Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Joe had come home in April the year before, 1919. He had a war like most, a bad one, escaping it for a while when he was gassed at the end of 1917 and spent nearly three months in England recovering before returning to the trenches: nothing then but horror until, as the war wound to an end which the men fighting it were barely aware was so close, his war finished the following August in a blaze of pain and (so he was told, though it didn't feel like it at the time) glory, with severe wounds to an arm and a leg, and a military medal which was awarded to him the following January four months before he sailed home. Jennie thought he would return as a conquering hero; instead he seemed to be the shattered remnants of the young man who had left four years before. Jennie was to understand later when Lillie told her that Queenie had left Gordon "because he wasn't the man she had married." But you couldn't walk away from your children. Physically, the effects of the gas were still with him, so that sometimes he was as tired and breathless as little Anthony, but his mind, Jennie thought, had suffered even more than his body. He refused to return to his law course and settled down to a minor position in the Public Service. Jennie had pinned so many hopes on his restoring the family fortune and reputation that she railed at him when he told her he had taken such a job, and shouted that he was wasting the brains the good God had given him. "Brains!" said Joe. "What good did brains ever do for a man?" And he shut himself off in his room, where most of his time at home was spent these days.

Joe had come home with other ideas about restoring the family reputation. He found on his return that they owed money everywhere and survived only by the generosity of friends and the few relatives who themselves had anything left. He sat down with his mother one evening and tried to convince her that they couldn't drift on in this way, that the only solution was to sell Calooli and find something smaller in a less fashionable suburb. The girls, he said, could surely find some work after all that education, and his pay and small disability pension from the army would help. But Jennie was adamant that her daughters would never go out to work while she was alive, and that she hadn't worn her fingers to the bone all these years to go and live in a house in Collingwood in her old age, that ... Joe gave up. He handed the bulk of his salary to his mother every week and never brought up the subject of the family finances again.

Strangely, in the midst of all this, Calooli in the next few years was often a happy place. Joe remained outside, shut up in his own world of fearsome memories, but Marie and Allie, and Johnny and Anthony as the twenties moved on and they too entered adulthood, built up a bond of shared comradeship and activities that gradually excluded their mother. The house was always full of their friends. When Joe had been home nearly three years he realised that one of the group, Kitty Desmond, who had been at school with Marie, was becoming for him more than just his sister's friend. Kitty had loved Joe for years, without hope. The great cloud that had hovered over him began to lift, and even his physical health improved. Allie realised all of a sudden with some surprise that they seemed to have become an ordinary happy family like thousands of others.

* * *

"Joe is so handsome," she would say, "and a poet." And indeed, she thought he was, and could tell her mother how beautifully he had sung that afternoon while Allie played the piano, and that Johnny said he wrote poems while he was shut away in his room. "When he's sober enough," Johnny had added, but she needn't tell her mother that. Joe's drinking was all a part of the sad romance of his life, but her mother might not see it that way, not at any rate without knowing Joe. Until she had met him Koro herself had wondered a little at Johnny's obvious devotion to the brother who seemed to cause them a lot of trouble; she had tried to hide the shock she had felt at the tale about calls from the local police station asking them to "come down and take him home again" after Joe had been thrown out of the hotel in High street after closing time, yet again. She had, of course, heard the story that made them all pardon his drinking, but it wasn't until she had fallen under his spell today that she had understood. It was not much more than a year ago that Joe's fiancée, Kitty, whose photograph stood amongst the family ones on top of the piano, had died of consumption. The illness had developed very quickly after it had been diagnosed not long after she and Joe had become officially engaged, and were making plans for their wedding. In the last few weeks of Kitty's life, as she lay dying at home, Joe had sat with her every night after the day nurse had left, holding her hand and brushing the hair back off her face with the tenderest of touches; then during the day he would be off to his office work in town. Everybody wondered how he could keep going, but he did until Kitty was laid in her grave. It seemed to Joe especially cruel that the rosy-faced Kitty should die so young when he, who had come back from France an invalid, survived without her. He became again the Joe of the first few years after the war, outwardly living but mostly dead inside. Kitty had asked him if he would take care of her two beloved dogs, so they came to Calooli and the family was grateful for their presence that took Joe outside once a day when he exercised them. Since they were Kitty's dogs he tended them with something of the devotion he had expended, in vain, on her.

Our life in St Arnaud was a happy one that has left no darkness of feeling to threaten the placid scenes of place in my mind. Our leaving it was prompted by yet another Collins family tragedy, but the sadness of this left in my self-absorbed five year old mind only a mild feeling of desertion when, in November 1937, I was told that Pat and I were to be left in Doreen's care while Mummy and Dad drove to Melbourne for the funeral of the third child of Granny Collins to die within twelve years: Joe, who lived with his mother in a boarding house in Williams Road, had been knocked over by a car on Williams Road and was dead at the age of 42.

