Beneath the Southern Cross

by Judy Nunn

  Billy Kendall was one of the thousands who attended the rally, as many a returned serviceman did. Men in uniform were prominent amongst the crowd, soldiers on crutches, or blind, or missing an arm. Many wondered which way such soldiers would vote.

  Up on the platform the opening speaker was delivering a stirring speech. Beside him stood fellow Labor Party members and those waiting to lend their voices to the cause. A representative from the Women’s Peace Army was present, her placard reading: ‘A vote against conscription is a vote for peace!’

  But not all the women amongst the crowd were there to lend their support. A large group had banded together to oppose the rally, and they were shaking their fists up at the platform. ‘Shame!’ they were yelling. ‘Our boys need help! Shame on you!’

  ‘I lost two sons!’ one woman was bellowing angrily at the top of her voice. ‘Why should my boys cop it while others stay home?’

  Billy recognised the voice. He couldn’t see through the crowd to the group of hecklers, but it was Nellie Putman all right. It was her constant theme these days. If she had to give up her two boys, then other women should risk losing theirs. Like the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ of women who were dedicated to forcing men into the army, Nellie had become quite a monster. She would accost any physically fit-looking man she saw in the streets. ‘Get into uniform!’ she’d demand. ‘Be a man, go and fight for your country!’

  As Billy forced his way through the crowd he heard the cries of the women Nellie was whipping into a frenzy. ‘I lost my husband’, ‘I lost my brother’, and even a young girl’s voice, ‘My father died at Gallipoli.’

  He had to get away, he couldn’t breathe. He’d cut through Woolloomooloo. More and more people were pouring into the Domain from every direction, he’d head home through the backstreets.

  Billy breathed a sigh of relief as, the worst of the crowd behind him, he started down the hill. Amongst the many who were walking up from Woolloomooloo to the rally, he glimpsed a face he knew. He turned away quickly before she saw him, and when he was sure she was safely past, he turned once again and watched her disappear into the crowd. It was Kathleen O’Shea.

  Billy hadn’t seen Kathleen since the visit he’d paid her shortly after his return from the front. Two months ago now. He’d wanted to offer his sympathy. To Otto De Haan too, whom he’d never met. A tragic thing, both Kathleen and Otto losing their only sons. But then it was a tale all too common these days. Billy knew one family who had lost all three of their sons.

  She hadn’t recognised him at first, then it had slowly dawned. ‘Billy Kendall?’

  She’s as beautiful as ever, he thought. She would have had to have been over forty, but even the dark circles of grief beneath her eyes couldn’t mar her beauty. He wanted to embrace her. He’d always been a bit in love with Kathleen O’Shea, but then, he supposed, what man wouldn’t be?

  Kathleen put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek, horrified at how much he’d aged. He couldn’t be more than thirty-one, thirty-two, and yet he looked fifty.

  ‘Come in, Billy, come in, come in.’ She ushered him into the front room and sat him on the sofa. ‘I’ll put the kettle on and fetch Otto. You haven’t met my husband, have you?’

  ‘No. I’ve heard a lot about him though. From …’ he gave a quick jerk of his head which seemed to indicate the war was just behind him, ‘… from over there.’ They both knew that he meant from Johann.

  Kathleen nodded. ‘I’ll fetch him, he’s just home from church.’

  Aggie was in the kitchen, rocking baby Caroline’s cradle, and as Kathleen walked through to the porch she asked, ‘Would you put the kettle on for me, Aggie? We have a visitor.’ Out on the back porch she said to Otto, ‘Billy Kendall’s come to see us.’ He didn’t appear to hear her. ‘He’s young Tim Kendall’s uncle,’ she explained.

  Otto nodded vaguely, still staring into space, as he did so often lately.

  ‘He knew Johann and Robbie,’ Kathleen prompted. ‘He’s just come home from the front.’

  ‘Oh.’ Otto put his arm around his wife as he rose. ‘I am sorry, I do not mean to be rude.’

  ‘I know. Come in and say hello.’

  Billy jumped to his feet as they appeared, and Kathleen made the introductions. When Otto extended his right hand, Billy clumsily shook it with his left, and it was only then that they realised.

