by Gee, Maurice
But Mum was all business now. She took the hairbrush from me and put it on the table. She stood Gloria up and picked stray hairs off her school uniform. ‘You get that bed cleared off, my lad. You’ll find out all you need to know tonight.’
That was the sort of breakfast we had, everybody running round, dancing round each other with pots and plates and kettles and billies of milk, all talking across each other, and the radio going. Food got cooked and eaten and hair got brushed and hands washed, lunches cut, and poems written, and we got off to school and work somehow. I was the only one who sat at the table every morning, the only one who put his spoon straight. I made a little island of order in the middle of it all but I wasn’t obsessive about it. It was just that a war was on and I was the only one who seemed to know. A war meant pulling yourself together, trying to win. All I could manage in that way, in our family, was having breakfast properly, things like that.
I went to my bedroom and cleared the bed. I kept my room tidy and clean. Things weren’t thrown about. My American cigarette packet collection on the spare bed was neatly laid out on a tray. My BB gun was parallel to the headboard. The sideboard top was equally tidy. For example, my collection of cartridge cases was arranged according to size. The pictures of fighter planes pinned on the wall were evenly spaced. Mum’s broom mightn’t go under the beds but when she’d finished I borrowed it and did the job myself.
So, on that morning when she first mentioned our American, I shifted my gun into the cupboard and I cleared a space for the cigarette packets on the sideboard. I ranged the cartridge cases at the back like a row of soldiers. Then I went to the scullery and mixed a tin lid of flour and water paste. I got Mum’s scissors and cut out an American flag I’d found in a magazine. I pasted it on the wall above the bed where our American guest would be sleeping. Then I stood in the middle of the room and saluted it.
Chapter 2
Raising the flag
As Mum’s poem said, Kettle Creek had its feet in the mud and its head in the hills. It was thirty-five miles from Auckland along a metalled road. Standing in the hills, on clay tracks cut from gorse, you could see the twice-daily bus coming from miles away through the farms. It left a trail of dust like the vapour trails jet planes leave in the sky today. Down on the flats lay the town: red roofs, wooden houses, corrugated iron shops with false fronts and curved verandas. We had no railway. We had a picture theatre and a town hall, we had a domain with a bandstand, and a jam factory that made no jam now that sugar was short, and some poultry farms and pig farms, and a few scrubby dairy farms like the Stewart one, some apple and pear orchards, and one or two vineyards owned by Dalmatians. We had, I guess, eight hundred people. The sea stretched away beyond the bar, where sea birds gathered at low tide. The mud of Mum’s poem was in the estuary, acres of it when the tide was out. There were acres of mangroves too, an African jungle of mangroves. I can’t imagine growing up without those two things – three things – mud, mangroves, warm brown tidal water.
Our house was on the edge of town, up towards the hills where the main street, Barrington Road, petered out. A hundred yards past our place it turned into a clay track and zig-zagged up towards the dam. (I hope you don’t mind my saying ‘yards’ and ‘miles’ and ‘acres’ and ‘pounds and ounces’ and ‘pounds, shillings and pence’ instead of kilometres and kilograms, etc. I’m trying to describe things the way they were.)
After I’d saluted the American flag I put my lunch in my schoolbag and left for school. I rode my bicycle, a big heavy-framed machine with balloon tyres, down Barrington Road, and shortly after I’d got off the gravel on to the seal Dad passed me in the hearse and gave a honk on the horn. He had his nose stuck in the air, pretending to be an undertaker, but I wasn’t amused. At home he amused me, most of the time, but outside in the world I was more often ashamed of him. He rolled on in his mock-dignified way, in the centre of the road, past the jam factory, the scout hall, the picture theatre, and I rode on slowly, letting him get well ahead.
‘Rex,’ someone hissed at me – mine is a good name for hissing. It was George Perry, by his gate. George was one of Dad’s mates, in all sorts of shady deals with him. Shady is, in fact, the word for George. (Crooked is the word for Dad, but so are lots of others – happy, eager, keen, cunning, enthusiastic, generous, acquisitive, open, honest, devious; he was full of contradictions.) George was a one-adjective person and that was ‘shady’. Whenever you met him he was either sidling up or sidling away, with a stoop in his shoulders that meant he didn’t want to be noticed. His eyes shifted here and there, up this street, down that alley, and his voice was on soft volume all the time, a grey sort of voice – but I mustn’t go on about him because he’s not important in the story. I circled my bike and rode back to his gate. He pushed a scrap of paper into my hand. ‘Give this to Alf. In your pocket, boy, don’t wave it about.’
