My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  It was shortly after this that I began to get rid of the contents of the big drawer. I did it quite carefully, a little at a time – I suppose it took me months to complete the job – and after a while I found I could do it with material gain to myself. I sold the books of the Raemaker cartoons and the sets of the Illustrated War News to Garcia the greengrocer for wrapping paper, and all the silk postcards and strange coins and odd souvenirs I either sold to kids at school or swapped for marbles or foreign stamps or toodilumbuks. There was a slight shock one day when we had parsley delivered from Garcia wrapped up in some of the Raemaker cartoons, but Granny didn’t even notice it.

  I left the revolver there, and the bandolier and Dad’s medals and things like that, but my parents never went to the drawer in the wardrobe, and I don’t believe they ever knew what I had done with all the other things; perhaps they no longer even remembered that the stuff was there.

  It doesn’t matter any longer, of course, because all them blokes in there really are dead now.

  2

  The thing I am trying to get at is what made Jack different from me. Different all through our lives, I mean, and in a special sense, not just older or nobler or braver or less clever.

  Only the other day, sitting in the sun outside a waterfront coffee-house on a Greek island where I have been hiding for several years, something happened which made me think about this. It was a day of intense heat – that burning Mediterranean summer heat that should be measured in degrees of cicadas. The sort of heat and the sort of burnt-out light that always reminds one of Australia, of the smell of bushfire smoke and dust blowing and the dry tangle of bark-litter beneath the gum-trees.

  At our table was a tall, youngish Englishman, a failed aristocrat who had been sent down from Oxford some years before, rather disgracefully, and who had come to this island with the evident intention of drinking himself into a condition of irreparable decay. He was the sort of person who burns easily and the heat had made him despondent and he had been telling us of some of the more lamentable interludes in his life. After he had completed the sorry account he stared broodingly into his wine glass, then shook his head sadly and said:

  ‘None of you, of course, will ever know what it was like to be the younger son of a younger son.’

  ‘No,’ I replied with sudden sharpness. ‘And you will never know what it was like to be the younger son of a tram driver!’

  The angry way in which I said this startled the Englishman – it rather surprised me, too – and he left the table almost at once, and without paying for his wine.

  It did not occur to me until later that my brother Jack, even had he been the younger son, would never have said a thing like that, because I cannot imagine him wanting to carry a grudge against anything, the way I often seem to have done.

  My father’s name also was Jack, simply because that had been his father’s name. Jack – never John – was the name always given to the firstborn boy, and Dad had been the eldest boy among nineteen children. Mother differentiated between my father and my brother by calling them Big Jack and Little Jack; when my sister Jean had a son and named him Jack as well, Mother gave a promotion to my brother and from then on they were stepped down as Big Jack, Young Jack, and Little Jack. And years later, when my brother finally had a son after having fathered a whole clutch of daughters, the boy was named Jack without the least hesitation.

  How far this goes back I do not know, but there was an even earlier ancestor who had gone to Australia midway through the time of convict transportation, as first mate on a three-masted barque, and his name, certainly, was Jack Meredith. This one was a bad lot. In the Southern Ocean he led a mutiny in which the captain was thrown overboard, then they deliberately ran the vessel ashore near Twofold Bay, and because there was a desperate shortage of general merchandise in the penal settlement at Port Jackson, they salvaged the cargo and began to run it up to Sydney Cove in the ship’s boats, expecting to sell the stuff at huge prices. The plot was detected almost at once because a duplicate copy of the barque’s cargo-manifest had already reached Sydney in a naval brig, so this particular Jack Meredith was convicted for barratry and hanged in chains on the gibbet at South Head.

  There were odd things like that in the series of developing human patterns which eventually culminated in Jack and I sharing the floor in the sleep-out.

  I suppose it was all pretty typical of what happened in Australia in the first century or so of colonial life. One ancestor of ours had been in the naval landing party which first hoisted the British flag over the new settlement at Botany Bay in 1788. Other ancestral connections drifted out there later, mostly from Scotland and probably nonentities.

