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( Chapter Eight: ❛ ONE MILLION OTHER SMITHS ❜ )
NOVEMBER, 1943
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GINNY WOKE UP BRIGHT AND BREEZY THE NEXT MORNING, prim and proper and ready to take the tram to the town hall stroke enlistment office to sign herself up for a position in the AWAS. Though warned by her father she would have to spend a fair bit of her time out of town, she assured her parents that she would make time on the weekends to see them. Besides, she was far too invested in the war effort to pass up such an opportunity out of fear of being homesick for a little while.
Her mother had gathered up all her past medical papers from the bureau the night before and clipped them into one of her father's leather briefcases for her to take with her. She was over the moon to see Ginny so invested in the women's section of the Australian army, and kept mentioning how exciting it was and how she wished her daughter could pack her in her suitcase and take her with her.
She set her blonde hair in rollers the night before and did it up real nice the next morning, off the collar like the rules in the workplace. She wore her stockings that day too, something she only usually did for work or for special occasions. A special occasion indeed!
She wasn't sure what to expect — would they send her right off to Yarra Junction in Victoria? Would she get three weeks notice? One week? A couple of days? Maybe they'd even deny her. She didn't have anything major on her medical records, apart from a broken arm when she was eleven from falling over after Gordon Love had failed at giving her a piggyback, and some childhood eczema that had long cleared up by then. She knew that nothing too substantial would crop up, unless they preformed routine medical checks that came back with bouts of bad news.
She'd heard that AWAS personnel would eventually serve in Headquarters and Base Installations, and a number of direct command Army units. Perhaps, if I get good enough, I'll work alongside the fellas, she imagined, but that's far above my pay grade. After strapping on her oxfords, she picked up her father's leather briefcase and stood in front of the front door. Her stomach doing somersaults, she stationed herself on the doormat and announced loudly through the house, "I'm leaving!"
Her mother rushed out of the living room in a cooking apron and planted a firm kiss on her cheek, "Oh, Ginny," she gushed, her thin eyebrows upturned with pride, "Make sure to stand up straight and say your name clearly, won't you? If they ask you where you'd prefer to be based, make sure to say nearby so you can come and visit us if you ever need anything or you feel homesick. Have you got your papers? Have you checked?"
"Yes, I have everything I need," Ginny nodded, casting her mother a loving smile and giving her a hug. "I'm only gonna be gone for a couple of hours, mum, you don't need to snap your cap. I won't even be doing my aptitude test today, all I'm doing is putting my name down to see if they'll accept me into Phase One. I'll make sure to come straight home when I'm finished."
Halfway down the stairs, her father leaned against the banister in her dressing gown, saluting lazily and bidding, "There she is. Miss Melbourne does her bit. You best come straight home afterwards and tell us everything about it, eh?"
After she'd agreed to her father's terms and closed her front door behind her, she spotted Hoosier with a brown woolen blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He had been standing a short distance away from her front lawn, across the road. Knowing that her parents were probably proudly watching her leave from their front window, she waited until she had rounded the corner past their hedgerow and was out of view before she remarked laughingly, "Aren't you just a sight for sore eyes this morning. What on Earth are you doing here so early for, Yank?" buttoning her coat against the cold snap of the Australian Monday morning.
"Good-morning, Virginia. Don't you look like one of them pin-ups today?" Bill drawled in his southern American accent, his eyes hardly open. He looked jaded that morning, and like if she'd have planted a hand to his chest and given him a shove, he'd have fallen straight over. He announced, "I'm just lettin' you know, I wouldn't be here if I didn't care."
"I'm afraid I can't come out with you today, Bill," she told him a matter-of-factly, "I'm off to the enlistment office to go and put my name down for the Australian Women's Army Service. I'll be in khakis just like you before you know it."
"I expect you'll look prettier than me, too," he huffed his half-laugh, a simper of some kind. He rubbed his eyes. "How does your hair get as white as that, anyway?"
"I believe it would be called platinum on the box, actually — white makes me sound like an old maid. Come on, you can walk me to where I catch the tram," she announced, allowing him to follow in her self-assured gait as she began down the pavement, "I was born with hair a pale, pale blonde, similar to how it is now, but my mother used to wash my hair with water and lemon juice when I was a little girl to try and keep me as blonde as possible. What are you doing here so early, anyway?"
"Well, I knew I owed you some time, right? Some proper time that I spend with you, awake and talking and all that. But I'm not exactly the talking type, nor the awake one. I had to—" he interrupted himself to yawn, "—Slip out before drills began this morning, since I knew you'd be at work today."
"Oh, Bill," she sighed as they passed a poster advertising war bonds, and another that said JOIN THE U.S.A.S. — KEEP AUSTRALIA SAFE!, and another that said in more garish capitals KEEP THEM FLYING! THERE'S A JOB FOR YOU IN THE WAAAF. "I don't want you to get court-martialled for going AWOL again."
