the sides and down the middle. You could sit on that or straddle it—neither was comfortable—for the ride to Frankston, where we’d catch the train into Melbourne.
The city had streetcars and buses, the first double-decker buses I ever saw. Trains left for the suburbs every three or four minutes. You could go anywhere and you didn’t have to wait all day to do it.
We’d pull into the big Flinders Street Station about ten a.m. Jim usually spent the day across the street in the bar at the Young & Jackson Hotel, where the big attraction, other than strong beer, was
I might have a couple beers with Jim, but then I would go sightseeing. But first we would have some business to attend to.
Jim had requested that the Marines send his allotment home to Clinton so his folks could bank it for him. But for some reason, the Corps went on paying him full salary, too. By the time someone caught the mix-up, he owed the Marines a lot of money. So they cut him to $5 a payday until it was paid off. That wasn’t enough to go on liberty.
Before we went out on the town, Jim and I would go to the PX and each buy three cartons of cigarettes at fifty cents per carton. We were getting good American brands—Lucky Strikes, Camels and Chesterfields—not those wartime cigarettes like Fleetwoods. We’d hide them in the short wool jackets they’d issued us—Eisenhower jackets—take them into Melbourne and walk down the street until we sold them. We were getting two and a half Australian pounds a carton, and the exchange rate was about two and a half American dollars on the pound. You could buy a pint of beer for about twelve cents. Steak and eggs cost fifty cents. About thirty cents would get you into a movie. So six cartons would get Jim through liberty that weekend.
Late one Sunday afternoon in April, Jim and I were walking down Collins Street when we found ourselves following two young women, a blonde and a brunette, both very pretty. When they stepped into a milk bar—a combination sweetshop and soda fountain very popular in Melbourne—Jim and I stopped and looked at each other.
“The brunette’s mine,” I said.
“I’ll take the blonde,” he said.
We stepped inside, where the salesgirl was just weighing the candy the girls bought. “I’ll wait on you next,” she said.
“Never mind,” Jim said, nodding at the two girls. “We’re with them.”
“I’ll have what she’s having,” I said, indicating the brunette.
Outside the shop we asked their names. The brunette was Florence Riseley and her friend was Doris Moran. They said they were eighteen. They had come downtown from Albert Park, a suburb, to meet Florence’s mother and three-year-old brother, who were from Tasmania and would be taking a train that evening. Since none of us had anything to do for a couple hours, the girls offered to show us the Melbourne Museum, which was a few blocks away.
The museum’s main attraction turned out to be a stuffed racehorse named Phar Lap, which Doris informed us had been poisoned by “you Yanks” while racing in the United States. After about thirty minutes in the museum, staring at exhibits, Jim complained that everything in the place was starting to smell as dead as the horse.
“We told you that you Yanks killed him,” the girls said and laughed.
We walked them back to Flinders Street Station, where Florence’s mother and little brother had already arrived and were waiting to catch a local to the suburbs in an hour.
While Florence and her mother talked, Jim and I took turns entertaining her brother with train sounds and piggyback rides up and down the platform. It was the right move.
“They seem to be nice,” Florence’s mother whispered to her daughter. “Anybody who plays with a child like that can’t be all bad.”
When it came time to go and we said our good-byes, Florence’s mother slipped her a twenty-pound note. “I was wondering where we were going to eat,” Jim muttered to me. Florence heard him.
We found another milk bar nearby and the four of us had a pretty good meal by Australian standards—meat pies and milk shakes. When the waitress brought the bill, Jim and I pointed to Florence.
“It’s hers,” we said.
As we got up to go I saw Florence’s eyes flash and her jaw tighten. Just as we got to the cash register, I slipped the bill out of her hand and, as I’d planned all along, paid it myself. We all had a good laugh over that.
The evening was young. The train back to Frankston didn’t leave until 11:55 and the girls’ train to the suburbs left at midnight. So we took a boat ride on the Yarra River. If you get a bunch of Australians together, no matter where, pretty soon they’ll start to sing. So we drifted down the Yarra River, passengers singing “A Boy in Khaki” and “Bye for Now,” and, of course, “Waltzing Matilda.”
At the station, they gave us big hugs, and we agreed to meet the following Saturday at seven p.m. under the station clocks. At six minutes to midnight, Jim and I climbed aboard the train to Frankston, which started rolling almost as soon as we took our seats. Through the window we could see Florence and Doris take off on a dead run. Their train was several platforms over and it left in just five minutes. I noticed Florence had long legs.
Almost every Saturday for the next three months, Jim and I would meet Florence and Doris at Flinders Street. We’d ride around in one of the city’s horse-drawn buggies, cracking American jokes, which the girls seemed to enjoy. Sometimes, we’d pay six pence and walk downstairs to a movie house where they showed continuous newsreels of the war, or we’d go out to Luna Park, an amusement park by the river.
Florence and I spent a lot of time just sitting on benches in the city’s gardens—Melbourne had some of the most beautiful flower gardens in the world—talking about our families, about what was going on in the world and about life before the war. And after. She was easy to talk with.
I found out her father operated a steam shovel in the coal mines at Yollourn North, about ninety miles from Melbourne, and that he had fought in France during World War I, where he had been gassed. I also found out that she was sixteen, not eighteen. She had lied about her age to get a job at a factory making biscuits for the troops. Her boss had been so impressed by her work that he made her assistant floor supervisor over twenty-four other girls, and the company was sending her to night school to study management. So I knew she was smart.
One weekend I rode the train with her to Albert Park, where she lived with her uncle. At her front yard, she stepped inside the gate and swung it closed between us. Then she leaned forward and gave me my first kiss.
We’ve laughed about that over the years—that she had to put the gate between us.
On August 13, my birthday, Jim and I met the girls, and since it was a special day, we had some drinks. Then we all went to the Tivoli Theatre, where they had beautiful dancing girls wearing big feathers and not much else. The show was almost sold out, but we got tickets for the third balcony. I remember stumbling up the stairs, Florence in front of me, counting steps and trying to remember if we had passed the second balcony. I also remember we finished the evening in a movie theater, where Florence held my dizzy head in her lap and gently kissed me.
Something was in the wind. They were picking up the pace of training over the whole division. We started pulling field exercises with the Guadalcanal vets, crawling under barbed wire with our rifles, live ammunition zinging a few feet over our heads. We’d run, hit the deck, get up and run again. We’d practice making landings in rubber boats, all of it as if the enemy were right in front of us. The Guadalcanal vets had already been through it with real Japs. Just hanging around the barracks listening to those guys was an education. They’d tell stories about how they nearly starved to death on Guadalcanal, how they came down with malaria or dysentery, how they had to fight the Japs stationed on the island and then had to fight the reinforcements the Japs brought in. Just good talk between fighting men.
More than anything, we learned about tactics, both ours and the enemy’s. Of course, they’d taught us all that in boot camp and at Camp Elliott—we knew enough that when someone called out “Hit the deck!” we shouldn’t stand there asking questions. But the men from Guadalcanal were an advanced course. They’d been there and they’d done it.
Jap snipers would tie themselves in the treetops. You couldn’t see them, but they were there, watching and waiting. They’d cut fire lanes through the trees, narrow breaks about three or four feet wide at right angles to our line of march. They’d set up a machine gun and when a line of Marines would come along they’d open fire. You’d be like pins in a bowling alley.
