The Land Girls

by Victoria Purman

  ‘There’s three eggs from Mrs Jones on the sink.’ John sat up straighter, his voice a little brighter. ‘She dropped by today. She had a letter from her son and wanted to tell me all the news.’

  ‘How’s Robin going?’ Jack asked, a note of false cheer in his tone too.

  ‘He’s keeping well, she says. Staying out of trouble.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Flora said. ‘Nothing from Frank?’

  ‘Not today, Flora,’ John replied. ‘Not today.’

  While she knew the army had more important things to do than ensure letters home arrived in a timely fashion, they hadn’t received a letter from Frank for a month. She tried not to think about what it might mean.

  Flora went to the sink, pulled the blind and tugged the floral curtains closed against the approaching dark and the spying eyes of those enforcing blackout restrictions. Against those who presumed to make judgements about things they knew nothing about. Against those with white feathers. ‘Why don’t you both clean up? I’ll get supper going.’

  After vegetable soup and toast with boiled eggs for dinner, John moved into the living room to sit in his comfortable armchair and listen to 3UZ and the nightly discussions about the war. He liked the company there. On the mantelpiece above the coal grate there was a framed photograph of Frank wearing his khaki army uniform, its sleeves proudly bearing the insignia of his regiment. Next to it, her parents’ wedding photo, taken in 1910 and a permanent fixture there every day since.

  At the kitchen table, Flora sipped a cup of hot milk with Ovaltine, fighting her tiredness. She skimmed the headlines in the first few pages of The Age, trying not to take in too much detail about the war. Did knowing help at all with the worrying about what was happening overseas? And anyway, signs of it were everywhere she went in the city now. Melbourne had become the national headquarters of the Australian and American military, so the city—and the paper—could talk of nothing else. Shops advertised hamburgers and Coca-Cola to appeal to the thousands of Yanks at Camp Pell. Military cars and khaki lorries drove right through the centre of Melbourne and there seemed to be nowhere you could go without hearing an American accent. When the US troops had arrived in the months after Pearl Harbor, people in Melbourne were relieved. After the dark months of 1940, people knew that the English were too busy saving themselves to come to Australia’s aid, and all eyes had turned to the United States with their troops and planes and tanks to help protect Australia from invasion.

  But it wasn’t just up to the Americans. Everyone was now being asked to do their bit to defend the country, and not just men. Women were being called on too, to release fit men from routine tasks to increase the frontline strength of Australia’s fighting forces. Flora had seen the advertisements in the newspapers encouraging women that they could do a real job, ‘A man’s job!’

  She had so far been able to look away from those entreaties without feeling the call herself. She was thirty years old, and the army and the air force and the navy wanted younger women, those with a sense of adventure, those possessed with courage and bravery. They didn’t want women like Flora who’d spent the best part of the past fifteen years living a quiet life in Camberwell worrying over her father and brothers.

  Flora turned the pages of the newspaper, quickly flicking past the death notices until she reached the Women’s Section. She couldn’t even escape the war there. There was a call for more women doctors for the RAAF, and an article offering handy sewing patterns for the remodelling of clothes. It was better to make do and mend than use rations to buy new garments, it advised.

  A headline caught her eye: ‘More Leaders for the Land Army’.

  She lifted the paper so she could properly read the fine print. With paper in short supply, the print had become so small—and the brownouts made everything so dim—that she thought she might need glasses sooner rather than later. Land Army girls were going to orchards, flax mills and poultry farms. She remembered she’d seen a poster in the window of the post office on Burke Road. Her attention had been captured by the image of a young woman waving a pitchfork speared with wheat stalks, wearing a hat with a pin on the brim. She was smiling proudly in the sunshine with blue cloudless skies overhead.

  ‘Do you need a hand cleaning up?’

  She looked up to see Jack standing in the doorway.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.’ Flora folded the newspaper, put it on top of the icebox to save for the butchers on Saturday, and went to the sink. As it filled, she sprinkled soap flakes into the water and watched them bubble. Jack moved in next to her, on her right side so he could hear her with his left ear. One by one, she slowly washed each dish with a rag, her mind in a million places and none at all.

