AustLit
About the Story ...
A country family deal with the rejection of their son for military service.
A more gently humorous story than ‘Men’, ‘Mobilising Johnny’ is in keeping with the ‘backblocks’ stories (in the tradition of Steele Rudd) that had brought Locke critical attention: her Mum Dawson, 'Boss' (1911) had sold over 20,000 copies, though it never reached Ruddian heights.
The bulk of the story takes place between Johnny’s desire to enlist and his notice to attend for pre-enlistment medical examination. The revelation of Johnny’s height during the latter casts an entirely different light on the story’s events. However, despite the Ruddian humour of the story and the revelation of Johnny’s unusual height, Locke never allows either Johnny’s urgency to enlist or his family’s pride in him to become objects of satire.
Right in the middle of the hardest work of the season the eldest son of James and Mary Porters threw up the job he was on, and made a final declaration in the living-room of his father’s house.
“Mother, I’m for Sydney.”
The words didn’t exactly create a panic, but they stirred up enough trouble to make the next few days into a chaos of seething, fermenting eruptions.
Mrs Porters answered him.
“You’re for Sydney, are you? In the middle of the work? P’raps you’re for your best suit of clothes, too, and your other boots, an’ p’raps you’re asking father an’ me to let you have a couple of pounds in your pocket to spend down town. I shouldn't be over-judging you, Johnny, should I, if I was to say you’d be expectin’ us to harness up Billy the horse, and get you to the station by the mail train tonight?”
There was enough humor in her tones to give anyone the correct joke she wished to serve, but Johnny knew the seriousness that lay behind. “I'm not saying a thing about best clothes and money in me pockets. I just said I was for Sydney — right away.”
In the low living-room, the woman, standing over a half-cooked joint in a kerosene tin on the fire-chains, turned to look at him.
“You got a great cheek, Johnny, then, to suppose father an me’d allow you to go to the town in your workin’ clothes. We’d as soon think of it — as think of you goin’ at all at such a time, and the work near killing us all as it is.”
She started to walk away, but Johnny brought her back, quick turn, with his repeated declaration.
“I tell you, mother, I’m for Sydney.”
More serious now, she asked irritably, “What for?”
“To sign on.”
“Sign what on?”
“Sign my name on.”
“On what?” She screamed the last word.
“On — on whatever they wants me to. To sign John Henry Porters to go to the front.”
Mrs Porters put her hands firmly on the table and leaned over to stare at him.
“The front — the front of what? Talk plainly and get it over, John.”
“The front.” Johnny himself became irritable then. “H’ain’t you heard of the front, mother?”
“Front! I’ve heard of the front verandah and the front of father’s starched shirts often enough when it comes to the doin’ up of both. Look here, Johnny, make things easier if you want me to understand you. What’s this ‘front’ you’re talkin’ about?”
“Well, didn’t Father tell you there was war goin’ on between England and Germany? Didn’t Bill Hopkins come over last week and say there was printed notices up all over the township an’ on the trees along the bridge road: ‘Your King and Country Needs You’. That’s what it is. ‘Your King and Country Needs You.’ That means it’s calling to us chaps out here, too, to go and join the army, that’s what!”
Mrs Porters nodded slowly. “I see, and you’ve been thinking all this week, Johnny, that the King has been sort of calling your name to go to fight, eh? Kind of coo-ee-ing up our paddocks, has he? Funny thing, neither me nor your father heard as much as a curlew these nights, much less the great King of England.”
She laughed at her own joke.
“It’s me been calling you, Johnny. Calling you of a morning till I’m tired to death, and the season’s work at its hottest, and your father swotting some thing fearful over it. My word, I’d have something to say to the King and the country if they did happen to call you now.”
But John Henry Porters was a son of the soil. A good, honest, steady youth, who only saw the glory of victory and honor in stern, hard, unrelenting duty, and that duty apparently belonged to him.
“Well, mother,” he said quietly. “I’m going to the front if they'll have me. My name’s going down right away.”
