‘I’m a Battle of Britain pilot who got through it alive,’ he had said to her once. ‘Now I’m teaching kids who are scarcely out of nappies to fly planes, knowing they may only do a couple of ops in before they go for a burton. It makes you think. So when I go back to active duties, I’d like to be a married man with my own home. I’d like to have someone waiting for me when I come back from an op, someone who smiles just for me. Life is short, and this war has made me realise that one shouldn’t waste a moment of it.’
He needed someone, really needed someone, but why did he have to pick on me? Tess wondered helplessly. I’d like to love him, but I don’t think I can. Well, I do love him, in a way, but it isn’t the way he wants. Or I don’t think it is. I think, of the two of them, I like Andy best, though I don’t believe for one moment that we love each other. Oh God, what a tangle it is!
‘So then he tried . . . ooh, here’s my stop!’ Ruby jumped to her feet with much clutching at her light coat, much groping after her shopping basket. ‘Well, Tess, nice to see you, hear all your news. Give my love to Janet, do you see her, an’ her mum. Byee!’
She jumped off the bus, waved and set off, whilst Tess sat and smiled to herself. Much news she had told Ruby – much chance she’d had! But that was Ruby all over. Only interested in herself, when you got down to it. Some people, Tess concluded, simply enjoy the opportunities which a war gives without a single pang of conscience. Poor George, sitting in a Burmese jungle somewhere whilst his wife carried on with anyone who would carry on with her. But he must have known when he married her that Ruby was a hot little piece. Presumably, he was willing to take a chance on her fidelity.
‘Deeping Lane!’ called the conductress, and Tess hastily jumped to her feet. She would go and see Marianne, and then walk back to Willow Tree Farm in time for evening milking. Mr Sugden wouldn’t mind, so long as she wasn’t late back.
It was April. Mal sat in the back of the liberty truck with a dozen other aircrew and waited for the WAAF driver to arrive. The truck wasn’t supposed to leave for another twenty minutes, but you never knew. If you were lucky enough to be free you didn’t hang around your hut or the mess, waiting for someone to ask you to do something. You made for the hills – in this case, the liberty truck.
Mal had been in England now for five whole weeks, and he was still awed by it. The smallness, the variety of accents of its people, the greenness. He had tried to tell the folk back home, particularly Kath, how beautiful it was, but he didn’t think he’d succeeded. The trouble was, writing to Kath about all this was like trying to explain Sydney Harbour Bridge to someone from Mars. Kath was so far away, so involved in another life, and the Magellan and Queensland seemed like a dream he had dreamed in other, peaceful, times. He had loved Rhodesia, but it was a different world, he had told Kath it was an Aussie’s idea of paradise. Beautiful people, wonderful food, and for the whites, an easy life. As for the countryside – well, he and his pals had taken a trip to see the Victoria Falls and that had summed up Rhodesia for him. The river Zambesi, on its 400-foot plunge, sends up a constant rainfall in reverse which is all scattered across one bank of the river. That bank, therefore, has for centuries been a tropical rainforest, verdant, luxuriant, whereas the other bank is dry, its foliage that of the veldt. And that was how Rhodesia was; the whites were on the rain forest bank, the blacks on the harsh veldt. The white Rhodesians had been extremely hospitable to all the foreigners. Relaxed and friendly, they took their good life for granted and delighted in sharing it. Labour was cheap, the natives working harder than any white, so though the farmers owned huge tracts of land they didn’t work at all, not by Australian standards. They organised, Mal and his friends had decided, and very well they did it. Only it wouldn’t have worked in Queensland – and Mal had seen right from the start that it wouldn’t have worked in England, either. One was too huge and harsh for anyone to exist without hard physical work, the other too small.
Because for all his travelling – he’s spent time in Egypt and South Africa as well as in Rhodesia – England wasn’t like anything he had seen or imagined, and though Kath’s parents had come from here, she had been born in Australia and had never set eyes on their native land. She longed to know about England and he had tried to explain the extraordinary greenness and the diminutive fields, the age-old buildings, but she had simply written back, puzzled, saying that there were old buildings in plenty of Melbourne, and Queensland was surely green enough for anyone, in the wet.
