BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978
‘I don’t understand,’ said Arjun. ‘How could it be exciting and boring?’
The moon had risen. Its reflection bobbed a comforting rippled yellow in the water and gave just enough light to make out the shape of his companion, still sitting cross-legged just below him on her motorbike. The water was lapping, slipping, slapping all around, moonlit ripples coiling across the drowned land.
It was impossible to sleep half standing, half squatting, cramped in a rubbish bin, and even if he did drift off for an exhausted second, the sudden crashes as trees that had withstood the flood suddenly gave in and the shrieks and growls that might be possums or koalas seeking safety in the branches woke him over and over again. Nor did Mrs McLain seem to want to doze. She just talked in that calm voice of things so far away.
Now she laughed. ‘Just like now. You’re sitting in a rubbish bin listening to an old woman tell you nonsense, and it’s an adventure and yet it’s boring too.’
‘It’s not boring,’ Arjun said. ‘You’re not talking nonsense, are you? This really happened?’
She was silent for a while, leaning against the rubbish bin. She had put her helmet back on for the warmth, and it glinted in the moonlight. At last she said, ‘Such a small slice of my life, yet so vivid still. Sometimes I wonder if it really happened, too, especially as we could never talk about it afterwards. Everything about us women signallers was hidden from the newspapers. Probably lots of other things women did were kept secret too. The High-Ups couldn’t afford to let the public know they needed us.’
‘But you’re telling me?’
She laughed. The sound seemed to echo across the water. ‘It’s a bit late for the British Government to prosecute me for breaking the Official Secrets Act now, though I suppose they could still put me in prison for telling you this. But yes, it all happened. It was so different from anything I’d known before, or anything I’ve seen since. War is a different world, and in it there are lots of other worlds, like Rouen was completely different from Folkestone. Then of course it changed again, the biggest change of all.’