-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.
****************
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
