by Janet Tanner
The troopship on which they sailed had once been a luxury liner but now had none of the trappings of those balmy days. The bunks cramped into the ‘brown-out’ below decks were stained and without sheets; the blankets which eventually arrived to cover them – one grey woollen army issue per bunk – were scratchy and uncomfortably hot, but at least they were clean. In spite of the stabilizers which had been fitted to the ship in her cruising days, Tara began to feel queasy the moment the swell began to lift it and by the time they put to sea she was violently seasick. Lying miserably on her hard narrow bunk, Tara remembered that other voyage when she and Mammy had sailed halfway round the world and the nightmare of it was suddenly all too real, as if it had been yesterday instead of almost two decades ago.
The cabin hummed with the conversation of the other girls and the thuds, bumps and metallic clunks as they scrubbed and cleaned in an effort to make it habitable, but Tara heard it all as if it were a dream. More real was the musical lilt of Mammy’s voice somewhere inside her head as she sang softly ‘Too-ra-loo-ra-loorah! Too-ra-loo-ra-lay!’, and the smell in her nostrils was not the hot water and disinfectant smell but that indefinable mix of cheap perfume and whisky fumes which always evoked for her the essence of Mammy.
Six days after leaving Townsville they had landed at Port Moresby. Struggling along the jetty, laden once more, Tara was still weak and shaky but the nausea was passing and by the time she was ensconced in one of the waiting jeeps her usual perkiness had begun to return. Driving along the gravel roads where the dust flew in choking clouds from the wheels of the jeep, she made a special effort to take in her surroundings and listen to the friendly patter of the driver as he pointed out the sights – Fairfax Harbour, bathed in morning sunshine, the small houses which had been built on stilts over the water – and the landmarks the war had left, a ship sunk by enemy action, looking now like a great pathetic beached whale, a paddock where a fuel dump had gone up sky high, bomb craters resulting from the frequent air raids. Brought face to face with destruction of the kind she had witnessed at first hand in Darwin Tara shuddered but made mental notes all the same. She had to have something more interesting than an account of her seasickness to put in her letters to Richard, though on reflection she supposed the censor would chop most of it to pieces in any case.
When they had staged at a well-established AGH Tara’s spirits had lifted a little. In the hot sunshine the mess was an oasis of beauty, thatched with sago palm leaves, surrounded by thick tropical ferns and shrubs and neat gardens bright with flowers of every hue. There were cool showers to wash away the sticky heat of travel and ice-cold beer finally settled her queasy stomach. But the hospital for which she was bound was no nearer completion than the one in Queensland had been – and less comfortable.
Bulldozers were still carving out terraces for tent lines and showers on the hillsides and scooping out pits for latrines, sudden storms of torrential rain turned the earth into a sea of mud and dripped through every weakness in the tents where the girls slept, lived and worked, even though the Wet was a full two months away, and between the storms the mosquitos descended in thick clouds to nip and irritate. The girls slept six to a tent, their clothes stowed in cupboards made from wooden boxes laid on their sides with a curtain to replace the lids – which were then utilized as bedside floormats.
For the first time in her life, almost, Tara was aware of a creeping sense of lack of purpose. It wasn’t that there was not enough to keep her busy – there certainly was. But most of the AAMWS in Tara’s draft had received formal training as medical orderlies and it was they who were assigned the nursing jobs, while Tara found herself ordered to do the menial tasks which fell to those on ‘general duties’. She began to dread the morning parade and roll call when the day’s work was allocated. Someone, she supposed, had to sweep and tidy the sisters’ tents, empty the rubbish bins and clean the covering of fine dust from the lantern shades; someone had to scrub the wooden seats of the latrines and make sure they were as hygienic as possible under these conditions. But why did it have to be her?
‘Oh, couldn’t we have a swop around for once?’ she asked one morning when Sister detailed her yet again to the hated tasks, and the chilling glance she received by way of reply only deepened her resentment.
‘We are fighting a war, Allingham. I’m afraid there is no room for adhering to the niceties you may be used to in civilian life,’ sister told her crisply.
Had she not been so wretched Tara might have smiled at the irony of it. But she was in no mood for smiling. As she washed and scrubbed, and pegged out endless lines of bandages with hands puffy from immersion in hot harshly-treated water, Tara remembered the days when she had worked for Dimitri Savalis. But even then, she thought, she had been driven by motives which had somehow kept her going – her determination to find a way back to a better life, her fear of Red and her anger at what he had done to Jack, her grief, still raw, at the loss of her beloved Maggie. Now, it seemed she had gained everything she had ever dreamed of only to lose it again. She was here for the duration, caught frustratingly in a trap of her own making from which there would be no escape until the war ended – whenever that might be.
