The ENT Specialist, a thin little sniffly man, did the best he could with the very limited equipment Dr Cobbity had to lend him for peeking into Prindy’s ears. He said he couldn’t make a full diagnosis with such gear. Seeing that he was having a sort of busman’s holiday, else he wouldn’t have dropped in on Cobbity and gotten himself involved, it was a wonder he hadn’t brought his apparatus with him. But then, busmen on holidays don’t take their ticket-clippers with them. All the ENT man could say was that one of the boy’s ears looked Rather Dingy. Then he looked into the other kids’ ears and found a lot of dinginess, and a couple who were deaf. When he suggested hearing aids for the deafies, Cobbity laughed and said, ‘We’re flat out getting money to feed ’em.’
Perhaps Alfie was a bit piqued at being more or less ignored during this visit of the otherwise always eagerly regardful Cobbity in her presence, not knowing that while a medical man can also be a man when left to himself, with another or more of his kind he becomes part of a Medical Faculty, which, of course, is a kind of Theocracy, beyond common human ken. Anyway, to that remark of Cobbity’s she added a tart one of her own: ‘I pay the cook out of my salary.’
The ENT Man looked at her over his rimless glasses, sniffling, ‘Do you indeed!’ Then he looked at his colleague for conformation.
Cobb was looking red and angry. He snapped, ‘She doesn’t have to do it. She’s been told not to.’
Now it was Alfie who was red: ‘If I didn’t pay her, we’d have no cook. Then where would we be?’
Cobbity got control of himself and grinned at her, saying, ‘On much better terms with the Government Auditor than we’ve been since you came along and appointed your own catering staff.’ He laughed. The ENT man laughed. Alfie made a little face to show she took it in good part.
But to disprove that showing, as the two doctors were leaving, after taking a quick look at the black part of the menagerie, and happened to meet her near Turkney’s office and paused to say goodbye to her, she, having just a few minutes ago had to deal with Lucy Snowball, who was still sitting in a weeping huddle against the office wall, asked the ENT man, ‘Doctor . . . do you happen to have heard that leprosy is now curable and considered not as contagious as it was?’
The medical gentleman should properly have consulted his colleague first, especially as he must have known that Cobbity would know more about the disease than he, even if Cobbity hadn’t told him of his qualifications, as was likely, because while often arrogant, he was never pompous. But perhaps for the first time he had noticed how pretty this young lady was, prettier for being angry too, and so far forgot his Theocratic Oath as to reply, ‘Why, yes . . . I believe that it’s got such a new look they’ve given it a new name . . . Hansen’s Disease . . . Isn’t that so, Doctor. Ahem!’ It was plain enough to see by the look of Cobbity that a frightful mistake in Medical Ethics had been made.
Alfie must have realised, too, that she had made a mistake, because when later she phoned Cobbity it was with due humility of tone. He was stiff to begin with, very official, wanting to know what official business it was she wanted him for. She told him it was only to say that she was sorry, that she wouldn’t have done it only he was so mean about the cook business. She said, ‘You made it sound as if I’m just a damn nuisance.’
He answered, but with the stiffness gone, ‘You are, too.’
‘Well, why don’t you fire me?’
He sighed: ‘And take out of my life the only joy that’s left in it?’ She was silent. He asked, ‘Are you there?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then say something?’
‘What is there to say?’
‘Lots, actually . . . but . . . but . . .’
‘But what?’
He was the silent one now, till he broke it, saying, ‘Look, what about coming to Vic Shane’s party on Anzac Night?’
‘I can’t stand that vain old man.’
‘Oh, old Vic’s not so bad. But if you don’t like the party, we could go for a drive somewhere while they’re boozing . . . and have a talk. We never get to talk about anything but bloody boongs.’
‘I thought bloody boongs were your chief interest in life.’
‘They were. Not now.’
She was silent. Then she said softly, ‘Cuthbert . . .’
She must have heard him catch his breath. He answered slowly, ‘Yes?’
‘I know it’s not the time to ask . . . but I’m worried about that poor woman, Lucy Snowball . . .’
He cut in sharply: ‘Now listen, if you’re going to . . .’
