The Climate of Courage
Fictionalised account of part of the Kokoda Trail battles between Australian and Japanese troops in 1942.Set during the Second World War, The Climate of Courage involves a group of Australian soldiers who have returned from service in the Middle East. The novel is broken up into two parts and follows the soldiers from their leave in Sydney, where they engage in various romances and witness the famous submarine attack on Sydney, to their taking part in a patrol during the New Guinea Campaign.The book is partly based on Jon Cleary’s own experiences of the war.
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Jon Cleary
The Climate of Courage
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in 1954 by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd
Copyright © Jon Cleary 1954
Jon Cleary asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780006139652
Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007568987 Version: 2015-04-26
ToBarry
Contents
SYDNEY AND home came towards them gradually, a slowly returning memory. The outer suburbs, shallows of the city, were behind them and now the familiar stations were rushing past. Granville, Auburn, Lidcombe, the names all at once were personal. Rookwood cemetery went past, the long rows of ghostly headstones stretching away to the pale morning sky, the dead arranged neatly for Judgment Day. The old jokes were made about digging up a friend and everyone laughed: laughter hung on the lips like a bubble, ready to burst at any moment. Strathfield, Ashfield, Summer Hill: there was a yell as each station went past, of recognition and greeting and excitement. People on the platforms waved, and even their fleeting smiles, out of sight almost as soon as they were seen, left an impression that warmed the men. They were coming home and every welcome counted.
A sergeant, his thick black hair blown into a frightened wig about his small head, his lean body still bent from the wind, plunged into the carriage from the outside platform. He slammed the door behind him and leaned back against it, laughing and his eyes quick and bright in the brownness of his thin smooth face. Men looked at him for a moment, for Greg Morley was the sort of man everyone looked at, always expecting him to say something that would make them laugh or take their minds for the moment from their particular problem; but he had nothing to say this time, still laughing to himself because of his inner good feeling, and the men went back to finishing the game of Five Hundred, to staring out the windows, to waiting for the end of the journey. Sergeant Morley slapped a man on the shoulder and moved on through the carriage, picking his way none too carefully through the litter of bodies and legs.
Morley at last came to a vacant seat. He dropped into it almost gracefully; every movement was quick but there was never any awkwardness. He was the battalion swimming champion and had been a State champion before the war; nearly all his life had been spent close to the sea and there was the fluidity of water in every movement he made. There was also some of the unreliability of water in him. Strangers meeting him would note the faded sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves, there too long, and the purple ribbon of the Victoria Cross on his chest, and they would wonder that he wasn’t an officer by now; then after a while they would be aware of the lack of stability in him and would reason that the Army authorities were also probably aware of it. Morley himself was aware of it, but it didn’t bother him. Nothing bothered him, except getting home.
He took a cigarette from a packet flipped it into the air and caught it between his lips. He was full of such small vaudeville tricks: he should have gone on the stage instead of on to the clerical staff of the Water Board. In the Middle East he had even made the Arabs laugh with his antics and more than once had stolen the show from a street magician. He loved to be the centre of interest, but no one, except possibly the street magicians, had ever resented his conceit. It was hard to resent anything about Greg Morley.