  ‘Oh Billy,’ Kathleen said, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.’ The cuff of his right sleeve was neatly tucked into his jacket pocket and she’d not noticed that the pocket was flat.

  Billy loathed introductions. Daily he cursed the fact that he’d lost his right hand and not his left. If it had been his left, he might have been able to talk to people for a while before embarrassing them, or seeing pity in their eyes. For a while he might have been normal, just like them.

  ‘It’s only the hand,’ he said. ‘They took it off at the wrist, I’ve got the rest of the arm.’ It would only have been two fingers, the doctor had said, if they’d got him to the field hospital quicker. But he’d been stuck out in no-man’s-land for two days and gangrene had set in. Just his luck.

  ‘Would have been better off losing the whole arm,’ he said with false bravado. ‘They pay better compensation for an arm.’

  He was clearly in a nervous state, talking too loudly, too quickly, and Kathleen tried to calm him. ‘It’s good to have you home, Billy. Sit down, please. Aggie’s getting us some tea.’

  Billy sat on the hardback chair beside the table, leaving the sofa for them, and fought to calm himself. He got the jitters a lot lately. For no apparent reason he’d get jumpy and tense. He hoped he wasn’t about to have one of his turns.

  ‘I wanted to offer my sympathy,’ he said. ‘To you both.’

  Otto nodded, and Kathleen said, ‘Thank you’, and Billy wasn’t sure what to say next. ‘Johann spoke about you a lot, Mr De Haan.’

  ‘Otto, please.’

  ‘Otto. He was a good soldier, Johann was. Popular too. You would have been very proud of him.’

  ‘I am. Thank you.’ Otto’s reply was brief but his gratitude was evident.

  There was an awkward pause before Otto rose saying, ‘I go to help Aggie with the tea.’

  When he’d gone, Kathleen asked, ‘And Robbie? How was Robbie when you saw him?’ She wanted to ask how he’d died, whether it was quick, whether he was in pain, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know whether she’d be able to bear the answer.

  Billy knew exactly what she was asking. ‘Robbie handled the war pretty well,’ he said, hedging. ‘Both him and Tim. Strong young blokes. Good mates too, just like when they were kids.’ Her eyes still begged the question. ‘I wasn’t with him when it happened, Kathleen.’

  ‘Ah.’ She looked away, both disappointed and relieved.

  ‘Tim was, though. It was Tim who told me that Robbie had been killed, when he visited me at the field hospital. It was about the same time as …’ Billy gestured at his missing hand.

  ‘Was it quick?’ Kathleen had blurted it out before she could stop herself.

  Billy felt a surge of anger. What did the woman expect him to say? ‘No, your son lay in the stinking mud for days, helpless, in agony, listening to death rattling in the throats of his nearby mates, knowing it’d be his throat rattling next?’

  Billy didn’t actually know how Robbie had died, Tim had not gone into detail. ‘You just get yourself better, mate,’ that’s all Tim had said when he’d asked. But no death on the boggy battlefields of France was pretty. What the hell was he expected to say?

  Tears glistened in Kathleen’s eyes. She was holding her breath, Billy was sure, and he could see the artery in the side of her neck throbbing.

  ‘Yep,’ he said brusquely. ‘It was quick. That’s what Tim told me. “Robbie never even knew what hit him”, they were Tim’s exact words.’

  Brutal as they were, those were words Kathleen was longing to hear, and she put her hands over her face, surrendering to the tears of relief whic
h rolled down her cheeks.

  Billy himself was not lying, but he believed that Tim had been. Why should he have to lie? Why should any of them have to lie? Countless men were dying hideous deaths and all people wanted were lies. Then Kathleen looked up at him and whispered, ‘Thank you’, and the anger drained from Billy to be replaced by an overwhelming despair. It was the deaths not the lies that were wrong.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Billy?’ Kathleen leaned forward and put a hand on his knee.

  Billy rose from his chair, agitated. ‘This killing, it has to stop.’ The images crowded his brain as they always did when he was about to have one of his attacks. There wasn’t enough room in his brain for all those mutilated bodies. He tried to will them away but they kept pouring in. ‘It has to stop,’ he said over and over, ‘it has to stop.’

  ‘Billy, please. Sit down. Please. I’ll get you a glass of water.’