  They worked in silence, voices from the radiogram in the next room a muffled background noise. Jack stacked the bowls and bread-and-butter plates in the cupboard next to the ice chest. He was amiable company, always had been. She glanced sideways at him as he wiped. He’d been taller than her since the year their mother had died, when he’d turned twelve and Frank ten. They not only shared the same brown eyes, but the same light brown hair of their mother. Flora liked having something of her mother’s. She’d faded in Flora’s memory after so many years, her voice now only a whisper in her memory. She’d lost the taste of her scones and her homemade lemon butter and the warmth of her embrace. They had been a close family, still were, yet she and Jack had grown even closer since Frank had gone to war. Their mother’s premature death had already taught them that loved ones could be lost in the blink of an eye. They knew to hold on tight to each other.

  Flora swirled the suds in the sink and searched for the knives and spoons. ‘Did you read The Phantom today?’

  ‘The ghost who walks? Man who cannot die?’ Jack’s voice took on a dramatic tone.

  ‘Which evildoer is he vanquishing this month?’

  Jack laughed and Flora let herself feel happy for a moment, the gloom over the day’s events lifting just a little.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I’m all right, Flor,’ he said. ‘Really.’ He picked up a bread-and-butter plate and wiped it in a neat circular motion.

  ‘Let me be angry for you, if you can’t be angry for yourself.’

  He nudged her shoulder with his. ‘Spoken like a true big sister. I can’t say it doesn’t cut me up, make me think of the sacrifices Frank is making that I can’t, but what you said before? About people being ignorant and cruel but that we just have to keep to our own business? That’s what I’m doing. This isn’t the first time I’ve had looks from people, accusing me of skiving off.’ He shook his head, as if it might wish the thoughts and the memories away. ‘You see, Flor, my problem is and will always be that I look perfectly healthy on the outside. Tall. Strong. Bloody handsome, even.’

  Flora laughed, felt a swell of pride in her chest. She’d watched him grow and flourish and thrive, despite his hearing loss and the teasing and taunting he’d received because of it. She lifted her shoulder and pressed her face into the fabric, pretending it was a bubble from the sink she was wiping away and not a tear. ‘And don’t forget, humble too.’

  ‘No one can tell by looking at me that the hearing’s half gone.’

  ‘No, they can’t. Which is all the more reason for them to mind their own business. What makes me angry is … people should know better, that’s all, before they rush to judgement. Appearances can be deceiving.’

  ‘So they should, and if we could change the world, perhaps that’s where we’d start, hey? But let’s talk about something else. How was your day at the office?’

  ‘Oh, you know. The work never stops. Especially now.’ The discussion about the feather was over, but that didn’t mean she would forget it in a hurry. ‘I went for a walk at lunchtime. The sun was shining for a minute or two so I thought I’d take advantage. I went up to Bourke Street to stretch my legs, stared at the Myer windows and wished they were full of pretty dresses like they were before the war,
and then I hurried back to the office to eat my cheese sandwich at my desk. At afternoon smoko, I had to give one of the young girls a bit of a talking to. Norma. Pretty thing. She likes to talk. All the time.’

  Jack raised a brow. ‘Did you say pretty?’

  ‘Yes, she’s quite the dish. Blonde, almost white hair, and such a petite little thing. But sadly for you, Jack, she has a sweetheart. He’s a butcher’s apprentice, so he’s exempt too. We hear about him all day long. Endlessly. Apparently he makes a rather delicious mutton sausage.’ Flora rolled her eyes and Jack burst into laughter. She loved the sound of it, loved that she was able to make him laugh, that in the middle of a war there was still time for a joke.

  Flora stared into the soap suds, popping the bubbles between her slick fingers. She had tried very hard not to envy Norma her youth and her beauty and her luck. Sometimes, Flora felt as if she were the last one left at a game of musical chairs, although when the music finally stopped, she was left standing all alone with no prize.

  ‘I had to take young Norma aside and remind her about office etiquette. Mr McInerney prefers me to do the disciplining, you see. He thinks of the new girls like his granddaughters, he told me. Wants them all to adore him. What we both know is that if they’re unhappy with the work, he’ll lose them to something far more exciting that pays more, like the services or munitions factories.’

