The Refuge (25 page)
‘All right,’ she said, recovering herself with her usual disconcerting ease. ‘I don’t care for all this nonsense about the maternal show of bravery and a stiff upper lip. Brian is ready to go, and we’re going to do without his visits for as long as we have to. My main trouble is with old Molly. All the Irish is coming out in that woman—the crying Irish, with occasional unconvincing bursts of the fighting Irish. You’d think he was her own only son, instead of mine and one of three, by the way she goes on. I sometimes wish Con hadn’t been so fond of her for the shameless fun he used to get out of playing up to her. I could do with someone a little—firmer—in fibre just now. Ever since Con died she’s set herself against my way of bringing up the boys. It’s still going on. Patrick and Terence still lean her way a bit in their weaker moments. I wish they could have gone to that school of Alan’s.’
‘The only thing I have doubts about, as far as Alan is concerned, is that Townsend’s system may give him the idea that there is a virtue in not conforming mainly to the social pattern. I may be wrong. I foresee him going through a period when he has more imagination and intelligence than he can cope with at his age. When he is twelve he will go on to Shore, I hope, and live with boys only. I cannot say I care much for the idea of boys and girls living in close proximity for the first years of adolescence.’
‘I wish I had a daughter,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to become one of those mothers people mean when they say, “She simply lives for her boys.” That awful gaiety, Lloyd!’
‘I know what you mean. They are, in fact, sexually abnormal, and it seems to me about time our society recognized the fact, instead of praising it under the name of devotion. Not many people know the real meaning of the word. It is misused to hide a number of gross crimes of conduct.’
‘How stern you look when you talk like that,’ she said. ‘Like a sea-captain ashore—still stern and dependable even as a pedestrian.’
‘Especially the pedestrian part,’ I said. She waved that aside. ‘What I want to know is, what are you going to do about yourself?’ she said.
‘Work.’ I got up to go. ‘Tell me one thing. Why have there been none of the usual interruptions today?’
Her easy smile lightened her answer: ‘I had a feeling it might be the last talk of this sort we’d have for a time, so I told them in the other room I simply wouldn’t be in if you came. I bet that made them smile knowingly—or are they used to us by now? Tell me, Lloyd, just what do the people here think of you and me? I’m really shamefully out of touch with the rest of the office, most of the time.’
‘I never bother to wonder what people think here,’ I said. ‘Ours is not the only innocent friendship in the place, though I doubt whether any of the others is as good and as lacking in self-interest.’
She laughed. ‘You do keep yourself untouchable, don’t you. I hope you always can. I hope you’re always spared the self-betrayals the world offers us so often.’
A minute or two later I left her. The next time we met, during the following week, her son had been sent to an advanced training unit. We were officially at war with Germany, and the final over-running of Europe had begun. Her feeling about our last talk had not been wrong.
For the men and women of my profession, or trade as my father had insisted upon calling it (‘for come, my boy, admit you will be trading in the human passions, from intelligent curiosity down?’), the six years of active warfare could be described as years of prosperous discomfort.
There was almost an over-supply of news made ready to hand. ‘The war angle’ applied to everything, from women’s fashions to stock-sales at Homebush and crime in Darlinghurst. The idea of violence and death, incomprehensible still, became commonplace and meaningless, its mysterious fascination now only a legend. We knew they were impressive years. What we did not realize, because of their often brilliantly-lighted darkness, was that they were to impress and alter beyond remembrance the whole mind and manner of the civilian community.
The men and to a less degree the women in uniform were impressed and altered under our very eyes, even before they had gone abroad. We expected this. They became men and women of another race, unconscious initiates into the mystery of how to be a sheep proudly, hardly less strange though of course more nearly related to us than were the plump, heavy-drinking, over-courteous young Americans with their—to us—astonishing, naively uncouth adolescence who came to the country later, on the heels of General MacArthur.
