You Never Met My Father (22 page)

The haughty Assistant Chief Director recommended a TTI pension for Denny to be reviewed in six months.

My mother lost her job at Borthwicks. A contraction in its overseas markets had led to lay-offs. Forty years later she still felt bitter towards the foreman who had retained a flirtatious young woman instead of her, someone who could only pack half the amount of meat she did in a day.

“And I let him know it,” she recalled. “He tried to say a single woman needed a wage, and I said what about the three kids I've got to feed? Bloody men!”

She was worried enough to contact her brother although it distressed her further to ask him for help again. But Uncle Mick was a kind man who loved his sister, and he was as indignant about her dismissal as she was. He told her he would see what he could do.

The next day he got a message to her via a telegram boy. There was a job going at the post office where he worked and he could fix it with the postmaster, if she wanted it.

Before the week was out she was sorting mail, for a higher wage and more civilized hours than she had ever been offered before. It was one of the few times in her life, while Denny was alive, that luck went her way.

The post office was situated near the railway station with views across the port, a grand old bluestone building that had been painted white. It had an elevated entrance, up stone stairs worn down by a century of entering and exiting feet. It had lofty windows that bore cumbersome timber slat blinds that gathered dust from the port and grime from cigarette smoke. Surrounded by other historic bluestone buildings—the customs office, the police station and jail, the courthouse, the public library—it had an aura of importance and solemnity, until Uncle Mick started cursing in the rear office, loud enough for the public at the front counter and further afield to hear.

He had worked for the Postmaster General all his life, first when telegrams were sent in Morse Code and later after the teleprinter machine was introduced. He was a two-finger typist of impressive speed but aired his frustrations whenever the machine broke down or failed to transmit. On other occasions he started fires in the waste paper basket when he carelessly tossed a match or cigarette butt aside, which also provoked his outbursts. He put these out with his and his colleagues' cups of tea. He wasn't afraid to express his feelings loudly, since he had grown to hate his job over the years and wouldn't have minded the sack, which was unlikely, given how indispensable the rest of the staff found him.

When he also arranged a job for me as a telegram boy in the busy summer-holiday period, and I was dazzled by my first pay packet ever, he took me aside and warned against any silly notions of pursuing a career in the postal service.

“It's okay for your holidays, for a bit of dough to tide you over, but that's all, Butch. You don't want to bloodywell turn out like me.”

A poor argument when I compared him to my father.

But he had at least one weakness: weekends of heavy drinking. Each Monday morning he asked Pat to check the death notices in the paper to see if he was listed.

My mother appreciated the stability the post office job promised. With Denny away and a little extra in the pay packet each week she was able to buy a few things she badly needed for herself: new shoes, new dress, new glasses and a new handbag. She also bought some cut flowers for no obvious reason and put them in a glass vase in the living room.

She enjoyed her job, enjoyed the camaraderie and appreciated the respect the postmaster showed her for the diligent way she worked, which soon earned her a promotion.

We all dared to entertain a turning point in our lives.

The atmosphere around the house was always more relaxed when Denny wasn't there. Pat had an old pedal sewing machine, given to her by her sister after she upgraded to an electric version. While Pat used the machine, her forehead was knitted in concentration and her eyes were focused on the needle. She would swirl the material into a new direction with a confident flourish, and hum like she was without a care in the world. Her skills as a seamstress hadn't faded.

On weekends while she did the housework she listened to the cricket, since the radio wasn't needed for the races. I maintained the vegetable garden that Denny had started and chopped wood for the stove and copper. Often in the evenings we played cards, usually cribbage.

“We learnt it from our father,” Pat told me, referring to her siblings. “We were all keen crib players. Dad, Mick and Fred used to play for a penny a hole. They could cheat, those boys. Dad would give 'em a clip over the ears if he caught 'em.” She sighed as she remembered. “We used to have great fun in those days.”

“Not any more,” I said foolishly.

“We can't afford a penny a hole, that's for sure,” she chuckled.

