The patterns set in their youth and young manhood continue for Jack and David. Jack, full of life and dynamism, marries Sheila who is ‘extraordinarily attractive, with her colour and vitality and the sparkle of her personality’. Indeed, they mirror each other: they ‘were much alike – they had the same loyalties, audacities, obstinacies, prides, the same strong and frank sexuality’. Everything about them, even at their lowest ebb, suggests life and process. Conversely, David and Helen Midgely, married ominously enough on the day of a terrible human catastrophe (the bombing of Guernica), have a barren, death-in-life relationship. The family gathering for Mrs Meredith’s birthday precisely points up the differences and the potential problems through a series of tensions that grow between David and Helen on one side and the rest of the family, especially the vocal Jack, on the other. But perhaps the most significant and portentous moment, and the one that summarises the tenor and the import of the whole episode, is the wordless encounter David perceives between Sheila and Helen – an encounter between vitality and inertia, creativity and unproductiveness, between a commitment to life and a turning away from it:
… Sheila, her heavy rich ripe figure full and splendid in a grey linen maternity smock, relaxed in the big rocking-chair … her hands were clasped uninhibitedly across the swollen mound of her stomach, her pretty knees, as always, were exposed, her blouse was cut as provocatively as ever … but now there were new and deeper qualities which enhanced all the younger attributes – a kind of mature vitality seemed to pump through her; one sensed the subdued vigour of fulfilment tempered by a powerful but deeply lodged serenity; it was almost as if the fruitfulness of her womb was like some great riparian flooding which gave a renewal of richness to all the other humours of her body. It always astonished me that Helen should so instantly have disliked her …
David is astonished only because he is blind to the omens – unlike Jack and the reader. But in any case, what is most instructive here is the language: it is the language of adoration. David elsewhere admits that he had in a way fallen in love with Sheila and it becomes obvious that only someone like Sheila will release in him such positive and life-affirming emotions.
Along with Sheila and Jack, the other important ‘life’ figures in the book are the Turleys, and it is they who cause David to see clearly at last. In the ‘astonishing jumble’ of their dilapidated, rambling house and in Gavin Turley’s study (‘even more of a clutter … if that were possible’), David recognizes the disorder not of neglect but of vibrant living, of passionate interests and pursued purposes: the processes of existence. Significantly, while he sees the place and the Turleys’ way of life in it as delightful, illuminating and enviable, Helen sees it as a ‘midden’, ripe for the vacuum-cleaner. She abhors the Turleys’ ramshackle ménage and the attitudes that sustain it. But this time, David is not ‘astonished’. On the contrary, his moment of truth has arrived.
He leaves the terrifying death of the melancholy suburbs and the empty marriage in which he and Helen are trapped, and embarks on the path that will take him, as it turns out, to Cressida Morley, a woman ‘with more life in the corners of her mouth than other women had in their whole bodies’. Cressida is a younger, more sophisticated version of Sheila. As always, though, David is acted upon more than he acts. After his initial rage, he does not actually leave Helen and the Beverley Park Gardens Estate, but simply drifts away, aided by the run of events. Similarly, he prevaricates over other crucial moments (such as whether or not to enlist) long enough for the decision to be taken out of his hands by fate or intervention; and his pursuit of Cressida is, yet again, at the expense of Jack. So that, while it is clear that his incipient relationship with Cressida has the potential to restore, or awaken, the appetite for life and the capacity to confront rather than shrink from its rush of complex possibility (including the ‘pain and despair [he] had always wanted to avoid or evade’), the book still ends on a note of betrayal and avoidance. The way is being paved for the real defeats, the insupportable anguish and loss of Clean Straw for Nothing.
Like Johnston’s earlier and mostly forgotten fiction, My Brother Jack has its share of stereotypes. Jack himself is the stereotypical Aussie fleshing out the well-known myths of mateship and male solidarity and independence, all of which, as Garry Kinnane rightly points out, Johnston treats without irony. The Turleys are also stereotypes – the moderately affluent, cultured class who are above the need for outward show, and whose very casualness, untidiness and apologetic disorder are marks of their inherent and inimitable style. So too is Johnston’s suggestion of the ‘grim adventure of true poverty’. True poverty is more than grim and never an adventure; only people who have never known it can romanticize it in this way.
