The Story of Danny Dunn (43 page)

Neither Danny nor Helen had ever seen their new home as an opportunity to make money or as a stepping stone to a more salubrious location. They loved the old house – Helen had a library and study of her own, and the twins, now aged seven, had a big garden to play in – and they were more than happy. Each Monday the girls needed very little encouragement to rise and trot down to the restored boathouse to launch the Whitehall skiff. While Danny treasured its varnished beauty, the twins saw it as essentially belonging to them. They'd winch it into the harbour in minutes, then each would take up an oar mid-ship and wait for Danny to arrive to man the oars at the front thwart.

The twins were virtually identical, and strangers found it almost impossible to tell them apart. Even
Mrs O'Shea, now more housekeeper than nanny, would become confused, a fact that delighted the girls, especially when she'd accuse one of them of some misdemeanour only to be met with a denial, the blame placed firmly on the other in a ping-pong game of catch the right twin. But Helen and Danny had discovered fairly early that there were differences, especially in their personalities. Helen defined this by referring to Sam as ‘Miss I' and Gabrielle as ‘Miss We'. Sam seemed to be the more competitive. But it wasn't a time when anyone took much notice of children or their personalities; they had no rights or entitlements except to be loved and nurtured. They did as they were told and behaved as they were expected to, accepting the rules of behaviour set for them. That children should be seen and not heard was still a widely held view among parents. The twins were polite, compliant, innocent and friendly; Sam loved books, and Gabby music. But at such an early age they were, according to Helen, who would take on the task of training their minds, best left untrammelled to develop as they might. It wasn't a time when children were expected to be gifted, and few Australians would have even considered the possibility of their child becoming a prodigy, except perhaps in sport, or music, which was too rarefied a pursuit to be considered by most families. This was a phenomenon that would come later, perhaps from European migrants.

While people might marvel and exclaim about their appearance, and although they often grew weary of being asked who was who, the twins showed no impatience, accepting their identical appearance as simple fact. They didn't think being twins was special, or that dressing identically was any different from simply dressing. Their marks at school were usually within a point or two of each other, but they accepted this as being the natural outcome of doing everything together. They also accepted that adults, confused by how alike they were, rarely used their names but simply referred to them as the Dunn twins. This would last throughout their sporting careers, and, if anything, made them seem even less individual, even to themselves.

But the twins did all the things kids of their age did: played hopscotch, skipped, chanted rhymes and giggled
a lot, and while they were cute and said funny things, this was no different from every other contented child of their age.

However, there were differences between the twins and most other Balmain children. For instance, they went to school regularly, had never been beaten in what was known in the schoolyard as ‘taking a belting from me dad'. And their father paid them a great deal more attention than most fathers gave their children. Danny had taken on responsibility for their mental discipline, preparing them for the sporting achievements his own ambition suggested they deserved. The twins simply responded to his instructions; ambition was still an alien idea to them. It was not until their early teens that they felt, like many others, they had a right to differ from their father. And it was even later before they thought to differ from each other.

There was one notable incident, however, where the twins showed a marked contrast in the way they responded. They'd been walking down what they had come to call ‘Brokendown Street' on their way home from school one Thursday when they were approached by a man from one of the houses.

‘Hello, young ladies,' he said with a grin. ‘You look like the type of girls who like lollies. Am I right?'

‘Yes,' Sam said, smiling, but Gabby remained mute.

‘What sort of lollies are your favourites?' the man said, dropping to his haunches in front of Sam.

‘Smarties,' Sam said excitedly.

‘And yours?'

‘Raspberry suckers,' Gabby said, still serious, but trying to be polite.

‘Well, this is your lucky day, my sweet little twinnies,' the man chuckled. ‘Guess what? Last night I won a whole bucketful of lollies in a church raffle and I can't eat them 'cause I've got a bad tooth and it hurts if I eat chocolate and lollies.' He stuck his forefinger in the side of his mouth and pulled upwards. ‘See . . . the big one at the back's rotten.' Sam stepped forwards to take a closer look, then pulled back suddenly because the man smelled nasty. He reached out and gently took her hand. ‘If you come to my house,' he pointed to a rundown house two doors down, ‘and give me a kiss, I'll give you the whole bucket just for yourselves. Will you come?'

Sam nodded, smiling.

‘Come then, both of you.' He rose to his feet. ‘Boy oh boy, is this ever your lucky day!' he laughed, releasing Sam's hand.

‘No!' Gabby cried. ‘Run, Sam!' Grabbing her twin's hand she jerked her into a run. Sam reacted instinctively to Gabby and started to run. It was the first time they had ever differed in their response to a situation, and while nobody understood the significance of it at the time, it was a defining moment in their lives.

The twins, panting, told their neighbour Mrs O'Shea about the lolly man, and were asked to describe him.

‘He smelled nasty,' Sam said.

‘He had black hair and a bad tooth. Sam saw it,' Gabby answered.

It wasn't much to go on but she immediately called the police and then Danny and Helen. The police came down in a van half an hour later with the sirens blaring, did a search of the house the twins indicated, but made no arrests, claiming they had no identification to work from and that there wasn't anyone in the house at the time. Very few men were about because they were all still at work. The police suggested a line-up of every male in the street, but Danny was unwilling to expose the twins to such an experience, aware that it would be pointless. ‘It's time you blokes did a regular patrol down here. You must know what this street's like. It's out of control every weekend,' he said.

‘See what we can do, sir,' the sergeant said impassively. Which turned out to be nothing.

From that day on Mrs O'Shea would collect the twins from school.