The separation from Richard ached in her like a nagging tooth which sometimes, in the quiet of the night, flared into raging pain. Was he missing her as much as she missed him? His letters told her he was, but always in the same carefully modified language that was a hallmark of his well-bred nature – not for him phrases of undying love for the censor to gloat over. When she had been there with him Tara had been confident of her own ability to hold his attention, and affection. Now, with the distance between them, she wondered uncomfortably just how much he remembered her. Might he not forget the warmth of her touch and the delights they had shared and remember instead the small awkwardnesses? Might he have time to think about the manner of their marriage – and wonder? Lying sleepless beneath her mosquito net, listening to the hum of insect life and the scuttle of something she feared might be rats, Tara fretted, and when she slept her dreams were all too often highly coloured, nightmarish affairs. Sometimes she dreamed that she came upon Richard holding another woman in his arms, but her face was hidden and Tara always woke before discovering who her rival was. Sometimes she dreamed of the bombing and saw Richard killed before her eyes the way the wharfie had been. Sometimes she dreamed of Jack’s murder, only when she turned Jack over to comfort him it was Richard’s face which stared up at her, lifeless from the cobbles. She woke from these dreams in a cold sweat with tears pouring down her cheeks; once she believed she was being stifled and fought through the layers of sleep to find a hand pressed over her mouth. Panic made her fight wildly to escape, then the fog cleared a little and she realized it was only Jill Whitton from the neighbouring bed.
‘Sorry, but I had to do it,’ she whispered to Tara. ‘You were screaming out loud. You would have woken the whole ward!’
One horror at least was missing from her nightmares, however. The rape never came back to haunt her – at least not while she slept, though she did sometimes feel a chill run up her spine when the bushes rattled behind her, and once in a while she found herself remembering and wondering who her attacker had been. Investigations by the Provost had long since been abandoned, she guessed, and her file ‘lost’ beneath a pile of more pressing ones. But it seemed strange the culprit had not been apprehended. Thousands of men in the area there might have been, but surely whoever was responsible must have taken away with him some evidence of what he had done, even if it was only dust and leaf mould on his uniform. Surely, in some billet somewhere, someone must have looked at the man in the neighbouring bunk and wondered. But nothing had ever come to light – and Tara was glad. Much as she would have liked to see him brought to justice, the facts about her past life which would have come to light under cross-examination at a court martial would certainly have ended any hope she might have had of becoming Mrs Richard Allingham.
Throughout the months of earl
y spring the AGH worked at full stretch. The battles of the notorious Kokoda Trail had been fought and won, but many of the victims were still here, too ill to be shipped home to Australia, often delirious, always emaciated, their bodies covered with a honeycomb of weeping sores. Add to them the constant stream of casualties from the skirmishes which still continued as the Allied forces drove the Japs back and attempted to cut them off from their command at Salamaua, and there were enough patients to occupy every available bed in the tent lines and keep the operating theatre busy.
Here in New Guinea the fighting was always at close quarters, conducted with machine guns and rifles. Though bayonets were fixed in place all the time and the distances between the enemies was often more suited to hand-to-hand fighting, quite often it was the guns that were used, firing at one another at point blank range. There was sniper fire to contend with and the Japs were notorious for the way they could creep up swiftly and silently and take a man, or a battalion by surprise.
As if the wounds and the burns inflicted by battle were not enough, the climate, too, took its toll in casualties. Dysentery was rife, malaria still reared its head in spite of the prescribed atebrin tablets, and mild beri beri was not uncommon. Sometimes, even, a man was admitted suffering from the dreaded scrub typhus, contracted in the mangrove and sago swamps around Buna and Gona and in the suffocatingly hot areas of tall kunai grass, further inland.
Nor was it only the Allied forces who required medical treatment. There was a POW ward at the hospital too – a ward to which the sisters and AAMWS orderlies went only under the protection of an armed guard. It was a place which aroused Tara’s interest and sparked her imagination, but she never had cause to go there.
Week in, week out her duties remained the same. On one occasion she managed to whittle down her lat cleaning rota by one – by placing an ‘Out of Order. Dangerous!’ notice on the door of the furthest little hut. But that ruse lasted only a day or two before a stony-faced corporal marched up, took a good look round, and marched back again – bringing the notice with him.
When a new consignment of ward equipment was delivered and Tara was allocated the duty of cleaning it where it stood, at the edge of the dusty gravel track, she was glad. It was hot and dirty work – black dirt and mud caked everything – and for hours, as the heat of the day gathered, Tara worked with a scrubbing brush and a fire bucket full of water, cleaning until her arms ached and the sweat ran in rivulets through the powdering of fine black dust which covered her face and neck. But at least she felt she was doing something to help the sick and wounded fighting men and not simply skivvying for the other women, who were better qualified than she was. And when she saw the beds and cupboards carried away into the ward by a couple of perspiring orderlies, she experienced far greater satisfaction than she ever could from a polished toilet seat or a freshly-swept tent.
‘You did quite a good job on those, Allingham,’ sister said and Tara recognized her far-from-effusive comment as praise indeed.
‘Sure wouldn’t I like to have another go at them when they are all in place,’ she said craftily – thinking that perhaps a job well done might prove her passport into the wards – and the much more rewarding task of ward orderly. To her delight Sister nodded.
