by Peter Corris
'And when will we have those identities, Mr Simondsen?'
'Tomorrow.'
So it was that I became Anthony (Tony) Grace, South African born, 23 years of age, photographer, heart weakened by childhood rheumatic fever, etc. etc. (That was my first passport; they'd brought the damn things in a few years before. It was British, of course: Sir Somebody Something requested and required that I be allowed to pass without let or hindrance etc. If I were drawing a pension for every passport and alias I've had since I'd be on easy street today.)
Hans became Dieter Schmidt, motor mechanic and citizen of the Federal Republic of Switzerland. He looked crestfallen when he received the papers and I felt mildly miffed. I'd paid for them after all.
'What's wrong, Hans?' I asked.
'Medecin', he said. After some stammered pidgin French and German I discovered that he had wanted to be a French doctor – God knows why.
I showed my passport to Georgie who was sitting in the roof garden on top of the Simondsen building, as usual, hand in hand with Maj.
'South African, eh?' says Georgie. 'Ever been there, Bill?'
I thought for a minute, as I always did when faced with questions like this in case I might reveal something discreditable. I gave myself the all-clear and owned that I had been to South Africa, albeit briefly.
'Pick up the accent?'
I shook my head.
'You sort of clench your teeth and squeeze the words out. Try it – say your name.'
'Tenny Grease.'
'That's it exactly. Corker!'
After that it was a matter of grabbing the papers every day to see how the war was going. Only a lunatic would've left Switzerland while those maniacs (I mean half the nations of the World, the civilised half, too) were out there mauling each other. But they were running out of steam, all except the Americans who hopped in at the right moment on the right side as they mostly managed to do in these affairs, at least up until recently.
They say the November Armistice was pretty well celebrated in London – public fornication and drunkenness and so on – well, there was none of that in Basel. I think the merchants might have run quickly through their balance sheets to calculate the effect on monthly profits and a few wilder spirits might've had an extra half gill of schnapps, but that'd be all. Hans and I tried to get a party going at the inn but had no luck. Georgie and Maj came by for a quick drink before setting off into the mountains to look for a chalet. I suppose Georgie is there still, if he's managed to endure the boredom.
That left Dieter and Tony, drunk as skunks in the bar, contemplating their future. There were a few other people about, not all of them Swiss which was unusual. I gazed at a pair of women with liquor-dimmed eyes and wondered when I'd next be murmuring sweet nothings to a member of the fair sex and getting my just reward. Hans nudged me and I realised he was asking me where I would go.
I felt a foolish grin slip over my flushed face. 'Home to South Africa, I suppose.'
One of the two women I'd been looking at got up and walked across to our bench. She was fair and freckled, not my type at all, apart from the swell of her chest under a loose blouse.
'Where did you say home was?' she said.
There was something familiar in the voice but I was too stinking to pick it up. I knew I had to go on the defensive though.
'Seth Effriker.'
She let out a hoot of laughter and the sound cut through my alcohol fog like a kookaburra at dawn – pure Australian. 'South African my eye. You're an Aussie if ever I heard one!'
13
Her name was Elizabeth Macknight and she was to become my first wife. Had I known that then I would've spat in her eye or thrown an epileptic fit – anything to shake fate from its course. Where are premonitions when you need them? I had no warning though and was probably too drunk to have been aware of one anyway; I mumbled something about a joke and invited her friend and herself to join us.
Over they trotted and I took in their particulars through a haze of schnapps and beer, not to mention tobacco smoke. Elizabeth, as she declared herself to be in a booming voice, was large, red-haired and freckled. She wore a modified Swiss costume – white blouse, black laced weskit and, to my horror, hiking boots under the wide, peasant skirt. Her companion, Patricia Greenacre, was smaller and darker, much more to my fancy, and similarly got up. I introduced them to Hans, stumbling over the new name and making a complete mess of my own alias.