  She ushered him back to the chair, her arm was firmly around him. Briefly, Billy regained his senses. ‘I’m sorry, Kathleen. I’m fine. I’m fine.’ Any minute the images would be back, he had to get out before he made a scene. ‘Yes, I’d like a glass of water, thank you.’

  The moment she had disappeared into the kitchen, Billy had dived for the door. He had to get home. Kathleen mustn’t see him having one of his turns. No-one, least of all Kathleen, must be witness to his humiliation.

  Billy’s head was throbbing now as he watched her disappear into the crowds at the rally, her huge husband by her side. He would have liked to have said hello and to have apologised for his rudeness in disappearing that day. But he didn’t dare, not with his head throbbing the way it was. A headache like this was precursor to an attack; he must get home to Marge.

  When he got home he knew what would happen. He would bawl and blub like a baby and Marge would cradle him in her arms and rock him to and fro until the sobbing subsided and he was left drained and exhausted. Then he’d hate himself for his weakness, and he’d hate Marge for having witnessed it and, no matter how many times she told him that she loved him and that it didn’t matter, Billy would remain convinced that his wife must surely despise him.

  By the time Kathleen and Otto had fought through the crowds to a vantage point from which they could see the official platform, the speaker from the Women’s Peace Army was addressing the rally.

  ‘A vote against conscription is a vote for peace,’ Susan Kendle proclaimed. Nellie Putman and her band of women booed loudly, but Susan ignored them. ‘We must not send more of our men to their slaughter!’ Through the megaphone, her voice rang out clearly across the expanse of the Domain. ‘We should be bringing them home, not sending them to their deaths!’

  Susan was walking a fine line. There were many present who, despite being anticonscription, were not antiwar, and there were mutterings of disapproval from many amongst the crowd. Kathleen, however, strongly agreed with the woman. At the outset she’d tried to convince herself that Robbie was risking his life for a noble cause, and she’d done what she could to make herself feel useful, collecting for the War Chest fund and joining one of the innumerable sewing and knitting circles which provided clothing for the troops.

  Before Robbie’s death, Kathleen had found the work fulfilling. The knowledge that, in her own way, she was serving her country had made her feel closer to her son. But although she worked even harder after his death, joining the Red Cross Society whose contribution was paramount to the war effort, she no longer believed that she was serving her country. She worked in order to distract herself. She no longer believed in the war.

  The woman was right, Kathleen thought, and she wanted to applaud both her views and her boldness. She had never before thought to enquire about the woman’s name, now she wanted to know. She edged her way through to one of the nearby policemen.

  ‘Who is the speaker?’ she yelled above the din.

  ‘Susan Kendle,’ the policeman yelled back. ‘A troublemaker.’ The police regarded Susan as an agitator with the potential to incite a riot. ‘You’d think at her age and with her money she’d have something better to do with her time, wouldn’t you?’

  Kathleen stared at the policeman. ‘Kendle?’ she asked.

  ‘Kendle and Streatham,’ he shouted louder over the babble of the crowd. ‘Her old daddy’s a millionaire.’

  Kathleen edged her way back to Otto. Susan Kendle. Good heavens above. All these years she had been admiring Charles Kendle’s daughter. What would Paddy O’Shea have to say about that?

  Kathleen had been eighteen when her father had died and, like her mother, she was convinced that Charles Kendle had killed him. ‘Or if not,’ Dotty had always insisted, ‘he ordered it done.’

  The crowd was starting to get angry. Several people were pushing and shoving at the platform, which was rocking dangerously; the policemen were disengaging their batons and calling for order. Otto took Kathleen’s arm.

  The sins of the fathers, Kathleen thought, and she looked back over her shoulder as Otto protectively cleared a way for her through the mob. All so much water under the bridge now.

  ‘Stop the killing on the Western Front!’ Susan bellowed. Fist raised, she continued to denounce the war, even as the police moved in.

  Kathleen thought she’d like to meet Susan Kendle one day. Not to talk of the past—the woman wouldn’t even know who she was—but to tell Susan Kendle that she was right. Right in every word she said. It was a senseless war.

  On 28 October, 1916, 1,160,033 Australians voted against conscription and 1,087,557 voted for. Soldiers, including those on active service, voted 72,399 for conscription and 58,894 against.

