My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  Towards the end of February I got a letter from my brother Jack:

  Dear David,

  I am dropping you a line from Civvie Street just to let you know how all of us down here keep thinking of you in these difficult times. We read everything you write in the paper, and it seems you must be going through a pretty rough time up there. Sheil’ burns a couple of candles for you every week at Saint Teresa’s. (I don’t know what good that’s going to do you!!!) I just keep my fingers crossed and we all hope the Japs don’t come down from Rabaul to have a bash at the place. I would give almost anything to be in it up there with you, but the trouble is my last medical board turned out pretty rotten for me and they say that for the moment I have been classified as unfit for overseas service. However, I have got two officers pulling some strings and I am confident that all will be well. Anyway it looks as if the thing will be going on a good long while yet, thanks to our little friend Tojo, so while there’s life there’s hope and I keep up the old exercises like mad.

  On the family front, you will be interested to know Bert is back in the Army again, driving a lift in a new building they have taken over for part of LHQ, with that old leg of his pinned up. Dad is trying to wangle himself into the VDC, that’s this Home Guard thing they have started, and he might pull it off. Mum’s Red Cross auxiliary has got so big they have moved into a church hall. Jean drives a staff-car for some brass-hats down at the Barracks. Marj has got herself engaged to a Navy chap in one of the corvettes, the Bendigo, I think. He seems a quiet decent sort of a chap. Reading back on this makes it sound as if I am the only drongo in the family, doesn’t it?

  Incidentally, I just stopped Mum in time. She was sending some of those blessed balaclavas up to you and I told her you were practically sitting on the equator and she said yes, but it must get cold at night. Isn’t she a real old card?

  Sheil’ is well, and the kids. We don’t see much of Helen, but you would hear from her anyway. Well I believe that is about all the news as it leaves me at present. You take care of yourself. We are all very proud of you being up there in the front line of things. Even Dad does a bit of a skite about you every so often. So keep smiling, nipper. We are all with you in spirit, and I myself would give anything to be with you in the flesh too. We all send our love.

  I remain,

  Your affectionate bro.,

  Jack

  The letter had come in the dusk plane from Townsville, and after I had read it I went out into the little clearing between the huts and tents. The moon was up above the squat hills on the far side of the Seven-mile Airfield, a full moon, the bombers’ moon, and there was a still, silvered, waiting look about everything, and even as I stood there I heard from the listening-post on the airfield the three repeated rifle shots which was the air-raid alarm because we had no sirens at that time.

  The shots were taken up from hill to hill and through the scatter of the camp areas, and when the echoes of all these fusillades had died away I could hear the high faint whiningly uneven drone of the Mitsubishis coming closer above Laloki Gorge, and then the searchlights were cutting blue-white channels in the dark sky, stretched right out up towards the sound, arcing, swaying, searching, probing, meeting and parting, meeting again, locked at last on a moving silver glitter like a single trapped insect. Then other searchlights came in, and the glitter became a triangle and then a diamond, a cheap bauble of costume jewellery, of marcasite, pinned to the purple velvet of the sky, and ruddy hard flashes were shuddering along the hills as the 4.7 Militia batteries opened up, and rubies pricked the sky sharply around the high inexorably moving lozenge lodged in the holding beams of light. There were other dronings coming in from the reef and over the stilt-village of Hanuabada, and from the west too. It was to be a big raid. Behind me I could hear the boots pounding in the huts and the clink of steel helmets, and dark figures were scurrying everywhere in the scrub, running for the slit-trenches.

  I had Jack’s letter crumpled in my hand, and for some reason I didn’t want to go back for my own steel helmet, and I didn’t want to run for the shelter of the trenches, and I just wanted to stand there watching it all for the great and terrible beauty that was in it: because I wanted Jack to be there in my place, not from cowardice this time, but because I felt he had earned the right to it and I had not, and I found myself wishing suddenly that a younger brother could claim an older brother.

