WHEN BILL RETURNED I GOT compassionate leave and came down to Warragul in Victoria and we went through the old ceremony with not a word between us as to why we were going to ‘join in holy matrimony’. Aunt Sarah’s husband, the urbane Englishman, Eric Anderson, drove me to church. Well, he seemed urbane to us because twice he had received an inheritance from England (and each time had blown it on the gee-gees, ‘even flying interstate to race meetings!’ Aunt Alice and the rest of her sisters gasped). Anyway, in those days of rationing he was the only one in the family with enough petrol in his car to get me to the church.
Uncle Eric was a rather decent sort. Everyone else had gone on ahead, including the two witnesses in their army and airforce uniforms, and we set off later but a train held us up at a rail crossing. ‘Do you really want to get married?’ Uncle Eric asked.
That was a peculiar remark, I thought, what with me in a long white dress and carrying flowers. Eric asked me again and said, ‘I could turn the car around and drop you as far away as you want to go.’ I was silent. ‘Get back to your battalion or whatever you’re in?’ But it had gone too far. I couldn’t back out. I was never a good backer-out, I never have been. Mum always said I was ‘staunch’. I wish I wasn’t. Who would? Could? And suddenly we were in the church and the organ played ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire’ And it wasn’t too bad, all the fuss, frills and the long veil lent by Mum’s cousin Anne. The bridegroom set this veil on fire when he lit a cigarette as we left again in Uncle Eric’s car. I belted the flames out with my bouquet of nerines, and on we went with him singing ‘I’m going to buy a paper doll that I can call my own.’ Bill had begun to sing this while we were walking out of the church:
A doll that other fellas cannot steal …
When I come home at night she will be waiting,
She’ll be the truest doll in all the world.
I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl.
The aunts must have saved up months of their butter and sugar ration cards for the ‘breakfast’: Alice’s cream-puffs were known for miles around, and there were butterfly cakes, jelly and chocolate-covered lamingtons with real cream. The collection of gifts was just as difficult to find in those times, there being nothing frivolous produced during the war and yet I still have, and use, many of those gifts my family searched so diligently for over fifty years ago.
We sat side by side in the train from Warragul to Melbourne. By now I’d got back into uniform, and he talked to his airman friend and I talked to Anne whom I’d known from my first day of enlistment. It was all rather nice, the four of us yarned about troops and who was wounded and who was on their way to New Guinea – by now nobody was going to the Middle East – and time went quickly. Once in Melbourne, Anne went off back to her hospital unit, and the airman ducked off, and we two got on the Burwood tram to get to Aunty Julia’s house (Dad’s sister). And the party was over.
* * *
I went to the altar a virgin and I’ve been preaching ever since that it is the most damnable thing a girl can do if she expects or wishes to live a life of what is euphemistically called ‘conjugal harmony’. No one should be exposed to that – not just the tearing of the membrane and the blood, but the trip to the chemist the next day, giving the semi-whispered order for Vaseline ‘we only got married yesterday’, and the wink from the chemist and the smug return of a semi-grubby grin. Then back to the room, walking with your legs apart, and the yelp when it started all over again because the Vaseline couldn’t protect the tender parts.
The next morning my Aunt Julia said ‘What do you think of being married, Jeannie?’ laughing as old women have done for centuries, a sort of historical chain, adding a link each time another victim joins the initiation ceremony. Julia wasn’t a nasty woman, she was usually fun, but this was tradition.
Bill and I sailed that night on the old Wairana to Tasmania to stay with his parents in their little, thin-walled, rented cottage. It was winter, bitterly cold. I thought of Queensland and wanted to get back there, or at least to Sunset Country where I was born. It snowed. Snowed! I hated it, had never seen it before, feared it, like I subconsciously feared most things in this place of old people as opposed to the vital warm youth I had lived with for so long. I thought there was only one good thing going for me: no one knew my thoughts. I was fun. ‘You’re always laughing’ Mr O’Day, the bank manager, said. But, ‘You must join the CWA’ (Country Women’s Association) said the mother of the man who told people we were married.
I never knew, and still don’t know, what ‘marriage’ meant or means. The wedding ceremony that became popular among the working classes towards the end of the last century is still the one where the girl wears a white dress as evidence of her virginity and a veil over her face which will later be thrown back as the symbol of the breaking of her hymen. The man then places a ring on his captive’s finger as evidence of ownership. When Bill’s mother explained this to me I took off the gold ring with the three big emeralds and threw it over their back fence. Search as they did they never found it and I didn’t care. What a farce the whole thing was – and is. Until my first real lover and I joined, I thought fucking was the greatest historical exaggeration since John the Baptist resisted the unparalleled temptation of Salome.