She cut in on him: ‘All right, all right . . . I won’t. I just wanted to ask for her, because she asked me to.’
‘I told your husband.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. But I had to ask.’
After a moment he said, ‘Fair enough . . . and now, what about that party?’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Anzac night. When’s that . . . about a week? I’ll have to go with Frank, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay . . . sweetheart.’
It was a fact that Alfie was paying the Compound Cook, Nelly Ah Loy. To be sure it was only a few shillings a week, mostly spent on buying things for the allegedly half-wit son, a bit for the pictures of Saturday nights. Dr Cobbity told Alfie to tell Nell to wait until they were out at the New Settlement, the Estimates of which allowed for wages for a cook. But the New Settlement would not even be begun building until July — a long while to wait to go to the pictures and buy a new dress and a couple of pairs of drawers, let alone the pretty things the girls who traded with the men of the Kerosene got, even rouge and lipstick and silk stockings and handbags. Queeny Peg-leg, who managed the trade, often told Nell what a fool she was not to be in it: ‘Pretty girl like o’ you . . . crise . . . you can get tcharjent tcholdier!’ Anzac Day was a particularly good day for business, she said, because the Kerosene men all got drunk and had a great party in the night and it was a simple matter to get in there with them. In fact she always organised it: ‘Wha’ you say, eh?’
And there at length it was that Day of All Days to the Australian Nation, Anzac Day. The Christ may have been born on December 25 and died on the First Friday after the Full Moon that falls on or next after March 21; Captain Cook may have first set eyes on the continent called Terra Australis on April 29 and renamed it New Wales and the property of King George III of England; Captain Phillip may have landed with his lags to found the Nation on January 26; the Diggers of Eureka may have hoisted the Five-starred Flag for the first time on December 3 (and been shot down and jailed for it); God may have finished building the Earth on Saturday evening and proclaimed every Sunday a holiday thereafter; but nothing that ever happened on any day, anywhere, at any time in history, compares in importance to Australians with the Day of Anzac.
Why is it? No one ever really found out. From its Inauguration schoolchildren (white) have been asked to write essays about it for prizes, perhaps in the hope that out of the mouth of some inspired babe someday the truth will come. The nearest anyone has ever got to it, of all that has been spouted annually, like the periodic puking of geysers, out of the mouths of Priests, Parsons, Poets, Politicians, Boy Scouts, and Bemedalled Soldiery, is that On That Day the Australian Nation was Blooded. An English term that, Blooded, in the huntin’, fishin’, shootin’ tradition, referring to the actual bespattering with a victim creature’s blood of a novice huntsman to mark his first bit of slaughter. But how can it be appropriate to the so-called Tradition of Anzac when it was the victims who were bespattered and the blood their own?
But to say those Heroes of Anzac were victims, is to deny them their undying heroism and risk bringing down upon one’s head not simply the wrath of the God of War but what is ten times more thunderous, at least in Australia, that of the RSSAILA or as it is more generally called, perhaps because it’s much more easy when you’re drunk, on Anzac Day, the RSL — and who would dare? Therefore let the story of how
it came about be told, while the bugle of Lefty Larkins sings of its glory in Reveille at the initiatory ceremony at four in the morning before the concrete statue of a soldier in a comical slouch hat, the Cenotaph so called, outside Government House, Port Palmeston.
There was a podgy little Englishman, lived in England, who thought he was a military genius because he was descended from the Duke of Marlborough, had seen service in the British War of Suppression of the Boers as a newspaper correspondent, and as Home Secretary had taken part in the so-called Sydney Street Siege, London, in which poor madmen dubbed Anarchists were shot for refusing to believe in the glory of institutions like, say, Marlborough House (a famous photograph shows the fat little fellow directing the shooting in a top hat). Well, this little man was a Big Man in the British War Office, and conceived the bright idea that on April 25, 1915, the Turks could be knocked out of the war by someone’s sneaking up behind them over the Heights of Gallipoli and bayoneting the Sultan into the Bosphorus, and even if it didn’t do the immediate enemy, the Hun, much harm, it could mean adding the Ottoman Empire to that of Imperial Britain. The right boys to do it were almost right on the job, the Aussies, a mob who called themselves the Imperial Force, yet were wasting their time and substance in the brothels of Sister Street, Alexandria, Egypt. A tough lot — as you might expect of the descendants of the sweepings of the British Prisons of a hundred odd years before. So the brothels were emptied, and the thing happened at four on that Morning of Glory according to plan. The little fat man would have been in bed at the time; or if awaiting word of how it went, indulging a disgusting gustatory habit he was famous for, eating sandwiches made with a mixture of Marmite and sardines. Would be have been put off his food by the terrible news when it came? Some men would have hanged themselves in the privy with their braces. But such men would not be the descendants of dukes.
