My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  It was from the tree that I derived a sort of spiteful comfort. Old Jos. Goodenough had been right – it took astonishingly. One could almost see it grow. At some stage I must have accepted that the tree had become very much more than merely a symbol of protest against suburban values. If I had not, in fact, planted it with malice aforethought, I very soon began to be aware that I was using it as a weapon with which to force a situation which I was not prepared to attack directly. I gave it much attention, forking, watering, manuring – far more attention than I would give to the now-hated flower-beds which were Helen’s pride and joy. (One was always on the prowl, of course, trying to sniff out other sources of resentment.) It even came to the absurdly childish point where I would water the tree copiously and, in the case of a eucalypt quite unnecessarily, and deliberately neglect those beds which I had come to detest because of the little wooden label-stakes which Helen had lettered herself so neatly. I think I really hated them because of the affectation she had perpetrated in using only the botanical names for her flowers, and I would stalk the hated beds at dusk, spitting the words out under my breath: Phlox drummondii, Tropoeolum, Arctotis, Myosotis dissitiflora, Antirrhinum! God! what was wrong with forget-me-not or snapdragon?

  As it worked out, it was neither Helen nor I who forced the issue in the end, although Helen was obliged to act as the intermediary. It began one evening at supper, which we were eating in the dining-room, and she had gone to some trouble preparing a menu of what she called ‘Chinese chow’, and there were dim-sims and spring rolls she had bought from a Chinese restaurant in Little Bourke Street, and she had made the soup and the sweet-and-sour pork herself, and the candles were green, and from the radio-console in the adjoining room a record was playing ‘Selections From The Great Operas’ and La Bohème had just taken over from Madame Butterfly when she said, ‘David, I’m afraid we’ll have to do something about that tree in the front.’

  ‘Do what?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, what happened is that Mr Treadwell from next door dropped in here this afternoon. He’s complaining about it.’

  ‘He’s what! It’s not his bloody tree!’

  ‘He insists you’ll have to dig it out. The roots are getting in under the cement of his drive.’

  ‘Oh, bollocks!’ I said. ‘His drive’s thirty feet away from the tree! Do you mean to tell me that roots can go thirty feet underground in a few bloody months!’

  ‘I’m not telling you anything, darling. I am simply repeating to you what he says. Treadwell is a perfectly nice inoffensive little old man, and he’s not a fussy neighbour, and he was most polite about it all. But you know he is a very keen amateur gardener himself and —’

  ‘Well, the old bastard’s got nothing else to do, has he? He’s on a Government pension. He doesn’t work. And what the devil has that got to do with our gum-tree?’

  ‘Because he also claims that a tree like that takes the good out of the soil, too – our own lawn is getting awfully patchy, darling – and if the roots get near his dahlia beds he —’

  ‘Oh, go to blazes with his dahlia beds. And what’s wrong with some upended cement slabs? The place is too damned neat as it is. It’s – it’s like having some damned woman walking around after you with an ash-tray in her hand, or plumping up the cushions the minute you stand up. My God! I’d like to have two whacking great Moreton Bay figs like those at the Turleys’, and then we could tip the slabs up the whole length of the street! Which might be a bloody good thing! And I think I’m going to plant a huge black Dollicus outside my study window, do you know that? I would, too, if I knew what the real name of the thing was.’ I looked at her deliberately. ‘You’re rather set against this tree yourself, aren’t you, my dear?’

  ‘I’ve never liked it particularly,’ she said quietly. ‘You know that. I think it’s rather dreary, and it does spoil the whole look of the front of the house.’

  ‘I happen to place a great importance on that tree,’ I pointed out stiffly.

  ‘I know you do. I’ve simply conveyed what Mr Treadwell said.’ She met the challenge with cool dignity. ‘That’s all. And you’re working yourself up to another of those moods, aren’t you?’ With that she got up from the table and left me, and I went out to the front garden and gave particularly solicitous attention to my sugar-gum.

