Johnno Read online

  How like him!

  I thought of the times he had caught me in just this way in the old days. Clever as I was, cool and unshockable as I liked to think myself, he had the knack of turning me into a staring idiot, caught without warning as one of his jokes went off bang in my hand or some new piece of outrageousness left me floundering on the sidelines, unable either to follow or turn away. He was always one jump ahead. While we were hanging round corners, sometimes, or peering into bookshop windows (Johnno pretending to be drunker than he was, I pretending as often as not to be more sober), he would suddenly holler over his shoulder at a group of punters exchanging tips in Tattersall’s arcade, or a couple of housewives with shopping baskets, “It’s all lies!” — then swivel on his heel and stare at me as if I had said it.

  It was a trick that never failed. I was always left on the kerb, spluttering, red-faced, trying to clear myself or explain.

  Twenty years later I am still doing it. The book I always meant to write about Johnno will get written after all. Johnno made sure of that, on an afternoon years back when we barely knew one another, while he was just a cocky schoolboy setting out to sabotage, for pure devilment, a picture he should never have been in, with his eye on — what? One of the tatty grey pigeons that picked up sandwich crumbs in the yard, which had just taken off in a flurry of dust and was passing at eye-level between Mr. Peck’s tripod and the roof of the War Memorial Library? Not, surely, on a future biographer!

  Still, the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.

  I

  ✧✧✧

  He was the class madcap. I see him, a smallish boy with bulging blue eyes, mooning at us through the doors of the New Building verandah, while Soapy Allen, our science master, dictates: the uses of isinglass …

  Johnno has been put outside, and after whistling up and down for a bit with his fists in his pockets, or watching under cupped hands the golfers on the far-off links, he has come back to make faces through the door, exerting what Soapy calls his “malign influence”. The glass of the doors is striped with sticking-plaster from the War, and Johnno, his nose flattened against the pane, his eyes rolling, gives a good imitation of a fish in a tank, his mouth rounded, inaudibly gagging, and immediately afterwards of a baboon from the Gardens menagerie. Soapy pretends not to notice. But he is, in fact, as much under Johnno’s powerful spell as any one of us. He is a big chalky man with a passion for dangerous experiments. “No, no,” he insists, “no magnesium flares today — no pandering to this weakness for sensation!” But in the pocket of his tweed jacket there is always a good-sized roll of something inflammable, and before the lesson is over the room will be fizzing and flashing while he shakes his head and makes little deprecating clicks out of the corner of his mouth. “This isn’t science,” he murmurs delightedly, “it’s the Royal Show. All you boys are interested in is sensation.”

  He plays the same elaborate game with Johnno, never addressing him in anything but a highflown rhetoric that gives all dealings between them the air of a scene at the theatre. The scene ends, inevitably, with Johnno’s exile to the verandah, and Soapy watches out of the corner of his eye while the notes on helium or copper sulphide flow steadily, full-stops, commas and all, from his whiteish-grey lips. Johnno is off-stage, but never quite absent. And occasionally, by long-established precedent, he makes a comeback like Banquo’s ghost, mouthing eerily through the glass till Soapy opens the door a crack and he makes his formal protest. “I’m as innocent as a milk-white lamb,” he’ll say, rolling his blue eyes so that the rest of us have to double up in our desks. And Soapy, briefly allowing him a place in his Fourth Form chemistry course: “Then go you forth, little lamb, and separate yourself from these my goats a comma, in a weak solution of hydrochloric acid, full-stop.”

  But Soapy always relents at the last moment and calls him back for the fireworks.

