Women and War

by Janet Tanner

  To sit in full view of Red and see his eyes burning hatred and the threat of revenge, to look away from him and feel his presence, his command, his power over her; she hated him for what he had done to Maggie’s man, despised the jealousy that had driven him to it and yet still was aware of the hypnotic attraction that had kept her with him for more than five years, even when he had made it clear, he would no longer allow her to sing in his clubs. More than once she was almost torn apart by the overwhelming desire to run to him even now, to throw her arms around his powerful frame, to beg him to forgive her. She longed to touch his face, so expressionless it might have been carved in stone, run her fingers over the hard bunched muscles in his back and shoulders that rippled through the silk of his handmade shirt. And then she would remember Jack, whose only crime was to love Maggie, the lifeblood pouring out of him as he lay dying in a Sydney gutter, and the hatred would return, so fierce it took her breath away, so searing that her body burned with the agony of it. Jack had died because of her, Tara, because she had deceived this monster. She did not think she would ever forgive either of them.

  Yet even at the end Red had held in his hands the power to draw one more emotion from her – total blind terror. It had come when the judge had passed sentence with the stern words: ‘For the sake of this whole community I feel it is my duty to make certain you are removed to a place of detention for a very long time.’

  Tears had blurred her eyes suddenly so that she did not see the guards moving in to take Red away, did not see him move forward. Then his voice had filled the court room and she had raised her eyes to see him looking directly at her, fists clenched threateningly.

  ‘Watch out for yourself, Tara. I’ll get you for this. Don’t think there is anywhere you can hide away from me. If it takes the rest of my life I’ll make you sorry for the day you did this to Red Maloney!’

  It was a moment of pure melodrama. The next day the newspapers were full of it. ‘Gangland boss threatens former Moll’ read one banner headline. If Tara had not been so shocked and afraid she might have laughed. As it was she had no energy left for anything but fear.

  ‘An idle threat,’ the police told her. ‘He’s safely behind bars. He can’t harm you now.’

  Tara knew better. Red would not make idle threats and Red would not forgive. In prison or out he would find a way. And if he was set upon revenge, one way or another he would have it.

  Where could she go where Red would not find her? He had friends everywhere; his power was enormous.

  Mentally Tara drew a map of the continent, picturing the wild and desolate outbacks and deserts where no clubs and sly grog shops were to be found and no racketeer or gangster could live a life of luxury on the strength of his ill-gotten gains. A possibility. But sure, I could never survive in the wilds, Tara thought in panic. I’m a city person. I need people and buildings around me.

  Darwin. It came to her in a flash of inspiration. Darwin – frontier town of the wild and untamed Northern Territory. Darwin – outpost of Australia. Perhaps she would be safe there.

  With no thought in her head beyond escaping Red’s vengeance, no thought of what she would do when she got there, Tara fled.

  ACT II

  Chapter One

  Alys Peterson zipped up her Red Cross uniform skirt, neatened her tailored blouse and went out onto the louvred veranda of the spacious clifftop house where James and Sylvia Crawford were at breakfast.

  It was a beautiful February morning. Later, the heat haze would close in and the rain begin to fall in a steamy suffocating cloud as it did each day in this season of the year, but as yet the sky was clear and the sea was an unbroken band of broad blue below the scarlet-leaved crotons and banana palms, vibrant bougainvillaea and fragrant frangipani that rioted along the edge of the clifftop.

  Alys breathed in the perfumed air and felt she breathed contentment with it. She loved this place and it had repaid her by working a miracle in her life. When she had arrived here three years ago she had believed she had been sent to the last place on God’s earth and she had not cared. Race was dead. Her child was dead. It no longer mattered to her where she was or even whether she herself lived or died. She had woken each morning to a well of misery so deep that not even the miseries of the steamy hot Darwin climate or the fact that a continent separated her from everything and everyone she had ever loved could make things worse.

  And then slowly, subtly, things had begun to change. Sylvia had had much to do with it, she knew. Sylvia who, although she never probed or asked awkward questions, seemed to understand so well. In her brisk no-nonsense way she had set about encouraging Alys to take an interest in life again and she had unerringly selected as a starting point the very thing which Alys found irresistible.

  ‘You’re a very good driver – if you were to learn vehicle maintenance you could be very useful to us,’ Sylvia had said and there was no hint of either sympathy or reproof in her voice, only that enthusiasm and energy which she had brought to everything she did.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Alys had asked. In all her life no one had ever before suggested she might be useful.

  ‘There is a war coming. Heaven knows it may be soon. And when it does come we shall need every able pair of hands we can get. You can drive an ambulance for us Alys.’

  ‘Oh!’ Alys had been too surprised to say anything else. She knew, of course, that Sylvia was one of the mainstays of the Red Cross here in Darwin – in fact her whole life seemed to revolve around it. But it had never occurred to her that she might become involved herself. ‘ I don’t know anything about First Aid,’ she said lamely.

  ‘You can soon learn,’ Sylvia said briskly. ‘That will be a damn sight easier than me trying to teach one of my nurses to drive. And it will do you good. No sense moping around here by yourself all day.’

