4
Mayhem was only a part of it

‘Violence in large lumps fascinates only the timid; and viewers of news bulletins can sup with the devil of war every evening in their lounge and dining rooms. One lesson we all learned in the war was that mayhem was only a part of it.’

Peter J. Jones, 9th Division AIF

The military machine had no time to pause and reflect. Just one week after the battle ended, retraining commenced. To boost morale the troops received a letter of gratitude from Monty for their ‘very fine performance’. He mentioned a few encores still to be had, and wished those involved ‘good hunting to you all’.

There was an overwhelming sense of relief and something more: ‘A gnawing, deep sadness affected everyone as they reluctantly considered the reality. It took at least months for these feelings to adjust.’ The commanding officers’ directive was that every man be occupied. It was time for the bump out. For a start, the battlefield needed to be cleared and 9.2 per cent of their mates required burial. Row after row of identical crosses presented a sobering image of these men who died together, no single act of sacrifice greater than the other. In stark contrast to these Allied military graves, Pte Jones remembers being moved by the sight of a neatly maintained German cemetery not far from the enemy front lines. He was particularly struck by the attention to detail of each individual grave. While these were only temporary burial sites, enormous care was taken with each plot. No two graves in the German cemetery were alike and there among them was the grave of a Canadian airman, complete with the date he was shot down. Half of his propeller blade made for a memorial; white pebbles formed a cross on the sand. All hell might have broken loose, but somehow, in this theatre of war, a degree of mutual respect seems to have survived.

The war diaries for 14 November 1942 state that there was nothing particular to report. The battalion were at ease, resting on the Mediterranean coast. As Pte Stanley Livingston breaststroked along the shoreline, at a certain hour of that day in a small cottage in Tramway Street, his father, Ernest James Livingston, died at the age of fifty-four. A few days later a violent khamsin raged all day in the desert. So too, perhaps, did Pte Livingston.

Towards the end of November, the troops received their orders for a return to Palestine. The convoy of trucks skirted the pyramids before crossing the Nile and entering Cairo. After four days they arrived at Camp Julis in Palestine, where the men were met with a generous issue of beer. Lt William Pye returned to Palestine with the 2/3rd Anti-Tank Regiment, who missed out on the beer allotment as the entire regiment were down with jaundice. Bill was not having a pleasant war. Leave passes were on offer to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Cairo until 21 December, when the troops were once again in full dress rehearsal—this time for a ceremonial parade at the Gaza aerodrome set for the following day. All units were in attendance as General Alexander addressed the entire 9th Division, the assembled troops stretching for a kilometre across the airstrip. From the sky the battalion lines would have resembled a highly disciplined herd of caterpillars. Stanley Livingston was down there somewhere, and in a Salute to the Fallen, closer inspection of the twelve thousand gathered revealed that ‘tears ran down many faces, but there is nothing in the book to say that can’t happen, only that you must stand still’.

Christmas came and went. And so did Stanley. On the twenty-seventh he was AWL from 6.30 a.m., back again by nightfall. The only activity reported for that day was an order that all personnel were to be vaccinated and inoculated, so why do a runner? Was he distraught about his father? Was he just out for a good time? Was he simply afraid of needles? He was fined five pounds. He could have used those pounds: there was a mule-racing event on the parade ground that week, bookies and refreshments provided. Perhaps the photo was snapped here? Was Stanley a jockey? Was the wog a bookie? It’s more likely Stanley borrowed a few shillings and lost them immediately. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time he would lose a packet on the mules.

Roy Lonsdale was up and about again, left buttock obviously none the worse for wear, as he was reported AWL on 28 December. When he returned to duty the next day he was charged with conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline, and fined five pounds. For a man earning only seven shillings a day, being docked five pounds must be something of a butt-clencher.

On 7 January all other ranks were informed that the division was moving by sea to an unknown destination codenamed Operation Liddington, fuelling much debate about the destination. Some were adamant they were headed straight for Japan. All they knew was that their latest tour of duty was coming to a theatre closer to home. At least two people were not too pleased with the decision to move the troops. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were intent on changing Prime Minister John Curtin’s mind. While Curtin was a minor player on the world stage, American general Douglas MacArthur could upstage the best of them. ‘Dugout Doug’ was keen for the 9th to play a supporting role in his Pacific theatre of operations, and without further ado plans were put in place to return the division to Australia at the end of January 1943.

