CH 1 – The Nurse

1945.

She was twenty four and dealing with the men who had been repatriated after the Japanese surrender, prisoners of war, the wounded, men with lost limbs and vacant eyes, men no longer men, some so damaged they were permanently bound to their beds and placed in locked wards, their wives and mothers only able to gaze at them tearfully through a reinforced window. They never stayed long. Some didn’t return.

The nurse worked through it all, changing the soiled bedsheets, carrying away the overflowing bed pans, not listening to the muttered entreaties of damaged men who had not been near an attractive young woman for years. She hardened herself to what the war had delivered into her wards.

One man though was different, a reader, and as she took away his breakfast tray one morning the nurse asked him what his book was about. He showed her the cover and smiled, then said, ‘The writer may very well serve a moment of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.’

In the weeks until he was discharged the nurse could often be found in his ward, listening as he read the many quotes of Karl Marx and spoke of his dreams of social equality, peace and of international Communism. One quote galvanised her, something written by Marx a generation before two world wars had killed and uprooted millions.

‘There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.’

Two months later she joined the Australian Communist Party.

And she wasn’t alone.

Melbourne, Vic. 1942. Communist Party members and sympathisers taking part in the Anglo-Soviet Unity Procession through the city streets.

A member of her cadre wanted to know where she worked, where she socialised, what were her opinions on democracy and capitalism, who were her friends, where they worked, what were her feelings on the Americans’ destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of the thousands of innocent lives.

FILE – This Sept. 8, 1945 picture shows an allied correspondent standing in the rubble in front of the shell of a building that once was a movie theater in Hiroshima, Japan, a month after the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare was dropped by the U.S. on Monday, Aug. 6, 1945. A movement is growing worldwide to abolish nuclear weapons, encouraged by President Barack Obama’s endorsement of that goal. But “realists” argue that more stability and peace must first be achieved in the world. (AP Photo/Stanley Troutman)

Then the nurse was asked if wanted to work for the Party, to do something other than march through the city streets shouting and waving a banner.

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