A Letter from Paris Read online

  Crippled with debt, used to the sirens and having to cover their windows for blackouts, the English in the immediate post-war period sounded anything but jubilant the war was over. They were hungry, depressed, and exhausted.

  Dad’s first meal at a bistro in France, by contrast, was almost a holy experience. Meat, wine, bread, butter, mussels … this seems like life again. A detail from this meal in Marseille struck him: The French sit facing the sun.

  Despite the diagnosis of TB, and difficulty being allowed currency that wasn’t English pounds, dad had seemed determined to cover as wide an amount of European terrain as possible. His passport was filled from 1947 to 1949 with stamps across stamps — Spain, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland … I had trouble making out the dates.

  The feeling of shame again, hitting that part of the solar plexus I associate with survival. He squandered three fortunes … The painful words came back. What were those fortunes? All I knew was that his father, my grandpa, was a Church of England vicar, who would have raised six children on a parishioner’s salary. I made a note to ask my cousins where the ‘fortune’ would have come from …

  The cost of exchanging Australian dollars for pounds, the medical bills, the open-handed way he gave to his friends … Dad was extravagant, it was certainly true. But it was as though he thought he didn’t have much time left, and I understood that feeling of urgency, even though I wasn’t sure where it came from.

  There was ‘squandering’ to encourage David Boyd by paying for his music lessons in Melbourne, more ‘squandering’ on one of Arthur Boyd’s earliest paintings of Rosebud, more encouragement. Music, art, beauty, travel. Random loans to artists. A hundred-pound fare for the boat from Melbourne to England given to poet mate Alister Kershaw, then another hundred pounds loaned to mate Albert Tucker. The cost of the printing press. Printing a poem into a book for Al, then printing Adrian Lawlor’s book …

  In London, he even saw Swan Lake two nights in a row because it filled some spiritual need — falling in love with the lead, Anna Cheselka, and waxing lyrically in his diary about how love and art and beauty could fill a hunger that mundane concerns could not. He was a mad romantic. Art, music, and love moved him spiritually much more than the church, and he felt this differentiated him from his family. His father had been a clergyman — was that why dad was considered the ‘black sheep’? In Paris, he’d describe himself ‘galloping’ every time he heard music coming from inside a church. Music moved him more than anything.

  The war was over and he was always starving hungry, it seemed, but he wanted to live as well as possible, with as much friendship and culture and poetry and romance as possible. He was always shouting people meals in London. But he was never full, always describing a ‘dull ache’ in his stomach.

  Until he got to France.

  I shifted in and out of journalistic objectivity, remembering to look for clues about dates, names, times, then falling into this strange, obsessive, trance-like state, caught up in the marvel that he was actually talking to me, through these diaries. Once home from every library trip, I’d pull a diary of my own down from the cupboard, locating eerily parallel lines written by my own hand, at similar ages.

  A short story about a trip to the country echoed lines from my first book. The similarities in our writing style had me wondering about what we inherit without even knowing: a focus on snatches of dialogue, the idea of freedom and spirituality, and love versus traditional religion. A deep distrust of hierarchies and pretension. All the parts of me that had never made sense were here in dad’s pages.

  It was intimate and intense, this relationship I’d formed with dad’s words, and I didn’t know what it meant or how it could be a good thing — I had nothing to compare it to, no one to ask about it. If I said it out loud, I would sound like I’d been possessed by a ghost. I kept it all quiet, only expressing my feelings in emails to the French sisters, in my diary, and to my siblings.

  I couldn’t focus on anything else, I found dad’s writing so entertaining. Even the most banal diary descriptions were interesting. How had this been tucked away from me for so long? Why hadn’t anyone told me?

  I had to consciously remind myself he’d written these diaries for no one but himself.

  1949

  The Russian boys get on at Ennsbrucke. One of them smiles and says ‘Guten Abend.’ We are suitably astonished. He looks at the passes, holds mine for a long time. Then he says, ‘This is too late. It has expired.’ I gasp. The others all turn around. I stand up and start talking bad German with him.

