Brother Fish (76 page)

In the end Wendy had packed her suitcase and gone to stay with the Walsh family, which made her mum and dad change their attitude in a hurry. Wendy, it turned out, had always been the peacemaker in the family, negotiating the way through her father's drinking and her mother's moods, which Wendy described as becoming much worse as she got older so you never knew what state she'd be in when you got home. ‘Sometimes she'll just burst into tears and weep hysterically, and at other times she'll stay in a huff for days,' she explained. Dr Kalbfell put her on sedatives but she complained that they made her woozy. She told Wendy that she believed he was prescribing sedatives so she wouldn't go on about his drinking.

The Walsh family loved having Wendy staying with them, although I know she felt guilty about being away from home. When her parents ate humble pie and visited her at the chemist shop to ask her to return, she made a deal with them: she'd come home if they'd stay away from the subject of her engagement. It was a compromise but not a solution, and it can't have been pleasant. Even avoiding the issue resulted in a lot of tension. Years later she would tell me how her father would get drunk and come to her locked bedroom door late at night, all worked up, and bang his fists against the door and shout, ‘I demand you get rid of that cretinous little albino bastard!'

When she told me she made it sound funny. I said, ‘Well, I've been an albino when I was also an Aborigine – but I'm definitely not a bastard, and have a birth certificate to prove it.'

Typically, she hadn't told me any of this at the time it was happening – how her father would eventually stop raving and grow morbid and start to weep, sitting with his back against her door sniffing and mumbling drunkenly, drinking straight from a bottle of Johnnie Walker until he passed out. At one o'clock in the morning she'd open the door and, taking him by the legs, pull him along the hallway to her parents' bedroom, where she would roll him onto the bedside carpet, place a pillow under his head and throw a quilt over him. Meanwhile her mum was oblivious to all this, zonked out on the sleeping pills he'd prescribed for her.

Of course, getting married in a hurry was out of the question. We were as poor as church mice, and until I had a steady income I had no way of supporting us. Wendy was perfectly willing to continue working, but there were very few, if any, suitable jobs for women on the island, so we wouldn't even have the prospect of her salary. Life was complicated further by the plans Jimmy and I had made, now placed on the backburner while we waited to see what would happen to him.

We were both working as casual deckhands on the boats, making ourselves available if regular crew were sick or, as was more often the case, drunk. But Jimmy had to watch out for the Fisheries inspectors because he wasn't supposed to work with a visitor's visa. Temporary labour paid poorly, and certainly what I earned as a deckhand wasn't sufficient to support a wife.

At best I was getting back into fishing after all these years, getting the rust out of my system, while Jimmy was learning the cray-fishing game from scratch. If he wasn't going to be allowed to stay in Australia we would have to give up our immediate plans and go elsewhere. I'd spoken about New Guinea, where the colour of a man's skin wasn't a problem and the two of us could start something together. The prospect of our parting company was unthinkable. So this was yet another complication, one with which Wendy and I hadn't really come to terms. Until we knew for sure what was going to happen to Jimmy we were in limbo, and naturally she was anxious to be a part of whatever was going to happen to the two of us.

Colonel Stone looked to be in his mid-forties, his dark hair starting to go grey at the sides. He was a fit-looking bloke and greeted us cordially in what passed as a reception area at the depot. He'd ordered tea and a coffee for Jimmy and when I pointed to his Korea ribbon and asked him where he'd been, he immediately apologised. ‘Mr McKenzie, the closest I got to the big stoush was landing on Korean soil on two separate occasions to sort out a problem between the high command in Japan and one of the field commanders. I was posted to military headquarters in Japan as a staff officer and my frequent requests for a job in the field were ignored. That's the problem with the permanent forces – you join up to be a fighting man and you end up pushing a pen.'

But I could see he'd done his bit. In addition to a string of World War II campaign ribbons he had been awarded the Military Cross. ‘By the way, this is not the first time I've come across you, sir,' he said to me, with a hint of a smile.

‘Me?' I asked, surprised.

