Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘What’s the joke?’ I asked, as she began to wheel me away.

  ‘Oh, nothing, just your caller. At first I didn’t know who he wanted. This deep American voice kept saying, “Put me through to Brother Fish, ma’am!” It wasn’t until he described you that I realised who he meant.’

  I became excited, Jimmy had called. ‘What did he say, I mean, how did he describe me?’

  The nurse stopped the wheelchair and giggled, embarrassed. ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Go on, nurse, I can take it,’ I grinned.

  She started pushing again. ‘“Little runt. Ginger. Millions of freckles. Leg’s broke bad, ma’am.”’ She laughed again. ‘It still didn’t entirely click until he added, “Plays da mouth organ like he an angel.”’

  I shall always remember her name because it seemed so appropriate to the colour of her eyes and wasn’t the sort of name sheilas had in those days. Skye Morrison had dark hair, a trim figure and a lovely little bum that apple-shaped the rear of her khaki pants, though I should quickly add my libido at the time was nonexistent. We’d arrived at a phone affixed to a corridor wall, the receiver still open and dangling from its cord. I grabbed it, grinning like an ape. ‘G’day, Jimmy,’ I yelled.

  ‘Well, Brother Fish, when I’m gonna have me some of yo’ mama’s dee-lish-ous cray stew?’

  He would later tell me that my persistent invitation to visit was the first time anyone, other than an institution and the army, had allowed him to share in their life. Life on an island in Bass Strait was probably as much beyond Jimmy’s imagination as his life in New York was beyond mine. I felt pretty certain that a bloke who’d grown up in what I knew from the movies was the world’s largest concrete jungle would soon enough grow weary of island life. It was sufficient to hope we might share our convalescence for a short time. Rest, sunshine and good home cooking with the added tender loving care Gloria and Sue would lavish upon us was what we both needed to mend our broken bodies and restore some sense of normalcy to our lives. The island may have had its shortcomings but I felt sure it would supply all these prerequisites in abundance.

  Our friendship had developed seemingly against all odds. When you are locked up with other men, sharing the stench of their rotting flesh and their constant moans and cries of despair, craven as it may seem, you soon lose any sense of compassion and become deeply preoccupied with your own survival.

  All you can think about is release from hunger and pain. Staying alive becomes everything, a primal instinct that comes to possess and separate you from the fraternity of your fellow prisoners. While you may occasionally bond with them against the common enemy, it is merely another survival mechanism kicking in. You sense that you are going to need all the selfish strength you can muster to stay alive. Affection is pointless, emotional energy wasted – if you’re not careful it will kill you all the sooner.

  Hate and anger are emotions that attach to pain and starvation as a means of survival. Pretty soon your fevered imagination turns the bloke dying beside you into the enemy who is stealing the food from your mouth. That is to say simply by receiving a similar mouthful to your own, your share and therefore your chance of survival is diminished. This is a vile sentiment to which, in retrospect, few men will admit. Moreover, it is completely irrational. The North Koreans in particular – or even the Chinese – would not have increased my ration by a spoonful had all the men around me perished. But logic plays no part in one’s sensibilities when pain and starvation conspire to rob you of life.

  In such circumstances, where each wounded man in captivity is in great pain and hanging on for grim death, conspiring to keep himself alive at any cost, it takes a strong leader to hold men together and to prevent them from descending into a dog-eat-dog environment. I regret to say that leader wasn’t me. At twenty-five I was the oldest among the equally ranked prisoners of war and, as veteran of another war, I should have done better. My gammy leg was no excuse, I should have assumed control. Instead, Private Jimmy Oldcorn, three years my junior and with a leg as bad as my own, was the man who pulled us through. He gave us the leadership we so badly needed and, in the process, forced us to keep our collective nerve while giving us hope when death seemed a far more certain outcome than the prospect of staying alive.