  Mother’s father, however, made quite a name for himself. He was a Highland Scot from Sutherland and he got to Australia as second mate on a smart Liverpool clipper of the White Star fleet, the Red Jacket, but he and all the crew abandoned her at the anchorage in Hobson’s Bay to join one of the periodical stampedes to the goldfields. He later became an officer of the Mounted Constabulary in the man-hunt after Ned Kelly and his gang, and later still prospered enough to own a goldmine and two newspapers, and grow rich and mean and puritanical.

  I remember him as a very old man. He was tall, stiff, gaunt, and grey – he always reminded me of a ringbarked tree, and inspired in me something of the same dread which would always fill me when I saw one of those dead, ghostly trees standing alone in a paddock at night – and I don’t think he ever spoke to me except to quote some precept from Scripture.

  He died as he had lived, in a suffocating smell of sanctimony, and left most of his fortune to build an enormous and incredibly ugly Presbyterian church. At his funeral a good many men who had worked for him, in his mine or on his newspapers, lined the driveway of the big, proud, inhospitable house he had lived in, and I remember that one of these men spat on the coffin as it was being carried out to the hearse.

  It was not until long after his death that it became known that this pillar of righteousness had kept his private secretary as his mistress for over twenty-five years. He left her a small annuity. Nobody but his wife, Emma, had even suspected his secret infidelity with Miss Throckmorton. My grandmother had, in fact, been aware of it from the beginning; she had then left her husband and never went back to him again in forty years, but she never betrayed his sin to a living soul and died with her secret intact. It all came out, ironically enough, from Miss Throckmorton herself, who by this time was senile and old, and boasted of her sexual adventures, partly because she felt she had been treated parsimoniously by her former paramour and partly because she hated to be thought of as an ‘old maid’.

  Emma herself, who was to be the custodian of our infancy, was a very singular character. Her mother had died in giving birth to her, somewhere along the Clyde, in 1847, and her father, a roving Clydeside engineer, took charge of her. Her first infant years were spent with him in Spain, where he was engaged on the construction of the earliest Spanish railways; then he went back to Greenock and supervised the building of one of the first small paddle-steamers to be designed for the Australian coastal river ports and took her out to the Grafton River, in the colony of New South Wales, with his daughter aboard. The ship, which was named Grafton, carried only enough coal for forty-eight hours’ steaming, so there was a fine departure down the Clyde under an impressive black plume of smoke and enough coal left in the bunkers to make a majestic appearance off the little river port of Grafton, twelve thousand miles away. The passage out around the Cape was made under sail and took 266 days, during which time the ship was twice dismasted and eleven members of the crew died from scurvy. Granny, who would have been about ten at that time, never forgot this experience, and in the final years of her life, when she lay in our house, crippled and bedridden, she often recounted the story to me. This provided me with my first opportunity to practise real deception.

  I had become an apprentice in an art studio by this time, and an art student, so as a birthday gift to the ol
d lady I expertly forged a ‘contemporary’ water-colour painting of the Grafton in the exact mode of the marine painting of the time, ‘aged’ and faded and spotted it meticulously with chemicals and smoke, had it carefully framed, and presented it to her with the statement that I had picked it up in a Melbourne antique shop. She identified it at once as the very picture which had hung in the ship’s tiny saloon over seventy years before. Poor Gran. Still, it became her most valued possession, and never left the wall above her bed until she died in that stuffy little front room smelling of senility and lavender water, when, in accordance with her deathbed request, it was put into her coffin and buried with her. The unqualified success of this deception delighted me for years, less for the pleasure I had given my grandmother than for the testimony it provided of my own cleverness.

  Her father had stayed in command of the Grafton for some years after sailing her out, but in the late sixties, when news came of a great gold strike in Otago, New Zealand, he hurried down to Melbourne, invested his savings in a decrepit old Williamstown ferry steamer, loaded her up with mining machinery, and sailed off to cash in on the big bonanza. It was just as well that this time he left his daughter Emma at home, for the overloaded vessel struck a gale in the Tasman Sea, and ship, crew, and my greatgrandfather were never seen again.