Yet, in the end, neither this nor other occasional infelicities matters very much. The stereotypes are worked into a narrative of remorseless and dramatic honesty: the anatomy of a family and an age; the story of the strange fated maverick who, against all the odds, some parents produce in powerless collaboration with their ancestry and the times in which they live; with the catastrophes and the triumphs of those times, and the fatality of crossing paths and interweaving lives.
Though it is perhaps fair to say that My Brother Jack becomes complete and its slightly lightweight concluding sequences more acceptable only when we read its harrowing though in some ways inferior sequel, Clean Straw for Nothing, the book nevertheless thoroughly and securely warrants its status as a contemporary Australian classic.
BRIAN MATTHEWS
Flinders University, 1990
1
My brother Jack does not come into the story straight away. Nobody ever does, of course, because a person doesn’t begin to exist without parents and an environment and legendary tales told about ancestors and dark dusty vines growing over outhouses where remarkable insects might always drop out of hidden crevices.
Childhood, looking back on it, is like this – a mess of memories and impressions scattered and clotted and pasted together like a mulch of fallen leaves on a damp autumn pavement. So the first memory, naturally, is of a childhood we shared together – he was only three years my senior but he always seemed to me to be much, much older – and although it is a memory made up of many parts, distinct and indistinct, mundane and fantastic, coherent and incomprehensible, it is fixed now into a final and exact if distant image of a place once lived in and never to be returned to, like the city seen by the wife of Lot in that last yearning moment before she became the pillar of salt.
With me it focuses most sharply around the small, rather fusty wallpapered hallway upon which the front door opened in that undistinguished house – weatherboard painted dark stone and a corrugated iron roof of sun-faded Indian red – which sat behind a wire fence, privet hedge, small square lawn of buffalo grass, and the name Avalon in gilt letters on a blackwood panel in a flat and dreary suburb far away in Melbourne, Australia. ‘Far away’ is meant in a temporal as well as a spatial sense, for not only did all this begin to occur some ten thousand miles distant from where I am now, but this was more than forty years ago, not long after the First World War ended.
The hallway itself, in fact, was far from undistinguished, because a souvenired German gas-mask hung on the tall hallstand, looking like the head of a captured Martian, and the whole area of the hall was a clutter of walking-sticks with heavy grey rubber tips – the sort of tips on walking-sticks that relate to injury rather than to elegance – and sets of crutches – the French type as well as the conventional shapes of bent wood – and there was always at least one invalid wheel-chair there and some artificial limbs propped in the corners. Our sister Jean, who was the eldest of us four children, eventually married a returned soldier who had had his leg amputated, and this seemed to us, at the time, quite normal and expected. Jack and I must have spent a good part of our boyhood in the fixed belief that grown-up men who were complete were pretty rare beings – complete, that is, in that they had their sight or hearing or all their limbs. Well, we kn
ew they existed, but they seldom came our way.
How this happened ought to be explained, and this can be done only through the figure of our mother, still something of a stranger to us at that time, mostly because of her years of absence from us, but also because she was even then not really an integrated part of the household but seemed only to visit us each afternoon or evening in her starched nurse’s uniform or her dark blue, red-collared cape. Usually she carried with her a smell of ether or iodine, or of carbolic. She was head sister in the operating theatre of the big military hospital which was only a mile or so to the north of our house, along Kooyong Road. Twenty years later, when I was a grown man, the hospital was still there behind a black wall of huge pines and a secondary palisade of dustily-mottled plane-trees – the same confused blocks of long low ‘temporary’ wards, much more faded, set amid flowering shrubs and overstuffed beds of wilting cannas, and tired lawns, and scuffed gravel paths. I went there to visit my sister’s husband Bert, who was back as a patient having the nineteenth additional slice taken off his amputated leg. By this time the place had become, by official designation, the Caulfield Convalescent Hospital, although quite a few of the patients were there from that time of twenty years before, already a pretty long convalescence and one which for a good many of them was never to end.
