You Never Met My Father (12 page)

Portland in the late fifties was witnessing its most dramatic change in a hundred years. A modern port was under construction. Sometimes Pat took us to Battery Point, a knoll which once had the sea lapping at its base, to watch massive vehicles called Euclids, whose wheels alone were taller than most trucks. These carried loads of bluestone boulders from a quarry south of the town to dump into the sea below Battery Point. Named after the ‘father of geometry', according to Jean, these monsters were reshaping the coast. Two breakwaters were inching into Portland Bay, one north, one east, to protect its harbour from periodic sou'easterly gales that in the past had destroyed piers and wrecked ships. Each was to have a wharf on the lee side; one for cargo and grain, the other as an oil terminal. A timber pier, which had seen better days but was still operational, curved half a mile over the deep water. And there were other smaller piers and jetties, Edwardian seabaths with a kiosk and changing rooms over the water; rows of colourful bathing boxes along the shore. All these were inside the burgeoning barriers.

In summer I joined the crowds of kids swimming at the beach, playing on swings and slides, building sandcastles, hiring paddleboats or paddle skis to navigate around the jetties. The excitement and joy was contagious. I knew hardly anyone but felt a participant in something grand—a carefree idyll. I had no idea, looking down at the Euclids from Battery Point, that their work would continue until the idyll was destroyed, until much of the harbour was ‘reclaimed', the timber piers, seabaths and bathing boxes were gone, the placid sea virtually unswimmable. That realisation occurred decades later as I walked along the polluted shore, my mother and father gone, with only ghosts of the carefree for company.

There were other beaches out of town where I occasionally went with my relatives: Dutton Way, named after an early whaler, Narrawong where the Surrey River ends, and Bridgewater Bay, between massive capes, where I played cricket with my relatives on the hard sand at the sea's edge, fossicked in rock pools, and climbed sandhills and dunes.

My mother found employment as a cleaner at the local Anglican vicarage. The minister was Mr Sinclair. Maybe there was something wrong with his wife, or maybe she was getting old and couldn't do the work herself. I doubted they were rich like Angus Campbell. Pat liked working for them. They were kind to her.

She was relieved to have her own income again. It meant she could keep us well fed and dressed without relying on her relatives. She was a proud woman who fought hard all her life to avoid the stigma of poverty, which manifested in appearances: the condition of your domicile, the cleanliness and neatness of yourself and your children, and your manners. She taught us to be polite to our elders and policed our table etiquette. She taught us not to be wasteful—with food, clothes, toys or time. She taught us to help with the household chores. Her method was rarely punitive. Rather, she appealed to our consciences. She appealed to what we had learnt was right and wrong. And knowing what she had been through we were usually eager to please her.

Around this time Nanna, my father's mother, died in Launceston. She had lived to what seemed an impossible age, seventy-three. I vaguely remembered her.

My mother cried a little. “Nanna was like a proper mother to me,” she told us, remembering her own mother's premature death and the difficult times she'd had with her father's mistress. “She supported me when you were just a baby and your father was not well. None of us would've survived without her help.”

Pat had to bear her grief alone because Denny wasn't around. She wanted to go to the funeral but the cost of getting there was prohibitive.

As far as I remember Denny never lived with us at Bentick Street. I place his momentous reappearance at our next home. Yet in his medical files there is a letter he wrote bearing the Bentick Street address, mentioning his recent treatment in Portland of a corneal ulcer, which was received by the Repatriation Department on 19th of June, 1961.

The ulcer had been aggravating him since he received shock treatment the previous year.

It confounds me that I don't remember him being with us at Bentick Street. He could have just been using our address for his mail, but the letter also mentions the work he was doing in Portland, a job he had for a while, which I do remember, quite clearly, but place a year later. I thought his return, given the circumstances in which he departed, would have anchored itself chronologically in bedrock.