  For reasons I shall never understand he chose me as his offsider. It may simply have been that he was a coloured man from a segregated regiment and his fellow American prisoners were all Caucasians. Perhaps he feared racial prejudice would forbid any of them acting as his offsider. I was the stray dog without a collar – by choosing me he avoided confrontation. Whatever his reason, I count myself fortunate. Despite my own self-preserving instincts, Jimmy forced me to behave rationally and with a concern for the welfare of our fellow prisoners. In the process, the leader of a New York street gang turned a pack of near-animals back into humans and undoubtedly saved my life and the lives of a great many others.

  You see, humans are essentially tribal. Such is the strength of tribal bonds generated in the military system that soldiers will conform to the hierarchical demands of their army unit even in the face of probable death. The wanton slaughter of the 8th and 10th Light Horse regiments that took place at the Nek on Gallipoli is a classic example, the charge of the Light Brigade at Crimea yet another.

  Captors intent on destroying the morale of prisoners in order to crack their resistance must first break up the tribal structure by separating the officers, senior noncommissioned officers and soldiers. They must also break up any sub-units they may have captured intact. Without the leadership to organise and direct and the solidarity created by time and habit, soldiers suffering mistreatment become more vulnerable to capitulation and death.

  Even when rank is present and taking responsibility, in circumstances where men are constantly harangued, neglected, weakened and dying of their wounds or starvation, it takes a very talented leader to keep them mentally steady and determined to hold out. That Jimmy, a buck private and coloured soldier from a segregated regiment, had the fortitude and character to step forward and take control rather than give in to his own self-preserving instincts was, to say the least, unexpected. He’d endured a lifetime of discrimination, was very much a loner and with his orphanage and reform-school background, where initiative and original thinking would have been beaten out of him, he might have been expected to just look after himself. Yet, here he was, taking control when we needed it most. I found this little short of remarkable.

  By the time we were transferred to the POW camp, the bond formed between Jimmy Oldcorn and myself had grown very strong. I had come to trust him like a brother. More than this he was my mate and, in the arcane and inarticulate way Australian males have of expressing their emotions, your mate is for life, come hell or high water.

  This is how we might have been described when we first joined our respective armies. In the red corner, Jack McKenzie, K Force, 3rd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR), five-feet five-inches in his size-six army boots. In appearance all sinew and bone, wearing a blaze of copper-coloured hair, deeply freckled and, at twenty-five, already irreparably sun-damaged. Fighting weight, 125 pounds when fully fit.

  In the blue corner, Jimmy Pentecost Oldcorn, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, American Negro, six-feet six-inches in his khaki army-issue socks, weighing in at 260 pounds of solid muscle with fists the size of soup plates.

  This was not how we looked when we departed from the hell of the North Korean hospital cave and were handed over to the Chinese. Despite losing a mountain of weight Jimmy remained a big man, around 180 pounds. While I, reduced to sixty-five pounds in total, could have been knocked off my feet by a healthy sneeze.

  Jimmy was the colour of bloodwood honey, which at the time was disparagingly known in America as ‘high yella’, while I came from a long line of redheads who seem to have been born minus a layer of skin. His hair, grown long in prison camp, would at a later time become fashionable and be referred to as the ‘Afro’, while his
dark beard sat naturally and evenly attached to his jowl and chin as if carefully worked up by a clever make-up artist. By contrast, I carried several months of uncut, filthy, matted red hair and a ragged beard, both crawling with vermin. I must have looked like one of those long-limbed Indonesian ginger-coloured apes. What are they called – orang-utans!

  Even when we’d been liberated and cleaned up, the disparities between us remained. We were both emaciated, heads shaved, eyes over-bright and set into deep dark sockets, the difference being that he still looked like a Nubian prince while my hollow, bruised-eyed appearance and pale, almost translucent skin speckled with a firmament of ginger freckles suggested that I’d been subjected to several bouts of chemotherapy long after I should have been mercifully left to die.

