I took him to a small hotel, he fell on the bed and went to sleep immediately, and I went off to the hospital to get into my day uniform. When I was free later that night I went back to the hotel and realised he was very sick, so I returned to the hospital and asked the warrant officer what I should do. He said he would get him into the hospital, although it was irregular. Bill was indeed AWL (absent without leave). He should have stayed on board the ship until he was granted leave, but Colonel Colquohoun and the warrant officer fixed this up between them, they were two splendid men. Bill was put to bed in the hospital, a sick, ill, disoriented and debilitated man. When he was well enough, he was sent down to be discharged to go to his home in Tasmania. He wrote to me constantly, telling me I must come down immediately, must be discharged and care for him, and that we must marry.
I had never intended this. I was still mourning the seeming desertion of me by Ginger. But the concert was over.
* * *
I can’t remember, never could, how I had first met Bill and, given the preponderance of men over women – at least twenty to one in the Queensland military areas, and all aged roughly between eighteen and thirty-six – it still surprises me that he was able to cut me out from the noisy, cheeky young boys I so happily gambolled with.
He never said anything beautiful to me. He was tired, not just because he was so much older than me but because he was war-tired. He had been away almost from the day war started. He had fought on the Western Desert, El Alamein, Tobruk, the whole shooting match, and when the 9th Division was sent home to ‘face’ (as the saying went) the Japanese, he was first sent to our hospital to be patched up. It was there I came to know him, before he went into battle again. He was tall, blue-eyed, had straight, streaky blond hair, was sun-tanned – and looked awful. He was wearing the nosebag we hung on men from the desert war whose antrums had been scoured by the blinding sand-storms. Many Middle East veterans had this operation and their dripping noses were not a sight to delight; for weeks after the operation they looked like sad-eyed horses snuffling into chaff bags.
Except for the few days when Ginger and I had visited his parents in Victoria’s Western District, I can’t recall ever having gone out alone with another boy, until this older man came along. Sometimes I would be with two boys, more often groups of us who were off duty at the same time tore off together.
One day I was passing by the antrum ward and Bill said ‘Hello nurse. I’ve been watching you for some weeks.’ I gave an ‘oh yeah’ or whatever the equivalent expression was in those days. And then he said a thing that no one until that time had said to me: ‘Would you like to come to dinner?’ In those days the ordinary folk didn’t ‘go to dinner’. We might have had tea with someone – and that didn’t mean afternoon tea. His way of asking me out must have interested me because I said yes, I would be off duty that evening until 10 pm. There wasn’t much in the nearby town in those days, and I suppose there weren’t many eating places anywhere in Australia where ordinary people went as it was so much cheaper to eat at home. The working class was not used to dining out. I thought it was fine to be in a place with fresh flowers on the table and a good-enough menu. I asked Phyllis to come with me.
We talked about tanks, battalions, hospital ships, and then he became more personal and asked me if I had a boyfriend. I said yes. ‘Where is he then?’ ‘I don’t know. I thought, and he thought, he’d be going to New Guinea and up the Kokoda trail but I doubt it now, I think something different, I think they may have pushed on further. I haven’t had a word from him and they sailed three months ago.’ I had written to Ginger and had waited and watched for letters from him. It was an ominous thing not to have received a letter after so long but I didn’t want to discuss it with this man. I was thinking of Ginger, not of him.
The next day I spoke with the regimental sergeant major and told him I hadn’t heard from Ginger. He said, ‘Oh, that’s funny because there have been several girls here who have got letters regularly only a week after the men sailed.’ I asked if he knew if they had been in action and he said yes, they had been, but he’d not heard of any of the men who had gone through our hospital recently having been killed, missing or wounded, although he said this might not yet be in the newspapers ‘but the word gets around quickly’. I went to one of the girls who had a boyfriend ‘up north’ and she said her boy even got a letter away just as the ship landed in New Guinea and he had been writing regularly. She said it was magnificent how the army postal corps got mail back to Australia so quickly and expertly. She then asked, was I serious about Ginger? and I said of course, I had visited his parents with him and he had visited my parents and I had been taken to meet his sister who was serving in a canteen at Spencer Street station. This girl was some years older than me and she said, ‘Well Pat, there’s only one answer, isn’t there?’ I said I didn’t know what she meant and she said, ‘If everyone else is getting letters, don’t you think it odd he hasn’t bothered to write to you?’
