And it did. Having waited for months and then years for word of their son, James and Lucy had both been guilty of wondering from time to time whether or not he was still actually alive. James, as a veteran himself, was especially aware of the ease with which men on active service could and did vanish seemingly into thin air. In his time it had been into the greedy, grey mud of French fields, but now he supposed it could have been anywhere in the Indian Ocean, or in the hot, seething jungles of Indonesia. Neither the Royal Navy nor the Red Cross had been able to tell them how he was, only where they assumed he had been incarcerated. But they had been able to confirm that when POWs died, the Japanese did occasionally pass this information on, and as they had received no such notification regarding Able Seaman Andrew Murdoch, it could only be assumed that he was still alive. Somewhere.
And so they had continued hoping, and praying, and Lucy had refused to let his bedroom be disturbed, not even for visitors. And it seemed to have paid off, because here he was, taller than he had been when he’d left home at the age of nineteen, certainly very much thinner and older-looking, but here all the same.
They would all be home soon, all of his and Lucy’s children — the whole clan, in fact, when Duncan finally got back, except for poor Billy, and Robert who was still on active service — but he wondered how long it would be before they all started to go their separate ways again. He desperately hoped his sons would stay on at Kenmore and work with him, but knew he could only wait and wish.
Kathleen, he suspected, would be off soon enough, although where, he had no idea. Since she’d been released from her war job in Wellington she’d received an awful lot of mail from England from a certain Jonathan Lawson, a young RAF pilot she’d apparently met on VJ Day, and there had been talk about the chap coming back to New Zealand next year for a visit. Well, that would no doubt be very nice for Kathleen, who seemed rather smitten, but James wasn’t sure if he fancied the idea of some bloke turning up out of the blue and wooing his only daughter away. And it would probably be back to England where they’d never get to see her again unless they made the effort of going there for a holiday and that could only ever be at the end of the fruit-picking season each year. Lucy said he was being a worrywart and getting ahead of himself, but it didn’t stop him fretting about it.
But at least Drew was back, and Duncan would be home soon, and for a while they would all be together again.
Drew thought it would be easy to settle in at home, but it was proving to be very difficult.
He had not been able to get used to sleeping in a comfortable bed again, for a start. In the hospitals, whenever he was feeling out of sorts, he’d simply spread a blanket on the ground next to his cot and slept there. Nobody had really seemed to mind, and plenty of the other POW patients had done it too, but here it didn’t feel quite so right. It upset his parents, and the first time his mother had discovered him sleeping on the floor she’d burst into tears. He tried to explain to her that he just somehow felt safer closer to the ground, but she hadn’t understood, although he knew she was trying hard. After breakfast that morning his father had come and had a chat with him and, surprisingly, he’d had some very helpful advice about what a bloke could do when that sort of thing was going on. He could go for a walk, even if it was two o’clock in the morning, or find someone to talk to who might understand how he was feeling, or go out and do some hard physical work, which James said he’d often found useful.
By the end of his first week home, Drew was finally beginning to understand what had so plagued his father for so many years. And it shocked him, to think that James had carried all that fear and anxiety and confusion around with him for decades, and that no one had been there to help him. By the time he got around to asking his father why not, he was almost irrationally angry about it all.
‘Oh, but I didn’t have no one,’ James replied. ‘Not at all.’
‘But … but if there was someone, well, I don’t understand.’
James looked at his son thoughtfully and somewhat sadly. ‘Don’t you? I rather thought you might.’
Drew said nothing, but there was a horrible crawling feeling in his stomach at the sudden certainty that his father was seeing straight through him.
