I suggest you bookmark this page, or else you'll end up getting lost

Click on any image

CHAPTER 11

Trojan Crunch !

 

Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, Pelues’ son, and the ruinous wrath that brought upon the Achaians innumerable woes... and it was bloody great. I loved it. The most difficult thing I had read so far and I remember how apprehensively I approached it, all that blank verse poetry and proliferation of words I didn’t understand. I persisted because it got hold of me and made me do so. And once the riproaring battle began and the defeated warriors bit the dust (literally), I was hooked. The Iliad became my new favourite book.

And Meriones slew Phereklos, son of Tekton Harmon’s son, whose hands were cunning to make all manner of curious work; for Pallas Athene loved him more than all men. He likewise built Alexandros the trim ships, source of ills, that were made the Lord of all the Trojans and himself, because he knew not the oracles of heaven. Meriones pursued, and overtaking him smote him in the right buttock, and right through passed the point to the bladder beneath the bone; and he fell to his knees with a cry, and death overshadowed him.

Then Meges slew Pedaios Antenor’s son, that was a bastard; yet goodly Theano nurtured him carefully like to her own children, to do her husband pleasure. To him Phyleus’ spear-framed son came near, and with keen dart smote him upon the sinew of the head; and right through amid the teeth the point of bronze cleft the tongues root. So he fell in the dust, and bit the cold bronze with his teeth.

Warrior after warrior, dozens of them, get their mini-biography before the death blow falls upon them, their slayer often delivering a stirring speech in fine poetry before or after the kill. Blows to the temple send helmets flying, severed limbs splash in dark pools of blood, a complete liver slips out and the butt end of a spear quivers as the heart it pierces thumps its final beats. They bite the dust, fall in their rattling armour, hollow hands clutching at life as it slips away from them, and darkness closes over them. Whereby the reserve warriors rush in to scavenge armour and weapons so that they may join the fray themselves. Back and forth between the black ships on the wine-dark sea and the windy walls of Troy, the battle rages, and the gods often join in even though they frequently fare as badly as the favourites they defend.

And the characters, those noble leaders Agamemnon and Priam, sulky Achilles and sturdy Hector, and the chief inspirers on both sides, Odysseus and Aeneas, and the all-slaughtering giants Diomedes and Ajax and… it goes on magnificently, the most vivid battle scenes ever depicted, and they still have few peers despite the innumerable men who have written of their wars.

Of course, not a word of it was true. Homer lived at least three hundred years after the Trojan War and had no written records to go on (which, had they existed, he could not have read anyway because he was blind)—it relied entirely on myth and legend. It mattered not one jot. Twenty-seven centuries later, I fought in the Vietnam War, between which conflict and the Trojan War there was not the slightest point of comparison. Nevertheless, what Homer wrote is just exactly the way it felt.

At those times between classes when the student body of Moorabbin Tech were turned loose—not to mention on what were dubiously called sports days—the schoolyard resembled nothing quite so much as an ancient battlefield. Apart from the continual eruptions of fights, there were more orderly skirmishes such as the simple game of kick-to-kick where up to a dozen footballs would be booted back and forth between two groups of several hundred boys. No one ever considered dividing them into more practical groups with one football each—instead a pack of twenty or more would fly for each mark, and more than thirty scouts would swoop if the ball spilled to the ground. A lunch break when I managed to get one kick was cause for jubilation.

When your turn came to bat at cricket, you faced a continual stream of bowlers hurtling in like planes out of the stack at a busy airport, such that you barely had time to retake your stance before the next bouncer would come flying at your head. Everything they did was done for the most violent and chaotic effects possible. The school employed a full-time nurse who was the busiest person in the establishment. But of all the dangerous, berserk activities that went on in the yard daily, nothing was the equal of the game of Trojan Crunch.

"I have to piss again!" he yelled out. "I have to… I have to… I have to!" And he made water, a high arching jet that splattered the leaves and vines. This time he felt the pain, like a long slicing sliver of glass ripping through him. He closed his eyes, the colour drained from his face.

"Now!" he shouted—a high-pitched cracking sound. "It will be easier with that done!" He coughed, grabbed hold of a branch and pulled himself forward, and those Germans who had heard him coming finally saw the Centurion, and made ready with their darts.

The first one entered the fleshy part of Talt’s shoulder, and Talt, feeling his new pain, stopped, looked at the dart, started to laugh. He tore it out, did not wince as the barbs widened the initial wound. Flicking his tongue over his dry, cracked lips, he tried to search the bushes, the trees for some sign of the enemy. He thought he saw them; a branch bent, and he yelled, and made toward it.

What he had been looking for, he finally found.

Three more darts entered his body, each one prodding him on. There was blood in his mouth, a wet tangy substance that he could taste—recognise. Branches were split as he crashed through them. He caught a brief sight of one of the Germans, went after him, and a spear whistled down through the undergrowth and entered his side. He fell to his knees, tried to pull it out, but his hands slipped with the blood, would not take a firm grasp. He tried to stand, but his legs would not move. He tried to think of something else, a something he must have been taught a long time ago—a way to deal with such a wound as this. But there was nothing, only a film of darkness that began to move out and over the surface of his sight. A part of his mind split away from him. He realised he was dying. For a moment he wondered if it was really true. He had not expected death to be the way it was, like the opening, spreading thighs of a woman…

In the year of Rome 762, nine years after the birth of Christ, three Roman legions under the command of Proconsul P. Quintilius Varus were trapped in a dense forest near the Rhine and, unable to hold their formations and tactics, were slaughtered by German tribes. It was the first step toward the fall of the empire, and it sent Emperor Augustus run through his palace in a frenzy, shrieking "Varus, give me back my legions."

These events were graphically described in a nasty little paperback called The Three Legions by Gregory Solon—the author’s name and writing skills he deployed strongly suggests some better writer working under a pseudonym—and it described the battle scenes with a new sense of realism. The army is crippled by venereal disease and weakened by its other indulgences, the toughest soldier is left exposed to German arrows when he needs to take a cripplingly painful piss, the heroes fumble and stumble in the mud and the blood. I loved it. Unfortunately, the author wasn’t able to find a story to match his graphic descriptive skills and pinched the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles over a whore from The Iliad. Silly bugger. `With a barbarian beauty lay the fate of 30,000 Roman soldiers’ the lurid cover screamed. Actually, there were only 25,000. I treasure it still, even if I am just a little bit ashamed of it.

Now at this time in my delicate development, there occurred a television comedy that gave me pause. In fact, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis—which was such a classic that its name can safely be shortened to Dobie in any company over 25—was based on a novel by Budd Schulberg who usually wrote books that were turned into tough movies like On the Waterfront and The Harder They Fall, but this was a semi-autobiographical comedy about his sexual misadventures as a post-adolescent. The series was funnier than most, and had a lot going for it—Bob Denver’s immortal creation of the beatnik Maynard G. Krebbs (even better than his second immortal creation, Gilligan), the delights of the gorgeous Tuesday Weld in the early episodes and Frank Faylen’s eternally hassled father figure. Best of all were those wonderful monologues delivered straight to camera by Dwayne Hickman as the protagonist, placed before a looming replica of Rodan’s thinker, which, while an inferior imitation of George Burns’ discourses on Gracie Allen’s antics, was nevertheless a television milestone.

So what was the problem? This ! Here was a TV presentation of an exact contemporary of myself, same age, same situation—albeit American and from slightly wealthier circumstances—and in theory his concerns and feelings and activities should have held up some sort of mirror to my own life. It did nothing of the kind. Keenly aware of this fact from the first episode, weekly I hunted for some slight sign, some wee moment, when the events on-screen might have been connected—however minimally—to some aspect of my life. It never happened. Not one millisecond—not even the vaguest parallel. Was America truly on a different planet? (If only… sighs the rest of the world)

Slowly a much more horrible truth dawned on me. You just could not believe everything you saw on television.

Like those nightly news reports, for instance, of a war being fought by those same Americans in an obscure place called Laos. Now this Laos seemed to be a friendly Buddhist pacifist innocuous sort of place where the young men were drafted as monks rather than soldiers and there just didn’t seem to be any reason why anyone would want to fight a war with them. Nor was there. But the US bombs rained down as they are wont to do, and the images of devastated orphanages were all too common.

It turned out, of course, that the Laotian War was the overt side of a covert war being fought in secret in its neighbour, Vietnam, which no one wanted to admit to. Even in the present age as new revelations occasionally appear concerning US terrorism there, it’s still called The Secret War in Laos, but that was never the secret bit and it still isn’t. Even the new revelations are themselves new lies…

An expedition of six scientists—three Russians and three Englishmen—sets out across the harsh Kalahari Desert with the most worthy of intentions—that of accurately measuring one meridian and therefore calculating the true circumference of the Earth. As the very unimaginative title—Measuring a Meridian—suggests, Jules Verne is not really in his best form here, but he does have something to say nevertheless. They all get along just fine and progress well despite the difficulties of the terrain, until suddenly word arrives that the Crimean War has broken out, dividing them against each other. Some think their work takes precedence over petty political squabbles, others that national pride matters more than any silly measurements, still others don’t care.

