In the morning he eats the eggs and sausages and bread and takes the crib his mother sets in front of him. He waits till his dad has gone on and he doesn’t follow the rest of the lads on the track down to the mine. He’s at the station again, catching the first train out.
He keeps his mind off it. He’ll not think about what he’s doing; he’ll just do it and that will be that. He’s got his birth certificate ready, he fills out the forms, his name and his age and his address and his occupation and then his next of kin. Would that be Pansy, now he’s married to her? He doesn’t know but he writes his dad’s name down, anyway. Michael Bright.
He’s all set now. He’s shown his birth certificate at the desk, proved he’s old enough to go, he’s filled the forms in right but the sergeant in charge is looking at them and frowning. ‘Coalminers can’t go,’ he says. ‘Sorry, son, but the war needs coal. Miners have to stay down the mines.’
He tells him he’s not a coalminer any more. He’s left the mine.
‘You’re saying you’re no longer employed as a coalminer?’
He’s not going back. ‘That’s right, sir.’
‘Then why have you put “miner” down as your occupation?’
He says he saw in the Argus that experienced miners were needed for the New Zealand Tunnelling Company and he is experienced but he’s not working right now. He says he saw there weren’t enough miners enlisted and he thought he should be in on it. ‘I want to serve my country, sir.’
The sergeant looks at him closely, then nods. ‘It’s true,’ he says, ‘there are recruits needed. All right. There’s the medical tests to get through and then there’ll be the inspector of mines talking to you and if all’s well with that you’re in.’
He looks at the chart on the wall and reads the letters, big down to the little, both eyes, then the right covered up, then the left. That’s all right and his hearing is good as well, then the doctor has him strip down and takes a look at the rest of him, everything including his balls and the underpart of his feet and he says he’ll do.
By now he’s stirred up, nervousness and excitement mixed in together. He’s sent into another room and the bloke in there tells him he’s an inspector of mines and he needs him to tell him what experience he’s had so he says how he was in the clipping shed as a youngster, it was two years he had there and after that he was a trucker, that was another two, and for the past three years he’s been a miner.
The sergeant looks up when he comes back into the office. ‘All right, you’re in, sonny. You need to report for duty back here Monday morning and then we’ll see what should be done with you. The New Zealand Mining Corps, eh?’
He can’t back out now and nobody can stop him. He’s signed up. All he has to say is he wants to serve his country. Nobody can argue with that.
21
Dear Mother and Dad,
I am in Auckland, now, and in good spirits and health. I came up with men from Greymouth and Reefton and so was in good company. There are four hundred here in training and billeted in tents on the Avondale racing track. We are kept busy each day, first of all with the early morning run around the track and that is followed by six hours marching. The food is good and there is plenty of it. There was word we were sailing out in November but it looks now as if it will be December. Please pass on my very good wishes to the girls.
Your affectionate son,
Clem
He bites the end of his pencil as he reads over what he has written. It sounds to him stilted and unaffectionate but they hadn’t parted well and he finds it hard to find words for writing anyway. He knows he should send a separate letter to Pansy as well to save her from the awkwardness of his parents and sisters wondering and asking, but he doesn’t have the words for her either. He took some time in coming up with the last sentence. Girls rather than sisters, he’d decided, could include Pansy. He’d first thought love was what should be passed on but that had felt wrong. Good wishes had seemed cold when he first came up with that, which is why he’d added in the very.
All letters are to be handed in at the barracks to be censored by the officers before they’re sent out and that’s perplexing to him. He doesn’t see why it has to be that way. There are no secrets here: anyone living in Auckland can come by the racecourse and see them marching any day of the week.
T-u-urn right. Tu-u-urn left. Left right left right left right. Atten-tion.
Each day starts with press-ups, then the trot around the race-course, breakfast, then marching. He’s heard the older men, ‘Tin soldiers marching around a bally racecourse, that’s not what we’re here for.’ Well, what is the marching for when what they’ll be doing when they got to France is what they’ve been doing most of their lives and that’s digging? He doesn’t know the answer to that one and he had to think carefully about putting about marching in the letter because he knew Dad wouldn’t think much of it either.
But why should he keep it from him as if he’s ashamed of what their orders are? If marching’s his duty, well, it’s what he’ll do. They say it’s for discipline so that they’ll carry out commands without thinking over the wrongs and rights of it first. The army must know what it’s doing.
Perhaps he should put in the letter that they’re under the motto of the New Zealand Engineers, Quo fas et gloria ducunt. Where do duty and glory lead? Though he doesn’t think Dad would rate that very highly either. He’d laughed right in his face when he’d said what he had about serving his country. His face still burns, thinking of it.
‘Don’t stand there giving me that King and Country tommyrot. You’re a fool if you believe that.’
It’s Mother he thinks of most. He’d said what he’d decided on; he’d gone over and over the words in his mind on the train back from Greymouth. I’ve signed up. I see it as my duty. To my country.
