The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  I am sending this letter via Mr Gunnar Petersen, a passenger (or is it refugee?) on the last boat to leave New Britain. Gunnar is a deacon in the Rabaul congregation and a thoroughly decent chap who, I am confident, will make every endeavour to get this letter to Henry in Perth. ‘If I have to walk all the way myself, Vicar!’ he assured me.

  I was, of course, offered passage on the same boat, and my hope is that you will understand why I could not avail myself of the opportunity to escape the island. I am a missionary, not simply for the good times but also for the bad. I have a native flock I feel sure are going to need me in the days and months to come. There are also a number of whites of assorted nationality who are unable to escape, and who will need my spiritual guidance. My hope is that I will not be found wanting.

  With a fluency in their language and knowledge of the Japanese mindset, I believe I will be in a position to bring about some amelioration. After all, is this not God’s true calling — to bring comfort and restore faith and hope in those around us?

  If you receive this letter that will mean you are safe and the Lord God will have answered my ardent prayers for your safe return. These are uncertain times and, with God’s will, we will soon be together once again — father and son, priest and sailor, bibliophile and butterfly collector.

  I realise that I have not always been the father you may have hoped for. With the premature death of your mother you lacked the maternal care every child is entitled to receive, and I know I should have done better. Yet you have grown to be a splendid man. If I haven’t told you as often as I should, I am immensely proud of you. As for my shortcomings as a parent — and I am aware they have been many — I hope and pray that you will forgive me.

  I should, perhaps, end with Psalm 23, but choose not to: too much valley, shadow and death and, I fear, very little green pasture is ahead for mankind.

  Although, as far as I know, there is not a scintilla of Irish in our family, I prefer to leave you with this simple and traditional secular blessing:

  May the road rise to meet you

  May the wind always be at your back

  May the sun shine warm upon your face

  The rains fall soft upon your fields

  And until we meet again

  May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

  Your loving father,

  John Duncan

  After reading my father’s letter so soon after the news about Anna, I confess I crept away to a quiet corner of the Archbishop’s spacious grounds and found a garden seat where I blubbed like a small child. Why is it that we so often reveal our true feelings when the time has passed? I had never once told my father that I loved him and now, possibly too late, I realised how very much I did.

  His notion that he could somehow lighten the load of his parishioners by negotiating with the Japanese was naïve but predictable. He didn’t have a skerrick of commonsense, and never got it into his Anglican clergyman’s head that a good intellect, a dollop of tolerance and a soupçon of God thrown in for good measure isn’t the solution to every human problem. Faith, hope and charity — that summed up his attitude perfectly.

  I spent the larger part of my so-called ‘holiday’ (before embarking on the train trip to Melbourne and going on to the HMAS Cerberus) lying on the bed feeling sorry for myself. I had found a fleapit to replace Mrs Beswick’s establishment with its ‘All stations alert — spies are everywhere’ and ‘One cold shower a day’ features.

  Two of the three people I cared about most were either dead or imprisoned by the Japanese. Marg Hamilton, of course, was the third. If we ever met again a fourth would be Kevin Judge, telling whoever expects him to face up to the enemy: I want ya ter unnerstan, I ain’t no fuckin’ hero!

  Three of these four I now cherished as friends, two as lovers. I hadn’t known any of them that long, but when you’re a loner you pick your associates very carefully, yet more by luck than good judgment these people had come into my life and I cared about them very much. Perhaps it was because I was finally growing up that I recognised their importance to me. Now two of them might well be dead, and a third would be getting on with his life in the US Navy or back in Chicago. That left only Marg Hamilton, who so wonderfully ended my impatient virginity by guiding me across the post-pubescent threshold into manhood.

  Added to my depression was my guilt that I knew I loved both Anna Van Heerden and Marg Hamilton. Can a man love two women simultaneously? I mean love, like in romance? Marg had invited me into her bed. That was, and still is, one of the truly wonderful events — with bugles blaring — in my life. As importantly, while I didn’t recognise it at the time, she gave me the comfort of a woman, the warmth, the closeness, and other outwardly female characteristics I had not experienced as a child. By this I don’t mean she was a surrogate mother — nothing of the sort. She belonged to a gender I had instinctively longed to love and, now that I’d been taught to do so, in return she had shown me how to receive love. Does that make any sense?

