Four Fires (77 page)

That's Tommy again with what Nancy calls Irish humour. Which is humour that shows how
Page 368

dumb the Irish really are. If it's true then she's of Irish descent and so is Tommy and me, don't know why she thinks being Australian for five generations is going to make us any smarter than we were before we came here.

Tommy goes on. 'Anderson is buggered if he's gunna surrender but decides instead to withdraw to the east. There's been no contact with the enemy in that direction for hours so he reckons it's the best way to go. The idea is to circle around the Jap positions and make for Yong Peng, which is fifteen miles as the crow flies but a whole lot longer the way we have to go to avoid the enemy. It's all on foot through swamps and jungle so we sabotage what trucks, carriers and guns we've got lert

and prepare to move out in small groups. It's like every man for himself, with Yong Peng the destination.

'We also have to make the hardest decision you can make in war and that is to leave your wounded behind. There's one hundred and fifty can't make it. We make them as comfortable as possible in trucks and fill them with morphine and leave what's left for them to use as well as enough rations.'

Tommy pauses, looking down into the water between his feet, the fire in the distance is now down to a glow, perfect for the rabbit. I hope the clothes are dry enough to put on before we turn in for the night.

'Mate, I'm saying goodbye to blokes I've trained with, some of them we picked up at that first recruitment drive and who are part of the Snowy Mountains contingent. We've been real good mates and shared many a beer and a laugh together.

'One bloke, Lofty Mason, gives me his fighting knife, "Take it out, Tommo," he says, meaning for me to take the knife out of its combat sheath. I pull it out, "Look on the blade." I do as he says, he's got the name "Garth" embossed on it. "It's me small lad at home in Cooma. If you come out of this alive, mate, can you get this to him, tell him it's took more than one Jap in his name. Then tell him I love him, the same to his mum."

'"Don't you worry, mate, I'll hand it back to you personally," I say, trying to sound a bit cheerful.'Tommy looks up. 'What else could I say? It turns out the Japs herd them all together and bayonet them and then make this big funeral pyre and douse it with petrol and set it alight.

So, we're out of there and the Japs see us going but maybe they've also had enough because they don't come after us. Later they send planes over to strafe us but we're in the jungle and they can't see us and we re not too concerned. The going is really rough, there's times were wading up to our waists in swamp and then thick jungle and up and down mountains. Some blokes arrive at Yong Peng several days later but we make it by late that night.

There's the six of us, all that's left of our platoon, Blades Rigby, the er tour and me. We've become a small independent unit and we vow we'll stick together, come what may.'

Inats only six out of thirty men, one-fifth, and you had knife training?' I say, though maybe I shouldn't, I don't mean to suggest how come the casualties are so high with them being so highly trained and having knives an' all. I just want to know what happened, but Tommy thinks I mean the knives.

'Yeah, the fighting knives. Blades Rigby was exaggerating a bit when he said every Jap can disarm you if you're coming at him with a bayonet on the end of your rifle. It's still the standard way to fight em close up, that and the hand grenade. If it sounds like we're in control and each of us is a sort of superman, that's bullshit. Mate, no way! I know it sounds a bit gung-ho, the knives and all. I mean it ain't in the official war history or anything. But I have to say, I don't reckon I'd personally have come through the war without what Blades Rigby taught us. I owe him a great debt.

'But, for the most part, we fought just like the other platoons, only on three occasions I come suddenly upon a Jap and I used me knife.' Tommy squints up at me, 'Okay, that's three times I
Page 369

could have been dead. Far as I'm concerned, you only die once and I've been given three extra lives because of Blades Rigby's constant knife drills. Fair enough?'

'I didn't mean to criticise,' I protest. 'I just wanted to know what happened to your platoon.'

'About the same as every other platoon, I guess. When we get to Yong Peng there's 499

Australians left, and our platoon is doing slightly better than average. Like Lofty Mason said, he'd also taken three Japs with his blade before he copped a Jap bullet. Maybe the knives helped a bit, eh?'

'So what happened next?' I ask, knowing Tommy's kind of put me quietly in my place.

