The Australians had acquitted themselves well in the fight, and were now treated as heroes by all those on board. Our cabin had adopted one in particular as our mascot, or perhaps he had adopted us – a fresh-faced youngster named Roy Cornford, who had been in the thick of the fighting.
That night we invited him to join us for a supper of chocolate cake and cocoa which Christine had scrounged from the kitchens. He sat on the floor with the children, and I realised that he was not much more than a child himself. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.
‘Where do you come from, Roy?’ I asked, and he swung round from the game he was playing with the children and faced me politely. ‘Wollongong, ma’am. That’s a small town south of Sydney. Right on the coast. Our house is so close to the beach the surf keeps you awake on stormy nights.’
He had been in the army three months before being bundled on a ship for Singapore. His unit had expected to receive combat training on the island but they had gone straight into battle, hardly knowing how to use their Lee Enfield .303 rifles. He had been cut off with three or four mates when the Japs had stormed across the Straits of Johore, and the group had been told by its sergeant that it was every man for himself. A three-day trek through the mangroves had brought them to the coast west of Singapore, and from there they had used their hands and some planks to paddle to the Empire Star in an oarless sampan. ‘Still don’t know too much about the .303,’ Roy said self-deprecatingly. ‘But I reckon I’m a bit of an expert on paddling a sampan.’ He was a modest boy and blushed scarlet when we all solemnly lifted our cocoa cups in his honour.
We entered Tanjong Priok, the harbour for Batavia, in the early hours of the morning, and I remember lying half awake, and thinking with muzzy happiness of the words of the lovely psalm 107: ‘bring us safe into harbour’.
Christine stormed into our cabin, shouting us awake. ‘Quick, everybody. We’ve got to stop them taking the Aussies away!’
None of us had the slightest idea what she was talking about but we pulled on our clothes and tumbled out onto the deck. We were alongside by now and we could see the Australian soldiers lined up on the wharf surrounded by grim-looking British Marines with Tommy guns under their arms. The Australians were dressing under the British guns with a kind of desperate dignity, shuffling crisply into perfect lines and then snapping to attention as if on a parade ground. They looked strangely vulnerable without their arms, which we could see piled neatly at the foot of the gangway. ‘They’ve been arrested,’ Christine said breathlessly. ‘For cowardice or some such stupid thing.’
People were beginning to pack the side of the ship, calling down angrily to the Marines and shouting encouragement to the Australians. But the incipient protest had no time to gather strength because within minutes the party was marched off towards a line of waiting trucks. I caught sight of young Roy, marching tall and with his slouch hat at a rakish angle, but his face as white as a sheet.
Dreadful rumours swept the ship during the morning, the worst being that the whole party had been lined up just outside the dock gates and shot for cowardice. ‘I’ve seen the bullet holes in the side of a godown,’ some dreadful woman said, seeming to relish the words. ‘And the blood on the road! So much blood . . .’ Denis assured me that none of it was true, that the Australians were simply being re-mustered and would only be reprimanded for what they had done. But the thought that something might have happened to them, to Roy, lingered on in my mind, spoiling even the feeling of relief that we had escaped.
We were in Tanjong Priok for three days as welders and engineers swarmed over the ship making her seaworthy, and then we were on our way again, heading south for Australia.
On 23 February 1942 the Empire Star docked in Fremantle, Western Australia. Denis joined me at the rail as we stared out over the rusty tin roofs of Victoria Docks. It was raining, soft summer rain falling from a leaden sky and making puddles on the wharf where customs officers, military policemen and Red Cross officials waited for us under black umbrellas.
‘It’s going to be very different, Norma,’ Denis said, gripping my arm gently. Behind us, the boys were arguing the toss about who should carry the umbrella we had given them to share. In the innocence of childhood, they were completely oblivious of the immense change we were about to face, as they had been oblivious of the huge dangers we had been through.
Their calm acceptance gave me strength and I gripped Denis’s arm in return. ‘Piece of cake,’ I said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
At the beginning, it was a piece of cake.
