I grew up believing you got out of the madness by manufacturing your own.
And they bought it with some derision, some torment and some reluctance.
I heard tell on many occasions you had the snot kicked out of you but still you did not serve.
I'm married now with a new born son, you would say.
I cannot hear in that ear, you said. (This because you had perforated your own eardrum with a pencil and in my books that takes some small courage for a coward).
Your brother went off to Africa with the 9th and stayed stock still under the stinking, unrecognisable remains of human beings whose uniforms were the same colour as his own while the enemy slowly passed, gloating and terrified as he himself had been mere days before. In this sanity-rending manner he saved his body, but as with all else about war, I cannot for a second imagine what it cost him inside himself.
And although he would see little of the viciousness of shot, shit and shell, yet another brother would lose the little a young man can know of himself in the interminable deluges of New Guinea.
While you were daily subjected to the ordeals of avoiding an honest day's work and grubbing through the less famed battles of Annandale and Leichhardt, Darlinghurst, Glebe and Rozelle. Grifting and stealing and wheedling and scamming where you could, keeping a razor in your pocket, just as you had done as a boy, as a teen (for let's face it, you were ancient by the age of twenty two, just as your daughters and sons after you would be).
So many things I was told, never to learn if they were true or not.
Ah well,
I'm old now and past caring and I only know that I didn't like you as you lived
But at least with the going down of the sun and in the morning,
I will remember them.
Very differently to how I remember you.
And not so very differently at all.
Wail
