Forged with Flames (20 page)

I realised pretty quickly that I didn't have enough strength in my legs to step down. The sensible thing to do would have been to call Cyril back and ask for his help but, being so independent, this didn't even enter my mind. I did the only thing I could think of and that was to launch myself as forcefully as possible into the bushes at the far side of the bus steps, tumbling unceremoniously into the middle of them as my legs buckled under me. I quickly glanced around to see if anyone else had witnessed the undignified display. Luckily, no one had! And fortunately, I wasn't hurt either, just a bit winded and uncomfortable. I gathered myself together, brushed some leaves off and somehow managed to get myself upright again just in time to see Cyril coming around from the back of the bus to see what was taking me so long.

‘Everything okay?'

‘Oh yes, Cyril,' I assured him. ‘No problems at all.'

I had a long way to go before I'd understand that asking for help was a sign of maturity, not weakness as I'd always believed.

About three months into my rehabilitation I started walking by myself to the Hampton Street shops. It was great to get out and a huge achievement to walk there and back, though I was often aware of people staring at me in my brown suit as I went. One day, however, Jenny drove me to the shops so we could spend some time at a local cafe. I was looking forward to it because Jenny was good fun and I could now drink a cup of tea by myself without having to suck it out of a straw while someone held the cup up. I had longed to be able to pick up a cup of tea and sip it at my leisure. Well, I am English! With my face mask on, we headed out to the shops.

Jenny parked in front of a bank and as I got out of the car, a woman came out of the bank, took one look at me and screamed. She must have thought I was a robber. My first reaction was to retreat—straight back to Hampton Rehab, and just hide myself away—I was so upset. But Jenny insisted that we carry on with our plan and go into the cafe for a calming cup of tea. As we sat there sipping our drinks, I began to see the funny side of it. We both ended up having a good chuckle over it. I realised the woman's reaction was perfectly normal because people robbing banks do wear balaclavas and there aren't that many people walking around in burns suits, so why would anyone know what it was? I was glad it happened when Jenny was there because I would have slunk right back to the hospital if I'd been on my own and it would have been harder to go out the next time. Apart from that, the café outing was wonderful and signified another baby step back to everyday life.

However, as I made progress physically, I realised that I'd soon have to leave the cocoon at Hampton and venture back into the world again, a prospect that evoked in me a confusion of thoughts and emotions. Towards the end of October, Terry and I decided we'd all spend the following weekend together in Upper Beaconsfield. I would join them in our friends' house where Terry and the girls had been staying, which was three doors down from where we'd lived. As we drove there on the Saturday morning, it felt surreal to be passing through the neighbourhood, like a film rolling past my eyes. I sat very quietly in the front seat trying to take it all in. Everything looked different yet familiar going up the hill towards Upper Beaconsfield. A lot of the trees were gone and those standing were blackened by the fires with vivid green leaves sprouting
thickly right up their trunks. Houses once shielded by foliage stood stark and exposed. My heart lurched as we turned into St Georges Road. Our charming weatherboard church was gone. Of course, I'd known this, but nothing had prepared me for how bare the corner site looked without it.

I touched Terry on the arm.

‘Could you just drive very slowly now?'

I needed to steady myself before I saw the block where our house had once stood. The car crunched gravel in a way that reminded me of turning out of the drive on trips to school and kinder. As we crawled past, I sensed that now wasn't the time to look closely. All I took in with the glance was emptiness. Terry and his workmates had cleared the remains of the building and a carpet of grass had grown over the block. The rose garden was completely gone. The swing was no longer there. Nothing seemed to remain of our life. It was just a vacant block waiting for someone else to build their dreams on.

I thought of the absent dogs. Dusky went missing in the fires and Tammy was with Terry's parents. Terry and the girls had visited the site not long after Ash Wednesday and a very singed Tammy had come running out of the bottom of the block to greet them. I remember holding onto the dogs for as long as I could during the fires. I reflected with sadness that at least one of them had survived.