'Really?' bellows Elizabeth. 'I'll have to take both of those names with a bag of salt.' She looked around for a laugh and got a big one from Patricia although I could only manage a weak grin. Hans, lucky chap, couldn't be expected to get jokes in a foreign language, even bad ones.
Bad jokes were Elizabeth's stock-in-trade along with, as I was to learn to my cost, beaver-like persistence, insatiable curiosity and indomitable courage. She and Pat, as she shyly asked to be called, were both nurses in a field ambulance unit. They were taking a spot of leave in Switzerland when the Armistice broke out.
'End of the fun for us,' Elizabeth lamented. 'It'll be back home to tennis parties and bridge after supper, eh, Pat?'
Pat nodded solemnly and sipped her sweet white wine. She gazed at Elizabeth who was scraping mud out of the cleats of her right boot while waiting for her beer to arrive. Despite my adventurous life to that date, I was still in the dark about the Sapphic persuasion, and I wouldn't have been able to interpret Pat's behaviour towards Elizabeth even if I'd been able to see things in single image and understand more than about half of what was said. I was in no trouble with 'another beer?' or 'what about a bite to eat?' which was the sort of thing Elizabeth was coming out with, but Pat's murmurings about edelweiss and telegrams passed me by.
Somehow or other we spent a few hours in the company of these two women. I must have kept up my end of the conversation because Hans' English was rudimentary as I've said and I think he was still sulking about not being a doctor. I remember plates of food being set before us which must have sopped up some of the booze. Eventually Hans fell asleep in his chair, Pat went off to bed and Elizabeth and I were left alone in the smoky parlour of the inn. She'd unlaced her weskit and loosened the neck of her blouse and I felt extra heated by the sight of the rise and fall of her big bosom. She seemed to get excited by the same thing, or maybe it was excitement at my reaction. In any case we staggered up to my room, practically groping each other on the stairs.
'Is your heart up to it?' she says, unbuttoning my shirt and plucking at the hair on my chest.
'Eh?' I'd forgotten the rheumatic fever story, you see, which I must have come out with at some point.
'Your heart . . . kept you out of the service. Oh, you're so big.'
I think she meant my shoulders. I was down below her shoulders by this time, nuzzling away at her breasts and trying to get up inside her skirt.
'Wait, wait.' She had my trousers and her own underthings, including the boots, off in no time – well, she was a nurse and practised at these things – and then she was under me on the bed and I was ploughing away, not caring that her thighs were nearly the size of my own and her buttocks were soft and spreading like understuffed cushions.
It had been a highly charged day, one way and another, and I slept like a dead man after I rolled off Elizabeth. When I woke up it was morning and there she was, dabbing at herself with a towel.
'What are you doing?'
'Had a douche,' she boomed. 'Don't want any accidents, do we? Especially with you wandering around not knowing what your name is and how you spent your childhood. Not too keen on Newcastle, are you?'
'What? What?'
She dropped her skirts over those ghastly boots, came across to the bed and gave me a slightly slobbering kiss. Her breath was like a dog's bowl but I don't suppose mine was any better. 'You talked in your sleep, lovey. Don't worry about it. I got what I wanted and you did too. Fortunes of war.'
I hadn't the least idea what she was talking about, brain still fogged, you see, but I certa
inly wasn't used to being treated like a raped maiden. I raised myself up on an elbow and immediately sank back with a groan. She was over at the bureau now, writing on the back of an envelope.
'Here you go, Tony or whatever your name is.' She flicked the envelope on to the bed. 'Look me up when you get to Australia. I have to run or little Pat'll be throwing a faint.'
She opened the door and looked back at me with what could have been fondness or maybe she was thinking about her breakfast. 'Prepare yourself for a shock though if you turn up at the old place – very different Elizabeth there.'
