Brother Fish (2 page)

After three and a half months in hospital the authorities took the opportunity to bum a ride for a dozen or so of the Australian walking wounded, myself included, on a chartered Qantas flight taking some of the military top brass back to Melbourne.

It was decided that I would do a further three months' convalescence in Australia before being discharged from the army. With my left leg in plaster up to the hip I was still very much dependent on my crutches, and it had taken a fair bit of persuasion on my part to convince the army doctors to let me go home. Crutches notwithstanding, I was going back to the island – the war was over for me. Before leaving Japan I'd been given two years' back pay and a couple of medals to wear on Anzac Day. It was more money than I'd ever possessed in my life, and I got scared just thinking about it.

The arrangement was that I was to remain in Melbourne to await Jimmy's plane from Tokyo due in two days' time. How he'd persuaded the US military to let him do his convalescence in Australia I'll never know, except that Jimmy could persuade most people to do most things.

My chartered Qantas flight had been the first plane into Melbourne that morning and, after I'd taken the airport bus into town where the driver dropped me off at a boarding house in St Kilda Road, one that he personally recommended and that turned out to be owned by his auntie, I took the tram into the city and bought myself some civilian clobber. The usual stuff – sports jacket, a couple of pairs of daks, one brown and one grey, three pairs of socks, though I only had need for one sock in the meantime, two white shirts and a decent pair of shoes, though again, only one shoe being useful in my present predicament. Then I bought a cheap suitcase to carry my army uniform and slouch hat.

I was still sixty pounds under my normal weight and I'd been careful to buy everything miles too big, with the result that I looked an awful fright. I'd put on a few pounds in the hospital but was still in a pretty emaciated condition and reckon I could easily have been mistaken for a dero who had been shaved head and beard to get rid of the lice, given a good scrub down and then issued with a new set of one-size-fits-all charity handouts from St Vincent de Paul.

I don't suppose it mattered much, I knew nobody in Melbourne. After all the fussing about in the hospital and the military debrief, where they took us through the propaganda to which we'd been subjected by the Chinese, I was happy enough to be left on my own. I spent the remainder of the morning taking several short tram trips for a bit of a squiz at the big city. Around one o'clock I got off the tram at Flinders Street Station and bought a meat pie, which the bloke behind the pie cart smothered in tomato sauce without being asked to. I guess an Australian who didn't want tomato sauce on his meat pie was unimaginable. Earlier in the day, crossing the bridge in the tram going down St Kilda Road, I'd seen several ducks gliding on the Yarra, so I bought half a loaf of bread and, with the pie and the bread stuffed inside my shirt, I headed towards the Botanic Gardens across the bridge. I only just made it; the pie in a brown paper bag was hot as buggery and left a blister on my skin, a small price to pay for your first meat pie in three years. I found a bench beside the river, ate my pie, fed the ducks with the bread, watched the lazy brown Yarra go by, basked in the sunshine and soaked up the calm and peaceful world around me. Calm was something I hadn't enjoyed a lot of for what seemed to me to be a very long time.

Melbourne in the summer of 1953 was just trying to get its head around hosting the Olympic Games in three years' time and the city fathers were busy painting and repairing buildings, knocking down the odd one, and planting a few extra street trees to give the metropolis a veneer of sophistication when the world came to visit. A row of a dozen or more cranes stretched along a street near Flinders Street Station.

Though I wasn't much of a judge of big cities, four days before I was due to leave Japan I'd been given a forty-eight-hour leave pass and took the train to Tokyo to meet up with Jimmy, who I hadn't seen since we'd left the hospital in Seoul. We'd chatted on the phone a couple of times and sent the odd postcard to each other but, having been together cheek and jowl through hell and back for just under two years, I was naturally anxious to see how he was getting along. One thing was certain, Melbourne was no Tokyo – that much I can tell you.

With both of us on crutches, Jimmy and I had gone to the Ginza strip where we took in several of the honky-tonk, neon-and-noise girlie bars, beer halls and strip-tease joints. They all seemed much the same, the Japanese girls wearing too much lipstick, their short, stocky legs in PX nylons and high heels, hitching up their skirts to show a provocative glimpse of suspender as they hoisted themselves onto the bar stool beside you. ‘You buy me drink, soldier.' The pitch, like Johnnie Walker whisky, never varied.

Later we headed for Shinjuku, the red light district. It was awash with beer and bourbon and the dull roar of humans trying to have a good time. The bars were seemingly endless, most with tricked-up American names such as the Golden Horseshoe and Alabama Annie. I especially remember two, Hound Dog Hotel and the Memphis Maiden, though in the latter instance I imagine very few of your actual maidens ever stepped through its sliding bamboo doors. All of them existed for a single purpose: to attract the homesick GI with a pocketful of Yankee dollars and a determination to get laid before going home to Mom's apple pie and the waiting arms of a Mary-Lou, a bobby-soxer when he'd left and now a lovely young woman waiting glory-boxed and teary-eyed to become a bride.

After almost two years in the grim surroundings of a POW camp the glamour and glitter of Tokyo's Ginza strip and the blatant sexuality of Shinjuku seemed totally surreal. The fact that we were drinking alcohol while pumped full of antibiotics no doubt added to the bizarre experience. It was all becoming too much: the blazing lights, flashing neons in pinks and reds, electric blues and acid-sharp whites, the noise, especially the noise, the painted faces of the girls with their hard, obsidian eyes, began to physically overwhelm me. It felt as though I was being bashed over the skull with a baseball bat and I could feel my heart beating like a voodoo drum. I was suddenly possessed by an almost irresistible desire to screw up my eyes, hold my hands cupped to my ears, squat down onto my haunches and go into a blithering funk. My senses were completely overloaded and I knew I was very close to breaking down. When Jimmy turned to me and said, ‘Brother Fish, let's get the hell outta here, I can't take no more, man,' I was damn near tears and, in my haste to put my beer down I bumped the base of the glass I was holding against the edge of the bar spilling what remained into my lap.

Now, less than a week later, here I was in Melbourne where the pubs shut at six o'clock when the city settled into an almost sepulchral quietness. It seemed entirely appropriate that the dozens of construction cranes piercing the pre-Olympic skyline gave the impression of a city playing host to a convocation of bishops, their arms stretching out to bless the buildings kneeling beneath them. I was to learn later that they were there to remove the Victorian verandahs from many of the buildings, a modification that the city fathers believed would improve the city in preparation for the Olympics. Melbourne was tarting itself up, determined to show the world it was not some colonial backwater, but a modern and vibrant city.

I'd decided to buy myself a slap-up dinner on my first night home as a quasi-civilian and so I took the short tram ride up Swanston Street, then hobbled up Bourke on my crutches. It was just a little after six-thirty but the city already had its shutters down. I eventually discovered a restaurant but found myself suddenly reluctant to enter. Looking through one of the windows I could see the small square tables covered with snowy tablecloths and matching serviettes, each folded into a Pope's bonnet. A single red rose in a small cutglass vase was the only colour on the tables. Gleaming cutlery lay pristine, softly glowing as if presented for display in a jewellery-shop window, and the wine glasses, two at every place setting, sparkled as they reflected the light from an enormous crystal chandelier that dominated the centre of the room.

I'd never tasted wine, it wasn't the sort of thing a bloke drank in those days. Maybe if you were taking a girl out and wanted to impress the pants off her you'd order a bottle of Porphyry Pearl, but you'd drink beer and she'd drink that and you'd hope it had the desired effect. It was the wineglasses more than anything that told me this was the wrong place for my sort. It hadn't been long since I'd frantically grabbed at rice gruel from a communal dish hoping to get two fistfuls into my mouth before it had all disappeared. I'd dreamed of one day sitting at a table with a clean cloth, cutlery and a plate of my own, but slap-up dinner notwithstanding, this didn't appear to be the sort of restaurant I'd have instinctively chosen to eat my prodigal son's return dinner. The menu stuck into a little frame in the window left me further confused.

Canapés Riche
Cream of Asparagus Soup
Fillet of Sole Meunière
Chicken Maryland
Bombe Henri
Welsh Rarebit
Coffee

What the fuck was
Canapés Riche
and why was it necessary to
Bombe
Henri
?

