Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  ‘Ethel,’ she said to her eldest daughter, who was crouched over a cooking pot in the fireplace. ‘Ethel, he’s come home.’

  Ethel stood and turned to Percy. She threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around his neck. His mother then stood, passed the baby to Ethel and did the same. Holding Percy’s shoulders, Charlotte leaned back and looked up into his face. ‘You trying to shock an old woman with that uniform, Percy? Why on earth would you want to go to war?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve got to do my bit, Mum,’ he said, tossing his hat onto a chair and placing the damp cardboard box on the kitchen table, the blond wood having been exfoliated over the years into smooth, gentle undulations.

  ‘Last thing I need is to lose my eldest boy, Percy. The last thing, after all I’ve been through.’

  ‘I’ll be right, Mum. I always am,’ he said, stepping back and shaping up as if he were in the ring.

  She knew what he meant. The life of a knockabout boxer was a tough one. But Percy had carved out a name of sorts as a middleweight, first in the pubs of Bendigo and later in the stadiums of Melbourne as Paddy Rowan. She had disapproved of the boxing because she hated the idea of him being hurt. But he was still her beautiful boy; he had avoided the flattened noses and cauliflower ears of some of his opponents. And then, of course, there had been the money—money she had always been thankful for and which she had come to rely on. He hadn’t been much on writing, Percy, but the money had always kept coming in dribs and drabs—a pound here and a fiver there, depending on the fight results. Charlotte shook her head, moved closer and hugged him.

  Ethel, holding baby Gwendoline in one arm, removed Percy’s hat from the chair, threw it over to him and sat down. She rocked the little girl and cooed to her. Gwendoline gurgled. Percy leaned over the child, placing his hat on his head as he did so. Suddenly, the baby coughed and then began to wail in short, sharp bursts. Percy, startled, pulled his face away and removed his hat. Gwendoline stopped crying. Percy moved forward again, gingerly, and leant over the child. Ethel had her pinky finger in the baby’s mouth. Gwendoline chewed it and locked her blue eyes onto those of her brother. She smiled when he whistled. But as soon as he put the hat back on, she burst into tears again.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Ethel,’ Charlotte said, ‘give her to me. And don’t be putting your hat on inside my kitchen, Percy Rowe. Don’t you know it’s bad luck to wear a hat inside the kitchen? And you’re frightening your sister half to death.’

  Ethel handed her baby sister back to her mother, then went back to the fire and boiled the kettle for tea. Percy sat at the kitchen table while his mother suckled the baby again.

  She noticed his wedding ring. ‘So, who was she that finally caught you, then?’ she asked.

  As he explained about Louie and the baby, he knew what his mother was thinking: that because Charlotte had been unmarried when he was born, Percy would never skip out on a woman who was carrying his child. Percy had been three or four by the time Charlotte had married John Avent Rowe. The birth certificate recorded him as having an unknown father. Officially, he was a bastard. It was always said that John was his father, but Percy had never known for sure. And he had always wondered if Charlotte knew for certain herself.

  ‘I should ask if you love her, Percy,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Mum, she’s beautiful and she’s smart. She has a good family. And she’s … a lady—a real lady,’ he said.

  ‘A lady ? She might be a lady, but is she good enough for my boy? And what are you doing, going away to a war on the other side of the world, with a new wife and a baby on the way? What sort of lady is she, having your baby and letting you do that? She needs to be keeping you at home.’

  He explained that he’d signed up before he knew for sure that Louie was pregnant, that he and his best mate Doc had volunteered together so that they could go and fight and look after each other—that he wasn’t the sort of bloke who would just go back on his word like that.

  ‘And what about the football, Percy? The football at Collingwood. We read about the grand final last weekend. No wonder you were off your game.’

  He shook his head and said, ‘There’s time for footy after the war, Mum. I’ll be back to win the premiership for the Maggies.’

  They drank tea, saying nothing for a while. Eventually, she broke the silence: ‘So the child, what will you call it then?’