Sitting on the doorstep of our friends' house to welcome me ‘home' was a bunch of flowers and some freshly laid eggs. The girls could hardly wait to get inside and show me all their new toys. I tried to show them all how happy and enthusiastic I was, but I in truth I felt a strange numbness, as if this were all happening to someone else. It felt like several lifetimes since I'd been here last.

As the girls showed me their toys—unfamiliar teddy bears and dolls I'd never tucked in beside them, and new books someone else had read to them—the reality of our material loss suddenly sank in. Photos had been burnt, a tape of my grandma's voice lost, little treasures made for me by the girls gone, and the house we'd imbued with so much of ourselves obliterated.

Later that afternoon, we visited our neighbours, Carol and Alan. Their house had survived the blaze though I found out a long time later that the service station they owned hadn't. We hadn't seen one another since the night of the fires and I badly wanted to thank them. I felt apprehensive as we stood on their doorstep, puzzled that I hadn't heard from them nor seen them in all these months. I wasn't sure what that meant.

Alan was out, but as we sat around Carol's kitchen table and talked, I was finally able to relax a little. Carol appeared as practical and down-to-earth as ever. We talked in a strangely light-hearted way about the fires; nothing serious raised, nothing talked about in any depth. I tried not to look outside, to the scene of my nightmares. I wanted to thank them both for being there for the girls and me, but anything else was left unsaid—for now. I was sorry not to have seen Alan but pleased to hear that his hands had recovered well from the fires. Later, I wrote them a long letter of thanks which they really appreciated.

We went to a church service the next morning, my first time in church since the fires. Roger now took St John's services in the village hall. I was looking forward to seeing everyone there, but nervous too, wondering how people who had not seen me since the fires would react. What would they think of me in my bodysuit and Perspex mask? Would they pity me or feel awkward? What would they think about the fact that
I'd survived while others had died? That such attention had focused on me? That their houses still stood while ours was razed? Bushfires and other disasters can bring out the best in people but they leave a wake of roiled emotions.

I sat through the service in a daze, disoriented and in shock. It still felt too raw for me, coming back to my home and community which seemed familiar but not, the scene of so much pain and tragedy. While I had been in hospital, people were moving on with their lives out here. It felt like a time slippage. If there were undercurrents that day, though, I didn't detect them. People came up to us to say warm hellos, but the scene around me and the voices all seemed a long way off.

In the afternoon we made a quick visit to Procie, who was living on his block in a portable house supplied by the council. By late afternoon I was exhausted, emotionally as well as physically, and more than ready to return to my sanctuary at Hampton. The neighbourhood homecoming had been a somewhat sombre visit. I was unnerved by what it had stirred, and although my love for the people had deepened, I wondered if I could go back there to live.

Shortly after this, I stopped going out at weekends. We'd been staying at friends' houses beforehand and it became distressing. There was an old nurses' home in the grounds of the hospital that wasn't used any more, and the new matron suggested Terry and the girls stay there one weekend. On the Saturday night soon after we'd eaten our evening meal, I started crying and couldn't stop. This started the girls crying, too. I don't know what set it off but I had to be taken back to the hospital, where I was given a sedative. After that incident, the staff said it would be preferable for the girls and Terry to visit me in the hospital at
weekends, and to have a break from other visitors for a while. This was to last for the rest of my time at Hampton. By the time I was due to leave, the imposed stability had worked; I had regained my equilibrium.

I was discharged from Hampton Rehab just before it closed for Christmas, on the 23rd of December, 1983. The staff and patients, many of whom I'd grown close to, contributed to buying Terry and me kitchen equipment as we still didn't have anything. Some of the men had made a coffee table in their woodworking sessions and were raffling it off, so I bought a couple of raffle tickets. They drew it while I was at the Alfred one day and when I got back they said, ‘Guess what! You've won the table!' It was our first piece of new furniture. I've never been sure if I actually did win it but either way it was much needed and very useful.

