by Mark Dapin
‘Bluey went down and got stretchered off as usual, but a fella named Fredericks, who had a beard like a prophet – but then, we all did – turned to me with eyes like silver coins and said, “It’s a miracle. The Lord saved him.” As far as I could see, the Lord hadn’t saved Bluey from anything, unless the Japs had planned to shoot him or toss him over the cliff, but Freddie was convinced Bluey had only made it through his beating because God had sent an angel to look after him.
‘“Did you see the angel?” Freddie asked all the blokes on the hammer and tap. “Did you feel His glow?”
‘Suddenly, everyone started shouting, “Praise Jesus!” and falling to their knees like Bluey. Naturally the Japs belted them around too – and they got hit a lot harder, because the guards hadn’t had to waste their strength knocking them down in the first place. I stood there and watched a crowd of men crumbling, just giving up and letting their minds fall apart. But while they were being beaten by the Japs, the blokes were singing. They started out all on different songs, but it ended up with the lot of them chanting, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, because it’s a hymn for slaves.’
*
There were no frummers out walking on a Sunday morning in my grandmother’s street, just a procession of Maoris on their way to church. The broad-faced women wore spotted frocks and bright hats, the men smart shirts and polished shoes.
Johnny the Head stopped to say g’day to Jimmy.
‘What’s in the pot today?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Kosher meat,’ said Johnny the Head. ‘What’re you building?’
Jimmy grunted. Johnny the Head strained over the fence to see Jimmy’s drawing.
‘It looks like a wharenui for Patupairehe,’ he said.
‘You look like you should be wallowing in a waterhole,’ said Jimmy.
Johnny the Head told me to look after my grandfather, who had a few possums running loose in his loft. ‘What I mean,’ said Johnny the Head, ‘is he’s as mad as a meat tray.’
‘I’m not the one who dances around with his tongue sticking out,’ said Jimmy.
Johnny the Head explained to me that Jimmy had no understanding of Maoritanga and if Johnny the Head showed the same kind of disrespect for traditional Jewish customs, such as pawn-broking and fiddling on roofs, he would be dragged up before the discrimination people.
‘Anyway I haven’t seen your wife for a while,’ he said to Jimmy.
‘You’ve probably eaten her,’ said Jimmy.
Johnny the Head belched.
They both laughed, then enjoyed a short argument about the Wallabies.
‘So, what else is new?’ asked Jimmy. ‘Apart from gunpowder, the telephone and the horseless carriage?’
‘I hear you people’ve got a fighter,’ said Johnny the Head, ‘going up against our boy Hone.’
Johnny the Head raised his fists and danced about a bit.
Jimmy twisted his lips.
‘If Hone’s got a head like yours, Yuri couldn’t miss him with his eyes shut,’ he said.
‘If Yuri’s got a nose like yours, Hone could hit it from Auckland,’ said Johnny the Head.
The two men nodded at their own wisdom.
‘I’ve never met a Maori who couldn’t fight,’ said Johnny the Head. ‘Or a Jew that could.’
‘Who do you think would win a war?’ asked Jimmy. ‘Israel or New Zealand?’
‘Jewish doctors, yeah,’ said Johnny the Head. ‘Jewish accountants, yeah. Jewish lawyers, the courts are full of them . . .’
‘Defending Maoris,’ said Jimmy.
‘. . . but boxing’s not in your blood,’ said Johnny the Head. Jimmy smiled.
‘Tell your boy to bring a machete,’ he said. ‘He will anyway.’
‘The only thing he’ll need is a knife and fork,’ said Johnny the Head. ‘What sauce goes best with Jew?’
Johnny the Head licked his lips.
‘Put your tongue away, Johnny the Head,’ said Johnny the Head’s wife, who had a beard tattooed on her chin. ‘Come to church and leave the Jew to build his bird table. He’s not hurting anyone.’
‘His fighter won’t be hurting anyone either,’ said Johnny the Head.
Nancy the Beard took Johnny the Head by the wrist and tried to march him off to church, but he was too heavy to drag.