'From Yong Peng they wait for the stragglers to get in and they truck us back to Johore Bahru.

We're too bloody exhausted to be happy we've survived. Besides, with most of your mates dead, you don't want to celebrate nothing. Blades Rigby is the only bloke that's happy, he's off his head most of the time, don't know what it is he's on as there's not a drop of grog out here in the jungle, but he calls it "jungle juice" and he must have personally killed twenty or more Japanese.

Later he called what we were doing "bravely running away" and I reckon he was right, though I don't know so much about the brave bit. I was shitting my pants most of the time. More than once I said goodbye to all the Maloneys whose names I could remember, because this particular Maloney was on the way out, convinced he wouldn't make it through the day's fighting.

'Well, we eventually get to Johore and they give Anderson the VC after that. Some say that because of the gallant resistance of the 8th Division at Bakri/Muar River and the bridge at Parit Sulong and Anderson's refusal to surrender, General Yamashita, "The Tiger of Malaya", had to abandon his plan to invade Australia. If it hadn't been for the way we fought the Japs and held them up, in all likelihood Australia would have faced invasion from the northwest.'

Tommy scratches his head and takes a sip from his mug, though his tea must be dead cold by now, he's been talking a good hour. To tell you the truth, I dunno about them being held up that long, or if it's correct what they said about us saving Australia. All I know is the Japanese crossed Malaya from north to south in fifty-six days, a feat declared impossible by the British High Command in Singapore.

Their soldiers were lightly equipped and whole divisions were" mounted on bicycles. The Brits also said they didn't have good maps and would get lost in the virgin jungle. That's a laugh, there were fifth columnists everywhere. They even had the smaller jungle paths flagged. You can ride a bike as good as you can walk along a jungle path.

'So now we're about as far south as you can get in Malaya and we're set to hop over the causeway to Singapore. They've made up our battalion numbers with over seven hundred new blokes, all recruits, a lot of whom haven't been in the army much more than a month and don't know their shit from a tin o' brown Kiwi.

'Because I'm a corporal I'm made a section leader to train a third of the platoon.'

'Congratulations,' I say, grinning in the dark.

Tommy holds up his hand, restraining me. 'It's no honour, I can tell yer. I've got blokes in my platoon who still call a rifle a gun and it's my job to pull them into shape before the next attack.

Give you an example, I take them onto the makeshift shooting range one day and each has ten rounds rapid fire at a hundred yards. Not one of the silly buggers even hits the flamin' target, which is roughly eighteen inches across. When I bring out a knife and demonstrate how it goes into the gut and how to bring it out in one movement, a bloke from Sydney faints. I reckon the Nips must be quaking in their boots when their intelligence tells them the fighting shape we're in.

'We've now been fighting the Japs for less than two months and they've come right across Malaya with us retreating all the way. I'm not so sure about the impregnable-fortress theory. Still and all, I hope to Christ the British High Command are right, I can do with a bloody good rest,
Page 370

'I'm one of the lucky ones, I haven't been wounded, only a bit scratched and cut about, everything festers in the jungle anyway, so we're all wounded in different ways. We've got a touch of the squits and various other complaints, tropical ulcers starting, infections. Most of all, we're completely knackered. A bit of a rest in Singapore city would be just what the doctor ordered.

So when in late January we withdraw to Singapore from the shithouse they call Malaya, Tommy Maloney is one happy little soldier.

'Mate, if I'd only known, Malaya was to be the dress rehearsal and the shit is about to hit the fan in a big way. We're in Singapore and from here there's no place to go except into the sea.' He sits back and reaches for a Turf, the packet with a box of matches is resting on a rock beside the hot pool. The way he's smoking I hope he's brought an extra packet. Usually it's only three or four a day when we go bush, back home he's puffing all day. He lights the fag and then I see his hands are shaking and he has two goes with a match. He's been telling things pretty calm-like, but now I see the memories flooding back are taking their toll.

