The Story of Danny Dunn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Could it be that while we acted with incredible, dare I say, foolish bravery, we failed to ask ourselves what we hoped to achieve by our actions? Brave men may win posthumous medals, but the real objective is to keep them alive so we can win battles.’ Doc Evatt was silent, hands resting on the kitchen table, fingers curled inwards so he could examine his nails.

  Danny groaned inwardly; he knew, or thought he knew, what was coming next. Doc Evatt was going to point out that his country was giving him a choice. He did have permission to complete his degree before joining up. But he’d guessed wrong. Without glancing up Evatt asked, ‘What if your country had a different agenda this time?’

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Well, you’re aware of the economic situation. In this constituency alone the rate of unemployment is still appallingly high. The centre for the Unemployed Workers Movement is right here in Balmain.’ He paused momentarily. ‘I assume it’s the Sixth Division you want to join. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’ll believe me when I say that for most of the men who join up, it will be the first job with steady pay they’ve had in quite a while. Some of the younger ones have never known a regular job. Some are permanently unemployed. Too many men are still doing it tough, so it stands to reason the ranks will be swelled by the unemployed, unskilled and hard doers. That’s just a fact of contemporary Australian life.’

  ‘Sir, I don’t think I’m anything special; I’m not any different to them . . .’

  ‘Ah, but you are, son; your education is what separates you.’

  Danny frowned. ‘Sir, all my mates, the blokes I grew up with, fit your description. I’d like to be in it with them.’

  ‘That’s quite understandable, even commendable. But in terms of your country’s needs, it’s not sensible. It’s a fact of modern warfare that rank and file – ordinary soldiers – are wasted as a fighting force unless there are sufficient men qualified to lead them.’

  Danny felt that, judge or not, he couldn’t let Doc Evatt get away with a statement like that. ‘Sir, in the Herald yesterday the editorial pointed out that the rush to join the Sixth Division from the professional classes is such that there is sufficient officer material to lead an army.’

  Evatt hardly missed a beat. ‘I hope the Herald is correct – I cannot comment – but I am led to believe that you are a highly regarded sportsman and I guess not altogether stupid either. You captained your school in rugby and I’ve heard you described in Balmain as a born leader, someone young blokes choose to follow. During the First World War, the officers were almost entirely “educated”,’ he gave the word an ironic inflexion, ‘but nevertheless there were few men who could lead, and I include the generals in this list of ineffectual leaders. Australia also had its fair share of nincompoops – private schoolboys from our better families, professional men, officers who, when it came to leading in the battlefield, didn’t possess an ounce of commonsense. But we also had men such as Monash and Pompey Elliott, who, I’m sure you will agree, support my point; men who had completed their education, honed their intellect and so could understand the complexities of modern war.’

  ‘But . . . but, it’s only an Arts degree,’ Danny protested. ‘It has nothing to do with the complexities of modern warfare!’

  ‘True enough. But a degree, any degree, cultivates your mind, teaching you how to think, organise, analyse and research. Besides, you’ll receive the appropriate officer training when the time comes and if, as has been suggested, you have the instinct to lead, the rest will follow naturally.’ Doc Evatt leaned back and folded his hands across his pot belly. ‘Take my advice, son. You owe it to your country to complete your education, the education your country has granted you, to be used, one would hope, in its service. War is to be avoided at almost any cost – I myself lost two brothers in the last one – but now we’re in another we all have to contribute what we can. If I might put it differently, your country needs all your capabilities rather more than it needs another trigger finger.’

  Evatt rose to his feet. He looked steadily at Danny until the younger man was forced to drop his gaze. ‘Complete your degree, son. You’ll enjoy officer training. Take my word for it, this war isn’t going to be over in a year or even two or three. There will be plenty of opportunity to do your duty by your country when the time comes. Generally speaking, an athlete who is a natural leader makes a damn good officer. If men are prepared to follow you willingly, you must be competent to lead them intelligently.’

