Johnno Read online

  “Have you heard the news? Isn’t it terrible!”

  The sudden swoop of her voice at breakfast, or during my mother’s afternoon nap, was a sure sign of disaster. “My God,” my mother would say, “that’s Vera. I wonder what they’ve done now.” And sure enough, the Germans were at Leningrad, Guadalcanal had been taken, the Centaur was lost, or some figure we thought of as almost in the family was listed in the latest raids.

  I see myself sitting at school one morning, aged six. I am sobbing bitterly. “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?” one of my schoolfriends asks, settling beside me on the little form and putting his arm across my shoulder. I look shocked. “Haven’t you heard?” I say melodramatically. “BELGIUM’S FALLEN.”

  It was a catastrophe that had thrown our whole house into confusion just before I left. I thought of Belgium as being rather like Humpty Dumpty. Obviously it could never be put together again, and in this case the wicked king and his men didn’t even want it to be.

  But the war for me had a private and more sinister dimension. Though I knew with one half of me that it belonged to the world of daylight reality, the world of newspaper headlines and apocalyptic announcements from the bottom of the stairs, I also knew, in some other part of my being, that this was only half the truth; there was more to the war than the wavering voices told us, more even than my Aunt Vera knew. When I crawled into bed at night and my father came to put out the light the war took on its real form. Giant staghorns leapt through the papered glare of my bedroom window and our fernery beyond, with its mossy fish-pond and slatted frames hung with baskets of hare’s foot and maidenhair, sprang up in shadow around me, an insubstantial jungle there was no way through. I choked. Hider and Mussolini, those historical bogeymen that even adults believed in, burst in upon me bearing their terrible paraphernalia of barbed wire, bayonets, tin helmets, hand grenades; their purpose now having nothing to do with the wall-map and its pins in our spare room, but being, quite simply, to reach up over the foot of my bed or down over the pillow and drag me into the pallid, black-and-white world of newspaper photographs and newsreels — a world without colour, like the night itself, in which everyone was a victim, pale, luminous, with flesh already frazzled round the edge, and where being a child with curly hair and apple cheeks that everyone wondered at was no protection at all. The war wasn’t one of those activities that were strictly for grown-ups. The newsreels were full of children no older than myself climbing up gangplanks or being herded into trains. And how else did they get into the war (I couldn’t imagine their parents allowing them to go) unless they had been dragged there, over the pillow and down into the furballed, spider-crawling darkness under their beds?

  In later years my night terrors came to seem truer to the real history of our times, as it was finally revealed to us, than the list of sinkings and beachheads that made up the headline news. And it was for this reason perhaps that the explosion of the real war into our hemisphere seems in retrospect like the beginning of a lighter period of my childhood. The war came into the open at last. The Japanese struck Pearl Harbour, and my father took me one brilliant morning to see the first American warships come grandly upriver and swing at anchor off Newstead Park. What I remember is the whiteness of the sailors’ uniforms as they stood in dazzling rows on the deck, and the light of that moment floods all the years ahead. There was greater danger of course. But danger is open and easy to deal with. Better any day than dread. The war, now that it was with us, turned out to be quite an exciting affair. A bit frightening at times, but mostly comic and commonplace.

  We were given air-raid kits that we took to school with us. They contained rubber mouthpieces that we were to bite on during the raids and rolls of bandage that got used almost as soon as they were given out for bloody knees. My father was made Senior A.R.P. Warden for South Brisbane. He wore a white helmet, a red felt armband, had a gasmask and rattle, and went out each evening after dark to inspect the blackout. Once a week, on Wednesdays, his group came in for their meeting. After practising with the stirrup pump in our backyard, they read through the emergency drill, checked off a list of hospitals, fire-stations, and emergency first-aid centres, and ate a ten o’clock supper of sausage rolls and cream-puffs. Brisbane was suddenly at the centre of things. Though we hardly knew it at the time, our city was having its moment of greatness, its encounter with History: General MacArthur had arrived and the whole Pacific campaign was being directed from his office in the A.M.P. building.

