They were going past now in the rhythmic thunder of the boots, with the clip of metal in the sound, beating through the roar of cheering, and they marched, not like Guardsmen, but in their big loose straight easy way, the hard brown faces under the tipped-up hats, lean faces with the chin-straps taut and shining on the harsh slanting planes, and the strong brown downy legs above the socks and the white gaiters, the men of the far adventure, the soldiers of far fortune. And the anguish inside me had twisted and turned into an awful and irremediable sense of loss, and I thought of Dad and the putteed men coming off the Ceramic, and I thought of Jack when I had seen him at Puckapunyal five long years before, looking just like these men, hard and strong and confident and with his brown legs planted in the Seymour dust as if the whole world was his to conquer, a man fulfilled in his own rightness, and suddenly and terribly I knew that all the Jacks were marching past me, all the Jacks were still marching …
I have no idea how much time passed before I turned to him and said, ‘Do you want to see the rest of it?’ and he looked at me for a moment and said, ‘Oh, no, not if you don’t want to.
I mean, well … these shows do turn me up a bit, you know … I thought you’d like to see them, that’s all.’
‘I’ve had enough, I think,’ I said. ‘Let’s push through.’
‘Righto. We could go up to the Royal Empire and have a grog. Some of the boys are bound to be up there.’
I turned, and behind me they were still marching and marching and marching, and as we shouldered our way out through the press of people I heard someone say, ‘Psst! Look. A war correspondent!’ and we went down to Exhibition Street to get out of the crowd, and the parade had emptied out the whole street and as we turned up to the north through a flurrying shower of rain I noticed for the very first time that Jack walked with a slight limp. The realization made me study him more closely and I saw that he no longer held himself quite so straight and there was a hint of heaviness around his hips, so that I looked leaner than he did and two inches taller. He seemed older and different somehow and there was a plain LHQ colour-patch on his sleeve above the crown and the chevrons, and he walked with a limp and the screw turned tighter as I realized that he had given up …
‘They looked good though, didn’t they?’ he said. ‘They looked bloody fit.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I don’t go for these parades much, as you can imagine, but they do march well, don’t they?’ I just nodded. They were still marching, marching inside my brain, marching through my whole life. Jack said, ‘I’m glad we cut out of it early, though. I told the boys in my Pay Corps section I’d try to get you up for a beer or two. They’re all dead keen on meeting you.’ A heavier squall of rain flurried across the street and then it stopped quite suddenly and the surface of the asphalt turned pale and cloudy like a drying slate.
There were seven or eight of them already there, waiting in the bar. They were all in uniform, but not impressively so: there was a rather timid, quiet, unsoldierly look about them in spite of the khaki and the slouch hats, and two of them wore spectacles.
‘Well, here he is,’ Jack said with a flourish. ‘Told you I’d bring him, didn’t I? This is my brother Davy; these are the jokers from the section I was telling you about. This is Bill here, and Steve, Harry, and Tom over there, this fat bastard’s Alfie …’ He made the introductions like an entrepreneur presenting his great celebrity, and they shook hands one by one almost with the deference the head waiter had displayed, and then there was an eager rush among them to be the first to buy me a drink, and it was a young pimply-faced lance-corporal who won the honour and he handed me the glass, and said, ‘Did you have a look at the march, sir?’ And Jack said, ‘Eh, chop that! You don’t have to pull that sir stuff, Sid! He’s only a civvie, you know.’ But Jack said it with an immeasurable pride, and there was a good-natured, understanding burst of laughter … and the screw began to twist tighter. ‘He gets about, yeah,’ said Jack, ‘but he’s still only a civvie, after all … I mean he hasn’t got the burden of the war effort on his broad shoulders like us bunch of old-and-bolds.’ Again they all laughed, and each one of them seemed anxious to catch my eyes and be the one to be laughing with me, but at the same time this made them seem more at ease with me and they became almost excessively friendly, and none of them would even hear of it that I should pay for a drink, and Jack was standing back with a pot in his hand, pleased as Punch and beaming with pride, and then he fixed his attention on a thin and sallow private at the far end of the bar and said, ‘Well, go on, don’t be a bloody drongo! He won’t bite you! Go on, Tom, hand it over, he’ll be tickled pink.’ And Tom rather shyly took up a newspaper-wrapped package from the bar counter and unfolded it and took out a book, and there was a photograph of me on the back of the dust jacket looking rather intrepid in front of a Burmese temple, and Jack said, ‘Old Tom’s the great fan of yours, and when he knew you were coming he bought a copy of that last book you wrote, and he thought you might write some … well, you know, some affectionate epistle in the front of it. For crying out loud, pass it over to him, Tom! I mean, it was you who bought the flamin’ book! He makes a bob or two out of you, doesn’t he?’