I was desolate in the sort of way one becomes when you are busy, far from home, have no time for tears, and certainly wouldn’t shed them in front of your compatriots. I saved them for my pillow that remained damp throughout the night until a burning sun would heat the tent enough to dry it.
I felt rejected, and thoroughly so. There was no one to talk to and if there were I was too proud to let anyone know I had been rejected. There were still fragile parts of my psyche that could tolerate no damage, no pain, nothing. I had no word for this but I knew it was so within me. So I forced myself to forget all those merry months Ginger and I had had, and I recall that I felt great embarrassment that I had sent him letters almost daily, even some small gifts to cheer him and let him know I loved him.
I walked straight through the ward to Bill and said ‘I’ve got the day off tomorrow’. I can hear now the cheapness of the way I said it. ‘Good’ he said, ‘we’ll go off and do the town.’ And so it began, this new relationship that spawned so much sadness and so much joy of children.
We went out to the few things one could go to there, and then he went on leave to see his parents in Tasmania and I promptly went out with the group of young people I used to be with before Bill came along. In this group there were men almost as young as me, and we were never less than three together, rarely more than five. We had a lot of fun and there was extraordinary comradeship amongst us. Then I heard a rumour of the battalion that was going up to the north coast of New Guinea and realised Bill would most likely be sent there. And he was. He came up north to embark and he brought a ring his Mother had given him, a heavy gold ring with three emeralds, put it on my ring finger and I felt the weight of it and I was trying to tell myself ‘Who cares?’ Then he sailed away and with him went Shy Bill.
Shy Bill had been his mate and would be until his death. Shy Bill had been through the same battles in the Middle East, Greece and Crete. ‘My’ Bill had asked if I knew someone to make a foursome and I said my girlfriend, Phyl, would be off duty and maybe we could go to the pictures. So we four went out together, never again did we go in pairs. Shy Bill was a blacksmith in civilian life on the west coast of Tasmania, and he was so shy he didn’t kiss Phyl until he was due to embark for the battlefields again. They always walked apart, Phyl would be by the fence and he would be near the kerb. Only on the day he set off for New Guinea did they walk close together.
And so, once again they sailed off to war. And we waited, Phyl and I. I received letters, she none at all, not a word. I asked our RSM what he thought about that as he knew Shy Bill, and he said Shy Bill was ‘true blue’. The letters I was receiving from ‘my’ Bill were heavily censored with great strips cut out of them, and the areas that hadn’t been cut didn’t mention Shy Bill. I wrote to ‘my’ Bill once I realised so many letters he wrote had had large amounts cut out and asked him what was happening? He replied, and had cleverly written on the top of the page: ‘Censor: my letters are being censored heavily and I had written these things because there are two young nurse
s who are awaiting news and the friend of one is dead and has been dead since the second day of our landing.’ So I had to tell Phyl.
She was on duty and I asked Matron what I should do and whether she would tell Phyl. She said no, I was old enough to handle it and to tell her the best way I could as her closest friend. She said she would give us leave for the rest of the day. I went to the ward, got Phyl and told her, and I recall there were quite a few young boys in fold-up chairs outside the ward in the sunshine and we had to pass them to get back to our tent lines at the back of the hospital. I could hear them calling out ‘What’s wrong with the young girls? They’re crying. Nurse, what’s happened?’ And we went on with our arms around each other, sobbing our hearts out.
Shy Bill had died in a strange way. He had been only slightly wounded when they advanced and he was taken to a Regimental Aid Post and ‘my’ Bill then went forward. He returned two days later expecting to take Shy Bill forward and found he had died the previous day. Shy Bill had been given the wrong blood group, the wrong serum, not an unlikely event in those days when transfusion was a relatively rare and new medical aid.
