The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘Tell me again why you have to go back to Melbourne to join up?’ Tilly had asked, aching at the thought of him leaving one day sooner than he had to.

  ‘Family history, Tilly,’ he’d told her with a grin. ‘It’s my father’s division, you see.’ He’d paused and leant down to kiss her quickly. ‘I told you he served in the 22nd in the Great War, didn’t I? Gallipoli, the Somme, Flanders, all that. Came back with nothing but a scratch. You know me, Til. Strong as an ox and smart as a whip. It’ll all be over bar the shouting by the end of the year.’ And so he’d left on the train to Melbourne for the Victoria Barracks. By September 1940, the 2/22nd had marched one hundred and forty-five miles on foot to Bonegilla, near Wodonga on the New South Wales–Victoria border, to continue their training at the camp.

  They’d only had one more night together before he’d gone to war. The entire battalion had arrived in Sydney by train in preparation for heading off to New Guinea, and Tilly and Archie had spent it together in her new flat in Potts Point. She hadn’t been able to afford the Bondi rent on her own, stubbornly determined to save all Archie’s wartime pay for a house of their own when he returned, and anyway, she’d found the sudden loneliness unbearable.

  ‘I don’t need to see the sights,’ Archie had told her, as they’d lain together, entwined in the dark, having made love one last time. ‘I know what the Coathanger looks like. I want to be right here, remembering what you feel like in my arms. You’ll get me through this, Tilly. The idea of you in this bed in this little room. I’ll think of you every day and every night. You will write to me, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’ll write to you,’ she had answered hurriedly and desperately. ‘It’s what I do. Write.’

  ‘And perhaps when you’re a reporter, you might become a war correspondent and come and see me in action. You’re always talking about that. Writing about the war, I mean. Wouldn’t that be marvellous! I might get my picture in the paper.’

  She’d only shared her dream with one person and Archie had been a cheerful supporter of her ambition. But that had been before Pearl Harbor. Before Singapore had fallen. They had fought a very different war after those catastrophes.

  The day Archie left Sydney, on 17 April 1941, Tilly had sobbed as she’d waved him goodbye at Circular Quay. By the time the SS Katoomba finally departed two hours later, she was at Embarkation Park in Potts Point watching him sail away towards the Heads and on to the war. She remembered now with great humility her expectation, and the whole country’s, that the war would be all over by Christmas and that all the boys would soon be home.

  Their Potts Point landlord, who was as flash as a rat with a gold tooth, had taken their details and quickly judged Tilly and Mary to be good prospects, being two women of twenty-six years of age with husbands doing their duty to the king and no little ’uns to squawk at all hours and annoy the neighbours. He was used to letting share flats and bedsits to women, he’d told them.

  ‘They make good tenants. They look after everything much better than the blokes do. Have you seen the state of some of those boarding houses in the Cross? It’s a bloody disgrace,’ he’d expostulated as he’d stuffed their bond money into his wallet then his wallet into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. ‘Pity about all the ladies, though, wouldn’t you say? Old spinsters, you understand. There weren’t enough blokes to go round after the Great War and they missed out.’

  Tilly reached for another cigarette and knocked the pack off her bedside table and onto the wicker basket on the other side. She could unpack that basket now. Years before, when a Japanese invasion was all anyone in Sydney could talk about, when people in harbourside houses and flats who had the means moved to the Blue Mountains to get as far away from torpedoes as they could, she’d assiduously taken the very precautions she’d read about in her own newspaper. Pack supplies in the event you have to evacuate in a hurry. Include a torch. A candle with matches. Some money. A warm cardigan and a pair of slacks in case you need to get dressed in a hurry and in the dark. While it was frowned upon to wear trousers at the newspaper—something Frances had never given two hoots about—the authorities had advised women they would be a sensible choice if one was forced into an air-raid shelter.

  Next to the wicker basket was a case filled with a roll of bandages, cotton wool, drinking water, sticking plaster, a bottle of iodine, a pair of low-heeled shoes and another change of clothes: they were the essentials one would need if one’s home was destroyed.