But England’s greenness was gentle, its lushness tender, a far cry from the harsh landscapes of home. And there were so many different greens – hundreds. In the matter of greens, even Rhodesia could not compete. So Mal tried to explain, to give Kath an idea, a taste of England, but he guessed that he tried in vain. There were no words to express how beautiful it was, or no words that he could command, at any rate, and the words of the poets told Kath nothing. She wanted his words, his experiences, she said, and she asked, wistfully, how everyone was bearing up. Even in the outback they had heard about the bombing, the carnage caused by the Blitz, the shortages of life’s essentials, and the way the British were fighting back, a tiny lion against the mighty German war machine.
‘Them Yanks waited long enough before they come in,’ she had written crossly back in the spring of 1942, when he had just arrived in Rhodesia. ‘But it’s just like last time, they don’t make no move until someone rubs their noses in it. Self-interest, that’s all they know, the Yanks.’
It embarrassed Mal when his mother wrote things like that, because he’d only just entered the actual war himself, in spite of being one of the first to volunteer. The trouble was he had taken to flying, found it easy, delighted in it, so when he got his wings he was told – not asked, told – that he would be instructing others for a while.
So he had missed everything, from the evacuation of Dunkirk through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz down to the more recent battle – Stalingrad, where the Russians had turned the tide of war so effectively that for the first time, even the most pessimistic were saying that there was hope for the Allies.
But all the while Britain had been suffering he had been doing his bit, instructing other men in the art of flying aircraft. He might have been there still but he had grown restless as the war continued and horror stories began to flow out of Germany and Japan. Concentration camps, torture, the dreaded SS and the stormtroopers entering Russia and killing, killing, killing. Not soldiers. Women and kids. Folk dragged from hospital beds and strung up on gallows ten, twenty at a time. And the sickening cruelties of the Japanese, the bombing of Britain until it seemed as though not a city would be left standing. He could no longer bear inaction whilst such deeds were being perpetrated by the hated enemy, so he had applied for active service and a posting to England.
It had taken time, of course. Everything took time. He had applied in the early autumn and it had been late spring of the following year before he had finally got his posting to a fighter station ‘somewhere in England’, the somewhere turning out to be Norfolk.
He was glad to be moving on, though he had enjoyed Rhodesia immensely. Despite being so near the equator, the fact that it was 4000 feet above sea-level meant that it was warm but pleasant all year round, never gaspingly hot like Queensland or terribly cold. And the girls, particularly, were so friendly, bronzed, open-faced and healthy! They had thronged round the aircrew, and all his shyness and diffidence with the opposite sex had disappeared under their delightful tuition. He began to enjoy female company, to be at ease with women, in a way which had not been possible in Queensland, where women were so rare.
He seldom thought or spoke of the reason for his flight from Australia any more, though it had haunted him for the first few months. Even now, he had never told anyone that he had fled from the too-eager attentions of Coffee Allinson, a girl five years his junior, who had decided she was going to marry him. From the moment that she had set foot on the Wandina, his fate had been sealed. She had made up her mind that it was Mal she wanted and so far as Coffee was concerned, what she wanted she got. She caused considerable resentment by pushing to one side the loyal staff and the good friends he had gathered round him so that she might always be on hand, and no one resented this more than Mal himself.
If she had been more intelligent she would have realised that her too-obvious pursuit embarrassed and annoyed him, but she was not intelligent. She was, however, the possessor of a very strong sex drive. Her needs and desires were an itch that she had to satisfy. So instead of taking it slowly and gently, instead of waiting for him to make a move, she followed him around the house, never losing an opportunity to cast her arms round his neck, her pink hair brushing against his chin, her firm, muscular body pressed against his. ‘Come on, Mal, cuddle me,’ she would croon. ‘What’s wrong with a quick cuddle, Mal? Ain’t you human, feller? Don’t you want me?’
The truth was he did want her, though not in the way she imagined. His need was on a shamefully basic level. He wanted her because she was so obviously available, so obviously panting for his touch. If she had been less eager, less pushy, he might have given in, gone to her. But because he resented her manipulation of him and feared her appetites, he had no difficulty in turning away from her, time after time.
But it ruined the Wandina for him, spoiled his good life. And unfortunately, Uncle Josh couldn’t see it.
‘She’s a fine gal, boy,’ he said several times, when Mal tried to persuade him to send Coffee packing. ‘What’s wrong with settlin’ down young, eh? I made the mistake of puttin’ it off, thinkin’ next year would do, or the next, the next . . . and then it was too late and I was alone, with a station I couldn’t handle and a staff who didn’t have no confidence in theirselves or me. If you marry now you’ll have kids quick an’ before you’re forty you’ll have sons to teach an’ train up.’
