Free Swords and Crowns and Rings by Ruth Park Page A

fainted, screamed, cursed, amongst growing clouds of dust. A hysteric sentimentality prevailed. The mayor, sunset-faced on the hastily assembled official platform outside the town hall, inaudibly prayed, condemned, thanked, and was cheered to the echo. The half a band played ‘Boys of the Dardanelles’, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘The Old Hundredth’.
    There was liquor everywhere. The publicans of three of the hotels had rolled out barrels of free beer. Quickly emptied whisky bottles passed amongst the crowd. The Nun, even as he drank, hoped that his old woman wasn’t getting stuck into too much of it.
    In the park, closely watched by the Fire Brigade, the flames licked up the post where the effigy of the Kaiser hung, his withered arm pinned across a chest heavy with jam-tin-lid medals. People threw things, clods, potatoes, dried horse manure, at the smouldering figure. Jerry, though he felt foolish and shaky with goodwill, thought it was an ugly scene, and he was glad when some moron hit the dangling dummy fair and square with a bottle of kerosene and the whole thing exploded in a pillar of fire. Some were burned, some knocked off their feet by the hoses being dragged here and there. Jerry was glad to see his wife’s blue hat, now askew above a flushed face, well back in the crowd, and Jackie and Cushie on the very edges of it, dancing with excitement.
    He pushed his way to them. ‘Keep away from these boneheads,’ he advised. ‘You’re likely to get wet to the skin.’
    But of course the Fire Brigade didn’t dare put the bonfire out, in spite of the captain’s bellowed threats. They would have been mobbed if they had.
    â€˜You mind you look after Cushie, now,’ Jerry said to his son.
    Father Link went past, looking friendless, though there were many of his parishioners amongst the crowd. He had soft ginger hair like wool, a mouth pulled down into a strange shape as though it had been paralysed in the very act of saying ‘Pip’.
    â€˜Poor lonely bugger,’ thought Jerry. He wrung the priest’s hand, said, ‘Great night, eh? All over.’
    Then he gave him a nerve nut. It must have done Father Link good, for some time later Jerry saw him moving self-consciously around in a circle, hand in hand with the blacksmith on one side and Mrs MacNunn on the other, singing:
    In the sweet by and by
We shall meet on that beautiful shore,
In the sweet, in the sweet, in the sweet by and by.
    The Nun thought he had better sit down somewhere. The combination of whisky and Hean’s Tonic Nerve Nuts had sent him into a curious languor. His fingertips were numb, and his bad leg in limbo, the pain having changed to a long-distance kind of pins and needles. Half-sprawled in the plushy dust near the Gallipoli memorial, he enjoyed a blissful melancholy.
    The figures that staggered and jerked about the bonfire were all known to him. A few were friends, many were customers; but they were more than that. They were members of the Kings-land tribe, split up into septs and families, his tribe now, their involved folklore part of his own life and history. They were all part of the poor silly bloody human race, pitiable, mindlessly stomping around in the dust, off their heads because some other silly bloody humans had been killed, pauperised, bereaved, humiliated, beaten.
    In his god-like drunken remoteness, Jerry felt nothing for them but impersonal affection.
    â€˜The Huns, too,’ he thought, His wife found him. A beatific smile was fixed on her face as though tacked there. It stayed there even when tears began to trickle down her cheeks.
    â€˜God, you’re a sloppy old bint,’ he said. ‘What’s up now?’
    â€˜I was thinking,’ she babbled. ‘I was thinking of Piper Nicolson. His boy and all. Gawd, I been hard.’ She burst out, ‘I want to go and see him, Jerry. Tell him I’m sorry about Baillie.’
    â€˜Better