The Grocer

George came out of the army with no medals and nothing intact but his convictions. He had been shot in the foot – too slow to scramble into a trench and a machine gun bullet pierced his instep – and kept in a bamboo cage for a month with only rice water slops to eat. Nothing had pierced or starved his beliefs, and some had been made stronger.

When I knew him before the war he was a short, olive skinned, wiry man with dark eyes and thick slicked back black hair, suited to coal mines in the country of his forebears. He enlisted at the beck of his fundamental beliefs, and when it was over, was glad he had.

But the jungles of New Guinea, the Kokoda track and Borneo had been tougher than he expected, hauling heavy loads up slippery tracks in torrential rain, dodging machine gun fire and bayonets, digging fox holes in the dark, little food and less sleep. He hadn’t really taken to the locals, wouldn’t share their huts or food. He was, behind the dark of his eyes, traumatised by what he’d seen and done.

He wasn’t afraid of death, just dying, which he knew with certainty was coming at him from behind, not the ahead, so he had to run. Problem was he didn’t know where.

Whenever we met back then he was mostly silent, the way he thought the world should work often in conflict with how he saw his world now, and so unable to frame his thoughts or emotions. He had the unshakable belief that what was before, what he had risked his life to save, would continue forever.

In the 1920s his father had opened a small grocery store at the front of a house that he had laboured to build in an almost empty new suburb after arriving in the country. His father had died before the war and his mother struggled with the shop for as long as she could. When George came back, he found the shop in debt, claustrophobic and inhibiting, yet his options were few. He had no trade and little education.

He was strong and reliable in the army but had never risen above private. He could see how and why and was deeply embittered by it. He resented the men - they were all men – who poured firefighting foam on his ambitions and were quick to ask for help when they needed something done. Yet he courted them for the remote possibility they would favour him one day. I told him they wouldn’t, but it was advice he couldn’t hear.

He quickly found and married Maude. She was of a similar build to George but her parents had been slightly more successful translating themselves into the new country. She was a clever and witty woman but hid her cleverness so as not to embarrass or anger George, and as was the fashion had barely finished high school.

George began to add some weight prompted by Maude's cooking and filled out, looking sleek but never prosperous. They quickly had a daughter and a few years later a second. I hoped they would be the survivors they deserved to be.

When George's mother died they moved into the small two bedroom house she had left, and George set about renovating it. He also rented a bigger shop a few kilometres along the road near the end of the tram line that came from the city, delivering the workers from the flourish of new desk jobs brought on by the peace.

He worked hard at building the grocery business, making friends with other shopkeepers, filling orders left in the morning to be collected at night, doing home deliveries for free, helping elderly and infirm customers, but he didn’t have a solid grasp of business and struggled to turn a profit.

He joined the Freemasons where, as he said, he came to know some well-off and well-known people, but it was the sort of acquaintanceship limited to the arcane ceremonies of the Freemasons Hall, and their comments about helping him evaporated.

Still, he ‘kept the roof together’, as they say, over his family and made his mother's house a home. He drove a 1940s brand name sedan that he thought made him look prosperous, but could never save enough for a van to do the grocery deliveries. A cursory glance at George and Maude told you they would struggle through the coming decades because his rock hard convictions would be no match for the insistent change needed to create the future.

I came upon him once in the driveway of that house, standing next to the car. He had his back to me and a light rain was falling. In front of him the white walls of that small house, to his left the grey bricks of the abandoned grocery shop, the dull flat of the lawn with nothing to break the plainness. It was like picking up a small black and white photo from the 1930s or 40s with a forlorn George wondering whether this had become a burden handed on by his father.

Some years after the second daughter was born they had a son, George’s hope for a lad to take over the business and continue the legacy of his grandfather. The boy was incredibly bright and, before he reached ten, usually at odds with his father's opinions and commands. Eventually the boy made himself a nest in the disused grocery store in front of the house and moved in amongst the derelict shelves and old wooden boxes, often refusing to speak to his father for weeks. He was the first in the family to go to university, earning a doctorate and heading his own research unit on a prestigious campus in America. I, at least, was incredibly proud of him.

George’s world was shrinking, and as we talked, I heard him beginning to doubt whether the beliefs his parents had bestowed on him were sufficient to sustain him and his family within the chaos he saw in this emerging world.

