by Mark Dapin
‘Ramsay turned the pages and stopped at an etching of two bare-breasted women.
‘“That’s art,” said Townsville Jack.
‘“It’s filth,” said Ramsay.
‘“Filth is dead bodies, mate,” said Townsville Jack, “not living ones.”
‘Ramsay went back to Lady Chatterley, whispering to himself and nodding. After a while he closed the book and locked his hands behind his back, which meant he was about to make a speech. He was only talking to Townsville Jack, but the whole hut was listening – not because we gave a damn, but because there was bugger all else to do.
‘“Normally,” he began, “I’d be obliged to confiscate this book from you, as the possession of a book that is banned in Australia is contrary to the King’s Regulations, whether you’re in Singleton or bloody Singapore.”
‘“Which regulation?” asked Townsville Jack.
‘“All of them,” said Ramsay. “There is no regulation that states a soldier has a right or duty to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But in our present circumstances I can’t see it’s a bad thing. You’ve got eyes, soldier. You know what’s going on with a few of the younger blokes. It’s not the Aussie way.
‘“Maybe,” said Ramsay, “reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover will take their minds off buggery.”’
Jimmy relaxed out of his impersonation of Ramsay. His shoulders fell and his mouth softened.
‘It was true,’ he said, ‘there were a few boys who’d . . . become attached to each other. In my day, you didn’t have all this . . . stuff you have now with men. You didn’t hear about it, you didn’t talk about it, you didn’t see it, but you were a bloody fool if you thought it didn’t go on.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Jimmy. ‘It makes me sick to think about it, but I’ll tell you this: some of the boys never had any love in their lives, and if they got it from another bloke, if they wanted it from another bloke, then I know sailors who’ve done a lot worse for a lot less reason. Some of the younger ones, they just needed somebody to touch them, to hold them. Better they spent their last days that way than digging a useless bloody trench. And that doesn’t mean I’m in favour of any of this rubbish you see on Oxford Street either. But to Ramsay, buggery was the opposite of morale. It was what blokes did when they had no holes to fill.’
*
It was past time for a drink, which meant we had to make up the minutes by dashing like the Energizer Bunny through Bondi Junction. (The old men didn’t like the Energizer Bunny. They preferred the adverts with Jacko Jackson, although they didn’t like him either.)
We were the last to arrive at the Club. Myer was already halfway through the story of the blonde shiksa who’d given him a handjob after the AJEX march on Anzac Day in 1951.
‘I’d’ve rather had it from a yiddisher woman,’ said Myer, ‘but there weren’t many Jewish girls around in those days.’
‘There weren’t many around you,’ said Solomon.
‘I have my memories,’ said Myer.
‘Every dog has its day,’ said Katz.
‘Yes,’ said Myer. ‘St Bernards, for instance, have St Bernard’s Day, which I believe is the twentieth of August.’
‘Every dog has its hair,’ said Solomon, lifting his glass.
The old men drank, and chewed their tongues. Katz tapped his copy of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.
‘So,’ he asked me, ‘what did you learn at school today?’
‘I didn’t go,’ I said. ‘I had to stay at home and help Jimmy.’
The old men gloated sadly.
‘Is he still having the problem with his pisching?’ asked Myer. ‘I told him to stick a rod in it.’
‘Did you shake it for him afterwards?’ asked Solomon.
‘You should go to school,’ said Katz, ‘otherwise you’ll end up a cabinet maker.’
‘I like cutting wood,’ I said.
‘So you should become a merchant banker,’ said Solomon, ‘and cut wood in your spare time.’
‘It’s a nice hobby,’ Myer agreed, ‘cabinet-making. Because anyone can do it.’
‘All you need is no education,’ said Solomon.
‘And I suppose you have to go to university to read a tape measure,’ said Jimmy.
‘Yes,’ said Solomon, ‘the tailoring process must look impossibly complicated to the outsider, but all it takes is a fine mind, an unerring eye and a cock the size of a security torch.’
‘You must’ve slipped in the back way, then,’ said Jimmy. ‘Like a faygeleh.’