  Still, innocence is something Johnno cannot claim. Not seriously. In class he is an endless source of wisecracks (delivered in a fierce stage whisper) and of noises that he can produce at will from every part of his anatomy, stentorian belches and burps, farting sounds from the armpit, or real farts either wheezily protracted or released in a staccato series, short sharp punctuations of a sleepy afternoon. Gangling at the blackboard, he makes half-witted attempts to solve geometry problems that leave even the master confused. Asked to construe a sentence out of Noctes Latinae he sighs, scratches his head, shuffles from foot to foot and suddenly discovers the most improbable and suggestive translation. Out of class, with the help of a boy whose father is a bookmaker, he runs the school’s most profitable SP racket, with half a dozen bullies to beat sixpences out of those who can’t pay; and at Cadet Camp organizes “sessions” in the showers at which he wins over three pounds by being able to come faster and further and more often than any other boy in his platoon. Twice in our second year he is threatened with expulsion; once for shop-lifting from Woolworths and once for spiking one of the rowing eights. And on each occasion his mother appears wearing black gloves and a hat and the headmaster lets him off. The prediction is that he will fail the Junior, lose his scholarship and be sent to work at a tyre factory, or be apprenticed to the printing trade, though why these particular careers should be mapped out for him nobody knows. Perhaps the tyre factory is related, somehow, to the french letters he peddles to boys in the Fifth and Sixth, with the sage advice that you should never be without one just in case.

  We were all awed, I think, by his sheer recklessness. He would do anything. Get up with a shrug of his shoulders and accept any dare. Accept with the same lift of his shoulders any punishment. No other boy in the school appeared so regularly on detention lists or made so many trips across the gravel to the Office.

  “He’s crazy,” people said. “Someone dropped him when he was a baby.”

  “He’s a clown.”

  “He’s a ratbag.”

  “He’ll end up on the end of a rope.”

  “He’s anti-social.”

  And it was true he had no sense of responsibility, no school spirit, no loyalty to his country or to his House, no respect for anything as far as we could see. It meant nothing to him that minor servants of the British Raj had sent their sons to be educated here in the years before the Great War, or that a tree had been planted in the grounds by a Royal Duke, the son of Queen Victoria, or that the honour-boards in the Great Hall carried the names of seven generals, nine judges of the Supreme Court and a governor of Queensland, not to mention the war dead, whose names were recited, alphabetically, to the assembled school on Anzac Day. Johnno cared for nothing and nobody. No crime was beyond him. He was a born liar and an elegant shoplifter, who could walk through Woolworths at a steady pace and emerge with his shirt fairly bulging with model cars, pencil sharpeners, rubbers, exercise books, wind-up teddybears, toy trumpets — anything you liked to name. It was generally agreed he would have slept with his sister if he’d had one. We were appalled and delighted by him. He gave our class, which was otherwise noted only for its high standards of scholarship, a dash of criminal distinction.

  His attitude to us was one of unconcealed contempt. We were a lot of “pikers”. And he had the same contempt, even less concealed, for the gang of slavish and dimwitted followers who repeated his wisecracks, wore their hair with the same gangster parting, and greeted his every gesture with boisterous guffaws. Johnno was never to be seen without at least one of them in tow: Stal Henderson, whose father owned a property in the west and whose nickname derived from a boast he had made in the first year of having serviced his father’s mare; Carl Reithmuller, with his pockets full of frenchies (“as thin as a shadow, as strong as an ox”) and the starting price for the midweek races; and The Mango, a skinny crazy-looking kid whose hair stood up all over his head like a sucked mango seed. Johnno took their loyalty for granted and abused them unmercifully. In the middle of a piece of outrageous foolery he would
suddenly turn on them and wipe the grin from their faces with a savage: “Piss off, the lot of you. You too Stal! Get lost!” And they’d troop off together like whipped dogs. But ten minutes later they’d be back, trailing along somewhere behind him, giggling, poking one another in the ribs, urging him on. I think now that he hated them. But in those days Johnno and The Boys were to the rest of us — myself included — pretty well indistinguishable. All foul-mouthed, all bullies, all hopeless at French. Johnno was more daring, that’s all. If there was anything more to him than that I had no way of perceiving it. I was too busy with the character of Brutus and the boyhood of John Ridd (both of whom, it seemed to me, bore an uncanny resemblance to myself) to see anything more in Johnno than a shameless waster of his own and other people’s time and a thoroughly bad influence. Though he was, of course, fun — you couldn’t deny that, and our lives would have been poorer without his disorderly presence. But dangerous! It was best to keep out of his way.

  II

  ✧✧✧

  I had known him longer than the rest. We had been kids together on the beach at Scarborough, and I was stickily embarrassed on my first day at Grammar, just when I had got out of short pants and was preparing, for the second or third time in my life, to put the past behind me and make a good impression, to have Johnno come up and claim me. “Well look who’s here,” he announced cheerfully, “it’s the Professor.”

