The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘We’ve been happy here, haven’t we, Tilly? I mean, it’s not much and there’s damp in the bathroom, but it’s been fine for two single girls.’ Mary covered her mouth. ‘Oh, no. That’s not what I meant. I meant two girls on their own. Two girls with husbands away.’

  Tilly started. ‘And it’s close to the newspaper. We walk even when it’s raining.’

  ‘The buses and trams have been so crowded it hasn’t been worth the bother of squeezing in like sardines with every other soul in Sydney. We’ve walked everywhere, haven’t we, Tilly? Shank’s pony and all that.’

  Bert looked from Mary to Tilly. ‘All the Americans here, I suppose? Making the buses and trams so crowded?’

  ‘Not, not particularly, although we’ve had a lot of them around since you—’ Mary stopped. ‘For the past few years. You’ll be able to see them for yourself, all lined up outside The Roosevelt Club on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s just across the road here. It’s quite the place, apparently, very swanky, although I’ve never been inside.’ Mary’s nervous chatter came to a sudden halt and her red flush continued its creep to her cheeks.

  ‘Neither have I,’ Tilly added, sensing the need for a conversational diversion. Poor Mary and Bert. He was a rabbit in a spotlight and she was as jittery as a bride on a wedding night, both of which made Tilly feel like an absolute gooseberry. ‘The Americans are all over the Cross, but it’s the petrol rationing, Bert. If anyone had a car in the first place, it’s been almost impossible to get enough petrol to go anywhere.’

  ‘There’s petrol rationing?’ Bert glanced from Tilly to Mary and back.

  Mary looked to Tilly, wide-eyed. ‘Yes … for the um …’

  ‘Every spare gallon was reserved for the war and supporting our boys,’ Tilly said. ‘Diggers like you, Bert.’

  ‘And Archie, too,’ Mary added.

  Sweet Mary. ‘Yes, and Archie, too. You know, Bert, everyone’s calling you the Invincible 8th, you boys from the 8th Division. On account of the fact that you were all POWs for such a long time and fighting on, coming home like you have. That’s marvellous, isn’t it?’

  Bert smoothed a hand over his shaved head. ‘Sure beats The Lost Division. That’s what they called us for three-and-a-half years, I hear. So one of the doctors at the hospital told us.’

  ‘Do you remember what I told you, Bert? Tilly’s a reporter at the paper. She always knows what’s going on, usually before the rest of Sydney does.’

  Bert smiled generously at her. ‘I don’t know if I remember that.’

  Mary’s face fell. ‘I told you that, I’m sure. In one of my letters.’

  Bert kissed her cheek. ‘I bet you did. Letters were pretty few and far between in Changi, love. You’ll have to fill me in on everything I’ve missed.’

  Mary looked up at her husband, and Tilly swore she glowed with love and relief and sheer joy. ‘We have all the time in the world now, dearest Bert.’

  ‘That we do.’ He turned to Tilly. ‘I hope you won’t go asking me any questions about the war.’ His smile faltered then disappeared entirely and his expression was blank. ‘I didn’t see much of it myself.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ Tilly replied. ‘I wouldn’t want to intrude. But, you saw the war.’

  Bert stiffened. ‘Changi wasn’t war. It was captivity.’

  Mary’s face betrayed her confusion.

  And Tilly took that as a cue to leave the reunited lovers alone. She untied her apron and hung it on the back of the kitchen door. ‘Welcome home again, Bert. It’s so lovely to finally meet you. I’m off to see my parents for Sunday lunch. I bet that’s something you’ve missed, too.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘It’s the least I can do, Mum.’

  Tilly pushed the hessian bag of groceries across the kitchen table towards her mother. When Elsie pushed it right back, it toppled and a plump red apple rolled onto the floor.

  ‘You don’t need to be feeding your parents,’ Elsie said with a frustrated huff. ‘I can’t believe you’d think such a thing.’

  Tilly stared at her mother hard but lovingly. She realised how alike they must look: their arms crossed in the exact same way, the same narrowed hazel eyes and determined mouth. Anyone looking on would have no doubt they were mother and daughter, each as obstinate as the other.

