The Turning Tide (4 page)

‘The Americans might still get involved in the war, and if they do the Japanese would never try to go up against them,’ I said with more confidence than I felt. ‘They’d have to be insane.’

Betty looked at me steadily. ‘I think they are, Mike, I think –’ She let go of my hand. Ken was walking towards us, a towel around his waist, water droplets sparkling on his black hair and brown shoulders.

‘Mike! You’re here!’ I stood and he slapped my back and shook my hand. He laughed and said, ‘Look at you, so big and strong. Why aren’t you in the army, man?’

‘Got to finish my studies first, mate,’ I said, happy. Despite Betty’s words he still looked just like my friend Ken. As tall as me now, healthy and handsome as always.

‘So what’s this sorry tale I hear about you going off to join the Japanese army?’ I said jokingly.

His face became serious. ‘Mike, it’s not a game. Japan is destined to have its own empire, like Britain. It’s the natural progress of civilisation. The stronger races always win out over the weaker ones.’

‘But most of the spare real estate was colonised ages ago,’ I said. ‘It’s already taken.’

‘Then we’ll just have to take it back,’ he said, and for the first time he looked like a stranger. ‘It’s my duty to support my country.’

‘
This
is your country, Ken. You were born here, for God’s sake.’

He laughed cynically. ‘Really, Mike? I’m an alien, a bloody Jap, and will be forever. And Japs can’t join the Australian army, so there’s not much alternative. But the Japanese Imperial Army is very keen on recruits who speak English.’

‘Ken.’ I looked at him in amazement. ‘That’s so you can translate when they invade us.’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Not
here
, Mike. What do you take me for? No, it’s those Asian colonies – Dutch, Portuguese, British – that’ve made a hash of it, and now we’re going to show them how it’s done.’

‘What about China?’ I said. ‘That invasion didn’t do much for the Chinese. Rape of Nanking mean anything to you, Ken?’

‘Chinese? Decadents. Stupid pigtails and crippled feet. Come on, Mike. The Emperor’s doing them a favour.’

‘Is Billy Wing a decadent?’ Betty burst out. ‘You were happy enough to eat lollies from his shop and play with Eddy Wing at school. Are they decadents too, Ken?’

His face became dismissive. ‘Girls don’t understand important things like this.’

There was a shout and he turned. A muscular, hard-faced Japanese man was calling him from the water. I knew enough of the language to understand Ken was being summoned, crudely, by a superior.

‘See you later, Mike,’ he said, and ran back to the water. In the end we only met a couple of times during my stay. He was usually too busy.

When the time came to return to Melbourne in February 1941, Betty and I went for one last walk in the warm evening. There wasn’t much to say at this point; we’d talked the problem over and over and couldn’t figure out a way to keep her in Broome and save Ken from himself.

We ambled slowly back to her house and stopped outside the door. No one was around. I looked at her in misery, convinced I’d never see her again. Betty put her hand to my head and drew me down towards her, kissing me gently, then with a passion that surprised me. Despite all the time we’d spent together, it was our first kiss (if you don’t count an experiment under a frangipani tree when we were eight).

She moved away and murmured, ‘Goodbye, Mike.’

‘We’ll meet up again, Betty, I promise you,’ I said, my heart thumping.

She smiled sadly and closed the door.

Four weeks later Mum sent a letter saying Betty and Ken had sailed for Japan.

Chapter 4

‘I thought I’d see you here,’ says Lena. ‘I notice you don’t go to the staff cafeteria very often.’

I look up in surprise. ‘Too much chance of running into someone who wants to chat academic politics. How are you, then?’

‘Very well, thanks. This is James, my study buddy.’

A tall skinny boy is beside her, holding a tray of food. I recognise him from one of my tutorials.

‘Mr Kingston, welcome. How’s that assignment in electronics going?’

He blushes. ‘Um, okay. I finally worked it out, Professor Whalen. Submitted it yesterday.’

‘Good. You two want this table? I’m about to go.’

‘You didn’t choose the
curry
, did you?’ says Lena. ‘There’s looking for trouble.’

I smile, hearing one of Helen’s turns of speech. ‘I know it now. I’ll never make that mistake again.’

Lena pushes back her hair, pulls out a chair and motions James to sit too. ‘It’s all right, James. He’s practically a member of my family.’

