ANZACS - 100 years continued...

-The Consequences of War-

My mother said

war took everything from her.

Even though her father and her husband-to-be returned from their respective wars and were considered lucky, war took their lives after all.

The experience of war and how it left them when the fighting ended, also took from the women and children around these men.

My mother told me my father had glandular fever when he came back from the Second World War. He was thin and looked sick and yellow and when he travelled out to the farm to see her, he was wearing a pale green suit that clashed horribly with his yellow skin, she said. I’ve seen a photo of him on that visit, standing like a lanky-armed scarecrow in front of the farm-house hedge; hollow face and cheek bones pushing up to a hat brim tilted at an incongruous rakish angle.

I remember as a child, I was proud of the fact that my father had been in the Royal Australian Air Force. Other kid’s parents whom I knew had not gone to war. My father though had fought on the islands dotted on a map around New Guinea and Borneo and I liked trying to pronounce these strange foreign-sounding names; Kiriwina, Noemfoor, Tarakan.

I had also seen my father’s small box-brownie photos of his war. Groups of uniformed but casual, thin young men sitting and smiling for the camera, under palms just beyond the thatched huts and beside the planes which were painted with giant goddess Jean Harlow look-alikes.  Relaxed and healthy looking.

There were other photos too, of dead Japanese soldiers and wrecked and burnt-out planes against a jungle background. My father spoke once to me of his horror at the idea of cremation because he’d seen too many of his mates burnt alive before they could pull them from planes that had crash-landed.

I had pieces of turtle shell he had collected there. Dark, unpolished shards, that when held to the light glowed with red and orange sunsets. He had also carved a small photograph frame from the turtle shell and made an exquisite tiny ring box that he gave to my mother. He said he had polished it painstakingly with a toothbrush while beaten-down threepences became the ring box hinges and handles. These pieces are passionate in their colour and yet gentle in their line, and speak of a patience and skill I never saw him possess at home after the war I could see from these he was a craftsman and that he could make beautiful things; loving things.  He could very carefully fashion fragility.

But for whatever reasons, when he returned he more often than not clutched a bottle in those hands.  All the grace in him warred with something else.

I could see mostly that he was, or had become, a man who destroyed things.

He was skilled but could never follow through. He was a man of talent who did not seem able to believe in his gifts and who could not believe that dreams could be realised.

He squandered talent and shot it out in fragments, like bullet bursts. As with his gifts and also with money, he found no way to gather and direct these and they ran like liquid through his fingers as fast as the liquor that poured down his throat.

Perhaps his drinking and squandering were part of war’s legacy.

The war was not the sole reason perhaps, nor could we have named it back then as the unwelcome guest in our family’s daily life. But war shaped something in him, and broke off another piece of him.

Perhaps because of the war or perhaps because of his drinking that escalated after the war.

He could no longer create things that lasted and he became a violent and unpredictable man.

He constantly promised us so much and every night undid it with his drinking and his fists. Despite his strong, capable builder’s hands and lucky return from a world war, my father mediated an early gruelling death through the booze.

My mother felt the war had robbed her of her husband, or what he might have become.

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War also finally managed to kill her father.

One night in early 1942 she was making herself up by a mirror in the lounge where the lighting was the best before she was to go to a country Ball.  Her mother sat crocheting and her father sat reading. She could see in the mirror that he had lain down his book and was staring at her. She said her father didn’t take his eyes off her until she left for the dance.

The next morning she woke early and lay in bed listening to her father’s footsteps down the passage, out onto the verandah, down the steps and away into the yard to do the early milking. He did not return for breakfast or lunch and finally late that afternoon a neighbour found him hanging from an old cypress tree.

My mother’s father hanged himself on the 10th of April 1942. The Second World War was underway and Tobruk would be soon.

My mother said that ever since she could remember her father’s hands had shaken so much that his teacup rattled in its saucer. He skipped rigorously each day to try and strengthen his nerves. And that sometimes, even though ordinarily a gentle, quiet man, he would unexpectedly get into a temper and whip the horse.

He had fought at Gallipoli and then in Flanders and even though wounded a few times he refused to return to Australia for convalescence because he feared that if he came home, he would never return, even if his body healed. He also refused to be promoted, despite being mentioned in Haig’s Dispatches for bravery.

He said “he could never order men he knew into battle.”

My grandfather cut down trees, fenced in land, sunk dams, built roads, schools and his own house as part of the group of men who bought soldier settlement blocks that they tried to turn into dairy farms. He even made it through the Great Depression when one in four families in Victoria had to walk off their land.

He made it through that First World War, through all that back-breaking work and then through the Depression, only to take his own life during the Second World War.

An aunt told me there were stories that he was afraid his nerves would get the better of him and that he might end up hurting someone in the family.

My mother adored her father but his suicide unfortunately left her at the mercy of her uncle’s predatory sexual advances, and without protection from her possessive and no doubt frightened mother.

Perhaps this is why she chose my father, returning from his own war, thin and scrappy looking, and why she didn’t heed her friend’s warning that my father looked like trouble. But trouble she had had already and trouble continued for her and us, her children.

We lived with the consequences,

with men who had not been so lucky after all coming back from their wars.

Karyn Down