risque than one would imagine for the 1930s. ‘Oh, take me where the daisies cover the country lane. We’ll make hay while the sun shines …’ etc. And when it was over we went back to the rail line and Mum manoeuvred the iron three-wheeler back on to the tracks and off we set for home, singing ‘We’ll make love when it rains’, and laughing and retelling the jokes which doubtless were corny but we repeated them for months.

  In that same year my Mother carried me on her back from Flinders Street railway station to Melbourne University where I was to sit for an Australian Music Examination Board exam. Some weeks before the examination I had been running along the parapet of a railway bridge, lost my balance and fell off, tumbling down to the dry creek bed below. My ankle was badly sprained and ligaments were torn and I could not walk or lower the grossly swollen limb for some months. In the meantime, I had prepared for this piano examination and we knew we may not be so close to a city by the time the next exams would be held, so we went to Melbourne by train, my crippled leg sticking out like a fallen tree trunk. When we reached Flinders Street station, Mum asked for directions to ‘The University’ (there was only one university in Victoria in those days), and we set off, me clinging to her back, my arms around her neck and legs around her waist, and she bent over. After a while she had to put me down and ‘have a blow’, and then she set off again through the throng of city people who averted their eyes as though we were a freak show. Time and again she had to rest. We didn’t speak. Once I tried to hop on one leg but this jarred the injury and I screamed. I don’t know how far it is from the station to the university but there are quite a few tram stops but nobody thought to tell us then about the tram and, once Mum had set off, it was too late because, like a heavy-labouring man she had no energy left for brain-storming, she could afford only to remember to force her legs to keep going one after the other along that seemingly never-ending pavement. I look back now and remember this day some sixty years ago with a sort of horror that makes me feel faint and terribly sick.

  I can remember the exhaustion of trying to hang on to Mum and even as a child knowing her own effort might kill her but knowing she’d never give up. She’d never given up any labour that needed to be done, the whole of her five-foot frame straining until she righted the problem, especially if it was to do with her children or her husband. So she was unlikely to give up this day.

  Lindsay Biggins, the fine musician and examiner, discovered us sitting on the steps of the conservatorium, Mum’s pretty hair dishevelled, her face pouring sweat as though it were rain. It is this woman I write about. Her actions may bewilder a person today, but she was unique, even in her day. When something occurred that she could not handle, was not able to carry on her back and she sensed harm of any degree to her children, she attacked like a lioness, but this wasn’t always clear to outsiders – or to us children.

  My title, ‘the Duchess’, was endowed on me when I screamed in fury ‘I’m not going to scrub floors!’ It was not only a social crime – there were outsiders visiting us at the time – but worse. Mum knew what I meant. Every girl we ever knew in our milieu went ‘to work’, and the only work that was available for women in the bush was housework or, as it was often called, ‘being a slushy’.

  ‘I’m not going to scrub floors!’ There was no time for silence or shock. Mum had leapt up as if she had expected this. ‘The Duchess, eh? Too big for your boots to scrub floors, eh?’ And all the while she shouted it I knew it was something else that contorted her voice and twisted her face: she knew there was no other employment and there was no more schooling for me. I would have to go out as a slushy. Had we been alone it wouldn’t have boiled over like this, she may have discussed it, said it wasn’t real flash but what else was there? But now the lines were drawn. I screamed ‘I’m not going to scrub floors!’

  I had often scrubbed floors, like anyone brought up in a workingclass household, and thought nothing of it. All houses had a floor cloth, a very poor rag indeed for anything less ragged would have been put to better use. Down on your knees on the floor with grey, home-made soap which had been left on the splintery board that served as a shelf in the washhouse until it was hard as rock. The soap was made of old fat and lye and fit to take the skin off the hands as well as dirt off and out of the bare wood floor. It even wrecked the linoleum that was cut to fit so many different houses we lived in that eventually it would fit nowhere and congoleum was bought as times were hard, and when the next move came it proved its lack of mettle by refusing to be rolled into a cylinder and cracked across every fold. ‘Cheap stuff,’ Mum snapped in the frustration of loss.

  But now I would stop. ‘I’m not going to scrub floors.’ It was a sort of inarticulate cry that had nothing to do with the scrubbed floor but more with the indignity and the sense that childhood could end at this point.

  And I never did scrub floors, not for any but my own.

  * * *

  Kathleen and I couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Most people meeting us refer to it – at their peril, for we two may appear to have nothing at all in common but any outsider who comments on it leaves with scars from both of us.

  Writing didn’t come easily to our Kathleen, but she was once moved to send news to Mum. ‘Old Bill Leaf about a week ago.’ It took Mum weeks of delicate enquiry to learn ‘old Bill Leaf had died.

  Because she came into the family seven years before me she had some good years before the depression when there was enough money to have her taught music, voice production, Scottish dancing and what passed for ballet. But she had no talent for these things. Mum tried to get her to teach me the piano when she was seventeen and I was ten. We sat at the wooden-framed Bord piano. ‘Put your finger here.’ ‘Which finger?’ ‘Any finger. Now: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P …’ and so my finger went to the end of the alphabet and the keyboard, and that was the last lesson I received from Kathleen.

