David took that image of Jake away with him as he drove the hire car back to the airport for his return flight to Sydney, the road dropping in loops from the Hills to the plain. Memory returns there as he sits with Anne in Bronte, taking her measure. He stays sitting on the deck after she leaves, reconstructing. How he and Jake knew each other as schoolboys. That’s what comes when David thinks back. How it happened through the cadet corps of all things.
Jake arrived in the third year of high school on a scholarship, having excelled in a special examination to win the opportunity. But the transfer from the country was not easy. No one at the privileged private college was going to let an outsider upset the established order. Tall, skinny, with dark hair close cut, Jake kept his own counsel. If his new uniform sat badly on him, it balanced his other used and shabby things. From the first day he had decided he would do his best to measure up. He had a flat accent and never said more than was required. That’s how David recalled Jacob Treweek. Though David was one year younger, one year behind, they became friends.
Shaggy-haired and rebellious, David was arm-twisted into the cadets with the notion that it would be good for him. Everywhere on the walls of the school were honour rolls that commemorated the valiant dead. It was something the boys resisted. Such reverence for war came to seem ridiculous to this generation. Treweek, however, was one of the few who didn’t look silly in the army-issue khaki clothes. He strode around briskly with his sleeves rolled up to regulation standard as if he were part of something larger and more necessary than the creeper-covered school. It was an acknowledgement of his father who had been in the war and returned to work the family farm. His father and the farm were inseparable for Jake. He joined the cadet corps for a taste of his father’s military preparedness. Soon he had a lance-corporal’s stripe of his own on his sleeve.
How David hated all that. He smirked and sneered and declared that it was absurd to drill up and down, to polish boots and buckles, to fumble over the disassembly and reassembly of antique rifles. In time he would argue his way out on grounds of conscientious objection. But in that first year he was stuck with it, including the dreaded annual week-long army camp up north.
Among those scenes from boyhood one in particular comes back with awful clarity, even now. That cold dark morning when they boarded the bus outside the school hall and waved goodbye to their loved ones – his mother in a huddle of eager, worried parents and the miserable curled-up ball that was himself, transported from home with other boys from a dozen city schools to the desert foothills of a training place called El Alamein, named in memory of a battle in World War II in which Australians fought bravely and turned the tide.
David remembers Jake from that time with a feeling of eternal gratitude. The line goes straight back, as if nothing has changed. They are the same people, one dead now, the other alive, and between them – real, needing his help – is Anne, whom he loves. For herself and for the sake of his friend.
—
On reaching the camp the buses formed a line to enter the fenced-off barracks. The group from David’s school were taken to a place on the grid where ranks of tents awaited them in the dust, arranged by numbers and letters in an orderly allocation – except for the last stage where you had to scramble to find a bed for yourself as mates stuck together fiercely, grabbing places for each other and turfing anyone else out. When the frenzy settled David had a back corner spot where the tent came down low and he was hidden from sight. He pulled out his book, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, and lay there on the camp bed with his head on his hand until someone called him. And so it would be for a week that yawned like eternity: rigid marches, mad scrambles and a numb nothingness.
The sergeant of David’s platoon was Henry Hunt, who had three stripes. At the first general inspection he sent David off to have his hair cut. David had ignored his mother’s warning to visit the barber in advance. Now that provocation became a humiliation. A long wait in a line outside a tin shed for the barber’s chair and a leering fellow with a razor who flicked at the boy’s fine brown hair before shaving it off in a job that took all of five minutes. It was swept into the pile of schoolboy plumage that the barber collected in an afternoon, leaving David with an exposed scalp that exaggerated the scorn in his eyes and the derision of his mouth. He looked like a reffo, a displaced person, an untouchable, a convict.
Sergeant Hunt – in the same class as Jake Treweek at school, one year above David – said the cadets must follow the regulations at all times, that appearances must be strictly maintained, that they must meet and surpass expectations, that the troops from their school must set an example to the other schools, and that NO ONE would be allowed to let the side down.
David recalled the hair cut as a grievance inflicted. He was late getting back for the early meal that first night by which time only slops were left. He never got his appetite back all week. He stared in blind rage through the evening lecture on camp discipline and was glad when the lights went out at nine o’clock and he could cry himself silently to sleep.
It was so cold in the morning that even in his thick sleeping bag he woke at the first stirrings of dawn. It was winter, it was the outback, the desert. The regimentation of the place, which he resisted passively at every encounter, was inescapable.