  He is quite right, the damned thing had run out. Fat monocole has moved back a table to be out of the way, but he suddenly says: ‘He has broken his ankle, can’t you see? That’s why he is late, he’s been in hospital.’ I suddenly play the foot argument, showing the plaster monstrosity. But the boy half grins and says ‘I must see my officer’, disappearing. I am shattered. A sallow, hooked-nose man who has been talking bad French with another, both wearing violent American feature ties says, looking at me, ‘Now we will be late in Vienna …’

  I walk back to my compartment to look for hospital documents to confuse and stupefy the Russkis. After ten minutes the train moves, slowly, but it moves. I put my head out the window and laugh for glee.

  Damn the passport, we’re off. But the porter comes along with my passport. The nice Russian boy had just taken it outside the carriage, hung rough for a minute, then given it to the porter. Nice boy. The second nice Russian!

  We’re off again. The fat monocole returns. ‘Er war sehr nette, jener Russe, sehr nette. Ja, er war sehr net, nicht wahr?’ Grey hair agrees with him.

  The Arlberg Express, held up by one figure on a grey card for twenty minutes, roars off to beat the clock.

  Despite whatever mysterious ailment he seemed to have on those train rides, he galloped from place to place at a giant speed, hungry to devour the culture and interact with everyone, so grateful to be out of Australia, to feel like he was ‘living’ again, even though his medical records painted a different picture.

  Then somehow we’d gone from London to Paris again, and he was living in an upstairs room at the Hotel Floridor in 1951. There was no hot water, the lift was broken, the hotelier couldn’t speak a word of English, but he was happier there than anywhere he’d lived in his life, parking his bags in an upstairs room overlooking a square for over a year. It was close to the nearby international train station, and he could zip off to Brussels or Berlin or Bern whenever the mood took him.

  I could understand his excitement at being out of Australia, particularly after what sounded like a harrowing six-week voyage on a ‘hell-ship’ with ‘no windows’ in a cabin with five other men and no trips out on deck, but the rate at which he travelled was overwhelming even to me. He seemed determined not to miss out on something. Like perhaps he had, before.

  Thinking I was picking up another page from 1949, I opened up a ten-page memoir about his army service in Australia during World War II. It was typed up as if for publication, but one line threw me:

  … and the next detail will be of interest to my children …

  Simply titled, 1942.

  I surrendered to what had become clear that first day in the library. I couldn’t understand 1949 until I understood everything that came before.

  Particularly, dad’s experience of the Second World War.

  Chapter Eight

  Le régiment

  What would we do if the Japanese came? I had a Tommy Gun, but we were under strictest orders not to shoot a single round. Meanwhile in the heat, without news of the war, sound nor sight of a plane or a civilian, eaten by insects and forgetting the taste of fresh food, we sank.

  The entire ten-page essay, and another tucked just behind it, were both penned decades after the war had ended. Perhaps they were drafts of a story for publication? The manuscripts recounted, in detail, dad’s experienc
es during 1941 and 1942. His handwritten letters and diaries from 1939 to 1943 filled in the gaps.

  I learned he’d joined one of Australia’s first Commando units, and was sent to guard the Northern Territory from Japanese invasion.

  I’d never really looked into dad’s war service — never known how much World War II had affected my family, my grandparents on both sides, even dad’s eldest sister, Louise, who’d lived through both the First and Second World Wars. His obituary said he’d been ‘invalided’ while still in Australia. I had never understood how or if dad had ‘served’, not really understanding what the Australian contribution had been, or if you could still say you’d ‘served’ if you’d never been posted overseas.

  But it all connected to his feelings about France.

