From Strength to Strength

by Sara Henderson

  In January I received a phone call from Wal Tracey, in Darwin.

  ‘Charles has arrived home. He’s very sick, so sick he can’t travel to the station.’

  CHAPTER 18

  1986

  I flew to Darwin. Charles was staying at the Darwin Hotel and I got a shock when I saw him. He looked absolutely terrible.

  One lung had collapsed and Wal had him on antibiotics. But a few days of attention and pills and the recovery was amazing. Charles thrived on attention, and that he received. I massaged him for hours on end. He looked a lot better after a week, but he was still a very sick man.

  Wal sent him to Sydney. He said Charles needed a specialist now. There was nothing more he could do. I put him on a plane to Sydney and went back to the station. I now regret this action. If I had gone to Sydney with him, maybe the events that followed would have been different.

  He called to say he was going to have an operation.

  ‘What type of operation?’

  He said his lungs would be opened up and all the cysts stapled and this would improve his breathing capacity. I didn’t want him to have the operation, but he wouldn’t listen.

  ‘If I’m going to be a vegetable, I’m not interested. This operation can fix the problem once and for all.’ This was Charles’s opinion, but no one else’s, not even his doctor’s.

  The year before he had had two operations six months apart to remove cataracts from his eyes. These operations had been so successful that his sight was restored to almost 20/ 20 vision. Before that his eyes had been so bad that I had to send one of the girls flying with him to point him in the direction of the strip.

  I think he was so excited with the eye operations that he thought all his problems could be cured with an operation. He had renewed both his eyes, so why not both his lungs?

  He also told me on that call that in four days’ time we would have a business meeting to discuss the plans for the coming seasons. He obviously considered Marlee and me as new recruits, although he made it quite clear that he thought he would have a difficult time directing us. However, in about six weeks he would be back on the job, so as long as we did as we were told, we couldn’t make too much of a mess in that short time. Needless to say I ignored most of these remarks.

  Charles’s operation was on the 18th of March 1986. When the doctors opened up one lung, it was far worse than the x-rays had indicated. In fact, there was very little they could do to improve the situation. Janie called to say the operation had gone okay and Charles was recovering. Janie had sailed on the Mary Blair with Charles from the first trip around the Pacific. She deserves a medal for her patience and understanding. During the next four horror-filled months she was as strong as steel, yet gentle and always thoughtful. I could never have made it through without her.

  My other great close-at-hand support during this terrible time was my brother Blue and his wife Margaret. Except for a few short stays in a hotel near the hospital, I lived with them at Palm Beach from April to June. Blue and Margaret own and run a kindy in Mona Vale, and busy as they were, they always helped when I had problems, and I had non-stop problems.

  Charles and I had separated in 1983 when he bought the boat and hired his all-female crew, but now he was sick and needed me, and I didn’t hesitate to be with him. I knew he would have done the same for me. We argued like hell, but we were friends.

  Charles had a cut from under his arm, around the fourth rib, across his back and up to the top of the shoulderblade and nearly over to his spine. It was a shocking wound. Three weeks after the operation he was not improving. The lungs were not responding, the wound had become infected and Charles was not in good spirits. As the drugs increased, his character changed. On Marlee’s birthday on the 8th of April, he spoke to her on the phone. He could hardly get out ‘Happy birthday, I love you.’ Marlee burst into tears, I burst into tears and Charles did too. Great birthday, all alone on the station, waiting to know what to do.

  A few weeks later Charles’s lung collapsed. He was already on pills for everything you could imagine, but he was given more.

  I moved into the hotel just down the road, ‘just in case’ were the doctor’s words. Janie and I sat at his bedside all day and until ten or eleven each night. We massaged him and read to him and followed his endless instructions. He started to improve. His lung started to inflate and the ghastly draining machine attached to his side was taken away.

