The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘I hope it does help.’ Then she remembered and hoped Mrs Teale didn’t mind her saying it. ‘I knitted for the Red Cross during the war. My husband—’ Tilly’s words caught as they always did when she spoke of Archie, as if saying his name might summon his ghost and she should prepare herself. ‘My husband served. I was always so very grateful for the work of the Red Cross because of him, you see. I sent so many letters and fruit cakes to him in New Guinea and I’d like to think he received at least some of them before he was killed.’

  Mrs Teale’s expression changed from one of polite reservation to implicit understanding. ‘Please accept my sincere condolences. He served in New Guinea, you said?’

  ‘Yes. Rabaul. He was taken prisoner when the Japanese took the town and was later drowned on a prisoner of war ship bound for Japan. The Montevideo Maru. It was sunk off the Philippines in July 1942 but it took the whole war to find out what really happened to him.’

  Mrs Teale’s face fell. ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Tilly took a deep breath and opened her notebook. It was brand new, with not a mark in it. She wrote the date across the top of the page: 22 October 1945.

  ‘Mrs Teale, are you able to tell me a little about your recent work?’

  The woman nodded. ‘Of course. I was a relief worker with the British Red Cross in Europe. On 21 April this year I was among a contingent that was sent in to the Belsen concentration camp in Germany six days after it was liberated.’ Her voice cracked a little and she became quiet.

  ‘Our job was to begin rebuilding the minds and bodies of people that had been … broken by the Germans.’

  Tilly’s pencil moved over the page. ‘What did that work involve?’

  ‘We staffed the hospital, coordinated all the fresh supplies into the camp, because there was absolutely nothing there for those poor souls, and we tended to the sick. Welfare officers took care of the children, the orphans, and some of us became cooks, establishing canteens to feed the inmates. It was such a simple thing but you can’t imagine what difference a clean bed can make to new mothers and their dear, starving little babies. They were as small as birds. Barely alive.’

  Reports from the Belsen war crimes trials had been in the newspapers every day, filled with harrowing, matter-of-fact testimonies. However, Tilly guessed that the worst of the evidence had never made it into the newspapers.

  ‘It was a catastrophe, the proportions of such we couldn’t even have imagined, Mrs Galloway. There were thirteen thousand unburied bodies and sixty thousand others, sick and starving.’

  As Tilly filled the lines in her notebook, she wanted to ask this quiet, unassuming, kind woman how it was that she hadn’t gone mad at being a witness to it all?

  ‘What was it like when you arrived at Belsen, Mrs Teale? Do you think you were prepared for what you were to encounter?’

  The colour slowly drained from her face. ‘It’s difficult to explain the absolute shock of it. Arriving there … it was as if we had walked into another world. It was eerily quiet. I remember that so vividly. People didn’t even have the energy to speak, nor the little children to cry. And bodies, the skin on those poor skeletons of people was stretched so thin you could almost see through them. The smell of typhus was ghastly.’

  Tears welled in Mrs Teale’s eyes. Tilly looked up from the curves and dots and loops of her shorthand, her own vision blurred by tears.

  ‘There were lavatories but they weren’t functional. There were buildings full of medical supplies but nothing had been given to those who were dying.’

  Mrs Teale was staring over Tilly’s shoulder, her expression blank and, as she continued to talk, she closed her eyes.

  ‘I couldn’t get over the fact that there were German doctors and nurses that had been complicit in that treatment. Doctors and nurses,’ she repeated. ‘And so many women. I had thought, perhaps naively, that those in the caring professions might be better than that, that the Hippocratic oath might outrank the evil philosophy of Nazism. But women wielded bayonets and set dogs upon prisoners, watching as they were savaged. One of the guards, Irma Grese, used to beat people with a riding whip. A mother was caught talking to her daughter in another compound and she beat the mother until her head and shoulders were covered with blood. When she fell to the ground, Grese continued to kick her. Women were sterilised, hung up by their legs for experiments in artificial insemination, injected with petrol. It was criminal barbarity on a scale that is unthinkable to any right-minded person. And yet they were ordinary people, weren’t they, before the war?’

