It was beautiful when the four of us walked it down the Mandurah road to Josepha’s early on Saturday morning on a white tray. But the day was a scorcher, it got up to 108 by afternoon, and by the time the wedding party got back to Josepha’s after the church, the cake was lurching in a puddle of white icing and the sugar flowers had slid onto the tablecloth. Nobody minded, though, not Enzia, not Josepha, and for a few hours we pretended that the faraway war was actually far away. It was a time to laugh and dance, to toast to hope and happiness with warm lemonade, to eat sponge with melted icing and think it the finest wedding cake.

War has a habit of making you grateful.

August 1974

August 1974

I’ve been thinking about all those boys who have come back from Vietnam, who didn’t ask to go in the first place. There were parades at first, a few of them—do you remember, lambsie? And then the parades became a place for people to throw red paint and shout. And then there was nothing. What must they think, those boys?

Aye, I know, lambsie, you have done your share of shouting, and you’ve the right, no mind what Kathryn says. Your mother has always been cautious. But these protests of yours—I just canna think you were shouting at the right people.

Doesn’t mean I hold any ill-feeling to that young man, your friend’s brother, who burned his notice in a kerosene tin. There’s some who know, just know, they canna do it, and there’s some who say they’ll not let the government offer them up for something they don’t believe in. And the ones who go—isn’t because they want to kill, or want to die, only that they will do it, because they do believe. Seems to me they’re all right, lambsie, if you can turn your head to look at the world their way.

I used to puzzle about those patriots in the first war—men and women both—who called the men at home cowards. I found a poem in The West Australian before Magnus Tulloch went. I cut it out and hid it away in my knitting. I would read it sometimes and wonder what manner of man, what father, what grandfather, what brother, could write such words. The poet whipped up a frenzy about all the killing to be done in the trenches and begged the boys at home to go and do their bit. And then, then, he told them they’d never get a girl if they remained behind.

Come and be killed, or stay and be shunned. Wasn’t much of a choice, eh, lambsie.