Judy Crozier

Tell Me

Later. Alone. 1968

I scrambled in the pocket of the suitcase for that postcard, sent, what – a year ago? Why did I keep it? Perhaps because it made us laugh. Or because it made me laugh. Or just because it was so like Jack. I read it, and looked at the unlikely lurid palm trees on the other side, and read it again, until my eyes blurred and I felt suddenly that I couldn’t breathe:

Greetings to you both. Am brown with sun and sea, and sleep late

after nights of women and song.

Yet can’t wait to argue with Robert and drink your whisky,

listen to the drone of jets, learn

civilization from Ailsa.

Prepare the ice!

Cheerio, Jack.

1961

March to June: Settling in.

We are in Vietnam now. In Saigon. Barbed-wire years in Asian and South East Asian mountains and deserts, villages and lonely mining camps have made Robert an ‘expert’, apparently, in all things South East Asian.

Now, suddenly he is attached to the Australian embassy here. The diplomatic community is an enchanted circle, as mining communities never were. Time ticks quietly for us while the country urges on all around, beyond the hedge between our house and the street. Beyond our street, beyond the city and into the countryside and every water-filled paddy.

I have sunk into this elegance and its nuances – all the strategic introductions, over canapes, time spent before a mirror adjusting hair, face and a little subtle jewellery, a little Chanel No. 5 – grateful though a little self-conscious at the careful language, the listening for innuendo, silver on the table…after those years of ragged edges and protected compounds.

Remember, we wore guns on our hips then.

I am thinking: a tour here of a couple of years away from armoured cars, snakes and bandits, then, perhaps, back home. A house near the sea, eventually: a large, muscled gum tree draped in bark. Tea on the veranda with friends. Magpies and kookaburras. My mother’s pleated smile; white, white hair floating in filaments from her bun. My children… to be in Australia together, all together for more than those short visits to Phillip at his school. How odd that will be.

But Phillip is still over there – growing, growing; his voice cracking; his adolescent face hopefully clearing – still at school, with its quadrangles and ivy and cricket, to visit us once a year and to be sometimes visited. And Laura, much younger, is with us here.

She has hair like palest fairy-floss, bones tiny as a bird’s, talks to strangers with her head on one side and her feet just a little pigeon-toed. She grasps my skirt in a crowd. The hand I hold along footpaths, across roads, through crowds, is impossibly small. She looks at me with dark eyes and her chin raised, and speaks softly, mostly, like a sleepy chick, though there are shriller days and moments. She is never indecisive; waist-high, she stands erect and points a tiny finger: ‘That one.’

I had a sense of mild disconnection when she was born, so utterly white and pink, tiny tufts of silver on her head, then the focus of those eyes strengthening day by day. She has woken to her six birthdays alien to several different environments. So far these have been reasonably conducive to the presence of this child. It hasn’t always been that way, given the places Robert has taken me.

My daughter often, usually, plays alone in her room, soundless in the hum of the air conditioner. The sounds of the street kept at bay behind the shutters, she spends hours stretched on the cool tiles, surrounded by paper; drawing princesses with very long hair, ballooning skirts and rather short arms. Occasionally she draws a male, the prince I suppose, who looks androgynous and awkward in armour. Or she may be making constructions of her furniture and her bedclothes, sheets tied to knobs and bedhead, the paper and pencils temporarily abandoned. For this, she borrows straw from the garage and sits happily all the hushed siesta, a prisoner on bread and water in her cell of knotted sheets and chair-backs. It is one of her messier games, and probably the least popular among the servants, who end by tidying up the aftermath.

Sometimes, just sometimes, in the middle of the day and apropos of nothing very much, I am struck by the very foreignness of Laura’s childhood compared to mine. I lift my head, say when she raises her voice to talk to our servant-in-chief, Chi Ba, and I almost blink in surprise to see her pad her way barefooted so sure of herself across the expanse of tiling, cross to the hand-knotted Indian carpet, look up into Chi Ba’s so very Asian face.

And here’s a cultural conundrum, I suppose. Chi Ba’s name is Nguyen Thi Thu, but we call her Chi Ba. Laura calls her that, I think that’s right because the woman is older. Is she older than me? Or is it a polite form?

Many times after dinner, the house is empty of Laura while she visits the servants. If I stand on the front porch I can hear her voice, high-pitched and endlessly questioning. The answers are comfortable; there is the sound of a saucepan being scraped. Laura often begs, she tells me, for the burnt edges of rice that would otherwise be soaked and scattered for birds.

Someone, usually Chi Ba, might sing something intricately Vietnamese.