  Jack shook his head in disgust. ‘So he leaves you to do all his dirty work?’

  ‘I’m rather forbidding, apparently.’

  ‘You’re telling me.’

  Flora was, by a good ten years, the oldest woman in her office. One by one, each of the young girls had fallen in love, married and left, and it had become Flora’s responsibility to train up every new girl and supervise them, with not a shilling extra in her pay packet. Even the young male clerks continued to earn more than she did.

  ‘Flora?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  Jack hung the damp tea towel on the hook on the back of the kitchen door. ‘You’re off in the clouds again, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m tired, that’s all.’ She pulled the plug and the water gurgled down the drain. How self-indulgent it was to allow herself a moment to wallow over her life when Frank and thousands of other men and women were putting theirs at risk. Her problems seemed so inconsequential in comparison.

  ‘Do you think he’s all right?’ Jack asked after a moment.

  Flora forced a smile. ‘You know Frank as well as I do. He’s no doubt charming the pants off everyone he meets. God forbid he should ever meet a nurse.’

  They leant back against the sink.

  ‘He’s going to come home, Flora. If anyone will, it’ll be our Frank. The Japs wouldn’t dare take a shot at him.’

  ‘We shall not let ourselves think otherwise.’ Flora hoped that the repetition of the sentiment might help it come true.

  ‘So, what are you up to tonight, Flor? Going out to the pictures or something?’

  ‘I have some war knitting to do. That’ll keep me occupied until my eyes simply won’t stay open any longer. Which will probably be,’ Flora checked the clock on the wall, ‘in about an hour, the way I feel.’

  ‘C’mon, don’t be such a bore. There’s a dance on at the Trocadero. Why don’t you put on a pretty frock and come with me? There are two bands on the line-up and there’ll be dancing all night. I might even whirl you around the dance floor myself.’

  Flora jabbed Jack with an elbow. ‘No, thank you. You’ll be too busy fighting off all the young ladies of Melbourne to be bothered dancing with me. Handsome men are in such short supply these days, Jack, which means your chances of finding partners are vastly improved.’

  She knew immediately that she’d said the wrong thing. ‘Oh, Jack, I didn’t think—’

  ‘It’s all right, Flor. I know what you meant.’

  Flora collected herself. ‘I’m perfectly happy to stay right here with Dad, listening to the radio and knitting socks.’

  ‘You and your socks.’ Jack grinned. ‘I reckon you’ve knitted enough for the entire AIF. You are allowed to have fun, you know.’

  Flora found knitting to be a nice distraction from all that worried her. Without her mother to teach her, she’d struggled at first, having to unravel her first two attempts after making a right mess of the heel. But she was patient and committed and had found it easy going after that. Knitting had helped pass the time on nights too numerous to count. It had helped distract her from her loneliness, from thoughts of Frank. Her father quietly smoking. Songs on the wireless. Stitch after stitch. Row after row. Sock after sock. The routine quieted her mind. She tried to imagine the soldiers receiving her gift and how happy they’d be to have something clean and new. Socks were about warmth and comfort. She’d also tried muffs and balaclavas, but couldn’t come at knitting the fingerless gloves in the instruction books. Trigger gloves, they were called.

  ‘I don’t feel like heading out. Anyway, I’m too old for fun.’ Flora had never liked crowds particularly, didn’t go to the football because of it, and Melbourne bustled now, every minute of the day and night, even with the blackouts. Sometimes she didn’t recognise her own city.

  ‘Forget about me,’ Flora told her brother. ‘Go and have a good time at your dance.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ As if to reinforce the point, she stifled a yawn.

  ‘Enjoy your night then. Knit one, purl one,’ Jack said, leaving Flora standing by the sink with a damp tea towel over her shoulder.

  ‘Jack,’ she called out.

  At the doorway, he turned.

  ‘Empty the drip tray under the icebox before you go, won’t you? It’s almost full.’

  ‘Will do,’ Jack replied.

  ‘And not down the sink. Pour it on the war cabbage in the front garden.’

  ‘You are forbidding.’ He winked.

