The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  Her three flatmates emerged from their bedrooms and we all said hello. Moments after we’d left the flat I couldn’t have told you if they were collectively brunettes, redheads or blondes, pretty or plain. I simply couldn’t take my eyes off Sally Forsythe.

  Joe Popkin was waiting for us next to the Packard and I introduced Sally to him. ‘Evenin’, ma’am,’ he said politely, not extending his hand.

  ‘Mr Popkin! I’ve heard all about you. You’re the hammer-man! Saved Da Judge in the reformatory!’ Sally exclaimed, genuinely excited to meet him. ‘Da Judge often talks about you.’

  ‘Yeah, I got dat message, ma’am,’ Joe said, smiling, although I think a little embarrassed. ‘Da Judge, he got a big mouth,’ he chuckled, shaking his head.

  Then, impulsively, Sally stood on tiptoe and kissed him. I thought for a moment that the big black bloke was going to collapse on the spot. Then he smiled, touching his cheek. In one spontaneous gesture Sally had won his heart forever.

  We climbed into the back of the car, Joe holding the door open. Once inside and settled Sally said, ‘I’m so excited, Nick — where are we going?’

  ‘Ask Joe,’ I said. ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Hospital, ma’am.’

  There was a second of silence as we took this in. ‘Hospital?’ we both exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Joe replied politely.

  ‘Is this some sort of practical joke, Joe?’ I asked. ‘Because if it is —’

  ‘No, Nick, patient da virtue, wait on. Dis a hospital even Da Judge and da chief, dey cain’t get in.’

  I turned and looked at Sally; we were both mystified. ‘Why would they want to?’ I enquired.

  ‘Cos everbody want to! Nearly dere,’ Joe said enigmatically.

  We hadn’t gone much further when we turned into a road with a sign that read ‘US Navy Mobile Hospital No. 9. Camp Hill’.

  ‘Jesus, what now?’ I whispered.

  ‘We nearly arrive, Nick.’ He braked the big Packard and turned to me. ‘Da chief, he say, yoh gotta pin dat Navy Cross ribbon.’

  I think by this time Sally was close to tears. I fished the ribbon from my outside jacket pocket and pinned it beside the DSC. Then Joe Popkin accelerated and we proceeded down the road. Moments later we heard the strains of a Glenn Miller tune coming from what sounded like a swing band. We drove into a gravelled circular driveway and halted outside a building that was ablaze with light. ‘If this is a hospital, then the patients are having a whale of a time,’ I said in an effort to cheer Sally.

  ‘Dis hospital got two t’ousan’ patient, Nick.’ Then Joe started to chuckle. ‘It also got da navy senior officers’ club, da best in da land. Admiral Ben J. Horn office, dey make da arrangements. Da Admiral ’pologises he cain’t be wid yoh all tonight, but he want yoh to have a good time and evert’in’ took care of; no money change hands.’

  ‘Shit!’ I exclaimed, temporarily forgetting there was a lady in the car.

  Sally giggled. ‘Nick, come to think of it, I’ve heard it mentioned in hushed tones at the Bellevue, but I never dreamed… Oh, are we posh enough?’ she suddenly exclaimed.

  ‘Don’ cha worry, ma’am, yoh gonna be da prettiest dere. All dem doctor, admiral, dey gonna want to dance wid yoh. Nick, dat der Navy Cross, dey gonna be fallin’ over demself. I be back here t’enty-tree hunnert hours but yoh c’n stay long as yoh want. Be happy, enjoy, I’ll be waitin’.’ He grinned as he let us out of the back of the big two-star car.

  It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable going-out-somewhere nights of my life so far. Lots of top brass (there weren’t any other kind), one of them a captain, came up to our table to congratulate me on my award, though it wasn’t too difficult to see that the captain’s primary motive was to get a closer squiz at Sally. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, and sent a bottle of French champagne over to our table. He was fairly young for his rank, no more than forty I’d say, so he must have been a bright bloke. For the first time we both tasted caviar, Sally with champagne, me with Coca-Cola — not quite the same experience. We ate and danced and it was easy to see Sally was having a great time. She went to the powder room around ten o’clock to freshen up and came back smiling. ‘All the women want to know where I found you, Nick. I could see they didn’t believe me when I said, “I served him a Coke from behind the bar at the Bellevue Hotel.”’ She laughed. ‘One of them, an older woman, turned to the others and said, “Not only stunning, but she’s also got a great sense of humour!”’

