CHAPTER 3

THE WAR and my father’s gift of the typewriter had given me the idea that I might actually work for the visiting young American gods. With such an incentive, I enrolled in a secretarial college and spent three sleepless weeks absorbing the skills on offer; normally a two-year course. It took little more than a chance meeting one night to find my perfect niche. Our American servicemen with whom we danced and flirted nightly had to be fed, clothed and armed: these necessities being supplied by the U.S. Army Services of Supply, based in Sydney. With my new, untested skills, in a brief interview I acquired a job and a boss, the C.O. of this Service. I typed out the orders: soon my boss left the choice of ordering to me. I gained my first experience in the feeding, clothing and bedding of men.

Before the war, girls and young women from the more privileged strata of society did not go out to work. Their goals were engagement and marriage, except for the tiny minority who went to a university. It is generally thought that the lives of women are far better now, but not being of feminist inclination, I am not too sure of this. We did not, in general, enter the masculine workplace: should we be forced, in the absence of the wedding ring, to ‘work’, our place was either behind a counter as a saleswoman in an upmarket store, or behind a typewriter as a secretary. Such a thing as a ‘p.a.’ was unknown. By the time the war had ended I had become accustomed to early rising, discipline, and had learnt to type, since proven extremely useful, as well as how to take dictation, swiftly forgotten. The fact that I could work, even earn a living wage, was stored in a comforting mental back pocket, although in what capacity was unclear. I was too busy falling in love to care.

As the focus of the war shifted to the Pacific and Asia, and France was liberated, the American pilots and marines gradually went home. One barely had time to dry tears before the British Navy arrived. There were no more nylons or candy: instead we had cocktails aboard the war ships, the American ships having been ‘dry’. My current American fiancé being trapped back home in Boston, I acquired a British one.

His name was John Mackay, not a sailor on one of the ships but a paratrooper in the Lancers, waiting to be dropped into Japan when the atom bomb was dropped instead and the war changed again. He was shipped back to England, closely followed by my next ‘trousseau’, chiefly new clothes this time, as well as some of the marital recoveries. He was not only beautiful to look at, sterling in character, enchanting in personality, but suitable in every way in my parents’ eyes. I had, at last, fallen in love with someone beyond reproach. He was a far, far too nice and decent young man to have been treated as I then treated him, as my passport to England.

I was desperate to get to England, as in Johnny’s absence, I had fallen in love again, with one of the naval officers, the young David, Marquis of Milford Haven. My divorce was the main reason we never married: we remained deeply in love for five years, melding into a lifelong friendship. We were never engaged—I was already engaged to Johnny—but we hoped to marry. (I do, however, still have David’s ring on a finger.) Because David was young and penniless except for his naval pay, we imagined ourselves in need of family approval and support. In those days (they would not dare suggest it now), any direct descendant of Queen Victoria, as was David, needed to ask the reigning monarch’s permission to marry. The Duke of Gloucester was then the Governor General of Australia: David made a tentative approach to him. I was a divorcee. He received a fairly gruff response. We put our plans ‘on hold’.

When David left, in command (his first) of the last destroyer to leave Australia, I was determined to follow, and we hoped things would look rosier for us in Britain, to which I was now allowed by my parents to go, ostensibly in order to marry Johnny.

Meanwhile, whilst still in Australia, although officially engaged to Johnny, and unofficially to David, it had never occurred to me to change the habits of the war years. Our nightly haunts, Romano’s and Prince’s, were still available and although the influx of U.S. and British troops had dried to a trickle, there was still ample opportunity to meet, dance with, and flirt with a constantly changing flow of admirers (such a lovely, old-fashioned word whose usage and meaning have disappeared). Whilst I hung around waiting for the necessary permit to get out of Australia to join Johnny, David, and the trunks en route to Glasgow, I had busied myself with just such an admirer. His name was George Silk, one of the star photographers of Time-Life. He was about to be posted to Shanghai, and left days before I did; not before, however, I had tentatively promised to marry him, too. I think Shanghai was the main attraction, and I regret not having at least a trial trip there, the last chance to have seen it in its great days.