But militarists have a way of imposing themselves, and they fight their own minor version of the war, until the ferocity of the environment, the savage natives and the bands of marauding baboons oblige them to call a truce and join forces again. And somehow, in the midst of all this, the job gets done. Captain Nemo’s anti-war ideas are carried here with great effect, and the stupidity of war was never more evident.

The structure of the game of Trojan Crunch was as simple as could be. Half the school population would line up across the width of the yard, the other half would line up twenty-five yards away facing them, and when the moment came, both would charge. The astonishing whop! that arose from the bodies of five hundred boys at full tilt slamming into those of five hundred other boys meeting them head-on was an awesomely exhilarating sensation, no matter how horrifying it might otherwise have been.

The objective was to come out the other side in one piece. Amazingly, no one was ever killed or even seriously maimed—the resilience of young boys is the most indestructible force on the planet—but almost everyone came out bruised and battered. Any notions of the mental scarring involved were laughable.

Of course the game was banned, on pain of every known threat and punishment, and therefore took place only about once a week. It would take that length of time for the various rival gangs of bodgies to egg each other into it, allegiances switching from side to side continually. In winter the sides were jumpers and shirts, in summer singlets and skins. You chose your own side simply by adjusting your attire appropriately. The only other rule was that everyone had to participate—the most evil gangs of bodgies would roam every possible hiding place to flush out cowards. A sufficient number of pacifying teachers had found themselves trapped in the middle of the crunch to ensure that usually the staff turned a blind eye to the whole affair.

Georgette Heyer might be regarded as a female Denis Wheatley, doubling between historical romances and modern thrillers. If so, she never captured my interest. The Conqueror was the tale of William, 1066 and all that. My copy natural falls open on page 374 where Harold falls in a very undramatic fashion.

King Harold had fallen at the foot of the standard. Men dropped on their knees beside him. He was quite dead, must have died instantly. An arrow dropping through the dusk had pierced through one eye to the brain.

The only way this could have happened was if he was standing on his head at the time. It was all about half as interesting, less informative and far less visually appealing as reading the Bayeaux Tapestry. I never bothered with Heyer again.

But history didn’t have to be the boring stuff they failed to teach us in classes. Sellar and Yeatman, for instance, wrote a scurrilous little book that parodied the whole thing called 1066 and All That. The title, however, was the funniest bit of it. But we loved its irreverence toward the great personages of the (British) past.

Why were they all like stone statues ! Why was the fort so utterly and horribly silent ? Why did nothing move, there in the fierce sunlight of the dawn ? Why this tomb-like, charnel-house, inhuman silence and immobility ?...

When, as in a dream, I rode right round the place, and beheld more and more of these motionless silent forms, with their fixed, unwinking eyes, I clearly saw one of them, whose kepi had fallen from his head, had a hole in the centre of his forehead and was dead—although at his post, with chest and elbows leaning on the parapet, and looking as though he was about to fire his rifle !

I am rather near-sighted, as you know, but then the truth dawn upon me—they were all dead !

Beau Geste was a wonder but I stopped short of the many sequels by P. C. Wren although I did follow up with a bunch of stories under the grabbing title Dead Men’s Boots.

Having been shot twice, and rolled upon thrice by the big mule, Xarro was quite definitely dead. Being dead, he had no further use for his excellent boots—even less for them than I had for my old ones...

The War in the Air saw HG Wells at the peak of his predictive powers, and what he got wrong is as interesting as what he got right. Writing in 1907, he failed to imagine heavier-than-air aircraft, hence the great airfleets are variants on Wright Flyers, Zeppelins and hot air balloons. And he failed to anticipate that there would be two world wars – believing that one would be enough. But he got the antagonists right – the Germans versus the rest, and then the Japanese cashing in with their own conquest of Asia while the west was busy. The notion that the principle would be bombing cities was what he got most right, but he could not see how the aircraft could successfully attack each other. He did not anticipate atomic bombs, but thought that conventional bombing would be able to have the same general effect, blasting humanity back into the stone age. And once it all began it was unstoppable – he did not anticipate that populations would be able to stop wars.

He has a nondescript hero named Bert (his own name), an aviator captured early by the Germans and whose expertise they need. As a prisoner, he rides with the great airfleet and it blasts its way across Europe, over the Atlantic and stages a huge attack on New York. (Meanwhile, the Japanese get into the act with swordsman pilots and superior aircraft). Bert harbours the secret of a superior type of plane that will beat them all.

The final battle, for Bert and the German Prince who leads the assault, occurs over Niagara and they crash on Goat Island in the middle of the falls. Bert shoots the Germans and escapes. Wells was so deeply into his ideas and far removed from his characters that he had Bert rescue a kitten and then forget it. As the last fires burn in the last cities, Bert makes his way home to England where anarchy prevails and his girl Edna has been claimed by a rival. Bert guns down the male members of the bridal party and runs off with Edna, getting clean away with it because all law and order has broken down.

Once the time was set, the event moved inexorably toward its fruition. The boys gathered and picked their side, all shapes and sizes, and you tried to assess the best side to be on and the best people to be behind. Singlets and jumpers went on and off willy-nilly as boys trooped back and forth across no-man’s land as they re-assessed their possibilities of survival, wading through the long grass and the tumult of threats and curses hurling back and forth between the groups.

There was never any order to it, no one commanded the charge. Most often it fizzled, the build-up somehow losing it heat and we would troop back to class when the bell rang, and oddly it was always somewhat disappointing when the charge never came. But other times the emotions would boil over, and the charge would be on—once one side started, the other knew that offence was by far the best chance for survival. For at the back of the ranks, the senior boys, the veterans with nothing to prove, prowled to intercept run-aways and give them a far worse kicking that they might have received in the crunch.

At Mr Wackford Squeers’ Academy, Dotheboys Hall…. Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, provided with all necessities, instructed in all languages living and dead… No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled.

Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

Nicholas Nickleby? No thank you. Oliver Twist on his way to becoming David Copperfield, with none of the merits of either. I really don’t understand how people could like this one. They reckon it’s a fine example of Dickensian energy and spirit but I must have skimmed over those bits. A wormy hero, dreary misfortunes and even more improbable recoveries. Squeers, the villain, does his best to liven things up but he is such a germ that the task is beyond him. Dickens was trying to describe his version of a Moorabbin Tech, but it was all too exaggerated (no matter how true) to be believable. The point is that, having also attended an abominable academic institution, I should have been able to connect with this, but I encountered no point of comparison. Perhaps that is the reason for my disappointment while all around me they sing its praises. Looking through my copy—which I read I know not when—and having seen one movie, one play and two TV series made from the bloody thing without my initial impression of tedium being altered one iota—I hardly found any part of it I remembered.

Of course, Dickens was still in development at this stage and allowances must be made in all fairness. You just can’t expect a genius to be a genius all the time. Of his seventeen novels, he produced at least five masterpieces by anyone’s count, (more than anyone else in all literature) and five more pretty good ones. This is one of the other seven.

At around this time, the making of the movie The Misfits received a lot of attention, although it is rarely seen these days and would probably have been rather minor had it not been the fact that it was the last film for three of its stars—Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe. They all looked pretty ill on screen; the two men were dead before the film was released and MM soon after. The title had obvious appeal to my sort of person, but in fact referred to a bunch of stray horses of a type unsuitable for any purpose, and therefore reflected the trio of aging cowboys who try to round them up. But when girlfriend-along-for-the-ride Monroe discovers the horses will be sold for dogmeat, she tries to save them. A pretty sorrowful business all the way around, although you really had to live through the time to fully experience the tragedy of it all. The death of immortals is the saddest of all.

It didn’t take long for me and others like me to start figuring out ways of avoiding Trojan Crunch. The one good thing about bodgies is because they have so little regard for intelligence, so they aren’t very bright. Week by week, I would search the school and surrounding region for hiding places, to which I could retire when the crunch was on. Some of these sustained me for months but inevitably circumstances would change or someone would blab, and I would be discovered and herded shamefaced to join the assembled rabble. I hid in the air conditioning system, and the rubbish bins, and under the floorboards everywhere. I found holes in the perimeter fence through which I could escape into neighbouring yards. But if I learned that no one can hide forever, still I could take pride in the number of crunches each hiding-place had allowed me to avoid.

If I had run out of hiding places, there were other ploys to be utilised. My long experience with gastro provided me with considerable skill in faking or even provoking the condition—in many ways it was not dissimilar to fear. But soon they wised up to the coincidence, and kept a closer watch on me. More deviously was to report to the headmaster’s office for supervised detention as punishment for offences that were never committed—which worked well for a time, but teachers will talk to each other. Best trick of all was to make a highly illegal departure from the school at the right time, and bolt. But really, in the end none of these things proved to be quite worth the ridicule that they incurred. Having a reputation as a gutless wonder could bring on problems of its own.