Sometimes I see Laura through the window, pottering in the garden, dropping stones into the well, calling into it to catch an echo. She chatters to that gormless dog the gardener brought us. To guard the house, we were told, though we had our doubts about the rotund puppy periodically knocked off his feet by his own tail-wagging enthusiasms. A week after he was brought to us, he found the front gate ajar and adventured a few moments in the traffic. Struck across the haunches by a motorcycle, he has had no more foreign adventures. He is faithful to the point of neuroticism. There is a scar hardening across his rump and his tail still whisks hysterically. Brenda the kitten tends to walk around him – if she must – in a wide circle.

Alone in my room sometimes, Laura will borrow my shoes and giggle as she teeters. I’ll find her with a scarf around her head because she yearns for that heavy fall of hair that Asian women have, the hair that all her princesses have.

I remember, when Phillip was the only child, his forays as a small knight, his helmet snipped from an old dried milk tin, a sword of stiffened tin-foil, a cloak from an old sack.

Other times, Laura sits on the edge of my bed in her pyjamas, smelling of soap, with her hair drying slowly into a cloud. The shutters are closed; the air conditioning creates a slight chill, the twin beds are crisp, turned down for the night. She is intent as I dab scent, silk rustling. Robert and I are preparing for another embassy evening. He whistles tunelessly in the sitting room and tinkles the ice in his whisky. She rattles on to me about her day and her questions. I am steadily drawing on an eyebrow. I stab at an earlobe with the stalk of an earring, to find the hole; I’m still not used to earrings as daily wear. Laura is absolutely certain of my knowledge. There is a short pause as I stretch my mouth for the lipstick. The talk is about everything a child can think of or an adult might want to teach: current events; people liked or disliked; my childhood – exotic to her – of corseted life in provincial Australia; and the rights of women; favourite tales about my father, a vicar plodding and correct in all things except when crouched in apparent racing-mode behind the wheel of his beloved Ford, through whose windscreen we watched the terrified populace scatter.

‘There was very little chatter and hardly any breathing done in that car,’ I say. ‘Though sometimes my mother would squeak, and he might then slow down for a few minutes.’ Laura laughs at this point, of course. Phillip always did, too.

Sometimes she asks to brush my hair, after my bath or before I dress for an occasion, but really it’s a job for more vigour than she can provide.

Evenings, I have been thinking, are the times when it’s most evident how we now live a separate life, in these our enclosures. Even our cooled air isn’t what the locals breathe.

In any case, she must go to school. Yesterday, before the afternoon rain, we went to meet the nuns who will teach her. Our sandaled feet crunched on gravel. Laura’s red plastic schoolbag hung from its strap and bounced against her hip. She felt she should take it along, with its brand-new shine and chemical smell, though there’ll be no need for it until September. I struggled in my inadequate French with this fleshy woman; Mère Marie St Bernard, in starched tropical-white habit, who looked at me with a half-smile on her red and sweating face. I laboured on with schoolgirl grammar. Laura gazed through the window: another nun hurried across the expanse of white-gravelled ground. The wooden beads of her rosary swinging from side to side, she slipped from bright, steaming sun to the green gloom of clustered trees and fronds. There was a pause. Mère Marie St Bernard spoke Laura’s name. The child looked across, solemn, surprised and light-blinded in the darker room, her hair a near-white nimbus, her feet hooked around each other swinging well short of the floor, and, I could see, Mère Marie St Bernard fell in love.

I contemplate Mère Marie St Bernard, and her well-trained beatific smile. I can’t help but feel the vicar’s blood – my father’s blood – rise up in me. This city is everywhere filled with the sophistications of the French overlords, now largely departed, and I do have a sense that, much as my Anglicanism has receded, nonetheless I must guard my daughter’s soul, and perhaps even my own. Mère Marie St Bernard looks over to me, half-smiling and in her element. I wonder if I am adequate against this adversary.

For a moment I picture Phillip in his grey uniform, his cap and his blue tie, coming to the end of his life of dormitories, desks, and chapel.

We’re home; we’ve had our lunch; the air-conditioner is on; a novel lies propped open next to me. In the adjoining bed there is a faint scrape as a page is turned. Robert reads science fiction, or a detective novel, or adventures, whose language is taciturn and manly and whose heroes invariably go it alone. It is swash-buckling romance, but I could never tell him so. After all, in imagination he lives there still. It was there with the British in Malaya; in the secret hills of Burma; when brutalised miners of Bolivia battled their government for a pittance. He sees it in the battle here, against communism, far away in the countryside. I glance over to see what he’s reading: it’s a Rex Stout. Robert stirs his tea; the spoon tinkles against the glass.

Yet. Back in the days of the Malaysian villages waiting for blood in the night, or the Burmese Karens crouched over their work and glancing up as the soldiers swaggered by, or the Bolivian miners’ anger over their stolen pittance – Robert was not the man to deny utterly the causes of those he worked with most closely. He keeps his scorn for those who do.

The embassy car arrives. Robert returns to work.

