Voyage One - A Son, A Father by Michael Brohier

A Son, a Father Memory, Perspective, and Interpretation A short story By Michael Brohier

First published in 2021 Published by Michael Brohier

Copyright © @2021 Michael Brohier All rights reserved. No part of this novella may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Printed on the Gold Coast, Australia.

“In the end, all we have are memories, imprecise, battered at the edges, always tantalisingly out of reach, a feeble construct at reimaging a life, leaving a legacy, bringing meaning to this existence”. (Michael Brohier)

MICHAEL BROHIER

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Voyage One - “A Son’s Perspective”

“ Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.” Guy de Maupassant

Adelaide, Australia, 6th June 2010.

Nineteen, which is one more than eighteen, is almost twice ten, which can, at times, come close to a complete or perfect waiting period; the perfect waiting period that ushered my father into the nightmarish theatre of a World War. Was he complete? Was he ready? I don’t think so, but then, is one ever ready for a war? Here I am, in Adelaide, spending a few days with my sister. The house is empty, and I am at a loose end. It is one of those biting cold, bleak Adelaide winter afternoons, on the birthday of my father. Trees are stripped of leaves, and endings seems more plausible, life more tenuous, even finite. It is a time for reflection, for whimsy, for looking back into a neglected past and making sense of fragmented memories. I open the intricately carved teak chest in my sister’s lounge room, bursting with albums packed with fading photographs. With each new snapshot I am drawn, insistently, into a world of ghosts. All no longer what they were. All grown older now. A world where my parents are younger than my 55 years; where my father stares back at me from a sepia print, taken in the post - pandemic world of 1922, in a staged studio photograph, aged two years, with his tentative smile that I would come to know so well, propped up between his father and an aunt. His mother, my paternal grandmother, an indistinct memory, consigned to the Angoda Mental Institution, as these places were called in that age. I never knew her nor knew of her. If my father were alive today, exactly to this day, the 6 th of June 2010, he would have been 90 years of age. It is five years ago that he died, just nineteen days after his birthday, in a bed, in the Kingswood Aged Care Facility, with the self-same sister in whose house I am, by his side. He had been dying for the last eight days. No food, no water, no words, no recognition. Simply a state between waking and sleeping. And I was with him for some of those eight days, with my mother, who fretted and saw hope of a recovery when all hope had fled. In little over half a century that he was my father, I fought with him, loved him dearly and wanted and needed his approbation. And yet to me, he is still here, dominant in my mind, my thoughts, and my stories. It may be the photographs I have of him scattered around the walls of my house, that rouse memories, but I do know I dwell on him. I dwell on my mother too, but the ones with whom you had a harmonious relationship are not the ones who resurface repeatedly. It is the contentious ones that flick the switch on and off, light and dark. I remember him. I love him. I ask forgiveness of him. I forgive him. Crouched over these old photographs, my mind inexplicably shifts to the afternoon of the death of my paternal grandfather; a quiet, thin man, shadowy (to me) and dressed in sarong and singlet, lounging in a rattan chair. In the stories handed down to me, death came to him, on a Christmas But that is another story for another time.

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afternoon, whilst the world lay in somnambulance, lulled by the suffocating heat and humidity of a down south, Kalutara*, Sri Lankan December. I have vague recollections of myself and my three siblings, locked away, out of sight, whilst the adults attended to the serious business of the dead, an ambulance lurking in the background. But this is all the recollection I have of him. No loving patriarch, no games, no tenderness, nothing to hold in my heart; nothing but that one distorted memory of the day, that event, that life ebbing away. Curiously enough, I never experienced grandfathers. This Christmas memory, opaque as it is, is one piece of the debris I cling to. It washes up on the shore of my recollection, briefly recognised then swept back into a churning whirlpool along with other distorted, half-recognised, partly verified events. Febrile tendrils of seaweed, tentative, searching, reaching out in the dark, tempting me to venture into a place where my feet don’t feel land, where my head is submerged, where I am simply not comfortable; where I find fact in fiction, where I make my life up as I go. This is the furthest reaches of memory land. This the wilderness, the icy tundra of my recollections. These tendrils invite me to reach past my own memories to the life of my father, a man’s man, who lived with scant regard – it seemed, to my adolescent eyes - for his safety. I have stories gleaned from this reluctant, shy man, never one to talk about the extraordinary life he lived; the distinct life we have before we metamorphose into parents. I would coax these gradually from him in the afternoon games played with my brother using his Air Force issue pistol, his hidden and exotic long knife in a walking stick, his navigator’s khaki headcover and earphones. But I was too young to listen closely, to hear, and the stories come halting, unfinished, and erratic, as if he has erased them and now finds it difficult to bring them back to life. I have long asked myself why that is? Why he kept these stories of his war years to himself, and the fears he must have confronted, come to terms with, become resigned to, in all those years of flying over hellish, pock – marked, war - torn skies? Was it that speaking of it would bring these fears back, in anxious wave upon anxious wave; unremitting? Better left unsaid then? But who can lock away the secrets of the human heart and remain unscathed? My father’s complex life comes back to me, in that lounge room, in fits and starts and I gradually build a narrative around that. An extraordinary life! A life of courage, sacrifice, humility, and blokey compassion. First to war, at the age of nineteen, (he died nineteen days past his birthday) and I ask myself, what made him do this? Why did he enlist to fight in a war for the British who had subjugated his people and instituted an unbearable racism in a land that did not belong to them? But he did. This skinny Dutch Burgher from Sri Lanka, barely out of his teens, enlisted and faced what must have been, unimaginable fear of death, lives cut short, too early. And then to South Africa with its earlier version of Apartheid, its demeaning of Africans and Coloureds. That was what he faced, on his passage to Scotland for bomber training. I wonder how this brief stay and the exposure to overt racism, to the valuing of one life over another, affected him? In my eyes however, it only increased his nobility, his value as a human being; the youth and chivalry that lead him to be a navigator in Wellingtons, Lancasters and Mosquitos, facing ack-ack, over Germany, North Africa, Burma, signing Last Wills and Testaments, such was the prescience of death, every night, every low flying mission. At nineteen! I wish I could ask him now, face to face, why he went to war? But I can’t and I never will.