  The dronings had become a roar now, throbbing and terrifying, and the salvoes of the batteries were slapping at the air, and I heard the thin tight whistle of the falling bombs, and I was running, falling, crawling, pressing my face against the earth and the twigs and the soft damp leaves, and some dry scaly insect scrabbled against my mouth then burrowed away.

  16

  I stayed in New Guinea, on and off, for about a year longer, evading or avoiding when I could, getting back to the comforting fleshpots of Townsville or Brisbane whenever the chance offered. (Correspondents’ dispatches then were always datelined ‘Somewhere in the South-west Pacific’, so nobody could be really sure where you were writing from, and I know of many a jungle skirmish that was covered vividly from the bar of Lennon’s Hotel, in Brisbane, nearly two thousand miles away!)

  It was a pretty savage year of war for the fighting men, though. The veterans of the Expeditionary Force came back from North Africa – those who were still alive and not in prison camps – and they changed their uniforms from desert-khaki to jungle-green and were thrown almost at once into the tangled rain-forest of tropical, mountainous New Guinea to try and halt the Japanese advance towards Port Moresby. Air support did come eventually. The Americans sent squadrons of Kittyhawks, and when they were wiped out they sent squadrons of Marauders, and when they were wiped out they sent squadrons of Lightnings, and they sent Flying Fortresses and Liberators and Mitchells, and although there were a lot of Americans and Australians who were dead at the end of it, the Japanese were finally beaten in the air.

  And Guadalcanal was fought and the Battle of the Coral Sea and the bitter, brutal campaign of the Kokoda Trail, and the beaches were swept clean at Buna and Gona, and retreat became victory and for the first time the Japanese were being beaten back and back and back. It was a costly and merciless war in that jungle-fighting year, but victory did come out of it – and so did a greatly enhanced reputation for David Meredith.

  From the hindsight of a much wider experience I suppose now I would classify that David Meredith of the New Guinea days as middling honest, as war correspondents go, and perhaps no more cowardly than a good many others – there were really brave ones too, of course – and perhaps there are extenuating circumstances in this curiously isolated role which the unarmed, noncombatant, untrained reporter has in war. He is, after all, a free agent: he is under no direct orders, he may come and go more or less as he chooses, pick his own vantage-points, decide the measure of his involvements. I have wondered sometimes since if all soldiers, however gallant, would remain in their positions, fighting back, if the choice to be there or not to be was in their own hands …

  At any rate, I looked after myself as carefully as I could, and if there were unavoidable little periods of direct involvement I sedulously tried to observe Mr Brewster’s instruction, and I stayed alive. I never walked the Kokoda Trail, although I did walk some of it: I saw something of the fighting at Buna and Gona, but my visits there were short. In a sense these were no more than the necessary skirmishes made to pick up the vibrant colour, the human textures, that would be woven into the more detailed and more comprehensive pictures of the struggle which could only be done competently – or so I was able to convince myself – from some base headquarters far behind the fighting front. I remember that once Gavin Turley’s words recurred to me: ‘You will wonder how you will pillage it and what trophies you will find …’ Well, I raided my little settlements and by the time I returned from New Guinea my reputation stood higher than ever before. My dispatches were admired, syndicated, published abroad. If you are given the privi
lege of having your name in the papers every day, and on your own terms, deception and self-aggrandizement are easy arts to practise.

  Coming south through the cities again was a strange experience. So much had changed in that time I had been away. One saw women in uniform everywhere, and Americans in their thousands, and one could pick the men back from New Guinea by the atebrin-yellow of their complexions, and the taxi-drivers had grown ruder and more unscrupulous and shopkeepers greedier, and black markets were booming everywhere, and yet the very air was alive and vibrant and charged with presage. It was not the same as the atmosphere of 1939, for it seemed to me that there was some sense of innocence lacking, and yet there was another dynamic element in it of success and accomplishment, and a rapidity about everything that had not been there before, as if the coming of the Americans had somehow quickened the tempo of life.

  Mr Brewster had arranged certain engagements for me before my return – guest speaker at a Rotary Club luncheon, an important dinner at the Constitutional Club, a meeting with Legacy, some morale-building lectures to home defence units organized by the Army Education Service.

