Читать книгу Seize the Day - A M (Jack) Harris - Страница 10

Under Mary’s care, Martin clung to life but he died the day he was told that Clarrie had been killed in his first action in New Guinea. Martin was buried in the Mildura cemetery after a brief service in the main Catholic church. I did not realise that my mother had such a beautiful clear and full-powered soprano voice until she sang at the grave-site. I thought proudly, ‘That’s my mum!’ and afterwards when we held a wake at the shack on Buronga Ridge most of the neighbours made sure that the old man went out in style with Eileen singing again, accompanied by Shoofty on that violin of his, Luke on the fiddle, Rocky belting a drum and sometimes pumping his accordion with great gusto. The drinking and feasting never seemed to stop, with Enzio Clemenza contributing most of the viands, including many choice dishes and the wine, which he had held back in cared-for storage for just such an occasion.

I had no alternative afterwards, but to leave Buronga. I loved my mother and wanted to go along with her wishes, just to make sure that she never again turned to the destructive solace of heavy drinking. In Moonee Ponds I would be much nearer to her and Jock’s dairy farm in Gippsland which, while some way from Moonee Ponds, was many hours nearer than Buronga was from Melbourne.

I discovered paternal grandmother was a capricious and contradictory woman, carping and critical, who found fault with everyone and everything. Small and thin, she wore a tight bun of hair on the back of her head. She was a vegetarian and mostly served boiled cabbage, potato and carrots. Her husband was also thin; he was bald-headed, and so afraid of his wife that he was obsequious to her and everyone else. When I was introduced to my uncle Bernie, a big man built like my father Bonnie and I wondered how these grandparents had ever got together for what I had once heard Martin call the pleasures of the flesh. Marriage and living together, from what I had mostly observed when living on the ridge, was generally nothing but painful servitude for many women. But here, a kind and helpless man was dominated by an appalling female. When I met Bernie that son, I was told I was to help him on his milk run, just as I had with Rocky Daniels at Buronga. I was to give the five shillings a week that I was to receive, directly to that new grandmother of mine. I found the work hard, the hours long, but the running along with six crated bottles in one hand and a pail of milk in the other strengthened my body while the milk and cream supplemented my vegetarian meals. Bonnie was working in a nearby general store and she was able to bring me sandwiches and cake, which I enjoyed sitting up in bed in a darkened room, hidden from prying eyes.

That part of my life passed slowly and unpleasantly but I managed to get my Merit Certificate, much to Eileen’s pleasure. The only thing that gave me any sense of happiness from my schooling was that I had nice teachers who never strapped me when I fell asleep at lessons, exhausted from those early-morning milk runs. They seemed to understand that I was up at four to go on the milk run and go from that work direct to school. Those same teachers encouraged to get me out on the playing field at lunch time for a game of cricket and I became proficient at the game. But I was also reckless. One day, chasing a ball, I went under a boundary fence but ducked up too quickly and cut my head badly. I was cleaned up and bandaged but when I was taken home, the place was empty. So my teacher kindly took me to his home where his wife tucked me into a comfortable bed. For the first time since I had left Buronga I was encased in happiness, a feeling heightened by music I could hear being played on a machine. I later asked the lady looking after me the name of the music and she said it was ‘Finlandia’ by a man whose name I could not remember, but who years later I was able to track down and begin my love of classical music. That crack on my head was an incident that led to a pleasant discovery. Later on in life accidents that happened to me all led to better circumstances. Having finished my secondary school, Eileen enrolled me in a technical college where I studied hard for a few months. But Eileen apparently fell out with Jock, she had a furious argument with our paternal grandparents, and Bonnie and I found ourselves being bundled on the overnight train to Mildura. The following day we found ourselves happily back with Martin and Mary at Buronga. There may have been no technical school in Mildura so Eileen took me along for enrolment in the Mildura High School. After an interview I was wary about my future there for I had not studied algebra or science to the level of the Year Eleven students there. I worked hard but understood little, although in the English class I studied diligently and seemed to do well. That was until one day the teacher asked who could recite a sonnet. No one volunteered, but I put up my hand and was told to get on with it. I then launched into that endless verse about Mad Carew which I remembered well. I accompanied my words with all the movements and gestures I believed were necessary to the drama. ‘He returned before the dawn /His shirt and trousers torn/ A gash across his temple dripping red/’.