After four days of ‘marriage’ I bolted back north to my hospital – with the assistance of my army friends who had sped to my aid when they received my telegram asking to have my two weeks of compassionate leave rescinded. Swiftly they telegramed that my leave was cancelled and I was to report back to lines within the next five days, the time it would take for a person to travel from Tasmania to Queensland. And so my first journey to Tasmania was brief and unhappy and full of foreboding, but it was not crippling. I was still in my teens and the resilience of youth is instantly refreshed.
I marched back in past the guard on duty as if I’d never been away. The five days of travelling had been like a dream. Happy, I slept, got off every three to four hours when the train stopped for recoaling, watering and inspection, and for the hundreds of hungry men on the long troop train to get a meal. ‘Ho! Ho! Make way for the nurses!’ some soldiers would shout, and you’d push in for a hot pie and sauce and sometimes, if it was a real outback place, there would be home-made cakes, but they went fast. The big mugs for railway coffee moulded into your hand as you pushed back out to the platform with your booty.
One night, following a stinking, hot, high-humidity day on the Sydney to Brisbane run, there seemed to be no air at all, the heat just swamped us, crowded as we were in the carriages – and me in winter uniform I’d been wearing down south. One of the crazy things about the army (and navy and airforce, for that matter) was uniform and how it must be worn. For instance, if you were in winter uniform you did not remove your jacket – and on this occasion I was in winter uniform of woollen jacket and skirt, long lisle stockings, heavy shoes and felt hat, gloves in my little army-issue wallet. The men in the carriage were, like me, all odd-bods, returning from leave or on transfer. A sergeant said ‘You!’ to two corporals, ‘move into the corridor’ and ‘You!’ to a great big private, ‘stretch out on the floor’, and to me he said, ‘Nurse, you can now stretch out on the seat’. I didn’t waste any time. I put my feet up, put my head on his lap and went to sleep until we got to the border and I never once thought ‘what would Matron say?’ I was going home to my unit.
* * *
The uniform conceals the man – or the woman, for that matter. In war the uniform reveals nothing of the personality, honesty, or the background of a man’s true life. Marriage under these circumstances is much more bizarre than the marriage of some races where women do not meet their man until after the marriage ceremony. It is often said that marriage is a gamble, but relationships forged in wartime are even more so.
By late 1944 the war had moved away from Australia, Americans were in total control, and the egocentric General MacArthur determined to get all the glory (if glory there be in war – I for one cannot and never did see it). The Americans raced on to take Japan while Australians were left to ‘mop up’ – truly, they do use these awful expressions in war. Where once we laboured day and night, now we could get a discharge with very little trouble. Married women were being encouraged to get ‘de-mobbed’. Pressure was used, none too subtle, even outright demand from marital partners who were now discharged.
I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to stay in the best company I ever knew. But a letter from Tasmania changed all that. Pinned to it was a doctor’s certificate stating the soldier had neurasthenia which was being exacerbated by the absence of his wife. Was that me? I had never thought of myself as being a wife. ‘The Wife of Bath?’ I scribbled over the discharge document.
I wasn’t even working with my own mob when I left; damn the promotion, the increased pay and the stripes. But a great body of old army friends saw me off as the train passed through Brisbane, young men and women singing and crying in equal quantities. We had all loved one another.
Mum, Dad, and the two boys, John and Albert, who were being brought up as part of our family, met me off the train at Melbourne. After I’d used up my army deferred leave I went to Royal Park in Melbourne to get my discharge, feeling strange in my new civvy clothes. I felt even more strange when a group of young recruits in neat new uniforms, marching down the avenue, assumed I had come to enlist and called out ‘You’ll be sorry!’ – the old army quip we’d all used at some time. ‘You’ll be sorry!’ I was now in mufti and my smart new clothes suddenly lost their glamour. No more Stand To, no more reveille, no more girls, no more boys.
My parents accompanied me to the ship which was to take me to Tasmania. Mum had knitted me a dress of vieux-rose wool, the very prettiest thing I had seen for over three years, and men and women on board the old ship commented on it. It fitted my seven stone five pounds figure like a soft glove. I adored it and wore it for years. Now the lines were parting, the ship’s screw was turning, and all I loved – the people and the soil – were down on the wharf and I was off to somewhere, and someone I had no feeling for. It wasn’t hate, not even dislike, it was – the war. It had turned all of us upside down.