I can't help myself, though I know it's like showing off and I'm not usually like that, but I want Tommy to know how interested I am. I want him to know before he gets into his sleeping bag that I've waited a long time for this night, this moment. That he's taking a battering telling the story and it's not for nothing. I really care and his time ain't wasted. So I decide right off to recite it, the poem he taught us when I was six years old.

'Singapore

A mighty island fortress

The guardian of the East

Impregnable as Gibraltar

A thousand planes at least

Simply can't he taken

Will stand a siege for years

We'll hold the place forever

And show our foes no fears

Our men are there in thousands

With defences quite unique

The Japanese didn't believe us

And took it in a week.'

Tommy laughs, 'Jeez, Mole, I must have told you that one when you were knee high to a grasshopper. Good on ya, mate.'

So we've had our meal and another brew and then we've crawled into our sleeping bags and I reminded him again to make sure he wakes me. Now, when I think back, I wonder why the urgency? After all, when we eventually come back out the tunnel again it's going to be a full day and probably half the night to get home, plenty of time to tell me the whole story on the journey back.

I tell myself at the time that he may change his mind. Tommy's a funny blighter, better get him now, here at the big old tree that's become a sort of spiritual home for four generations of male Maloney. He's brought me here as a sort of initiation, something only he can give me. It's a precious gift, a secret place, a kingdom of our own. It's only fitting that he tells me his story here.

I tell myself he'll say things here beside the mighty Alpine Ash, the Maloney tree, that he won't elsewhere. Now I've been initiated, there's another knowledge I have to acquire and my greatest fear is that once we're back in the outside world, Tommy might clam up again. Tommy's spent too much time alone in the bush and in a prison cell so when there's people around they seem to diminish him and he goes quiet and almost completely disappears.

I think about the tree again. It's stood tall two hundred years before the white man came and chopped down all the great monarchs of the forest and sawed them into planks from which they've built their shitty little homes and bred their snotty-nosed,
Page 371

barefoot kids, just like what we've done. Except that it's a Maloney that's saved one old tree, to remind us all that when we cut down the great trees, we cut down the anchors of the earth and allow the broken land to crumble and wash away forever.

Now Tommy's telling me that I'm its guardian. That, while the Maloneys may have amounted to nothing much in the past, stayed the lowest there is, they have nevertheless been entrusted with this one great task and they haven't failed in three generations. He's saying the secret has become mine and he's going to have to trust me to keep it safe, the fourth-generation Maloney, the next guardian of the mighty Alpine Ash.

Tonight he's been yacking away, a Tommy I've seldom heard before, except sometimes when we're alone and he talks about nature. Now he's talking about himself, that's different, Tommy is unlocking his heart. He's digging up memories that haven't been aired since he come back looking like a drover's dog, a bag of bones that lay on the soft pillow that meanwhile Nancy had become. It's stuff I need to know urgently. Maloney stuff. If you know the past, you may just figure out what it is that makes you who you are. I only wish I'd brought the alarm clock from home.

Then, in a sudden panic, I tell myself, 'What if Tommy doesn't wake up till morning?' I think about trying to stay awake, building the fire up, sitting in the hot pool, thinking about Anna Dombrowski.

Tommy's snoring away. At least there won't be any tears tonight. Poor little bugger's dead to the world. Now that I've been over his story in my head so I've got it down pat, my eyelids are like lead.

I look up one last time, along the mighty pillar that rises from the forest floor, the massive trunk of the old man Ash. My eyes follow up the great stem and, through its missing canopy, I see there's stars pinned to a sky that has become its rightful roof.

chapter twenty-two

I don't know how but I wake up. Sometimes your mind has its own alarm clock. The moon overhead is pouring silver light through the canopy. Tommy is snoring away. We've never known Tommy when he didn't snore. Nancy says it's because of his broken nose and his sinuses and his battered jaw. I glance over at the fire, which is down to a few glowing embers.

Somewhere in the trees to my left I hear a mopoke, then another answering, the real name is boobook owl, but what they sound like is 'mopoke' so that's how come they get that name. The frog chorus has stopped.

