A Letter from Paris Page 11

  They’d been taught how to fight in hand-to-hand combat, but no one, particularly the British, who came from a cold climate, knew what special-forces soldiers would need to survive the searing temperatures in the landscape of northern Australia.

  There is a war, somewhere, and we’ll be in it soon, dad kept telling himself.

  Sleepless in the Territory heat while mosquitoes hammered them relentlessly with what dad deliriously described as ‘bayonets’, their wounds soon getting infected, his group took it in turns to pile three apiece underneath their one square of netting from March to September 1942.

  He was twenty-one.

  Perhaps the War had ended … ? How would we know? he wrote. The idea of Europe, and the German occupation, was an abstract and illusory thing with no radio and no British officers keeping them in the loop.

  The mozzies were so bad one man shot himself on Hermit Hill. Similar things happened on the Roper … Others just wandered off into the featureless Northern Territory landscape …

  He couldn’t even fathom the meaning of the word ‘fascism’ at one point, hallucinating and delirious and unsure of who or where he was. It had meant so much in Melbourne: it was the reason he’d enlisted. Yet ‘fascism’ seemed unreal when he was surrounded only by the Australian outback and the faces of the same men caving in on themselves around him.

  They were actually dumped there, I realised. Dumped by a swamp and left to ‘disarm the Japanese if they come’.

  His commanding officer went MIA, after two of the men in his group had also wandered off. Eventually, another officer turned up in their miserable camp, like something out of a hallucination. He oddly demanded dad’s group pull their boots on for ‘March Out’ (parade in formation).

  What was this ‘March Out’, and why on earth did it matter in the outback? One of the men, in pain beyond bearing, unable to get his boots over his swollen feet, and by then covered in infected sores, threw his boots with a yell into the scrub and was put on a charge sheet.

  Good show, really, wrote dad, scornful, like the rest of the group, of the bizarre order.

  The soldier with strikes on his record for throwing his boots into the bushes wandered off, too, eventually.

  While another man shot himself (‘accidental death’, the official line), choosing to end the mosquito hell and the confusion and the anticlimax of staring at the same starving faces next to a swamp full of leeches, dad battled his torrid inner world with the determination that there is a War, and I’ll be in it, soon.

  In September, half a year after they’d been dumped near the swamp, a truck appeared, taking the remaining soldiers to the Adelaide River. There they saw fresh, flowing water for the first time, a shaded eating area, food brought in by truck, and, most importantly, a wireless radio.

  But they still didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. After a few weeks, another truck appeared, taking dad’s group to a camp in Katherine filled with thousands of other soldiers.

  But why had they trained us as commandoes to fester out here in the scrub? No answer. We were to move to a prepared camp with amenities, regular mail and so on, just like human soldiers.

  These soldiers were well fed and had plenty of water. They even had ammunition.

  Instructed to join the ‘regular’ soldiers to dig trenches for hundreds of toilets, dad was digging with his mate Matt, who was then accidentally shot in the back by one of the ‘regular’ soldiers carelessly taking target practice.

  It seemed particularly insane that the regular soldiers were allowed unlimited ammunition. The Independent Company were given 200 rounds each and the instruction not to use a single bullet in practice. Just disarm the Japanese … That’s what the hand-to-hand combat training had been for.

  While getting his ulcers lanced in what seemed a glamorous camp, because it was shaded and had a medical tent, dad heard the Sergeant Major call.

  Finally. My luck had turned — I’d get to be in the action. He allowed himself to think, Alamein, definitely. He was sure they were needed in Egypt.

  It was different news, but still exciting. The second part of the Independent Company — the men they’d trained with in Wilsons Promontory — had made it to Timor-Leste by boat. Behind enemy lines, they were ‘disrupting’ the Japanese, just as they’d been trained. But 20,000 Japanese were apparently looking for them. Overtaken by the enemy and cut off, they hadn’t surrendered. Could Dad’s company join them?

  Dulled by a variety of ailments including malaria and malnutrition, dad allowed the information to sink in. Soon after, a telegram appeared, delivered to the Sergeant Major.

  Private Deasey is to be returned south on compassionate grounds as his father is dead and his mother a cripple.

  He took himself outside and sat under a tree to absorb the news.

  Father … dead … mother a cripple.

  The harshness of the word ‘cripple’ in reference to his mum made him reel — he’d never considered her inability to stand or walk like that. She was just his mum. It’s all he’d ever known her to be, bedridden by arthritis. Not a ‘cripple’.

  And now his father, Denis, was dead.

  Denis had died of a heart attack on the train from Geelong to Fawkner, remaining upright still wearing his hat, so that no one knew he’d stopped breathing until the train got to the end of the line and he was still in his seat.

  Denis’s death was yet another casualty in a war in which dad hadn’t even stood in battle or left the country.

  After the telegram, dad was ordered onto a cattle truck packed with sickos and psychos and ex-inmates of the boob. He stood for days on end, making it back to Melbourne almost two weeks later. He wrote that the truck stopped in Adelaide on the way, and ‘Ninette’ met him at the station. Hers was the first friendly face he’d seen in so long. He told her, and himself, that he’d be back in the fight after a brief return to Melbourne. (Was this Ninette Dutton?)

