Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  With the recent news of Mother’s arrangements still running around in my head, I couldn’t wait to shed my civilian skin and turn myself over to Army Intelligence. The uniform was scratchy and immediately uncomfortable, and after only a few paces around James Fowler’s office I knew that the shoes would be torture. Nevertheless, as I moved inside the heavy, ill-fitting material, I felt something close to elation. As far as I was concerned, this wasn’t a uniform. It was a costume.

  James Fowler looked at his watch.

  ‘I’ve got two hours to give you some idea of what’s in store for you. Obviously we don’t have time to turn you into real soldiers, but I’m afraid you can’t go where you’re going without a crash course in a few basic skills.’

  Over the next hour or so I began to wonder whether I’d made a ghastly mistake in signing up for this run, if I might use a theatrical term for what now appeared to be rather more military in nature than I’d bargained for. We were to be put on a troop train immediately and sent to somewhere called Ingleburn in New South Wales where, God help us, we were to learn how to fire a gun and, worse, how to ride a horse.

  ‘The Observer Unit is basically a cavalry unit, so being able to ride, even inexpertly, is essential. Did I mention that yesterday?’

  ‘No,’ I said calmly. ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure I did.’

  ‘You didn’t actually say that we’d have to learn how to ride,’ Brian said.

  ‘Ah, well, there you are,’ he said.

  Corporal Pyers was to accompany us to Ingleburn, where he, too, would be taught to ride, and where he’d rehearse us in preparation for our performances.

  ‘Today is the sixth of October,’ James said. ‘The NAOU training course is generally eight weeks. You have eight days. In ten days, on the sixteenth, you’ll be onstage for the first time with the Third Division Concert Party, in Maryborough.’

  ‘That’s Maryborough, Queensland?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  His interjection was timely because I was speechless.

  ‘I understand,’ James said, ‘that Will had a few difficulties up there recently, but I’m afraid they’re immaterial to this operation. The Third Divvy CP happened to get going in Maryborough, back in August, and they’re just about ready now to put on their first show. From our point of view, the timing is perfect. You, Will and Glen, are replacing two blokes who’ve dropped out. After Maryborough the concert party heads across to Mt Isa, and then up to Darwin. On the way, in Katherine, you’ll make contact with the Unit HQ there and get your instructions. Any questions?’

  I had too many to settle on one, so I remained silent. Brian asked, ‘Any more surprises?’

  ‘Just one,’ James Fowler said. ‘His name is Archie Warmington, and you’ll meet him in Ingleburn.’

  The closest I’d come to troop trains was seeing them in newsreels at the cinema pulling into, or out of, stations, their windows writhing with the vermicelli of excited soldiers waving and smiling, and their carriages graffitied with names and clumsy sketches. The train we found ourselves on, bound for Sydney, was a sad disappointment. It was crowded, noisy, and noisome. We were crammed into a carriage with a group of soldiers, none of whom could have been older than twenty, and their demeanour and conversation was unappealing to say the least. After a few hours of their pointless, witless larrikinism, I wasn’t entirely certain that they and I belonged to the same species.

  Corporal Pyers, however, saw this as an opportunity to relieve these raw recruits of what little money they had about their persons by demonstrating, and taking bets on, sleights of hand that were remarkable. He was able to make coins and notes appear and vanish with unpredictable and astonishing dexterity. The fingers that closed over a coin in the left hand opened a moment later on an empty palm, and the foolish soldier who’d laid a whole pound on its whereabouts found himself a poorer man. Pyers was able to undo a watch without the wearer knowing, and spirit it into the pocket of a baffled companion. He produced cigarettes out of nowhere, one after the other, until every man in the crowded compartment had one. I was sitting beside him, and I didn’t detect the mechanism of any of his tricks. Corporal Glen Pyers went up in my estimation.

  Apart from Glen’s entertainments, the journey to Sydney was tedious and uncomfortable. When we arrived we were directed, like so much livestock, onto trucks, and driven west towards Ingleburn and an army camp that had been set up there in 1939. If the facilities were primitive, I thought, they would at least have the advantage of being relatively new.