Judging from the position of the moon it's around midnight. I crawl out of my sleeping bag, my body stiff and aching from the cuts and bruises I've copped in the tunnel and from sliding down the waterfall. I collected wood to build up the fire before going to sleep and, soon enough, bring the billy to the boil.

Tommy isn't all that happy being woken up. I guess he's hurting even more than I am. He grunts when I shake his good shoulder and groans when I shake him a second time. He opens his eyes, sits up, and I hand him a mug of tea. I've put a bit of extra sugar in to perk him up a bit. I'm sorry waking you, Dad.' I really am because Tommy needs the sleep, though I can't take a chance he'll clam up on me once we get off the mountain.

'Nah, 's all right.' He remains sitting up in his sleeping bag and takes out a Turf cigarette. Most working-class blokes smoke roll-yer-own. Far back as I can remember he's always smoked Turf. John Crowe used to say it wasn't a bad name for them because they were made from pure horseshit. Tommy takes a couple of puffs to help him wake up, then a sip from his mug and sighs.

I wait for him to say something but he doesn't so I say, 'I suppose I could have waited and you could tell me on the trip home.' I'm apologising to him, because in the light from the fire I see he looks like absolute shit, as if he's whacked beyond belief.

Page 372

'Nah, it's okay, I couldn't do it nowhere else, it's partly why we come here.'

'Doubt we'll get home by temorra night. Climb out's gunna take us five hours, I reckon,' I say, for want of a reply.

'Yeah, sorry about that, Tuesdee late.' He gives a weary grin. 'Yer mother's gunna be ropeable.'

'Yeah, well, it's been worth it, you telling me the war stuff and the tree and all.'

Tommy doesn't say anything for about two minutes, just takes sips from his mug, puffs on his cigarette and looks into the fire. I decide to climb back into my sleeping bag, sit up nice and cosy, hugging my knees, and wait for him to talk.

'Well, we're in a right pickle, mate,'Tommy begins at last. 'The Japs have chased us across the causeway onto Singapore Island. Not only do they now control all of Malaya, they've got the food they need growing on the land and what we've left behind during the retreat. There's so much stuff we haven't taken, food, ammo, equipment, that the Japs call them "Churchill Supplies". Now they got airfields to bomb us from, what's more, they control the water supply that is piped over from Johore Bahru to Singapore. Although they have far fewer men than us, they're well trained and battle-hardened.

'That bloke Winston Churchill never could get it into his head that the Japanese just might be good soldiers. Far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of midgets with buckteeth wearing glasses thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle. He reckoned they'd be a pushover. He kept all his trained Pommie soldiers to fight the Germans and, same as we done, sent the raw recruits to the Far East as reinforcements. Some

bloody pushover! I hate the Japs, can't never forgive them for what they done, but they were bloody good soldiers. A man would be stupid to say otherwise.

'Anyway, we blow up the causeway between the mainland and Singapore, which any galah can see is basically a waste of time. They also blow up the water supply, which comes from Malaya.

Percival reckons there's plenty of big reservoirs on the island but he doesn't reckon on two things; the Japs overrunning them or bombing the pipes at that end. That's exactly what happens and one of the reasons for the final surrender was the lack of water for the one million civilians in the city.

Anyway, Bennett wants to destroy the entire causeway but there's old Percival at it again who overrules him. In the end they blow up the first seventy feet or so. As the water at low tide was only about four foot deep, the Japs simply waded across until they repaired it. They'd have come across easy enough even if the causeway wasn't there. F'instance, some of our blokes who got left behind in the final withdrawal from Johore waited until low tide and then swam across. At best, blowing it up was a minor inconvenience. The Japs rebuilt it, good as new, in a couple of days.'

'But I read there were around 120,000 soldiers on our side, more than three divisions,' I say.

'Yeah, on paper! On paper it all looks dinky-di, we should've been able to make a go of it.'

'Just bad leadership, you reckon?'