The main event of the week was the bivouac, a training exercise where they stayed out overnight. They were taken on the back of a truck to a drop-off, then marched along a track with their swags on their backs. The plan was to take up positions on the hillside for a mock offensive. David was in Lance-Corporal Treweek’s section. They were to fan out over the steep terrain and set themselves up in their one-man tents in the hour before dark. That was the practice run. When the order came they had to break camp, pack away their tents and move forward to new positions. David had not even got his tent up properly when he had to bundle it into its bag again.
The dusk made things vague – stone, saltbush and the damp dusty ground that the boys trampled underfoot. A mob of kangaroos fled before them, bounding away into a low valley. It was a hard slog climbing the slope. From the crest they could look out over the shadowy plain. They became aware of activity closer to hand as other sections of other platoons and groups from other schools manoeuvred. A flare went up and exposed pale vertical figures.
‘Get down,’ said Jake and then yelled it as an order. ‘Get down!’
They crawled on their bellies to a position of cover behind a rocky outcrop where they gathered to listen to the objectives and the plan. The enemy were ranged across the hill face opposite. Jake’s section had to get through those lines to the top. They would advance pre-dawn. For now they had to spread out in a long line, erect their tents where they would be invisible, and get some sleep. It was dark and cold and the sandwich at the earlier stop was the last food till morning. They moved sluggishly, finding partners. They needed to work in pairs. David was the odd one out. He shouldered his pack and looked around for which way to go.
Jake nodded at him. ‘You come with me.’
It was a look of faith rather than pity, a leader’s problem-solving, and David roused himself in response. He followed Jake as they crept over the terrain, bent low in the dark, making as little noise as possible through all the obstacles, boulders and rabbit-burrows and thornbushes, until descending from the ridge after half a mile they found themselves in a sandy concavity. Jake stopped and David bumped into him.
‘This looks like a good spot,’ Jake said. ‘Let’s set up here.’
It was a serious game, but a comedy nonetheless, as they tried each singly to erect their pup tents in the dark. Jake did his with efficient speed. David emptied his bag of rods and pins and string and flattened the bundled tent out on the ground before sneaking a look at the situation with his torch.
‘They’ll see us,’ Jake admonished. ‘No torch.’
‘I don’t know if I’ve got all the bits,’ replied David.
‘You can do it later. We need to reconnoitre.’
What he meant was that they needed to fetch their rifles and find a position where they could look across to the other side and defend themselves against attack.
From a dark mass of feathery shrubs, creatures skittered into the night. Beyond the bushes was a rocky barrier behind which the ground was smooth and soft, almost warm, as if an animal had been resting there. The view of the valley and the hill looming opposite was uninterrupted.
Jake and David waited there, observant, watching the gibbous moon climb the sky, its light making the scene silver and decipherable. The stars came out, sharp in their patterns in the clear sky, the jewels of planets, the powder of the Milky Way. Speaking low, Jake pointed out the celestial beings one by one, to the extent of what he knew.
David felt happy then. More than that, he felt exalted, weightless, open. He smelled the pungency of crushed foliage and musty animal. He felt his skin against rock and sand. From the comfortable security of their position they were able to witness this infinity – eternal, ancient – as terrestrial observers who were part of it.
They joked, of course, they were boys together, but that was no more than a film over a sense of wonder and exhilaration for which they had no words.
Flares went up here and there as the leaders of the exercise checked where people were. Someone was always caught in the arc of light, standing up, moving forward, who would have been dead if it were for real. Jake’s protective company and authority made David feel safe. He stayed low.
There was an agreement that hostilities would cease from one a.m. to four a.m. when the cadets were expected to sleep.
‘Let’s go,’ said Jake at last, checking his watch. ‘We’ve only got three hours.’
They crept back to the sandy basin where their stuff was and where Jake’s tent and sleeping bag were waiting for him. He went to check on the others in his section. ‘Coo-ee,’ he called, and some not very convincing ‘coo-ees’ were returned, and on he went.
David fiddled with his pile of canvas and things, found his sleeping bag, took off his boots and covered his legs. With the cold air on his face he sat contemplating the moon and stars, in love with this vast pristine sky. Those millions of lights were like all the things he thought and felt and imagined. Their sweep was an expression of his soul. Then there were noises. His shoulders trembled. A cry. Of an owl. Of a wild cat. He fumbled some more at his tent, flapping the canvas hopelessly.