  When we were grown and away from home I didn’t correspond with her greatly, she not at all with me. The roses didn’t leave Kathleen’s cheeks, they didn’t ‘fade away and die’ as the old song says; her voice was never sad, it was often strident, barbing me until I screamed in temper. I cried but she didn’t cry, I could never say that in her lifetime I saw ‘tears bedim her loving eyes’. Not in the deep sense. Except, years later, at Mum’s funeral where she stood weeping tears that fell like a waterfall and she could not control the flow. And her mourning was painful and long.

  Mum loved company. We played and sang every Sunday evening around the piano and always included ‘I will take you home Kathleen’, the haunting melody with the tender lament. Kathleen had no singing in her, couldn’t hold a tune or recognise one. I had and could, but didn’t sing this song, couldn’t see through the tears to read the notes so I played by memory. ‘I will take you home Kathleen’ I vowed over and over and over again. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what it meant to me.

  She had a rage in her. Her elder brother, Jack, (well, that’s a puzzle, that is) became so insane with her behaviour one day when visiting us he chased her wi
th a log of wood – which was his undoing and her saving. The log inhibited his speed and movement and after her head was split open she escaped and hid until Mum came home. Her taunting extended to teachers, aunts (she once belted Aunt Vera to the floor with her fists and Vera was a big woman), and me; which meant I got beaten for screaming and clawing at her while she, much taller, older and stronger, held me at arm’s length. ‘I don’t know what’s got into her’ she’d say to Mum, who then got into me. But in a way for which there are no words, she was my champion. I don’t know what she saw me as, perhaps just a little girl, although that can’t be the only reason. When I was grown she would still protect me. Would do so to this day. We were all each of us had, and I still cannot hear that beautiful, sad refrain without tears bedimming my own eyes.

  I will take you home again Kathleen

  Across the ocean wild and wide

  To where your heart has ever been …

  One night when Kathleen was away our gentle Dad said, as if in a dream, ‘None of us will ever know what is in Kathleen’s heart or where it has been.’ And he was a man who loved her dearly for her madcap carryings-on and her courage and stalwart stance when life was not the thing the romantics say the bush and the depression were.

  But I will take you back Kathleen

  To where your heart will feel no pain

  For when the fields are fresh and green

  I will take you to your home, Kathleen.

  But she found her home without my help, although she still gives me hers. Her marriage – not her early marriage to Bob which was lost in the war – but her young man who came back from the war still a scallywag, a laugher, but with a severe speech problem from some shock he never speaks of, fracturing his words into a staccato stutter that was doubtless painful for him but painful too to those of us who tried to understand him because we couldn’t help him. I knew Kathleen and he had each met their match when he came in one day and tried to tell her there was a market stall being set up outside their house. But we couldn’t understand what he was saying. I tried the conventional ‘it’s alright’ sympathy, which was quite wrong and made him angry and his stuttering worse. Kathleen showed no sympathy at all. She laughed with what seemed glee. ‘Well then, let’s make money,’ she said. ‘We’ll set up a stall for the poor stuttering old soldier.’ He stared, then began to laugh, they began to wrestle, I was laughing, we were shouting, near crying with mirth at the absurdity. It wasn’t medical science that cured him of his affliction, it was Kathleen, over the years of teasing him, imitating him and both of them carrying on like ten-year-olds laughing, pushing one another around, having a beer, wedded as if they were Siamese twins. Now they are in their seventies but when they were younger they came out with some quite original hilarity to do with sex, never grubby but always side-splitting. From listening to them I learnt what ribald fun sex was. And also, what true love was.

  And yet, for all that, there are odd, always unexpected moments when we two women – now so far away from harm, protected by friends and our children – can see ‘the passing shadow on your brow’ and we avert our eyes.

  We are careful, we do not ever stand on a battleground or take up weapons, we never vent spleen. I sometimes wonder if she recalls the line, the haunting song:

  I will take you back, Kathleen,

  To where your heart will feel no pain.

  Perhaps she has found that place but I never knew it. Perhaps it was only me looking for someone to take me home. But now I know no one does that. And why should they? We must each find our own way home.

  And a life without Kathleen would have been no life at all for me.

  Goodbye Girlie

  THE WIVES AND MOTHERS AND fathers and the children on No. 2 platform at Spencer Street railway station, Melbourne, began to wave and cry out to us and to sing:

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine;

  You make me happy, though skies are grey.

  You’ll never know dear,

  How much I miss you,

  Please don’t take my sunshine away.

  The civilians sang all the while as the long troop train began to pull out slowly from the empty No. 1 platform where no civilians were permitted when troops were being moved.

  The other night dear,

  While I lay sleeping,

  I dreamed I held you in my arms.

  When I awoke dear,

  I was mistaken,

  And I hung my head and I cried.