The war, the idea of it, claimed them at once. As they dressed differently, so they thought—when they did think—differently; and the others, the men and women of the civilian front, showed them a startling degree of humility that was to continue for the duration. Once more, as in my own childhood, the voice of the fighting man was heard up and down the land, like a drunkard’s in a church hall during a welfare-society meeting. It was heard and listened to, suffered with every appearance of enthusiasm, and obeyed with a readiness that must have been gratifying to those minds that could be called normal only in such abnormal times. The old values, the old words, the thoughts of the philosophers and the poets, were for a long time forgotten, or, remembered, remembered mostly with impatient scorn. This was war, the killing season. Man’s life and soul, it seemed, could be divided into those of the man of the time of peace, and of him of the time of war, two men without a bond between them. The bombs fell, the guns dinned, the blood ran brightly, and the future of the race was not worth imagining.
Through it all, the news flowed in along overburdened channels of wire and air, coming from all over the continent and all over the world. There were no silly seasons now, those times in the newspaper year when it seems impossible to fill the paper, when news-editors become irritable, and the youngest cadet suspects an underlying futility in his joyfully-chosen profession . . . or trade. On the contrary, most of us were over-worked, and some received more money than was good for them. Money had begun to change hands with its inevitable wartime carelessness, because no costs were being counted anywhere, except in the hearts of a few men and women; and the whole country’s sudden preoccupation with secondary production, factory work, not only denuded the land, the whole source and security of Australia’s existence, of men and the girls they should have married, but also set free a flood of currency which, like the workers, swirled into and round about the capital cities so that from very early in the years of war the face of city existence was suddenly and ominously changed.
The Americans, when at last they came in interesting enough numbers, were never absorbed, as they were to some extent later in Europe, where fragments of their roots still clung, for here the native-born community, barely eight million strong, would have been too small even in peace time; and now, with hundreds of thousands of younger men and women—approaching one-eighth of the population in the end—in uniform and often engaged overseas, the friendly, boastful youngsters from across the Pacific, eager as adolescents in their sexual curiosity, their uncomprehending enthusiasms and their schoolboy passion for food and drink, were conspicuous to the very end. Wherever they went, in Australia as in other parts of the world, they never quite achieved popularity with the people, despite their efforts, despite what they and we were told; but the years of advance publicity spread by talking-pictures and imported gramophone records and wireless programmes made them in one way or another invariably spectacular; and the impression they in turn made upon the life of the bigger cities has endured—sometimes tragically. We were to discover the secret of the American way of life—that it offered the greatest ease for the least effort; or, as one of their officers told me with a wink as rich and heavy as a slice of fruit-cake, ‘pleasure without payin’, son—pleasure without payin’.’
But they paid—they paid for everything, willingly and twice over, and nearly overthrew our own domestic economy by the effect their full pockets and liberal ways had upon prices.
I had quite a lot to do with them, both on and off duty; and, though I found it was possible to accustom oneself to the curious hollow unreality of what they claimed, with sharp, parrot-like cries, to be that American way of life, I could never overcome a depressing shyness of those who lived it and took it with them wherever they went—and they went everywhere. Nor could I ever believe, in spite of what I had read and heard about that country, that the young men, and the men not so young in the higher posts, who invaded our already chaotic life to its further gross confusion were characteristic of the powerful nation they were said to represent.
However, they were news. Their presence affected the papers themselves, and their staffs. We chose to trace to it the most startling development in latter-day Australian newspaper history, when
The Sydney Morning Herald
, the property of generations of Fairfaxes, older than the
Gazette
, abandoned its old-style, conservative ‘open-up’ lay-out (based on that of
The Times
of London, of which it had long been a devoted if not always impressive understudy) for the modern American front-page presentation of the morning news. As well as recurrent and inevitable special articles about the young American soldier abroad (including a couple of my own in which I was allowed to hint at the effect these foreigners were having on Australian crime methods and statistics), we printed for their benefit and that of their numerous Australian friends (and even more numerous parasites) more and more news from the United States, of a sort we had not bothered to use before. It meant a recasting of our American offices. At the same time, America wanted more news—of the acceptable, ‘we’re-over-there’ sort—from our own end, and their papers mostly had their own representatives, as well as those of the big press agencies, in Australia, so that even the newspapers felt within their walls the full impact of the invasion.
