Remember Me (4 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was sorry about. It upset me to see Mack so distraught, but I also had to consider the possibility Mack had betrayed his country, that he’d placed his obligations to the enemy above his duties to God, king and the entire British Empire. I was torn between supporting Mack, my friend, and my own sense of what was right. I felt guilty for thinking Mack should’ve told the policeman straight away. That’s what I would’ve done. Yet that would have meant breaking a promise and you had to be a pretty poor type to do that. But on top of everything was an overwhelming feeling of disappointment. Mack had been picked up by a German U-boat, and I’d expected a
Boy’s Own Annual
story with Mack emerging as a hero. I hadn’t expected a moral dilemma.

I noticed his glass was empty so got up and fetched a bottle of Dominion Bitter from his cooler. He took it from me without a word. I could see by his eyes that he’d disappeared into another place and another time. I started to sneak away, through the back door and down the passage, towards the front door. He seemed oblivious to everything except what was going on inside his head. I didn’t think he’d noticed I’d gone until he yelled after me.

‘Don’t you dare tell anyone!’

The sudden boom of his voice scared the daylights out of me. Mack had never shouted at me before.

‘I won’t,’ I called back.

‘Promise me!’

‘I promise.’

‘God as your witness!’

‘God as my witness.’

I ran home like a frightened rabbit but not sure why. It’s not as if I was scared of Mack. He’d never hurt me if you paid him. Maybe I was frightened for Mack’s sake. Maybe I was frightened by his confession and what would happen if his secret ever got out. Mostly I think I was frightened because I didn’t think I was up to the challenge of keeping my promise. Mack had shared his burden with me and the weight of the knowledge was unbearable.

Far too much for one small boy.

My father always claimed my Uncle Vic owed his life to his incompetence. He used to say it as a joke but it wasn’t far from the truth.

A
N EXTRACT FROM
‘S
AVED BY THE
S
KIN OF
M
Y
T
EETH
’

‘Don’t you dare tell anyone!’

The tone of Mack’s voice had left no room for manoeuvre. I’d always thought I was pretty good at keeping secrets, but the secrets I’d been charged with keeping didn’t amount to a fart in a thunderstorm alongside what Mack had told me. Mostly they were along the lines of who liked whom, who didn’t like whom, who’d slipped under the girls’ dressing sheds at Herne Bay Beach and who’d broken what and wasn’t telling. Nobody had ever asked me to keep a secret as big as Mack’s, and the more I thought about it the bigger it got. I was bursting with it, almost in pain from the effort of containing it. But what choice did I have? I’d given
Mack my solemn promise, God as my witness, and I knew it would be just like God to take a special interest in this one.

That night I got into an argument with my brother Nigel and burst into tears. My mother heard the commotion and came running into the bedroom where we’d been playing marbles. She grabbed hold of Nigel’s arm and dragged him to his feet.

‘What did you do to him?’ she demanded. I guess it’s only reasonable that she assumed Nigel had done something to me because if there was ever any mischief going round you could bet he was up to his neck in it. He’s only eighteen months older than me but back then he was years ahead of me in maturity and street smarts. He knew how babies were made long before the rest of us had even thought to wonder about it. But this time he had no case to answer.

‘I didn’t do anything!’ he protested.

‘He’s right,’ confirmed Rodney, who was lying down on top of his bed reading a book. Hearing his voice spooked me. Rod was so quiet we tended to forget he was around. He was the eldest son every mother dreamed of having. Some kids his age used to call him ‘queenie’ which was another word for sissy because he had different priorities. But nothing could be further from the truth. He played fullback for Mt Eden’s fifth-grade soccer team and, let me tell you, nobody tackled harder or defended more resolutely. For all that, it was embarrassing
having a brother who read all the time, still wore the long shorts my mother favoured and his shirt buttoned up to the collar. After school, that most precious time of day when kids are entitled to run a bit wild, he was tied to Mum’s apron strings. He was the one who had to do the shopping or drag a huge bag of washing to the laundrette. This did nothing to enhance his image. Rod was the rock my mother depended upon. She relied on his help in preparing dinner, this at a time when real men weren’t seen dead in the kitchen. She used to boast to her friends about what a good little cook he was. Hell’s bells! If word had got out around school that my brother cooked I never would’ve lived it down. He also had the job of keeping an eye on Nigel and me when Mum was tied up in the shop or out at the warehouses or, as often happened at night, out visiting friends with my father. Given the fact that Rod was four-and-a-half years older than me, he couldn’t have been much older than ten when he first assumed the responsibility of baby-sitting. Let me tell you, the nameless, faceless fear that Spielberg later exploited in
Duel
and
Jaws
was also well and truly alive and thriving back then, and it took a lot of guts for a ten-year-old to baby-sit a seven-year-old and a five-and-a-half-year-old. Rod’s acceptance of his role bound him but liberated us. It enabled Nigel and me to do what we wanted to do. In return we grudgingly accepted his authority as de facto parent. So when he supported Nigel’s claim of innocence I had nowhere to turn.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mum. Honestly, when Mum got that concerned look on her face no secret was safe. But what could I say? My friend Mack was a traitor to his country? He got picked up by a German submarine and didn’t tell anyone? And by not telling anyone put all the troops on the
Queen Mary
at risk? How could I tell her that? How could I tell her I’d just discovered my hero was flawed? What was worse was that I couldn’t remember what had started me crying in the first place. Ever since I’d left Mack the tears welling up inside me had been begging for an opportunity to get out. God only knows what triggered them. Under the circumstances I did the only thing I could do. I stormed off to the bathroom and locked the door. It was a favourite and much abused tactic of mine. My mother used to tell people I was highly strung but a lot of it was just an act.