Friday was the twins' morning off, and although they didn't go rowing on the harbour with Danny, they'd usually be up to have breakfast with him and to compete in the push-up competition, so Danny was a little surprised they hadn't appeared by the time he was ready to leave for the office the next day. Sam had seemed none the worse for their experience, but Gabby had lingered after their mandatory bedtime story, asking for another. They hadn't been tucked in until a quarter to nine, when they sang ‘The Fish Tummy Song' and finally kissed Danny goodnight.

While Helen got away with reading to them while they were in the bath, he was required to tell them a story to which they could contribute. It always ended in the same way with the singing of ‘The Fish Tummy Song'. It was a routine that had begun when they were too tiny to remember, and he often wondered if they could go to sleep without it. The song was pretty basic, but once a verse had been established and added to the song, the twins policed it with a diligence that brooked no possible alteration.

The Fish Tummy Song

Sam and Gabby, I heard someone say,

You haven't been terribly good today.

You've given the next-door neighbour's cat

A nasty whack with a ping-pong bat.

And can you possibly tell me why . . . 

You pulled the wings off a butterfly?

Chorus

May you eat boiled cabbage and pumpkin mash

And row inside the tummy of a great big fish

In a hollowed-out calabash!

Now, my girls, it's not very nice

When you torture poor little baby mice,

And squash the bug on the Persian rug,

With the brand-new rubber bathroom plug.

And can you possibly tell me why . . . 

You made the butcher's parrot cry?

Chorus

May you eat boiled cabbage and pumpkin mash

And row inside the tummy of a great big fish

In a hollowed-out calabash!

It's not very kind to creep up behind,

And frighten a lady who's almost blind,

And make a poor little slimy slug

Dance a waltz and a jitterbug.

And can you possibly tell me why . . . 

You told a fat little pig she could fly?

Chorus

May you eat boiled cabbage and pumpkin mash

And row inside the tummy of a great big fish

In a hollowed-out calabash!

Now it's really not good that you watched the dog

Eat up the frog on the log in the bog,

Or captured some tadpoles to put in the water

You gave to your favourite teacher's daughter.

And can you possibly tell me why . . . 

The canary was dipped in bright-blue dye?

Chorus

May you eat boiled cabbage and pumpkin mash

And row inside the tummy of a great big fish

In a hollowed-out calabash!

But now is the time to go to sleep,

Snuggle right down and don't make a peep.

Grab your teddy and close your eyes,

Off you go to sleepy-byes.

And can you possibly tell me why . . . 

You dream of ice-cream and apple pie?

Chorus

May you eat boiled cabbage and pumpkin mash

And row inside the tummy of a great big fish

In a hollooooowed ooout caaaalaabassssh!

After the children were asleep, and he and Helen had retired to bed, he would kiss her twice last thing at night. The first kiss meant, ‘Goodnight, darling. Sleep tight,' and the second, moments later, meant, ‘Wake up, beautiful. I'm off to work.' This was so that he didn't have to wake her in the morning.

Still a little disappointed at not seeing the twins before he left for work, Danny sat down on the bathroom chair to perform the last step in his morning toilet. He reached for his boots, as he did every morning, and said aloud, ‘Glossy Denmeade, I haven't forgotten; I'll get that bastard Riley yet.'

The boots, hand stitched and slim, were highly polished in the military manner. Pulling them on served as a daily reminder of his origins, and his place in the constant fight against injustice and the class system. The boots had become a symbol, as had so much else that served to mould his character when he was a prisoner of war.

Danny, with all the other prisoners, had spent the first thirteen months in Changi Prison, prior to being sent to the death camps to work on the Burma Railway. During the period they'd spent in Changi, the officers were allocated separate compounds from the men, outside the walls. By the standards of captivity under the Japanese, the officers were relatively comfortable, unlike their men, who were housed in the prison itself. The officers had gone to great lengths to maintain discipline, none more so than the martinet Colonel Callaghan, who'd built his entire career on spit and polish, even maintaining a batman while in captivity. Towards the end of the first year, as their uniforms began to wear out in the harsh tropical climate, British, as well as some Australian officers began confiscating from the men under their command, for their own use, items of apparel in good condition. Perhaps they were under the illusion that their appearance in full uniform was good for general morale, and a sign to the Japanese that, although they were captives, they couldn't be intimidated.

This appropriation was deeply unpopular with most of the Australians, although their British counterparts seemed to accept it as part of the natural order of things. British officers, with a few exceptions, were notorious for not looking after their men, whereas the Australians were usually much more closely allied to the rank and file, though, in truth, a small percentage of them behaved in much the same way as the British. The officers in Danny's Company, B Company, played no part in this uniform appropriation, but there had been some talk of two officers in C Company who had demanded items of clothing from some of their men.

The day had come when Danny's company was arbitrarily separated from the remainder of his battalion by the Japanese to make up the numbers in a contingent to be sent to ‘somewhere in Thailand'. The men were already in pretty poor shape, having worked as slave labour on Japanese projects on the island, existing on food that delivered no more than 1000 calories; in effect, a starvation diet. While life can be sustained for a time on 1000 calories a day, eventually it will lead to death, and the process is markedly accelerated by the addition of hard labour. The weakened body begins to waste away and its natural defences are overwhelmed by disease and infections. While over 30 000 Allied soldiers died in captivity, mainly due to cruelty, starvation and sickness, only a handful of officers perished in this way. The reason was quite simple. Officers were not required to do any forced labour. Those who died, like the Reverend John Ayliffe, were among the few who elected to remain and work beside their men.