Tom handed me the book, and three other men were offering me pens, and Tom said very respectfully, ‘I’ve started it already, Mr Meredith, and I like it very much. I read everything you write in the papers, I have for years … Jack’s right, you know, I am a bit of a fan, and … well, you know I’ll treasure this book now … I mean, having met you in the flesh and all that …’
‘Christ!’ I said to myself, ‘when is the pain going to stop?’
But I stayed on with them because I couldn’t let Jack down now, and others came in, wet from the rain, and had to be introduced, and someone went off with a message and that brought Bert down on his crutches with his leg pinned up, and he told me with a grin that he’d put the out of order sign on the lift, and he had two quick schooners before he had to go back, and every now and then Jack would say, ‘Go on, Davy, tell the boys about some of your adventures over there … you know, this is an opportunity for them, isn’t it? … I mean, getting it straight from the horse’s mouth … tell ’em about Churchill, or that hurricane you were in. Fair dinkum, he’s got a thousand bloody stories, this young brother of mine,’ he said to them. ‘No, I’ve got it, Davy – tell ’em about that time you broke the jeep record for the Burma Road – he did, you know, you bastards, it’s true! … he had a date with some Chinese sheila who stood him up. Go on, tell ’em that, Davy. It’s a bloody good story.’ There he was in the haze of cigarette smoke, the genial entrepreneur, managing his famed celebrity, his eyes shining, wrapped in the delight of his own inexhaustible pride, and the slouch hat was nonchalantly tilted back on the broad freckled brow and there was the same thin fair receding hair and I saw suddenly how exactly he looked as Dad had looked on that day the Ceramic came back, and I seemed to be drowning in a chaos of disordered time, because even the smells were the same, damp serge and tobacco and beer, and there were explosions of laughter, and the strong brown boots were still beating and beating through my brain, and suddenly I knew with the last final excruciating turn of the screw that I had become surrogate for my own brother. He had given up, and he limped, and he had invested all his brave pride and passion and purpose in me; I had become his vicarious adventure. I was his brother Davy!
I stared around at the slightly rumpled uniforms, the lounging unsmartness, the unsoldierliness of them all, the spectacles, the not-quite-fitness, the Pay Corps … at the respect and admiration in their eyes for me … at the expansive good humour of the entrepreneur who had scored a bull’s-eye. And they were all triers, and I had never really tried, not in five whole years … I had only grabbed at the opportunity whenever I saw it …
‘Listen, Davy,’ Jack was saying eagerly, ‘when we break it up here what about coming up to our place, and we can soldier on a bit up there? It’s just half a block around the corner. I mean some
of the other jokers can’t get off duty, and they’d like to meet you too. I mean, we’ve got a place there … well, it’s not a mess exactly, but it’s a nice big room and we’ve got a wet canteen and there’s a piano. We could have a bit of a sing-song.’ The others were nodding and smiling their eagerness for me to accept.
‘The trouble is, Jack, I have a date at six,’ I said regretfully.
‘I have to meet someone at The Australia.’
