CHAPTER 23

The Morning After

I had a beaut time with Nana and Grandpa – there was lots to eat, I felt warm all night, there were no arguments and I slept like a log in my comfy bed. Next morning, I went into a cosy kitchen where Nana had already set the table for breakfast. She didn’t need a toaster; we just opened the stove door to the fire and I toasted the bread with her special long fork. Then we melted the rationed butter and painted it on with a special little brush to make it go further. There was as much toast and her homemade plum jam as I wanted. At home I made my own breakfast in a cold kitchen while Mum slept in.

I left Nana and Grandpa’s for home. I wasn’t surprised everyone was still in bed, even though I’d been up for hours. It must have been way after nine. I knocked on the locked front door and yelled out and after a bit Mum let me in. She told me to make myself useful and brew some tea. ‘Ask Roma if she wants some too.’ When Roma welcomes me into her bedroom, she looks happy and her bloke does too. ‘Tell your mum what we’d really like is a nice cold beer.’

I knock cautiously on Mum’s door and when she says, ‘What do you want?’ I tell her Roma wants a nice cold beer. ‘Does she now,’ says Mum. ‘Tell her I’d like one too if she’s offering.’

Between the two bedrooms there’s a rug with frills each end. It was one of my jobs to keep the frills neat and tidy and I must be careful to step over them. Mum could give them a flick and they would be perfect, but I had to straighten them individually and it was very hard to do it well enough to please Mum.

Back I go to Aunt Roma. ‘Your mum must have some beer tucked away somewhere.’ Mum has a reputation for ‘putting things away’. When a party kicked off at our joint and there was lots of grog, she’d hide a couple of bottles in the linen closet or under my bed or behind the nectarine tree or in the back of the broom cupboard. She had a dozen devious hiding places but trouble recalling them. Sometimes bottles would turn up days later in the shed or the long grass.

I’m so busy running messages I don’t think about Pearl. While Mum and Roma both have bedrooms to share with this weekend’s Yanks, Pearl has made do with an improvised bed of cushions in the lounge room. The floor was covered with green Feltex – a thin, cheap version of carpet that didn’t provide much comfort and the room was painted a cold off-white with calsomine that came off on your clothes if you leant against it.

Pearl lived next door with her parents, but when we were celebrating (the girls always found something to celebrate during the war), Pearl sort of moved in with us. I don’t know what her parents thought, but they were always kind to me when I went over to pick some mint or borrow a cup of sugar. Sometimes Mrs Thompson would feed me. She made cherries in green jelly with custard that was simply delicious.

When I went into the lounge room it sounded suspiciously quiet, so I decided to allow Pearl some privacy. Better to please Mum with a cup of tea. At least I knew how to make it and could be relied on to deliver it bedside, hot, weak with a slice of lemon, just as instructed.

Mum had trained me how to make tea shortly after she’d taught me to walk. It was important that the water be boiling hot when it touched the tea leaves. This meant I had to hold the little teapot in one hand and tilt the kettle with the other. I was not tall enough to reach the stove without a chair and I had to be very careful lighting the gas as Mum said I could easily blow the house up and kill us all. The boiling water needed great care also; Mum said not to pour it over me, otherwise she would have to take me to hospital.

I was always anxious walking the tea to Mum’s bed. The whole exercise was ruined in her eyes if there was even a drop of tea spilt in the saucer, so I walked with tiny, dragging steps. One might wonder if I would ever arrive. Mum usually had a Bex powder with her cuppa; it was good for her hangover she said. I was impressed she could pour the powder onto the very back of her tongue. She gave me a Bex once when I was sick, but I gagged and vomited bile on the clean sheets and she cuffed my ear. Thankfully, this morning, Roma comes into the kitchen to help me. She knows her boyfriend and Mum’s Yank would prefer coffee to tea and she will make it, while I do Mum’s tea.

Eventually everyone got out of bed – even Pearl and her Yank – and they sat on the ramp outside that led to the backyard. They were enjoying coffee and cigarettes while Mum wondered where the beer might be stashed. Suddenly Aunty Roma noticed black puffs of smoke in the air. ‘See that plane?’ A plane was flying our way and it was being shot at from the ground. We couldn’t hear much noise, it was too far away, but I do remember the Yanks reassuring us. ‘It’s probably one of ours and it’s wandered out of the air corridor. The ack-ack gunners are just having a bit of fun.’

One of ours or not, I was impressed. This was war and right at our back door. They played war songs on the wireless and we knew all the words and sang along: ‘… ’til our boys come marching home’, ‘… don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me’, ‘… we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when’. Singers like Vera Lynn, the Andrews sisters, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were part of our lives; they were part of the war effort. We were all pulling together; it made us feel proud.

The war waged on. Mum suffered hangovers from so much partying. She drank, she smoked, and didn’t eat or sleep enough. Sure, she might be in bed with some Yank, but I could tell they weren’t asleep.