The Story of Danny Dunn (8 page)

Brenda, aware that the judge hated any sort of fuss, had placed a pot of tea, two mugs, a milk jug, a sugar pot and a plate of assorted biscuits on the upstairs kitchen table.

Doc Evatt sat down and indicated to Danny to take the chair opposite. Brenda poured them each a mug of tea, adding the milk and sugar first. Accepting the mug absentmindedly Doc Evatt glanced up at her and said, ‘I'll see you downstairs to say goodbye.' Danny was impressed as he watched his mum leave without a word.

‘So you want to join up, son?' Doc Evatt asked.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Because your friends are all doing so?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Do you always do as they do?'

‘No, sir.'

‘So, you must have a special reason this time.'

‘Well, yes, sir. It's the war. I want to do my bit.'

Doc Evatt thought for a moment. ‘This
bit
you want to do – is it for these friends you talked about?'

‘No, of course not, sir! For my country.'

‘Ah, I see; your country! So, even if your friends stayed at home, you'd join up?'

‘Yes, I think so, sir.'

‘Think so?'

‘Yes, I would.'

‘So, you believe your country comes first, ahead of your education?'

‘Yes, of course, sir.'

‘Hmm . . . very commendable.'

‘No, sir . . . it's my duty,' Danny said, beginning to feel decidedly awkward. Evatt's simple questions, which he sensed were far from cursory, were slowly backing him into a corner.

‘And if your country asked you to jump headlong into a hail of machine-gun fire to meet almost certain death, would you do so unquestioningly?'

Danny hesitated. ‘Well, yes. I don't suppose I'd have a choice.'

‘Ah, Gallipoli, eh? Leave a letter for your sweetheart with your mate then scramble out of the trench when your officer blows his whistle and into a hail of Turkish fire.' He looked up, one eyebrow raised quizzically. ‘Were you not taught at school that we lost that stoush?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Could it be that while we acted with incredible, dare I say, foolish bravery, we failed to ask ourselves what we hoped to achieve by our actions? Brave men may win posthumous medals, but the real objective is to keep them alive so we can win battles.' Doc Evatt was silent, hands resting on the kitchen table, fingers curled inwards so he could examine his nails.

Danny groaned inwardly; he knew, or thought he knew, what was coming next. Doc Evatt was going to point out that his country
was
giving him a choice. He did have permission to complete his degree before joining up. But he'd guessed wrong. Without glancing up Evatt asked, ‘What if your country had a different agenda this time?'

‘How do you mean, sir?'

‘Well, you're aware of the economic situation. In this constituency alone the rate of unemployment is still appallingly high. The centre for the Unemployed Workers Movement is right here in Balmain.' He paused momentarily. ‘I assume it's the Sixth Division you want to join. Is that right?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Well, I hope you'll believe me when I say that for most of the men who join up, it will be the first job with steady pay they've had in quite a while. Some of the younger ones have never known a regular job. Some are permanently unemployed. Too many men are still doing it tough, so it stands to reason the ranks will be swelled by the unemployed, unskilled and hard doers. That's just a fact of contemporary Australian life.'

‘Sir, I don't think I'm anything special; I'm not any different to them . . .'

‘Ah, but you are, son; your education is what separates you.'

Danny frowned. ‘Sir, all my mates, the blokes I grew up with, fit your description. I'd like to be in it with them.'

‘That's quite understandable, even commendable. But in terms of your country's needs, it's not sensible. It's a fact of modern warfare that rank and file – ordinary soldiers – are wasted as a fighting force unless there are sufficient men qualified to lead them.'

Danny felt that, judge or not, he couldn't let Doc Evatt get away with a statement like that. ‘Sir, in the
Herald
yesterday the editorial pointed out that the rush to join the Sixth Division from the professional classes is such that there is sufficient officer material to lead an army.'

Evatt hardly missed a beat. ‘I hope the
Herald
is correct – I cannot comment – but I am led to believe that you are a highly regarded sportsman and I guess not altogether stupid either. You captained your school in rugby and I've heard you described in Balmain as a born leader, someone young blokes choose to follow. During the First World War, the officers were almost entirely “educated”,' he gave the word an ironic inflexion, ‘but nevertheless there were few men who could lead, and I include the generals in this list of ineffectual leaders. Australia also had its fair share of nincompoops – private schoolboys from our better families, professional men, officers who, when it came to leading in the battlefield, didn't possess an ounce of commonsense. But we also had men such as Monash and Pompey Elliott, who, I'm sure you will agree, support my point; men who had completed their education, honed their intellect and so could understand the complexities of modern war.'

‘But . . . but, it's only an Arts degree,' Danny protested. ‘It has nothing to do with the complexities of modern warfare!'

‘True enough. But a degree, any degree, cultivates your mind, teaching you how to think, organise, analyse and research. Besides, you'll receive the appropriate officer training when the time comes and if, as has been suggested, you have the instinct to lead, the rest will follow naturally.' Doc Evatt leaned back and folded his hands across his pot belly. ‘Take my advice, son. You owe it to your country to complete your education, the education your country has granted you, to be used, one would hope, in its service. War is to be avoided at almost any cost – I myself lost two brothers in the last one – but now we're in another we all have to contribute what we can. If I might put it differently, your country needs all your capabilities rather more than it needs another trigger finger.'

Evatt rose to his feet. He looked steadily at Danny until the younger man was forced to drop his gaze. ‘Complete your degree, son. You'll enjoy officer training. Take my word for it, this war isn't going to be over in a year or even two or three. There will be plenty of opportunity to do your duty by your country when the time comes. Generally speaking, an athlete who is a natural leader makes a damn good officer. If men are prepared to follow you willingly, you must be competent to lead them intelligently.'

