By Ian C Smith
An odour of petrol and coal lingers as rain drizzles on silent, huddled, but still intact, abodes of pitted brick, privet hedges, the tenebrous streets, rinsing smog’s grime. For many seconds of what will remain within the realm of his memory chest’s oddities, an alarmed boy looks up at his father clasping his mother in the entrance to the house where the boy was born. Crushing his mother, it worryingly seems to him, against the man’s khaki tunic’s brass buttons, a side cap folded in an epaulette, those parents fiercely lock mouths, a tableau the boy never sees again. That passionate stranger, brief leave over too soon, startles the boy in blitzed London where the air-raid siren around the corner had not. His mother’s breasts heave as her soldier vanishes into the blackout.
He has two hundred cold hitchhiked miles to cover. No lamplight. Unsignposted roads. Luftwaffe overhead, so, secrecy. This will be included in the boy’s search through frangible memories when he reaches manhood long after fathers returned, changed, carnage over, back to peace, familial scars.
His father wears both belt and braces, working men’s idea of fashion then. No chance of catching this moody man with his pants down, a spectacle, the boy later realises, he never witnessed. Also wearing a collarless shirt, smoking rollies, his father reads the Mirror, and News of the World, while the boy gobbles crunchy puffed wheat with substitute sugar, post-war Britain still being on rations. They fill up on remnants like toasted stale bread spread with used frying-pan fat and Marmite. Head cocked, the boy also reads the backs of his father’s newspapers at an inconvenient angle: sports results, Al Phillips, the Aldgate Tiger, lambastes his way to the British bantamweight boxing crown, Len (the Duke) Duquemin, star Spurs centre forward, rampages, a supreme destroyer on the attack. This calligraphic style of power sports writing as if the war had never ended, propaganda still alive and persuasive, stirs the boy. If Hamlet was signed by Tottenham Hotspur, the goal netting would become a quivering arras.
They emigrate, heading south. School Down Under is easy for the boy who had almost completed that year’s work in England: fractions and friction, explorers and bushrangers, gold and progress, instead of kings beheading or divorcing queens, battlefields and bubonic plague.
Arriving in their mild winter, he adapts to Australian Rules football, an exciting game, havoc for the faint-hearted, the ball a rugby lookalike, success his father coldly ignores as if his son was unpatriotic. He also proves his worth receiving the strap, smirking after laughing at his classmates’ larrikin antics. Their parents’ relaxed policing of children’s swearing suits him, too. His parents loathe how his new school friends ‘sing out’ at the immigrants’ front gate for the boy to come on adventures with them. It was their idea to loop across half the globe, not his, but Australia, bonzer, you beaut, ‘struth cobber, also suits this Pommie kid who loves new words and sayings. Fair dinkum, mate.
His first Australian summer is the long school holiday. In this land of swimmers, sinuous, soon suntanned at the outdoor pool – the baths – who drip on towels spread over concrete, steaming between lazy plunges into their shimmering domain, the boy has a problem. Pale, skinny, but eating better, so, stronger, he must master the deep end or wither in shame, both terrifying thoughts.
Most ten-year-old English children can’t swim. Coastal Australians, casually dolphinesque, equate water with fun. What these bathers wear they call ‘bathers’. The boy wears boxer shorts, wants to look like the brawling boxer, Rocky Graziano, that tough guy whose name he would like, too. He confesses his angst to his working sister who taught him to read, who can swim. She agrees they shall go when it is quiet, to execute their plan.
Those parents, strangers in a foreign land, struggle, although the father now drives, with excessive caution the boy scorns, his first brand new car, a Morris Minor, taking the credit for its British engineering. In aerogrammes to her family in the slow postwar recovery bleakness, they fled, where the new young queen won’t lose her head, the vexed mother carps, using proverbs, about Australian backwardness. Her loud quibbling English accent turning heads in shops skewers the boy. That mother would come to value her adopted land only when these times, by then distant, turned bittersweet.
The father, rigidly obstinate, an outcast at work ridiculed for his meanness, evolves from usually being taciturn into a nagging bully at home, a wasp on a windowpane. Their boy knows nothing of the loneliness of estrangement, of vanished other lives. At school, he hates what the rough-sculpted Aussies sneeringly label Pommie, whingeing. He also hates his parents’ sorrowful bandaged history, the father’s tidal wave of intolerance, voice trembling with indignation following the young survivor’s seamless integration. The boy’s philosophical reason for this is he attends school therefore fits in. When his adult social life peters out into a walled garden of privacy, his losses a long corridor of shadows, doors all closed despite a legion of descendants, he will recall the scents, the throb, of those hot summertimes, like treasured paintings.
On a cool morning promising a ripper of a day, the silvered pool just opened, his sister slips them over the side at the deep end, coaxing him. Impervious, clinging to the edge, shivering, swivelling, he sentinels his schoolmates’ imminent arrivals. Vital minutes of harsh whispered arguing later, he finally lets go, sinks into the Jacques Cousteau sound effect, eyes shut at first, toe-touches bottom, dogpaddles furiously, lungs in a panic before breaking the surface, gasping. Elated, he goes again and again, further out each time. He can swim, more or less. Now he must climb to the high board. Diving is for drawling bronzed gods, or lunatics, but our boy can jump. Gravity should do the rest. Those schoolmates have arrived, faces turning his way like sunflowers, including a girl’s whose mother’s evening newspaper he now delivers. They all watch his frightful ascent to heroism or mortification, blood beating in his head. When he looks down, he hesitates, shocked, sees his future staring back, knows he must go, knows he shall.
Ian C Smith is an Australian writer whose work has previously been published in Borderless.
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