He said that his commanding officer, a good bloke by the name of Carrick, wanted him to go to NCO school and move up the ranks, but Frank wasn’t interested. Plenty of chiefs already, he said. I’ll stay an Indian.
After North Africa, Max had fought in Greece but the Germans had beaten them there. They’d retreated to Crete until the Germans got there too. Now they were in Egypt, and Max had got typhoid. He was going to be invalided home but they thought he’d die.
Even Charlie Gledhill joined up, over in England. He sent Nance a snap of himself in uniform, some kind of naval doctor. Dear Nance, he wrote, I was glad to hear you were married. Your husband is a lucky man. I think of you often and always with the warmest feelings. In the photo he was caught pointing out of frame in the middle of saying something. On the back he’d written, As usual, telling someone what to do. Yes, she thought. He knows himself and knows me too. Two bossy people in the one marriage: that would never have worked.
No one handed out white feathers these days, but as the war news got worse Nance wondered how Ken felt, an able-bodied young man not in uniform. People glanced at them when they were out together. He didn’t seem to notice, but what was he thinking? He never talked about joining up. It was as if somehow it didn’t apply to him.
Nance didn’t feel she could talk to him about it. Imagine if she did, and he felt pressured to join up, and got killed!
In her letters Dolly never missed a chance to say how lucky Nance was not to have a husband away fighting, the way most women did. All Nance could do was put on a brave face and ignore the hints.
When Frank enlisted, Dolly left the farm at Guyra. There was work for everyone now, even a half-educated woman of sixty. She had a string of casual jobs in Sydney: cook in a hospital, housemaid in a hotel. Easy work, good money, room and board thrown in. For the first time in her life she could do as she pleased, beholden to no man.
Bert left Mittagong and came up to look after Green Hills while Frank was away. After so many pubs leased and sold, after a fortune made and lost, it was back to ploughing and shearing. His letters to Nance were full of his plans. He was going to improve the pasture and buy a good ram. Do my very best for Frank, he said. Make it a showplace by the time he gets back.
She wasn’t going to say anything at the hospital about the baby until she had to. War or no war, a woman with a job was already bad in the eyes of a lot of people. A married woman working was worse. A pregnant woman working was unheard of. She’d work until she couldn’t hide it any more, and build up a bit in the bank.
It was humbling, being pregnant. Things were happening in her body that were nothing to do with any decision she made. There was a surrender to the process, a great passive peace that came from submitting to her body and all the things it knew that she didn’t.
She’d always thought art was the great teacher about life. That moment with the Enmore tram had proved it for her. But none of the great writers talked about the biggest drama of all. A woman feeling a new person grow inside her had no words to understand it with. It wasn’t the subject of a single sonnet or novel. You were alone with it, other than the commonplaces that other women could offer: the old woman on the bus who assured her that when she started sweeping the yard it meant her time was come, or the neighbour who felt her bump and proclaimed that the baby was a girl.
She and Ken were on the ferry one Sunday when they met two men who Ken seemed to know. There was something funny in the way the three of them greeted one another, a hesitation and then an overdone heartiness. Jack Wishart, my wife Nance, Ken said. Alan Thistlethwaite, my wife Nance. She smiled. What a peculiar name Thistlethwaite was. He must have to write small to fit it on his cheques, and did the woven-labels people charge extra for so many letters? The men did that little not-quite bow that men did to women, and to her surprise Ken put his arm around her. Nance is a pharmacist, he said. Works at the Coast Hospital.
Oh, the Coast, the one called Thistlethwaite said. You’d know Miss Young, she’s the librarian out there. We’re friends of hers, aren’t we, Jack?
She knew Miss Young, a quiet watchful woman too old and spinsterish for there to be any hanky-panky with either of these men. There was something going on, though. How men loved their little secret games!
She and Ken strolled like a courting couple along the Corso.
Those fellers, they’re in with the Trotskyites, Ken said. But keep it under your hat, Nance. It’s an illegal organisation.
