CHAPTER 30

The War is Over

People recall the end of the war as a big celebration with streamers and music and dancing in the streets. But I’m sure if there’d been dancing in West Brunswick, I would have noticed. All I remember is the Yanks stopped coming and the party was over. Roma went back home, Pearl lost her job at the ammunition factory and stopped visiting, and there was no more patriotic duty required at the Dug-Out.

Dad came home on extended leave like he was the boss telling us what to do. Mum wasn’t used to this because she’d been the boss during the war. Our home became a battlefield. It was like the war had stopped in the Pacific and come to us. Mum would be yelling about how hard we’d suffered while he was away gallivanting with his WRAAFs. I didn’t know what a WRAAF was at first, but I soon got the drift – women in the Royal Australian Air Force that Dad had been sleeping with. This was a new development to have Mum yelling at Dad for sleeping with other women after all the Yanks she had slept with. I’d be cowering, petrified while they screamed at one another. It didn’t seem fair.

Why is she so cross? Should I tell Dad the truth? You did it Mum. You slept with other men. Why are you making such a big fuss? I debate over and over about telling him. Would it help? What would be the repercussions? Would Mum just kill me right there in front of Dad? Would he save me? Would he be strong enough? The truth is, I am just too scared.

The big arguments happen in the evening after they’ve been drinking and there’s no doubt the grog makes them worse. I’m huddled in bed while they shout and scream at one another, slamming doors. Mum throws whatever is at hand and there are thuds as they crash into the walls and furniture. Finally, a resounding bang of their bedroom door as Mum shuts herself in for the night and Dad gives the piano a really good thumping with the ‘Warsaw Concerto’. I don’t know what Mum does, she probably just goes to sleep; battles like this don’t seem to worry her – she takes them in her stride. I do wish they wouldn’t drink.

I feel rotten for not telling Dad about Mum and the Yanks. Men who were cowards in the war were despised. Cowards were detestable. At the pictures when men were being tortured, they never gave in. When I don’t tell Dad, because I am terrified of Mum killing me, I know deep down that I am a coward and I am ashamed. It would be easier to tell Dad if we were closer. I want to like him. I would really love to have a father, but he’s not friendly and never spends time with me. Fortunately for Mum, he isn’t interested in talking to our neighbours either. What stories they could tell.

Unfortunately, Mum’s yelling doesn’t help. ‘A dirty WRAAF, a dirty, bloody, stinking harlot!’ This could be heard for miles around and I was sure the neighbours laughed their heads off. We were different – I was raised with booze and screaming arguments, with parties, lots of grog and drunkenness, and people chucking up on the back verandah, the lawn, and in the toilet. I figured there was something wrong with us.

***

My Uncle Max was a beaut whistler and could whistle songs. I could whistle ‘Whistle While You Work’ from the Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs movie. Max and I performed duets and he was very impressed that I could whistle on the in-breath. When he came home from New Guinea, Nana and Grandpa celebrated the occasion by entertaining us all in the lounge room, where there were big soft seats, carpet, a piano and a leadlight window. They were thrilled to have their son home safely but struggled to accept how much he’d changed. He even sounded different. He was no longer their innocent teenage son who had left home an apprentice, but had returned a lanky grown-up serviceman after experiencing God knows what. Mum and Roma were thrilled to have their brother home.

He recalled how many of his mates were wounded and sick with malaria. ‘The Repat hospitals are full of wrecks. Horrible injuries,’ he said. ‘A lot died and a lot wished they had.’ He shocked his parents with stories of mates who suspected their wives had been unfaithful. ‘They’ll give them a good beating just to be on the safe side.’ He showed us his wallet with his money covered in mud. ‘It never stops raining up there.’ The best part of our visit was when my big uncle shook my hand like a grown-up and Nana served us a special afternoon tea.

However, the day turned bad when Mum and Dad and I were walking back to our dump and they started arguing again. Were they going to get separated? From the newspaper Grandpa read the divorce rate had tripled with adultery and desertion the main reasons. I wanted to know what adultery was and since no-one would tell me, I guessed it was something that adults did. Probably behind bedroom doors.

Now the war was over, people were leaving the services in droves. Dad worried whether he’d get a job if he left the air force. He’d had a good war, only flying transport missions behind the front line. And then safely home to the officers’ mess, some beers and a singalong around the piano, where he reigned as usual.

Only near the end was he transferred into a bomber squadron where even then, they only dropped bombs in training, had some gunnery practice, drank a lot more beer, and in general had a pretty good time. Why would he give it up to live with a harridan like Mum and a freckle-faced kid he barely knew? He stayed in the air force and was posted to Cressy as CO. That stood for commanding officer and even Mum was impressed as she readily agreed to join him in the married officers’ quarters on the base. ‘God knows where Cressy is,’ she told her friends.

The first priority was to get someone to look after our house while we were gone because there was a terrible housing shortage. ‘They haven’t built any houses for years,’ Grandpa said. ‘And now there’s a shortage of materials. Even if you’ve got the money, you have to pay kickbacks to suppliers. It’s bloody criminal.’ Our rent was pegged at a good rate and Mum said if we went to Cressy and left the house empty, squatters would break in and take it over. ‘If they got in the bludgers would stay forever and we’d never get ’em out. And God only knows what they’d do to my good furniture.’

