And get the MO’s morning tea and heat a poultice,
And maybe sponge a man or two as well.
If you can take a ‘ticking off’ from Matron,
And realise she doesn’t mean it – much,
If you can bear to see your rec. leave vanish
When you thought you had it safely in your clutch,
If you can take the trials and tribulations,
The good times and the bad all in your stride,
If you can do all this and keep good tempered,
Then you’re not a VAD, but a saint who hasn’t died!
Thinking back, I believe we young women in this quite humble and laborious VAD service could never, then or now, have gathered together a greater group of women than we had in those years.
The system of using VADs worked smoothly and well. Our Commandant in each State cared for us and saw us as her girls. From this distance in time it could be seen as an exclusive group, and it was in one sense: all had volunteered to work under any circumstances and hours under the discipline of army orders. There never was any need for discipline – mostly because we had all enlisted in our home town areas where everyone knew one another, or in the case of city girls, were known to the group they had enlisted with. We were proud of our distinctive uniform and shoulder flashes and Red Cross on the upper arm.
And then, in 1942, an announcement: we were to discard all VAD uniforms and the bits and pieces that went with them and don khaki. You could almost imagine you heard the cry go up from Hobart to Port Douglas and across to Darwin. No! We most certainly wouldn’t change our uniforms. Khaki! Even the men of our hospitals were against it. We were adamant. We would stay with our time-honoured uniform. We were still outraged when the next blow hit: we were to go into Darley training camp in Victoria, as did the soldiers and the service-women, and we were to learn to march and, God help us, salute.
I honestly tried. To salute you had to take a swing of the arm and elbow that could decapitate a stander-by; and worse, you could almost tear out an eye with the nail of your middle finger with no difficulty at all – I bore witness to this. For the whole of the three weeks we tottered up and down the parade ground my bloodshot eye was bloody, hideous and embarrassing. Everyone, including the poor First-World-War sergeant-major whose charges we were, did a poor job of sympathising. There was more, worse, and everyone said ‘But how did you manage to do that?’ How would I know how I did it? I thought I’d executed a perfect about-turn. I didn’t do it on purpose, as many accused me. None recognised that I had believed I would surprise them all – including the sergeant-major – with my dexterity. When four or five girls fell to the ground I had assumed it was their doing, not mine.
I didn’t have time to wreck any other army convolutions for the following day we, the staff of the First Orthopaedic Hospital, were marshalled and told to be ready at 6 am the following morning to entrain to go north and set up our hospital in Queensland. That night, Phyllis, my mate, and I had an unplanned celebration behind the latrines. Phyl’s mother had died recently and her father was remarrying and Phyl had been given the day off to attend the wedding. This sudden remarriage had upset the young girl greatly. That night on her return she smuggled in a bottle of champagne and a cake and we had a secret party. In retrospect, it seems a rather ordinary event, but the business of getting in and out of your hut in such a training camp was quite difficult. An AWAS (Australian Women’s Army Service) corporal slept at the end of each of these big barracks and one had to wake her for permission to visit the latrines after 8 pm any night. Phyl and I so confused ourselves with how to get out and stay out for a decent time that we finally couldn’t work out how we’d get back in until the corporal herself had to relieve her bladder and left the door unlocked for a moment, so we shot in and slipped into bed, fully clad.
There was some antipathy between the women’s services in the same way as there was in the men’s. In our case, the VADs (the name had already been changed to the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service, but many of us refused to accept the change for some time) had an aura of superiority because of the long tradition that shaped us.
I had two cousins in the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force and another cousin in the Australian Women’s Army Service, and when we met again at war’s end we laughed at the stupidity of it. But we agreed that women were narrow-minded only to the same degree as were the male services, and both sexes flashed their colour patches and stripes equally proudly.
In retrospect, I am surprised at the ease with which we slipped out of civilian life and into army discipline without looking back. To us, leave was a matter of filling in time until we could get back to our hospital and the men and women there. This was our home, no matter where the hospital strayed and settled for a time, that was our place and its inmates were our charges, the staff our compatriots. There is no other explanation of how we bonded. We saw civilians as people in no way related to us. As Sergeant Margaret McLeod (‘Mac’) said, ‘They are them and we are us.’
On joining up we each had been issued with a carton of cigarettes which were replenished each fortnight, and I immediately lit up as if by order of High Command. From then on I chain-smoked ‘for the duration’.
We were given no instruction on how to fit into this new life. I only once heard a lecture on venereal disease and even that talk was as much a joking thing as a serious problem among troops. Phyl and I came out of the lecture saying ‘but what’s that to us?’
The 1 AOH (1st Australian Orthopaedic Hospital) was first formed at Mount Eliza in Victoria, then moved to Queensland. There was a large contingent of physiotherapists there and although they marched in as officers we aides got along famously with them. They were adaptable women: one day I saw one twist a bit of fencing wire to haul a leg up in traction while waiting for equipment to arrive. The 1 AOH, although not the ubiquitous AGH (Australian General Hospital) most aides worked in, nevertheless dealt with a great variety of diseases, wounds and sickness, as well as serving its general purpose – the repair or removal of bones, restructuring of everything from ligaments to supplying missing bits and pieces of bodies.