The story goes that one morning a Russian peasant woman saw a man in a space suit descend by parachute and land nearby. She went up to him, asking: "Have you come from outer space?" To which Yuri Gagarin turned on his famous smile and replied: "I certainly have."

While the Americans continued to have their failures, Yuri Gagarin flew. It started as a rumour in the newspaper on the morning of the 13th of April, but that had happened before. Several times the media had reported that the Russians had put a man in space but each time it probably to be untrue. Rumour had it too that each of those cosmonauts had actually flown and not survived, but that only tended to underscore that fact that the Yanks were pussyfooting. The Americans tried to portray the Reds as callous bastards, barbaric and cruel, who would happily kill to win, while they were determined to take a more humane approach, but it didn’t wash—not for a moment. Spacemen were supposed to be heroes with their lives on the line and martyrs to the cause were considered part and parcel of the exploration of space. Why didn’t the Americans show a bit of nerve and just fire the guy up there—they were so close to doing so for such a long time? In fact, had they tried, Alan Shepherd would have died any of several fiery deaths, since the several test attempts that might have been his first flight failed explosively.

Next day the rumour became true but there were no details. It wasn’t until the next day—when Yuri could be photographed returned safely to the bosom of his family—that we learned any details. Up he went on a Vostok I, a 2½-ton steel ball modified from and unmanned satellite, launched on a Sputnik booster with a third stage added, completed one full orbit, scorched back into the atmosphere at 28,000 km./hr, and then ejected from the capsule at 23,000 feet and parachuted back to earth in Central Russian. The joy on his beaming face spread into every corner of the world, except possibly NASA and the Pentagon. America may have lost the space race, but humanity at large had won it.

After a few occasions when there was no escape and I was forced to participate, I quickly learned that their were strategies that could be employed to survive the game of Trojan Crunch. Placement was critical. You learned who to get behind and who to stay away from. Areas near particularly enraged or belligerent bodgies were to be avoided. The opposing forces would tend to close in on those who drew their attention most, which in turn opened gaps to their flanks that could be safely slipped through.

Pace too was important, especially to a large lumbering fellow like me who could not dodge and weave skilfully. While most boys put their heads down and charged, I learned the better plan was to keep your head up, your eyes open, and bound along as an easy pace, anticipating problems before they manifested themselves fully. In this way you could glide through, never by the most direct route, always making sure other boys of some substance were between you and any threatening position. It was actually something I became rather good at in the end, even though I never fully abandoned the idea that avoidance was the best plan. The adaptability of human kind is one of its most remarkable features.

Here finally was the moment for which they had been trained: the men jumped out of the boats and began wading the last fifty yards to the land. A few were hit, a few were dragged down by the weight of their packs and drowned, but the rest stumbled through the water to the beach. A group of Turks was running down the shore towards them. Forming themselves into a rough line and raising their absurd cry of ‘Imishi Yallah’ the Dominion soldiers fixed their bayonets and charged. Within minutes the enemy before them dropped their rifles and fled. The Anzac legend had begun.

Thus the landing at Anzac Cove in Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli. Weak in detail of the experience of the men, the book is far more about the errors and incompetence of the British commanders, and how they turned a situation where they outnumbered the enemy six to one, out manoeuvred them and achieved all their objectives on the first day, and yet still managed to lose the conflict. The betrayal of the Australians by the British, written at a time when no one wanted to believe it.

Three thousand years after the events Homer described in The Iliad, at the same place and under the same circumstances, Colonel (later General Sir John) Monash said it all in his official report—the formal creation of a myth and a legend. The scene was Gallipoli, 1915.

Private Simpson and his little beast earned the admiration of everyone at the upper end of the valley. They worked all day and night throughout the whole period of the landing, and the help rendered to the wounded was invaluable. Simpson knew no fear and moved unconcernedly amid shrapnel and rifle fire, steadily carrying out his self-imposed task day by day, and he frequently earned the applause of personnel for his many fearless rescues of wounded men from areas subject to rifle and shrapnel fire.

Simpson and his donkey were yesterday killed by a shrapnel shell, and inquiry then elicited that he belonged to none of the Army Medical Corps units with this brigade, but had become separated from his own unit, and had carried on his perilous work on his own initiative.

In fact the donkey was not killed, and the man’s name was not Simpson, but John Kirkpatrick. The mystery that surrounded him related not to his deeds, but who he was before he turned up mysteriously at Gallipoli. The fact that they remain unsure what unit he actually belonged to confused the matter and cast doubts over his reality. But it was all sorted out long ago. And yet, once it was known exactly who he was and where he came from, still he remained a ghostlike, inhumanlike brave person. It is suggested that he was a shell shock victim, suffering what is these days called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which manifests itself as an inability to relate to other people, a lack of emotional response, a total, casual disregard for your own well-being, and a need to decide your own values and calmly ignore the fundamental tenets of the system around you.

Prime Minister to General Ismay of Chiefs of Staff Committee, January 18, 1942.
Please report what is being done to emulate the exploits of the Italians in Alexandria Harbour and similar methods of this kind.
At the beginning of the War Colonel Jeffris had a number of bright ideas on this subject, which received very little encouragement. Is there any reason why we should be incapable of the same kind of scientific aggression that the Italians have shown? One would have thought we should have been in the lead.
Please state the exact position.

Now the British should have known better than to go following the Italians anywhere, but the matter in question here was those whackos who whizzed about enemy harbours in midget submarines or riding human torpedoes to sink moored battleships. C. E. T. Warren was one of those whackos and told us how they sank the German raider Tirpitz in the remarkable book Above Us the Waves, made into a no less remarkable film starring John Mills. Second only to the Kamikazes as suicide missions go, they lost only 39 men (16 in operations and the rest in training and experimentation) while accounting for over 100,000 tons of enemy shipping. Exceedingly brave, exceptionally foolish, but I couldn’t quite shake off the idea that it was all just a little bit underhand.

My nemesis proved to be Myopic Peters. Here was a truly hopeless human being, short and rotund, with heavy spectacles that obviously weren’t heavy enough if the puzzled way he stared at the world and everything in it was any guide. He was the dumbest kid in my class. He was dumbest because, rather than getting wrong answers like many of the rest of us did to varying degrees, Myopic would always mark under us because he won’t attempt the questions. He could not read or write. He was hopelessly incompetent at absolutely everything. He never got jokes, never had anything interesting to say, never did anything except sit like a vegetable and stare stupidly at the world. Then one day, the bit of the world he decided to stare stupidly at most was me.

I found it intensely unnerving. Every time I would look up from whatever I was doing, there he would be, staring at me through those weird distorting lenses. Soon, everyone began to notice.
"Why does he stare at you like that?"
"I don’t know. It makes me feel like I’ve done something terrible to him. But I haven’t."
"Maybe he’s fallen in love with you."
We all contemplated that for one terrible moment.
"No, that isn’t possible," we agreed.

Day after day it went on. I asked him what he wanted but he just continued to stare. There was something in the way that the lenses exaggerated the size of his cow-like eyes that haunted me continually. He even invaded the sanctuary of my room and sleep with frightful nightmares about those eyes. I began to lose all confidence in myself, under that unrelenting gaze. Teachers noticed and ordered him to stop but he ignored them as he always did. They even punished him—with lashings and detentions, but still he persisted unwaveringly. My nerves were so much on edge I began to have trouble seeing straight myself. Friends interrogated him and threatened him but nothing worked. On and on, he ruthlessly stared at me. It was like walking through life with your fly-buttons permanently undone.

One day I fronted him—a frayed and broken man—and snatched his glasses from his face. Without them, those eyes seemed just as big and stared just as relentlessly. I handed his glasses back to him, and he didn’t even cease his stare as he slipped them on again.
"Okay. I’ll do anything you want if you’ll stop staring at me."
"Anything. You swear on your honour?"
Remarkably for such a place, honour was everything, apparently. To go back once you swore on your word of honour was utterly inconceivable.
"Yeah, as long as you give your word of honour never to look at me again."
"I want you to pick a fight with me."
"Consider it picked."
"After school behind the main shelter shed."
"Can’t I just declare you the winner now?"
"Bring three witnesses."
"If you must."

She was still doing forty knots when, as if by magic, a great gaping hole appeared in her bows just above the water-line. Shell-fire, possibly, but unlikely at that angle. It must have been a torpedo from a U-boat, not yet located: a sudden dip of the bows could have coincided with the upthrust of a heavy sea forcing a torpedo to the surface. Such things had happened before: rarely, but they happened… The Ulysses brushed aside the torpedo, ignoring the grievous wound, ignored the heavy shells, crashed into her and kept on going.

