There was the RSL hall, the War Memorial in Redruth Square, Anzac Day, Poppy Day, Maxine’s armless father, uniformed men frozen in silver frames upon sideboards and mantelpieces in every house in the district. There was an oak chest, passed down from the first Ison, squatting glumly in the hallway at Isonville, exactly where passing boots and the carpet sweeper might lay fresh bruises upon the old. Anna propped the hinged lid open against the wall, hooked her waist to the rim, and leaned in, parting inessential counterpanes and doilies to reveal the shoeboxes below. She hauled them out. They were marked Ison and Tolley, and linked her to her parents’ youth and wartime. The little she knew of the wars of her grandfathers lay mainly on the surface: Grandfather Tolley’s jumpy eyes after a night of tormented sleep, Grandfather Ison’s cloth insignia, leggings, artillery-shell ashtray and purple ribbons, stored or displayed here and there about the house. These shoeboxes were a treasure trove of photographs: ‘Sunken Road Trench, Pozières Heights, August 1916, looking east’. Mum, is this you? Her mother, dressed in baggy overalls, is straddling a bicycle outside a factory gate. My job, she replied, was to inspect for faulty cartridges. Every day I expected to be blown sky high. Anna also found ration books, a rail pass, her mother’s identity card and a funeral order of service for ‘Flight Navigator Rex Showalter, killed during air operations over Dusseldorf, August 1st, 1942, aged 22 years. Gladly he Answered his Country’s Call’. Anna’s mother blinked away the tears. We grew up together, went to school together, the Showalter boys, Uncle Kitch and me. Rex had been to Cambridge, he was a scientist, they even said he was prime minister material. Anna wondered: Were they meant to marry? There were letters home from Lance Corporal Kitchener Ison, stationed for the duration in a quartermaster’s store outside Townsville:
Thank you for your last. It sounds pretty clear to me that the Government doesn’t have a clue concerning the man on the land. The Pastoral Industry has always delivered the goods and will do so very much better if not mucked about by all the form-filling that has to go on in wartime.
Anna could hear her uncle’s voice in her head as she read the letter; he spoke then as he did now. Her father liked to say: Your mother’s brother had a good war. Did her father have a bad one? His heart beat hot and cool in his diary:
28 April 1944. I await Eleanor’s letters with the deepest longing. They sustain me, and as one mailcall after another fails to bring me the scrappiest communication from her I want to slink away like a dog and howl my homesickness at the jungle. 2 May 1944. We are surrounded here by Nips, as far as can be gathered thirty thousand, so why the delay, why no attempt to break through our lines? The odd one will slip through the lines to steal our boots or tucker, which are far superior, or set a shell to explode inside a tent of sleeping men. Two flushed out yesterday, a sabotage patrol. One emerged from behind a latrine, hands in the air, and got a rifle butt to the head for his pains. The other ran into a drain and would not come out again, so our chaps poured aviation fuel into the drain and tossed in a match or two.
Anna repacked the diary, replaced the shoeboxes. At the end of the decade, with a slump in prices, a credit squeeze, a couple of dry seasons, Grandfather Ison said: What we need is another war. He meant a war like the Korean War, when wool fetched a guinea a pound and even a sibling-divided family property like Isonville earned money to burn. Anna was disposed to hate a war that threatened to take Lockie from her, but the ballot was years off, months off yet, so she stored her anxiety somewhere at the edges of her mind. Besides, there was no one to shake it loose—certainly not the women in Women’s College, wearing their pleated skirts and white ankle-socks. What finally did shake her was a studied act of loathing on the homebound train after her exams. A smiling boy no older than her was making his way through the carriages, talking to those who returned his smile, leaving broadsheets on the empty seats: ‘Stop the Country to Stop the War’. Anna smiled back and called him by name. His father had shorn the sheep at Isonville and was still her father’s shearer on the six-forty acres, a man who stood for Labor against the sitting Member in election after pointless election. They talked briefly, and the boy moved on. Almost at once he was there again, backing up past her seat, one supplicating hand raised to protect his chest from the men who were advancing on him, spitting hate and mad anger. Freedom of speech, he said, but they ground his leaflets and bumper stickers into the floor and finger-jabbed his ribs. Leave him alone, Anna said, and one man, beer-fed and knotted with hate, leaned his face into hers: What’s it to you, slag? Pure, useless, helpless indignation rose in Anna and she pursued the pack, which shrugged her off and trampled over the boy, tossing him aside. She helped him to stand, then sit, peering at his damp eyes and dust-smudged face. Animals, she said, but he shrugged and smiled lopsidedly: Oh well. It was as if he knew too much about the world. Anna knew too little, and what she was beginning to know she couldn’t put a name to, but she did know that it was fierce in her heart—fiercer, when the boys from home began to die. When her son was born she made it a rule: no guns, no uniforms, no war toys. But what was the point? She saw the crazy light in his eyes, the gun in his fist and his lust for blood whenever he played with other little boys. Only three boys from Anna’s class had been spared by the ballot from fighting in Vietnam. One of them was Chester Flood. When Anna met up with Chester again, a part of her hoped that his good luck might rub off on her. The other part sank into his arms, forgetting everything. Chester was a relief from the Jaegers. He was a beautiful, bold, unnerving, quicksilver lover, a reminder of the love she had lost. She has never forgotten those distorted faces on the Pandowie train. She sees them from time to time, most recently on the evening news, chin-jutting, spitting in the faces of women attempting to lay wreaths commemorating the rape of women in wartime. Anna telephoned the little house in North Adelaide: Is Becky all right? Was she hurt? A little shaken, Meg replied, spitting chips, but basically okay. More and more women will rise to the position of prime minister or president in the years to come, and some of them will propose or wage war. Anna will listen to the arguments—a woman like that is a traitor to her kind; a warlike disposition isn’t the exclusive province of men—and find little satisfaction or relevance in either position. The point is, she will say, war makes us all hateful.