‘I was apprenticed to Solomon Solomons the First,’ said Solomon, ‘often known as “King” Solomon, the true “King of the Cross”. My father did not need gunsels to guard his reputation, his good name rested on his unparalleled skills with the thimble and shears, and a certain degree of confusion with the British pre-Raphaelite painter Solomon Solomon – a yiddisher fella who was, by the way, a great favourite of that anti-Semitic bastard Norman Lindsay.’
‘He invented camouflage,’ said Katz.
‘My father invented electric light,’ agreed Solomon, ‘nuclear fission and microsurgery. He cured the common cold.’
‘No,’ said Katz, ‘Solomon the artist. He designed camouflage for tanks.’
‘So it is possible for an artist to serve a useful purpose in wartime,’ said Solomon. ‘I would never have believed it, had the information not come from such a reliable source as Ernest Katz, who once told me that Mrs Ethelberger – then Miss Ethellotz – was no longer a virgin and would offer her favours in exchange for a strawberry milkshake.’
The old men raised eyebrows and thumbed chins. There was the kind of silence that usually came before one of Solomon’s detailed attacks on Katz. Katz sensed it coming and spoke first.
‘Do you know who I saw?’ he said. ‘Mrs Ethelberger’s brother-in-law, Izzy Berger.’
‘That gonif,’ said Jimmy. ‘What’s he doing?’
‘He was walking down Darlinghurst Road,’ said Katz. ‘I didn’t speak to him.’
‘I was assaulted by Mrs Ethelberger,’ said Myer. ‘She slapped me around the chops.’
‘It’s a small world,’ said Katz.
Solomon stabbed the table with his finger.
‘You should write down your insights,’ he said. ‘Make sure they’re not lost to the Jewish people when you’re gone.’
‘The Jewish people, nothing,’ said Myer. ‘They’re the inheritance of all mankind. What did he say earlier? “Every dog has its day.” Brilliant.’
‘It belongs in the Torah,’ said Solomon.
‘He got it from the Torah,’ said Myer.
The men pretended to daven to Katz.
‘This morning,’ said Solomon at the end of their prayer, ‘I almost crashed my car into the driver in front of me, who came to a sudden stop for no reason except that he needed to answer his phone.’
The old men groaned. They hated the new mobile phones.
‘He was, of course, Asian,’ said Solomon.
‘And you were, of course, Jewish,’ said Katz.
‘What’s your point?’ asked Solomon.
‘My point is that neither fact has any bearing on the story.’
Solomon sighed like a steaming kettle.
‘Ernie Katz,’ said Solomon, ‘is a multiculturalist. That is to say, he sees a unique value in every creed and lifestyle and believes that if only we made the effort to understand each other, not as “others” but as reflections of ourselves, we would realise that we are all pieces of one big jigsaw people, of the kind that used to be popular in the days when we made our own entertainment in dismal parlours after the six o’clock swill, or gathered around the piano to check that nobody had hidden a bottle of whisky inside the footstool.
‘Katz believes we should love our enemies, a sentiment he shares with another great yiddisher turncoat, Jesus Christ. But does he love his friends, this is the question. No doubt Ernie Katz, like Jesus, would allow a prostitute to wash his feet – and whatever transpired after that would be the privat
e business of two consenting adults and no concern to us at all – particularly you, David – but would he even stretch his already unusually elongated legs in service of three yiddisher returned servicemen whom he has known all his shirking life? Would he stand up and be counted and declare to the world, “Jimmy has bought one round! Myer has bought one round! Solomon has bought two rounds (including both the last drink yesterday and the first drink today)! Nobody is keeping a scorecard, but if they were, the numbers would not lie! When it is my shout, I hide in the bathroom, disguised as two flush pipes and a float, and this is to my eternal shame!”’
Solomon came out of character for a moment to wipe his brow.
‘No, you will not hear those words from the sealed lips of Katz’s piscine mouth,’ he continued, ‘because he is too concerned with the public image of Chinamen to lift a finger for a friend.’
