Читать книгу We’re Pregnant and I Can’t Speak Japanese - William Hay - Страница 4

My father never thought he could have children because he had this war injury. On some rainy day in some Italian field, a German mortar which landed short of its mark fired a sizzling hot souvenir into his lower back to remind him of his time in the south of Italy. That splinter of shrapnel, which could have but didn’t render him a paraplegic, kept him off his feet for six months and left him with a dire prognosis about his manhood.

Youwill be fine, Corporal, but youwill not be able to father children, was the last thing his military doctor said before handing him his release papers to be shipped off to the sunny Middle East for lighter combat duties.

What did my father care? The year was 1943. He was nineteen years old, canon fodder for the British army, probably not going to see out his teen years, and not smart enough to realise his doctor meant he would probably be impotent from his injury and not sterile. Whatever: was his only thought. The idea of parenthood was as distant to him as his hometown up in the north of Scotland where the purity of the water produced the finest Scotch whisky.

For my father, the war provided an escape from a life of predictability. He was trapped in a job at the whisky distillery where his father and his father before him worked. Once he reached his early twenties, he would marry a local girl, start a family then live out the rest of his days not far from the home where he was raised. Going off to war was an adventure, a chance to be a hero, so he and his older brother, Bill, travelled down to the nearest recruiting office and signed up.

In his five years with the British Army, my father got more than he bargained for as a dumb teenager. He had travelled through twenty-four countries, experienced the extremes of hot and cold climates, crossed gaping cultural divides, and witnessed the beauty and the tragedy of the human spirit, which plagued his memory with haunting images that could only be tempered by these tiny red and yellow pills he would take daily. By the time he was demobbed by the British army in 1946, he was a Regimental Sergeant Major stationed in Khartoum.

While the British Army was vigorously thinning its ranks for peacetime, the Australia Army was looking to bolster its numbers. The Australian Government feared the “Yellow Peril,” Chinese communism, could reach down through Southeast Asia and clutch at its shores. When the call was sent out to ex-British soldiers to reignite their military careers in Australia, my father put up his hand. His job description was to train Australian soldiers conscripted to do three-month stints of National Service.

In 1951, at the age of twenty-seven, my father traded a bitter Scots winter for the incessant flies and heat of Kapooka Army Barracks in country NSW, arriving with nothing more than a suitcase of clothes and a promise from a young lady, a promise she would join him in Australia once he was settled and he could send her the fare for her passage.

She never came.

After tearing up the letter he had waited months to receive, he drank himself into a state of numbness at the Sergeant’s Mess then walked out of his barracks and any kind of future he was to have with the Australian Army.

He boarded the first train heading north, and ended up finding work on a farm in northern Queensland as a jackeroo. He was taken in by an elderly Scotsman who had immigrated to Australia many years before and had married a local girl. My father was an extra pair of hands they desperately needed to keep the family farm going, and literally became the son they never had. They suspected he was on the run from something or someone, possibly the law or a wife, but never pushed him for answers. It was his business, and his alone.

Over a roast dinner on a hot Christmas Day, my father confessed that he was a deserter from the Australian Army, a crime the British Army viewed as punishable by death in a war zone. For the Scotsman and his wife, it was a relief. Being a deserter wasn’t so serious, anymore; especially with the world at peace and the fact that my father was just training raw recruits to march and carry guns correctly. They doubted the Australian Army wanted him shot on sight. The wife had one question, though. She asked my father if he could live the rest of his life on the run.

On his return to Kapooka, my father had officially been Absent Without Leave for 545 days. His court martial was a brief affair after he ignored the advice of his defence counsel, who was keen to argue that my father’s actions were based on compassionate grounds and would ask for leniency from the judge. Instead, my father requested to be assigned to active duty in Korea, which was greater than any punishment the court could have handed down. He was immediately transferred to a battalion bound for a war zone, as he wished.

Whether it was fate, pure chance or good or bad luck, the outbreak of war on Korean Peninsula set my mother and father on a course to bump into each other in a town called Kure, not far from Hiroshima. Two people from different parts of the world looking to rebuild their lives after living through one of the most destructive times in history, had found each other in a bar, as many couples seem to do. My mother was working as a barmaid to make ends meet after leaving her hometown, which was still recovering from the carpet bombing of the B-29s almost a decade earlier. My father was a thirsty customer on leave from his duties as a Regimental Policeman stationed in Japan via a stint in Korea.

With his commitment to active duty behind him and the Korean conflict settled to some extent, my father was ordered to return to home. Again, he left for Australia with another promise from lady to join him once he was settled, but this time it was from his wife. Practically a year after they were married in Japan, my mother arrived in Sydney. It was 1955, prosperous times for Australians and the start of a new life for both of them. They would grow old, just the two of them, through long, hot, southern hemisphere summers and eventually die of sun cancer, especially my father with his pasty Scots complexion.

But suddenly my mother started to feel sick.

Every morning, she woke up feeling nauseous and the sight of certain food turned her stomach. My father drew the only possible conclusion: my mother was dying of exposure to radiation. His reasoning was that on 6 August 1945, my mother was standing across a relatively narrow stretch of the Japan Inland Sea when the Enola Gay dropped its nuclear payload on Hiroshima. Eleven years later, on a cold but cloudless winter’s morning in Sydney, the doctor pronounced my mother wasn’t dying, but pregnant with my sister. My father went numb. He was supposed to be sterile, and had been able to explain his childless marriage by simply saying: war injury. Others would respectfully change the topic of conversation; the guy’s a war hero.

My God, Doc,I can’t afford to have a kid! he blurted out.

Somehow, it wasn’t quite the reaction the doctor expected from a man who thought he couldn’t have children, but now knew he could. This was post-war, baby boom Australia; everyone wanted to have kids.

Three years later, my father had a legitimate reason not to be able to afford any more children. He had just scraped together the deposit for a home in a new subdivision and was shackled to a 20-year mortgage which bit large chunks out of his paltry army wage. But, before he could make a fool of himself again in front of the very same doctor, he was informed my mother definitely didn’t have radiation sickness and was most definitely pregnant again, with me.