Highways to a War (6 page)

Today as always she wore the white linen sun hat and green dress. She peered from among the leaves, and I saw her eyes meet Mike’s. This time they looked at each other without smiling: he returned her gaze boldly, with a steady seriousness I admired. Then we walked on, saying nothing, kicking at clods of earth.

From beyond the hop fields, somewhere near the creek, a half-heard whirring came. It seemed to me to sound from the heart of the summer, and to contain a deeper meaning than summer itself: the true secret of Clare and of the land. This secret had an essence, I thought; and sometimes I imagined it to be concentrated in a particular room in the house I’d never visited.

I thought the room to be imaginary; but that summer, Mike took me there.

 

The sleepout was built into the end of the front verandah, with walls of vertical boards and sliding windows on the outer side. We lay in narrow stretcher beds placed at right angles, and read by the light of two candles.

Mike read a good deal. He was naturally more active and athletic than I was, and had he lived in town, I doubt that he would have read so much. But we had few other entertainments, except when one of his brothers took us in to the cinema in New Norfolk, on a Saturday afternoon. Hobart was only thirty-odd miles down the highway, but country people traveled to town less, in those days; cars were slower, and less readily used. A shopping trip to Hobart, in Mr. Langford’s big blue Dodge, was a major expedition.

Mike’s reading was indiscriminate, ranging from current Westerns and thrillers to more serious British books from the period before we were born, at the height of the Empire. He had a big supply of these in an old wardrobe here——many of them dating back to his father’s boyhood; some to his late grandfather’s. They came from a hemisphere and a past that were both intimate and remote to us, and included the Sherlock Holmes stories and works by such writers as Kipling, Rider Haggard, Captain Mar ryat and R. M. Ballantyne.

But more interesting to us than any of these books was a big set of papers in the bottom of the wardrobe. This was a collection of weekly colored supplements from an American newspaper, and featured serialized comic strips. It was called
Wags,
and I can still smell the pungent American newsprint. Somebody (Ken perhaps, or Marcus), had bought
Wags
over a period of some ten years, from the mid 1930s to the early 1940s, and had hoarded it; and now Mike regarded these papers as his personal treasure. Television hadn’t arrived; this was still the great age of the comic strip, and all the classics were here: Tarzan, The Phantom, The Captain and the Kids, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon.

Few of these strip cartoons were actually comic. They seemed in fact to be aimed at adults, but we knew that many adults disapproved of them. American culture wasn’t much liked by our elders: it was seen as vulgar and often suggestive, and they preferred that we feed our imaginations on approved books from parental England. So two Northern Hemisphere cultures competed for our interest; and
Wags
drew us, like a forbidden maze. At ten, we’d found it both enigmatic and shocking. The sadistic gangsters and the graphically depicted bloodletting in
Dick Tracy
appalled and fascinated us, since spilled blood was seldom shown then for entertainment. Neither Mike nor I had really understood these strips when we were young; but each summer, we understood a little more. From the big newsprint pages of Wags came the reek of a world of machines, of violence, and of sexual mysteries. Even the lurid colors were violent. Beautiful women appeared here, stripped at times to their underwear, but mostly clad in the sleek gowns of the just-missed 1930s, when Mike and I had been infants. The cars and biplanes of the thirties roared through the strip cartoon frames, no less modern and glamorous for being a decade out of date.

One strip fascinated Mike more than any other, to the point of obsession: Milton Caniff’s
Terry and the Pirates,
set on what was then called the China Coast. He would lie on his bed studying it for hours. We would read it together, when we were ten, carried along by the pictures, struggling to understand the speeches in the balloons. We were really studying these texts for clues to an alarming and seductive adult cosmos that was waiting in the future, and many of the more puzzling speeches I can still remember, as an archaeologist might remember hieroglyphics he once spent years deciphering.
(“You’re the Dragon Lady? The woman pirate?”
“
It is so! And thanks to the fair-skinned one, I look myself again!”)
The American boy Terry was clearly Mike’s alter ego, and we followed his life, from his boyhood in the South China Sea of the thirties, when Chinese pirates were the villains, to his manhood in World War Two, when Colonel Flip Corkin of the U.S. Air Force became a leading figure, and the villains were our villains: the Japanese. That Mike would one day go to the China Coast to lead the life of Terry (in that weird Far East which was not east for us, but north), I always took for granted.

