Brother Fish (60 page)

I read the rest of the letter with my heart pounding and with a deep sense of despair. For once I'd got something right, and now it was all smashed to smithereens. Gloria certainly wouldn't go without the family, and going with Wendy and Jimmy alone just wouldn't be right.

. . . if you and your party could arrive at Government House not later than 10.30 a.m.

If you are unable to be present, would you kindly state whether you desire to have the decoration forwarded to you by registered post? If so, please indicate the full address to which it should be sent.

Yours faithfully,
T.M. Mathews
Official Secretary to the Governor of Tasmania

There you go!
I said to myself. They said that bit about posting it in the last letter – that's how the bastards get out of it. They don't really want you there, so they trick you like this. I bet if I'd been some high-ranking officer, a major or a colonel, they'd invite my family – probably include cousins, and the whole bloody neighbourhood. ‘Would you kindly let us know, for catering purposes, how many people will be attending?' That's what would be in
their
letter, for sure. Of course, this was immature and indicative of the chip on my shoulder. But I was still a soldier with all the usual enlisted man's paranoia. I was also confused and resentful and found myself in a predicament I couldn't solve without hurting a number of people I loved. It just wasn't bloody fair.

I sat there for at least an hour feeling miserable and sorry for myself. Finally I decided to say nothing to anyone about receiving the second letter and take the bull by the horns and write to the governor and ask him for clemency. I'd read about people doing that, though it was usually for murder and such like crimes.

I got out the blue Croxley pad from the kitchen drawer and uncapped my fountain pen, and then I hit my first problem.
How the hell do you
address a governor?
I examined the letter I'd just received and then went and got the first letter, which Gloria had had framed and which now stood alongside her other precious possessions on the shelf above the stove. I thought there must be titles and phrasing that were common to both letters; protocol I would need to use. I also thought of consulting Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. But then, of course, I would have let the cat out of the bag. So finally I just sat down at the kitchen table and wrote.

His Excellency the Governor
Government House
Hobart

28th January, 1954

Dear Your Excellency,
I am writing to you to beg for your clemency as I find myself in a terrible predicament.

Recently I was awarded the MM, although this was a big surprise as there were lots braver soldiers than me who deserved the honour much more than I did.

Your secretary wrote inviting me to receive the medal from your own hands and I replied saying I'd be honoured on behalf of my family.

Now, here comes the predicament.

The most recent letter I received restricts me to two guests. But that's not how it works with my family – with us it's one in, all in. Mum, Sue and the twins, Cory and Steve.

But there's worse to come, Your Excellency. I've already invited my girlfriend, Wendy Kalbfell, who was Miss Tasmania in 1951, and Jimmy Oldcorn, an American who saved my life as a prisoner of war in Korea more than once, and who is visiting our family on the island while recovering from his wounds the same as I am. Finally, there is Miss Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, who you may know, as she is the justice of the peace on the island, the ex-librarian and now runs the
Queen Island Weekly Gazette
. She taught me everything I know.

My mother and Sue, my sister, have already cut out the material they ordered from McKinlay's in Launceston for their dresses, and they've layby'd their gloves and high-heel shoes.

Please, sir, even if we all stand at the gate and you come out and give me my medal that would be okay, or if you like, we won't drink any tea or eat any cake if there's not enough to go around and we won't hobnob with anyone.

I beg your indulgence.

Yours sincerely,
Private Jacko McKenzie

I admit there are bits in there I could have written differently at the time – or, if you like, in a more sophisticated vein. Even then I was less ingenuous than the letter is made to sound, though how much less I can't really say. But, if this makes me a phoney, then I don't apologise. You only get one chance in these things, and if only two guests could accompany me to the investiture then none of us was going. I knew Gloria too well to know she wouldn't compromise. I could almost hear her saying, ‘
Jacko, if that's all they care about our family they might as well shove your medal in the mail or up their bums as far as I'm concerned. We're staying put, love.
' I confess I felt exactly the same, only along with my family I included Jimmy and Wendy. And, because I had come to realise how much I owed Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, her as well.

