There is nothing quite so perfect as a memory that really never was.
The mention of the seventy-fifth
anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea (8 May 1942, A.M.D.G.) by Australian
Prime Minister, Malcom Turnbull, conjures up pleasant memories of the
twenty-fifth anniversary of that first allied victory in the Pacific that
stemmed the Japanese blood-flow toward my favourite country on Earth. Peter
Jones, my next door neighbour, and I 'pinched' his father's dinghy and rowed
all the way across Sydney Harbour to Woolloomooloo to greet two of the three U.S.
Navy ships in from Viêt Nam (or so I assumed): the carrier, U.S.S. Bennington,
and the destroyer, the U.S.S. Emerson.
The Yanks were friendly. I tried a head-fake on Peter to illustrate the
metaphysical oddity of the International Date Line, when I asked a sailor
aboard the Bennington what day it was. Expecting him to answer Saturday, as per
the U.S., he said, in effect, "Sunday, of course." Rats. It was the
trip back that was interesting, though we had seemingly and narrowly avoided
getting rammed by a gigantic liner, 'The Empress of Australia' (supposedly a car-ferry) on the way
over; I am sure that we were nowhere near the mighty vessel but the waves she
left in her wake made me glad I had skipped breakfast for this episode of “Mission
lmplausible”.
Anyways, we were already past the Admiralty House, almost home when we rowed in front of this very large supply-ship, the U.S.S. Sacramento, said to be 75,000 tonnes. The junior officer on the bow was not impressed with my greetings, as I informed him I was from the great metropolis of Pittsburgh. He rather directly told Peter and me to get the Hell out of there, using words I would not utter for another two or three years. The Sacramento was pulling in, perpendicular, to some wharves to tie up and had to go into reverse to turn the vessel before she went aground and ended a Captain’s career.
Apparently doing so when the two wayward lads were in front of her, would have sucked us right under. Of course, as ten year olds, Peter and I had no idea of the hazards of life on the high seas. We should have noticed that the Harbour Police's P.T.-size boat was keeping its distance. Peter and I were dead, beat; we each took an oar and heaved ourselves away and then spelled each other rapidly, once away from the Sacramento. Getting bawled out had been unpleasant. Only later did my dad inform me of the danger faced sublimely; ignorance may or may not be bliss but it is less prone to panic.
For
the twenty-seven years until his early demise, Dad loved to tell that story
every once in a while. Apparently, the Sacramento was blowing her fog-horn or
something. In telling the story, which accumulated interesting (if apocryphal)
details as the years went by, Dad would add the flourish of the pulling-down
gesture of a skipper honking loud and wide. That cloudy Sunday May morning in
the Autumn of 1967, my father observed to my mother (who would be 87 years
young today, as Bob Prince
would say) that two kids were stuck in front of the big ship. Then Dad realized who those two benighted
souls were.
My parents now got very worried; Mom exclaiming her concern and Dad, ever the engineer, focussed on what to do. Immediately, he notified Ray Jones, Peter's father. Well, obviously, Peter and I extricated ourselves from our unknown (if ever really extant) peril. Once ashore, Ray Jones subpoenaed Peter to return home immediately. Once in our flat, my mother kissed me, inexplicably, and my father really let me have it, equally inexplicably. Hey, I was just being patriotic, man! It made no sense, at first, except for the razzing received from my angelically diabolical little sister, Claire. That was her standard operating seizure. How could God pair such a rancid tongue with so innocent a visage?
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