That fat-arsed old Sultan of Turkey, called Mohammed Reshad Effendi, was not as silly as he looked from the British War Office. His nation had been repelling invaders while the War Office chappies were still painting themselves with woad. Do the Turks celebrate Anzac Day; and if so, is it as one of the silliest things the Unbeliever ever tried on them, with laughter and dancing in the streets, or with silence and a sense of guilt at having taken simpletons like those poor Aussie boys who’d come boasting halfway round the world at such disadvantage? But even if they’d laughed while they watched the impending blooding of the Heroes in their own blood through the sights of their artillery hidden in those supposedly empty hills, could they be blamed, men being what they are?
So Lefty Larkin’s bugle rang, rather flatly, as ever, in remembrance of that Hour of Glory, that bright black morning in Port Palmeston twenty-two years later, while the waters of the harbour reflecting the stars of the Milky Way poured to the sea, and the Southern Cross swung round her invisible axis. They might have had a first-rate bugler from the Garrison, if they’d liked. But as was said when the offer was made with the establishment of the Garrison a couple of years back, old Lefty would have been hurt; and besides, he was one of the only two of the gathering who’d seen action on Gallipoli. Not that the last mattered so much. So long as you were a member of the RSL you were an Anzac, and you could be that so long as you had been a member of the Australian Imperial Force and had left Australian shores, even if all the action you’d seen had been behind the counter of a Quartermaster’s Store or Pay Office, so long as you had been prepared to die outside your own country. ‘Up the Old Diggers!’
As well as the bugler there was a parson, since they were conjuring the spirits of the dead: the Reverend Mr Tasker, wearing his campaign medals like the rest, won for dishing out Holy Communion to those about to kill their fellow men. It didn’t last long. Just a bit of mumbling and head-hanging and the flat bugling and sobs in the background from one lone invisible woman; then led by His Honour, the Administrator, Colonel Close, they marched into Government House, where the traditional rum and curry were awaiting them along with the ladies of the RSL Anzac Day Committee, who would dish it out, or at any rate the curry. Apparently that was what the men of Anzac had gone to their death with in their bellies, because there was something holy about the partaking of it. Even a ginger beer drinker like Mr Tasker, while not partaking of the OP rum, showed none of his usual antagonism to alcoholic liquor. As tradition has it, they stayed on there till the Sun came up, by which time most were silly drunk. But this was only the beginning. Anzac Day is the Day of the Great Drink Up. Drunks are a nuisance other days; but on the Day of Anzac the Booze Artist comes into his own. The drunker you get the more you are honoured, because it means that you saw more action than the others, saw more of your mates’ guts hanging out, did the bravest deeds — at least that’s how the drunkest made it seem. Those who were well under the weather already were driven home by others and made to lie down to sleep it off in readiness for the Anzac Day Parade that would culminate with the laying of wreaths on the Cenotaph so-called, the full-dress eulogy by Mr Tasker, who would conclude with: They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old . . . and At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them — the singing of the Old Hundred as Oh, God our Help in Ages Past, our Hope in Years to Come, without thought to the dirty versions the troops had used to divert themselves — the playing of the Last Post, this time by the Garrison bugler because the troops would be there with their band, that Holiest of the Holy Acts of this Holy Boozy Day, the Two Minutes Silence, during which probably no one thought of anything but how long two minutes silence seems in the noisy world of Man — then the raising of the Flag, the blue banner composed of the Five Stars the men of Eureka fought for, superimposed by the Union Jack of those who shot them for it, from half-mast to peak — then a lively Reveille by the Garrison’s cornetist — and as that died away, the Garrison Band would break into some such good old Australian military marching tune as It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, or Soldiers of the King. After that it was the booze ad lib.
