Swords and Crowns and Rings (8 page)

In his best suit, of a cloth rigid as cardboard and, because of the War and the lack of good dye, of a purplish navy, Jackie trailed his mother home from Benediction. In common, their feet hurt excruciatingly, Jackie's in glittering boots and Mrs MacNunn's in her Christmas shoes, which her husband had been kind enough to buy in advance. Mrs MacNunn's striped zephyr dress ended four inches above the ankle; her natural straw hat, ornamented by a bunch of stiff blue quills and a gilded lump of glass, transformed her into what she inwardly described as a vision.

But in spite of her stylish appearance, Mrs MacNunn felt high-strung to tantrum point. The thunder in the air made the roots of her hair turn in their sockets. For another thing, the War was about to end.

For a week Kingsland had waited on tenterhooks for the news of the Armistice. Still, it was hard to believe that peace was nearly here after all the dreary years. Mrs MacNunn found the prospect unreal, even though she had already inspected the huge woodstack in the park, ready for the Armistice bonfire. In the bandstand, too, had reclined several coarse effigies of the Kaiser and his son, Little Willie, ready for hanging from the flagstaff.

Kingsland had been decorated for peace ever since the false alarm which, a few days before, had thrown sophisticated Sydney itself into an hysteria of celebration, with screaming, jigging crowds doing their best to shove in the plate-glass windows, and hordes of hobbledehoys trying to turn trams arse over tip.

Jerry had strung the shopfront with Union Jacks, filled the shop window with pictures of the War leaders, and enriched the fascia board with a swag of tri-colour bunting. But his competition, the Chinese General Store, had gone one better by erecting a victory sign in fireworks.

‘Hell, I can't go another step!' whimpered Mrs MacNunn, hobbling onwards nevertheless.

All day long Kingsland had been intermittently electrified by rumours that the Huns had signed and it was all over. A large crowd shifted restlessly outside the telegraph office, which had, without precedent, remained open for news. The operator and his assistant, now the most important men in town, made the most of it—appearing mysteriously at the window, scribbling notes, putting on grave looks, and refusing to answer the crowd's chiacking.

So it was justice, the Kingsland people felt, when the northbound express brought the news before it was confirmed by telegraph.

Jackie and Mrs MacNunn were near the bottom of Church Hill when they saw the express go through, blowing cock-a-doodle-doo on its whistle, the windows crowded with yammering passengers. The train had stopped for refreshments at Ghinni Junction: now a shower of white railway cups and saucers shattered on the station platform; a drunken soldier with a rifle scored a near-miss on the water-tower; and the Kingsland stationmaster collapsed under a barrage of mailbags erroneously thrown from the van.

‘It must be over, it surely must be over!' cried Mrs MacNunn, and she pressed Jackie's face into her stomach, releasing him to cry jubilantly, ‘What a night we're going to have! Clear away home now, and get into your old duds, for you'll want to be comfortable for all the rumpus!'

The church bells began to ring; from the shunting yard sounded something like a collision; and the clamour of kerosene-tin drums split the air over a dozen back lanes. Behind the western cloud-bank was a gasp of light.

‘Ah, God,' said Mrs MacNunn aghast. ‘It wouldn't rain on us!'

From the veranda of the big house in Edward Street, Cushie Moy heard the hullabaloo.

‘Mama!' she cried. ‘The War must be over! Look, Mama, look!'

A rocket, invisible in the late sunset, exploded over the Chinese General Store, its smoke hanging in the air like a flock of cotton-wool doves.

Mrs Moy felt strange, tremblingly excited.

‘I'm glad, aren't you?' ventured Cushie. ‘Oh, Mama, could I go to see the bonfire? For a little while?'

Mrs Moy recalled her mother and father dancing half the night through at the Relief of Mafeking. Australia, her eldest sister, was ‘out' then, but she was pro-Boer and remained in her bedroom, sulking all through the celebrations. She even hung a black flag out the window, till her father sent one of the servants to drag it down.

For Mrs Moy there was no chance of leaving the house. Olwyn was unwell, querulous and half-choked in a tent filled with the fumes of a bronchitis kettle. Mr Moy was away in a neighbouring town on Bank business, and there was no one available, on such a night, to sit with Olwyn even for an hour.

‘I could, Mama!' said Cushie eagerly. ‘You go and have a look at everything, and I'll look after Olwyn. And when you come back, perhaps I could go. Please, Mama!'

