Remember Me

by Derek Hansen

  Collitt turned white. I called him a chicken-shit prick. Me, a weedy Pommy, and there were witnesses and not a thing he could do about it. He let go of me and stood impotently bunching and unbunching his fists. The mention of Sergeant Rapana had had the desired effect.

  I spun around to his mates. ‘Come on! Which one of you sheilas wants to have a go? What are you scared of? Scared the other kids in Borstal might think you’re girls?’

  The word Borstal had its desired effect. It suddenly dawned on Nigel that we had power over Collitt and his gang, power in the form of Sergeant Rapana.

  ‘Chicken-shit pricks!’ he chanted. Maxie joined in. Ryan joined in. Soon all the kids standing around joined in. They pointed and chanted, jeered and taunted. Collitt and his gang swore and cursed but their threats sounded pathetic. They slunk away like kicked dogs.

  I stood there the very image of the heroic, wounded gunslinger-turned-town-saviour, the last man standing at the OK Corral. Nobody could believe I’d had the guts to take on Collitt. To say they were stunned is an understatement. They failed to understand that what I did hadn’t required guts but brains, but I let them think what they liked. Even kids who weren’t supposed to speak to me joined the scramble to pat me on the back. It was like the good old days before Christian Berger when I’d scored a goal for the school soccer team or written an essay everyone liked. It felt great to be back.

  Maybe being carted off to hospital helped, but I think things at school would’ve returned to normal sooner rather than later. If alliances can shift in the space of an afternoon, how many times can they shift in the space of a week or a month? The fact is, my school pals and I spent five days a week from 8.30am until 3.30pm together either in class or on the playing fields, constantly interacting. None of them was capable of a sustained campaign of discrimination, particularly as the discrimination wasn’t a matter of their choice but of parental instruction. Before long it was clear the prohibition only applied outside of school hours and even then it was fairly rubbery. You can’t stop kids joining in a game of soccer. The exception, of course, was Gary Gillespie. He still sat as far away from me as he could and avoided me in the playground. He became an increasingly isolated figure. Only Clarry stood by him and Ken occasionally. For a while Eric tried to stay chummy with him but Gary eventually pushed him away. Eric was too closely allied to me.

  I’d like to be able to say that everything resolved as neatly but of course it didn’t. Christian Berger lost his job before he’d even had a chance to begin it. The firm he was supposed to go to work for said they couldn’t afford to wait any longer for someone to fill the position. Captain Biggs said it was just an excuse to get out of their commitment. Club suffered. A few kids straggled back but even on a good night only half the usual number of kids showed up. Church suffered. No more than twothirds of the regular parishioners attended the Sunday morning service, a fact the bishop could not fail to notice. Captain Biggs’s tenure looked decidedly shaky. Mum’s shop suffered. There were plenty of days when Mum said she didn’t know why she even bothered to open the door. As a consequence our dinners suffered, but not as much as they might have.

  Once my wrists healed I went fishing down on the breakwater at least three times a week. Often Mack went on ahead of me and we met up on the breakwater after school. Mack had regained the taste for fishing on a regular basis and cut his trips out on the La Rita to once a fortnight in favour of fishing off the breakwater. He was great company, a great teacher and also an insurance policy. He understood my situation perfectly. I suspect that at the beginning he only started going fishing with me so he could help out. On the afternoons I failed to catch anything he’d slip me a couple of fish from his sugarbag. I hardly ever returned home empty-handed. Mum was as pleased as punch but I think there were times Dad and Nigel wished I’d missed out so they could have something else. After two or three nights of fish even liver began to appeal. Rod, Mum and I could’ve eaten fish every night without complaint.

  Christian Berger was released from hospital exactly one week after me and from that point on he was fair game. On the days when I didn’t go fishing Eric and I raced up to the Church Army as soon as school was over. If the afternoon was sunny, we sat on fold-up chairs out on the lawn by the clubhouse. If it was overcast we sat in the lounge. If we sat outside, Sister Glorious brought us a jug of cordial and tall glasses; if we sat indoors she brought us mugs of Church Army tea. We were in heaven.