  Tilly retrieved the fruit, checked it for bruises and set it on the table. ‘Stop being so stubborn, Mum. With the strikes still on, I know there’s no rent coming in. For goodness sake. It’s a few slices of corned beef, a loaf of bread, two apples and a few potatoes. And three bananas. Did I mention I found bananas? Martha’s boys will eat them if you won’t.’

  Elsie turned away from the bounty. ‘Take it away. I’m not taking charity from my own daughter, for pity’s sake.’

  Tilly spread her hands on the table and stared down her mother. ‘How many times have you fed everyone in Argyle Place when there haven’t been any ships in for a week? Who did the washing for the McCartneys when Mrs McCartney was sick after having another baby? Who always sees to the men at the Coal Lumpers’ Hall across the way when they’re skint? Yes, Mum, you. If you’re accusing me of having a generous nature, I plead guilty as charged, your honour. And I wonder where I learnt that? All I’m doing is sharing what I have and doing what I can.’

  Elsie went to the stove, still mumbling her protest, and put the kettle on.

  ‘Where’s Dad? I’m sure he’d like an apple.’ Tilly took it from the table and tossed it from hand to hand like a juggler missing a ball or two.

  ‘He’s having a rest before the meeting starts. You know how het-up he gets. It’s worse now and all with the strikes going on so long.’

  ‘Why is the meeting here? Why isn’t it at the union office?’

  Elsie didn’t reply and couldn’t look at her daughter. Tilly’s pulse quickened. ‘Mum? Is he all right?’

  Elsie gripped the counter and dipped her head. The bun that sat at her collar looked unusually frayed.

  Tilly felt a surge of guilt that she’d fought with her mother when so much more was going on in this house than the need for an apple and some potatoes. ‘Is it his back again? Or his hernia?’

  ‘These past few days he’s barely been able to get out of bed. You should hear him moan, Tilly. I’ve had to put his shoes on and do up the buttons on his shirts. The doctor says there’s something wrong with his heart. He’s fifty years old but he’s got the ticker of a seventy-year-old. The only thing that’s helping him at the moment, would you believe it, is the strike.’

  ‘Oh, Mum. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You’ve got enough on your mind.’

  ‘Never too much that I can’t hear news about Dad.’

  ‘And while I’m at it, don’t tell your sister, either. Your father doesn’t want either of you to worry.’

  ‘Why ever not? Martha will want to know if Dad’s poorly.’

  Elsie clasped her hands together. ‘She’s already got enough on her plate with the boys and working as many hours as she does and Colin still at sea and no word yet on when he’ll be back.’

  The war had stretched every person’s capacity for worry and fear and grief and forbearance. What was one more thing to add to the scales when they had been overbalanced for so long?

  ‘I promise,’ Tilly said, knowing full well that it was a commitment she would break the moment she saw her sister.

  A broken-down watersider—and a union man at that—was in a world of trouble. The men, like a flock of seagulls waiting for food scraps in the form of a pointed and beckoning finger, only had the strength of their bodies to recommend them. The stevedoring companies wanted the strongest and fittest men who were able to cope with the work, who wouldn’t break down or quit when the work got too heavy or too hard. Not men who would cause trouble. But the day Stan had handed over his dues to the Waterside Workers’ Federation and joined the fight for shorter shifts and washrooms and canteens down at the wharves, he’d quickly been branded a socialist
troublemaker and he’d only got work when there was a desperate need for men. The war had created that desperate need and there was more work than there had been in generations. The wharves at the northern end of Cockle Bay along the western shores of Millers Point became the engine room of Australian shipping to supply the war effort, with watersiders the cogs in that machine.

  When she’d been a teenager helping her mother with the boarders, Tilly had taken food to her father as he’d waited in the crowd of desperate men along the Hungry Mile. Carrying his sandwiches and fruit cake wrapped in a tea towel, Tilly had scurried along High Street to the High Steps, which she’d taken as gingerly as she could because they were narrow and so, so steep and she was a tall girl with a tall girl’s large feet, and then hurried down to Hickson Road to find her father among the crowds of men.

