The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  She then lifted her fingers from the keys, leant back in her chair and announced in an exasperated fashion, ‘For god’s sake. Leave your daughter-in-law alone, you interfering old busybody. Does it really matter if she doesn’t iron her tea towels?’

  If the smell of Woodbines drifted across the floor, it was Maggie, who smoked incessantly at her desk while she transcribed from her shorthand notes stories of the wartime crimes and misdemeanours of the populace of Sydney. Nothing seemed to faze Maggie. She didn’t blink when covering bodies dragged out of the harbour, or backyard abortionists arrested after the death of a patient, or raids on upmarket gambling dens or men arrested for wilfully and obscenely exposing themselves in a public lavatory, often in the new men’s toilets at Lang Park near Wynyard Station.

  If something smelt delicious, it was Vera, who had been experimenting with another of the ration recipes she insisted her colleagues judge before she put them in her column. The best, by popular acclaim, had been meatloaf with boiled egg. The worst by a unanimous vote was choko marmalade. With one taste, Tilly had vowed to never eat marmalade again until it was made from real fruit, even if it meant she would have to wait until the end of the war.

  While Maggie and Frances and Tilly answered to Mr Sinclair, the women of the women’s pages worked for Mrs Freeman. Tilly had always thought Mrs Freeman to be quite formidable. She’d been at the paper forever and had edited the women’s pages even longer. Tilly knew her, of course, from her time as Mr Sinclair’s secretary, when Mrs Freeman had walked by so lightly on her feet that sometimes Tilly swore the woman was barefoot. She was always immaculately dressed. She wore her hair in a trim bun pinned at the nape of her neck, which emphasised its length and her high cheekbones. Her make-up was always flawless, lightly powdered and pale pink lips, not too much for her age and not too little. Mrs Freeman’s exact age was a closely guarded secret, but Tilly guessed she was perhaps in her sixties, judging by the fine lines that had settled into the corners of her eyes and the back of her hands, which, while sheathed in white gloves during the day and black of an evening, were a gentle landscape of ridges and sunspots. She wore a simple wedding band on her left-hand ring finger and every day a string of pearls around her neck.

  The women of the Daily Herald worked at the oldest desks in the building, and typed their copy on typewriters with the stiffest keys, which Maggie swore were as old as the paper itself, and ribbons that had been turned over so many times that if they were held up to the light, stories announcing the beginning of the war might be seen. They were surrounded by the detritus of life on a busy daily newspaper: old reporters’ notebooks, torn pages scattered near ashtrays and stained teacups and crushed cigarette packets; wartime information booklets telling the women of Australia to eat more lamb, to do it for the boys, to make do and mend, reminding them that loose lips sunk ships, to keep their legs closed and deny men regular intercourse to banish venereal disease, to refrain from drink in case it might lead to intercourse, to keep a clean home to ward off infection, to not be too nervy lest it affect your children, to get your share of air and sunshine. The men may have carried the major burden of fighting the war on foreign shores, but the women had carried their own burdens at home, there was nothing surer.

  Chapter Three

  At midnight on VP Day, Sydney’s streets were still bursting with victory celebrations but Tilly was almost home. It had taken her two hours to make her way up Pitt Street and then through the crowds of Hyde Park, many still trying to get to the joyous celebrations around the Anzac Memorial. William Street and Kings Cross heaved with people, the trams and buses having given up hope of ever making their stops much earlier in the evening. She had elbowed her way through crowds singing ‘Parlez-Vous’ and ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’. The searchlights that had been erected on tall buildings when the war was at its bleakest were not trained on forbidding dark skies any longer but on revellers below, like those that might shine on a starlet at a Hollywood opening night. They almost blinded Tilly as they arced in delirious streaks across the crowd, following her up Darlinghurst Road and down Macleay Street to the flat.

  She arrived home exhilarated. The air had crackled with stories and she’d caught as many of those threads as she’d been able to and written her heart out. As she locked the front door, yawning, she took a moment to let herself bask in the knowledge that every copy of the hundreds of thousands of special victory editions of the Daily Herald that had been at that exact moment rolling off the presses had her words in it.

