by Gee, Maurice
Maurice Gee
THE CHAMPION
PUFFIN BOOKS
Contents
1 Shooting Hitler
2 Raising the flag
3 Canoe
4 Jackson Coop
5 Mammy
6 Amphibian
7 Dawn has visitors
8 Sugar
9 Chicago
10 Gala day
11 Tiger Coop
12 Flapjacks, milk and Lootenant Paretsky
13 AWOL
14 Thieving
15 More thieving
16 Gifts
17 Meanwhile…
18 Jack goes to sea
PUFFIN BOOKS
THE CHAMPION
Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s best-known writers for adults and children. He has won a number of literary awards, including the Wattie Award, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the New Zealand Fiction Award, the New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year Award and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Maurice Gee lives in Nelson with his wife Margareta, and has two daughters and a son.
ALSO BY MAURICE GEE
Under the Mountain
The World Around the Corner
The Halfmen of O
The Priests of Ferris
Motherstone
The Fire-Raiser
The Fat Man
Orchard Street
Hostel Girl
Salt
Chapter 1
Shooting Hitler
What do you answer when people say, ‘Who was the most important person you’ve ever known?’ They don’t mean important in the way a politician is said to be, or a footballer or film star or rock singer. They usually mean someone not well known, who made you see things in a different way.
It’s a hard question. Most people, in the end, answer ‘Mum and Dad’, or ‘My big brother’, ‘My big sister’, ‘Auntie Joyce’, ‘Uncle Dick’. And I can make that sort of answer too. Mum and Dad, my poetry-writing mum, who never stopped hoping, who never stopped trying to make other people happy, and gabby tricky Dad, my crooked dad, helped make me what I am, no doubt about it; and my sister Gloria played her part; and so did Grandma and Grandpa, in their crazy way. But I can give another answer too, name the one who came and went and left me a different person. It was Jackson Coop. He changed my life – Jackson and the things that happened in those two weeks in February 1943.
I was twelve. I’ll try to speak with my Standard Six voice not my grown-up voice. I want to say how it was and not change the shape of it by putting in ideas I’ve thought of since. So I have to time travel, go backwards in time; put myself in those days, say, ‘This is it.’
Well, this is it, a place to start from: the house in Barrington Road, Kettle Creek. The kitchen had match-lined walls and brown lino curling at the edges like stale bread, and a black wood-burning stove in an alcove with a wire drying rack above – steaming socks, navy blue girl’s rompers, barber’s aprons dried as stiff as boards. (Mum was often late with the washing.) The living room had a red-brick fireplace and books on the mantelpiece – poetry and novels and a book called The Maori Race, which I thought was about running. A rose in a stained-glass window gave a lovely sunset glow to light from the porch. We had three bedrooms, mine a narrow one with two narrow beds. The bath in the bathroom stood on iron legs like tiger claws. The enamel was worn through, with black iron patches where you sat. If you knelt and looked underneath you could see bits of dried-out soap against the wall and cigarette butts Dad had dunked in the water and dropped down there when he soaked in the bath reading his racebook. The broom wouldn’t reach that far, Mum said.
There was no hot water, not till after the war. When we wanted a bath we boiled the copper and carried dangerous buckets from the wash-house – where the wringer was clamped on the wooden tubs, where empty coal sacks thrown in the corner bred spiders that I believed were poisonous katipos, where Dad’s padlocked cupboard stood upright and secret behind the door.
The house was a bungalow needing paint. It stood on a quarter-acre section with undug garden, undipped hedge and scraggy lawns. Dad wasn’t any good with lawnmower and spade. He said, ‘A barber’s got to keep his hands in good nick.’ So does a pool player.
On the morning of the day Jackson arrived I was out on the back lawn in my pyjamas shooting Hitler and Tojo with my BB gun. Hitler you’ve heard of. Tojo was the Japanese war leader. I drew him with slanty eyes, forty-five degrees, and buck teeth coming to his chin. Hitler had a blacked-in forelock hiding his left eye and a moustache like a Maori bug. (This is my Standard Six voice. ‘Maori bug’ isn’t used today.) I had fixed the drawing on the open end of a cardboard box so I could get my BBs back. You couldn’t buy BBs in the war. Standing on the back gravel I shot Hitler and Tojo from a distance of twenty feet until only tatters of them were left. ‘Take that, Hitler’ – dead centre in the moustache. ‘Take that, Tojo’ – in the specs. I feared them but I had the upper hand. Sniper in a tree, behind a wall, I won the war with a single shot, time after time.