As a telegram boy I raced around Portland on an unwieldy post office bike, delivering missives with an air of importance, especially those inside red envelopes that declared their urgency. I convinced myself the job was essential for the smooth running of the world. I loved the riding too, even when fierce winds were blowing, which they did every second day in Portland, even when it was raining, for that allowed me a sense of sacrifice, adding more weight to my responsibility.

Sometimes I had to ride to the wool auctions in a modern auditorium amongst the wool sheds, where I saw my first real Japanese men, the men we had fought in the war, the men my father had been sent to subjugate in the Occupation, who looked more civilised than I imagined in their immaculate, tailored suits and preened appearance—more civilised, in fact, than the locals.

When my holiday job ended at the post office I started working at the Star Theatre, the local picture house. I was a lolly boy a couple of nights a week and at Saturday matinees.

I worked for a grey-haired woman who was stout and swayed from side to side when she walked due to some problem with her hips. I have forgotten her name but she was a kind old soul, patient most of the time with her team of teenage boys, and trusting, but given to outbursts of exasperation when one or another of them seriously short-changed her.

I donned a white jacket and carried a red tray filled with sweets, ice creams and nuts. I plied the aisles at interval.

Although I had enjoyed delivering telegrams, working as a lolly boy was far easier and had better perks, such as being allowed to watch B-grade movies, gratis, before interval.

Over the next few years I saw scores of films, Westerns and war movies, comedies and romances, and on rare occasions when the usher allowed me in after the interval, some that were blockbusters like
Spartacus
or
Th
e Sound of Music
. Rarer still were the torrid movies forbidden to someone my age, like
Irma La Duce
, and even some that were steamier, featuring mythical starlets like Bridgette Bardot whose breasts I glimpsed through a glycerine fog.

Besides the chance to see so many films, there was the opportunity to be on the streets at night, a sense of freedom never extended to my sisters, a privilege, which I began to associate with being a male. I became enamoured of the shadowy streets, the closed shops, the dark alleys, the unsighted laughter and giggles. I knew the excitement that seemed almost within reach was the privilege of adults.

On top of everything else I began to save money.

Often on weekends my mother would take us to our relatives in South Portland, where I played with Brenda and her retinue of followers, or Don, my other younger cousin.

There always seemed to be someone at the Stagg's piano, Aunt Gerty herself or an inebriated guest, like the ambulance driver whose favourite tune was
Th
e Drover's Dream
, which was about a parade of native fauna with human capabilities. I loved to watch his wet lips flap and his hands jerk up and down as if at the ends of invisible strings, amazed that such dislocation could produce fluent music without the trick of a pianola. There were other guests who sang rowdy numbers or sweet ballads.

Once I remember my mother was asked to sing a Harry Belafonte song about leaving a pretty girl in Kingston Town, at the end of which she received some hearty applause.

“Good on yer, Pat!” someone shouted. “You've got the voice of an angel.”

She blushed. “I can't really sing.”

“Of course yer can, love. What do you think you were doing? Sayin' yer prayers? Have a shandy,” he teased. “Then you wouldn't be so bloody modest. You might even sing us another one.”

When the adults had finished, Brenda put on her own records and taught me the latest dance sensations: the Limbo, a back-arching creep under a lowered broom handle, and the Twist, which generated so much friction with the floor that the balls of my feet felt on fire.

Around this time my grandfather, Da, arrived from Gippsland to live with the Staggs. He was my mother's father, but I had only met him once before, when Uncle Mick had taken us to see him in Sale, shortly after Pat had left Angus Campbell's employment. I had been born on his birthday but that hadn't granted me any privileges. He hadn't paid me much attention at all, so I had played in his back yard, while he drank beer with Uncle Mick and talked with my mother.

Now he was over eighty and no longer able to take proper care of himself. So Uncle Mick and Aunt Gerty housed and fed him. Pat cut his remnant hair and flinty yellow toenails. And as I recall Aunty Barb looked after him during his occasional bouts of illness. Uncle Mick supplied him with beer and tobacco.

