Free Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay Page A

usually got applause as the audience liked the quick uptake I’d manage, sometimes even to catching the end of the note he hadn’t completed so that some of them even thought it was a part of the act. We’d been worried, thinking Alf had the smoker’s cough, which is not good if you play the mouth organ, and Mum said he had to cut down. It never occurred to us that because he’d smoked since the age of ten and was seldom to be found without a roll-yer-own dangling from his lips that it could be any more than this. In those days nobody told you smoking was dangerous. Eventually, against his protests, Gloria dragged him into Dr Light’s surgery. Now here was the result: at the age of fourteen any future I may have imagined was dashed before it had begun.
    I am ashamed to say that this was my reaction, rather than concern for my old man being on the way out. I can’t think of an adequate excuse for thinking this way. It was just that Alf hadn’t played a real big part in the lives of us kids. He’d be out to sea on a trawler all week and then he’d write off Saturday night and most of Sunday, so had very little time to get to know his children other than when we played the mouth organ together, always practising late on Sunday afternoons when his hangover was halfway settled down.
    The sextet was Gloria’s way of trying to keep us all together as a family. Unfortunately Alf, hangover notwithstanding, was a bit of a musical martinet and, with his head still hurting and him grouchy as a bear to boot, the practice sessions were seldom joyous occasions. When she was younger Sue was often reduced to tears and us three boys would try to remain stoic, but we’d secretly wish we could jack the whole thing in.
    Gloria would let Alf carry on ranting and raving – I guess she thought it was really the only time he could assert any authority over us. After a while we came to understand that Alf McKenzie the music maker was the only thing that separated him from the other fishermen.
    It was something he was recognised and respected for among his peers, consequently his family group had to be perfect or we’d show him up, shame him in front of his mates and their wives. It made for a very good mouth-organ sextet but it didn’t bring him any closer to us kids.
    In his defence, we were no different from the other fishing families. The sea stole our fathers from us in more ways than one and, as I mentioned before, at least Alf didn’t beat us up or have a go at creeping into his daughter’s knickers. Those were hard times and you couldn’t fault him as a provider, but whereas Mum was the centre of our lives, Alf was never a dad in the traditional sense, he simply did the best he could under the prevailing circumstances.
    Getting through high school isn’t a big deal these days, but at the time it was a major achievement. In fact, it became a social demarcation: pass your final high-school exams and you were a somebody; fail them, or fail to get to this point in your education, and you were regarded as a nobody forever onwards. My passing the last year at high school would have been seen as an educational milestone for a fisherman’s family. Now I was condemned to be just like every other McKenzie. Even at fourteen, having grown up with an illiterate father, I knew that without an education I was destined to be yet another of the long line of no-hopers and failures my family inherently produced. I hadn’t the nous at the time to know, just by realising this, that I had sown the seeds of my emancipation. At least I could read, and so the gate was half open – I had somewhere for my mind to go.
    From the age of eight I’d been an avid reader and much to the consternation of the other kids had inadvertently formed an association with the dreaded Miss Lenoir-Jourdan, justice of the peace, piano teacher and town librarian. I say inadvertently, because I felt