We played games of that sort in the war years, stalking Germans in the grass, bayonetting Japs – and dog-fighting in Spitfires, arms out rigidly, making a high-pitched drone on the roof of our mouths and going ‘rat-tat-tat’ with our tongues. Down went the Messerschmitts and Zeros in flames. ‘Take that, Jerry!’ ‘Die, yellow dog!’
The Japanese had scared us for a while. They came down the Pacific so fast, taking Singapore, which wasn’t an American but a British place, and taking the islands one by one, and sinking the Repulse and the Prince of Wales. We had air-raid drills at school. The siren blew in town and we filed out in our classes into trenches dug in the wattle grove. We put up blackout curtains and watched the sky for flights of bombers and the sea for periscopes. But now, 1943, the danger was over, Tojo was stopped at Guadalcanal, he wasn’t going to get to New Zealand, he wasn’t even getting to Australia. We liked the Yanks and cheered for them in the pictures and still ran out to see jeeps driving through Kettle Creek; but we turned our interest back to the real war, where our men were, the one against Hitler.
So there I was, on that morning, shooting Hitler twice to Tojo’s once, when Mum put her head out the kitchen window and said, ‘Rex!’ very sharply. I was so deep in my game it was like being slapped, which was more than she’d meant. Mum couldn’t be cruel if she tried.
‘Mum,’ I cried, ‘you made me miss. Now I’ve lost that BB.’
‘Bother BBs,’ Mum said. ‘You get the billy down or there’ll be no milk for breakfast.’
‘I can’t go in my pyjamas.’
Gloria stuck her head out beside Mum’s. She was wearing curlers in her hair, two in front, two at the sides, and little tin things like bulldog clips here and there. ‘He’s scared Dawn Stewart will see him,’ she grinned.
‘Why can’t Gloria do it?’
‘It’s not my job.’ She disappeared.
Dad came out the back door. Dad was a bit of a dandy in the shop, sometimes he wore a bow tie – he wore it for billiards – but at home he liked to be comfortable and went around in shirts with their collars off and baggy old trousers held up with perished braces. He was heading for the dunny, up behind the hedge, to read his racebook.
‘Come on, Daniel Boone, get a move on.’ My BB gun made him choose Daniel Boone. If I’d been on my bike he’d have called me Destry or Tom Mix and if I’d been in a tree it would have been Tarzan. These out-of-date heroes made me cross. I’d settle for Bill Ross of the Lost Commandos if I had to, but the one I most wanted to be was Rockfist Rogan of the RAF.
‘Daniel Boone,’ I said disgustedly. I went to my bedroom and pulled on my clothes, reading my Champion at the same time. This was a boys’ weekly that came from England and sold for fourpenc
e. It had stories about Rockfist and Bill Ross and Colwyn Dane the detective and Fireworks Flynn and his soccer team, the Freebooters, and Gusty Gale, the Junior Captain at Greystone School. These last two I hardly bothered with. I read Rockfist three times before I turned to them. I was in the middle of a story about Rockfist luring the Hun ace into a fight by pretending his Spitfire was crippled when Mum came in and pushed the billy at me and whipped away my Champion with her other hand.
‘She’s nearly at the gate.’
‘I’ve got to get my shirt on,’ I complained.
‘You’ll do it faster if you don’t read. And,’ she said, going out, ‘get that stuff cleared off the bed. Someone’s got to sleep in it tonight.’
‘Who – ’ I started to say, but she was gone. Sometimes Mum could be like a whirlwind. Her dreaminess was annoying but I liked it better than her bouts of mad activity that left you giddy and not knowing where you were.
I ran down the path with the billy, wondering who was coming tonight. People were always sharing my room, friends of Dad’s from town mostly, caught in Kettle Creek for the night. (That meant they’d played cards too late to catch the bus.) I hated them because they came to cook up deals with Dad, and some of them looked young enough to be away fighting in the war, so why weren’t they? And some kept me awake by snoring all night. Mum gave me bits of rag to stuff in my ears but that made them ache.