“Better ask your father,” was the next shot from the female parent, and Johnny, as he took himself from the living-room, answered dutifully over his shoulder,
“I’ve asked him. He says it’s all right. I’m going to sign on now.”
Later Mrs Porters had a word with her man, in the presence of the entire family. Dinner and other things were the order of the hour.
“Seems like we’re all getting highly serious about John having wrote his name to join in the fighting,” she said evenly.
“Nothing to laugh at in it, is there?” came from Porters, senior. He fixed a deep meaning eye on his wife.
“Laugh?” She looked thoroughly disgusted. “Who wants to laugh: I’m surprised at you, Father. I was about to say that, seeing half the country lads is what they call ‘mobilising’ themselves ready, we'd best get Johnny into suthin’ decent to go and meet the King.”
“Meet the King?” One blood-rimmed eye worked round to search the subject, and the old man held the floor for one fraction of a minute.
“Course he’s responsible,” said the old man. “And isn't Johnny responsible along with him?”
“Course he is.”
This from a younger member of the family who knew something the rest didn’t.
“ … Alf Brown says they got to carry a service rifle; but I s’pose the King ‘ud have one of those large cannon-guns what’s wheeled along.”
This set the family thinking, and Mrs Porters looked a trifle more pleased.
“Does anyone happen to know if Geordie Carter is going?” she asked.
“Geordie Carter carn’t leave now his father's dead and him in charge of things.”
Mrs Porters looked more pleased than ever.
“I must call and have a talk with Mrs Carter,” she said. “Must be orful to have your only boy stoppin behind, like he wasn’t wanted. I must say if there was any saving of a country, an’ me a good strong, strapping fellow, like Geordie, I’d like to to be saying I had a hand in it.”
And, proud as a Christmas turkey before the feast, Mrs Porters called on Mrs Carter.
“We’re getting our Johnny away,” she told her neighbor, sitting stiffly under her best summer bonnet and talking over an elevated chin. “We been mobilising him ever since the King and his country called him, I’m proud to say. It’s a great day for us, too, with the girls all sewing his clothes and things ready, and the schoolmaster teaching him what to say and how to manage his feet.”
Mrs Carter had certain instincts culled from her progenitors, who had fought in the Crimea and Peninsula wars, that somehow gave her an impetus now. She tried to put her neighbor right as regards Johnny's enlistment.
“Your girls are only wasting their time, Mrs Porters. Johnny won’t be allowed to take anything but what he stands up in, and a tin to eat his food out of.”
“I beg your pardon, Mrs Carter, but Johnny is carrying a service rifle. I suppose you don't know what that is?”
“It’s a single barrel gun, something like a Winchester repeater,” said the unconquerable Mrs Carter. “I can show you one that my father's father carried time of the Indian Mutiny. I don't suppose you'd know what that is, would you?”
“I never hold with fighting the natives, Mrs Carter.”
Mrs Porters rose, with an objection to most things on her face.
“ . . . I should be ashamed to remember my people fighting the “aborigines” in a country that belonged to them. Up at our place, now, my husband always makes a point of employing black labor if he can. He says the blacks had first say in this country, and I s’pose it was the same in India when — when your father’s father tried to steal it from them.”
She walked to the door. “Maybe you’ll be seeing Johnny walking past in his uniform, presently. I must order up some red, white and blue ribbon, and make him a flag he can carry and be proud.”
“It would be better if you were to knit him a warm undershirt, so’s he doesn’t get cold at the front,” said Mrs Carter as a benefit, but which somehow the other woman regarded rather as a brick thrown after her.
Meantime, things at the Porters’ 16-acre lot progressed favorably. So now Johhny had signed on at the local township, and reflected certain graceful honors on the local maidens, who knew him well at the same time. John Henry Porters was a great success. No one spoke of the work in the present hot season.