Most of us very young aides were, quite rightly, kept from the theatre but one day when a convoy came in with more patients than expected, I was hauled in – feeling very important as I dressed in a white nightdress that fell to the floor, the length of my five-foot body – but like most things in life or war, the bigger you are the harder you fall. Sister Kirk 2 I/C (second-in-charge) saw me hovering and ever so silently but with terrible menace in the only part of her body that could be seen, turned eyes of ice on me. ‘Stand over there,’ she somehow hissed without making a sound, ‘you shouldn’t be here.’ ‘I was told …’ ‘Keep quiet.’ ‘But Matron said …’ ‘Shut up and keep out of the way.’ Well, she got her come-uppance when the surgeon, Colonel Colquohoun, who was in charge of the whole hospital, called ‘Nurse!’ Me? I wasn’t sure, could anyone possibly want this theatrical outcast in a gown so long it swept the floor as had those of Florence Nightingale’s girls eighty years before? ‘Nurse,’ our bulky surgeon called. I raced over, holding up my gown so I wouldn’t fall over it. ‘Mop!’ he snapped, not even turning sideways to see that I was in place. Mop? ‘His forehead!’ hissed Sister Kirk. His forehead? For god’s sake, who would want anyone to mop their forehead when they were fit and well enough to do it themselves? But the lights blazed down and the heat up north defied the crude cooling machines of the day. Sister pushed a wad of gauze into my hand while directing a laser beam of fury down on me and I leapt into my most important task in the war, mopping my leader’s copious sweat that poured down as though he had a malfunctioning cistern on top of his head.
Dr Colquohoun always said ‘thank you’. ‘You are very good at mopping’ – and I always thought I was, too.
* * *
My peripatetic life had left me with many friends and relatives scattered over the continent and I heard of many of their movements, woun
ding, illness or death. While we still had boys to write to, I wasted my time by writing silly, flippant letters. I recall asking the Jackson boys, Pompey and Doug, who were a little older than me, ‘Are you both still as bushwacky as ever? Surely at least one of you will come back having learned something besides flirting with girls!’ And to the two Simpson boys I wrote ‘It will surprise me if you don’t get lost over there as you did when we were coming home from the dance at Jindivick.’ (Only one of these brothers came home.) When you are young you never contemplate death, never think that three out of four boys would never come back, never flirt again.
From the time you put on uniform until the day you are ordered to remove it, you are a person so removed from anything that came before, a new persona has enveloped you, and civilians, family and acquaintances are aware of it.
We had a portable gramophone in our mess but, except for the officers’ mess, I never saw a wireless set in the hospital or quarters and, of course, there was no television at that time. The gramophones were said to be ‘both restful and cheering’ for the men in wards. I know only that they were blaring and the musical taste of both the patients and the good people of Red Cross who brought the records was in their boots. At the beginning of the war, the songs we sang were from the First World War; some, such as Goodbye Dolly Grey, were actually from the Boer War:
Goodbye Dolly, I am leaving,
Though it breaks my heart to go.
Something tells me I am needed
At the front to fight the foe.
See, the soldier boys are marching
And I can no longer stay.
Goodbye darling little Dolly,
Goodbye Dolly Grey.
No one appeared to be surprised to find us young girls living within a community peopled by a great preponderance of young men scarcely older than we were. Before we left our parents’ homes we had always been separated from boys, even at dances our parents or older sisters had chaperoned us home. But now we were on our own, and if our working shift hours allowed it we could go out of the grounds until 10 pm (2200 hours, army talk) every night, and one night a week until 2359 hours (one minute before midnight). We younger girls used these hours to the full, running pell-mell back to camp from the nearest town or army camp, getting on to our palliasses by the skin of our teeth before an inspection party came around. For almost all my time in the service I lived in tents within a whole encampment of tents lined up in rows. Accommodation was spartan, no furniture apart from a low locker, our uniforms hung from the tent walls. We had two grey blankets and a change of bed linen was issued once a week.
We set up hospitals all over Queensland. Some places had no name until we trundled in. We were at one hospital running right down to a lovely beach. Here on night duty we could hear the tide come in and go out, and when our shift ended at day break we’d go to sleep on the sand in the sun. When it got too hot, we’d move like somnambulists, dragging the groundsheet back among the tea-tree and take up where we’d left off sleeping. I had a small alarm clock Granny Smith had given me when I joined up. ‘Dinna lose it!’ her still-Scottish voice snapped. ‘It cost me two shillings and sixpence.’ It had a ring on the top big enough to hang it on a twig of tea-tree and during the stay at that hospital, if I wasn’t using it for an alarm it was out on almost semi-permanent loan. Sadly, the day we were packing up that hospital – always an horrifically army-style You! and You! At the double! sort of day, ending with ‘Men to the trucks! Nurses to the ambulances! and off we’d go – this time the wee clock was forgotten and it may hang to this day beneath the tea-tree near a golden beach.
