The Naked Island | Page 2

before we would be out. A year probably, I thought. That was if they didn't shoot us as they'd said they would. Then, more honestly, I added to myself, "four years, more likely." It didn't bear thinking about

2 INSANITY IN THE FAMILY?
I looked at the Argyll. He was about my age, perhaps a little younger, perhaps twenty. I reflected that only recently I had taken the activity and the fleetness of foot and the exuberance of youth entirely for granted. I reflected that only a fortnight ago I should never have considered mounting these stairs any other way than two at a time. Now, one by one, counting idiotically, I had crawled up: andfinallyhad bogged down altogether at number fourteen.
In the dark, on the stairs, resting my elbows on my knees, my forehead on my fists, I gave myself over to misery. I found myself retracing in my mind the sequence of events which had led me, so inevitably, to this staircase between the punishment cells and the courtyard of Pudu Gaol, Kuala Lumpur, onetime administration centre of British Malaya.
It was that brass band I blamed most. Day after day, with unremit ting fervour, it had played martial airs outside the Sydney Recruiting Office in a jolly attempt to convince young Australians that war was just one long march by Sousa. Thousands of volunteers (the theory was) hypnotized by the blare of brass would pour, in a Hamelin- like procession, into the Australian Imperial Forces.
Once before, months earlier, I had volunteered, only to be told to go away and get my mother's consent, and finish my university course. Accordingly, I had obtained my mother's consent and passed my exams, and become a Bachelor of Arts. This, to my limited intel ligence, did not appear an excessively helpful contribution to the Empire's war effort, so, at the beginning of 1941, 1 had returned to the Recruiting Office, determined this time to enlist and kill many Germans. And there, outside the small wooden hut (which, in the middle of the grandeur of Martin Place, and immediately above the gentlemen's lavatory, was so typical a product of the military mind), stood the scarlet ranks of a brass band playing martial airs.
Irritated, I stopped short on the corner of Martin Place and Pitt Street. If I was going to join up, I was going to join up of my own accord. I was not going to be wafted into the Army on the end of any conductor's baton, however magnificent his moustache or in numerable his campaign ribbons. Stubbornly, taking care not to walk in step with the march that stirred the depths of the city, I strolled away up the hill, crossed Castlereagh Street, crossed Elizabeth Street, caught the Bondi tram and went for a swim.
Next day, punctually after my morning lectures, I ran from the University Chambers, wherein the Law School was housed, down to the Recruiting Office in Martin Place. And there, once again, the sun glinting on the silver of epaulettes and the gold of instruments, was the band! Again I went for a swim. Every day for a week the band was there and every day for a week, while others joined up and were consigned to Syria and Darwin and England, I went swimming.
Then at last the band vanished, and in I marched, into the small hut in the middle of Martin Place, immediately above the gentle men's lavatory. The same recruiting sergeant greeted me in the same bluff and congenial manner as he had when first I was interviewed by him a manner that had all the roguish humour of a commercial traveller and all the sincerity of a pawnbroker.
"Hullo there, laddy," he said, "going to join our Army?" I nodded. "How old are you, laddy?" he asked. I said, "Twenty," and he said, "Tell it to the Marines, laddy, tell it to the Marines. Eighteen years ago you wouldn't even have been a gleam in your father's eye, now would you, eh?" Realizing that the sergeant was the possessor of a particularly hammy wit, I didn't answer. I simply placed on the table before him a form signed by my mother the form which rendered minors eligible for enlistment
"Mother's signed this, laddy," he observed astutely, "why not your father?"
"Died eight years ago," I told him. At this the sergeant appeared embarrassed and started pounding his pockets one after the other in the frenzied manner of all smokers who know quite well that they have no cigarettes but wish to give the impression that this is a fact they have only just discovered. Finally, with an air of childlike candour, which was most unbecoming, he turned to me and said: "Wouldn't it, eh? clean out of smokes! Got a cigarette to spare, laddy?" I said I was