That same week, the Fellowship newspaper, of which I was editor and leading contributor, was largely devoted to a long article extolling the virtues of atheism. I had cribbed this almost word for word from the preface to Androcles and the Lion, one of the set books for English I. Shaw had enchanted me with his rationalist blarney. It was fitting that my shallow faith should have been uprooted by a toy shovel. The Reverend C. Cummings Campbell asked me along for afternoon tea at the Manse. Still coughing from his evening at the one and orformance of Unidentified Flying Objects (handicapped by a pair of lungs which had been poisoned at Ypres, he had been among the last to fight his way out of the hall), he nevertheless managed to contain his anger. Instead of booting me immediately into the street, he began by gently suggesting that I might care to offload some of my more onerous responsibilities, such as the editorship of the Fellowship newspaper, until I had worked out of my system what was plainly ‘the influence of that man Anderson’. As usual I was careful to resign a split second before being fired. I told him that I did indeed need time to think, and that perhaps it would be better if for the nonce I were to absent myself altogether. He heaved what would have been a sigh of relief if it had not turned into a coughing fit. My last vision of all things Presbyterian was of the piece of sponge cake – it had pink icing – which I had parked uneaten on the edge of my saucer.
Showing my usual capacity to walk away without a qualm, I left it all behind upon the instant: the bugles and the drums, the vaulting horse and the oak pews, Christine Ballantine’s eyes like a pleading fawn and Mrs Pike’s voice like a strangled fowl. I had no doubts that I was through with it all for ever. My cocksureness must have been terrible to behold. Night after night I reduced my mother to tears with my intellectual arrogance. Copied sedulously from Spencer, but potentiated by an insensitivity that was all my own, my forensic style was as intransigent as Vyshinsky’s. Ferociously I attacked my mother’s lingering, atavistic determination to go on believing in something. If she didn’t believe in anything specific, I insisted, why couldn’t she just believe in nothing? Triumphantly I refuted her arguments, never recognizing that they were true feelings and amounted to a deep intuition of the world, which in the long run we must see to be purposeful if we are to live in it at all.
I suppose that first year at university was just about the most ridiculous phase of my life. It was love again, of course, but this time I was in love with all of them. I copied Spencer’s walk, talk and gestures. I copied the way he wrote. I copied the way Keith Cameron read: Spencer, lost in the toils of a fully bisexual love life and a chronic deficiency of funds, hardly ever read anything except science fiction. I soon realized that his pronunciamentos on literature in general were based on the most evanescent acquaintance with its individual products. But Cameron, who already had a BA degree and was qualifying to begin an MA, had an impressive private library of modern literature. I devoured it author by author. Spencer had told me Four Quartets was the greatest thing written in recent times. I practically memorized it, but was bewildered to find that Spencer had switched his allegiance to Edith Sitwell. Cameron was less capricious. His level head was the necessary corrective to Spencer’s influence. Huggins I admired for grace, ease, creative fertility and plethora of beautiful girlfriends. He was always promising to let me have one of them when he had finished with her, but somehow it never came about. This was lucky in a way, because I would scarcely have known how to behave. I had a girlfriend of my own, an Arts I student called Sally Vaughan: sweet, pretty, decent and intelligent. There was a lot of heavy petting going on but she was a Catholic, I was an idiot and there was nowhere to take her anyway. She lived with her parents in Mosman, across the harbour. I still went home every night, although later and later as the year wore on, especially after I had discovered in myself a liking for the effects produced by several schooners of New consumed one after the other.
In the Forest Lodge I drank with the Bellevue Hill mob and the aesthetes. With Spencer, Huggins, Grogan and Wanda (Cameron was a teetotaller) I visited my first King’s Cross cafes and became acquainted with wine. There was more of the same stuff at Lorenzini’s, a wine bar where the university writers made contact with the intelligentsia of the town. Lex Banning, the spastic poet, was often to be found there. But the place where all the half-worlds met was the Royal George Hotel, down in Pyrmont. The Royal George was the headquarters of the Downtown Push, usually known as just the Push. The Push was composed of several different elements. The most prominent component was, or were, the Libertarians – a university free-thought society consisting mainly of people who, like the aesthetes, failed Arts I on a career basis, but in this case as a form of political protest against the state. Endorsing Pareto’s analysis of sexual guilt as a repressive social mechanism, the Libertarians freely helped themselves to each other’s girlfriends. They had their own folk singer, Johnny Pitts, a hairy dwarf who every few minutes would flail his guitar, launch into a few bars of some barely comprehensible protest song about working conditions on an American railroad and fall sideways.