  Two weeks later she was invited into the Treadwell garden to examine the unevenness of the drive. Quite probably there was neighbourly collusion, but a few days after this Mr Phyland also complained about the tree. I bought a bag of superphosphate and forked it well in around the healthy-looking trunk.

  Some little time passed before Helen reopened the issue. ‘I’m sorry to bring this up,’ she said very quietly. ‘It’s the tree again, I’m afraid. Mr Treadwell and Mr Phyland intend to make an official complaint to the municipal council if you don’t do something about it. Now wait, please David, it really has to be taken seriously this time. There is something in the council by-laws, and they can bring a lawsuit against you … they have perfectly good legal grounds, it seems. And don’t forget Mr Treadwell was a magistrate, and he has quite a lot of pull and —’

  ‘So I should dig it up, eh? Is that what you think?’

  ‘It’s your tree, David,’ she said evenly. ‘You’re the one who’s been so obstinate about —’

  ‘I asked you a simple question. You think I should root the bloody thing out?’

  ‘I see no point whatever in upsetting all the neighbours, darling. Not just for a tree.’

  That was when I saw red. I knew, of course, that I had been defeated by the forces of conformity. Yet, in its way, the tree had served its purpose. And it was still a weapon to be used, a weapon that would hurt – that would inflict pain – that might even kill …

  ‘Not just for a tree,’ I repeated bitterly. ‘God! you just can’t afford to be different, can you? You always have to conform to their rotten dreary suburban sameness. If Sandra Solomons has a page-boy you’ve got to have a blasted page-boy! If bloody Phyland plants out antirrhinums we’ve got to plant out antirrhinums. If we all do everything exactly the same none of us will upset the other, will we? We can die for air in their suffocating bloody sterility, we can die for water in their barren bloody desert, but we mustn’t cry out or make a scene or protest about it! All right. Let’s conform! Let’s be just the same as they are. I’ll dig out the blasted tree. And we’ll fill the bloody hole with antirrhinums! and let’s go the whole hog, shall we, and give a name to the house? What would you like, my pet? Nothing banal, like Emoh Ruo or The Nest or Nirvana. No, something original and imaginative, like your damned dull little parties! I’ll do it! I’m very expert at painting signs for front gates. How does Valhalla appeal? No, no, we can do better than that. Not Avalon or Bangalore, they’re out, they’ve been used. Something sentimental, like Guernica, say, to remind us of our wedding day? Or how about The Masses? Or better still – here’s a beauty, a real original – suppose we call it Sacco and Vanzetti?’

  I had broken her at last. All her defences had collapsed, the poise and the coolness and the composure gone, and there she was standing before me in her neat smart clothes, stricken and trembling, hopeless and bewildered, and afraid of me, and she looked older than her thirty-one years, and her fine thin face was ravaged by a flood of tears, and because this was the first time I had ever seen her cry I brought the razor-strop down again across her back to punish her for the crimes she had never committed, and I said, ‘You’ve asked for this, you know. You’ve been told there’s no guarantee in me. And there isn’t, by Jesus, there isn’t.’

  There was no finality in it, then or later, it just went on, dragging, drifting, and there was a wall between us that could never be scaled again, and yet she still tried – I swear she did – but the parties went on, and the cleaning of the car, and a mock-orange was planted where the sugar-gum had grown, and then it was the morning of September the fourth, and the bedroom telephone rang to awaken me barely half an hour after I had dropped o
ff to an exhausted sleep. It was Jack, and he sounded very excited. ‘

  Nipper? That you, nipper? Listen, are you going to be in it?’

  ‘Be in what?’ I said, yawning through the daze of sleep.

  ‘Why, the war. There’s a war. They’ve declared war.’

  ‘I know,’ I said drily. ‘I’ve been up all night. I just got to bed five minutes ago.’

  ‘I woke you up, eh? You’re going to be in it, aren’t you?’

  ‘What are you talking about? Be in what? England’s declared war, Jack. Parliament hasn’t even met out here. We aren’t at war.’

  ‘Ah, we will be, though. Everyone knows that. But I just thought I’d make sure you intended to be in it. That’s all.’