We spent our first night in a small seaside hotel just south of Fremantle, dining on fish and chips, then walking along the beach before turning in. The weather had cleared but I was so tired that I walked in a daze, enjoying but scarcely noticing the darkening sea, the loom of houses in the dusk, and the other strollers out with their dogs. I was glad to get back to the hotel, and it was bliss to doze off knowing that there were no Japanese planes to fear, no submarines lurking in the depths beneath. There was just the sound of a distant train in the night, and the soughing of the wind in the Norfolk pines outside our windows.
After breakfast, we had a family conference. Denis insisted on the two boys being present, and they sat on the edge of our bed as we discussed our new life in a new land. I remember that conference so well, the boys nodding their heads solemnly as Denis made them promise to look after me, the muslin curtains billowing in a warm sea breeze, the sound of traffic from the street outside. I felt it was all a little unreal, as though we were actors in a play. I half expected Amah to tap gently on the door to ask about lunch, or to hear Margaret calling from the garden. I suppose the truth was that I was a little bit in shock, but we didn’t recognise the condition in those days and so I just gritted my teeth and tried harder to pull my weight.
The first decision we had to make was whether to try and access the funds we had in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, or to assume they were lost for the duration of the war and to try and cope on Denis’s naval salary. I favoured the latter course. I had seen too many émigré families in Malaya living beyond their means, led on by expectations that they would recover the fortunes they had left behind in Russia. They had always seemed rather pitiful to me, pretentious and silly, and I didn’t want us to become like them. So we opened the West Australian to the ‘to let’ pages and tried to gauge the rental market. A small house (‘three bed plus sleep-out, verandah and garage’) looked viable, and we circled a couple in South Perth and Bicton.
‘Have you boys anything you want to say?’ Denis asked. ‘You are part of this conference too, you know.’
Tony put on his grown-up look, frowning mightily. ‘Can Bobby and I watch the trains? There’s a railway bridge just up the road.’
Denis sighed. ‘I will soon be going off with the Navy,’ he said seriously. ‘When I do go, Tony, you will be the man of the family. So you will have to be very grown up, and help Mummy when she needs help. You won’t have too much time to watch trains.’
Tony hung his head, abashed. Then he brightened a little. ‘Can we watch them from the window? You can just see them if you climb on a chair. They’re steam trains, Daddy.’
‘I want to watch the trains, too,’ Bobby piped up.
Denis looked at me across the boys’ heads, shaking his head but with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘A lost cause, I’m afraid,’ he said ruffling their hair. ‘I suppose we had better adjourn and have a look for these trains.’
So our family conference reconvened on a railway overpass, and while the three males craned their necks over the white-painted fence-rail at the puffing engines beneath us, I wrestled with sums in my head, trying to work out how much we could afford for rent. It was a strange experience for me, being exclusively in charge of the family budget, and not a totally unpleasant one.
After lunch we ordered a taxi and set out to inspect a handful of houses. There weren’t many available in our range and we settled on an older red-b
rick home in a sandy street in Bicton. It was small but it had a sunny sleep-out, linoleum on the kitchen floor and a fenced back yard for the boys to play in. When we got back to the hotel there was a dark blue Navy car parked outside with a WRAN driver polishing the windscreen. It belonged to a lanky RAN lieutenant called Lumley Rycroft, who became our first friend in Western Australia.
Lumley, or ‘Rye’ as he insisted we call him, had brought along a veritable treasure trove: drawing pads and pencils for the boys, kit allowance and a pay advance for Denis, and a small suitcase for me. The suitcase was packed with good quality second-hand clothes for the children, a few essentials like soaps and toothpaste, and a few morale-boosting luxuries including cigarettes, stockings and cosmetics. Fremantle was receiving quite a number of displaced Navy wives from Singapore and the Far East, and the RAN Women’s Auxiliary had developed a very useful rescue package.