  We arrived late at night and, to my surprise, Corporal Pyers, Brian, and I were separated from the mob and taken to a wooden hut some distance from the long barracks that housed most of Ingleburn’s recruits. There were three cots set up, and I fell soundly asleep moments after stretching out on the one I’d claimed as mine.

  I woke next morning to the sweet and cloying smell of clove tobacco, an odour new to me at the time, and which I came to associate indelibly with the man who was sitting with his back to us in the open doorway of our hut. He sucked deeply on his exotic kretiek, flicked the butt end away from him, and entered the hut. By this time I was up on my elbows, and thought from the man’s confident stance that he was about to bellow an order like some ghastly caricature of a pissed-off sergeant major. Instead he said, in a rather beautiful, mellifluous voice — every vowel round and every consonant acknowledged — ‘Good morning. I hope it wasn’t the pong of my kretiek that woke you.’

  ‘No,’ I lied, reacting with an instinctive reluctance to offend him.

  He leaned towards me and extended his hand.

  ‘Major Archibald Warmington. But I think Archie will just about cover it.’

  ‘William Power. Will, please.’

  ‘One of these recumbent fellows must be your brother Brian, and the other, Glen, who is, I believe, a prestidigitator of some renown. As you see, I’m quite well informed.’

  ‘I’m Brian.’

  ‘I see a family resemblance.’

  Corporal Pyers had by now stood up and, in the harsh light of the morning, exposed as he was in his underwear, looked emaciated and more in need of medical attention than whatever Archie Warmington had in store for him.

  ‘We’ll have to look after your hands,’ Archie said, ‘and I’ll get some fruit into your diet.’

  He swept his eyes over each of us.

  ‘My instructions, gentlemen, are to do no more than teach you three things — how to shoot, how to ride, and the rudiments of signalling. There’ll be no square-bashing, no six-mile hikes or runs, no gruesome exertions of any kind. The four of us are temporarily in a little bubble of privilege, and I’ve never been one to moan about privilege.’

  It was then that I noticed that Archie Warmington’s uniform was discreetly tailored, and that there was an air about him that wasn’t quite fey, but which wasn’t at all the air of a commando, either. He must have been in his late thirties, perhaps even early forties. His dark hair was cut close to his skull, and his face was lean and so strongly boned that it spoke of a body beneath it that must have been all muscle and sinew. He carried it loosely, though, and his movements suggested that its explosive potential was calibrated to dance rather than violence.

  I’d been dreading Ingleburn — dreading being a part of the vast and impersonal machinery of the military. As it happened, the eight days we spent there count amongst the happiest of my life. Archie Warmington made it his business to protect us from the rigorous banality of army training. Indeed, we were so thoroughly protected that we were barely aware that the business of preparing recruits for battle was going on around us. Distant shouts, the sound of gunfire on the range, the tramp of feet — this was as close as we came to the day-to-day routine of these inchoate diggers. We weren’t obliged to engage in the faux camarad
erie of mess-hut conversation with people whose only commonality was their possible violent death. We took our meals in our hut; they were delivered by motorcycle, and they weren’t the slop that everyone else was eating.

  I’m not suggesting that the food available to us was luxurious, but its preparation was more akin to restaurant dining than to the trough-feeding one associates with army food. The menu included plenty of fruit — rather more pineapple than I would have liked — and the innovation (under the direction of Archie Warmington) of rice for breakfast, as a consequence of his long association with Bali. In only a matter of days, Corporal Glen Pyers began to look almost healthy. I didn’t make any inquiries regarding his khaki dermatitis, for fear that he’d show me either its improvement or its steady deterioration. Either way, peering at some dark corner of the Pyers body wasn’t something I’d volunteered for.

  After breakfast on our first day, we were shown the guns that we’d be required to master.

  ‘You won’t actually be issued with any weapons,’ Archie said, ‘but you may have to use one nonetheless — if not against the Japs, then possibly against wildlife.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Brian said, ‘did you say “wildlife”?’

  ‘You may have to shoot something for food,’ Archie said casually. ‘And then, of course, crocodiles can be a problem.’

