Ship of Brides (6 page)

Darling, I can’t wait to see you. I’ve missed you so terribly. Mummy says that when we’ve got our new home sorted she and Daddy will be over ASAP. They are planning to travel on the new Qantas ‘Kangaroo’ service – did you know you can get to London in only 63 hours flying on a Lancastrian? She has asked me to ask you for your mother’s address so she can send on the rest of my things once I’m in England. I’m sure they’ll be better about everything once they’ve met your parents. They seem to have visions of me ending up in some mud hut in the middle of an English field somewhere.

So, anyway, darling, here I am practising my signature, and remembering to answer to ‘Mrs’, and still getting used to the sight of a wedding band on my finger. It was so disappointing us not having a proper honeymoon, but I really don’t mind where it happens, as long as I’ll be with you. I’ll end now, as I’m spending the afternoon at the American Wives’ Club at Woolloomooloo, finding out what I’ll need for the trip. The American Wives get all sorts, unlike us poor British wives. (Isn’t it a gas, my saying that?) Mind you, if I have to listen to one more rendition of ‘When The Boy From Alabama Meets A Girl From Gundagi’ I think I shall sprout wings and fly to you myself. Take care my love, and write as soon as you have a moment.

Your Avice

In the four years since its inception the American Wives’ Club had met every two weeks at the elegant white stucco house on the edge of the Royal Botanic Gardens, initially to help girls who had travelled from Perth or Canberra to while away the endless weeks before they were allowed a passage to meet their American husbands. It taught them how to make American patchwork quilts, sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, and offered a little matronly support to those who were pregnant or nursing, and those who could not decide whether they were paralysed with fear at the thought of the journey or at the idea that they would never make it.

Latterly the club had ceased to be American in character: the previous year’s US War Brides Act had hastened the departure of its twelve thousand newly claimed Australian wives, so the quilts had been replaced by bridge afternoons and advice on how to cope with British food and rationing.

Many of the young brides who now attended were lodged with families in Leichhardt, Darlinghurst or the suburbs. They were in a strange hinterland, their lives in Australia not yet over and those elsewhere not begun, their focus on the minutiae of a future they knew little about and could not control. It was perhaps unsurprising that on the biweekly occasions that they met, there was only one topic of conversation.

‘A girl I know from Melbourne got to travel over on the
Queen Mary
in a first-class cabin,’ a bespectacled girl was saying. The liner had been held up as the holy grail of transport. Letters were still arriving in Australia with tales of her glory. ‘She said she spent almost all her time toasting herself by the pool. She said there were dinner-dances, party games, everything. And they got the most heavenly dresses made in Ceylon. The only thing was she had to share with some woman and her children. Ugh. Sticky fingers all over her clothes, and up at five thirty in the morning when the baby started to wail.’

‘Children are a blessing,’ said Mrs Proffit, benignly, as she checked the stitching of a green hat on a brown woollen monkey. Today they were Gift-making for the Bombed-out Children of London. One of the girls had been sent a book called
Useful Hints from Odds and Ends
by her English mother-in-law, and Mrs Proffit had written out instructions on how to make a necklace from the metal rings for chickens’ legs, and a bed-jacket from old cami-knickers for next week’s meeting. ‘Yes,’ she said, glancing fondly at them all. ‘You’ll understand one day. Children are a blessing.’

‘No children is more of one,’ muttered the dark-eyed girl next to Avice, accompanying the remark with a rather vulgar nudge.

In other times, Avice would not have spent five minutes with this peculiar mixture of girls – some of whom seemed to have landed straight off some outback station with red dust on their shoes – or, indeed, have wasted so many hours enduring interminable lectures from middle-aged spinsters who had seized upon the war as a way to enliven what had probably been dismal lives. But she had been in Sydney for almost ten days now, with her father’s friend, Mr Burton, the only person she knew there, and the Wives’ Club had become her only point of social contact. (She still wasn’t sure how to explain Mr Burton’s behaviour to her father. She had had to tell the man no less than four times that she was a married woman, and she wasn’t entirely sure that as far as he was concerned that made any difference.)

