The Turning Tide (6 page)

I saw Helen behind the bar at the Exchange. We chatted between orders and she told me the secret base at the Prom had been suddenly closed a month before. Johnny and Alan’s group were to be the trainers for a fourth independent company, but the brass couldn’t decide how to use irregular-warfare soldiers: some felt their sheer existence was an affront to military tradition.

‘To Johnny’s disgust, they’ve sent them all off to New South Wales to join a light tank regiment,’ said Helen, smiling.

‘Poor Johnny,’ I said. ‘He was having so much fun blowing things up.’

As Helen moved away to take someone’s order she pushed her hair back. I noticed she had a small red mark above her right eyebrow. I pointed at it enquiringly as she was getting a glass and she mimed running into something. ‘Oh, darlin’, let me kiss it better!’ called one of the lads. She rolled her eyes.

The local policeman Frank, a nice bloke, dropped in to make sure the pub closed at six (there’d been a complaint about stragglers). The regulars drifted off. Frank and I had a chat, then I helped Helen clean up. The other girl said goodbye and left with a pleased Frank. By the time we’d finished wiping down and sweeping up it was almost dark. I carried the heavy bag of takings into the office so Helen could put it in the safe. She shut the safe door and sat on the edge of the desk.

‘Oh, my feet are sore,’ she said. ‘I’m glad the day’s over.’

Suddenly I realised how quiet it was. For want of something better I said, ‘Did you see Johnny before they had to go away?’

‘Yes, he had a couple of days off.’ She looked at her hand and turned her ring. Her face was still.

I didn’t understand the tension in her voice. Feeling awkward, I said, ‘So, tell me, how did that happen?’ pointing to her eyebrow.

She looked away. She was silent for a few moments, then stood and moved to the window. She looked out and said, ‘You can see so many stars tonight.’

Her voice caught and it took me a moment to see she was trembling slightly. I moved towards her and realised
she was crying. Without thinking, I put my arm around her shoulder and said, ‘Helen? What’s wrong?’

She put her hands to her eyes. I held her lightly and murmured ‘There, there,’ against her hair. It was all I could think of.

She took a deep breath and pulled away. She found her handbag and a handkerchief and blew her nose. She sat again on the edge of the desk, her head bent. I perched beside her in silence, stunned, my body tingling where we’d touched.

She lifted her head and I noticed the small brown dot in her blue eye I’d grown to love. Then she looked away from me, at the window.

‘When Johnny was on leave we had a disagreement. He was so miserable about the base closing, I shouldn’t have kept on at him. He was furious and punched the wall and one of his mother’s ornamental plates fell on me. She was so cross with him.’

‘Oh, Helen. Why was Johnny angry?’

She sighed. ‘I wanted him to try to take more time with me. You know, Mike. What we talked about. Johnny was always rushing off somewhere. I wanted him to take some more time.’ She laughed sadly. ‘I wanted overwhelming. I suppose that’s what I got, but not quite how I’d expected.’

I put my arm gently around her. Afterwards, I asked myself whether it was pity or calculation, knowing how vulnerable she was. She turned to me – of course she did – and kissed me. In seconds that kiss exploded into taste, texture, salt, colour, heat.

Nothing I had felt before compared. Nothing I had known prepared me, could have prepared me. Even today,
indelible fragments of memory still shock. A wave of hair, a seam of fabric, a crease of flesh. A scent, a texture, an incomparable joy.

I stood, pressing myself against her, kissing her neck and face, pushing between her legs. I stroked her breasts and undid the buttons down her dress, kissing her all the while. She whimpered in the back of her throat as I caressed her thighs.

She met my every move with her own. Laughing quietly, she wriggled out of her panties and undid my belt and fly buttons. She touched me, looking up, her eyes wide. I pulled her towards me and kissed her again and again. She raised her hips and took me in, murmuring with pleasure.

I managed to hold on for a time but it took every anti-erotic image I could summon. Helen was clinging, moving against me, then she groaned and arched her back. Heat flushed through her body and I couldn’t wait a moment longer. Dear God, dear God.

She lay back on the desk, breathing heavily. I leant on her, my head on her breasts, her knees around me. Our gasps, our sighing slowed. She kissed the top of my head and I nuzzled the round of her breast. I had never felt such joy. I think we dozed for a moment or two, then I lifted my head, grinning.