‘Hardly that, young lady,’ I say as I stand up. ‘I think I’d be safer as an orphan.’

She laughs. ‘Hey, do you want to come to my Christmas party? James is coming.’ Her study buddy goes red. ‘It’s at my mum’s place in Foster. She said you’d be very welcome.’ I look at her aqua eyes, enthusiastic and warm, and feel exhausted. ‘Lena, I really can’t. It’s very kind of you and your mum but … I can’t.’

After a moment she nods and says quietly, ‘Okay, Mike. Some other time.’

I feel like a complete shit. ‘Perhaps I can drop in, I don’t know, maybe in the new year.’

She grins. ‘That’d be good. I’ll be working in the bar at the Exchange again. You can always find me there.’

In March 1941 Johnny’s brother Richard came home from Tobruk. He’d lost his left hand and been discharged from the army. Grimly he took up work on the farm again, fitted with a metal and rubber contraption. Sometimes I’d see him look at it in puzzlement, as if he couldn’t quite comprehend how it came to be there on the end of his arm. I thought it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen: I still had a lot to learn.

Johnny was desperate to join up, his mother equally desperate he shouldn’t. In a way I found it hard to understand his fervour because he had at last landed the glorious
Helen. It had taken him well over a year and I’d witnessed every phase of the campaign.

At first she was only an ambition. His blue eyes calculating, he said, ‘Mike, she’s so gorgeous, she’s going to be my girl. That’d show everyone.’ This would hardly have been my main concern if I’d had a chance with someone like Helen, but I’d started to understand a little more about the vulnerability behind Johnny’s beautiful facade.

One drunken evening he’d revealed to me how unhappy he’d been at school. Because of his looks some of the boys had called him ‘queer’ and ‘poof’. In revenge he’d charmed away their girls. It hadn’t made him any new friends but at least it had stopped the jibes.

Then he hit his first obstacle, indignant: ‘Mike, she won’t go out with me. She wants to be a school teacher and says it could harm her reputation.’

‘And that surprises you?’ I said and he chuckled and threw something at me.

A few months later, worried: ‘Mike, her mother’s really sick, in the hospital. She lets me drive her there and back. Won’t let me touch her though.’

Then her mother died and Johnny found he cared more for Helen than he’d realised. ‘She was so brave at the funeral. She let me kiss her afterwards. God, it was amazing. I don’t understand, she’s just a girl.’

‘Maybe you’re falling in love with her,’ I said and he scoffed unconvincingly and punched my arm.

Helen’s father did not recover from the loss of his wife. He started drinking heavily, let their small farm go to ruin and drank away Helen’s chances of going to teachers’
college, Johnny told me angrily. By now we both knew he cared deeply for her.

For nearly a year he flirted and cajoled and tried to persuade her to become involved with him. Finally, once Helen had accepted her hopes of teacher training were gone, she let him into her life. Within a few months she was passionately in love and they became engaged early in 1941, while I was away in Broome.

Because of my studies I had come and gone from Foster and had never had more than a passing chat with Helen. That changed during the following holidays, when we sat beside each other at a farewell party for one of the local boys who’d signed up.

She didn’t know how much I already knew about her, so she told me a little about the loss of her mother and her failed hopes of teacher training. She wasn’t bitter or even sad at her lost opportunity. She missed her mother terribly and had only pity for her father.

It was so easy to be dazzled by Helen’s looks, it took time to recognise the calm depths of her mind, her wit, her kindness. And she was certainly dazzling: tall for a woman, her brows well shaped, her lips pink, her blonde hair caught back into waves. She was rather like Lauren Bacall, but to my eyes Helen was prettier. I see her now, dimples deepening as she smiled, in a floral cotton dress that brought out the warm sea-blue of her eyes.

Johnny’s eyes were blue too, a pure light blue, and with his slow smile he had charm to burn. His fair hair, falling over his forehead, was almost platinum blond. With his height and build he would have been startling enough by
himself, but beside Helen the two of them were as if made for each other.

Over time Helen became close to Johnny’s family, especially his mother, Inge. Inge was religious but Helen’s mother had been devout too: Helen often wore her mother’s small gold cross at her throat. Her father was now staying at a local boarding house, so Helen went to live with the Erikssen family.

