Chapter 39

It didn’t dawn on me when Katherine’s next letter arrived ten days later, just what she meant. She said that she had decided to give up nursing and instead take Wilf home and look after him. I thought that, at last Mum and Dad would be happy that their errant daughter had returned back to them. I also felt that Wilf would have the best chance of recovery well away from the war and other soldiers in the Rocky Creek hospital. He was always a loner and having others around him seeing him in the condition he was in, would not improve the situation. He had seemed the most relaxed I had ever seen him when he was out helping Dad on the farm. There is something magical about Dunedin countryside that calms you instantly and the strong gusty wind that prevails seems to blow all your cares away.

I decided not to pre-empt her news by contacting Mum and Dad. This was her responsibility and she needed to hear first their joy. Their call to me came as quite a shock. Getting a phone connection to Brisbane in a time of war was almost unheard of. Dad must have pulled a few strings. He had lots of contacts all over the place. I certainly wasn’t expecting the anger and fury that raged down the line.

“Your bloody sister, I can’t call her my daughter because it makes me sick, has just run off with that Wilf you brought to our place. She’s living in sin with him on some farm in the Queensland outback. It’s all your bloody fault. What possessed you to even bring him into our lives in the first place…………….”

Dad ranted on for a few more minutes as I held the phone away from my ear. Others nearby could hear the swearing coming down the line and turned away trying to smother their laughter. They figured that I was getting a bawling out from a superior, which if you take away the army notion, I really was. When Dad ran out of steam, I didn’t try to defend either Katherine or Wilf or even myself, I merely asked quietly to speak to Mum. Eventually Mum came to the phone and I could hear swearing in the background and the slamming of a door.

“Mum,” I began, “I am not sure that it is all that it seems. Wilf is ill. He is suffering from shell shock. Katherine took some leave and went up to see him at the army hospital and finally convinced his doctor that Wilf’s parents should be allowed to come and see their son. I gather that between her and them, some breakthroughs were made. Katherine said that she was going to quit her job and start looking after Wilf. She said that she was taking him home. I assumed that meant back to Dunedin, but it must have been to Wilf’s own home. His parents will be there, so “living in sin” is hardly likely to happen and even if it did, it is hardly the disgrace it used to be. When you are in, or have been in, a battle situation you tend to grasp onto anything that brings some normality back to your life. Wilf has a chance back at his parents’ home. Katherine, as a trained nurse, will be a godsend to them and Wilf. The fact that she loves him will make his recovery much smoother and quicker. Tell Dad I will somehow finangle some leave and go up and see them. That way he won’t be jumping to the conclusions he has at the moment. I don’t know Wilf’s parents but if he is a product them, they must be fine people. I have yet to meet a more trustworthy and honourable human being than Wilf. I will let you know.”

Mum hadn’t interrupted and I didn’t wait for much of a reply because Mum doesn’t like to use the phone. She’d prefer a letter or talking face to face. Dad uses it as a weapon. All Mum said was, “Thank you, son.” The ‘son’ part she knew always meant so much to me when it came from her.

I wondered how I was going to broach my issue with the Colonel and get some leave and then it dawned on me that I was in charge of my own destiny. I dealt with leave issues where death and serious illnesses were concerned. Someone in my family had a serious mental illness. I wasn’t talking about Wilf, whom I saw almost as a brother. I wasn’t thinking of my father who was a complete lunatic. My sister, according to my father at least, had lost her mind. I just faked some paperwork and set the wheels in motion. This entitled me to transport priority and within a day I was on my way to Cairns and from there, on to a cadged flight with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. I had sent a telegram ahead to the Downs homestead just out of Croydon and after the red dust cleared when we landed, I saw a very much older version of Wilf standing next to my sister on the edge of the runway.

When my sister had stopped hugging me and smothering me with kisses, Wilf’s father held out his hand, “I’m Wilfred’s father, Augustus, but please call me Gus. My father has a lot to answer for when it comes to naming children. But then again, it’s a family tradition and names get handed down, Wilfred was named after him. I got my grandfather’s name and I would gladly give it back if I could.”

I instantly warmed to this stranger with his sun-baked face that cracked when he grinned. He grabbed my kit bag and threw it into the back of the battered old Ford ute and the three of us climbed into the cabin. Katherine sat between me and Wilf’s father and prattled on about the countryside as if she had lived here for a decade rather than a couple of weeks. She was nervous and always talked non-stop when she was like that. Gus just looked ahead, taciturn and concentrating on the corrugations across the dirt road.

I looked at the land from a farmer’s perspective as we drove along. There was nothing like it in New Zealand. In fact, nothing like it I had seen anywhere. It was flat and dry and dusty. Any vegetation including grass was withered and clung on for dear life to the reddish sandy coloured ground. How you ran sheep here astounded me. We used to run about sixty ewes per acre and around here I imagined that it might be one ewe per sixty acres.