  All night now the troop transports rumbled past our house, and in the early dusk, with mosquitoes beginning to dance under the bushes and flying foxes in the mango trees tearing into the pulpy fruit, I sat out on our lawn away from the sprinkler and counted them. They went on long after I had run out of numbers, and all through tea and the radio serials I listened to afterwards, and went droning on in my sleep. Neighbours began to evacuate to places like Coonabarabran, and the big houses along the park, where I used to play in the afternoon, were boarded up with chains on the gate or turned over to the Yanks. When my father decided we should stay put our house was fortified with sandbags and workmen came to dig a trench in our tennis court. It filled with water in the first summer and remained a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and a marvellous setting for our games of Cowboys and Indians, till my sister broke her leg jumping across it and my father had the workmen back to fill it in. On the two occasions when the sirens did go, the shelter had nine inches of muddy water in it, so we sat behind sandbags in the garage, on the running-boards of our huge tanklike convertible, and bit hard on our rubber mouthguards, till after an hour or so of foolish expectancy my mother (who thought bombs had your number on them anyway) led us back into the house.

  But our one-storeyed weatherboard wasn’t the only one to be fortified. The whole city had taken on the aspect of an armed camp, and there were rumours that when the Japanese landed the whole country to the north would be scorched and abandoned in the Russian manner and a last stand made at Brisbane. We were suddenly in the front line. Concrete pill-boxes appeared in the streets and became places where people “did things” after school, or where children who took sweets from strangers were discovered with their heads cut off — victims (now that all the swaggies and metho drinkers had been drafted) of the negroes who congregated round the Trocadero in Melbourne Street and the brothels along the south side of the bridge. Troop transports rumbled day and night, ferrying soldiers from the Interstate Station, where the New South Wales line ended, to Roma Street, where they would board one of the slow narrow-gauge lines to the north. Antiaircraft guns were set up on the city’s high places and the sky at night was crisscrossed with the shafts of giant searchlights, moving pale among the clouds, creating in the blackout a ghostly reflected light that you could actually read by if you half-opened the venetians. Our sleepy subtropical town, with its feathery palm trees and its miles of sprawling weatherboard, was on the newsreels. It was the gateway to that part of The War that was raging all over the islands now, just a thousand miles away. Brisbane had, for a time, the heady atmosphere of a last stopping place before the unknown, and there were service clubs, canteens, big dancehalls like Cloudland and the Troc where girls who might otherwise have been teaching Sunday school were encouraged by the movies they had seen, the hysteria of the times, the words of sentimental Tin Pan Alley tunes, and the mock moonbeams of a many-faceted glass ball that revolved slowly in the ceilings of darkened ballrooms, to give the boys “something to remember” before they were mustered (forever perhaps) into the dawn.

  ✧✧

  Of course there are some things that even the war could not change.

  Any morning at nine-thirty, any afternoon at three, our local postman, Mr. Shultz, a big red-faced man with no teeth, might have been discovered in the little courtyard at the back of my grandmother’s shop, sipping tea if it was winter and cold ice-block sarsaparilla if it was summer, while my father’s sisters (all three of whom were unmarried) went through his mail bag. Mr. Sh
ultz, his boy scouts hat laid aside, would turn a blind eye, while my aunts, who held the seven streets of his round in a grip that not even the Japanese Empire and all its forces could have broken, kept tally of wedding invitations, engagements, sympathy cards, twenty-firsts, who was being invited, who was not — piling the letters out on to the scrubbed wooden table, sorting them, re-sorting, then carefully piling them back. When they had satisfied themselves that all things in the area were going as expected, Mr. Shultz, in the name of His Majesty’s postal services, resumed custody of the mails and went on his way.