Danny was suddenly conscious that he was being addressed by a justice of the High Court, living proof of what a boy from an ordinary background can achieve in Australia. ‘Thank you, sir. I'll try to do as you say.'

Evatt smiled. ‘Good. Now I must go.' He extended his hand. ‘Good lad. Don't disappoint me, or your country. Give us all you've got to give. That way we'll win this war.'

Danny watched from upstairs as Doc Evatt's big black Buick pulled away from the front of the pub. The drinkers had spilled onto the pavement to see the great man leave, his mother at the forefront, giving the judge a farewell peck on the cheek. Brenda had won, Danny thought sourly. She always won.

Doc Evatt's logic couldn't be faulted. Danny would go back to uni and eat crow while locals watched their sons marching off to war, thinking to themselves that he was the gutless wonder who would remain behind. Any explanation – that he planned to complete his degree and then go on to officer training – would only increase their silent scorn. Balmain boys were born with a healthy suspicion of authority and stuck with their mates come what may. A famous example, taught to every kid when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, was the story of the six Balmain boys, waiting in a narrow trench at Gallipoli to go over the top when the officer blew his whistle. The first boy handed his mate the letter he'd written to his sweetheart. The whistle blew five times and the first five were, each in turn, mown down by Turkish machine-gun fire. The sixth eventually returned home with five letters for five sweethearts. In fact the legend was so well known among Balmain folk that it was simply known as ‘Five Letters to Five Sweethearts'. When unity of opinion or effort against an outside opponent was called for, it was shortened further: ‘Okay, fellas, Five Letters!'

Danny went downstairs to help with last drinks, then cleaned the bar and afterwards went for a long walk, crossing over to neighbouring Birchgrove where he sat on a bench in a small park.

Half Dunn had watched his grim-faced boy silently leave the pub without calling goodbye or indicating, as he usually did, when he might be back. He had no need to ask how the meeting had gone upstairs. Danny's silence as he cleared the glasses and cleaned the bar was answer enough. She'd won.

He felt for his son, recognising his own impotence in the face of Brenda's determination. He still hadn't recovered from the recent scene in the kitchen. Passing out at the sight of a drop of his own blood in Danny's presence had been pathetic. After returning to the pub from Dr Keeble's with a silent and humiliated Brenda, he'd waited while she went upstairs and shortly after returned with a hand mirror and led him into the ladies toilet. Making him stand in front of the mirror she'd held the second mirror up to the back of his head to show him the extent of the wound on his bald patch. It was truly nothing and he'd felt ashamed and worthless. Despite the satisfaction he'd obtained from the huge scare he'd given her, by silently demonstrating her contempt with the mirror, she'd ultimately made it seem like the cheap and unworthy trick it was. The large and tender bruise that came out around his coccyx caused him considerable pain when he sat down, but it could not be seen and, of course, he daren't mention it now. He knew it would heal in time, but his humiliation would remain.

Now, here was more of the same with Doc Evatt: the cursory way the great man had acknowledged him on arrival, a mere nod of the head as he and Brenda had sailed past and she'd called out to Danny to follow; then ignoring him completely on the way out. It hadn't even occurred to her to include him, the father, in a discussion involving the boy's future.

She'd left the pub two nights previously dressed to the nines, new dress, hat, gloves, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, hopped into a waiting taxi she must have ordered earlier, and when he'd called out to her from the front door, she'd waved and called back, ‘Primo's, Doc Evatt!' She'd made no mention of her assignation the next day.

Now she returned from farewelling the judge wearing a decidedly smug smile, but, as usual, didn't bother to tell him a thing. She'd gone directly into her office, closing the door behind her. To hug herself gleefully? To gloat?

Half Dunn felt a tightening in his chest, a feeling of frustrated rage that had been occurring more and more lately, in fact, since the declaration of hostilities a couple of weeks earlier. He had always felt a private shame that his obesity had prevented him from enlisting in the AIF towards the end of the last war. He traced his subsequent lethargy and sense of worthlessness to this rejection, which had been further exacerbated when the diggers returned home to bands and parades. He was fully aware of the deference shown to the men who had served their country, and of the way people in Wagga regarded him – girls in particular – with their slender arms around the waists of returned diggers, the corners of their pretty-coloured lips curled in contempt when they thought he wasn't looking, or of how they'd coolly survey him under their lashes as they exhaled the smoke from their cigarettes, then disdainfully turn away. He'd sought solace in grog and covered his hurt with bombast, bonhomie and bullshit.

This self-serving explanation for his early decline wasn't strictly true. Lethargy, gluttony and a somewhat cowardly demeanour had marked him from childhood, but his large and abiding thirst had appeared promptly with the arrival of his legal drinking age and wasn't necessarily due to his rejection by the army. We all seek comfort in excuses of our own invention and Half Dunn had come to believe in these largely fallacious reasons for his failure to live up to his own and others' expectations.

But this new conflict was Danny's war, his rite of passage. His son was everything he would have liked to have been and wasn't. Danny's misfortune was that he'd come up against a formidable mother, a veritable force of nature, if not a virago, then certainly the single most determined person Half Dunn had ever known.

Pathetically he realised that any effort he might make to support his son wasn't worth a pinch of shit. Brenda was capable of cutting him down to size any time she liked, that is, when she didn't simply ignore him. Even her former token ‘Yes, dears' had now been replaced by an impatient tongue cluck and a flick of her hair.

Half Dunn didn't regard the Doc Evatt episode as an act of desperation on his wife's part but perhaps uncharitably as an act of sheer determination. Now he watched helplessly from the sidelines as she schemed to get her way and in the process whipped the kid back into line.