  Tilly stared wide-eyed at Mrs Teale, with her librarian looks and her graceful demeanour. Allied forces had liberated more than three hundred concentration camps all over Europe. In the Pacific, they were doing the same. What fresh horrors were yet to be discovered?

  It was a long moment before Mrs Teale met Tilly’s gaze. ‘I worked there until 21 May, when it was burnt down.’ Her eyes hardened. ‘It’s a tragedy for you that your husband lost his life, Mrs Galloway. I hope it helps you to know that he did so to protect the rest of the world from that evil.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tilly surveyed the shorthand notes and crumpled cables and clumsily refolded newspapers that were strewn all over her desk, gathered like souvenirs from the stories she’d covered since she’d been back at work.

  Suddenly, none of it made any sense. She looked around the women’s newsroom and it was full of familiar faces: Mrs Freeman and her calm elegance, Dear Agatha spraying Tosca Eau de Cologne at her neck, police reporter Maggie Pritchard taking a break from hunching over her typewriter to light a fresh Woodbine from the tip of another, Frances Langly pushing her glasses up her nose as she pursed her lips and listened intently on the phone.

  But Tilly saw them all as if she were on the other side of a pane of glass. There was a buzzing in her ears which blocked out every sound except the thud of her heart, so fast she thought it might break her ribs. She was still gripping the telephone receiver and as she stared at it for a moment, she felt herself begin to shake. She dropped it into the cradle with a Bakelite clunk and when she looked down at her hands she saw they were trembling. The tremor travelled up her shoulders and her teeth began to chatter at the same time as her stomach wrenched. She bit down the nausea and got to her shaky feet.

  Tilly made her way in a daze upstairs to the men’s newsroom and as she crossed the floor a shrieking wolf whistle split the air.

  ‘The reporterette’s back.’

  Tilly turned to shoot Robinson a stone cold glare.

  Her attention fired him up even more. ‘No stories up here for you, love. Better head back downstairs,’ he called out, which encouraged a round of hooting laughter and catcalls from the other male reporters.

  ‘Stairs are that way.’ It was a voice Tilly didn’t recognise but one she would never forget. She kept her pace steady and her head held high, ignoring the jibes and the whistles and the disrespect that followed behind her like a waft of perfume, and went to Cooper’s desk.

  Cooper got to his feet, dipped his chin and pointed at Robinson with an accusing finger. ‘Cut it out,’ he growled, which only led to more wolf whistles and catcalls from across the newsroom. He pushed his hair back from his forehead with a quick, exasperated shove.

  ‘Cooper,’ Tilly said as she approached and his anger dissipated and quickly became concern as she came close.

  ‘Mrs Galloway?’ he asked quietly, reaching for her arm.

  ‘It was us,’ she murmured through trembling lips. Her knees felt as loose as rubber bands.

  ‘What was?’

  He urged her into his chair and swiped a spare from the desk next to his and came close to her. All around them, typing resumed, the striking of keys on butcher’s paper creating an echoing click strike click.

  ‘It was an Allied submarine that torpedoed the Montevideo Maru. The Japanese are finally telling the truth. At three am, sixty miles north-west of Luzon Island. The prisoners�
�Archie—were battened down in the hold. It sank with all hands on deck within a few minutes.’

  The blood seemed to drain from Cooper’s face. ‘An Allied sub? Where did you get this from?’

  ‘The army. I’ve been chasing it. I’ve been calling every day to find out about his letter and how the dates didn’t match. They told me about Major Williams, who was sent to Japan to find everyone who was still missing. All those people from Rabaul, the soldiers of Lark Force, the civilians and the missionaries. He found a list of names from the Montevideo Maru. A nominal roll, but it was in Japanese and they had to translate it. Archie’s name was on that list. That’s how they know he’s dead.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Tilly met Cooper’s gaze. ‘Someone, somewhere made a mistake, didn’t they? How could we … we … torpedo a ship full of POWs? Of Australians?’

  He kept his voice low. She could barely hear him. Perhaps she didn’t want to. ‘It wasn’t a hospital ship to them, Mrs Galloway. It was a Japanese vessel.’