‘You see, Drew, I did have someone to talk to, several people in fact. I had your Uncle Joseph, and Thomas and Owen — they all went through experiences during the war just as unpleasant as mine. Not exactly the same, perhaps, but certainly as upsetting. And they all offered me help, more times than I can count, actually. But I didn’t want it. And I didn’t want it because I was ashamed, not just traumatised, as the fashionable word for it seems to be these days. I don’t know what’s wrong with good old shell shock any more, I really don’t. But I did something I was horribly ashamed of, and I just couldn’t talk about it. No, it wasn’t that I couldn’t talk about it, I wouldn’t. So it went on for years, I went on for years, making your life hell, making your mother’s life hell, upsetting Gran constantly and everyone else I care about.’
‘Why couldn’t you talk about it?’
James shrugged. ‘Pride, I suppose. Or ignorance. I was brought up to believe that there were certain things you just didn’t do, and I did one of them. But instead of accepting that it happened, and coming to terms with why it happened, I spent years punishing myself for it, because I thought I should have been above it. But we’re only human, you know, all of us, and all sorts of things happen in wartime.’
Drew looked at up his father for several long moments. ‘What did you do, Dad? No one has ever said. Not to me, any way.’
James stared back. ‘I killed a man, a colleague, an officer in my company.’
‘By accident?’
‘No, on purpose.’
Drew continued to stare. ‘But why?’
‘At the time I believed he was seriously endangering the lives of my men.’
‘And now?’
‘I still believe that.’
Drew was stunned. ‘But … weren’t you court-martialled?’
‘Yes. I was acquitted.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, I don’t really, either. Evidently my men all lied for me.’
‘Well, weren’t you there? At the trial?’
‘Not really,’ James said, and tapped the side of his head.
Drew rubbed his hands wearily over his face. ‘I had no idea. We just thought you were, you know, shell-shocked. When we were boys there were other kids at school whose dads were a bit barmy, too, from the war. Sorry, I didn’t mean … well, yes, I suppose I do mean barmy. It was really hard living with you then, Dad. Apparently one poor boy’s father woke up quite regularly in the night and ran about with a rifle in the paddock next to the house shooting at Germans. He was carted off to Napier Hospital, then ended up in Porirua. It drove his mother mad as well, they reckon. So we weren’t the only ones. But no one really talked about it. It was just accepted, you know — some chaps had loony fathers because of the war and that was that.’
James didn’t know what to say. But Drew was certainly concealing something, he was sure of it. And he was also sure it would come out when the time was right, and only then. Drew was exhibiting clear signs of shell shock himself — or whatever it was you developed after years of being starved and treated like an animal in a Japanese POW camp — but there was very little that James could do about it until Drew decided he was ready.
‘Well,’ he said, getting to his feet as it seemed the conversation had come to an end, ‘if you do feel like a chat about anything I’m … well, you know where I am.’
Drew nodded, then listened to the sound of James’s boots crunching on the gravel driveway as he headed out to the shed to start work.
He was grateful for the sentiment behind his father’s words, but appalled that he seemed to think his son had done something inglorious or ignoble while he’d been away. And he had, but not the sort of thing James could ever entertain, or perhaps possibly even imagine. It was inco
nceivable that he could ever talk to him about Tim — and that was what he wanted to do. Because amid the excitement of coming home and the love and support his family were giving him and the sheer relief of knowing he was finally safe and that it was all over, he’d realised, very belatedly, that he had loved — did love — Tim, and loved him in the way that Tim had always wanted to be loved. And it made him feel even more revolted with himself. Not only was his body tainted and ruined, but also his mind and his spirit. He could never go back to being the person he’d been before he went away, but who the bloody hell was he now?
He had his first ‘New Zealand’ migraine on New Year’s Day. It was a bad one and went on for a week, during which he vomited all over himself, couldn’t eat anything at all, wept with the pain and wished several times that he had the guts to kill himself. The headaches were getting worse again, and no matter what he told himself to the contrary, the fact was becoming impossible to ignore. Lucy insisted that Doctor Fleming was called in. He had been attending Drew regularly since his arrival back home, and was deeply concerned at his immediate and marked loss of physical condition as a result of the headache. Prescribing strong painkillers and a draught to settle Drew’s stomach, he made a referral to the neurological specialist at Napier Hospital.
