Eighty-two years later, as Prime Minister of Australia, and with the assistance of the very helpful army defence attaché, Colonel Chris Galvin, from the Australian Embassy in Paris, I was able to establish roughly where my father and grandfather had met up all those years ago.
One of the journalists who accompanied me on that visit, Tony Wright of the Age, described the scene thus:
On Friday, at the village of Clery, between a farmhouse and the great marshes and ponds and swiftly-flowing streams of the Upper Somme River, those experts found for him the most likely spot where his father and grandfather had met. Howard carried with him excerpts from his father’s wartime diary. The entry for August 30 1918, reads simply ‘Met dad at Clery'. Here in Clery, close to the slopes of Mont St Quentin, the site of one of the great battles of World War I, Howard experienced a sort of coming home of the heart. You could see it in his face as he peered intently at the map laid out before him, not heeding the rain falling or the small crowd milling about him.2
Wright had captured the emotion of the occasion for me.
I had attended the 85th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, at Anzac Cove, and then called to see President Chirac in Paris before visiting the battlefields. French gratitude for the huge sacrifice of Australia in defence of France, so many years before, was not forgotten. At the beginning of our discussion, the President expressed the thanks of his nation for the war service of my father and grandfather.
It was fairly unusual to have father and son fight in the same war. My grandfather died when I was only nine, and it was only occasionally that I talked to my father about his wartime experiences. His generation were a reticent lot. Who could blame them? They had lived through unimaginable horrors, and to come home alive and intact would have been a miracle to celebrate in itself. All those years ago, veterans were encouraged to forget about things, and not talk about their experiences. That was thought to be the right therapy. There weren’t too many counsellors then, but returned soldiers were welcomed home as heroes, and in addition to repatriation benefits a variety of special schemes were set up to help them.
My father usually marched on Anzac Day, in Sydney, and the family would go and watch the march. The last Anzac Day that he was alive was in 1955. He hadn’t been very well that year so didn’t march. Instead he stayed at home, propped himself up on the couch in our back room, and reminisced with me, his youngest son, about his time on the Western Front 40 years earlier.
He told me of being detailed to escort an Australian officer back from the front, towards the end of the war. When they came under heavy attack the other man panicked, telling my father that he had been at the front for three years and was going on extended leave, and feared he would get hit before he made it to safety. There would have been numerous stories of men who had dodged bullets for several years, only to be hit minutes from the relative safety of being away from the front. I recall the story so vividly because Dad rarely spoke about the war. Like most Australians who served in that conflict, he thought that Australian soldiers were the equal of, or superior to, any others. Dad had no hostility towards the Germans who had been his enemies.
When my father came back from the war, he resumed his apprenticeship with CSR, only this time it was at Pyrmont, in inner Sydney, as his family had decamped there. According to my mother, he was retrenched in the early 1920s, during a slump, when the company had a policy of giving preference to the retention of married employees. My father was then still single.
After my mother left school she was employed doing office work with Nock & Kirby’s, then a well-known Sydney department store, which disappeared as a separate entity in the 1980s. Two of Dad’s sisters also worked in the office at N&K, and it was through them that my parents met.
I took a part-time job with that store in the late 1950s whilst going through university. I was in the pet section for a time, which resulted in Bill Hayden as Opposition leader, years later, dubbing me a budgerigar salesman. The description amused me.
My parents married at the Presbyterian church, Marrickville, on 11 July 1925 and honeymooned at the still-standing Clarendon Guesthouse, Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
My mother, born Mona Jane Kell in 1899 in Smith Street, Summer Hill, an inner suburb of Sydney, always found immense security in the familiarity of her home environment. She would often say to me that if she started early in the morning, she could walk to all of the locations in which she had lived and be back at home by lunchtime. Whilst a bit of a stretch, the point being made said a lot about my mother. Mum did not like straying far from her roots, either geographically or the value system by which she lived.
To my mother, family was everything. From her immediate family of husband and four sons to the very large extended Howard family, my mother’s life was all about the welfare and, importantly, the stability of her family. Her early family life had been far from happy: losing her mother to a brain tumour at age eight, and having a father whom she clearly adored, but who was a heavy drinker, she plainly found in my responsible and sober father a source of security and dependability.
The heavy drinking of my grandfather had a lasting impact on my mother. She retained throughout her life a real dread of alcoholism and virtually anything associated with drinking. I enjoy a drink but realised, as the years went by, how deep and understandable had been my mother’s reaction.
Many years ago, drinking habits were different; women drank a lot less. It was very much a male pursuit. Men got drunk at hotels and staggered home, often to the great public embarrassment of their families. There was much less drinking at home than is the case today. For many women and children, the local hotel was anything but a place associated with warm conviviality.
Something else was to touch Mum’s younger years: that was sectarianism. She was a child of what was once called a ‘mixed marriage'; that is, her father was a Protestant and her mother a Catholic. After her mother’s death, although Mum had been baptised a Catholic, her father sent her to a Church of England Sunday school. There was subsequent estrangement with her mother’s family and, given the Catholic/Protestant divide of the time, that action of my grandfather had likely been a cause.
Mum was a good Christian, totally lacking any pretensions in her dealings with others. She was privately devout. Every night she would kneel at her bedside to say her prayers. Sadly, however, she was always self-conscious about the fact that she had been born Catholic, but raised Protestant. For people of her generation, regrettably, those differences mattered much more than would later become the case. For all of her life she retained what I thought to be an unreasonable suspicion of Catholicism. Then I was of a generation which, in the 1960s, would experience the welcome disintegration of sectarianism.
Mum had a sister, May, and a brother, Charlie, and after her father’s remarriage following her mother’s death, two half-brothers, Ted and Arthur. She spoke frequently of her affection for her stepmother, and how fortunate she had been in having her after losing her mother at such an early age.
Premature death returned to Mum’s family in a particularly tragic way, several months before I was born. Ted, who had been diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 16, suffered a seizure while standing on Newtown Railway Station, in inner Sydney, and fell under an oncoming train. He died from the terrible injuries he sustained. To add to the family’s grief, May, Mum’s sister, was a passenger on the train.
Mum’s family never owned their own home, and always lived in rented accommodation in and around Petersham and Lewisham, inner suburbs of Sydney. I suspect that my grandfather was an unsuccessful punter, and that his gambling habits were strongly disapproved of by both his wife and his elder daughter. Whenever I visited their home as a young child there was a sad atmosphere. As I grew older, and learned more of the background, I understood why.
Grandfather Joe Kell was a great walker. When over 80 he would regularly walk from his home in New Canterbury Road, Petersham, to his daughter May’s place in Wardell Road, Earlwood, a distance of almost 4 kilometres. That is something he passed on to one of his