Where the Line Breaks Read online

  The cabbie was still perched at the end of the street, waiting for us to go inside. Em hadn’t moved for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep, until she spoke. You should go.

  What?

  You should go – I can wait for Dan.

  Leave? I stood up and walked away, breathing heavily. I counted thirty-six bricks down the length of the driveway. Same number of lines in ‘Anzac Bay at Midnight’. She looked up at me from the front step. Hair in a mess of thick dreadlocks, dark purple panda eyes. She looked like a circus act. What do you want me to do?

  I think you should leave. Thank you, but it’s unfair on Dan. Whatever it takes, right?

  75 Pyke, The Annotated Letters, p. 299. She went back to work on Monday. The same office space, the same emails, the same workload. I told her she should wait until she’s ready. She said she is ready.

  The Prof is away for two weeks, doing some mentoring thing at a university in Germany. Yes, he speaks German.

  I told her I think she should quit. She said she needed me to be supportive. I said, once I’m published I’ll be able to support her – financially too. She said forget about your book for one goddamn second.

  I asked her what she’ll say when he gets back. She said she wouldn’t say anything. It’s the British way, she said, smiling like she’d made the funniest joke ever. I said the British way was attacking machine-gun nests by walking at them in straight lines. She said, It’s a joke, Matt.

  I sit up writing and wonder what would have happened if I’d insisted on staying and cleaning up. I lie awake, counting the marks on the roof, knowing Em is doing the same.

  76 From Hereford, They Walk Amongst Us, p. 63. Written in 1933, not that long after the end of the First World War, the work fetishises Victoria Cross recipients by imbuing them with the qualities of deities. For many Australians, that is how these men have continued to be viewed. For a country which loves nothing more than to cut down the tall poppy this might seem surprising, but from the beginning we have idolised the hero figure refusing help when it is offered, worshipping those who fight on alone.

  I asked Em if she wants me to say something to him. She said no, forget about it, stop thinking about it.

  I said, I can’t, it obviously affected you, or you wouldn’t have called me.

  She put plates out on the table and threw the knives and forks down next to them in a clatter of metal.

  I’ve forgotten about it. So should you.

  We ate in silence.

  77 From Curtin-Kneeling, Busso to the Holy Land: Alan Lewis and the 10th Light Horse, p. 236.

  78 See Shuckman, ‘Literary Allusions in the Poems of the Unknown Digger’, p. 72. It’s been a better week. Em’s still alone in the office. I head round to hers after work, and we eat dinner and watch TV, and then I go home and write. I figured she needed a little extra loving during all of this, so I bought her a present.

  I got the call at ten this morning, half-arsing my way out of bed. I called Em as soon as I hung up.

  Hey, you awake?

  She was out last night, drinks with Sam and Cait, and judging by the messages I woke up to, it was a big one. Maggot, as we’d say back home. She grunted down the phone.

  Fancy heading south of the river? I tried to sound nonchalant. Harder than I thought.

  Why?

  It’s a surprise. (She hates surprises.)

  I can’t move.

  I promise it’ll be worth it.

  She met me at Bounds Green and we caught the tube down to Brixton and the smells of the fish market and bloody red slabs of meat. Is this the surprise? She said. From Brixton, we had to catch a proper train from the upstairs station, heading south out of the city. I wouldn’t tell her where we were going. She gave up asking, and stared out at the countryside in her giant sunglasses. Like moth’s eyes, hiding half her face.

  We got off in the middle of nowhere, somewhere with grassy fields and that same little high street all nowhere towns have now: a Costa, a Paddy Power and a Pizza Express. I led her through the streets, glancing down at my phone for directions. Where are we going? she complained.

  Almost there, I said, three houses before the house we were looking for. The gate to the backyard was fenced off, and there was the musty smell of Old Pub in the air. Before I could knock, two dogs started barking from behind the fence: loud, Turnpike-Lane-after-dark barking. Em pulled her glasses up and looked at me queasily.

  A lumpy, middle-aged woman opened the door, cigarette hanging from her lips, a Yorkshire terrier yapping in her arms. I told her our names and waited while she looked us up and down, then grunted and beckoned us in. I ushered Em indoors.

