The Story of Danny Dunn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘So what have we got here . . . a smart-arse?’ Danny said, slightly defensive.

  ‘No, no, the point you make is still valid,’ Franz Landsman insisted. ‘My family, Mum and Dad and I, we escaped the Nazi death camps by leaving Germany in 1932. Six million Jews didn’t escape. Persecution of the Jews is a fact of history – it’s happened several times before and we simply forgot to remember, and now it’s happened again.’ Franz Landsman paused, then said quietly, ‘I apologise for being a smart-arse and belittling your wife’s vocation.’

  ‘Don’t worry, mate. If you ever meet Helen and try to belittle her, you’ll have your hands full.’

  ‘Good mind, eh?’

  ‘You better believe it, son,’ Danny said, liking Franz Landsman for his own good mind, forthright manner and honesty. It was like having a younger quick-witted brother who kept you on your toes. ‘Well, okay, let’s start by being friends,’ Danny said, extending his hand again. ‘But you need to understand I’m not one of your mob.’

  ‘What, a Jew?’

  ‘Christ, no! I mean from the soft underbelly of the Eastern Suburbs and the North Shore, a private bloody schoolboy. My folks own a pub in Balmain.’

  ‘And mine own a delicatessen in Bondi Road.’

  ‘Righto, that’s about equal; the chips on our shoulders are roughly the same size. But you have to do the legwork for the debating society, okay?’

  ‘Shit, already the Yid is being persecuted by the Gentile.’ Franz laughed. ‘Then you pay for another Coke. Two good minds working together is thirsty work.’

  ‘Stuff’ll rot your gut. In the army we’d leave our dirty brasses in it overnight, and next morning they’d come out shining like a new pin.’

  ‘Won’t bother me, mate, I was brought up on Jewish cooking.’ The boy from Bondi was quick.

  Danny came third in his first year, with Franz Landsman ahead of him in second place, first place going to an ex-serviceman called Ron Ridge, who had missed the last three months of his first year due to an operation on his lung and elected to repeat. Danny had completed his Arts degree during his first year of Law and Helen believed that was why he hadn’t topped the year, although Danny was chuffed with his result, if secretly a little annoyed that Franz had beaten him. But he pulled away quite significantly in second year to take the top spot, with Franz Landsman second and Ridge still in the top ten. After two years full-time at university, Law students began work in a law firm and continued their studies part-time.

  The city law firms would line up to select those students they wanted to invite to serve their articles with them for the next two years. This was when well-connected parents flexed their social and business muscles, using any means available to influence the big important firms. It was a no-holds-barred contest that roped in uncles, cousins and friends, and employed dinner parties, nominations to exclusive clubs, the calling in of old favours, sometimes even threats or occasional blackmail, to help work the legal profession and the old-boy network. It was the time when who you knew in town really mattered.

  So, there were quite a few powerful noses out of joint when Danny and Franz, two nobodies, a Tyke and a Yid, not only filled the first two places for second year but, despite their total lack of legal connections, were selected by the venerable Sydney law firm Stephen James & Stapleton, who until then hadn’t employed a single Jew or Catholic on its staff of twenty-four lawyers. As Franz put it to Danny, ‘Mate, I’ve done my research and you can hear the buzz from that particular Wasp nest from three blocks away.’

  They completed their articles during their third and fourth years and sat their final Law exams, with Danny again topping both years and Franz Landsman coming in second and fourth respectively (he’d met a girl in his final year).

  While Stephen James & Stapleton dealt more with commercial law than criminal, one or two of their solicitors worked the criminal courts and Danny quickly sought them out. Not surprisingly, it was the injustice he saw that prompted him to choose criminal law. As Helen put it when he told her of his decision, ‘Darling, what else? With your anti-establishment ethos, it was a done deal.’

  ‘You mean the chip on my shoulder?’ Danny said defensively.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I’m proud of your decision,’ Helen replied. ‘Somebody has to do it.’