  Alys had taken the bait unenthusiastically at first then with growing interest. For so long she had been aware of a lack of purpose in her life, now suddenly she had found one. As Sylvia bullied and chivvied her into shape she found herself marvelling that this busy little woman could ever have been a friend of her mother’s – in attitude and lifestyle they were light years apart. Where Frances had expected ladylike decorum, Sylvia demanded devotion to duty and a willingness to roll up her sleeves, literally as well as metaphorically; where Frances had tried to rein her into a tight narrow well-ordered world, Sylvia opened new horizons.

  For the first time in her life Alys found herself looking forward to each day as a challenge. The pain of Race’s death and the loss of her baby were still there but she no longer had so much time to think about them. And as her new life helped to mend her broken heart and set her new goals, Alys found that she was falling in love with this strange wild frontier town. She loved the feeling of space and lack of convention, loved having the sea spread out at her front door and the wild wide desert of outback at the rear. She loved the sneaky treacherous way that golden sand turned to muddy mangrove flats, loved the smell of the pure salt air that sometimes carried on it a sharp whiff from the iron ore loading jetty or the bitumen plant, loved the rioting tropical greenery and the huge spreading banyan trees. She loved it so much she felt she never wanted to leave it – even when the war that Sylvia had predicted had become reality and letters began to arrive from Frances urging her to come home.

  ‘My dear Alys, I am so worried about you,’ Frances wrote. ‘ I cannot sleep for worrying and your father is afraid I shall make myself ill. Sylvia means well I know, keeping you occupied, but she doesn’t understand you are not used to that sort of thing. She is hardy – she always was – while you … Please Alys, do as your mother asks and come home immediately.’

  Alys had tucked the letter away in her handkerchief drawer with a wry smile: It was not Sylvia who failed to understand her, she thought. The Red Cross was busier than ever and she was enjoying the sense of urgent purpose which filled her days. Besides the war seemed so far away, in France and Belgium, Syria and Egypt. What on earth was
there for her mother to worry about? But then Frances would always worry – and advertise the fact if she thought it would help her to get her own way.

  As the months passed the letters from home became more urgent and in spite of herself Alys was forced to admit that perhaps there was after all something in what Frances had to say. The war that had seemed so distant was creeping inexorably closer and daily it seemed the news grew ever more grave. Half of the cream of Australia’s troops in Crete had been safely evacuated after fighting a brave but losing battle – what had become of the other half? HMAS Sydney, pride of the Australian fleet, was sunk and all aboard her lost – all those gallant young men who had so recently marched with pride in their tropical white uniforms through the streets of the city for which their ship had been named. And then Japan was involved and the world rocked to the news that her planes had decimated the US fleet in Pearl Harbor and attacked Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines. When that happened a telegram had been delivered to the clifftop house in Darwin: Come home at once stop Frantic with worry stop Mother.

  Again Alys had smiled, perhaps more because for the first time in her life she was beyond the reach of her mother’s jurisdiction rather than from amusement. But six days later she had stopped smiling.

  She had been in the cinema that evening, Tom Harris’s Star Theatre, known locally as Tomaris’s Place, watching a gangster film, when the air raid siren had begun to wail, louder even than the gunfire and sounds of a car chase on screen. She had scrambled out into the hot dark night almost unable to believe the impossible was happening yet swept along by the panicking crowds who had appeared on the streets – the entire audience of the cinema, swarms of Chinese from the gambling dens and dives of Cavenagh Street, families who had fled from their homes – all making for the only place that might be safe from the threat of Japanese bombs, the beach beneath the protective shelter of the high cliffs. With them she had spent an uncomfortable couple of hours plagued by the mosquitos and sandflies who hovered in constantly moving clouds above the warm sand until it became clear that no Japanese planes would come tonight. But with the relief had come a new and frightening realization – tonight the siren had sounded a false alarm. Next time it might not. Next time it could be for real.

  Alys was not the only one to see that what had seemed like an empty threat could be on the point of becoming reality. Next day the evacuations began, evacuations that had been planned for many months by the administration and zone wardens for just such an eventuality. Women and children were ordered out of Darwin, leaving by road and by sea, some unwillingly, some only too anxious to escape the vulnerable north coast.

  But Alys had resisted. For one thing she was needed here – and was not Aunt Sylvia too insisting that she remain for exactly the same reasons? For another she was unwilling to leave the scene of action. Afraid and uncomfortable as she might have been that night on the dark beach, she had also felt strangely alive, the vibrancy of fear awakening in her new and exciting sensations. Never before had she been on a knife edge of danger; it was an exhilarating experience. To leave now and run for the safety and claustrophobic boredom of home was not what Alys wanted.

  During the weeks that followed that first air raid warning Darwin took on the appearance of a town under siege. Barbed wire entanglements appeared on the beach, concrete machine gun emplacements were built and armed, the streets, almost cleared now of civilians, thronged with soldiers. Fresh food and liquor were in short supply; petrol became as valuable as liquid gold. And the letters from Melbourne became more frequent and more insistent than before, in spite of the fact that Alys had written home stating that she had every intention of remaining until she was forcibly carried out.