  ‘But why wake me up to talk about that now?’ I said wearily. ‘There’s plenty of time, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you understand, if we do go in with Britain it’s going to be weeks and weeks, months even, before anything will be teed up. Recruiting. They’ve got to have camps. Uniforms. Millions of things. So go away, will you, and let me get back to sleep.’

  ‘Keep your shirt on,’ he said cheerfully. ‘As long as you’re going to get a guernsey, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘Jack, please piss off. I’m nearly dead.’

  ‘Davy?’

  ‘Oh dear God, what is it now?’

  ‘Listen, be sure and give me the drum if you hear anything at the office. You’d know about things before they get into the paper, wouldn’t you? I mean, about enlisting and that. I’d like to be in there and sign on the dotted line early, you know. So give me the drum, Davy, won’t you? And I’ll be in it like a rat up a rope. Well, both of us, eh? We could —’ I yawned and put the receiver down and cut him off and dropped my head back on the pillow.

  14

  The time of war began as sometimes a storm begins, with nervous little gusts and flurries of excitement rising and dying away, veering this way and that, dropping altogether into waiting gaps of brief calm: and indeed the very air in that opening fortnight of September seemed charged with something of the electrical apprehension that forbodes the tempest: and then all would fall still again, as it often does, deceptively, in advent of the fiercest hurricane, and the storm was still there pushing away behind the hills, waiting. And of course it was spring, and the wattle yellow along the Yarra, and the high air charged with restlessness anyway.

  This queer trenchant time, stimulating yet frustrating, eager yet balked in some way, had, in Australia, I think, an effect on people peculiar to the nature of their environment and to the odd quirking elements of their character – which were part of the same thing, of course – and the words that Gavin Turley had used months before, ‘And after all we are a long way away’, derived a different intonation from the long remove of our involvement.

  Parliament had met and we were, unanimously, in a declared state of war with Hitler’s Germany: as in the past there would be discipline and organization, but no compulsion – the Australian Expeditionary Force to fight overseas would follow the established tradition of being composed entirely of volunteers. The system had worked well enough for the Boer War and the First World War, and nobody would have had it any other way.

  Jack’s almost passionate response to the new situation was typical enough of many Australian young men at that time – he was roused very probably by the same pull which a quarter of a century earlier had taken Dad away, and Bert, and had made Mother leave her small children and go to France – yet he could not have made articulate the reason for his excited eagerness. It was not patriotism that lay behind it nor any particular political feeling. He was not drawn by causes – I doubt if he ever questioned the rights or the wrongs which were involved: others more qualified, the ‘brainy jokers’, had decided the justice of the decision (for justice, whether consciously or unconsciously, always did concern him): the pull, I am inclined to think, was almost mythic, and dictated by the land in which he lived.

  I have thought about this thing very often during the years of my expatriation, and I have concluded that there is the substance of myth in the very insistency with which this call towards the distant adventure is repeated to generation after generation of my countrymen. Myths do grow out of the eternal earth, this much is certain: and this Australian myth seems to derive from something primal, an earth-challenge. The continent is cruel and pitiless, four-fifths of it uninhabitable. The vast dry heart of the land is dead, and it is on this intractable central grimness that the teeth of adventure have long since been blunted. Here journeys have ended, the pioneering flame has guttered and failed, hopes and ambitions lie buried beneath the blowing sand. It is the one challenge from which the adventurous Australian has always had to retreat, back to the narrow, safer skin of his coastal holdings, and he has been forced to turn his back, because he must, on the invincible wilderness that lies behind him. So he has been obliged to look elsewhere for the great adventures, the necessary challenges to the flesh and spirit. This is why his wars must be fought for other causes than his own – and often for strange ones – and always in faraway places. He is, because the merciless quality of his own land dictates it to him, the soldier of far fortune. This is why his armies which are sent to these faraway places are always of volunteers, for there is never any lack of young men of eager spirit willing to respond to the far call. I have been with the armies of many races, but I have known no other soldier with such pure and passionate regard for the adventure in itself.

