Two Generations

by Anne Connor

‘Kick it, like I did. Come on, kick it like I showed you. Go on, have a go. Kick it, kick it, as I showed you.’ Jock took the newspaper football out of Cleary’s hands and dropped it onto his foot and gave it a gentle kick. ‘See, it’s easy.’

  It was too much for the little boy and ended in tears.

  ‘Now don’t cry. That’s silly. Don’t be a baby. Come on, kick it,’ and Jock pushed the newspaper football into the little boy’s chest.

  Bess watched while she hung out the second load of washing. She noticed how Jock’s speech was sounding more Australian – his English accent softening. In addition, she noticed how impatient he had become.

  She walked over and stood next to Cleary and put her arm around his shoulder. He buried his face in her dress. She patted his head and stroked the side of his face.

  ‘Never mind, there, there. It’s alright.’

  Jock watched his wife and son together. He’d never have the bond they had. He remembered again the last conversation he’d had with his own mother and the familiar sense of dread and aloneness returned.

  Cleary stopped crying and Bess handed Jock a red rubber ball.

  ‘Throw this to him, but not too hard. He can manage that.’

  Jock had wanted to be close to his son, had looked forward to seeing him again after the years away. He had missed out on so much of the boy’s growing up.

  ‘Give him time, love,’ Bess said. ‘He doesn’t know who you are. You left when he was just months old. It’s not his fault you’re a stranger to him. You’re the one who made the decision to leave. Didn’t you think there’d be consequences to such a choice?’

  ‘I don’t have time. I’ve only got a few days left.’ Jock stood holding the rubber ball in one hand. ‘He’s being spoiled here with you women. He’s growing up to be a sissy. He can’t even kick a football.’

  ‘He’s not yet four. Hardly a failure if he can’t kick a football.’

  ‘Well, it’s got to change when I’m home for good.’ Jock threw the ball into the sandpit and walked up the path to the back door. ‘There will be rules he has to obey.’

  Bess moved back to the clothesline. Cleary walked with her holding her dress. ‘Rules! What are you talking of, rules?’ Bess said. ‘This is not the bloody army.’

  She had become the go-between, translating their son’s wants for Jock and comforting the boy when his father expected too much. To keep the peace, she took to lying next to the youngster at night-time in the front bedroom until he drifted off to sleep. Jock played canasta in the lounge room with her mother and sisters.

  When her son’s breathing indicated he was asleep, she untangled herself and crept out of the room. She walked along the hallway to the lounge room to where the canasta game was taking place and stood in the doorway trying to adjust her eyes to the brightness of the room.

  Jock smiled when he saw her and said, ‘Come and help me out, love. The girls are ganging up on me.’

  Lae

  Army records, war diaries, veterans’ anecdotes and my father’s journals helped me piece together my father’s time in New Guinea between 1943 and 1945.

  Orders arrived for the 2/14th to leave Australia. With America’s large contingent of armed forces annihilated in Darwin, New Guinea was strategically important as it provided locations for Japan to set up large land, air and naval bases. The enemy was well and truly entrenched in the jungles and it was the 2/14th’s job to stop them advancing. Jock was part of a regiment sent to Lae, to set up camp. Orders were to take over from the men who had been fighting the Japanese in the jungles for months. They were skin and bone and suffering either malaria, dysentery or both.

  It was 1943. Jock leaned on the railing of the Dutch merchant ship SS Bontekoe . He stared into the pitch-black sky, embracing the fresh ocean air. The diesel odour and the sea breeze took him back to his voyage from Southampton to Melbourne in twenty-nine.

  A lifetime ago.

  Handrails, seats, windowsills and lumpy pipes were covered with a greasy dark smudge, a mixture of black soot from the Bontekoe engines and sea air. Jock wrote there wasn’t much difference between the Dutch and British ships. But the passengers and their destinations were worlds apart. His voyage to Australia had been filled with excitement of a new life in a country filled with space, fresh air and sunshine. During the eight-week voyage from Southampton to Melbourne, three babies had been born. In capital letters and underlined twice, he had written NO BETTER SYMBOL OF NEW BEGINNINGS.