He nodded. ‘It was when you and a few mates “escaped to the front” and joined the Americans at the beginning of the war, afraid it would all be over before you could fire a shot.'

I groaned, making a face, then asked, ‘But how were you involved, sir?'

‘Well, the assistant provost marshal in Japan wanted to make an example of you lot. You will recall he sent a contingent of military police to fetch you and your mates and bring you back to Japan.'

I nodded. ‘We were . . .' I was going to say ‘shitting our pants', but caught myself in time, ‘. . . bloody terrified we were going to be court-martialled.'

‘That was precisely what the assistant provost marshal had in mind. He had already prepared the charge sheets and wasn't too pleased when Colonel Green, your battalion commander, took the matter into his own hands.'

‘What a great bloke Green was.
And
a great soldier. Why do the good blokes always have to die?'

I'd told Wendy and Jimmy the story of our escape to the front, and Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had followed it in the newspaper. In fact, I was to learn that she had been the major source of most of Gloria's clippings for her war journal, ordering the clippings of the war coverage from the
Gazette
's cutting service on the mainland and handing them to Mum. But I'd only told Jimmy the story of the death of Colonel Green, so I briefly explained it to the others. ‘We were in reserve with battalion headquarters deployed in a spot safe from artillery fire in the lea of a ridge line when a freak shell bounced off the hilltop and spun into a tree. A piece of shrapnel from the exploding shell ripped through the tent where Colonel Green was taking an afternoon nap, slicing through his abdomen.' Everyone, including Colonel Stone, winced at the thought of a sharp slice of red-hot metal going straight through your body.

‘Yes, well the assistant provost marshal wasn't all that pleased with Colonel Green's decision and complained to the commander-in-chief of Commonwealth forces. I was told to investigate and sort it out. In the end I persuaded the assistant provost marshal that because enthusiasm to fight rather than the reverse was the motivation for the offence, no lasting harm had been done to army discipline, so Charlie Green had done the right thing to deal with it himself.'

Jimmy looked at me. ‘Yoh done save his ass, colonel!' he chuckled.

‘I owe you big-time, colonel.' I couldn't imagine how different my life would have turned out if we'd been taken to Japan and court-martialled.

‘My pleasure, sir,' Colonel Stone replied, grinning. What a crazy thing the army was. Here he was calling me ‘sir' when just three weeks previously I would have been standing in front of him to rigid attention, staring at a spot I'd located on the wall behind him and barking out the answers to his questions in monosyllabic bursts. The reminder of the incident in Korea, which seemed to have happened half a lifetime ago, served to relax us all, and it wasn't hard to see why Colonel Stone had been chosen for this particular job in the army. He placed his cup down on the little table beside his chair and reached for a bulging file bound with red tape, and proceeded to open it.

‘Private Oldcorn, I should begin by saying that I am not from the Immigration Department, and so have no power to decide on your case other than to try to influence those who do. It is also highly unusual for me to be dealing with the records of a soldier from another nation. However, I received a copy of some of the papers in the submission your sponsors sent in on your behalf, particularly the submission by Mr McKenzie, outlining the role you played while you were prisoners of war together in North Korea. I must say it made for interesting reading. May I congratulate you both – the time you spent in captivity can't have been easy, in particular as you were each carrying a severe wound.'

‘There were worse off than us,' I answered.

Colonel Stone looked up at me and smiled. ‘Be that as it may, we have checked the details in both submissions and, if anything, both accounts appear to be somewhat understated, which is unusual in a submission like this where sinners are routinely turned into saints.'

‘How yoh check dem records, colonel?' Jimmy asked, surprised. ‘Wid da US Army?'

‘Yes, exactly. We have many affidavits and letters from fellow US prisoners of war that testify to the role both of you played in the various North Korean and Chinese field hospitals and the POW camp where you were held until the armistice.'

‘I hope they asked the black blokes,' I interjected.

