In a tiny wooden-walled cottage, bereft of comforts of anything of beauty, except love, the playing of classical music, scales and exercises, even if badly, gave a dimension that relieved the hard, cruel, dreary monotony of the life most people were sealed into as inexorably as had been the generations before them.
I was stationed for a while at one hospital on the outskirts of the city of Toowoomba, and promptly found a music teacher. ‘But you won’t be able to practise’ she said. ‘No piano, or even a room to yourself where you could continue to study your violin.’ But I already knew that. I would continue my work on the theory of music and harmony and could be examined at the end of the year as though I were a civilian. The precision, the elegant phrases of this study were a joy; at the end of the year the hospital was moved, lock, stock and barrel, and I couldn’t get to a city to sit the exam but that didn’t cause me any pain. It was the doing of it, the purity of the progression of notes and harmony, the excitement of little skittish bits of relief, even humour in a score, and the unending possibilities of notes on staves that gave me pleasure and rest from every other thing around me.
Ginger
THE HEART CAN BREAK; I know – I’ve heard it. Once only, and I doubt one could survive the hearing of it a second time. It doesn’t crack, it crumbles like the fragile egg-shell of a tiny bird, and leaves a shadow on the palm of an outstretched hand and sometimes you think you see it there, long years after the body that had surrounded the heart has gone to dust – or wherever lost boys go, and young girls yearn for another chance.
A girl of seventeen – or seventy – would today be so much more sophisticated, worldly, practical, and may not hear the tiny egg-shells shatter, or feel the bluish dust in the palm of her hand for the rest of her life. C’est la vie, yes, that’s life, baby, and half your luck if you missed it. But we, us, certainly me and the girls I knew in the 1940s, took life differently. At the very least it could be said of us that we did take it, grabbed it and ran with it, unafraid. There was a thrumming in the air, an excitement, an ephemeral but warning drum that presaged Armageddon, and a short life: so kid, make it a merry one.
I was an older lady, seventy years old to be exact, when I heard my heart break and the years tremble backwards to when I was eighteen, cheeky, sparky, game for anything, in love with every boy I met and they with me. We ran hand in hand up the hill outside our camp, yelling and hurrahing like the wild young, mad things we were, us girls in our indoor uniforms of pale blue and white veils fluttering behind us, the boys in army hospital garb of shapeless navy-blue dressing gowns. ‘God help you lot if you’re caught,’ an old man called out to us one day. We sang, and we recited aloud as we ran. Though poor and in trouble I wander alone, with a rebel cockade in my hat’ – we all knew it in those days. Henry Lawson. He was ‘home’ to us much more than the darling of the drawing room, Banjo Paterson. ‘Though friends may desert me and kindred disown, my country will never do that.’ We were naive – innocent and very young. And the civilians, knowing we shouldn’t be out, would laugh and waggle a finger at us for being naughty girls and boys.
We knew all the Australian songs and poems:
They can sing of the Shamrock, the Thistle, the Rose,
Of the three in a bunch if you will,
But I know a great country that gathered all those,
And I love that land where the waratah grows,
And the wattle blooms out on the hill.
Oh yes, we were corny, but we embraced life as if we knew it was the only one we would have:
Though the battle be grim ’tis Australia that knows
That her children will fight while the waratah blows,
And the wattle blooms out on the hill.
And we kissed and ran down the hill again. Not just once, and not just with one boy.
When we grow older we revere our bodies, protect them, lead them away from danger, but youth laughs easily at death or danger. One day I came to my place in the mess and there was a note for me:
Maiden who readest this simple rhyme,
Enjoy your youth, it will not stay;
Enjoy the fragrance of your prime –
For oh! It is not always May.
I never knew who wrote it or why it was left there; it meant nothing to me as I slipped towards being eighteen years old.
A batch of girls were being taken down to open up a new hospital, 108 AGH, in a hurry. Matron said ‘Step forward all the country girls,’ It was the middle of the night. ‘For God’s sake!’ said Betsy who ran the hostel we were billeted in. A few girls stepped forward. ‘Nurse!’ Matron said to me, ‘You’re from the country aren’t you?’ (How could anyone mistake it?) But I replied, ‘No, Matron, I’m from the bush.’ My word, did she puff out her proper pigeon bosom. ‘Get out here!’ It was all very well for the girls to laugh at me, but it was all Dad’s fault. He had always told us that the rich came from the country but that we poor came from the bush.