I grabbed at my shirt, pulled at my trousers, wiped all that blood from my temple, pounded on ‘When the ball was at its height/ On that still and tropic night/ The colonel’s daughter hurried to his bed/ The door was opened wide, the silver moonlight shining through/ An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew/ ‘

Plunging an imaginary knife deep into my chest I looked up, breathlessly awaiting to be applauded but the teacher looked very hard at me and asked if I did not know that a sonnet contained only fourteen lines. His remark was followed by derisive laughter that swamped over me in a humiliating flood and I sat heavily in my chair, knowing my school days would be over and in failure at the end of the year.

The following year I was employed for a few months as a house painter but when I told Mary that the man I worked for, a professional painter, was drinking a lot of the spirit we used to thin the oil-based paint, she took me from that work. Í never mentioned that my mother had once been drinking that same spirit! A few weeks after, I was back in Moonee Ponds living this time with Eileen and Bonnie. Some time later Eileen got me apprenticed to an engineering company working out of North Melbourne involved in supplying the armed forces with certain requirements, hence my military call-up deferment. I liked the work, the metallic hum of the factory and the schooling at the technical college, and I became a competent fitter and turner. Whenever I could get away I hurried back to Buronga, looking for love and that splendid Murray River.

Some time later Bonnie married Harold, the son of the shop man Bonnie worked for. He was a cheery person with a nice smile and a nature to match. Older than Bonnie, he became a surrogate father to me, helping me with problems at my work, with growing up and matters of the heart, and telling me about books I should read, for he was a scholarly person. I also had a girl friend named Doris. Harold advised me on such matters as safe sex not that he practised it as Bonnie was happily pregnant. So I was contented at home and at work and in love.

I was also progressing slowly through the preliminary rounds of boxing at the West Melbourne Stadium, getting a pound a round for each contest, which was nice money along with the small amount I received as an apprentice. Three years slipped by and I lost two important bouts in the boxing ring and so it was unlikely that I would promoted to the main events, and big money. At the same time Bonnie had the misfortune to lose her first child, a son called Brian, and I let go my lingering belief in that God my grandmother had cherished. When the Catholic priest, a fat, well-fed man with a flowery tongue, told Bonnie and Harold that God needed their child and he had been called to heaven to serve as one of his angels, I abandoned God. I had long had doubts about woman being created from a rib ripped out of Adam anyhow, and about that Ark with Noah who had fed and watered two of everything on board for forty days and nights of pouring rain. But Harold and Bonnie accepted the priest’s words and grew even closer together in their sorrow, but I was shut out of that embrace. Seeking comfort I tried to believe that some heavenly entity existed controlling events and our environment, for how else could there be a river like the Murray with its blue water and majestic silver trees?

Although I had received good marks at the technical college and a report noting that I was now entitled to a statuary increase in salary, my employer rudely refused my request for any more money. Troubled and depressed by that and other matters, I outlined some of my problems with Harold. He listened carefully and advised me to ‘cut, and get out’, as he put it. I thought he was offering good advice for, although I had gone along with my mother’s wish over the apprentice deal, I had wanted, like Clarrie, to get away to the war. But believing that my name might be indexed in the files of the fighting services, I decided to join the Merchant Navy, a civilian outfit receiving glowing reports for its service to the war effort.

I hurried back to Buronga. As I had earlier suggested following Clarrie’s death, Minnie had moved in with Mary, for I believed that Clarrie’s father would most probably start beating her again now that Clarrie could no longer protect her from his bullying. I found her to be the same sort of silly, sweet woman with such an amplitude of good cheer that she could disgorge without effort huge peals of jolly laughter. Mary had found her good company and liked having her in the house. Luke had also moved into a spare room and out of his bough shed. I explained to him that the purpose of my visit was to ask for his war-time ration cards so that I could use them and enter the Merchant Navy, but under his name. He instantly agreed and Mary also approved of my scheme to get away.