  Yet in Melbourne, he was confined to desk duties while still technically on ‘active duty’. He never did make it back out. Put in the army communications department, he was given reporting duties on the army magazine, Salt. Health and science were his beats, and he soon moved across to the civilian broadsheet the Herald. (Its successor, the Herald Sun, was the first place I worked as a journalist.)

  I wondered who wrote that telegram, talked about it to Ayala and Dec, and read everything I could to try to find out. Eventually it became clear: his eldest sister, Louise, had written to the government. She didn’t want their mum to lose all her sons. She probably didn’t want to lose all her brothers, either.

  Des and Randal were both too heavily embedded in their postings to be let out — Des now in the Middle East, Randal preparing to go to Borneo. Their sister Kathleen was by then leading the women’s army in Mildura. Irwin had died as a child. Louise likely hadn’t wanted their mother to go through any more anguish. Telegrams had already arrived announcing that Des had been ‘wounded in action’, with no further details.

  Besides, dad was the ‘bubs’ of the family — he shouldn’t have enlisted to begin with, according to his role in the family opera. Let alone in the Commandoes, the least likely to survive.

  The sickly one, the black sheep, he said they always called him.

  He should have been at home with his mother.

  He wrote of those years after returning from the Northern Territory to Melbourne with a deep sense of loss. The house was cold and grief-stricken; his mother’s nightly shrieks of pain pierced his sleep and dreams.

  I realised, when I cross-referenced the memoirs with the obituary I’d once read — that I’d had the wrong information about dad’s service my whole life. He hadn’t been invalided out, and it hadn’t been in 1944, as was written in his obituary. What other stories had I taken as truth?

  Melbourne in the war years became a place of austerity, pain, and other people’s wi
shes, a place where dad was forced into a role he had no interest in playing. Where he felt confined.

  He was angry his sister had taken his choice from him — he’d never know if he’d be up to battle, if he could have played a role in history.

  His company did see action, the action he’d wondered about and prepared himself for by that revolting swamp for six months. The 2/4 Company made it to Timor the week dad’s train arrived back in Melbourne. They carried out ambushes, blew up bridges and roads, secured observation posts in the mountains, and relayed information on the movements of Japanese ships and aircraft.

  They deployed.

  But dad went back to that cold house which reeked of death. Angry, confused, starting to go off kilter in the confinement of life back in Melbourne, he gained dozens of AWOL strikes on his military record whenever he was told to turn up for March Out. Perhaps it reminded him of the boot episode near the swamp.

  His friend Bill, a calm and measured friend from school, died in his first deployment with the RAAF during that time, too.

  The war memoirs conveyed a feeling of powerlessness and randomness — that who lost out to war, and who survived, could never be predicted. And that all dad wanted was the freedom to choose what to do and when.

  Dad also hungered for honesty, to the point where he’d throw money (his ‘inheritance’) at people who he considered ‘authentic’ and ‘stimulating’, those who marched to the beat of their own drum and didn’t care what others thought. The war years were when he started kicking around with artists and non-conformists who had nothing to do with his Geelong Grammar crowd. He met Alister Kershaw in 1940, introducing him to author Geoff Dutton.

  I saw dad was looking for the truth. He didn’t want the ‘social’ position the family conditions — and their connection to the school — imposed. It can’t have been easy being the son of a vicar (who was also on the school board) in such small circles. Sometimes, he’d search for a homeless man, just to shout him a beer and have an ‘authentic’ conversation. In one diary after the war, he wrote of driving all the way to Gippsland to have a drink with some ‘real’ people in a country pub.

  The artists that he started knocking about with in Melbourne — irreverent, a little wacky, completely unpretentious — refreshed him. They weren’t bowing to some invisible hierarchy. They were a little cracked and crazy, like him.

  What use is money, if you can’t use it to further the things you value and love?

  There seemed such disparity between what the world saw of dad, and what he confided into his diaries. He was so lonely in those post-war years in Melbourne, even during his brief and impulsive-sounding first marriage. I didn’t understand why he married a woman who also came from quite a well-known Melbourne family, but he did love her, until the ‘petty concerns’ got too much and he realised she was happy to live in Melbourne for the rest of her life while all he wanted was to get out of it.

  He was desperate to travel.

  Alister Kershaw, by then his close partner in crime, cheered dad with his extreme nature and similar tendencies to rail against social expectations. He hated conformity as much as dad, and when they both met Irish artist Adrian Lawlor at a bar, they hatched a plan to publish his first book. Dad funded it all, as well as Kershaw’s first book of poetry — but I understood, now, that the money was all tied into that feeling of constriction and conditions. Spending it on some form of creative expression, on things he valued, gave him a sense of freedom. Like he was building a bigger world in the conservative Melbourne of the 1940s.

  There was a receipt in the boxes dated July 1947, signed by Albert Tucker, confirming that dad had given him one hundred pounds to get out of Australia, away from this accursed country. I knew dad had thrown another hundred pounds to Kershaw, too, paying his fare to catch the boat to England.