  ‘Charlotte if it’s a girl, Mum. Percy if it’s a boy.’

  ‘Not Paddy then?’

  He laughed. ‘Not Paddy. Percy Rowe. Percy Junior.’

  He stood and picked up the cardboard box. ‘I brought this for you and the old man,’ he said, placing it in front of her. She tried to lift the parcel.

  ‘It’s heavy,’ she said.

  ‘It’s silver. Open it.’

  ‘You do it for me.’

  He took a bread knife, slashed the string and pulled away the soggy brown paper. Then he drew from the box a large silver teapot, its handle and spout embossed with an elaborate floral design. It bore the inscription:

  Phillip’s Trophy won by P E Rowan Most Popular Collingwood Footballer 1913

  ‘Percy, it’s beautiful,’ said his mother. ‘We’ve never had anything in this house like this. But you can’t give it to us—it’s yours. You won it.’ She grabbed his arm, pulled him close and kissed his hand. ‘Percy, you’ve been a good boy for me. We’ve always been so proud of you.’

  ‘Mum, keep it. Mind it for me until I come back. I can’t take it on the ship with me.’

  ‘Percy, you should give this to your child. Leave it at home with your Louie and make sure it’s there for your little boy or girl.’

  But he insisted: ‘Mum, it’s staying here. And I’ll be back for it.’

  She stood as he did and handed the sleeping baby back to Ethel again. Then she took her boy in her arms and put her head on his chest.

  Eventually, he said, ‘Mum, I’m best off. I’m due back at camp tonight.’ It was a small white lie. He had two more days of a three-day pass left, which he intended to spend with Louie at her parents’ home in Park Street.

  ‘When do you leave?’

  ‘I dunno. I reckon it’s soon, though, because the drills are constant. March here. March there. The boys reckon we’ll ship out October, November at the latest.’

  He turned to Ethel and kissed her on the cheek, then leant over and gently brushed his lips against the baby’s forehead. Gwendoline stirred and watched the soldier put his hat on. Soon she was crying again. Charlotte snatched up the child and said, ‘Hush, hush. Don’t be crying as your brother’s leaving to go off to the war.’

  Percy chatted to John Junior and Evie for a bit in the yard, kicking the paper footy and making a mental note to bring them a Sherrin next time he came. Then his family all stood at the front gate and watched him walk off towards Bendigo and the war, the baby still crying.

  Charlotte knew she’d never see him again. The baby howling like that at the sight of her brother in a soldier’s hat, that was a bad omen for sure.

  13

  Twenty Rounds in Egypt

  Percy Rowe may have won the girl, but he would go off to war alone. Six days after the 1915 VFL Grand Final, just as he and his best mate, Doc Seddon, were being readied to ship out to Egypt, Doc was suddenly transferred out of the 29th Battalion of the First Australian Imperial Force. While Doc’s move to the 5th Field Company Engineers was made official on 24 September, it would have been requested some weeks earlier—perhaps around the time of Percy and Louie’s wedding.

  Doc, an experienced driver who also had some knowledge of vehicle maintenance and repair, certainly had skills that were in great demand by the engineering corps, whose job it was to build bridges and roads so that supplies could reach the troops, maintain trenches and bunkers, and also, if necessary, devise ways to destroy enemy structures. But while transfer protocols were usually
rigid in the Australian armed forces during World War I, wherever possible mates were, like brothers, kept together for the good of morale. Doc’s relocation to the engineers would not have been forced upon him. It seems much more likely that he actively sought the transfer, despite having decided, just two and a half months earlier, that he would go to war with his mate.

  Apart from the very brief period when Doc, again due to his skill as a driver, had been assigned to move the 29th Battalion from the flooded camp at Seymour to Broadmeadows, it was to be the first time that he and Percy, who had been inseparable since they had met in 1910, were truly apart.