Jake returned and found David sitting there uncovered. He crawled into his own tent and said goodnight.
Then he called out. ‘There’s room in my tent if you get cold out there. You’ll be awake all night otherwise and you’ll keep me awake. It’s okay. We can share. Top to toe. Stick your feet up my head end.’
David was already cold. He heard Jake shifting to make room. Without saying a word he accepted the offer and bumped his way over, his legs in his sleeping bag. He wriggled into the warm tent, trying not to touch the sides and not to touch Jake. Once he was in position he made himself as compact as he could, a curled-up ball again, and lay there listening to his breath. He was content. He was thankful.
In the pre-dawn dark Jake kicked him out of his sleep. They hastily stuffed their packs and were on their way. Jake fanned out with the others in the section. David, on his own, floundered forward.
There was shouting now, and running, and some fake gunfire. People were crashing through the bush in all directions, hollering in full-on assault as the light rose. It was a shambles.
Then all of them from all the different groups were milling around on a rough track at the bottom of the valley where a truck arrived with urns of tea and sweet condensed milk and buttered buns for breakfast. Heads were counted and recounted, numbers tallied. At the end of it all there were still some people missing out in the hills and search parties were sent out. Their compasses had pointed in the wrong direction and it took half the morning to sort things out.
Lance-Corporal Treweek’s section was all present and accounted for from the start. Sergeant Hunt commended them on completing the bivouac in an orderly and timely manner. Then they had to march all the way back to camp.
There was one day to go before it was over. The camp held no surprises anymore, no cause for trepidation. David just lay about, catching up on sleep or reading. He skipped roll call a couple of times. It didn’t matter now. He had survived the camp, mastered it in his own way, thanks to Jake. It was the closest to war he ever wanted to come. He would quit the cadet corps next year. What he took from it, which was not a tale he could tell, was an experience of sharing the shining infinity of the world with another person.
He could barely keep the smile off his face when the final salute came. His salute was for Jake who had done a good job. He got on the bus knowing that when they were back and out of uniform, they would be friends.
—
David wonders if Jake remembered it as he did, with undying gratitude, as an act of cosmic beneficence, or if he remembered it at all. It was only later, after the cadet camp, that David came to understand the connection between Jake Treweek and Henry Hunt. They were thick already, as schoolboys. So David reflects, piecing things together.
When Jake won the scholarship and his mother moved from the country with her two children to stay with her sister in the Adelaide Hills, the family had lived near the Hunts. Jake was in the same class as Henry and sometimes, if Henry took the bus, or when car ferries were organised for special events, they travelled together. Jake excelled at his schoolwork where Henry struggled. They would go over the homework together on those trips, Jake filling in the blanks for Henry, whose mother quickly understood the benefit and kindly offered to make it a regular arrangement. On those days Jake would travel to and from school with Henry in the family car, which stopped for Jake on the corner of the road. Sometimes Mrs Hunt drove the car. More often it was a man who worked for Henry’s father. Mr Hunt was in the government in Canberra then and had heavy responsibilities. The driver, Wolfie, had looked after the family’s property while Mr Hunt was away at the war. He stayed on afterwards as part of the place.
Jake and Henry spent time together after school. The Hunts were the first people in the area to have colour television and Jake would go to Henry’s place to watch. They listened to music – Henry had everything, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’, the Rolling Stones – and in summer they played tennis or swam in the blue-tiled pool. Hunt House was a sandstone mansion in a Georgian style in a park of stately trees and tended shrubbery.
Jake had nothing, by comparison. After his father died, the year he came to town for school, his mother sold the farm on the bottom of Yorke Peninsula. It had never been much of a property in reality but it filled the boy’s dreams and he loved it. His mother stayed with her sister in the Hills for a while, then bought a cottage nearby for herself and Jake and his sister Susan.
Larry Treweek had been in the war too, like other men of his generation. His early death was caused by the lung damage he brought back with him from the islands. The farm on the southern peninsula had started as Larry’s parents’ place. It was a small holding in country that needed a changing mix of cropping and grazing to support a family. Jake’s dad worked it hard when his turn came. Jake remembered the white stones that kept coming up through the ground to be gathered into those growing piles that made the walls that bounded each paddock. When Larry couldn’t work like that any longer, the place went downhill.
