CHAPTER 4

IT MIGHT be easier and quicker for women to travel alone today, but we no longer expect help or chivalry (another lovely old word) from men along the way. We join the queues and battle for space with them. They may lift a heavy suitcase from an airline or railway luggage rack if you are lucky but I doubt they will do much more. On this, my first lone travel, I was the first female civilian to get out of Australia, shamefully so privileged because a friend of my father’s was the chairman of Qantas. Travel was still restricted by wartime rules: a ‘priority’ was necessary—no civilian aircraft and no passenger ships.

I was cosseted from start to finish of what in retrospect should have been a terrifying ordeal. I had nothing awaiting me except a charming fiancé in Glasgow whom I unceremoniously dumped as soon as my luggage had arrived, shipped by his regimental army transport, and the true object of my affections and intentions—my young lover, disapproved of by my parents, in London.

My five fellow passengers, in reality middle aged but to me elderly, were men on important government or army missions. The Lancaster bomber in which we started the first leg of the journey was equipped with six hard metal seats facing sideways into the fuselage. I cannot recall how they managed it but somehow they constructed a sort of sling hammock for me to lie on as they crouched, knees to shins, on the chairs below. On every stop along the way my comfort and entertainment were their concern. In Cairo they escorted me to dinner at the then-famous Shepheard’s Hotel. At Karachi, in March/April 1946 a city torn apart by the fighting for independence, one of them escorted me to a hotel for the night, protected me for three days from chaotic rioting in the streets and the next day gave up his travel permit to get me on a plane out. He was probably stuck there for weeks, without a permit. In Sicily the remaining five came with me to the market and carried back to England my huge pile of oranges and lemons bought for my waiting, rationed hosts. We were transferred to a Sunderland flying boat; after landing at Southampton, I saw none of them again. I am ashamed at not remembering their names or attempting a feeble thank you. They were men and I was a woman so it seemed normal to me.

* * *

We went by train into London, where I was met by Qantas officials and taken to a hotel, Bailey’s in South Kensington. I didn’t check in: I hauled my bags into a telephone booth and called, on Johnny’s instructions, friends of his in London, Jerry and Nan Hochschild—he a consultant anaesthetist, she an ex-actress—who lived in Portland Place.

‘Where are you?’ said Nan; and when I told her I was at Bailey’s she told me to stay in the foyer until she arrived to fetch me. So my first home in London was a delightful maisonette in Portland Place, my first friends the warm and welcoming Hochschilds, and my new life begun in the first post-war spring.