‘Are you going to the fight, old man?’ asked Johnny the Head.
‘Why would I pay to see a Maori have a blue?’ asked Jimmy. ‘I could go to the Beach Hotel and watch for nothing.’
‘All the brothers’ll be there,’ said Johnny the Head, ‘barracking for our boy. While the Jews sit in the box office, counting the takings.’
Jimmy’s lips wobbled. He bit down on his dentures and steadied his chin.
‘Oh, I’ll be there,’ said Jimmy. ‘We all will. There won’t be a Maori in the house. We’ll buy up all the seats.’
‘Hurry up and get to church,’ said Nancy the Beard, ‘before they buy that too.’
Johnny the Head shook hands with us both and walked away humming a hymn.
‘Now I’ve got to go to the bloody fights,’ said Jimmy.
I waited until he had finished complaining about that before I asked him what had happened with the angel.
*
‘Well, six men got taken to hospital, and the rest of us had to work two hours extra to meet our total, our darg, but something changed in the camp after that day. Blokes started to call it “The Miracle of Monday”, and the fella who’d first identified the angel, which most people’d thought was just a cloud, started to call himself “Reverend Jebediah” and hold prayer meetings, where men stepped up to the front and told their own stories about the Angel of Siam, who somehow got the name Seraphiel and the head of an eagle.
‘Seraphiel was sighted all over the camp – at the cookhouse, in the creek, over the graves of the dead – but mainly he floated over the hospital, keeping an eye on Bluey until he made a full recovery, which took a lot longer than usual because he’d burst both eardrums by not protecting his head.
‘Townsville Jack had a knack for predicting the future. He said, “You know what’s going to happen next? Seraphiel’s going to have a word with the Reverend Jebediah.” And he did. The Reverend Jebediah announced at a prayer meeting that Seraphiel had told him the thing to do was surrender ourselves to God and not to man. “Haven’t we surrendered enough?” asked Townsville Jack. The Japanese were no longer our masters, said the Reverend Jebediah. We had to serve the angels instead.
‘Anybody but another madman could see the Reverend Jebediah was meshuga, but he gave the blokes something to hope for, the idea that an angel might come down and save them, that we didn’t all have to die.
‘After the Reverend Jebediah had passed on the griff that the angels were in charge now, the Japs took him away and broke all his fingers with a plumb hammer. So then the Reverend Jebediah realised that Seraphiel, like the Japs, was in favour of building the railway, because in this way we could get the news of the Lord’s word to Burma where the population were godless Mohammedans. So hope became another jailer.
‘There were about twenty Seraphielites by then, and they turned into the hardest workers in the camp, because they were doing God’s bidding. We started meeting our dargs by midday, but these blokes worked on until they collapsed, then picked themselves up, prayed and started again.
‘Once Bluey got back to the line, the guards figured they’d repeat the trick. So they waited until Bluey insulted the Emperor by dropping his hammer, then they knocked his bloody voice out of him.
‘Everyone was waiting for Seraphiel to show up and smite them, but Bluey was on his own. Even our officer that day was a Seraphielite, and he didn’t intervene in case it stopped Jesus from coming back to earth. Dopey, Sleepy, Bashful and Happy made a circle around Bluey, kicking him like a Sherrin, all of them aiming for his head, until Townsville Jack threw down his hammer and ran at the dwarfs, grabbed Bashful and Happy and pulled them off.
‘So they all forgot abou
t Bluey and whaled into Townsville Jack instead. By the time they were finished he was just a lump of meat on the ground. But when the Reverend Jebediah walked up to his body and cried, “A saint walks among us! Saint Jack of Townsville!”, he still managed to get up and break the Reverend Jebediah’s nose with a right cross made in heaven.
‘I’d run out of “at leasts” by then. I couldn’t see how things could get any worse. I tried to imagine what I had thought war might be like before I joined up – frightening and tough, maybe, but never this. In 1941 I thought I’d come alive. By 1942 I’d started dying.