The next most prominent component was the aesthetes themselves, minus Keith Cameron but plus some specimens who were no longer to be seen around university, their nine years having finally run out. Without exception they were on the verge of writing, painting or composing something so marvellous that they did not want to run the risk of injuring it by rational analysis. As well as the Libertarians and the aesthetes there were small-time gamblers, traditional-jazz fans and the homosexual radio-repair men who had science fiction as a religion. A pick-up jazz band played loudly in the bar. The back room had tables and chairs. If you stuck your head through the door of the back room you came face to face with the Push. The noise, the smoke and the heterogeneity of physiognomy were too much to take in. It looked like a cartoon on which Hogarth, Daumier and George Grosz had all worked together simultaneously, fighting for supremacy.
Nothing feels more like home than the place where the homeless gather. I was enchanted. Here was a paradise beyond the dreams of my mother or the Kogarah Presbyterian Church Fellowship. Here was Bohemia. I had friends here. Everyone in the Push borrowed money from everybody else. Happily I joined the circuit, forming a bad habit I was not to conquer for many years. Even in the rare evenings when Spencer or Huggins did not turn up, there was always Bottomley to talk to and borrow from, since this was the place where he made contact with his fellow gamblers. One of them was six feet six inches high and nicknamed Emu. Apart from his being permanently a thousand pounds in debt and in fear of his life, there was nothing remarkable about Emu except his mistress, but she was very remarkable indeed.
Her name was Lilith Talbot. About thirty years old, she was classically beautiful, with a discreetly ogival figure and a river of auburn hair. She was softly spoken and always elegantly dressed – two qualities which by themselves would have been enough to make her unique in those surroundings. What she saw in Emu was one of the great mysteries. Some said, crudely, that it was a matter of physiology: others, that it was an attraction between opposites. I adored her, first of all from afar, then from progressively closer to. She was openly delighted with my naive worship of all these people whose every secret she had known for years. She was probably also, I now realize, secretly delighted with my absurdly affected mimicry of Spencer. She accused me of being in love with him. I hotly denied the charge, even though it was partly true, and counter-attacked, greatly daring, by telling her that I was in love with her, which was wholly true. I tried to content myself with the prospect of a Platonic relationship. Not only was she entirely loyal to Emu, but Emu had friends who were almost as frightening as his enemies. The world of crime started just where the Push finished, and often the edges overlapped.
By this time my first poems were coming out in honi soit. They were, of course, the most abject pastiche, but my first appearance in print led me to an excess of posturing beside which Nerval walking his lobster would have been as inconspicuous as the Invisible Man.
A symphony in corduroy velvet, smoking cigarettes the length of a blow-gun, I casually sprinted into Manning House, spread out a dozen copies of the paper, and read myself with ill-concealed approval. Even the patience of the Bellevue Hill mob was strained. They voted that I should no longer be heard on the subject of literature. Since the aesthetes grew equally tired of hearing their own opinions coming back at them, I was left with only Sally to berate during the day, and Lilith to harangue in the evening. They were bemused and long-suffering respectively. Heinrich Mann, writing about Nietzsche, remarks at one point that self-confidence often precedes achievement and is generally strained so long as it is untried. No self-confidence could have been more strained than mine. Underneath it, needless to say, lay gurgling indecision. The contradictions were piling up to such an altitude that it was getting hard to see over the top of them. On the one hand I was a petty-bourgeois student, on the other a libertarian bohemian. Sobbing into my beer in the Royal George, I predicted doom for myself in the forthcoming examinations. By day I nursed my hangover and meticulously took notes, wondering what the Push was up to. What was I missing out on?