She was still doing forty knots, driving in under the guns of the enemy, guns at maximum depression, when "A" magazine blew up, blasted off the entire bows in one shattering detonation. For a second, the lightened fo’c’sle reared high into the air: then it plunged down, deep down, into the shoulder of the rolling sea. She plunged down and kept going down, driving down to the black floor of the Artic, driven down by the madly spinning screws, the still thudding engines her own executioners.

Of HMS Ulysses, Alistair MacLean said: the technique was to create a ship with a bunch of interesting characters for a crew and then kill one of them off in every chapter. This he does—even the bold captain is dead fifty pages before the end and the man who takes over also dies, along with the whole ship eventually. As in Moby Dick, there is only one man who lives to tell the tale.

Alistair MacLean got off to a great start with this book and The Guns of Navarone, but the rot began to set in by his third work—South By Java Head. It was probably meant to be a serious work but it went too far the way of Denis Wheatley, a well-handled novel of the escape from the Fall of Singapore slowly dissolves into an admittedly exciting but formulaic tale of spies and secret documents and traitors and it was along that line that MacLean would continue despite his own best efforts.

As you probably gather, I was not the fighting type. It was probably some sort of record that I had not had a single punch-up in all my years at the school. Of course, all this was in line with my reputation as a gutless wonder. Now I was about lose my virginity.

Nor was I able to keep the matter completely secret. I consulted my three witnesses—Letch, Stretch and Ivan the Hallinan.
"Why would he want to fight me?"
"Because you’re weak as piss. The most gutless of all gutless wonders, remember?"
"But I’m twice his size. And three times stronger. And ten times smarter. I’ll kill him."
"No you won’t. You won’t hurt him at all."
"No. I s’pose I won’t. And you reckon he knows that?"
"Only possible reason."
That evening, we four made our way toward the dilapidated shelter shed on the far side of the school yard.
"I reckon this is like the Emden," I said thoughtfully.
"The what?"
"Emden. First world war German battle cruiser that was sunk by HMAS Sydney off Western Australia."
"It’s naked terror that’s causing him to rave like this."

I explained. I had read a slim volume recounting the battle in 1914 called The End of the Emden, a book that I have never encountered again. But I did find Edwin Hoyt’s The Last Cruise of the Emden, published ten years later, which told of the bravery of the Germans, of how the Emden was hopelessly outgunned by the Sydney and of the long adventure of the survivors who made their way back home through hostile waters in a small boat. Patriotism is always a matter of perspective.
"You mean our navy actually sank a German battleship?"
"All by themselves."
"The Anzac tradition will never die."
"The point is, the two ships manoeuvred for ages, as the Sydney tried to bluff the Emden into making a fight of it, so she could blow her out of the water."
"The point being?"
"That’s how Myopic manipulated us into this. So it must be because he reckons he has superior firepower."
"Well, you do have a reputation for being as weak as piss."
"But I am twice his size."
"So was Goliath."
"If he’s gonna break the rules and use a weapon, why does he want you witnesses?"
"Oh shit! There’s gonna be a whole gang of ‘em waiting there for us!"
"Don’t be bloody silly. Myopic hasn’t got any friends."
"Well, what then?"
"I don’t know. But it’s gotta be a trap of some sort, so stay alert."

…He was dead as his knees gave way under him and he fell back over the rail of the chair; his feet caught under the lower rail, and he hung head downwards, grotesquely inert. A bright splash on the plate where he had been working showed where the bullet which had passed through him had flattened. There was another widow now in Hamburg.

But no one at all paid any attention at the time to the dead body of Maschinistmaat Zimmer, hanging by his knees, and certainly no one thought at all about his widow. Leading Seaman Brown saw him fall, snicked the bolt of the Mauser out and in, aimed again coolly and rapidly, and fired. The other man on Zimmer’s bo’sun’s chair fell dead even as he looked around to see what had happened to Zimmer; one man in the other chair died as he turned to see whence came the firing; the fourth man crumpled up as, panic-stricken, he sprang toward the Jacob’s ladder to safety.

Brown fired three more shots into groups of men who swarmed to the side of the ship on the upper deck out of curiosity; they took effect and in a few seconds the upper deck was deserted as far as Brown could see. Ziethen swung idly on her anchors, grey and grim, with her big guns peering dumbly forth. At her side, absurdly small, the white corpse of Maschinistmaat Zimmer dangled head downward, and above him lay two white splotches which were the bodies of his mates. The fourth man had fallen into the sea.

It was an apt picture of the simultaneous power and helplessness of modern machinery. On the one hand lay Ziethen, with her ten 6-inch guns and her hundreds of crew and her horsepower reckoned in thousands, and on the other a lad of five foot eight, aged twenty, dominating her and forcing his will upon her…

Brown on Resolution by C. S. Forester—I was struck at first by the incomprehensible title but needed to go no further than the first line to discover Brown was a sailor with a rifle, Resolution was an island in the Galapagos group, and there the German raider Ziethen lies undergoing secret repairs while Brown’s sniping slows them down long enough for the British squadron could arrive and finish the raider off. Forester’s best story, I think. It was filmed in 1935 starring John Mills, called Born for Glory in the US and then retitled Forever England everywhere, then remade twenty years later as Sailor of the King, with Jeffrey Hunter and Michael Rennie. All versions, under any title, are as terrific as the book.

But Myopic was alone—sitting on the bench looking pathetic and hopeless. Letch checked out the surroundings for hidden gangs. Stretch frisked him for weapons. Ivan the Hallinan politely offered to hold his glasses. I rolled up my sleeves and flexed my fists, the way I’d seen them do in movies. He stood, and said. "You ready?" I nodded. And he charged!

He tried to head-butt me in the middle but I backed off, thrust his shoulders away easily and then closed in on him. He immediately put his arms in front of his face, hunched up, and pranced while I began to pummel him. I rained down blows upon him, but soon I began to realise I was having little effect. His defence was airtight. And then the nature of the trap occurred to me—someone had been teaching this hopeless little bastard how to box.

It was the purest defence, the way that the Marquise of Queensbury decreed, done to perfection. It quickly occurred to me that if he knew how to defend so well, he might also know how to throw a punch. I kept up the pressure, pounding away at the top of his head, his flanks, getting in and ripping up-cuts underneath, looking for some way through. I offered little defence myself. The only way to survive was to attack.

In May of 1941, the war had just begun,
The Germans had the biggest ships with all the biggest guns,
The Bismark was the biggest ship that ever sailed the seas,
With its shells as big as (something or other) and its guns as big as trees.

Unbelievably, this ditty topped the hit parades in 1960, although I don’t remember them using it in the film Sink the Bismarck which it promoted. Hunting the Bismarck by C. S. Forester, published the year before in 1959 was not credited as the basis of the film which is odd. Forester was frequently filmed—The African Queen, Brown on Resolution and The Gun (The Pride and the Passion), not to mention his extremely popular and still revered Hornblower series (which somehow have never managed to attract me after several attempts to read different volumes—maybe the character was just too British for my taste), and its hard to imagine that the film-makers overlooked him this time. Especially because, from a literary viewpoint, he was plainly the master of the art of sinking battleships.

"All right," said Rose. "We’ll go down to the Lake and torpedo the Louisa."
"Don’t talk silly, miss. You can’t do that. Honest you can’t. I told you before. We can’t get down the river."
"Spengler did."
"In a canoe, miss, wiv—"
"That just shows we can, too."
Allnutt sighed ostentatiously. He knew perfectly well that there was no possible chance of inducing the African Queen to make the descent of the rapids of the Ulanga.

But I was doing him no harm and I knew it. This was as I planned—I had no intention of hurting him in any way. My desire was to subdue him. Soon I began to tire from flailing blows upon him, but the sheer volume of my assault was having its effects, he was staggering and exhausted himself, his breath rasping as he sobbed in desperation.

It might have gone on indefinitely like this, but I knew I was tiring—because I was doing all the work and expending all the energy—and I needed to change the pattern. So I grabbed him by the wrists and dragged his defence apart, but as soon as I let go to hit him, the arms shot back to their protective position. Exasperated, I tripped him up and hurled him on the ground, sat on him and continued to pound away—at least the change of angle briefly offered my fists and arms renewed strength.

"Had enough?" I asked, after he had not moved for a while. He did not respond. I got off him. He got up slowly, his face red with exertion, and immediately snapped back into his defensive position.

I’d had enough of this. I rushed him, thrust my arm between his defence and his face, and got him in a fierce headlock. I dragged him to the ground, screaming in pain and flailing the air hopelessly. I put my knee into his spine, intensifying the pressure and he was crying out piteously.
"Had enough?" I roared at him.
"Yes," he murmured.
I let him go, and he fell to a pathetic heap at my feet.