When troops are on the move, all the world’s a staging camp. The unit moved by truck convoy to a staging camp at Asluz. The next day the convoy left for the long trek across the Sinai to the East Bank canal staging camp. The next morning they left for Tahag staging camp near Al Qassasin in Egypt. On 24 January two trains left Al Qassasin on the four-hour ride to the Suez staging camp. On the twenty-seventh the battalion embarked on HMT Aquitania. The four troopships in the convoy, Queen Mary, Ile de France, Nieuw Amsterdam and Aquitania, were supported by an armed merchant cruiser and an escort of warships. The men were warned not to consider the trip a pleasure cruise, but with the thought of perhaps returning home, and with the African desert behind them, spirits were high.

A photograph shows soldiers lying prostrate, packed like sardines on the open deck of Nieuw Amsterdam while a melee erupts in the background. At second glance it’s clear the men are all happily bathing in the sun while behind them a boxing tournament is taking place. These bouts were a feature on each ship. No doubt Pte Stanley Livingston, who fancied himself as a handy pugilist, would have stepped up for the challenge—and been downed just as swiftly. Stanley had plenty of courage, but he had a glass jaw and a nose of putty. He had dodged many bullets during the battle of El Alamein, but he couldn’t dodge a left jab on board Aquitania. Amateur boxing was a challenge Pte Livingston attacked with passion, but his skills failed to match his passion; and by the time he reached Australian shores, the boy from Zetland had had his nasal septum crushed so often that it departed from the centre of his nose, never to return. This deficiency was put to good use by the young private, who would flatten his nose with his thumb in attempts to impersonate any number of snub-nosed officers in the vicinity. Many years later this defect would also serve as a source of endless amusement for two infant boys who would take turns poking the nose of their father with an index finger until it disappeared into his skull.

Each night, Stanley, Gordon and Roy stood on deck smoking Capstan Navy Cut tobacco and searching the skies for any sign of the Southern Cross. On 17 February they sighted Fremantle, where seven bags of mail were delivered on board to the battalion. Among them were letters for all three. It was all good news from Roy’s family in Mascot, and Gordon was delighted to receive a swathe of mail from Lilly Livingston. A letter to Stanley from his eldest sister Margaret was more sombre. The death of their father had left his sisters distraught. Lilly had been inconsolable and feared the further loss of her brother, as well as his good friend and her first love, Gordon Oxman. Margaret feared for her wellbeing.

With his duty to country and empire fulfilled, foremost in Stanley’s mind now was the feeling that he had been AWL from his family in their time of great need. He was torn—he wasn’t about to desert his mates but neither would he desert his family. However, they were not yet home and safe. Journalist Fred Smith’s notes, dated 24 February 1943, from one of John Curtin’s regular press briefings report that although the 9th Division had arrived safely in Fremantle, Curtin remained worried and had not slept well for three weeks. The problem was that if the troops disembarked in Western Australia, the force would be immobilised for months, the rail system not being up to the task of ferrying troops across the nation. They would have to continue on by boat to Sydney. A further concern was that a Japanese plane spotted over Sydney on the previous Friday night was thought to be a surveillance flight to ascertain whether the troops had arrived. Curtin insisted the return of the troops remain a secret, so although those at home knew of an imminent return of the 9th, the finer details had been denied them.

As dawn broke on 27 February, HMT Aquitania approached Sydney. It was a fine, sunny morning, and as the convoy edged towards the safe harbour, stillness fell over the troops. They were home. Just after midday, Aquitania cruised past South Head, through the great sandstone gates of the harbour. Years before, they had left these heads as young adventurers. Apart from the New Zealanders, no soldier had been further away from home during the North African conflict.

William Pye and Eddie Emmerson were in that convoy as H.D. Wells stood on the deck of Aquitania, not too far from Roy, Stanley and Gordon. Wells claimed there were no words to describe the scene, before going on to describe the scene in vivid detail:

It was the hearts saying it, for voices had stilled while the convoy slowly edged through the heads. And then as the Aquitania steamed past South Head we heard it. Horns of cars honking till their batteries almost became flat. People waving sheets from windows, rooftops, jetties. Voices shouting unintelligible, jumbled noise—but it was a jubilant exciting sound. Slowly troops responded, afraid at first their voices would not obey their throats . . . For those who returned—this morning was worth it. This feeling, the inadequacy of words to express it. No man can buy it, no masterpiece of oil painting can conjure it up. It can only be felt inside. Each man reacting outwardly as if it happened every day but knowing this only happens once and is then present for all time.