It is said that out of it all, out of the increased tragedies and mis-marriages and other youthful crimes (including the soft debauchery of a surprising number of adolescent girls in the cities) good came, in the firmer drawing-together of the two young nations; until today they are like suburban neighbours of different ways of life but with a street, a fence and some opposed windows in common—friendly enough to borrow each other’s gardening tools and repair outfits, so to speak, but still no more than deliberately amiable strangers, with nothing more in common than a common regard, on the part of each, for what may be gained at least cost to face and fortune from the other.
The war years saw the commencement of this superficially enthusiastic playing at good neighbours, while to us the Australian way of life, in climates ranging from the tropical to the temperate—but no lower, except in the snow playgrounds and pastures of the eastern Alps—still seemed preferable, in spite of the heightened clamour in our midst. It was a way of living more like that of the pure British convict stock from which a large part of the population had descended, and its snobbery continued to be concerned with origins and traditions belonging to the British islands from which our ancestors had departed, no matter how ungracefully, as pioneers of a new nation. When, towards the conclusion of armed action, British fighting men from the three desperately-tested services passed through on their way north and east, they were greeted not with caution but with the joy and fury that so often characterize a reunion of blood brothers. It was then that the tragedy of the American way of life suddenly showed clear; we saw that they were a sovereign people without a sovereign, with no fixed object for their love or their hate save only one another, not even a cultural heritage, like that of France, to bind them together gladly at the foot of Democracy’s empty throne. By contrast, to our people the British on their way through were as irresistible as a breath of fresh air in a bedroom through the opened window of morning.
Through all this, my own work increased considerably, and I had no assistance in it, for by nineteen forty-two we were seriously short of staff, when the Japanese approached from the north and the most unlikely men suddenly appeared on the streets in uniform. That was no bad thing, for it helped me to keep the piling horrors of warfare as made by my own generation at a certain distance from the point where recognition of them would have threatened sane behaviour. Sane I knew I must keep me, for Alan’s sake if for no other reason; for in a convulsed world he was growing nearer to adolescence, nearer to that moment where, as I foresaw it, our ways must separate to run apart for a time on near-parallel lines separated by a whole generation; that moment when—also perhaps for a time only—our half-wordless intimacy of the blood must end, and we must begin to speak new languages, I his, he mine.
During his four years at S. Johns school, about which the brief controversies now rose less often and more quickly subsided, he had developed into his true self in a way that was delightful and astonishing. He was not to be called precocious; Townsend and his wife did not encourage such false growth; but he bloomed fully and freely into a kind of boyhood which filled me with a hot pride I was ashamed to reveal. The perfect, normal health of his flexible young body was repeated in the health and quality of his mind. He never lost what he found at that modest, eccentric school-home—a sort of brightness as it were of the spirit cupped in the cupped hands of secret reserve and quiet generosity. Above all, he had neither malice nor deceit in his heart. I never knew him to lie, or to countenance with amused composure lies in others of his age. The one thing in his character which gave me most unease was his habit of single-minded optimism. It appeared, indeed, when he first learned to walk; and the impulsive fears for his safety which I then suffered I underwent, for always-differing reasons, a hundred, a thousand times subsequently. Then and always, he saw the end and smilingly took for granted the rightness and inevitability of the means—not always wisely, not always successfully. Failure in an enterprise stunned him into temporary incredulity and slow, unchildlike, old-man’s tears; success turned him silent and brilliant, or dreamy-eyed at the tremendous thoughts of further conquests of the world of matter and energy. He had from infancy a habit of sitting silent on the edge of his bed in the dark of early evening. Once, when I thoughtlessly asked him what he was doing, he told me without self-consciousness or what would have been a pardonable irritation, ‘Just thinking.’ It seemed to be a conscious, planned act of thought, after the manner of the religious who withdraws from habits and surroundings at certain times of the day consciously to commune with divinity.