Every soldier knows the Military Medal is not the biggest deal in the army. But it wasn't me wanting all the kerfuffle – the folk at Government House were the ones making all the fuss. If it wasn't for Gloria I'd have preferred the bloody medal to come in the mail. When I said others had deserved to get it more than me, it was the truth. The more the island people shook my hand to congratulate me, the more isolated from them I felt. No McKenzie had ever been special in the eyes of his peers, and it constantly embarrassed me to be singled out for attention. But if we were going to go through with the whole business then I wanted my family at my side, and I was savvy enough to know that writing a strictly formal letter to the governor wasn't going to help achieve this end.

Anyway, I told myself we were yobbos from way back and I couldn't help it if I'd received a bit of gratuitous education in correct grammar and punctuation from Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan and should probably not have worked the ingenuous angle in the letter. She, for one, would have been appalled at what she'd refer to as ‘theatrics'. But I reckon if anyone else in the family had written the letter, they'd have put it just about the way I'd written it. Only, of course, with Steve and Cory there would have been heaps of spelling mistakes. I confess I even thought of throwing a few in for good measure, but decided that I'd be laying it on a bit too thick and the governor might smell a rat.

I was sweating on the reply because Gloria kept saying, ‘When are the bludgers goin' to tell us when it is?' Her and Sue's dresses were completed and were hanging on her best satin-covered padded hangers behind her bedroom door. I knew she needed a firm date so that she could pluck up sufficient courage for the boat trip across Bass Strait to Stanley. Gloria worked up to things – ‘slowly, slowly, catchy monkey' was practically her motto. I mentioned earlier that Jimmy was in the clutches of the dreaded Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, who, early on in our stay on the island, had asked if she could interview him for the
Gazette
. She referred to him as James from the beginning, in the same formal way she'd done with me as a small boy seated cross-legged on the library floor. Jimmy, despite my warning not to fall into her clutches, agreed to an interview. When he arrived she said in her typically forthright manner, ‘James, I'm afraid there is a problem.'

‘Problem, ma'am – what problem yoh got?'

‘With your grammar and syntax. If I write down the words exactly as you say them my readers may find the article distinctly peculiar.'

‘It only peculiar iffen I tells you somethin' dat's peculiar, ma'am,' Jimmy said, laughing. He was well prepared for Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. ‘Foh instance, dat word “peculiar” it also mean “belonging ex-clu-sive-ly” and dat how I talk – ex-clu-sive-ly like
me
, ma'am. Now what yoh want is I should talk like some honky turkey.'

‘Goodness gracious, a turkey! No, no, no! One should
never
gobble one's words,' she replied hastily.

Jimmy laughed. ‘“Talk like a turkey”, dat mean talk like white folk, ma'am. I can do dat.' Whereupon he did as he'd done in the POW camp when he'd tried to tell me not to worry about him going over to the Chinese side. He answered all Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan's questions using the correct grammar and pronunciation, which put her nicely in her place and impressed the pants off her at the same time. I'd learned as a prisoner of war that Jimmy had a wonderful ear and a real gift when it came to learning languages. He'd impressed the Chinese in the POW camp with the way he picked up words and phrases, and towards the end could make himself understood in Cantonese, which was another reason they'd embraced him so willingly when he'd pretended to become a progressive. In later years he would become fluent in Mandarin as well, and also spoke Japanese as fluently as a Westerner possibly could. With my ear for music I wasn't all that bad myself, but I could never compete with him.

Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan wasn't the first to make the mistake of thinking Jimmy's way of talking meant he was – well, to put it bluntly – a bit ignorant. But now she became absolutely intrigued by his intelligence and, as usual, wanted to take over. Jimmy went along with her in as much as he accepted the books she recommended and found time, between his various liaisons, to read them. Then he discussed them in depth with her. It was like the old days, except that, unlike myself, who'd been young, callow and intimidated by her formidable presence, Jimmy argued back and often won, though mostly when he pointed out that the life described in the literature he was reading and his own observations were two entirely different experiences. ‘To draw con-clu-sions from dat fiction narration, ma'am, dat a most dangerous exer-cise. Yoh too refine, ma'am,' he'd often say to her in ‘Jimmy talk'. ‘Yoh ain't been street-poisoned.'