  Doc’s transfer would have come as a great blow to Percy, who had come to rely heavily on him during the years of their friendship. Together with the Collingwood Football Club, Doc had been the mainstay of Percy’s life in Melbourne. He had looked to his mate as he would to a brother, and Doc’s absence, especially in the face of such a great unknown as deployment to war, would have affected Percy acutely. But would Doc’s decision have come entirely as a shock to Percy? Probably not. Percy would have reflected—first, after his initial coupling with Louie, and certainly after she became pregnant and he married her—on how recent events would’ve affected his best friend. And he was canny enough to anticipate the answer, even if there had not been an outright argument between the two mates or an expression of anger and hurt on Doc’s part.

  Early on 4 November 1915, Percy and the rest of his battalion boarded three trains at Broadmeadows. They alighted at Flinders Street Station about an hour later and began a march through the centre of Melbourne. Crowds of thousands of onlookers had lined Swanston Street and many of them cheered and threw streamers as the excited soldiers marched past, before turning to go up the hill towards Parliament House.

  The defence minister and deputy prime minister, Senator George Pearce, a vociferous advocate of conscription who, along with Prime Minister Billy Hughes, would later leave the Labor Party over the issue, stood on the steps of parliament and saluted as the men of the 29th paraded past. Somewhat embarrassingly for Pearce, most of the soldiers marching before him carried neither rifles nor bayonets, such was the inability of Australia’s war complex to keep pace with the growing demand for matériel.

  The men were given five days’ leave, with orders to report back to camp on 9 November. Having recently visited his family in St Arnaud, Percy would have spent those precious few days with Louie, who was by then quite visibly pregnant, in her family’s neat, comfortable house in Park Street.

  In the aftermath of a four-year drought that had gripped eastern Australia and caused terrible human hardship in rural areas, not least by claiming wheat crops, the spring of 1915 in Melbourne was warm and dry. Ordinarily at that time of year, Percy and Doc would have been attending cricket training at Victoria Park. But in the midst of so much apprehension over what he was about to face, sport was surely largely absent from Percy’s mind. He and Louie would have been among the dozens of couples—the men in uniform and the women in their best dresses and carrying parasols—strolling arm in arm about Smith and Johnston streets, or perhaps along the pebbled paths that meandered through the gum trees above the Yarra at Kew. They were all savouring their time together, living in the present, fully cognisant that the war might well ensure that their passion would never be relived. They were the last days that Louie and Percy would share.

  The 29th Battalion boarded the troop ship Ascanius on 9 November at Port Melbourne’s pier, in readiness to sail the next day. The men were told only that they were about to set sail for a ‘destination unknown’. But they’d have known they were heading for the Middle East. If there was any uncertainty attached to the voyage, it was about the troops’ deployment after they reached Port Suez in Egypt. While newspaper reports in Australia made it plain that the British campaign at Gallipoli was faring badly, there was little credible public speculation that the Imperial troops, including the Anzacs, were soon going to be evacuated in defeat from the peninsula. And so the men of the 29th Battalion might have reasonably envisaged that their first action would be against the Turks in the trenches at Gallipoli.

  The other possibility was that they would be used to reinforce the British forces who had, since a few months after the declaration of war, been fighting the Germans on the Western Front, a line of meandering Axis trenches fortified by masses of barbed wire and protected by machine-guns, artillery and air support, and which would eventually stretch 435 miles from the French–Swiss border to the coast of Belgium. The front would be in a military stalemate until late 1918, with the Germans to the east and the British and their allies to the west.

  ‘We were so near that every morning a German used to shout to me “Hello Tommy”, and I would reply “Good Morning Fritz!”’ explained an English sergeant, Ernest Bryan.

  The disparity between the modern weaponry—tanks, machine-guns, grenades, devastating artillery—and the traditional infantry method of attempting to win land by charging enemy strongholds on foot, led to the deaths of millions of soldiers on the Western Front. About 46 000 of them were Australians—7200 of whom have been buried anonymously because they could not be identified. Another 11 100 have never been found. The bodies of these men were sucked down by the mud or churned up by the machinery of war, which transformed what had been a picturesque, wooded part of Europe, famous for its soft palette of landscapes and gentle waterways, into a horrifying, apocalyptic vision of deep black mud and viscera, of razed forests and flattened villages.

