CHAPTER 5

War with Germany

It was Father’s Day when we heard about The War – Sunday, September 3, 1939. You don’t forget a Father’s Day like that and where you were when it happened. Mum had bought a cake up at the junction and Dad had bought home some beer. I’d already had a sleep and was wide awake when we heard the news at 9.15 p.m. The new Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, said, ‘It is my melancholy duty to inform the nation that Britain has declared war on Germany and we are therefore at war ourselves.’

‘How about that,’ said Dad. ‘No discussion or referendum. Menzies just makes the decision and we all go to war.’ But I could see that he was excited all the same.

‘What’s melancholy mean?’ I wanted to ask, but Mum and Dad were too excited to hear my silly questions. They had been expecting this news for days and the wireless had been on most of the time. The only time it was turned off was when we needed the toaster or the iron, which used the same power point.

A day earlier Menzies had broadcast the likelihood of war and said that as Australians were a British people, we were fit to face the crisis with cheerful fortitude and confidence. Is that what we felt? Cheerful fortitude and confidence? Being such a little kid, I hardly knew where Germany was, but I certainly knew who the Prime Minister was. If there was one thing that the Protestant and Catholic working class were united about, it was that Bob Bloody Menzies was a stuck-up bastard. Mum often said so. I knew her words off by heart: ‘Bloody, phony, Pommy bastard.’

That night, we had our usual Sunday ritual: Dad cooked dinner like his mother always used to and we listened to a play on the wireless. His mother cooked scones that she was very proud of, but Dad didn’t know how to make them, so he cooked scrambled eggs on toast. We had our weekly bath, ate our scrambled eggs and got into bed together. After Dad had plugged the wireless in with an extension cord from the kitchen, we listened to the play and ate a quarter-pound block of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and Mum drank her bottle of beer. A lot of people turn their noses up at beer with chocolate, but Mum said it was a very good combination. I had tried beer and didn’t like it, but I loved chocolate.

Next morning, our newspaper was full of the war. But instead of it being the exciting event I imagined, the paper reported that there was a lot of disillusionment and apathy. Mum read that people did not sing patriotic songs like when World War I was proclaimed. Instead, the mood was sombre. ‘And so it should be,’ Dad said. He recalled ‘the war to end all wars’ followed by the Depression, the period known as ‘The Mean Decades’. ‘People are going to join up just to get a job.’

When Mum and I went Christmas shopping a few months later, the shops were packed. People were buying everything they could because they expected the war would mean rationing. Mum bought all the silk stockings she could afford and Dad surprised her with a new watch for their anniversary. I didn’t get anything much for Christmas, just clothes, but during the holidays we went to see The Wizard of Oz. That was a beaut show and afterwards Mum and I would sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ together. I liked that song.

Mum loved Shirley Temple but was glad that she didn’t play Dorothy in the movie; Shirley just couldn’t sing as well as Judy Garland. Afterwards, Mum told our neighbour, Irene, she had bawled her eyes out in the movie. ‘You know, the part when Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home. I’ll never leave home again.” It was so sad.’ I liked the Tin Man best.

Irene said she might go and see it. Mum secretly thought Irene was ‘a lazy cow’, but as she lived across the landing from our flat, Mum appreciated she was always ready for a natter with a ciggie and a drink. Unfortunately, Irene didn’t have any kids; she did tell Mum why, but I wasn’t allowed to listen and was sent to my room to play. My room was quite nice really, plenty of toys, but very lonely.

Mum said no one seemed to care much about the war ‘over there’ in Europe; when the first convoy sailed to the Middle East on January 10, 1940, it went almost unnoticed. I remember the date well because Mum took me to a birthday party for a nice little girl called Joan Wareham who was four years old. This girl made an everlasting impression on me because she lived on an apple orchard at the edge of the city, and we spent the afternoon playing together and eating all the apples we wanted. I loved apples.