We drank tea in the pokey hotel lounge while the boys scribbled busily on their drawing pads, and then Rye drew a brown manila envelope from his pocket. ‘Orders from Naval Officer in Charge Western Australia, Denis. I can tell you what’s in them because I drafted them. You are to join me as an Intelligence Officer on Admiral Collins’ staff here at HMAS Leeuwin.’
‘Who is the Senior IO?’ Denis asked, and Rye grinned a little self-deprecatingly.
‘I am he, old son. A humble lieutenant like yourself. I’m afraid they don’t rate Naval Intelligence fellows too highly in this part of the world.’
Denis got up and shook his hand. ‘Glad to join you, sir.’
I couldn’t have happier to hear this news. HMAS Leeuwin was the shore depot at nearby Fremantle. Until he was posted elsewhere, Denis could live with us at Bicton and go to work each day, just like a normal husband.
When we’d finished our tea, Rye took us for a drive in his Humber, or rather the young WRAN driver did while Rye lounged beside her, leaning over the seat to point out the sights. We drove along a highway that skirted the Swan River, stopped for a while in Perth while I did a little shopping, and had an early dinner on the terrace of an open-air café in Kings Park. When he dropped us back at the hotel, Rye gave us one last gift. It was a couple of little silver-plated spoons embossed with the Perth crest, which he had picked up at a tourist kiosk next door to the café in Kings Park. ‘Just something to say welcome to Australia,’ he said almost shyly. ‘Only worth a few bob but if you collect trinkets it will remind you how welcome you are here.’
We moved into our Bicton home a week later, and quite suddenly I became a suburban Australian housewife, seeing my husband off to work on the seven thirty bus, doing the shopping at the corner store, and whitening the family’s clothes in the wash with Reckitt’s Blue. Denis was suddenly a working husband, spending the day at Leeuwin and coming home each night to water the garden and help with dinner. Every payday he would count out his pay on the kitchen table, then give me my housekeeping before putting the rent and the electricity money aside in jars we kept on a shelf above the stove. ‘No champagne this week, Norma,’ he’d say with a wry smile, or ‘I’m afraid you can forget caviar for Sunday dinner, my dear.’
The humdrum nature of our life was comforting and, as I had no idea how long it would last, I clung to its routine with gratitude. I began to sleep again, long, dreamless sleeps from which I would wake refreshed. I resumed my passion for reading, joining the local library and borrowing up to half a dozen books a fortnight. Every day after lunch I’d tuck myself into a rather battered cane chair in our sunny sleep-out, and read solidly while the boys had their rest and the sprinkler chipped away on our lawn outside the open glass louvres. My reading was quite catholic. As well as all my old favourites I read and learned to appreciate Australian authors new to me: Miles Franklin, Frank Davison, Aeneas Gunn, Vance Palmer, Eleanor Dark and Ion Idriess. I was particularly captured by Eleanor Dark and Ion Idriess, whose robust tales were of the great red heart of Australia and its tangled tropical north.
Although by this time my pregnancy was well advanced, I was feeling wonderful and there had been no complications. To keep fit and mobile, I’d been taking walks with Denis in the evenings, and swimming with him at Cottesloe Beach on the weekends, provided the seas were not too rough. We’d bathe the boys in the shallows, then set them to building sandcastles while we swam out past the breakers, where we’d tread water, looking back at the golden beach and the towering Norfolk pines.
‘Happy?’ Denis had asked on one of these occasions. I’d thought about it carefully, then nodded slowly so that my chin dipped into the blue water. I was happy, but it was a conditional happiness. I was happy because Denis was with me every day and every night, but I knew with certainty that as soon as duty took him away demons would swarm around me. The demons of regret that so much was lost. Demons of guilt that we were alive and so many dear to us were dead. And the worst demon of all – the fear that Denis would be killed and I would be left alone in an unfamiliar, alien world.