  But this confounded me the most. Why did he support everyone else on their creative journeys — but not himself?

  With his good mates gone, but still technically married, he did eventually buy himself a ticket to England, cementing his role as the ‘black sheep’.

  So he’d gone overseas on that awful boat where he caught TB — I guess five weeks on a boat to somewhere was better than six months waiting in the outback, only to have a letter from your family bring you back home.

  He left behind land on the Yarra River, a car, and a wife he’d been married to for less than a year. He felt enormous guilt for the ‘shame’ he’d brought to his mum.

  But he had to get away.

  By Friday night of that first week in the library, I was battle weary. Ayala and Dec invited me over for dinner, and I was desperate to share and unload. I cycled straight from the library, wanting real live family, not pages in notebooks, ghosts and stories. And I knew this was just as important to them as it was to me.

  My brother padded in with his walking stick, and joined us with eyes aflame in interest.

  ‘What’d you find today, Lou?’ he said as Ayala joined us. I spread the latest printouts on the dinner table in front of them like spoils from the battlefield. Dec examined all the photos I’d taken of the library photo collection, and explained which ones must have been taken in the Northern Territory during dad’s Commando posting. My sister showed us a photo she’d downloaded from the Australian War Memorial after I’d sent her copies of the war memoir.

  The man in the photo looked at first like a complete stranger.

  The date, place, and company corresponded, but this man was shirtless, skeletal, and in a camp that could only be described as squalid. In another photo, Dec pointed out that a dead pig was strung up on a tree just behind the man. There was no cover to the man’s bed, which appeared to be a bit of plastic lying on the ground. And this man had a moustache.

  ‘That’s his tommy gun,’ said Dec, pointing at a blurry piece of black in another photo of a man we would have had trouble recognising without the memoir. The tommy gun he wasn’t allowed to use.

  Dec flicked through the rest of the army photos, zooming in on particular details of the camps and the train, explaining the details as only someone who’s served in the same kind of unit would know.

  No wonder dad loved Gisèle’s father Gerard — they’d both had that shared war experience, although Gerard’s was more horrifying. Each would have filled missing pieces of history for the other.

  ‘I never knew why I had the name Gerard,’ said Dec.

  Food arrived, and we all kept talking and sharing. It was a campfire dinner, a room full of family, and even though everyone we were talking about was dead, I felt them join us, perhaps relieved that we knew their stories, and how they joined to ours.

  Dec’s first deployment, in the modern-day offshoot of the Commandoes, the Special Air Service — was to Timor.

  The place dad never got to go.

  Through no influence of his own, he even ended up in the exact same regimental letter and number configuration: 2/4 Bravo Company.

  When Dec broke his back parachuting in the unit, we found he’d signed a form that said his family weren’t to be informed if he were in danger — as if he’d inherited that fear of interference, that someone would block him from making his own choices.

  In Paris, the French sisters met to try to sort out the chronology and send me more information.

  We have just returned from Michelle’s funeral … her younger sister remembered well the story of your dad … even that his mother — your grandmother — died when they were seeing each other.

  Michelle was totally smitten, but their parents apparently asked her to stop seeing Denison.

  Coralie sent me a photo of Clém sitting with one of Michelle’s letters about dad. While Ayala and Dec and I had been talking about dad and the war over dinner in Melbourne, they’d been examining dozens of Michelle’s letters about dad in Coralie’s apartment in Paris.

  Tonight Clém brought over more letter
s from Michelle’s apartment. She nearly had a heart attack when she read this letter from 1950.

  ‘… I regret losing Denison … he was so interesting, and played the piano well, he could speak about the war against Japan in the Pacific islands, and he took me to the theatre. In short, he was the perfect man.’

  Chapter Nine

  Crise d’identité

  As I worked my way through dad’s gargantuan collection of diaries and letters, life trundled on, oblivious to my seismic shifts.

  Somehow in that first week of documents and library opening hours, I’d interviewed for and landed a six-month contract job. Employed in a high-security government department, I was to write half a dozen or so tweets and update their website with compliance certificates for speed cameras, as well as perform the odd editing or rewriting task. It was extremely boring, but the team I worked in was lovely, mostly because they left me alone to process everything that was shifting and sliding underneath my skin.

  To think of how much hustling I would have had to do to earn the same wage from freelancing exhausted me. And while I was looking into dad’s life, I just didn’t have room in my head for any other stories. I needed to save for Paris — but I couldn’t justify going to France until I’d made my way through all of dad’s boxes.

  My new job was on the top floor of a city building, located beyond various security checkpoints, on account of the number of death threats sent to the department’s director. As the weeks passed, I was always having trouble selecting the right printer, and sometimes printed documents I’d found the night before — a story dad had written, or a library collection listing, or a reference — only to find, with horror, I’d sent them to a printer at the Magistrates’ Court instead.

  Finding dad’s papers was a privilege and a gift, but it was also draining. It was a little like I’d signed up for a PhD, but I had no direct supervisor, no one telling me when the research might finish, just dad subtly guiding me from another plane.