‘The only thing I had left were memories of women, and there were so few of those. I thought about everything Mei-Li had ever said, every time she had looked at me, the feel of her skin on mine, her breath in my mouth, her shadow in the light of the opium lamp . . . But I kept going back to chances I’d missed to get close to girls, the times I’d been nervous and shy, too frightened to talk. What the hell was I scared of? Did I think I was going to live forever?’
I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
‘Can you stick to the war for a bit, please?’ I asked.
‘This was the bloody war,’ said Jimmy.
‘What about Townsville Jack?’ I asked.
‘He was in better shape than me,’ said Jimmy. ‘He was recovering on the line, working as hard as ever – which is to say, only when the guards were watching – in splints and a sling, with a bandage around his head, when he said, “At least I’m not with my old unit.”
‘Me and Townsville Jack talked about everything, but I still knew bugger all about him. He told thousands of stories, but he always left out places, dates and names. If you asked him a question he didn’t want to answer, he’d just say, “That was Townsville, Jack.”
‘But that day he started talking about his unit. He said they’d trained in Darwin under one commander and he’d seemed like a fair bloke. There wasn’t a lot going on in the camp and sometimes the boys would walk into town – which was a fancy name for a handful of hotels and humpies, and the worst looking women in the world – and start a blue with the boongs or the fishos or the other bloody troops, and the worst that would happen to them was they’d get a couple of days in the lock-up, which they usually needed to dry out anyway. There was discipline, but not the brutal, stupid kind. It was the discipline of mates looking after each other, of knowing when to stop. Once they’d got to Singapore, their commander was sent home and replaced by a retread who looked like a fat king. The troops weren’t told why, of course. They were kept in the dark and fed furphies, like the story that the first bloke had been a defeatist, or he was rooting the general’s wife.
‘But once they’d shipped out to Singapore and got stuck in, Townsville Jack’s diggers had done well. Everyone had the same story. We didn’t feel like we’d lost a battle, so how could we have lost the war?
‘As they retreated to Singapore, a couple of the men lost their nerve under the shelling and ran, but you couldn’t call it cowardice, it was more like madness. One bloke thought the bombs were planets dropping out of the sky. You couldn’t blame a fella for trying to get out of the way of that.
‘But some of the officers were no good, and Townsville Jack’s commander couldn’t control them. He didn’t know them, and he put the bad ones where they could do the most damage. They realised Malaya was a lost cause before anyone else, and they didn’t want to die for nothing. But you have to want to die for nothing in a war, because otherwise you just give up fighting and the whole show goes to buggery. So the officers were hiding and disappearing and leading from behind, and skiting that they’d shoot the men who did the same.
‘The commander was brave, said Townsville Jack. He’d parade around in front of enemy fire, rallying blokes who couldn’t hear him for the noise, ordering corpses to polish their boots. That was the thing about the toothless: they’d survived one world war, so they didn’t believe anything could kill them. And they knew the more you tried to save your own life, the likelier you were to die – but the commander couldn’t convince his officers of that, and the men laughed at him behind his back, because he spoke like he had airs, like a fella who read books. And the union blokes all hated him because of what he’d done between the wars.
‘Townsville Jack said he’d had problems with his unit in the war, but at least he was on his own now. At least, at least, at least.’
Jimmy coughed.
‘You didn’t hear much about the angel Seraphiel for a while, but the blokes in the camp went through all sorts of other crazes: collecting butterflies, learning Japanese, writing limericks, making tattoos, pressing flowers, keeping invisible pets, just about bloody everything. A lot of fellas took up knitting with bamboo needles, unravelling dead men’s clothes and turning them into blankets. For a while a few got into painting, but Katz was the only one who stuck with it, and he gradually gathered all the brushes and paints and pencils and paper from the fellas who gave up or died. And usually the ones who gave up were the ones who died.
‘Then the Reverend Jebediah went up a hill to collect some timber and while he was chopping wood he bumped into Seraphiel again, and came back down with the Seven Commandments of Seraphiel carved into his arm in blood.
‘“I am the parchment,” he said. “I am the tablet of stone.”
