Women and War (15 page)

As she drove her ambulance along the Esplanade with yet another supply of comforts for the hospital ship
Manunda
, Alys had a perfect view of the harbour but the sight of all the ships gathered there did not disturb her as they had disturbed James Crawford.

War is terrible, Alys reminded herself. But it made no difference to the way she felt – the sharp needle edged thrill, half fear half something else – a primeval emotion handed down from the beginning of time and conjuring up a dozen pictures coloured in the green and gold of glory, the scarlet of freshly spilled blood … Roman legions marching, Royalists and Roundheads clashing in sunlit clearings, cavalry at full gallop heads held high and unafraid …
Into the valley of death rode the six hundred …

War is terrible, she reminded herself. But at the same time she was honest enough to admit that it had brought her alive in a way that nothing had ever done before.

On the Esplanade Alys stopped her ambulance outside the post office, a solid stone building where so much of Darwin was timber and corrugated iron. The previous evening she had written a letter to her mother explaining why she was not coming home and she was anxious to post it as soon as possible. But there was a long queue waiting to be served and Alys thought she had better not wait. She was already running a little late for she had been delayed at Red Cross HQ while a missing consignment of comforts was located.

The clock in the post office said 9.45 a.m. Alys waved to Iris Bald, the postmaster's twenty-year-old-daughter, who was just passing through with a library book under her arm, and wondered why she was not at her desk in the Taxation Office where she worked. Then she stopped for a moment under the veranda to check her private mailbox and turned back to her ambulance. Get the comforts delivered and then she would come back to post her letter.

She was driving towards the harbour when she saw the aeroplanes. At first she took no notice. There was always activity in the skies over Darwin – if it was not the Aussie Wirraways it was the American planes who used the base. Then something in the sound of the engines made her uneasy. They did not sound like Wirraway, Kittyhawks or Hudsons. They sounded heavier and more ominous …

And suddenly there were objects besides the aircraft in the sky – slender objects catching the light of the morning sun as they fell. Alys gasped, jamming on her brakes and feeling a slow sharp edge of terror slice up her spine. It couldn't be a raid – could it? There had been no warning.

At that very moment the siren began to wail.

Tara was on the wharf when the Japanese bombers came. It was an ugly and inconvenient structure supported on steel and wooden piles which jutted out into the harbour from Stokes Hill then dog-legged through an angle of 90° to run parallel with the shore and provide berths for two ships, a large one on the outside and a smaller one on the inner. On the landward end of the wharf a locomotive pulled the trucks to and fro, but it could not negotiate the acute angle of the dogleg and to overcome the problem a turntable operated by a donkey engine had been installed. Trucks were shunted onto this turntable two at a time then pushed by hand one at a time to the waiting ships.

As on the previous day the harbour was crowded. Two vessels were unloading and it was for one of these that Tara was making. Back in the docks she had enquired for the
Fortuna
and the man she had asked had pointed to the ship tied up at the outside berth. At the time it had seemed like good fortune not to have to find a launch to take her out to the
Fortuna
. Now, as she lugged her suitcase along the seemingly never-ending length of the pier, she was not so sure.

Oh, it was so hot! Early as it was the atmosphere was suffocating, made heavier, it seemed, by the clouds of steam rising from the hardworking locomotive and impregnated by the sharp whiffs from the iron ore loading jetty and the bitumen plant. Tara's head throbbed with every step she took, her arm ached from the weight of her suitcase and she thought she was starting a blister on one heel.

At the dogleg angle of the wharf she paused, setting down her suitcase and idly watching the engine shunt a couple of trucks onto the turntable. Two wharfies were waiting for them, swarthy little monkeys of men in vests and shorts, their muscles hard and rippling beneath skin tanned to burnished leather by constant exposure to the sun.

As the trucks angled off onto their section of rail they took charge, calling their intentions to one another then man-handling them on their way with the ease of toys.