Jake inherited the same lip-biting determination. When his father married Lily Lucas in the plain local church at the crossroads that passed for a town, he made a vow he was determined to keep – to her, to their place, to the kids they would have. Then, as a boy on that farm, Jake buried himself in the studies that were his own rampart from which to look out on a different, distant future. He scored success after success and made his parents proud. And made a vow of his own. When the time came the boy would take care of his mother and sister as his father wanted.
As the children of a deceased ex-serviceman, Jake and Susan were looked after by an organisation called Legacy that provided clothes and money for schoolbooks and other approved items such as health checks and sports gear. After they moved to town, Lily Treweek found work three days a week as a doctor’s receptionist with the help of the same charity, and the family managed.
Mrs Hunt identified Jacob Treweek as a worthy cause and extended her family’s generosity in his direction. She did this as a demonstration of the community spirit that ran so deep in her husband’s electorate.
‘It’s marvellous,’ said Freda Hunt, ‘how everyone lends a hand.’
In return Jake did Henry’s homework for him.
Henry liked running around. He had yellow-white hair and skin the colour of sugarplum. His eyes squinted when he was made to sit at a desk and peer at numbers and formulae through his thick glasses. He liked to laugh and would take a swipe at Jake in fun. He was literally his mother’s white-haired boy. Some of that brushed off on Jake, who was patient with Henry.
Each spring there was an Open Day at the Hunt mansion to raise funds for Mr Hunt’s re-election to parliament. The family joked about it behind their hands. It was the one day of the year to let in the hoi-polloi. The house and gardens had to be immaculately presented, of course, and it took months of preparation. The tickets were expensive. History attached to the gracious vision of colonial life that Hunt House conjured up. Its noble continuity was a reason for the present to be proud. Only in a few rooms upstairs, kept out of bounds to the prying public, did the usual chaos reign.
Jake was expected to help out on the day, as if he were one of the family, like Wolfie the driver. His mother dropped him at the gate where there was a sign up to welcome visitors. Women from the district were setting out trestle tables and festooning the walkways. Jake wore his weekday school suit even though it was Saturday. He had no other clothes for a special occasion. His mother kissed him and said goodbye as she left him at the gate. She wouldn’t come in herself, feeling shy in such company. She watched as her son walked up the white gravel drive with his head held high.
Jake patted the dogs, a pair of old Airedales he knew well. There was Mrs Hunt in her hat of blue hydrangeas, pleased to see the boy wearing the Legacy badge on his lapel as she had suggested – a little flaming torch so people would know who he was.
There was a sausage sizzle and homemade cakes and tea. The crowd swelled towards lunchtime. It was all a wild success. In the afternoon Henry disappeared, laughing with a trio of girls, and Jake was left on his own. He didn’t know what to do with himself then. By this stage he was sick of smiling at people and being introduced as Henry’s schoolfriend and feeling himself on display. He found his way to Henry’s bedroom in the closed-off part of the house and sat at the desk where he and Henry did their homework together.
The view from the window was familiar through the seasons. It looked down at lawns and flowerbeds that were pink and white now, the rose walks and the golden wattle, and the white tent where the visitors milled about the bedecked tables. In the distance rolled the hills in a dark haze.
Henry’s framed school photographs hung on the wall alongside similar framed photographs of his father and grandfather in team uniforms, in corps uniforms, in the dashing outfits of the day. There was an oak dresser and a high old bed with a print of Westminster Abbey above it, and a watercolour of gum trees flushed at sunset, painted somewhere nearby by Sir Hans Heysen. In the corner was a cricket bat signed by Don Bradman, another friend of Henry’s father.
Jake pressed the smooth timber of the desk, rubbing his fingers against the ink stains, hunched over and gripped by an emotion he could not specify. He considered the place to be his too. All this that was Henry’s, Henry’s family’s, he, Jake, might have access to, by association, by inclusion on certain terms.
That much Jake understood. The room was dim and cold and he felt cold too, with a cold anger that he didn’t like feeling. This was the Hunts’ history, their world, their claim to a position of dominance, in relation to which he felt separate and unnecessary. Yet he also felt that the things the room offered and stood for were for him as well, that he was earning them by his efforts and deserved them as much as they did.
Jake remembered the farm on the peninsula. The image of it – pale stone, dark earth, bleached crop – all in the plain clear light. The farm where he had grown up came to him as an expression of what lay behind his strange mood and displaced him from the present.