But Mrs Moy hesitated. Olwyn was always fractious with Cushie, nasty-tongued and recalcitrant. She could work herself up into a fit of suffocation after ten minutes alone with her sister. Mrs Moy shook her head.

‘But I don't like your going by yourself, either,' she said. ‘There might be hooliganism, goodness knows what. Intoxication,' she added with restraint.

‘Mama!' cried her daughter in an agonised tone, ‘I might never have another war!'

A manic din on the firebell commenced. A long spiral of smoke ascended from the bonfire, prematurely ignited.

‘They're going to hang the Kaiser! They're going to have fireworks and I won't see any of it!' begged Cushie. Mrs Moy hesitated, but before she could give the child a reluctant refusal, Jackie Hanna bowled through the gate, seesawing excitedly beneath the veranda.

‘Mrs Moy, Mrs Moy, can Cushie come and watch with me and Dad and Mum? Oh, it's grand, Mrs Moy!'

‘Mama, now I may go, mayn't I?'

To Mrs Moy there was something uncannily simian in the way the boy bent forward and looked upwards, tilting his large head back horizontally on a delicate neck. She marvelled that Cushie was not repelled by him. But the girl was flushed with excitement.

Suddenly Mrs Moy became indifferent. It was only the kind of vulgar tribal celebration to be expected in this dreary town.

‘Stay with Jackie's parents,' she instructed her daughter. ‘And don't stay out too long. Jackie, if people become rowdy, you must promise faithfully to bring Dorothy home immediately.'

Mrs MacNunn was pleased to see Cushie. She had a simple fondness for the child she had known since a toddler. The child was plump and rosy, perfect, yet the astute instincts of the woman recognised the anxiety or uncertainty behind the doll-like face. Now she squeezed her cheerfully, saying, ‘Thanks be there's a girl to look after me, because I tell you straight, I'm going to be a wild woman tonight. I'm going to take a nip or two, no matter what his lordship over there says about it.'

She gave Jerry a roguish look.

‘You'll get home by yourself if you keel over, I'm warning you,' he said. ‘I'll not be seen with any drunken old biddy and that's flat.'

Jerry's leg was giving him jip.

Yet he grinned with spontaneous pleasure to see his wife capering about the kitchen, overflowing with high spirits not because of the War's end but because it gave her a chance of a bit of a shindig.

‘Wear your new hat, love,' he said. ‘You look a treat in it.'

From afar came the halting sound of half a band. Seven of the younger players were marooned in Ghinni Junction, staying over after the cricket match.

‘Run along, you kids!' cried Mrs MacNunn. ‘You don't want to miss a skerrick of it.'

She pinned on her dress the Nun's service medal from the Boer War.

‘Someone's got to wear it on a night like this,' she said. ‘And I'm proud that you went and did your bit, young devil that you were.'

The Nun smiled. ‘You go on ahead with the youngsters, Peg,' he said. ‘I got to scrape off the whiskers.'

As he shaved, he kept sipping at a medicine glass of painkiller beside him. Some said it was laudanum. All Jerry knew was that it sometimes euchred the pain in his leg. To help him get through the evening, he filled his pocket with Hean's Tonic Nerve Nuts, which promised nerve health for threepence a day. They couldn't do him any harm, he supposed.

As he left the house he noticed how bright everything was. People had left all their lights turned on. The Salvation Army marched past, all six of them. Their one lassie was a stout old duck who'd been a naughty barmaid in Sydney in her youth and had repented it ever since.

Jerry was astonished that his little town had so large a population. The main street was so crowded that no one could move. They fought, wriggled, fainted, screamed, cursed, amongst growing clouds of dust. A hysteric sentimentality prevailed. The mayor, sunset-faced on the hastily assembled official platform outside the town hall, inaudibly prayed, condemned, thanked, and was cheered to the echo. The half a band played ‘Boys of the Dardanelles', ‘Rule Britannia', ‘The Old Hundredth'.

There was liquor everywhere. The publicans of three of the hotels had rolled out barrels of free beer. Quickly emptied whisky bottles passed amongst the crowd. The Nun, even as he drank, hoped that his old woman wasn't getting stuck into too much of it.

