Frank. 1941

 Frank. 1941

Nolene died when Frank was three days at sea, and it was two months later, in camp in Palestine, that the letter from home reached him. The news was not unexpected, he had lived with this dread for months now. A slip of a girl at 17, her “weak heart” had increasingly struggled. His mum had included with the letter a clipping of the death and burial notice from the “Yass Tribune”, and he stared at it through teary eyes, unable to escape its black-edged finality.

 

But it was the photo, taken on his last leave, which opened up the depths of his misery. Standing on the back steps of home, his mum and dad at the front, Frank and Nolene behind, her arm through his, a married sister on the top step. Nolene’s shy smile contrasting with the seriousness on every other face,  suppressing the fear of the farewell to the soldier off to war. The bond between brother and sister, always strong, had grown in recent years through increasing hospitalisations and the attentions of a big brother shaped by his own realisations that “next time” she may not pull through.

 

And now he cried, quietly. A private grief beyond the need for telling. He would find words, later, in his letter home.

 

The routine of life in camp, the endless marching and drills, soon dampened, then assimilated, his grief. Marching with gas masks, without gas masks. With bayonets and entrenching tools, without encumbrances. Quickly they learned that the job they had come to do, was in fact already done and dusted. Instead of joining the fight for the liberation of Syria and Lebanon, their job was now simply to protect the peace that had already been won while they were still on the boat on the way over. Didn’t come all this way to be bloody police, they muttered.

 

Although based primarily in Palestine, his unit also visited Lebanon and Egypt. Ostensibly this was to relieve other units who had secured the peace, but this was easily done and there was plenty of time for sight-seeing. Like so many travellers, he viewed his surroundings through the lens of a distant, and younger, culture. Photos sent home carried full descriptions on the back:  in Lebanon, a two up school outside  the Australian Club in Beirut (“a very nice town in parts”); in Egypt, a street scene in Alexandria (“a grand old place – note the trams”); in Palestine, the military cemetery in Jerusalem(“very well kept and looked after – a real credit”), Bethlehem (“an old ramshackle place – this snap flatters it”), a street in the old city of Jerusalem (“very narrow and cobbled stoned ….. very shiny and slippery….some of the streets stink a hell of a lot….nice clean people”), Arab market place in Haifa (“where the boys have fun bargaining for a long time and buying nothing”), the main street in Gaza (“the town of stinks and more stinks”), and a beachfront and street in Tel Aviv (“notice the Hotel Hess…there are a lot of German names in the town”).

 

Strangely enough, Frank found himself drawn to the souks and markets of the bigger towns, particularly in Jerusalem. He had never liked crowds, hated “shopping”, and had scant regard for the locals. His letters home displayed a casual racism on all matters Jewish and Arabic. And yet, he was drawn to their shops. Particularly the souvenir shops and those selling religious postcards and items of Christian piety.

 

Raised a Catholic, he now didn’t know what he believed. Two younger sisters had been “taken back into the arms of a loving God”. He had heard these words from well-meaning others, even his own mother, but they no longer made sense or brought him any comfort. Why would God want to take little Faith back to himself, to heaven? Why would a loving God want to inflict such misery and grief on his parents, on his family? Did she bring too much joy to her family? Was she not washed clean of “Original Sin” at her baptism? He clearly remembered the bubbling infant, baby of the family, dead in her third year. Soldiering had opened his eyes to the arbitrariness of life and death, and god-talk just didn’t make sense any more.

 

Yet here he was, in the shops, buying religious souvenirs. Postcards of the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Church of the Nativity in Nazareth, the Via Dolorosa. Rosary beads, “blessed by the Pope” himself. A wooden box, with inscription of the 3 wise men on their way to pay homage to the Christ-child. His messages on the postcards found an eloquence and cadence he had long forgotten, in words and phrases from his convent education. He knew his mother would cherish these postcards, would dwell on these words. Frank was in the Holy Land, was seeing the actual places where Jesus lived and died, was walking in His footsteps. It gave him a comfort he could feel but couldn’t describe.  It was enough to know that what he was doing felt right, that it would mean so much to his mum.

