We’re Pregnant and I Can’t Speak Japanese
William Hay
Copyright © 2012 William Hay
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2012-09-08
Welcome to the world
9 May 2007
Dear Nicholas,
I just got home from the hospital after a long day waiting for you to arrive. I’ve called Irene with the news that you were born. You don’t know Irene yet, or Michael, Peta or Scottie, or anything about the half of you that comes from 8,000 kilometres away. Don’t worry, when you’re old enough to travel, possibly this Christmas or next, we’ll take you to Sydney to meet your family.
You’re quite a mix, a wonderful mix for that matter. Of course, you are Japanese on your mother’s side and have grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins you will get to know very well. My side gives you a real uniqueness. Your grandfather, Poppy Jocky, was from Scotland, and your grandmother, Nanny, was Japanese just like your mum. Unfortunately, you won’t get a chance to meet them, because they’re in heaven now. Well, Nanny… I’m not sure about Poppy Jocky. He might have gone to that other place.
I was born and raised in Australia, a first-generation Australian, but I’m as Australian as anyone else with an Australian passport, no matter how far back they can trace their ancestries. I had such a great childhood and upbringing that I hope you will somehow find an attachment to that part of you that is Australian.
I’m sitting at my computer putting the finishing touches to this; my diary, log, notes, my tangle of thoughts and experiences of what your life was like before you actually came into ours today. I borrowed some ideas from my parents, which I think have made me a better person, so I hope you will take notice of them.
It’s hard for me to comprehend the incredible change you will bring to our lives. I know for however long we are together it’s going to be a wonderful journey into the future. I think I’m ready for this. I know I am going to make mistakes as your father and I know there will be times when we will clash and you won’t like me so much, as it was between my father and me. But, I never stopped loving my father and, believe me, after my first glimpse of you today with your little bald head and honey coloured skin, I can say categorically that I will always love you no matter what you do or say or believe.
See you in the morning,
Dad
Immaculate conception
My father never thought he could have children because he had this war injury. On some rainy day in some Italian field, a German mortar which landed short of its mark fired a sizzling hot souvenir into his lower back to remind him of his time in the south of Italy. That splinter of shrapnel, which could have but didn’t render him a paraplegic, kept him off his feet for six months and left him with a dire prognosis about his manhood.
Youwill be fine, Corporal, but youwill not be able to father children, was the last thing his military doctor said before handing him his release papers to be shipped off to the sunny Middle East for lighter combat duties.
What did my father care? The year was 1943. He was nineteen years old, canon fodder for the British army, probably not going to see out his teen years, and not smart enough to realise his doctor meant he would probably be impotent from his injury and not sterile. Whatever: was his only thought. The idea of parenthood was as distant to him as his hometown up in the north of Scotland where the purity of the water produced the finest Scotch whisky.
For my father, the war provided an escape from a life of predictability. He was trapped in a job at the whisky distillery where his father and his father before him worked. Once he reached his early twenties, he would marry a local girl, start a family then live out the rest of his days not far from the home where he was raised. Going off to war was an adventure, a chance to be a hero, so he and his older brother, Bill, travelled down to the nearest recruiting office and signed up.
In his five years with the British Army, my father got more than he bargained for as a dumb teenager. He had travelled through twenty-four countries, experienced the extremes of hot and cold climates, crossed gaping cultural divides, and witnessed the beauty and the tragedy of the human spirit, which plagued his memory with haunting images that could only be tempered by these tiny red and yellow pills he would take daily. By the time he was demobbed by the British army in 1946, he was a Regimental Sergeant Major stationed in Khartoum.
While the British Army was vigorously thinning its ranks for peacetime, the Australia Army was looking to bolster its numbers. The Australian Government feared the “Yellow Peril,” Chinese communism, could reach down through Southeast Asia and clutch at its shores. When the call was sent out to ex-British soldiers to reignite their military careers in Australia, my father put up his hand. His job description was to train Australian soldiers conscripted to do three-month stints of National Service.
In 1951, at the age of twenty-seven, my father traded a bitter Scots winter for the incessant flies and heat of Kapooka Army Barracks in country NSW, arriving with nothing more than a suitcase of clothes and a promise from a young lady, a promise she would join him in Australia once he was settled and he could send her the fare for her passage.
She never came.
After tearing up the letter he had waited months to receive, he drank himself into a state of numbness at the Sergeant’s Mess then walked out of his barracks and any kind of future he was to have with the Australian Army.
He boarded the first train heading north, and ended up finding work on a farm in northern Queensland as a jackeroo. He was taken in by an elderly Scotsman who had immigrated to Australia many years before and had married a local girl. My father was an extra pair of hands they desperately needed to keep the family farm going, and literally became the son they never had. They suspected he was on the run from something or someone, possibly the law or a wife, but never pushed him for answers. It was his business, and his alone.
Over a roast dinner on a hot Christmas Day, my father confessed that he was a deserter from the Australian Army, a crime the British Army viewed as punishable by death in a war zone. For the Scotsman and his wife, it was a relief. Being a deserter wasn’t so serious, anymore; especially with the world at peace and the fact that my father was just training raw recruits to march and carry guns correctly. They doubted the Australian Army wanted him shot on sight. The wife had one question, though. She asked my father if he could live the rest of his life on the run.
On his return to Kapooka, my father had officially been Absent Without Leave for 545 days. His court martial was a brief affair after he ignored the advice of his defence counsel, who was keen to argue that my father’s actions were based on compassionate grounds and would ask for leniency from the judge. Instead, my father requested to be assigned to active duty in Korea, which was greater than any punishment the court could have handed down. He was immediately transferred to a battalion bound for a war zone, as he wished.
Whether it was fate, pure chance or good or bad luck, the outbreak of war on Korean Peninsula set my mother and father on a course to bump into each other in a town called Kure, not far from Hiroshima. Two people from different parts of the world looking to rebuild their lives after living through one of the most destructive times in history, had found each other in a bar, as many couples seem to do. My mother was working as a barmaid to make ends meet after leaving her hometown,