  The immediate result of the referendum was a split in the Labor Party. Prime Minister Billy Hughes stormed out of a Labor parliamentary meeting exclaiming ‘let all who support me follow me’, and twenty-three of the sixty-five members did.

  Abandoning his past allies, Hughes formed a new party, the National Labor Party, a coalition of his followers and his former political opponents, and, in 1917, the National Labor Party came into power. In December of that year, the indomitable and dogmatic Hughes forced yet another conscription referendum upon the people.

  The Commonwealth Government issued lurid posters portraying the ‘Hun’ as a bestial creature who, if he was not shooting soldiers, was murdering grandmothers and babies. The press, too, hounded the people. ‘Remember,’ the newspapers said, ‘that every No vote is a vote to dishonour Australia, a vote to tarnish the glory that has been won by the Anzacs.’

  But, as they had done the previous year, a majority of Australians voted no. And, thistime, not only because they wished for freedom of choice; it was nearly 1918 and Australia was thoroughly war-weary.

  Kathleen knew there was something going on. She’d known ever since the New Year’s Eve party down at the docks.

  ‘You’re not going out again,’ she said. Aggie had been out every Saturday night for the past three months.

  ‘Just a gang of us going to the dance hall,’ she answered petulantly. ‘I’m allowed to have a bit of fun, aren’t I?’

  But Kathleen knew Aggie wasn’t going to the dance hall. The dance hall didn’t sell grog. Neither did the pubs for that matter, not at night any more. That was another change the war had brought about. Early closing. The ‘sixo’clock swill’ now saw workers head from their offices and factories straight to the pubs to pour as much alcohol down their throats as they could and then stagger home well before the sun had set. So how come Aggie was getting in after ten o’clock, the worse for wear and stinking of cheap grog?

  Kathleen had caught her out twice. ‘Just a little drink at a friend’s place’ had been the girl’s defensive response, but Kathleen had known better. And the other times, when Aggie’s heavy-footed clumping in the downstairs rooms had woken her, Kathleen had known that the girl was drunk again.

  So when Aggie brazenly said she was leaving, Kathleen was not at all surprised.

  ‘You’ve met someone,’ she said. It was not a que
stion.

  ‘What if I have?’ Aggie’s tone was belligerent. ‘Why should I pretend to be a widow for the rest of my life? We weren’t even married, when all’s said and done.’

  Kathleen bent over the large tin tub on the back porch table and concentrated on the washing. As usual Aggie had been careful with her timing, she thought as she scrubbed at the heels of Otto’s woollen socks. Sunday morning, Otto was at church. Aggie was scared of Otto.

  ‘So where are you going?’ she asked, trying to sound indifferent. The prospect of Aggiedisappearing from her life was neither here nor there, but her heart pounded at the thought of losing Robbie’s child. She looked at little Caroline playing in the small courtyard with the wooden building bricks Otto had made for her. The little girl was two and a half years old now, a good-natured child, happy in her own company, and Kathleen adored her.

  ‘He loves me.’ Aggie’s pert chin was tilted defiantly, as if she dared Kathleen to differ. ‘He wants to marry me.’

  ‘I’m sure he does and I hope you’ll be happy.’ Kathleen squeezed the socks dry, dumped them into the wicker basket and started on the collar of one of Otto’s work shirts. ‘So where are you going?’

  ‘He’s got a good job too, he works at Vicars Woollen Mills.’

  ‘You’ll be living in Sydney then,’ Kathleen said, relieved. Vicars Woollen Mills was in Marrickville.

  ‘Yes. Near the factory.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, I’ll be able to visit Caroline.’ Kathleen relaxed. ‘And when she gets bigger she can come and see me,’ she said, squeezing Otto’s shirt dry and placing it in the wicker basket with the rest of the washing.

  ‘Leo doesn’t want the baby.’

  Kathleen had picked up the tub of dirty washing water and was about to tip it down the drain beside the porch. Now she stood embracing the tub and stared disbelievingly at Aggie.

  Aggie had anticipated Kathleen’s contempt. She’d even considered leaving without telling her, but she had a begrudging respect for the older woman and she wanted Kathleen to understand. ‘Men don’t want a woman with a child,’ she said.