  Danny was suddenly conscious that he was being addressed by a justice of the High Court, living proof of what a boy from an ordinary background can achieve in Australia. ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll try to do as you say.’

  Evatt smiled. ‘Good. Now I must go.’ He extended his hand. ‘Good lad. Don’t disappoint me, or your country. Give us all you’ve got to give. That way we’ll win this war.’

  Danny watched from upstairs as Doc Evatt’s big black Buick pulled away from the front of the pub. The drinkers had spilled onto the pavement to see the great man leave, his mother at the forefront, giving the judge a farewell peck on the cheek. Brenda had won, Danny thought sourly. She always won.

  Doc Evatt’s logic couldn’t be faulted. Danny would go back to uni and eat crow while locals watched their sons marching off to war, thinking to themselves that he was the gutless wonder who would remain behind. Any explanation – that he planned to complete his degree and then go on to officer training – would only increase their silent scorn. Balmain boys were born with a healthy suspicion of authority and stuck with their mates come what may. A famous example, taught to every kid when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, was the story of the six Balmain boys, waiting in a narrow trench at Gallipoli to go over the top when the officer blew his whistle. The first boy handed his mate the letter he’d written to his sweetheart. The whistle blew five times and the first five were, each in turn, mown down by Turkish machine-gun fire. The sixth eventually returned home with five letters for five sweethearts. In fact the legend was so well known among Balmain folk that it was simply known as ‘Five Letters to Five Sweethearts’. When unity of opinion or effort against an outside opponent was called for, it was shortened further: ‘Okay, fellas, Five Letters!’

  Danny went downstairs to help with last drinks, then cleaned the bar and afterwards went for a long walk, crossing over to neighbouring Birchgrove where he sat on a bench in a small park.

  Half Dunn had watched his grim-faced boy silently leave the pub without calling goodbye or indicating, as he usually did, when he might be back. He had no need to ask how the meeting had gone upstairs. Danny’s silence as he cleared the glasses and cleaned the bar was answer enough. She’d won.

  He felt for his son, recognising his own impotence in the face of Brenda’s determination. He still hadn’t recovered from the recent scene in the kitchen. Passing out at the sight of a drop of his own blood in Danny’s presence had been pathetic. After returning to the pub from Dr Keeble’s with a silent and humiliated Brenda, he’d waited while she went upstairs and shortly after returned with a hand mirror and led him into the ladies toilet. Making him stand in front of the mirror she’d held the second mirror up to the back of his head to show him the extent of the wound on his bald patch. It was truly nothing and he’d felt ashamed and worthless. Despite the satisfaction he’d obtained from the huge scare he’d given her, by silently demonstrating her contempt with the mirror, she’d ultimately made it seem like the cheap and unworthy trick it was. The large and tender bruise that came out around his coccyx caused him considerable pain when he sat down, but it could not be seen and, of course, he daren’t mention it now. He knew it would heal in time, but his humiliation would remain.

  Now, here was more of the same with Doc Evatt: the cursory way the great man had acknowledged him on arrival, a mere nod of the head as he and Bre
nda had sailed past and she’d called out to Danny to follow; then ignoring him completely on the way out. It hadn’t even occurred to her to include him, the father, in a discussion involving the boy’s future.

  She’d left the pub two nights previously dressed to the nines, new dress, hat, gloves, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, hopped into a waiting taxi she must have ordered earlier, and when he’d called out to her from the front door, she’d waved and called back, ‘Primo’s, Doc Evatt!’ She’d made no mention of her assignation the next day.

  Now she returned from farewelling the judge wearing a decidedly smug smile, but, as usual, didn’t bother to tell him a thing. She’d gone directly into her office, closing the door behind her. To hug herself gleefully? To gloat?