Gus must have seen me staring for he said, “Katherine tells me that you grew up on a sheep farm. We do things a bit different around here. Of course, it gets much worse when there’s a drought and the monsoons fail. We get the tail end of those and we make the most of cyclones they trigger. We rotate our flock around not based on markets, but more on our predictions of the weather. Wool is a bonus for us, it is meat that puts food on the table.”

He didn’t say how his son was and come to think of it, Katherine hadn’t mentioned Wilf once. Her letters had all been about him and as we drove along, she was curiously silent about him.

The farmhouse or homestead as they called it was well off the road and was on one of the undulations that had begun to break up the flat expanse. I looked at the barbed wire and posts and did some mental calculations and my mind boggled at just how many pounds had been invested in just the fencing that I had seen so far. Large straggly ageing gum trees were dotted around the front paddocks and someone had been planting some new trees up either side of the driveway. Over near the front fence was a small sealed off section and Gus explained that it was where his parents were buried. He said he was saving up for headstones but other things had priority now especially as the army bought most of the meat and that made the prices artificially low. Once the war finished, he said that things would be better. There didn’t seem to be any question to him, even after the bombing of Darwin and Japanese submarines in Sydney harbour, that the Japanese were going to lose. It was late October in 1944 and things were turning ugly for the Germans in Europe. The Japanese were slowly losing ground in the Pacific too, so I suppose he was right to be confident. However, whether he knew the real situation or not, I don’t think it would have mattered. Already he seemed to have shown a belief that right would win over might when it came down to the crunch.

I was introduced to Wilf’s mother who seemed like a kind and generous soul. She didn’t put on any airs and graces and came over to me and kissed me on both cheeks and followed that up with a hug. I must have timed everything perfectly because she had a huge meal prepared and the farmhouse kitchen table laid out. She sat me down next to her seat and Gus took up his spot at the head of the table. Katherine had disappeared only to return with her arm linked to Wilf’s.

He had changed a lot. I didn’t think that he could get thinner but he looked like just skin and bones. His face was drawn and he shuffled over to where Katherine pointed. His father rose and gently pulled the chair out. All I could think of quite selfishly was that my father would never have done that for me. Mrs Downs said a prayer that her husband rolled his eyes at. Then there was an eerie silence as we ate. Wilf picked at his food, almost with disinterest. After the meal, we just sat there until Gus asked Katherine to help him with some things outside and Mrs Downs quite suddenly disappeared leaving Wilf and I alone.

“Do you think they did that deliberately?” I asked Wilf.

He looked around as if just noticing that we were the only two left in the kitchen. He nodded his head and said haltingly, “Undoubtedly. They probably think that an old army mate will somehow magically make me get better. It won’t. The demons in my head won’t allow that, so you may have made a long trip for nothing.”

“Didn’t come here to see you. Came to see Katherine. Actually, came to check up on Katherine because my father blew a fuse when he heard that she was living here. He made her out to be a slut without using those words. I said that I’d come out and prove him wrong,” I told him.

“Your father is nowhere near close. The truth is that if Katherine hadn’t turned up and helped me make peace with my parents, I would have carked it by now. All I needed at the time was the courage and opportunity. Just when I had both, in walks your sister. As for the living arrangements here, she is nursing me and that’s all. She’s my friend. You can tell your father that I don’t deserve someone like his daughter. When and if I get properly better, I will seek his permission to take her out, but only if she wants to go out with me. Nothing will happen until then. You can also tell him that I can’t believe that he would even think of such a thing about his own daughter and especially about someone as wonderful as her,” he said angrily.

“I told him pretty much that, but via my mum as when he gets riled up, no-one will get through to him. She will though. You are lucky there’s a war on, because he would have flown over here and had it out with you,” I pointed out.

“If he had said one thing about Katherine, his teeth would have been scattered between here and the Gulf. I’m not fighting fit but that wouldn’t stop me,” Wilf said quite seriously

I smiled at the thought. I wish someone would have done that to my father years ago. He had his generous side, but at times he was a hot-headed bully.

“I’m sorry, but I really am tired,” Wilf said, “It doesn’t take much these days although each day I last a little longer.

I escorted him down to his bedroom. It was like a child’s bedroom; however it had a very long bed. All his toys and books were still in the same place he had probably left them when he’d gone to enlist. On his bedside table next to him was a book with a bookmark in it. I looked at the title and it read, Great Poets of the Great War. As Wilf’s eyes closed, I idly flicked through the pages and read a couple by Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. They really hit home and I looked at Wilf with a new-found wonder. There was even more to him than I thought. I scanned the room and saw model planes and cars and lots more books, some by Mary Grant Bruce and Henry Lawson that I also had, but there were others by people called Steinbeck, Tolkien and Hemmingway. There were children’s books too by A. A. Milne and May Gibbs and Norman Lindsay. I replaced the book of poems back where it was next to a faded army tag. This person I had regarded as a rugged outdoors man had a softer and intelligent side that I hadn’t seen. I closed the door and went out to talk to Katherine.