  ‘We killed them,’ she stammered, barely able to breathe.

  Cooper squeezed her arm. ‘War killed them, Mrs Galloway.’

  The truth about the deaths of the prisoners on the Montevideo Maru only received a few paragraphs of coverage in the Daily Herald, on page eight of the 23 November edition. It seemed that a story about one thousand people being killed in 1942 was nothing but old news by 1945 and, anyway, they’d been missing so long didn’t their families believe they were already dead? How could it possibly have been a shock to discover that the men of Lark Force and all the civilians had long ago met their maker? Australia had seen twenty-six thousand other soldiers killed in action and more than eight thousand prisoners of war had died in captivity. There was death and loss everywhere. The prisoners of that ship were nothing but more names and numbers to add to a long tally.

  Tilly carefully cut out the story and set it neatly on Archie’s letters and the telegrams in the box in which she kept her memories of him. When would she be able to put a lid on all the mysteries surrounding his death, the most perplexing of which was the arrival of his last letter months after he was already dead. Where had it been? Had it been misplaced by the Australian PMG in the Sydney Post Office? Had a bag of precious mail been lost off the back of a truck somewhere and lain undiscovered for months before being hurriedly sorted and delivered?

  She had pursued an interview with Major Williams, calling the Australian Army Directorate of Prisoners of War in Melbourne every day for a week, but she couldn’t get as much as a phone call to him in Tokyo. She would never know if it was because she was a woman, but a male reporter in Melbourne got the scoop. Williams said on the record that he’d discovered the Japanese had displayed utter ineptitude and indifference when it came to the mail of prisoners of war as well as information about POWs altogether. They hadn’t kept complete or detailed records—unlike the Germans who were sadistically meticulous—of who they had captured and of those who had died in captivity. Withholding mail and parcels was another instrument of abuse against these tortured and starving prisoners, further isolating them from news of home and family. Bags of undelivered mail had been discovered abandoned in the Japanese Government’s Prisoner of War Bureau—the Furyo Jôhôkyoku—in Tokyo. Is that where her letters to Archie were? The thought that her words of love, her funny little stories about her life at the newspaper and Mary and her parents and Martha and Bernard and Brian and Terry had been handled by the enemy, kept aside as a means to torture Archie, was a new and unbearable blow.

  No one wanted to hear, after all that time, that the deaths on the Montevideo Maru were an accident. Because, really, what did it matter whose torpedo it was?

  Cooper had been right. The war had killed Archie.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  For the first month of Tilly’s return to work, she kept busy by burying her head in stories during the day, doing all that was asked of her and more, so she could leave the office and her notebook behind, weary and spent, with as little time as possible between dinner and bed. It didn’t pay to have too much time to think about anything else, she reckoned. Her mother had always said that idle hands were the devil’s playground, mostly when she sensed her two daughters were bored and about to get into a scrap with each other, and her refrain usually presaged the handing over of some kitchen or household implement or other. A potato peeler. A broom. A mop. Tilly tried everything to fill her mind so thoughts of all she’d lost wouldn’t find any purchase or succour. If she had time in the evenings, between a meal and sleep, she turned the wireless up loud, to listen to Melody and Rhythm on 2UE or Amateur Hour on 2CH, which sometimes made her laugh and forget.

  For a couple of weeks, Cooper had been constant and diverting company. If it wasn’t lunch at Circular Quay during the week in the sparkling Sydney spring sunshine, it was soup and a coffee after work before going to the pictures; and one weekend they’d walked through the Botanic Gardens to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and waited their turn to sit on the stone steps so they could look out in the distance to the bridge and the sweep of the harbour still filled with ships, lined up like cigars in a box.

  In the trees and shrubs and sky all around them, Cooper had pointed out the brown goshawks soaring overhead on their slightly upturned wings, the eastern spinebills hovering over lush blooms and the figbirds searching for fruit. There was a peace about that spot that Tilly had only come to appreciate sitting next to Cooper. He hadn’t needed to spell it out for her to know what he was trying to help her understand. That there could be life and hope after the worst blow. That the sun rose every day on both tragedy and triumph equally. Fresh life would continue to be born anew all around them in nature’s garden as it would again in hers. Buds and blossoms and blooms would burst from bare branches one might have thought were devoid of life and would reach for the sun and light and warmth as they had done for millions of years.