Phyl and I wandered about when off duty, each stunned, though from a different cause. Her short acquaintance with Shy Bill and his bizarre death, and my confusion over the seeming indifference of Ginger and the even more confusing possessiveness of Bill, had moved our erstwhile gaiety and security into a phase we could neither understand nor deal with. We were, after all, still very naive and young. And the heavy work load and long hours often drained us of the sparkle of our years.
And then, everything brightened. A soldier I had met in the ward asked me if I’d like to ‘go to the pictures’. I hesitated. ‘My cousin is just back from the islands’ he said. ‘He could come with us.’ And I told him of Phyl’s loss and before any time at all Phyl and her Gordon were in love, and I greatly approved (and I still do!). But the man who initiated this meeting was a sick man, mentally and emotionally. As Gordon described it, the young man was trigger-happy, his long spell in action had tripped his reason and he was taken by ambulance to the Army General Hospital in Brisbane where he would stay for much of the life that was left to him.
Life in a busy army hospital had an immense variety of characters and conditions and there was little time to ponder on the sorrows and the unfairness of life, and nobody wanted to hear about it anyway. The emotions of the young do not differ between nations. Vera Brittain, the English girl who was a VAD in the First World War, wrote: ‘I walk in ways where pain and sorrow dwell, and ruins such as only War can bring, Where each lives through his individual hell.’ She was ‘worn with tears, For he I loved lying cold beneath the stricken sod’ and she wondered as she grieved, ‘If when the long, long, future years creep slow, And war and tears alike have ceased to reign, I ever shall recapture, once again, The mood of that May morning, long ago.’
Bill and I would never have met had it not been for the war. He would have remained on the island of Tasmania where his family had been born, for generations since they came to Australia, and never sallied forth across the water to the ‘mainland’. In his thirty-three years until he left for the war, he had never been off the island. I, eighteen, coming from an outgoing, dancing, singing, cuddling, peripatetic, laughing railway family of the Australian bush, was swept up by the excitement of the periphery of war and the whole dramatic, unbridled, dangerous, wild, blood-stirring atmosphere of the times. And there was another thing: when we first met, the war was still near us, threatening Australia; the 9th Division who had fought at Tobruk had been sent home. There were boys from training camps nearby who were suddenly ordered overseas, there were boys I had known who were now dead, and boys I knew who had disappeared, not heard of since February 1942. Life was a flighty thing, and in our hearts we knew it.
Bill and I would walk along the fragrant frangipani-lined streets on my off-duty hours, and other ‘9th Divvy’ men, seeing his colour patch in the shape of a T (for Tobruk), would call out across the road: ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!’. It was a cheeky, comradely greeting meant to resemble the droving of sheep across the paddocks (which is what they later did do – not sheep, of course, but they did drive the Japanese back and out of New Guinea). Sometimes they would call out ‘See you up a tree’, referring to the way it was said the Japanese fought.
Something within me should have sent a signal but no message came and I didn’t notice its absence. Looking back, I can’t recall if I even noticed the different tenor of our days when the young boys had left to go to the fighting areas of New Guinea. I didn’t notice that I wasn’t having as much fun any more, didn’t admit that things were different when a tired man in his thirties was hanging round the hospital grounds, waiting to take me out.
You Make Your Bed
WHEN BILL RETURNED I GOT compassionate leave and came down to Warragul in Victoria and we went through the old ceremony with not a word between us as to why we were going to ‘join in holy matrimony’. Aunt Sarah’s husband, the urbane Englishman, Eric Anderson, drove me to church. Well, he seemed urbane to us because twice he had received an inheritance from England (and each time had blown it on the gee-gees, ‘even flying interstate to race meetings!’ Aunt Alice and the rest of her sisters gasped). Anyway, in those days of rationing he was the only one in the family with enough petrol in his car to get me to the church.
Uncle Eric was a rather decent sort. Everyone else had gone on ahead, including the two witnesses in their army and airforce uniforms, and we set off later but a train held us up at a rail crossing. ‘Do you really want to get married?’ Uncle Eric asked.