We ‘country’ girls were not being singled out for any medical skills – we had little – but there was hard physical work to be done quickly, with the need for each girl to tackle whatever seemed necessary without troubling the professional nursing sisters who had their own long hours of work. Matron had been born up-country and she believed we who had had a less pampered life than city girls were what she wanted. We were to go in a train of ambulances to Ballarat, a beautiful inland city in Victoria: fast.
It was now early 1942. We had not heard from the young men we knew must now be in battle – dead? Captured? There was no way to tell. The newspapers were silent and gave no clues, the silence from the islands and Singapore was intense. No letters came. The last I’d received from our Simpson cousins was a Christmas card with a palm tree painted on it; Pompey and Doug Jackson who, up till now had written regularly to me, were silent. I had known for a time that Jack Page from Penshurst and other country boys we knew had been captured by the Germans in the Middle East, they could write to us, but from those young men in the islands north, west and east of northern Australia there was only an ominous silence we all tried not to speak of. Until now: now the wounded were coming in. Who? We were not told, but we were to get the beds made, match up pyjama tops and bottoms, unpack cooking gear – do the many menial jobs one did on the run if one was a VAD.
It was late at night when the patients arrived. We heard the first few ambulances stuttering up from the gates where the big sign ‘Ballarat Lunatic Asylum’ hung. A few boys lifted the canvas flaps at the back of their ambulances and saw the sign and quickly passed the word: ‘It’s a bloody lunatic asylum!’ And a whole batch of them leapt out and ran for the trees. It took time to round them up and assure them they were in a totally secure, new building in Australia and when daylight came they could see what a beautiful setting they would be in.
They were all too sick and weak and tired to be much trouble, but they needed a sponge and were hungry. Matron came to me and said, ‘Get them something to eat!’ (I don’t recall her ever speaking without ending it with an exclamation mark.) ‘But I can’t cook, Matron,’ I cried. She said, ‘Get out there and cook enough food to get these men to sleep.’ Well. That was a problem. Not only could I not cook (my Mother was too good a cook to have me or my sister in her kitchen, except to wash the basins, etc.), and worse than that was the obvious fact that, this being a brand new, empty hospital, our food supplies had not yet arrived. I ran out and round to another ward and there I found rice, milk, bananas. As that ward was empty I ran off with them, taking a dixie with me which, I learned later, was big enough to feed sixty men.
When I got back with my booty there was a young, red-headed boy about my age in the kitchen. He was really good looking, even when dressed in the hideous army pyjamas that came only half-way down his legs. I said, ‘Matron would kill me.’ He said, ‘Blow Matron!’ and stoked the wood fire. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked, meaning what part of Australia. ‘We’re not allowed to say at the moment.’ And I suddenly recalled
that none of these patients had colour patches, the small insignia all troops wore on their upper arm to identify their battalion. ‘Who are you and the others?’ But he wouldn’t say, and I knew I should not have asked – they must be men who had escaped from islands we had lost up north, and the government would fear that Australians might panic if they knew how close to defeat the country may be. That was how I saw it. The young man/boy sat down by the stove and we talked and laughed and I stirred the porridge-like mess of rice, bananas and milk and when I considered the whole mess to be cooked, the boy, whose name I learned was Ginger, carried it into the ward for me and put it on a trolley. The patients came over and I began to ladle the food out into each individual’s little dixie and within the time it took for them to taste one spoonful the man next in the queue had got a glimpse of the food and said ‘Hell! It’s rice and bananas!’