In the park, closely watched by the Fire Brigade, the flames licked up the post where the effigy of the Kaiser hung, his withered arm pinned across a chest heavy with jam-tin-lid medals. People threw things, clods, potatoes, dried horse manure, at the smouldering figure. Jerry, though he felt foolish and shaky with goodwill, thought it was an ugly scene, and he was glad when some moron hit the dangling dummy fair and square with a bottle of kerosene and the whole thing exploded in a pillar of fire. Some were burned, some knocked off their feet by the hoses being dragged here and there. Jerry was glad to see his wife's blue hat, now askew above a flushed face, well back in the crowd, and Jackie and Cushie on the very edges of it, dancing with excitement.

He pushed his way to them. ‘Keep away from these boneheads,' he advised. ‘You're likely to get wet to the skin.'

But of course the Fire Brigade didn't dare put the bonfire out, in spite of the captain's bellowed threats. They would have been mobbed if they had.

‘You mind you look after Cushie, now,' Jerry said to his son.

Father Link went past, looking friendless, though there were many of his parishioners amongst the crowd. He had soft ginger hair like wool, a mouth pulled down into a strange shape as though it had been paralysed in the very act of saying ‘Pip'.

‘Poor lonely bugger,' thought Jerry. He wrung the priest's hand, said, ‘Great night, eh? All over.'

Then he gave him a nerve nut. It must have done Father Link good, for some time later Jerry saw him moving self-consciously around in a circle, hand in hand with the blacksmith on one side and Mrs MacNunn on the other, singing:

In the sweet by and by
We shall meet on that beautiful shore,
In the sweet, in the sweet, in the sweet by and by.

The Nun thought he had better sit down somewhere. The combination of whisky and Hean's Tonic Nerve Nuts had sent him into a curious languor. His fingertips were numb, and his bad leg in limbo, the pain having changed to a long-distance kind of pins and needles. Half-sprawled in the plushy dust near the Gallipoli memorial, he enjoyed a blissful melancholy.

The figures that staggered and jerked about the bonfire were all known to him. A few were friends, many were customers; but they were more than that. They were members of the Kings-land tribe, split up into septs and families, his tribe now, their involved folklore part of his own life and history. They were all part of the poor silly bloody human race, pitiable, mindlessly stomping around in the dust, off their heads because some other silly bloody humans had been killed, pauperised, bereaved, humiliated, beaten.

In his god-like drunken remoteness, Jerry felt nothing for them but impersonal affection.

‘The Huns, too,' he thought, His wife found him. A beatific smile was fixed on her face as though tacked there. It stayed there even when tears began to trickle down her cheeks.

‘God, you're a sloppy old bint,' he said. ‘What's up now?'

‘I was thinking,' she babbled. ‘I was thinking of Piper Nicolson. His boy and all. Gawd, I been hard.' She burst out, ‘I want to go and see him, Jerry. Tell him I'm sorry about Baillie.'

‘Better not,' said Jerry. ‘Come on now, you sit down here and forget it. You've taken too much aboard, not being used to it.'

She appealed to Jackie and Cushie, standing interestedly by.

‘That's the decent thing, isn't it, kids? Make it up, comfort poor old Piper, the Christian thing to do. Holding grudges all this time, it's wicked.' She broke down and sobbed copiously.

‘All right, all right, I'll take you,' said her husband.

Slowly and uncertainly they moved towards Edward Street. The main street was so carpeted with confetti that in places it was as soft underfoot as a lawn. Outside the post office the Salvation Army band continued to play between two carbide lamps.

‘Wait, got to give them something,' mumbled Mrs MacNunn. She pressed a shilling into the elderly captain's hand. ‘Goo' man,' she sobbed. ‘Peace now. All brothers, goo' will to men. Play “Faith of Our Fathers” for me now.'

Cushie noticed that the light in Olwyn's room was still lit. She hesitated, thinking she should go home.

‘No,' said Jackie authoritatively. Cushie started. The two began to giggle.

‘Got to pee,' announced Jackie's mother majestically. Jackie and Cushie's giggles rose to an uncontrollable pitch.

‘Ought to be ashamed!' said the Nun in mortification, and angrily he bundled his wife away. Jackie and Cushie waited in silence until the Nun reappeared, sheepish, but dignified.

‘She's passed out,' he reported. ‘Better put her into bed, best place for her.' He scratched his head. ‘Don't know that she didn't have a good idea about the old Piper, though. Think I'll go along with you and ask him to come and give us a blast of the pipes, just to mark the occasion.' He said shyly, ‘She's not really shickered, you know, she just isn't used to the drop she had.'