Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Remember, I also sit my matriculation exams that year. In fact, I’d just finished them the week before Sarah’s graduation. Of course, I didn’t do as well as she did, not even half as well, but I think I passed okay and Nancy wants me to go to university if I get the marks. The Victorian Forestry Commission are giving out a scholarship and Mr McDonald, the district officer, is keen for me to apply for it. But I don’t know. It sounds attractive and Nancy is dead keen I should do it, but I’ve seen Mr McDonald and he seldom gets out in the bush, mostly he’s in his office pushing a pen and he doesn’t even have a degree. I’ve noticed before that blokes with degrees always end up behind desks.

  Besides, there’s been something nagging me for months, ever since Tommy’s death this idea has been knocking around in my head. I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night and it’s there. It’s there first thing in the morning when we get up for the garbage run. I know it’s mad and it don’t make sense, in fact, just the opposite, but I want to join the army. Yeah, I know, knowing what I know and what Tommy’s been through it’s a bloody stupid idea, but I can’t help it, that’s what I’ve set my heart on doing.

  Nancy goes spare. When I finally summon up enough courage to tell her, she’s in the kitchen rolling pastry for sausage rolls for little Colleen’s birthday. I tell her right off, because if I don’t I’ll lose the courage. ‘Mum, I’ve decided to join the army.’

  She doesn’t move for a moment, then she turns around and I think she’s going to brain me on the spot. ‘Join the what?’

  ‘The army, I’ve made up my mind.’

  ‘Over my dead body, Mole Maloney!’ Only the way she’s coming at me with the rolling pin, I reckon it’s going to be over mine. Even for Nancy, you’ve never heard such a fuss, it’s nearly as bad as when Sarah told her she was pregnant.

  I’ve spoken to Bozo long before I went to see Nancy and he thought it was a ratshit idea and said I should go to university, or if I didn’t want to, he’d like me to join him in the transport business. But after a while he could see it was no good, that I’d made up my mind.

  ‘You’re a bloke who thinks about everything first, Mole. I’ve got to give you that. Been the steady one. But I have to ask you one last time, are you absolutely sure that’s what you want to do?’

  I’ve always thought of Bozo as being the steady one, I’ve just been the person standing there listening, stickybeaking, so it’s a nice compliment, I think. ‘Yeah, that’s what I want,’ I tell him. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Righto then, I’ll support you with Nancy. Better speak to Sarah first though, you’ll need her on your side as well.’

  So the day after Sarah’s graduation, I take her aside, tell her and ask her to help me with Nancy. I’ve got to admit, like Bozo she’s not happy and tries her best to dissuade me. When she sees she can’t, she says, ‘Will you go to Duntroon? If you get a university entrance pass in your exams you could take a degree with them, they’ll pay for you to study and you’ll still be in the army and be an officer.’

  I wonder what she’s thinking when she says it. To my knowledge she’s never seen Murray Templeton since he ran away. Now he’s graduated as an officer. We’ve seen him around town a few times. Once when Bozo and me were at a footie game we saw him with his uniform on, the one pip on his shoulder. Naturally we didn’t speak to him and he looked over and saw us, but he didn’t come over or wave or anything. Bozo said he was a bloody coward. It was like he didn’t know who we were. Now Sarah, like always, guesses what I’m thinking.

  ‘No, Mole, I don’t love Murray, that’s all over long ago. I’ve got my daughter and that’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It wouldn’t upset me in the least if you went to Duntroon and became an officer.’

  ‘Nah, I want to join the proper army, I don’t want to be an officer.’ She has another go at me and points out how disappointed Nancy is going to be in me. But in the end Sarah gives me her blessing. Funny, she says the same thing as Bozo, that I’ve always thought things out and am the steady one in the family. I’m not so sure now that that’s supposed to be a compliment, although they both said it like it was one. Sarah then smiles, gives me a big hug and a kiss, and says, ‘Mole, I’ll always love you whatever you do, you’ll make a wonderful soldier.’