But the words and the way he’d said them had sounded like a child reciting a rhyme he’d learned. He looked first at Dad, saw how his face turned pale then flushed up with anger. He looked at Mother then. Her skin looked grey, as if all her colour was stripped away. She’d slipped down into the chair as if her strength had left her. She sat at the table and put her hands up and rested her head in them. Her hands were trembling. She looked up at him and her eyes were filled with fear. He’d never seen her eyes like that before.
‘Please, son. Please not that.’
It was her words he heard though Dad was shouting over her, ‘And what about your duty to this new wife you’ve brought to us, eh? What about your duty to her and this baby you’ve been telling us about?’
He looked at Pansy but she kept her head down, didn’t say a word. Alice and Jeanie had another night sitting in their room waiting for their dinners. This time he didn’t eat with the rest of them, because he’d walked out. It was the only time he’d ever walked out on them and he shut the kitchen door behind him and stood in the dark outside wondering if he should go back in and try to make friends with them again but then he’d walked off.
He’d gone around the streets first, past the cottages and the shops and the pub, past the Miners’ Hall. There hadn’t been many out but he’d nodded to the ones he passed. This town had been his home for all of his life: he hadn’t been any place else, other than visits to Greymouth and Ahaura and once up to Reefton for the funeral when Mother’s brother drowned crossing the river.
He might never come home again, might never walk these streets passing the houses of people he’d known his whole life. The thought shook him but then he pushed it aside. He’d be back soon enough. He was only leaving it for now; off on an adventure, he was. There across the road was the Weatherbornes’ place; he’d been at school with Jimmy and Seth, both of them with him, now, in the mine. They’d all of them been kept countless times after school by Mr Kennedy for some misconduct or other. Jimmy and Seth had the devil in them then, with their cheek and fighting and dipping the end of the girls’
plaits into the inkwells. For him it’d mainly been not being able to remember his tables; he never had been able to get them right. Some afternoons Mr Kennedy locked them in and forgot them and they’d had to climb out the window. He remembered Jimmy and Seth Weatherborne larking about those afternoons, drawing pictures of willies and bosoms on the blackboard. He remembered the smell of the schoolroom, sweat mixed with coal, and the drift of chalk dust and how stiflingly hot it was when you sat up the front near the stove and how cold it was down the back.
Over there was the Lambertons’ place. Dorothy, the littlest one, died of the diphtheria last year and he remembered how at the funeral Mrs Lamberton cried so bitterly and said afterwards to Mother they had to bury her poor little girl still with the marks on her hands from the strapping she got at the school.
He remembered waiting for his turn for the reading and how, by the time it came around, he’d be so scared he couldn’t get the words out right. He remembered the others laughing, remembered the swish and crack of the thick leather strap and the sharp, stinging soreness as it landed on his hand and how he’d shaken his hand and blown on it and tried to grin, like he’d seen the older boys do, as if it didn’t hurt.
He remembered going home and crying to Mother he was too stupid to learn and how she’d held him in her lap and rocked him, said he was her own special boy and when Dad came home, Mother spoke sharply to him and turned over Clem’s hand to show him and his face went dark. He remembered after that Mr Kennedy left him alone. He remembered, as well, that when he was crying and looked up into Mother’s face she was crying as well.
Mother. How he’d hurt her.
He wasn’t good at numbers, all those figures made his head pound, but he liked reading well enough, the silent reading that is, the reading you did only with your eyes. Even now, every book and newspaper and journal that came into the house he read in a rush then started over, taking the words in, one after another, and thinking of what they meant. He remembers when he understood that he could read properly and he remembers the magic, also, of the poems and the stories and how the words made pictures in his mind.
That nice young lady teacher who stopped only a short while in Blackball had made him see learning could plant dreams in your heart. She used to take them outside on warm days to sit underneath the trees and she’d read to them. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was all pirates and gold and ships and he’d closed his eyes listening for what came next but holding on to what he’d listened to as well, not wanting it ever to end but needing to know what happened. Was this the same Robert Louis Stevenson who’d written the poem about the little house? He wanted to put his hand up and ask but he was always afraid his tongue would trip him up. In the end, he wanted to know so much that he waited until they were walking back to the school and the teacher was on her own and he walked close beside her and she looked down at him and then he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, ‘the very same man, indeed. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson.’
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson. That was a proper kind of name, just right for the kind of man who came up with poems and a story like Treasure Island. He ran on then in case the others saw and said he was sweet on the teacher but later he tried writing the name in the best letters he could make, Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson. Mother saw him trying and she gave him the book Kidnapped for his next birthday. Mother’d always been so good to him and now he was leaving her and, into the bargain, they were at odds with each other.
He was leaving it all, each house with the lamps burning inside and the row of shops and the schoolhouse and the bush and the creek and the mine, all of it and he was afraid of what he’d done. Wherever he was going would be a whole lot bigger than Blackball and he wouldn’t have his cobbers with him; everyone he met and lived with would be new. He’d never been away from Dad and Mother for a night even, and here he was going to the other side of the world.