  In fact, the casual disregard for due process of those who worked within the law – the police force and magistrates, in particular – had been a constant topic of conversation between them on evenings when Danny had been in court. The police seemed to decide for themselves whether a defendant was guilty or not, and backed up their prejudices with verbals that suited the prosecution case. He noted that this scant regard for true justice all too often involved working-class defendants, who were easily dismissed as the criminal element in society and automatically assumed to be guilty. Magistrates saw rape victims as cock-teasers or sluts, almost by definition, and it was rare for a rapist to be convicted. Wife-beating and violence against children was seen as a domestic matter, and was yet another area in which the law wore blinkers.

  Danny wasn’t allowed to practise on his own, and the senior lawyers were either too busy for or too uninterested in the pro bono cases that began to pop up in Balmain now Danny was, in the eyes of the locals, a proper lawyer. Danny would, at Brenda’s instigation, attend one of her afternoon soirees at the pub and advise the women preparing their veggies on their legal rights, in particular in the area of wife-bashing and even sometimes rape. This didn’t help his popularity with some of their husbands, amongst whom this category of crime went largely unreported. He would even visit errant husbands and threaten them with an injunction, which would often scare the daylights out of them and change – for a while, anyway – their aberrant behaviour. In one or two cases when a husband continued to bash his wife, Danny persuaded one of the solicitors at work to allow him to prepare a brief and to let him function as his associate in court. They’d won the cases and the solicitor, Gary Murphy, was so impressed that he took, under Danny’s instruction, three further cases: another battered wife, a rape victim and children assaulted by their father. They’d lost only the rape case.

  Danny had earned a reputation in Balmain: amongst drunken husbands, who saw it as their right to beat their wives, it was as a meddler and a do-gooder; amongst wives, it was as a hero and a white knight. These were poor people but proud, and Helen would often arrive home from university to find a pot of stew, a batch of scones, a meatloaf or a cake on the doorstep with a note that said something like, Thanks, Danny, return pot to Brenda.

  Helen was to learn that Danny never forgot or forgave an injustice, no matter how small. ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’ had become one of his favourite sayings. Helen would often wake at night to find him missing from their bed. She had learned not to go after him, because often it was his demons that kept him awake, but sometimes he’d confess at breakfast, ‘Couldn’t sleep last night for thinking about . . .’ and name some incident that was worrying him. Two that were most frequently on his mind were those concerning Captain Riley and Glossy Denmeade’s boots, and Colonel Mori, his Japanese camp commandant.

  Danny assiduously followed the fate of officers who had served under Mori, often asking Helen to call in favours, and scanning the newspapers for news of the trials. Several of the NCOs and soldiers from the camp were executed or jailed for crimes they’d committed while following Mori’s direct orders. Danny continued his research in an attempt to build a new case against Mori, and discovered through a contact supplied by Helen that the American occupying powers in Japan had requested his unconditional release and his immediate and urgent repatriation to help with post-war reconstruction. Danny was learning that affluence and influence went hand in hand; Colonel Mori’s aristocratic family were the owners of one of Japan’s largest engineering firms and the Americans claimed he was needed to bring it back int
o effective production. If being a prisoner of war had taught Danny anything, it was never to give up, and he became obsessed with this injustice.

  Helen, as forthright as ever, replied, ‘Danny, you’ve got to forget Mori! You have to stop this battle against injustice and make peace with yourself, or the war is going to kill you as surely as if you’d taken a bullet in the heart from Mori himself. The world is a cruel and hateful place. For God’s sake, Danny, you should know that better than anyone! Are you to take all this accumulated hate with you to the grave?’