When the exam results came out, I was deeply shocked to find that I had passed in both Anthropology and History, was listed in Order of Merit for English – i.e., midway between a pass and a credit – and had secured an outright credit in Psychology. Obviously the examiners had been moved to find their own lectures being returned to them in condensed form. Apart from Huggins, a star student in Architecture, none of the aesthetes had ever done as well in a lustrum as I had done in a year. I was neck and neck with the boys from Bellevue Hill. This made me feel guilty and alarmed. Which was I, a conformist or a nonconformist? I could feel my own personality coming apart like the original continental plates. Getting drunk was no solution, even though my mother was charmingly willing to accept the consequent behaviour as evidence of fatigue brought on by too much study. As I collapsed in the porch at midnight, having fallen over every garbage bin on the way down the street, I would explain to her that the Habsburgs had been too much for me. In a dressing gown with the hall light behind her, she looked down at her son, doubtless wondering what he was turning into. I was wondering the same thing.
Could there be such a thing as a virgin sophisticate? Had there ever been a man of the world who came home every night to his mother? Fate resolved this latter anomaly with brutal speed. My number came up and I found myself conscripted for National Service.
14. BASIC TRAINING
National Service was designed to turn boys into men and make the Yellow Peril think twice about moving south. It was universally known as Nasho – a typically Australian diminutive. Once you were in it, four years went by before you were out of it: there was a three-week camp every year, plus numerous parades. But the most brutal fact about Nasho was the initial seventy-seven-day period of basic training, most of which took place at Ingleburn. Each new intake of gormless youth was delivered into the hands of regular army instructors who knew everything about licking unpromising material into shape. When we stepped off the bus at Ingleburn, they were already screaming at us. Screaming sergeants and corporals appeared suddenly out of huts. I stood clutching my Globite suitcase and wondered what had gone wrong with my life. While I goggled at a screaming sergeant, I was abruptly blown sideways by a bellow originating from somewhere behind my right ear. Recovering, I turned to face Ronnie the One.
His real name was Warrant Officer First Class Ronald McDonald, but he was known throughout the army as Ronnie the One. Responsible for battalion discipline, he had powers of life and death over all non-commissioned personnel and could even bring charges against officers up to the rank of captain. His appearance was almost inconceivably unpleasant. A pig born looking like him would have demanded plastic surgery. His brass gleamed like gold and his leather like mahogany, but the effect was undone by his khaki drills, which despite being ironed glass-smooth were perpetually soaked with sweat. Ronnie the One dripped sweat even on a cold day. It was not just because he was fat, although he had a behind like an old sofa. It was because he was always screaming so hard. At that moment he was screaming directly at me. ‘GED YAHAHCARDP!’ Later on a translator told me that this meant ‘Get your hair cut’ and could generally be taken as a friendly greeting, especially if you could still see his eyes. When Ronnie was really annoyed his face swelled up and turned purple like the rear end of an amorous baboon.
For the next eleven weeks I was running flat out, but no matter how fast my feet moved, my mind was moving even faster. It was instantly plain to me that only cunning could ensure survival. Among the university students in our intake, Wokka Clark was undoubtedly the golden boy. Already amateur middleweight champion of NSW, he was gorgeous to behold. But he couldn’t take the bullshit. What happened to him was like a chapter out of From Here to Eternity. They applauded him in the boxing ring at night and screamed at him all day. That summer the noon temperature was a hundred plus. Ronnie the One would take Wokka out on the parade ground and drill him till he dropped. The reason Wokka dropped before Ronnie did was simple. All Ronnie had on his head was a cap. Wokka had on a steel helmet. The pack on his back was full of bricks. After a few weeks of that, plus guard duty every night that he wasn’t boxing, even Wokka was obeying orders.
You couldn’t fight them. Even the conscientious objectors ended up looking after the regimental mascot – a bulldog called Onslow who looked like Ronnie’s handsome younger brother. It was like one of Kenny Mears’s games of marbles: nobody was allowed not to play. I could appreciate the psychology of it. The first task when training new recruits is to disabuse them of the notion that life is fair. Otherwise they will stand rooted to the spot when they first come up against people who are trying to kill them. But my abstract understanding of what was going on impinged only tangentially on the concrete problem of getting through the day without landing myself in the kind of trouble that would make the next day even more impossibly difficult than it was going to be anyway.