They had endured what no sheet-waving, horn-honking civilian could ever imagine—and made it home again.

Apart from the return of a few thousand speechless young men, life went on as usual on that Saturday morning in Sydney in February 1943. The Herald reported that there was to be no children’s party in the restaurant at the Farmer’s department store in the city that day. On a more disturbing note, especially for Stanley, there was a threat of a one-day beer workers’ strike. In the lost and found column was a notice that someone had left a red bag in a yellow cab: call Miss Perry. Also lost was one cow, a brown-and-white spotted Ayrshire, in full milk. Reward. On another page was a plan to save money by shortening matches; it was predicted that by reducing the size by a mere quarter of an inch, the saving would be seven million feet of timber per annum. A meeting of the women’s council of the Lord Mayor’s fund announced a drive for one hundred thousand pairs of socks to be made in a new pattern. The new sock pattern would make it possible to create five pairs out of a pound of wool. There were vacancies in the Women’s National Service office. Women of up to twenty-eight years were required to be trained in oxy and electric welding, no experience necessary. Lower down the page a 38-year-old Roman Catholic gent was eager to meet a lady or a widow with view to matrimony. Just below that a self-described smart, refined Protestant lady in her late fifties of good address and some means wished to meet a respectable gent. Sadly for the pair, in those days, the romantic merging of the two faiths was frowned upon, as Stanley would soon enough find out. There was also something about the Royal Air Force heavily bombing Nuremberg, and the Red Army in Russia preparing to launch an offensive on the northern and western fronts.

When Aquitania berthed at Woolloomooloo, thousands of men loaded with gear and kitbags filed down the gangways, attracting a crowd of a few hundred who had spotted the ships silently making their way down the harbour. Word travelled slowly in this mobile-phoneless world, and so did the people. The small crowd waved handkerchiefs and towels. As the men passed, some asked them about the desert, but there were no boasts. Many glanced down; they weren’t ready to talk. Most never would be. Some of the soldiers thought that their involvement in the final breakthrough at El Alamein had been overhyped and were insistent that the New Zealanders, the South Africans and the Highlanders should share equal credit. The men were swiftly split into groups and shuttled by buses to a camp at Narellan on the outskirts of Sydney. It was a short stay; all personnel were given leave the next day. Newspapers reported streams of tough, brown fighting men on three weeks’ leave pouring through the city after what one headline described as a ‘strangely silent homecoming’.

Some of the men were affronted by the attitude that greeted them, claiming that locals were more than happy to whinge about conditions on the home front, the effects of rationing, the new sock patterns, shorter matches and striking beer workers, but were indifferent to the soldiers’ ordeals. One veteran of Tobruk and El Alamein was disgusted by the armchair opinions of the civilian population, including one acquaintance who assured him the 9th Division would find the Japs far harder to handle than any mere German or Italian. Another returning soldier reported that many didn’t have a clue who they’d been fighting over there. ‘Someone asked me where I had been and I said, “Syria”. He was puzzled and wanted to know whether we had been fighting the Japs in Syria! I told him we had been fighting the Vichy French. They said, “What were you doing fighting the French? Was it a brawl in the street or something?”’

While no civilian could be expected to grasp the essence of what those returned soldiers had endured, neither did the soldiers quite understand the urgency and fear that had gripped the nation while they were away. All eyes had been focused on the threat from the north; the war in the Middle East had taken a back seat. The presence of so many US soldiers signalled to the returning troops that the war closer to home was now the priority. The blissful journey through the heads was turning bitter for some, but for the majority it was enough to spend time with family and loved ones. It had been a tough couple of years, with no doubt more to come in an entirely different theatre, and out-of-town rehearsals set to begin shortly in the Atherton Tablelands in far northern Queensland.