I nodded, regretted the movement, and put my head gently into the pillow while she closed the door. After a while I eased up gently, ungummed my eyes and read what she'd written: 'Elizabeth Macknight, The Gables, Church Street, Brighton, Melbourne'. Thoughts of Sydney flooded into my head and I felt a wave of homesickness sweep over me. The harbour, the beaches, riding in Centennial Park, beer picnics in the Botanic Gardens. I folded the note and put it where I could recover it later. This was not on account of Elizabeth Macknight – I'd keep the Murray River between her and me and even a whole state might be safest, Queensland might be the go – but out of the blind sentimentality of youth. Later I had reason to wish I'd burnt it.
It was time to be on my way. Georgie was staying and Hans didn't have far to go but with every passing day I felt more like a fish out of water. (I wouldn't even have minded a second tussle with Elizabeth but she and Pat left to rejoin their unit on the morning after our encounter.) I bought some clothes, maps and other necessities and paid a visit to the Simondsens to check on some details about the identification papers.
'And where are you going, Herr Grace?' Simondsen asks with an ingratiating smile.
'England eventually. I've got a rail ticket as far as Paris; Calais and a boat after that.'
He frowned. 'I know how to get from Paris to London. Let us see, you are a photographer, aren't you?'
'That's right.'
'Come with me. I can sell you an excellent camera.'
As well as being a river port, Basel was also a major rail head, all quite undamaged by the war, of course. You couldn't say the same for the tracks and signals and stations across France. They sold me a ticket for Paris in Basel all right, but it was often touch and go as to whether I'd make it. The train was damnably slow and frequently interrupted. It sat in a siding for an entire day at one stage and I had to keep to my seat or lose it. You needed a royal bladder for train travel in those conditions.
There was the cold to contend with too. I'd bought a heavy coat with a fur collar and some thick gloves but cold winds seemed to be attracted to railway platforms and it took liberal doses of rum to keep the blood liquid. All Europe seemed to be on the move that winter; crowding into the train were displaced Frogs and Fritzes, Poles and Russians getting away from the Bolsheviks, and probably some Bolsheviks getting away from others, too; demobilised soldiers of all kinds; Scandinavians heading south and Italians going north. I even saw one Chinaman, fat as a pig and carrying a huge two-handed sword.
In fact the cold worked to the advantage of shady characters like me, and I've no doubt there were plenty of others travelling at that time who could well have been sitting in a cell; we all rugged up and muffled ourselves to the hairline so that unwelcome identifications would be hard to make. I was travelling with a fair bit of money on me and I made sure that anyone I didn't like the look of saw that I had a pistol in my pocket. I didn't have any trouble.
I also had a camera and I fell into the habit of snapping pictures from time to time. I did this at first to lend plausibility to my identity but, as I say, it became a habit which I've kept up ever since. You may think I'm over-precise with some of my descriptions of people and places, but you see I've still got photos dating from 1919 and I've refreshed my memory with them here and there. [Browning's photograph collection has survived. The pictures were kept in no particular order in three wooden boxes that had once contained bourbon whiskey. They are amateur work which show some improvement in technique over more than sixty years. One expert I consulted described them as 'energetic'. Ed.]
We finally got to Paris some time before Christmas and I booked into a hotel in the Rue des Ecoles, not far from the University. I've never been attracted to universities, although I've played college professors in my time and it's been said that I've managed to appear as foolish as the real thing, but you generally find good boozers and eating places nearby. This was certainly true in Paris after the war. The place was going full barrel, loud and brassy and open for twenty-four hours, just the way I like it. The best thing though was the cheapness; I'd converted some of my war loot into francs and whatever the exchange rate was I doubt it's been equalled since. You could get a meal with wine for a few cents and everything (and I mean everything) else was just as cheap.
I really let off steam in Paris. I rid myself of the memory of Elizabeth Macknight with half a dozen small dark French women who mightn't have been to the Sorbonne but had certainly had a sound education. I rampaged in Montmartre and the Boul' Mich', got into drinking contests with Americans and generally made a swine of myself. It was all a bit of a fraud really; I played the fool and spent money as if there was no tomorrow partly because I lived in fear of somebody recognising Corporal Billy Hughes. I waited for the tap on the shoulder or the sidelong glance and in my soberer moments I even scouted a few lanes and flights of steps and gardens around the hotel in case I should need to make a sharp getaway.