  On the Bontekoe, Jock could sense the men, many not yet twenty, knew danger was ahead of them. Dread and anticipation were palpable. Jock wondered whether he’d return and whether he’d return the same. His thoughts were interrupted by the unmistakable noise of someone heaving. He knew what it meant. Many people he’d travelled with from the United Kingdom spent their sea voyage bent over the ship’s rail. He followed the sound and came across a young man stripped to his waist leaning over the vessel’s handrail.

  ‘Can I get you water, mate?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m out. Dropped mine over the side.’

  Jock handed him his water bottle. ‘I’m Jock.’

  The young man took a gulp, rinsed his mouth then spat over the side. ‘Joe Forrester.’

  ‘Takes a while to get sea legs,’ said Jock. ‘You’ll be right.’

  Days later Jock saw land – just a speck on the horizon at first. He was on the top deck watching the sea and lost in thoughts of Bess and their son. He missed them and wondered whether he’d see them again. Guilt and dread flooded him when he remembered the way he acted with Cleary. I’m a drongo making him kick a stupid newspaper football. I don’t know what I was thinking. He made a promise to himself he’d make it up to his boy next time they were together, by being more patient and not expecting too much from him.

  As the ship edged closer, a wall of untamed prehistoric wilderness materialised before his eyes – an ancient landscape of giant trees and thick rainforest. He thought of how ordered England’s landscape was compared to the jungle emerging before him. He remembered Bess’ garden in Geelong, the fig and lemon trees, lavender bushes, geraniums, arum lilies, and spongy buffalo grass.

  He stood in the clearing taking in the verdant landscape surrounding him. Both sides of the Butibum River were edged with snarled forest and hundred-year-old palm trees with umbrella-sized leaves. Pink and orange tropical flowers shot through the soft grass. The air was humid and thick with a scent Jock hadn’t come across before – frangipani, a perfect, delicate white flower amidst the rugged terrain. The grass was covered with a carpet of frangipani blossoms. Every now and then a single perfect flower lay in the midst of the bruised and brown petals.

  They set up away from the sandy riverbed, hidden in the primitive landscape between two mountain ranges. The locals called the larger group Atzera, the smaller remained nameless. What little clothes Jock wore, were constantly damp from sweat or rain.

  Camp was assembled on the soft grass under pandanus palms. Canvas sheets thrown over stripped bamboo poles became two-man shelters. The front and back of the tents were left open to make the most of any breeze, and closed against the pelting rains by unfurling the rolled up canvas sheets. Larger tents housed long tables and benches. The men used these pavilions as a meeting place where they ate their meals, wrote journals or letters home, played card games, or just sat, smoked and talked. A number were fitted out as sleeping quarters. Wooden supply boxes and tin drums were set up outdoors and used as seats and tables. The tents were erected in a horseshoe shape with the central section left for drill practice and parades. Bulky army supply boots killed the grass and the rains created a muddy mess.

  Breakfast was the usual weevil-infested bully beef and tinned peaches. Jock couldn’t face it again and ate two bananas and a guava he found on the ground, followed by a cup of weak black tea. He threw the fruit scraps at a couple of ravens scavenging near the communal tent, rinsed his mug in a bowl of water and walked back to his tent. He slipped the cup into the folded blank
et then checked his gun leaning against a couple of wooden boxes stacked in the corner and made sure his Owen was empty with the safety switch on.

  He was reminded of the talk describing the Owen, known as the ‘diggers’ darling’, when they were back at Puckapunyal. The officer-in-charge had explained the benefits of this new weapon, how it was different to similar guns of its type. It had a selector switch. This meant it could be secured in a ‘safe’ position. If the trigger was pulled, it wouldn’t shoot. On setting two, it slipped to semi-automatic, shooting just once. On the last setting, the weapon became fully automatic, shooting multiple times. He made sure the safety switch was on and his gun was empty.

  Lieutenant Broom, a new officer assigned to them, reminded Jock of a head prefect at an all-boys private school. While most soldiers were bare-chested with their socks flopping over their boots, Broom had tucked his buttoned-up shirt neatly into his shorts and pulled his socks up to just under his knees, folding each top over so they matched perfectly.