  But Helen knew that her husband had inherited his stubbornness from Brenda and that her pleas were useless; it was Danny’s obsessive nature that kept him going – it was what made him formidable in whatever he tackled. Danny hated to lose, either at tiddlywinks or in a court case. As a young man before the war he could put his aggression and determination into water polo and rugby league, but now his bad back restricted him to swimming endless early-morning laps of Balmain pool. All his energy went into social justice, or, for that matter, justice itself. His experience as a prisoner of war had clearly and irrevocably demonstrated to him what it was like to be at the bottom of the pecking order. He wasn’t a goody-goody – he was a Balmain boy, after all – but he hated anyone who took advantage of the innocent or underprivileged. It was his tenacity that was going to earn him a reputation as a formidable opponent in a court of law. He never knew when to quit, even when it might have been to his advantage.

  For instance, not long after he graduated as a lawyer, in what the military authorities and the government decried as ‘grandstanding’ he had petitioned the government to reconvene the War Crimes Tribunal and to reinstate the prosecution trial of Colonel Mori. But once again it proved a case of might being greater than right. The government denied the request, dismissing the charge that the authorities had been influenced by any request from the Americans. In their letter of rejection they also failed to mention that they were currently being pressured by the Americans to sign a formal peace treaty with the defeated Japanese. Pragmatism über alles, with truth and justice always easy victims.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT HAD TAKEN THIRTY years for Brenda’s moment of glory to finally arrive, when Danny was to receive not one but two mighty scrolls on the same day: his Arts degree as well as his Law degree. Brenda had put off writing to her parents until Danny had received the results of his final-year exams and notification that the graduation ceremony would take place at 10.30 a.m. on Tuesday the 30th of January 1951 in the Sydney University Great Hall.

  She’d spent several days writing and rewriting the letter in an attempt to persuade them to make the trip. Over the years, especially when she made her annual visit to the farm near Wagga, she’d tried to get them to visit, but without success. They’d always agree when she asked, but then Patrick, her father, would find some excuse not to go at the last minute – the drought or the rains, lambing, fencing, fixing the tractor she’d bought him, digging a dam – always something to prevent them coming, and always to the bitter disappointment of her darling mother, who would usually confess in a letter that she’d ‘been to the chickens’.

  Rose O’Shane had never allowed her children to see her cry, although they all knew as kids that when she appeared with red puffy eyes it meant she’d been to the chickens. The chicken run was a place Patrick never visited. The hens were his wife’s responsibility. So when life became too unbearable she’d visit the hens for a good old Irish keen. Letting a hen roost on her hands was very comforting.

  In the end, Brenda wrote a very formal letter, spending the entire Christmas break composing it and taking care with every word. In the years since she’d left school she’d forgotten about the importance of paragraphs and the letter seemed somehow all the better for this, because, while formal, it also had the virtue of appearing to come, as indeed it did, from the heart.

  Brenda decided to take the bit between her teeth and talk about Danny’s injuries and war record as well as his two degrees. While she desperately wanted her parents to be present at his graduation, it had to be on her terms. Her father had bullied her for long enough with his refusal to visit. This time she wasn’t going to take it on the chin. She had, after twenty-nine hard years, achieved her ambition for a member of her family to be a ‘somebody’. Now there could be no more compromises.

  Dear Father,

  Your grandson is to receive not one, but two university degrees. While I know your stance on the first war and this recent one, nevertheless, Danny served with great distinction. I often receive letters from the men he was responsible for in the Japanese concentration camp. They all say the same thing – that he should have received a DSO for bravery. Many claim he saved their lives and some describe how he did this. Many of their stories make me weep, but I also take great pride in my son, your grandson, who is soon to become a lawyer. They also speak of the terrible injuries to his face and back, which he sustained at the hands of the Japanese while defending one of his own men. I feel sure my brothers were heroes in the last war and Danny has followed in their footsteps, in your, our family’s footsteps. I know life has been hard for you and Mother Rose, but since leaving Ireland you have shown a steady courage, which has been passed on to your grandson. As the first member of our family to receive not one but two university degrees, we have cause to celebrate in the knowledge that it has not all been in vain, that at last we are somebodies. Without you and Mother Rose at Danny’s graduation it will not be a true family celebration. In the name of my two dead brothers I beg you from the bottom of my heart to be with us on this grand day, the triumph of the O’Shane family.