  I’m not sure what it takes for two blokes to become the sort of mates who will willingly die for each other. It can’t simply have been gratitude. Jimmy had little reason to feel grateful to me and while he had undoubtedly saved me on more than one occasion from throwing in the towel, he’d done the same for the American prisoners. Yet, apparently they didn’t feel the same way about him. I asked him on one occasion whether they’d come to see him in the Tokyo hospital to which they’d all been taken. Jimmy just laughed. ‘Ain’t like dat, Brother Fish, in Uncle Sam’s mil-it-tary. Coloured soldier do a white soldier a goodly deed, pick him up when he fall down, dat white guy he gonna hope his friends ain’t lookin’ on, man.’ It seemed that not one of the Americans he’d helped pull through had come to thank him.

  On the contrary, they’d appeared without Jimmy on a movie newsreel they’d shown us in the hospital, where they’d all been transformed into individual heroes. They were now men of enormous internal fortitude who had survived the worst the Chinese could throw at them and, in the true spirit of the American fighting man, triumphed over adversity. I have no doubt whatsoever that these mostly whimpering, frightened little boys with conveniently short memories will wear their Purple Hearts and campaign ribbons with pride for the remainder of their lives.

  Perhaps, unlike me, they didn’t feel the obligation to be grateful. It is my observation that when men are dying they hate in a more specific way and haven’t the energy required for gratuitous racial hatred that only seems to reassert itself when an ethnic type finds itself in the majority or back in firm control, as they may have felt once we’d been liberated.

  If the other Yanks weren’t exactly salt-of-the-earth types, then nor was I. On the racist issue, when a law such as our own White Australia Policy existed I had little cause to feel superior. Though, I confess, back then I wasn’t even aware such legislation existed. Around eighty-five per cent of Australians live in one or another city on the eastern seaboard where it is not common to see a full-blood Aborigine; that is, someone who is actually black in colour and not someone of mixed race who is basically unrecognisable from the white population. Often the children of a black–white relationship will be as white as the Caucasian parent; moreover, the second generation will be indistinguishable from the general population. In any case, there weren’t any Aborigines of any caste on Queen Island so that, like most of my fellow countrymen, I had no experience of people of a different colour. The first time I really became aware of racism in my own country was after I’d joined K Force and we were sent for training to Puckapunyal, the military base just outside the town of Seymour in Victoria.

  We’d all but completed our training and were given a weekend leave pass before returning to pack up and get ready for embarkation to Japan to join the remainder of 3RAR. The island was too far to travel home and so I’d spent the weekend with Jason Matthews, who lived in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. We’d left Melbourne to return to camp and arrived in Seymour at ten-thirty a.m. with three hours to spare before we were required to report. Naturally we made for the local pub, which was already crowded with K Force troops. I joined a mob where I knew most of the blokes except for one of Rick Stackman’s mates named Dave McCombe, and an Aborigine I’d seen previously at camp but hadn’t yet met. Rick introduced me to McCombe, a real big cove, and then I went over to the black guy. ‘G’day, Jacko McKenzie,’ I said, sticking out my hand.

  ‘Johnny Gordon. ’Ow ya goin’, Jacko?’ He had a chest full of campaign ribbons and looked a fair bit older than me, perhaps in his early thirties.

  We proceeded to get stuck into the grog and it didn’t take long before the beer loosened our tongues and the usual subject came up – our personal reasons for joining K Force. Some blokes admitted it was to get away from their wives, but most, like me, simply couldn’t settle down after the Second World War. When it came to Johnny Gordon’s turn he seemed a bit hesitant, and took a quick gulp from his glass before speaking. ‘I was brought up on a mission outside Condabri. That’s in Queensland, up north some. It’s one of those places with whites-only toilets – a one-pub town that doesn’t serve blacks except out the back next to the rubbish bins and the boss’s pig pen. They won’t let you in the front door but they’ll take your money, no worries. First thing I found out as a kid, money don’t have no skin colour.’

  ‘You fair dinkum?’ I was genuinely surprised. While the others may have heard of Australian pubs that didn’t allow black people to drink on the premises, it was a first for me.

  Johnny nodded.

  ‘So this mission – like a hostel, was it?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, we had a house – two rooms, kitchen outside. I lived with me granny.’

  ‘And yer mum and dad?’ Jason Matthews asked.