  Jock wrote of his curiosity as to what caused such a man to tick. Broom was a loner, rude and disrespectful to the men under his command. Whenever possible, he grovelled to higher-ranked officers. During a card game, Jock heard Broom’s story from Bluey. The young gunner and the Lieutenant had grown up in the same street in Glenelg, south of Adelaide. The red-headed soldier punctuated the card game with snippets of Broom, always checking over his shoulder, making sure the Lieutenant was out of earshot. He told the men around the table how Broom’s father was a major in the 5th Australian Division in the First World War – one of the five and a half thousand men killed within a twenty-four-hour period at the Battle of Fromelles. Broom was five when his mother received the news. She took the envelope from the telegram man, walked into the lounge room and drank the cocktail cabinet dry then passed out on the floor. Broom joined the army on his eighteenth birthday and when he walked into the kitchen in his uniform his mother burst into tears then opened a bottle of vermouth, or so the story went.

  Bluey’s mum told her son the reason she thought he had joined up was because he liked knowing what was going to happen next. This was different to home, when his mother could be cooking tea and talking one night and then passed out drunk on the floor, the next.

  The Lieutenant stood under the pandanus palms in the middle of the boggy clearing with hands on hips and feet spread wide apart.

  He ordered the men to strip bamboo for tent supports.

  Jock struggled with cutting the rattan. It was a case of learning as you go. The machete he was given was old and had rusted in the tropical air. He watched the others attack the bamboo, but they weren’t much better. He tried holding the stalk at the top and then ran the machete downwards. But he couldn’t get traction and the tool slipped and came close to cutting his leg. He swerved to save himself and nicked the side of his hand. As he wrapped his dirty handkerchief around the cut, he heard a rustling noise behind the clumps. He had been looking for older, thicker, bamboo and hadn’t realised he’d wandered deep into the jungle away from the other men. He stood stock-still and moved his head from one side to the other, listening, trying to work out what was making the noise. They had been warned of wild boars, how they’d run straight at you, lift you off your feet with their tusks, then come back and gore their startled prey. Plus, the threat of the Japanese nearby was always front of mind.

  He had left his Owen leaning next to a tree fifty yards away. He had no hope. The noise grew louder. Whatever was behind the bamboo was moving closer. I’m a goner. His hands began to tremble and he thought of making a run for it when Joe Forrester appeared from the thicket and took the machete out of Jock’s hands.

  ‘Here mate, give us a shot.’ He stripped the stalk cleanly and quickly, moved onto another, then another, until three identical tent poles lay flattening the kunai grass.

  In an attempt to steady his hands, Jock pushed them deep in his pockets and said in a deep voice, ‘Well, you’re looking better than when I saw you on deck the other night.’

  ‘I’m on solid ground mate, that’s why.’

  ‘Pretty deft with that machete.’

  ‘I worked in a timber yard in Perth. Used to working with wood.’

  Jock took his sweaty hands out of his pockets and walked towards where Joe was stripping the bamboo.

  ‘Usually, cut logs much thicker than this. That’s how I got to Darwin; brought a load up for laying tracks.’ He skinned another piece of bamboo and threw it on the ground. Then turned and sliced another at its base, held it at one end, with the other resting on the earth, and continued cutting. ‘Got drinking with a few blokes at The Don and before I knew it, I’d joined up. Thanks for the water. It was a lifesaver.’

  Jock piled the bamboo together. ‘No worries.’

  ‘Always been a healthy bloke; never known such sickness. Glad I didn’t enlist in the navy. Probably would have deserted the first port I landed in. You’ve done a bit of sailing, have you, Jock?’

  ‘From Southampton to Melbourne.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘England, mate,’ Jock said smiling to himself.

  ‘This is the furthest I’ve travelled,’ Joe said, as he skinned more bamboo. ‘And before here, the furthest was Darwin. I guess you could say I’ve lived a sheltered life in Perth.’

  ‘Live with family, do you, son?’

