Once a Pommie Swagman

by Thomas, Nick Arden

  Christmas and New Year came and went, and gradually my money began to run out, but it was difficult to motivate myself. I felt somehow lost, as if my life was in limbo, and I’d sit on the veranda until the early hours, singing loudly to a radio — as loudly as Mrs Henderson next door could cope with. I knew my stepmother was returning in a few weeks and that I would have to get some sort of job then, but I didn’t really make any effort to find one. I spent most days in the local snooker hall, and a few nights a week some of the old crowd started playing cards again at my place, but it was never the same as before and I certainly didn’t make any money out of it. Then one evening about five o’clock I was sitting on the front veranda listening to the radio when it hit me.

  “… ah but, two hours of pushing broom

  Buys an eight by twelve four bit room

  I’m a man of means by no means …”

  Of course! That’s it! Monto! I’ll go to Monto! Work and Carol, what could be better than that! I even thought about leaving right then, but I knew I had to get sorted first. I wasn’t about to set off as unprepared as Glen and I had originally been. What I could do, though, was begin to pack, so I went into my bedroom, happier and more buoyant than I’d felt since we got back. Then from out in the street came a loud and prolonged hoot. I went to the front door to find a smart Ford Customline parked outside the gate, engine running. A bloke I didn’t recognise was driving, but inside were Johnny Mickelton, Ronnie Wilson and three or four other blokes I vaguely knew, waving manically at me. At first I thought they wanted to play cards, so I yelled out that I couldn’t that night, but Johnny stuck his head out the window, shouting: “No, we’re going up to Terrigal Beach, surf club’s putting on a barbie. Come on. It’ll be great!” To this day I do not know why I went with them.

  We’d just flashed across the Hawkesbury River Bridge, beer bottles frothing, Bobby Darren blaring: “Splish splash, I was taking a bath, on about a Saturday …” when the police siren sounded and the motorbike pulled alongside, the cop motioning for us to pull over. “Gidday, boys. In a bit of a hurry, are we?” He asked cheerfully enough, then he poked his head through the window and ran his eyes over the seven of us.

  “Bit crowded in here, isn’t it. Whose car is this?” The silence was as incriminating as it was deafening. Oh no! For Christ’s sake, no!

  One of the central pillars of western democratic law is that a person is held to be “Innocent until proven guilty.” However, when a motorbike traffic cop stops a speeding Ford Customline crammed with seven teenage boys, all of whom are drinking, none of whom have a licence and some of whom have, at best, implausible reasons for being in the vehicle, and a few of whom have skeletons in their police cupboards; then that tenet goes straight out the window and that wonderful line from an American television cop show springs to mind. “You boys is in a whole heap’a trouble, ‘cause I is the sheriff of Boon county!”

  This in turn creates a situation of logistical complexity and mind-boggling confusion. First, two police cars are despatched to the scene to collect the suspects, with an extra policeman going along to drive the Ford Customline; then, in convoy, they depart for the police station where each of the suspects is placed in a separate room and questioned, even interrogated, long into the night. During the course of which, alerted to their son’s predicament, parents and other relatives begin to arrive, some accompanied by family solicitors; until, by 2am, there is a gaggle of people milling about in the foyer, all wringing their hands with anguish and proclaiming their son’s innocence. Despite the best of intentions, nothing is quite so embarrassing for a teenage boy, innocent or not, than a hand wringing parent. Fortunately I was spared this ignominy — for the time being, that was.

  Of course, unbeknown to all but one of the rest of us, the car had been stolen by the driver, whose name I didn’t even know! It turned out he was a serial vehicle thief and got his kicks from pinching cars, especially big, expensive ones, and then showing off to his peers by giving them lifts in it. Rarely did he keep the vehicle for more than a few hours, stealing a car in Parramatta and taking it to Bondi, where he would dump it only to steal another one and take it somewhere else. He was smart enough never to steal or leave a car near his home, and on this occasion he’d stolen the Customline from a used car lot in Maroubra, specifically to take to Gosford where he planned to dump it. Five of us that night may not have had the slightest knowledge of any of this, but saying so was easy; proving it was not!

  Eventually us ‘innocent’ ones were released, although in my case, due to my ‘skeletons’ I was warned not to go anywhere in case they wanted to question me further. Which was why, a few days later, I was still at home, Monto but a distant dream, when the phone rang. I’d had no idea she was coming, much less was in town. “Hello. Nicholas? It’s your mother. I’m booked into a twin room in such and such a hotel in Milson’s Point. Come over and stay for awhile.” It was not so much an invitation as a summons, but I hadn’t seen her for awhile so I set off, slightly anxious but happily enough. In the end I stayed with her for about a week, and by the end my life had changed forever.

