Trooper to the Southern Cross

by Angela Mackail Thirkell

  One evening, after we had been there a couple of months, I got home and found Celia rather upset. I asked her what the matter was, and she showed me a telegram that had come for me. It was from Horseferry Road, to say we had been booked for a boat to go back to Australia the next week. Celia must have been crying over it all afternoon.

  ‘All right, babe, don’t get the wind up,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go some time, and you’ve got your old man to look after you.’

  But the poor kid cried and cried. She said her mother would have fits if she went off suddenly like that.

  ‘Well, damn the army,’ I said. ‘Some Horseferry Road blighters butting in as usual where they aren’t wanted, I suppose. Cheer up, babe.’

  When I began to figure it all out, I came to the conclusion we must wangle things somehow so as not to go. I know the King’s Regulations on my head, and if this had been a proper army job I would have known just what strings to pull, but with Horseferry Road it was quite different. A lot of blasted N.C.O.’s who never saw France used to sit there giving cheek to officers. Oh, there’s a lot to be said about Horseferry Road. In case you don’t know about it, it was the Headquarters of the A.I.F. in London during the War. It was handy for the R.C. diggers, being almost next to the big cathedral at Westminster, and it was handy for anyone who wanted to shop at the Army and Navy Stores. Otherwise it wasn’t much of a show. A kind of old building across a yard with a lot of sheds built on behind, and just crawling with N.C.O.’s and warrant officers. I never saw such a set of lousy counter-jumpers in my life. If you were a poor old digger who had been in Egypt, or Gallipoli, or France, they treated you like dirt, but if you had been sitting tight on the Plain, or a nice safe job behind the line, and had had a red band round your hat, you could get your pick of a job there. I never could stand that sort. But I am a bit of a diplomatist, and I never wasted time telling them what I thought of them, because they could do you a bad turn if they liked.

  Figuring it out, I knew I ought to get another two months at the hospital, and then I’d be ready to move. I couldn’t very well leave Leeds myself, so I said to Celia she’d better go up and see what she could do.

  ‘Oh, Tom, I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘They won’t take any notice of me, and I’ll only make a muddle of it.’

  ‘That’s all right, babe,’ I said. ‘You buzz off to London tomorrow and see what you can do. Perhaps you’ll see General Levy, he’s rather an old pal of mine, or General Legge. And you can stay the night with your mother. It will cheer the old lady up. What about something to eat?’

  The long and the short of it was that Celia did go off to town next day. I can only go by what she told me afterwards. In case you are anxious, I may as well tell you at once that we didn’t have to go by that boat, but as things turned out it might have been better if we had. However, it’s all over now.

  Well, Celia said she got to Horseferry Road all right — it’s down a queer street full of barrows called Strutton Ground — and she got in easily enough and found the department that was dealing with repatriation. Then, by what I gather, she struck a snag, one of those damned warrant officers who get a pen behind their ears and sit in an office like little tin gods. Celia said she got nothing from him but a lot of damned insolence — just what a woman would get from those fellows. Horseferry Road Dragoons the diggers used to call them, and my word, they didn’t like it. Just as the poor kid was going away in despair, who should blow into the room but General Legge. Leggy was a great fellow. He was one of our best surgeons and had a waiting list as long as your arm in Brisbane where he practised. I’d had a good deal to do with him on the Peninsula, and we always got on very well. Celia had met him when she was on the Plain with the Colonel and Mrs Jerry, and she had made rather a hit with him. He was a dear old fellow and did his work just as well when he had been lifting his elbow. Naturally he wondered what Celia was doing up there. When she told him what had happened, he went right in off the deep end and fairly lifted the roof. That W.O. must have had the ticking-off of his life. I must say I’ve seldom known a man with such a command of language as Leggy. He was pretty good at most of them and could curse a Gippo, or a Johnny Turk, or a Boche in his own lingo, besides knowing every swear-word in the French language, and a few over. It must have been a treat to hear him tell off that W.O., and at the end he said he’d have him sent back to Aussie at once for interfering with one of his men. For he looked on all us army doctors as one big family and wouldn’t allow anyone to come butting in, though mind you he would strafe us himself good and proper if we needed it.

  I won’t forget in a hurry that night near Villers Bret, when my field ambulance ran short of supplies and the wounded hadn’t enough blankets. I had given my British warm and my tunic to two poor blighters who were half dead with wounds and exposure, and then I forgot myself and went to sleep. When I woke up I was half frozen and as stiff as a board, and there was old Leggy in among the casualties.

  ‘Well, Mr Bowen,’ he said in his sarcastic way, ‘I suppose you think three corpses are better than two.’

  I then saw that the poor fellows were dead. I had the wind up properly, because they oughtn’t to have died without telling me, and I thought the General — Colonel he was then — would have me up on the carpet for letting them get away with it like that.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry’s no good,’ said the Colonel. ‘Do you suppose I want you down with pneumonia? Have a drink,’ he said, giving me his flask, ‘and give me a hand with these other poor bastards.’ So I had a good pull, and then we got my coat and tunic off the dead diggers, and I was never so glad to get a coat on in my life. When we had got things a bit straight and the supplies had come up, the Colonel let fly at me. I’ve heard some pretty good swearing in my time, but the Colonel beat the band. I’ve always had a great respect and affection for the old chap since then.