  Your loving and obedient daughter,

  Brenda

  She then attached two first-class return tickets for the train from Wagga to Sydney and a money order for five pounds for travel expenses. She was ecstatic when Rose wrote to say Patrick had agreed they would definitely be coming as he wanted to see his grandson get the first degree ever earned by a family member.

  Brenda’s own preparation for graduation day had lasted nearly a month, so that on the big day she was dressed to the nines with everything brand-new and of the very best quality. Helen, whenever she was free from the university, became her constant companion and consultant, as Brenda wouldn’t trust herself in such matters. Her accessories were chosen with the help of Madam St Clair, dressmaker to the Eastern Suburbs’ rich and famous, who’d created Brenda’s outfit and then insisted on accompanying them, for an appropriate fee, to Mark Foys (underwear and stockings), David Jones (shoes and handbag) and Anthony Hordern (hat and gloves). Finally, to set off the whole outfit, Helen had lent her a genuine pearl necklace and drop earrings left to her by her grandmother – much to the chagrin of Helen’s mother, who’d always had her eye on them but had received instead her mother’s wedding band and (very small diamond) engagement ring.

  While Brenda and Half Dunn were considered well off, even rich, by most standards, it had never occurred to Brenda to spend very much on herself. Like everyone else she depended on Freda’s Frocks to tell her the latest fashion and length of hem required for the year to come. Every Wednesday she’d have her hair and nails done at Nina’s Beauty Salon, and once a year on the 31st of December she had a permanent booking to have ‘the works’ – a facial, which included a mudpack; and hair and nails – in preparation for midnight mass at St Augustine’s to see the new year in.

  In fact, the last time she’d splurged on clothes was when she’d gone to dinner at Primo’s with Doc Evatt, then a judge in the New South Wales High Court, but later President of the General Assembly of the United Nations, and now being spoken of as the next leader of the Labor Party should the ailing Ben Chifley retire from parliament.

  For the big occasion, Brenda’s make-up, usually a hastily applied lick of Rita Hayworth-style red lipstick to show off her pretty mouth and sometimes a smudge of eye shadow and a dab of rouge, was now personally supervised by Nina fro
m the beauty salon. She’d brought all her paraphernalia in a large suitcase over from the salon in Darling Street to the pub, arriving just after eight in the morning.

  Danny and Half Dunn privately agreed the result was somewhat over the top, but they were nevertheless quick to compliment Brenda, who had become increasingly nervous after breakfast, lighting twenty single-puff cigarettes that were later discovered burnt out in various ashtrays around the premises. By the time the taxi taking them to the university for the mid-morning graduation ceremony arrived, she was very close to tears from a mixture of anxiety and overwhelming excitement.

  Brenda sat in the Sydney University Great Hall between Rose and Helen, whose parents, Barbara and Reg, sat next to their daughter, with Patrick next to Rose, and then Half Dunn next to his father-in-law. While the dolled-up version of Brenda didn’t look any prettier for all the expense, at forty-eight, despite the years of hard work – or perhaps because of them – she was still a trim and good-looking woman. She was blessed, as some people would have said, with good bone structure and a nice figure.

  Rose had been to Freda’s Frocks, too, where Brenda had insisted she have a new outfit: a pink mid-season rose-patterned dress, white shoes, hat and gloves, the loveliest undies she’d ever owned and real nylon stockings. Half Dunn was in a new Pineapple Joe suit and Patrick, at his insistence, once again in his Irish tweed wedding suit, starched detachable collar, black tie and button boots, though this time the weather was a little kinder.

  But the day, as so often happens when we eagerly anticipate an event, didn’t quite turn out as Brenda had always imagined it would. Later, when Half Dunn told the story of Danny’s graduation, he would begin by saying, ‘When, as Brenda has done, you wait almost thirty years for something, you tend to build up a fair head of steam.’ He’d pause, then say meaningfully, ‘That can be dangerous . . . very dangerous.’