CHAPTER 10

Pearl Harbor

When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, our whole world changed.

Grandpa was stunned. ‘How could the Japs get from Japan to Hawaii undetected? How come they did so much damage to the Yanks and were barely hurt themselves? Lucky the Yank’s aircraft carriers weren’t bombed too.’ Mum thought the attack typical of sly Asians with slanty eyes. ‘The hide of them,’ she said. ‘You can’t trust them as far as you can kick them.’

Grandpa now worked in the shipyard at Williamstown building ships for the war and he knew all about shipping stuff. He told us he had monitored reports of the dirty Jap attacks with his short-wave wireless and heard they had also raided Malaya, Singapore, The Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Midway and Ocean Islands as well as Pearl Harbor. To top it all off, there was a rumour that the Sydney, our big warship, had disappeared with its crew of 645 men. What the hell had happened?

He was excited because he reckoned now the Americans would have to get off their backsides and join the war. ‘It’s bloody criminal. The Yanks sat back and made a fortune selling arms to Great Britain and Russia. And there was Hitler ransacking Europe.’

I was home with Mum when we heard our new Prime Minister, John Curtin, make the fatal broadcast: ‘This is the gravest hour in our history.’ I wasn’t four yet and barely able to make a decent cup of tea, let alone pour a beer with a good head, but I knew this was really fair dinkum serious.

Mum pulled up a kitchen chair to the wireless as Curtin continued: ‘We must go about our allotted tasks with full vigour and courage. The Japs have struck like an assassin in the night, leaving the Pacific Ocean reddened with the blood of their victims.’ I wondered if the blood would come to our beaches. Mum said she needed a drink.

Everyone on our street was talking about the war now, it had come to our side of the world. The ferocity and success of the Jap attacks mocked our prejudices that the Japs were ‘inferior little runts’. We kids had been brought up laughing at them – our cartoonists drew Japs as midgets with buckteeth and thick glasses. We were told their planes were made out of bamboo, rag and rice paper and they were a bunch of ‘poorly trained yellow bellies’.

We could hardly believe it when two days after Pearl Harbor, the Japs sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off Malaya. Every kid knew these two British battle cruisers were like floating fortresses protecting Australia. The belief that ‘Britannia Ruled the Waves’ was now false.

Laurie and I ran around with our arms outstretched, banking and diving and shooting one another down. We had become fighter pilots – our new heroes. We knew one man in a plane could sink a giant battleship.

Mum had been one of the many Australians indifferent to the war in Europe. ‘It’s all so far away,’ she said. But now she worried the infamous ‘yellow peril’ was racing across the Pacific. ‘I’m scared to turn the wireless on and scared not to.’ Hearing how the Japs behaved, Pearl said her friends at work feared being ravished and bayoneted. I didn’t know what ravished meant but from the way Pearl talked it sounded pretty crook.

***

When school broke up for the Christmas holidays, the big kids were going around telling a joke I thought was pretty funny: ‘Have a Jerry Christmas and a Jappy New Year’. They also came home with a form asking if parents wanted their children evacuated inland. Because I hadn’t started school yet, Mum said I was too little, but I had the feeling she rather liked the idea and had given it serious thought.

The war really messed up my Christmas; I didn’t get any decent presents. All anyone talked about was the war. The only good thing was going to Grandpa and Nana’s for Christmas dinner. I got a threepence and a sixpence in my first helping of plum pudding, and a shilling in my second. Mum said Nana spoilt me, but Nana said I should ask Aunty Roma where the shilling came from.

It was so hot on Christmas Day and I was so stuffed I had to lie in the shade on the back lawn after dinner. I had never eaten so much in my life and my stomach felt so tight I wondered if it could burst. It was a heavenly feeling, though, even if I did think I might chuck up.

Dad was home on leave. He hadn’t wanted to go to Grandpa’s for Christmas dinner. He knew Grandpa was still a Mason and crook on him being a Catholic. And he whinged about having to drink Grandpa’s homemade beer, which didn’t compare with the unlimited quantity of Melbourne beer the air force supplied. Mum and Roma were grateful that Grandpa offered anything alcoholic. ‘You can still get tipsy on Grandpa’s home brew,’ they said. I was told not to tell anyone that Grandpa made his own beer because it was illegal and he could go to gaol. I was horrified at the thought. Who would cut the wood for Nana? I promised not to tell.

Things were so crook on the war front that the Prime Minister appealed to America. Grandpa saw it in the paper and read it out loud to Nana and me: ‘Without any inhibition of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’

Signs went up around town saying: ‘Australians are British and proud of it’, but Grandpa was all for the Yanks. When the Japs invaded New Guinea, that really put the wind up everyone. Before we knew it, they landed in Rabaul and overwhelmed our small garrison.