  ‘Me mum got the polio and . . .’ he paused, and grinned self-consciously, ‘me daddy was someone I didn’t never know.’

  ‘Sometimes that’s better, mate. Me old man was an alky, come home pissed and beat the crap outta me most days of me life,’ Dave McCombe said in an attempt to cover Johnny’s embarrassment. Then he asked, ‘How’d yer live? You know, make a crust?’

  ‘Me granny got a permit.’

  ‘What, that like the dole?’ Tiger Anderson asked.

  Gordon shook his head. ‘They called it a Certificate of Exemption, and it meant she didn’t have to get special permission every time she wanted to leave the mission to go to work in town. Without it, if they seen her on the streets at night, the police would pick her up and throw her in the slammer ’til mornin’. She’d walk the four miles from the mission each day, get treated like shit as a cleaner and get paid about half what the whites got doing the same yakka, then she’d walk home again at night carrying the groceries she’d bought.’

  There was silence all round, then Tiger Anderson said quietly, ‘Why didn’t she bugger off, I mean, go somewhere else?’

  ‘Couldn’t,’ Gordon replied, ‘it was against the law to leave the mission.’

  I was finding all this hard to believe. People who couldn’t leave, go where they wanted like other Australians, was an entirely new idea to me. I wondered for a moment if Johnny was conning us, but he didn’t seem the sort of bloke who’d bullshit for a bit of gratuitous sympathy.

  ‘Your grandad, where was he?’ Jason Matthews asked.

  ‘Dead, when I was a little kid. He was a TPI – totally and permanently incapacitated, something he got in the First World War, my gran never said. He coughed a lot, probably his lungs were buggered from the gas. He fought with the Light Horse in the Middle East. I reckon he must have been a pretty good soldier – he was mentioned in dispatches twice.’ Johnny Gordon then gave a bitter little laugh. ‘On Anzac Day my granny would arrive at the ceremony wearing Grandad’s medals and for that one day a year she was treated like a whitey. “Mrs Gordon, would you like a cup of tea? Do have a scone.” I get real agro when I think about it, but my gran glowed with pride.’ He took a pull from his beer, and continued. ‘Next day they crossed the street to avoid her. To them she was a twenty-four-hour once-a-year white and then, at the stroke of midnight, she magically turned into a dirty black lubra again.’

  We were all silent – I wanted to ask if his mother died from
the polio, but I mean there wasn’t a whole lot you could say. I reckoned we’d asked enough personal questions.

  Then Rick Stackman spoke up.

  ‘That’s pretty crook, but it don’t explain why you joined up for World War II, Gordie.’

  Gordon grinned. ‘What do you reckon, mate? Anything to get away from bloody Condabri! You join the army and they gave you an exemption certificate.’

  ‘Yeah, exemption to get your balls shot off!’ Rick Stackman joked.

  Johnny Gordon lifted his glass. ‘The army was a different world for a blackfella like me, for the first time in my life I was an equal. I remember writing home to Granny saying how we’d wear each other’s shirts, eat from the same plate, wash in the same water, shit in the same toilet – wonders would never bloody cease!’ Johnny laughed, recalling. ‘She wrote back and said that was very nice but if I ever used a word like that again she’d take a stick to me.’

  We all laughed. ‘Righto, Gordie, from now on we’re gunna treat you like a boong so you don’t get too bloody uppity with us white guys!’ Rick Stackman jested. He was the one among us who always had a wisecrack at the ready.

  Rick’s joke seemed to clear the air a bit. ‘Yeah, them were the bad old days, all right. Must have been a bit different though when you got back, you know, from the war?’ John Lazarou suggested a bit clumsily; Lazarou had been made a lance corporal only because everyone else had refused the job and he was too dumb to work out that as a lance corporal he’d end up being everyone’s dogsbody. Predictably enough he was known as ‘Lazy’, which wasn’t a bad sobriquet for a bloke who was by nature energy deficient among other things of a dilatory nature, but who had been stupid enough to be elected lance corporal of our platoon under the mistaken impression that the added authority was going to give him an easy ride in the army.