I do not remember the beginning of it, because I would have been hardly three when my father, an electric tram mechanic, volunteered as a sapper in the engineers, and went off to Gallipoli with the Anzacs. Nor do I remember my mother going.1 It seems that after the brave bungle of the Dardanelles she volunteered as an army nurse, and was shipped off to France, leaving her four small children, Jean, Jack, me, and our two-year-old sister Marjorie, in the care of a pugnacious and diminutive little woman named Emma, who was our grandmother on our mother’s side. There were just the five of us in the house, then, Granny and us four kids.
Dad was away at what was always referred to as ‘The Front’ for four years altogether, and Mother for rather more than three. They were still overseas when the Armistice was signed. They both came home in 1919, but not together, because Mother returned, of course, in a hospital ship: an odd thing was that in all the time they were in France together they never once succeeded in making contact with each other. Dad, who had been gassed, but not seriously, near Vimy Ridge, went back to his old job at the tramway depot, but Mother got herself transferred to the operating theatre in the hospital and went on being a nursing sister.
One recollects something of this later phase in a series of vivid little vignettes that are incomplete and scattered, but bright enough, like the fragments of spilt colour I remember strewn on the hall carpet all around the artificial limbs and crutches when the front door slammed in a gusty wind one day and shattered the decorative leadlight side panels of red and green and blue and amber glass.
Almost the earliest and yet the clearest of these images is of the troop-ship Ceramic, with her four rakish masts and her tall tilted smoke-stack, coming home to the flags and the festoons of garlands and the triumphal arches and the bands playing Sousa marches on the pier at Port Melbourne. The blue-grey abstract dazzle of the camouflage-painting on the steamer’s incredibly long, lean hull, although spectacular, came as no surprise to me, but I do remember being astonished by the bright daubs of red-lead and the more sanguinary streams of rust streaking down from ports and hawse-hole and scuppers, because I had only visualized the ship before in the grey monotone of a mounted photograph which was kept on top of the piano, together with a hard army biscuit on which was drawn with Indian ink a sketch of a camel and the Sphinx and a palm-tree and the Pyramids and the legend Australian Imperial Forces Cairo New Year 1915. There was no coincidence in the photograph being there on the piano; the Ceramic was the transport that had taken Mother away; the coincidence was that it was the same ship that brought Dad home. Even so, I had not expected the vivid redness of the rust and the red-lead, which to my awed childish imagination looked like blood pouring down the ship’s side. Perhaps it had been.
I was seven then, but small for my age, and the day was charged, for me, with a huge and numbing terror. This fear was involved with the interminable blaring of brass bands, and a ceaseless roar of shouting and cheering, and the unending trampling past of gigantic legs. I can only assume that after the beginning of it I became too frightened to look up at the hours-long progression of dark, hard faces under wide, turned-up hats seen against bayonets and barrels that were more blue than black. I seem to retain glimpses of packs and rolled blankets and bandoliers, but the really strong image that is preserved now is of the stiff fold and buckle of coarse khaki trousers moving to the rhythm of knees and thighs and the tight spiral curves of puttees and the thick boots hammering, hollowly off the pier planking and thunderous on the asphalt roadway. The climax of it all came when a strong voice, hoarse with excitement, began to shout, ‘Minnie! Minnie!’ and without warning I was seized suddenly and engulfed in one of the gigantic, coarse-clad figures and embraced in a stifling smell of damp serge and tobacco and beer and held high in the air before a sweating apparition that was a large, ruddy face grinning at me below a back-tilted slouch hat and thin fair hair receding above a broad freckled brow, and then there was a roar of laughter, and I was put down, sobbing with fear, and the thick boots marched on and on, as if they were trampling all over me.
Minnie was my mother. She had come back from the war three months earlier than Dad, but she was at the hospital and still pretty much a stranger, and on that day of my father’s homecoming it was the familiar, gnarled hand of little Emma, my grandmother, which I tightly and damply clutched all through the overwhelming day.
At home neighbours and relatives had erected a big arch above the wire mesh of the front gate, with ‘Welcome Home’ picked out in daisies and snapdragons and carnations against a background of lily leaves and gum tips and maidenhair fern, and at the party that evening everybody crowded around the piano and sang ‘Roses of Picardy’ and ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’ and ‘The Rose of No Man’s Land’ and ‘Blighty’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag’ and ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding’, and everyone was drunk and hilarious, and I was fed so much fruit salad and jelly that I vomited.