So it was this Anzac Day of 1937, with nothing untoward, except that a dog nipped in and piddled on a wreath, probably not out of the disrespect it was taken for, judging by the indignation hurled at him with stones, but out of pride of ownership, because his master had put it there. The same dog, at a safe distance now, howled during the sounding of the Last Post, again most likely moved by feeling deeper than the stony-faced humans were capable of.
As usual everybody was there, except a few of the type called Bolsheviks (they would have been called Anarchists earlier on), blacks as well as whites, and the kids from the Halfcaste Home, who were always given free lollies. There was only one Aboriginal member of the local RSL, a halfcaste, and he was missing this day. Before this year of grace, only on Anzac Day would he be permitted to take alcoholic liquor, which went to show rather that the RSL was beyond the Law — like the Ku Klux Klan, according to its enemies, the Bolshies. His absence wasn’t due to the fact that, having at last got the right to drink simply as a man, he didn’t give a damn any more about being a Digger. Indeed, he had been perhaps the proudest Digger of them all, seeing that The Day conferred upon him not only the status of a hero but also of a full citizen of the land he had fought for. That was his wife, the invisible woman weeping at the Dawn Service, Mrs Lucy Snowball.
Alfie Candlemas, taking her children back to the Compound in the truck, also took Lucy, and heard all about Digger Albert Snowball, from her driver, Barney Bynoe. Lucy, still weeping, would have told her all about it, too, and how her old man must be feeling sitting out there in his hut in the lazaret today; but Alfie, looking as if about to weep herself, fled from her. She also abandoned her children much earlier than usual, giving them a kind of picnic tea, so that she may be in good time to prepare for that party she had promised to go to at Captain Vic Shane’s. She told the children of the party; and they were interested and asked her to tell them all about it tomorrow; and also, a couple of the big ones hinted that there was also to be a party at the Kerosene that night, w
hich some of the adult girls would be attending. As a Protector she should have done something about that information. But what? Dr Cobbity, who was Captain Cobbity today, was celebrating the part he had taken in the blooding of the Nation in the Officers’ Mess at the Garrison; and Tubby Turkney, today a Corporal and jangling medals, although on duty, was pretty drunk and singing with some old comrades in his residence: ‘Ol’ solyers neffer doy, dey sim’ly fyde awye . . .’
Besides, how dare one stop others going to a party when one was bound for a party oneself?
The adult girls had a way of getting out of their cages when it suited them and it was safe. There were six of them, including that Big Dolly, who’d long since had her baby and was leaving it for an older one to mind, and Nell, whom Queeny Peg-leg, her tribal sister, had at last persuaded. Queeny saw them safely out through their bolt-hole in the dusk like a string of bandicoots emerging from a hollow log and down to the beach and along and over the little tide creek. The escort was essential in a place where no undefended woman was safe at night, and particularly on the night of such a day when many of the male inmates of the Compound had been emulating the behaviours of their civilised masters in celebrating the Blooding of the Nation that denied them citizenship. Queeny, with her bulk and her crutch and her hatred of blackmen, was as good as a guard with fixed bayonets. She didn’t have to go beyond the creek, because an Old Woman lived in the tumble of rocks at the foot of Point Lookout, had always lived there, it seemed, on shell-fish and crabs and things, and also men, it was believed, if she could lay hands on them. This Old Woman was said to have red hair, like the Ol’Goomun-Ol’Goomun, and to be able to change herself to look young and alluring. No one of the present generation had set eyes on her, except King George, so he claimed; although her tracks occasionally were seen in the sand, after the tide had been over it. Some believed she was the Ol’Goomun-Ol’Goomun, who hated men for stealing her secrets. Others were of the opinion that she was just a debildebil. Anyway, women had nothing to fear from her. Nevertheless, the girls left the beach as quickly as possible, to head for the heights on which the Kerosene stood within its high barbed wire enclosure, following a pad that led up through the scrub. It wasn’t really dark. The young Moon hung silvering the purple tide racing out to sea.
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