I left Hampton, walking unaided—back to my family, back to what I hoped would one day be a normal life. But not to St Georges Road, Upper Beaconsfield. That block of land would soon have a For Sale sign on it.

30

I DO LOOK A BIT UNUSUAL

T
owards the end of 1983, when I was close to leaving Hampton, Terry and I had decided not to rebuild in Upper Beaconsfield. We no longer felt the same about the place. We'd always loved Berwick where we'd first lived in the farmhand's cottage and thought it would be a good choice; familiar, yet a new start. After the traumas of that year, I realised a new start was what the whole family badly needed. We'd still be close to our many good friends, yet a safe distance from the bush and all the painful memories.

Terry was pleased to report back that he'd found a house in a cluster of streets all named after places in the Lake District, a favourite area of my father's. Berwick, with its Victorian buildings, oaks and elms, and central avenue of poplars, had always struck us as being an echo of England; and its civic administrators were obviously still maintaining the theme. The brown-brick house in Ambleside Crescent was spacious yet easy to clean, a big consideration for me now. We set about rebuilding our life, working on the somewhat naive assumption
that one day we'd recreate what we once had.

Initially, the house looked rather sparse inside with our limited array of furniture. We had the Hampton Rehab coffee table, and furniture and other household items that friends and the Salvation Army had given us; you could identify all the people whose houses had burnt down because they all had the same dinner set! One of Terry's workmates gave us an old black vinyl lounge suite, we already had a couple of black vinyl armchairs—not quite matching but close—and a small television that Liz had given me while I was in the Burns Unit. The living area was so big that the furniture looked lost in it. We bought a new waterbed because the doctors said it would be good for me, and the girls were given second-hand beds. It was all basic but it didn't matter; we were together again.

Terry and the girls moved in first. On the day that I came out of Hampton they were there with Mum and Dad, who'd travelled out from England to spend Christmas with us, arriving the previous week. I had been allowed out of the hospital briefly to meet them at the airport. Whilst I was sitting in the airport lounge at Tullamarine in a wheelchair waiting for them, wearing my brown bodysuit, a middle-aged woman came up with a red rose and said, ‘This is for you'. That's all. I don't know if she knew who I was or had just noticed me sitting there, but it was one of those unexpected, memorable gestures that reinvigorates our faith in the intrinsic goodness of others.

This was the first time I'd seen my father since my parents visited Australia a decade before. Dad had greyed and seemed less upright somehow. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, that must have hurt'. I replied, ‘Yes, it did a bit'. English to the core. That was about the extent of our conversation about the fires.

After we arrived home and I took my mask off, my poor Mum was shocked to see how bad my face looked. Since her last visit, keloid scars had formed, leaving thick red and raised tissue all over my face.

Although my rehabilitation was remarkable, I had limited movement in my hands and still couldn't bend at the knees which restricted my daily activities significantly. I was thrilled and comforted to have my parents with me at this critical time, my mother busying herself around the new house just as she had during my childhood in Barrowford. She ended up staying with us for five months, this time to help with the girls and all the domestic chores until I could manage on my own. Dad hadn't met the girls before but instantly and easily took to spending lots of time with them. He'd mellowed, or maybe that's part of being a grandfather.

This was the first and only Christmas both Terry and I had our parents together under the one roof for the festivities. It was fitting that our former neighbour, Procie, was there as well, a link to our previous life as we embraced the new beginnings. If any comparisons were made to the Christmas before, no one expressed them, and I was happy to rejoice in the thought that the worst was behind me.

I knew there were many operations ahead but I felt confident that these would be small matters compared to what had gone before. My left hand was all curled up and needed surgery to give it more movement; other parts of my body had become very tight; and my face needed operations to improve my appearance. But I had a loving husband, two beautiful children and was surrounded by people who cared. I revelled in being independent physically again and would marvel to myself: look at me now,
I can walk! I can get in and out of this chair. I can drink a cup of tea by myself! Even sweeping the floor was an achievement to relish. I was full of confidence for the future.