The dixies were put down and the soldiers got back into their beds. I was shocked, I had no idea what was wrong until Ginger came over to my trolley and wheeled it and the big dixie back to the pristine kitchen, ‘It’s all we’ve had to eat since we went on the run,’ he said to me, ‘You couldn’t have served them worse.’ And he in his poor army pyjamas and me, between rage and total distress, sat down on wooden crates and stoked the fire in the stove and made a cup of tea. And I learned that night of his battalion. Isolated on the island of New Britain from any other ‘friendly’ troops, they had been swamped, overwhelmed by the Japanese invasion force. Those who could, ran. ‘We call ourselves Curtin’s Harriers.’ (John Curtin was the Prime Minister of Australia at the time.) They had crossed and recrossed the mountainous island, looking for transport to make an escape, but they were being hunted too hard for many weeks before some of them, including Ginger and his mate, Jimmy, got off in little boats and managed to get across the Japanese-held waters and arrived in New Guinea, and eventually, Australia. I didn’t then know that many of these men – including Ginger and Jimmy – had been witness to the grisly Tol massacre, some escaping after being left for dead, their thumbs tied behind their backs, their wounds including bayonet stabs from the upper cheek down through their mouths. Ginger was crying. ‘I’m sorry’ he said, ‘I’m sorry’, and stood up and I took him into the ward where most of the men were asleep and the remainder were shivering and shaking with the effects of malaria and the various worms that had afflicted them in the damp, hot, sweaty crossings of this fetid island where they had slept on the ground.
We were not encouraged to befriend patients, but it would be unbelievable to think we couldn’t get around this. When decent food and medication were administered, the young men soon recovered, even though they would be troubled regularly with malaria and the worm – either behind the ear or the big, long one in the stomach.
We never knew what prank they would be up to next. Once, when I was on night duty, the sister in charge of the ward went off to another ward to chat with a friend and I was half dozing when the phone rang. It was a sister from the civilian hospital down in the city, ‘We have two of your patients here and we want them out,’ she said, ‘Not from this ward’ I replied. ‘What uniform are they wearing?’ ‘Well may you ask’ said the civilian sister, ‘They are in pyjamas and the blue flannel dressing gowns of an army hospital and wearing digger hats,’
There could be no doubting that they were ours. The civilian was a decent woman. How did they come to be in beds in her hospital? ‘Oh, they had had a couple of drinks they said and needed to lie down, and they saw an open window and climbed in and went to sleep. I nearly dropped dead when I saw them only a little while ago and realised they were not ours.’
The ambulances were lined up ready to take us back to digs when the night shift ended so I told a driver about the two scallywags and how the civilian sister only wanted them out of her ward – there would be no charges. So off the ambulance rumbled and returned with the lively lads before our ward sister returned. And, for the first time in my life, I could ‘read the riot act’ and truly frighten someone.
In those years Ballarat still had trams and when we were on day shift we could trundle up to the hospital or down to the city, and because of our long hours we were usually nodding asleep as the tram rumbled down past the lake. When the 2/22nd men first arrived it was a common thing to have a woman or man on the tram approach us and softly ask what battalion had got home, or ‘Is it true some men have got back?’ ‘Have some got home?’ ‘Are any alive?’ We, of course, could say nothing, but it was very sad and this approach must have been multiplied all over the areas in Australia where army ambulance trains rumbled into a hospital.
I was at Ballarat for only a short time but it was the coldest billet I ever knew. As more patients were rushed in, big canvas tents were erected in the grounds and, because of the mud, we VADs were issued with gumboots. We slipped and slid in them and, with the continual hurrying around, our feet perspired and the odour was revolting when we took the boots off when we were going to bed.
Ginger and I had ‘gone’ with one another for two months while we were in Ballarat. He called me ‘Lik Lik’ – native for ‘little’. When he was well enough we hired a rowboat from the Lake Wendouree boat sheds and he and I and his mate Jimmy spent a day rowing on the calm water with curious swans about us. Within half an hour of us being there both the boys were lying flat in the bottom of the boat, shaking, shivering, sweating with malaria. Almost every man who lived to get home from the islands had malaria, so this was ‘no great panic station’. This day I had brought with me two bottles of drinking water and their atabrine tablets; they had bought a bottle of rum, the only grog on the shelf of the nearest hotel in those days of strict rationing of beer when almost no top-shelf stock was left ‘for the duration’. The boys had been ecstatic about the rum. ‘What a beaut publican!’ But a few swigs from the bottle and they had begun to shake, shiver and shudder and sweat until it dropped off their faces and wet their summer uniforms. There was nothing to do until the attack wore off.
