Meggie didn't find the reassurance a comfort, though it was reassuring. This precocious little scrap was going to steal her son from her, and there was no way she could avert it. Back to the paddocks, while Justine staunchly guarded Dane. Ousted by her own daughter, who was a monster. Who on earth did she take after? Not Luke, not herself, not Fee. At least these days she was smiling and laughing. She was four years old before she saw anything funny in anything, and that she ever did was probably due to Dane, who had laughed from babyhood. Because he laughed, so did she. Meggie's children learned from each other all the time. But it was galling, knowing they could get on without their mother very well. By the time this wretched conflict is over, Meggie thought, he'll be too old to feel what he should for me. He's always going to be closer to Justine. Why is it that every time I think I've got my life under control, something happens? I didn't ask for this war or this drought, but I've got them.
Perhaps it was as well Drogheda was having such a hard time of it. If things had been easier, Jack and Hughie would have been off to enlist in a second. As it was, they had no choice but to buckle down and salvage what they could out of the drought which would come to be called the Great Drought. Over a million square miles of crop- and stock-bearing land was affected, from southern Victoria to the waist-high Mitchell grasslands of the Northern Territory.
But the war rivaled the drought for attention. With the twins in North Africa, the homestead people followed that campaign with painful eagerness as it pushed and pulled back and forth across Libya. Their heritage was working class, so they were ardent Labor supporters and loathed the present government, Liberal by name but conservative by nature. When in August of 1941 Robert Gordon Menzies stepped down, admitting he couldn't govern, they were jubilant, and when on October 3rd the Labor leader John Curtin was asked to form a government, it was the best news Drogheda had heard in years. All through 1940 and 1941 unease about Japan had been growing, especially after Roosevelt and Churchill cut off her petroleum supplies. Europe was a long way away and Hitler would have to march his armies twelve thousand miles in order to invade Australia, but Japan was Asia, part of the Yellow Peril poised like a descending pendulum above Australia's rich, empty, underpopulated pit. So no one in Australia was at all surprised when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; they had simply been waiting for it to come, somewhere. Suddenly the war was very close, and might even become their own backyard. There were no great oceans separating Australia from Japan, only big islands and little seas.
On Christmas Day 1941, Hong Kong fell; but the Japs would never succeed in taking Singapore, everyone said, relieved. Then news came of Japanese landings in Malay and in the Philippines; the great naval base at the toe of the Malayan peninsula kept its huge, flat-trajectoried guns trained on the sea, its fleet at the ready. But on February 8th, 1942, the Japanese crossed the narrow
Strait of Johore, landed on the north side of Singapore Island and came across to the city behind its impotent guns. Singapore fell without even a struggle.
And then great news! All the Australian troops in North Africa were to come home. Prime Minister Curtin rode the swells of Churchillian wrath undismayed, insisting that Australia had first call on Australian men. The Sixth and Seventh Australian Divisions embarked in Alexandria quickly; the Ninth, still recovering in Cairo from its battering at Tobruk, was to follow as soon as more ships could be provided. Fee smiled, Meggie was delirious with joy. Jims and Patsy were coming home.
Only they didn't. While the North waited for its troopships the seesaw tipped again; the Eighth Army was in full retreat back from Benghazi. Prime Minister Churchill struck a bargain with Prime Minister Curtin. The Ninth Australian Division would remain in North Africa, in exchange for the shipment of an American division to defend Australia.. Poor soldiers, shuttled around by decisions made in offices not even belonging to their own countries. Give a little here, take a little there. But it was a hard jolt for Australia, to discover that the Mother Country was booting all her Far Eastern chicks out of the nest, even a poult as fat and promising as Australia.
On the night of October 23rd, 1942, it was very quiet in the desert. Patsy shifted slightly, found his brother in the darkness, and leaned. like a small child right into the curve of his shoulder. Jims's arm went around him and they sat together in companionable silence. Sergeant Bob Malloy nudged Private Col Stuart, grinned.
"Pair of poofs," he said.
"Fuck you, too," said Jims.
"Come on, Harpo, say something," Col murmured. Patsy gave him an angelic smile only half seen in the darkness, opened his mouth and hooted an excellent imitation of Harpo Marx's horn. Everyone for several yards hissed at Patsy to shut up; there was an all-quiet alert on.
"Christ, this waiting's killing me," Bob sighed. Patsy spoke in a shout: "It's the silence that's killing me!" "You fuckin' side-show fraud, I'll do the killing!" Col croaked hoarsely, reaching for his bayonet.
"For Crissake pipe down!" came the captain's whisper. "Who's the bloody idiot yelling?"
"Patsy," chorused half a dozen voices.
