Question 7

When Flanagan’s father returned from the POW camp, he took a trip all over Tasmania. Flanagan talked to other POWs from Tasmania who described finding peace in the Tasmanian wilderness after their experiences of captivity and forced labor.

Flanagan’s father grew up poor and felt ashamed about it. As a young man, he asked a shopkeeper in the wealthy city of Launceston for a shirt he had seen in Hobart. The shopkeeper refused his request, describing Hobart as “a convict town” (44).

Flanagan recalls that his father was often ill when he was growing up. He worked as a schoolteacher in the town of Longford. They left when he had a dream that he had died and his coffin was being “wheeled” through the streets of Longford while the whole town watched. Flanagan reflects that his father’s kindness was a form of courage.

Flanagan recalls the time he asked his father to see the movie King Rat about an American POW in Changi POW camp who becomes the criminal leader in the camp. His father refused, saying the camps were not like that. His father told him that the Australians survived the camp by sticking together, unlike the English.

Later, Flanagan read an account of his father volunteering to help push Japanese trucks in the mud instead of sending one of his men. His father denied the story and seemed offended, even though he had previously said the book was very accurate.

Flanagan’s parents felt that money and ambition were “dangerous.” They didn’t see it as the central motivation for life.

Flanagan wonders if his parents’ attitudes toward money came from the ancestral culture of Tasmania, home to people who revolted against “the enclosing capitalism reshaping the world” (52). His maternal grandmother, Mate, insisted she was not descended from convicts. However, Flanagan found that her grandfather had been a convict from Co. Westmeath, Ireland who had been part of a group called the Whiteboys that fought against English repression.

Flanagan’s Aunty Blossom told him that when Mate’s family came to town in a dray [horse cart], the town children followed them, calling them “crawlers” or convicts. When she was dying, Mate had dreams of a dray trying to take her away. One day, the dray was driven by her grandson Tom and she went with him and died. Two weeks later, Tom, an infant, died of SIDS.

Flanagan imagines his grandmother Mate sitting in the dray being followed by children chanting “crawlers.”

Although Mate almost died of a stroke in 1956, she lived to be 99. Flanagan notes she lied and said she was 98. Toward the end of her life, Mate lived in a nursing home. At first, she befriended her roommates, but they kept dying. She outlived much of her family. Flanagan wonders if she thought G-d had “punish[ed]” her “with life.”

Flanagan says he was Mate’s favorite because he listened to her. Mate lived in their house when he was growing up and she was very particular about her morning toast. His father was very respectful of her.

Flanagan describes how his family sat in the back of the church and his father refused to take communion. He compares contemporary literary events to a form of church with a new orthodoxy, but says he intends to be a “heretic.”

Flanagan’s father described himself as a “bush Catholic” and believed people returned as animals after death. He was respectful of his ancestors, about whom he knew very little. His own father had been an illiterate railway worker.

Once, around the age of six or seven, Flanagan asked his father how many Japanese people he had killed during WWII. His father got angry and told him to never ask that question again. Later, his father told him war “is the ultimate obscenity” (63).

Flanagan describes how his father was gentle and seemingly unconcerned with traditional masculinity. He did not like to spank his children.

Flanagan’s father preferred to eat alone and was catered to by his mother. When Flanagan’s mother got dementia, though, his father cared for both of them and their domestic needs.

Flanagan’s father was very “original.” He got a lot of interesting ideas from the stories in the local newspapers.

Flanagan’s father didn’t cry during the war, but after the death of his grandson, Tom, he wept openly when reminded of him by something like an empty stroller.

Toward the end of his life, Flanagan’s father discovered what happened to a woman who had disappeared from his small town, but he felt sad at the discovery because “there’s no one left to tell” (70).

At the age of 98, Flanagan’s father told Flanagan he loved him, and Flanagan realized his father was dying. Flanagan recalls how even though his father was often sick, he would take them to the ocean in the summer. He would get so tan that he would be “refused service” [because people would assume he was an Aboriginal Australian], but he never complained or denied it. After he died, he was buried under a eucalypts next to Flanagan’s mother.

Rebecca West and H.G. Wells had a tumultuous relationship for 35 years after their first encounter.

After Wells and West kissed for the first time, Wells “retreated” to the Château Soliel, owned by his mistress, Elizabeth von Arnim.

West had written that “unrequited love was pathetic and undignified” (77). Nevertheless, she wrote to Wells threatening suicide over his rejection.

Wells and Elizabeth, whom he called “Little e,” went for a walk in the woods and read The Times. They found a letter by a writer named Mrs. Humphry Ward complaining about the younger generation of writers, namely Rebecca West. As a symbolic revolt, Wells and Elizabeth had sex “all over Mrs. Humphry Ward” and then burned the newspaper.

Back in his study, Wells continued to read The Interpretation of Radium by Frederick Soddy. He felt inspired by discoveries in atomic energy. Many of his earlier texts dealt with the theme of entropy, but he felt atomic energy could be a form of “perpetual energy.”

Meanwhile, West felt tormented by Wells’s rejection of her. She desperately wrote Wells demanding his affection. He responded that they [could not] see each other until she acted more “reasonable.”

While in Switzerland, Wells worked on a novel, The World Set Free [1914], about atomic bombs. However, the novel was uneven, didactic and sprawling. Flanagan attributes this to his desire for West even though Wells found her “disturbed—and disturbing” (83).

Wells felt his work-in-progress was not going well. However, in the novel, Wells foresaw the destructive potential of advances in nuclear technology. West imagined the military applications of radium which he called “the atomic bomb” (87).

In The World Set Free, Wells imagined the development of a small bomb that could cause massive damage based on principles of radioactivity in the 1930s followed by nuclear war in the 1950s. At the time he wrote, military airplanes were in an embryonic stage of development.

Flanagan describes Wells’s work as setting off a chain reaction that resulted in the development of the atomic bomb, its use in Hiroshima, and the shock of the crew that dropped the bomb.

In his novel, Wells described what he thought a nuclear mushroom cloud would look like. The bombing crew used very similar words to describe the cloud they saw over Hiroshima after dropping the bomb.

The World Set Free was a “failure.” By the time it was published, Wells had ended things with Elizabeth von Arnim and was seeing West. On August 4, 1914, the first day of WWI, West gave birth to their son Anthony. After WWI, they broke up and West went on to become a rightwing reactionary. Flanagan notes that The World Set Free was “forgotten.”

Even though Wells’s novel was a failure, it was read by scientists and Wells’s friend Winston Churchill. The idea of an atomic bomb took root.

The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima from the B-29 bomber the Enola Gay, named for the captain’s mother. The last word of many of the dying victims of the bomb was “mother.”