CHANGI DIARY
MAY 1942
Today I gave a short lecture on Japanese history at Changi University.
The men love the university, although it has no great Gothic halls, no quads or colleges, not even a campus, except in the mind. The Commodore of the Changi Dry Land Yacht Club is talking about establishing a boat race although, of course, we have no rivers and no rivals. But dreams and jokes and grand pointless gestures all lend colour to our surrendered lives.
Many of the men did not finish school. They cannot read or write, and they nurture an exaggerated idea of the quality of the faculty of Changi University. I’ve heard them say their degree certificates will be accepted by employers after the war. They need to think that something good and useful will result from their captivity, because otherwise these months are just a part of death.
My lecture was entitled ‘What the Japanese Believe’. Two priests attended, thinking I was going to speak on Shinto. But I was trying to afford the men a glimpse inside the mind of the enemy. I explained the Japanese thought white colonial rule in Asia was a crime, which had fuelled hatred, resentment and independence movements from the Punjab to Java. They were confident to invade Malaya because they would be greeted as liberators. The Malays and Tamils would turn on us because we took their land, or indentured them on plantations, and used them to produce raw materials that we exported to England, where we turned their rubber into manufactured goods we then sold back to them. Since the planters didn’t pay the locals enough to buy, for example, tyres made from their own rubber, most of the goods ended up back in the hands of white men.
It is difficult to present a foreign case without appearing as a devil’s advocate. At the lecture was a planter who had served in a local volunteer regiment, and he stood up to object. He said he’d never exploited anybody, he’d looked after his Tamils (he was so angry he could hardly speak, and I thought he’d said ‘towels’) and they were a damn sight better fed on the Tamil lines than when they were starving in their villages in India, which was why they’d come to Malaya in the first place. He ran a tea plantation, and any damn fool who thought the Tamils were too poor to buy tea (or had any use for a set of Dunlop tyres) had no place in a university.
I explained that I was not passing my own judgement on colonial rule, but trying to illuminate the Japanese case, to explain why we had gone to war in Malaya and, to an extent, why we were now imprisoned in Singapore.
The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn’t a joke to the Japanese. They thought they could reorganise a whole continent in the way of the European powers, and use Siam, Burma, the Philippines, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies and Malaya to feed Japanese industry and agriculture. They promised the natives freedom and independence within a region whose security was guaranteed by an enlightened, benevolent Japan. In the Japanese mind we weren’t fighting to defend the natives, we were fighting to keep control of them after the war.
The men do not understand the culture of the Japanese military, and ignorance on both sides can only add to the prevailing atmosphere of hatred and mistrust. In the IJA, discipline is maintained through physical punishment. If they have committed the slightest breach of regulations, and whether or not they are aware of the law they violated, a captain might slap a lieutenant who in turn might punch a sergeant who could kick a corporal who’ll thrash a private who’ll punch the daylights out of a Korean (who don’t seem to have any rank, only a nationality). The Japanese do not resent this, they accept it as the natural order. They believe it toughens them, makes them into more vigorous, physical men – which it probably does, in its way. They don’t fear blows. They may not welcome them, but they respect them. A gunso doesn’t take it personally when he’s whacked across the cheeks by his CO, so he finds it difficult to grasp why a prisoner objects to being corrected in the same way.
A Jap might see one of the men work a hammer poorly (and, if there were a cup for the most moronic use of a simple tool, the ferociously uncooperative Australian POWs would carry the trophy back to Fremantle) and yell instructions at him in Japanese. Since the prisoner is unlikely to speak much Japanese beyond tenko, ichi bun and yasumi, and the guard almost certainly knows no English apart from some obscene nonsense the men may have taught him, the gunso sees no other way to alert the prisoner to his mistakes than a couple of quick stinging blows to the face. His own men would recognise this as a part of their daily routine, and redouble their efforts to please him. Our boys swear they’ll never forget the bastard’s name, record the time and date of their beating in spidery marks in the margins of Bibles, and pledge to see the poor man hang.