‘No, as a matter of fact they all seem to be Caucasians.' Colonel Stone picked up a sheet of paper. ‘This one is from tail gunner Chuck Ward of New York State.' He began to read. ‘“Rear Gunner Chuck Ward's B27 was shot down over North Korea. He bailed out and landed in snow-covered mountainous terrain behind enemy lines where he avoided the enemy for two days before finally being captured. He was made to walk a further two days to a field hospital, where his frostbite was so severe the Chinese physician was forced to amputate both feet.” He speaks here of the care he received from Private Richard Oldcorn, commonly known as ‘Jimmy', of the US 24th Infantry Regiment, US 25th Infantry Division, and Private Jack McKenzie of an unspecified Australian infantry regiment.

“I can positively testify that I owe my life to those two men, Jimmy Oldcorn and his buddy from the Australian Army. They were not orderlies on hospital duty and were both recovering from wounds, but they volunteered to dress my feet and bring me water and they fed me by hand such food as was available. They washed me and demanded a second set of bandages from the Chinese and they washed these daily and dried them in the hut, cleaning and changing my dressings morning and evening. They carried me to the latrine and kept me as clean as possible. I do not doubt for one moment that these good men saved my life. Two brave soldiers who took care of a comrade when they were recovering from injuries themselves.” Signed, Chuck Ward.'

The colonel picked up the next sheet of paper. ‘Here's another. It's from a Private Ward Brady Buckworth Junior from Georgia,' he said.

Oh no! The southerner Jimmy nearly killed in the hospital cave. We're gone for all money.
I held my breath as he started to read.

‘“I owe Jimmy Oldcorn more than my life. In the North Korean hospital cave he taught us to behave like men when we'd been reduced to being animals. He taught us to share when we'd decided it was every man for himself. He made us care for each other when previously we wouldn't have lifted a hand to help the man beside us. I have no hesitation in saying that without his leadership, together with his little redheaded Australian buddy with the harmonica, many a now happily married family man in America would never have come home. Since returning to America I have found Jesus Christ and I am now a born-again Christian and a Pentecostal Evangelist. If this message ever reaches Jimmy Oldcorn please thank him and tell him he made me take a good look at myself, and what I saw I didn't much like. I am certain that the deserved hiding he gave me in that cave was the first step in my salvation. I praise the Lord each day for Jimmy Oldcorn. With men like him, America will always be safe. God bless America!” Signed, Ward Brady Buckworth Junior.'

I looked at Jimmy, incredulous. ‘Praise da Lord,' he said, grinning. As Gloria would say, ‘Miracles will never cease!' Of all the people unlikely to give Jimmy a rap, I would have placed Ward Brady Buckworth Junior about equal with the Kraus twins at the very start of the queue.

‘There are dozens more like this, and I must say that together they make an outstanding testimonial,' Colonel Stone said. ‘If it were up to me I'd be proud to welcome you to our country, Private Oldcorn.' He paused, and looked at us. ‘But it isn't. All I can do is petition on your behalf with whatever influence the Australian Army may be able to bring to bear. Which, from past experience, I am forced to tell you, isn't very much.'

He then went on to explain that he'd been with the Australian occupation forces in Japan in 1946 and for the duration of the Korean War. In that time a number of Australian soldiers had taken Japanese brides. ‘It has taken until last year for them to be given permission to bring their wives and, in many cases, children home to Australia,' he informed us. I immediately thought of Catflap Buggins and his little Lotus Blossom, and wondered if she was one of these war brides. ‘I was involved in making representations for many of these long-separated families,' Stone said. ‘Even now, the Japanese wives can't get permanent residency – they are all on five-year Certificates of Exemption.'

‘Exemption from
what
, Colonel Stone?' Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan asked.

‘I feel ashamed even saying it, Miss Lenoir-Jourdan. Exemption from the dictation test. The idea is that these women are not actually allowed to become Australian citizens. While they can renew their certificate every five years and – providing they don't commit a crime or get divorced – can stay in Australia for the rest of their lives, they will always remain citizens of their native country.' He leaned back as we took it all in. ‘So you see, you're not the only one in the army to run slap-bang up against the so-called White Australia Policy.'