She was right though about nearly missing the milk. Mrs Stewart’s old Dodge truck with the special low tray was only two doors up the street. She was ladling milk into a billy that Dawn, her grand-daughter, held up. I have to tell you more about these people fairly soon, because they’re a part of those two weeks, Jackson’s story, a very big part. But for the moment I’ll just say that Mrs Stewart owned a farm, a crummy sort of farm, on the edge of town, by the mangrove swamps, and our half of Kettle Creek bought its milk from her. Dawn lived with her – just the two of them. Dawn was in my class at school. Mrs Stewart was white and Dawn was half Maori.
She put the full billy on a gatepost, then grabbed our next-door neighbour’s and came for mine. On the way she passed our garage where Dad’s car, the hearse, poked its bonnet over the footpath. It was too long for the garage, and Dad always parked it with its rear doors inside, ‘for very good reasons’ he said with a wink. That meant things he had to leave inside, hidden under sacks. Don’t be alarmed, it wasn’t bodies, he was a barber not an undertaker and he had the hearse only because he hoped to get an extra ration of petrol (he never did). As she passed, Dawn slowed down and ran her hand along the grille.
‘Hey,’ I shouted, ‘keep away from that.’
‘Who wants your stupid car?’ She snatched my billy and ran to the truck, which had moved down the street. Mrs Stewart climbed on the tray and ladled milk from the urn to the billy. Dawn looked up and seemed to ask a question and Mrs Stewart waved her away. You could hardly tell if Mrs Stewart was a woman or a man, in her tartan shirt and overalls and her hair as short as mine. There was a muscular stringiness in her neck and a bony hardness in her hands. She jumped down from the tray just like a man.
Dawn put our neighbour’s billy in its box and gave me ours.
‘Hey,’ I protested, looking inside.
‘It’s not my fault.’
Mrs Stewart was getting in the cab. ‘Mrs Stewart, we get more than this.’
‘We’re short today,’ she said indifferently, and drove twenty yards down the street.
‘You’re cheats, Stewart,’ I said to Dawn.
‘We are not.’
‘We’re not paying for a full one.’
‘Who cares?’ She ran for the next billy, in her clean sandals and skirt. I was in bare feet, with buttons off my shirt. Mum had got a needle and thread last night to sew them on but had put them down somewhere and couldn’t find them. I didn’t like Dawn’s clothes being better than mine.
I went up the path with the billy and put it on the back step while I chose clods of earth from the dried-out flowerbed by the kitchen window and lobbed them at the Hitler/Tojo box. They burst on contact, that was satisfying, but I didn’t score any direct hits. The lavatory made an easier target. I chose a clod the size of a grenade and pulled the pin out with my teeth and overarmed it high over the clothesline, over the willow hedge, dead centre on to the iron roof, where it exploded, raining bits of dirt everywhere.
‘What the hell!’ Dad yelled.
‘Direct hit,’ I said, and escaped inside with the billy.
I put it on the bench in the scullery, where Gloria was cutting her school lunch, and got my Champion from the bedroom and sat down at the table. I straightened my spoon at the side of my plate. Mum just plonked stuff on the table but I liked things four square. I was, I’d heard her say, ‘an elbows-in-at-sides sort of boy’. She was at the stove stirring bread and milk in the porridge pot. The radio was playing ‘Chattanooga Choo-choo’, one of the tunes of that year.
‘The lemon honey’s finished,’ Gloria yelled.
‘There’s Marmite in the cupboard.’ Mum carried the pot to the table and dumped mounds of bread and milk in our plates. I didn’t complain, what was the use? I hated bread and milk but left-over bread had to be used.
Gloria brought the billy from the scullery. ‘Old Ma Stewart gave us short.’ She poked the bread and milk. ‘It’s like a poultice.’
‘It’s like white mud.’
‘Stop complaining, you two,’ Mum said. Then her eyes went blind and she put the pot on the stove. She went to the sideboard, turned the radio down, and wrote a line in her notebook. She was writing a poem on Kettle Creek for the gala. She smiled at us.