  It was as if the sun had emerged from behind a dark cloud. Charles was smiling again. His lungs were far from good, but I read to him about a chap who with only one third of one lung had passed the army fitness test. Each day Janie and I watched as the fight slowly came back into his eyes.

  It had been a close call—I thought we had lost him. Yet all through that terrible period, I remember clearly thinking, Of course Charles will make it, he can beat anything.

  During all that time, Marlee was alone, back at the property, waiting. She was not alone in the sense of no people. Uncle Dick was always there and by April there were a few staff starting on the endless fencing. But she had no family. Thankfully she did have her Charlie. He dropped in in the chopper whenever he was in the area. It was now the beginning of the mustering season and, being chief pilot, he was very busy, yet he still managed to check on her regularly.

  I was dozing by the bed when one of the nurses came into the room. ‘You’re wanted on the phone, Mrs Henderson.’

  It was my sister Sue, calling from Queensland. When she said my name my heart dropped. There was something wrong.

  ‘Sara,’ I held my breath, ‘Mum has had a stroke.’

  My legs turned to jelly. Slowly I sat down in the chair at the desk, trying to breathe. My brain wouldn’t follow any normal procedure, it just kept screaming ‘First Charles, now Mum, first Charles, now Mum,’ over and over.

  ‘Sara, are you alright?’ She went on to say that Mum was in hospital. It had been major. At the moment she was out of danger, but they were not sure how things would progress. It would be weeks before they could tell us anything definite.

  ‘I’ll come straight away.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t know anyone yet, so wait. I’ll call you as soon as there’s any change.’

  She asked about Charles and Marlee. Danielle was going to school in Bundaberg and living with her and her husband Ralph. She told me Danielle had been a great help, going to the hospital and doing all she could.

  Charles improved steadily and the doctors said he could move to a convalescing home. He wouldn’t hear of it—he was going to the boat. The argument went on for days. The doctors told me I had to get the message across, they didn’t have time to argue. Of course Charles only wanted to argue with the doctors. They were worthy opponents, not me.

  He now started his underground network. Because I wouldn’t do as he ordered, he went around me. He arranged to move the boat to a serviced marina—until now she had been at anchor in Palm Beach. He arranged to have an oxygen machine set up on the boat, emergency power—the list was endless, not to mention the money being spent.

  I think the morphine was having an effect on his thinking. At this stage he was even talking about sailing to America. When I asked him how he would get oxygen in the middle of the ocean, he said he would take enough for four months. The power equipment alone would have filled up the boat.

  Charles was very excited the day he was to leave hospital. Janie and I were terrified. He was convinced there would be no problems, I saw thousands of problems. But he was determined to get out of the hospital, and I couldn’t blame him for that.

  My brother Blue was waiting with the car, Janie had packed all of Charles’s belongings, and we were ready.

  The doctor came into the room and said they were ready to go to x-ray.

  ‘What? We’re about to leave!’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Leave where?’

  ‘The hospital. Charles has been discharged, hasn’t he?’

  He asked me to wait. Charles tried to bulldo
ze his way through. ‘Forget him, let’s go.’

  ‘No, we’d better wait.’ I could smell a ‘Charlie manoeuvre’.

  Another doctor arrived and said, ‘We’ll take an x-ray, and if it’s clear, we’ll talk about leaving.’

  We silently went down to x-ray. It was the door next to the front door. We waited for the results.

  Then we were back in the lift, on our way back to that terrible room. The x-ray had revealed a large bubble in the lung. He needed complete rest and no movement until it could be brought under control. He was back on that awful draining machine, with tubes inserted into his side. I watched the excitement in his eyes slowly fade, until he stared at me with blank openings.

  The drugs increased and his behaviour became unpredictable. He demanded that the bank manager appear at the foot of his bed at a moment’s notice, only to issue ‘office boy’s orders’ to him. He had the entire hospital in an uproar. He told me to hire security guards as the nurses were trying to kill him. He wouldn’t eat any of the food—Janie and I had to bring all his meals in from outside.