Funny, Nance thought, you’d never pick either of those men for a red.
Matter of fact, they run it, Ken said. They’ve invited me in, Nance, and I said yes. Joined up last week.
How do you mean, Ken, joined, she said, thinking for a confused moment he’d enlisted.
I’ve been considering it for quite a time, Ken said. The Labor Party’s moribund and the Trotskyites have got it right. I applied and I was accepted. They’ve given me a party name for security. Comrade Roberts.
Comrade Roberts! What, a made-up name? She started to laugh but stopped.
Nance, this is a dangerous game, he said. He was talking low and glancing around, though no one was watching. They call us subversives. He put an ironic spin on the word. And they’re right, Nance. In fact we’re more than that. We’re revolutionaries.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or be appalled. Comrade Roberts! Revolution! She still only half understood.
So you’re a communist, she said, but he made a derisive noise.
Not communist! Not those Stalinist boobies. We Trotskyites follow a different kind of socialism, Nance. We’re the true socialists. I’ll explain it all later.
So that was what all those meetings were, she said. Not Labor Party.
Oh, the Labor Party expelled me, he said, and she heard the pride. Lang expelled me for moving too far to the Left.
Not the Labor Party! All this time—how long had it been?—he’d let her think the endless meetings were more of Lang and the point-of-order types, when he’d been travelling on a secret inner journey. No wonder her little stories about the broken hearts at the Coast had never interested him. Was it better to have a husband who was never home because he didn’t love you, or because he was a revolutionary?
And who am I to doubt, she thought. I don’t know anything about this Trotsky thing. She’d picked Ken and not Wal Glendon because Ken was interested in ideas. Now he was acting because of an idea. He had the brains and the passion to be a leader of men.
I’m proud of you, darling, she said, and kissed him. He didn’t like that, kissing in public. But when she took his hand he didn’t take it away.
Later she asked him what it was all about. Why Trotsky? Ken went all the way back to the tsars to make sure she got the full picture. He relished rolling out Trotsky’s real name: Lev Davidovich Bronstein. He explained that he’d taken the name Leon Trotsky when he became a revolutionary. She started to understand that the Trotskyites were a special sort of communist. In fact they seemed to hate the other communists even more than they hated the capitalists.
Ken was eager, explaining it all to her. She thought she might be getting the hang of making marriage work. You had to be interested and you had to not know too much.
He gave her what he called his bible to read: The Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky. It wasn’t as hard to read as she’d feared. Everything she’d learned from those miserable years of the Depression—all the unfairness, loss and tragedy—had nothing to do with bad luck or even bad management. According to Trotsky, the machine of capitalism was to blame. It was a machine designed to keep working people on the bottom and the bosses on top. She’d seen it in her own life: no one got ahead working for someone else. The people who owned the business would always be the winners. Her parents had thought they could borrow their way into joining those winners, but in the end the bank had won. Trotsky was saying that there was no use tinkering with the system. You had to undo it all and start again.
She thought on the whole Trotsky’
s ideas were sensible, but now and then he’d come out with something shocking. We were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life’, she read, and recoiled. That’s where I part company from Trotsky, she thought. I don’t have all the words, but I know I’m right about that. Human life is sacred.
Next time Nance passed Miss Young in the hallway at the hospital she said, Oh, Miss Young, I met a friend of yours recently, a Mr Thistlethwaite. A friend of my husband. I believe they have an associate in common, name of Leon.
Miss Young smiled and gave her the shadow of a wink. Oh yes, she said, I’ve heard that Mr Gee knows Leon. Again the smile, and Nance went on her way understanding the thrill of talking in code. It was as if you were two people at once, twice as alive.
She saw that Ken had always been the outsider: out of place in his family, out of place in a profession that didn’t interest him, out of place even in their marriage. Being part of this secret elite was the outsider’s way of joining. He was a man newly energised, brought to life by that inner coiled spring of passion.
He explained why he hadn’t enlisted: this was the bosses’ war, over national boundaries that were part of the machinery of capitalism. The international proletariat had no borders. If all the world’s workers rose up in what Trotsky called the Terminal Crisis, there’d be no more war. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat would forge a better world and the future would be glorious.
Nance said yes, but in the meantime Germany and Japan were knocking over country after country, and looked like taking the whole world before the Terminal Crisis. All the more reason to be vigorous in spreading the word, was Ken’s answer, and be disciplined in resisting the call to arms. Not a Man, Not a Ship, Not a Gun for the Bosses’ War.
He had an answer for every argument. She wasn’t convinced, but she was silenced. It was his profession, after all, she thought: finding reasons to support whatever case he was making. And there was always the chance that he was right. Revolution had happened in Russia, when it must have looked impossible there. The incredible thought was that it could happen in Australia too.
At the Domain he introduced her to some of the other comrades gathered under the Communist League banner. Jim McClelland looked dapper even in a worker’s cap and John Kerr, one of Ken’s classmates from Fort Street, was an imposing figure with a great shock of thick hair. Ken called him an intellectual titan. Like Ken, they were both lawyers. Guido Baracchi kissed her hand in an elaborate way. She noticed his beautiful Italian shoes. Not the shoes of a working man! Laurie Short, a nuggetty energetic union organiser, was the only genuine proletarian.
There was a back-to-front aristocracy among the revolutionaries. At the top were the proletarians like Laurie. At the bottom were the recruits from nice middle-class homes. As a pharmacist, on her feet all day, she was certainly a worker. But a pharmacist was usually a business person too. The comrades were polite to her, but she wasn’t one of them.
In any case, women didn’t count among the Fourth International, Sydney Branch. Ken told her—several times—what Trotsky had said when asked about the role of women in the revolution. Ken quoted him as saying, They should be rooted on the workshop floor.
Ken took his turn up on the stepladder in the Domain. When someone heckled him, she’d see the light in his eye as he thought of a clever put-down. The crowd would laugh and the heckler would turn sullen. Well done, comrade, McClelland or Short would say, clapping Ken on the back.
There was something about the business that didn’t convince her. She didn’t believe Ken really cared about the workers. After all, real workers were those people he didn’t want to go to dinner with. He’d never worked seven days a week at a job he hated but couldn’t afford to leave. She had the private disloyal thought that, for Ken, revolution was a complicated game he was good at, a secret and dangerous game that got the blood racing.
By the time Nance was too pregnant to hide the fact, she was happy to leave the Coast Hospital. They did a whip-round and got her a second-hand Singer, such a generous gift she was in tears. The tears were also for saying goodbye to her old life. Once the baby was born she’d be bound to this new human being in a way she’d never been bound to anyone before. The tears were for the end of a certain kind of selfishness.
And for her independence. She’d always had her own money and had taken her independence for granted. When she first left work she kept that independence by dipping into her savings to buy the food and pay the bills, but soon realised she couldn’t keep it up. She had to accept that from now on all her money came from Ken. He was generous with the housekeeping money and never queried when she came to him for extra. But she was conscious of the way money could change the shape of a relationship. If Ken wanted to stay at home on a Saturday afternoon rather than take her to the pictures, behind their disagreement was the shadow of an unspoken contract: It’s my money you’re living off, so we’ll do what I want. When he made up to her in bed and she wasn’t in the mood, there it was again: My money, my right.
The baby was jumping around now, keeping her awake at night. How strange it was to feel a little foot-shaped bulge under the covering of her own f lesh. It was a cliché to call it a miracle, but that’s what it was. Ken talked about the proletariat being the midwives of history. This was no metaphor. It was the thing itself.