  But as she slipped out of her coat, that exhilaration drizzled out of her like blood from a fresh wound. She looked around for Mary, but the only sound in the flat was the faint ticking of the clock on the wall. She and Mary had lost each other somewhere in Martin Place almost the minute they’d left the office and Tilly had no clue where Mary had ended up.

  Tilly dropped her handbag on the settee and dragged her feet to the wireless, tuning it to the ABC. She tried to keep her eyes open as she listened to a repeat of the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s broadcast from London.

  The reception in the apartment building had always been patchy and she turned it up loud to make out his address over the static and hiss. ‘Japan has today surrendered. The last of our enemies is laid low. Taking full advantage of surprise and treachery, Japanese forces quickly overran the territories of ourselves and our allies in the far east and at one time it appeared as though they might even invade the mainland of Australia and advance far into India. But the tide turned. First slowly, then with an ever-increasing speed and violence as the mighty forces of the United States and of the British Commonwealth and Empire and their allies, of finally Russia, were brought to bear. Peace has once again come to the world. Long live the King.’

  She needed to sleep. She was as weary as worn-out shoes. She’d been on the streets for hours and hours that day to properly capture the sights and sounds of victory, knowing that if she didn’t make it back to the office in time for deadline the typesetters would scream at the subeditors who would then scream at her.

  Tomorrow would be another day and there would be more news to report. Tilly decided, respectfully, that another item should be added to Benjamin Franklin’s assertion that the only certainties in life were death and taxes.

  There would always be another story.

  The voice she heard wasn’t a subeditor screaming at her. It was far too caring and kind.

  ‘Tilly?’

  She blinked open her eyes to find Mary kneeling by her side. The living room light was still on and excited voices continued to broadcast from the wireless. Tilly’s head felt thick and her tongue was furry with thirst.

  How many hours before had she fumbled with the lock in the darkness of the hallway and dragged her weary self inside?

  ‘Tilly?’ Mary looked down at her.

  Tilly slowly sat up. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s two in the morning,’ Mary whispered. ‘I’ve just got in. How long have you been out here? Why didn’t you go to bed?’

  ‘I must have fallen asleep, I suppose. Where did you get to?’

  Mary sighed, deep and exhausted, and then her bare lips parted in a pretty smile. ‘I was swept up in a conga line and found myself in Martin Place. 2UW was doing a live broadcast with Alwyn Kurts, Tilly. Alwyn Kurts!’ Mary burst out laughing. ‘And suddenly the crowd became an enormous choir—louder than anything I’ve ever heard in church—and it felt so jolly, I didn’t want to leave.’

  Mrs Mary Smith, nee Houghton, was a neat and particular thirty-year-old woman from the Daily Herald’s Classified Advertisements department who loved fresh flowers and went to bed each night with her wet hair in pin curls.

  She and Tilly had been born within a day of each other, in June 1915, almost a month after the landing at Gallipoli which the family would only months after discover had claimed Tilly’s uncle Herbert, her father’s oldest brother. Mary was a grocer’s daughter from Forster on the Cent
ral Coast who’d come to Sydney in 1939 looking for a job that didn’t involve turnips. She’d landed a position at the paper the week she arrived, the typing skills she’d acquired at school proving most useful, and within two years she’d married Bert, a fine young man with a barrel chest and a winning smile. Once Bert joined the army in 1941, Mary hadn’t fancied living on her own, so she’d moved in with Tilly.

  In every respect but one, Mary was as neat as a pin. The exception was her shoes. Every evening when she walked in the door, she would slip off her coat and fold it neatly over the crook of her elbow before going to the fireplace and toeing off her low-heeled brogues, where they would lie until the next morning.

  ‘They need an airing, Tilly. They’ve walked a long way, those things,’ she always said. It had only taken one day for Tilly to realise that Mary’s habit had more to do with taking a long and loving look at the photograph in the silver frame right there on the mantelpiece and kissing her fingers and pressing them to Bert’s lips than it did with damp brogues. Bert had been captured in his uniform, his slouch hat proudly askew, and from there he perpetually smiled down at his wife. In four years, his expression had never changed; he hadn’t aged a day, and his dark eyes remained as handsome as any film star’s.