That was a peculiar remark, I thought, what with me in a long white dress and carrying flowers. Eric asked me again and said, ‘I could turn the car around and drop you as far away as you want to go.’ I was silent. ‘Get back to your battalion or whatever you’re in?’ But it had gone too far. I couldn’t back out. I was never a good backer-out, I never have been. Mum always said I was ‘staunch’. I wish I wasn’t. Who would? Could? And suddenly we were in the church and the organ played ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire’ And it wasn’t too bad, all the fuss, frills and the long veil lent by Mum’s cousin Anne. The bridegroom set this veil on fire when he lit a cigarette as we left again in Uncle Eric’s car. I belted the flames out with my bouquet of nerines, and on we went with him singing ‘I’m going to buy a paper doll that I can call my own.’ Bill had begun to sing this while we were walking out of the church:
A doll that other fellas cannot steal …
When I come home at night she will be waiting,
She’ll be the truest doll in all the world.
I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl.
The aunts must have saved up months of their butter and sugar ration cards for the ‘breakfast’: Alice’s cream-puffs were known for miles around, and there were butterfly cakes, jelly and chocolate-covered lamingtons with real cream. The collection of gifts was just as difficult to find in those times, there being nothing frivolous produced during the war and yet I still have, and use, many of those gifts my family searched so diligently for over fifty years ago.
We sat side by side in the train from Warragul to Melbourne. By now I’d got back into uniform, and he talked to his airman friend and I talked to Anne whom I’d known from my first day of enlistment. It was all rather nice, the four of us yarned about troops and who was wounded and who was on their way to New Guinea – by now nobody was going to the Middle East – and time went quickly. Once in Melbourne, Anne went off back to her hospital unit, and the airman ducked off, and we two got on the Burwood tram to get to Aunty Julia’s house (Dad’s sister). And the party was over.
* * *
I went to the altar a virgin and I’ve been preaching ever since that it is the most damnable thing a girl can do if she expects or wishes to live a life of what is euphemistically called ‘conjugal harmony’. No one should be exposed to that – not just the tea
ring of the membrane and the blood, but the trip to the chemist the next day, giving the semi-whispered order for Vaseline ‘we only got married yesterday’, and the wink from the chemist and the smug return of a semi-grubby grin. Then back to the room, walking with your legs apart, and the yelp when it started all over again because the Vaseline couldn’t protect the tender parts.
The next morning my Aunt Julia said ‘What do you think of being married, Jeannie?’ laughing as old women have done for centuries, a sort of historical chain, adding a link each time another victim joins the initiation ceremony. Julia wasn’t a nasty woman, she was usually fun, but this was tradition.
Bill and I sailed that night on the old Wairana to Tasmania to stay with his parents in their little, thin-walled, rented cottage. It was winter, bitterly cold. I thought of Queensland and wanted to get back there, or at least to Sunset Country where I was born. It snowed. Snowed! I hated it, had never seen it before, feared it, like I subconsciously feared most things in this place of old people as opposed to the vital warm youth I had lived with for so long. I thought there was only one good thing going for me: no one knew my thoughts. I was fun. ‘You’re always laughing’ Mr O’Day, the bank manager, said. But, ‘You must join the CWA’ (Country Women’s Association) said the mother of the man who told people we were married.
I never knew, and still don’t know, what ‘marriage’ meant or means. The wedding ceremony that became popular among the working classes towards the end of the last century is still the one where the girl wears a white dress as evidence of her virginity and a veil over her face which will later be thrown back as the symbol of the breaking of her hymen. The man then places a ring on his captive’s finger as evidence of ownership. When Bill’s mother explained this to me I took off the gold ring with the three big emeralds and threw it over their back fence. Search as they did they never found it and I didn’t care. What a farce the whole thing was – and is. Until my first real lover and I joined, I thought fucking was the greatest historical exaggeration since John the Baptist resisted the unparalleled temptation of Salome.
Goodbye Girlie Page 9