The worst thing was the dreaming : I'd wake up, alone or in company, streaming with sweat and trying to deny that I was Browning or Hughes or Grace. My accusers varied from Captain Thorndike to Georgie Witherspoon to Flinders, the faggot guard at Long Bay. I'd wake up shouting, 'No, no, not me!'
'Doucement, chéri, doucement,' Yvette or Mimi would say and I'd have a brandy and try to get back to sleep. I decided in the end that it was being among foreigners that created the anxiety, that plus the sight of so many uniforms. London was the place for me, grey and foggy London where they spoke a civilised tongue and the only uniforms I'd be likely to see would be on the Guardsmen at Buck house.
Besides, I'd almost run out of money.
14
In 1919 (don't ask how I spent the New Year's eve, I can't recall a thing about it), there was none of this EEC nonsense on entering England. If you were white and from the Empire you strolled along to Customs and lesser breeds just had to muddle through as best they could. Customs was a pretty relaxed business too; there was no comment passed about my pistol, for example.
I'd been practising up on the South African accent and my papers were in order so no-one looked at me twice. Currency was a bit of a problem, not this pettifogging about maximum and minimum amounts carried, but simply my lack of the stuff. When I got off the train from Dover at Victoria I had precisely three pounds and two shillings to my name. My visits to the capital when on leave (God, it seemed as if it had happened in a different life) had given me a bit of knowledge about the place so I took myself off to Kings Cross where the cheap hotels were. Installed in a small room which was over-heated and made noisy by a service elevator that seemed to rattle up and down behind my bed, I contemplated my future.
I should have known then that the right place for me was in movies: in what other occupation is it considered acceptable, even necessary, to lie about your age, name, background and talents and pretend to be what you're not while behaving like a selfish child? But I didn't know it and thought I should set about earning a living. I confess I had it in mind to save enough for a passage back to Australia. This unadventurousness nearly finished me or perhaps it made me – you'll have to judge for yourself.
Bolshevism was the great issue of the day. The papers were full of it with every poor devil who went on strike being accused of it (Australia would have been ripe for the take-over if that had been true), and every employer shedding tears for the Tsar. I even read about an expeditionary force that went into Russia after t
he war to set things straight. Australians present too; probably along for the vodka.13 A lot of good it did them. There was heavy unemployment in London in the aftermath of the war and a few Reds among the ranks I daresay, but the English workman proved to be as docile as ever.
I tried selling some of my European photographs in Fleet Street but got nowhere, too frank I suppose. My only real talent was for straight shooting, literally not colloquially, and there was no market for that. When the funds got really low I sat in my hot, noisy hotel room and looked at the service pistol for which I had three rounds. I was contemplating robbery not suicide but I didn't have the nerve for either. Instead, I pawned the gun in a place near Euston Station and took the proceeds to the pub. It was lunchtime and busy but I wasn't hungry. I bought a pint of the thin, tasteless stuff they call bitter and hunched over it with a cigarette. After a few puffs and draughts I looked around and almost fell flat – I was standing next to Georgie Witherspoon.
I steadied myself with some more tobacco and alcohol and looked closer. It wasn't Georgie but the dead spit of him, maybe a little younger. He was smoking a Senior Service and sucking down lager, looked prosperous enough in a rough, working-class sort of way. I wasn't exactly looking like a toff myself – I still had the fur collar coat but it had taken a lot of wear. My boots weren't very sound. Browning's rule is, friendship is no barrier to a touch.
'Excuse me,' I said to him, 'your name wouldn't be Witherspoon, would it?'
'S'right, mate. Eddy Witherspoon at your service. Who might you be?'
'Ah, Tony Grace. I knew your brother in the war. Georgie. How is the old Georgie?'