"It ain't much trouble, Ginny," Bill claimed, shaking his head. "Don't worry 'bout me. Leckie's hardly around these days. There's this broad that he spends all his time with. A Greek one, I've heard. He's slept over at her house a couple of times in a row."
"And the other boys?"
"They all come home for supper," he exclaimed, describing his friends like little children who always came home for tea when it began to get dark. "Sid has a girl too, but her grandpa's a strict old fella so apparently they're not allowed to touch, or something. Runner's never gone for too long and Chuckler never seems to get far enough with his dames to stay out overnight with them."
They passed a woman walking down the stairs of the local church, a tin can in her hand, with FOR THE WAR WIDOWS written on the side. She shook the pennies that were already inside, and they rattled. In her own little bubble, Ginny had almost forgotten about all the soldiers who must have died alongside Bill and the other boys at Guadalcanal, and all the wives they must have left behind in America. She thought of all the wives the First Marine Division would leave behind when they left.
"And you?"
"Me?" he huffed again, shrugging the woolen blanket further over his shoulders and wrapping it around himself. The mornings in Melbourne were usually bitter during the winter months, and although it was just beginning to warm up, a Monday morning in November was still enough to give someone chills. "I'd sleep anywhere. Foxhole, hammock, boat, park bench. Any place, any time. I thought I'd learn something about myself by joining the army, and I think that's probably it."
"Did you have a job before you enlisted?" she asked him. "Like, back in America?"
"I always knew my parents found looking after my family tough. We kept no secrets in that house. My father was a travelling salesman, and if he sold nothing that day, he'd drive straight home and tell us at the dinner table. We always managed to get by, but it got 'specially bad after the Depression. I dropped outta school when I was sixteen and became the assistant to an architect for a while — to help my parents, y'know — but they never liked me so much in the office, and I got the boot after a year or so. I kind'a jumped around after that, I worked for a steel contractor, as a busboy, on the mail run, a couple of years blue-collar living, the whole shebang. And then Pearl Harbour happened, and that was that."
"And it brought you here," she finished. "On our doorstep in a woollen blanket. You know, you were the first Yank I'd ever spoken to. My father had always warned me off the Americans . . . I mean, he still does. He doesn't want me to get hurt, or worse — I expect he thinks — knocked up. I think he thinks that's what will happen to Jackie if she continues the way she is at the moment."
"Do you always let him talk badly about your friends?"
He doesn't, she wanted to say, but he'd spoken badly about Gordon at the dinner table too. "My parents know I'm not so easily influenced by the people I spend time with. I've always been my own person, and they've always respected that. They love me more than anything, I know they do. I'd miss them terribly if I were halfway across the world from them. I couldn't bare it. Do you miss your parents?"
"I'm not a little boy anymore, Ginny," he said, but soon went back on his comment as they passed some young schoolboys collecting metal scraps. He admitted, his blue eyes now wide and sober, "But yeah, I miss home. Sometimes, when I'm laying awake at night in the cricket grounds, I miss the arguments and the clusterfuck of my parents and four other siblings in a three bedroom house. I sometimes miss the way my life used to be. Everything's so different now. It's been two years since I've seen my family. Two since I left home. I enlisted when I was nineteen. Can you believe that?"
She sighed whimsically, "I couldn't imagine doing something like that."
"You're just about to."
"Not in the same way, though. I'll be a secretary, I expect, perhaps a clerk. I've never driven a car in my life, so I don't expect to be a driver. I'm not signing up to wield a rifle and be shipped half way across the world to fight in the jungle. I wouldn't expect for me to return being able to sharpshoot, or anything. I'll never be as brave as you," she trailed off as she reached the tram. "Well, thank you for walking me, Bill," she said, "when will I be seeing you next?"
Hopefully not among the million other Smiths in the death register, she told herself cynically. He sighed, "It's always been a lottery."
She paused for a moment, before announcing, "Well, I'll be feeling lucky around seven tomorrow. Will you?"
He huffed softly to himself, "Yeah."
"Lovely," she reached over, taking his hand and giving it a fleeting squeeze before she turned and hopped gracefully onto the tram, her body rushing with heat and her fingertips tingling, "I'll see you then."
That tram could have gone anywhere in Victoria: to the Federation Square where her parents met, with plazas, bars, and restaurants by the Yarra River. The Southbank area, where they could have visited the Melbourne Arts Precinct and the National Gallery of Victoria. On that very day, she could have taken him anywhere. They could have gone together. But war calls, she told herself, and when war calls, it calls louder than any other voice. Louder than any Bill Smith, that was for certain.