I cried all the way to Tasmania, always did, sobbed and sobbed. As often as I forced myself to return to that island state I sobbed with great gasps. It was as if I was exchanging paradise for perdition. I wasn’t even embarrassed by my tears, they were only the outward symbol of my total distress. I cried and cried inside and out, as the coast of the mainland of Australia faded behind and the island threw its loneliness at me.
On another return trip I was flying back to Tasmania and a portly lady sitting beside me offered her handkerchief. ‘Have you lost someone dear to you?’ she asked and I said, ‘Everyone. I’ve lost everyone I love.’ It was the first time I’d admitted to myself that that was what distressed me when I went south to Tasmania. After a while I blew my nose on her handkerchief and talked until this stranger said, ‘There are things you can do to ease this.’ I was bitter. I said, ‘I know, I’ve been told to “Grin and bear it” and I’ve been told over and over again “You’ve made your bed, now lie on it”.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘work.’ And that was how I became a sort of loosely tutored waif of Australia’s fine female politician, Dame Enid Lyons. ‘You will grow to like this little island, come to me whenever you like,’ said Dame Enid, and I did.
But I hated waking to days of dreariness and nights where there was no love. My mind was cluttered with words and ideas I daren’t utter. I wished I could be buried like the boys who had died in our hospital. I wished I was back with my friends, boys and girls of my own age and style.
My parents, desolate with despair at my situation, sent me the piano, brought me a wireless on one of their trips – and they made several voyages in an attempt to stop me from running away to God-knows-where. They had so little money and even the freight for the piano must have been exorbitant, but still they tried to make my marriage work.
It was 15 August 1945. There was a rumour on the wireless but the men went to work, it was hard to believe war might be ending after six years. Then the bells rang out and the shops shut and everyone ran on to the street. The war was ended, finished.
I was home alone. It was particularly painful for me and the feeling remains clearly. I wanted to be with the mob of girls and boys in the army, not the people who took to the streets down south. Anyway, I couldn’t go anywhere. The little bells of the several churches in Ulverstone clanged away all day and I was alone. I walked down to the river, clambered down the bank where violets grew and gathered a great clump. The man, Bill, was home, drunk, his battered years overseas gave him no strength and I thought, they shouldn’t have done that to him, left him lying with his face in a puddle of muddy water for me to drag him out. Later he had a bath and went off with old First World War diggers who had made me put my army jacket on. I played old songs on the piano, hoping some of the revellers would stay but they all ran off to the pealing bells and pubs and left me playing ‘My Darling Clementine’. I thought: what were the girls and boys doing up north? Were all the sick and wounded wheeled outside? Given beer?
A girl came with a box of chocolates she’d kept all through the war for just this occasion and, as no one in the town cared for her, she came to me and we sat in front of the fire and ate the chocolates. So the war ended for me.
When I went to live with Bill I went straight back to teaching piano. My students’ fees paid for the rent for our miserable house. When we first left the in-laws’ tiny, shared, rented cottage we were still to share a house with others, a recently married (for the first time) sixty-year-old couple who were bitterly anti-drink, anti-Catholic, anti-sound and voluble about all three. Here was the echo of the men who came back from the First World War and wanted to marry, only to find there were no houses for them, no hospitals for their babies, and not enough schools for the baby boom that followed.
Because of the Second World War no accommodation had been built for six years. Living as we did was well enough, if whispering was your idea of private conversation. We moved to three other equally unpleasant houses before we were able to build a house of our own with the help of the government scheme for returned servicemen. But in the meantime, we were living in rooms behind a funeral parlour, and in other unlikely shelters including one decent house – though the owner wanted to evict us to enable her to get a higher rental than the government’s fixed rate which we were paying legally. She came to our gate daily and shouted ‘Aren’t you ashamed to keep us out of our own house?’ But this house did have one mighty bonus for me: we were near the seaside. Bass Strait rolled by near enough for us to hear the sea change in the night, and every day I inhabited the magic shore. Every day. Sometimes I just sat and stared at it. Like Billy Wilson of my childhood who, when first taken to the seaside on a bush school excursion had whispered it, I almost whispered ‘What a bloody lot of water’. After my upbringing in the dry-lands country it was unbelievable to gaze at water as far as the eye could see.
