Those who stayed with us all seemed to go on wearing their khaki uniforms or their hospital blues for a long time, and whenever they were being photographed – and somebody was always taking group snapshots on the square of buffalo lawn with everybody carefully placed and grinning around Stubby in his wheel-chair – they would invariably put on their army caps or hats. One of the group would always be holding a crutch up, jokingly.
When they were not posing for these photographs they were a cheerful, diligent crowd on the whole. Stubby had learnt to make string doilies, using his teeth and the leather-padded stumps of his forearms, and blind, taciturn Aleck endlessly knitted balaclavas in navy blue or khaki wool. He knitted very expertly and I never understood why he made only balaclavas, which had been useful enough in the winter trenches of the Western Front but which I never saw a single person in Melbourne wearing. Bert had acquired a kit of shoe-repairer’s tools through a grant from the Limbless Soldiers’ Association, and at this time he was teaching himself a trade and intended to rent a little cobbler’s shop with his deferred pay and gratuity. The others would tease him good-naturedly about this ambition; his active service had been of such brief duration that his gratuity and deferred pay would hardly have added up to the price of a snobbing bench. (Bert always talked of the trade as ‘snobbing’; he did become quite adept at it and for years, even after he had gone to work in the Artificial Limb Factory, he always kept our school boots and shoes in wonderful repair.)
Sunday was the big public visiting day at the hospital and Mother had made it a practice that Jean and Jack and I should go round the wards selling postcards to aid the Red Cross. The other two used to enjoy this, because they would get sweets and fruit and biscuits, and even little tips of money that were not meant to go into the big cubical Red Cross tins, and Jean liked to put her Sunday dress on and a white bow in her hair, and Jack had a way of cheeking the wounded men he had come to know, and they would always engage him uproariously and then say to their visitors admiringly, ‘That’s Sister Min’s kid; he’s a real dag, that one!’
I was the one who hated these Sunday commitments. I hated the unending tiring labyrinth of wards, the stretching miles of maimed men in white enamelled cots, the non-committal doctors in their white gowns moving silently along corridors that smelt of chloroform and cotton lint, the squeaky wheeling of shrouded trolleys, the shapes and the no-shapes that lay hidden beneath the white counterpanes with the red crosses embroidered on them, the lowered false voices of visitors. I was half aware of a formless shadow of disaster that I wanted to shout against or run away from: it existed in the unexpected sounds of pain or delirium that came from behind screened-off beds, it lay across the interminable recession of men’s profiles that were always lined and ward-pallid and set horizontally on white pillows, it clung to the changes in occupancy that one noticed from one Sunday to the next without ever knowing, or even daring to ask, whether it was death or healing that had effected the changes.
I don’t know when it was that I began to suspect that these desperate Sunday feelings were really only an extension of a terror which I knew to be real, even though I did not understand it, but which was somehow related to the day the Ceramic brought my father back, and also to the leather-and-metal, stiff-jointed legs and the claw-like appendages to the artificial arms propped in the corners of our hallway, and to the faces of Aleck and Stubby posing for snapshots beneath their flat-brimmed New Zealand hats, and to Gabby Dixon weeping in the darkness of his bedroom, and to Jack and me in the sleep-out listening to the grown-up laughter around the cribbage-board in the sitting-room or to the more furtive slithering noise which was made by a big creeper vine we called the Dollicus as it moved in the night wind against the screen of flywire.
I never did talk to Jack about these mysterious, disturbing fears. Or perhaps I did and don’t remember. (It occurs to me that there is almost no conversation in this story yet, but this is right. One remembers fears first, then things, like the Dollicus, and conversations only much later.) There was always that difference of three years between us, anyway. On Jack, the effect of the absence of both our parents at the war had been to make him wild and adventurous and reckless. He was fighting other kids in the streets, and usually winning. More and more often he would go truant from school – we used to call it ‘playing the wag’ – especially when he learnt to forge Mum’s and Dad’s signatures impeccably and could write his own excuse letters to his teachers … there had even been some minor scrapes with the police. He gave poor old Granny, our seventy-year-old guardian, a terrible time from the very beginning. He regarded me, tolerantly enough but without any mincing of words, as a ‘bloody sawney little sonk’, and it is perfectly true that the period which had turned him into a wild one had made me something of a namby-pamby. Jean bullied me, Jack despised me, my younger sister was a nuisance and a tell tale, so I clung to my grandmother then as I did later, when the troopship came home. The mischief with which I involved her was always unintentional. Like the terrible day of the Dollicus seeds.