  Helen, as might have been expected, had a party to celebrate my return, at which I had distinction now, even among her officer friends, most of whom were of an older group than before, and of higher rank. There were quite a few Americans among them, most of them Air Force although one was a colonel of Marines.

  I noticed that she smoked only American cigarettes now, and there was a good deal of American idiom in her speech, and this made me wonder a little because in the letters which she had sent me every week during my absence – always affectionate and sometimes even tender – she had never mentioned having American friends. The party was lavish, with lots of bourbon and rye and Scotch, and it occurred to me that Helen had probably suffered very little from the rationing and the war-time austerities because her officer friends would have been generous to her, and I remember that Sandra Solomons was brought to the party by an American lieutenant-colonel from MacArthur’s staff, and she was not brought from the house opposite us but from a flat in St Kilda Road. Wally was away in North Queensland somewhere, and I was only in Melbourne for a week and I never found out whether they were divorced or had separated or what. Much later, when the war was over, other people were living in the house across from us in Beverley Grove. And I don’t think I ever did bother to ask Helen what had happened.

  On the following day I took Jack and Sheila to lunch at The Australia.

  Sheila was as pretty as ever, and neat in her ‘best black’, and again a little older, and there was some look about her that made me suspect she might be pregnant. It was Jack who had really changed, though. He no longer looked young, that was the first thing I noticed, and there was a sort of shamed, almost furtive look in his eyes, and lines around them that had not been there before. He wore sergeant’s chevrons on his tunic now, but I noticed he had taken off his overseas colour-patches. He had given up rolling his own cigarettes and he chain-smoked full-strength Capstans from the brown packets, and he smoked them very quickly and nervously, almost tugging at them. We were not done with the hors-d’oeuvres when I began to understand the rage of desperation that possessed him.

  ‘Now listen, Davy,’ he said, leaning across the table at me, keeping his voice low and taut, ‘this time you’ve got to do something, sport. By Christ you have! You can pull some strings, you know you can!’ He was suddenly aggressive and accusing, and Sheila looked nervously from his face to mine and moved her hand across as if to pacify him, but he shook his head quickly, without looking at her, still fixing me with stern, blaming eyes, and said, ‘No, I’m going to say it. Been bottling it up too bloody long as it is. Davy, you could have done something that last time I asked, you know you could, and I don’t think you did, did you? I could have got away to New Guinea if you’d only tried for me. You were up there, for Christ’s sake, you must have seen some of the drongos, the Chockos, they did send, that time when the Japs were pushin’ through. You know —’

  ‘Jack, I did what I could!’ I protested. ‘But it isn’t for me to decide who —’

  ‘You can’t say I haven’t tried to get away, can you?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Do you bloody well realize what my VX number is? Jesus, I was there on the first day, wasn’t I? And I’ve sat here on my arse in Melbourne ever since! Three whole bloody years! Do you know how many days there are in three years? One thousand and ninety-bloody-six! … I’ve counted them and there was a Leap Year in that and I’ve counted that one in too! And what do you think I felt like down here during that Owen Stanley thing? … shovin’ off the stuff for them – Owen guns and Sten guns and Brens and bloody ammunition and mortars and shells and things! And look where they’ve been while I’ve been sitting on my backside down here wrappin’ up parcels like some flamin’ counter-jumper in the haberdashery at Myer’s! They’ve been all over bloody New Guinea and they’ve been to Syria and Greece and Crete and Abyssinia and Malaya and Java and Timor, and El Alamein and Bardia and Derna and Benghazi and Tobruk! Jesus Christ, Davy, a little squirt like Dud Bennett got himself killed at Tobruk, didn’t he? While I sit here on my arse for three flamin’ years —’

  His voice had risen in his passion and he stopped suddenly, flushed and aware that the waiters and the people at the other tables were turning and looking. ‘Excuse me,’ he mumbled awkwardly, and pushed his chair back, and rose. His face was crimson and there was a nerve twitching in his cheek. ‘I got to go and splash the boots,’ he said. ‘Be back in a jiff.’