  Some nurses requested not to be assigned to his room. He refused to follow the hospital routine. He wrote out his daily routine and told them to follow that. One morning they called me to come to the hospital as he would not allow them to come into the room until ten a.m. These were the instructions he had given to the night nurse to hand over to the morning nurse.

  His health started to improve again, if not his manners. The dreaded draining machine was removed and he was actually walking from the bed out to the balcony. He was on the up road again, the second time he had won the battle. But he would not do any physio work for his lungs. One walk down the hall and he flatly refused to do it again.

  I pleaded for days, to no avail. I think he couldn’t bear being so helpless, having to be supported by women in order to walk. So he wouldn’t do it. I finally convinced him to walk around his bed behind closed doors, and he did do this, but the physiotherapist said he needed to stretch and strengthen the lungs, and that required walking the length of the hall and up and down stairs.

  The ‘pass-out’ from that place was the length of the hall and two flights of stairs and back again. I would run up and down four or five flights daily because the lifts were so slow, and I would meet the poor patients on the way, labouring a step at a time with two minutes’ rest on each step, trying to qualify for the ‘pass-out’.

  My sister called.

  ‘Mum is out of the coma, Sara. She’s paralysed down the right side.’

  My heart cried. Our Mum was a wonderful person, always on the move, she never sat still. Even watching television she would knit or crochet. She devoted her life to helping others. Now she was paralysed.

  ‘Sara . . .’ There was more. ‘Mum cannot speak.’

  I put the phone down and cried. At that moment in my life I really didn’t want to go on. I felt as if the problems were closing in around me, crushing the life out of me.

  Charles was acting strangely. That was normal of late, but he still sensed my sorrow and when I told him about Mum, he insisted I go and visit her. He said he was feeling better every day and by the time I returned, he would be able to leave the hospial.

  I flew to Bundaberg. Mum looked like a little girl in that big bed, very small and frail. Her face beamed when I walked in—she recognised me immediately. She took my hand and although she could not speak, she could certainly verbalise. It was the quaintest language and although I could not understand what she was saying, the meaning was clear: ‘I love you, and I’m so glad to see you.’

  I heard the doctor’s report. ‘Ninety years of age, not much hope of recovery, possibility of another stroke any time. Best put her in a nursing home.’ Home! That dreaded word. All Mum’s life she had cared for and visited people in homes. She would say to my sister and me, ‘Please, if I’m ever old and cannot care for myself, please, never put me in a home. That’s all I ask.’ And all her life, that was all she ever did ask of us. It was now our turn.

  The doctors warned us of the cost of looking after her at home. They also said if we didn’t send her from hospital to a nursing home, she could lose the bed she was entitled to. We did discuss the plan and the decision split the family. But we eventually decided to get her back to her own home. Later, the look on her face when she got there made it all worth it.

  The first step was to get her out of that bed, get her moving. She was despondent, listless. I would ask her what the matter was and she would pat my hand and chatter. Ralph, Susan, my brother Tod, his wife Frances, and I took turns at the hospital sitting with her through the day, so she had constant company. Yet at night, when I went to leave, she would cling to my hand.

  I spoke to the doctor. What about physio? He said she would not cooperate. Now I had two of them! But it was not like Mum not to want to fight this. I stumbled onto the problem accidentally.

  In desperation I said, ‘Well if you don’t get out of that bed, you can’t go home. Wouldn’t you like to go home?’

  On the magic word ‘home’, all the light came back into her eyes and she made a noise that was her version of ‘home’. Seeing what a wonderful reaction this comment had elicited, I quickly continued.

  ‘Yes, you walk, and we can go home. The hospital will let you go home.’

  When I said ‘hospital’, she hit high ‘C’. After many hours of charades, I gathered that she had thought she was already in a ‘home’. When I said it was only a hospital, she cried out for joy.