  This morning as she crossed to the breakfast table where the Crawfords were already seated she saw there was another one – but this time it had been addressed not to her but to Uncle James. The pages covered with her mother’s unmistakable hand were spread out across this morning paper and as Alys approached he riffled them together and looked up at her over the rim of his gold-framed spectacles.

  ‘Morning, Alys. Your mother has been writing to me again. She is very concerned about you, you know.’ Alys helped herself to a piece of toast.

  ‘I wish she would stop worrying. I have explained to her that I am needed here. But Mummy can be extremely obtuse when she chooses.’

  James Crawford hid a wry smile. He had spent his life, he thought, wrestling with deliberately obtuse women. At the Darwin branch of the United Bank of Australia where he was manager he was thought of by his clients and staff alike as a man to be reckoned with but in his own home …

  ‘I happen to think she is right.’ James settled himself back in his chair, dabbing at his military-style moustache with a damask napkin. ‘Darwin is no place for women just now.’

  ‘Oh do stop nagging, James!’ Sylvia Crawford said with a touch of impatience. She was a daunting woman in her own right, features sharp and clear in a face still smooth in spite of having survived almost fifty Australian summers, pepper and salt hair curling irrepressibly from the kirby grips which attempted to tame it. ‘Alys is needed. She is the only girl here who can drive the Red Cross ambulance – and she is a great help with the police canteen too. If she went I don’t know how I should manage.’

  James Crawford sighed and poured himself more coffee.

  ‘Alys’mother and I are not alone in thinking Darwin is a dangerous place to be,’ he said testily. ‘The administration have deemed it sensible to evacuate women and children. It’s almost two months now since the order and most people have had the sense to obey it.’

  Sylvia snorted, an explosion which somehow still managed to sound ladylike. ‘ What order? Oh, they’ve tried to get us out, but you know as well as I do they have no real power. Just let one of those jumped-up wardens try to force me to evacuate. I’d soon send him packing!’

  ‘And no doubt you have already done just that,’ James said drily. ‘I know you are an impossible woman, Sylvia. I’ve learned that to my cost in the thirty years since I married you. But, because you are determined to stay here and get yourself killed, it’s no reason to encourage Alys to do the same. We have been lucky so far. But it can’t last. I think Alys should go immediately.’

  ‘Just because of my mother’s letter, I suppose,’ Alys said biting into her toast.

  ‘No. Not just because of that.’ He moved the letter aside and tapped the newspaper. ‘Singapore has fallen now. Singapore – the one place everyone thought was impregnable. Now it will be only a matter of time before Australia is attacked – and Darwin is right in the front line.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks,’ Sylvia said briskly.

  ‘Have you taken a look at the harbour this morning?’ James demanded, waving at the panoramic view laid out beneath them. ‘Can’t you see all those ships?’

  ‘The harbour is always full of ships. That’s what it’s for.’

  Not like that. There must be close on forty of them – corvettes, sloops, tankers, a minesweeper. There’s even a hospital ship. Look, you can see its red cross.’

  ‘Which reminds me that I have work to do.’ Sylvia stood up smoothing her uniform skirt which had wriggled into a web of horizontal creases across the widest part of her plump thighs. ‘We have a consignment of comforts to get to that ship, Alys.’

  James brought his fist down sharply onto the table making the china rattle.

  ‘Will you listen to what I am saying, woman! Amongst those ships is a convoy of transports. It was on its way to reinforce Timor but the Jap bombers drove it back. It came running back here for safety. I heard about it at the Club Hotel last night. Now look, if the Japs have followed it in they might have another crack at it here in Darwin. If they can do it in Pearl Harbor, they can do it here.’

  ‘Sometimes, James, you sound exactly like an old woman,’ Sylvia said calmly. ‘Are you ready, Alys? Let’s get your ambulance on the road.’

  ‘Yes, I’m ready.’ Alys stood up too,
pausing to drop a kiss on James’ sandy head. ‘Don’t worry, Uncle. We’ll be all right. And you are still here, after all, aren’t you?’

  James watched them go and sighed. He had done what he could. Short of ordering the army to cart them away there was no more he could do. Well, very likely they would be safe enough. Pity the Jap who thought he could take on the pair of them!

  With a small shake of his head he returned to his paper. At the top in black ink the date stood out clearly.

  February 18th, 1942.

  Chapter Two

  The kitchen of the Savalis’ Darwin boarding house was stiflingly hot in spite of the lateness of the hour and the large twirling ceiling fan. The heat emanated in waves from the big old range and to a lesser degree from the central lamp, bounced off the shutters, firmly closed to enforce the blackout, and wafted in to join that central pool of suffocating air which moved slowly up, stratum by stratum, to be dispersed temporarily by the fan and begin the same inevitable round again.

  At the range Tara Kelly was stiring gravy in a large cast iron frying pan. Perspiration was trickling in small steady rivulets down her neck and her hair, usually a mass of tight springy curls, felt damp against her hot face. Irritably she raised a hand to brush it away and the pan, no longer steadied against the violent rotations of her wooden spoon, slopped thick floury-looking liquid onto the range where it spat and bubbled for a moment before congealing into an evil-looking crust.

  ‘Damn,’ said Tara.