Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  Something extraordinary happens as Patsy Adam-Smith pares away the Anzac myths, all that Union Jack and King and Country drivel inflicted on generations of school kids.

  You’ve only read a few chapters before you realise that the reality – the truth Patsy Adam-Smith has lovingly and stylishly stitched into a superb book – is nobler than the myths.

  Take Simpson and his donkey. The authorised school version, the municipal sculptor’s version, depicts this saintly figure, serene, eyes raised above the petty horizons of mortals. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Simpson is no less heroic. But he is also a wild colonial spirit. He swears; he loves a stoush. ‘You couldn’t see anything for blood and snots flying…’ he writes rapturously about a fight at sea. He’s fond of his mum and stray dogs; he misspells terribly; he has humped a swag and been skint. He was heroic in Shrapnel Gully. But, above all, he is flawed and real.

  Mythology gives us a saint we admired but could not comprehend. Patsy Adam-Smith gives us a bloke we might have known and liked … and who was as much a hero as the saint.

  And it is this flavour of the book. It is about real people and the real war, the greatest ritual sacrifice of the young by the old, the innocent by the corrupt, in history. It is not about generals, strutting and thinking of posterity, or the chess world of strategy and diplomacy.

  No, the hero is a bloke who walked out of a shearing shed, joined up to fight for a cause he did not understand, for a monarch he had never seen, for – God help us – a ‘mother’ country where he was not born … and fought and endured and died with a bravery and stoicism that in these soft days seems unreal. Actually, the hero is hundreds of such men. Patsy Adam-Smith has read nearly 8000 diaries and letters and interviews with many of the survivors, and she skilfully lets them tell the story.

  And this is perhaps the book’s great power, this first person in the trench. A soldier crouching in the bone-strewn slime of Flanders has no time for affectation; … like Simpson, he is real.

  They can make you weep, these diaries, when they suddenly run out, or when the author interposes a line like: ‘Perhaps now we could walk day by day with him, for there is only a little time to go.’ There is often a poetic quality. ‘… I saw an Australian and a Turk who had run each other through with their bayonets … their arms must have encircled each other … they had been in that sad embrace for at least a week.’ There’s she’ll-be-right optimism: ‘One old chap when he was dying kept saying: “Stop the bleeding boys, and I’ll get back home to the missus and kids.”’

  In one sense it is the technique of the New Journalism, the non-fiction novel: let people tell it their way; leave the omissions, the wrong tenses, the vernacular, for they are the things that make it authentic.

  Patsy Adam-Smith writes with polish and clarity; she never departs from her aim of letting the men tell it themselves. She is sympathetic when interposing her own conclusions, but never cowed by the Anzac ghosts she has grown up with. And, apart from its inspired use of photographs and captions, this book is an exquisite piece of engineering and editing; a lesser writer would have been overwhelmed by the weight of research.

  And Patsy Adam-Smith deserves a special place – not just for getting it right but for doing so with so much style and so much heart.

  In 1977 the Literature Board of the Australia Council, in partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs, invited me to visit the USSR on the first government-to-government cultural exchange of writers between the two countries. Three Australian writers were invited: Barbara Jefferis, the novelist, David Williamson, the playwright, and me. We each knew we could raise a laugh in a tight corner – and what more do travellers need to know of each other? The exchange had its origins back in the days when Geoffrey Blainey was chairman of the Literature Board and it had now materialised in the form of an invitation from the Writers’ Union of the USSR.

  Before we set off for the USSR we learned that we were also to go to Japan for three days. I didn’t care for that: I’d already been there before. Now we were to take part in a seminar and an exhibition of Australian books. It turned out to be like the curate’s egg – good in parts. Ambassador John Menadue did us proud. The books were set up in the embassy and we arrived to lunch with invited writers, publishers, translators and professors of literature. We promenaded through the gardens and I forgot to talk of literature because I was agog with the changes I could see in the country. Affluence, power and confidence had replaced the land I had known more than twenty years before.