…"What a woman—oh, what a woman!" cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all read the epistle. "Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?"
"From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to your Majesty," said Holmes coldly…A Scandal in Bohemia

…"What are you going to do then?" I asked.
"To smoke," he answered. "It is quite a three pipe problem…"…The Red-Headed League

…"’Pon my word, Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method…"…A Case of Identity

…"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."…A Case of Identity

…"Besides, we may chance to hit upon some other obvious facts which have been by no means obvious to Mr Lestrade."…The Boscombe Valley Mystery

…"I beg that you draw your chair up to the fire, and favour me with some details as to your case."… The Five Orange Pips

…"I think, Watson, that you are now standing in the presence of one of the most absolute fools in Europe. I deserve to be kicked from here to Charing Cross."…The Man with the Twisted Lip

…For answer, Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. "It is a question of cubic capacity," said he: "a man with so large a brain must have something in it."…The Blue Carbuncle. You see, Doyle, and therefore Holmes, held a common erroneous belief of the time that intelligence could be measured by the cubic capacity of the brain. The big hat size means the man must be at least a professor. This argument was commonly used to keep women and natives in their inferior place in Victorian England. The fact that it made gorillas and whales more intelligent than humans was apparently to be ignored.

…"It seems to me a most dark and sinister business."…The Speckled Band

…"I think I could lay my finger on it," said Holmes, quietly…The Engineer’s Thumb

…"The case has been an interesting one," remarked Holmes, "because it serves to show very clearly how simple the explanation may be of an affair which at first sight seems inexplicable.."…The Noble Bachelor

…I knew my man, however, and I clapped a pistol to his head before he could strike…The Beryl Coronet

…As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further interest in her when once she ceased to be the centre of one of his problems…The Copper Beeches

In 1892, after a shaky start, Sherlock Holmes came into his own when Arthur Conan Doyle published the first collection of short stories, those run throughout the year before in The Strand Magazine. At this time, Doyle abandoned the medical profession, only to be struck down with flu from which he nearly died. In fact he was working on a historical novel The Refugees, little regarded these days, and he considered Holmes merely a source of making the money to support his more serious works. Everyone else on Planet Earth saw the matter otherwise. It should be noted that by then, Watson is married and no longer living at 223B Baker Street, and that Holmes’ cocaine addiction seems worryingly advanced without Watson there to keep tabs on him.

As I looked at him lying curled in the foetal position, whimpering pathetically, I could see the true hollowness of my victory. To defeat someone not worth defeating was defeat in itself. I wished that he had at least fought back a little. When we could stand his sobbing no longer, Stetch dragged him to his feet. Tears streaked the dirt on his face. His lips were blubbery and horrible. I wanted to like him or admire his bravery or something, but the best I could manage was pity. Ivan handed him his glasses and he fitted them slowly, with shaking hands.
"Well that was probably the weakest fight in the entire history of the school," Stretch said in disgust.
"Shake and we’re quits?" I asked him. He nodded tragically. I stepped forward and extended my hand… And that was when he threw the best straight right I have ever seen in my life.

He worked the screwdriver down into the frost over the three tiny holes and it crackled with a peculiar sound. It was so odd that he pulled his hand away involuntarily and, even when he didn’t touch it, it still crackled.
"Run like hell," he bawled. "The fuse."
He fled toward the hedge and couldn’t see a gate or stile, only the sailor, scuttling like a terrified rabbit. The sailor took the hedge in his stride, like a cartoon character through a wall and Mould went after him. Whether he went through the hedge horizontally or vertically, over the top of it or under it, he never knew, but he was blasted to the ground and half the county of Warwickshire seemed to thunder down on top of him.
He saw nothing, only felt it. The sky rained mud, in lumps and clods, in smoke and mist. It came down like a cloudburst. He expected to be buried alive.
After a while he sat up and rubbed the muck out of his eyes and there was the sailor groping to his feet , shaking his head.
They looked at each other and each saw an animated heap of mud.
"It’s gone off, sir."
"It certainly has."
Softly Tread the Brave—a great title !—is the big book on the subject of those idiotically heroic chaps who spent the war disarming bombs in England. It has one vivid and powerfully truthful line—An explosion is an emotional experience. Anyone who has been near one will agree. The men involved are Australians, the only blokes silly enough to do this sort of thing, and it was written by Ivan Southall. It has many imitators, but what fascinates me about it is that there is a second shorter version, called Seventeen Seconds, designed for young readers.

It caught me neatly on the cheek bone below the left eye and jolted me back a pace. But I was momentarily blinded and when my eyes cleared, Myopic was gone. He had bolted for his life. My three friends stood, mouths hanging open, rooted to the spot.
"He can’t do that!" Stretch declared indignantly. "It’s against every rule in the history of warfare."
"Hitting a bloke on the shake. Unbelievable," Letch agreed.
Ivan the Hallinan, one of the fastest runners in the school, regathered his wits and ran after him, but he never caught him. I sat on the bench, holding my face, utterly dismayed.
"Some bastard’s been teachin’ him how to box," Stretch declared, as if that too was somehow against some cosmic rule.
"It ain’t the one that taught him to fight that’s the bastard," I said sadly. "It’s the one that taught him to cheat."

Dennis Wheatley is a man hopelessly outdated yet he doesn’t deserve to be. He was one of those unfortunate souls who served in both world wars; in the trenches of WWI, he was gassed and invalided; in WWII he was on the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet—the only civilian to do so—and then was in Winston Churchill’s underground headquarters as a Wing Commander. Between the wars he ran the family’s very successful Wine Merchant business, until, at 35, he sold it and decided to become a writer. His first novel was reprinted seven times in seven weeks. He was extraordinarily prolific and 60-odd books, none of them short, usually 500 or so pages, seem to have been produced at a rate of about two a year. Mostly they are thrillers and adventure yarns, or else horror stories, or science fiction and occasionally weird blends of two or more genres.

His great skill, however, was action scenes, which he would describe in remarkable detail without losing the suspense. Few have such talent. In my copy of The Scarlet Imposer, the first Wheatley I read and possibly his best work, there is a sequence in which the hero hears the Nazi patrol enter the house, escapes onto the roof, fights off two of them on the tiles, drops on another on the ground, steals their motorcycle and escapes in a hail of bullets, but these few minutes of desperate tension are sustained for fully 17 pages—in close type in my copy—of non-stop nailbiting action.

Along with his war yarns, which make a fair history of WWII, his other popular series concerned Satanism, with a team of good guys toiling voluminously to thwart the Devil’s works on earth. To the Devil—a Daughter is one of the best—the virgin must be rescued from the priestly manifestation of Lucifer. Later, he even tried to draw a link between the Nazis and the use of Dark Forces, which idea would eventually be exploited in the Indiana Jones movies.

A very promising title was his A Bill for the Use of a Body but of course it was as decent and proper as anything that worthy wrote. I read it anyway because my very battered copy was signed by the author. A young woman is captured by Japanese (the hero fails to rescue her) and eventually grows to a position of great power which she deploys to destroy her tormentors (including the hapless hero). Wheatley, thinking her a villain, had run out of his age.

In Sixty Days to Live, Wheatley took on the subject of the comet that collides with earth, which got me all fired up as such subjects do even to this day. The book was fine, although no match for George Pal’s 1951 movie When World’s Collide, which I saw at around this time. Since we were faced with nuclear disaster, a collision with another world seemed a far more romantic way to go. I looked at the stars and almost wished for it.

Denis Wheatley seemed a remarkable compendium of Verne, Haggard, Poe, Stoker, Wells, Johns, Dumas and Doyle all muddled together, but all of it is firmly rooted in the days of the indomitable British Empire, and so very contemporary that it would have dated in ten years. More fashionable and specialist writers like Fleming and MacLean would soon displace him, but no one in all literature comes close to matching the breadth of his scope. He sold over 40 million books and not one reader was ever disappointed.

It developed into the most outstanding black eye. The line was straight from my eyebrow to cheekbone, the lid bulbous and closed for days, and the whole side of my face turned a spectacular purple shade, fringed with yellow. My nose frequently bleed at unexpected moments for years afterward. At home I told them I fell and hit a locker door. My mother and Rosely were sympathetic but Horrie only shook his head in dismay.

Around the school, everyone knew what had happened and there was general outrage. Myopic’s breach of the rules was unconscionable. Gangs threatened to take him out in dark alleys but none did. Perhaps all of them, even the toughest, feared that they might suffer my humiliation. To Myopic, this made no difference, and he sat hopelessly in class, as unloved and uncared about as before since no one could find a way to care less for him than they had previously. When you were as far down as he was, further down was impossible. At least he stopped staring at me after that.

SS Untersturmfuhrer Becker writes to his commander of some technical difficulties he is experiencing with his equipment:

I should like to take this opportunity to bring the following to your attention: several commands, after the gassing is completed, have had the bodies unloaded by their own men. There is a great danger that this will lead to their health being affected, if not immediately, at least later on. The commanders do not want to countermand these orders as they fear that if prisoners were employed they would find some opportunity to escape.