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For my second birthday, I’m given a new trike. It has a small tray on the back which I can fill with dirt and stones with my beach bucket and spade. I still have the same swimsuit from last year even though I’m twice as big. It has to stretch so much that what used to be a neckline, now comes down to my waist. True, I was pretty chubby and didn’t really have much of a waist. Indeed, I looked like a weightlifter. And I liked what I saw.

A few days after my birthday, Mum went swimming wearing her new watch and ruined it. It was not waterproof. She was devastated and I toddled off for cover. A young man at the beach was silly enough to ask Mum if she always swam with her watch on. He was lucky to get away with his life. Even hours later when Mum was telling Irene for the umpteenth time of her misfortune, she was still wanting him dead. ‘What a heartless, sarcastic bastard,’ Mum would say forever as she repeated the painful story. She continued to wear the damaged watch; costume jewellery she called it. Of course, the watch no longer told the time. It just kept her anger boiling.

***

The next six months were a period of turmoil at home with Alan egging Dad on to join up. In March, the air force was being rushed and Dad came home saying there were 2000 applications in Melbourne alone when they only needed 160. Mum said everyone wanted to be in the air force because it was the best and more modern than the army or the navy. ‘Flyers look so smart with the wings on their uniforms,’ was her clinching argument.

Mum always bought The Women’s Weekly and in the 1940, March 2 issue, she was pleased to read that ‘curves are in’. She was having a glass of sherry with Irene and reading out loud. ‘When did they go out?’ asked Irene.

Mum read on: ‘Bustlines and softly curving hips are in vogue again. Pencil slim silhouettes have no place in the new season’s fashion.’ I was very pleased to hear my mum in such a good mood. Whenever Mum was happy, I was happy too. Even Scotch and Whisky were happy, although they could get into terrible trouble when they made a mess. So could I.

After reading the article, Mum felt justified that she hadn’t breastfed me and still had her fashionable figure. She read more, telling Irene we could expect emphasis on military styles of clothes because of the war. Padded shoulders, button pockets, that sort of thing. Irene lit a cigarette. She didn’t take fashion quite as seriously as Mum.

We had the Melbourne Sun delivered every day; Mum said it was the best. Her father got The Age, which he said was not a rubbishy tabloid like the Sun. My dad’s family read The Argus because they were Catholics. Dad brought Mum the newspaper in bed every morning, along with a cup of weak black tea with lemon and a slice of toast with runny butter. Mum got the idea from a movie, probably the one with Claudette Colbert. Sometimes she would let me sit in bed with her, but I wriggled too much.

When I saw the newspaper, it was on the floor under Scotch and Whisky’s food dishes. That is where the cat and dog and I puzzled over big black headlines announcing Germany had overrun Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and that even France was about to fall.

I heard Mum and Dad talking about Winston Churchill, the new Prime Minister of Britain. We liked him and called him Winnie. Britain was facing invasion and we feared for the king and queen and the lovely little princesses. The king asked us to pray to save his army trapped in Dunkirk by the awful Huns. I asked Mum why we didn’t pray, but she told me not to be stupid. Apparently, it was a miracle that the army escaped to England. I asked her what a miracle was but she sent me to my room.

We were shocked that winter when Italy joined sides with the dirty Krauts. They were allies, which meant we now had two countries to fight. All Melbourne’s fruit shops were owned by Italians. Now we worried they were spies. People started calling them dirty dagos and bloody wogs to their faces instead of politely behind their backs like we used to; they threw bricks through their shop windows and wrote nasty things on their walls. Eventually, they were called enemy aliens and taken away to prison camps.

Dad said after years of the Depression, there would now be work for everyone and bloody Menzies, being a Melbourne man, would make sure we all got the jobs.

In the latest Women’s Weekly there was a poem by Dame Mary Gilmore that said,

No foe shall gather our harvest,

Or sit on our stockyard rail.

However, Mum is more interested in the Weekly’s report of the new movie sensation, Gone With the Wind: ‘They say it is genuinely breathtaking.’