The mobilising was complete to the last touch of sentiment. The girls and Mrs Porters sewed late into the night. They had thought of everything, despite what Mrs Carter had said. Johnny was packed and ready with every available comfort and convenience that would go in a bag. In fact, he was ready to be called any minute, and daily he lingered about the kitchen or the verandah, or the unhinged front gate, in case a “blue paper envelope” might be handed in by the once-a-day mail boy.
No one blamed him for leaving the work to his father, and the expensively hired man. No one said “Get busy” when he was first down to a meal, in case he got “called” before he was through with it.
Indeed, everybody for once, called him “Dearie,” and his sisters lopped over him as he ate his food. Even the sisters of his local pals lopped over him, where once it took sixpennyworth of milk rock or two seats at the local bio-scope to get them to even take his arm.
Indeed, John Henry Porters knew he was a success generally. He knew it because he felt his King and his country calling him every time his mother woke him in the morning with, “John, it’s a quarter to eight, dearie, an’ father's been at work three hours.”
He knew it by the bulging blanket, provided with things he was sure to need at the front. The bulging blanket contained flour and tea, and a little sugar, scented soap from the girls, and a book on “Doctoring at Home” supplied by his eldest sister, who had heard hints that she would make a good nurse. (The gentleman who had credited her with such talents was really looking for a housekeeper and a stepmother to his seven, half-washed bairns).
Another thing supplied to Johnny in his impromptu “kit” was a copy of the song, “A boy's best friend is his mother,” in B flat, and “Let me like a soldier fall,” with maternal hopes written in one corner that he wouldn’t.
Oh, Johnny knew he was a success from early morn till curlew call at night, and the whole district seemed to approve of him as a man and something that “England expected” to do some certain deeds of glory presently.
And one day, in a tiring, uneventful afternoon, the “blue paper envelope” came over the gate. Johnny took it to his mother, who took it in her turn to his father, who also took it out of his turn to his neighbor, and much was said thereon. It wasn’t exactly the “call,” but it advised John Henry Porters to report at a certain quarter for examination and medical inspection. Indeed, indeed, the house of Porters was proud. Even the dogs barked with the excitement; the cows lowed; the pet wallaby wallowed; and the family famished for his return.
Johnny departed “pro tem” for inspection, and spent a nasty quarter of an hour under supervision of a burly deep-throated, hard-lipped man who looked at him as if he were a weed.
It was all very well, they told him afterwards, being able to ride like the wind on a bare-backed cow, knowing a gun from a mouth-organ in foggy weather, and having teeth as strong and deep-rooted as the rocks in the Atlantic Ocean; but didn’t it ever strike him that the King wanted men the average height, not a foot and five inches under regulation size; and hadn’t he better wait till he'd grown up a bit. There might be another war with Japan or Chili by that time. They advised him to stand out in the rain a bit mean-time.
When he told his mother she performed like a maddened calf. She wrecked the “bit of country” that hadn’t been called, as if he was sheer dirt and nothing better. She talked up hill and down dale, and said things about “her boy” being as good as any one, whether he was undersized or tall as a gum tree. She finished off by slapping the entire family, for wasting her time, and reckoned she’d say her say to the King and country next time she got the chance. She hoped Germany would win all the battles, and that it would serve England right for refusing to take Johnny.
Later, she simmered down, and things went on as usual, Porters senior never saying a word.
Mrs Carter did see Johnny walking past her place some time after, but he wasn’t in uniform, and he wasn’t carrying the red, white and blue flag — nor the service rifle.
He was in working “corduroys,” and carried a cross-cut saw, because he was under engagement to take the place of her son Geordie, at so much per hour per day, while the said Geordie Carter passed his examinations as “special,” and went down to Sydney to answer the call of his King and his country, and to join his comrades ordered to the front.
Note: According to the Australian War Memorial, requirements in August 1914 were a height of five foot six inches (which would make Johnny an inch over four feet tall). The height was lowered to five foot two inches in June 1915, and lowered again to five foot in April 1917. In the first year of the war, when standards were at their height, some 33% of all applicants were rejected.