  You are my sunshine …

  The Regimental Transport Officer (we knew him as the RTO) and his men had directed the groups of naval men, army, airforce, nursing sisters and us – enlisted VADs (nursing aides) – to the sections of the train that we would occupy for many days and nights to come as the steam train rattled northwards.

  Many of us were escapees, young men and women happy to be leaving behind the memories of the depression, that period that had almost wrung the pride out of us, some of us were under-age, all of us were glad to be leaving.

  There was little disorder, each of our groups had been given their marching orders before being bussed in, men in trucks and steam trains, nurses and aides in ambulances, each of us kitted out with tin helmet, gas mask, kit-bag, shoulder bag, waterproof ground-sheet, and emergency rations, as well as a small, splendid leather suitcase. And, coming from a heavy tea-drinking family, I had tied on to my kit-bag a ‘silver’ teapot – ‘EPNS to prove it’, as Matron said when she looked for the brand – and smiled as she came along the corridor to see we were safely packed in.

  And packed we were. Some girls had already climbed up and claimed the string-bottomed luggage racks, but they eventually swapped with us tinier, younger girls; there was much to be said for being small, nippy, fit and young in the army. As for the teapot, it stood me in good stead for the whole of my army days and I have it still, the broad-based, non-drip, sensible style symbolic of the great days of railway refreshment rooms,

  There was scarcely room to move in the carriages, the floor was thick with kit-bags, the floor of the corridors just as deeply covered with gas masks, tin helmets and the rest strung up wherever we could manage. And then we were off to ‘Somewhere in Australia’, as we had been ordered to tell our parents to address our mail.

  These were the singing days, days before television, video, and a-radio-in-every-household took the joy from the voice and threw it back canned. But in 1941 the families and friends were still singing:

  Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.

  Not a tear, mother dear, make it gay.

  Give me a smile

  I can keep all the while,

  In my heart while I’m away.

  Till we meet once again, you and I.

  Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.

  The train moved slowly. It was long and heavily laden, and it took a time to clear the platform. All troop movements were supposed to be secret but relatives invaded No. 2 platform at Spencer Street whenever a troop train steamed out. Coming from the bush, I had no one to see me off so I didn’t push my head through the open windows to look out on to that platform like everyone else did. I looked out on to platform No. 1, empty now except for the station master. ‘Good luck,’ he called. As the train gathered speed he shouted ‘Goodbye Girlie!’ And he waved to me until I was swallowed up by distance. And only then did I know I was free.

  The Second World War provided the greatest escape route in history for women and girls, while at the same time it exacted the most repressive and restrictive time for most young married women who were left at home with small children. I was one of the lucky ones – young, unmarried – I escaped. Kathleen had two tiny tots, one born just before the war, the other a few months after her husband, Bob, left for the war. Some readers of my earliest work (Hear the Train Blow) have written that the story of Bob in that book is the most poignant reminder of what the depression had been. When every attempt for a job had failed, Bob had got one day’s work at a timber mill and, at the end of t
hat day, put his hand under the circular saw and lost his index finger. With the almost £100 insurance money he and Kathleen were able to move out of our railway house into a two-room cottage on a rocky knoll on the outskirts of Penshurst, with enough money to pay rent and be assured of growing enough food ‘until things get better’. But, as hindsight tells us, things didn’t get better, but the war came and that was good enough. For many, it was their escape route from boredom, poverty and the fear that things would never change.

  Unlike Vera Brittain, the celebrated, upperclass, young English writer who went to war in 1915 as a nursing VAD, I did not experience ‘exasperation’ at the breaking out of war in 1939. Vera Brittain saw her war, at the beginning, ‘as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to personal plans’. She was ‘going up’ to Oxford. I, twenty-five years later, was trapped in the depression and was going nowhere. Like many another of my class and generation, I saw the war as my only escape, and I enlisted in the army as a nursing VAD as she had done a generation before me. Her book, Testament of Youth was my lodestar.

  The only things we two young women had in common was that neither of us, at the beginning, saw our war becoming a superlative tragedy, and both of us perversely volunteered to serve in the most menial toil. And both of us lost lovers. Beyond that, we had nothing in common – or perhaps everything.

  Being a VAD (Volunteer Aide Detachment) was an anomalous position. Like army nursing sisters, we enlisted in the Australian Army and could be sent overseas, but we were under the auspices of an organisation that had originally been formed in England.

  Our leader had the title of Commandant. The Lady Commandant, a First World War nursing sister, Alice Appleford, was married to the Doctor Appleford at Lang Lang who ‘fixed’ my ankle when I fell off the parapet of the railway bridge when I was eleven years old, and so I knew her when she began recruiting girls for the VAD in Melbourne. She most certainly would have known my real age as she knew my Mother well, but nevertheless she enrolled me, one year under-age. Yes, I would study and get my First Aid and Home Nursing Certificates (in June 1941), plus working, ‘getting in’ 100 hours in a civilian hospital after my daily work. We country girls scarcely needed a reference: our community was our judge.