I don’t think Mack stopped to think of the impact his confession would have on me. For most New Zealanders the war had been a case of absence and heartache. New Zealand hadn’t seen any fighting at close quarters, sending its troops over to the other side of the world to fight in Greece, North Africa and Italy. Despite the fact that the New Zealand military suffered the highest casualty rate of any country in the Empire, the war didn’t come to New Zealand. The closest it came to an invasion was playing host to hundreds of thousands of mostly polite, mostly frightened American boys preparing to battle their way to Tokyo.

On the other hand the Germans had set out to get me the very day I was born. I was supposed to have been born on D-Day. One week before I was due the street next to us was flattened. We had our windows blown in and walls cracked. My mother thought her best friend had been killed because her house was reduced to rubble. It turned out her friend was away visiting, nevertheless my mother got one hell of a shock and as a result my birth was delayed an extra week. I don’t think Mum wanted to bring another child into a world that was so fraught with peril.

My earliest memories are of Rod throwing Nigel and me under a reinforced table every time a plane flew over. He did it to Nigel when we were evacuated to Bootle in Cumberland the week after I was born. Rod wasn’t even five years old. It brought home the terror of the Blitz to my northern aunties and broke their hearts. He did it to me when I was old enough and was still doing it in 1948 when we arrived in Auckland. He kept on doing it for at least another twelve months. I clearly remember Rodney freaking out the first time my father took us to visit a park in our new strange land. Rod found an unexploded bomb. He grabbed hold of Nigel and tried to rip me out of my father’s arms to drag us both to safety. It took my father and several bystanders ages to convince my terrified older brother that the unexploded bomb was just a broken, abandoned, motorcycle sidecar.

The war never left us alone. Among the surviving
essays is one I wrote about my Uncle Vic. We had to write an essay titled ‘Saved by the Skin of My Teeth’. The idea was to teach kids how to write drama. Some wrote about nearly being caught while raiding orchards, others about falling into the deep end of swimming pools and more than a third wrote corny essays with them being captured by Indians or King Kong and ‘waking up and discovering it had all been a dream’. I wrote about my Uncle Victor who’d sailed out to New Zealand on the same old tub as us.

The ship was the
Arawa
, a converted refrigerated meat carrier. Uncle Vic wasn’t really an uncle, simply a family friend. We were taught to call him Uncle just as we called other family friends Uncle or Aunt. Given that we had no blood relatives in the country, this arrangement worked well in providing us with the sort of extended family other people take for granted. But getting back to Uncle Vic. He’d been an ack-ack gunner at the London Docks. The docks were the Luftwaffe’s favourite target and hard to miss as the River Thames led the bombers right to them. Uncle Vic liked to tell how he arrived late one evening at his battery just as the bombers were lining up to drop their load. He sat on a little steel seat and worked the handle controlling the gun’s sideways movement. This particular night he arrived so late he made a hash of hooking on the strap which acted as a backrest. Given that he had to lean back and watch the searchlight beams in case they picked up a bomber, this was a pretty critical
oversight. The inevitable happened. The gun barrel tilted up, he leaned back on his strap, the strap gave way and Uncle Vic toppled back into the Thames. He knew how to swim but had his tin hat, overcoat and boots on, and was flat tack just trying to keep his head above water. He screamed blue murder but his screams were lost in a hail of exploding bombs. Uncle Vic reckoned he was all but drowned by the time he got rid of his heavy clothing and virtually unconscious from the cold by the time he was picked up. When his rescuers asked him what gun he was on everyone went silent. Within seconds of him toppling into the Thames his battery had taken a direct hit. Uncle Vic was the only survivor. I was asked to read my essay out in front of the class—exactly the sort of dramatic story my pals loved.