  Morrie, when he hears, says the world’s not a safe place and good soldiers are needed and Sophie bursts into tears, she can only remember one kind of soldier.

  I don’t want to go on about Nancy. She raves and sulks for a week and argues with Bozo and calls Sarah who’s gone to Queensland with Morrie and Sophie for their first holiday in six years. Templeton’s staying with us because little Colleen loves to have her and the other way round. The three of them, Morrie, Sophie and Sarah, are having a rest, Sarah needs one before she starts as a resident medical officer at the Royal Melbourne in January. Nancy calls Sarah at her hotel and speaks to her for an hour and I can hear her arguing. It must have cost a fortune and I’m feeling guilty. Then Nancy comes off the phone and sits down, while little Colleen makes her a cup of tea and gives her a Bex. Templeton climbs into her lap and Nancy strokes her flaming red hair that’s just like her mother’s. After a while, she calls me over and says, ‘Yer a typical bloody Maloney, Mole. Two paths to take, one good, one bad, you’ll choose the wrong one, every time!’ ‘What’s that mean?’ I ask.

  ‘You can join the bloody army! Gawd help us all!’

  I haven’t talked about Mike in London, that’s mostly because he doesn’t write to us much, though we know he’s okay because Sophie gets these sketches for kids’ clothes in the mail and he writes at the bottom, ‘Still surviving! Love to all, Mike.’

  I write to him every month and give him all the gossip but I don’t expect he’ll write back, Mike’s the sort of person who’s got a tongue sharp as an axe, he’s good on his feet and he’s got imagination. He’ll see a picture of a dress and, quick as lightning, he’ll redraw it, changing it, and suddenly it’s a new dress that’s much better than the old one. But he’s not the sort to sit down and write. Though he does sometimes say at the bottom of the kids’ sketches: ‘Please tell Mole to keep writing to me.’

  Then out of the blue, just before I join the army in January 1962, I get this long letter from Mike. I can’t believe it, it’s taken him ages to write because the pen he’s using isn’t always the same colour, though it’s all in ballpoint except when he writes in pencil. It’s scrawled because even Mike’s writing is impatient, more like drawing than writing. There are big sweeps in the letters and sometimes where a word ends in ‘s’, the ‘s’is connected to a sweeping line that’s nearly a quarter of an inch away from the letter behind it. When I point this out to Nancy, she says, ‘That’s his artistic nature.’ But I reckon it’s because he’s impatient to finish the word and get on to the next one. The letter has no date on it so that’s also a sign that it’s been written over a long time. Besides, Mike probably didn’t know the date anyway. He’d know the month all right, and maybe what day of the week it was, but he wouldn’t know the date unless the next day was Christmas or New Year.

  324 Earls Court Road Earls Court,

  London SW5

  England.

  Dear Mole & Family,

  I haven’t written before because as you know writing is not my strong point. But thanks, Mole, for writing and also Sarah, who’s written four times. Tell Mum to write because I really love to get letters from you all.

  Well, to tell you the truth I haven’t written because things have been tough. I better start at the beginning because it’s OK now because I’ve got a job and I’m learning heaps. But more about that later also.

  The boat docked at Tilbury and we took the train up to London. One of the friends I made on the boat knew of a place in Earls Court which he said was cheap and I could come with him. It wasn’t that cheap and we could only have a bath once a week. The room I’ve got, it’s really a garr
et, isn’t much bigger than a cupboard. In fact, I can’t stand up straight without my head hitting the ceiling and the bed fits into a cupboard and you pull it down at night and it fills all the space there is in the room except for the gas ring. There’s also an army fold-up table and chair you can use when the bed is locked in the cupboard and a set of shelves for your clothes on one wall. The other wall has a tiny window you can see the rooftops of other houses from.