  They had been fierce and desperate times on the waterfront. The hungry men looking for work, some with famished families at home, numbered three or four hundred at a time, yet there was only work for forty of them. The one in ten chosen for the day’s shift would eat the next day, while the rest walked pitifully away. There had been nothing more miserable to Tilly’s eyes than the agony she’d seen in the slumped shoulders of men who wore their failure as heavily as their old coats, their begging having come to naught. Her father and his comrades always talked with derision about the decision of Australia’s Arbitration Court, back in 1931, to reduce the basic wage for workers by ten per cent.

  Tilly knew her father’s thoughts about that as well as she knew her own name. ‘It was supposed to get things moving again, give the bosses more money to bring on more people, but all it did was lead to more poverty for people like us, Tilly.’

  For the Bells and for other waterside families, their lives didn’t really improve until the war, when the demand for labour gave them a collective power they hadn’t had in decades. For the first time, Stan Bell had regular work, but it arrived at the same time as his body was starting to betray him. His last few good years were slipping away from him as sure as one of the ships he helped load would disappear across the ocean to distant lands.

  In those lean times, Elsie’s labours had kept the family afloat. The second floor of the terrace, below the attic and above the family’s bedrooms, had for many years been let to men who worked the wharves, coal lumpers or watersiders or seamen, men who needed to be close to the Hungry Mile. Tilly had met men from all over Sydney and even a few Norwegians who’d come to work the ships back when she was younger. It had never seemed out of the ordinary to Tilly to have strangers in the house, nor to be asked to serve them their dinner in the evenings after school or wash up a household’s dishes. She’d earnt her keep from a very young age.

  When the kettle whistled, Tilly filled the teapot and then set it on the trivet on the table. She went to her mother, slipped a comforting arm around Elsie’s shoulders.

  ‘We’re family.’ Tilly kissed the top of Elsie’s head. ‘You sit for a while. I’ll take Dad a cup of tea.’ Tilly loaded a tray with two cups and some fruit cake and made her way up the narrow staircase to the next floor.

  ‘And don’t you think I’m taking those damn bananas home.’

  Tilly’s parents’ bedroom was on the ground level of their terrace—above the kitchen on the lower floor—and its window overlooked Argyle Place. In the mornings it was flooded with light but once the sun was overhead it was dim and in winter, cold as charity. It had always been plain and nothing had changed. It still smelt as it always had, of shoe polish and Velvet soap. There was a two-door wardrobe. A dresser with a lace doily Tilly’s grandmother had sewn as a wedding gift for Stan and Elsie, a hand mirror, a brush and a wooden box, which held Elsie’s hair nets and pins. Tilly knew that in the first drawer on the dresser on the left side there was a green velvet box with a string of pearls and matching clip-on earrings. Tilly knew because she and Martha used to slip the necklace on when they were convinced their mother was too distracted in the kitchen to notice them playing dress-ups in her bedroom. It was easy when their father worked twenty-four-hour shifts and Elsie was busy with the house and the boarders. The bed was the same, the curved bedhead rising in the middle like the Harbour Bridge, and two tables on either side. A mirror hung by a silver chain above the fireplace.

  Her father was lying on his side on top of the blanket, drowsy but not asleep, and Tilly’s heart clenched at the sight of him. All his strength had slowly seeped out of him over the years and it still broke her heart to see it.

  ‘Dad?’ she said quietly as she approached. The cups tinkled against the saucers like a chime.

  Stan stirred and moved to sit up. ‘Hello, Tilly girl.’

  ‘Don’t get up.’ Tilly set the tray on the bed by his socked feet. ‘Let me fix your pillows so you can stay right where you are and drink your tea. There’s fruit cake, too.’

  Stan smiled sleepily at his daughter.

  ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes, Florence Nightingale.’ His face was pale, even in the dim light, and his breathing rasped.

  Tilly smiled. ‘Me? I would have made a terrible nurse. I feel nauseous at the sight of blood, you know that. Remember when Tommy McCartney—or was it Roger—came off his billycart outside number 32? We were still all together at school, I think. There was blood all over our front step. I almost fainted.’

