I learned how to live in never-ending anxiousness. All of us day after day with our hearts no longer beating a steady rhythm. Tuned in to static, news of death and damage. The West Australian would publish The Lists, state by state. Wounded. Killed. We took it all in, often without discussion, each of us reading the names in silence. There was no need to acknowledge what we all were feeling, it would only have made it worse.

I kept writing to Magnus, but few letters came back from him. I don’t know, I muttered one day, coming in from the empty letterbox. What does it mean?

Clementina swallowed me up in a hug, but her words were blunt. No news is good, quinie. No news means alive.

It was another thing I learned: that nothing could mean everything.

I learned what I could do when Mills & Ware broke up the old teams in Creaming and Packing and moved the more experienced of us into areas of the factory where only the men had worked before. The huge mixing vats. The cutting rooms, with their stamping machines that had to be hand-fed, sheet by sheet. The ovens, which we would load and unload—trays so heavy they bent our backs. Before long the fingers of some of the girls looked a bit like mine, the skin scarred white and toughened from handling biscuits straight from the oven, the tips red-raw and bleeding from the sharp gritty surfaces of army biscuits. We used to say: Poor boys, our poor soldiers, who have to eat the things!

I drew a breath of courage I didn’t feel and knocked on Mr Prentice’s office door, and he sat back and heard me out as I told him my idea of having the girls tie their fingers with clooties, for protection, like the gutting girls used to do. I thought he would laugh, or be disgusted, offended. Here I was, comparing Mills & Ware with the dirty work of gutting. But he listened, Mr Prentice did, and I’ll never forget what he said: that it was a fine day that day he’d heeded his waters and taken me on, a very fine day indeed, Mrs Tulloch, married or not.

Later he called me into the office and said Management had talked it over and the factory couldn’t supply finger bandages because of the shortage of cloth. But if you can bring your own, Mrs Tulloch, you and the other girls, then we have no objection. None at all.