  After that it was plain sailing. You couldn’t keep her down. She amazed the doctors and hospital staff.

  Mum had a beautiful singing voice and was a wonderful dancer, so I bought her a Walkman. She had never seen a Walkman before and looked worried when I started to put the earphones on her head. I told her to be patient, one thing my mother never was. I put the tape of one of Mum’s favourite operas in the machine and turned it on.

  The expression on her face when the music started was wonderful. She listened, mesmerised for the first few moments, then took off the earphones and turned them around. She listened into one earphone and hearing the music again, smiled at me. Then with her good arm she handed the earphones to me—I was to put them back on her head. She closed her eyes and sang along with the score. The only drawback to this otherwise wonderful scene was that, along with her speech, Mum had also lost her lovely singing voice.

  I started her dancing to strengthen her leg. I would put her paralysed foot on top of my foot and lift it. We were dancing around the bed, Mum singing off key at the top of her voice, when I turned and saw the doctor standing in the door.

  ‘If only I had a hundred of you!’ he remarked.

  That night Janie called to say that Charles had again taken a turn for the worse and was acting very strangely. He had told her to get out and never come back. Janie was very upset. I said I would be there the next day.

  How to tell Mum? We decided that it was better not to say anything. Ralph, Sue, Tod and Frances would keep going to the hospital and continue the singing and dancing.

  I arrived back in Sydney late, checked in at the hotel down the road, and walked to the hospital. The Charles I saw that night was a stranger. He was raving, aggressive and vicious. He accused me of doing terrible things behind his back, of selling Bullo to his enemy. Janie was part of this plot, so he had sent her on her way and now, he was sending me on my way. I was to sign the station back to him and he was changing his will and cutting me out of everything.

  Very few people knew that all the shares in the station were in my name and had been since the early seventies. In fact, everything he owned at that stage was in the company’s name, so legally it belonged to me.

  Charles had received various visitors and phone calls while I was in Queensland and obviously some of the outrageous acts he was accusing me of were the result of these—along with the morphine he was taking.

  I snapped! I was feeling desperate and so tired. I’d had enough.
r />   ‘Okay, it’s all yours. I’m tired of the whole thing. After all we’ve been through and you behave like this! You seem to kick the people who help you and you’re nice to people who only use you. So take the stupid station, it owes more than it’s worth, and by the time you get Bonnie and your sons out from America to run it, the bank will have sold it anyway.’

  Part of his unbelievable plan was that his sons in America would drop everything and come out to run Bullo. I don’t know if they were privy to this plan at the time, but later events seem to indicate that he could have had conversations with them along these lines.

  By this stage, Danielle had gone back to the station to help Marlee, so there were his two daughters working their guts out for him and he was going to call in other family members—who had left to do their thing—to run the station because he thought we weren’t capable.

  I took the chequebooks out of my handbag and threw them at him. ‘Here, take them. There’s nothing in the bank anyway, but no doubt you’ll manage to run up some more debt.’

  I ran to the elevator and pushed the button furiously. The night nurse came running down the hall and said Charles wanted me to come back.

  ‘Tell him from me, “Get stuffed!”’ She looked at me in surprise, but I was past caring what anyone thought.

  I hailed a cab. I couldn’t go back to the hotel—he would have called me all night. I had to get away. I told the driver to head for the city. I had him stop at some hotel and I booked in. I had a hot bath and sat and cried. When I had calmed down a little I realised I had not eaten since breakfast, so I ordered a meal.

  ‘Would you like wine with your dinner, madam?’

  I was about to say ‘No’ but said ‘Yes’. Food and a whole bottle of wine later, I was feeling a lot better but was completely drunk. After a few more drinks on top of the wine, I was completely smashed.

  I awoke the next morning feeling like death. I crawled to the bathroom and drowned under hot and cold showers for hours. After some hot coffee and dry toast, I convinced myself I would live.