She pushed back her tangled hair and raised herself on her elbows. ‘Mike,’ she said, half-laughing. ‘Darling Mike. Oh, how wonderful –’ She kissed me again, then somehow we got ourselves vertical, giggling, adjusting clothes, doing up buttons and belts, smoothing hair into place.

We stood, respectable again, facing each other. She said breathlessly, ‘Well. I’d definitely call that overwhelming.’ I hugged her, laughing, burying my face in her golden hair.

Then a thought struck me and I drew back, worried. ‘Helen, we didn’t use any protection –’

She shook her head. ‘No, it’s all right. It’s a safe time. Delia’s a nurse, she told me how to work it out.’

‘All right.’ I looked at her, content, amazed. ‘Helen, sweetheart –’

She put her fingers against my lips and shook her head slightly, smiling. ‘Shh. We’ve stayed here too long already. Time for you to go home.’

‘Oh God. I’ve got to cycle to the O’Briens’ and that cold single bed. Wish we could stay together tonight. Wish we could every night.’

She looked at me, her face gentle. ‘Oh, Mike, darling Mike. We can’t. Not ever. This doesn’t change anything. It was wonderful, amazing, but I’m still going to marry Johnny. We’re going to get over our problem.’

‘But Helen,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t treat you properly. He doesn’t know how to make love to you.’

‘Then he’ll have to learn,’ she said, moving away from me. ‘People can. I’ll teach him. Mike, I’m sorry. You’re my dearest friend. I don’t understand how …’ She was puzzled, hesitant. ‘But I’m crazy about Johnny. The more complicated he is, the more I want him. I know we’ll be happy once we’re married.’

I looked at her and felt like weeping. ‘That’s infatuation, Helen. I don’t think he loves you, not the way you need –’

‘You can’t be sure of that, Mike. You don’t know how he is when we’re together. We’ve had a few problems, but the rest of the time he’s wonderful. Nothing, no one else matters. I can’t let this … Oh dear God, what a fool I am, I shouldn’t have …’

She put a hand on my chest and looked at me pleadingly. ‘This has to be a secret, always. Promise me, Mike. Please. Promise. You must never,
never
tell anyone.’

I was suddenly exhausted, heartbroken, angry. I nodded slowly.

‘All right. All right, Helen. I’ll do that. I’ll just piss off. Thanks for giving me a good time, darlin’. Our little secret.’

I hurt her and it was a cheap shot and I left before I could feel even more humiliated. But later I lay awake for hours, reliving every extraordinary moment.

Chapter 6

I kept myself busy on the farm for the following week or so and didn’t see Helen at all. Then, on the morning of 8th December 1941, everything changed. In the kitchen I found Harry listening intently to the radio. He held his finger to his lips to tell me to be quiet. I sat down on a chair beside Sally, who was twisting a tea towel in her hands.

The Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong and Malaya and Thailand: the Pacific War had begun. I returned to Melbourne, put my belongings into storage and volunteered for the 2nd AIF. I was sent to a camp at Bacchus Marsh for a few confusing weeks of marching and saluting, then a recruiting officer came to address us.

He asked for volunteers for special service in an independent company, to undergo extremely hard training in trying
circumstances, he said. Oh yes, I thought to myself and stepped forward.

Later, I wondered why: perhaps I wanted to be like Johnny, a hero in Helen’s eyes. But in my heart I knew I’d been fascinated by the stories I’d heard. I understood I had a hardness, a savagery of my own that owed nothing to my kind parents and happy childhood. I thought I might suit an independent company.

The base at the Prom was reopened after Pearl Harbor, so with a handful of others I took the familiar train from Melbourne to Foster in early January 1942. We stopped overnight at the Exchange but I didn’t see Helen. That night, sitting in the toilet, I carved
M-H
, Mike-Helen, on the wall. It felt as if I was carving
goodbye
.

Next day I joined twenty or so men at the station and we climbed into the backs of trucks. It was a long ride on the dusty road to Wilsons Promontory, through the hills and bush around Foster, over the flatlands of Yanakie and into miles of low, dense coastal vegetation which cut off the view around us. It was frustrating as I’d never been right out to the Prom itself before.