At the end of his letter, which is a request for payment for the treatment of a corneal ulcer he had suffered throughout his life, he writes:

I'm sorry to be such a pest but I've lost almost a fortnights [sic] work. The first for nearly two months as the work I was doing dislodged quite a lot of old whitewash at a woolstore which we have been reflooring, & I couldn't take the risk of any lodging in the eye itself…but as I've been unemployed as stated I just could not afford the expense.

The Repatriation Department was unwilling to bear the cost of the treatment, since it refused to take any responsibility for the eye problem, even for its deterioration due to the electric shock sessions, as Denny was claiming, because it had existed before he enlisted.

The job he referred to was putting in new timber floors at one of Portland's wool storage depots, a vast three-storey building where hundreds of tons of wool bales were stored for auction and export. In a different time-space dimension he took me there. I remember him in khaki overalls, steel-capped boots, a handkerchief knotted in each corner and fitted tightly to his head, a big leather pouch with nails and claw hammer at his waist.

“What do you think?” he had said as he paraded before me. And, suspecting I wasn't impressed enough, he insisted I accompany him aloft.

I had never seen the interior of such a huge building. The whole area was dimly lit and reeked of lanolin. He led me up some rickety stairs to the level where he was working.

When he saw I was scared of the gaps, which revealed a great drop to the floor below, where bales of wool were piled, he grinned. He wanted me to know he wasn't scared. He jumped around from joist to joist, like a circus performer. He took several boards from a stack, explained their tongues and grooves as he slipped them into place. I watched as he nailed them onto the joists. It took two or three clean hits to sink each large nail.

“Come on, Butch,” he said, shamelessly borrowing the nickname Aunt Gerty had bestowed on me. “Have a go.”

He handed me the hammer.

I hesitated, reluctant to make a fool of myself; worried I might make a mistake that cost him his job. He urged me on. I detected irritation in his tone. I tried to imitate what he had done. I swung the hammer, missed and dented the timber. I tried again and ricocheted off the nail. On the third try I bent the nail. He seized the hammer from me and sank several in quick succession.

“You see, huh?” His eyes were fervent. “You still think your old man is completely worthless?”

“I never said that.”

“I know. But I can see it every bloody time you look at me.”

Did his disappointment with my response drive him away again? As I was growing up I often felt that my reactions prompted him to leave. I didn't know him very well. Mostly he frightened me. Whenever I was with him, my everyday anxiety intensified, which must have manifest on my face and in my body language. I wanted him to be like the father that other boys had. I had seen how relaxed fathers and sons could be. But Denny was never around long enough for me to get to know him, and for him to understand that I wanted to love him.

He wasn't living with us when we shifted to another house, another half-a-house (again the back half) on Percy Street near the centre of town, right where these days a supermarket stands. I don't know why we shifted, unless it was to shorten Pat's walk to work at the vicarage, which was just across the street. I was disappointed to lose my cypress-hedge hideaway, but there was something appealing about living so close to the shops. The house was an old weatherboard place and in the back yard was a bungalow, which another family occupied. There were a few kids living there. One of them taught me how to climb onto the roofs of houses without a ladder, but the thing I remember most vividly about him was the day he took me to view what he had left in the outhouse. It was in the bottom of the toilet bowl, a long, incandescent green turd, the likes of which I had never seen before or since. He refused to reveal his secret method of colouring poo. Maybe he had none. Maybe it was normal for him.

The front tenants were the Hothmans; a woman Pat called Bev, her husband whose name was Robby, but Pat called ‘that mongrel', and their three timid boys whose names I have forgotten. Robby was an overweight brute who used to batter Bev when he got bored with punching a huge sack of sand he had hanging from a rafter. He scowled most of the time. I only saw him happy when he was with his mates, riding huge black British motorcycles along Percy Street, or with his sons when he tried to teach them to use their fists.

I used to hide behind some bushes near the front corner of the house to watch his version of
Th
e Wild One
. The noise the bikes produced impressed me deeply, enough to curse me with a lifelong interest in motorcycling.

I knew why my mother called him a mongrel. It started to dawn on me that a lot of men hit their wives. Maybe my father wasn't so different from other men. Yet he never showed me the rough devotion Robby and other fathers showed their sons.