What sort of creeper the Dollicus really was is something of which I have no idea to this day, but that was what it was always called. (Granny had a rare malapropism with botanical names: the rhododendron was the ‘rota’, our pelargoniums became the ‘paragonia’, the hydrangea was always the ‘hyter’. Still, for all I know she might have been pedantically right for once with this creeper, because botanical names often derive from Ancient Greek and dolikos is a perfectly good Greek word meaning ‘long’ and this particular creeper was certainly a fantastically long one and the seeds it bore were carried in long thin black pods.) It was ink-dark, huge, dank, and insect-haunted and although it often scared the wits out of me at night it was useful on rainy days because it carried thousands of hard pellet-like little seeds in its pods – in a Daisy air rifle you could use the seeds in place of BB shot – some of them white and some of them black, and these I would collect and arrange on the linoleum-covered floor in a complicated make-believe game which was supposed to represent battles between the Germans and the Aussies.
I was doing this one rainy morning when my grandmother came home from shopping, by which time my private Armageddon had spread from the sleep-out to the vestibule. Granny opened the back door, shook her umbrella, and stepped inside. The combination of her wet shoes, the waxed linoleum, and the scattered Dollicus seeds was too much: her feet slid from under her, and down she came with a crash which, considering how frail and tiny she was, sounded quite awful. But worse than this, her shopping basket went high in the air, then followed her down, a bag of new-laid eggs falling and breaking in a paste of yolk and albumen exactly on the grey crown of her aged head. The shock of witnessing and being responsible for this grotesque disaster plunged me into immediate panic. I fled through the back door, scaled the wall of the outdoor privy, from there scrambled to the roof of the house, clawed my way up the slippery gable to the brick chimney, and sat myself shivering on top of it.
I stayed up there for two hours, with Granny raging around the garden below me, threatening me with a brandished tablespoon and a bottle of castor-oil. Eventually it was my fear of the height that proved too much for me, and I was cold and wet and desperately unhappy, and I had to come down.
To my amazed relief she didn’t punish me at all, and when she put her arms around me very tightly and kissed me I realized she was crying. Perhaps it was the memory of this that made me clutch her hand so tightly on that later day when the Ceramic brought the soldiers home.
In a sense, of course, I was too young for the war to have had any direct effect on me, since there was really nothing of it that I could remember. Yet what is significant to realize now is how every corner of that little suburban house must have been impregnated for years with the very essence of some gigantic and sombre experience that had taken place thousands of miles away, and quite outside the state of my own being, yet which ultimately had come to invade my mind and stay there, growing all the time, forming into
a shape.
And it went on for years. There was no corner of the house from the time I was seven until I was twelve or thirteen that was not littered with the inanimate props of that vast, dark experience, no room that was not inhabited by the jetsam that the Somme and the Marne and the salient at Ypres and the Gallipoli beaches had thrown up. Stubby sitting by a window tearing with his teeth at the white threads of his doilies; Aleck in another room knitting his balaclavas or fumbling with quick-tapping insectine fingers for his tobacco pouch; the bumpy, squeaky sound of someone in a bedroom testing an artificial leg; the bathroom that everlastingly smelt of antiseptic and ointment and ether and Condy’s crystals: and even outside, in the backyard sunshine, there would be Mother’s white nursing veils and aprons blowing on the clothesline in a smell of yellow soap, and underneath the fig-tree Bert sitting on an upturned packing-case, a long leather bib tied around his chest and his empty trouser-leg neatly folded up and fastened by a safety-pin, hammering away at half-soles and heels. There was no radio then, but we always had ‘sing-songs’ around the piano on Sunday nights, with Mother playing, and for years the songs were always the same – the ‘old favourites’ of the war years, ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Over There’ and ‘Johnny Get Your Gun’ and the rest of them.
It was not until I discovered the big deep drawer at the bottom of the cedar wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom that I began to sense a form in the shadow that lurked in the wards and the corridors of the hospital, and to give a shape to the faraway experience which had moved in behind the privet hedge to occupy every room and every cranny of our mundane little house. During the years when Mother and Father were away the drawer must have been the repository for all the souvenirs and things they would send back to Granny, or the things she had preserved herself for their relationship to ‘The Front,’ and to this collection Mother and Dad would have added their own memorabilia when they returned, for there was a service revolver in the drawer, and a cardboard box full of stubby .45 bullets and clips of .303 ammunition in a leather bandolier and campaign ribbons and various regimental badges and a German Iron Cross and the citation that had gone with my father’s Military Medal. But also there were elaborate French silk postcards and innumerable foreign coins and banknotes and, most important of all, the full set of weekly parts of the Illustrated War News and a copy of The Anzac Book and the three volumes of Louis Raemaker’s cartoons about the German atrocities.
I would steal into the bedroom when Dad was away at the tram sheds and Mother on duty in the operating theatre, and I would lock the door and spend hours on the floor in front of the big drawer. The Raemaker cartoons, at first, were the dominant fascination.