Now that we were adolescent, the stories had come into focus; and what had been enigmas in our early years were comprehended. We pretended to be casual, now; we weren’t children any more, and
Terry and the Pirates
was just a comic strip. But we still sometimes read
Wags
in the sleepout, as a ritual to pass time, and Terry’s spell persisted, especially for Mike. And we couldn’t be casual about its women, who had now altered their dimensions for us. There was a blond and beautiful American adventuress called Burma, and an equally beautiful villainess (to use the terminology of the time), called the Dragon Lady. That Dragon Lady, Mike would say, and he’d shake his head and grin. I think he was in love with the Dragon Lady: a Eurasian who was as alien to us, in our Anglo-Saxon island, as a being from another planet. And certainly we were both in love with Burma.

When he wasn’t reading in the sleepout, Mike would listen to a green portable radio on the chest of drawers next to his bed. He liked Country and Western music, and nevvscasts. At such times, his face deeply shadowed in the candlelight, he appeared older than fifteen: his heavy white eyelids were like seashells, exaggerated in a way that made him unfamiliar. He lived an interior life that he didn’t talk about, and I guessed that some of it had to do with the Second World War, as well as with
Terry and the Pirates.
He still admired his brother Ken without reserve, and greatly regretted that the War had ended before he could go too.

It’d be good to serve your country, he said, and stared into the candle, lying with his hands behind his head.

Even at fifteen, I privately found the direct expression of such a sentiment quaint and old-fashioned; and I glimpsed for a moment the degree to which the books in the wardrobe must be influencing him, as well as
Wags.
No doubt his hero worship of Ken played a part too—a!though Ken’s personal influence on him wasn’t calculated to make war desirable; rather the reverse, as I’d seen long ago over the guns.

 

 

When we were younger, we’d played a silly game with .22 rifles. Ken used to take us rabbiting and wallaby-shooting, and had lent us each a .22 for our personal use. Without his knowledge, at Mike’s suggestion, we began a stalking game with them: a version of our juvenile games of cowboys and Indians to which an element of realism was added. Recalling this now, I’m half appalled.

There were rules. We fired over each other’s heads, or well to the side. And knowing the alarm it would have caused had we been found out, we played the game well away from the farmyard, on the steep, grassy hill behind the pickers’ huts, on the other side of the wire fence that marked the boundary of the Langford property. There, among yellow tussocks and gray boulders coated with lichen, on the edge of a forest of gums, we stalked each other. And it was there, I often think, as well as on the football field, that Michael first began to develop the uncanny skills that would stand him in such good stead on the battlefields of Indochina.

We took turns at being the hunter and the hunted. Given a short start, and limited to an agreed area of bush, you had to try to evade discovery. If you were spotted, a shot was fired directly over your head, and you then had to freeze and surrender. I was good enough at the game to keep Mike interested; but I was never as good as he was. When I hunted him, crawling or stumbling along through the prickly undergrowth between the gum trees and black wattle, it was like hunting something gone insubstantial. If his bright blond head hadn’t given me a small advantage in spotting him, I might have had to give up altogether.

When Mike hunted me, I would wriggle on my belly along the bush’s floor, breathing in the sharp, papery smells of eucalyptus, fallen bark and ants: waiting for his shot to ring out. Once, the bullet thudded into the trunk of a blue-gum six inches above my head, and I laughed hysterically, raising my arms in surrender.

It was on that afternoon that we suddenly heard Ken’s mighty shout. It came from down the hill: his tall figure was toiling up towards us through the grass, and soon he stood over us, hands on hips. He still wore the Digger hat, stained and bent and faded so that it was just an old hat, now. His eyes seemed darker blue and more wide open than usual.

You stupid young buggers, he said. For once, his big grin was missing.

Just firing a few potshots, Mike said.

Ken held out his hand. Give us those twenty-twos, he said.

We knew better than to argue, and handed them to him. He sat down on a small boulder a few feet away, the rifles across his knees.