  Those who could be recovered were eventually buried in a series of military cemeteries scattered across the Somme and Flanders, close to the places where they fell. Many latter-day visitors to these battlefields comment on how peaceful and serene they seem today. And it is true that, in the warmer months, when the verdant fields are punctuated by vivid poppies lying under a vast aquamarine sky, these are beautiful expanses of land—just as they were before the war. But even in summer and spring, the Somme is, I feel, characterised by an indefinable malevolence, and an infinite sadness that comes from knowing that just about anywhere you step, a soldier probably lies not too far beneath.

  Percy and Doc would end up here, and it is where Percy would stay.

  But as he held Louie tight and kissed her on the grey, windblown dock at Port Melbourne on 10 November 1915, before shaking her father’s hand, hugging her mother and May, then kissing Louie goodbye once more before walking up the gangplank of Ascanius with his kitbag, all that Percy could reasonably surmise was that his next stop was going to be the Middle East.

  All around Louie’s family, other soldiers bade farewell to tearful lovers and wives, children, siblings and parents. According to Black and Gold,

  the troopship sailed from Port Melbourne leaving behind a streamer covered pier and hundreds of emotional relatives and friends. As the vessel cleared Port Phillip Heads, a heavy swell soon persuaded dozens of the men, many of whom had not been at sea before, to ‘feed the fish’.

  The slow voyage to Egypt tested the men’s patience. Besides an hour’s drill each morning and night, the troops’ time was effectively their own. The intense boredom of the crossing was, however, punctuated by regular boxing matches in which Percy Rowe excelled; he would go on to make a name as the 29th Battalion’s finest boxer. After the Ascanius finally docked at Port Suez on 7 December, the battalion was immediately transferred by train to a camp outside Heliopolis. Soon, the men were again moved to a base north of Cairo, at Ismalia.

  On 19 and 20 December 1915, the British evacuated their forces, including the Australians, from Gallipoli. Free now of having to defend Turkey from the invaders, the Turkish Army once again concentrated its efforts on the British protectorate of Egypt, making sorties across the Sinai from neighbouring Palestine. The 29th Battalion was among the forces that were assigned to protect the defences of the strategically important Suez Canal. But they saw no action against the Turks. Indeed, it would be some months
before members of the Australian Light Horse regiments, who had been deployed to Gallipoli without their horses, would reacquaint themselves with their animals and conduct skirmishes with the Turkish cavalry across the Sinai.

  While on leave, the men found easy distractions in the bazaars, bars and notorious brothels of Cairo. A number of men contracted venereal disease, the dangers of which they had been constantly lectured about both at Broadmeadows and on the journey over, and were hastily returned to Australia for treatment. So prevalent and virulent was ‘the pox’ (as the soldiers called it) among the Australians in Egypt that a special hospital was established in Langwarrin, south-east of Melbourne, to deal with VD cases. However, undeterred by tales of the misery caused by syphilis, the men of the 29th Battalion—joined by thousands of light horsemen who had returned to Egypt after the horrors and deprivations of Gallipoli—continued to seek comfort in Cairo’s ‘knock-shops’, including the infamous Khan Khan.

  Corporal George Spooner of the 29th wrote: ‘The rumours one hears of the native women are absolutely correct. They are absolutely without parallel in Australia and one wonders how those chaps who were returned to Langwarrin could have anything to do with them. I presume they must have been drunk.’

  In late February 1916, the 29th Battalion moved to Tel el Kebir, which was little more than a camel station between Ismalia and Cairo. Within a week, however, it had been transformed into a sprawling tent city, home to thousands of men from both the 4th and 5th Australian divisions. Conditions were harsh: water was scarce; blowflies, attracted by the human and animal waste and the rubbish, flew thick in the air; the body lice were prolific. And the weather was getting steadily hotter as the dreaded scorching desert winds, the kham-sin, began blowing in from Arabia.