  When Leggy had quite finished with the W.O., he took Celia round and introduced her to the officer in charge of the shipping section, who arranged for all the transport of officers and their families. He was none other than old Larry Sievers, whose people lived up at Wanderagong near Mount Buffalo. I was up that way one summer, prospecting for a little gold. All that valley was turned upside down by the old-time prospectors. They used to get quite a bit of alluvial gold there in the old days, but it had petered out, and now it was all little farms. But if you liked to camp beside the Wanderagong creek and wash for gold, you might make enough to keep you in grub for a few weeks. I never got anything worth mentioning but I got to be friendly with the Sievers family and used to go round to their place of an evening. It was good-oh up there, right at the end of everything. Just where my camp was the track petered out, and there was nothing but a bridle path over the mountains to Omeo. Quiet — you would hardly believe how quiet it was. Except for the magpies and the rosellas and the parrots and maybe some kookaburras and the noise of the creek, you could have heard a pin drop. And in the morning the air felt as clean as — well, I can’t describe it. You have to get away into the bush to know what I mean. When once you’ve felt the air there, nowhere else seems the same. It’s great to think that for hundreds of miles you’ll hardly find a township, and everything is as fresh as it was the day it was made. It’s enough to drive a chap to poetry, if he was one of those writer chaps. But though I’m a fair hand at writing, having done English with honours for my leaving exam at school, I’ve never seemed to shape well at poetry, though I daresay with my experience I could do quite well if I had the time. I’ve read most of Banjo Patterson and Adam Lindsay Gordon, and I much appreciate Robert Service and some of Kipling.

  Well, Leggy took my little missis and old Larry out to dinner and a show, and Larry told Celia to come to him next time and he’d see she got a good boat. So the poor kid came back as pleased as anything. So time went on till just after Christmas we got a fresh notification that we came next on the roster for Australia. I’d about finished up with my job, so we said go
odbye to Leeds, where I think I’ve never seen so many ugly women in my life unless you can count the day I went to Sheffield, and came to Celia’s mother for our last days in the old country.

  First thing I did, I went down to Horseferry Road to see Larry.

  ‘Well, old son,’ I said, ‘what have you got for us this time?’

  Larry pitched me a long yarn.

  ‘You can go on the “Rudolstadt”, he said, ‘she’s a German liner and is only carrying troops below and officers and families first class. They say she was specially built for tropical voyages and the last word in comfort. If you don’t fancy going in a trooper, there are a few cabins left in the “Ormolu” that the authorities have chartered for us, and I daresay I can get you in there.’

  I didn’t quite know. I didn’t much fancy the ‘Ormolu’ myself. I thought it might mean a white shirt for dinner every night, and all that sissy stuff. I asked Larry, but he said all officers of the A.I.F. would be wearing uniform on the voyage. That disposed of one snag, but I thought I’d better see Celia first, so I told Larry I’d come back next day, and I asked him to dine with Celia and me and go to a show that night.

  We had a nice dinner at the Oceanian Officers’ Club and went out to some musical show. That club was a queer place. All the waitresses were real ladies, wearing uniform of course. Some were all right, nice quiet girls you could yarn to a bit while they served you, but some of them were pretty hot stuff. There was one little fairy, Marquise de something she called herself, but nowadays she would be called something different, and gold-digger would only be the beginning of it. Some of our fellows used to get pretty drunk there, but I was never in with that set. Beer or tea with my lunch perhaps, and maybe a port and lemonade with my dinner was good enough for me. I don’t think you should drink much if you have a lady with you, and I must say when I got back to Australia I was pretty sick at the way I saw the girls drink in Melbourne and Sydney. Some would carry it and some couldn’t, and I don’t know which were the worst. Quite young girls too. When I got well into practice in Sydney I frightened one or two of them off it. Cirrhosis of the liver sounds a pretty tough proposition, especially if the girl doesn’t know what it means. I like a cheery evening as much as anyone, but I have some very serious feelings about women, and I can say that no woman has ever seen me the worse for drink. As for Celia, her mother was a real old wowser and went clean off the handle if one so much as had a whiskey and soda after a long day’s work. But Celia is a sensible little woman and sees that an occasional cocktail isn’t going to break all the commandments.

  We gave old Larry a cheery evening, and next day we blew into Horsefen y Road. I had talked it all over with Celia the night before. She had an idea she’d like to go by the ‘Ormolu’, because she knew some people that were going as far as Colombo, but I told her that she would like the ‘Rudolstadt’ much better. You see, I didn’t know those ‘Ormolu’ pals of Celia’s, but on the ‘Rudolstadt’ I thought I’d be bound to find some old pals and Celia could chum up with their wives. Well, that was where my toes turned in, but of course you can’t tell beforehand how anything will turn out. Anyway, when I nutted it out with Celia, she quite agreed, so we decided on the ‘Rudolstadt’. Larry had the map of the cabins spread out on his desk when we got there.