James went with him on the appointed day, and waited in the public waiting room for several hours while Drew was subjected to a battery of very thorough medical tests and an X-ray.
The afternoon was rather muggy, and Drew stood near an open window in Todd Bickham’s large, airy office while the specialist went off to collect the pictures that had been taken of the inside of his head. Bickham seemed to be a bit of a virtuoso in his field, Drew noted, judging by the number of framed certificates adorning his office walls. He hoped so.
Bickham was back in ten minutes, holding a set of large, dark sheets of celluloid carefully by their edges.
‘They’re ready,’ he said cheerfully, as if announcing the removal of a batch of particularly tasty scones from the oven. Clipping them onto a wire above a shallow glass case mounted on the wall, he flicked on a switch and stood back. ‘Let’s see what they can tell us, shall we? Please, do sit down, Drew, make yourself comfortable.’
Drew sat, and waited for some minutes while Bickham studied the X-rays, rocking backwards and forwards on his heels with his hands clasped behind his back.
‘The head injury was severe, obviously. Were you knocked out?’ He turned and looked at Drew over the top of his spectacles.
Drew nodded. ‘For a few hours, apparently. I can’t remember.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. Come and look at this.’
Drew moved closer to the screen. On it he could see a rather disturbing image of his own skull, complete with teeth — and gaps where some of them were missing — and the knobbly vertebrae at the top of his spine.
Bickham pointed with his pen. ‘This crooked line across the back here, on the occipital bone, is where your skull was cracked when you sustained your injury. It seems to have healed well enough, but the ragged edges suggested it took some time. Did you receive medical treatment after the event?’
‘No.’
‘None at all?’
‘The Japanese weren’t too hot on it for POWs.’
‘I suppose they weren’t, no,’ agreed Bickham as he went back to studying the X-rays. ‘This dark patch here, do you know what it is?’
Drew shrugged. ‘No idea, I’m afraid.’ But suddenly he was very scared.
‘Sit down again, will you, Drew.’
Bickham went to his desk and sat down himself, leaning forward with his elbows on his enormous blotter pad and his chin resting on his hands.
‘It’s not good news,’ he said. When Drew didn’t respond, he continued. ‘You have a tumour in your brain. It appears that it may have started off as scar tissue — you can see where a small piece of bone has gone into the brain matter — but over the years, and without treatment, the scar has compounded and begun to generate cells of its own. Well, I can only guess at that without having a close look, but it’s a very educated guess.’
‘And it’s the tumour that’s been causing the headaches?’
‘Without a doubt. That, and the original scar tissue.’
Drew contemplated his knees for a moment. ‘Why do you think the headaches are getting worse?’
‘I think, because the tumour is getting bigger.’
‘Why now?’
‘I’m not completely sure, and it would be terribly ironic if it is the case, but I suspect it’s because you’re getting decent food now. When you weren’t, your body didn’t have the nutrients to support the tumour’s growth, but now it does.’
There was another short silence. ‘Can you take it out?’
Bickham took his spectacles off and polished them absently with the end of his tie. It was clear to Drew that he was struggling to find the appropriate words.
‘No,’ Bickham said eventually, ‘I’m very sorry, Drew, but I don’t think we can. It’s very advanced. In my opinion, surgery to remove it would almost certainly kill you.’
Calmly, Drew asked, ‘Are there any other options?’
‘I don’t think so, no, not now.’
‘Am I going to die?
Bickham put his spectacles back on. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He paused, then added, ‘But we’ll do our best for you while we can.’
Outside in the waiting room, James got to his feet and collected his hat as Drew appeared. ‘All right?’ he asked.
‘Yes, fine. All sorted.’
‘What’s the problem, do they know?’
Drew shrugged. ‘Mystery headaches, apparently. But the doc’s given me a prescription for some pretty strong painkillers, so that should help.’