The application of gas is not always carried out in the correct manner. In order to get the job finished as quickly as possible, the driver presses the accelerator down to the fullest extent. Thereby the victims suffer death by suffocation and not by dozing off, as was intended. By correct adjustment of the levers death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully. Previously the victim’s faces and other signs showed they died in agony.

An outstanding example of a true humanitarian at work.

The distorted stuff they passed off as history in those days completely failed to notice both world wars. We were left to search it out for ourselves, and surely it came in its most pungent form in The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool. Only the more bloodthirsty amongst us dared speak of it. It was full of remarkable horrors that were best absorbed in silence. The pictures of naked women running the gauntlet and piles of skeletal bodies left no gaps for the imagination to dare to fill. When anyone raised the subject, we just said ‘yeah’ and swept the conversation on to Audie Murphy.

I smouldered with outrage. In my dreams I inflicted every death and torture imaginable upon him. The Assyrians were pussycats compared to the way my mind continually destroyed him. I said nothing, did nothing, rode out the derision and chiding and laughter and humiliation. None of that bothered me really. I carried my blatant injury with as much pride as I could manage. I had survived a reputation as a gutless wonder. This was no worse.

But I was biding my time, waiting my chance, and it came the next time it was decreed that there was about to be another game of Trojan Crunch.

So, for the second time that winter night, the door of No. 11 silently opened to the knock of a uniformed police officer…. After a few seconds Sergeant Bentley pushed the door open and stood with one foot in the gaslit room and one in the lobby, while Sergeant Bryant moved up to the door and their colleagues waited close at hand in the shadowy alley.

In that moment the scene changed swiftly from a routine police check to a saga of ruthless gangster slaying. Without a shadow of warning, shots ripped out from the inner room and staircase. Sergeant Bentley collapsed to the doorway shot in the neck. Sergeant Bryant, bullets in his chest and hand, reeled back to the footway. As their fellow officers rushed forward they were met with a volley of shots as armed men fired wildly from the doorway over the body of the prostrate sergeant. Martin, standing just outside the door of No. 11, ducked as a hand with a pistol in it came around the door; Woodhams, the next nearest, was shot down in his tracks as he tried to draw his baton; Sergeant Tucker, further down the mews, was hit several times and mortally wounded; P. C. Choat fell with eight bullets in his body as he tried to grapple with one of the assailants.

The Herald was still serialising books and this time chose a fascinating thing—The Battle of Sidney Street, they called it, but it was a condensed version of The Gaslight Murders by James Edward Holroyd. In 1910, a group of Russian ancharists were surprised while robbing a London jewellery shop and a siege followed after three policemen (Bentley, Tucker and Choat) were shot dead and two more wounded. The anarchists escaped leaving three dead behind but most of them were soon captured. Graphic photographs at the scene illustrated the event, one of them showing police taking cover and amongst them, Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary. It was a fiasco really, as those sort of events tend to be in reality and never in fiction. And a rare instance in those days of unarmed policeman being shot.

Even at the time I read it, the idea of policemen being shot at was almost impossible to believe—it just never happened. All of the names of those handful of criminals who in living memory had shot policeman were known to everyone, and they were all either executed or serving life sentences, never to be released. In those days police were unarmed and although the criminals sometimes carried guns, they thought twice about using them against the men in blue. And almost always when facing guns, the unarmed policeman were able to convince the gunman to surrender, because that was the way they were trained. Now, the police carry guns, lots of them get shot (by each other as much as criminals) and they are regarded as fair game as men carrying guns always will be.

That day no one needed to flush me out of my latest hiding place—there were no imaginary orders to the headmaster’s office. I was right out there, at the front of the line. Myopic was wearing a singlet so I was a skin, but I kept my singlet tied around my waist. It went on and off three times as Myopic tried to switch sides. I stalked him ruthlessly, prowling the front rows, impervious to the rabid mob behind me, keeping myself in line with Myopic. And he knew it too. Stretch and Letch and Ivan, along with a number of other large fellows who believed in cosmic order, formed a barricade behind him that kept him to the forefront, and they moved as he moved and, across no-man’s land, I moved with them, keeping him in my sights.

One of the most arresting of all book covers—definitely the sort that you should never judge the contents by—adorned the novelisation of the movie (by JM White and Val Guest) of The Camp on Blood Island. It depicts a British POW on his knees, head bowed, while towering above him a Japanese guard has samurai sword held high, about to lop his head. It is a painting—the incident does not occur in the book and the film does not feature such a scene. But it is stunning, nevertheless, and, it emerged, based on an actual photograph from WWII. Book and film are sad events. Like the cover, the idea offers much and delivers little. The war is over and every prisoner will be slaughtered if the commandant learns of the Japanese defeat and efforts are made to prevent him from finding out. It was a dull B-picture with gratuitous off-screen violence and weak acting. The book was a fair match for it.

It was a desperate game of cat and mouse and slowly everyone became aware of it. One by one they began to forget their own grievances and revenges and turn their eyes and minds toward the merciless game being played out in front of them. They shouted at Myopic, calling him rat and snake and arsehole, and he behaved like all three, darting back and forth along the ranks, trying to find ways to slither through their legs, trying to make himself as small and forgettable as possible. It was one tiny insignificant figure against the whole school, and they formed two solid walls, each of five hundred boys, between which he was trapped. While I, the predator, stalked him coldly.

Two rival sea captains, one in the destroyer on the surface, the other in the U-boat beneath, fight out a battle of wits and wills on a knife edge. It’s an age-old theme but never done so well as in The Enemy Below by someone called Commander D A Rayner D.S.C and Bar V.R.D., R.N.V.R. He wrote no other fiction that I know of, which is a pity because few books got me on the edge of my seat as this one did, nor resolved the matter more satisfactorily. Hollywood made a pretty good film from it—it would have been hard to achieve less—excepting that they changed the remarkable ending to one where the good guys win, and, most worryingly, from a British to a US destroyer. It was the first time I remember noticing American parochialism, and I couldn’t quite forgive them even if it did allow Robert Mitchum to be added to the cast. At least a German actor—the excellent Curt Jurgens—played the rival captain.

Of course it was all a fantasy—the book admits that the war annals record no such one-on-one tangle between such vessels and if there had been, the sub would have won too easily to make such an riveting story. Trivia buffs may be amused to know that it was remade as a cat-and-mouse battle between starships in the second episode of the first series of Star Trek.

The heat went out of the occasion and a chill set in. It was plain that this game of Trojan Crunch would be a fizzer. But nobody left the double ranks. They fell silent, and all we could hear was Myopic’s frantic sobs of terror and gasps for forgotten breath and he quailed before them. His energy sapped. He abandoned his attempts to escape, stopped moving altogether, wet his pants and stood, crying shamelessly.

But they held their fire, and he heard the sibilant hiss. "This way!"
"No!" he suddenly yelled, his horror-stricken voice ringing like a cracked gong through the clearing. "No, Charlie!"
Blinded, Charlie on his knees, his hands held out in front of him, turning his head in bewilderment. "Jack! Greg!"
Again there was the sibilant call from further down the track, in a voice deeper than the normal Japanese voice. "This way, quick!"
Jack heard Greg call out in a shrill, frantic voice. "Here, Charlie, this way."
Then Charlie got slowly to his feet, mud dripping from him like after-birth, as if the earth had just spawned him, blind and lost and alone as a new-born animal. He stood, his head twisting from side to side, his hands clutching with fearful hesitation at the air about him; then like a child taking its first frightened steps he began to walk towards the clump of sugar cane.
There was a shout from the other side of the track and Jack could hear Greg yelling something with a sob in his voice, and then abruptly he saw Vern standing behind his tree.
"Charlie, the wrong way!" Suddenly Charlie stopped, and in that instant Vern gave the bush cry, something the Japanese could never imitate. "Coo-oo-ee!"
Charlie turned as Vern gave the cry again; then stumbling, crying incoherently, he began to run towards Vern. Jack saw Vern come out from behind the tree in a crouching run, then he stepped out into the open himself.
"Bore it up ‘em!" he roared, and opened up with his tommy-gun at the clump of sugar cane. He heard the sharp stabbing sound of Mick’s bren, the crack of rifles, and the sugar cane waved and snapped and flew as the fire poured into it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Charlie stagger and fall…

The Climate of Courage by Jon Cleary, and a terrific portrait of Australians fighting along the Kakoda Trail, but the love story in Sydney lets it all down. The battle scenes are classical and excellent—the one above obviously based on Damien Parer’s immortal footage of a blinded soldier being led back down the trail by his mate. There a nice scene too when the Jap mini-sub sinks the harbour ferry. This was as good as Cleary ever got.