  Inside, six more Yorkies were running around a lounge room.

  Watch where you tread, the dog woman croaked. The smell of old piss was stronger in here.

  Well, here it is.

  She motioned toward the one dog that hadn’t leapt up as we entered, a puppy with tan ringlets, and the beginnings of a blond goatee around its muzzle. It looked up at us.

  Pure Yorkie. Got the papers to prove it. This is the mother. She held forth the yappy dog in her arms, who scowled at Em and scrabbled in the air. The puppy was twice the size of the supposed mother, with different colouring, a longer snout, droopier ears and coarse dreadlock hair. The mother had a long, silky coat.

  I turned to tell Em the surprise was off. Obviously a scam – no way are these two related. But she’d dropped into a crouch and was stroking its head, forgetting the hangover and the smell of piss. The puppy opened its mouth wide, licked its chops, and nestled deeper into the cushions.

  79 It’s a boy dog. Em says she’ll call him Arthur. Artie, for short.

  It’s not like it was a complete surprise. Em’s been actively looking for a Yorkie for a while now, and she’s been saying she wants a dog since I met her: we bonded, down in the tequila bar, over the fact we both had Cavalier King Charles Spaniels as kids – she had Milo, ours was Harpo.

  I’ll be his stepdad. He was £350 all up, plus another fifty for a lead, poop bags and puppy food. Em said she’d pay me back. I said don’t, he’s yours. She stood on tiptoe with the puppy in her arms and kissed me, and said, One day you’ll be his real dad.

  She hasn’t stopped smiling since we left the house.

  80 The Prof is back, and Em says it’s all fine. Hasn’t mentioned the night of the party, doesn’t look like he’s going to, and Em certainly isn’t going to bring it up. I reminded her that I could talk to him if she wanted.

  She said, Artie is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and, We should build him a dog house!

  I could talk to him? I said again.

  She said we should take Artie to the park.

  I dropped the subject.

  CHAPTER 4: Examining the previously unexplored implications of a potential Alan Lewis authorship on the Unknown Digger poems: The Lemnos poems and their potential to change everything we think we know.

  Conventional academic study assumes that the Unknown Digger was a member of one of the Light Horse regiments. The consensus that has built, since the discovery of the poems, has led to a general agreement that he left Australia in early 1915, fought in Gallipoli, and was then either transferred to the Western Front or fought and was killed in the Middle East campaign, possibly as early as the defence of the Suez Canal.81 We can determine this much from the relatively candid poems of the Gallipoli campaign, with their obligingly literal titles (‘Anzac Bay at Midnight’) or easily demonstrable facts (‘The Morning of the Attack’).82 Compared to these early poems, those poems academics have identified as being written following the Gallipoli campaign are frequently more ambiguous, which makes them, vitally for us, considerably more open to interpretation. This has led scholars to make riotously contradictory assertions about their meanings, and from there, to hypothesise on any number of timelines for the Unknown Digger’s life.

  For instance, Max Whitlock claims that, based on the word choices in poems such as ‘To the Poet’ a
nd ‘The Billjim’, the Unknown Digger is ‘clearly hiding a deep affection for his fellow soldiers, an embarrassing secret he would die before revealing’.83 There is absolutely no evidence the Unknown Digger was secretly gay, but people will read into poetry whatever they want to read.84

