by JH Fletcher
What are they going to do? she thought rebelliously. March up and down the street, stripping us off to have a dekko? Check us over with a tape measure? Some of that mob, she wouldn’t have put it past them, at that.
At least there were still the pictures. She had laughed along with the rest of the audience at the antics of Abbott and Costello in Hold That Ghost. There had been a drama called Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. She went and sat for an hour or two and forgot the war, and then the lights went back up, she came out into the blackout and nothing had changed, after all.
Still, it was a break.
Kath had never been much for mates. Even at school she had been something of a loner, but now, with so many of the men away, the sense of emptiness drew people together.
She took Walter to the hospital to get him checked out. There was never anything wrong with him, thank heavens, but it gave her the chance to catch up with some of the other young mothers. She wasn’t the only one with a husband overseas, although Hedley was the only one who was a prisoner of war.
In some ways she thought that made her luckier than the rest. At least Hedley was out of it. There was no danger of someone turning up with a telegram from the War Ministry for her.
Then one day she heard how Mrs Vogel had received word that her son Peter had died in Changi Jail. So even prisoners weren’t safe, although presumably safer than they would have been in a battle.
The sense of unreality persisted. For all the shortages and restrictions, life went on, much as it would have done had Hedley been here and there had been no war at all.
But the facts were undeniable: there was a war and Hedley was a prisoner. She found it hard to think of herself as married, yet she was and, with Hedley away, her life seemed to have come to a stop. Like everyone else, she held her breath and waited for the day when it would all be over and they could start breathing normally once more.
Such a waste of her life, she thought despairingly. She was twenty-one years old and there were times when she seemed to have nothing to look forward to at all.
Conscientiously she sat down each week and wrote a letter to Hedley, telling him what had happened over the past seven days. It took her forever to scrawl the few lines; there seemed so little to say.
Walter is crawling. He’s very well, as are the rest of us, although we are all missing you and hope you are well, too.
This year the wheat went nine bags up at Daley’s, but the barley wasn’t so good, only seven. Still, the prices should help.
No sign of rain yet, everywhere very brown and dusty.
They’ve started a Fighting Services Memorial Fund in Kapunda.
There’s talk of some Americans being stationed here. Maybe that’ll liven the place up a bit.
She never knew if he got the letters, but she sent them anyway. She could do nothing else to help him; at least she could tell him what was going on. Whether he would care, being so far away, she didn’t know. It brought home how little she knew him, but that couldn’t be helped. We’ll just have to catch up later, she thought.
In the meantime the jolly letter (written on both sides of the paper, obediently) was finished. Another job out of the way. She stuck it in its envelope, she licked the flap, she took it to the post office and put it in the box. She went home.
She helped around the house, driving her mother nuts. She visited her mother-in-law and did the same to her, knowing and not caring. She had to keep busy, to speed the dragging days and months and years.
There was never enough to do. She’d heard that Ruth Ballard was writing a book, which might have been all right for her but no help to Kath, who could hardly string two words together. There was only so much washing and ironing and polishing you could do without going mad. For the rest of the time, she played with Walter, went for walks through the scrub, and waited.
At least, she thought, Hedley is safe. She clung to that thought. He was her husband and she hardly knew him, yet he remained important. Hedley is safe.
9
HEDLEY
1943–1944
Hedley stood, swaying, the sinews in his raised arms like fire. The boulder was beginning to slip, despite his efforts. He tried desperately to prevent it — there was no knowing what that bastard Nakajima might do otherwise — but could not.
He had been ordered to hold the boulder above his head, not as a punishment but as a game, so that Nakajima and the other guards could see how long he could do it. He would have to let it drop eventually; they all knew that, but it was still important to hold it up as long as possible. An acceptable time, by Japanese standards, and he might be rewarded with a cigarette, even a few grains of rice, but if he failed, if the boulder fell too quickly, he would be shown up as a weakling or — worse — someone who had insulted the Emperor and the Imperial Japanese Army by not trying hard enough. No saying what they might do to him, then; blokes had been killed for less.
So he clung to the rock while his arms trembled, shoulders blazed with pain, legs naked and pitted with ulcers threatened to collapse under him. The watching guards, complete with cross belts and soft-peaked caps, watched closely. They chattered, they pointed out to each other the trembling muscles, the feet sliding uncertainly upon the muddy ground, and they laughed. Behind the guards a handful of prisoners, ribs stark as five-barred gates, also watched. They had seen it all before, but the terror, the pain, was something that none of them had learned to accept.
He knew they were there, felt the support that strove to strengthen his buckling arms, reinforce the strength that was draining swiftly from his body. He screwed up his features in a last grimace and, for a few seconds longer managed, staggering, to keep the boulder aloft, but it was too heavy. It slipped further, slipped again, and came crashing down, barely missing his feet. Much more important to his survival, just missing the feet of Kempi Lance-corporal Nakajima, who had arranged the little game in the first place.