I wanted to say, ‘Give it yourself,’ but I took it and put it in my pocket, and right at that moment Bob Davies, the Kettle Creek policeman, came out of the station and got into his car. George Perry turned on his feet as though in a foxtrot and slid away behind the hedge. I felt my heart turn over like a doughboy in a stew. But Davies drove off the other way, and when I looked for George again all I saw was the door of his house closing softly. I gave his gate a kick before riding on. I knew that Dad was letting us down by having deals with George Perry.
He was polishing the hearse outside the shop when I rode up. ‘Alfred Pascoe, Gents’ Barber, Billiard Parlour’ the window said in gold letters edged with black. ‘Here,’ I said and gave him George’s note. He read it and crowed, ‘That’ll never win, that’s got lead hoofs.’
‘Dad…’ I began.
He heard the complaint in my voice and looked at me.
‘What if they catch you, Dad?’
‘You reckon Bob Davies can catch me?’
Across the road two American soldiers strolled down the path of the Whalley house and stood at the gate lighting cigarettes. Faye Whalley was Gloria’s friend so I knew who they were: Marvin Varcoe and Herb Cutter from the Ozark Mountains. That name, and their names too, had seemed romantic until I saw Marvin and Herb – one flabby and pink-coloured and one with high skinny shoulders and boil scars on his neck. They didn’t come even close to my idea of fighting men. But they gave me the chance to say to Dad the thing that bothered me.
‘Everyone else is trying to win the war.’
That knocked him off balance. Dad thought it was a game when we criticised him. Now he saw I was unhappy. He touched my head. ‘I give people a bit of fun, Rex. Even in wartime, you know, there’s got to be fun.’ Then his natural cheekiness came back. ‘And I make a bit of money on the side.’ He winked at me and ruffled my hair. ‘Morning, boys, lovely morning,’ he called to the Ozark boys. ‘Come and have a game of snooker later on. You can have a free one.’
I rode away to school, choosing the smoothest part of the road. My tyres were getting worn and there’d be no more till after the war. Dad could fix me up with ordinary tyres but not balloons. I put my bag in my desk and came outside to take charge of my platoon. I was NCO of the school cadets and I’d learnt to shout, ‘Left wheel, right wheel, shoulder arms, present arms, attention, stand at ease.’ Not much fun. I had hoped we’d do war exercises and get something better than the broomsticks with butts attached we used as rifles. Our main job was to be an honour guard as the Union Jack went up each morning. That made me feel important and it seemed to make up for Mum and Dad not doing much for the War Effort.
The whole school was lined up in classes, with the primers on the right, wriggling and giggling and wiping their noses on the bits of rag they had to bring, and the Standard Sixes on the left – the ones like me who would be off next year on the morning bus to schools in town. ‘Platoon,’ I cried, ‘present arms!’ They obeyed, with a ragged slapping of palms on rifle butts. I saluted Mr Dent and he said, ‘Very good, Pascoe,’ with his usual clacking of false teeth. A dithery amiable man, Mr D
ent, who should have been pottering in his garden, pruning his roses, which he loved, not trying to run a four-teacher school at the end of his days, and trying to boss a fierce young woman like Miss Betts.
That was Miss Betts now, in the Standard Three and Four room, Mr Dent’s room, striking up ‘God Save the King’ on the school piano. I could see her fingers white as bone, whiter than the keys. She had a way of squashing keys as though they were bugs, and the tune that came out, even ‘God Save the King’, was like slaps on the face. Jim Whittle, a big rough boy with flea-bitten legs, pulled on the rope to raise the flag. Up the front of the building it went, into the breeze over the gable. But halfway up the pole it stopped and Jim Whittle gave half a dozen jerks to make it move. I saw Nancy Barnhill snicker and Leo Yukich grin.
‘It’s stuck, sir,’ Jim Whittle said.
Mr Dent, still singing, whipping up our voices with one hand, took the rope and tugged, but it wouldn’t move.