  Later that night, after Flora had admired the perfectly shaped khaki heel on her umpteenth pair of socks, she roused her sleepy father from his armchair and urged him to go to bed. She turned off the wireless, emptied his ashtray, took his teacup into the kitchen, checked the doors were locked and turned out the low lamp in the living room.

  With a net pinned over her short hair, she tucked herself into bed with an old Agatha Christie novel, but the words swam and she couldn’t concentrate on any of the twists and turns of the plot.

  Their little house in Camberwell was quiet but her mind wasn’t.

  The image of the white feather burnt behind her closed eyes. When she’d gone to her bedroom to fetch her knitting earlier in the evening, she’d opened the top drawer of her dressing table and placed it inside her wooden jewellery box. It fluttered alongside her mother’s string of pearls and matching pair of clip-on earrings that Flora loved so much but never wore any more, and a cameo brooch that had belonged to her grandmother, her mother’s mother, from the Wimmera. Both women were long gone.

  Flora remembered her anger, her pure, white-hot fury at the cruelty of the young woman who had handed the envelope to her brother.

  Coward? Jack was anything but. That night, Flora could only swallow her anger, learn to live with it, and try not to let it make her rage.

  Chapter Two

  Betty

  It took thirty-five steps. She’d counted them out a million times, at least.

  Seventeen-year-old Betty Brower walked out her front door, down the cement path between the deep red rose bushes, turned left onto King Street, Rozelle, skipped twenty steps, and then turned left again through the Dohertys’ wooden picket gate, six steps to the door, one step up to reach it, and pushed open the front door.

  ‘Hooroo.’ The darkly stained wooden door swung open with a squeak of its hinges and her voice echoed down the dim hallway.

  A cup clattered in a saucer and a chair scraped on the kitchen linoleum. There was a mumble of voices and then, ‘Don’t you knock any more, Betty Boop?’

  Betty smiled at the sound of Michael’s laughing to
ne. She skipped into the house, past Mr and Mrs Dohertys’ bedroom on the left-hand side (the door had been firmly closed forever and she’d never so much as peeked inside) and the boys’ bedroom next on the right after that.

  Only one son slept in the room now and she was familiar with every inch of it. The wall-to-wall Axminster carpet that Mrs Doherty had saved up for and installed back in 1938, much to the horror of her sons who’d rebelled against the floral design. Michael’s collection of rocks on the windowsill, and the way the quartzite glittered in the early-morning sun. His Biggles books on the shelf that formed his bedhead. The leather rugby ball abandoned in one corner of his room. His scratchy grey woollen blanket with the white sheet turned over it at the pillow end, and the jar of three-penny bits on his dressing table that he was saving to buy a war bond. His brother Patrick’s bed was pushed up against the opposite wall to Michael’s, and was still as neatly made as the day he’d left for the war.

  Just as Betty was two steps from the kitchen door, Michael leapt through the doorway.

  Betty screamed in shock then glowered at him. ‘Michael Doherty,’ she exclaimed, slapping his arm. ‘You scared me half to death.’

  ‘Did not.’ He’d grown so tall lately that he could rest an elbow on her head as if she were a hatstand, and he did it often just to tease her.

  ‘Hello, Betty,’ Michael’s mother called from the kitchen. ‘How was Woollies today?’

  ‘Hi, Mrs Doherty,’ she called out around Michael’s broad shoulders. ‘It was fine, thank you. Have I mentioned to you lately that your son is as mean as can be?’ Everything about her best friend was bigger these days. Since he’d left school the year before and begun working at Cliff’s greengrocer in Rozelle, he’d grown up and out. His shoulders were broader. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down now when he spoke. She’d poked it once when they were wrestling on the carpet in his room and he’d scared her senseless by making dramatic choking sounds and playing dead. For a few moments she’d honestly thought she’d killed him and was so scared that when he’d begun to laugh uproariously at her shock she’d paid him back by ignoring him for two whole days. The swipe of freckles that had always been splattered across his nose had almost faded into a tan. Almost. If she looked close, they were still there, the little pieces of the Michael Doherty she’d grown up with, the boy who’d been her best friend since she could remember.