I was visiting ‘Ahava’, the place of Aunt Bella’s benisons, when I learnt that I was pregnant with my first baby. It was just before the end of the war and I had been staying in this enchanted place with my parents for a week when I realised I was pregnant and ‘as happy as Larry’. I went back to Tasmania immediately. There was only one thing wrong with that lovely time while waiting for the baby – I was surely the champion thrower-up of all time (and repeated the performance when my little girl was on the way in 1948). I am a small woman and remained so during pregnancy, at one time taking part in a parade of 18th-century dresses wearing an 1820s yellow taffeta gown with a twenty-inch waist. I was happy, entirely.
My only surprise was that I had taken so long to get pregnant; after all, I had married and had then ‘had sex’ and, with the ignorance of most of the young women of my generation, I had been under the impression that one became pregnant immediately after intercourse. But we didn’t use those terms: I was ‘in the family way’.
I had not only been enchanted to be pregnant but relieved that I could be so. When my first period came after marriage I was so embarrassed I tried not to let him know. I wasn’t pregnant! I had already worked my way out of much religious belief but now, suddenly, I prayed, not just because I wanted a baby but because I thought I must be odd not to have conceived ‘at first blow’.
When I was pregnant I ‘had the fancies’ for rice (which was not easily available to civilians). I wrote to the girls up north and they replied by telegram: CEASE THY CRAVINGS WENCH. RELIEF AT HAND. ALL SEND OUR LOVE. SIGNED MAC AND CO. The rice arrived in a beautifully wrought box made by John, the carpenter. I learnt later that it was a concerted effort by the cook, the carpenter and the army postal service, and it brought me immeasurable cheer.
Five days after the peace bells rang out the baby came. The following day Mum arrived on the boat and I was happy in the way one never ever expects to be. To hold my own baby, someone I knew to be mine, so dependent on me; to see my Mother hold the baby and whisper to him, his father pleased as punch at the infant, and me engrossed by his thick black hair tousled in the crook of my arm, and I without a care in the world.
Perhaps it wasn’t as magical, deeply and heavenly as I thought, it may merely have been that, for the first time in eight months, I was not vomiting.
Five months after my healthy, laughing son was born I miscarried with another babe at home, in bed at midnight. It didn’t hurt as I remember, but I was mystified: what was happening? Something was coming out with the blood from my ‘front passage’, as we females called the vagina in those days. ‘You are miscarrying’ my children’s father said. ‘You must have been pregnant again and we didn’t know.’ I thought I wasn’t as silly as that and told him so: ‘The front of me. Not the back.’ It was his turn to be mystified. ‘You have a baby out the front, not the back, you must know that, you’ve already had one baby. They come out the front.’ Oh! In those days chloroform was given when the babe was ‘coming’ and you were well on the way and yelling ferociously, hurting and terrified. In the ‘private hospital’ in our town (it was an old house), Nurse Stuart, Proprietor and Accoucheur, administered the liquid when she thought proper. A pad was stuffed over your face and chloroform poured willy-nilly over it and you went out cold and stank of it. So how could you be expected to know where anything came out?
When this second pregnancy ended in the babe deserting me before I was taken off again to Nurse Stuart’s establishment, I didn’t have anything except a stench of chloroform around me, hanging particularly heavy in my long thick hair. That afternoon when my five-month-old son was at home yelling for a drink and was brought to lie on my breast he promptly inhaled the fumes and went to sleep. I had to scream to have him taken out of the room to air. The father came in and he was affected also. How could a girl expect to know what came out of where in such an era?
My children were ‘baby-boomers’, as were the children of the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who poured back into civilian life at the end of the war. My darling little daughter (yes, I was besotted by the pretty, healthy, wee thing – still am) was born with great ease and no chloroform in 1948. A young, fresh-from-medical-school doctor had come to our town, and although Nurse Stuart was permitted to retain her establishment until retirement, a certificated nursing sister must now be employed on the premises. Yet it wasn’t these medical advances so much that changed the terror and pain of childbirth but the erasing of the myths and old-women’s tales. Trevor, the young doctor, talked to me about this. ‘Some won’t listen,’ he said. ‘Some say mum and gran know best.’ He promised me a pain-free childbirth and I did have this. He also promised – and did – ‘fix up’ the damage done during the birth of my first child. Being a tiny woman I had torn badly and had not been stitched properly, and the ragged gash healed in a lumpy fashion causing urine to trickle out sideways.