‘Ar, that’s bad luck. Well …’
I hesitated. ‘Afterwards perhaps?’ I suggested. ‘I mean, how late do you go on?’
‘Well, not too late. I mean, most of us are family men, you see … and, you know, there’s wives and kids. But we could stay on, of course … I mean we’d hang on if we knew you would be coming …’
‘I’ll try and make it if I can,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how tied up I’ll be though. It’s my last night, you see. So you mustn’t wait on my account … I mean I will try, but I just can’t promise …’
I was more than ten minutes late in getting to The Australia because I stayed on with Jack and the Pay Corps men until closing time, and I half-thought she might not be there, and a little flurry of panic made me take the steps two at a time. But she was there, sitting on the curved leather lounge, polished shoes demurely together and gloved hands resting on a brief-case, and she seemed quite unaware of the nine wolves in various Allied uniforms who were circling her with intent.
As I walked towards her through the crowded foyer I was a tangle of violent emotions – it was my day for violent emotions! and if some were unlike anything I had ever experienced before and therefore not to be recognized, it must have been because I had never been in love before. In the confused whirl of these feelings there was wonder, and terror, and something magical, and there was certainty and uncertainty, and most of all a sense of hurtling willy-nilly into something so extraordinary, so risky, and so filled with a potential of pain for me that for an impulsive instant I wanted to turn around and run for my life.
But she had seen me and was rising to meet me, in the well-tailored uniform and the felt hat with the rising-sun badge set square on the broad brow, and with that smile already touching the wide corners of her mouth, and she might laugh in a moment, I thought, from the sheerest pleasure in herself and in David Meredith coming towards her across the foyer in a war correspondent’s uniform, and I remember thinking then that there was more life in the corners of her mouth than other women had in their whole bodies. But I remember realizing also that she was more dangerous than a bomb, and more risk than I had ever taken in my life, and that I would have to go back to the war tomorrow and that there was not enough time for anything, and it would be more sensible to leave her to the wolves than to even attempt whatever it was I would have to attempt at the risk of the pain and despair I had always wanted to avoid or evade.
And at the expense of Jack, too, because Jack would be up there waiting, expecting, hoping that I would return to that mess that wasn’t quite a mess, with a wet canteen and a piano for a singsong. Jack was still haunting my mind, and I wanted desperately to go back to him and try to explain to him what it was all about, but I was looking down into the welcoming eyes and it was too late and I was drowning in their cloudy marshes … Yet there was still time. There was still time, and it was the easiest thing in the world. I need only say to her, ‘Look, it’s pretty early to dine. Would you like to come with me for an hour or so and meet my brother Jack? He’s a staff-sergeant in the Pay Corps and they’ve got a kind of mess in that LHQ building up the top of Swanston Street. He’s a very good chap, my brother …’
But my hand magically was under her firm young arm and we were going through the glass doors into the carpeted comfort and the white napery and the glitter of glass and silver and the coloured bottles along the cocktail-bar, and the head waiter was bowing his deference and smiling his pleasure, and already I was planning my assault on the fortress to which I had fallen captive and I told myself that I was, after all, five years younger than Gavin Turley and I had both arms and I could offer her Venezuela, and Gavin, anyway, was far too honourable a man to contest an issue so much to the girl’s advantage … and then I was taking her brief-case and handing it to a bowing boy in a short white jacket, and through the parrot-chatter all around us I seemed to hear Jack’s voice, loyal in protest against the tinny tinkling of an out-of-tune piano:
‘Oh, give him another ten minutes or so, you lot of bloody whingers! He’s a pretty important character, you got to realize that, and he told you this was his last night. He just got caught up in something. And it’s not all that late, anyway. He’ll be along. Here, let’s have another go at that mouth-organ. After all, he knows we’re waiting here for him, doesn’t he? My brother Davy’s not the sort of bloke who ever let anyone down, you know …’
Notes
A small number of notes is provided here mainly to point out differences between the novel and the biographical details of Johnston’s life. This does not mean that the remainder of the novel is autobiographically accurate; only the more significant departures are noted here.