‘This time the Reverend Jebediah found it hard to muster up a decent mob of followers, but eventually he wrangled four apostles, who swore to live according to the laws of the angel Seraphiel, stopped eating rice and started refusing medical treatment, and when the last of them died we fought over his Bible, which was the most popular book in the camp because it contained the word of God and you could sell the pages for cigarette papers.
‘Most of us were in one of two factions: blokes who thought the war would be over by this Christmas and the fellas who bet on Easter. There was a third group, who thought we’d die there, and they all did. The blokes who survived, you wouldn’t’ve picked them – except the bloody officers, of course. They weren’t the strongest men physically. They weren’t the pick of the bunch for brains either. But they were the type who could see the good in every situation. They’d be lying bleeding to death, trying to hold their guts together and thinking, Well, at least it’s not raining.
‘At any other time, in any other place, you’d’ve wanted to push them under a car. But in the camps and on the railway, they were the type you needed to have around to make you see there was still some beauty left in the world.
‘It was all bullshit, of course. Every day was bloody awful – especially for a bloke like Bluey – and you were just torturing yourself by going on. But nobody wants to die, even when there’s no point in living.
‘Every bloke had something he thought would bring him luck. Some men kept their cap badges, others still had their house keys, because they’d need them when they got home. Bluey carried a horseshoe. It must’ve been the unluckiest horseshoe in the world. Townsville Jack had his tote bag, which he used to rub like the Buddha’s belly, and I had my memory of Mei-Li.
‘All of us, the godless and the god-fearing, were always looking for a sign. If the guards beat us, we thought they were angry because the war was nearly over. If they laid off us, we thought they were wary because the war was nearly over. If supplies were short, we thought the Allies were strangling the Japs and the war was nearly over. If we had a bit to eat, we thought they were fattening us up because the war was nearly over.
‘But the war just dragged on and on.
‘I worked in bare feet, bleeding, with insects crawling over my ankles, up my legs, into every scab and crack and hole. I thought I’d get used to flies in my eyes, like the cows or the boongs, but you never do.
‘We were eaten by sandflies and lice and bugs that bit or stung or gnawed at you all day and all night. We were meat for them, meat and rice. Mosquitoes stole our blood. We were eaten from the outside, and eaten from the inside too. I could feel the acid boil in my belly, burning through th
e walls of my stomach. And diseases ate my skin with rashes and sores, left me like I’d been roasted over a spit, like a pilot who’d gone down with his plane. It made me feel ashamed to look that way. My skin was the outside of me, the part that people could see, and it was ugly and disgusting and it stank.
‘But it would all have been bearable if the bastards hadn’t been so bloody cruel. That’s the thing: once you’ve decided somebody is subhuman, you’ve got to make sure they end up that way. It was the same on the line in Thailand as in the camps in Poland. Work them to exhaustion, starve them half to death, cover them in filth, don’t let them wash, leave their diseases untreated, count them, count them, always bloody count them, and then see if they behave like men.
‘The counting was the thing for me, all those numbers, screeched out in bloody Japanese, over and over for hours on end. We were counted every morning, on the marches and in the camps, as soldiers and as prisoners, as if every life mattered, to the Japs and to the army, when, really, none of them did.
‘The Jap army didn’t even care about the guards. They were cowards and bludgers and bloody Koreans. They were bored and they spent half their time bashing each other. I remember Dopey copping a whack from his gunso for sleeping on the job. He woke up to a big heavy slap around the cheeks, then had to stand and take his medicine until the gunso’s slapping arm got tired.
‘Me and the rest of the boys gave the gunso a big cheer, which at first he seemed to like, but then he got the idea that we thought he was on our side, so he came up with a new game. He ordered all the blokes to stand in two rows, facing each other, and throw punches, like the bare-knuckle boxers in the old picturebooks. He didn’t speak any English, so he couldn’t explain the rules. You just had to learn them by breaking them and having a fist crash into your face. He wanted us to box but we weren’t allowed to defend, so every punch had to land. If a bloke didn’t connect, a Jap hit him across the back with a cane.