  Later we answered questions at a seminar, a pretty translator taking notes and reading the whole thing out at the end. David brightened the day for Barbara and me by stating that something was ‘ratshit’. The Australians in the audience laughed: how would the translator handle that? She did well: ‘Of no value, useless.’ A professor who knew David’s work inside out bombarded him with questions; another professor got into holts with me (and later took me to dinner) on the strength of Yoknapatawpha County-type writing in Australia. That was OK because I had been at the university in Mississippi studying Faulkner. In her own impressive way Barbara handled Australian-fiction-today questions.

  She and I deserted our playwright companion the following day when he was to show the film of The Removalists at the embassy to Japanese guests. Barbara and I boarded the Bullet, the silver, streaking train and in fifty minutes were 68 miles out in the countryside. ‘My God!’ David greeted us on our late return. ‘I fear I’ve set Australian-Japanese relations back ten years!’ He was sure that the silence which had followed his film showing indicated displeasure, even distaste. ‘Not so,’ Professor Mikio Hiramaku told me later when he visited Australia. ‘It was the colloquialisms. Few Japanese could follow them.’

  Before we left Tokyo we strolled down the Ginza which, on Sundays, has been turned into a mall, and David’s height made the day for the Japanese. They pointed at him, laughed, came right up to him and talked of the sight; one lady actually raced over to get her husband from a shop to view the spectacle, and a small boy ran into David’s knee before he realised there was a man on the top of it and he yelled ‘oooaahh!’ as he stretched his neck skywards.

  In return I found myself staring at the Japanese. They seemed taller than I remembered them, better looking and more smartly dressed. I had not been back to Japan since 1960. I remembered then seeing armies of women on their hands and knees all through the night beating wooden blocks into the wide pavements, making a new road or a new pathway, with their masters, the men, overseeing their work but, of course, upright! At daybreak you’d hear the clatter-clatter of their wooden clogs as they returned to their homes to do their day’s work and be back on the pavements by sundown.

  Then we did the long haul across Siberia. Three hours after our arrival at Moscow airport we were taken to dinner by Yuri Nagibin, whom some of us had met when he visited the Adelaide Arts Festival (and we waited in vain to meet his ex-wife, the excitable and exciting poet, Bella Akhmadulina).

  We were weary. The flight to Japan, three busy days there, followed by the long flight across Siberia – and, in the case of at least one of us, copious stone bottles of warm sake – had taken its toll. Barbara, cool and gracious as ever, sat as befits a representative of government, and kicked neither of us under the table when first David spilt a whole glass of red wine and then broke the stem off the glass in putting it back on the table and I, not to be outdone, appeared to act with precision in tossing a full glass of lemonade the length of the table. When a monumental lady had mopped that lot up and we had recovered our aplomb, we ate heartily as all the other writer-members in the Writers’ Union building were doing: olives, lush and black, rye bread, bowls of caviar, cucumber in sour cream, cold meats and tiny spiced sausages, vodka, neat and copious and wines, red and white. One feels replete and content – when in comes the main course: the other was what would be called ‘snacks’. With an ‘Ah my country, it is all for thee’ feeling, we began again.

  Next day we were to meet ou
r hosts. The USSR Writers’ Union was housed in the building and grounds used as the Rostov’s home in the film of War and Peace. The graceful circular driveway sweeps up to the steps where fussy old Mr Rostov had scampered down to ask Audrey Hepburn why she was taking the furniture off the escape carts and putting wounded men there instead.

  Inside we met the Deputy Chairman of the Foreign Commission of the Writer’s Union, Mr Sheshkin, who sat us down and told us about the Union. It was rather heavy, with a certain feeling from the voice and surroundings that we were to listen and take notes. I am not at my best at such times and refused to lift my pen. We were told that the print run for the average book of poetry was 15 000 and for prose it was 50 000 copies. We did not buy or, indeed, see any of these works in shops and on enquiring we learnt that they were sold out immediately on publication. The Australian Ambassador, Sir James Plimsoll, told me that he went to a shop two hours after opening time to buy a novel he wanted to read on the day it was being published and the work was sold out.