  We danced until we nearly dropped and it was one o’clock when we came out of the club to find Joe waiting, asleep behind the wheel. We took Sally home, the mother factor preventing anything else. But on the way she snuggled into me in the back of the Packard, and Sally’s kissing had the same David Livingstone intrepid-explorer touch the Virgin Mary had perfected in Melbourne.

  I was bushed beyond belief and when I got back to the Bellevue and thanked Joe he said, ‘Nevah yoh mine, Nick. Ain’t no man evah gonna beat da mudder factor. I reckon yoh was right on time to catch dat fly. Da contrack herewith cancelled. I reckon we gonna renegotiate. Yoh got yourself ’nother forty-eight hours extension, yoh heah?’ I laughed, thanking him for the night. ‘Yoh heah me now, boy!’ he said, pulling away and, as usual, chuckling to himself.

  I realised I wasn’t quite as far into my recovery from the malaria and jaundice as I’d supposed. I slept until twelve the next day and only woke when Sally phoned to say the little bloke and the chief were expecting to have lunch with me in half an hour. She greeted me at the bar, looking like magic. ‘Mum’s going home this afternoon,’ she announced. ‘She said to say goodbye,’ she laughed. ‘You’ve got the royal seal of approval.’

  At seven that evening, after the cocktail hour, when Sally finished work and I’d arranged to pick her up, she handed me a small canvas bag. ‘Can you take this upstairs? Keep it for me ’til later. I just want to freshen my make-up. See you in the foyer in five minutes,’ she said in a perfectly natural voice.

  I guess I should have cottoned on, but I still wasn’t sparking on all eight cylinders from the night before. I went upstairs, dumped the little bag and came back down again to find Sally waiting. Halfway through dinner at a local café, Sally said to me with a mischievous grin, ‘Did you peek into the bag?’

  ‘Of course not!’ I said, genuinely shocked.

  ‘Someone help me!’ she sighed. ‘Nick Duncan, what am I going to do with you?’ she asked in apparent despair.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Look into a lady’s bag?’

  ‘I should have guessed,’ she sighed. ‘Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, commendation from the marines — you’d think with a record like that you’d be capable of just a little, I mean a teensy-weensy bit of personal initiative.’

  ‘Sally, what the hell are you talking about?’ I asked, completely mystified.

  ‘What happens if the cap comes off the toothpaste and squeezes all over my fresh bra and panties for the morning?’ she giggled.

  I’d made it with time to spare on Joe ‘Hammer-man’ Popkin’s renegotiated ‘patient is da virtue’ slow-move contract. He’d allowed me forty-eight hours but I’d made it in thirty-one, not counting the time it took to finish dinner, get back to the hotel, climb the stairs and check the toothpaste tube.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Darling Nick,

  I’m seeing the surgeon.

  Will never forget you,

  Love

  Sally XXX

  P.S. Mum sends her love.’

  Sally Forsythe

  Brisbane, 1943

  SALLY FORSYTHE AND I spent a glorious three weeks together — she only had to descend the stairs to start work with the lunchtime crowd at noon and her shift ended after the cocktail hour at seven in the evening. As that lovely saying goes, they were ‘days of wine an
d roses’.

  The little bloke was more than kind, extremely generous and a great deal more grown-up. His lady, the quick-firing but loving Bren Gun, had all but eliminated the ‘f’ word from his vocabulary, reducing his use of it to occasions of real agitation. Although it was early times and Brenda, fortunately also a Catholic, was the kind of girl who would dutifully and willingly respect a mourning period for her soldier husband, their relationship nevertheless had a permanent, comfortable feel about it.

  In Joe ‘Hammer-man’ Popkin I had made another friend I hoped never to lose, although in a time of war, permanent friendship is always a dangerous pursuit. I had written to Colonel Woon to ascertain the whereabouts of Gojo Mura. He’d replied to say that Gojo had been placed in a prisoner of war holding camp in Luganville, but he’d emphasised that Gojo was technically a Japanese civilian and he’d requested that he be sent to Australia. At this stage Marg got involved and, through the Services Reconnaissance Department, pushed through the official paperwork requesting the Americans to transfer him to our new facility for civilian Japanese prisoners of war at Hay in New South Wales. She may only have been a newly promoted naval lieutenant but I was constantly made aware that Marg Hamilton was a great deal more than she appeared to be. She also sent Gojo Mura two new sketchpads and a professional set of ‘quite impossible to find’ watercolours that, of course, she’d duly procured somewhere.

