Women and War (45 page)

She did not add that she had suspected she had seen a gleam of triumph in Colonel Adamson's eyes when he had told her the news, nor that she was fairly certain he had never forgiven her for rebuffing him and then marrying Richard. Jealousy seemed too petty a motive to attribute to a senior officer – and there was a hint of conceit in suggesting it. She had never told Richard of the CO's approaches to her; now did not seem the right time to bring it up.

‘It's no good. I'll just have to go and hope it won't be for too long,' she said.

‘Well, they had better look after you,' he said vehemently. ‘ It does seem as though we have got the Nips on the run at last, but I don't like it. New Guinea is no place for a woman. It's a hell of a climate for one thing and too damn close to the action for another.'

‘I expect I'll be all right,' Tara retorted a shade indignantly. Having Richard anxious about her was very nice but she was irrationally proud of the toughness which was her only heritage. ‘They say they put atebrin tablets on the dinner table with the salt to stop us from getting malaria, and since Guadalcanal the Japs have really got their tails between their legs.'

‘A wounded dog can be dangerous,' Richard said, sipping his beer. ‘Oh, I'll be glad when this damned war is over and we can get back to normality. Go back to Melbourne, have a home of our own, and just get on with our lives. We've been married more than six months, Tara, and how much of that time have we been able to spend alone together? Precious little. But that will all be different when we get home and that's a promise.'

Tara nodded but said nothing.

She did not want to go to New Guinea it was true. But the thought of returning to Melbourne with Richard was a daunting one, too. Remembering her evening of discomfort with Alys and her friend, John, she shuddered. Life back in Melbourne could be a series of such evenings, every one of them spent with people with whom she was totally out of her depth.

But she was in no immediate danger of that.

She sighed, raised her glass and smiled at Richard over the beer foam.

‘Papua New Guinea – watch out. Here I come!'

From the very outset Tara disliked New Guinea. She had not, she supposed, made a very auspicious beginning; for even the journey to Port Moresby had been fraught with discomforts. First there had been the ‘trooper' – the train taking her and the other AAMWS from Brisbane to Townsville – hot, packed tight with perspiring bodies, and laid up so often in sidings for hours on end that the journey took three times as long as Tara had expected. Then there was Townsville, crowded to suffocation point with service personnel, and the long stumbling walk in the blackout to the waiting ship. Tara had staggered along under the load of her heavy kitbag, with all the items of equipment that would not fit into it draped around her neck. Fortunately, some of her issue of tropical kit had been stowed away in a tin trunk and was not her concern for the moment, for there was no way she could have managed such items as the beekeeper's head net and the heavy boots, and the smart new khaki trousers and safari jacket which had been issued to her would have been rags if they had had to be stuffed into the kitbag along with her pyjamas.

The troopship on which they sailed had once been a luxury liner but now had none of the trappings of those balmy days. The bunks cramped into the ‘brown-out' below decks were stained and without sheets; the blankets which eventually arrived to cover them – one grey woollen army issue per bunk – were scratchy and uncomfortably hot, but at least they were clean. In spite of the stabilizers which had been fitted to the ship in her cruising days, Tara began to feel queasy the moment the swell began to lift it and by the time they put to sea she was violently seasick. Lying miserably on her hard narrow bunk, Tara remembered that other voyage when she and Mammy had sailed halfway round the world and the nightmare of it was suddenly all too real, as if it had been yesterday instead of almost two decades ago.

The cabin hummed with the conversation of the other girls and the thuds, bumps and metallic clunks as they scrubbed and cleaned in an effort to make it habitable, but Tara heard it all as if it were a dream. More real was the musical lilt of Mammy's voice somewhere inside her head as she sang softly ‘Too-ra-loo-ra-loorah! Too-ra-loo-ra-lay!', and the smell in her nostrils was not the hot water and disinfectant smell but that indefinable mix of cheap perfume and whisky fumes which always evoked for her the essence of Mammy.

