‘Well, it only took her three years but she got him,’ said Paul. Gracie saw him look at Edie and whisper, ‘Did you wish it was you?’
Gracie was suddenly still. She knew she was hearing an adult conversation and that more was being said behind the words. Paul and Edie both looked at her, as if suddenly remembering she was there, and she smiled at them both.
‘No,’ said Edie. ‘What do I want with the worry of a man away at war?’ She was lost in Gracie’s smile, which always filled her with a sense of being in the right place. Then she got up and put more water in the kettle and while she was turned away from them she took her notebook out of her pocket and wrote:
Ninth November Fourteen
Plan — Help Theo at war.
Twenty-Six
The Comfort Pack
Wednesday, 26 May 1915, when love is sent across the sea.
The first list of Gallipoli casualties appeared in the Ballarat papers on the third of May 1915. From then on the lists of dead boys grew longer each day. The attack on the Turks on the fifth of May was a disaster, as were the attacks on the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth of May and all the other days of May and the lists of dead boys continued to grow longer and the advertisements urging more young men to go and die also grew. Mining reports of new shafts sunk and good stone quarried and advertisements for new fabrics were jammed in tiny spaces between all the news of the war. Buy war bonds the ads cried. Send little luxuries to the front. Send your sons to the front. Women were encouraged to keep knitting, buy buttons, hold fetes and pack up comfort packs to send to the soldiers. Germans were notified that they must attend the police station to register their details, including their date of birth, current address and occupation. The Royal Agricultural Show was suspended but Dame Nellie Melba sang at the Coliseum Theatre in South Street with all proceeds to the Red Cross and the trams waited to take the concertgoers home afterwards.
Notices of the dead, missing and injured were printed in thin, neat columns, sometimes with a photo and an obituary — a young man from Box Hill, another from Fitzroy, two from Hampton. Soon the local papers didn’t have room for the dead boys from far away and gave preference to local lads. The pages were filled to the brim with notices of boys from town and the surrounding areas — a lad from Sebastopol who was ruck on the football team, a captain from Garibaldi with a baby, a chap from Black Hill who was youth leader at the Methodist church. Heroes to the last. Crisp, clean words suggesting tidy, painless deaths.
Everyone thought the war would be over quickly — by Christmas, the experts had said, and the boys would be back home in no time. Mothers comforted themselves with this thought; they dreamt of their sons walking in the door and laughing about what a good lark it had all been and how the government had let them see Europe for free. Everyone agreed God was on their side, just ask Reverend Whitlock or Father O’Malley. But now Christmas had come and gone and the war drove on like an insatiable beast.
The town had not seen one bullet, one bomb, one Turk in his weird little hat, but the town would never be the same again.
Every day Edie scoured the newspapers to make sure Theo’s name wasn’t there, and in Ligar Street Beth and Lilly did the same. When it wasn’t there Edie thanked God for answering her prayers and Beth and Lilly hugged each other and Lilly put on the kettle and got out the biscuits.
Lilly and Beth had finished their dinner and cleared away the dishes and now Lilly was putting together a package for Theo as she had done every week of the six months he had been away. She had the box up on the kitchen table and Beth was sitting at the end of the table knitting green socks for the soldiers who were going to face a cold northern winter.
Lilly picked up the string to tie up the box and asked, ‘Have you got a note you want to pop in, Beth, before I tie this up?’
Beth became flustered, her cheeks went pink and her ball of wool rolled off the table onto the floor. In fact, Beth looked as if she had been caught off guard in an embarrassing situation, which didn’t make any sense to Lilly at all.
‘Of course,’ Beth stammered, picking up the ball of green wool from the floor. She dropped her needles onto the table and the ball of wool rolled onto the linoleum again where it remained as Beth disappeared into her room. Lilly had assumed Beth and Theo would write to each other regularly, growing their love through words, but as it was always she who collected the mail she couldn’t help but notice that Theo only wrote to both of them, Dear Mum and Beth, and she wrote long letters back with much love always from Beth and Mum.
She could only wonder why her request had made Beth so uncomfortable. Maybe it was the distance, and she thought of when Peter had gone away to cure himself and how she had been devastated and closed herself off from the pain in her