Something about my general appearance annoyed Ronnie. There were a thousand trainees in the intake but I was among the select handful of those whose aspect he couldn’t abide. I could be standing in a mess queue, Ronnie would be a dot in the distance, and suddenly his voice would arrive like incoming artillery. ‘GEDDABIGGAHAD!’ He meant that I should get a bigger hat. He didn’t like the way it sat on top of my head. Perhaps he just didn’t like my head, and wanted the whole thing covered up. The drill that I had learned in Boys’ Brigade saved my life. When it came to square-bashing, it turned out that the years I had spent interpreting Captain Andrews’s commands had given me a useful insight into what Ronnie was likely to mean by his shouts and screams. When Ronnie yelled ‘ABARD HARGH!’ I knew almost straight away that it must mean ‘about turn’. Thus I was able to turn decisively with the many, instead of dithering with the few.
On the parade ground Peebles drew most of the lightning. So uncoordinated that he was to all intents and purposes a spastic, Peebles should not have been passed medically fit. But since he had been, the army was stuck with him. After a month of training, when Ronnie shouted, ‘ABARD HARGH!’ nine hundred and ninety-nine soldiers would smartly present their backs and Peebles would be writhing on the ground, strangled by the sling of his rifle. For Peebles the day of reckoning came when he obeyed an order to fix bayonets. This was one of Ronnie’s most frightening orders. It had the verb at the end, as in German or Latin. In English the order would have sounded something like: ‘Bayonets . . . fix!’ Bellowed by Ronnie, it came out as: ‘BAHAYONED . . . FEE!’ The last word was delivered as a high-pitched, almost supersonic, scream. It was succeeded on this occasion by another scream, since Peebles’ bayonet, instead of appearing at the end of his rifle, was to be seen protruding from the back of the soldier standing in front of him. After that, they used to mark Peebles present at company parade every morning but lose him behind a tree on the way to battalion parade, where he was marked absent.
My kit, not
my drill, was what got me into trouble. For once in my life I had to make my own bed every morning, without fail, and lay out for inspection my neatly polished and folded belongings. Since the penalty for not doing this properly was to have the whole lot thrown on the floor and be obliged to start again, I gradually got better at it, but I never became brilliant. National Servicemen had to wax and polish their webbing instead of just powdering it with blanco. It was a long process which bored me, and the same fingers which had been so tacky at woodwork were still likely to gum up the job. The problem became acute when it was my platoon’s turn to mount guard. Throughout the entire twenty-four hours it was on duty, the guard was inspected, supervised, harassed and haunted by Ronnie the One. The initial inspection of kit, dress and rifle lasted a full hour. Ronnie snorted at my brass, retched at my webbing and turned puce when he looked down the barrel of my rifle. ‘THASSNODDAGHARDRIVAL!’ he yelled. He meant that it was not a guard rifle. ‘ISSFULLAPADAYDAHS!’ He meant that it was full of potatoes. I looked down the barrel. I had spent half a day pulling it through until it glowed like El Dorado’s gullet. Now I saw that a single speck of grit had crept into it.
In the guardhouse we had to scrub the floors and tables, whitewash the walls and polish the undersides of the drawing pins on the notice board. When we went out on picket we could not afford to relax for a moment, since Ronnie could be somewhere in the vicinity preparing to do his famous Banzai charge. At two o’clock in the morning I was guarding the transport park. It was raining. Sitting down in the sentry box, I had the brim of my hat unbuttoned and was hanging from the collar of my groundsheet, praying for death. I had my rifle inside my groundsheet with me, so that I could fold my hands on its muzzle, lean my chin on the cushion formed by my hands under the cape and gently nod off while still looking reasonably alert. I had calculated that Ronnie would not come out in the rain. This proved to be a bad guess. I thought the sentry box had been struck by lightning, but it was merely Ronnie’s face going off like a purple grenade about a foot in front of mine. I came to attention as if electrocuted and tried to shoulder arms. Since the rifle was still inside my groundsheet, merely to attempt this manoeuvre was bound to yield Peebles-like results. Ronnie informed me, in a tirade which sounded and felt like an atomic attack, that he had never seen anything like it in his life.