Six days after leaving Townsville they had landed at Port Moresby. Struggling along the jetty, laden once more, Tara was still weak and shaky but the nausea was passing and by the time she was ensconced in one of the waiting jeeps her usual perkiness had begun to return. Driving along the gravel roads where the dust flew in choking clouds from the wheels of the jeep, she made a special effort to take in her surroundings and listen to the friendly patter of the driver as he pointed out the sights – Fairfax Harbour, bathed in morning sunshine, the small houses which had been built on stilts over the water – and the landmarks the war had left, a ship sunk by enemy action, looking now like a great pathetic beached whale, a paddock where a fuel dump had gone up sky high, bomb craters resulting from the frequent air raids. Brought face to face with destruction of the kind she had witnessed at first hand in Darwin Tara shuddered but made mental notes all the same. She had to have something more interesting than an account of her seasickness to put in her letters to Richard, though on reflection she supposed the censor would chop most of it to pieces in any case.

When they had staged at a well-established AGH Tara's spirits had lifted a little. In the hot sunshine the mess was an oasis of beauty, thatched with sago palm leaves, surrounded by thick tropical ferns and shrubs and neat gardens bright with flowers of every hue. There were cool showers to wash away the sticky heat of travel and ice-cold beer finally settled her queasy stomach. But the hospital for which she was bound was no nearer completion than the one in Queensland had been – and less comfortable.

Bulldozers were still carving out terraces for tent lines and showers on the hillsides and scooping out pits for latrines, sudden storms of torrential rain turned the earth into a sea of mud and dripped through every weakness in the tents where the girls slept, lived and worked, even though the Wet was a full two months away, and between the storms the mosquitos descended in thick clouds to nip and irritate. The girls slept six to a tent, their clothes stowed in cupboards made from wooden boxes laid on their sides with a curtain to replace the lids – which were then utilized as bedside floormats.

For the first time in her life, almost, Tara was aware of a creeping sense of lack of purpose. It wasn't that there was not enough to keep her busy – there certainly was. But most of the AAMWS in Tara's draft had received formal training as medical orderlies and it was they who were assigned the nursing jobs, while Tara found herself ordered to do the menial tasks which fell to those on ‘general duties'. She began to dread the morning parade and roll call when the day's work was allocated. Someone, she supposed, had to sweep and tidy the sisters' tents, empty the rubbish bins and clean the covering of fine dust from the lantern shades; someone had to scrub the wooden seats of the latrines and make sure they were as hygienic as possible under these conditions. But why did it have to be her?

‘Oh, couldn't we have a swop around for once?' she asked one morning when Sister detailed her yet again to the hated tasks, and the chilling glance she received by way of reply only deepened her resentment.

‘We are fighting a war, Allingham. I'm afraid there is no room for adhering to the niceties you may be used to in civilian life,' sister told her crisply.

Had she not been so wretched Tara might have smiled at the irony of it. But she was in no mood for smiling. As she washed and scrubbed, and pegged out endless lines of bandages with hands puffy from immersion in hot harshly-treated water, Tara remembered the days when she had worked for Dimitri Savalis. But even then, she thought, she had been driven by motives which had somehow kept her going – her determination to find a way back to a better life, her fear of Red and her anger at what he had done to Jack, her grief, still raw, at the loss of her beloved Maggie. Now, it seemed she had gained everything she had ever dreamed of only to lose it again. She was here for the duration, caught frustratingly in a trap of her own making from which there would be no escape until the war ended – whenever that might be.

The separation from Richard ached in her like a nagging tooth which sometimes, in the quiet of the night, flared into raging pain. Was he missing her as much as she missed him? His letters told her he was, but always in the same carefully modified language that was a hallmark of his well-bred nature – not for him phrases of undying love for the censor to gloat over. When she had been there with him Tara had been confident of her own ability to hold his attention, and affection. Now, with the distance between them, she wondered uncomfortably just how much he remembered her. Might he not forget the warmth of her touch and the delights they had shared and remember instead the small awkwardnesses? Might he have time to think about the manner of their marriage – and wonder? Lying sleepless beneath her mosquito net, listening to the hum of insect life and the scuttle of something she feared might be rats, Tara fretted, and when she slept her dreams were all too often highly coloured, nightmarish affairs. Sometimes she dreamed that she came upon Richard holding another woman in his arms, but her face was hidden and Tara always woke before discovering who her rival was. Sometimes she dreamed of the bombing and saw Richard killed before her eyes the way the wharfie had been. Sometimes she dreamed of Jack's murder, only when she turned Jack over to comfort him it was Richard's face which stared up at her, lifeless from the cobbles. She woke from these dreams in a cold sweat with tears pouring down her cheeks; once she believed she was being stifled and fought through the layers of sleep to find a hand pressed over her mouth. Panic made her fight wildly to escape, then the fog cleared a little and she realized it was only Jill Whitton from the neighbouring bed.