The Battle for Australia had begun.

Grandpa said Darwin could be next and he made arrangements for his friend’s daughter, Betty, to come and stay with him and Nana. He had met her parents when he had gone on ‘an adventure’ to Darwin and Broome back in the late 1920s. I heard Mum tell Aunty Roma that Grandpa had gone to get away from the twins, who were still infants, and that if Nana hadn’t gone to Broome to get him, Grandpa would never have come back.

I struggled to imagine Nana going on a ship to Broome by herself. She’d never travelled anywhere before. I wondered why Grandpa didn’t want to come back. I couldn’t ask anyone. It was a mystery. However, I did know that Grandpa had closed in his back verandah to display the spears, boomerangs, didgeridoos and pearl shells he had brought back. He’d shot a buffalo and mounted the horns on a beautiful varnished shield he’d made. He’d shot crocodiles too, but Nana said there was no room for an 18-foot saltwater crocodile in her house.

Laurie and I were excited to learn Sydney’s first war casualties were three lions, a leopard and a tiger from a circus. They were destroyed because it was feared they would be dangerous if they escaped during an air raid. Coffs Harbour on the NSW Mid North Coast made the news when a submarine alarm was raised, but the potential Jap sub turned out to be a whale. School students there were drilled in target practice on a rifle range, and when it was feared saboteurs would attack the big railway tunnel near Coffs, it was protected round the clock by a solitary guard armed with a pick handle.

People were moving away from the seaside suburbs which were likely to be the first shelled and bombed. We were lucky we’d moved already and had a house with a scarce telephone. Mum begrudgingly allowed neighbours to use our phone. She took their threepenny pieces and stood beside them making sure they didn’t make trunk calls. She considered placing a moneybox by the telephone but did not want them to think she was stingy. Also, she knew she would inevitably rob it just like my teddy bear moneybox, which had two tiny screws in the base that even I knew how to undo with the butter knife. Mum used my savings for ‘milk money’, promising to replace it. She sometimes did.

There was an English ten shilling note in my moneybox that was taboo. Pa gave it to me when I was born. She would have to take it to the bank and have it exchanged into Australian currency. Even Mum would not sink that low.

She taught me our telephone number, FW5971. I needed to know it so that I could tell a policeman if I got lost. ‘Never talk to strangers,’ Mum said. ‘If you need help, ask a policeman.’ I couldn’t remember ever seeing a policeman where we lived, but I wouldn’t get lost there anyhow.

***

Two days before my fourth birthday, I was having morning tea with Grandpa and Nana when we heard on the wireless that Singapore had surrendered – the biggest defeat in the history of the British Empire. Grandpa was stunned again. ‘So much for our British fortress. We’ll be next, mark my words.’

Even though we were rocked by the news, Nana went ahead with my birthday cake request – a fruitcake with chocolate icing. Mum rolled her eyes at the thought of it; so solid, so sweet. It was like a chocolate Christmas cake. Not your fluffy sponge that disappeared in a sitting. This was a cake that you could base a campaign around. Something for a soldier’s kit. Emergency rations for the duration. I was fortunate Mum did not like this wonderful cake; it was all mine.

For my birthday present I got a sensational motorbike and sidecar. This was a special toy made by Cyclops and painted red with white trim and white rubber tyres. I heard Mum telling Pearl it cost a fortune, but she’d had it on layby since last June. I loved it.

Two days after my birthday, Darwin was bombed.

Betty, Grandpa’s friend’s daughter, was evacuated from Darwin by ship with 2000 women and children. We weren’t getting much news on the radio. The censors were at work. But when Betty arrived in Melbourne, she told us Darwin was devastated from the attack by 188 Jap planes. Morale hit rock bottom, with Australian troops drunkenly rioting and smashing up the Victoria Hotel. She said there were bodies and arms and legs all over the place and a mass grave in a bomb crater near the Darwin hospital. There were still bodies lying around town days afterwards. As shops put up signs ‘closed for the duration’, everyone who could, fled south. Cattle were being driven south ‘so the Japs wouldn’t get them’; locals buried their valuables in secret places in their backyards. It sounded awful. We were scared.

In Melbourne, air raid trench digging began in earnest. One boozy weekend Dad and Alan dug ours and it immediately filled with rain water. Mum told me not to fall in and drown myself. Grandpa built a proper air raid shelter in his backyard, a beauty.

The Women’s Weekly published Mary Gilmore’s poem called Singapore that read in part: ‘We swear by our dead and captive sons REVENGE FOR SINGAPORE.’ The Weekly said the poem echoed the rage most Australians felt about what they saw as Britain’s desertion of Australia. ‘We were sacrificed for self-interest,’ the Weekly said.