'Can't say that, mate. I'm only a corporal, a shit-kicker, trying best I can to stay alive. The real point is we've got no air cover and a huge number, about half, of the men available to us were Indians. I don't want to heap shit on the Indians, some of them fought like tigers in Malaya, but many were fresh recruits who'd had hardly any training. Like our own reinforcements, they were raw as butcher's mince. The Pommie 18th Division arrived in Singapore in time to see us crossing the causeway. They'd just spent eleven weeks at sea and hadn't acclimatised to the heat and humidity. They'd expected to be sent to the Middle East and what training they had was for the desert, not the jungle. The experienced blokes like us who fought in Malaya were exhausted, especially those of us who'd fought at Parit Sulong.

'We left Johore Bahru on the tip of the Malay peninsula and marched across the causeway to Singapore with the Japs hot on our tail. The Australians and what was left of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were the last to come across. The Jocks are a crack outfit, the only one
Page 373

of the Pommie battalions to train in jungle warfare. The English garrison troops thought they were crackers. Us and the Jocks are supposed to be the seasoned fighters, just in case the Japs surprise us from the rear, they said.'Tommy chuckles at the thought, 'We were that knackered I doubt we could have fought a boy-scout troop. But the highland pipers weren't beaten yet, they played "Hielan' Laddie" and "A Hundred Pipers" as we marched across. It was grand after the horror of fighting. There's this story I heard told of the Argyll's drummer, a bloke called Hardy.

'It seems Hardy ain't never been known to run and he's at the very end of the rear guard and he's taken his usual measured step as we're retreating across the causeway. His C.O.'s getting just a tad anxious so he yells to Hardy to get his arse into gear, the Japs are on the way and the engineers want to blow up the causeway.

'Hardy takes no notice, he ain't never run from the enemy to date and he ain't gunna start now.

The engineers are looking at their watches, waiting to push the plungers, and Drummer Hardy is still beating his drum to the same measure, increasing his pace not one inch, and while we cross the border the last two pipers alive in the Argylls play "Blue Bonnets over the Border".'Tommy laughs and so do I. 'Finally he crosses the Straits of Johore and the C.O. gives Hardy a proper bollocking for being so bloody slow. But Hardy answers, "Sir, Japs are only Japs and it is undignified for an Argyll to take any notice of them."

'I remember looking about me at the blokes who fought at Parit Sulong and on the way, and you can see in everyone's faces they've had enough. We weren't cowards, nothing like that, we were just bloody exhausted. Up ahead there's new recruits, young kids just out of school, some of them singing "Waltzing Matilda", thinking how good it will be to fight the Japs, the job they've come over to do.'

'Another cuppa?' I ask Tommy. He nods and I get out of my sleeping bag and put a little more wood on the fire, empty the tea-leaves

out of the billy and go down to the stream to fill it, then set it back on the fire.

Tommy lights another Turf. 'Moon's clear enough, should be a nice day termorra.'

I think about how we've only had a few hours' sleep and we'll be spending the better part of tomorrow morning trying to get up the mountain. 'Keep talking,' I say to Tommy, 'I can hear you okay while I make the tea.'

'Nah, wait till it's done, I need to clear me mind a bit. Should have known yiz would've wanted to know all the details, it's how yer mind works, don't it?'

'It's just that I want to hear it the way you did it, Dad.'

Tommy doesn't reply and goes on smoking, staring into the night. I make the tea. We're running out of sugar so I leave off putting some in my cup. I don't really mind it without anyway. 'There yer go,' I say and hand him his mug.

I'we never told any of this before,'Tommy begins, holding his mug in both hands to warm them, the cigarette hanging out the corner of the broken side of his jaw. That side doesn't work that well so he can talk almost perfect with a cigarette in his mouth. 'When you listen to the blokes on Anzac Day after they've had a pot or two and the bullshit begins waxing lyrical, you'd think the lot of us were heroes.'

'You were, Dad.'

Tommy shakes his head. 'No, mate, it was just that there was no place to hide.' He takes the fag that's down to no more than half an inch out of the corner of his mouth and repositions it to the front, then draws it down to his fingertips and flicks the last quarter of an inch into the fire. The tops of his finger and thumb are stained dark from nicotine.