That, for me, was how the First World War ended. It was also, in a way, the beginning of my trying to piece it together …
Because of the differences in our ages, the impression of all these excitements on us four children could not expectably have been the same, but Jack and I must have shared certain similar feelings about the symbolism of the hallway and the constant presence in our house of all the derelicts of war whom Mother brought home to stay, since we had to be turned out of our room, and for years after we shared a make-shift bed on the floor of the sleep-out, which was really only a section of the back veranda partitioned off by flywire screens and a lot of damp ferns. But there must have been a great deal of this sort of thing at that time – being turned out of beds and sleeping in provisional rooms, I mean. Not only in our house or our suburb, but everywhere. All over the world.
There was a lot of mess to be cleaned up in those years of 1919 and 1920, after the war and the Spanish influenza: the bodies of the dead to be located and the great cemeteries set up, and all those military hospitals in France and Flanders and Britain and Italy to be cleaned out of colonial troops so that there would be space in which to try to heal the indigenous maimed. Back to Melbourne then the hospital ships and transports were bringing sick and wounded Anzacs by the thousands, and in the big military hospital where Mother worked temporary wards were added to temporary wards, and beds were shifted out on to verandas or even crowded into hastily erected canvas marquees – there were some parts of the place where one would get the odd impression that a circus or a garden fête was going on – and what had once been no more than an old mansion set in spacious grounds began to have the look of a swiftly developing city. Even so, things finally got to such a pass that any of the earlie
r patients who seemed capable of existing on their pensions in the civilian world outside were quickly discharged and repatriated to make room for the newcomers. So there were quite a few disabled men, still pretty infirm, who suddenly found themselves demobilized and alone and helpless outside the army organization which for four years had enveloped every second of their activities, and with no place to go. These were the ones whom Mother brought to our house.
Some stayed a few weeks or a few months, there were others who were with us for years. Altogether I suppose forty or fifty of them must have inhabited our house at one time or another.
The majority of these have now become a kind of diffused composite image – they must have been brave people and cheerful enough in their collective infirmity, because in the composite there are their jokes and their badinage, but not all that much suffering – but there are still some of them who are distinctly preserved in memory, as sharply detailed as an insect sealed in amber.
The two New Zealanders, for example, are there – Aleck, who had been blinded early, at Gaba Tepe, with his polished leggings and his Boy Scoutish hat with the four dents in it: and ‘Stubby’, who was really only a trunk and a jovial red face in a wheelchair, a German whizzbang having taken both his legs and both forearms at Villers-Bretonneux. At various times we had others who had lost more than one limb, and all the rest were intensely proud of these ‘double amps’ and would boast to their friends about their good humour or their dexterity, but among these victims Stubby was always the doyen. Then there was Bert, the gawky, tow-headed Australian country boy who had been a real ‘hayseed’ when he had volunteered. He had been under age then and had given a false name, but after all that he lost his right leg on the first and only day of action he ever saw in France. And that was only four days before the Armistice was signed – the very day that Kaiser Bill was scuttling off to Holland. Bert was still only about eighteen when he came to our house on a pair of French crutches, there being no point in a one-legged cripple trying to go back to work on his father’s impoverished little selection-farm outside Corindhap, which isn’t real farming land at all, just quartz country and worked-over gold diggings. In a sense Bert never left us again, because later he got a job working in the Repatriation Department’s Artificial Limb Factory at South Melbourne, and then he married our Jean. The nightmarish one in this remembered gallery is Gabby Dixon, because he kept in the background and was never seen much, and I don’t suppose he wanted to be seen because he had suffered terrible facial burns with mustard gas and his face was no longer really like a face at all. He used to frighten me with his staring silences, and he is about the only one I remember as a cheerless figure, because sometimes at night through the thin partitions of the wall we could hear him sobbing in his room. I am pretty vague now about all the others, although I do remember Duval, who was French and very dapper and had lost an arm. He used perfume on his handkerchiefs and made high-pitched incomprehensible jokes and upset everybody, even Mother, until he finally took off for Noumea. Nobody who came back from France ever seemed to like the ‘Frogs’ very much.
My Brother Jack Page 2