Cars had got bigger, faster and more ubiquitous, supermarkets were being built not ten kilometres away, a large shopping mall was under construction near the end of the tram line. George was not ready or able.

Then Greg stumbled into George’s world.

When Greg met Elizabeth, George and Maude's second daughter, he was a long haired, bearded, at times scruffy university student with his own car who went to protests. Everything George disliked and could not understand. And worse – he was studying philosophy, not some steady course like law or economics that guaranteed high paying and respected jobs.

Greg and I got along well enough. I could see into his world with some understanding. It’s possible Elizabeth was attracted to Greg because he was definitely not George. The son certainly expressed his feelings that way. Not one to use cliches when complex grammar was more fun, I was surprised once to overhear him say to Greg “my lips are sealed”, as if it was some in-joke or code.

George scrambled and fought to keep the grocery shop afloat with his personal service and Freemason connections, but Maude was frustrated having to work long hours in the shop by herself. George was in an ambush of stress and despair but lacked skills and imagination to find a way out. His health suffered but he never would speak about it.

Elizabeth was looking for a lifeboat to escape in, and so she and Greg fell in love, or lust, and proceeded down the stages of relationship towards a marriage, a convention that George was adamant would be observed by his children before any sex happened.  But Greg’s parents lived in the country, and I know those two first made love on a summer evening under the stars on the lawn of Greg’s parent’s house years before they married.

They were already a world away from George and the grocery shop and moving fast.

Sometimes Greg’s parents would come to the city and when it became clear the relationship was going to be a long one, it was arranged that Greg’s parents should meet with Elizabeth's.

George being the gentleman he believed he was, invited them to his place for lunch one Sunday, when the shop was closed. The meal was set up in the kitchen, the only suitable room in the small two-bedroom house. The chrome and laminex table struggled to seat the six of them comfortably between the sink and the cupboards. George had thoughtfully ordered champagne and for the first time there were crystal wine glasses on the table, a legacy from Maude’s mother.

Maude was not a great cook but she gamely wrestled with every meal, and today served overcooked roast beef. Greg’s father, my brother, was no doubt his usual smarmy and arrogant self, looking down his nose at the table and what was on and around it, wondering how he could thwart this match. I can visualise it in the tilt of his head, the tone of his voice and at the back of his eyes.

George served the wine and proposed a toast. They all touched glasses and drank, and my brother placed his glass down on the table a little harder than was necessary. The stem broke and the wine spilled on to the floor.

He didn’t apologise but said the glass must have weakened standing on its stem instead of upside down. George looked startled and affronted, Maude quickly cleaned up the mess and another glass was presented. Several minutes later my brother repeated his sham performance, bringing his class down hard on the table shattering the stem and cutting his hand. George was now deep in his roiling anger, certain my brother was one with those who had kept him a private all those hard and dangerous years of the war, and a serf chained to a grocery shop.

Yet he spoke moderately as he admonished, asking him to stop so the meal could continue.

My brother, riding the wave of his own self belief, having risen from private to railways clerk to an area sales manager, had to assert his superior position, and so an argument flared and Greg and his parents were asked to leave.

The heat intensified as they hustled through the short passageway to the front door. There was pushing, a punch was thrown, and a nose began to bleed. There was crying and remonstrance, more pushing and shoving.

Greg walked away, disgusted with his father, and barely spoke to him again. Elizabeth followed and they drove away in Greg’s car. Her father never spoke to her from that day.

Life engulfed them quickly. They moved in together and Elizabeth became pregnant. I helped as Greg borrowed and scraped together the money to fly them both interstate for an abortion. They had a wedding and George didn’t come though Maude and the rest of our families did.

George’s aggressive cancer killed him soon enough. Maude became the smart woman she had hidden for forty years and managed the grocery shop well for another decade. I called in occasionally and she was always cheerful and then teary when we spoke of George.

Greg and Elizabeth moved interstate and then overseas, as if to flee from family. She had an affair when he relented and went home for a month to see his dying father. A year later I got a postcard from Greg saying they had divorced.

I wrote back to him: We fear the future, but it’s the past that catches up with us for a reckoning.