Then Sully from the grocery shop answered our prayers. She had a customer whose married daughter was living with her mother because she couldn’t find a house. Merv and Lucy were so glad to get out of her mum’s place, they would guarantee to pay the rent, look after the furniture and mow the lawn. ‘They’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles to move out when we want the house back,’ Mum said. ‘Even if it means moving back with her mum.’

Cressy was a one-pub, three-shop town surrounded by sheep-grazing properties a morning’s drive west of Melbourne. In the wartime frenzy, it had become a fighter pilot training base with low-flying Spitfires scaring the sheep and local lads besotted with the dream of being fighter pilots. However, when Dad arrived the planes had gone and all but a handful of men. My father set up his command in the officers’ mess and my mother proudly took her seat at the bar. She liked her new role as the CO’s wife; it gave her instant status in the local pub.

Since Dad was the only commissioned officer, it was no trouble for her to appropriate the officers’ mess with its big log fireplace and huge woodpile. There were two billiard tables and a bar that contained a refrigerator that Mum quickly filled with Melbourne beer. We’d never owned a car and now we had a small fleet – a Jeep, an ambulance and a truck. The ambulance was best. We’d take it to Ballarat shopping with the three of us sitting in the front seat. Invariably we’d stop at the Cressy pub on the way home, and as the hours passed and I lost my thirst for lemon squashes, I would retreat to the ambulance to sleep. They’d leave me there overnight if the drive home hadn’t woken me.

For me, the air force station was a big adventure, even if there weren’t any planes or other kids. Certainly, it was lonely. I learn to ride an adult’s bicycle by putting my leg under the cross bar and get really good at it even though it’s difficult. The door to one of the huge aircraft hangars is open a crack and I can just squeeze the bike inside so I can be out of the wind and frequent rain. Inside, there’s a huge concrete floor that I can ride round and round on to my heart’s content.

When school begins, I’m deemed capable of riding the 2 miles there. There’s an enormous headwind every morning so I must wheel the bicycle. I think how fast I’ll return home after school with the wind at my back, but annoyingly, the Cressy gale drops in the afternoon. At least I don’t have to walk home.

As the ranking local serviceman, my father presented commemorative victory medals to my classmates on behalf of a grateful Australian government. Staring fixedly ahead like a good little soldier on parade, I remembered to keep my chest out, shoulders back and head up. Intently at attention, I had no idea it was my father who presented me with the medal and had to be convinced at the family tea table. ‘That was your father, you silly goose,’ Mum said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you know what day it is. You’re such a silly billy.’ This was my mum being nice.

At the table I had to hold my knife and fork properly by the handles rather than lower down where it made it easier to cut meat. Slurping was another one of my many faults and keeping my elbows down was difficult for a small boy sitting at an adult table. I was told to be quiet at the table. ‘You might just learn something if you’d only shut up,’ Mum said. That was how I learnt that nearly a million Americans had passed through Australia during the war and it took 18 ships to take the 12,000 women they’d married back to the US. ‘A lot of them were pregnant,’ Mum sneered. The girls who married black US servicemen were called ‘boong moles’, and Mum sneered again.

I had my eighth birthday at Cressy. I don’t remember getting any presents, but surely, I got something. There was probably a cake which I ate sitting up straight with my elbows tucked in and holding my fork properly by the handle. There were no other kids, just boring big people.

At night I marvelled at the huge fires we had in the officers’ mess; the adults would all be sitting at the bar drinking and talking. Mum was the only woman and she enjoyed flirting. There was nothing for me to do except play billiards. Because I could hardly see over the table, my lonely billiards game involved throwing the ball as hard as possible against the end cushion and counting the rebounds. Three was doable but if I went for four and the ball left the table, it made a terrific racket on the wooden floor and I would be in trouble. It wasn’t much recognition, but at least my presence was acknowledged.

We still got the Women’s Weekly every week. I used to follow Mandrake, which was inside the back page, but Mum read everything. ‘Here’s something that’ll interest you,’ she tells the men. ‘The Weekly says bosoms are big news in America.’ Then she reads, ‘Cheaters and gay deceiver brassieres are as much a part of the average woman’s make-up as lipstick, rouge and nail polish.’ I couldn’t see why, but everybody used to laugh at Mum’s jokes.

At Cressy, the town butcher killed his own meat. I witnessed this one Saturday morning and I have been scared of butchers ever since. It would help if they hadn’t thrown body parts around so casually, let alone chat while they did it. ‘Bloody Butchers’ is a good name for them. People often asked me where my red hair came from and my mother, with just the right amount of alcohol, would reply there was no history of red hair in Dad’s or her family. However, she used to have a red-headed butcher when she was first married and … at this point Mum would pause before delivering her punch line: ‘Perhaps it was something to do with his meat.’ This oft-repeated story and my mother calling me a bastard when riled made me doubt my lineage. I blush to think how many times I hoped for a different father. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like him, but I thought him a fool to be bossed around by my cheating mother.

One day when we went mushrooming, he managed to bog our air force Jeep. Before he drove into the marsh, he probably thought it was impossible to bog a 4WD Jeep. Mum refused to get out and walk home, so Dad walked back to the base alone for the ambulance. In trying to tow the Jeep out he bogged the ambulance. Mum was seething, but at least the anger kept her warm. I was freezing, but she wouldn’t let me accompany Dad back for the truck; unusually, she wanted my company. When Dad came back, he bogged the truck also. He could be embarrassingly ineffectual. Back to the base he trudged and phoned a neighbouring farmer, who easily saved Dad’s fleet using his tractor. The farmer left the aerodrome with a wonderful story to entertain the district.