  Now, about Russia. There is one hazard to avoid there (I’m damned if I know how you can avoid it but have a go): those mighty, big-bummed, doughty, Brobdignagian keepers of the keys of rooms in Russian pubs. Respect them, do as they shout, for you haven’t a Buckley’s chance against them. These women were positioned on every floor of the hotel, placed at the vantage point on the corner of the floor so they could see from both angles. They were the caretakers of morality.

  Our hosts were generous. They took us in hire-drive cars to galleries, ballet, theatre, the circus. They gave each of us 150 roubles for ‘extras’: our accommodation, travel etc. was paid for. We had few chores. We addressed an English-speaking audience at the State Library of Foreign Literature, an unnerving experience as we followed Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Richard Aldington and other eminent authors of past years. Seated in the front row were the noted English translators, Oxana Krugerskaya and Alla Petroviskaya.

  Then we were off on the Red Arrow to Leningrad (as it was called then). I do have to boast (and after all, I’ve travelled more train-miles than most Australian backsides), the pride of the USSR railway system could not compare with the dolce far niente of Queensland’s long, slow shunt into yesterday. There were no WCs in the cabins, dirty (even to grey) rags were used to wipe floors, then the samovar and then flapped to frighten one away back to one’s own seat. There was no shower on the train, no tea or service of any kind from the time we boarded at Moscow until an hour before we reached Leningrad, when we were given a cup of tea. For much of the time we were entertained by David singing ‘My Funny Valentine’, a sort of hung-over effect from our last few hours in Moscow when he’d danced with a Russian lady who had held him Moscow-style – very close. She was very tall and that was necessary if one was to dance very close with a man who was 6 foot 7 inches high. Barbara and I were afraid that if we danced with him the buckle of his belt would scratch our foreheads.

  It rained in Leningrad as if the Second Flood was due, but even that couldn’t hide the legendary beauty of the place. We spent a day at Petrodverets, the most enchanting old Summer Palace, wandering the grounds which had fountains cascading and gilded statuary lining the waterways to the sea. There, across the water, live the Finns, a race superior even to the Russians in putting away their liquor. And this led to yet another petit embarrassment for David. We had stopped to have a beer at one of the convenient beer kiosks on the street (why can’t we have beer kiosks in Australia like wee tobacco shops, where a thirsty passer-by can have a quick, cold beer?) and the lady dispenser took exception to David, the gentle giant. She shouted (so we learnt from our translator) that it was ‘because of Finns like him coming over the border to drink that people say Russians drink too much!’ Well, well – as our translator, Anatole, said returning to the car with David. I banged my drinking mug down on the counter, presented the shouting lady with the two-finger salute, and ran like hell in case the gargantuan blonde took after me.

  At Petrodverets, Anatole met his match with one of the mighty keepers of the keys. He was attempting to get us into a gallery at the head of a queue and told the big lady we had come from far away, from Australia, and that we were writers. ‘So what!’ this admirable Amazon shrugged. ‘I am a member of the Russian Architects’ Union!’ I loved her for that.

  We had heard that one needs to be a hero to drink in Georgia, but the sunshine and the balmy air of the land undid us and heroes we became. Here we went to the famous Georgian brandy distillery and emptied our glasses into a crystal bowl on the fruit- and biscuit-covered table as we tasted one, two … six brandies. And then the toast. Always they toast in the USSR, anything up to a dozen toasts at a meal. We three agreed we were bumble-footed about this but occasionally we hit the right note. The toastmaster, Tamadah, was a tyrant. ‘Bottoms up!’ he cried in the Georgian equivalent and valiantly we upheld our country’s honour in brandy, vodka, Georgian wine, and the local cha-cha (or is it tzcha-tzcha?) that reminded me too terribly of Irish potheen.

  Once again we were at the airport in the wee small hours. Uzbekistan was fabulous; its capital, Tashkent, had treasures, but Samarkand… well! The markets, both here and in Tashkent, were a joy – very like eastern markets anywhere except that there were no beggars and everything was clean. Our Uzbek guide, Alisher, as gentle as a girl, took my hand and held it out to a stallholder; the man placed a vine leaf on my palm and piled it high with the golden flesh of peeled figs and Alisher fed them to me with his slender fingers. (Note for D. H. Lawrence: you’d have slipped your trolley here. I did.)