  Back then, Mary and Tilly had carefully read the new instructions issued each week by the authorities on how to stay safe in case the Japs invaded.

  ‘We have to fill the bathtub with water in case incendiary bombs destroy the rest of the flat,’ Mary had announced.

  Tilly read on. ‘And it says here that we should cover all our food. “Plates will protect the contents of basins against flying splinters of glass. Food in airtight tins or jars is protected against gas.’” They exchanged wary glances.

  Tilly picked up the case and slipped back in bed, lifting it onto her lap and snapping open its clasps. She unfolded the emergency cardigan that held wrapped in its warm embrace an Arnott’s biscuit tin filled with her most precious things: envelopes containing telegrams from the army, all Archie’s letters and their framed wedding photo.

  She slowly shuffled the letters in her hands. There were only forty of them. Perhaps if she was more careful, if she didn’t sort roughly and hurriedly through the pile as she’d done in her worst moments, as if she were shuffling cards in a game she didn’t want to play, there might be one she’d previously missed. Perhaps one had been caught up under the flap of another, and she would open it to find fresh declarations of love, observations about the weather and some new, humorous stories from the husband she hadn’t seen since 17 April 1941.

  Twice each day since then she’d checked the letterbox set into the curved brick entrance to the apartment block downstairs, and twice each and every day for the past three years there had been nothing more from Archie. She only had forty letters from her husband. There were the letters from Melbourne and Bonegilla and then his first few from New Guinea, which were filled with greetings and messages of love, about how much he missed her, telling her not to worry, that he was well and surrounded by blokes who would look after him. It was hot, he had written, and the jungle was dense and humid. He’d seen some kind of monkey, which had amused him no end. ‘He wasn’t that keen on our bully beef, I can tell you. Come to think of it, neither are we.’ And on that weekend, Tilly caught the ferry to Taronga to study all the primates to try to figure out which one Archie had seen in the verdant jungle so far away.

  On the back of each envelope, he’d written OOLAAKOEW: Oceans Of Love And A Kiss On Every Wave. Or HOLLAND and EGYPT: Hope Our Love Lives And Never Dies, and Ever Gives You Pleasant Thoughts. The acronyms had made her laugh once upon a time. Now they made her weep.

  Archie’s last letter was postmarked September 1942. In it, he had informed her that he was a prisoner of war of the Japanese.

  Things had gone badly in the war that year. In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the Americans into the war, Singapore had fallen on 15 February 1942. Mary’s husband Bert had become one of the fifteen thousand Australians captured there by the Japanese. And then when Darwin had been attacked four days after Singapore, it seemed the darkest days of the war in the Pacific had only just begun.

  Archie had been in New Britain for just eight months when the Japanese had invaded. They’d bombed Rabaul, a town north-east of Port Moresby, and taken all the remaining troops and local civilians prisoner. When Tilly had heard the news, she’d run to the bathroom and vomited.

  Shortly after, in February 1942, she’d received a telegram informing her that her husband was missing, believed prisoner of war. And then nothing from Archie until September. How much she had grieved for Archie in those dreadful, lonely months.

  That final letter from Archie, the one that arrived in Septemb
er, had been confusingly dated 5 June. It was brief and to the point. And then there had been nothing in the three years since. Not a word. Not a line in any story her own newspaper or any other in Australia had run. The soldiers of Lark Force and all the Australian civilians in New Britain had disappeared into Japanese hands.

  Lark Force, as it was called, had been sent to Rabaul to protect Allied airfields and to provide advance notice of any Japanese movements through the islands to Australia’s north. It had been a disaster. Mr Sinclair had heard rumours that the commander of Lark Force had declared every man for himself when the Japanese had invaded, and there were rumours that a few soldiers had made it out of New Guinea and had returned to Australia to tell the tale. That detail had never been in the papers. Mr Sinclair had told her things about the war no one else knew.