  I watched him go through the tables, tall and loose-moving in his khaki uniform, and then I turned and I saw Sheila, with the tears pouring down her cheeks, not even trying to hide them, and her fingers trembling on a wadded handkerchief.

  ‘In all my life I’ve only loved this man,’ she sobbed in a choking whisper, ‘and I can’t bear it, Davy! I can’t bear to see him ashamed! Jack! Jack of all men to be ashamed! You have to try for him, Davy! You have to!’

  ‘But, Sheila, I —’

  ‘You must, Davy!’ she insisted. ‘This time you’ve got to try for him. He … I think he’ll go mad if you don’t.’

  I realized that for once Sheila could not manage, and perhaps that was the most heartbreaking thing of all …

  The thought of Jack haunted me for the rest of the afternoon, and a curious little coincidence occurred to sharpen it all up, because I was committed to one of the Army Education lectures which Mr Brewster had arranged, and the staff-car came and I was driven to an anti-aircraft training camp, and it was on the golf links where Jack and I had played as children, and the actual gun-site was located around that very mound where the two of us had once pretended to be Everest mountaineers.

  The top of the mound had been scooped out and sand-bagged to make instrument pits, and arced around were the four big gun-pits with the lean long graceful 3.7 barrels nosing up, and beyond that was barbed wire and outside the wire were green level patches where some late-afternoon golfers were playing. From the instrument pits cement steps led down through sandbags to the plotting room, a strange science-fiction cave buried deep in that unimpressive little knoll whose rough skin of onion-grass and dandelions had never betrayed even the smallest hint of its future to the two small boys who had rolled and climbed on it so many years before.

  The funny thing was that the unit was composed largely of women, the AWAS, who were taking over home defences at that time so that the men could move up to the forward areas, and this was the first chance I had had to really look at them, and I remember being amused at the way they deliberately copied the loose, lounging look of Australian soldiers, and at their stained overalls and casual battle-blouses, and at the obvious suspicion with which they, as gunners, regarded me. After I had given my talk the battery commander took me on a tour of inspection.

  He was a lieutenant, only lately promoted from WO, not quite young, with a long pale sheep’s face and fair woolly hair like unscoured merino clippings, and mour
nful yellow eyes. There was a shamefaced, diffident air about him. I could not decide whether he really did want to get away to the war – he kept telling me this – and accordingly resented the job of having to train these women, or whether he just thought there might be something disgraceful to be discovered if he didn’t keep his distinguished visitor on the move.

  At any rate, he kept talking quickly and nervously as he walked me around, and then we came to Number 3 gun-pit and surprised five girls cleaning ammunition, and I said to the lieutenant, ‘Well, it’s nice to see that a woman’s place is still with a duster in her hands!’ but even as I spoke I was conscious of a pair of marsh-green eyes, cloudy and a little scornful, and of a grubby hand pushing a book surreptitiously between the grass and the sandbags, and I knew that the lieutenant was just as aware of the eyes as I was, and more nervous than ever in case his awareness should be detected. I suspect, anyway, that this prompted him to seize upon the excuse of an old DC3 coming in from the east towards Laverton to insist upon a mock ‘action’ for my benefit.

  The alarms shrieked and men and girls came scrambling from everywhere, and the girl with the green eyes grabbed a tin hat from the sandbags and legged it out of the gun-pit and up the rise to the instruments, and I reached over and took the book out from behind the sandbags to see what it was. Tristram Shandy. I put it back in its hiding place and followed the lieutenant to the top of the mound.

  It was a good, efficient demonstration as demonstrations go, although it was very odd to hear the clear young girl voices calling the old familiar action cries that I had heard in quite different circumstances. On target! … height-finder on target … a lapse, a frantic traversing of the predictor, the telescopes elevating, the lean gun-barrels following the predictor telescopes, swinging ahead of the lumbering DC3, the triumphant yells: On target … predictor on target! … Fire! And I saw that the sheep-faced lieutenant could not keep his eyes off the girl on the Number One telescope and that her bottom was fairly jiggling. Tristram Shandy, I thought, and suddenly I wanted to laugh out loud.