  Scarborough was a flimsy bayside settlement on the Peninsula, with Deception Bay and the Glasshouse Mountains on one side and the sandhills of Moreton Island on the other. Each morning at ten the S. S. Koopa steamed across the view on the way to Bribie, its two funnels smoking, its silhouette clearly outlined against the blue. At night the light at Cowan Cowan fanned slowly back and forth at the entrance to the bay. Scarborough had one hotel, three shops, and the Ginns’ crab kiosk, which sold the sweet pink sandcrabs that could be caught almost anywhere in these waters by sinking nets weighted with a bone. From the beach we would watch the boats making their round of the nets a hundred yards offshore, and sometimes, if we were lucky, one of the Ginn boys would take us out to see them hauled up with three or four blue monsters thrashing about in the mesh and the big knuckle-bone shining clean. In the Ginns’ red corrugated-iron shack, with its bare rafters and stamped clay floor, we went sometimes to see the crabs boiled in a vat, throwing their claws in the steamy brackish water while a second load waited in baskets in a corner, one of them suddenly hurling itself out into the sunlight to be chased amid shrieks and caught expertly behind, the long blue nippers, which could take your finger off, working fiercely at the air.

  In winter Scarborough was just a fishing village at the end of the line. In summer it was a vast encampment. In the early years of the war, while hostilities were still confined to Europe, and the Royal Navy, not to speak of Singapore, stood firmly between us and any threat of invasion, we had a caravan at Scarborough and would drive down on Friday evenings in our ’27 Hup. There was a regular colony of campers on the strip of grass behind the beach and a whole gang of kids who played Donkey on the long wet sands when the tide was out or Cowboys and Indians in “The Trees”. Johnno was one of them, and he had been a tearaway even then. One of those wiry, barefoot state-school kids that my mother preferred me not to play with and my father, I suppose, wanted me to be like.

  Johnno was what my mother called bad company. “Show me your company,” she would recite largely, “and I’ll tell you what you are.”

  I didn’t frankly know what I was and I preferred not to think of Johnno as “my company”, he wouldn’t have had me anyway. But I lined up waiting to be called when they picked teams for Red Rover or Rounders, and slunk off quietly when it became obvious that I would be last. I tagged along when they went out on the dunes with a flashlight to find soldiers and their girls, catcalling along with the rest till someone appeared fumbling with his flybuttons and gave us money to get lost. The Americans arrived early in ’42, and we went on frenchie hunts along the cliffs or round the Skating Rink at Redcliffe. You could find as many in a single afternoon these days as the white horses we counted, galloping about in sunstruck paddocks, as we drove down in the car; and I didn’t let on that till recently I had thought they were some sort of fungus, hanging shiny and white from the twigs. But I never really belonged to the gangs. I was happiest at home under the tentflaps, reading my favourite Dumas and dreaming myself back into those marvellous Olden Days when people wore satin and spoke French and when everything that happened was History. I was very strong on history. Not the terrible history of our own misplaced continent, with Burke and Wills staggering off across the desert or Leichhardt coming to the end of a dotted line somewhere west of Quilpie — but the history that was recounted in the books I bought at Old Neds in Melbourne Street, huge closely printed Victorian volumes that told the story of the Fair Rosamund and the Wars of the Roses, with diagrams of the Plantagenet family branching out across two pages in marriages and remarriages more interesting than our own family’s decent and regular line-up of uncles and aunts, and vastly more demanding of my schoolboy memory than the first four governors.

  Australia was familiar and boring. Now was just days, and events in The Courier-Mail — even when those events were the Second World War. History was The Past. I had just missed out on it. There was nothing in our own little lives that was worth recording, nothing to distinguish one day of splashing about in the heavy, warm water inside the reef from the next. Only the appearance once of a turtle, stranded at the bottom of one of the red-soil cliffs. And an afternoon of panic, after Singapore had fallen at last and invasion wasn’t at all improbable, when we saw what we thought was a Japanese sub lurking in the shallows — though it turned out later to be a petrol tank jettisoned from a passing plane. In the evening the lamp had to be pumped. In the morning there was water to be fetched, in a kerosene tin, from the tank at the top of the hill. Between there were just days. Nothing extraordinary happened.