First Ginger lay down with his deep-red curly head by my feet, and next Jimmy. I gathered the open bottle of rum and had what can only be called a swig. Then another. Tremendous! I rowed to the miniature island in the lake and, hidden among the reeds, I had a truly decent drink. I then rowed out on to the lake and had fun learning how to steer while rowing but, as the hot day wore on, I needed more liquid and the bottle of rum supplied it until, to my surprise, I found the bottle empty. Coming from a teetotal family, it was the first time I had drunk alcohol ‘to excess’. Eventually Ginger and Jimmy woke, one after another, with a slight fever but no worse than usual. I was worse than I had ever been before or after. I was so affected that when I got the boat to the sheds and the boys hopped off to secure our painter, I managed to let the boat drift back out in the water and it took a long time to get it back in, with me getting one oar in the water and one in the air as the craft swirled round and back again. The boys were calling out, a civilian took a photo of me. (I know he did because he presented it to me forty-three years later.) And the instant the boat got near enough to the jetty I stumbled off and hurried to the nearby toilet where I was as sick as sick can be. And then I blacked out.
I remember no more until I woke up in a bed I’d never seen before, in a house I didn’t know, with the two boys holding my hands and begging me to wake up. I didn’t want to wake because each time I did pains slashed across my eyes and forehead and I was sick again. I slept, and when I awoke this time I was alone and darkness had fallen. I didn’t know then that it was the day after yesterday.
There was no one in the room, no sound in the house. The boys didn’t return until much later and then I was told everything. Ginger and Jimmy had been caring for me in between dashing back to the nearby hospital to cover their tracks – and mine, although I was officially off for my three-day-a-fortnight leave. Behind the bedroom door I could see my uniform, clean and splendidly starched. I felt around under the blankets and found I had been left in all my clothes, except the unifor
m. I looked up at the boys, little older than I was, and then we all began to laugh – except I didn’t laugh long because it hurt too much. That bottle of rum had left me very sick and I have never drunk it since. ‘Poor Lik Lik VAD’ Ginger crooned as he stroked my forehead.
And the house? Well, several families had got to know the young men who had escaped from the beleaguered islands up north of Australia. They had given them door keys and the thoughtful offer to relax, drink tea, listen to the gramophone, cook a meal. Suddenly I panicked. ‘What day is it? Is my leave up?’ No, there was still this evening and I would be back on deck at 6 am tomorrow, clean uniform and all. They had even polished my shoes.
And the story never got around to Matron, nor anyone else at that time. (But, forty-five years later, when I was dining with the Anglican Bishop of Ballarat prior to my dedicating a new library to the college, he said to me ‘Did you ever get dragged over the coals for taking those boys for a row on Lake Wendouree?’)
Ginger and his mate Jimmy would go walking in the grounds of the hospital when they were first out and about but, as soon as the available drugs began to lessen their malarial attacks, we were all able to run off freely. Ginger and I got a three-day leave pass and went down together to see my parents. And a month later we got another leave pass and went down to Ginger’s parents ‘in the wildwoods’ as he said. But time was short, and we had to get a train down to Warrnambool and stay overnight, ready to get on the early morning train to get us back to Melbourne then on to Ballarat.
The publican at Warrnambool said yes, he did have two empty bedrooms, and took us upstairs and asked ‘The one key will do?’, leering at Ginger who said, ‘Yes, one for the Lik Lik VAD and one for me’. It was late in the evening. ‘We’ll have to go to bed right away’ I called. ‘Beat you!’ said Ginger, but I got into my pyjamas and into his room as he was buttoning up his pyjama top. ‘I won’ I yelled. We cuddled, and murmured on his bed and then he said, ‘I wish we were married, don’t you?’ and I said, ‘Yes’, and in a short while I went off to my room and left him in his. I didn’t wonder whether we were being virgins. I didn’t think of it. I just loved him, cuddled him.
Goodbye Girlie Page 6
