Voyage One - A Son, A Father by Michael Brohier

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.

MICHAEL BROHIER

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