For her part, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan loved him for his ability to convince her that he was right because he could back his arguments with logic or explain how it was different in his own experience. She'd even asked him to stop calling her ma'am and to call her Nicole. Jimmy thought for a few moments, then said aloud, ‘Nicole, baby', as if he was testing it on his tongue. He shook his head. ‘No, ma'am – it ain't gonna work none,' he said, and then addressed her ever after as ‘Nicole ma'am', adding ‘ma'am' to her name in the same way he did with Gloria's name, when she had made a smiliar request.

Jimmy was working his magic on Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan and she simply loved it. She found him sanguine and open-minded but far from stupid, with a willingness to learn that amounted almost to a hunger. With him she also abandoned her bossy-boots attitude and became less didactic and pedantic. ‘You've got a good mind, James,' she'd sigh. ‘Such a pity I couldn't cultivate it sooner.'

‘I ain't goin' nowhere, Nicole ma'am – help yo'self. We got plenty time to plant all dem in-tee-lec-to-al vegie-tables in mah mind.'

Jimmy had talked to me about returning to the island after he was discharged from the forces. In two weeks he was due to fly to Japan, where he would attend his final parade and receive his honourable discharge from the United States Army. From there he'd head straight back to the island. We'd discussed the future together and decided to give fishing a go. How I'd hated the idea of being a fisherman before I'd left for Korea! But now I found myself feeling differently about the prospect of earning a living from the sea. Jimmy loved fishing and went out on a boat with the professional fishermen whenever he could. To coin an obvious phrase, he took to the life like a fish to water.

This was despite my initial warning to him that the life of a fisherman working for wages was far from a pleasant or even a prosperous experience. ‘It's mostly sheer bloody drudgery, mate. What's more, Bass Strait is a real bitch – unpredictable and treacherous. A lot of what you do takes place in bloody terrible weather. A nor'westerly will blow up out of a clear blue sky, and a full-scale gale can hit you in half an hour. Ask Cory and Steve – they'll tell you how much fun they're having making a crust.'

But, as usual, Jimmy saw it differently. He said nothing until he'd gone out with one or another of the boats in most weather conditions, and he always returned grinning. ‘We ain't workin' for some cocksucka foh no wages, Brother Fish. We gonna work foh ourself, man. Der lotsa fish in da sea and some o' dem belong to us, same as dey belong to dem fish bosses. I reckon we gonna special-lise in crayfishes.'

‘It's not that easy, mate,' I warned him. In the POW camp I'd once told him about Alf's venture into cray fishing, pointing out what a bitch of a way it was of making a living.

In 1939 Alf had decided he'd had enough of working for a bigger boat and being paid barely enough to keep his family eating regularly. So he resolved to branch into crayfish on his own, and managed to borrow fifty pounds from the bank by putting the house up for security. He bought a twelve-foot second-hand dinghy, none too seaworthy, caulked, repaired and painted it the best he could and then fitted it with a new set of sails. He powered the little dinghy with a two-and-a-half-horsepower BSA motorcycle engine from a motorbike our Uncle Les, Percy Pig's father, pranged fifty yards down the lane from us when coming home drunk from the pub one night. We heard the bike go past the house, then the bang that followed as he hit one of the new telegraph poles. We came running only to hear a series of oaths and cusses that would have burned your ears off if you'd been a little closer. Alf told me to wait and went off to see if the driver was okay. It turned out to be Uncle Les, who was all scrapes and bleeding – but nothing seemed to be broken, and he staggered off into the night still cussing. Alf returned and told me to go home and bring the hurricane lamp and the wheelbarrow and his set of spanners from the shed. I was thirteen at the time and when I returned I held the lantern while Alf salvaged the engine from the wrecked motorbike.