  If anyone had questions about how much time she and Cooper were spending together—Mary, her mother, Martha—they had been silent on the issue. And Tilly wasn’t sure what her answer would have been in any case. He was a dear friend and a wonderful distraction and a handsome companion. And that was it. In those moments when she’d forgotten who she was and what she’d gone through, when she’d looked into his eyes and seen something reflected back at her that she didn’t want to see, she’d turned away, embarrassed. It had only been grief and loss playing havoc with her. She was sure of it.

  Tilly had been to Angus and Robertson’s on Castlereagh Street many times before, but Cooper’s tour helped her see it with fresh eyes. She’d only ever lingered at the front of the store, glancing back along the brightly lit pendants which formed two perfect rows, their perspective narrowing until they might have met way down the back. Cooper led her through the crowds poring over the display tables that ran down each side of the store, filled with novels by Eleanor Dark and M Barnard Eldershaw and Kylie Tennant, past the Books for Boys and Girls shelves, to the section at the rear where he pulled from the shelves a copy of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career.

  ‘I haven’t read this one,’ she’d told him, taking it from his hand and flipping open the inside cover to read the blurb on the dust jacket.

  ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

  Playing at being offended, she said offhandedly, ‘I was a little too busy being taught typing and shorthand and office skills at my high school to prepare me for a life as a secretary. What’s it about?’

  ‘Read it,’ he’d said, and because it was Cooper, she’d gone home that night and devoured it, page by page, until she’d fallen asleep with the book cradled to her chest.

  Tilly hadn’t had the opportunity to discuss her many thoughts on Sybylla Melvyn or Harry Beecham with Cooper because the next day he’d flown off to the Dutch East Indies with his battered portable typewriter, landing in Batavia to report on the independence battle being waged by the Indonesians. There were still bans in place on Dutch ships in Australia and s
trikers at the Rose Bay flying boat base were doing their best to frustrate the Dutch suppression by voting not to service any Dutch aircraft at the base. Tilly was thankful of that because she imagined it would make Cooper safer.

  Her father had been deeply immersed in union meetings as watersiders continued to be involved in the action against the Dutch too, not just in Sydney but in Newcastle, and in other cities and towns, where two thousand steel workers were still idle. Nearly one hundred printing firms were being boycotted because they’d sacked members of their workforce who had refused to toil more than a forty-hour week.

  When an official statement was made on 2 November by the British that Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun had suicided after their marriage back on 30 April, two days before Berlin had fallen, Tilly found no sympathy in her heart for that murderer, nor his wife, and she wished she’d been there outside the German Chancellory to see their bodies burn and their bones smashed to shards.

  They would never have the dignity of a grave and she was glad of it. Archie and thousands of others like him would never have graves either.

  Hadn’t the end of the war been supposed to herald a new era of peace and prosperity? Those lofty goals seemed a long way away in the lead-up to Christmas 1945. At home, Mary had come to a kind of weary resignation at Bert’s odd behaviour, or at least it seemed that way to Tilly, and Mary coped by increasingly finding things to do that didn’t involve her absent husband.

  And through all this continuing turmoil and uncertainty, Tilly found herself writing stories about lives that looked nothing like hers or the lives of the women she knew. She covered prize-winning beach girls, telling readers how fortunate they were to have secured themselves good jobs such as models and receptionists after featuring in competitions—coincidentally sponsored by her own newspaper. She’d visited a kindergarten exhibition at the Sydney Town Hall and had crafted a story about how important kindergarten experts believed the earliest years were for the healthy growth and development needs of children, and wondered why that story was destined for relegation to the women’s pages and not the main news pages at the front of the paper. She had written twenty paragraphs on the joys of spring cleaning and a list of ten gift ideas for the man in your life but her biggest story yet appeared in the first week of December.