  Nothing in the universe, one felt, could interfere with rituals like these. Not even censorship and those placards that warned us to say nothing, write nothing, since the enemy was always listening. The life my aunts had established was inviolate. They went to mass in the morning, returned to breakfast, entertained Mr. Shultz, kept an eye on my Uncle Nick (who raced greyhounds and was forever falling asleep on his mattress with a lighted cigarette), cooked enormous meals at a wood range that made their kitchen, at all seasons, like a furnace, had nuns to afternoon tea, went once each year to Melbourne to buy new dresses, never spoke if they could help it to known Protestants and wore much too much rouge on their cheeks. My Uncle Nick was a terrible trial to them. A disgrace in fact. He walked his dogs round the suburb in a singlet and floppy old grey flannels, barefoot. He had a girlfriend called Ada who wore ringlets and was thought to be associated with one of the “houses” in Melbourne Street. Behind the choko vines at the end of the yard he fed his greyhounds gobbets of raw meat and occasionally, illegally, in those days when they still used live hares at the races, a rabbit, whose squeals could be heard two blocks away. Uncle Nick was for all of us a man of blood. He had once been to jail for stabbing an Albanian in a card game. He had also gone to the first war, of course, and had never been the same afterwards.

  The war—this war or the last one — was the reason for many things. My Uncle Nick was one of them and Johnno’s wildness was another. And there was the sudden fall from grace (which was perfectly inexplicable to me) of several “big girls” at Scarborough who had once minded us for the day or taken us to the pictures at Redcliffe, and were now unrecognisable in their high strapped wedgies and pompadours; they were not to be spoken to. One of them, Colleen, had been a particular favourite of mine and I hadn’t been at all jealous when an American sailor or a Marine joined us on the Redcliffe bus and fed me Babe Ruths. Now Colleen was someone I wasn’t to go out with, and I associated her fall with jitterbugging, which couples performed in an illuminated boxing ring at Suttons Beach — a spectacle my father forbade us to watch. Jitterbugging was a mystery. So too was Leftkas’ fruitshop where we had once bought our vegetables. It was now, overnight, declared “black” — though not surely because it sold fried chickens to the negroes, who were restricted to the south side of the river and whose presence had given our nice, old-fashioned suburb a “bad name”. That was yet another effect of the war. South Brisbane, with its big rambling mansions, each one with a tennis court, grass or hard, an orchard of lemon trees and loquats, a vegetable garden, a dung-and-feather chicken house — South Brisbane was finally done for; no-one respectable would ever live there again. It had been ruined. Like our girls. Who had been ruined by the high wages they were paid in munitions factories and by the attentions of foreign servicemen, but most of all by their passion for nylon. Things had gone to pieces. Children had been allowed to run wild under the special conditions of Australia at war, and now there was no holding them.

  For all this and a good deal more Johnno was the perfect model, and other parents than mine must have shaken their heads over him and thanked their stars that they weren’t responsible for the windows he broke or the words he shouted at old ladies who objected to his rattling a stick along their fence. I hadn’t been allowed to run wild of course. If I used bad words, even the mildest “shut-up”, I had my mouth washed out by Cassie with Lifebuoy soap — or was, at least, threatened with it. I had been properly brought up. And I sometimes thought how different from my own homelife poor Johnno’s must be. No wonder he was so awful. What else could you expect?

  My mother, I see now, was reproducing for us her own orderly childhood as the last of a big family in pre-war (that is, pre-1914) London — though it was no different from the life that was lived in other houses where we went to play in the long evenings after school.

  They were all enormous those houses. Huge one-storeyed weatherboard mansions that had been intended for more spacious days, and for larger families than we could manage, they were only half lived-in nowadays. Every house had its row of locked bedrooms on one side of the hall. You could look into them from long sash windows on the verandah, and believe (as I was told often enough) that people had died there — grandmothers, little brothers from scarlet fever or whooping-cough, bed-ridden uncles from injuries they had received in the First World War. The high beds had brass ends with superbly polished finials and little rows of porcelain balusters. Lace curtains, a lace coverlet and bolster, a washstand with doilies and a floral jug-and-basin. And often as not, as in my grandmother’s house, a Sacred Heart of Jesus over the bed, and on the shelves of the dressing-table a whole series of extravagant saints among artificial flowers and candles. The kitchens were tiled, with walk-in pantries and an old wood range (for baking) beside a newer gas stove, perhaps an Early Kooka like ours, with its legs in tins of water to keep off ants. One huge room, always at the centre of the house, always darkly panelled and with a picture rail, was never opened except to visitors. Its curtains were kept drawn to preserve the carpets and the genoa velvet lounge chairs from the sun; there were chromium smokers’ stands and brass jardinieres full of gladioli; on a heavy sideboard, cut-glass decanters of whisky, brandy, port; and a big central lampshade of silk brocade, with tassels, that gave a smoky gold light.