Then Mrs Hunt came in. ‘There you are, Jake. We’ve been searching high and low for you. No need for schoolwork today,’ she added, seeing the boy at the desk. ‘You should come outside and have some fun. Henry’s on the tennis court with the girls. They need you for doubles.’
She saw a skinny boy in a grey gaberdine suit that had been bought for him to grow into, with a charity badge on the lapel. He had a sharp, grinning face, but sad eyes, she thought suddenly and took his arm. ‘People want to see you, Jake. You’re part of our family. It’s such a jolly day.’
And Freda Hunt marched him down the stairs where she could show him off to the ladies who made the cakes.
—
Jake Treweek was never very sociable. Out of place like his mum, he was studious and kept his own counsel: a man of few words. He performed well at school and was accepted into the national military college where a full academic education in applied science and officer training would be provided at no cost, with allowances that were generous enough for Jake to be independent of his mother and even return something to her.
Lily Treweek was sorry to see her son go, yet understood that he could never have stayed. Selling the farm was the act of uprooting that set her son on a mobile course through life, a sequence of temporary situations through which he could advance. Nor had Jake formed friendships that he was unable to leave behind. He was singular in that way.
The military option was unfashionable at the time. It was an embarrassment among his school mates who aimed at the various civilian professions – law, medicine, accountancy – and could pull the necessary strings to get there. Entry into the army turned into a kind of secret mission that set Jake apart, even if his motivation was pragmatic in regard to his family situation and decent in respect to memory of his father’s service and the charity that flowed from it. His friends understood that Jake’s career choice was determined by his circumstances. He himself did not weigh what was lost in the decision. For him it was the clearer choice to leave home, the world of Adelaide and the Hills and a circle to which he never really belonged.
Oddly Henry Hunt did something similar. After a couple of years at the local university studying politics and economics, mainly with Marxist academics who, despite their commitment to the revolution, had little interest in actual government, Henry transferred to an Ivy League school in America with his father’s help and emerged eventually with a Masters in International Studies. That positioned him to apply for graduate entry to the Department of Foreign Affairs back in Australia.
Henry’s mother kept in touch with Jake’s mother in the Adelaide Hills. The two women met at the local market with baskets of fruit and vegetables over their arms. Freda Hunt kept Henry informed of Jake’s progress and Lily Treweek duly passed on Mrs Hunt’s interest to her son. That way Henry was able to track Jake down in Canberra when he returned from the United States.
Henry had a favour to ask of his former classmate. He was out of touch with the Australian scene and needed Jake’s help with the entry examination for Foreign Affairs. The American system was so different, Henry explained. He took his glasses off. Jake saw the familiar yellow eyelashes blink over eyes that were almost pink as Henry pleaded. He had got through it there but feared he might not pass this more searching local test. It was calibrated to probe for the right attitudes and values and a grasp of current policy settings. Henry needed some highly informed coaching and Jake, after moving across from Army to the Department of Defence, was an insider now and his man.
They met over a beer at the Royal Canberra Golf Club where Henry had visiting rights and for three intensive weeks they went back to their old schoolboy arrangement of shared homework. Henry affected embarrassment, but he was really quite pragmatic about it. Jake knew his stuff. He knew the political parameters and he was a good teacher. He was by then on the first rung of the ladder himself, as a trainee Defence analyst who would move up through Intelligence.
Henry got what he needed and acquitted himself creditably in the examination. If strings were pulled, it was done within acceptable bounds. There was a follow-up interview and Henry Hunt was named within the exclusive Department of Foreign Affairs intake for that year.
He was busy after that and didn’t see much more of his old schoolfriend. A year had passed when Henry’s first overseas diplomatic posting came through, as third secretary in Brussels, and he invited Jake to send-off drinks at the Commonwealth Club.
In the Canberra dusk in its mock-Tudor reception room Henry was flush with confidence. His yellow-white hair was gold with grooming. His skin was rosy. When he established that Jake was still stuck in the same position in Defence after two years on the job, he quickly moved the conversation on. It might be time to leave the friendship behind.
Jake realised too that they didn’t have much to say to one another anymore. Henry had trusted Jake, but now, at this new juncture, that old trust had no further use. It had become something empty that needed to be let go. Jake shook Henry’s hand in farewell and wished him the very best. There was no further contact after that night, not for a very long time.