  Christian Berger talked to us for an hour at a time, from 3.30 until 4.30 and allowed only a few minutes afterwards for questions. For the first two weeks we chose the days to fit around my fishing. After that, once he was mobile again, we had to coordinate my fishing days with the days he went job hunting or caught the bus to go explore more of Auckland. Christian Berger began with his early days at the naval academy and progressed through to the first time he went to sea in a U-boat. He told us how proud he was and how scared he became when the U-boat dived. He told us how the hull creaked and groaned as the pressure increased, how some cadets who he thought were much tougher and stronger-minded than he, became claustrophobic and panicked. I don’t think he ever had a better audience. I took notes while Eric just listened wide-eyed. Neither of us interrupted, neither of us fidgeted and neither of us missed a single word. On the day when he promised to tell us about his first kill he had a surprise in store for us. The funny thing is, I don’t think he was expecting it either.

  I remember it was a Wednesday, the last club night of the week. I usually went fishing on Thursdays because it wasn’t a club night and I didn’t have to race home to get ready. Eric and I had ants in our pants all day. At that time radio was our prime source of electronic entertainment. Mr Berger’s stories were like the most exciting and enthralling radio serial we’d ever heard. And he was about to tell us, blow by blow, how he torpedoed his first merchant ship. How could we possibly concentrate on mundane things like comprehension or maths? Mr Ingleby took Eric and me aside when the lunch bell rang and asked us what was going on. We told him we were sworn to secrecy.

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘Someone else is giving you history lessons. I’ve seen you racing up to the Church Army after school.’

  I suppose our stunned faces provided all the confirmation he needed, but he’d only guessed the half of it.

  ‘I bet it’s pretty exciting,’ he said, ‘but I want you to keep your excitement bottled up until after school. Don’t you think I also deserve a share of your attention?’

  You can see why Mr Ingleby was popular. Eric and I dutifully kept our excitement contained until the final bell rang. After that there was no holding us. We dropped our schoolbags off behind the counter at the shop and raced up the road. The afternoon was pretty cool so we knew Mr Berger would be waiting for us in the lounge. We burst in high on expectations to find Mr Berger already had company. Our spirits dived when we saw who his company was: Mr Holterman. We could hardly believe our eyes. Mr Berger and Mr Holterman together? The U-boat captain and the Lancaster pilot? Greetings died in my throat. I was far too stunned for words. We expected to be dismissed out of hand, to be told to come back another day and yelled at for barging in on them without knocking. Mr Holterman never needed much of an excuse to let fly. But the surprises kept coming.

  ‘Sit down, boys,’ said Mr Holterman.

  Sit down? What?

  ‘My friend here has explained the rules but let me go over them to make sure we all know the score. Everything you hear in this room stays in this room, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Eric and I were like two stunned parrots.

  ‘You don’t interrupt, you don’t muck around and you save any questions until last. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Mr Holterman fixed his gaze onto me. There was a hint of the Mr Holterman we all feared in his look. ‘I understand Mr Berger has given you permission to write an essay based on what he tells you. The same rule applies to everything you hear in this room. But if I learn that you’ve shown
anyone what you’ve written I’ll kick you so hard in the pants I’ll make your nose bleed. You’ll wish you were still lying in the gutter. Is that clear enough for you?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Holterman.’ I could hardly believe what he was suggesting and didn’t dare seek clarification or confirmation. ‘I promise. Cross my heart.’

  ‘All right, the two of you just sit quietly and listen. And Sister Glorious…’

  Sister Gloria stopped dead in her tracks. I hadn’t even been aware she was in the room until Mr Holterman called out her name. She was doing what Mum called ‘fluffing around’.

  ‘You do know these two call you Sister Glorious, don’t you?’ Sister Gloria turned bright red. Eric and I squirmed on our chairs. ‘I want you to know we’re counting on your discretion as well. OK?’