Only anger, sheer body-trembling rage, was holding me back. As I watched his suffering, his terror, I wanted to absorb and savour the moment. Only then would my desires be sated. So I kept him lined up, stayed poised and ready to strike, but never went, because I could see there was still some residual agony, some tiny fragment of terror, left in him and I wanted it all. Then his sobbing stopped—he had nothing left, neither energy nor emotion sufficient even to sob. And that was when I had him where I wanted him. Around me, a thousand boys held their breath and watched in horror. Only one of them now had the power to move, and that was me.

Three abreast, the elephants moved, and truly there seemed no end of them. On the head of each, the driver sat, and behind him was a box of heavy wood, slit all over for archers. All naked were the drivers, thin brown men, who sat with crossed legs, dangling a long stick, pointed and with a hook just below the point, and occasionally they hooked and prodded the beast they drove. Adam ben Lazar was my lieutenant there, and I told him to kill the drivers first, but I wondered whether it would stop or divert the beasts. Now, more than a hundred of them were in sight, and we could see the gleaming spears of the mercenaries who marched behind them. The frightening rumble of their feet filled the whole valley and mixed itself with the shrill shouting of the drivers, while from beyond them the hoarse cries of the mercenaries sounded heady with triumph….
… our little cedar arrows that fell like rain only enraged the great beasts. We killed the drivers, but the elephants came on…
… I was close enough to hear Eleazar cry. "And are you afraid? Of what? Are beasts born that cannot be slain?"
In that mad rush of the elephants, the men behind Judas halted in fear and wonder; but Elaezar leaped ahead and alone he met one elephant that had outpaced the others. Such a sight was never seen before then or since, for Eleazar’s great body arched, the hammer swung back over his head, and then it met the elephant with a crushing thud that sounded above the screaming and shouting. And the elephant, skull crushed, went down on its knees, rolled over and died…

Prior to Spartacus, Howard Fast wrote My Glorious Brothers, a pretty good yarn about the Maccabees, a bunch of Jews who ran a guerilla war against the occupying forces of Alexander the Great. This story is usually left out of most bibles, or else relegated to the apocryphilia, it might be the first truly great bad editing decision in literary history, for the Books of the Maccabees are the most historically accurate of all old testament books—maybe that was the problem—they put the rest in such bad light. They are also a fine example of how to conduct a war of resistance against the established forces, which was not quite the message that the Church nor State of any period wanted to generally get about. Furthermore, it told us how, not for the first time, the priesthood sold their people out to the wealthy invaders. So they simply edited it out. Fast’s retelling of the tale is lively, with terrific battles scenes of warriors bringing down war elephants, but it was really just a build-up for the master work to come.

…So shaken are we, so wan with care…
…There lives not three good men unhang’d in England, and one of them is fat and grows old…
…I am not in the roll of common men…
…I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you call for them?…
…Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,
A good mouth-filling oath…
…He was but as the cuckoo in June,
Heard, not regarded…
…The time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long…
…But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop…
…The better part of valour is discretion; in which better part I have saved my life…
It could be argued by the purists that I have slighted William Shakespeare but all such quibbles must now be best aside and the Bard began to move toward his peak. In Henry IV Part One, he takes a small piece of history concerning the attempt by one young man named Henry to usurp the throne from another—a most routine chain of events for the time—and turns it into a lively and powerful play. It is characterisation that achieves his effect. King Henry is a good bloke but given to elicit revelry with his mates down the pub, headed up by what many regard as his best character, Falstaff – the fat, blustering, cowardly man who is the true hero of the story. But there is too a likeable rogue in the villain, Henry Percy, called Hotspur, a witty and adventurous young chap who possibility would make a better King than his rival. They meet on the battlefield at Shrewsbury as equals, one must die but the death of either will be a tragedy and Hotspur goes down bravely and with a witticism on his tongue that his slayer finishes for him…
…But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue; no Percy, thou art dust,
And food for --- [Dies
For worms, brave Percy; fare thee well, great heart !
Ill-weaved ambition, how much thou art shrunk…
Knock out stuff.
Shakespeare Scoreboard:
Original plays (good) 2. (MacBeth) (Henry IV Part One)
Plays ripped off from contemporaries 1. (Merchant of Venice from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta)

With something that was born that day so long ago in St Martin’s Choir and waited for this moment, I let fly with the most unbelievable roar, and charged. I went at him like a guided missile. No one else moved. I saw his eyes bulge all the more behind his glasses, but there was only submission, defeat, in his face.

It is impossible for me to honestly relate what happened next. All versions of the story related afterwards were exaggerated as such legendary events must necessarily be. I seized the poor terrified fellow by the collar and the crutch and—well I like to imagine it was like Samson in the Philistine temple, or blind Cyclopes hurling huge boulders at Ulysses’ fleeing boat, or Tarzan heaving a tiger slain with his bare hands back into the jungle whence it came—but it probably wasn’t anything like that. But I do know that Myopic Peters, his screaming considerably muffled by my own roaring, came from somewhere high over my head to hit the ground three feet in front of me. He hit so hard he bounced up to knee height again and then flopped, utterly motionless.

After the noise, everything was suddenly quiet and still. The cockpit was tilted. That was odd: it leaned him sideways. He must have crashed; but it was only a hazy idea and not very interesting because pain was stabbing at his back. Slowly it ebbed, leaving a passive torpor, and sitting in the straps, hands on his lap, he was placidly aware of the cockpit: beyond that, nothing.

Gently as his mind came into focus he was aware that his knees were buzzing as though he had hit his funnybone. His eyes wandered down and absorbed with curiosity that his legs were in peculiar positions. At least his right leg was. He could not see his left leg and forgot about it. (It had buckled under the collapsed seat so that he was sitting on it.) His right foot was tucked over in the far, right-hand corner and the clean white overalls were torn at the knee and staining in blood that was pumping in slow little squirts and spreading in filmy waves. There was his knee through the blood and something sticking through it. It looked a bit like the rudder bar. Very odd. He regarded it in an abstract way, and for a while it made no impact until an ugly thought crystallised: "Damn! I won’t be able to play rugger on Saturday."

Douglas Bader, the legless Spitfire pilot, greatest hero of the Battle of Britain, collides with destiny in Paul Brickhill’s Reach for the Sky. No greater hero was possible at the time, but you could only admire him from afar—you certainly never wanted to be him. Unless, of course, you were already a cripple. Flights of fancy have their limitations.
He was still unconscious when the ambulance took him away. We could all see plainly the sharp bulge where his broken collar bone protruded. Soon word arrived that he had recovered fully, but we never saw him again for his parents decided it best to take him out of school. It wasn’t doing him any good in any case. The story went that he suffered an innocent collision playing footy and it was never disputed.

It was 7am. The second wave of troops arrived on the shambles that was Omaha Beach. Men splashed ashore under the saturating fire of the enemy. Landing craft joined the ever-growing graveyard of wrecked, blazing hulks. Each wave of boats gave up its own bloody contribution to the incoming tide, and all along the crescent-shaped strip of beach dead Americans gently nudged each other in the water.

A film I saw with reluctance. I read The Longest Day and just plain didn’t want to see the movie when it was released despite the presence of John Wayne and lots of other favourite actors (how could they miss?) I think I had just seen one American war movie too many. Anyway, I knew it was in black and white, which was inappropriate to any epic. And I knew too that no movie could match the horror to be found in the book. I was right. The lack of colour made it seem like the same old WWII footage (despite the wide screen and thundering sound), Wayne was really the only performer big enough not to be swallowed by the enormity of the events, and there were no American bodies bumping gently against each other in the red water. There just wasn’t anything the film could do that the book didn’t take care of. Cornelius Ryan was very brave to take on such a huge subject and put it in such a small space.

I heard Christian say, "Will you hold your tongue, sir, or shall I force you to hold it. I’m master of this ship now, and, by God, I’ll stand no more of your abuse!"…
"Master of my ship, you mutinous dog!" he (Bligh) yelled. "I’ll see you hung! I’ll have you flogged to ribbons! I’ll…"

Mutiny on the Bounty is one of those truly great stories that really happened and as such, without the aid of fiction to spice it up, in the end comes off just a little bit dreary. I read the Nordhoff and Hall version, which combines Men Against the Sea, the sequel concerning Bligh’s long voyage in the open boat. The original was written by Sir John Barrow not long after the events it describes and although good enough, it leaves too many questions unanswered.

A year or two later, an epic version of the movie was released, with Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as Captain Bligh and although they plainly gave it the works, it was a very disappointing film. Somehow, the long Tahiti sequence littered with hordes of bare-breasted females who managed to show not one nipple between them, said it all. Bligh’s cruelty to his crew, as well, could not be depicted with sufficient violence to justify the mutiny. On television I had seen the far more powerful Laughton and Gable version but it was superior only in terms of the acting—otherwise it too suffered the same difficulties. In more recent times, Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins gave it a go in an era when the savagery could be far more explicit and there were nipples everywhere, but it was the most unsatisfactory version of all.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, they say, and they are right. The Bounty saga contains such a terrific collection of delicious facts that they can neither be ignored nor distorted and therefore the good story that could have been drawn from it all remains trapped inside forever. When it should have climaxed with the final showdown between Bligh and Christian, instead they end up living happily ever after ten thousand miles apart.