One is aware of the lies, the dishonesty about war, but also the challenge of endurance. Vera Brittain rightly believed that those boys and girls who have just reached the age where love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time are drawn to it. ‘The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged fatality.’
Both my grandmothers died while I was away and it was strange, when I think back, how close we all were in that family of Adams and Smiths yet their deaths meant no more to me, and indeed, meant less to me, than did those of the men who died in our hospital. Grandmother Smith died in 1942 aged ninety-five and my mother wrote me that my father, who had been the youngest of Grandma’s thirteen children, was desolate. I knew he’d been the pet of the family but somehow I’d never thought of my father being disconsolate at the death of his mother. The young see death so differently to the old, and we were young and we were now in a different sphere.
Grandmother Adams died shortly after, and I had leave at this time. Her coolness towards me had not pained me greatly, and watching her slow dying in the bed at home gave me time to think of the hard life she must have led, with ten children and a husband who had never been gentle. My leave was up before she died and I had gone into the room where she was lying at her home, and my great-aunt Anastasia (not to be confused with my younger Aunt Anastasia) was sitting at the bedside holding a lighted candle in my Grandmother’s right hand. She had placed her left hand in the brown burial habit representing the passing of life to death. I only saw this briefly, and then ran with all my accoutrements to the train which would take me back north again and away from the life that seemed no longer real to us. The life of the hospital and the comings and goings of sick and wounded men were the whole of our life and our families were in retreat, left behind us emotionally as well as physically.
Chauvinistic jargon of the day was slanted in a way one would hope the men of today would never do. We can pity the men in their fear, and their frustration at being separated from their woman and/or women in general, or no woman at all. But some of their reactions were unforgiveable.
Our mail was always left on a rack in the VA’s mess, and we’d pick it up at lunch. You saw some sad things, although most reports of relatives being killed or taken prisoner first went through Matron’s office. But mail was usually glad tidings of someone being safe or on their way home, or just letters like young men and women back home would write to one another when separated for a time. One day a VA in her mid-twenties opened her mail and collapsed, falling straight across the table with the open ‘letter’ in her hand. The girls began to resuscitate her while one ran for Sister Kirk, the Deputy Matron. The ‘letter’ lay open on the table for all to see. ‘She’ had written, according to the anonymous sender:
I’m sorry dear, I missed the lights, the fun,
I couldn’t wait until this war is won.
It might mean years, and youth is very short,
My friends kept urging me to be a sport.
I tried, but I was powerless to resist –
I want to live, I couldn’t just exist.
I’m far too young to make you a good wife,
I’d never settle down to married life.
Forgive me dear, it’s hard to write you this,
So I shall end it with a farewell kiss,
To wish you luck, and hope you’ll soon forget
The empty little playgirl you once met.
‘He’ had supposedly written in answer:
Your letter reached me when I straggled back
Dog-weary from the old Kokoda track
And something died; something I’d had was gone.
The thing that kept me sane and spurred me on
I know you’ll find it hard to understand,
The way you helped, the way I schemed and planned
When things were tough; I didn’t mind the war,
I felt I had someone worth fighting for,
You say you’re too young, perhaps you’re right.
I’ve aged, I grew to manhood overnight.
Goodbye my dear, may you be happy in
The peace we’re fighting night and day to win.
signed Hal Percy
* * *
Sister Kirk rose
to the occasion as she would always do (she had already served in Greece and the Middle East until she was evacuated). ‘Oh you little sport’ she mimicked the letter. ‘I’m far too young to make you a good wife: I’m really just an empty-headed little playgirl.’ And then she roared to the rest of us: ‘Eat your lunch and get back to work.’ But she took the pale, trembling, mousy girl who we knew never went out with boys, and with her arms about her led her away to her own quarters to comfort her. And we, left at the table, could hear the rasping, choking sobs of the poor plain girl disappearing into the quarters and not until then did our rage burst wide open.
I think our Sergeant ‘Mac’ got it right, as she usually did do. ‘We must understand men who are away from home, but that doesn’t mean we should bear their cross – because we are already carrying our own crosses.’
We were ignorant of the great events affecting the war and our troops – so were the folk back home but it does seem odd that so much was kept from those of us who were so very involved. Once our old surgeon, Colonel Colquohoun, saw a long line of ambulances trundling down the dirt road towards our unit and he swore: ‘I don’t suppose the buggers know how to send a signal that they’re coming.’ I loved this old man – I suppose he was in his forties, but to me that was very old indeed.
* * *
As time went on some of us tried to continue with our pre-war interests. It had never worried me that my friends had said ‘Woof! Woof!’ when I told them I was playing Bach, or that Kathleen went into a fit of coughing when I played Prokofiev (kof, get it?), but at least it wasn’t my family who, after reading the title of their child’s new music, forever more referred to her as playing ‘Choppin’ – and with great pride. And why not? To play any instrument in bad days and bad places was an achievement, no matter how it was pronounced. It is all very well today for folk to ridicule the ‘way backs’, but what they need to know is that these people, we people, isolated by time, distance and lack of education, were at least trying to get by with, if the gods were kind, a small step forward.
Goodbye Girlie Page 5
