On the fifth of September 1943 the Ninth Division was landed from the sea just east of Lae. It was hot, the humidity was 100 percent, and it rained every afternoon though The Wet wasn’t due for another two full months. The threat of malaria meant everyone was taking Atabrine, and the little yellow tablets made everyone feel as sick as if they had the actual malaria. Already the constant moisture meant permanently damp boots and socks; feet were becoming spongy, the flesh between the toes raw and bloody. Mocka and mosquito bites turned angry, ulcerated.
In Port Moresby they had seen the wretched state of the New Guinea natives, and if they couldn’t stand the climate without developing yaws, beriberi, malaria, pneumonia, chronic skin diseases, enlarged livers and spleens, there wasn’t much hope for the white man. There were survivors of Kokoda in Port Moresby as well, victims not so much of the Japanese but of New Guinea, emaciated, masses of sores, delirious with fever. Ten times as many had died from pneumonia nine thousand feet up in freezing cold wearing thin tropical kit as died from the Japanese. Greasy dank mud, unearthly forests which glowed with cold pale spectral light after dark from phosphorescent fungi, precipitous climbs over a gnarled tangle of exposed roots which meant a man couldn’t look up for a second and was a sitting duck for a sniper. It was about as different from North Africa as any place could get, and the Ninth wasn’t a bit sorry it had stayed to fight the two Alameins instead of Kokoda Trail.
Lae was a coastal town amid heavily forested grasslands, far from the eleven-thousand-foot elevations of the deep interior, and far more salubrious as a battle-ground than Kokoda. Just a few European houses, a petrol pump, and a collection of native huts. The Japanese were as ever game, but few in number and impoverished, as worn out from New Guinea as the Australians they had been fighting, as disease ridden. After the massive ordnance and extreme mechanization of North Africa it was strange never to see a mortar or a fieldpiece; just Owen guns and rifles, with bayonets in place all the time. Jims and Patsy liked hand-to-hand fighting, they liked to go in close together, guard each other. It was a terrible comedown after the Afrika Korps, though, there was no doubt about it. Pint-size yellow men who all seemed to wear glasses and have buck teeth. They had absolutely no martial panache.
Two weeks after the Ninth landed at Lae, there were no more Japanese. It was, for spring in New Guinea, a very beautiful day. The humidity had dropped twenty points, the sun shone out of a sky suddenly blue instead of steamily white, the watershed reared green, purple and lilac beyond the town. Discipline had relaxed, everyone seemed to be taking the day off to play cricket, walk around, tease the natives to make them laugh and display their blood-red, toothless gums, the result of chewing betel nut. Jims and Patsy were strolling through the tall grass beyond the town, for it reminded them of Drogheda; it was the same bleached, tawny color, and long the way Drogheda grass was after a season of heavy rain.
“Won’t be long now until we’re back, Patsy,” said Jims. “We’ve got the Nips on the run, and Jerry, too. Home, Patsy, home to Drogheda! I can hardly wait.”
“Yair,” said Patsy.
They walked shoulder to shoulder, much closer than was permissible between ordinary men; they would touch each other sometimes, not consciously but as a man touches his own body, to relieve a mild itch or absently assure himself it is still all there. How nice it was to feel genuinely sunny sun on their faces instead of a molten ball in a Turkish bath! Every so often they would lift their muzzles to the sky, flare their nostrils to take in the scent of hot light on Drogheda-like grass, dream a little that they were back there, walking toward a wilga in the daze of noon to lie down through the worst of it, read a book, drowse. Roll over, feel the friendly, beautiful earth through their skins, sense a mighty heart beating away down under somewhere, like a mother’s heart to a sleepy baby.
“Jims! Look! A dinkum Drogheda budgie!” said Patsy, shocked into speaking.
Perhaps budgerigars were natives of the Lae country, too, but the mood of the day and this quite unexpected reminder of home suddenly triggered a wild elation in Patsy. Laughing, feeling the grass tickling his bare legs, he took off after it, snatching his battered slouch hat from his head and holding it out as if he truly believed he could snare the vanishing bird. Smiling, Jims stood watching him.