  In four long years, and despite knowing for most of that time that her husband was a prisoner of war in Changi, Mary had never had a skerrick of doubt that Bert would come home from the war. ‘He’ll be back, safe and sound,’ Mary had told Tilly, more than once, with unflappable optimism and unshakeable confidence.

  ‘You don’t know Bert like I do,’ she’d said. ‘He’s a larrikin, that one, and I know that’ll see him right. The Japs won’t know what to do with a bloke like him, Tilly. He’s strong and smart and works hard. One day, when the war is over, he’s going to march up from Kings Cross Station, knock on the door and sweep me into his arms. I’m going to kiss him like there’s no tomorrow and then we’ll be able to get on with things. To make up for all the years he’s been gone. Just you wait and see.’

  Every morning, she sat at a switchboard, slipped on a headset and took down advertisements that members of the public called in for the newspaper. For births, engagements and marriages; flats for let; situations vacant; motor cars and lorries and pianos for sale; glasses and teeth and school blazers lost and found; employers looking for young girls for the boot trade; and, inevitably, deaths. War deaths. So many had died, their lives memorialised by their families and loved ones in five brief lines on page eleven of the newspaper. How many calls like this had Mary taken? Tilly wondered about the inner strength it required to come home each evening wearing a smile.

  So many had grasped on to the slimmest slivers of hope even when there seemed to be none. Tilly’s younger sister Martha had always expected that her husband Colin would walk off his ship after his service and resume being a father to their three young boys, just as he’d promised in every letter he’d written home to his family during his time in the navy. Sometimes Martha’s stoic insistence on Colin’s safe return had been too much for Tilly to bear. And now, Mary was staring at Tilly with a clear-eyed belief that her own happy ending was now one step closer.

  How could they know? How had they not given up hope?

  Tilly stretched and flopped back in her armchair. ‘That sounds marvellous. I went back to the newsroom and then had to fight my way home. All those people …’ she trailed off, yawning. ‘And I seem to remember I decided to sit here for a minute to listen to Attlee’s speech again. And next thing I know, here you are.’

  Mary sat on the chair’s wide and flat arm. ‘I’m exhausted, but who on earth will get a wink of sleep tonight?’ Her cheeks were rosy pink and her bright blue eyes looked even brighter in the dim light of the living room. Her pale lips had lost their lipstick much earlier in the evening and her straight blonde hair, which she’d coaxed for years into gentle curls, had turned limp.

  She laid a hand on the top of Tilly’s head. ‘Don’t look at my hair, whatever you do. It’s a disaster, I know. A few drunken fellows were splashing in the Pool of Remembrance in Hyde Park and I copped it as I walked past.’ Mary began to dig the pins out of her formerly elaborate rolls. ‘Truth is, Tilly, my mind’s been racing like a hungry greyhound since this morning. Bert’s coming home. I can barely believe it.’ She glanced at his photograph. ‘It’s truly going to be over. For all of us.’

  Tilly found a smile. ‘I know. It’s the best news. And now, I really must go to bed.’ She stood slowly, wincing at the ache in her back. ‘Goodnight. Sleep tight.’

  Mary responded in a light, singsong voice, with the words she always did. ‘Don’t let the bed bugs bite.’

  Tilly changed out of her clothes wearily, making sure to hang her suit to air overnight, and slid between the sheets, as thin as muslin on her single bed. Her limbs were heavy but her mind spun like the Catherine wheel she’d seen on the dragon in Chinatown earlier that night. Outside, the rest of Sydney seemed to be experiencing the same problems settling. The voices of revellers floated up through her closed window and flashes of light from The Roosevelt Club across Orwell Street shone bright every now and then, like a policeman’s searching torchlight.

  ‘Nothing to find here,’ she whispered into the dark as she began to cry softly. Nothing but a girl reporter with a half-broken heart. She’d shed so many tears since 1942 they could have filled Sydney Harbour four times over. How was it possible she had any left?