There were twelve other young women at today’s gathering; few had spent more than a week at a time with their husbands, and more than half had not seen them for the best part of a year. The shipment home of troops was a priority; the ‘wallflower wives’, as they had become known, were not. Some had filed their papers over a year previously and heard little since. At least one, tiring of her dreary lodgings, had given up and gone home. The rest stayed on, fuelled by blind hope, desperation, love or, in most cases, a varying mix of all three.

Avice was the newest member. Listening to their tales of the families with whom they were billeted, she had silently thanked her parents for the opulence of her hotel accommodation. It would all have been so much less exciting if she had been forced to stay with some grumpy old couple. As it was, it became rather less exciting by the day.

‘If that Mrs Tidworth says to me one more time, “Oh dear, hasn’t he sent for you yet?” I swear I’ll swing for her.’

‘She loves it, the old bitch. She did the same to Mary Knight when she stayed there. I reckon she actually wants you to get the telegram saying, “Don’t come.”’

‘It’s the you’ll-be-sorrys I can’t stand.’

‘Not much longer, eh?’

‘When’s the next one due in?’

‘Around three weeks, according to my orders,’ said the dark-eyed girl. Avice thought she might have said her name was Jean, but she was hopeless with names and had forgotten them all immediately she’d been introduced. ‘She’d better be as nice as the
Queen Mary
. She even had a hair salon with heated dryers. I’m desperate to get my hair done properly before I see Stan again.’

‘She was a wonderful woman, Queen Mary,’ said Mrs Proffit, from the end of the table. ‘Such a lady.’

‘You’ve got your orders?’ A freckled girl on the other side of the table was frowning at Jean.

‘Last week.’

‘But you’re low priority. You said you didn’t even put in your papers until a month ago.’

There was a brief silence. Around the table, several girls exchanged glances, then fixed their eyes on their embroidery. Mrs Proffit looked up; she had apparently picked up on the subtle cooling in the atmosphere. ‘Anyone need more thread?’ she asked, peering over her spectacles.

‘Yes, well, sometimes you just get lucky,’ said Jean, and excused herself from the table.

‘How come she gets on?’ said the freckled girl, turning to the women on each side of her. ‘I’ve been waiting nearly fifteen months, and she’s getting on the next boat out. How can that be right?’ Her voice had sharpened with the injustice of it. Avice made a mental note not to mention her own orders.

‘She’s carrying, isn’t she?’ muttered another girl.

‘What?’

‘Jean. She’s in the family way. You know what? The Americans won’t let you over once you’re past four months.’

‘Who’s doing the penguin?’ said Mrs Proffit. ‘You’ll need to keep that black thread for whoever’s doing the penguin.’

‘Hang on,’ said a redhead threading a needle. ‘Her Stan left in November. She said he was on the same ship as my Ernie.’

‘So she can’t be in the family way.’

‘Or she is . . . and . . .’

Eyes widened and met, accompanied by the odd smirk.

‘Are you up for a little roo, Sarah dear?’ Mrs Proffit beamed at the girls and pulled some pieces of fawn felt out of her cloth bag. ‘I do think the little roos are rather sweet, don’t you?’

Several minutes later Jean returned to her chair, and folded her arms rather combatively. She seemed to realise that she was no longer the topic of conversation and visibly relaxed – although she might have wondered at the sudden industriousness of the toy-making around her.

‘I met Ian, my husband, at a tea-dance,’ said Avice, in an attempt to break the silence. ‘I was part of a young ladies’ reception committee, and he was the second man I offered a cup of tea to.’

‘Was that all you offered him?’

That was Jean. She might have known. ‘From what I’ve heard I don’t suppose everyone’s idea of hospitality is quite the same as yours,’ she retorted. She remembered how she had blushed as she poured; he had been staring conspicuously at her ankles – of which she was rather proud.

Petty Officer Ian Stewart Radley. At twenty-six, a whole five years older than her, which Avice considered just right, tall and straight-backed with eyes the colour of the sea, a gentlemanly British accent and broad, soft hands that had made her tremble the first time they ever brushed hers – even holding a shortbread finger. He had asked her to dance – even though no one else was on the floor – and with him being a serviceman, she had thought it mean-spirited to refuse. What was a quickstep or a Gay Gordons when he was looking death in the face?