  I was headed back to the marines who were recovering in Melbourne and would be rested until October. While this might seem a long time to be out of a combat zone, it was, in fact, only just sufficient to bring the battered, the weary and the sick back to health and fighting fitness and to re-equip them. After taking the leave owed to me I was to return to Fraser Island for much the same period and reasons. In the Machiavellian mind of Commander Long, I was a legitimate combat hero with the Americans and therefore regarded as a tiny cog in the wheels of mutual cooperation. Or that’s how Marg Hamilton put it, in a letter where she once again urged me to resign from Intelligence and the clutches of the SRD. ‘You’ve more than done your bit, Nick,’ she’d urged. ‘You have your whole life ahead of you and you’re entitled to sit out the rest of the war in a job that keeps you interested, occupied and safe. I’m sure the navy can find just the right billet.’ This was, of course, shorthand for: ‘I’ve talked to Rob Rich and he’ll arrange something away from the machinations of the SRD, Naval Intelligence and Rupert Basil Michael Long.’

  However, the original obsession to find my father remained. There had been no news out of Japanese-occupied Rabaul and he might well have been dead, but I couldn’t in all conscience rest until I knew his fate. Though our own troops were in New Guinea, some of the marines were probably going to be based at Goodenough Island in the D’Entrecasteaux Group to the east of New Guinea, and this seemed to offer the better option of eventually getting me into New Britain.

  The paradox, of course, is that I had arrived in Guadalcanal fighting fit: probably in a better physical state than Joe Louis would have been when he defended his world heavyweight title against the German heavyweight Max Schmeling in 1938. Within four months the islands had chewed me up and spat me out, carrying the scars of the work of battle, stress, malaria, jaundice and a whole heap of unknown intestinal bugs and infections.

  I’d been restored to health in Australia; now I was to be trained even more specifically, my fitness regained and I would be returned to the islands so the whole process would begin again. In my case I was a willing participant, but this was not so for many others. Tens of thousands of Allied soldiers, including my own 1st Division marines, were patched up in hospital, rested, re-equipped, then sent back to combat under the same previous conditions. This back-you-go-again routine was fair enough in the European theatre of war, where a rest and repair job might get a soldier back to being fighting fit, but malaria was something you couldn’t cure with a pill or a week in hospital. The disease usually lingers on for years and you can quickly become reinfected.

  The majority of casualties sustained in the war conducted in the south-west Pacific could be attributed to the sting of the anopheles mosquito rather than to being wounded from a bullet, mortar, hand grenade or enemy artillery fire. God knows how many of the enemy were struck down in the same way, but it eventually transpired that the Japanese lost ninety per cent of all the troops they sent to the islands.

  When Naval Intelligence had informed me that I was returning to the marines I had hoped it might be to Colonel Woon’s mob, but Japanese–American translators such as Lee Roy Yamamoto (Da Nip widda Chip) had proved so successful that I wasn’t required in my capacity as a translator and interrogator. Instead, there was more interest in my local coastal knowledge and the fact that I could liaise with the natives using pidgin English and a few local languages with which I was familiar. In effect I was finally to become, in part anyway, a coastwatcher — and this required me to get fit and undertake a refresher course on Fraser Island.

  As I mentioned previously, my stay in Brisbane had been wonderful and Sally Forsythe had given me a tearful farewell and we’d promised to write to each other. She’d been loving and perfectly wonderful, and probably, with the exception of Anna, the best-looking of the women I’d known. But with the loss of Marg Hamilton I’d grown up a fair bit and realised that in affairs of the heart the warrior going off to war can’t, or shouldn’t, make permanent plans. On the morning of my last day in Brisbane, after we’d made love, Sally, sitting astride me, suddenly cried out, ‘Oh, Nick, I’m going to miss you awfully! Whatever will I do without you?’

  I still blush when I think about it, but I gave her a serious look and then launched into a totally pompous speech about not waiting for the soldier boy to return; that times were uncertain; that I was eventually going back to the islands; anything could happen and that I’d be upset, I think I said ‘saddened’, if she (this is the pompous prick bit) remained celibate when I was gone. Ouch! Marg Hamilton would not have talked to me for a week if she’d known I was capable of spouting such arrant and presumptuous juvenile crap.