  Stan chuckled. ‘That’s not how I remember it. You bolted inside and told your mother and me all about it. Left the poor kid bleeding all over the place.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Oh, yes. How Tommy—or was it Roger—had dropped dead right outside our front door. And that his little sister screamed blue murder and his mother tanned his hide as she dragged him off the cart, which I reckon was in pieces by that stage.’ That her father had remembered that particular five minutes from twenty years ago touched Tilly in a way she couldn’t express.

  ‘I did have a flair for exaggeration. Perhaps I should throw it in at the Daily Herald and go and work at Truth.’

  ‘Those Truth racing pages are pretty top notch.’

  ‘And that’s not all that’s racy about it.’ Tilly rolled her eyes.

  Stan sipped his tea. ‘Just what your old man needs, this.’

  ‘Mum tells me you’ve been at the doctor’s again.’

  He tsked good-naturedly. ‘I s’pose there’s nothing secret between a mother and her daughter, is there?’

  Tilly shook her head and took a bite of cake. ‘No, there isn’t. Not when it comes to you. I suppose he’s given you orders to stay right here in bed?’

  ‘You going to boss me around too?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am,’ Tilly replied. ‘And tell me you’re going to listen to him this time. Please.’

  ‘From where I sit, I can’t see I’ve got much choice, Tilly girl. Your mother will have my guts for garters if I don’t. Since we’re all out, it seems like as good a time as any to get crook. I’m not paid for lying in bed when I’m at work, and I’m not paid when I’m on strike, so it’s much of a muchness.’

  She spoke as she ate more cake. ‘Mum tells me the men from the union are coming here for your meeting.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Stan said, giving nothing else away. He had grown used to her habit of probing and he had developed his own way of dealing with it, usually by not saying much of anything at all.

  ‘Can you tell me what the strike’s really about, Dad?’

  Stan narrowed his eyes at his daughter. ‘This isn’t for the paper, is it?’

  ‘No. Maybe.’ Then she shook her head. ‘The industrial reporter might have something to say about it if a woman reporter started invading his patch.’

  ‘What does it matter what I say? They’ll never run the truth about what we’re fighting for. The Daily Herald, and come to think of it, almost every paper except The Worker, has had it in for us as long as I can remember. Before I was born, even. They’ve always been on the side of the bosses and the big shipping companies. None of them will be happy until we work f
or nothing.’

  Before Tilly could reply, her mother appeared at the doorway. ‘You all right, love?’

  ‘Just giving Tilly a history lesson.’

  ‘A lecture more like it.’ Elsie winked at her daughter. ‘They’re all here.’

  Tilly followed her parents down the stairs to the kitchen where the union men were waiting, making sure to grip her father’s elbow as he took slow and tentative steps.

  This was a familiar scene. She’d spent many nights as a child eavesdropping on meetings like this, sitting out of sight at the top of the stairs when she was supposed to be long past asleep.

  ‘Comrades.’ Stan wheezed and coughed, the exertion of the stairs taking its toll, and Tilly ushered him to a chair.

  The three men were organisers with the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Arthur Black was a bull of a man, as tall as her father, with neat, white-grey hair and a large red nose. Bob Bailey was half bald and stocky as a boxer dog with a twinkle in his sea-blue eyes, and Walter Rose still had a head of curly carrot-red hair, which he attempted to smooth into position with brilliantine.

  Walter stepped forward. ‘Your mother’s just told us all about Archie. We hope he’s home soon, love.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Rose. That’s very kind of you to say. I hope so too.’

  Tilly moved to the sink. Elsie was slicing a loaf of bread and together she and her mother made a plate of sandwiches for the men, who were smoking and strategising.

  ‘We’re up to thirty thousand workers out now,’ Arthur announced. ‘That’s watersiders, miners, ironworkers, those blokes in electricity up at Bunnerong, meat workers and the printers.’

  A silence fell. Tilly glanced over her shoulder, aiming for nonchalance, to discover her father and the three union men looking at her through narrowed eyes.

  Stan coughed. ‘Might be best if you leave, Tilly. What with you working for the paper. This is union business. And men’s business.’

  Tilly took the plate of sandwiches to the table. ‘Here you are, gentlemen.’

  ‘It’s a feast fit for a king, sister.’ Arthur nodded his appreciation to Elsie.