Trains and Lovers: A Novel (10 page)

“Red. So he could have chosen. He could have gone to Malaya or Nyasaland or Hong Kong—there were lots of places that would have taken a nineteen-year-old Scotsman who was good with his hands and prepared to work. There were plenty of places where he would have been slotted in. But he went to Australia because of a book he had as a child. It was called
The British Empire in Pictures
, and it showed people doing all sorts of things in exotic settings. He said that there was a picture of an Australian stockman on a horse and this man had turned to the camera and was smiling. He said that there was something in the man’s expression that meant something to him, and when you turned the page you saw a picture of people running into the surf on a beach in New South Wales and that tipped the balance.

Imagine being in Scotland, just after the War when there was still rationing and you were hungry and probably cold as well, and you saw these pictures of people riding horses and standing on beaches. Imagine.

MEN NEEDED FOR WESTERN AUSTRALIA. THAT
was all it said. He saw it in the newspaper that his father brought back from work each day, and he might easily have missed it, had he not begun reading a report on page ten that was continued on page twenty-two, where the notice was tucked away alongside other advertisements for cheap suits, pills, sturdy bicycles. The wording might have been terse, but perhaps it said quite enough. There was a place called Western Australia and they needed men there. What more was there to be said? They would need men because everywhere seemed to need men. Too many men had died—unimaginable millions of them—and now they needed men to do the things that those men had done. That, surely, needed no further explanation.

He cut it out and placed it in the pocket of his shirt, and might have forgotten about it had he not found it again that night when he took off his shirt and laid it on the chair in the bedroom he shared with his two younger
brothers. They all slept in one bed, which was common in those days, because they were poor and they were lucky not to have to share with their parents as well. There were two beds in the house: the parental bed, which was behind a curtain off the living room, and the children’s bed, which was in the other room. They lay like sardines: two heads on a long pillow separated by one set of feet. Turns were taken to be the one in the middle, the feet, and the blanket was used to protect one from elbows and kicking. The youngest of the three boys, who was eight, suffered from nightmares, and cried out in the darkness; something about bombing, which they had never experienced in the Ayrshire town where they lived. There had been bombs in Glasgow, but nothing as bad as the London Blitz, which they had seen in the newspaper pictures, and it had lodged in the mind of the younger boy.

“Alec, do they bomb boys as well? Bairns too?”

This question had been prompted by a picture of a young boy picking over the ruins of a house in London—all tumbled brick and split rafters like sticks of firewood; the boy had been looking for his toys, or the remains of them, the caption said.

“Aye, boys get bombed, too, but not here, Jack. Not here. Nobody’s going to bomb you.”

“Auld Hitler wadnae waste a decent bomb on you!” This from the middle brother, who was silenced by a threatening look.

That was reassurance, perhaps, but not enough to prevent the nightmares, which woke them all and inevitably brought a parent into the room to comfort the frightened boy. On that evening there had been such a disturbance, and he had lain awake for long hours afterwards, thinking about the advertisement and about Western Australia. He would go. They needed men, and he was now a man, who could do a man’s job in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter.

The notice had given the address of an agent in London, and he wrote off the next day. In his letter he explained that he was currently serving an apprenticeship as an electrician, but that he could be released from this and could turn his hand to any job offered him. It was six days before he received a reply; a form was enclosed and he should fill that in. There was a pamphlet describing the benefits available and the terms on which he might be given an assisted passage.

His younger brothers watched him as he filled in the form. They did not want him to leave—he was their brother, their protector—but he assured them that they could come, too, once they were old enough.

“There’ll be room for all of us,” he said. “It’s a big country.”

He told his parents. They said that he was an adult now and the decision was his.

“We’ll miss you, Alec; of course we will. But you’ll be all right. You’ll find a nice girl out there and have your own family and we’ll come and see you one day maybe …”

He could see that they were being brave. Australia was as far away as could be imagined, and everybody knew that when you said goodbye to somebody going to Australia, it was often goodbye forever.

He arrived in Fremantle, on a ship that had called in at Cape Town. The last leg of the journey, across lonely wastes of ocean, had brought home to him how far away he was going. In Cape Town, where more passengers had boarded, passengers on deck had thrown paper streamers down to friends and relatives on the quay below. As the tugs nudged the ship from its berth, these streamers had briefly become taut, brightly coloured links between those on board and those on shore, and then had snapped and fallen graceful and fluttering into the water below. Beside him on the deck, watching the crowds, was an Australian serviceman, weeping with relief at leaving Africa, his hand in a plaster cast from a wound he had received somewhere
up north, doing something, he explained, that he should not have been doing, and therefore his own fault. What was Perth like? he asked. The tops, mate. The tops. No doubt about that. None at all.

They met rough seas, and the air below became fetid with the results of sea-sickness. It was everywhere—the acidic smell of sickness; in the corridors, in the dining room, in the cabins themselves. The stewards, overworked, did their best, but many of them were sick themselves and simply added to the problem.

Then it stopped, and the smell of sickness was replaced by the smell of liberally applied disinfectant. People went back on deck, where they played quoits with heavy rubber rings, or sat in deck chairs and stared up at the sun that was so unfamiliar to many of them. It was as if they were escaping a darkness that had lasted for years; for some of them, for all their life.

Fruit had been brought on board at Cape Town: oranges, plums, peaches. There was an abundance that was almost shocking to him, because they had so carefully husbanded their rations back home and had simply not seen fruit. He found himself sucking hungrily at oranges, making a hole in the skin and then squeezing out the contents—the pith, the juice, even the pips. He felt his
body react to the jolt of sugars; he felt stronger, he felt more confident.