One knew nothing then about propaganda, so that the cartoons, in my mind, assumed a horrible reality, the substance of nightmare translated into printed truth. For weeks I was in morbid thrall to these grotesque, hating pictures of brutal infernos, of cloven-footed devils wearing Kaiser Bill hats impaling naked babies and women on their swords, of priests being mutilated and crucified by the Prussians in front of sacked and burning towns, of the grinning skeleton of Death in a Uhlan’s helmet wielding a scythe across the shell-pocked desecration of No Man’s Land, of the bestial Huns disembowelling starving Belgian children, and mysterious words like Kultur and Gott Mit Uns written across a ruined world in letters of blood.
But after a time, perhaps because it was essential to reject the horror that the pictures inspired – for I was unable to develop a hatred, which, in fact, was the purpose of their message – I forced myself to realize that these were only drawings, after all, made, I thought, by some vengeful and embittered man who must have suffered frightfully at the hands of the Germans. And as their power to oppress me lessened, I gave greater attention to the copies of the Illustrated War News. For these pictures were not imagined and drawn out of wrath and vindictive hatred; these were the real photographs of what had taken place.
Here, across two whole pages, was that treeless, shell-torn wilderness of mud and barbed wire and duckboards and craters and broken artillery wheels and abandoned ammunition boxes that was the Somme, ‘The Front,’ that No Man’s Land about which they all sang so robustly at the Sunday night sing-songs. Here, in actual photographs as true as the Kodak snapshots taken on our own front lawn, were the gas victims and the blinded and the bandaged tottering back from Cambrai, and gaunt men in tin helmets squatting in the mud while the stretcher-bearers carried blanketed bodies along the duckboards, and the corpses sprawled in muck or drowned in flooded shell craters or hanging like cast-off rags on the tangled wire, and the tanks rolling down the trenches, and the smoke palls across towns, and the steeples hanging upside down from churches. And one day I suddenly knew that this was the connection with the things propped up in our hallway and with the shattered men who inhabited all of our house and half of my mind: for here, in sepia and blue and black halftone, were Vimy Ridge and Villers-Bretonneux and Hill 60 and Amiens Cathedral and Gaba Tepe and the burnt-out Cloth Hall at Ypres, and Bert ‘snobbing’ in the back yard and Gabby Dixon’s face at the dark end of a room and the smell of chloroform in corridors and the bronchial cough of my father going off in the dawn light to the tramways depot.
I was attending State school by this time, and I liked to walk home by way of the railway viaduct, down past the chaff-and-grain store where I was sometimes sent to buy bran and pollard for our hens, and then along the little street beside the railway line that ran between Ripponlea and Elsternwick. In this street there was a second-hand-dealer’s shop with a window full of contents that fascinated me. It was a shabby, rather ramshackle little shop; the whole building would shake whenever the train roared through the clay cutting opposite. There was always a special enchantment in this, for once the reverberations sent a stuffed owl toppling down into a tray of old wedding rings, and several times the tremors caused crystal pearl-drops to fall from the dusty chandeliers overhead, and always the shuddering of the building would make the little collection of second-hand glass eyes jiggle around and change their places slightly in the fly-spotted saucer that lay at the front of all the crazy clutter, so that the eyes seemed to wink or glare at me.
Two doors along from this place was the Phoebe Biograph and Cinema Palace which showed episodes of the Pearl White serials on Saturday afternoons, and between the two buildings was a dilapidated, narrow-fronted photographer’s studio which had been deserted and padlocked for as long as I could remember. The window was full of dust, dead flies and cockroaches, and a great many spotted photographs that had been there for years. The sun had faded them to a ghostly, deathly pallor, but they were all of young men in the uniform of soldiers, most of them wearing slouch hats turned up at one side, and all of them with Rising Sun badges on their tunics. They were mostly boyish-looking faces, none of them with the expressions that I had seen at home or in the hospital wards, so that I guessed the portraits had been taken years before, when they had enlisted or just before they had embarked for overseas.
I was staring in at these photographs one day – really I was only waiting for the signal of the train’s whistle on the viaduct, which would be my cue to move on to the second-hand shop window – when a ragged, agate-eyed boy who was at my school but several years older and in the sixth grade, came down the street, kicking a tennis ball before him. He stopped alongside me but said nothing. He just stood there for a long time, right beside me, staring in with me at the pale photographs. Finally, in a flat voice and without even looking at me, he said, ‘All them blokes in there is dead, you know.’ He stared at the pictures a moment or two longer, then said, ‘Well, hoo-roo,’ and waved to me and moved off and kicked the tennis ball right down to the end of the street and trotted off after it, whistling.
I ran all the way home that day, trying not to cry, because I didn’t know what it was I wanted to cry about, but I never after that looked in the window of the photographer’s studio or the second-hand shop. From then on, when I went to the Phoebe for the serial matinees or the
Harold Lloyd comedies, I would always make a long detour to go the back way.
My Brother Jack Page 3