He seemed a stern old bugger to me. His smile was fierce. His face was sharply sculptured, a skull with diminishing layers of skin and eyes floating in gaunt sockets. His nose was a rugged outcrop, like a feature of the cliffs of Cape Nelson. His lips were cankered with burns from cigarettes. I marvelled at the way nicotine had stained much of his bony hands. He had a voice that was thin and breathless but it could still intimidate me. He seemed like someone from a different era.

At the Stagg's I can't recall seeing him moving about much, although I assume he slept in a bed at night, used the brand new lavatory connected to mains sewerage and still drove his pale blue Hillman, brought from the other side of the state by a relative, which was kept in the back yard, sagging on one side due to a broken spring. He must have gardened too because I have a photo of him between some beds of vegetables leaning on a spade instead of his walking stick. He was usually hunched in an armchair when I saw him, with a translucent droplet of fluid gathering like dew on the tip of his nose. But whenever there was a sing-along he shifted onto a kitchen chair brought into the living room for the occasion, and took up his heavy accordion, wheezing bellows attached to great reddish compartments with rows of mother-of-pearl buttons. His gnarled fingers moved inexplicably to capture melodies like
When
Irish Eyes Are Smiling
or
Danny Boy
, while his eyes glazed over and his lips puckered in concentration. And, if he stumbled a little now and then, people were polite or drunk enough not to notice. All the adults enjoyed his music. They showed their appreciation with applause and calls of
Good on yer, Jimmy!
More Jimmy!
which he drank in like a desert wanderer at a soak.

Pat was glad to have her father close by, glad of the opportunity to reconcile with him decades after her jaundiced departure from the family home as a young woman. A dutiful daughter, she rolled his tobacco into dozens of cigarettes at a sitting, since his fingers had lost their dexterity, a skill more demanding than playing the accordion, apparently. She reminisced with him, judiciously avoiding the topic of his house-keeper mistress, who had died long ago, and her own husband, who was still alive and kicking. She gossiped with him about the Stagg family.

One of his sons, who lived in Perth on the opposite side of the country, was coming over to see him. Another son had suffered a massive stroke and looked like a deflated pumpkin, an object of pity, who gargled and spluttered incomprehensibly from a wheelchair, and was shortly to die. He would be brought to Portland, too, for a final reunion. Then there was Fred, the derelict, whom I would get to know better than any of my other uncles, who arrived in Portland now and then, always intoxicated, with a couple of his own ragamuffin children in tow.

Others dropped by to see Da; a swarm of my cousins who lived in different regions of Australia, many with families of their own already. The Staggs, of which I was a part, were arriving to pay tribute to their patriarch.

My mother loved the gathering of the clan. She showed them around the Portland district. She took them to the beaches, the lighthouse, the capes, across the border to Mount Gambier to view the Blue Lake and over to Port MacDonnell, a fishing village at the northern end of Discovery Bay. It was like a return to the pre-war years when, in her mind, life had been idyllic. It provided the sense of belonging she craved, which had never interested my father. It refocused her life, away from the misery she routinely experienced, onto a uniformly insouciant bunch she could call ‘family'.

Yet loyalty to her extended family wasn't enough to protect her from the dramas Denny had in store for her.

When I was still in primary school I fell in love with a girl called Kathy. She was on the dumpy side but had a pretty face and a seductive way of smiling, which made her popular with all the boys. And she enjoyed the attention lavished on her. But I was too shy to follow their example.

On St Valentine's Day I surreptitiously placed a cheap butterfly brooch I bought at Coles and an anonymous note saying nothing more than
‘
I love you' inside her desk.

I was in the class when she discovered my humble offering, so I witnessed the kerfuffle it created.

First there was the crowd of girls that gathered around her before the morning lesson started, the squeals and giggles, followed by a hush as she whispered instructions. Then they suddenly dispersed, eyes flashing at boys for any sign of culpability. Some boys wanted to know what was going on and word soon got around about the St Valentine's mystery.