One learned much in the bars, in fact, and I was able to sharpen many fine professional skills through my meetings with other correspondents, some of them the ones with the really big reputations, bigger reputations, in fact, than the generals they had wrote about and called by first names – the men of great standing who had written books and graduated beyond mere eyewitness demands and who sat in bars with the impassive majesty of Buddhas in temples, big and intimidating, buying highballs and signing chits, and sucking brains.
I met them and learned from them, and I met Prime Ministers and Presidents and great generals and admirals and statesmen and leaders, and I walked in the rain with Gandhi under a black umbrella, down to the white-robed hordes on the banks of the Jumna, and I met film-stars and the figures of popular excitement, and I met eager unstable women in flirtations and brief liaisons and quick hot affairs, and I met Helens everywhere …
It was queer about these Helens, these facsimile substitutes for my own wife, for in meeting them I began to realize how very pleasant she must be out there in faraway Australia for the bright and momentary company she would offer: and they kept occurring and recurring with me as my staging-posts to somewhere – at the garden bar of Maiden’s in Old Delhi or the Galle Face in Ceylon, in the smart street cafés along the bright curve swinging up Vittorio Veneto, at Groppi’s on Melika Farida, at the Savoy Bar in London – and they were the same women, really, as the ones I had met in the cocktail-bar of the Pierre on Fifth Avenue or at the Twenty-one or at the Statler in Washington. I drank with so many of them, and I laughed with them, and was refreshed by the undemanding vivacity of their companionship, and I saw how essentially these Helens were a part of war. I slept casually with a number of them, and always after I had done this I would go to one of the smart shops, or to a bazaar if it was in the East, and I would buy some special present to send to Helen – a length of silk or of brocade, ear-rings perhaps, or a bracelet of black silver …
Through all these experiences I could feel my own growth, a development, a new sophistication, so that the casual conquests were never difficult. I saw that the very singularity of the uniform and the badges did give a special sort of glamour (it was a word much in use at that time), the very fact of separateness, of not belonging to the unified structure of things, a kind of adventuring and different individuality. But this isolation from the corps, the organized unit, the cohesive groupings of war, created periods of oppressive loneliness, too – of birthdays and anniversaries and carnival moments uncelebrated in impersonal hotel rooms in friendless places, of dull waitings on alien airfields, of sad and solitary debauches in strange bars – and there were many times when I thought this romantic world-wandering life was in some way very like those lonely Sundays of my early youth when, solitary and unsure, I would wander around the Melbourne wharves, searching for the bright little fragments of beauty and of colour, and I imagine this must have been the mood that was on me on that afternoon when I landed on Capodochino airfield, coming in from Bari, with a black storm boiling over Vesuvius, and it was too late to get on to Rome and the tempest, anyway, was raging all the way along the Apennines, and so they quartered me for the night in the transient billets, which were at Caserta, in the palace of the old Kings of Naples, and they gave me a splendid room with marble walls and a marble floor which was ice-cold as a tomb.
I stayed there only that one night, frozen and sleepless, and so I remembered it only sketchily. The room was very much in the grand manner of the Bourbon Baroque, and it was sixty-eight feet long and thirty-six feet wide – I paced it out as a way of keeping warm – and the ceiling was wholly and floridly frescoed with Tritons and Dryads and allegorical figures in golden breastplates and plumed helmets, and there was a bad lithograph on one wall of some obscure Neapolitan saint, half out of its frame and with the glass broken, and some earlier lonely transient had drawn moustaches on the saint’s face, and a huge and magnificent mirror of ormolu above an ornate mantelpiece, and nothing else except a creaking camp stretcher with one grey army blanket.
I spent the night in my greatcoat smoking cigarettes through chattering teeth, and it was perhaps the very absurdity of my opulent discomfort that turned my thoughts away from the physical state of my loneliness and misery, and into my mind crept that more poignant and still indefinable sense of loss which more and more frequently was beginning to assail me in the solitude of these foreign places. And it occurred to me again how strange it was that in all my travellings, in all the mélange of races and places that had come to be the new reality of my own experience, I almost never encountered my own countrymen any longer. For them the far adventure was over: they had all gone back and they were fighting from their own land now through the tangled pattern of the islands.
I sat huddled on the edge of the camp stretcher with the army blanket wrapped around the greatcoat and thought about this. I knew that on the following day I would be in Rome, and that the New Zealanders, at any rate, would be there: but they were not the same, any more than their hats were the same, because theirs were the flat-brimmed, three-dented hats of a lifetime before – the hats that Stubby and Aleck had worn for snapshots on the front lawn – and I thought of the bush-hats the British had worn in Burma and they were not the same either, nor the hats of the Gurkhas with their pleated puggarees – and suddenly I resented other people wearing hats like that! And the very curious thing is that I believe this is the precise moment – in this quick, unreasonable, ridiculous little flare of prejudiced nationalism – when I began to expatriate myself.