  David was suddenly accosted by a tribal-costumed, merry-faced lady stallholder. She held up three fingers, struggled for English, and said, ‘Three metres?’ His height. ‘No,’ said David, charmed like a little boy at her merry approach, ‘two metres’, and held up two fingers. The lady scampered back to the other gaily caparisoned women and held up her fingers and waved and greeted David when he next passed.

  Having a guide who travelled with us meant that language was no problem, except for the vernacular. While Anatole may have had his problems getting over to us the subtleties of a Russian joke, there were times when we too had our difficulties. In Samarkand a pretty, scholarly lady guided us through the 15th century observatory of Ulugbek. Nearby she showed us the ruins of the 15th century building that the beautiful Bibi-Khanym had had erected to surprise her husband, Tamurlane, on his return from conquering India. The legend was that the architect fell deeply in love with Bibi-Khanym and refused to complete the building unless he was allowed one kiss. Bibi, anxious to see the roof-beam raised, said ‘Da, but only on my cheek and through my hand’. The lover approached, Bibi placed her hand upon her cheek and he kissed the palm, but his passion was so strong that his kiss burnt through her hand and branded her cheek. A sort of medieval love-bite resulted which Tamurlane recognised as swiftly as any returning husband would, and the architect fled on wings to Persia. At dinner that night David attempted to relate the story to our interpreter, Anatole. ‘There was this Bibi Khanym you see, and this architect got the hots for her …’ ‘What is “the hots”?’ asked our faithful guide.

  Later, in Georgia, Datar, our companion who spoke Georgian and French but no English, suddenly learnt, from God knows where, a line that enchanted him. After a lunch in a country restaurant where we sat on low stools and ate a sort of soda loaf, borsch and greens with, as ever in Georgia, much local wine, Datar skipped with glee to David and cried, ‘You are drunk as skunt’. We quietly corrected the final consonant, and for the rest of our days in Georgia, Datar told anyone who would hearken that David was ‘drunk as skunk’.

  Our leaving was warm and sad. As all travellers learn when touching a little of another world, if we exercise sympathy, patience and love, a journey becomes an entrancing field in which, perhaps, even the most erudite may learn something.

  The Flowers in the Cannon’s Mouth

  IN 1978 MY BOOK, The Anzacs, was published to great acclaim, but I did not wait to se
e it launched. Instead I went overseas with First World War veterans to France and Belgium to stand at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, sixty years after the end of the war.

  This was no political stunt, as was to be done by governments in later years, but a yearning of men to once again walk where they had walked with their friends when they were all young. The men had all paid their own way. On return I wrote of the pilgrimage. Of the seventy men, half were from a later war (‘My God’, one old man said, ‘if you’d told me there’d be another war in my lifetime I’d have said you were raving mad.’) The others were the survivors of the most terrible four years endured by modern man.

  Otto Nielsen (24th Battalion) was ‘outed’ at Pozieres where a small plaque told us that more Australians died there than at any other place in the war. ‘I ran in the dark through a gap in the wire with some others, and I’d hardly got through when I was hit on the leg.’ Otto was a massive man, bent from the hip-length caliper that held his left leg together. ‘A cobber was hit badly and we rolled into a shell hole. When daylight came I looked around and saw our mates on the barbed wire.’

  As we tramped down the old stamping grounds, snatches of half-remembered songs were whispered:

  If you want to find the battalion

  I know where they are

  They’re hanging on the old barbed wire,

  I saw them, I saw them, hanging on the old barbed wire.

  Bert Field remembered the mud most of all: ‘The earth was decayed from being fought over and back so long, beaten to pieces, falling apart. There were bodies in the mud. Limbs, hands jutted out, slime and stink and always mud and you fell over in it. Bodies buried in the trench from last month’s, last year’s battle … we walked over them.’