‘Smoke-oh!' A shout close at hand startled Tara and she turned to see another wharfie standing in the open doorway of a shed which also occupied the dogleg. He was a larger man than either of the ones working on the trucks, with a beer pot which hung over the top of his shorts and heavy, unshaven jowls. The one who got out of manual work as much as possible, obviously; the self-appointed tea-maker. ‘Smoke-oh!' he bellowed again, then leered at Tara. ‘You want a cup, darlin'?'

Tara shook her head and picked up her case once more. Wharfies were drifting down the jetty now in groups, making for the recreation shed; they ogled and whistled at her as they passed. As she came closer to the two ships that were tied up she felt the first niggle of doubt. The smaller one on the inside berth was a freighter, the
Barossa
. But the other was a much bigger ship than she had expected. Officers from a ship as impressive as that one did not usually dine at the Savalis' place, for all Dimitri's delusions of grandeur.

Another wharfie was heading towards her and Tara approached him.

‘Excuse me, is that the
Fortuna?'

‘Fortuna? Naw. She's not in yet.' The wharfie rolled a wad of tobacco across his lip.

‘But I was told that was her,' Tara said, pointing out the ship at the end of the wharf.

He shook his head. ‘
Neptuna
that is. She's unloading explosives.'

Tara swore. ‘Oh, you don't mean I've got to go all the way back!'

The wharfie grinned and picked up her case. ‘Come on, I'll give you a hand. I've got to go back that way myself.'

His last words were almost drowned out by the drone of approaching aircraft. ‘More of those noisy Yankee bastards,' he yelled above the roar.

Tara looked up and saw a sky full of planes. He was right, the Yanks were everywhere now. Then, more in surprise than alarm, she registered something wrong. Yankee planes did not fly with gaping holes in their bellies and those markings …

Simultaneously she heard the wharfie yell a warning.

‘Christ – look out! It's the bloody Japs!'

He grabbed her arm pulling her down towards the decking. She hit it with her knees and experienced a moment's searing pain. Beneath her the wharf vibrated, all around the thick air echoed with the throb of engines. Then a high-pitched whine threatened to split her ear-drums. Instinctively she covered her head with her hands. And the world seemed to explode around her.

She came back to consciousness like a drowning man surfacing through choppy storm waves with the ground rocking beneath her and the trembling air torturing her ear drums with a sharp stabbing pain that was both physical and aural. Thuds and explosions jarred through every one of her senses, each preceded by the piercing whine that made her clap her hands across her ears. Yet nothing could shut it out, nor the screams and the shouts, nor the crackle of gunfire.

Acrid smoke drifted past her filling her nostrils and stinging her eyes and she arched her body coughing, only to gulp in more of the smoke so that for a moment she thought she would choke. The sensation frightened her more than the mayhem around her and she struggled to a sitting position, hawking and gasping. Then, as her streaming eyes took in the scene, she froze in utter horror.

The whole of the harbour, it seemed, was ablaze. Clouds of smoke, thick and black, obscured some ships, others listed at crazy angles. In the water men struggled and screamed, small boats dodged, patches of oil blazed. And still the planes threatened overhead, not the high level bombers now – they had done their work – but dive bombers and fighters, swooping in, attacking.

Near the wharf edge a swathe of scarlet fluttered; Tara recognized it as one of her own skirts. She rolled over to reach for it and saw her suitcase bobbing in the water below, blown open, with the contents spread over a yard-wide area. Beside it, face down, was a body blackened by oil – the wharfie who had been helping her. A scream bubbled in her throat and died, then she was on her feet stumbling back the way she had come into the drifting cloud of smoke.

A few yards she ran, then drew up sharply with all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck pricklingly erect. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. She hesitated. Then as the smoke swirled away she saw what it was. The dogleg angle of the jetty had been destroyed. Just a few feet in front of her the steel and timber ended abruptly and there was nothing but the sickening drop to the oil blackened, water below. Another step and she would have gone plunging down.

For a moment Tara stood frozen unable to believe her own eyes. The turntable, the locomotive, the recreation shed where the men had been gathering for smoke-oh – all gone – blown to oblivion by a Jap bomb. Then as her mind cleared like the drifting smoke she realized the full implications of the destruction.