Hedley stood, half-collapsed body folded like a hinge, and waited. Nakajima stood up from the chair in which he had been sitting. He strolled closer. He raised his hand. Hedley’s expression did not change; he made no attempt to avoid the impending blow. He was beyond caring. As he had counted the thousands upon thousands of footsteps that had brought him and the rest to what the Japanese had promised would be a well-equipped convalescence camp, so now, inside his still-defiant brain, he told himself over and over again, It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter …
Despite everything, he remained human. Mostly it was a blessing, but there were times, as now, when it was not. He would not cringe, yet felt what remained of his muscles grow tense as they waited for the blow, the succession of blows, that would come.
Nakajima slapped him genially on the shoulder. ‘Good,’ he said, and laughed, as though congratulating a friend. ‘You very strong man. You Number One.’
He gave Hedley a cigarette, flicked his lighter to give him a light, watched until Hedley had drawn the first dizzying breath of smoke into his lungs.
‘Good,’ he said again, ‘good.’
And strutted away, a man who had done his good deed for the day.
There were so few things that enabled him to differentiate between the days. When horror was unending, nothing stood out. Even despair became routine. Therein lay danger. Despair led to indifference, indifference to death. He had seen it happen to so many, was determined that it would not happen to him. Once again the golden vision of the farm, paddocks rich with ripening crops beneath a hot but beneficent sun, sustained him. The lust for the land — simple, absolute and uncomplaining — called him back.
So he held boulders aloft, endured the beatings, humiliation and starvation, willed himself to accept the ulcers that gnawed flesh to the bone, even tried to resist by will-power the assaults of malaria, telling himself, and believing, that somehow, anyhow, he would survive.
There were some things that few, however strong their will, could survive. Plague. Typhus. Cholera.
There were rumours of plague, of typhus. Other camps were said to be devastated by both. Cholera, especially after the monsoon broke at the end of May, was no rumour. Cholera was an actuality.
The cholera tent consisted of four bamboo poles, ten feet high, supporting the ridge of the frayed tarpaulin sheet that gave flimsy shelter from the driving rain. The edges of the sheet, three feet from the ground, were attached to shorter poles. With both ends open to the elements, the contraption was guyed into precarious position by ropes held in place by rocks lugged up from the river. It flapped and vibrated in the wind, a tatterdemalion bird beating its wings in preparation for take-off.
The skeletal bodies of naked men, living, dying, dead, were stretched on bamboo platforms that raised them an inch or two above the mud. Everywhere there was water: running in septic rills, streaming down the poles, dripping constantly upon patients and orderlies alike, probing its moist tongue across the mud floor, turning it to soup from which the stench of rot became indistinguishable from the faecal reek of the disease itself.
Men died, but that, in the monsoon-scourged nightmare of the camp, was nothing. The miracle was that so many did not, were brought back from extinction’s edge by copious injections of saline, which was manufactured by some prodigy of ingenuity and dedication by their own doctors, stored in empty saké bottles retrieved from the dump and sterilised in boiling water. Making a fire to boil it, in those conditions, was itself nothing short of a miracle. Of the water itself there was no shortage.
To this place, in July, came Tom Jenkins, the mate who had shared with Hedley, and so assuaged, every horror in the countless litany of horrors that had befallen them since that night, in a time and world now inconceivably remote, when they had stood and watched the flickering play of shadows upon the white screen and shared with the sarong-clad audience the enchantment of the puppet-master’s skills.
Tom lay, purging, vomiting, washerwoman’s fingers clutching the putrid air. Hedley, voiceless, anguished, stayed with him. There was nothing he could do yet, by being there at all, he was perhaps doing everything that could be done.
The work parties went out, as always, the half-naked, half-dead figures tottering one by one down the mud-churned track until consumed by the incessant rain. Hedley, had he been caught, might have been beaten to death as a malingerer but the medics covered for him, adding his name to the list of the dying and the dead.
He watched, raging but inarticulate, as the fires of cholera consumed his mate. From the rangy athlete who in pre-war winters had turned out for his local footy team, who had won the best and fairest award two seasons in a row, Tom had long ago been reduced, like the rest of them, to a peripatetic skeleton, axe-head thighbones protruding beneath skin as red as strawberries. Now, within two days, he degenerated further, dissolving into a bundle of bones like sticks, unrecognisable, with the shrunken, monkey face of a dead child.
Tom had been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours when, from some unplumbed depth of desperation and despair, Hedley at last found his tongue. He talked footy to the unconscious man, drew upon the foul and streaming air the images of matches he had watched, matches he had played, matches in which Tom, from a different state than himself, might have played. For the first and perhaps last time in his life, he found the eloquence to create against a backdrop of rain-soused jungle, of disease and hopelessness and death, a lion’s roar of sport, of blood-pumping triumphs in the cold Victorian winters, the heat of action, the glorious collision of flesh in the smoking and ardent air.
He talked of the top teams and the men who played in them: Collingwood and Essendon, Richmond and Footscray, of Melbourne, which had taken out the Grand Final in the last season before the war.
As though purging himself of every vestige of the disease that was consuming all the men about him, he talked on and on, words flowing like the saline solution that, in Tom’s case, failed to restore him to the living. He had talked for a long time before realising that his mate was dead.