Roy Lonsdale wasted no time in heading to the family home in Mascot. He had a brand-new wife awaiting him there—after enlisting as a single man, Roy had married on 2 November 1940, seven months before embarking for the Middle East. Making up for lost time with his bride was foremost on his mind as the train rambled from Narellan to Redfern, where he took a tram straight down Botany Road. It was the middle of the night when he knocked on the door of the barber shop, but there were no complaints from the household after they were roused from sleep. Stanley and Gordon were also on that tram. They hopped off a few stops before Roy, where Botany Road met Tramway Street, and headed for the Livingston family home at number 77. The tramline to and from the city had begun service in the 1880s, running along a single line with a loop at Gardener’s Lane. Tramway Street derived its name from being a part of this loop.

Tramway Street had not always been home to the Livingstons. As mentioned, Stanley had spent his childhood in Zetland, a suburb or two closer to town yet less densely populated. It was heavy with industry, and not exactly child-friendly. Stanley and his four sisters were encouraged to go out and play on the road: there was nowhere else to play, and very little traffic. During the post-war boom of the 1920s, large-scale factories had sprung up in and around Zetland. The Great Depression hit those industries between 1929 and 1933, but they had rapidly recovered by the outbreak of World War II. By then the local municipality of Alexandria contained over five hundred and fifty factories, and was supposedly the largest industrial municipality in Australia at the time. Stanley had found employment in one of those factories before he enlisted. He had left school in 1932, at the age of fourteen, and any of the local factories were willing to take on a local boy, no questions asked. Travelling long distances to and from work was out of the question: you’d need more than a factory wage to be able to afford a car, and if you weren’t near a tram or train line you walked.

Factory life proved hazardous for young Stanley; a scribbled note in his discharge papers makes mention of a pre-war crush injury to the fingers of the right hand. His palm was laced with a tangle of raised white scars, evidence that the hand had literally been ripped to shreds, devoured by a metalworking lathe. After he was rushed from the factory floor, doctors were quick to inform him that there was no way to save any of the fingers, but young Stanley insisted on keeping what was left of them. After all, he was a teenager, and it was his right hand. To lose those eager fingers at that stage of life would have been an unkind cut indeed. Stanley ended up with quite a capable claw, never shy of a cigarette, and the affliction was obviously no hindrance to enlistment. In fact, a gruesome gnarled fist most likely made a decent weapon.

Stanley Livingston was probably not a born fighter, but he would have had to learn fast on the streets of inner Sydney in the 1920s. The family occupied one of only two houses in the street, a pair of identical, decrepit terraced houses, two old molars among a row of sparkling new galvanised-iron, saw-tooth-roofed industrial dentures. Unable to afford the rent on one tooth, they moved out—to the tooth next door. The new neighbours turned out to be problematic. Not long after moving in, Stanley, then no more than ten years old, was playing in the dirt that passed for a garden in the narrow backyard. Behind him, two men, both wielding sub-machine guns, burst into the yard, sending him running for the back door, where he was met by his mother. Bridget Livingston stowed the boy under her skirt before folding her arms and blocking the door. There was plenty of room left in Bridget’s skirt to harbour the rest of her brood—Molly, Lilly, Margaret and Dorothy. To a child, the thin cotton of a mother’s frock is as safe as any shield, and may even explain Stanley’s later attraction to well-aired blankets in times of stress. The men demanded Bridget move aside. They had no interest in her or the children; they were after someone called Squizzy. She told them firmly that there were no Squizzies here and they might want to try next door. Duly chastened, the men backed out of the yard and instigated the same move next door, by which time Squizzy Taylor, a frequent visitor to the Livingstons’ neighbours, got wind of the situation, and before any blazing of guns commenced, the diminutive gangster was well and truly gone.

While his family were being harassed by potential murderers, the breadwinner, Ernest Livingston, was at work. Ernie’s early years had been tough, to say the least—he’d spent much of his first decade in the care of the Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children, an institution originally set up to care for abandoned children or those whose parents were deemed ‘dissolute characters’. Fanny and James Livingston were not parents of a dissolute nature; they simply had no choice, given the hardship of working-class life in inner Sydney in the nineteenth century. Their fortunes wavered, from being penniless to having just a few pennies, and on the rare occasions they managed to scrape together the means to achieve it, their six children would all be reunited at home. The records show that Ernest first entered the asylum in 1891 at the age of three, with three of his sisters. Life became even more desperate in 1894 when Fanny died after falling down a flight of stairs and fracturing her skull, leaving six children aged between two and thirteen, including five-year-old Ernest, with just their father, James, to care for them. In 1897, when he was eight, Ernest was again in the asylum, along with four sisters. Two of the girls were still there in 1901.