He takes a sip of the hot tea and then gets going again on the story. 'As you say, there's about 120,000 Allied troops and it looks dinky-di, but we don't amount to what you'd call a fighting force in any army's manual. 1 he Indians have just about had it, the Pommie reinforcements have just arrived and our reinforcements are wet behind the ears. On the credit side there's six 8th Division battalions, a good part of whom have had jungle experience, and the Jocks who can
Page 374

acquit themselves same as us, we re the old hands who now know how to fight the Japs.

'Anyway, we cross onto the island and, with the 2/20th and 2/18th and blokes from the machine-gun battalion, we make up the 22nd Brigade and are told to take up positions on the north-west coastline. That's where Bennett reckons the Japs will invade, though Percival disagrees and thinks the attack will come from the north-east and that's where he puts his main thrust.

'We're told to dig in. Our platoon draws the short straw and we get the position well forward as the greeting committee for the Japanese coming across the Straits of Johore. "To dig" is also a bit of a joke, we're situated in the middle of a mangrove swamp. We tell ourselves that at least the going is gunna be as tough for them as it is for us and the Japs have to come and fetch us while we only have to wait. It's small comfort, we've seen how the Japanese come in, stepping over the bodies of their mates.

'Maybe the Japs decide to give their men a bit of a rest. We have to wait a week before they make their big move. Meanwhile they're shelling the daylights out of us. A week sitting in the middle of a mangrove swamp isn't exactly homey. It's the eighth of February, right in the middle of the monsoon season, it's been raining all afternoon to make us just a little more uncomfortable than we already are. Don't know why, but we sense this is the time they're gunna come.

'Darkness comes suddenly in the tropics, one moment you can read a map, the next you need a torch to see your own feet. We're sitting there quietly shitting ourselves, each man thinking about what's about to happen, feeling a bit sorry for himself. We've just fought ourselves to a standstill in Malaya and deserve better.

'They've told us all to write letters home, which is not a real good sign. Letters home are generally followed by a telegram from the War Office to your next of kin.

'Anyway, we're sitting biting our knuckles when the shelling really steps up. There's a total barrage coming at us, sixty to eighty shells a minute, in the area where we're dug in. There's huge sprays of mud and shit every time a shell lands. You can't see them in the flash made by the explosions. Lumps of mud thump down on the ground beside you and hit you so we're all covered in shit. Something hits me in the neck and fair takes me head off. "Jesus! I'm done for!" I grab my neck but

there's no blood. Then something starts flapping at my feet.' Tommy laughs and looks at me. 'It's a bloody great fish, not a mark on it, we would've cooked it for tea under different circumstances!

'Next to me is an old bloke, first-war veteran, name of Tony Freeman, and in between the explosions and the shells whistling above his head, he says to me, "May as well take a smoko, Tommy, no point ducking. If your name's on one of them mortars or heavy artillery shells, you won't know nothing about it anyway. They'll keep this up a while, it's when it stops you've got to watch out, that's when the buggers will come at us."

'He's right. Eventually the barrage stops and we get ready for the fray to come. But there's nothing, not a sound. After a while I reckon the silence is worse than the shelling. At least in the jungle you're fighting on equal terms, they don't know where you are and you can't see them.

Here we are sitting ducks, we're not goin' nowhere and they know where we are.'

Tommy glances at me. 'You see, I've changed me mind about them having to come to us across the mangrove, which don't seem the better option any more. We're sitting ducks, all I can see is the black strip of water in front of me. After a while, I pick up the faint splash of oars and then shapes of boats and barges. Black shapes are moving towards us in the water, now there's bloody hundreds o' them. I hear Tony Freeman say "Here comes the fucking Spanish armada!"

'We wait until they hit the shore on our side and our machine guns open up. I guess they're
Page 375

dropping like flies, but who knows, there's no encouragement to be taken, it's dark. I think to meself, I've seen this before in the jungle, they're dying for the Emperor God and no machine-gun crossfire ain't gunna stop the fuckers. Soon they're close enough so we can hurl grenades at them or pick off their dark shapes with a rifle.