* * *

I was playing in the back garden when my mother came out of the house and told me that she and Dad had to go down to Melbourne because Uncle Joe had died. I remember feeling aggrieved, because I had a stye in my eye and felt that I was in need of special treatment, and instead I was being abandoned - we had a nursemaid, Doreen, of whom I was very fond, but that was not the same as my mother's care. It must have been not long before that we had last visited Granny and Uncle Joe, who were together in a boarding house in Williams Road, Toorak, because I remember the visit and my memories can hardly go back much before Joe's death when I was at most five and a half. What I actually remember best is the big white cockatoo that sat on a perch on the verandah in Williams Road with a chain around its leg, poor thing. Sadly, I can't picture Joe, though I know he was there with my ever black-clad grandmother: her mourning clothes remained the same from the time of James death until her own. But death meant nothing to me then, and all I felt was the hurt of my own abandonment. Joe was run over by a car on Williams road outside the house, probably on his way home from the pub, God rest his soul.

Marie Hyde

1915
* * * *

"Ma will skin you alive when she comes home, Joe," said Johnny, looking up from the football cards that·were spread all over the dining room table.

Joe was only too afraid that she would.

"You're crazy," Marie said. "Just don't expect me to back you up."

Joe had swaggered in this evening and had announced to his assembled siblings that he had enlisted. It wasn't at all like Joe to swagger, and his demeanor was an attempt to cover up the terror he felt at having to break the news to his mother the next day. He had spoken to Marie first, hoping that she might agree to be his messenger; Marie wasn't half as frightened of Ma as he was. But perhaps this was asking a bit too much, even of Marie. Joe was often amused to observe the deference with which his friends treated his mother on first being introduced to her: they saw her as a sweet little black clad lady. Little did they know she was a tigress, and though he had to admit that it was usually in defence of her children that her claws came out - or what she perceived as their defence, though they often saw it in a different light - that didn't help in the present situation. When she heard what he had done she would probably feel that defence was what he needed now, and after dealing with him she would march down to the enlistment office and demand that his name be struck off the list. And struck off it could be, because there with his papers was a sheet bearing her signature (written by himself with the skill learnt from many a school excuse note) giving the necessary permission for the enlistment of one under the age of twenty-one, as he was. One thing was certain. It was going to be a lot easier to face the Germans than it would be tomorrow to face his mother when she returned from her visit to Aunt Lillie in Daylesford, where she taken Anthony while Bumpy was home from school to help Marie hold the fort: the warm mineral springs at Hepburn were a palliative for Anthony's frail body.

Joe of course had no intention of actually killing anyone, war or no war. He was too much of a poet for that, killing wasn't at all in his line, but it was the poet in him too that had reacted to the glory of the whole idea. Luckily, it was unlikely he would have to do any killing as he had enlisted as a non-combative medical assistant - which meant in his case, since he had no experience in medical matters whatsoever, a stretcher bearer. Even in the alcoholic haze which had surrounded him this afternoon he had never succumbed to the idea of actually fighting, and certainly not for the English. Now that he was home in the familiar and comfortably shabby sitting room of Calooli he began to wish that he had not succumbed to anything at all. It might have been much better not to have got caught up in the patriotic fervour that had overcome his drinking companions, though in his case he knew it had not been entirely patriotism that drove him; rather, it was the sudden revelation of a chance to escape, with honour intact, from the mess the family seemed to be drifting into with his playing the law student but spending more time in pubs than at lectures, and little Ma holding her head high over the mounting flood of debts and creditors, pretending it wasn't there.

Joe kept away from his drinking mates next day; he thought things might be tough enough with Ma that evening without her smelling the drink on him. But when the time came for his confession after dinner, the explosion was muted. There were pursed lips and an air of pained resignation, but to his surprise he could see he was going to get away with it. In truth, much as the thought of Joe going off to a war hurt and frightened Jennie, she thought it might pull him together a bit. She had realised for some time that something had to be done about Joe. She loved him very dearly, but knew that in his role as the man of the family he wouldn't quite do. Marie should have been the male really, but Marie was never any help to her because they were locked in perpetual battle: they were too alike. Whereas Joe was dear James again, sweet and dreamy and ineffectual. And then there was the fact that Lillie had talked of nothing else for the past few days but of her Richard having gone off to the war, as if it were the grandest thing, and she had to admit to a touch of pride in now having her own story to tell. Richard's to be sure, was a little more romantic, as he had joined the Light Horse Brigade, but to Jennie the role of a stretcher bearer sounded almost reassuringly non-belligerent and she was happy to exchange romance for a certain modicum of safety.

In April of 1915, the far-away war still seemed to offer a chance of excitement, of travel, of something different, to young men bored with the even tenor of their days. But it was four months before Joe and his unit were considered sufficiently trained to be unleashed on the enemy - or rather, in their case, on their own wounded - and in that time before embarkation Joe began to wonder when the excitement would begin. He began to feel like a soldier only in September, when they marched down St. Kilda Road from the Victoria Barracks and were entrained for the docks where the Hororata waited to transport them to the action in Europe. Jennie stood with the children in pouring rain and watched the marching men swinging along with such bravado in the dull, wet, evening light, and though the flags and the cheering caught them up in a surge of excitement she felt bereft when they were home again and she realised he had gone, and that war meant danger whatever part one was playing in it. She cried about it for the first time a few days later when Nance came for a visit and said that it didn't seem the same without Joe there. Joe had always been there, for though the girls had gone off to school in Ballarat there had been no need to send the boys away. His absence now made Jennie realize that Joe's sweet likeness to James had made the loss of James a little more bearable. She knew that if she began to let the ghosts in (though Joe, she told herself fiercely, was a long way from being a ghost yet) she might begin to crumble under the onslaught. It seemed, despite her five children, that she had been such a long time alone.