  ‘My parents and six brothers; I’m the youngest. Mum was cut up when I sent her a telegram saying I’d enlisted too. The other boys joined up – overseas in Ambon, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. My sweetheart Cecilia isn’t too happy either. She sent me a letter and I could tell she’d been crying when she wrote it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She wrote it in the letter.’

  Jock smiled again to himself.

  ‘She wants to get married, but me going to Darwin and then enlisting and now over here, that will have to wait.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll get over it, mate,’ said Jock. The two men worked together stacking and tying twine around bundles of bamboo.

  ‘Do you have anyone bunking in your tent, Jock?’

  Jock shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘On my Pat Malone at the moment. Thought I must have had stinky body odour. But then again, I suppose all of us have that.’

  ‘Do you mind if I bunk in with you? I’m in the long tent. It’s crowded, noisy.’

  ‘Sure, son. I’m at the end of camp. I’m a quiet lad.’

  ‘Suits me. Might help keep me out of trouble.’

  Within days, mould grew on leather boots, kitbags, blankets, hats, clothes, canvas ceilings, and walls. Fresh air moving through the shelters was a weak effort against the multiplying spores. The ground, carpeted with lush grass, was home to snakes, giant spiders and scorpions. Jock made sure his army supply and personal effects were kept up off the ground to stop the marauders from slipping into dark corners. He was in the habit of shaking boots and clothes before dressing, a lesson he learned while stationed in Darwin.

  Jock and Joe swapped stories. Joe was intrigued by Jock’s life in England and reciprocated by telling Jock of his dream of buying land for a farm, building his own house, marrying Cecilia and having a cricket team of kids.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone else this,’ Joe said as they worked together building the camp. ‘People might think I’m bonkers. Where will I get money to buy a farm and build a house? I’m just a numbskull from Perth.’

  ‘Life’s in front of you, lad. It’s a great dream to have,’ said Jock.

  Jock was grateful for Joe’s strength when they needed to shift the heavy wireless casings and batteries from ship to camp. Palm trees were used as makeshift towers. Wires were looped from tree to tree in an effort to pick up signals from other camps scattered across the island, or on ships anchored off the coast. New Guinea’s rough terrain was a major interference with coverage and the humid conditions disrupted machinery. If the line was dead, it was trial and error to find the cause. Rats were a major culprit as th
ey ate through wires. Jock was one of a number of signalmen whose job it was to send and receive messages. He was in a team of four and worked a six-hour shift, during a twenty-four-hour period, for seven days. Then another team took over. Night shifts were the worst. On your own in the pitch-black was dangerous. Not only could nocturnal animals cause damage, but a number of Papuans were dangerous. While most of the local people were friendly and harmless, there had been cases where men on night duty were found in the morning with their throats slit.

  Jock spent much of his spare time writing. He found a couple of old wooden supply boxes and used them as a writing table and seat at the back of his tent, away from the racket of the parade ground and the noise from the other soldiers.

  15 NOVEMBER 1943

  Settled into camp life here in the wilds of NG. Joe Forrester has attached himself to me and I can tell he is missing home and the closeness of his big family. He talks a lot of home back in Perth, his mum and dad and brothers. None of the other lads listen to him and tell him to wipe his tears and cut his mother’s apron strings. I feel for the lad. He’s such a big strong boy, but underneath that front, he’s a sensitive lad. I’ve had my fair share of homesickness. I didn’t realise how important it is to have people around you who understand your history. When it’s not there, you have to explain yourself and you get sick of it, so you don’t bother. Young Joe is going through that, I can tell. So I just listen. He seems to like that. I’ve become quite fond of him – like a little brother. And he looks out for me as well. He helped me cut down the bamboo. He cut. I stacked. He also took over most of the heavy work when we were ordered to build a latrine on top of a grassy rise at the back of the camp. He did most of the heavy digging of the hole exactly at the peak. I cut out the bottom of a drum that had been filled with flour, then mounted it over the hole Joe dug. The latrine doesn’t have a roof or screens and is in full view of the camp.

  There are two advantages. Occupants have a 360-degree view and lads below could see whether it was engaged, without walking up the hill. Pleased Horry, Tic and Sticks are here too. Good to have great mates.