I tried to push these dark thoughts away but the birth of our daughter in mid-April unexpectedly rekindled them. Unexpectedly, because April is a lovely month to give birth and Frances was a lovely baby. In April, the long hot days of summer have passed, and while it is not yet cold the first rains have settled the dust, and brought the local trees and flowers back to life. Frances was a beautiful baby from the moment she was born, but when I held her for the first time I thought of Catherine’s little April, and the dream I had of our two babies growing up together. Despite my joy I felt a small sharp splinter of pain as I gazed mistily through the French doors of my hospital room to the flower-filled garden beyond.
Looking at those beautiful late summer blooms, I made a promise to myself. If ever I had a garden of my own again, I would plant a bed of roses in memory of Catherine. I was quite sure she was dead. I’d seen the look of utter despair in her eyes on that last awful afternoon. A look that told me so clearly that all she wanted was to be with Robert and April.
I remained at the Tresillian Hospital for a fortnight – they regarded confinement seriously in those days – but of course I had to come home eventually. And I found that looking after three children was a lot harder than looking after two, particularly when one of them was a baby. Frances was a very active baby, with a mind of her own and lungs as strong as a smithy’s leather bellows. I was quite unused to being awake all night, then having to cope with small children all day, and within a week I was a complete wreck.
It was during this first hectic week that I was woken by an insistent knocking at the front door. I was not expecting visitors and, with the boys having an afternoon nap and Frances thankfully asleep, I had taken advantage of the unexpected peace and quiet to have a rest myself. Grabbing a comb, I ran it through my unruly hair and straightened my crumpled dress as I made my way to the front of the house. When I saw who it was, my breath caught in my throat – standing on the doorstep, beyond the screen door, was Gabrielle Lyon, her baby asleep in her arms.
As usual, Gabrielle looked very chic, in the way only a Frenchwoman can look, and even as the smile broke on my lips I tugged again at my wrinkled skirt and cursed the fact that my hair must look a mess. ‘Oh, how absolutely wonderful!’ I exclaimed, and then looked beyond her, but there was no lithe, grinning Ivan in tow. ‘Come in, Gabrielle. I’ve little to offer but I know you like tea, and there’s lots of that.’
We sat in the kitchen, chatting in low tones because of the children, sipping Bushell’s tea and nibbling Arnott’s biscuits. I cradled Gabrielle’s baby, Clive, in my arms as we talked, and could not help noticing the similarity to his father. I wanted so much to ask where Ivan was but of course I could not. The likelihood – the overpowering likelihood – was that he was dead.
But Gabrielle raised the subject, and with a smile. ‘Ivan is fine, by the way. I’ve just heard that he is alive and well – but he’s in India!’ The rush of joy I felt made me rise to my feet and bend over to give Gabrielle a kiss. ‘So there are still some of us about,’ I s
aid with a huge sigh of relief. ‘Tanya and Eugene also got away, so we are scattered but safe – at least for now.’
Then my relief suddenly left me, and tears formed under my lids. ‘Alec and Margaret are dead, you know,’ I said quietly, ‘and their two boys.’ I sat there, wrestling with my new-found fragility, and Gabrielle helped by sitting still and letting the moment pass.
We chatted for most of the afternoon. The boys woke and ran riot, I had to feed Frances, and Clive had a tantrum when he was woken by the racket, but nothing spoilt our cheerful story-telling. There was so much to say, so much to learn.
‘I’m in Perth because Ivan got us a berth on the Narkunda,’ Gabrielle said. ‘He had no trouble getting tickets from the P&O office. Not only were they free, but at that stage the panic had not set in and the evacuation ships had hardly any passengers. I didn’t know a soul in Perth when I arrived, but Ivan had crewed a ketch to northern Australian before the war and had met quite a few people. One of the families he met, the de Pledges, own a big cattle station up near Onslow, but they were spending the summer in Perth to escape the wet, and they kindly took us in. Australians are like that, I’ve found. Probably a bit rough-hewn, but with hearts of gold.’
‘So what are your plans?’ I asked.
Gabrielle gave a vivid Gallic grin. ‘What do you think, Norma? I am sailing for Colombo as soon as I can. Tom de Pledge is arranging a ship. Oh, I really, really can’t wait!’
In the Mouth of the Tiger Page 57