After this tough start, Ernest made it to adulthood, met Bridget and landed a job at Tooth and Co breweries on Broadway. He loved his job and was a loyal supporter of the company product. Ernie was always up for a liquid lunch. In fact, the only substances that entered Ernie’s stomach arrived there via a straw. He had no choice, for this Tooth’s employee didn’t have a tooth in his head. The lowly wage of a brewery worker meant that he could not replace the teeth that had deserted his gums in childhood. Perhaps this didn’t worry him too much, as he turned his gums to the art of gurning to make a bit of spare cash on the side. Gurning, for those who don’t know, involves the grotesque distortion of one’s facial features for the entertainment of others, and is still practised to this day. The ability to gurn is compromised by the presence of teeth, which restrict the ability of the lower jaw to swallow the top one, if possible including a portion of the nose—all done while keeping the eyes crossed at all times. Ernie the Gurner made a few extra shillings on his way home from work, stopping in at the many pubs between Broadway and Zetland. Ernie had other skills, according to his daughters, who avoided the subject of their father’s gurning abilities and would instead heap praise on his delicate watercolours of native birdlife. It was the only respectful comment I ever heard about my paternal grandfather from anyone, but to my knowledge no paintings have survived.

Ernie’s gurning earnings, along with his ability to mimic the calls of both native and introduced birds, enabled him to squirrel away enough money to eventually put a deposit on a house in Tramway Street in Mascot. I own a photo of Ernest and Bridget standing outside their gurning-funded home. Ernie is dressed as a Scotsman, with Bridget in similar garb—the pair apparently loved an informal dress-up. But it wasn’t a marriage made in heaven; it was made in the Tooth and Co brewery. Bridget was partial to a drop herself, and every day she’d hand little Stanley a tin bucket and send him to the nearest pub, where it would be filled to the brim with ale before the slightly framed ten-year-old struggled home, trying not to spill a drop.

When not getting on the plonk, dressing up, gurning or bickering, somehow Ernie and Bridget managed to instil a strict moral code in their children, raising them as Roman Catholics. When Bridget died suddenly in 1936 at the age of forty-eight, Ernie was left with five children and no cotton skirt to protect them. His kilt would have to do. But he still had his second love, booze. In early 1942, with his only son in the Middle East and the threat from the north increasing at home, Ernie Livingston was given the duty of standing lookout for the Japanese on the brewery tower. Not long before he died, Ernie was found asleep at his post, having sampled the factory product a little too eagerly, and was unceremoniously sacked.

While Stanley embraced the dipsomaniacal inclinations of his parents, the girls embraced the spiritual side and maintained their faith throughout their lives. Somewhere along the line, Stanley Livingston lost his. Whether it was due to the trials of war, I have no idea. All I know is that Stanley was never one to rely on ethereal redeemers. Long before I met him, he had given up on ghosts.

Thanks to some hardcore gurning, the Livingston children had inherited a modest little cottage in Mascot. By 1943, three of Stanley’s four sisters were married. Dorothy and her husband, Jimmy, were living in the family home with Lilly when Stanley returned to Sydney. Jimmy didn’t fit the devout Catholic milieu. He was an SP bookmaker, a trade that was illegal outside a racetrack. Jimmy ran his bookie business from the Tramway Street cottage. He recruited local children to keep ‘cocky’ at either end of the back lane, on the lookout for the police. When Jimmy passed away in 1966 he had no bank accounts, but there was money stashed all over the house and a revolver on the top of his wardrobe.

On 1 March 1943, Stanley was expected home on leave, but there was no telephone at number 77, and no-one quite knew when he would arrive. When night fell, Stanley was missing, presumed drunk, and Dorothy and Jimmy hit the sack. Lilly couldn’t sleep, and when she answered a gentle knock on the door her mood improved considerably to find not just one but the two most important men in her life standing before her. Jimmy wasn’t quite so welcoming to the late arrivals. Generally it doesn’t bode well when an SP bookie gets a knock on the door in the middle of the night.