It was an awakening feeling much stronger than the mere fact that during my travels I had seen many places which had made me make the mental note that one day I would have to come back and examine them again, and more closely, and in different circumstances. (It is significant, I think, that I never visualized myself as coming back in the company of Helen.) It is not just curiosity that makes an expatriate, there must also be something that happens in the very soul of him. Gradually I began to sense that already, and deliberately, I had begun proceedings of divorcement from my country and my people, and it was at this point that I got up and walked down the room to the huge baroque mirror at the far end, and the glass had the same cloudy, muddy opacity of the mirror in Gavin Turley’s house, and I stared very intently at the indistinct reflection that looked back at me through the clouded darkness and the pin-spots of time. I saw change in it at once. I saw it as older than I had realized, and becoming a little world-weary, and a shade too cynical around the deep-set eyes, and then I looked closer and I realized that it was not at all the same face as those other faces under the broad-brimmed hats … not the same, for instance, as my brother Jack’s face. A difference had grown into it, or developed out of it. I turned my head this way and that, studying it, and suddenly I realized that there was a sort of calculation in it, that this was a face watching for opportunities, that what was lacking in it was the truth those other faces had for the passionate regard for the adventure in itself, and I knew then that I was not quite one of them, that I never had been, and that I never would be. Yet I went back to the camp stretcher still wondering why this had come about …
I went north to Rome next day, and up to the Hotel de la Ville, on the via Sistina, where the war correspondents stayed – no heating and frigid marble again! – and mail was waiting there for me, and among it a letter from Jack scrawled over with three different re-addressings.
This was only the third letter Jack had ever written to me, and it was the last. He has never written to me in all the years I have been away – although Sheila always keeps in touch – and perhaps he felt afterwards that there was never really anything more to say. I thought at the time that it was the saddest letter I had ever received, and I think in some ways it still is.
I went into the bar to read it, because it was a little warmer there, and I ordered a double brandy and sat beneath the coloured bottles.
Along the bar from me a very distinguished war corresponden
t, grossly fat and unfit-looking in his dark officer’s blouse, was closely questioning a New Zealand infantry lieutenant about the street-fighting in Florence and making notes on a paper table-napkin. He kept saying, ‘Yup, that’s swell. Keep filling me in, boy.’ There was a blind-eyed marble bust of the Emperor Hadrian on a pedestal just beyond his shoulder. I opened Jack’s letter first, and began to read:
Dear David,
This APO number thing seems a very funny address they have given me, but I take up my pen to write hoping it will find you in due course. After all the great trouble you went to on my behalf I am terribly sorry to have to inform you that circumstances seem to have been against me once again, so I did not get overseas in the end, and I am now back in Melbourne. What happened was that a command-car I was taking up from Larrimah rolled over in the mulga and the old leg went on me again. They flew me back here to hospital (not the old one but a new one at Heidelberg which is very swanky!!!) and when I was discharged they scrubbed me finally for any active service. I have now faced up quite realistically to the situation (at last!!!) and anyway I did have a good few months up there in the Territory and loved every minute of it and would give anything to get back there when the war is over. There is some talk now that it might be declared as an area for the 1939–43 medal, so I might even get one ribbon to pin on the old chest and that will be something, anyway.
‘Yup, that’s dandy!’ the war correspondent was saying, ‘but what was this Texas outfit doing outside the mine tapes? Let’s get the picture right, then we can peg the detail. Just keep filling me in, boy.’
I am a staff-sergeant now and I have been transferred to the Pay Corps, which is just about the softest job you ever saw, and Sheila likes it of course because she has me home every night, and I don’t mind it all that much myself although we are in the same building where Bert drives the lift and that is sometimes a bit hard to take.
‘It’s very difficult,’ the New Zealand lieutenant was explaining. ‘I mean in all that rubble, with the fronts of the buildings demolished across the streets, and the taping of the minefields was very rough, you know … well, half the time I wouldn’t know what the next platoon was doing. Thanks, yes, a very short one … lots of soda …’ The correspondent poured from the black Haig and Haig bottle, and he sat there on the high bar stool like some great tarantula, and the white sightless eyes of Hadrian stared right through him.
However as long as one of us is over there in the thick of it I have no complaints, and I must say that it is with very great pride that we read about all your adventures. You certainly are getting around!!! Sheila says we should have a big map of The World up in the kitchen with those coloured pins to mark your progress. We never know where you will turn up next!!!
I have left the most important item of news until now. Sheila had another baby and this time it was a BOY. His name is Jack of course!!!! I am naturally tickled pink. Sheila and I have always had an understanding that she can have the three girls for the Pope, but the boy is mine. I mean I would like to bring him up in my own way. Since he came along I have been giving a lot of thought to these matters, and I have come to the conclusion that education is the main thing. As you are aware, we did not have very much of a chance ourselves in this respect, and that is why I would like to say here and now how much I have admired the way you have battled it out for yourself and risen to the position you occupy to-day. I remember how I used to poke fun at you always stuck in that room with your books and those ‘sonky mates’ of yours, and never going out, but I must admit that events have certainly proved you right. In fact nothing would please me more than if my nipper Jack turned out as good a man, and as brainy a one, as his Uncle Davy. Sheila is in complete agreement with this statement, but then you have always been very popular in that quarter.