I entered the Merchant Navy as a trimmer, had a tattoo cut into my right forearm, and went to sea. I found that being a trimmer, a man equipped with a large shovel and wheelbarrow used to push coal from various parts of the deck to the firemen, was a fearsome job, especially in rough seas. But there is comradeship working in a vessel, often in bad weather with the men below decks often sweating, filthy and foul-mouthed, a closeness of workers that is mutually binding and keeps them, as long as they can curse and labour, in its embrace. I believe I would have stayed at sea until I could no longer stand; curiously one day when I could metaphorically no longer stand, I was thrown down a long flight of steel stairs and hurt my shoulder so badly that I returned to Buronga, looking for recovery.

It was now early 1946, I was twenty years of age and the army was advertising for men to join up, and serve in Japan with an occupation force. Believing that my shoulder would pass inspection, I enlisted and sailed for Japan. I joined the 67th Australian Battalion in Kaitaichi, a suburb not far from Hiroshima. Within eight months I was a sergeant in that battalion’s intelligence section and I requested leave to attend a nine month’s course in the Japanese language to qualify as an interpreter.

I was helped in my study of Japanese by Midori Suimoto, the sister of my language teacher. She was a lovely slim girl and when I was introduced to her she was wearing a classical Japanese gown of gold and silver thread with chrysanthemums and egrets etched into the fabric. Her obi, the wide sash worn by Japanese women was a soft purple shade. Her head, I thought, would nicely fit under my chin. Her face was delicate, her skin smooth and clear, her nose small in the tradition of Japanese beauty. Her eyes were black and brilliant under her well developed brows. She glowed with health and vitality while her body emitted a husky fragrance which tantalised me.

The Suimoto home had miraculously escaped the fire-bombing campaigns; it was a small place with a dull, but spotlessly clean tatami covering the wooden floors and stretching to the paper-coated walls on all sides. Midori showed me over the place. At one point she gestured to a table on delicately carved legs which sat in one corner and on which a bonsai, an artificially dwarfed pine tree, sat in a small bowl. Midori explained that her husband, an officer in a Japanese engineering battalion, had cared for the tree since he was a boy. As a soldier he had been captured when the Russians took Manchuria, and had been sent with hundreds of thousands of other prisoners to labour in the Siberian slave camps. Some of the world leaders had protested to Stalin, demanding that the captured men be sent home but, needing workers in those frozen wastes, he simply refused. Midori did not know if her husband had survived the surrender. She had never heard from him, she told me, as we went to walk outside and to a small hill nearby. It was shrouded in pine, cedar and maple, all so close planted that the Suimoto home peeped out as though through a shield of green. We returned to her garden, a designed landscape, with a stone pool crossed by a slender bridge where tiny bells tinkled in a breeze. Everything was compressed into a miniature world, all complete and enthralling, so different to anything I had ever encountered.

I understood that the invitation to meet Midori and study Japanese had economic reasons behind it. Japan was mostly in ruins with Hiroshima, only a few miles distant, a frightful wasteland. All the major cities had been flattened. Hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings had been destroyed, over a million Japanese soldiers had died in the war and as many civilians, if not more, had perished at home. Japan had become a nation of people living overwhelmed in a land of devastation, and those who had once believed their emperor to be a god, were now forced to understand that a hundred generation of emperors had not been gods at all, but merely men. That acceptance meant the collapse of their faith, and all they had inwardly cherished. It was an appalling and transforming, as well as a hungry time for many Japanese, and I was able, as Midori’s brother had guessed, to buy food from the mess sergeant and give it to them: butter and cheese, hampers of ham and other meats, along with milk and cream and good rice, which was scarce in most markets.

I did not feel I was doing anything wrong. These people were hungry, the food was available, and my language studies were progressing far better than any of the other students. There was something else of course. I was very attached to Midori and when she finally invited me into her bedroom, I found it to be a place with a floor of tatami matting, with dwarf pines set along one wall, all creating a spare, controlled beauty. The bathroom nearby where she took me and ritualistically bathed my body prepared me fully for her sexual abandonment and my sense of completeness when finally, we lay still, our naked bodies locked together. It filled me with a sense of wonder, and I could not but hark back to Doris of my working days, and how she had said she really liked good fucking. But I knew, after making love to Midori, that Doris had been happy if someone just wanted her body, so she simply let the man have his way, as it was quaintly called. With Midori I came to understand that Japanese boys and girls, when in their teens, have sex fully explained by their parents who give them woodblock art works of Japan which are very specific, and the books they are given to read stress patience for the man, an understanding of her body by the woman. Sex to the Japanese is supposed to be a pleasure to both people. Midori and I certainly found a mutual enjoyment, and thinking about it, I knew the Japanese had the right approach to an essential part of married life. It may be apocryphal, but I recall reading that some Europeans dislike the thought of their women screaming at the moment of climax, and they prefer going to a brothel and paying a prostitute to pretend having one.

