Tears of the Moon - Di Morrissey [164]
All heads turned to Tyndall. Slowly he stood and spoke calmly. ‘I understand what you are all saying. I believe you are wrong. You are short-sighted businessmen. Kokichi Mikimoto is a man with a vision, a dream and passion. He can see the future. One day Broome will produce, by deliberate means, large perfect round pearls of a lustre and quality that even people like my good friend here, Tobias Metta, will not be able to tell apart from a pearl brought up from the seabed by a diver.’
Tyndall didn’t hang around after the meeting but retreated to his office and sat down to pour it all out in a letter to Olivia, but after half a page, he screwed it up, threw it over his shoulder and reached for the whisky bottle.
A few weeks later, Tyndall received a letter from Olivia which gave him no comfort.
Dear John,
I read in the paper a report about the meeting over the pearl culture business. How distressing for you. The Mettas wrote me that you put up a spirited defence. Perhaps you are ahead of your time, John. These are hard times with the war getting worse and casualties beginning to add up. Be patient, your time will come I feel sure.
He added her letter to his stack and spoke aloud to the empty office with some bitterness. ‘The only time that counts, Olivia, is time with you. And I have precious little of that to look forward to.’
Olivia longed for letters from Hamish, which were few and far between. When a fat one arrived from Port Said, she made herself tea and sat alone in the lounge room to savour it.
He explained it was an ‘illegal’ letter in that he was getting a friend to carry it and mail it so it wouldn’t be censored. He talked of the great mates he’d made, of the strange places and people he had seen, of how he missed everybody back home …
… especially you, dearest Mum. It’s been a hard trip at sea for the horses … we lost seventy-nine of them due to sickness and exhaustion between Australia and Bombay. We were recalled to Colombo and returned to Bombay to land the rest of the horses rather than lose the lot—we need them for haulage. We got our orders to the Dardanelles to help prepare the British Army IX corps for the landing on Suvla Bay. But we had no tugs or lighters so our unit made timber rafts to get men, stores, baggage and equipment ashore. We were all loaded up ready to go when we got word someone had found us a tiny steamer, the Itria, which meant unloading and dismantling the rafts and reloading the lot onto the steamer. Once ashore we had our only training in building pontoons and piers and the like—-five days training, mind you! Now we’ve loaded pontoons and everything onto the Itria for the proper’ landings. What a job it’s been but as our CO said, we refuse to be associated with failure!
On 7 August, the Itria anchored off the invasion beach under orders to locate sites for a pier. At dusk Hamish was in the first group to go ashore and build a landing pier of barrels and timber. They’d had no rest for forty-eight hours, were under continuous attack by artillery and shrapnel fire and even had a bombing raid by a Taube aircraft. The anchorage was declared too hot and shifted.
Hamish was then part of a group helping to disembark and land troops and their stores. No thought had been given to water supplies and thousands of troops were suffering thirst.
‘It’s as bad as being lost in the Nullarbor,’ muttered one of the men to Hamish.
On August 12, the ‘train’ men were ordered to take over supplying water as well as their other duties. Hamish tried to ignore the sporadic fire from the ridge as they feverishly buried spare pontoons on the beach to use as water tanks, filling them from lighters with borrowed pumps and fire hoses from ships. Men who weren’t killed or badly wounded succumbed to paratyphoid, jaundice, pneumonia and blood poisoning from flies and dirt