She could not get off the wharf. She was trapped on an island of debris in the middle of the harbour with no means of escape. And still the Japanese planes swooped in overhead so low that the pilots' grinning faces were clearly visible, still the bombs fell and the guns fired, still everything burned around her.

As Tara stood there, staring down into the void, the air screamed again and she threw herself down as the wharfie had thrown her, burying her head in her arms. The world rocked not once but twice and the explosions deafened her. As they died away she rolled over, looking over the shelter of her arm and gasping at the sight which met her eyes.

The ship she had been making for in error – the
Neptune
– had suffered a direct hit. The bridge was gone, a pall of black smoke mushroomed up into the already thick atmosphere. Then, as she watched, the flames leaped orange and scarlet against the black, Dante's inferno here before her eyes.

Tara scrambled to her feet again – but which way to go? There was no escape. Someone caught at her arm and she turned to see a burly seaman.

‘Come on, love – we shall have to jump to get off here!'

She shrank from his touch. ‘No – I can't!'

‘Come on I say! We're effing good targets up here!'

Leaving go of her arm he launched himself, disappeared then bobbed up again. As he did so a bomb hit the water and a wave, feet high, erupted. The force of it lifted the man like a toy, hurling him at one of the struts. He crashed into it and fell back into the water thrashing feebly and fighting for breath, his lungs crushed by the explosion.

‘Oh Holy Mary!' she sobbed. Blindly she turned back towards the end of the wharf and as she did so a Jap plane sprayed a line of machine gun fire alongside her. Once again she threw herself down but a man running in front of her fell, blood spurting scarlet from his leg. He missed me on purpose, she thought, but she knew she could not rely on the next one doing the same.

Her searching fingers found the edge of the wharf. Perhaps she could climb down the struts and shelter underneath, she thought. It wouldn't save her if a bomb scored a direct hit, but it would keep her out of the way of flying debris and machine gun bullets. Concentrating totally on the effort Tara scrambled over the edge and sought a foothold. Slowly down, one foot then the other, hanging onto the edge of the wharf with hands that bled. Something whistled through the air close by and she flattened herself until she heard it splash into the water below. Then she lowered her foot carefully onto the next strut – and screamed as it splintered and gave way beneath her. For a moment it seemed she was bound to fall, then her searching toes found a ledge and she scrambled onto it, hanging out like a bow from the shattered structure of the jetty.

She could think of nothing now but the physical effort of hanging on; the attack was merely the background to the nightmare. Her fingers were slipping, slipping, every muscle screaming a protest. Then above the roaring in her ears she became aware of a voice she recognized calling her name.

‘Tara! For God's sake! Get down here!'

With difficulty she twisted round enough to see a launch in the water below her and there in the bows was Sean Devlin.

‘Come on – move!' he yelled at her.

She was hanging onto the strut for grim death. ‘I can't!'

‘Yes you can. Jump! We're here! We'll catch you! Come on!'

She did not answer. She couldn't do it – let go of this strut and fall towards the water! Holy Mary, she couldn't!

‘For Chirst's sake!' he shouted angrily. ‘You've got to get away from here. The bloody
Neptuna
is going to go sky high in a minute. Can't you hear it?'

Hear it? Hear what? Words meant nothing. She had been able to think of nothing but that fall. And then, through the cacophony of other sounds she heard it – a low and threatening rumble that seemed to come from the very core of the earth, shaking the air, reverberating along the wharf, entering her body through her fingertips as well as through her tortured ears. Vaguely she remembered words that seemed to have been spoken in another life – the wharfie who had died telling her ‘The
Neptuna
is unloading explosives' and saw again as she had seen with her own eyes the two crippling bombs that had torn into that ship. She saw it and heard it and suddenly it all came together in one terrifying flash of realization.

The
Neptuna
was going to blow up. If she remained where she was she would almost certainly be killed.

Tara swung round. Beneath her in the launch, arms outstretched, was Dev. For just a second she hesitated, then pushed herself away from the wharf and into thin air. She screamed as she fell, Dev caught her and they rolled over together. In panic she tried to cling to him, but without even asking her if she was all right he extricated himself, returning to the bows of the launch and yelling instructions to the three others who were crewing with him.