  Rumours had swirled in Sydney like smoke during the war. Tilly needed to see Archie with her own eyes, to hold him in her own embrace, before she would truly know he was still alive. When she was desperate with missing him, she would sit in bed and read each letter over again, whispering along with every line that she knew by heart after all these years.

  In his neat hand, between ‘Dearest Tilly’ and ‘As always, your Archie’, there wasn’t much detail about what he was up to and no purple protestations of love or of missing her. Censors read every letter, they both knew that, and anyway, she hadn’t needed words back then to be reminded of how much he loved her.

  She regularly dreamt of him in his khaki uniform, his pack on his shoulders, his blond hair glinting in the Sydney sun just the way it had that departure day when he’d lifted his slouch hat to kiss her one last time. In her dreams he was tanned and shirtless because of the New Guinea heat but smiling, always smiling. Or he was joking with one of the mates he’d written about from his battalion. Mates like Tugger and Bega and Spiller who were in the 2/22nd with him.

  Tilly wiped away tears with the back of a hand and stared at Archie’s last letter. He’d scrawled it on pale yellow paper, about eight inches by ten, folded it twice and slipped it inside an envelope of the same colour. There were three long stickers on the envelope, about a third of an inch wide, which were printed with the words Opened by Censor in bold red type, almost the exact same colour as her lipstick. And then, another sticker. Passed by Censor. It pained Tilly to think of all the people who had read Archie’s precious words to her before she had had the chance to, how something private between them had been studied by a man wearing an army uniform and wielding a sharp blade.

  The postmark on the envelope said 30 September 1942, and the letter began, as his letters always did, with ‘Dearest Tilly’.

  It is with the greatest relief that I write to tell you that I am well and there is no need to worry. I am a prisoner of war and I’m being held at Rabaul under the Japanese—.

  Tilly smoothed her right index finger over the paper on which a censor had wielded his pen knife. A rectangular hole had been spliced into Archie’s handwriting just after the word ‘Japanese’. She held it closer to the lamp and watched the light bleed through the gap in the page.

  I can only imagine how anxious you are but I am in excellent health and good spirits. Could you let mother and father know that I’m all right and that I look forward to seeing them again when I get home?

  It’s good of the Japanese to let us write a letter home and this might be my last chance for a while. Don’t worry. They’re treating us well.

  Let us hope that it won’t be long until you and I, darling, are reunited once again.

  As always, your Archie

  There had not been another word from Archie, nor any of the Japanese prisoners of war in Rabaul in New Guinea, since that letter had arrived.

  She’d wished every night for one more letter. Just one, in his familiar handwriting, neat and practised from his insurance work, telling her that he was alive. She would have begged to God if she were a believer.

  But nothing had ever come.

  All around her, Sydney was celebrating the end of the war.

  Tilly let herself think the most selfish of thoughts. When would her war be over?

  Chapter Four

  When the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 had brought the Americans marching into the war and sailing into Sydney, Tilly suddenly realised the city she loved was under real threat. Like hundreds of thousands of other Sydneysiders, she had agreed to the drastic measures the government had decreed must be put in place if they were to keep themselves safe from attack.

  Just twenty-four hours after the announcement that the country would go dark at night, Tilly’s mother Elsie Bell had arrived at the flat in Potts Point lugging two carpet bags with enough expertly made blackout curtains to cover all six windows.

  ‘What on earth are they?’ Tilly had asked when Elsie bustled in and began tugging on folds of fabric, which had unfurled like a magic pudding.

  ‘It’s for the brownouts, Tilly. The Japs are in Singapore and North Borneo and the Philippines and soon they’ll be marching into Malaya, just you wait,’ her mother had answered her indignantly, propping her fists on her hips and staring at Tilly with a dumbfounded expression.

  ‘No wonder you and Mary pay such cheap rent. That navy base Kuttabul is just down the road. Everyone around here must be scared out of their wits. And with good reason, too. These curtains will do the trick. Give me a hand to take down those old ones. Now, make sure you keep some newspaper aside to stuff in the cracks so you can keep every skerrick of light in. You hear me, young lady? Or your father will never forgive me.’