  Sally cried a bit but then sniffed and dried her tears on the edge of the sheet and said, ‘Do you remember the American naval captain who sent us the champagne at the officers’ club?’ I nodded. ‘Well, he’s from Boston and a senior surgeon at the hospital and he’s been downstairs at the bar at least eight times since then.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said, taken by surprise, but then fortunately recovered sufficiently to cover it up by saying, ‘I ought to go downstairs and punch him on the nose.’

  Sally looked shocked. ‘You will do no such thing, Nick Duncan! He’s a very nice man and hasn’t made a single advance!’ She grinned down at me. ‘Yet.’

  How’s that for a classy rebuttal? She was four years older than me and it showed in the sophistication of her reply and the arrogance of mine. Later I would comfort myself with the thought that at least she’d climbed up the promotional ladder while remaining with the navy. I also feel sure her mum would have approved — even if the surgeon captain was old enough to be her husband. Young naval lieutenants are not the world’s greatest catch.

  The little bloke and I had lunch together on my last day in Brisbane, again in the private alcove where we could talk unheard and undisturbed. Kevin had changed, not only because of the influence of the Bren Gun, but also because of his quartermaster responsibilities and by being exposed to Chief Lewinski, a permanent navy man who had become almost a surrogate father. Kevin was savvy, but I was about to find out just how much he had learned. After a dozen oysters Kilpatrick he leaned over the table. ‘What yoh gonna do after da war, buddy?’ he asked in a confidential voice, even though nobody could hear us.

  ‘Huh?’ I was taken aback. After the pompous little talk I’d given Sally that very morning, ‘after the war’ was an impossible thought. Of course, the fantasy of sailing to Java and rescuing Anna had always been present. But that was Duncan dreaming; I was smart enoug
h to know stuff like that didn’t lie within the context of the little bloke’s question.

  ‘Nick, this gonna all be over inna next three years, maybe a little longer. After da war everybody gonna go home and celebrate peace and goodwill, dey ain’t gonna want to ever come back to da islands — da hula-hula in da South Seas ain’t no attraction no more. Home and family, apple pie and picket fence, automobiles, Chevy, Ford, Chrysler, dat’s da American way. So what’s gonna be left behind? Answer me dat, buddy?’

  I looked at him, mystified. ‘Stuffed if I know, Kevin. The local people picking up the pieces?’

  ‘Hey, dat ain’t so stupid!’ He laughed. ‘Pickin’ up da pieces! Do yoh know what ya sayin’, buddy?’

  I continued to look at him, completely bewildered. ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean, mate.’

  ‘Scrap!’ he said, just the one word. Moments later he added, ‘Metal.’

  ‘Scrap metal?’ I asked.

  ‘Connection! Nick, da Pacific, it littered wit war junk. Non-ferrous metals, copper, brass, lead, bronze. It a gold mine, buddy, ’cept we don’t have ter dig for it. Joe and me, we partners and you, Nick, we want you to climb aboard. You da thurd, we da three musketeer.’

  ‘And D’Artagnan,’ I said, being a smart arse. He was the inspiration for the fictional adventures of the little gang that was dedicated to justice and the French way.

  ‘Who? Wha’ cha talkin’ ’bout, Nick?’

  ‘The man whose life was the basis for the adventures of the three musketeers.’

  ‘Nick, yoh gotta stop readin’ all dem cockamamie books, it de-fin-ately affectin’ ya brains.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Kevin.’

  ‘Maybe dere gonna be four,’ he said impatiently, ‘but we da three, buddy. Maybe Chief Lewinski, when he retire from da navy, he can be da number four. Da miners everywhere, dey been so greedy dey pickin’ da rim around der ass and sellin’ it to da US Government at da top price. Dey over-capitalised. Come da end of da war, manufacturers ain’t gonna pay da mining companies da money dey bin gettin’ from da US Government. Dey gonna go broke. Dere’s gonna be shortages o’ everthin’. Da manufacturers gonna be lookin’ for cheap foundry metal and it ain’t gonna be dere.’ His excitement was palpable. ‘’Cept, halleluja! Dere enough scrap lying around da islands to feed da post-war furnaces in da US of A, England, Europe, everywhere!’