  Anna, on the other hand, made me laugh and want to dance and do somersaults and handstands ahead of her on a green lawn, and feel the sheer joy of being young. She was a lovely mystery to be explored. A butterfly only just emerged from the chrysalis who was testing her beautiful wings in the dewy sunlight.

  During my week and a half of being a thorough pain in the arse, Marg took to fetching and feeding me in the evenings and enduring my moods. Then two days before I was due to leave on the three-day journey by train to Melbourne, she’d finally had a gutful of my pathetic self-pity.

  ‘Nick, there is no point in grieving for what may have happened. Until you are certain, until the telegram arrives, get on with your life. Even then, you’ll mourn them for the remainder of your life, but after the initial tears and heartache we all have to get on with it. We have to find a way to cope.’ She paused. ‘As I and many others have been required to do.’

  See what I mean? That same sentence said by a man would carry an unspoken but underlying criticism: C’mon, ferchrissakes, Nick. Time to get on with it; be a man, will ya! With Marg, it was loving and kind, wise and understanding and correct. And all of it was delivered without the underlying verbal sock in the jaw. It shocked me out of my self-pity.

  ‘Marg, I apologise. You’re perfectly right. I’m afraid I’ve been a miserable little shit. Thanks for looking after me and straightening me out, helping me get on top of it all.’

  ‘Well, I rather like the idea of your getting on top of it,’ she laughed. ‘Tomorrow night at 6.30 it’s sausages, onions and a volcano of mash with gravy, followed by trifle and custard and then…’ She paused. ‘I thought the traditional sailor’s farewell.’

  ‘Sailor’s farewell?’ I asked stupidly, momentarily thinking it was something to eat, then seeing her mischievous grin. ‘Oh!’ I said, blushing.

  ‘When a sailor goes to sea a prudent woman leaves him with a memory to come home to.’ She grinned. ‘So her sailor-boy won’t forget her.’

  At eighteen, unlike girls, I guess guys are a bit ‘um and ah’, resorting more to glottal sounds than to sentence construction. ‘Gee, ah, er, ummph, I’m not really, ah, going to sea, but er, ah, that’s wonderful, Marg,’ is a rough approximation of my highly sophisticated reply.

  ‘But you are going to sea, Nick. All naval establishments ashore are treated as ships, and when you leave the front gate it is called “going ashore”. I feel duty-bound to maintain a tradition that has probably existed since Francis Drake left England to circumnavigate the globe or to fight the Spanish Armada.’

  I guess it was still on Marg’s terms. I lacked the wit or the experience or whatever it takes to coax a woman into bed, hers or my own. Not that I had one to coax her into. My bed was an iron army cot on an upstairs verandah that had been converted into fibro cubicles just large enough to contain a narrow bed and a suitcase. I was in no position to conduct the niceties of romance,
even if I knew how to do so — which I didn’t.

  I wasn’t expecting Marg’s invitation and counted myself dead fortunate that I was being invited to sleep with a beautiful, generous and loving woman. My greatest concern was whether I brought my own frangers this time, or whether Marg (as she had previously done) would equip me with standard naval issue.

  I wasn’t even certain where one bought French letters. At school, the conventional wisdom was that they were obtained from the barber’s shop or the chemist. I wasn’t too keen on the chemist shop; they always seemed to have young girls behind the counter who wore a knowing smirk when you asked to see the chemist. Anyway, in my experience chemists are, generally speaking, a scrubbed-up and antiseptic-looking lot who mix potions in back rooms and take themselves fairly seriously: Take one twice a day after meals; if they cause constipation come back and see me, Mr Duncan. How can you front up to a bloke like that and say ‘I’d like a packet of contraceptives, please, sir’, particularly when you don’t even know how much they’ll cost?