I was nine years old when I began to treat my sister Jean badly.

Pat lost her job when the vicar and his family left on a mission to Papua New Guinea. She was upset for the next few days but soon found another, packing lamb and beef cuts for export at Borthwicks, a large abattoirs on the northern outskirts of town, which employed a third of the town's working population. Each weekday she started work at 7am, long before we were ready for school, much earlier than the vicarage had required. She got up before dawn, cut our lunches, got herself ready—made up her face and donned a starched blue uniform.

She left Jean in charge.

Once my mother was gone I proceeded with unprecedented single-mindedness to make my sister's life a misery. I refused to get up. I refused to get dressed once I got up. I harassed Carol until she cried, sabotaging Jean's efforts to get her dressed. Jean prepared toast for Carol's breakfast. I ate it. She toasted more. I ate that. I refused to help her clean up the kitchen, refused to make my bed (although I always did eventually, unwilling to leave evidence of my insubordination for my mother to find), refused to go to school. I yelled at her, insulted her and cursed her until she was ready to cry. Then I left for school, on my own, without her knowledge, triumphant.

It was the first time in my life that I had deliberately misbehaved. I couldn't understand why I kept doing it. Even today I can't figure it out, unless I was seduced by the novel joy of triumph. But my insubordination ended some months later when Jean, at her wit's end, told our mother.

Greatly upset and disappointed, Pat took me aside into my bedroom. I sat on the edge of my bed while she spoke about how difficult her life was without my father around to help, how she had to work so we could eat and dress nicely for school so others didn't learn of our circumstances, how she would have to stop working if I kept upsetting Jean, who was only trying to help.

I knew her life was difficult. She always looked tired and the hair on her temples was turning grey.

She knelt before me and squeezed my arms and made me look into her eyes. “I wish your father was here with us.” Her voice was strained with abject emotion. “Looking after us. Don't you?”

I suddenly had a sense of her as a person and not just a mother. She had a life I knew little about, an adult's life, which for her was a sad, miserable affair.

I took the opportunity, despite misgivings, to ask about my father. “Where does he go?”

“Can you keep a secret?” she said, touching my knee, tapping it to show she had faith in me. “I don't want you telling a soul.”

I nodded earnestly; grateful she was still prepared to put some trust in me after my recent disgraceful behaviour, relieved he was alive, at least.

“Your father stays in a hospital in Melbourne when he's not with us. He's been sick for a long, long time, darlin'. That's why we never see much of him.”

“What's wrong with him?” I stammered, astonished.

“You're still too young to understand.” She sighed, realising she needed to say more. She looked tearful. “Something bad happened to him when he went to Japan at the end of the war, before you were born. It still gives him a lot of trouble. It gets him down. And sometimes makes him very angry. When you're older, he'll tell you, I'm sure.”

Her allusion to something tragic brought me to my senses. I remembered my promise to devote myself to her and felt deeply ashamed.

She gave me another squeeze and a wistful smile. “Now go and play, and promise to be good.”

My transformation was immediate. I began to obey my sister. I did more than my share of the chores. I constantly tried to please Pat, volunteering to help her with the groceries, the cleaning, running messages, anything to prove I understood the gravity of our circumstances. The mysterious illness that kept my father in hospital (as opposed to jail where I'd feared he might be) allowed me to hold my head high in the face of miserable adversity. This was in an era when single-parent families were somewhat shameful. So when I saw kids with both parents I felt like a martyr—a noble feeling I came to depend on over the years.

It wasn't long after my mother took me into her confidence that my father did show up once more. I was starting Grade 5. Suddenly he was there, unannounced, just as I was about to go to bed one night during the second week back at school. He had taken leave from hospital and hitchhiked from Melbourne to see us. He gripped my shoulders with powerful hands and appraised me with his wild penetrating eyes but couldn't bring himself to hug me. To put me at ease he ruffled my hair as he always did and commented on how much I'd grown.