‘The rope’s jammed in the pulley,’ I said.
Mr Dent didn’t know what to do. He told his class later that he felt it would be unpatriotic to pull the flag down. He dithered and tugged, and kept conducting with his other hand, and looked inside nervously at Miss Betts, who hadn’t noticed anything wrong so far. It was Leo Yukich who fixed things up. I’m going to have a lot to say about Leo, because he was one of us, one of the four: me and Dawn and Leo and Jackson Coop. But before I tell you who he was, let me say how he fixed the flag. I had never taken much notice of Leo. You might say he burst upon me in that moment.
He ran to the chestnut tree beside the school and stepped up into it as though climbing stairs. Ten feet up, he ran along a branch pointing at the school and reached out his leg to the roof, curling his toes in the rain gutter for a hold. He balanced there, then used the elasticity in the branch to spring himself over. He went four-footed up the gable to the base of the flag pole, rubbed his palms on his trousers and shinnied up. The school let out an ‘Ooh!’ Miss Betts was at the window, leaning out with her body twisted to see. If Leo fell, he’d come down the front of the school like a blade and slice her head off. But he wasn’t falling, I knew that. I’d never seen anyone more sure of what he was doing.
He held the skinny top of the pole with one hand, below the cap, and worked at the pulley. ‘Give us a bit of rope, sir.’ Mr Dent still had it tight but he let go. Leo unjammed the pulley by wriggling it. ‘Try her now.’ Mr Dent pulled and the rope ran free. Everybody cheered, and Mr Dent showed his big false choppers in a grin. But Miss Betts wasn’t going to let discipline go, not even for something as exciting as this. ‘Silence!’ she cried, and when Miss Betts made that sort of yell you froze where you were. Mr Dent froze. Leo came down – down the pole and gable, down the tree – into deathly quiet. He walked across the asphalt to his place in the Standard Six line.
‘Yukich,’ she said. He stopped. ‘Next time don’t move unless you’re told.’
I couldn’t believe she was saying it. I knew what Leo had done could not have been done by anyone else – well, perhaps by Rockfist or Commando Bill. It seemed heroic to me, and I felt we should be cheering him and giving him a medal. I got dizzy ten feet from the ground. When he held on with one hand and worked the pulley I had thought I was going to black out.
‘Now,’ said Miss Betts, ‘let’s start again. And see if we can do it properly.’ To Dent she said, ‘That should have been one of our boys.’
She meant not a Dally, not a ‘squarehead’. She meant a New Zealand boy, a British boy.
We sang ‘God Save the King’ and marched inside to the Colonel Bogey March. Leo was still printed on my mind against the sky, on the moving clouds, on the skinny pole, making me feel weak and tummy-sick and worshipful. When we sat in class I couldn’t stop glancing at him. He sat in his window seat looking bored. Once he tore a sliver from his fingernail. It must have broken in the tree. He took off his red neckerchief when Miss Betts ordered him and put it in his desk, giving her a steady look, not of resentment, of dislike. Miss Betts and Leo had a running fight, but though she insulted him and called him ‘Yuck’-ich (although she was too clever not to know the proper way to say it was ‘Yook’ as in book) and strapped him for small things that other boys, that I, got away with, she never won. Leo just kept looking at her as though she was a blowfly he’d swat one day.
He wasn’t a big boy, he was small and hard and quick. He moved twice as fast as the rest of us and had small dark eyes that seemed to see twice as much. Miss Betts always made out he was dumb, but he was bright – and so was Dawn Stewart, I believe, although Miss Betts had a game of tapping on her desk as she went by, then tapping Dawn’s skull and listening as though the sounds were identical. Dawn and Leo weren’t friends, neither had friends, but now and then he stopped boys like Jim Whittle from picking on her. Even Jim, half as big again, backed off when Leo came along.
At half past nine we heard milk crates rattling outside. ‘Milk’s here, Miss Betts,’ Jim Whittle cried.