  Both chemists in Rabaul were Anglicans and on Sundays they’d arrive at church with their families in big, shiny cars, one a Dodge and the other a Studebaker. They were sort of one notch above the rest of us, except for the doctor and the magistrate and, of course, my dad the vicar. Those four professions, and maybe the headmaster of the local high school, made up the local royalty — oh yes, and the district commissioner, but he was a Catholic. The rest of us were the hoi polloi.

  I didn’t need a haircut because I’d had one (as a result of Marg’s suggestion) when Kevin and I had come ashore. The barber had asked me where I’d been when he saw my hair was practically down to my shoulders. The little bloke had always had a crew cut, but I didn’t want to look like a Yank so I’d just had the usual schoolboy short back and sides. Now it looked as if I’d have to get a haircut when I didn’t really need one, just so I could casually bring up the subject of French letters.

  The following morning I walked into a barber’s shop near the wharf, and waited until it was empty. ‘Good morning,’ I greeted the barber, who looked Italian or maybe Greek — probably Greek, since the Italians had all been rounded up and put in internment camps, even if they’d lived here for fifty years.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he’d replied, not looking at me, flapping the hair of the previous customer from the barber’s cloth to the floor. ‘Very good for ze tomato and beans. You want a haircut?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ I replied.

  He was a little bloke, tummy sticking out, verandah over the toolshed. He looked like he needed a haircut himself and sported a black moustache, waxed and curled up at the ends like a photograph of a German sergeant in the First World War. He turned and looked at me for the first time. ‘Why you want haircut?’ He jabbed his podgy forefinger at me. ‘I cutta your hair two weeks ago! Why you come back? You don’t like?’

  It was the same barber who’d cut my hair after Kevin and I had come ashore. There’d been so much happening that day and with the excitement of finally making it to Australia, I hadn’t noticed the outside of the shop or really taken much notice of the barber. ‘No, it’s fine, thank you. I just, er…’

  ‘You wanna franger? Five bob packet three. You wanna fancy? Tickle pussy?’ He bent his arm at the elbow and gripped his left hand with the right, with three fat fingers protruding from the left. He wiggled them. I think this was meant to portray my erection when it was fitted with the fancy condom, the tickle fingers sticking out of the top driving Marg mad with desire. ‘Very good, the best! She gonna like very, very much. Seven an’ six, two packet only fourteen shilling, one bob discount. You want, yes?’

  ‘I’ll have the five bob packet, please,’ I said, handing him two half-crowns.

  He went to the drawer in front of the barber’s chair and handed me a small packet. ‘Two more week, you come. I give you nice haircut, the best,’ he said, then patted me lightly on the shoulder. ‘Good luck, you good boy; you don’t make baby, leave girl, go to war, get kill, no papa that bambino.’

  With the condom issue resolved and the packet safely out of sight in my pocket, I was feeling somewhat more confident. ‘What’s good for tomatoes and beans?’ I asked him, referring to his previous comment.

  His podgy hand shot up and he grabbed a tuft of hair on his scalp. ‘Hairs. Every night I sweep. Take home dat customer hair, you put in ground for tomato, it grow big like pumpkin, beans, same size zucchini!’

  As digging human hair into the vegie patch seemed bizarre enough, I wasn’t game to ask him what a zucchini was.

  I bought Marg a bunch of carnations, red and white. They cost me more than the condoms. The flower lady wrapped them in butcher’s paper. ‘It’s the war, love,’ she sighed in a weary voice. ‘’Fraid it’ll have to be string, brown, no tissue paper, no ribbon neither. For your girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, thinking that Marg was a bit too good to be called a girlfriend, like someone you sometimes took to the movies.

  ‘That’s nice. Yer learnin’ early. Sure way to a woman’s heart. Last time me husband brought home flowers was 1928. He was pissed and stole them from the cemetery after he’d missed the last bus and had ter walk home. It’s three o’clock in the mornin’ and he’s standin’ there, holdin’ these white arum lilies. “Yer stupid bugger, Perce! Don’tcha know they’s bad luck in the home?” I says to him. It’s three o’clock in the mornin’ and it’s garbo collection next day, so I ’as ta go out on the pavement in me nightie and slippers ter throw them in the dustbin. Didn’t want no more bad luck in the house, Perce was enough!’ She handed me the flowers. ‘Good luck, son, hope she’s kind ter yer. How come a big, strappin’ lad like yiz ’asn’t joined up?’