  During these early years at Scarborough Johnno’s father was away with the army. In Greece at first, then later in Malaya, where he was posted as “missing” — one of that vast company of fathers, cousins, friends, who had gone off in the early months of the war (I recall being taken on my father’s shoulders to see the buff-coloured feathers of the Light Horse go bouncing down Queen Street) and had simply disappeared. They weren’t dead. No one believed that. They were “missing”. And they stayed missing through all the years at primary school when I was discovering America and the Spice Route to the Indies; through the Age of Elizabeth when the great houses, out of compliment to her, were built in the shape of an E like Queensland state schools; through the days of petrol coupons that put our car on blocks; and through nine hundred episodes of the Search for the Golden Boomerang. Till in the weeks after Hiroshima they drifted back into our Victory Polka and Mairzy Dotes world, so wraithlike and thin, so unlike anyone we had ever seen before, that it was better not to ask after them.

  Johnno’s father was one of those who stayed missing. And the reason for Johnno’s wildness, it was universally agreed, was that he was a war child. In the years when it really matters he had lacked the benefit of a restraining hand.

  ✧✧

  Our own father was too old for the war, so we did have the benefit of his restraining hand. Though I should add that he seldom raised it.

  Was I a war child, I sometimes asked. Was there anyone in those days who was not? “Before the war” was a hazy, rose-coloured period I could only vaguely recall. I associated it with the smell of oil-cloth picture books and the little spring chickens we used to eat, a whole chicken on each plate so that everyone had a wishbone. It was simply the earliest things I could remember. The clop of the milkman’s horse in Edmondstone Street just before dawn, and our blue-ringed jugs on the doorstep, their crochet covers weighted round the border with Reckitts-blue beads. Or waiting out front for the iceman to come with his hook, and the huge block dripping all over Cassie’s floor. Was it the war,
I wondered afterwards, or some change in me, that made everything in the years before I went to school seem different from the khaki and camouflage years that came after, when even the flowers we made out of plasticine were a uniform grey, the result of a dozen colours that could not be replaced being patted and squeezed into a single colour that was like the dirt-rolls in your palm. Was it only the war that made things change? And what would happen when the war was over? I knew the lights would come on again, all over the world. Even in Queen Street. But what else? What else? I think I expected some miraculous transformation might take place in us, as extraordinary perhaps as the explosion of a row of allied flags out of an empty sleeve (I had seen that at the Cremorne Theatre one Saturday matinee) and I longed for it painfully. The end of the war! Would it come when I was eight, ten, thirteen? I dreamed of it, impatient with the present, fearful of being disappointed, as one dreams of growing up.

  Meanwhile, for the duration, we had the war itself.

  Our spare room at the back of the house, which had once contained nothing but the piano where we sang in the evening and my mother’s sewing machine, was hung now with enormous wall-maps that came with The Courier-Mail. Here, day by day, we followed the fortunes of the campaign in North Africa, the landings in Italy, the long-drawn-out Russian campaign, and when D-day came at last the plunge out of Cherbourg into the German heartland. Places that would otherwise never have swum into my head have retained even today a spooky fascination for me. Benghazi, Byelograd, Bataan, Kokoda, Anzio, Wake Island. I knew the sea route to Archangel and the name of every U-boat in the German navy, and would have recognised, had they appeared overhead, any plane in the Imperial Japanese airforce — not to mention our own Spitfires, Sunderlands, Hurricanes, Mosquitos, Catalinas, Lockheed Lightings. As well as the wall-maps, and the silhouettes of war planes and battleships, our spare room had a plaster mask of Winston Churchill, complete with detachable cigar, a poem people were fond of at the time called “The Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels of the Owen Stanley Track”, newspaper portraits in colour of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek, and a diorama of the evacuation from Dunkirk, which an uncle of my mother’s had commissioned and exhibited for the Red Cross. In this miniature war museum we listened to the evening news and my father, before setting out to inspect the blackout, plotted a new landing or salient with wall tacks in scarlet and black. If something really shattering occurred, and especially if there was an unscheduled news flash, my Aunt Vera came up from two doors away and shouted to us from the foot of the stairs: