The Persimmon Tree (69 page)

‘I’ll have the five bob packet, please,’ I said, handing him two half-crowns.

He went to the drawer in front of the barber’s chair and handed me a small packet. ‘Two more week, you come. I give you nice haircut, the best,’ he said, then patted me lightly on the shoulder. ‘Good luck, you good boy; you don’t make baby, leave girl, go to war, get kill, no papa that bambino.’

With the condom issue resolved and the packet safely out of sight in my pocket, I was feeling somewhat more confident. ‘What’s good for tomatoes and beans?’ I asked him, referring to his previous comment.

His podgy hand shot up and he grabbed a tuft of hair on his scalp. ‘Hairs. Every night I sweep. Take home dat customer hair, you put in ground for tomato, it grow big like pumpkin, beans, same size zucchini!’

As digging human hair into the vegie patch seemed bizarre enough, I wasn’t game to ask him what a zucchini was.

I bought Marg a bunch of carnations, red and white. They cost me more than the condoms. The flower lady wrapped them in butcher’s paper. ‘It’s the war, love,’ she sighed in a weary voice. ‘’Fraid it’ll have to be string, brown, no tissue paper, no ribbon neither. For your girlfriend?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, thinking that Marg was a bit too good to be called a girlfriend, like someone you sometimes took to the movies.

‘That’s nice. Yer learnin’ early. Sure way to a woman’s heart. Last time me husband brought home flowers was 1928. He was pissed and stole them from the cemetery after he’d missed the last bus and had ter walk home. It’s three o’clock in the mornin’ and he’s standin’ there, holdin’ these white arum lilies. “Yer stupid bugger, Perce! Don’tcha know they’s bad luck in the home?” I says to him. It’s three o’clock in the mornin’ and it’s garbo collection next day, so I ’as ta go out on the pavement in me nightie and slippers ter throw them in the dustbin. Didn’t want no more bad luck in the house, Perce was enough!’ She handed me the flowers. ‘Good luck, son, hope she’s kind ter yer. How come a big, strappin’ lad like yiz ’asn’t joined up?’

‘Next week. Navy,’ I said, escaping.

‘Good boy!’ she called back at me.

So with the barber and the flower lady wishing me luck, I fronted up at Marg’s flat at half-past six on the dot. I was wearing my new slacks and shirt and Peter Keeble’s jacket, and was feeling in quite a decent mood in a tonight’s-the-night sort of way. It’s not every day you get this lucky with someone you love. I’d waited at the bus stop for ten minutes so I wouldn’t arrive before the appointed hour. I’d been told somewhere that women are never ready on time and that arriving early is considered gauche.

Marg came to the door and I handed her the flowers. ‘Nick, how lovely!’ she exclaimed, bringing them up to her nose. Carnations have a funny sort of smell, not like roses, but I only found that out after I’d bought them. ‘Hmm, beautiful,’ she said. ‘Come in, dinner won’t be long. Starving as usual, I suppose?’

‘You look lovely,’ I said. She did too: a blue dress that showed off her nice figure, white sort of ballerina-type flatties, suntanned legs and arms, chestnut hair shining, red lipstick and black stuff around her nice green eyes. She looked more glamorous than I’d ever seen her.

‘Thank you, Nick. It’s nice being out of a uniform. I feel like I’m a proper girl again.’

I needn’t tell you what the night that followed was like. Only — just completely — wonderful! We used up my five bob packet and then we had to use naval issue. There’s something about nice breasts. You just can’t get enough of them, can you? But it was more than that: it was her sweet tenderness, the way she touched me, like I was special. I tried to do the same to her, because she
was
special; I tried sort of stroking her, but my hands are so big it was like a grizzly bear patting a rabbit.

Marg picked me up at the boarding house the following evening in the Austin 7 and drove me all the way to Perth Railway Station. ‘I’ve been saving my petrol coupons. I think we can safely get to the station and there should be just enough in the tank to get me back,’ she said. When I’d insisted that I had a travel warrant and could take the bus, she looked at me scornfully. ‘We’ve had the traditional sailor’s farewell, Nick. Now I want the traditional woman’s farewell. I want to stand tearfully alone on a railway platform with a hiss of steam bursting from the engine’s wheels, waving the dearest man in my life goodbye, a small lace handkerchief crumpled in my trembling hand.’

‘Oh, Marg, I can’t begin to thank you —’

She cut me short. ‘Please, no thank yous, Nick. “Thank you” is an ending, not a beginning. Besides, everything we had together was on my own terms.’

‘I’ll take them rather than enter into negotiations any time of the day,’ I said, trying to grin, then almost said ‘thank you’ again.

On the way to Perth she said, ‘Nick, when you’ve done the course at HMAS
Cerberus
and you’re a snotty and they want to send you to a place I can’t name or talk about for further training, and you decide you don’t want to be in Intelligence or become a coastwatcher, remember, you can always opt out of either — or both. It’s not a disgrace, you won’t be disadvantaged. The navy will send you to England for further training and you’ll emerge a naval officer and I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun. You
will
think about it, won’t you?’ she urged.

‘What’s a snotty?’ I asked, attempting to avoid answering her.

‘A sublieutenant in the navy, the lowest form of officer life,’ she answered, a trifle impatiently, immediately recognising my motive for asking.

An idea had begun to form in my head I didn’t dare talk about, even to Marg. At first I even rejected it myself, instinctively knowing it was pie in the sky — stupid, irrational. But it wouldn’t go away and instead it kept invading my thoughts, nagging at me: as a coastwatcher I could ask to be sent to New Britain, where I could try to discover if my father was still alive.

I guess there was still too much
Boys’ Own Annual
or the Saturday movie matinee in me —
Nick sets out to save his father deep in the tropical jungles of New Britain. Will he succeed? Don’t miss next week’s exciting episode! Etc.
Here I was, just removed from being a virgin, yet still acting like a kid. My mind was filled with too much derring-do and I didn’t have enough feet-on-the-ground commonsense.

‘I promise I’ll think about it,’ I said, to ameliorate Marg’s concern that I’d be wasting my youth alone in the jungle, that I’d suffer from dengue fever and malaria, and that reporting on the movements of the Japs should best be left to older locals who had been trained for a couple of weeks in the use of a short-wave radio. Marg always saw things clearly. She would have made a good ship’s captain.

She was now, quite possibly, the only one left of the people I loved and who were important in my life, and we were about to be separated by the width of Australia. The idea of going to England for further training sounded okay, but judging from the news on the radio, 1942 wasn’t exactly party time in Britain.

Nicholas Duncan was back to being a loner, and the prospect of spending time in the jungle didn’t overly concern me. It was an environment I understood better than the city and, yeah, I admit, there’d be a chance to catch butterflies. If Anna had been in Australia or Marg closer, then I might have had second thoughts — although I don’t know.

However, as things stood, being my own boss in the solitude of the islands sounded a lot better than being a young naval sublieutenant buried in a submarine or aboard HMAS
Something
and being blown out of the water by a Japanese destroyer. I guess all navies are roughly the same, and I’d heard enough about the US Navy from the little bloke to make me wary. Moreover witnessing the slaughter of the shipwrecked sailors from the
Perth
on that lonely beach in Java, then our own lucky escape across the Indian Ocean on
Madam
Butterfly
, left me somewhat indifferent to the romance of a career at sea. Sailing is one thing, but surviving at sea or being blown to kingdom come quite another. If I was going to die I wanted to have some say in the matter.

I’d been issued with a travel warrant to be presented to the movement officer at Perth Railway Station, together with my booking slip for second-class travel to Melbourne, all meals included. There were lots of blokes in uniform, air force and army, boarding the train, but no navy. They kept glancing at Marg, probably wondering what a young bloke like me was doing with a terrific sort like her. They probably concluded she was my sister; that is, until they saw the farewell kiss.

When I entered my compartment an air force bloke made room for me at the window. ‘Jeez, you don’t muck around, do you?’ he said admiringly. Then, as the railway guard gave a sharp blast from his whistle and called ‘All aboard!’, slamming carriage doors as he worked his way down the platform, Marg reached into her handbag. ‘This arrived ten minutes before I left the office. Your godfather, the Archbishop, received it in the afternoon mail and phoned. We had it come by naval motorcycle dispatch rider. You’ll want to read it on the train,’ she said, smiling and handing through the window a fairly large envelope addressed to me with a round printed circle on the left-hand corner that read ‘US Army Air Force Command Mail, Colombo, Ceylon’.

I accepted the envelope, looking at it quizzically, but almost before I could comment the guard gave a final blast of his whistle and the train started to pull away. ‘Nick, I’m so glad you came into my life, albeit briefly,’ Marg said, reaching to touch my outstretched hand and, I could see, trying hard to restrain her tears.

‘Marg, I love you!’ I called as the train gathered momentum and moved into the darkness where her lovely face was only just visible on the fast-disappearing platform.

It may seem improbable, but I was so upset about leaving Marg that I quite forgot about the envelope I held in my hand. So much had happened; in only a matter of a few weeks my life had changed immeasurably. I guess I’d grown up, in some respects even beyond my years. The air force bloke must have read my thoughts. ‘Christ! It isn’t easy, is it, mate?’ Then he explained. ‘I left my wife and two kids all recovering from the measles. God knows if I’ll ever see them again. Wife and two little faces looking real crook and sad from the window and me walking down the front path off to war.’

I opened the envelope and withdrew Anna’s letter.

Tjilatjap, Java

5th March 1942

My dearest Nicholas —
This was struck through and directly below it Anna wrote:

My darling Nicholas,

I do not know if you are alive and have come in the
Vleermuis
already to Australia. But I think it is so, or I would feel it in
mijn
heart.

… My stepmother commit suicide in the river, she is jumped in the river and
Kleine
Kiki she cannot rescue her because she cannot swim. They have not found the body.
Mijn
father he is also drunk since Batavia.

… Nicholas I love you. I am very sorry I did not let you make love to me. Maybe I will die and not know how it would be to make love to you!

I love you, my darling Nicholas. Forever!

Anna — Madam Butterfly X X X X X!

P.S. I have always the Clipper butterfly. I will keep it till I die.

I love you!

A

I sat stunned, but confess I didn’t cry. Anna’s letter told me everything we had professed to each other. It told of her love for me and her hopes for the future, but nothing about what would happen to her once she was stuck in Java with the Japanese about to arrive. The suicide of her abusive stepmother must have been very difficult for her, and then having to cope alone with Piet Van Heerden’s drunken behaviour. Funny, I’d always thought the big Dutchman was full of shit. Some blokes who seem totally in command of their environment can’t hack it when they’re removed from their comfort zone.

We’d had a maths master at school, Mr Bruce Batten. We called him ‘Bastard Bruce’ because in class he was a genuine megalomaniac who delighted in tormenting kids. As vice-principal he was permitted to cane boys. He proceeded to do so on a regular basis and with atavistic delight. He was also one of the two masters in charge of the cadets. When we were on a weekend camp in the bush he’d taken a platoon of first-year students on a map-reading course in the morning and they were due back in time for lunch. By midnight he hadn’t turned up and I was sent out with four volunteers to find him. It was a full moon so it was not difficult to see and, as we were not avoiding an enemy, we walked in the open, calling out. We came across their camp in a small dead-end canyon at three in the morning. The juniors had gathered a stack of firewood and made a fire and were sleeping soundly around it. When we woke them, apart from being hungry and devouring the rations we’d brought with us, they were in reasonably good spirits.

However, Bastard Bruce was not amongst them. One of the kids told us he’d seen him heading further up the canyon and he’d seemed pretty frightened. I eventually discovered him about twenty feet up the end wall of the canyon, sitting on a narrow ledge, whimpering. When he was asked to come down he had trouble with his shaking legs. He was exhausted and it took us nearly five hours to get him back to camp, one of our blokes taking the kids ahead. I’d only had to cope with Bastard Bruce for those few hours and I’d found the experience thoroughly distasteful. Poor Anna would have had to deal with her drunken and pathetic father from the moment they’d left Batavia.