‘I don’t want sons yet,’ Mal had said sulkily. ‘I just want to be left alone to get on wi’ my work. Uncle Josh. I don’t want someone forcin’ herself on me the way Coffee does.’
‘You work hard,’ Uncle Josh agreed. ‘But a feller should play hard too, Mal. You won’t never git nowhere if you don’t play, now an’ then.’
‘Yeah . . . but not with Coffee,’ Mal insisted. ‘I don’t have no feelin’ for her, Uncle Josh. And I don’t believe she’s got no feelin’ for me. To be blunt, she just wants a man.’
‘And you don’t want a woman? I don’t deny it ain’t ideal boy, but there ain’t much choice in the outback, not amongst women. You grab what you can get, you’ll not regret it.’
The climax came when Coffee said she was pregnant, said the child was his. He was furious, outraged that she could lie over such a matter. He suspected that she was promiscuous, what was more, so when she told him she was pregnant he simply stared coldly at her and said that since he was not the father she had best cast her mind back and discover which of the men on the station she had been with over the course of the last four months.
Screams, shrieks, a thrown vase . . . threats. She had been an innocent virgin before she met him, she hated him more than she had ever hated anyone, she would get one of the aborigines to point the bone at him, she had been humiliated beyond bearing, he knew very well he had fathered her child, how dared he deny her?
Mal expected Uncle Josh to support him on this, knowing as he did that Mal didn’t want Coffee, but Uncle Josh wasn’t interested in the truth. He said that Coffee might have done wrong but it was clear she loved Mal, clear that Mal had lain with her, so why not do the decent thing and marry the girl, then they could all sit back and enjoy a wedding first and then the baby, when it came?
‘The baby won’t bloody come, Uncle Josh,’ Mal said, almost crying with frustration and rage. ‘Not if it’s mine it bloody won’t. I’ve told you an’ told you, she ain’t my sort of girl and I’ve not touched her.’
The men knew it was true and sympathised. In fact it was Rupert who suggested he should cut and run.
‘That woman, she dangerous,’ he said one evening when he and Mal were in the home pasture, rubbing down the horses. ‘She not give up till she git some poor feller, an’ there ain’t much choice around these parts. Why not go walkabout, Boss, till she move on? She won’t hang about here when there’s no feller to come on strong with.’
He went, of course. Went walkabout for six months, meaning to stay away a year, maybe, and ended up on an airstrip in Rhodesia, learning how to fly planes.
Wally and Soljer, between them, had taken over after he had fled. Rupert was immensely helpful too, and they all sent messages that it would soon be safe to return. Coffee, they thought, would move on once he was out of the way.
She didn’t, though. Unbelievably, she married Uncle Josh.
The old man wrote, telling him of the wedding, pleading with him to return.
‘With you gone, Mal, I needed someone to take care of me,’ he wrote pathetically. ‘She’s a good gal – you could come home now, you’d have no more trouble, I swear it. You were right, there weren’t no baby, but perhaps there will be, now.’
Mal, reading the letter, had snorted to himself. No more trouble, with young Coffee married to a man well over eighty, pushing up against him the moment Uncle Josh was out of sight, wheedling him to make love to her, to give her a baby which she would pass off as Josh’s get, no doubt? He could just see it! But he didn’t intend to say so, of course.
‘I wish you both happy, but I can’t come back to Wandina yet a while, Uncle Josh,’ he had written back serenely. ‘I’m serving my country, learning to fly so I can defend her. Mebbe I’ll come back when it’s all over.’
‘Hey, where’s the bleedin’ driver, then? Someone go an’ buck her ideas up or we’ll not get any time in the city. How about you, Shorty? Go on, give a yell in their mess or whatever it is.’
The voice cut across Mal’s day-dreams like a hot knife through butter and he blinked around him, as startled as a baby owl caught in a searchlight’s beam. Where was he? He had seen the Wandina, Uncle Josh’s sad face, Coffee’s smug, predatory smile so clearly in his head that for a moment he could not reorientate himself. Then he recognised the canvas top of the liberty truck, the men around him, even the slanting sunshine outside, lighting up the grass, the distant trees . . .