Nordoff and Hall teamed again for a slim volume called Men Without Country, which slowly started to become familiar as I proceeded. Eventually, I realised it was Passage to Marseille, one of my favourite action melodramas. French political prisoners escape Devil’s Island and steal a ship to sail home and join the resistance. The book lacked Bogart and Lorre.

Nordhoff by himself wrote a book called The Hurricane, which I only read the storm bits of. They were okay. What is unforgettable is that this was made, in 1937, into one of those extraordinary Dorothy Lamour tropical island siren movies, which we were meant to take seriously. An amazing movie to this day. Hollywood rarely got as far off track as this.

Did I feel any guilt or shame over this? I did not. Myopic went the necessary way of all men who break the fundamental rules of life, and no one felt the slightest sympathy for him. Sometimes I see some unfortunate, sitting on a park bench, dribbling as they talk aloud to people who aren’t there, and I wonder if it might be Myopic. I doubt that I would recognise him if I saw him, unless he stared at me, but they all avoid eye contact. Maybe it was a turning point for him and he went on to lead a successful life and thanks me for it to this very day. I don’t know. It was just something that happened.

No one treated me with any more or less respect after that. No one talked about it at all. Life went on, minus Myopic, which meant it was no different.

Indeed, the only effect I can record is this—that from then on I seemed to be regarded as one of those people it was very sensible to place yourself behind when playing the game of Trojan Crunch.

Leon Uris was a man with a great skill for turning recent history into terrific drama. Exodus was his best work, and I learned all about the ejection of the British from Israel as well as some in depth stuff about the Nazi prison camps. What made Uris superior at this form was his restraint—he refused to exaggerate for the benefit of his heroes, which was quite an achievement for in those days you had to stick to the formula to succeed. Making the formula fit the facts—it was quite a feat.

Unfortunately, his writing ability did not measure up to the enormity of his task. Perhaps it was the effect of writing about factual events from the point of view of a journalist, but his technique was always bland and efficient, and never interesting. Despite the monumental and fascinating events that he described, he was always just a little bit flat. There was a strange magnificent tediousness about it all. The result was that the reader became trapped—growing increasingly bored but knowing the work was far too important to give up on. It all became quite a chore to get through.

And there was a problem with the method as well—Ari Ben Canaan was far more like a movie hero than a real person (Paul Newman played him to perfection in the movie which kinda proves the point) and all the other characters suffered similarly to some degree. The result was that he denied the reader the opportunity of suspension of disbelief, and therefore was never quite believable even though you knew he was telling the truth. Somehow, even at that tender age, I suspected that this was the way they wanted the story to be told, rather the way it really was.

Odd business, memory. I was checking out the books in a Collingwood opp shop in 1996 and my eye fell on a slim blue volume that insisted I pick it up. Sammy Going South, it was called, by someone named Canaway. I recognised the book instantly—I had encountered it, in 1962, in the school library when it was newly published, and had then forgotten it completely. Odder still was the fact that it was not the book itself that I read, for it had been serialised in The Herald in the summer of 1961-2, but I always searched for such serialisations in the library and considered those volumes as treasured, even though I never opened their pages.

A British kid’s family is killed in Port Said during the Suez Crisis and he sets off overland, heading for his aunt’s place in Rhodesia. As the flyleaf jogged my memory, I realised that it was not as completely forgotten as I had thought, for the idea, although not its source, had resurfaced in 1989 when I composed my own novel Shadowrider—published that same year as The Tenth Hero. I egotistically thought I was being very original—in fact I was unwittingly ripping off this book.

Admittedly, Shadowrider was a deliberate linking of Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days to the idea of a bicycle, and some of my childhood stories, none of which occur in Canaway’s book. But the media pursuit, and the essence and style of the work, are absolutely the same. I always knew I had seen the story somewhere previously, or dreamed it, or something—in a newspaper in England in 1972 I was sure, but determined research proved that wasn’t so. Nor was it. It was this book, and thirty years earlier throughout which period of time it’s title, author, subject and existence were all stored in an unregarded corner of my memory, utterly ignored by consciousness. And yet, the moment I saw it in that opportunity shop, I knew it right away... Very odd business indeed.

Alan Paton’s great book Cry the Beloved Country is a sort of automatic classic. The tale of a simple man on a simple mission in a very complicated country couldn’t miss. The child-like simple language of the Zulu, a proud race at the brink of extinction and despair, is powerfully presented. No further description is worthy of it. Never was the inappropriateness and irrelevance of politics so evident. Anyone who has not read it has no right to live in the 20th Century.
Now the sharp-eyed amongst you will have observed that several of the big movies recently referred to—The Longest Day, Exodus and Mutiny on the Bounty—were in fact made or released sometime after the period in which I place them. This is in part because the placement relates to when I read the books on which those movies were based but it is also because, in 1961 and especially the latter part of it, there was a very serious dearth of worthwhile movies.

When in those summer holidays, I set forth to the city with my pocket money jangling expectantly in my pocket, hoping to repeat the phenomenal experience of Spartacus, I was about to learn that not only was life filled with disappointment but that the fantasy world of Hollywood could be so equally. I roamed from theatre to theatre, studying the posters and lobby cards for something that would catch my eye or stir my imagination, as the unexpected image of Kirk Douglas fending off the tripod of the giant black man had done a year earlier. Alas there was nothing of the kind. I couldn’t quite believe it when I realised that I had been to every cinema, and was left utterly uninspired.

Determined to see something, I back-tracked. Ultimately, I realised that there was only one possibility—the one that I thought least likely of all as I passed it by with my heart yet unspilled of its optimism. After all, it was on a subject that I had fulsomely rejected as valid more than a year before. This was the Samuel Bronson’s remake of the Cecil B. deMille silent epic King of Kings—the story of the life of Christ. Surely not…

Well, it was an ancient epic, set in Roman times and the lobby cards did suggest a battle scene of some kind. And, I happened to know, it was certainly the most controversial movie around at the time. Indeed the religious authorities were so outraged by it that maybe it was the film for me after all. Furtively, I slipped inside.

The controversy seemed to be based on three issues—firstly, that it depicted Jesus Christ as a real person rather than some ephemeral divinity; secondly, that it allowed the countenance of the Messiah to be seen; and third—and worst of all—that countenance belonged to the rather baby-faced Wild West matinee idol Jeffrey Hunter. Furthermore, purists pointed to the fact that the film declared that the activities of this blue-eyed, blonde-locked Christ sparked a fictional rebellion against the Roman masters, lead by the thief Barabbas. The miracles were passed over lightly and the whole thing was a picture post-card view of the grand passion-play. All in all, it was just too much.

In fact the film is pretty good, a lively three hour romp through the New Testament, not at all dissimilar to Monty Python’s handling of the same material twenty years later in The Life of Brian. Hunter, despite his inappropriate looks and accent, does a great job, bestowing Christ with real humanity, vulnerability and inner strength, and renders the sermon on the mount as the most outstanding piece of pure Marxism ever stated. Aussie Ron Randell is excellent as the centurion who gets converted, and compatriot Frank Thring adds his usual pompous villain thing as Herod Antipas; Hurd Hatfield delivers a coolly urban Pilate; Rip Torn, who would become famous as the expletive deleted Richard Nixon, gets some practice as Judas; and a sexpot named Brigid Bazlen is distracting as Salome. All good fun.

Now the film is not without substantial weaknesses, not the least of which was its unimaginative handling and mock reverence (which was actually real reverence gone badly wrong). No one knew what to make of Harry Guardino’s energetic Barabbas—an Italian-American playing a Jewish rebel against Romans, but Robert Ryan took the turkey honours, his pronounced southern drawl about as far away from John the Baptist as El Paso is from Jerusalem. Written by Phillip Yordan and directed by Nicholas Ray, the whole thing is most enjoyable, especially for those who wish to remember their Sunday School days with a wry smile.

But the biggest disappointment in a year to be remembered for its disappointments was Ian Fleming’s sorry excuse for a James Bond novel For Your Eyes Only. The sorriest thing about it was that it is not the worst James Bond—that was still to come. But this was in fact a collection of five Bond stories, all of them piss-weak. I’m sure that they were actually bits and pieces not good enough to make it as sequences in his real novels. They tell me Fleming’s health was pretty bad that year, but the publishers were pressing for the next volume now that they had recognised the character was taking off, and a movie series was in the offing, so Fleming trotted out his off-cuts. It was 007 who was pretty sick actually.

I suggest you bookmark this page, or else you'll end up getting lost