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I am taken back to a time when I must have been 6 years of age. Even then, we clashed over the most trivial things. We bumped heads over the suitability of wearing hockey boots to junior primary school, cowboy costumes to class, haircuts, and the existential debate over sideburns. We were destined to bicker and to go head-to-head. Such was the nature of our love. A blokey love, where I would stand with him shoulder - to - shoulder at the gas heater, in our modest lounge room in Edwardstown, South Australia, jostling for the heat, feeling it creep up our backs, banging shoulders against each other, pain and joy intermingled, showing love the only way we knew how, through jousting humour and the tender violence of the human touch. And yet it was love, unmistakeable love, that I had (have) for him. I ache to have him back for just one moment, to lean into him and have him wrap his arms round me, my head against his chest; as my beautiful young man – son, does with me now. Understanding, in moments like this about the ephemeral nature of our lives, the flitting, precious times, never adequate, never enough. These pictures, in this lounge room, on a bleak winter’s day in Adelaide, reveal to me a story, and as I lay the old prints in intricate geometric patterns following chronology from earliest to latest, a coherent narrative form – richer than the tit bits my father fed us through his life. They say the past is another country and it is. I see my father in those pictures and rebuild his journey, piece by piece...

MICHAEL BROHIER

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Voyage Two – “A Father’s Perspective”

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes” Vladimir Nabokov

Colombo, Ceylon, 1939.

September 3 rd , 1939, and it is the beginning of what came to be known as the Phoney War; eight months of bravado, bluster, manoeuvring and frantic mobilisation, before Hitler’s invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. People in Colombo are uneasy. There is an eerie sense of calm, the sort of hiatus before a searing war that would destroy innocence forever, with the dropping of the atom bombs, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the seaside capital, rickshaw pullers ply their trade, traffic police pirouette theatrically at the intersection of busy junctions, and life simply meanders to the rhythm of the monsoonal heat; as it had always done, here in this idyllic corner of the world, this Serendib. But there is a hint of change in the air. When would the waiting game be over? Each day the Sri Lanka Daily News blares headlines in bold black about Adolf Hitler’s imminent invasion of parts of Europe and teenagers in the capital grow restless. The talk in schoolyards is about the war, with seniors, spurred on by the bravado of youth, daring each other to enlist. My name is Fred Brohier, Frederick Horatio Brohier to be precise; named after the legendary Roman, Horatio Cocles, who defended the Sublician bridge (in Rome) against Lars Porsena and the entire Etruscan army. I am a Dutch Burgher, that subset of Dutch descendants, who patched the eroding racial divide between Singhalese and Tamil. A year year earlier, I was a Prefect in my Matriculation year at Royal College in Colombo. I look back on that time now, 65 years ago, and feel a touch of sadness, a longing for youth, brimming adulthood, innocence, and that uneasy nexus between peace and war; replete, it seemed, with possibilities. It seems to me, that I lost my youth to a war. In those 10 years from 1939 to 1949, (from 19 to 29), I would enlist, leave my homeland, go to war, court death every war- rent night over Germany, North Africa, and Burma, marry, and lose my first child to polio. I would live a lifetime in that ephemeral space of time, knowing love and loss, facing fear, and suffering unimaginable pain. I would grow up too soon. Royal College or Royal as it was known, was one of the elite schools in the island. I had been Captain of Rugby and holder of the record for the 440 Yard event for the Under 18’s in the Colombo Schools’ Athletics Competition. I simply assumed that good things were bound to happen when I moved on. I was privileged middle class and I had no doubt about the course of my life. I was “Content to breathe {my} native air / In {my} own ground” (Alexander Pope). Life for me, revolved around sport, girls, mateship, and the ‘old boy’ network. In this Sidhaleepa or Serendib, “the dwelling place of lion's island” at the bottom of India, the looming World War as it was being called even then, was a romantic adventure. And so, when my friends, the old scholars of Royal College, met for a party in the historic Colombo Fort just a year out of school, in the Christmas excitement of an early December, a good time was the only thing on our mind.