  ‘Next week. Navy,’ I said, escaping.

  ‘Good boy!’ she called back at me.

  So with the barber and the flower lady wishing me luck, I fronted up at Marg’s flat at half-past six on the dot. I was wearing my new slacks and shirt and Peter Keeble’s jacket, and was feeling in quite a decent mood in a tonight’s-the-night sort of way. It’s not every day you get this lucky with someone you love. I’d waited at the bus stop for ten minutes so I wouldn’t arrive before the appointed hour. I’d been told somewhere that women are never ready on time and that arriving early is considered gauche.

  Marg came to the door and I handed her the flowers. ‘Nick, how lovely!’ she exclaimed, bringing them up to her nose. Carnations have a funny sort of smell, not like roses, but I only found that out after I’d bought them. ‘Hmm, beautiful,’ she said. ‘Come in, dinner won’t be long. Starving as usual, I suppose?’

  ‘You look lovely,’ I said. She did too: a blue dress that showed off her nice figure, white sort of ballerina-type flatties, suntanned legs and arms, chestnut hair shining, red lipstick and black stuff around her nice green eyes. She looked more glamorous than I’d ever seen her.

  ‘Thank you, Nick. It’s nice being out of a uniform. I feel like I’m a proper girl again.’

  I needn’t tell you what the night that followed was like. Only — just completely — wonderful! We used up my five bob packet and then we had to use naval issue. There’s something about nice breasts. You just can’t get enough of them, can you? But it was more than that: it was her sweet tenderness, the way she touched me, like I was special. I tried to do the same to her, because she was special; I tried sort of stroking her, but my hands are so big it was like a grizzly bear patting a rabbit.

  Marg picked me up at the boarding house the following evening in the Austin 7 and drove me all the way to Perth Railway Station. ‘I’ve been saving my petrol coupons. I think we can safely get to the station and there should be just enough in the tank to get me back,’ she said. When I’d insisted that I had a travel warrant and could take the bus, she looked at me scornfully. ‘We’ve had the traditional sailor’s farewell, Nick. Now I want the traditional woman’s farewell. I want to stand tearfully al
one on a railway platform with a hiss of steam bursting from the engine’s wheels, waving the dearest man in my life goodbye, a small lace handkerchief crumpled in my trembling hand.’

  ‘Oh, Marg, I can’t begin to thank you —’

  She cut me short. ‘Please, no thank yous, Nick. “Thank you” is an ending, not a beginning. Besides, everything we had together was on my own terms.’

  ‘I’ll take them rather than enter into negotiations any time of the day,’ I said, trying to grin, then almost said ‘thank you’ again.

  On the way to Perth she said, ‘Nick, when you’ve done the course at HMAS Cerberus and you’re a snotty and they want to send you to a place I can’t name or talk about for further training, and you decide you don’t want to be in Intelligence or become a coastwatcher, remember, you can always opt out of either — or both. It’s not a disgrace, you won’t be disadvantaged. The navy will send you to England for further training and you’ll emerge a naval officer and I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun. You will think about it, won’t you?’ she urged.

  ‘What’s a snotty?’ I asked, attempting to avoid answering her.

  ‘A sublieutenant in the navy, the lowest form of officer life,’ she answered, a trifle impatiently, immediately recognising my motive for asking.

  An idea had begun to form in my head I didn’t dare talk about, even to Marg. At first I even rejected it myself, instinctively knowing it was pie in the sky — stupid, irrational. But it wouldn’t go away and instead it kept invading my thoughts, nagging at me: as a coastwatcher I could ask to be sent to New Britain, where I could try to discover if my father was still alive.

  I guess there was still too much Boys’ Own Annual or the Saturday movie matinee in me — Nick sets out to save his father deep in the tropical jungles of New Britain. Will he succeed? Don’t miss next week’s exciting episode! Etc. Here I was, just removed from being a virgin, yet still acting like a kid. My mind was filled with too much derring-do and I didn’t have enough feet-on-the-ground commonsense.