  Although the government had advised residents along Sydney’s eastern seaboard to evacuate, how could Tilly have left her family and her job? And anyway, even if the coast wasn’t safe, most people didn’t have the means to leave, unless of course they were the families living in the mansions of Elizabeth Bay. Bondi, Coogee and Manly beaches had been strung with barbed wire and impaled with iron stakes, and giant wire coils like hair rollers had been laid out along the sand. Other suburban beaches had been closed and every day on the way to work Tilly and Mary passed by another air-raid trench dug in Hyde Park. Car headlights were covered with hoods like droopy eyelids to subdue them, streetlights had been dimmed and street signs had disappeared from beachside suburbs to confuse the Japanese should they invade. All those threats of invasion became frighteningly real after the Japanese midget subs slipped into Sydney Harbour and attacked on a cold, moonlit night in May 1942.

  From that day, Sydneysiders had well and truly been drawn into the front line of the war.

  A street in Bellevue Hill had been shelled and another shell had exploded beside a block of flats in Rose Bay, gouging a crater that men stood around and stared at. Tilly and Mary had tugged on some clothes and headed to the harbour and had seen and heard it all: the heavy gunfire and the depth-charge detonations, the sweep of the searchlights across the water, and the terrific explosion of a Japanese torpedo. Tilly had filled her notebook as residents came out in their hundreds, not all quite so fussed as she had been about getting dressed. They were in dressing-gowns and slippers, hair in curlers and wrapped with scarves and hairnets, setting aside any embarrassment at being seen that way in the arc of the searchlights, which lit up parts of the harbour as bright as day. Shrapnel from bursting shells had rained down on the water like fireworks. It had been fantastic and terrifying all at once.

  Tilly had raced back to the flat to phone the newsroom and had dictated her story to one of the late-night copytakers, but it was days before anything had been able to be reported.

  Mr Sinclair had been apoplectic about the army’s censorship of the story. All the reporters had heard that the chairman of the board of the newspaper himself had got right on the blower to the Navy Minister Mr Makin to express his fury that his own paper had been prevented from printing what Sydneysiders had been able to see, as it was happening, with their very own eyes.

  What made it worse was that news of the attack in Sydney’s own watery backy
ard had been reported first in America, and by the BBC in London, and only then, officially, out of Melbourne. Tilly’s eyewitness account, and those of other newspaper reporters and photographers and broadcasters, had appeared in papers in every other state in the country and in radio reports broadcast all over the world. Finally, the Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces in Australia, General Douglas MacArthur himself, made the announcement that the enemy’s attack had been completely unsuccessful and damage had been confined to one small harbour vessel of no military value.

  Three days after the Sydney Harbour attacks, when the names of the twenty-one dead naval ratings had appeared in the newspaper with an announcement they would be buried at Rookwood Cemetery with full naval honours, Tilly had read each one aloud. They were boys from Medindie in Adelaide and Paddington and Penrith in New South Wales and Brisbane and Redcliffe in Queensland. She imagined their crooked smiles, their pride at wearing a navy uniform, their family’s grief and loss at losing their sons so close to home in a place they would have believed to be safe.

  After that, she had followed her mother’s advice and had stuffed every gap in the windows in the flat with newspaper as soon as darkness had fallen. It wasn’t just her mother’s urging which had her swinging into action; she and Mary also had to contend with the eagle eyes of the local air-raid warden who lived in the flat next door.

  Mr Kleinmann had never been backwards in coming forwards, rapping his knuckles on their door the minute the sun set.

  ‘Ladies,’ he would call. ‘It’s dark already. Make the lights out. We must be safe here. Make hurry.’

  Tilly had always bitten her lip and sucked in a deep breath before opening the door to him. On the day he’d told her that if Archie was listed as missing it meant he was already dead, she had decided she hated him. If she so much as heard his front door closing or the sound of a violin coming from his flat, she found herself swallowing bitter rage.