There is also an issue with bowing. The Japanese bow to one another in the same way as we might shake hands or salute. An Australian who claims he will bow down to no man might believe himself to be Ned Kelly or some similar romantic outlaw, but to the Japanese he is simply ignorant. If the gunso bows to the lieutenant, why shouldn’t we bow to the gunso? Or the private for that matter? We have no status here, we’re at the bottom of the heap, fighting men who’ve given up the fight.
In the act of bowing, the idea is to bring your head lower than the waist of the man in front of you. Unfortunately, for some of our boys this is not possible without the skills of a circus performer or the discipline of a yogi. There seems to be no minimum height for entry to the IJA (many of their men are well under five feet tall) and there is, of course, no upper limit for Australians: there is a surgeon here who is the height of one Jap standing on another’s shoulders.
When a prisoner fails to bow, or to bow low or stiff or quickly enough, and a Jap acts to correct him, he is merely maintaining the natural order of things. He doesn’t expect to be sued for reparations at some distant tribunal.
The men don’t want to hear this. They need to believe the Japs are monsters, driven by the compulsion to rape and murder; to tear unborn children from the womb, skewer them on their bayonets and roast them over campfires; to bury prisoners alive. They want to be told they were faced in the field by demonic fanatics, the bitter spawn of hell. They can’t grasp that we were beaten by a more disciplined army, with greater political power. The government of Japan is the army; the government of Australia is John Curtin’s Labor Party. The Japanese don’t have to worry about checks and balances, the niceties of democracy, the compromises with a loyal opposition. They are free to wage war as they see fit, with the whole nation at their disposal. They were never crippled by appeasers, or paralysed with doubt.
‘Get back to Tokyo!’ shouted the planter. ‘You’re a bloody white Nip!’
There is a small communist cell in the camp, and they sent along one of their agitators to make their point, which seemed to be that the primary purpose of the war for the working man was to defend the Soviet Union against fascism.
‘Hang on a minute, sport,’ said one of the diggers, ‘it was you blokes who opposed rearmament, and that’s the bloody reason we were undersupplied in the first place. If we’d’ve been able to build all the planes and tanks we needed, we might’ve been able to stop the Japs in Gemas, never mind scurry down to Singapore where we didn�
�t have enough ships to fill a bath.’
The communist said all progressive people had been forced to tactically oppose the war to give Stalin time to rearm.
‘You’re as brainwashed as a sheep’s head in a bucket,’ called the heckler.
I, of all people, have some time for the communists now. They may be blinkered, but at least they are blinkered realists. Many of the men are simple fantasists, who think they were forced to surrender by cowardly officers. All they have to take pride in is the fact their resistance caused the IJA to slow its advance sufficiently to make time for Australia to prepare her defences, but I suspect they are misguided even in this. Our sacrifice was futile; we inflicted only small casualties on the Japanese, their advance was as swift as could be reasonably expected, and Mr Curtin didn’t use his seventy days to erect a wall around Australia.
I suspect the biggest problem we have caused the IJA is the logistical conundrum of what on earth to do with us all.
BONDI
FRIDAY 27 APRIL 1990
The old men usually got drunk on a Friday night. At about eight o’clock they would finish their last glass of Old and begin to order trays of whisky. Their speech would droop and their eyes would slur, and the last word they said wouldn’t always be connected with the one before. Solomon would become nostalgic, Myer disdainful, Katz reflective and Jimmy more talkative. I didn’t like it much. They were all ruder and harder to understand. Solomon would suddenly do something secretly generous, like slip ten dollars into my pocket, then whisper, ‘If you spend it on a stripper, make sure you don’t get the clap.’
Myer heard him.
‘What do you think he’ll get for ten bucks?’ he asked. ‘It’s not like the old days when Jake had Aphrodite’s, and you could jump on the stage and dip your donga into Tina while you rubbed her Talking Tits. That’s all over now. You’re not even allowed to touch them.’
‘Nisht,’ said Jimmy. ‘Enough.’
‘Not even on the tochis,’ said Myer.
‘The boy doesn’t need to know,’ said Jimmy.