Thunder from Down Under

Almost 76 years ago, I was born, so I was told, at Mercy Hospital, Toorak, Melbourne, Australia. How did I get to Australia? Who were my ancestors? What have I done with my time while alive on this earth? Life is so short. We are not promised any specific number of years. As I get older and slower, I sense the need to provide a written account, so my children and their children, and who knows how many future generations of Bristols, will know more about their roots. And while I do not presume to write or speak for my younger brother or sister, this record should also be of considerable interest to their families. I apologize in advance to my siblings for any lapses in my memory.

Thunder Down Under: Australia Connections

My father, Matt Combes Cavendish Bristol, Jr. was a West Point graduate, part of the famous Class of 1939, a young Major temporarily attached to the staff of General Douglas MacArthur in Brisbane, Australia while he recuperated from malaria and various maladies sustained while fighting the Japanese in the jungles of New Guinea.

I am told that when MacArthur moved to Brisbane from the Philippines, he in effect drew a line in the sand, and signaled the Japanese that they could not penetrate Australian territory below the northern edge of Brisbane. I guess at the time there had been sporadic air attacks upon Darwin and parts of the relatively sparsely populated northern section of the Australian mainland.

I also heard that Churchill was telling the Australians to come help England in the fight against Hitler, and that in the event the Japanese occupied their homeland, the Brits would later help liberate their country. Somewhere around this time, the Aussies figured out that they needed to look out for their own country and join forces with the Yanks. Again, I digress...

My father was a very young battalion commander with the 41st “Rainbow” Division, weighing somewhere around 127 pounds, with a winsome smile and resemblance to the actor Marlon Brando. My mother, Elinor Herries Willis, was a volunteer typist in General MacArthur’s office. She was the daughter of Harold Willis, a senior officer with the Bank of England. Born into Australian “high society,” she was a debutante who, according to the custom of the times, went on a tour of the British Commonwealth with her mother instead of attending university. Then she volunteered.

I should point out that there was strong tension at times between young Australian men (most of whom were serving in their military far away from their homeland) and the Yank men whose military service brought them to Australia and to the attention of the Australian girlfriends of deployed service members. There was a major riot on a train when angry Aussie soldiers engaged in a legendary fight with their Yank “allies.” Many Australian friends have reminded me of this historical blemish after I admitted that my mother was an Australian war bride. But I digress...

Exactly how they met and fell in love, I cannot say, but they obviously met in MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane and attended dances at a local hotel ballroom. Early this century I visited Brisbane as the keynote speaker at a Christian legal conference, and was able to visit the hotel where they used to meet for dances. It was like stepping back in time. Anyway....

They were engaged, and then married at Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Toorak on June 26, 1943. I was conceived three months later, and then my father returned to the New Guinea jungles, where he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and at the young age of 27 had a battlefield promotion to full Colonel. He told me Japanese snipers targeted the officers in command of US Army units, that he was called on to replace his seniors who were killed, and was fortunate to have survived the war. He was a boxer at West Point and very tough for a man of slight build.

Before sharing more about my father, let me say that I was born July 6, 1944, while he was still off fighting in the jungle. I had somewhat of a yellowish complexion when I was born, due to jaundice, and some of my mother’s friends dubbed me “ToJo” as if somehow a Japanese interloper had been involved in my conception. Not a funny joke, I know, but the Aussies always manage to find humor in something. My own suspicion is that my father’s own jaundice, from multiple bouts of malaria, somehow found its way into the egg from which I was “hatched.”

My father had saved a bottle of warm champagne to share with his fellow officers when he received the news of my birth. The story goes that a telegram came through the day I was due to arrive. There was great celebration and the bottle was drained by well wishers. Then dad opened the telegram to read “No news yet.” My timing was not great. I really have no recollection of my first year of life in Australia. I am told my father came to meet me at some point and was so excited that he started throwing me up in the air in my grandmother’s apartment in Toorak. My head apparently made contact with the ceiling, to my mother’s distress. But I survived. Some feel this head trauma affected me for many years, but I am not making excuses😀.