  She nodded and almost ran from the room.

  ‘Shall we begin?’ said Mr Holterman.

  ‘You were telling me how you bombed my city,’ said Mr Berger. ‘Let me tell you something: you didn’t miss.’

  Mr Holterman laughed. You could’ve knocked us down with a feather. He was a totally different Mr Holterman to the one we’d come to know. ‘Sorry about that. I suppose you were pretty pissed off when you got home after the war.’

  ‘No. There was surprisingly little bitterness. We saw it as punishment. It was what we deserved.’

  The former enemies opened up and chatted away as though Eric and I weren’t in the room. I don’t think either of us even drew a breath. When Sister Glorious brought us tea we drank it without noticing. We didn’t dare look at each other in case the spell was broken and it all turned out to be a dream. The unbelievable, the incredible and the unimaginable were occurring right in front of us. Not only was Mr Berger telling his story, so was Mr Holterman. The U-boat captain and the Lancaster pilot, a double feature which, to this day, has never been equalled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Prepare for another attack from astern!’

  The Sunderland dropped out of the clouds behind them, guns twinkling brightly in the gloom, and levelled off at four hundred metres.

  ‘They are going to bomb us!’ warned the lieutenant. His binoculars were jammed tightly into his eye sockets to counter the shaking of his hands.

  The gun crews had the perfect opportunity to strike a telling blow with the Sunderland flying straight and level directly at them, but haste and panic again pushed their shots wide. They kept firing until they fell, moments before the Sunderland released two depth charges. The instant the aircraft passed overhead, Captain Berger rose from the cover of the conning tower to see where the charges had landed. Twin circles of foam showed they’d landed just short. Everything now depended on the power of the charges.

  The concussion lifted the stern clear of the water. Those sailors still on deck were lost overboard. The officers in the conning tower fell spreadeagled. Shouts from below deck alerted the captain to new emergencies. He’d practised dropping from the conning tower bridge down into the control room but he’d never done it faster. His only concern now was to keep his U-boat afloat. He raced towards the engine room, stopped aghast at the scene before him. Water flooded in through burst pipes and through joins in the hull where plates had buckled and welds opened. Without warning the engines shuddered and expired. The U-boat tilted ominously towards the stern.

  AN EXTRACT FROM ‘DEATH OF A U-BOAT’

  A lot of people can tell you where they were when they heard John F. Kennedy had been shot or when Armstrong took his ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. I feel the same about the day Ryan burst screaming and panicking out of the bushes that covered the easement down at the bottom of Cockburn Street. I know it was the second Tuesday in March although I’m darned if I can remember the date. I do remember it was one of those annoying Auckland days when localised squalls swept in from the Tasman spoiling an otherwise perfect day. One squall had cut into our lunchbreak and sent six hundred kids scattering for shelter, only to pass over the instant we were all under cover. Showers swept down the harbour off and on all day and away to the south. It was what Dad called an ‘umbrella and sunglasses’ day because you needed both.

  My first thought when I saw Ryan was that someone had fallen off the rope swing and broken their arm or something but Ryan was far too agitated for that. Then I noticed his pants were soaking wet right up to his navel. Eric and I practised mental telepathy when we played Battleships but I didn’t need to be telepathic to realise what had happened. I felt it right down to the pit of my stomach.

  While I’d been going fishing and worshipping at the feet of Mr Berger and Mr Holterman, life after school had been carrying on pretty much as normal. My solo return trip through the storm drain was no longer a big deal. At least thirty kids had done the run from one shaft to the other during February alone. Of course the influx of kids to the easement alerted people in neighbouring houses and somebody called the Water Board. I think all the nearby parents would’ve preferred it if the Water Board had concreted up both shafts but they only sealed the second shaft, the one that had caused all the excitement in the first place. Apparently they needed to have access to check on blockages, especially where small feeder drains intersected.