‘Funny little town with your feet in the mud – ’
‘There’s not much fun in Kettle Creek,’ Gloria said, wandering back to the scullery with her plate.
‘ – and your head lifted up to the hills – ’
‘Where’s the rhymes, Mum?’ I complained. ‘Miss Betts said the rhymes in the last one were all wrong.’
‘You tell Miss Betts,’ Mum said, getting snooty, ‘that feeling is more important than rhymes.’ She put her notebook in her apron and threw wood in the stove. ‘And a kind word is better than the strap.’
‘Good on you, Mum,’ Gloria said.
Dad came in. ‘Who was bombarding me?’
‘The Japs came over, Dad. Didn’t you notice?’
‘You, eh?’ He grabbed the toasting fork and pretended to bayonet me. Then he seized Mum and bent her over backwards. ‘Let me take you away from all this.’ I found the way they kissed and the way he patted her, sometimes on the behind and sometimes in public, embarrassing. But I liked the way he pretended to be a romantic actor. Dad was a short man with a round belly and round face and squashed-up nose and gabby mouth. I loved to see him taking the mickey out of soppy movies.
He went to the sink and washed his hands. ‘Love those things in your hair,’ he said to Gloria.
Gloria’s hands flew to her hair. ‘Mum,’ she screeched, ‘my curlers are still in.’ Mum left the stove and took them out while Gloria ate her bread and milk. Dad speared bread on the fork and started making toast. ‘You didn’t see anyone hanging round my hearse?’ he asked me.
‘No,’ I said, alarmed, ‘what’s in it now?’
He winked at me. ‘A little bit of this and a little bit of that. No bobbies in helmets hanging round?’
‘Can you really get extra petrol for it, Dad?’ Gloria asked.
‘If I start carting bodies.’
‘You might as well, Mum said, ‘you’ve carted everything else.’ She had Gloria’s curlers out and she pushed her at the living-room door. Then she took the toasting fork from Dad. ‘Pour yourself some tea.’
He sat on the settee to drink it, pulling his racebook from his hip pocket. Gloria came back with her hair brush.
‘I’m late.’
‘Rex will do it,’ Mum said.
‘I will not.’
‘I’ll miss my bus.’
‘Lend a
hand, Tarzan. No one will see,’ Dad said.
‘Not too hard,’ Gloria said. She finished her breakfast while I stood behind her and set to work. I rather liked that job. She had lovely hair with a silky feeling. I combed it with my fingers as well as brushing.
‘I bet Matty Yukich would like to be me.’
‘You shut up about Matty.’
I put the brush under her hair and spread it over my hands. ‘Anyway,’ I said to Mum, ‘who’s in the bed? There’s always someone sleeping in my room.’
‘That’s what a spare bed’s for, hospitality,’ Dad said.
‘Why not hers?’ meaning Gloria’s.
‘I couldn’t very well put a man in with her,’ Mum said.
‘What man?’ Gloria said.
But Mum gave a smile and left the toasting fork on the fire grille and took her notebook from her apron pocket.
‘Hush,’ Dad said. ‘Not a breath. The muse is here.’
‘What man?’ Gloria whispered to me.
‘I don’t know.’
Mum wrote some lines, and read: ‘And one dusty road to the world outside/ And all the wide world’s ills.’
‘Good stuff, Ber,’ Dad said.
‘What man?’ Gloria wasn’t going to let it go.
‘Mm?’ Mum said. ‘An American.’
That made me stop brushing. It changed everything. ‘A pilot?’ I said.
‘My toast is burning,’ Dad cried.
‘What American?’
Mum woke up and pulled the toast out of the fire. She started scraping it with a knife. ‘The one I wrote away for. He was wounded and he’s coming for a rest. So no pestering him,’ she said to me.
‘Is he a pilot?’
‘He’s a soldier.’
‘Is he young?’ Gloria said. ‘Keep brushing.’
‘I dare say.’
‘If he was wounded he’ll have the Purple Heart,’ I said.
Dad took his toast. ‘He’ll need the Purple Heart if he gets toast like this.’
‘What’s his name?’
