Adolescent Mateship

If we are marked to die, we are enow
To do our country loss

- 'Henry V' by William Shakespeare



On the odd occasion that my mates opened up to their parents, their various adolescent hurts were dealt with practically, if haphazardly, with ad-break conversation over TV dinner, a new shoot-‘em-up computer game or, in later years, a fresh bottle of Baileys for the bottom drawer.

Then there was my mother, who chose to ‘focus’ all issues indiscriminately, with reference to a fifteenth century English royal.

Prince Hal’s command of the redcoat army at Shrewsbury in 1403 was her favourite teenage band-aid. She liked to say that before his stirring speeches as King at Harfleur and Agincourt – indeed, ‘At the age of just sixteen, angel’ – Henry had been charged with the defence of his father’s crown.

And that anecdote should, apparently, have soothed everything.

Her point wasn’t lost on me, of course. My fourteen-year-old concerns about school and girls were hardly nation-changing stuff. Nevertheless, I longed for a copy of Men of Honour – and, though I’d never admit it to my friends between handball serves in the main quad, for advice that had a greater purpose than to single-mindedly indulge a selfish reverence for the Bard.

I longed for it even more when she left. Suddenly I missed being told that when Hal took an arrow in the face at Shrewsbury, he didn’t cry.



Big, blustering Dad reckoned I was soft enough to need to be packed off to the local branch of the cadet corps each Monday night – “To have some sense knocked int’ ‘im,” as he told Mr Granger over the back fence. For someone who’d hacked just half an annual camp back in the 60s, Dad sure made a lot of jokes with my new Commanding Officer about ‘their’ good ole’ days.

Turned out, though, that I passed Recruit Course easily. Within a year, they even wanted to send me on a regional promotions course: seven days to prove I ‘had it’ well enough to be a Junior Non-Commissioned Officer.

My life’s experience of suffering and comradeship comes back, thus far, to a bastard of a seventeen-year-old with a frightening set of lungs: Graham.



He was Australian Army Cadets Warrant Officer Class One Graham actually – Company Sergeant of the Course and ‘Sir’ – and he had not come to be liked. His qualifying corporals, he often said (because nobody’s standards could be higher) would be lean, mean and loud. We’d all been in a year or more, but none of us were much chop. Graham meant to change that.

Days began just past zero-five hundred: dark, cold Reveille, and pre-breakfast drill through deep frost. We scuffed a fresh-green snail-trail across the rugby oval each morning, round and round, back and forward; the chill seeping through our soles and laces and socks. Asphalt, and the road, came only later. Graham’s feet alone seemed un-blued – he’d hot-foot it from one end of the company to the other, bellowing continuously.

“‘eft-‘ight
         
          ‘eft-‘ight
                 
                    ‘eft-‘ight

                              ‘eft…
                             
                                                                      ‘eft-‘ight

                                                                                ‘eft-‘ight

                                                                                          ‘eft-‘ight

                                                                                                    ‘eft…”

Then: “Pick your feet up, Wilson! Friend!… You’re out of step! Get in time! Listen to each other – listen to the road – it’s your music!” Most times however, his numerous critiques were not so eloquently phrased. We hated Graham for his back-street language and his belittling stare, a habit of spitting when he talked; for his ever-flat slouch hat and his clean, creaseless uniform with stiff epaulettes and collar.

And we conspired to beat him.

We worked together on our own time, out of spite. Juniors was a fourteen by fourteen course: we slept in great big army tents. Duckboards ran down either side to cover the dust, raised pine and hollow, betraying ghost-walked steps of mice. We liked them though (until night-time toilet trips at least) – like the road, the duckboards gave us rhythm. We practiced marking time and changing step at ever-increasing speeds, echoing our new-found discipline off the brick barrack walls. We piled our stretchers in corners and did cane drill with fallen eucalypt twigs plucked from nearby scrub, “One, two – up, down – step – salute, one, two, three, four, drop – up, down, march.” At night we studied the day’s theory by torchlight, filling in each others’ blanks over jack-rat pretzels packed by some kind, anonymous mother.



Sometimes I think I should write a great, final speech for Graham – the epic kind, like the words Shakespeare wrote for Henry’s mouth: maybe that way the Junior Non Commissioned Officer Course, where I discovered myself, will last forever. He would applaud us as we came off the parade ground perfectly dressed, our steps united in a single beat. Later, he’d say that we had truly graduated from the snivelling, snotty-nosed recruit stage; that we were now lean, mean, loud leaders worthy of his chevrons.

Together we did all those things, but he never made any flattering speech for my Dad to hear.

Then I remember the Australian flag that Bennett carried at our graduation barbeque, filling the stars and Jack with autographs, and know that in its signings, we’re already immortalised.



Melodramatic? Oh, yes – but so was Mum’s Shrewsbury story. And at least to those cadets I marched out of JNCO with, we are a modern mythology; and adolescent mateship will bind us forever.



We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother



Disclaimer: This story is a kaleidoscope of recollection. Characters and events are the product of the writer's experience and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely tongue-in-cheek.



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