He was perhaps twenty yards away when the machine gun ripped the grass to flying shreds around him; Jims saw his arms go up, his body spin round so that the arms seemed stretched out in supplication. From waist to knees he was brilliant blood, life’s blood.
“Patsy, Patsy!” Jims screamed; in every cell of his own body he felt the bullets, felt himself ebbing, dying.
His legs opened in a huge stride, he gained momentum to run, then his military caution asserted itself and he dived headlong into the grass just as the machine gun opened up again.
“Patsy, Patsy, are you all right?” he cried stupidly, having seen that blood.
Yet incredibly, “Yair,” came a faint answer.
Inch by inch Jims dragged himself forward through the fragrant grass, listening to the wind, the rustlings of his own progress.
When he reached his brother he put his head against the naked shoulder, and wept.
“Break it down,” said Patsy. “I’m not dead yet.”
“How bad is it?” Jims asked, pulling down the blood-soaked shorts to see blood-soaked flesh, shivering.
“Doesn’t feel as if I’m going to die, anyway.”
Men had appeared all around them, the cricketers still wearing their leg pads and gloves; someone went back for a stretcher while the rest proceeded to silence the gun at the far side of the clearing. The deed was done with more than usual ruthlessness, for everyone was fond of Harpo. If anything happened to him, Jims would never be the same.
A beautiful day; the budgerigar had long gone, but other birds trilled and twittered fearlessly, silenced only during the actual battle.
“Patsy’s bloody lucky,” said the medic to Jims some time later. “There must be a dozen bullets in him, but most of them hit the thighs. The two or three higher up seem to have embedded themselves in pelvic bone or muscle. As far as I can judge, his gut’s in one piece, so is his bladder. The only thing is…”
“Well, what?” Jims prompted impatiently; he was still shaking, and blue around the mouth.
“Difficult to say anything for certain at this stage, of course, and I’m not a genius surgeon like some of the blokes in Moresby. They’ll be able to tell you a lot more. But the urethra has been damaged, so have many of the tiny little nerves in the perineum. I’m pretty sure he can be patched up as good as new, except maybe for the nerves. Nerves don’t patch up too well, unfortunately.” He cleared his throat. “What I’m trying to say is that he might never have much sensation in the genital region.”
Jims dropped his head, looked at the ground through a crystal wall of tears. “At least he’s alive,” he said.
He was granted leave to fly to Port Moresby with his brother, and to stay until Patsy was pronounced out of danger. The injuries were little short of miraculous. Bullets had scattered all around the lower abdomen without penetrating it. But the Ninth medic had been right; lower pelvic sensation was badly impaired. How much he might regain later on no one was prepared to say.
“It doesn’t much matter,” said Patsy from the stretcher on which he was to be flown to Sydney. “I was never too keen on marrying, anyway. Now, you look after yourself, Jims, do you hear? I hate leaving you.”
“I’ll look after myself, Patsy. Christ!” Jims grinned, holding hard onto his brother’s hand. “Fancy having to spend the rest of the war without my best mate. I’ll write and tell you what it’s like. Say hello to Mrs. Smith and Meggie and Mum and the brothers for me, eh? Half your luck, going home to Drogheda.”
Fee and Mrs. Smith flew down to Sydney to meet the American plane which brought Patsy from Townsville; Fee remained only a few days, but Mrs. Smith stayed on in a Randwick hotel close to the Prince of Wales military hospital. Patsy remained there for
three months. His part in the war was over. Many tears had Mrs. Smith shed; but there was much to be thankful for, too. In one way he would never be able to lead a full life, but he could do everything else: ride, walk, run. Mating didn’t seem to be in the Cleary line, anyway. When he was discharged from hospital Meggie drove down from Gilly in the Rolls, and the two women tucked him up on the back seat amid blankets and magazines, praying for one more boon: that Jims would come home, too.