‘More dust probably will shake out of the wood when we carry them into their places. Heaven knows it gets everywhere! All right, Allingham, you can spend some time on that tomorrow – just as soon as you finish the lats.’
By next morning, however, the job had attained top priority in Sister’s eyes. A new plane load of casualties had arrived, flown in from ‘over the Owen Stanleys’ – the mountain range that bisected the island – and were now occupying the tent wards to which the new equipment had been allocated.
‘Leave everything else and make sure the equipment is pristine clean!’ she instructed: ‘Some of the new patients have some very nasty wounds and one or two are threatening gangrene. I don’t want any MO saying they got infected through dirty equipment in my wards!’
Tara smiled, her old irrepressible spirit returning. And when she went into the ward, the comments and soft wolf whistles from the patients fit enough to appreciate the sight of a pretty girl lifted her spirits still further.
It seemed so long since she had been in the company of men! The girls were all very well, but Tara had never had close girlfriends. Her looks – and the fact that she was popular with men – too often made her the object of cattiness and, sometimes, outright jealousy. Oh yes, give her a man any time! Even if he did have to be kept in his place …
She bantered with them as she scrubbed the tables yet again, removing any last lingering traces of the thick black dust, passing amused comments about their incapacity to carry out their good-humoured threats and teasing them about the state of their feet – a subject too tender really to be a joke, since many of them had skin and flesh between their toes rotting away from the enforced encasement in boots and shoes day after endless days in wet and steamy conditions.
‘You know what the army advises you,’ she told one of them pertly. ‘A change of socks every day and you would have nothing to worry about.’
‘Turn it in, love!’ he rejoined. ‘I wasn’t going to be caught by any Jap with my boots off! I’d as soon be caught with my trousers down!’
At the end of the ward lay the more seriously sick – a man whose arm had been amputated at the elbow, another with a part of his shoulder shot away. Tara became quieter as she approached them, recognizing the need for them to rest quietly. In the very end bed and set aside a little from the others lay a still figure, his head turned away from her as he dozed fitfully. Tara moved towards him quietly, her soft-soled shoes making no sound. She set down her bucket and wrung out her cleaning cloth in the water, avoiding the crust of dirt which floated on it. Then she leaned across to the table – and froze.
There was something oddly familiar about the shape of the head, the dark thickly springing hair. She let the cleaning cloth fall back into the bucket and walked around the bed. Her breath was coming quick and shallow, and even now she was telling herself she must be wrong. But when she saw his face, pale and drawn though it was, with the skin stretched too tight across the cheekbones, dark smudges beneath the eyes and a growth of stubble around his mouth and chin, she knew she was not mistaken. Heavy lids lifted with an effort but the eyes that met hers, though dulled by drugs, were unmistakably hazel streaked with dangerous looking green. His mouth moved, the lips too thickened by the drugs he had been given to be able to form the words he wanted to say, but the small curve of a smile was there all the same to prove that he had recognized her too.
She stood motionless for a moment, her eyes wide. Then she dropped to her haunches beside the bed.
‘Sean Devlin – what are you doing here?’ she said.
When Dev first opened his eyes and saw her there, he was convinced he was hallucinating. Damn the stuff they were pumping into him! The quack had said it would do him good and he had thought it was beginning to – but when he started seeing things, well, he wasn’t so sure, even if what he was seeing was a very pleasant sight. Tara Kelly! Dammit, he’d thought he had got her out of his system when he had left her at the Adelaide River more than a year and a half ago. He had got her out of his system – and done it the hard way. So why the hell should he be imagining she was here now, standing beside his bed and looking as pretty as she had ever looked – a bloody sight prettier than any girl had a right to look?
His eyelids drooped; with an effort he forced them open again. It was not a hallucination – or at least if it was, it was a lot more vivid than any of the other figments his fevered imagination had been conjuring up. She was flesh, and blood, he could have sworn it – and dressed in tropical kit too. He could see from her expression that she was as shocked as he was. And when she spoke her voice was unmistakable – that Irish lilt was very real despite the ringing in his ears.
‘Sean Devlin, what are you doing here?’
Wi
th an effort he forced his lips to move.
‘It’s a long story, darling.’ His voice sounded thick; there was no way he could make the effort to tell her, though it was all there. Fragmented but real all the same, in spite of the long harrowing months since the night he had left her to that bloody upper crust medico Richard Allingham.
Once again he forced his lips to form words.
‘Well, it wasn’t the bastard Japs who got me,’ he said.
Then the effort – and the drugs – became too much for him and his eyelids drooped once more.
It must be malaria, Tara decided. The look of him and the details on the chart at the end of his bed made it almost certain, and his remark about the Japs seemed to confirm it. There had been a number of cases lately, Tara knew, in spite of the atebrin tablets with which every man was issued, and she had heard the doctor speculating that a new strain, resistant to the drug, was rearing its head. Nasty. Malaria was not something to wish upon anyone. Even given that you survived the first bout it could go on recurring for years and years. No, good as it was to see Dev again, she could have wished it had been under different circumstances.