  When you want to use the bed, you fold the table and chair up, pull the bed down and store the table and chair in the cupboard. The gas ring is for cooking and it has its own meter. You cook on it by putting a shilling in. I can tell you now that spaghetti brought to the boil with a small tin of camp stew mixed in at the last minute costs a shilling. You can get four kettles boiled if you only put enough water in for one cup of tea or powdered soup.

  That’s enough about the sleeping and cooking arrangements.

  Boy, do I miss Sophie’s cooking!

  But the thing I miss the most is having a shower every day, even a cold one like at home in winter after garbage. The English only have baths and it costs two shillings to feed the meter in the bathroom to get about four inches of hot water in the tub. Even if you were rich, you’re only allowed one bath a week in this first-class establishment. The landlady, Mrs Gibson, said I’d be destroying the natural oils in my skin if I bathed more than once a week and that ‘it ain’t natural in a healthy boy’!

  But you can forget all that, because London is the capital of the world! No flamin’ risk! I haven’t had the money to go to the theatre yet but just the art galleries and the museums and other places you can go to practically for free leave you gobsmacked. Like the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert. I’ll tell you all about them some other time.

  When I first came here I froze my balls off. I wore every stitch of clothing I owned to bed at night and I still froze. Shit, it’s cold here in the winter! It also rains quite a lot, but when it shines the parks are beautiful and green and there’s flowers everywhere in the spring, daffodils and hyacinths and bluebells in the woods, they just grow out of the grass natural as anything. In the winter, when I first came, I saw a robin in Kensington Gardens, it was weird, like straight out of Peter Pan or something.

  I like the English a lot, well some of them, they can be very snooty and sometimes bloody condescending, but when you get to know them they’re not such a bad bunch. The ordinary people are great but there’s a definite class structure here and everyone knows their place and, boy, don’t you dare step out of line! It’s how people speak that decides what class you’re in and they’re all experts at picking up on who’s who. Workmen wear caps here and they touch the rim of their caps and stand to attention if somebody who looks posh comes up to them and asks them a question.

  But the people in the fashion biz are, to put it mildly, bloody dishonest. They’re very tactful but they don’t tell the truth a lot of the time. I’m the boy from the bush and at first I believe everything they say but soon I learn the hard way what’s said and what’s done are two different things entirely.

  Like, when I first got here, I schlepped my sketches around to all the London manufacturers. You’d go to the front office and say you were looking for a position and could you please see the chief designer. Generally some bloke would eventually come out and I soon learnt he probably was an assistant designer or something like that because the chief designers wouldn’t stoop to coming out for an out-of-work kid. This is how the interview goes. It’s generally in the foyer.

  HIM: Good morning.

  ME: Ahem, I’m looking for a job as an assistant designer.

  HIM: I see, where else have you worked?

  ME: In Australia, I did my apprenticeship in Flinders Lane, that’s in Melbourne.

  HIM (not meaning it): How interesting. Fascinating. Do you have any sketches? (You soon learn that words like ‘interesting’ and ‘fascinating’ mean ‘who’s this little upstart from the colonies flogging shit?’ or something like that.)

  ME: Yes, of course. (I hand him my folio. He starts to look at the sketches turning them over, at first pretty fast, then a little slower, perhaps he likes what he sees, you’d never know from his expression.)

  HIM: Hmm! You’d better leave these with me, our chief designer has hopped over to Paris for a couple of days and I’d like him to see your work. Well done, Michael. Er, what did you say your surname was?

  ME: Maloney, sir.

  HIM (one eyebrow raised): Irish, are you?

  ME: No, sir, I’m Australian.

  If I’d told him I was from Yankalillee in north-eastern Victoria, later he’d have pissed his pants laughing. As it is, he most likely thinks Melbourne is pretty Hicksville. Which I suppose it is. Compared to London, everything is.

  So you walk away on cloud nine, thinking, well at least he’s liked your work, never know what can happen in the big city. He’s asked you to come back in three days when the chief designer will be back from Paris. In the meantime the chief designer is eating a cheese and pickle sandwich in the company canteen, though, of course, you don’t know this.