  Emma, now twenty-two, and bewitchingly pretty if the daguerreotypes of the period are any witness, thus became an orphan in a strange city without a penny to bless herself with. She took a job as a barmaid in a Melbourne saloon, and fought off drunken admirers, for the gold rushes of the fifties and the still-remembered exploits of Lola Montez had given to the Bourke Street pubs a reputation for raffish excess which they were loath to relinquish: and from there she gravitated to the rich goldmining city of Bendigo, lived precariously under canvas with the Chinese diggers, married a feckless Irish goldfossicker named Duthie, and gave him seven children before he abandoned her. I never found out what happened to those seven Duthie children, although I remember, as a child, that there were cryptic and vaguely shameful references to them from time to time: and it is my impression that my grandfather, who detested them, paid them to keep away, once Emma had married him.

  By her second husband Emma had only three children (Miss Throckmorton having occurred during her pregnancy with the third), and Minnie, my mother, was the eldest. From the wealthy, sheltered, and respectable life into which they were born, all three children for the rest of their lives steadily and conscientiously descended on the social, economic and perhaps even on the moral scale, probably because of the fact that the reckless Emma had a more profoundly vital influence on them than their stern, staid, and distressingly dull father.

  Emma must have had a complete understanding of my parents’ patriotic abandonment of their children during the war, because many years before, if not for the same reason, she had done precisely the same thing herself, for the moment her last baby could be entrusted to a wet-nurse she walked out, leaving her husband to the tender solaces of Miss Throckmorton and her children in the care of the servants. It is impossible to say now whether this action was taken as a genuine moral protest against her husband’s indiscretions, or whether she found him so insufferably dull that she simply seized on this as an excuse to get free of him. Anyway, for many years she cheerfully wandered alone around the world – she had a curious passion for spas and thermal springs and places where she could take curative mud baths; we once had an enormous collection of stereoscopic photographs of these places – and quelled her happy wanderlust only when it became necessary to look after us children.

  During her travels her own children separately began their declines from grace. My mother was the first to slip. Having grown up with governesses, pony-carts, riding instructors, music teachers, and private lessons in oils and pen-painting, she fell out of the provincial petite-bourgeoisie and clean into love with a tall young tram driver called Jack Meredith, who was physically attractive but socially beyond the pale, since he lived with a horde of ragged brothers and sisters in what was virtually a slum hovel on the fringes of Chinatown. He was a big-built, blond, athletic young man who had taught himself to play the violin, rowed stroke in a racing eight on Lake Wendouree, and was the colony’s amateur single-sculls champion. The match was categorically disapproved, not only by Minnie’s father, but also by old Meredith, an embittered, fiery Orangeman who had suffered great inequity on the question of mining leases, struggled constantly to keep nineteen children fed and shod, had become a rabid socialist, and loathed everything which, in his mind, my mother’s family stood for.

  In this impasse, my mother and father took the only course possible to young lovers. They eloped, were married by a young parson who happened to be the cox of Jack Meredith’s racing eight, and fled to Melbourne.

  Unfortunately, this happened in the nineties. The great land boom had collapsed, banks had closed their doors, depression had swept the colony, and half Melbourne was unemployed. For three whole years my father was unable to find work, except for occasional odd jobs, so during this time Mother went out as a charwoman or took in washing. When Dad finally found work as a mechanic in the tram sheds, Mother sold her mangle and bore him a son, which died a few weeks later of spinal meningitis, before it could be christened Jack.

  Two years later Jean was born, later a boy came along and survived long enough to be called Jack, Dad kept his job in the tram sheds, I was born, then my sister Marjorie, Mother joined some organization that was giving courses in home nursing, and in due time the war broke out and the Kitchener posters were up on the hoardings. During these years we lived in a pretty slummy neighbourhood and Mother, with a good grace, allowed her decline to continue. Except for the First-Aid Manual and her textbooks on nursing, she never opened a book after coming to Melbourne, and from all her careful grooming by governesses and private tutors she retained very little that was ‘genteel’ save a continuing interest in oil-painting – nothing original, of course, but careful copies made from oleographed prints of still-lifes, birds, flowers, and scenes, which were published for this purpose and distributed through the art stores. This hobby of hers was later to prove of significance to me, although this is really connected with what happened to her younger brother, who was my Uncle Davy (the one born at the time of the Miss Throckmorton incident).