  * * *

  When a mother ups and leaves her husband and young children for no discernible reason, relatives and friends are shocked and amazed. When she does so just after a traumatic war, then society itself is not only shocked and amazed but unforgiving and vindictive. A woman walking out on her husband was one thing, but that she could so callously leave her children as well was almost inconceivable in war-torn 1945 England. Hadn’t millions just sacrificed themselves to make the world a better place for children? Wasn’t motherly love one of the most instinctive and cherished qualities of a woman? What was the selfish cow thinking of; had she no sense of responsibility, no shame, no heart! Even animals didn’t leave their young in vulnerable times!

  This was the dilemma that confronted my mother, made even worse because the reason she left was primarily selfish and she knew it. There was no dreadful husband, no poverty, no lack of love or support; she just wanted to be free of the encumbrances of a husband and children. In 1947, having reluctantly accepted their separation was permanent, my father agreed she could take us children to Australia to live with her parents and he would come out later once their affairs in England had been settled. So it was we arrived in Queensland that year, and she dropped her bombshell on her parents. I have many letters my father and mother wrote to each other during that time, and although reasonably polite, each trying to understand the other’s point of view, they ooze with the torment of the situation. Shortly before my mother died in 1978 she did explain how traumatic a period it had been, especially the dreadful night in 1947 shortly after we arrived when she first told her parents of her plans to go to New Guinea and asked them to look after us until our father came out. My grandmother, a lovely, kind and thoughtful woman, was slightly more sympathetic than my grandfather; well, a lot more actually, but she too had great difficulty understanding how any woman could ever leave her children, never mind want to leave them. My grandfather barely spoke to my mother ever again.

  Given the clamour of outrage and the terrible burden of guilt and anguish involved, it is difficult to imagine any woman of the time ever making such a decision, much less carrying it through. Yet my mother did, and regardless of the rights and wrongs or how selfish it may or may not have been, one thing is certain. It must have taken a deal of courage and determination. When she heard that my father had married my stepmother she was greatly relieved, knowing that now at least the children would be well cared for. It no doubt came as a bit of a shock, therefore, to find ten years later, having been kept up-to-date of my goings-on by my sister, that she was required to sort out her son. Fortunately — or perhaps unfortunately for me — she bought her formidable determination with her.

  At the time she was struggling to make ends meet, running a native trade store up in the wilds of the Southern Highlands of New Guinea. On top of that, the journey from there to Sydney in 1961 was still a fa
irly arduous one. Thirty nail-biting minutes from Wau to Lae in a single-engined Pilatus Porter was a hair-raising trip at the best of times. On an overcast day you just had to pray that the clouds the pilot couldn’t avoid didn’t contain a rocky mountain! “Land on a billiard table, take off on a cricket pitch,” was the plane’s boast, and in the rugged and precipitous mountains of New Guinea it often needed to! After that, an hour in a twin engine DC3 Dakota from Lae to Port Moresby sounds a doddle by comparison; after all, that sturdy reliable workhorse had won the war in the Pacific twenty years earlier. Maybe, but sitting in a DC3 at ten thousand feet is about as comfortable as riding a three-legged camel in Antarctica! Next, after a two-hour wait in Moresby, came the stretch to Brisbane via a one-hour refuelling stop in Townsville, this time in an iconic three-tailed Lockheed Constellation. It might have looked a wonderful plane, but it wasn’t the swiftest, needing every minute of the six hours flying time. Yet still the trip wasn’t finished, with another two-hour wait in Brisbane and a three-hour flight to Sydney. Couple all this with the fact that she felt partly responsible for the reason she had to undertake this journey in the first place, and you have a mother not best pleased with things when she arrives, making her even more determined not to leave until she had sorted things out. Not that she was angry, or anything, just filled with dogged resolve to straighten me out once and for all.

  The first twenty-four hours were the most difficult, with a no-holds-barred, often fractious mother-and-son heart-to-heart. I can’t remember everything we talked about, or maybe I choose not to, as she did most of the talking. The majority of it being of the “Look at yourself. Wasting your life. Associating with the wrong people,” variety.

  “How about starting an apprenticeship?” she suggested in the dining room that first night. “Butchery or carpentry, get yourself a skill.”

  “But I don’t want to be a butcher or a carpenter!”

  “Well, what do you want to be? A car thief? A prisoner? Because that’s what you will end up being if you keep going as you are!”

  “But I didn’t steal the bloody car!”

  “No, but you were in it with boys who did steal it! Being caught in a stolen car once in your life may be forgivable, but twice in two months! It’s just another sign of where you are heading, Nicholas!”

  Like a cornered rat, my only defence was attack. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t be like this if you hadn’t pissed off and left us!”

  For a moment she looked at me and I thought she was going to be angry, but instead she sighed and nodded her head. “Perhaps” she said graciously. “But I don’t apologise for leaving. It might have been worse for all of us if I’d stayed. I just don’t think I was cut out to be a mother. Your father was a wonderful, kind man, but we had just fallen out of love, or rather, I had fallen out of love with him. He was twelve years older than me and I was very young when we married, both in years and maturity. It’s no excuse and I hope one day you will understand, but I needed to get away, to find out who I really was.”