  How that feeling of being trapped in Australia by the confines of his family had marked him so deeply, he’d been determined to see as much of the world as he could when it was over, though this meant breaking the conditions of the ‘inheritance’ from his maternal aunt’s husband, Randal Alcock. (I learned through my cousins that Alcock was a prominent businessman who’d never had any children of his own; he’d left dad and his five surviving siblings a small inheritance when they ‘came of age’. The inheritance came with conditions, though, and dad seemed to get in trouble a lot for exceeding the stipulated amount they were allowed to spend on travel.)

  I’d looked up dad’s war records online once, in a midnight Google search that went for hours but only gave me more questions than answers. I had zoomed in on scanned PDFs and tried to translate war-speak and army code, but the signs and handwritten references in his records were too hard to understand. I hadn’t understood Independent Company referred to the first Commandoes. All I could clarify was that dad was ‘taken on strength’ on 12 December 1941, went AWOL a lot after 1943, and wasn’t discharged until 1945.

  But he never left Australia.

  This memoir read almost like a translation of the ‘official’ story of that first Commando regiment in Australia.

  In September 1939, when Australia’s prime minister announced the country’s involvement in World War II, dad’s history studies at Melbourne University paled in significance with what was unfolding on the wireless. On 3 September 1939, he wrote:

  Tonight while dad was at Church, Chamberlain spoke suddenly to declare war. After, we did little but listen to news bulletins. When will the bombs fall on London? He sounded frightened, poor old man. Frightened at the things he was letting loose … the distinction Chamberlain made, between German people, and Nazi war-lords … I don’t yet realize what it will mean to me. If Hitler gets Poland, he threatens us.

  And later that year:

  Poland taken. Paris has fallen. Des marches out in uniform.

  Dad had been hospitalised with sinus infections numerous times as a teenager, and the family still called him ‘bubs’ at age nineteen. As he saw his older brothers leave — Desmond to somewhere in the Middle East, Randal in the Artillery, even his sister Kathleen to help form the Australian Women’s Army Service — the frustrated, always-missing-out feeling that came from being the sickly ‘baby’ of the family grew so intense that by the time the Japanese had joined the Germans in threatening the Pacific, he skipped his history lecture at Melbourne University to catch the tram to Town Hall and enlist.

  Melbourne was small back then. Someone had given ‘word’ that a sergeant major was taking volunteers for ‘especially dangerous and immediate service’. It was the first special-forces group Australia had ever formed, on directions from the British, intended to support the Australian Imperial Force in the Middle East.

  Dad was apparently rejected in that March 1941 attempt for sounding too ‘la-di-da’, so he learned to soften his English-intonated speech for the next interview. That first Independent Company — the one he missed out on being selected for — was the first to be killed in action.

  But by December 1941 he’d made it through. Hours after volunteering (this time, in suburban Caulfield) he was on a train to the tiny country town of Foster to be trained in guerrilla warfare at the Australian mainland’s rugged southernmost point, Wilsons Promontory. His father, through some kind of connection, managed to identify the train, and climbed the fence at Spencer Street station to see him off, appearing at dad’s window, determined to say goodbye. This visual of my grandpa was immense.

  I could finally picture someone further up the family line than dad — and I loved who I saw.

  ‘What are you doing?’ dad had apparently said, worried the officials would discover his dad had uncovered classified information, because no one was supposed to know where the group was being sent to train. Not ‘I love you’ or ‘Goodbye’. Dad berated himself for years afterwards.

  On the Victorian coastline of Wilsons Promontory, with no family to constrain him with their concerns and criticisms, no one calling him ‘bubs’ or saying he was too sick to attempt the gruelling routine or admonishing his impulsive streak, he trained with his fellow crackpots who’d signed up for ‘dangerous and immediate service’, burying limpet mines and explosives, conducting mock raids and hand-to-hand combat, taking target practice, and learning secret tactics only entrusted to the chosen few.