Then mother and I returned to the US by ocean liner, docking in San Francisco. She was met at the port by my father’s mother, Genevieve Huffman Bristol and her sister Mercedes. And then they flew to our family home in San Antonio, Texas to meet my grandfather, Colonel Matt Combes Cavendish Bristol, US Army (Retired).

The war ended before my father’s temporary promotion to Colonel became permanent, and he spent the next decade as a Lieutenant Colonel, then the next fourteen as a full Colonel. I do not remember much about my first few years, but we lived at Fort Benning Georgia long enough for my brother Roger (November 1, 1946) and my sister Jennifer (July 16, 1948) to be born, then at Fort McPherson in Atlanta for a year, and then dad went to the mountains of Greece to help the Greek army defeat a communist insurgency. I still have a framed award he received from the Greek government. Apparently they loved him and he loved them. The only thing he refused to do was to eat sheep’s head. [I learned how to do that half a century later while living among the Kyrgyz people in Central Asia].

While my father was serving in Greece, mother took my brother, sister and me back to Melbourne where we lived with my grandmother Herries, whom we knew as “Widdy,” for about a year. For the first time, I have memories of real life. Before that, I see photographs of family in San Antonio and Georgia, but have no actual memories. What do I remember from that year in Australia? The apartment complex in which we lived was a short walk from Toorak village. This was like a small shopping area, with service station, movie theater, barber shop and several other small shops. I remember the wonderful smells of the service station, where I liked to linger. I received a weekly “allowance” of six pence, with which I could buy several long sticks of black licorice, and buy a ticket to the Saturday morning movies. I remember standing and singing “God Save the King” while watching a short film clip of the King in royal garb. Then the serials where the hero would be in an impossible situation, then the episode would end and we had to wait a week to learn his fate (he always managed to escape his tormentors).

I remember driving up a steep hill in my Uncle Rory’s English Ford, and we had to get out of the car before it could finish ascending the hill. It must have been four or five horse power. I remember attending Miss Nankerville’s kindergarten, driving several hours through brownish countryside to visit my Uncle Dick and his family in Geelong (where there was no indoor toilet), and finally, nearly hanging myself on our mail box. The box was too high for me to reach, so I made a pile of bricks on which to stand. The top of the mailbox had a very tight spring. So I reached the box, opened the top, looked in to see its contents, then my brick pile collapsed and the top sprang shut before my little head could get out. I think I learned a lesson. This might have been related to my head bouncing off the ceiling as an infant...but probably not.

I clearly remember sitting on the living room floor in Widdy’s apartment and listening to radio programs filled with suspense and great sound effects. And the commercial messages for vitamin infused foods I could not tolerate. My mother had two older brothers. Uncle Dick was a chemical engineer. He and his wife Peg had two daughters, Gail and Catherine. Uncle Rory was a medical doctor who served in the Royal Australian Air Force in the Pacific theater of operations. He and his wife Barbara had two sons and a daughter, Martin, Michael and Kim. Rory was a brilliant ear surgeon who, in partnership with a colleague, Dr John Shea, in Memphis, Tennessee, developed and pioneered a procedure to transplant the tympanic membrane and enable some deaf people to hear. I loved him dearly. On a visit to Australia to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary, we spent New Year’s Eve with Rory and his wife Barbara, dining on fresh seafood and dancing the night away. Before he died from cancer, Rory was awarded the Order of Australia (the Australian equivalent to the British OBE) for his work among the Aboriginals in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Settling in to San Antonio

The next thing I remember is we were living in a big house on Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. My father was stationed at Fort Sam, and our house was just a short walk from the officer’s club swimming pool, where the clay tiles were so hot in summer that they could burn your bare feet. Someone’s dog came running towards us in our back yard, and my siblings and I were terrified. This will not do, my father said. Next thing I know, we had a new puppy, a boxer we named Buster. He was so small, we played with him, carried him around like a football. Then in six months, he was bigger than us, and our fear of dogs was greatly reduced. I have pictures of my sixth birthday party seated with friends and family at a picnic table in our back yard, with Buster on a leash tied to a tree.

Next installment: moving to Iran. Stay tuned.