  I laughed, assuming that Archie was lightening the mood with humour. His eyebrows moved slightly upwards, a minimal gesture that was surprisingly eloquent and horrifying. I pushed the notion of crocodiles to the back of my mind and turned my attention to the weapons lying on the table in front of me. These were, I learned, a .303 rifle, a .22 rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun, a German Luger, and a Thompson submachine-gun. When I picked this up it proved heavy and difficult to wield. I was familiar with it from American gangster movies, where it sat more easily in the hands of George Raft and Edward G. Robertson. The Luger was Archie’s own. Lugers were, apparently, regularly captured from German soldiers and issued to Allied officers. This was fine in principle, and Archie declared that his Luger was a marvellous weapon, but maintaining a steady supply of ammunition for it was problematic at best.

  I surprised myself by discovering that I had rather a facility for shooting, and in a very short space of time became not only comfortable with guns, but adept at firing them accurately. I was certainly a better marksman than either Brian or Glen. I don’t know why I assumed that an accomplished magician would be able to shoot straight, but Glen fired a rifle with the skill and accuracy one might expect from Teiresias. Brian wasn’t much better. He was, however, much better than I was at understanding the arcane workings of the FS6 transceiver, a device the mysteries of which defeated me, despite Archie’s patient explication.

  Glen proved to have a previously unknown affinity with horses. He’d grown up in Hobart and had had very little contact with them. Certainly, he’d never ridden one, but as soon as he climbed aboard the wiry creatures at Ingleburn — horses Archie called ‘walers’, and which he assured us were the favoured mounts of the Lighthorse — Glen looked, and felt, at home. My own relationship with the horses was more fraught. When I sat astride one of the quivering, snorting animals, I was uncomfortably conscious of how far I was from the ground, and that the security of my seat depended entirely upon the whim of the horse. I had no confidence in my ability to control its savage urges.

  Given the brevity of our training schedule, Archie sensibly decided to play to our strengths, and was happy enough to allow us to acquire minimal competence in our weakest areas and to more carefully hone where we were strongest.

  The acquisition of these skills took place during the day. After dinner, Glen rehearsed us for our roles in the Third Division Concert Party production of something called Camp Happy. This was a grab bag of sketches, songs and comedy acts, with no coherent through-line — a necessity, given that performers would come and go.

  At our first rehearsal, Glen blithely announced that he’d audition us for the roles that had fallen vacant. With epic self-control, I kept my indignation in check. The idea that my acting talent should be judged by a mere magician, however accomplished, was abhorrent and absurd. The expression on my face must have betrayed something of my discomfort, because Glen, in a clumsy attempt at conciliation, said that all he really needed to know was which of us was better able to project his voice without amplification.

  ‘This isn’t about who’s a good actor, Will. It’s just about who can make himself heard.’

  I needn’t have been concerned. I knew how to use my diaphragm to push my voice out across the footlights and up into the gods. Brian, when he attempted to project his voice across even our relatively small room, failed, because it was all coming from the throat. There was no resonance, no thrust; but, to his credit, he accepted with measured good grace that he’d be spending a good deal of time sashaying about in a slinky, satin sheath.

  ‘Archie will teach you how to walk in heels,’ Glen said.

  ‘My God,’ I said to Archie, ‘is there anything you can’t do?’

  ‘I don’t yodel,’ he said. ‘But, of course, that’s not as useful a skill as walking in heels, so I never bothered to learn.’

  ‘You ride, you shoot, you know Morse, you walk in heels. This is a surprising range of skills.’

  ‘I think my life has been very different from yours.’

  Archie spoke in a way that aroused in me an inexplicable little vibration of envy.

  The parts I was required to learn were unbelievably awful. Being the utility actor in any variety show is a thankless job. Whoever I’d be playing against had the best lines. I was there to set up the punch line, and there was no place for improvisation, and certainly no room for any excerpts from the Bard. It was clear, after looking through the whole program, that soldiers were prepared to sit still, and maybe even shed a discreet tear, for some indifferent tenor’s rendition of ‘Ave Maria,’ but there was no room for poetry. I consoled myself with the thought that once we were released from the constraints of the concert party, and we were troubadouring, Timon of Athens would ring out above whatever parallel it was that we were near.