It had seemed so odd to him when, as a boy, he’d been told the world was round and that it was all the time turning. What if I fell off? he’d thought that night and he’d grasped on to the end of his bed, holding on to the iron railings so he’d be kept safe and steady. And now he was to sail right around the world to France. We’ll sail the seven seas, my lad.
If he got killed, it’d be in a place where they didn’t know him. They didn’t bring the dead back, not even to England, there were too many of them, so he’d be left there for ever. Chances were they wouldn’t know who he was so he wouldn’t even have his name over where he was buried.
Clement Michael Bright. Clement for Mother’s side, Michael for Dad. Carefully named for the family he was from. Carefully, lovingly named.
He was in the bush now with the smell of leaves and wetness, the scuffling sounds of possums and rats and the odd birdcall. He knew this like he knew his own body, knew if he walked three or four minutes downhill in a direct line he’d be at the creek and if he walked seven or so more along the stones and turned left he’d come up into the Baders’ garden.
Otto’s garden. Otto, Pansy, Clem. He closed his eyes.
He’d always been a good boy. Always. Well, look where that’d got him now.
Dad said he was running away. You’ve broken your mother’s heart. Would you just look at the state of her?
And he’d looked at her again, seen in the greyness of her face the shock of what he’d done and the fear for what he was about to do. He’d brought home his pregnant wife to her and now here he was, leaving Mother to look after all that and going away, perhaps to be killed, and him always her favourite. He’d always known she loved him best. My own little lad. He’d always come to her with his secrets. What had happened that her own boy was doing this to her?
Yes, he’d been lovingly named and watched over and raised with the expectation he’d work with his dad and his uncles and cousins in the mine and he’d wed and have his children and live alongside his family, sharing his joys and his griefs.
He had turned and headed back in the direction of home; they’d be in bed so he made a bit of noise coming in so they’d know he was back. He couldn’t explain why he had to leave but he had to. It was done now, with everything said, and that was all there was about it.
22
He looks again at the letter. Well, he’s never been one for words, not with getting them down or getting them out, for that matter. This is the first letter he’s written home since he left, the first letter, in fact, he’s ever written home because he’s always been home; never away from it except these past weeks.
What if he screwed up this letter and started over again and told them everything that’s passed in those weeks? What would they make of that, now, if he told them not only about Auckland and what kind of place it was but what he and the other lads had got up to since they were here, not only that but all he’d been thinking about since he left as well?
He sits on his bunk, the letter in his hand. His cobbers have gone down town but the letter had been on his mind too long and he let them go without him. Mother had always said he was more of a thinker than he let on whenever anyone had said he wasn’t one for books and learning like his sisters. That one’s a thinker, make no mistake about it.
And perhaps Mother was right because all the way here, first in the train amid the clattering and the wheezing and the sharp blasts of steam in the stations and other lads joining them along the way and some of them whistling and calling out to the young girls at the stations, he’d been thinking in a way he hadn’t since he was a boy at school dreaming through the classes. In the mine you had to be sharp, no wool-gathering down there because one mistake and you and probably your mate as well were done for.
It wasn’t until he woke up in the bunk in the cabin, that first night, feeling the lurch and shudder of the boat and hearing the others snoring and muttering around him, that he thought, by God, I’m here and I’ve done it. He sat on the train that t
ook them to the ship that was to sail them to Auckland and he looked out the window without seeing any of it, though it was all new ground to him. He answered the others when they spoke to him and he went through the motions of eating the sandwiches and pies and he drank tea at the stations they stopped at and tipped some of it into the thick white saucers because he needed it to cool down quickly so he could make it back onto the train. That tea was black and hot and it’s all he can remember of the stations.
What would it be like, this France? Or Belgium, for that matter. They talked a lot about Belgium, too, in the papers; perhaps he’d be going there. They’d have different languages in the countries he was going. How would he get on in places where they didn’t use the same words as him?
He’d asked the sergeant at Greymouth where he’d be going and what he’d be expected to do but the sergeant had said he’d find out soon enough and what you had to learn in the army, sonny, was to keep your ears open and your mouth shut and follow orders.
He knew already that the Germans had dug tunnels under the British lines, planting explosives and detonating them, blowing up a whole shebang of British soldiers and weaponry and whatever else was in the way. What the British army wanted was to give Fritz back a taste of his own medicine and that was why they wanted miners to build their own tunnels.
It seemed a poor show to him, setting explosives beneath a man and blowing away the solid earth from under his feet, the one thing you think you can depend on. You’d think the very least a man could ask for is that he can see what’s coming but the Germans had started this first so they had to be paid back for it. They were an underhanded lot, the Germans, sly and cunning in the way they went about things. He’d heard people say they’d been planning this war for years behind everyone’s backs, that the Kaiser wanted to take over the world and Belgium was only the start of it.
From what he’d read in the newspapers, there were thousands, now, in the war and he tried to imagine that; everywhere as far as you could see filled with men shooting each other and the ground blowing up beneath them. There were aeroplanes used now so that was everything filled up: the air, the earth, the sea as well if you were by it.
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 17