The point is that Uncle Vic’s story was just one of many told and retold over the dinner table. The war was over but not yet done with. It dominated the movies we saw, the books and comics we read and the games we played. On rainy days you could usually find Gary and me down at Eric’s, under his house, flying an old battered sofa to Dresden. For us it was a Lancaster bomber. Eric wanted to be a pilot when he grew up so he always sat at the front with the broken shaft of a garden rake for a joystick and earphones from a discarded crystal set jammed on his head. Gary sat in the middle staring at an old street map stuck beneath a pane of glass salvaged from a picture frame. He was the bomb aimer. I was the tail
gunner and my weapon was a garden fork. Let me tell you, the four prongs of that garden fork shot down more Me-110s than Fighter Command ever did. The war may have ended but we still lived it every day.

Having been born in 1944 I was obviously too young to remember anything about the war, but Rodney’s actions every time a plane had flown over and dinner table conversation had made sure it was kept current. Mack’s encounter with the submarine happened sixteen years earlier but it might just as well have been yesterday. His secret burned inside me and tears alone couldn’t douse the flames.

That night I lay awake wondering what I could do to change things. I was addicted to happy endings and the end of his story was anything but happy. I mulled over what he’d told me, desperately trying to think how events could be reinterpreted so that he emerged with his hands clean. It was too much to expect him to come out of it as a hero but I figured there must be some way he could at least be spared being branded a traitor. But no matter how I worked over the story the fact remained that Mack had failed in his duty. He had kept his word to his enemy and had to be respected for that, but by not reporting the U-boat he’d placed his obligations to the enemy above his duty and put all the soldiers aboard the troopship at risk. I couldn’t think of a soul who wouldn’t damn Mack for what he did.

I desperately needed to talk to someone. But who?

Some kids would automatically take their troubles to their dad but for me that wasn’t an option. My father was a man of firm convictions acquired around the shipyards of no-nonsense Tyneside. His sense of what was right and what was wrong never wavered. Right was right, wrong was wrong, and you were a fool if you thought otherwise. There were never mitigating circumstances or grey areas. His opinions were fixed by the experiences of others and by the dictates of authorities, and he never saw reason to challenge them or waste a moment of his life reconsidering. He didn’t lie, cheat, steal or take advantage of the less fortunate and was unforgiving of those who did. He still hadn’t forgiven the Germans for what they did during the war; his views on them had a lot in common with John Wayne’s attitude towards Indians. As far as my dad was concerned, the only good German was a dead German, and the best German was one that was good and dead. He could never accept that a promise made to ‘Jerry’ could be binding. Never. I couldn’t conceive of any circumstance where he’d have the slightest sympathy for Mack.

Rod was another obvious choice because he tended to be the oracle I consulted, but I couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t discuss Mack with my father. Mum was ruled out for the same reason.

I thought about talking to Captain Biggs up at the Church Army. Captain Biggs was an unlikely hero to us kids and especially to me. A big man with a big heart and a
jaw so square and firm it made Dick Tracy look like a chinless wonder, he devoted at least half his time to keeping us off the streets and providing moral guidance. Some of the tougher kids said he was a bit namby-pamby but stopped short of calling him a poof. Despite his size, he wasn’t the type you’d expect to pack down in a scrum but, equally, there was never the slightest suggestion that he kicked with the other foot. Parents had no hesitation releasing their sons into his care when he took us away for ten-day holidays on Waiheke Island. We went to a place called Camp Jasper on Oneroa Beach and, let me tell you, those holidays were the highlight of our childhood. Captain Biggs was a pillar of moral rectitude and one of the most respected members of our community, right up there with the school headmaster and Dr Satyanand, our local doctor.

Somewhat fortuitously, Captain Biggs never once mentioned his family or his past. As he wasn’t the sort of person we would automatically be drawn to, his silence on his background gave us the opportunity to create one for him, one that made him more acceptable. We surreptitiously questioned him and drew conclusions from his evasiveness. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever we managed to convince ourselves he was hiding the fact that he was the son of a prostitute who had abandoned him and he’d been raised in an orphanage. In our eyes being the son of a prostitute gave him more kinship with us and made him more acceptable.

Captain Biggs was well credentialed as a confidant on a number of scores. Mack was a member of his congregation and had become a tireless worker at church fetes and fundraisers. Captain Biggs had also played a major role in dragging Mack out of his alcoholic haze following the death of his wife. But while I really liked Captain Biggs, his candidacy had a couple of major flaws. I wasn’t looking for sympathy but for a solution. My big worry was that Captain Biggs would simply pray for forgiveness for Mack when what was needed was exoneration. Besides, Captain Biggs would see it as his pastoral duty to discuss the whole business with Mack. I couldn’t allow that. Mack would never forgive me. I was smart enough to realise that if Mack had wanted a heart-to-heart with Captain Biggs he would already have had one. Reluctantly I had to rule Captain Biggs out.