‘Sorry, but I had to do it,' she whispered to Tara. ‘You were screaming out loud. You would have woken the whole ward!'

One horror at least was missing from her nightmares, however. The rape never came back to haunt her – at least not while she slept, though she did sometimes feel a chill run up her spine when the bushes rattled behind her, and once in a while she found herself remembering and wondering who her attacker had been. Investigations by the Provost had long since been abandoned, she guessed, and her file ‘lost' beneath a pile of more pressing ones. But it seemed strange the culprit had not been apprehended. Thousands of men in the area there might have been, but surely whoever was responsible must have taken away with him some evidence of what he had done, even if it was only dust and leaf mould on his uniform. Surely, in some billet somewhere, someone must have looked at the man in the neighbouring bunk and wondered. But nothing had ever come to light – and Tara was glad. Much as she would have liked to see him brought to justice, the facts about her past life which would have come to light under cross-examination at a court martial would certainly have ended any hope she might have had of becoming Mrs Richard Allingham.

Throughout the months of early spring the AGH worked at full stretch. The battles of the notorious Kokoda Trail had been fought and won, but many of the victims were still here, too ill to be shipped home to Australia, often delirious, always emaciated, their bodies covered with a honeycomb of weeping sores. Add to them the constant stream of casualties from the skirmishes which still continued as the Allied forces drove the Japs back and attempted to cut them off from their command at Salamaua, and there were enough patients to occupy every available bed in the tent lines and keep the operating theatre busy.

Here in New Guinea the fighting was always at close quarters, conducted with machine guns and rifles. Though bayonets were fixed in place all the time and the distances between the enemies was often more suited to hand-to-hand fighting, quite often it was the guns that were used, firing at one another at point blank range. There was sniper fire to contend with and the Japs were notorious for the way they could creep up swiftly and silently and take a man, or a battalion by surprise.

As if the wounds and the burns inflicted by battle were not enough, the climate, too, took its toll in casualties. Dysentery was rife, malaria still reared its head in spite of the prescribed atebrin tablets, and mild beri beri was not uncommon. Sometimes, even, a man was admitted suffering from the dreaded scrub typhus, contracted in the mangrove and sago swamps around Buna and Gona and in the suffocatingly hot areas of tall kunai grass, further inland.

Nor was it only the Allied forces who required medical treatment. There was a POW ward at the hospital too – a ward to which the sisters and AAMWS orderlies went only under the protection of an armed guard. It was a place which aroused Tara's interest and sparked her imagination, but she never had cause to go there.

Week in, week out her duties remained the same. On one occasion she managed to whittle down her lat cleaning rota by one – by placing an ‘Out of Order. Dangerous!' notice on the door of the furthest little hut. But that ruse lasted only a day or two before a stony-faced corporal marched up, took a good look round, and marched back again – bringing the notice with him.

When a new consignment of ward equipment was delivered and Tara was allocated the duty of cleaning it where it stood, at the edge of the dusty gravel track, she was glad. It was hot and dirty work – black dirt and mud caked everything – and for hours, as the heat of the day gathered, Tara worked with a scrubbing brush and a fire bucket full of water, cleaning until her arms ached and the sweat ran in rivulets through the powdering of fine black dust which covered her face and neck. But at least she felt she was doing something to help the sick and wounded fighting men and not simply skivvying for the other women, who were better qualified than she was. And when she saw the beds and cupboards carried away into the ward by a couple of perspiring orderlies, she experienced far greater satisfaction than she ever could from a polished toilet seat or a freshly-swept tent.