  That should’ve been the end of the game. Just going down into the drain was pretty boring after the thrill of running in pitch darkness from one shaft to another. But the kids weren’t ready to let go. Running the drain, as the game was known, had really caught on. Nigel and Maxie were with the bunch of kids who discovered they could lift the cover off a third shaft at the back of a small reserve on the northern side of Sackville Street. If there were two hundred yards between the first and second shafts, there had to be at least four hundred yards between the second and third. With more than six hundred yards between the first and third shafts, common sense should have told the kids that running between the two was a one-way ticket to Coxs Creek. But the discovery simply meant the game was back on and the extra distance added to the excitement. It became something of a challenge, even a competition, to see who would do the run first.

  I heard some kids talking about doing a run through the drains after school but didn’t take much notice. Eric and I were due to go up to the Church Army for another instalment of Mr Berger’s story. With Mr Holterman also telling his story, getting Mr Berger’s story down to the point where I could begin to write an essay about it was taking longer than anticipated. I didn’t mind and neither did Eric. We wanted these magical sessions to last forever. The more we heard, the more we wanted to hear. The more detail we were given, the more detail we demanded. We were as greedy as puppies, willing to gorge ourselves until we burst. The truth was we didn’t care what the other kids were doing. What we were doing was better.

  That Tuesday we raced up to the Church Army only to be met at the door by Sister Kathleen. She told us Christian Berger had important visitors, that he apologised for letting us down and asked if we could come Wednesday instead. There was no point in protesting. Sister Kathleen said the visitors had come to discuss the possibility of a job for Christian Berger and we all knew how important that was. Eric and I drifted off disappointed and worrying whether Mr Berger’s new job would spell the end of our sessions. Eric wanted to go and bomb Dresden but I didn’t feel like playing. I told him I wanted to work on my essay but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. Mr Berger still hadn’t told us how his war had ended, how his U-boat had been sunk or what it felt like to be a sitting duck with a Sunderland lining up for a bombing run with all guns blazing. Mr Holterman had told us about his part in the raid on Hamburg that had caused the first firestorm of the war, but he still hadn’t told us how he came to be shot down and lost his leg. There was so much still untold and that included the best parts of both men’s wartime adventures, at least from our perspective. I knew for sure that if Mr Berger got so busy in his new job that he couldn’t finish his story, Mr Holterman wouldn’t finish his either. Mr Holterman let us listen but didn’t talk to us. A
s far as he was concerned we were wallpaper. He was only interested in Christian Berger. He’d found a sense of comradeship in his company, something he’d probably thrived on during the war and which had been missing ever since. Without that carrot, he had no reason to continue.

  I think I probably went home to sulk and feel sorry for myself but felt too let down to even do that. When I told Mum what had happened she sent me off to the shops for some groceries to, as she put it, take my mind off things. That didn’t help. I did as I was told then, with nothing better to do, hopped back on my bike. My plan was to ride down Cockburn Street, swing left into Dryden Street at the bottom of the hill and then cut across Grey Lynn Park to Chamberlain Street where Eric lived. Bombing Dresden didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all and I figured we could drop a few bombs on Hamburg along the way.

  I took off down Cockburn Street determined not to brake until the absolute last moment, so I could lock my back wheel and leave a point-scoring skid mark on the road. It’s a hairy manoeuvre to attempt at high speed downhill because there’s no weight over the back wheel. You have to remain absolutely vertical and maintain a straight line or the bike will skid away beneath you. The collar on my shirt flapped so hard as I gathered speed it almost beat me to death. I wouldn’t be surprised if I set a new land speed record for boys on bikes. As a result I left my braking far too late, chickened out of braking altogether and flew past Dryden Street. To restore some vestige of pride I decided to change the game to seeing how far I could get up Hakanoa Street without pedalling instead. Hakanoa Street ran up the other side of the gully. My bike had only just begun to slow down when Big Ryan burst out of the bushes.