  I come back three days later to collect my samples, all wideeyed and bushy-tailed, and I’m waiting in the foyer when this model comes out to take a phone call. She’s wearing a calico garment, that’s a garment cut from a pattern made up from the original. All it is is pins and stitches to see how the garment will work on a live model. The calico the model’s wearing is one of my patterns. Only difference is that the chalk marks where the buttons will go are in a slightly different configuration.

  I’m excited as anything. I’m on my way, I think. Then the original bloke comes out and hands me back my folio and says he’s shown them to the boss but they’re not really interested, there’s nothing they can offer me.

  ‘What about the model?’ I ask.

  ‘What model?’ he says.

  ‘The model who came out to take a phone call, she was wearing my calico. You’ve ripped off my design, you bastard!’

  ‘What? What are you saying? Are you saying I stole your design?’ he shouts.

  ‘Yes, bring back the model and I’ll prove it!’I take out my folio and pull out the design. ‘There you go, that one, you’ve ripped it off. Only thing you’ve marked differently are the button holes! Go on, bring that model back out, I’ll prove it to you!’

  Suddenly the designer jabs his finger into my chest. ‘Look, sonny boy, if you don’t get off these premises right now I’ll call the police. You don’t know what you’re talking about! Now bugger off!’

  I suppose it’s a compliment, because it’s happened three times, one winter suit and two summer outfits all at different manufacturers. So I guess I’m a slow learner. But what I don’t understand is, if they’re ripping off my designs why don’t they give me a job? I’m not asking for a lot of bread, I just want to learn.

  Then later, when I’ve got a job, I learn why. Most of the manufacturers have blokes designing who are well past it. There’s a fashion revolution going on and they don’t know what’s hit them. They know how to cut a pattern but they’ve got no new ideas. So they rip off the young designers who come in, same as they did me. It wasn’t just me they’ve done it to, it’s standard procedure. They don’t want the youngsters to show them up, see.

  I have got to know some of the young designers. I met one in the foyer of a manufacturer’s, a real nice bloke, and he introduced me to his friends, who are also designers and some even have jobs. They like my stuff so I’m invited into their group, most of whom are as broke as I am. My money is just about run out and I’m buying a packet of dried apples and eating eight apple rings in the morning and drinking a pint of water with it so the apples swell up in my stomach and I feel full for a good part of the day.

  Then I land a job, one of the designers in our group wins a scholarship to go to America and he recommends me for his old job
as a junior designer where he’s been working. A place called Exquizeet. It’s middle-of-the-road and it’s not much dough but I can pay the rent and eat once a day at Walls. That’s a cheap restaurant you can get fish and chips and sausages and mash, pork pies, toad in the hole, food like that.

  The good thing is that they got a design room at Exquizeet and turn out quite a wide range and some stuff for the young people that doesn’t look like what their mums wear. But I soon learn that, as the new boy, it ain’t going to be easy. I design my first garment which the boss likes and tells me to cut the pattern. The head designer isn’t all that impressed when the boss tells him. ‘The boy’s good, see how he handles the pattern.’

  I cut the pattern and the chief designer can’t find a fault with it, so I think I’m doing OK. The next thing is to do the calico on a model and choose the fabric and make up the garment. Well, they bring in a model and I make up the calico and it looks beaut. But the model says it doesn’t feel right and she doesn’t like it. ‘It simply won’t do, darling!’ I don’t know at that time that some of the models are real bitches or that this one has been put up to it by the chief designer and is a real bitch all on her own.

  Anyway, the chief designer is in the process of telling me the design is ratshit and, while the sketch was promising and the pattern looked good, it simply doesn’t translate into calico. All the other designers say nothing, they know it works great but they’re too scared to speak up. But I get lucky again. The big boss walks in and sees the calico on the model. ‘My dear, that’s perfect!’ he says, and he turns to me. ‘What fabric do you have in mind, Mike?’