AS THE LAST notes of Jimmy Bigelow’s bugle playing of ‘Reveille’ dribbled away into the dank dawn, Rooster MacNeice opened his eyes. A spreading grey light painted the wall-less tent he slept in and the fetid mud, the filth, the hopelessness of the POW’s jungle camp beyond, into flat shades of iron and soot. Further away the teak rainforest was a black wall.
Before he was even properly awake, Rooster began that morning as he did every morning, with the first of several exercises in the self-discipline which he knew would ensure his survival, mentally, physically and morally. He commenced by reciting under his breath the page of Mein Kampf he had memorised the night before. He found that the parts with Jews in them—which was much of the book—were the easiest. They had a galloping rhythm that made them less difficult to memorise, the word Jew a helpful recurrent chorus. But now he was lost in the early history of the Nazi Party in Bavaria and he was struggling. Where were the Jews, wondered Rooster MacNeice, when you really needed them?
Bomb landed on Buckingham Palace, a voice nearby said. Took out the King and Gracie Fields.
As he pulled himself to the edge of the bamboo bench and scratched his thigh, and then more vigorously his crotch, Rooster MacNeice continued whispering to himself about the bravery of the early stormtroopers. He felt something hard and shell-like in his crotch and crushed it, then felt another and another, and only then did he begin to feel the itch and bite of the lice that lived in the bamboo slats.
One thing I’ll say for the Japs, an old man said on noticing his itching, they bugger you so completely you can even sleep through lice eating your balls for breakfast.
Rooster realised it was Sheephead Morton talking. He looked a haggard seventy, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four.
I thought someone said that Gracie Fields was with a dago, said Jimmy Bigelow, dented bugle in hand, as he walked back into the tent. Didn’t they defect to Mussolini?
That was just a rumour, Chum Fahey said. This time I got the good oil from some Dutchies who came through the camp the other day. Dutch as I am. Half-caste wops, most of ’em. They said the Russkies lost at Stalingrad, the Yanks have invaded Sicily, Musso’s been overthrown and the new dago government is calling for peace.
Rooster MacNeice had a scraggly ginger beard and the habit, when concentrating, of sucking it up from his lower lip and chewing on it. As he chewed on his whiskers he recalled that, the previous week, the rumour had been that the Russians won at Stalingrad. That was clearly bolshie propaganda, he thought. Most likely from Darky Gardiner. He’d say that sort of thing. Rooster MacNeice hated bolshies but on balance he hated Darky Gardiner more. He was a common and dirty man, and like most half-castes not to be trusted. He also couldn’t abide Gardiner’s habit—until the Speedo put an end to anything that wasn’t work or sleep—of sometimes standing on a teak stump at the camp’s edge singing ‘Without a Song’ as the POWs hobbled in of a night from the Line. Other men seemed to like it; Rooster MacNeice hated it.
And hate was a powerful force for Rooster MacNeice. It was like a food to him. He hated wogs, wops, gyppos and dagos. He hated chinks, nips and slopes, and, being a fair-minded man, he also hated poms and yanks. He found so little in his own race of Australians to admire that he sometimes found himself arguing that they deserved to be conquered. He returned to reciting Mein Kampf under his breath.
What you rabbiting on about now, Rooster? asked Jimmy Bigelow.
Rooster MacNeice turned to the bugler who had only recently been transferred into their tent and had no idea of his morning ritual. Rooster MacNeice thought Jimmy Bigelow was a Victorian, and so he freely told him that to stop his intellect stagnating amidst the convict-bred, card-playing, football-worshipping, horseracing-addicted Tasmanians—in whose tent they had both ended up and who were anything but what Australians should be—he had set himself the task of committing to memory an entire book, a page a day.
Rightio, Jimmy Bigelow said, not daring to tell Rooster MacNeice that he was from the Huon Valley and had enlisted with Gallipoli von Kessler. But as a way of passing a war, he went on, there are worse things than four-a-game crib.
The mind! said Rooster MacNeice. The mind, James!
Gallipoli von Kessler asked him if he had thought of playing five hundred, saying that though some people said that five hundred was perhaps a brainier game than crib, he didn’t necessarily agree, but it might be more Rooster’s fancy. It was really bridge without the bad company.