Mike looked contrite. We’re sorry, Ken, he said. We won’t do it again.

You won’t get a chance to, Ken said. He shook his head. Bloody hell.

Mike tried grinning at him, but Ken didn’t grin back. He sat in silence, and we sat down next to him, as long shadows put their fingers across the valley, and the sun left the red roof of the house and the white road between the poplars. Far off, we could hear the voices of pickers among the hops, and the barking of John Langford’s collie dog, Angus. When Ken spoke again, he seemed to be talking to himself, looking out over the valley.

You pick up a rifle and it gives you big ideas, he said. You think it makes a man of you, holding a gun. That’s all bullshit, boys. You don’t feel quite so good after you’ve used it on someone. Only mad bastards find that enjoyable.

Tell us how it was in New Guinea, Ken, Mike said. He was always trying to get Ken to talk about the action he’d seen, but Ken never would.

Not now, Chick, Ken said. But suddenly he looked at us, and said: You want to know how I killed my first Japanese? All right, I’ll tell you.

I glanced at Mike. His expression was utterly intent; he’d waited years for this.

It was just after I got to New Guinea, Ken said. I was twenty-one; I’d never seen action. The blokes up the trail ahead of us had knocked out a Japanese machine-gun post, and we were told not to take prisoners. We couldn’t; we were outnumbered. There was one Jap still alive, with a bullet in his guts, and our sergeant told me to kill him. “Shoot him, Ken.” That’s what he said to me.

He shook his head, and let out a quick breath through his nose that might have denoted amusement, but didn’t. “Shoot him, Ken.” He repeated the words wonderingly, as though they contained the key to something: a puzzle he’d been trying to solve for a long time. So I picked up my .303, and put a bullet through him, he said. He was the first man I’d ever shot. Then I went behind a tree and threw up.

He thought for a moment, while we kept absolutely quiet, waiting.

He was just lying there, looking at me, this Jap, he said. He was quite a young bloke. Sometimes I still see him looking at me before I go to sleep. I killed a lot of other Japanese in the fighting after that, and it got easier. But he was different. He was in cold blood. I don’t reckon that bloody sergeant should have made me do it. No, I don’t reckon he should have.

He glanced at us; but the glance told us nothing. Then his face softened a little, and became almost friendly; he seemed to be coming back to us. So don’t you young blokes think it’s fun, killing people, he said. It’s no bloody fun at all.

He stood up, holding the guns. I’ll keep these for now, he said.

He turned and walked off down the hill, erect as though marching, pulling the battered Digger hat low over his eyes, not looking back.

 

 

Mike blew his candle out, and I did the same.

Sometimes Ken has bad dreams, Mike told me. I’ve heard him sing out, at night. He still thinks about the War, now and then. And he lost his girlfriend Peggy by going to the War. He was engaged to her, and she broke it off, while he was up in New Guinea. Married someone else.

Why would she do that? I asked. Any girl’d want Ken.

Selfish, Mum reckons. All those Stantons are selfish.

There was silence for a while; then his voice came softer, out of the dark. Hey: you got a girl yet?

No, I said, I hadn’t got a girl. Had he?

Yeah, I’ve got a girl, he said. Don’t tell anyone this, Ray. It’s one of the pickers.

I laughed. I know, I said. That red-haired girl.

Don’t laugh, Ray, he said. I’m in love with her. His voice was low and fervent: he was clearly serious, and although he was only fifteen, he had the dignity of youthful maturity. Her name’s Maureen Maguire, he said; and he divulged it like a deadly secret.

We’d reached the age where the hop fields and the hills and the whole flowering land were filled with a buzz and murmur of desire. But this was still the era of sexual reticence and innocence, and although we’d exchanged inadequate information on human coupling, and occasionally told each other dirty jokes, girls and women were an almost total mystery, whom Mike in particular contemplated with reverence. So to me, and no doubt to Mike, the red-haired picker in her hand-me-down dress and faded linen sun hat was a nymph of the glades. To think of her being Mike’s girl pierced me with pleasurable envy; but I told myself that it was Mike who deserved her. He had the daring to woo her; I didn’t.