  Half Dunn felt a tightening in his chest, a feeling of frustrated rage that had been occurring more and more lately, in fact, since the declaration of hostilities a couple of weeks earlier. He had always felt a private shame that his obesity had prevented him from enlisting in the AIF towards the end of the last war. He traced his subsequent lethargy and sense of worthlessness to this rejection, which had been further exacerbated when the diggers returned home to bands and parades. He was fully aware of the deference shown to the men who had served their country, and of the way people in Wagga regarded him – girls in particular – with their slender arms around the waists of returned diggers, the corners of their pretty-coloured lips curled in contempt when they thought he wasn’t looking, or of how they’d coolly survey him under their lashes as they exhaled the smoke from their cigarettes, then disdainfully turn away. He’d sought solace in grog and covered his hurt with bombast, bonhomie and bullshit.

  This self-serving explanation for his early decline wasn’t strictly true. Lethargy, gluttony and a somewhat cowardly demeanour had marked him from childhood, but his large and abiding thirst had appeared promptly with the arrival of his legal drinking age and wasn’t necessarily due to his rejection by the army. We all seek comfort in excuses of our own invention and Half Dunn had come to believe in these largely fallacious reasons for his failure to live up to his own and others’ expectations.

  But this new conflict was Danny’s war, his rite of passage. His son was everything he would have liked to have been and wasn’t. Danny’s misfortune was that he’d come up against a formidable mother, a veritable force of nature, if not a virago, then certainly the single most determined person Half Dunn had ever known.

  Pathetically he realised that any effort he might make to support his son wasn’t worth a pinch of shit. Brenda was capable of cutting him down to size any time she liked, that is, when she didn’t simply ignore him. Even her former token ‘Yes, dears’ had now been replaced by an impatient tongue cluck and a flick of her hair.

  Half Dunn didn’t regard the Doc Evatt episode as an act of desperation on his wife’s part but perhaps uncharitably as an act of sheer determination. Now he watched helplessly from the sidelines as she schemed to get her way and in the process whipped the kid back into line.

  However, Brenda, after farewelling the judge, had barely made it to the safety of her office before she began to weep. Danny’s threat to leave home and university had been real. She could no longer bulldoze her son. The boy who had torn the porridge pot from her hand with such a look in his eyes was now a man who, unlike Half Dunn, was prepared to defy her. Had it not been for Doc Evatt’s silky logic, she realised, she might have lost both her son and her long-held ambition for him. The possibility that all she’d done might come to nought filled her with terror.

  She could see her mother’s pale-blue eyes with their look of resigned despair, her stoic father sweating in his wedding suit. With her help her twin sisters had progressed to shorthand and typing and held down nice clean billets, then regressed by marrying no-hopers, drinkers and gamblers, who condemned both women to lives of drudgery, with too many kids tugging at their aprons and too little money to nourish them properly. She’d tried so hard to lift them out of the mire and it had all amounted to nothing.

  She sometimes wondered if the smug, self-righteous middle class were correct about the hopeless lower classes being unable to rise above their misery, content to be pigs wallowing in their own filth. She had to prove them wrong, show them, and she would do this through her son. Danny carried the responsibility of the past and the future, redemption and fulfilment. If he failed her, then it had all been pointless, and she felt sure she lacked the strength of purpose to continue. She rose from her desk and, sinking to the small carpet beside it, began to pray. Mother Mary, Mother of God, Blessed Virgin, grant me two more years. In the name of God and all the saints, will you allow me to see my Danny holding that precious piece of paper? she begged on bended knees.

  Doc Evatt had been right. The raising of the Second AIF was a godsend to a lot of the young blokes on the peninsula. They were jack of bosses keeping them on casual rates or short-term employment. The Depression, in Balmain anyway, seemed to be grinding on endlessly. What work was available was exploited by the bosses, who constantly demanded more than they were entitled to from their workers. Furthermore, when a safety issue or legitimate complaint arose, they’d be quick to point out that there were another couple of hundred hungry men wanting a job; that if you didn’t toe the line, you’d be back on the pavement on your arse wondering what had hit you.