Later I had yet another miscarriage, and again I didn’t know what was causing my pains although by now I was knowledgeable about what went out and where from a woman’s body. I read all I could find but there was little of sense about childbirth and pregnancy, illustrations in books were mystifying to a degree that if you weren’t told what the drawing was you wouldn’t know it was part of the human body.
This miscarriage slipped away (out of the front passage!) while I was in hospital for treatment for bleeding, non-stop vomiting, a cancer on my cervix, and fainting. The man I’d married then got condoms – I never saw them. He used them, lying flat on top of me, and then put them in his shoe at the bedside. I didn’t move. I hated it all. Four pregnancies in three years was enough. If the pill had not been made available in the early 1960s I would have remained sexless. But some years went by before that happened.
Not having lived near water until then I had the delights of walking on rocks at low tide and peering into sea anemones which opened and closed like tiny gumnut babies in tutus. There were living things walking and sliding and stealing the homes of other living things, crabs as small as my smallest fingernail, and things I didn’t know at all. I spent hours every day down there on the edge of Bass Strait, never knowing the unthinkable – that I would some day live on that water and see it more as my home than I had any other place.
I had spent almost more time down there on the fringe of rocks and water when I was pregnant than I had in the half-a-house. When my son was born I had carried him down and bedded him in dry, soft seaweed where I would watch him and he me. When he began to toddle he too took to the rocks and islands made by the departing tide. When my baby girl arrived, she was soon following the two of us and was just as much enchanted by the to-ing and fro-ing of water, and the excitement of ‘rocks walking Patsy!’ and ‘flowers!’ when a sea thing showed off its temptation to its prey.
But I was not a good wife, or so I was told. The rages when I was late with the lunch were icy. I would run home, one kid on my back, one holding my hand, and try to get inside and have something cooking but often I was caught coming in the gate. Then it would be a bit ‘bedlamish’ with his pushbike seemingly intent on tripping us all up and his bicycle clips being severely snapped on to the handlebar of the bike while the eyes accused me. Oh well, the lunch hour would eventually pass and off we’d go again. The sunny days in Tasmania are few and we made the most of them. Come what may and come what did I remember that little town beside the sea with affection.
As a newcomer I saw what those who had lived there for generations took for granted, and I wanted to tell the world. It wasn’t quite the world I eventually told, but it was a start. I wrote to ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Commission) in Hobart and told them I was disappointed they had not mentioned the centenary of Ulverstone which was being celebrated soon. They wrote back and told me that no one had told them and could I tell them, and what was my telephone number? I didn’t have one – telephones were not yet universal among the poor in the 1940s and ’50s and I had wedded a very poor family. And there was another reason: ‘You’ll be wanting to ring your mother all the time.’ He had never lived in a house with a phone whereas I, of course, had lived on railway stations where my Mother used the phone daily. So I went to the post office, phoned the ABC in Hobart, and said if they put a telephone in for me I would … hell, what would I be? ‘A stringer?’ Hobart asked me. ‘Yes’ I said, as if I’d known the word forever.
I was to receive 2/6 for a local item, 5 shillings for a State item, and the rare one, a national story, earned me 10 shillings. I phoned in an average of three items a week, but when the split in the Labor Party came in 1953-54 this leapt up considerably. The State Labor Party’s annual meeting was to be held in Ulverstone at Paddy Bourke’s Hotel. I knew and liked Paddy, and he was one of the few people in those most stringently limiting days for women who noted my rising success and my increasingly long absences from the town. Paddy guessed I might soon be in a position to clear out permanently.
To tempt me to stay, this solid man coaxed me to do the local reporting of the Labor Party conference. He taught me how interesting, vicious and dirty politics could be. He reminded me that my Grandfather had walked home to Gippsland from Queensland in the 1890s when the squatters locked out the union shearers. ‘You must do this’ Paddy said. So I did. I phoned the ABC, they said they were sending up a reporter and he would do the reporting, I would do the stories and features. And I loved every hour of it, on my toes all day grabbing stories, national radio phoning to ask for interviews with politicans; there were the long nights drinking at the pub when rumours – and sometimes even the truth – would be exposed.
The Labor Party was splitting. Eric Reece, the Tasmanian Labor Premier who had always visited my home in Ulverstone, asked me to drive him to Devonport: ‘I have to talk to George Cole.’ George was going DLP, the new Democratic Labor Party that would eventually keep Labor out of parliament for many years. My few years of writing features for the top magazines of the day stood me in good stead, but politics was not an exercise I admired or wanted to be part of. So this foray ended at the time of the momentous split, and my days in the little seaside town were ending too.