Even then he found it hard to let go, holding the dead fingers, talking and talking as though the gale of words might somehow restore life. Eventually the doctor, who had seen it all before, who in the midst of unending trauma had somehow retained his capacity for sympathy and grief, came and, arm around Hedley’s shrunken shoulders, led him weeping away.
Even now Hedley was ashamed of such feminine weakness. ‘Not a word.’ Threatening ferociously, summoning fire from his own half-wrecked body. ‘Not a bloody syllable, mind.’
The doctor pushed him away gently, kindly. ‘I’ll stick it up on the notice board, what d’you reckon?’
From the beginning of the epidemic, the bodies of the dead had been burnt on kerosene-soaked bamboo pyres, initially one at a time, then in groups of two or three or four. By the time Tom’s turn came, he was one of seven.
Hedley scraped ash, rain-soaked and muddy even in the teeth of the flame, into a bottle.
‘I’ll get him back somehow,’ he menaced the rain. ‘Give him a proper funeral.’
It was impossible, and that knowledge was as corrosive as acid.
An orderly took the bottle from him, gently. ‘We’ll bury him here, mate. That’s best. He’s not going to be forgotten.’
‘Too bloody right.’ Hedley wiped his face of what might have been rain. His teeth drew back as he confronted this latest episode in all the long catastrophe of war and imprisonment. ‘I’m forgetting nothing.’
One more horror remained in memory and heart, as fresh and undying as hatred itself. On the opposite bank of the river, on the track leading to the hill through which the work parties were cutting a way, was a second camp. There the cholera had raged with such ferocity that it was impossible for the few who remained to cut sufficient timber to burn the bodies of the dead. Instead, they were forced to bury them in shallow graves hacked by exhausted arms from a forest floor matted by roots.
The endless rain worked upon the loose soil, in time washing much of it away. So the men from both camps walked to work through a jungle landscape transformed into a charnel house of bones and rotting flesh.
In time the rain died as the dry weather returned, but the memories did not die. Trauma and nightmare became a constant companion, colouring both waking and sleeping hours with the image and promise of blood.
In camp there was no real privacy, no chance of being alone for more than a few seconds at a time, but every night, when he returned from the work site, Hedley retired into the secrecy of his own head. He sat cross-legged upon the bamboo platform that served as a bed and watched the past and future with eyes that stayed open yet saw nothing of the world about him. He saw the spreading acres, counted endless mobs of sheep, fingered streams of grain; his feet crumbled the clods of chocolate-hued earth, he soaked himself in the fulfilment of the land. He was wedded to it. Far more than any woman, it became his life, his child, his bride, his salvation.
The land and his lust for it, the holy ardour of the earth, would not permit him to die. He would return and, in so doing, would lay his claim upon it.
10
KATH
1944
Life continued as it always had, an endless repetition of empty days and nights, the precious years of Kath’s youth dribbling away, consumed by war.
‘Might as well be dead,’ she complained to her reflection.
She told herself she didn’t mean a word of it yet, in a tiny corner of her heart, she did. The anguish of a destiny both unfulfilled and unfulfilling consumed her.
She had Walter, lively, healthy, a joy. She loved him passionately, knew now how lucky she was to have what in prospect had seemed a burden beyond bearing. As far as she knew, she still had a husband, a man she had chosen to marry, who from background and temperament was probably as suited to her as any man could be. ‘You should be happy,’ she told herself. ‘Thankful, at least.’
Yet was not. She had thought, wrongly, that the child would be the burden. Instead the burden was the husband, to whom s
he owed a duty of love that she knew now she had never felt, whom more than ever she was coming to resent.
‘He didn’t want to be a prisoner, for heaven’s sake!’
Of course not; yet resentment remained. Blame did not come into it. It was her life that was being wasted, her youth. There was one question, only. What was she going to do about it?
The answer was simple: nothing. Hundreds were in the same boat. Thousands. No doubt some kicked over the traces, but not Kath. It wasn’t Kath’s style. To say nothing of opportunity. In the mid-north you couldn’t breathe without people knowing. Besides, there were no new faces. No-one to talk to, nothing to talk about. Nothing, nothing, ever happened.
Her father came back from a trip to town.
‘Know that land at the back of the station?’
‘What about it?’
‘They’ve put up a wire fence all round it.’
‘Why?’
‘Search me.’
People knew, or said they did. Rumour was everywhere. ‘They’re bringing them Jap prisoners here, that’s what it is.’ Ellen Rose Goodall, eighty-three-years young and as skittish as a new lamb, had heard it, she said, on good authority.
Others had different ideas. ‘The Yanks,’ dishy Mary Williams hoped, eyes bright with dreams of nylons.
Wizen-faced Charlie Todd, owner of the store, hoped she was right. He thought, not of nylons, but of sales to boys far from home and unfamiliar with local prices, of finding a contact willing to supply, for a modest consideration, what the rationing system had made unavailable: whisky, cigarettes, fruitcake, canned California peaches.
Still others thought it might be a munitions dump.
‘Safer, see? Well away from the city.’
‘Safer? What about us?’