  That the Unknown Digger was transferred to the Western Front following the Gallipoli campaign is perhaps an obvious assumption to make, given the dominant themes of the later poems. In Unearthing the Unknown Digger, Jennifer Hayden transposed the poems alongside a timeline of the war, coming to the conclusion that the Unknown Digger perished on the Western Front sometime towards the end of 1916. As time has passed and more research has been conducted, this initial belief has been subjected to various arguments, though as a testament to Hayden’s standing in the field, the official website for the Unknown Digger still cites his death as ‘somewhere in Europe, circa 1916’.85 Howard Greene’s remarkable analysis of the poems in ‘Line by Line: Analysing the Poetry of the Unknown Digger’ states the Unknown Digger’s death as 7th June 1917, at the Battle of Messines.86 However, I’m convinced he stayed in the Middle East and lived longer, fighting through the Great Ride, and perishing in the fields of Har Megiddo. More and more academics are coming around to the idea that the Unknown Digger took part in the Great Ride, across the Sinai and through Palestine. As Susan Freedland states: ‘the Australian story of the First World War is much more than just Gallipoli and the Western Front. Most of the Light Horse battalions never made it to Europe.’87 Until now, no-one has considered that the Unknown Poet might not have been in the frontline when writing some of the middle poems. Rather than heading off to the Western Front or immediately engaging in the Suez conflict, there is actually evidence to suggest the Unknown Digger was somewhere else entirely, a third option unexplored by the academic milieu and therefore left in pristine readiness for my own analysis. Let us imagine for a moment that the Unknown Digger, rather than evacuating Gallipoli with the rest of the Anzacs, was injured, like Alan Lewis, and spent a period of several months convalescing in a wartime hospital on the Greek island of Lemnos.88 What evidence do the poems themselves provide for this new supposition?

  The most compelling evidence for this theory comes from the elegiac ‘To the Poet’, in which the Unknown Digger postulates an unnamed versifier, wondering aloud ‘how buttered is his bread?’, and then accusing, in a bantering tone, the poet of ‘under/minin’ the depths of language/for the worthiness/of outhouse doors.’ Kathryn Hounslow maintains that the persona of the poem is calling the unnamed second poet a fake and an imitator, worthy of little more than toilet-wall graffiti, and most commentators have agreed with her.89 In Australia’s Unknown Digger, Max Whitlock assumes the second poet is a contemporary: ‘The eponymous poet in “To the Poet” is Siegfried Sassoon, perhaps, or possibly Rupert Brooke’.90 But the poem is not about Rupert Brooke, or indeed any of the modern poets. I believe that the poet in ‘To the Poet’ is the ‘father of poetry’, Homer himself, whose works were one of the few books available in the Lemnos Hospital Library.91 One only needs to read a few lines further for the reference to become apparent:

  where’s the bleeding bog roll?

  searching bloody soil,

  doing all this for years

  you’ve been doing shit all

  ‘Searching … for years’ is an obvious reference to the Odyssey, while the repetition of ‘blood’ and ‘bleeding’ helps bring the point home. Crucially, ‘all this/shit all’, while a clever anagram, also tells us that the poet is well studied and long dead.

  In Lewis’s letters home we find similar classical references. As one of The University of Western Australia’s most famous sons, Lewis’s education record is easily obtainable. We know he studied the Greek myths as part of the first cohort to pass through the university.92 His reference to his stay in Lemnos as his ‘Greek odyssey’ proves he remembered those lessons93 but it was a fragment of a letter to Porter, found among his writings and sadly never sent, written sometime before the regiment entered Jerusalem in December 1917, that categorically hammered the literary allusion home:

  I will spend ten years working my way back to you, avoiding the siren call of the south, avoiding the war, avoiding living, to feel what we had for one more day.94

  Ten years? Avoiding wars? Avoiding the siren call of death? Obviously another direct reference to Odysseus’s long journey home from Troy in Homer’s epic Odyssey. In this light, the lines misquoted by academics take on a new meaning – rather than a teasing insult about poetry scrawled on outdoor dunnies, Lewis is referring to his own extended stay in the hospital’s latrines, suffering from a bout of diarrhoea,95 and the only company he had in those long hours, the Lemnos library’s copy of Homer.96 In Lewis’s/the Unknown Digger’s hands, ‘the worthiness/of outhouse doors’ is one of the highest accolades a fellow poet could hope to receive. When viewed from a different angle, the meaning of a few simple lines can change with a few words, or an entire poem can morph into another completely different piece. Knowing the context, cynicism evolves into elation, humour is extracted from the bleakest of situations, and a new poem emerges from the rubble of discarded academia.97