16
Not until the Emperor Hirohito’s delegate signed Japan’s official surrender did Gillanbone believe the war was finally over. The news came on Sunday, September 2, 1945, which was exactly six years after the start. Six agonizing years. So many places empty, never to be filled again: Dominic O’Rourke’s son Rory, Horry Hopeton’s son John, Eden Carmichael’s son Cormac. Ross MacQueen’s youngest son, Angus, would never walk again, Anthony King’s son David would walk but never see where he was going, Paddy Cleary’s son Patsy would never have children. And there were those whose wounds weren’t visible, but whose scars went just as deep; who had gone off gaily, eager and laughing, but came home quietly, said little, and laughed only rarely. Who could have dreamed when it began that it would go on so long, or take such a toll?
Gillanbone was not a particularly superstitious community, but even the most cynical resident shivered that Sunday, September 2nd. For on the same day that the war ended, so did the longest drought in the history of Australia. For nearly ten years no useful rain had fallen, but that day the clouds filled the sky thousands of feet deep, blackly, cracked themselves open and poured twelve inches of rain on the thirsty earth. An inch of rain may not mean the breaking of a drought, it might not be followed by anything more, but twelve inches of rain means grass.
Meggie, Fee, Bob, Jack, Hughie and Patsy stood on the veranda watching it through the darkness, sniffing the unbearably sweet perfume of rain on parched and crumbling soil. Horses, sheep, cattle and pigs spraddled their legs against the shifting of the melting ground and let the water pour over their twitching bodies; most of them had been born since rain like this had last passed across their world. In the cemetery the rain washed the dust away, whitened everything, washed the dust off the outstretched wings of the bland Botticelli angel. The creek produced a tidal wave, its roaring flood mingling with the drumming of the soaking rain. Rain, rain! Rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life.
A pale-green fuzz appeared, poked its little blades skyward, ramified, burgeoned, grew a darker green as it lengthened, then faded and waxed fat, became the silver-beige, knee-high grass of Drogheda. The Home Paddock looked like a field of wheat, rippling with every mischievous puff of wind, and the homestead gardens exploded into color, great buds unfurling, the ghost gums suddenly white and lime-green again after nine years of griming dust. For though Michael Carson’s insane proliferation of water tanks still held enough to keep the homestead gardens alive, dust had long settled on every leaf and petal, dimmed and drabbed. And an old legend had been proven fact: Drogheda did indeed have sufficient water to survive ten years of drought, but only for the homestead.
Bob, Jack, Hughie and Patsy went back to the paddocks, began seeing how best to restock; Fee opened a brand-new bottle of black ink and savagely screwed the lid down on her bottle of red ink; Meggie saw an end coming to her life in the saddle, for it would not be long before Jims was home and men turned up looking for jobs.
After nine years there were very few sheep or cattle left, only the prize breeders which were always penned and hand-fed in any time, the nucleus of champion stock, rams and bulls. Bob went east to the top of the Western slopes to buy ewes of good blood line from properties not so hard hit by the drought. Jims came home. Eight stockmen were added to the Drogheda payroll. Meggie hung up her saddle.
It was not long after this that Meggie got a letter from Luke, the second since she had left him.
“Not long now, I reckon,” he said. “A few more years in the sugar should see me through. The old back’s a bit sore these days, but I can still cut with the best of them, eight or nine tons a day. Arne and I have twelve other gangs cutting for us, all good blokes. Money’s getting very loose, Europe wants sugar as fast as we can produce it. I’m making over five thousand quid a year, saving almost all of it. Won’t be long now, Meg, before I’m out around Kynuna. Maybe when I get things together you might want to come back to me. Did I give you the kid you wanted? Funny, how women get their hearts set on kids. I reckon that’s what really broke us up, eh? Let me know how you’re getting on, and how Drogheda weathered the drought. Yours, Luke.”
Fee came out onto the veranda, where Meggie sat with the letter in her hand, staring absently out across the brilliant green of the homestead lawns.
“How’s Luke?”
“The same as ever, Mum. Not a bit changed. Still on about a little while longer in the damned sugar, the place he’s going to have one day out around Kynuna.”
“Do you think he’ll ever actually do it?”
“I suppose so, one day.”
“Would you go to join him, Meggie?”
“Not in a million years.”