  Looking back, I can see my big mistake was mentioning that Glen had joined the Navy. We’d gone for a walk around the harbour early one morning and were sitting on a seat under the bridge, watching the ferries go by, when she enquired after him and instantly I could see her eyes light up, making me leap up.

  “No! No way! I am not joining the Navy!”

  “Why not? Sounds like a wonderful solution to me. It’s well paid and you get to travel the world. You want to travel, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but not like that! Nine years you have to join up for! Bugger that!”

  “What about the Army then? You only have to join that for three years. Look!” she turned to me, the bit now obviously well between the teeth. “Many of us find ourselves drifting in our lives sometimes. It was like that for me with your father. I just had to break that cycle. It wasn’t easy, but it was the best thing I’ve ever done. Joining the Army could be the same for you. It will help you in so many ways, give you time to mature. In the meantime you’ll get paid, be well fed, have somewhere to live, they will teach you all sorts of skills and you will still only be twenty-one when you get out! Regardless of who or what is to blame for the situation you find yourself in, you have got to start taking control of your life, Nicholas, and now is the time to start!”

  Her persistence coupled with my own feelings of being ‘lost’ meant I didn’t stand a chance, really; and so it was that for the next three days we went together to the Army recruiting centre, situated in those days in Rushcutters Bay. It was such a lovely position for such a formidable place. She didn’t exactly drag me there by the ear, but it felt like it! Indomitable resolve and strength of purpose are mighty powerful weapons.

  The initial requirement for entry into the army was to pass a general knowledge and IQ test of silly questions like, “If a paw is to a cat what is a hoof to?” Despite my mother’s assurances, I still wasn’t convinced that joining the Army would suddenly make my life meaningful and happy. Free from her constant presence for half an hour while I sat the exam, I spontaneously ticked the box for platypus instead of horse. After that there was no stopping me and I made all sorts of mistakes; that I might be going a smidgeon over the top didn’t enter my head. In the maths section five nines became eighty-four, and to the conundrum, “If a man walks twenty-eight miles in seven days, on average how many miles does he walk each day?” I put “eleven.” As for the question: “Name three state capital cities of Australia,” I put down: “Sydney, Maroochydore and Julia Creek.” That should do it — surely they wouldn’t take anybody as stupid as me!

  There were four other boys in attendance that day, two of whom, I was relieved to see, were also escorted by their mothers. After handing in our papers, we were told to go and have some lunch and come back to hear the results. When we got back, a warrant officer emerged holding a clipboard. “You’ll be pleased to know you all passed the written test,” he smiled, addressing us as one. My gaping mouth must have given it away, and he looked at me briefly. “Yes! You too. Being able to spell Maroochydore clinched it. Right!” He stuck his clipboard smartly under his arm. “Be back here at nine o’clock tomorrow for your medicals,” and he left the room.

  Shit!

  The medical consisted mainly of the doctor holding my balls while I coughed — other than finding out you’ve got balls and can cough, why did they do that? But it was signing on the dotted line a day later that was the hardest bit, and even as we sat outside the captain’s office waiting to be called in, my mother sitting resolutely beside me as she was obliged to sign me away, I was desperately trying to think of a way out. But the opportunity to escape never came. Besides, I am sure my mother would have rugby tackled me if I’d tried to run for it.

  Three days later, myself and half a dozen other boys of a similar age found ourselves on Central Station, ready to board the train for the recruit training centre near Wagga Wagga. Three of the boys were those that had been at the Rushcutters Bay centre with me; the fourth had not been accepted, they told me, because he had flat feet. Some people have all the luck! As we settled back onto the hard benches of the recruit class compartment I was suddenly struck by a vision of Mr Archer, hollering at me from across the playground. “Ah! So you’ve joined the Army, have you, Pommie boy! Good! That should sharpen your ideas up!” He was right!

  The very first thing you learn in the Army is how to mop a floor. Not using much water was the secret, although the Corporal didn’t tell me that until after I’d sloshed it everywhere. Oh, very funny! Arsehole! The second thing you learn is that there is a rule, law and regulation for absolutely every conceivable situation. On my second day I discovered that even pulling a face was a chargeable offence; ‘dumb insolence’, it was called. I was fined ten shillings and banned from the wet canteen for a week, no matter that I was still too young to enter it! Just before I was marched in to confront the officer who would pronounce my punishment, I was told to stand up straight, not to move and never to look at t
he officer. “Pick something on the wall behind him and just stare at it,” the Bombardier escorting me advised. I did exactly as he said, and I can still vividly remember what was on that wall. It was a map of a strange-looking country I’d never heard of before, and I had to turn my head slightly at an angle to read it. Vietnam, it said.

  “Are you listening to me, Recruit Th

  omas!”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  Ohhh shit!

  THE BEGINNING