The Land Girls

by Victoria Purman

  ‘Me? Mean to you? Never.’

  Betty pulled her lips together in a line and propped her hands on her hips. Michael tousled her hair.

  She slapped his hand away again. ‘Stop it. You know I have to keep it looking just so for work and if I have to pin it again, I’ll make you pay. You can forget all about your surprise now.’

  She patted her right hand on the small bulge in the side pocket of her skirt.

  Michael’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t be that cruel. What’s the surprise, Betty Boop?’

  ‘If you think I’m going to tell you now, after you almost scared me half to death, you have another thing coming.’

  He shifted his weight and brought one boot forwards, pressing on the toe of her black court shoes.

  ‘Stop it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now I’ll have to polish my shoes again. You are being infuriating tonight.’

  Michael pressed just the slightest bit harder on her foot. ‘I’m going to pin you to the spot until you show me the surprise.’

  She poked him in the chest. ‘When you stop squashing my toes, I’ll show you. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’ They shook on it. Her hand in his. One, two, three shakes, as they always did. Michael slid his foot sideways off hers then got down on one knee. He pulled a folded white handkerchief out of his trouser pocket, flicked it out like Mandrake the Magician might when performing a trick, and pulled it taut between each hand. He lowered it and began polishing her shoe where his boot had left a dusty smudge.

  Betty looked down, past the crisp whiteness of her shirt, skimming her gaze down the length of her woollen skirt to where it hit just below her knee, and down her stockinged leg to the turn of her ankle. She watched the wave of his chocolate-brown hair. Studied him as his hands tugged right to left and then left to right as his handkerchief soundlessly slid across the leather. And when he was done, he lifted his face to hers, sighed and smiled. There was a look in his eyes that she didn’t recognise and it made her blush.

  She slipped her fingers into her pocket and pulled out a Cherry Ripe bar. ‘Your favourite.’

  Michael got to his feet. His grin was wide. ‘You really are an angel, Betty Boop,’ he said softly.

  She craned her neck to meet his gaze. ‘Just a girl who knows where to find chocolate during the war, that’s all.’

  He slipped the bar in the top pocket of his shirt. ‘Let’s go.’

  They’d always thought of the park at the end of King Street as their own. When they were children, they’d clambered over the gnarled roots of the Moreton Bay fig trees, playing marauding pirates with the other children from the neighbourhood. Once Betty had bowled him out playing cricket, knocking the stumps flying into the air, and she’d never let him forget it. He’d taught her to ride his bike by steadying her on the leather seat and then pushing her off with a shove and she’d wobbled and screamed and ridden thirty feet before falling off and skinning her elbow.

  Now they were too old for such childish pursuits. Warmed by a Sydney December evening breeze, Betty and Michael lay on their backs on the grass, side by side, in the dark. It was a clear night and with the streetlights still dimmed for the blackouts, the full moon overhead shone like a sun. It was too dark now for the street cricket players who were home, fed and bathed, so the only sounds were the sporadic footsteps and conversation of their neighbours and the flap of bats’ wings in the outstretched boughs of the Moreton Bay figs.

  ‘I can’t believe you found this.’ Michael moaned as he chewed languorously, savouring every bite of his favourite chocolate. ‘I don’t even want to know how you got it but I’m damn well pleased you did.’

  ‘A lady will never tell.’ Betty unwrapped her second Columbine and popped it into her mouth, carefully folding the foil and slipping it into her pocket. She would have to remember to add it to the collection in the kitchen drawer when she got home, for donating to the war effort.

  Chocolate and sweets had been in short supply since confectionary manufacturers had turned their efforts to supplying soldiers’ rations, but Betty had made some unexpected connections through her friend from work, Jean. All the trouble and waiting had been worth it for this moment: the darkness and the silence and her best friend and chocolate melting in her mouth.

  She liked surprising Michael. She liked everything about the Doherty family next door. When the family with two boys had moved in all those years ago, they’d welcomed her into their home with open arms. It was perfect: she had no siblings and they had no sisters. Mrs Doherty treated her like the daughter she never had. Betty’s father saw the boys through the local school at which he was the headmaster. He’d been her best chum for as long as she could remember.

  ‘You are the best friend a fellow ever had, Betty Boop.’

  She didn’t need to see Michael’s face to know that he was smiling. She knew his face as well as her own. She could see it even in the dark, the exact way it was just the slightest bit crooked, the right side of his mouth lifting a little more than the left. She knew that one of his ears stuck out more than the other, and she could pinpoint the exact place on his jaw that he bore a scar from the time he’d tumbled off his billy cart while barrelling down King Street with Patrick pushing him.

  She nudged his leg with her knee. ‘You’re so predictable. You say that every time I bring you sweets.’

  ‘How terrible of me, to remember what a wonderful friend you are only when you bring chocolate.’

  ‘Terrible and very, very ungrateful,’ she added with a laugh.

  ‘You’re wrong there, Betty. I am extremely grateful.’ He shifted his long body, turning towards her, one elbow in the grass, resting his chin in his palm. ‘Tell me. Did you get them from a blacketeer?’ He lowered his voice, whispering dramatically and looking left and right to see they weren’t being spied upon. ‘Have you been meeting dodgy characters in laneways in The Rocks?’

  ‘No, I have not.’ She giggled.

  ‘Wait. I’ve got it. You’ve turned your back on us Australian blokes and you’ve been flirting with an American, haven’t you?’

  ‘Me?’ Betty responded with nervous laughter. The idea was ridiculous. She’d never gone near one, had bowed her head and walked on if she heard that accent. Truth be told, she was slightly scared of the Americans, of how glamorous they seemed, of their polite forthrightness, of the way they felt so comfortable roaming Sydney’s streets in groups as if it had always been their city.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Michael started, flopping onto his back. ‘A Yank walked into Woolworths, right up to your counter, leant over all the face powder and the bottles of potions and lotions you girls like to smear on your faces, and made a little small talk about how pretty you are, or some such rubbish.’ Betty sat up, turned and looked down at Michael. His hands were splayed across his stomach, one knee was propped up and he stared into the night sky.

  ‘Why, Michael Doherty. You sound as if you might be jealous.’

  ‘I bet he impressed you with his ma’am this and ma’am that.’ He breathed deep and sighed. ‘Crikey. They’re everywhere in Sydney, those bloody Yanks, splashing around all their money. You know they earn more than our troops, Betty? Almost twice as much as Patrick and my cousin Arthur and Peter and Dudley from school?’

  Betty swallowed the last of her Columbine and stared ahead into the darkness. So many names. So many young men already gone to war. ‘That doesn’t seem fair.’

  ‘That’s how they can afford all these things to impress our local girls. They tip everywhere they go too. Show-offs.’

  She didn’t like keeping secrets from Michael and she didn’t want him to think she’d been flirting with Americans. ‘It’s Jean,’ she blurted. ‘She got them. She knows Columbines are my favourite and I asked her if she could get a Cherry Ripe too, because it’s yours. She’s the one who got them from an American, not me.’

  ‘Oh, right. Cheers to Jean then, I guess.’

  Jean believed herself to be in love with Kevin, a sailor from
South Carolina who was on one of the ships moored in Sydney Harbour. You couldn’t look out at the water these days without seeing an American warship, anchored where sailing boats had bobbed before the war. Kevin had bought Jean silk stockings and cigarettes and taken her on dates to the Roosevelt nightclub in Kings Cross. Jean seemed to be having the time of her life.

  Betty didn’t want silk stockings or cigarettes or nightclubs or smooth-talking Americans. She’d never given her heart to anyone and the hope of such a thing happening seemed so unreachable now, as far away as the moon.

  Betty breathed deep. The earthy smells of the grass and the Moreton Bay fig were so familiar. The war had changed so many things about Sydney. Shop windows were boarded up. There were no fancy Christmas displays in the windows. The streetlights were turned off and everyone had curtains drawn as soon as the sky darkened. Zig-zagged trenches had been dug in her father’s school yard and in Hyde Park, and no one, for love or money, could buy red lipstick. She had to tell the same story over and over every day to hordes of disappointed and infuriated customers.

  But this park, their park, the grass and the trees and the scent of it all, was the same. She hoped it would always be their little oasis in the upheaval the war had brought all around them. She never wanted this place to change, ever.

  Michael turned to face her. ‘It’s my birthday next week.’

  She huffed. ‘You think I need reminding of when your birthday is, Michael Doherty? I’ve had your present wrapped for two months already. Hidden in a place that even you won’t find it.’ She drew up her knees, crossed her arms on them and dropped her forehead to hide in the small space there.

  ‘I’m enlisting next week, on the fifteenth of December, the day I turn eighteen.’

  Betty had pushed this day to the back of her mind, wishing that it would never come, that somehow she might be able to keep them both at seventeen forever. She had promised herself she would not cry. She would show the same strength that the whole Doherty family had shown when Patrick had joined the navy. They’d waved him off at Circular Quay with smiles and hoorahs and then returned home to silence and a strong cup of tea.

  ‘And you’ll be eighteen soon, too,’ Michael said cheerily.

  ‘February—’ she started.

  ‘Fourteenth,’ he finished. ‘How could I forget your birthday? You’ve been my Valentine every year since we were five years old.’

  Betty wanted to be brave, truly she did. Not just for Michael but for Patrick and every other young Australian man fighting overseas. The last thing he would want to see was fear in her eyes. She lifted her head, looked over her shoulder at him and did her best to smile. ‘You’ll do us all proud, Michael Doherty.’

  ‘I hope to.’

  ‘I’m going to miss you terribly,’ Betty said. ‘What if it takes years to win the war? You’ll be a man when you come back. I might not even recognise you.’

  He smiled his crooked smile. ‘Aren’t I a man now?’

  She looked him over. ‘Not quite.’

  ‘I’ll be the same old me, I promise. Will you write to me, Betty Boop?’

  ‘Of course I will. Every week.’

  ‘I’ll do the same. I promise. No matter where I am or what I’m doing.’

  ‘Deal,’ Betty said.

  ‘Deal,’ Michael repeated, and when he took her hand, they shook three times on the promise.

  Chapter Three

  Lily

  Miss Lilian Thomas—known to her friends, family and many, many acquaintances as Lily but never Lil—lifted her delicate wrists and pressed down on the keys of the black Remington typewriter on a wooden desk at Miss Ward’s Training College for Young Business Girls. Her eyes were fixed on the sheet of butcher’s paper curled around the cylinder, and most particularly not at her fingers, because she was supposed to be learning touch typing, but with every strike of the keys her disappointment and frustration grew.

  The qwixk brpwn fox jymped ocer the laxy doh.

  ‘Will I ever learn this wretched thing?’ Lily whispered. She reached for the platen knob, revolved it until the paper fed out of the machine and turned it over. Paper was too precious to waste—the war, you know—and if her teacher, Miss Callen, had seen Lily giving in to her temptation to screw her mistake up into a crumpled ball, Lily would have been reprimanded in front of the entire class of fifty of Adelaide’s finest young ladies. She took a deep breath, willed away her frustration, and began again, pressing the keys in the vain hope that she might accidentally spell the sentence correctly.

  When her page was full of typed lines, when the clacking of the keys all around her had ceased too, she checked her tiny diamante watch. The hours seemed to stretch before her interminably.

  It hadn’t been her idea in the slightest to be thoroughly and systematically coached in shorthand, typewriting etc, which was the promise of the advertisement that had caught her mother’s eye in The Advertiser back in October.

  ‘You’re simply aimless,’ Mrs Thomas had told her over breakfast one morning in their elegant house in Buxton Street, North Adelaide. ‘You’ve had nothing to fill your days since you finished school. And it won’t do, Lilian.’