  ‘See here,’ he said, ‘I can fix you and the missis up O.K. There’s a cabin here you can share with Captain Knox and Lieutenant Smith just opposite the bathroom, and Mrs Bowen can go on the lower deck. There’s an inside cabin where we’ve got a berth to spare.’

  ‘Christ!’ said I.

  ‘Oh, the inside cabins are all right,’ said he, ‘they’ve got ventilators. And the two ladies that are there are real good sorts. One is old Puffy Williams’s widow, and the other’

  ‘Oh, to hell with Puffy and all his widows,’ said I. And I fairly hit the roof. I can tell you I made myself pretty plain. I told him I wasn’t going to be separated from my missis on a troopship, nor at any other time, even if I had to go to General Monash himself about it. It wasn’t the first time I’d taken something up to H.Q., I said, if anyone did the dirty on me like that. I didn’t lose my temper, because I’ve found it never pays, but I talked to old Larry like a Dutch uncle for ten minutes. When I’d got a little of what I wanted to say off my mind, I laid off and let him have his turn.

  ‘Kamerad,’ said he. ‘But just you look at the way we’re fixed,’ and he showed me the plan of the ship. Well, that ought to have put me off from the jump, and I’ve called myself all sorts of a fool since, but as you will see I hadn’t much choice. I never saw such a mess in my life. The ‘Rudolstadt’ was an ordinary liner, about 8,000 tons, with a couple of suites and a few cabins on deck. On the lower deck there were double-banked cabins down each side of the ship. The outside cabins had portholes, but the inside ones had nothing. Not like those Bibby cabins where you have a passage to your porthole and it comes in very handy for hanging clothes and stowing away your luggage. Some had a ventilator to the deck above that anyone could chuck the end of a fag or a bit of chewing gum down, and some had a ventilator to the alleyway. Some of these had been single-berth cabins and some had two berths. But the A.I.F. wanted to get on with the repatriation job, so all the single cabins were turned into two-berth, and the two-berth into three-berth. And all the two-berth cabins were on the inside, with no fresh air to speak of. I saw trouble ahead in the tropics, But I was too busy with my own troubles to let that worry me for the moment.

  ‘You see how it is, Doc,’ said Larry, quite ashamed, though it wasn’t his fault, poor old beggar. ‘The red tabs and the Adjutant have picked the deck cabins. We have two colonels going and they have the suites with their wives and kids. Most of the lower deck cabins are three-berth and how are we to fix up married couples? All we can do is to put the husbands together and the wives together. I daresay they’ll make their own arrangements later,’ said Larry, winking at me.

  ‘My oath, they will,’ said I. But just then Celia began to cry. The poor kiddie was quite upset about it. Poor old Larry got as red as a turkey cock, and I felt quite sorry for him. Then Celia let fly at Larry and told him she hated all Australians, and if she couldn’t go with her husband she wouldn’t go at all, and what did he think he was there for? I tried to calm her down, but then I got it in the neck, and she said she would go back to her mother and leave me to settle things, and if I couldn’t fix up a decent cabin I could just get repatriated on my own. And then she banged the door and went off.

  ‘Can you beat it?’ said Larry. I can tell you I felt really sympathetic to the poor old blighter. It wasn’t any good going after Celia, so Larry and I got yarning and we had a good laugh over old times on the Peninsula and the English R.E. colonel who always wore an eyeglass, even if he had nothing on but shorts, and then we got on to business.

  ‘Well, Larry, what about it?’ I said. ‘Perhaps we’d better go on the “Ormolu”.’

  ‘No good barking up that tree,’ said Larry. ‘We filled her up this morning.’

  ‘Then what do we do next?’ said I.

  ‘Search me,’ said Larry.

  So we had the plan out again and did some thinking. I saw one cabin that looked bigger than the others. It was on the lower deck, but it was a fair size and as big as two of the other cabins put together. As a matter of fact I found afterwards that there used to be a lot of cabins that size, but most of them had been divided into two, so that the ship would have more accommodation. The only other one that size was earmarked for the surgery. I showed it to Larry.

  ‘That’s for the Major,’ said he. ‘He wants it for himself and his missis.’

  ‘I’m a major myself, if it comes to that,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but he’s on the staff,’ said Larry, grinning.

  ‘That’s a fair cow,’ I said. ‘But never let it be said, Larry, that the Staff put one over on the Meds. Put him somewhere else.’ Well, after I’d talked to Larry for some time, I could see he was beginning to weaken. So we fixed
it up that he would put the Staff major somewhere else, and I was to have the big cabin.

  ‘And don’t you make any mistake this time, you old bastard,’ said I, for I was very fond of Larry. I haven’t ever seen him again except once I’ll tell about later. He got a job with a shipping firm in London and stayed on in England, and I believe he is doing very well. So we arranged to go to a show again the next evening, and I went off to Hampstead. I could hardly get out of Larry’s room for the crowd. There must have been about twenty people waiting to fix up about boats by that time. But that was just like Larry. He never made you feel he was in a hurry.