Fee sat down in a cane chair beside her daughter, pulling it round so she could see Meggie properly. In the distance men were shouting, hammers pounded; at long last the verandas and the upper-story windows of the homestead were being enclosed by fine wire mesh to screen out the flies. For years Fee had held out, obdurate. No matter how many flies there were, the lines of the house would never be spoiled by ugly netting. But the longer the drought dragged on the worse the flies became, until two weeks before it ended Fee had given in and hired a contractor to enclose every building on the station, not only the homestead itself but all the staff houses and barracks as well.
But electrify she would not, though since 1915 there had been a “donk,” as the shearers called it, to supply power to the shearing shed. Drogheda without the gentle diffusion of lamps? It wasn’t to be thought of. However, there was one of the new gas stoves which burned off cylindered gas on order, and a dozen of the new kerosene refrigerators; Australian industry wasn’t yet on a peacetime footing, but eventually the new appliances would come.
“Meggie, why don’t you divorce Luke, marry again?” Fee asked suddenly. “Enoch Davies would have you in a second; he’s never looked at anyone else.”
Meggie’s lovely eyes surveyed her mother in wonder. “Good Lord, Mum, I do believe you’re actually talking to me as one woman to another!”
Fee didn’t smile; Fee still rarely smiled. “Well, if you aren’t a woman by now, you’ll never be one. I’d say you qualified. I must be getting old; I feel garrulous.”
Meggie laughed, delighted at her mother’s overture, and anxious not to destroy this new mood. “It’s the rain, Mum. It must be. Oh, isn’t it wonderful to see grass on Drogheda again, and green lawns around the homestead?”
“Yes, it is. But you’re side-stepping my question. Why not divorce Luke, marry again?”
“It’s against the laws of the Church.”
“Piffle!” exclaimed Fee, but gently. “Half of you is me, and I’m not a Catholic. Don’t give me that, Meggie. If you really wanted to marry, you’d divorce Luke.”
“Yes, I suppose I would. But I don’t want to marry again. I’m quite happy with my children and Drogheda.”
A chuckle very like her own echoed from the interior of the bottle-brush shrubbery nearby, its drooping scarlet cylinders hiding the author of the chuckle.
“Listen! There he is, that’s Dane! Do you know at his age he can sit a horse as well as I can?” She leaned forward. “Dane! What are you up to? Come out of there this instant!”
He crawled out from under the closest bottle brush, his hands full of black earth, suspicious black smears all around his mouth.
“Mum! Did you know soil tastes good? It really does, Mum, honestly!”
He ca
me to stand in front of her; at seven he was tall, slender, gracefully strong, and had a face of delicate porcelain beauty.
Justine appeared, came to stand beside him. She too was tall, but skinny rather than slender, and atrociously freckled. It was hard to see what her features were like beneath the brown spots, but those unnerving eyes were as pale as they had been in infancy, and the sandy brows and lashes were too fair to emerge from the freckles. Paddy’s fiercely red tresses rioted in a mass of curls around her rather pixyish face. No one could have called her a pretty child, but no one ever forgot her, not merely on account of the eyes but also because she had remarkable strength of character. Astringent, forth-right and uncompromisingly intelligent, Justine at eight cared as little what anyone thought of her as she had when a baby. Only one person was very close to her: Dane. She still adored him, and still regarded him as her own property.
Which had led to many a tussle of wills between her and her mother. It had been a rude shock to Justine when Meggie hung up her saddle and got back to being a mother. For one thing, Justine didn’t seem to need a mother, since she was convinced she was right about everything. Nor was she the sort of little girl who required a confidante, or warm approval. As far as she was concerned, Meggie was mostly someone who interfered with her pleasure in Dane. She got on a lot better with her grandmother, who was just the sort of person Justine heartily approved of; she kept her distance and assumed one had a little sense.
“I told him not to eat dirt,” Justine said.
“Well, it won’t kill him, Justine, but it isn’t good for him, either.” Meggie turned to her son. “Dane, why?”
He considered the question gravely. “It was there, so I ate it. If it was bad for me, wouldn’t it taste bad, too? It tastes good.”
“Not necessarily,” Justine interrupted loftily. “I give up on you, Dane, I really do. Some of the best-tasting things are the most poisonous.”
“Name one!” he challenged.
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