  Such rooms were used only after dark. Daytime visitors were entertained on the front verandah among white cane chairs and potted ferns, and when I went visiting with my mother, this is where we were called in to eat pikelets or pumpkin scones for morning tea from a three-tiered cake stand, and in the afternoon, date slices, anzacs and cream puffs, while the ladies, with a lace fichu at their throat, patted the sweat from their upper lips or fanned themselves with plaited palm. Here, on a cane lounge, my mother and other ladies took their afternoon nap, and here we were settled when we were sick, close enough to the street to take an interest in the passing world of postmen, bakers, icemen and newspaper boys with their shrill whistles, but out of the sun. Here too on warm evenings, with a coil burning to keep off the mosquitoes, we sat after tea, while my father watered the lawn and chatted to neighbours over the swinging chains of the front fence and my mother had one of her “conversations” with Cassie’s Jack, who was considered a great expert on world affairs. He was our girl’s “young man”. In fact he was nearly fifty, a veteran of the First World War where he had lost a lung and a former valet to Sir William McGregor, the Governor of Queensland. These days he worked as a gardener at the local convent and did odd jobs like clearing berries from gutters and pumping out drains. A Dubliner with a marvellous gift of the gab, Cassie’s Jack also had a talent for turning clothes-pegs into dolls, squares of silver paper into little jumping beans, and ordinary cotton reels and pins into a machine from which I learned to spin yard after yard of off-white pyjama cord. While Cassie got herself ready in her little room on the side verandah he would delight my mother (or was he boring her, I wonder at this distance?) with one of his rambling disquisitions on the probability of war, and later, when all his worst fears had been fulfilled, on the objectives of tank warfare, bombing, and the second front. On very hot nights, when the family had gone inside to play bridge, I was allowed to come and sleep out on the front verandah — though it scared me to be so close to the garden, with just the cast-iron and Venetians between me and the dark.

  The front verandah was a free-and-easy world of open living, almost the outdoors. The depths o
f these old houses were dark and musty with damp. Even on the sunniest afternoons you needed a light in our dining-room, its walls were so thickly varnished, its windows so shadowed by the glossy dark Moreton Bay figs whose fruit attracted the flying-foxes and blocked our guttering. As for the series of little rooms beyond the kitchen where Cassie kept her provisions — great sacks of potatoes, onions, sugar, salt — you needed a torch to go in there: the floorboards were soggy underfoot and there were rats. I hated to be sent in, as I was once or twice each month when Cassie’s salt box was empty or her sugar cannister needed filling. But for some reason the dark of the kitchen itself, which opened through a wooden arch into the dining-room, delighted me, it was so cosy and safe — especially on summer afternoons when it stormed and the tin roof thundered under the hail.

  Here, usually, I did my homework at the big table with its velvet cover, while Cassie peeled potatoes or shelled peas. Sometimes in earlier days, before the war, my mother and Cassie would take it in turns to read aloud from the old-fashioned novels they liked, while Cassie prepared the tea and my mother darned or wound wool over the backs of chairs. John Halifax Gentleman, The Channings, David Copperfield, These Old Shades — they were the first adult books I ever knew. I associate them with the dark, lead-light windows of that room, and with the big two-storeyed glass case where my mother kept her best china, the green-glass jelly moulds that came out only for parties, and the little white-columned temple that had been the decoration on her wedding cake. The world of those novels and our own slow-moving world seemed very close. The Channings were almost like next-door neighbours — and preferable certainly to our real neighbours, whose alcoholic son had fits in the back garden and set fire, eventually, to the garage. It was a world so settled, so rich in routine and ritual, that it seemed impossible then that it should ever suffer disruption. Life was a serious affair. For that reason we had to be strict with ourselves; the rules and regulations were necessary, we needed them — how else could we discover order and discipline? But there were no punishments. Life itself would take care of that.