  Tilly moved to sit and pressed her back to the headboard. She shivered and rubbed her hands back and forth over her arms, but she couldn’t get warm. Then the shiver became a shudder and she shook and her teeth chattered against each other, the sound echoing in her ears like a rat-a-tat-tat.

  She switched on her bedside lamp, reached for a cigarette and smoked it tremulously. Then another. And when she was calmer, she looked around her bedroom. It didn’t contain much and most of it had been in the flat when she had moved in. Her bed with its lumpen mattress had always been pushed into one corner and a decent-sized rug covered most of the rest of the floor. A three-drawer dresser with a swing mirror on top sat by the window, and in front of the mirror rested her hairbrush and comb, a glass bowl full of hairpins, her deodorant cream and the dram of perfume she’d bought from the French perfumerie on Orwell Street when she’d desperately needed cheering up. She’d had to wait behind a queue of Yanks buying gifts for their Australian girls. When they’d left, the shop assistant behind the counter had sneered in their direction and turned to Tilly. ‘Who’d step out with a Negro, I ask you?’

  On the wall opposite the window a two-doored gentleman’s oak wardrobe with a broken hinge held her suits, a couple of pretty dresses and her wedding gown in a calico bag.

  This was not the life she had imagined for herself when she’d married Archie Galloway on Saturday 9 November 1939. That was the day she’d said goodbye to the home she’d lived in all her life, her parents’ rented terrace on Argyle Place at Millers Point; to the attic room she’d shared with Martha, her younger sister by two years; to the small dark spaces and wood stove downstairs; to a house full of coal lumpers and watersiders; and walked into a rented flat in Bondi on the arm of her new husband. She’d gasped when she’d seen its full view of the ocean. The ocean! For almost eight months she’d basked in the sun, in days with sand between her toes and in blissful married life with the caring and kind fellow she’d dreamt she would spend the rest of her life with.

  When they’d met, Archie had been a clerk in an insurance office in Macquarie Street, with a very bright future according to his boss. She’d first seen Archie at a supper dance at The Trocadero, a venue that promised never a dull moment. Back in the day, it had been a respectable place for young ladies to be seen and she’d hurriedly handed over her two shillings at the door and made her way inside. She’d found a position on the edge of the dance floor and, with a lemonade in her hand, she’d stood with a smile hoping to be asked to dance. She hadn’t been very good back then but
had told herself that the only way to improve was by practising. She took in the couples and almost immediately became spellbound at the sight of Archie. She understood with the merest glance that he was someone who knew what he was doing. He twirled his partners like ribbons; they stepped out and back to him with the merest guiding hand on the small of their backs. He made them look good and Tilly wanted to look good.

  When he escorted a partner back to the table near her, she took her chance.

  She’d gulped her soft drink, set the glass down on the table among the teacups and ashtrays and reached for his arm.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she’d said.

  Archie had stopped, glanced at her hand on his jacket and slowly lifted his gaze to meet her eyes. Was it possible that in that moment she knew she would marry him?

  ‘Good evening, Miss,’ he’d said and nodded his head.

  ‘You’re a wonderful dancer,’ she’d told him and he’d blushed, and then she’d blushed, too.

  ‘That’s very kind of you to say.’

  She stepped closer to him to be heard above the band, which had just begun another number. People began to move out to the floor and someone bumped Tilly right into him.

  ‘Can you teach me to dance like that?’ she’d asked. ‘I’m not very good at the moment, you see, and I need some practice.’

  He’d reached a hand out to her. ‘The name’s Archibald Galloway. Everyone calls me Archie.’

  ‘Matilda Bell,’ she’d replied. ‘But I’m Tilly.’

  Neither of them had danced with another partner that night or any other night. Carried away with a new passion for each other and an uncertainty about what would come next for themselves and the country, they’d had a quick courtship before Archie had proposed. Tilly had hurriedly accepted, but then Archie had enlisted in July 1940, and that life had been folded up and put away like winter blankets at the first warm hint of spring.