1. Johnston’s own mother, also named Minnie, was a VAD nurse during the First World War, but she did not go overseas. Moreover, it is doubtful that the authorities would have permitted a husband and wife to serve abroad at the same time in the way depicted in the novel. Johnston’s mother stayed in Victoria all her life.
2. Johnston’s brother Jack and his sister Marjorie are adamant that their father never used physical violence, nor any kind of systematic punishment. The general tyranny of Mr Meredith is fictional, and is undoubtedly created in order to provide an element of conflict, and a harsh environment in which to gain sympathy for young Davy.
3. The character of Sam Burlington is based on two Melbourne painters, Sam Atyeo and Colin Colahan. Johnston was a student at the National Gallery Art School with Atyeo in 1929, and became a friend of Colahan in London in 1952. Both painters left Australia in the 1930s, but have never met each other. See following note.
4. The ‘Jessica Wray’ murder is based on the notorious murder of the art teacher Mollie Dean in Elwood in 1930. The student first charged with the murder was one of her boyfriends, Colin Colahan, who was acquitted in exactly the way depicted in the novel. Johnston did not know Colahan then, as the novel would imply; he met him in London in 1952, when he learned the story from Colahan. Clearly, the character of Sam Burlington has been formed by Johnston’s friendships with Colahan and Sam Atyeo, who though they had no connection with each other, became fused in Johnston’s mind as expatriates who had fled to Europe from Australian philistinism. Atyeo was an avantegarde abstract painter who felt misunderstood in Melbourne.
5. Johnston’s real brother Jack made no such trip, either to Sydney or to South America. He did once walk with a friend from Flinders Street Station to Elsternwick on an exceptionally hot day, but this was a youthful piece of bravado. It is part of the deliberate inflation of Jack’s character to heroic proportions that such feats are attributed to him by Johnston.
6. Helen Midgeley is not a portrait of Johnston’s first wife, Elsie. Johnston stated as much in a letter just before My Brother Jack was published. Where Helen is described as tall, blonde, interested in writing and politics, is four years older than Meredith and is the dominant partner in their relationship, Elsie Johnston was short, dark, not interested in politics nor writing, was four years younger than Johnston and neither a domineering nor sexually aggressive person. Helen, whose character has three distinct sides – the sexual libertine, the left-wing fellow-traveller and the bourgeois housewife – is mainly devised as an attack on middle-class suburbia. Interestingly, her description (apart from its gender) fits Johnston himself more aptly than it does Elsie Johnston.
7. The character of Gavin Turley is based on three of Johnston’s journalist colleagues from different times and places – Bruce Kneale, Mungo MacCallum Senior and the late Geoffrey Hutton. Johnston’s method of chara
cter creation is often to draw upon different people and amalgamate their personalities and actions.
Angus&Robertson
Twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus stepped ashore in Australia in 1882, hoping that the climate would improve his health. While working for a Sydney bookseller, he managed to save the grand sum of £50 – enough to open his very own secondhand bookshop. He hired fellow-Scot George Robertson and in 1886 Angus & Robertson was born.
They ventured into publishing in 1888 with a collection of poetry by H. Peden Steele, and by 1895 had a bestseller on their hands with A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses. A&R confirmed the existence of Australian talent – and an audience hungry for Australian content. The company went on to add some of the most famous names in Australian literature to its list, including Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, C.J. Dennis and May Gibbs. Throughout the twentieth century, authors such as Xavier Herbert, Ruth Park, George Johnston and Peter Goldsworthy continued this tradition.
The A&R Australian Classics series is a celebration of the many authors who have contributed to this rich catalogue of Australian literature and to the cultural identity of a nation.
My Brother Jack Page 42