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Soon the conversation turned to the war. Not be outdone, I boldly ventured an opinion, although I had the flimsiest grasp about the politics of this war. “Of course, Hitler will invade, and I will be there to stop him”.

Hoots of laughter!

Egged on by my friends, made bold by the potent arrack and the palpable sense of excitement in the air, I said. “I’m nineteen and I could enlist in the Royal Air Force tomorrow. Just like that”.

Derisive laughter!

Soon the conversation turned to other things, the war, a receding memory.

But not for me!

The germ of an idea had been planted and I simply could not budge it. That is me! Stubborn! And I can see that stubbornness in my son, Michael. Stubborn to a fault. What if I turned up at the British Embassy tomorrow morning, bright and early? What if I enlisted into the British Air Force? I thought of the look on the faces of my friends when I told them. I didn’t think of the war, only of the admiration of the girls, of uniforms, esprit de corps, and combat training! Death, fear, were not options. I woke with a start at exactly 5 am the next morning. I had been dreaming of war; my sleep, restless, vivid, disconnected and yet strangely logical. I had not been able to shake the light-hearted conversation from last night about enlisting. My chaotic dreaming merely had strengthened this idea. And now I was awake, sitting bolt upright in bed and gripped by a trembling sense of excitement; the feeling one has when about to step out into the great unknown; that carefree sense of letting go and being open to the risks ahead. Strangely, I felt less uncertain than I had been about anything before. I crept out of bed, visited the toilet, splashed water on my face, slicked my hair down and quietly dressed in my work whites; pressed and fresh. I grabbed the rucksack, hurriedly packed before I had gone to bed, mentally listing, toothbrush, bylcream, underpants, socks, jacket, and passport photograph of myself. Gingerly opening the door to the bedroom of my great aunt, I memorised her serene face, deep in sleep. I felt an immense sense of love and gratitude towards this person who had stepped in to care for me and my sister, Sybil, after our mother had been institutionalised, only to die soon afterwards. Grabbing a plantain* on my way out of the house, I gently shut the front door, opening and closing the front gate with care, making sure I lifted the creaking side. Little did I know then that I was leaving the sheltered life I knew, forever. There would be no going back. But such is the breathtaking beauty of youth, there being no place for uncertainty. The early morning air was crisp and fresh, the beautiful hiatus before the oppressive heat of a Colombo December. Diminutive Morris Minor taxi cabs with their yellow tops were parked in crazy fashion by the small Kadeh* where the drivers sat on their haunches drinking sweet, hot, ‘milk tea’ and talking in Singhalese. It was the calm before the Colombo cacophony of noise that would break The carelessness of youth!

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with the traffic, the chattering school children in their starched white uniforms and the second-hand double decker red London busses full to the brim, spewing smoke and listing precariously as they chugged around the Dehiwela Junction roundabout. Now was the time when all great ventures seemed within the realm of possibility. Now, I felt that I could do it; I could enlist. The bus dropped me off at the British High Commission in Colombo 5, much too early for the start of business. I leaned against the white wall, one foot bent up against it and watched the traffic increase. At 8.30 am sharp, a uniformed Regimental Sargent Major, marched up to the gate and proceeded to open it. I felt a dryness in my throat, a sense of anxiety gripping my chest as I was suddenly confronted with the sheer magnitude of this moment. I felt the urge to turn and simply jump on to the footboard of the double decker pulling away from the bus stop directly in front of the embassy gates. I could resume my normal life; no one would know, no harm done. Tomorrow I would turn up for the junior executive position waiting for me at the Ceylon Tea Board, and then drinks at the Havelock’s Rugger Club on Buller’s Road; and this time, I could drink the single malt whisky, no age barriers now! The three glorious weeks before Christmas stretched out before me, inviting me to stay, to reap the rewards of my stellar career at Royal College, to use the old boy network, to meet the girls at the Burgher Recreation Club, just up the road from Havelocks, to step into the life of a privileged middle-class Dutch Burgher! Yes, that is what I would do! All this raced through my mind in that one instance.

“Can I help you young man?”

The clipped tones of the British RSM, ripped me out of my reverie. I had turned already and was reaching out for the bus. I stopped, dropped my hand, and – with a sense of inevitability – turned to face the question. The one rip in the fragment of my fantasy was fast closing and I felt a sense of destiny stretch before me. I knew that I would not be tasting that single malt tomorrow.

“How do I enlist in the British Air Force please, Sir?”

The die was cast!

The End

MICHAEL BROHIER

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References:

Kalutara – A seaside suburb in the south of Sri Lanka between Colombo and Galle.

Plantain – The word Sri Lankans use for bananas.

Kadeh – A small, inconspicuous roadside food store selling sweet tea and food.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA WELLINTON BOMBER WORLD WAR TWO

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My father second left (facing) with his Australian flight crew

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“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

Thomas Campbell

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