  Young blokes fed up with the insecurity saw the war as a chance to get off the poverty treadmill; not having to stand in the long line at Pyrmont docks at dawn trying to catch the foreman’s eye, hoping for a day’s mindless and backbreaking work; not forgetting at the end of the shift to seek out the bastard who’d hired you to thank him personally for the privilege, the sycophantic smile: ‘Remember me, mate. I’m good and I don’t make no trouble.’

  Seven bob a day was a bloody sight better than they were averaging in civilian life. In addition they’d have the status and respect given to the mighty Anzacs – Gallipoli and all that. But best of all, it was a chance to tell the boss to shove his fucking job up his fat arse!

  In January 1940, after initial training, the Sixth Division was sent somewhere in the Middle East for further training, no one quite knew where (Loose lips sink ships). It was becoming apparent that the war wasn’t progressing in the way everyone expected, and was far from coming to a successful end. By March, the beginning of the third and final year of Danny’s course, things had settled into what was being called the ‘Phoney War’.

  Danny reluctantly resolved to complete his third-year studies. A month into the new university term he met Helen Brown, a tall, leggy blonde, feisty, steady eyed and pretty, a student taking her MA in ancient history who didn’t go weak at the knees when he approached. She wouldn’t even let him kiss her until their fourth date and then only after she’d taken him home to get the approval of her dad, a chemist in Birchgrove, and her mum. When they gave him the nod, she gave him his first demure kiss, light and on the cheek, with no encore and strictly no pashing or groping to follow.

  Danny metaphorically pulled up his daks, buttoned his fly and said goodbye to those several generous girlfriends on the peninsula who’d indulged him more or less on request. He did it as nicely as he could, explaining how he was going to join up the moment he graduated and it just wasn’t fair. His deep-blue eyes, looking gravely into theirs, did the trick. Each in turn, sobbing, begged him to change his mind, but when they saw that his duty to his country must come first, they ended up demanding one for the road. Danny felt it his duty to oblige them before delivering himself body and soul to Miss Helen Brown, even though she and he had only reached the stage of a chaste kiss, lip to lip, with tongues safely confined behind teeth. He wasn’t within a bull’s roar of taking her to bed.

  Then, in early June, the Phoney War was over and the empire was suddenly in deadly peril. The unimaginable had happened – the Maginot Line had collapsed and France had fallen. There was the chaotic scramble to withdraw Allied troops fr
om Dunkirk, and now Britain stood alone facing a victorious and triumphant enemy across the narrow expanse of the English Channel. Defeat looked a real possibility. What, people asked, would happen to Australia if Britain fell? Australian troop divisions were in the Middle East. With the British Navy out of the picture, the German U-boats would control the seas. Our available fighting men would be stranded. A resurgent Japan was beating an aggressive drum. There was every possibility they would join the war on the German side. What then? Australia would be alone, undefended, with the Japs coming at us through South-East Asia. White Australia’s oldest fear would be realised: the yellow hordes of Asia would be upon us. The excrement, as they say in the classics, had well and truly hit the rotating blades.

  Danny agonised about what to do, working hard at his studies, but resenting every minute of it. Then, when he had only months to go at university, a deciding factor in the form of Billy Scraper walked into the pub on a Saturday afternoon, resplendent in an RAAF uniform so new you could smell the pine resin from its wooden packing case. He was with his old man, Sky Scraper, so named because he drove the big crane at Mort Dock Engineering, who was beaming fit to burst at the congratulations the patrons were shouting out to his son as he lapped up the reflected glory. Billy’s old man peeled off to join a rowdy group he obviously knew, but Billy, pausing only to receive the odd back slap, walked directly up to Danny behind the bar.

  Observing his approach, Danny grinned, holding up his hand. ‘Don’t even think of buying a beer, mate. Today you drink on the house.’ It was winter, and because he hadn’t seen Billy for a couple of months, he’d assumed he’d joined up. Often the period between joining up and being sent to training camp was no more than a couple of days and you couldn’t get around to saying all your goodbyes. Besides, Billy was essentially a water-polo friend; they’d never been close mates.