And then, shortly after dawn one morning, they were in sight of land, a low smudge on the horizon. A deckhand pointed it out to him and said, “That’s Fremantle. We’ll be there by lunch. You’ll be off by three at the latest.”

He strained his eyes trying to make out the details, but it was hours before he saw the shape of buildings—a harbour crane, ships at anchor outside the harbour, distant hills. They had been required to stay on board in Cape Town because of a tight sailing deadline, and so he had not gone ashore there. This, then, would be the first land on which he would set foot that was not Scotland or England. He had never been anywhere else in his life.

HE WAS GIVEN A ROOM IN A HOSTEL NEAR THE
docks. It was hot, and he also found it uncomfortable and noisy. As soon as he could manage it, he answered an advertisement for lodgings with a widow who let her two spare bedrooms to “respectable working men.” She looked him up and down, assessing his respectability, and then offered to take him. The other lodger was called Harry. He was almost entirely uncommunicative, and never said more than a word or two at the dinner table.

Eventually Alec and the widow took to conducting their conversations as if Harry were not there—occasionally referring to him in the third person, forgetting that he was sitting at the table with them.

“Poor man,” she confided to him one evening when Harry had gone off to a function at the returned servicemen’s club. “He was a prisoner of the Japs. That’s what it did to a lot of them. It broke them. Some managed all right, but others …” She left the sentence unfinished.

He nodded. He understood. She had had a number of ex-servicemen as lodgers, she had told him; she knew about them and what they had been through.

“Not that he might have had all that much to say anyway,” she said. “Some men are like that, aren’t they? People think that they’re keeping it all inside them, but there really isn’t very much there in the first place. And women, too, of course—I wouldn’t want you to think that I was picking on men.”

“No. Of course not.”

She warmed to her subject. “It’s just that women can talk about their feelings. You know that, don’t you? They can tell other women what they’re worried about. They can speak about it. And that makes it much easier for them.”

She looked at him, and he thought that perhaps she
was wondering what his feelings were, and this made him ask himself whether he should have more feelings than he did. It had never occurred to him to think too much about how he felt about things. You didn’t do that, did you? Not if you were Scottish. If you were Scottish you just got on with it—you did what you had to do and you didn’t complain about things or analyse them too much. What possible good did that do?

Then one evening Harry knocked on his door and asked if he could have a chat.

“Just a short chat, mate,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you? Sometimes a fellow needs to talk.”

Alec assured him that he did not mind. He ushered him into the room and offered him the sole chair while he sat on the bed. “Not much good for entertaining,” he said. “But it’s quiet round here and Joan does her best for us.”

“Too true,” said Harry. “She’s a good woman.”

There was a brief silence. Then Harry asked Alec how old he was.

“Just twenty. Last week was my twentieth birthday.”

Harry reached out to shake his hand. “Sorry, I didn’t know it was your birthday. But many happy whatnots and so on. Good on you.”

Alec thanked him. The silence returned.

Then Harry said, “I’m thirty-two meself.” He paused. “Had my thirtieth birthday in … in the place they kept us. The Japs. The camp.”

Alec looked down at the floor. “It must have been bad.”

Harry’s eyes widened. “Bad? You said bad?”

“Yes. Being a prisoner …”

Harry nodded. “It was very bad all right. That’s why I don’t speak about it very much.”

Alec understood. “That’s natural. And you don’t have to.”

“Except sometimes I want to, you know. Sometimes I feel I need to tell somebody about what happened.”

There was a short silence. Then Alec said, “Your mates? The ones who were with you in the camp? Can you speak to them?”

Harry looked down at the floor. “Not all of them made it …”

“I’m sorry.”

“My best mate copped it. If he were here, then I’d speak to him. But he’s not.” A pause. “Dysentery. Or that’s what got him finally. A lot of things before that. Then you get something that finishes you off. Sometimes that was just the sun. As simple as that. The sun.”

Alec said nothing. He was trying to think of people
he had known who had died, and the sudden realisation came that there was nobody—or nobody very close. A boy at school died of tuberculosis, but he had not known him very well. An aunt had died, but she lived up in Shetland and he had only seen her once or twice. How old did you have to be before you got to know death?

“I almost got it. Almost,” Harry continued. “There was a guard we were all dead frightened of. He was a short man—big stomach—and we were all walking skeletons, you know; rib cages, shoulders, all these bones you didn’t know you had until the Japs got you and you started to starve.

“This man called me out of the parade one morning and started bawling his head off at me. I had no idea why he chose me—I hadn’t done anything—I was just standing there. Just like this; trying to keep upright. If you fell over they could punish you for it, and so we all tried to keep standing.

“This man pulled me out in front of all the other fellows and was yelling away in Japanese before he took a stick from one of the other Japs and started to beat me. My mates said he beat me in front of everyone for about five minutes. Then the stick breaks, and he throws the pieces down. One of them hit my ear and made a gash in it. See?
Look at it here. Just a little scar, but I got it the same time that I got all the big ones on my back.

“I never worked out why he chose me. One of the officers said it had nothing to do with me, that it wasn’t personal. He just wanted to beat somebody.”

Alec looked up at him. “I’m really sorry to hear this,” he said.

Harry looked embarrassed. “I shouldn’t have told you, mate. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you listen to all that.”