I am left with my own paper and pencil, bolstered by the pillows of the bed and thinking about meals to be discussed with Thi, the cook, or an invitation list for the forthcoming socially obligatory dinner party. Then I’ll place guests strategically and look forward to an evening spent overseeing food and making sure conversation doesn’t turn into battle. This is my job, I’ve come to realise, a little in the vein of secretaries who maintain their employer’s business.

For some reason, I’m suddenly put in mind of the forward-and-back dancing of generals, royals and diplomats in intrigue just before the Great War. I wear a little smirk of irony. I hope my canapes and charm have greater effect. They also serve, who only serve champagne. I roll my eyes at myself.

In any case, today I am writing a letter to my mother, which I do because one remains connected; and because the events, sometimes, need to be chronicled. I am the chronicler. What I write depends on my audience, and I’ll think a little on who these might be. Some will want more than others.

Over the years, I sent photographs to my mother: pictures of one and then another child born in a strange outpost of the world. Of the tiny baby Phillip, blinking in the sun and dust of the Indian desert; of my son, solemn and awkward, gripping his swaddled sister; of me, olive skinned, my dark hair in those days unruly in waves; of Robert, fair and angular, imperious in a wide bamboo armchair, contemplating Laura’s lacy white smallness against a background of palms and Malaysian frangipanis. There are photographs we did not send, of barbed wire, soldiers and watchfulness; an alertness that has been life in all of Robert’s postings in mines dotted about this troubled Asia and beyond.

I’ve written about cold Andean mountaintops where life for most is simple endurance; and about the heat of that crackling Indian desert, where we carried our mattress into the cooler garden at night. There have been self-censored renderings of troubled revolts, and those moonlit battles between the Burmese army and Karen tribespeople, held so often in our own garden that we could count a dozen bullet holes in the walls of our house by the time we left.

But here in Saigon, trouble is distant from boulevards, and streets sound only with the honking, parping and hooting of every manner of horns and bells, the calling out of vendors, the murmur of friends in their wooden sandals. Such wide boulevards, and French-inspired government buildings important against the curved roofs of temples. On our road, which heads off to the airport, are the houses of Europeans, and the tiny streets like tributaries that lead the carts, motorbikes, cyclos and bicycles of residents from their crammed homes into the river of traffic.

Strangely, I have less, somehow, to do with those whose voices I hear now as they chatter past our hedge. The letters I write these days are about stories told to me by people who have themselves heard them. The diplomatic corps, after all, reports best on whispers and rumour. Murmurs and private, elliptical meetings. That’s my impression, anyway. The diplomatic corps lives a step apart. I feel I am watching them, myself another step away as I encourage them with cubes of cheese speared by toothpicks and then muse both to myself and to my audience, with chronicler’s circumspection.

This circumspection is new for me. I think it creates circles: a small group at the centre, the rest of us, as I see it, in our own circle at one remove. And so on.

I have rattled away all these years on my successive Olivettis with my still-respectable eighty words a minute, for which I must thank Stott’s Business College. And my father, who no doubt thought his daughter would do well as secretary for a few years until she married a respectable businessman and settled into somewhere a gentle drive from the vicarage.

Sometimes, fingers paused over the keys, I remember my father as he ran, pale and straining to wave as he thudded hopeless in his best shoes along the pier. That was my last image of him, that running and waving, lungs straining. With a great bellow, the ship was away. Streamers, and waving, and calling goodbye. I was off to join my Robert in exotic lands I knew nothing of; my father was steeped in foreboding. Overseas, if it was not England, was a frightening place.

And it was 1940. What was I thinking?

He died midway through our stay in India, after his nightmares had come true when we were pushed out of Burma ahead of the advancing Japanese.

There’s a clench when I think of him.

And it comes to me from time to time that, in all her life, my daughter never met my father. And he only knew of my son from the tiniest of photographs: a miniature story in shades of gray.

I look down at the little Olivetti. There’s a sentence there, unfinished, waiting for me.

Years ago, I wrote short stories, interrupted by friends who tapped on the door knowing, they said, that as they could hear the typewriter they knew I wasn’t busy. No-one is likely to tap on my door here, not even for tea.

July: remembrance of times past, danger and theatre

There was an evening out, after the afternoon rain. Not a late one, but the whisky flowed at the Continental at the tables pulled together for minor embassy people, a couple of journalists and a photographer. It was fine, actually, and comfortable for us. There was that remembered sense of a working adventure I hadn’t realised we’d got used to in all those mining communities rumbling with the effects of local enmities and politics. It’s a way of life, whereas a diplomats’ party is a piece of theatre, with costumes and script, not to mention understated peacemaking and introductions for an understood end. In those other communities something dangerous could leak to the surface at any time; perhaps that’s what groups of journalists and photographers overseas will always conjure up.

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