She’d wondered how she’d know when the moment came, but at the first pain there was no doubt. Vast stretches of time spoke to her through her body. She was every mother since Eve. Every one of those bodies had begun the long business of expelling the new being that had grown inside the old one. She had a long but uncomplicated labour and at the end of it there he was, the person she’d been waiting to meet. It was the day after her twenty-ninth birthday, the twenty-sixth of August 1941. He was a solid bundle, not fragile as she’d feared. Her arms knew exactly what to do.
Once mother and baby were nicely arranged, the nurse let Ken come in. He smiled and touched her shoulder, and held the baby for a few minutes. She was glad he was there. Still, something in her had shifted. Ken might never be the husband she’d hoped for. But it wasn’t the two of them any more, a husband and wife going along in a lopsided way. There was someone else in the world who mattered more than either of them.
ELEVEN
TIME HAD a different meaning after Christopher was born. It wasn’t measured by the clock, but by the baby. Time to feed him, to change his nappy, to play with him, to take him out in the pram. Nance loved to watch him sleeping, loved to feel him feeding and know that her body was all he needed. It was as if she’d gone to another country where all the big things became small things, and the small things were all that mattered.
There was a little garden at the back of the flats and she loved to put him on a rug there and laugh with him at the new wonders of his world. Fingers! Leaves! Birds! When she leaned in to kiss his fat cheek she could see herself tiny in his eyes. It was a bond more profound than anything she could have imagined, frightening in its power.
Ken loved the baby too, made a popping noise with a finger in his cheek that made Christopher laugh. Carried him around the room, jiggling him and singing, This is the way the ladies ride, ladies ride, ladies ride. She’d think, He’s changed, it’s going to be different. But soon he’d hand Christopher back and it would be as it always was. He had papers to go through, or a meeting to go to.
At work every day, Ken didn’t have the timeless moments with Christopher that she loved so much. Nance would have felt sorry for him if she thought he missed them. He loved his son, she knew. But she’d come to see that something in her husband was stunted. Grand, overwhelming feelings frightened him. He was content with something smaller. Perhaps I can’t blame him, she thought. It’s that cold upbringing he had. It’s left him embarrassed by emotions. Having feelings meant going into some part of himself he wanted to keep hidden.
He was out more and more with the comrades. Took elaborate precautions,
setting off briskly from the front gate towards La Perouse when she knew he was really going to Paddington, his Trotsky papers rolled up in a newspaper so he could get rid of them quickly. She thought all the cloak-and-dagger stuff was ridiculous until one night he came home shaking. He and another man had been putting pamphlets in people’s letterboxes along Selwyn Street in Paddington when the coppers were suddenly there. Tipped off, Ken said. He legged it, got away down a dunny lane, strolled out to Oxford Street and jumped on the first bus. They got the other man, put the cuffs on him. He’d do time. Distributing subversive literature. Six months and a five-hundred-pound fine.
She knew Ken wouldn’t have wanted to be caught. Imagine him in a cell with some burglar, and a bucket in the corner! At the same time, she thought there was a flicker of him wishing that he hadn’t been so smart in getting away.
Christopher was two months old when his uncle Frank’s unit was sent to Timor. Three months later, the impossible happened: Singapore fell to the Japanese. It was gone, and with it more than a hundred thousand captured soldiers.
Then the news came that the Japanese had taken Timor. That was all the paper said: Japanese forces landed on Timor Island yesterday, according to reports from Tokio. Australian troops there would be expelled. Then there was no more mention of Timor. Frank and all the men with him had vanished into a great silence.
Now the Japanese were bombing Darwin. The Sydney Morning Herald issued a special call for unity, self-sacrifice and confidence in facing the enemy and printed a booklet, What to Do in the Case of an Invasion.
Nance woke up every morning with the thought, Is he still alive? The war became personal, every action a bargain with fate.
One Saturday afternoon, out walking with Christopher, she passed a Catholic church and glanced in through its wide-open doors. It was full of people waiting to go into confession. There was a sense of light and warmth and a cheerful family mood. Her feet took her in.
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