 

As Christmas approached, he was still posted in Palestine. A few of the boys were going to midnight Mass at Bethlehem, nearby. Perhaps it was the memories of Christmas Masses in years past, from his childhood, that impelled him to join them. A link with the certainties of a life before the unknown future of a war to be fought. As much as he had accompanied his family to Sunday observance when at home on leave, he had otherwise felt no need for several years to cross the threshold of a church as a worshipper. And yet here he was, reciting the common language of the Catholic faith, in the birthplace of the Christ-child, this Christmas Eve, 1941. “Introibo ad altarem Dei”, intoned the Franciscan Friar –“I will go in to the altar of God” – and the response he had learnt as an altar-boy in far away Yass rose unbidden from his memory : “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” – “to God, the joy of my youth”.

 

If he had thought anything at all about these holy places of Palestine, he had pictured them as grand, imposing places. He had seen pictures of the immensity of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and he assumed all the iconic places of his boyhood memory were likewise built to emphasise the distance between God and man. He had now seen for himself the grandeur of the basilica in Jerusalem, its very structure itself emphasising the immensity of the story of the sacred triduum, the 3 days of Christ’s death and Resurrection. But this little church at Bethlehem could have been any poor parish church in the wide brown land down under. Its simplicity echoed the story of the manger birth upon which it had been built. Frank felt comfortable. In the simplicity of this place, the familiar rhythms of worship, the Latin carols, the incense rising in perfumed clouds, he felt a calmness spreading to the corners of his mind where residual grief and anger had resided these months past.

 

Back in camp, word spread that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbour earlier that December, and incomplete fragments of news told of an astonishing, fearful spread of large forces through the Pacific. Let’s get out of this place and back to where we can be bloody useful and do something that matters, his mates had muttered.  It was no surprise when the message came through, pack up and be ready to move out within a week.

 

He hadn’t yet sent the postcard purchased in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, and now he wrote.

 

Dear Mum and Dad,

I thought of you and the girls at Mass here on Christmas Eve and said a prayer for you all, and especially for Nolene and Faith. As you can see, it’s not a grand church, and they say that the altar is on the spot where the manger was where Jesus was born. A few of us boys were there but hardly anyone else as most of the locals are moslems. Before the war, the Friar said there would usually be a crowd of pilgrims but of course that’s all changed now. I will have some interesting news next time I write. Hope you have received the other postcards and I said a prayer for you all at all those places. I think I now understand what my faith means and what I hold onto. God bless. Love Frank

 

Well before the postcard arrived home, he had himself arrived in Australia and been immediately deployed to the Northern Territory. Anti-aircraft gunners were needed in the defence of Darwin and its scattered airfields, but his family was not to know that for some time.

 

His mother recognised the special whistle from the postie, and hurried to the letterbox for Frank’s latest letter. With shaking hands she sat on the couch on the verandah, and carefully opened the envelope. It’s a postcard she said to her husband, and together they read it, drinking in the familiar scrawl. It was the writing itself which made Frank present, and she could hear him in the choice of words and phrases. Just fancy, said his father, being in the actual place Jesus was born. But even as he said it, he sensed the dark cloud enveloping his wife.

 

Inside, his mother sat at the little table whose top drawer kept all Frank’s letters. Reaching lower, she put the postcard in a bottom drawer, with the other three already received. She had read them all, but she couldn’t bear to look at them again. She knew she could never tell Frank how much these images of the holy places of Christendom disturbed her, stoking again her despair at the death of daughters too early dead. She found herself even hating his newly-found god talk, and hating even more the distance from him this realisation brought. With a shudder, she now saw clearly what she had previously but dimly perceived. She could not, would not, believe in a merciless god who took her innocents, a god of war who let die the blameless in cities, in ships, in armies everywhere.

 

But there was no other god to believe in. She closed the drawer. Please, no more postcards.