  Despite the unsatisfactory nature of the material I committed to memory, the eight days at Ingleburn sped by. I rehearsed my parts with Brian, who read the other parts for me so that I could get the timing right. Surprisingly, as the days went by, he became less and less resentful of having been allocated the femme role. He rehearsed separately with Archie, and then with Glen, and he became so at ease with his role that, on the evening before our departure for Maryborough, he happily set about the time-consuming task of shaving his arms, legs, and chest. He refused, however, to show me what he’d learned. I’d have to wait to see it in performance. There wasn’t a skerrick of embarrassment or shame in this refusal. It was almost as if he knew that my reaction to his appearance on stage would be astonishment.

  Neither Brian nor I had pleasant memories of Maryborough. Only a few short months before, I’d been embroiled there in a hideous and violent series of events which had resulted in my unjust alienation from my eponymous acting troupe, who were still in Maryborough, working under the direction of my leading lady, Annie Hudson. Brian’s recent memories of Maryborough could hardly have been more pleasant than my own. Having come up from Melbourne, ostensibly to help me, he’d embarked upon a ludicrous and dangerous affair with a madwoman.

  We’d been told that Maryborough was the place where we were to connect with the Third Division Concert Party, but I’d put it out of my mind for the most part during these training days, and consoled myself with the thought that the estranged members of my troupe wouldn’t be in any audience to which we played. They were civilians, and the concert party was dedicated to entertaining the troops. Perhaps I could get in and out of Maryborough without making contact with any of my former colleagues. The person I most wanted to avoid was Sergeant Peter Topaz, a copper whos
e low opinion of me was out of all proportion to the one or two small errors of judgement I’d made.

  Archie Warmington wasn’t coming with us to Maryborough, and I was genuinely disappointed that I might now never get the opportunity to find out where he came from, and who he was. He’d obviously made an impression on Brian as well because, on the morning of our departure, while he merely shook my hand, he put his arm around Brian’s shoulder in a gesture of mateship. I suppose the bond that forms when you teach someone how to walk in heels is stronger than the bond that forms when you teach someone how to fire a Thompson submachine-gun.

  Chapter Three

  in concert

  WE ARRIVED IN MARYBOROUGH in the back of an army truck, and as we drove down Ferry Street I became absurdly and irrationally anxious about being seen by members of my former troupe. I was particularly anxious about meeting Arthur Rank, the person to whom I’d been closest and who had more reason than the others to despise me — given that I’d almost killed him with a blow to the head. I imagined that he’d be fully recovered by now (the blow had fallen a month ago, after all), but in the intervening time I’d been troubled by the collapse of our friendship.

  Initially, I admit, I thought Arthur’s attitude towards me had been peevish. I’d assaulted him in good faith, if such a thing is possible. Now, though, I was prepared to acknowledge that perhaps my actions had been ill-conceived; and so, although I’d have welcomed an opportunity to offer a sincere apology, I was also crippled by the inevitable mortification that this would entail. Brian, who’d got on famously with the troupe, was untroubled by the prospect of seeing them. Indeed, he said he’d seek them out at the first opportunity, and he helpfully provided Glen with a thumbnail sketch of each of them.

  The truck passed the town hall, and a sign out the front proclaimed that the Hudson Players, so recently the Power Players, were currently performing Pygmalion. Annie Hudson transformed from guttersnipe to princess? Sadly, she didn’t have the range to accomplish this alchemy, and her performance would provide irrefutable proof that a guttersnipe in a ball gown is just that — a guttersnipe in a ball gown. And who amongst the others could play Professor Higgins? Arthur had only one arm, and while Shaw doesn’t actually specify that Higgins have two arms, audiences would expect him to pull on two gloves when he takes Eliza Doolittle to the ball. Adrian Baden, who’d be more interested in seducing Freddy Eynsford Hill than Eliza, would make an adequate Higgins, so I hoped the company had the sense to appoint him over Bill Henty, who’d want to do the role bare-chested, or Kevin Skakel, whose club foot was less of an impediment than his inability to act.