Then we reached a small rise where the vegetation suddenly opened up. For the first time, ahead of us, we saw the mountains of Wilsons Promontory. They were steep and wide and tall. They rose abruptly from the low land, covered in grey-emerald scrub and gigantic half-exposed boulders. They filled our field of view from left to right. Clouds on their peaks were rolling in slow motion over the ridges, and the temperature was plummeting with the clouds.

‘Oh, shit,’ said someone reverently.

As we drove over the Darby River Bridge I saw the cluster of headquarters buildings, then the truck shifted to low gear to take the steep rise to Darby Saddle, which was inside the cloud. Over the top, then we descended, the sea ahead grey and half-hidden by drizzle. A couple of miles further and we reached No. 1 Camp, north of Tidal River. The other camp, No. 2, was at Tidal River itself.

We unloaded our tired bodies from the truck at No. 1 Camp, then lined up. Luckily the drizzle had stopped. The commanding officer addressed us. He said he expected a very high attrition rate from the hundreds arriving for this intake. By the end of training the 4th Independent Company would have just under three hundred men, he said, making up three infantry platoons and a headquarters platoon, with Medical, Engineering and Signals sections.

He said commandos specialised in sabotage, quick kills and fast retreats, not traditional military actions. They worked in small groups, aiming to confuse and harass the enemy and get away without casualties. When he got to the part about prisoners being a handicap to be eliminated without mercy – so commandos in turn would probably face the same fate – a number of blokes decided they weren’t much interested and went back to the trucks.

It all barely registered with me. I could see Johnny and Alan with some of the other non-commissioned officers to one side. They’d already returned to the Prom to train us. Johnny lifted his eyebrows in mock surprise, Alan gave me a wink and I grinned back.

I was puzzled I felt no guilt at all about Helen. But she wanted me to forget what had happened between us, so, with resignation, that’s what I did. In any case, I barely
had a single moment for reflection over the next couple of months.

We spent the first few weeks of January 1942 in lectures and demonstrations at No. 1 Camp, then moved to No. 2 Camp for section and platoon exercises. We learnt weapons, explosives, equipment, fieldcraft, lethal hand-to-hand combat. We practised observation, concealment, ambush, infiltration: the arts of guerrilla warfare.

Every morning at dawn we jogged up mountains or along sandhills, ending with a swim in the icy breakers, all before breakfast. We went on forced marches day and night, long ones with fifty pounds or more of gear on our backs, over muddy tracks, up and down mountains. We stripped and reassembled our weapons blindfolded, over and over, faster and faster. Sometimes our instructors would throw in a few spare bits to confuse us, but after a time it didn’t.

We’d hike vast distances, then our rations would be confiscated and we’d have to spend a few days living off the land, eating fish we’d killed with gelignite and wallabies we’d shot. Sometimes we went hungry.

The place was infested with mosquitoes, blowflies and march flies: a plate of food would be covered in pests before you got a mouthful. We had insect bites everywhere and blisters on top of blisters. The wind never stopped and sand got into everything; it was technically summer, but a bitterly cold, rainy one. There were only a few golden days, one of them the moment I’d so vividly remembered, Johnny and Alan on the beach at Tidal River.

The Engineering section had sounded interesting until
I found out it mostly involved demolition, so I decided to specialise in Signals – communications – instead. Alan was also in Signals, and Johnny was in the infantry, C Platoon. They were corporals, of course, and I was a mere signalman, but we were always friends; formal when required, mates when we could be.

I didn’t take leave. It was only the occasional day anyway and I dreaded the thought of running into Helen. I stayed in camp, reading or going for hikes in the hills. I might have been a hardworking farm boy, at least some of the time, but this kind of physical demand was something else. I was now as fit as I’d ever be in my life.

There was a kid called Davo who’d come hiking with me sometimes. He had a big brother in the 2nd Independent Company. His family was in Sydney and he wasn’t a drinker, so he didn’t care much about leave either. What he did care about was shooting. Davo would spend hours practising with a sniper’s rifle and was frighteningly accurate. In his life before the army he’d worked for a fashionable interior designer. ‘He used to say I had a good eye,’ Davo told me shyly. I wasn’t convinced that’s what made him such a coolly lethal shooter but I wasn’t going to argue.

Another bloke who’d hang around was called Whippet. He was a sharp-faced young spiv from a Collingwood gang. Nice enough but I wouldn’t have wanted to face him in a poker game. The story was that someone was gunning for him if he went home, so he didn’t.