I was hungry and tired and my leg hurt. I'd barely slept on the plane coming over and except for the meat pie, hadn't eaten all day. So I summoned up the courage to enter.

I'd hardly taken a step inside when a waiter in a penguin suit loomed above me. ‘Good evening, sir,' he said.

‘I'd like to dine,' I replied, hoping that by using the word ‘dine' I'd make the right impression. He gave me the once-over, slowly, starting at my feet, noting the crutches and plaster cast sticking out of the end of my trousers. He appeared to be passing silent judgement on my new clobber, which hung like a Charlie Chaplin outfit on my skinny frame, and finally he brought his gaze up to my pale, freckled face and shaven head. His expression was not welcoming.

‘Do you have a reservation?' he asked, omitting the ‘sir'.

‘Well, er, no. As a matter of fact I've just flown in from Japan,' I said, smiling pleasantly in an attempt not to appear nervous. I felt less assured in front of this jumped-up kitchenhand than when the Chinese had interrogated me.

Maybe it was his attempt not to laugh. I guess, in 1953, not too many people dropped into Melbourne from Japan on crutches, in oversized clobber, sporting a haircut of the type usually undertaken at His Majesty's expense in Pentridge Prison. His expression changed into a sort of half-sneer, not the full disdain, but more a ‘
Don't take me for a
bloody fool, sonny boy!
'

‘I'm sorry, we're fully booked tonight.' Again the ‘sir' was absent.

I nodded towards the empty room behind him. ‘But there's nobody in the place!'

‘People are inclined to dine late at the Society Restaurant,' he replied haughtily.

After two years as a prisoner of war under the Chinese my self-esteem wasn't up there with Laurence Olivier's. ‘I could eat quickly,' I offered, inwardly cringing at the pleading tone my voice had assumed without my permission.

One eyebrow shot up. ‘That is not the purpose of this restaurant – sir!' Except for the pause in front of the ‘sir' he pronounced each word as if it stood alone.

I knew I was beaten neck and crop, though at least the ‘sir' was back. Feeling piss-weak, I hobbled away grumbling to myself, ‘
Welcome
back to civvy street, Jacko, real nice to be home from the war, mate
.' Then, in the middle of the street I turned back to face him. ‘BASTARD!' I yelled, then again, ‘BASTARD!' But the restaurant door was shut and he'd disappeared.

I hobbled back to Swanston Street with my crutches burning into my rubbed-raw armpits and waited for a tram. With the help of the conductor I climbed aboard, and when he came to take my fare I asked him to let me off somewhere so I could find something decent to eat.

‘Fancy a nice feed o' fish, mate?' he asked.

‘That'd be great.' After the stuffy waiter, his vernacular was familiar and comforting.

‘Righto then, know just the place. It's a sixpence fare to get there, but, I promise, it's fair dinkum.'

After an excellent plate of flake and chips and a cup of hot sweet tea on St Kilda Pier I felt a whole lot better. During the course of the meal I had decided I'd had enough of the big city. Instead of our hitting the bright lights of Melbourne (
Ha, ha! What effing bright lights?
), I'd try to persuade Jimmy that we ought to catch the
Taroona
directly to Launceston. Melbourne had nothing to offer two Korean veterans on crutches, and the sooner we got to the peace and quiet of the island the better.

I also decided I'd spend the following day buying presents for Mum and my sister Sue, something girlie, like talcum powder and perfume, Chanel No. 5. While in Japan I'd already purchased my main presents, five harmonicas, one for each member of the family. They were made in America and had a real nice tone. Then, if I could find a shop that sold fishing gear, I might buy my two younger brothers, Cory and Steve, some good nylon fishing line.

Jimmy's plane came in late the following afternoon. ‘Let's go home to the island, leaving tonight,' I suggested at the airport. I indicated our crutches, my wooden ones and his fancy new lightweight aluminium Yankee extravaganzas. ‘No use hanging around here on these, is there?' Then, to slot the proposition home, I added, ‘Anyway mate, Boag's, the Tassie beer in Launceston, is miles better than the local piss.'