  No grog, plenty of grub, dad wrote. They ran up to the peak of Mount Oberon every morning, and if you didn’t make it up to the top by a specific time you were sent back to be a ‘regular’ soldier. Oberon was the difference between ‘regular’ and ‘dangerous and immediate service’. Unlike the soldiers stationed in outback Katherine or elsewhere, waiting for movement, the Commandoes would be deployed — and soon. We were sure of it. Dad made it up and back from Oberon in the specified time, every morning. Determined to get away.

  Something twigged, and I realised why he’d named his printing press Oberon Press.

  Soon, he’d be deployed overseas. Overseas, a distant notion taken from the wireless or the newspapers or history lectures. Alamein. Africa. Europe. Abroad. In a time without internet or long-distance air travel or television, the notion of ‘abroad’ must have been about as exciting as outer space.

  As they prepared in that training camp, dad considered what he knew about the fight against fascism and the Germans, how he’d be making his own contribution first-hand, a part of something global he’d only read of or heard in snatches on the radio.

  Finally, I’d have the chance to learn of my bravery, he wrote. I could make the choice.

  How refreshing it would have been to meet men from all over the place, not just the Church of England types from his boarding school, not just people who’d known his family, with all their loaded expectations of what was proper and ‘right’ behaviour, the weight of religious conservatism, that connection with his father being a vicar that made him feel endlessly monitored back in Melbourne.

  He wrote of how interesting the other guys in his company were. Though most of them came from the ‘lower classes’, he felt safer with these ‘good blokes’ than those he’d schooled with at Geelong Grammar (the Australian version of Eton). Why was that? He seemed to imply it was because they were honest.

  Here he was finally with some rebels and misfits. Men rewarded for taking risks. A little cracked. A little crazy.

  Brothers in the adventure.

  When the Japanese bombed Darwin in February 1942, his company was ordered to Katherine, to protect the Top End of Australia from further invasion by ‘harassing’ and ‘disorganising’ the Japanese.

  We’ll finally be in the fight, he wrote. Connected to the rest of the world. It was hard for me picture life in Australia without the ability to cross oceans through communication, at whim. As I pored over dad’s diaries, Trump’s fight for the US presidency was being televised globally and discussed all across the internet.

  From the moment dad stepped on the train north, his letters to family members — also held in the library — had such a sense of impending a
dventure. Signing up for active service was the most exciting thing he’d done in his life so far.

  No more grey skies and cold Melbourne winters. Here it was: fast travel and warm skies and palm trees, strangers bringing sliced pineapple as gifts to the men at the stations like the whole thing was a spectacle and the soldiers were the stars.

  He didn’t mind having no idea what came next. Perhaps it was the perfect outlet for a nature like his. The Commandoes, unlike the regular soldiers, were chosen specifically for that particular irreverence to authority and structure. Their ability to make snap decisions without needing to be expressly directed how to act and when was why they were chosen for this ‘dangerous and immediate’ service.

  Halfway to their destination were ‘Wet’ canteens at Alice Springs and even an outdoor cinema. What a luxurious business this War thing is, dad wrote.

  In one letter to his mum, he warned his sister Louise to stop asking about where he’d be going. I don’t want another word of it. Stay right off it, — please. He seemed scared she might take something away.

  It took over a week on the train to make it to the Top End. Katherine was arid, full of crocodiles and wild pigs and a blazing sun. But there was so much hope in dad’s early letters home that there’s no way he could have known he’d see nothing but the dust of that desolate landscape for the next six months.

  Somewhere next to a swamp in the Northern Territory, dad spent six months of 1942.

  No radio, no information, nothing but the Daly River rising and falling, and the leeches and the mosquitoes and the same ten faces of men soon suffering from dengue, malaria, and severe malnutrition. Armed with a tommy gun and enough ammunition to last a few minutes, if that, they had no food except a few cans of corned beef and dried rice, and no water to cook it in.

  Worse, they had no barely any cover from the Australian sun except a tent and a small net for the ten of them.