  ‘I’m not aimless,’ Lily had replied as she selected a polished silver butter knife and smoothed gleaming strawberry jam over her warm toast. The Thomas family’s maid, Davina Hawkins, stood quietly at her side, pouring tea through a silver strainer into fine bone-china teacups decorated with cobalt blue and gold. She set the elegant matching teapot onto a trivet, poured a dash of milk into Lily’s cup and then placed the beaded jug cover over the milk before slipping out of the breakfast room.

  ‘You most certainly are. It’s all dances and deb balls and recitals and frippery with you, Lilian. It’s as if you don’t even think about what’s going on in the world.’ Mrs Thomas stopped suddenly and sipped her tea with a sigh. Her mother seemed tired already and it was only eight o’clock in the morning. Lily looked down at her toast, embarrassed by the admonishment. When had she last had praise from her mother? Lily couldn’t remember. How could her mother possibly be at all wise to what Lily was up to, with her own important work for the war effort? Mrs Thomas was barely ever at home, it seemed. She hosted Red Cross receptions to raise much-needed funds for the troops. Together with the ladies in her bridge club, she sat for hours knitting socks and vests and scarves for the soldiers, and her gardening club collected donations for packages to be sent overseas to the troops. They’d been particularly busy in the past few months, with Christmas fast approaching.

  ‘No one serving king and country should miss out on a parcel from home.’ Mrs Thomas tried hard to ensure her passions were shared.

  There was a reason why her mother had thrown herself into war work with such particular dedication. Lily’s older sister and only sibling, Susan, was Captain Dr Susan Thomas serving in the Australian Army Medical Corp in an Australian General Hospital in Egypt. She’d been dux of school in her final year, an outstanding medical student at the University of Adelaide and was simply the smartest woman Lily had ever met. Susan had been the apple of her parents’ eyes, still was. Lily had arrived ten years after Susan was born, quite unexpectedly, and had upset the family’s carefully planned dynamics. A change-of-life baby, that’s what she’d been called, as if they might change their minds and send her back, and her arrival had further disappointed her father’s scheme for a son to carry on the Thomas tradition: to attend his school, become a member of the South Australian Cricket Association, and take up a job in the law firm he’d inherited from his own father.

  They’d got Lily instead. A frivolous daughter who wasn’t all that smart and who clearly couldn’t even type. Her only saving grace was her looks. Her lithe figure, her bow lips, the slightly upturned nose and wide eyes captured people’s attention, rather like Shirley Temple, although her blonde hair was dead straight and wouldn’t remain curled no matter how many rags Davina tied in her hair at night.

  In place of having their brilliant d
aughter with them in Adelaide, safe and sound, the Thomas family had to make do with a photograph of Susan in her uniform—a khaki tunic and skirt with large patch pockets, badges on each collar lapel and her army hat on a jaunty angle—which sat on the shelf above the fireplace in the front reception room. Every night, Lily crept in to say goodnight to that photograph and then prayed for Susan’s safe return when the war was over.

  Lily had put down her knife rather too quickly and it had struck her bread-and-butter plate with a clatter, which she’d regretted because it made her look petulant, and she wasn’t.

  ‘I do think about what’s going on in the world, Mother. How could I not with all the soldiers everywhere I go in Adelaide? And we have the blackouts and rationing just like everywhere else. I’m not oblivious to—’

  Her mother’s brow furrowed as she interrupted her daughter. ‘I know just the thing for your boredom.’

  She’d acted swiftly, and that very day directly after breakfast she had visited Miss Ward on King William Street in the heart of Adelaide’s commercial district, and secured for her youngest daughter a position in the best secretarial training college in the city.

  And now, all these weeks later, Lily’s fingers still stubbornly refused to strike the keys in the correct order to transfer the ink from the ribbon so the quick brown fox could jump over the lazy dog.

  Miss Ward’s guarantee was that every qualified student would secure a good appointment, which was a promise with a ring of truth to it since so many young men were away abroad and so many other young women had joined the forces or were working in munitions factories at Hendon.