Less than four months later they were married, a tasteful ceremony in the Collins Street register office. Her father had been suspicious, had made her mother quiz her – in a discreet woman-to-woman way, of course – as to whether there was any reason for such a hasty marriage other than Ian’s imminent departure. Ian had told her father, rather honourably, she thought, that he was happy to wait, if that was what Avice’s parents wanted, that he would do nothing to upset them, but she had been determined to become Mrs Radley. The war had hastened everything, foreshortened the natural timescale of such things. And she had known, from that first cup of tea, there was no one else in the world she could envisage marrying; no one else upon whom she could consider bestowing her many gifts.

‘But we know nothing about him, dear,’ her mother had said, wringing her hands.

‘He’s perfect.’

‘You know that’s not what I mean.’

‘What do you need to know? He’s been out there holding the Brisbane line, hasn’t he? Doesn’t protecting our country, putting his own life at risk twelve thousand miles from his home to save us from the Japs, make him worthy of my hand?’

‘No need to be melodramatic, sweetheart,’ her father had said.

They had given in, of course. They always did. Her sister Deanna had been furious.

‘My Johnnie was billeted with my aunt Vi,’ said another girl. ‘I thought he was gorgeous. I sneaked into his room the second night he was there and that was that.’

‘Best to get in early,’ said another, to raucous laughter. ‘Stake your claim.’

‘Especially if Jean’s around.’

Even Jean found that funny.

‘Now, who wants to practise making one of these lovely necklaces?’ Mrs Proffit held up an uneven-looking chain of aluminium coils. ‘I’m sure it’s what the best-dressed ladies are wearing in Europe.’

‘Next week it’ll be how to make couture evening cloaks from horse blankets.’

‘I heard that, Edwina.’ Mrs Proffit placed the necklace carefully on the table.

‘Sorry, Mrs P, but if my Johnnie saw me wearing one of those he wouldn’t know whether to kiss me or check my rear to see if I’d laid an egg.’

There was an explosion of laughter, an outburst of barely suppressed hysteria.

Mrs Proffit sighed and laid down her craftwork. Really! It was only to be expected, as embarkation drew closer – but really! These girls could be so wearying.

‘So, when are you out?’

Jean’s host family were two streets away from the Wentworth, and the girls had ended up walking back together, dawdling. Despite the air of mutual dislike between them, they were reluctant to sit alone in their rooms for yet another evening.

‘Avice? When are your orders for?’

Avice wondered whether to answer truthfully. She was pretty sure that Jean – immature and coarse as she was – was not the kind of girl she would normally want to associate with, especially if what had been said about her condition was true. But neither was Avice a girl used to self-restraint, and the effort involved in keeping quiet for an entire afternoon about her own plans had been a strain. ‘Same as you. Three weeks. What’s she called? The
Victoria
?’

‘It’s a bugger, isn’t it?’ Jean lit a cigarette, cupping her hands against the sea breeze. As an afterthought, she offered one to Avice.

Avice wrinkled her nose and declined. ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s a bugger. They get the bloody
Queen Mary
and we get the old tin can.’

A car drove past slowly, and two servicemen hung out of the windows, shouting something crude. Jean grinned at them, waving her cigarette, as the car disappeared round the corner.

Avice stood in front of her. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘Didn’t you hear Mrs Proffit? The one who’s married to the commander?’

Avice shook her head.

Jean laughed humourlessly. ‘I don’t think it’s quite hair salons and first-class cabins for you and me, girl. Our
Victoria
is a bloody aircraft-carrier.’

Avice stared at the girl for a minute, then smiled. It was the kind of smile she reserved at home for the staff when they did something particularly stupid. ‘I think you must be mistaken, Jean. Ladies don’t travel on aircraft-carriers.’ She pursed her lips, as smoke trickled her way. ‘Besides, there’d be nowhere to put us all.’

‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’

Avice fought back irritation at being addressed in this manner by someone who had to be at least five years younger than herself.

‘They’ve run out of decent transport. They’re going to stick us on anything to get us over there. I reckon they figure whoever really wants to go will put up with whatever they throw our way.’

‘Are you sure?’