  Aside from being wonderfully romantic, Lewis’s allusion in his letter to the Odyssey parallels a tendency observed in the poetry of the Unknown Digger to give the characters in the poems certain characteristics not unlike those in the ancient epics. I am not the first academic to have observed this. In her landmark article, ‘The Unknown Digger Revealed’, published in The Australian Literary Review in April 2003, Kathryn Hounslow argued for a former lecturer in English, Trooper Andrew Morrison, of the 2nd Light Horse, as the identity of the Unknown Digger. She based her argument on the abundance of literary references in the poems, and the fact that Morrison had published several poems under his own name in Australia before the war.98 While entertaining, her theory started to take on water when it was pointed out that Trooper Morrison faked his teaching credentials to join the army, and had in fact been released from a long stint behind bars in rural Victoria a month before signing up. Furthermore, his ‘previously published poems’, when examined more closely, were little more than sexualised doggerel and caricatures of the popular forms of the day.99 Despite being wrong in her main claim, Hounslow nonetheless made a valuable contribution by pointing out various instances where the Unknown Digger obliquely or implicitly referenced the classics.100 The most obvious allusions, such as the oft-quoted ‘Tell me, O muse’ from ‘Piccadilly Circus’, have since been joined by less obvious references.101 In ‘The Mundaring Gift’, the young protagonist is twice denoted by the epithet ‘duckboard-harrier’: in the context of the poem, the young trooper is a message runner, but when contextualised, the obvious inference is the similar ‘swift-footed’ epithet employed by Homer for Achilles.102

  Other poems reveal additional fresh information. ‘The Beach’ has often been assumed to refer to an unspecified Western Australian beach, and academics have argued for anywhere from Scarborough Beach down to Leighton in Fremantle, but once we recognise that Lewis wrote it in Lemnos, a reference to ‘the south’, which in most of the other poems is often correlated with a simplified means of referring to Australia, suddenly gains new significance.103 A simple glance at a wartime map of Lemnos throws up many small beaches on the south of the island that could be the eponymous beach. The fact that indisputably supports this theory is the following line from the poem: ‘behind the hills/the sun goes kipping’ which can only refer to the view of the sunset from a Lemnos beach, because, as any Western Australian sandgroper worth their salt will tell you: in the west, the sun sets over the sea.104

  The far-fetched contrivances of earlier studies, with their Eastern States–centric mindsets and lack of geographical knowledge, led to the jumping-to of numerous conclusions, and assumed the group of poems written following Gallipoli contained references to, among others, the Western Front, Suez, Australia, or, in one memorably ridiculous journal article, a ‘morbid fascination
with the Bible’.105 But when we know Alan Lewis spent four months on the hospital island of Lemnos recovering from wounds before he was sent back to his regiment, the evidence for this extended period of recuperation becomes manifest throughout the poems.106 Greene argues that ‘based on the number of literary references in his poems, the Unknown Digger must have [my emphasis] studied the classics’, which we know for a fact Alan Lewis did at The University of Western Australia.107 All the available evidence points to one university-educated, Greek-myth reading, West Australian trooper being the author of these poems – and only Alan Lewis fits the bill.108

  SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. MAY 1917.

  Each morning they wake to a new desert. Shifting dunes, like rolling waves, rearrange themselves in the dark.

  They hate the dust more than they hate the Abduls. The Abduls are following orders, just as they follow theirs. The dust obeys no man. Every breath of wind, every movement of horse, digger or vehicle, envelops them in a white cloud. Dust is the one constant in their lives. It finds its way into everything: the bully beef, the sickly tea, the rare cups of black coffee, the water pulled from wells, the rarely-spied rum, baked into the bread they haggle from the villagers, their hair, their eyes, the stitching of their shirts, the sweat patch on their backs, the leather of the saddles, the wet corners of their Walers’ eyes, the foamy flecks of spit by their mouths, the coarse hair of their manes, the roughness of their coats, their shit, their fodder, and the cracks of their saddle-sore arses, the peaks of their caps, the folds of a makeshift pillow, the waking hours, the writing hours, the eating hours, the downtime, the endless ride, the dreams at the end of the day.

  They hunt the Turk, but they can still respect him.

  They hate the dust.

  My love, another day has dawned, red sunned and sandy, and I have opened my notebook to a page of your handwritten declarations. Half asleep, I thought perhaps you had visited me in the night and left a note on leaving. I hoped for your kiss on my cheek, a lingering scent, a hair, as proof, laid out upon my pillow. No such luck.