I put the letter down and asked for another brandy, and I found myself desperately wanting something to intervene between me and Jack’s letter and between me and the fat war correspondent with his thirsty, sucking eyes, and the exhausted battle-wearied face of the New Zealand lieutenant, and the war correspondent was saying, ‘Yup, well just keep filling me in, boy. I can work it out,’ so I went back to reading Jack’s letter because there was nothing else I could do.
On the physical side, of course, I am confident that I can handle him OK. He looks pretty good material to me, and has a nice promising reach and a quick look about him. I would not want him to take after you in this respect!!! You were never much of a one in a scrap, were you? A good southpaw can sometimes be tricky, but a bad southpaw like you is an offence to the Noble Art and is always just asking for trouble. Still, in your case brains have proved more than brawn, haven’t they? Which is the main thing.
We are all well here, and as proud of you as all get out, and we sincerely trust we will all be safely and happily reunited when this other business is over, so I will close now on this note with much love from all of us back here in old Aussie.
I remain,
Your most affectionate bro.
Jack Meredith, Sr!!!
There was a postscript added after that mad neat copperplate signature:
P.S. We dropped in at home last week-end and Dad, who as you know is back in the colours, and a lance-corporal now!!! gave me a message for you. His VDC squad was being given small-arms training some little time back by a girl NCO from the AWAS who apparently knows you. I wrote the name down. Bombardier Morley. She asked Dad to pass on her very best regards to you if someone was writing. I nearly split my sides laughing at the thought of the Old Man being trained in small-arms by a girl soldier. How are the mighty fallen, eh!!!
The war correspondent said, ‘Yup, boy, now we’re really getting somewhere,’ and the New Zealander pensively stirred the soda with a swizzle-stick and I stared straight at the marble eyeballs of the Emperor Hadrian and I thought of the greenest eyes I had ever seen. Bombardier Morley now. Tristram Shandy was getting on in the world …
17
I did not see Cressida Morley until a little time after the fall of Mandalay. Once Fort Dufferin had been taken I flew from Burma to India then up to Assam and across to China, and a recurrence of malaria laid me up for a few days in Chungking, and there seemed to be nothing much doing anywhere, so I cabled Mr Brewster asking permission to return to Melbourne for a short leave. He agreed, so then there was the wearisome series of flights back, from Chungking to Kunming to Assam to Calcutta and down to Ceylon, and then across the Indian Ocean to Exmouth Gulf, and the whole width of Australia, and one saw how far away it really was, and I think I must have been very tired and dispirited by the time I got back home.
I remember being shocked and startled by the changes which I felt had taken place in my absence, although had I paused to look I would have seen much the same things going on everywhere else, and anyway I had not taken into account the changes in myself. The Germans had been defeated and the Japanese beaten back almost to their own islands, and there was this distinct feeling of the war drawing to its close, and the feeling seemed to hold all the city in its grip, as heavy in its portent as the autumnal weather. It was as if all the people had sensed this and were uneasily conscious of the imminence of other problems which soon would have to be faced, and very often these were deeply personal problems which they kept stalling at, as if they wanted more time in which to think about them. The air of excitement and jubilation in victories and the satisfaction of achievement was there too, of course, but the underlying feeling, the true spirit of the times, as it were, was not like this at all. It is a curious reflection on human attitudes that man moves from peace into war in a state of buoyancy and exhilaration, and from war back to peace with a melancholic and fearful anxiety. Perhaps too much had intervened, in time and events and change …
For it was not only the physical things that arrested one’s attention, like people having to share taxi-cabs, or that rackets had flourished and manners deteriorated, or that shiploads of ‘GI Brides’ were leaving for the States, or that
one had to buy queer-smelling South African cigarettes, or that there was a slightly frenzied edge to the hilarities, or that the slang in common usage was almost more American than Australian, or that a whole pattern of new caste-snobberies – and animosities – seemed to have been built around military exploits which had once been sufficient in themselves.
The city to my vision seemed to be gripped in an atmosphere that was tense and quick and brittle, not quite panicky but feverish in away, and I detected a kind of rapaciousness almost everywhere, as if people wanted to squeeze out the last of the juices before it was too late. They seemed nervous and in some way unsatisfied, as if a sixth sense was warning them that their own values were being melted away in the climate of victory. I came back to my own city with a sharp consciousness of things splintering and breaking and falling to the ground.
Probably I read much of my own personal dilemma into the general situation. Even though I knew I would have to go back to it, for Mr Brewster had allowed me only one week, I was quite certain that the war was hurtling inexorably towards conclusion. (Within less than six months of that visit I had walked the ghastly fused earth of Hiroshima, and in Tokyo Bay I had stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri and watched the Japanese bow before MacArthur and sign unconditional surrender.) And I knew that the time was drawing ever closer when I would no longer be able to push my own problems aside.
My Brother Jack Page 39