Duncan came home at the end of January, and brought Claire with him. In fact, technically, she brought him, because she was travelling with him as his nurse, as well as his wife. They would have left England earlier, but Claire wanted to work out a decent period of notice at Queen Victoria Hospital; she’d made a lot of very good friends there, and did not want to leave them in the lurch.
This time, Tamar was feeling unwell and did not go into Napier to meet the train. Instead, she waited nervously out at Kenmore, having counted down the days ever since James and Lucy had received the telegram saying that Duncan and Claire were finally on their way home.
She was resting in the parlour, reading, when she heard the sound of a car coming up the driveway. She marked her place, set her book down and composed herself.
She heard footsteps in the hall, but instead of Duncan in the doorway as she had expected, it was Henry.
‘Are they here?’ she asked.
Henry nodded, but he looked puzzled and rather disconcerted. ‘It doesn’t look like Uncle Duncs any more, Gran. It looks like someone else altogether!’
Tamar’s heart suddenly began to pound as her mind conjured up all sorts of awful visions of what her darling Duncan might look like now, and her fear came out as anger.
‘Not “it”, Henry, “he”. Your uncle is not an “it”. Don’t be so rude!’
Henry hadn’t intended to be rude at all, and was startled by his grandmother’s tone. He looked down at his shoes and muttered, ‘Sorry, Gran, but he does look, well, strange.’
‘Well, so he might, but don’t you dare ever say that to him, do you hear me, Henry?’
He nodded vigorously, and when he looked up he saw there were big, bright tears in his gran’s eyes. And then he felt like crying himself, because he hated it when people got upset.
He glanced over his shoulder as the front door opened, and whispered loudly, ‘Here they come.’
James and Lucy entered the parlour first. Lucy’s eyes were red and a little puffy, but James looked happy enough.
‘Well, the prodigal son’s home!’ he announced cheerfully, and moved aside to let Duncan in.
He was as big and as strapping as he’d always been, and came forward, smiling broadly. She
gazed directly into his eyes for a long moment then sat back, profoundly relieved to see that he hadn’t really changed at all. His face was scarred and lumpy in places, and his features were blurred, but he was still Duncan. The tears came again, and she felt like getting up and giving Henry a good smack for upsetting her so much. But it wasn’t his fault; he’d only been a small baby when Duncan left for England, and probably couldn’t remember him any way.
But her tears didn’t want to stop, and when one trickled down her cheek, Duncan sat down next to her and gave her a hug.
‘Gran, please don’t be upset. It’s all right. I’m fine now, don’t worry.’
Tamar blew her nose. Why were her grandchildren so often saying that to her of late? It was her job to comfort them, not the other way around.
‘I’m sorry, darling. I’m so pleased to have you home at last. We all are.’ She gave one last honk into her handkerchief and brightened visibly. ‘Now, where is this lovely wife of yours? We’ve all been dying to meet her.’
Duncan shot out into the hall, and came back leading a rather attractive girl, with a lovely figure, lots of dark hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose.
‘Gran,’ Duncan announced, ‘I’d like you to meet Claire — Pearsall that was, Murdoch that is. Claire, this is my grandmother, Tamar Murdoch.’
Claire leaned down and kissed Tamar’s cheek. ‘Hello, Duncan’s told me so much about you. It’s lovely to meet you at last, Mrs Murdoch. I love your rose garden; you have some gorgeous varieties.’
Ana and Kathleen, who had been released from the WLS and the factory respectively almost as soon as the war had ended, clattered in then, and smothered Duncan with kisses. Kathleen started crying and Duncan said, ‘You haven’t changed much,’ and Kathleen replied, ‘Neither have you, you big bully,’ and they hugged. Five minutes later the volume almost doubled when Bonnie and Leila, who had been up at the stream taking Daisy for a paddle, arrived, followed by everyone else, and the introductions had to be made all over again.
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