I was confused about Japan and what I was encountering: here was Midori, sensual and sensible with a sparkling sense of humour, a prudent temperament and delightfully kind. Yet many Japanese soldiers had been sadistic brutes whose cruelty to the people and to China generally, was well documented. In the war with the Allies they had been merciless to prisoners of war. Starving, torturing, working to death and killing without pity. The war crimes trials, then taking place in Tokyo, had produced much sickening evidence of exactly how barbarous Japanese soldiers had been to the people they had vanquished. Stories were also circulating about how ‘comfort women’ were rounded up in the countries Japan had occupied. Women and very young girls had been taken under guard and sent to live in barracks where Japanese soldiers were stationed. Once in place, the girls and women spent days and months, even years, serving Japanese soldiers in whichever way the soldier desired his sex. Some of these comfort women were said to have obliged as many as eighty men in a single day. One of the main countries for recruitment of these helpless women was Korea. A story coming out told how concerned Korean fathers were about their daughter’s virginity. A Korean girl returned home after years of being trapped in this dreadful situation, she told her father, and asked to be allowed back home. The father immediately slapped her face, denied her entry and thereafter ignored her. Many of the girls, though, never returned home because towards the end of the war thousands of them were loaded onto ships which were taken out to sea and scuttled, destroying the evidence of their years of sickening existence.

Japanese soldiers had been brave men with their code of honour making them fight almost to the last men. In some of the islands in the Pacific many hundred of thousands died, refusing to surrender. Some senior officers, including many generals, committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, by first drinking a glass of saki, plunging a knife deep into their stomach and having their head severed from the body by a loyal and junior officer.

Japan is a beautiful country and I had often visited the site of the Imperial Palace which had not been bombed during the war because of its historical significance. It had a wide moat around the front where swans glided through water lilies while red and gold fish swum effortlessly beneath them. The huge walls beyond the moat were of fashioned blocks, all different in size but fitted together so cleverly they seemed to curve smoothly upward with effortless grace. There was such a singular beauty about the palace and the moat, with cherry blossom in bloom, and in the far distance the snow-covered crest of Mount Fuji. In a way the tranquillity I knew walking about the palace convinced me that all Japanese men could not be bad, and the women, or one of them at least, were of fine character.

In time Midori and I came to talk about marriage, as it seemed that her husband must be dead. Just then, however, there was a non-fraternisation ban in place, which meant that British and Australian soldiers could not marry Japanese women. The Americans had no such ban and it was hoped that later the British also would abandon their restriction. At that time, if it became known that I was cohabiting with Midori, I could face court martial. But our plans had to be abandoned when Midori was told by the Japanese government that her husband was being returned from Siberia. He was said to be very ill, psychologically scarred, and she was expected to care for him, to nurse him back to health.

On our last night together Midori lay beside me, weeping softly. When we parted we kissed, and for both of us the meeting of our lips meant more than the urgency our bodies had known in love, and more too than her room where we had so often slept close together. The kiss took in more than the exquisite garden outside her home with its bamboo and cypress which seemed to protect the Suimoto home. I felt abandoned, knowing that my cup of happiness my grandmother once talked about had been rudely tipped.

I was returned to my battalion in mid-1950. It had been re-named the Third Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment 3RAR, just before it was ordered to Korea. Having requesting a reposting from the sedentary intelligence section, I was then a platoon sergeant with 9 Platoon C Company. Our battalion was to fight all the way to Chonju, a town about sixty miles from the Yalu River; it was there that I was wounded and our commanding officer Green was killed. Another accident in my life, which this time led to my return to Australia, a year’s study of Chinese, my re-posting back to Korea in early 1953 and now, my waiting for Pak and Chet to return from their mission behind the enemy lines in North Korea.