9
What’ll I do
With just a photograph
To tell my troubles to?
IRVING BERLIN, “What’ll I Do?,” 1923
When I was a child and we lived in an apartment next to the bakery in suburban Sydney, Grandfather Archie often visited us for Sunday lunch.
I remember him vaguely, in the way one does a person who disappeared from one’s life when one was seven. He’s indistinct, a scatter of impressions: bulky, white-haired, expressionless, monosyllabic, smelling of sweat, tobacco, and age. I was too young to ask the classic question, “What did you do in the war, Grandpa?” but he probably would not have answered. With a more recent war only just ended, most Australians regarded the conflict of 1914–1918 as remote and irrelevant, best forgotten.
Archie in the 1930s—with his wife, Stella, and his daughter Maureen (above), and on Anzac Day
In time, I discovered that Archie volunteered for the First Australian Imperial Force in May 1916, when he was thirty-one, and sailed for France that October. I would never even have known this except that our own family, following Archie’s death in 1947, moved into the house where he and my grandmother had lived and died.
A single-story cream-painted Victorian villa in solid Sydney sandstone, it stood behind a fence of spear-shaped iron railings on a hillside street of identical houses in the inner Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. My father and uncle inherited it jointly. Since housing was scarce, they decided to move in and share it. Disaster. Arguments between the families soon escalated into outright warfare. In the great tradition of political compromise, they partitioned the territory. Our family got the three front rooms, and my uncle the rest. Kitchen and bathroom were common ground. Any communication took place through third parties or via terse notes.
I blamed the house. From the start, it depressed me. I couldn’t forget my grandmother’s corpse laid out in her old bedroom, white hair a nimbus around her head, face set in the weary half-smile that was her most common expression in life. The mustiness of a century hovered in the high-ceilinged rooms with their plaster moldings and varnished picture rails. Bedside cabinets held those bits of medical equipment—chipped enamel, crumbling red rubber—that furnish props for the last years of the aged.
The parlor was dominated by a large framed black-and-white print of Millais’ The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower, 1483, showing the doomed boys, pale and long-haired, fearfully clutching one another as they await murder by Richard III. What sort of person hangs such an image on his wall? It said a good deal about Archie’s state of mind. Even more sinister was a black cast-iron doorstop in the form of a grimacing hook-nosed Mister Punch. In every way—style, shape, weight—it was made to bash someone’s head in.
Only my baby sister was unaffected by the house’s brooding vibe. Finding the worn linoleum ideal for sliding, she rowed herself along on her diapered behind with a surprising turn of speed. We got used to her skimming down the hall and cornering expertly into the living room. Those of us with more weight, however, had problems. Dry rot was everywhere. Once, my foot broke through the boards, engulfing my leg to the thigh. The instant during which it dangled there, in what spider-infested dark I could only imagine, became a special horror I never forgot.
The musty closets and towering wardrobes in mahogany and oak hid tin trunks, rusty and dented, inside which were relics of Archie’s war. One contained pieces of uniform, badges and buttons, and puttees in khaki wool. It also included a German military belt embossed with the slogan Gott Mitt Uns—God is with us. Our father recalled, expressionlessly, that it was with this belt that he had been beaten as a child.
Another disclosed more militaria, including a pistol, a few rounds of rifle ammunition, and a brown felt hat. Australia has no more potent military symbol than the slouch hat, which is still worn today. A leather chin strap keeps it at a casual tilt, or “slouch,” toward the left ear. The brim is turned up on the right side and secured to the crown by a badge. Some regiments added a plume from that oddest of Australia’s birds, the flightless ostrich-like emu. Though an English cartoonist suggested that Anzacs wore the hat with the brim turned up since it allowed them to press their cheeks closer to that of the girls they met, the hat had an iconic significance emphasized in a patriotic song of the 1940s.
It’s a brown slouch hat with the side turned up, and it means the world to me.
It’s the symbol of our Nation—the land of liberty.
And as soldiers they wear it, how proudly they bear it, for all the world to see.
Just a brown slouch hat with the side turned up, heading straight for victory.
We also found the photograph.
Most families have at least one such image. Going to war, like getting married, was a rite of passage. It demanded a formal portrait. “Something to remember him by,” murmured relatives, “Just in case . . .” When the soldier returned, it wasn’t unusual to have another taken before he returned definitively to civilian life. (“You look so handsome in your uniform.”) Certain studios offered a confidential service to families whose son or father died unphotographed. They supplied a man of similar build, wearing the correct uniform, to pose with the bereaved relatives. In the darkroom, his face was replaced, not always convincingly, with the dead man’s features, taken from a snapshot.
As usual with studio portraits, the photographer posed Archie and Stella against a painted backcloth. Ironically, considering what I later learned of Archie’s war service, it shows a scene in rural France. Almost hidden by a grove of trees and separated from them by a stone balustrade, a château in the style of the Second Empire stands complacently in a landscape straight out of Corot.
Archie, in full uniform, including tightly wound puttees and peaked cap, sits on a hard wooden chair. Stella stands behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his arm. Wearing a wide plumed hat, ankle-length black dress, and small, round spectacles, she radiates will.
Did I imagine it or does she appear to be holding Archie down? And surely his expressionless stare and the clenched fists in his lap convey, more poignantly than any written or spoken word, the mute appeal, “Get me out of here!”
Our family was convinced that experiences in the trenches explained Archie’s erratic postwar behavior. Some believed he’d been wounded. Others suggested shell shock—today’s post-traumatic stress disorder.
My father hinted at a less medical reason. When I married Marie-Dominique and moved to Paris, he confided, with a significant wink, “If you see anyone on the streets who looks like you, the resemblance might be more than coincidence.” Though I pressed him for details, he offered none. But the very thought that I might have unacknowledged uncles or aunts in France made the prospect of living in Paris even more enticing.