  Jack’s tragedy was that he was such a one. The myth was lodged and burning deep inside him.

  So there must have been for him in those jaunty jangled days of a September spring in Melbourne the charged atmosphere of a time that was opening to the promise of splendid adventure like a slow-blooming flower. The old women were out along Flinders Street with their baskets of spring blossom and sprigs of golden wattle, and the smell of brown boronia was in the streets, and men’s faces were eager over newspapers in trams, and the girls seemed prettier than one had ever realized, and vivacious, quick-tapping on their high spike heels, showing lots of leg that year, and London-tan and teal-blue were the colours, I remember, and the hair was worn in a page-boy and covered by a snood, so that the girls moved in the streets to the lively rhythm of those pretty coloured netted bags of hair lifting and falling, lifting and falling, as if to the measure of a conductor’s baton. And sometimes at a city intersection a tram-driver, exuberant in his cabin, would tintinnabulate in a mad, irresistible tattoo, a reveille, a tinny pibroch of the times.

  But it was an unresolved time, too, and slow in developing. One noticed that the flags were up, brave and bright in the equinoctial winds, but nothing was happening. We were in a state of war, and there was no war. An urgent patriotism would seem to flare up and then die in embarrassment. Hearts would kick with a queer compulsive excitement at the sight of some staff-car moving from Victoria Barracks with uniforms inside it and polished badges, but there was almost no khaki in the streets, and no posters that appealed for sacrifice, and no bands playing. At the far fringes of the world aeroplanes were dropping bombs inside the walls of old medieval cities, but they were dropping leaflets too, and even where buildings were falling in flame and rubble there was no way of grasping with any sense of belief the fact that death and captivity were also a part of war, because all the names were bizarre and unfamiliar, even unpronounceable, Warszawa and Lodz and Cracow and Grudziadz, and we were, after all, a long way away.

  Nobody stopped to consider that the other names that were familiar to every schoolboy, the names I had grown up with – Gaba Tepe and Gallipoli and Villers-Bretonneux and Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, even the earlier names of Mafeking and Spion Kop and Ladysmith – had once seemed just as alien and unreal. Familiarity with the words that were the fingerposts of wars had had to be learnt, that was the point, and would still have to be learnt, and blood was the only adhesive that might stick them into the native lexicon. It was too early then, in those impetuous, stalling Sept
ember days, to realize this, of course, for this was only the dawn of the distant adventure, and there were a hundred names for the later lexicon – Tobruk and Bardia and Kokoda and Merjiyun and El Alamein and Monastir Gap and all the others – that nobody had even heard of then …

  This state of uncertainty, as it went on, had no appeal at all to Jack. He grew nervous and impatient and angry, and never a day passed without his telephoning me. ‘Listen, Davy, haven’t you heard anything yet?’ he would say, bitterly aggrieved. ‘What the hell are they up to? Look, there’s a joker here in the factory, and he’s a pretty brainy bloke, he’s well up on these things, see, and he was saying only half an hour ago he reckons the bloody war will be over in six weeks! At the outside, he says! I mean it, it’ll be over before we’re even bloody in it!’

  I had little time to be concerned with Jack’s distress. Gavin Turley and I were frantically busy trying to explain it all, and we would be on duty fourteen, even sixteen hours at a stretch, monitoring the overseas radio broadcasts and churning out special articles of background and interpretation, half-buried in files from the morgue or reference books from the library. Mr Brewster had detached us from all other duties so that we might concentrate, in the words of his rather flamboyant memorandum, ‘on all aspects of the military situation, both at home and abroad’. Our two typewriters seemed to be endlessly chattering out hasty pieces to meet editions, and special editions were coming off the presses at all hours of the day and night – biographies of the German generals, comparative military strengths, assessments, speculations – what we called ‘situationers’ and ‘think-pieces’ – the significance of air power, of naval strength, of armour, whether the sinking of the Athenia would bring America in, the background of Poland with its absurd and baffling names …