  He had been trained on one of Grandfather’s newspapers and had turned out to be so brilliant as a journalist that he was actually editing a newspaper in Melbourne when he was still only in his middle twenties. Alas, the seeds of decline were in him also. He made the mistake of falling in love with a red-haired barmaid at the Saracen’s Head Hotel, drank to excess just to be with her, lost his job, lost the barmaid also, and sank into obscure poverty.

  The brother in between Mother and Uncle Davy, who was my Uncle Stan, sank ever farther. He became involved in a variety of sharp practices, then took up with a circus, became a sideshow barker and pitchman, and eventually began to run his own ‘attractions’ at the agricultural fairs which were then – and for all I know still are – always taking place somewhere or other in Australia. In an attempt to buy a costly new entertainment called The Whip, which was then being a great money-spinner in America, he heavily insured his ‘Speed Palace’ of Miniature Dodge-’em Cars and set fire to it in the early hours of a Sunday morning, his intention being to buy the coveted Whip when he collected the insurance money. Unluckily, he miscalculated the amount of petrol necessary for the conflagration and in the ensuing holocaust two adjacent shops and three houses were burnt to the ground as well as his Speed Palace. Poor Uncle Stan was apprehended in Brisbane, where he was living under an alias, and died later in the Bogga Road Gaol, probably of a broken heart, a year before he would have completed his seven-year sentence for arson.

  It was through this uncle that I was first introduced to a darker and seamier side of life than any I had known up to that time, for one of my earlier memories is of being taken on a furtive Sunday afternoon visit with my parents
to see Uncle Stan and his wife, who was my Auntie Gert. (It was then, and to a large degree still is, an inviolate Australian practice to make contractions of all personal names longer than one syllable and to expand those that are monosyllabic. So that, for example, while John almost invariably became ‘Johnno’ and Jack ‘Jackie,’ names like Minnie, David, Gertrude, Emma, and Elizabeth were only used in their shortened forms of Min, Dave, Gert, Em, and Lizzie. Every relative I had as a child was an Ern, Marj, Dot, Steve, Tom, Stell, Fan, Bert, Gin, Alf, or Bill.)

  There was something excitingly sordid about this particular visit – I suspect it was to do with money having been borrowed, or some trouble that involved Uncle Stan – because Mother was very subdued and Dad was furious. Uncle Stan at that time lived in one apartment of the first block of flats ever seen in Melbourne. It was in St Kilda Road, and of red brick, with leadlight windows. The novelty of this type of communal living was regarded in the somewhat staid city of Melbourne as having distinctly immoral qualities, and I remember how we entered the lobby with Mother holding my hand very tightly and speaking in a hushed forced voice, and Dad looking grim and disapproving and making it quite obvious to somebody that he was being forced into doing something to which he was strongly opposed.

  My own participation in this visit was very restricted, for it was not long before I was sent into a bedroom and the door was closed on me, and for an hour or more I nervously listened to the muted sounds of altercation or shivered at the persistent memory of the brief glimpse of depravity which reluctantly had been permitted me. It had been, to me, a startling scene of a smoke-filled room with the electric light burning, for the window shades had been drawn against the afternoon sun and over-curious neighbours, and around a beer-slopped table several hard-faced men in their braces had been playing poker for a scattered pile of sixpences and shillings. Torn-up racecourse betting tickets were littered on the carpet. Also in the room were three big-breasted women in blouses, who were sprawled in a kind of abandoned way in the Genoa velvet arm-chair or on the sofa, and they were all smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and making loud, laughing comments about the men, but the men just squinted through the cigarette smoke at their cards and took no notice at all. The women all were rouged and lipsticked, and one of them, my Auntie Gert, had dyed red hair worn very crinkly with the new Marcel wave.