There she was chaperoned, but she and Johnny had waited a long time and the old customs had lost their power before the urgency of war. As we sat talking over drinks at our friend’s farewell party I could see Helen’s contentment: she was loving and loved.

Harry O’Brien had an old truck. He let me use it to practise for my licence and then to drive friends around when he didn’t need it. One day Johnny was busy with the farm so Helen asked me if I’d take her to her parents’ place, to pick up belongings she’d left behind when she moved to the Erikssens’.

We still didn’t know each other well then, so I was feeling shy as we drove the narrow winding dirt road up to Mount Best, about half an hour from Foster. I was slowly negotiating a sharp bend when she cried, ‘Stop!’ so I did.

She jumped out of the car and ran to a large lizard in the middle of the road. I followed, assuming it was dead. It wasn’t. Helen tried to make it get off the road but it would only back away a little, stick out its wide blue tongue and hiss, ludicrously, attempting to be fearsome. By scuffling the gravel beside it, giggling, we persuaded it to the edge
of the road. It stalked away indignantly through the grass, head held high, as if getting off the road had been its own idea all along.

We were almost hysterical with the absurdity of it by then. As we set off again I glanced at Helen with new respect. No one else gave a damn about what they ran over as they dashed around the old dirt roads in their new motor cars. I liked that she cared enough to save even an unbeautiful lizard; it was something my mother might have done.

The small place near the top of the mountain looked south beyond rolling green and gold fields to a steep, astonishing view of Corner Inlet and the Prom, a different perspective from my now-familiar view from the O’Brien farm. I stood at the window, enchanted at the sight, while Helen busied herself packing books and clothes and odd things she wanted into a suitcase.

‘How could you possibly leave this place?’

Helen looked around the small room, with its cold fireplace and empty kitchen and said wryly, ‘I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.’

‘Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t mean –’

‘It’s all right. Yes. This is lovely but it’s brutally cold in winter, and getting down to Toora or Foster for groceries used to be quite an expedition.’

‘It must have been lonely.’

‘No, it only seems isolated, there are more farms around than you’d think. I went to that little school down the road. There were maybe thirty or forty of us, all ages. I loved it. I had some good teachers too. That’s why I wanted to be one.’

She trailed her fingers over the old kitchen table, looked around once more, then picked up the suitcase with a small sigh.

‘Come here. I’ll take that,’ I said. She smiled and handed it over.

By the time we’d chatted our way down the mountain we knew we were becoming friends. After that I worked hard at throttling back my response to her as a female, happy to be around someone with the same sly sense of absurdity; someone, man or woman, I could talk to with such ease.

But all too soon I was back at university and work was intense, concentration difficult. There was so much going on in the world and I yearned to take part, not sit in stuffy libraries.

I returned to Foster in the middle of 1941 and met Johnny in the lounge at the Exchange. A couple of months beforehand he’d finally overridden his mother’s objections and enlisted in the AIF.

‘So what’s it like in the army, soldier? I asked, putting beers down in front of him and Alan, a friend of his from basic training.

‘I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much, Mike. The parades and saluting are bullshit but training wasn’t bad at all. I was already a good shot from the farm, but demolition,’ he said, smiling slowly, ‘now that’s fun.’

‘I can imagine you enjoying blowing things up. I remember you making the rabbits pretty unhappy with gelignite that time. But how come you’ve been given leave so soon?’

‘I’ve volunteered for
secret and hazardous duties
,’ he said, raising his eyebrows as he looked at me over the top of his glass. ‘The leave was a bribe but I’d have done it anyway.’ He leant closer. ‘I had this hunch. You know the base at the Prom?’

The Wilsons Promontory road had been closed off by armed guards at the start of the year. The locals had to pretend they knew nothing, but well-behaved and well-built young men were billeted with families for meals before the football or the pictures on Saturdays. They said they were from the 7th Infantry Training Centre, which seemed curious because everyone knew there were only five of the centres.

‘I’m sure that’s where we’re going,’ said Johnny. ‘Report for training, go to Foster and get on a truck at the station. Got to be it. We’ve been told on the quiet they learn all sorts of irregular tactics down there.’ His eyes brimmed with satisfaction.