‘I’m not deaf, boy.’ She continued writing long-division sums with her squeaky chalk. And in case you’re getting the wrong idea about Miss Betts, let me say she was a good teacher. She got the facts into you and made sure you remembered them. In lots of other things, of course, she was bad. She seemed to enjoy hurting people, but that may have been because she was angry most of the time. She was angry not to be running the school. She knew she would do it better than Mr Dent. I should add that she was smart-looking too – smart in her clothes and the way she did her hair and put on make-up. She was a stylish pretty lady, but ‘sharp as tacks’ Dad said, and ‘hard as nails’ said Mum. I think she was unhappy, that may have made her cruel. She wrote poetry; and probably did know more about rhyming than Mum – but not, I’m sure, a quarter as much about good feeling.
She turned from the board at last. ‘Real milk for a change.’ She meant by that bottled milk, not milk from Stewarts’ farm, watered down some people said. Dawn kept at her sums but pinkness crept into her cheeks.
‘This week’s monitor,’ Miss Betts said. I stood up.
‘Choose a partner.’
‘Me, Rex,’ Jim Whittle said.
‘Me,’ cried other boys, shooting their arms into the air. Leo was the only one who did not have his hand up.
‘Leo,’ I said. His head came round in surprise. But he stood up quickly, glad of the chance to get out of the room.
We crossed the playground to the milk shed and picked up a crate.
‘Why’d you pick me?’
‘Dunno,’ I said. I looked at the flagpole, which seemed to rotate as clouds moved by.
‘I thought you didn’t like Dallies.’
‘I never said that.’
‘Bettsy-bum calls us squareheads. She reckons we’re pinching land while the soldiers are away.’
‘I don’t say squareheads.’
‘You better not.’
I had, though, said squarehead to Gloria when she started going out with Leo’s brother Matty. I wondered if she’d told Matty, and Matty told Leo. He didn’t like me, that was plain, and I looked for ways to change his mind.
‘We’ve got a Yank coming to stay.’
‘I see lots of Yanks.’
‘Yeah?’
‘They come to buy wine. With their girlfriends. In jeeps.’ He was dismissing me. If it hadn’t been for the flagpole I’d have been angry, and probably would have said something insulting, but the pole was there, over my head, and I couldn’t get rid of the memory of him clinging one-handed in the sky. He noticed where I was looking.
‘I can climb higher things than that.’
I believed him. Still, as our arithmetic went on I began to forget him. I grew excited about my American. I wondered if he would have medals besides the Purple Heart, and what battles he’d been in, and how many Japs he had killed. I hoped he would be a lieutenant. I like the way the Yanks said ‘loo’ instead of ‘lef’. Lootenant Buddy Storm was the name I made up for him.
Jim Wh
ittle made a sucking sound with his straw. Miss Betts swung round from the board.
‘Was that you, Yukich?’
‘No,’ Leo said.
‘No, what?’
‘No, Miss Betts.’
She eyed him suspiciously. ‘What did you get for number four? Let me see.’ She walked down the row of desks to him.
‘I haven’t done number four yet.’
She looked in his book. ‘You haven’t even done number three. Monkeys can climb flagpoles, Yukich, but you need something up here – ’ knocking her knuckles on his forehead so hard the sound travelled through the room – ‘for arithmetic.’
Whittle laughed. Miss Betts turned to Dawn. ‘Dawn Stewart, what did you get?’
‘I haven’t finished that one, Miss Betts.’
‘You shake yourself up, my girl, this isn’t the pa.’
She went round the room and we kept on working. I finished the sums and started a picture on a loose sheet of paper. I got so wrapped up in it I forgot where I was. I sucked my empty bottle and made a sound louder than Jim Whittle’s.
‘Pascoe!’ said Miss Betts, two rows away.
‘Sorry, Miss Betts. It was an accident.’ I tried to slip my drawing under my book.
‘What are you doing?’ She strode round the desks at me.
‘Sums,’ I said.
‘No, boy,’ rapping my knuckles with her ruler, making me yelp, ‘under your sums.’
I drew it out slowly and gave it to her: a drawing of a Yankee soldier bayonetting a Tojo-faced Jap through the middle. His speech balloon said, ‘Die, yellow dog!’
‘It’s my American. He’s coming to stay.’
‘Oh?’
‘Tonight, Miss Betts. Mum wrote away for him. He might be a lootenant, I hope.’
She gave a sniff that seemed to say he could have done better than the Pascoes. But she didn’t strap me. ‘Put it away, get on with your sums.’
‘Can I bring him to school, Miss Betts? To talk about America?’
‘He might not want to come.’
