Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  When we were children he cut Diana’s and my hair. He clipped my hair at the back and sides with a polished metal clipper that was manual, not electric. Tapering the cut was not a detail that interested him. He stood between two battered mirrors to cut his own hair. By his fifties, his brown hair was turning grey and his head was almost bald on top, although not quite a monk’s tonsure. I still have the small white canvas bag in which he kept his collection of clippers and the steel scissors with which he accidentally cut my sister’s ear when she was eight.

  My father was born not quite four months after his father’s death. Annie had only a day to discuss the unborn child’s name with her husband on his return. But it is unlikely she discussed anything like that with a dying man. My father’s elder brothers were given Germanic names, Carl and Otto; when she found she had given birth to another boy, she also gave this child a Germanic name. To make sure she got it right, she gave him three.

  It was a joke among his friends and family that my father had been named after the kings of Europe: ‘Leopold’ after the notorious king of the Belgians; ‘George’ after the German kings of England; and ‘Peter’ after the Russian czar, Peter the Great.

  My father had been named by his mother, and he happily ceded to Iris the right to name their children. She called me ‘Geoffrey’, she told me, after Geoffrey Fairbairn, the fifteen-year-old son of James Fairbairn, the Minister for Air. Bella’s scrapbook has a newspaper photograph of Geoffrey Fairbairn as a baby. His mother and Bella were distant cousins – a relationship of which I’m sure the Fairbairns would have had no inkling, but Bella boasted about it, as the Fairbairns were ‘squattocracy’.

  We were unaware that my father spelled my given name ‘Geoffray’ when he registered my birth. Twenty-two years later I applied to be admitted as a solicitor. I was mortified to discover his mistake. I made a joke to the Registrar that my father was not a good speller. With a flick of his pen, he altered the twenty-two-year-old registration to read ‘Geoffrey’ and initialled the change, which then became retrospective. I have never been ‘Geoffray’ – the only retrospective name change I’ve come across.

  My father was embarrassed when we laughed about his mistake. I can imagine how in 1940 he was in a puzzled frame of mind on his way to the Registrar General. As a man who worked Sydney Harbour, there was a Jeffrey Street wharf he knew well. If the spelling of the first half of my name was exotically different, the last part should have a highfalutin spelling too – ‘ray’ sounded grander than ‘rey’.

  Three small china toddlers that I have tell me something about his childhood. When he was a small child wandering with his mother through the city markets, young Leo insisted she buy the three little figurines. Cheap and simple and with no markings, they are in white children’s smocks and have pink faces. One of them has orange boots. Two of the toddlers are lying on their side. One is sitting up with legs spread out. There are various ways to arrange them. They are gazing out, and yet seem to be communi-cating with each other.

  Leo and his two brothers were skilled tradesmen. In their late teens and early twenties they rode motorcycles to building sites across New South Wales, staying with landladies in country towns. I knew the brothers only as cautious old men. I imagine as they rode their motorcycles, jolting over rough country roads – all dirt then, none were paved – they sometimes overtook each other with a burst of extra power and a jeering comment. Or they stopped, when one called out he had a ‘flat’, or paused for a leak, standing together and jibing each other.

  I know my father stayed with a Mrs Cranfield in Wombat Street, Young. Leo heard so much about her absent daughter, Emma, that one night coming back from his evening stroll, he tapped on Mrs Cranfield’s bedroom window and said: ‘I’ve just seen Emma. Waving a hurricane lantern from the window of the train.’ Mrs Cranfield was aware of his practical jokes and told him he was just kidding. Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was Emma with casks of wine from the vineyard where she lived. ‘But where’s your hurricane lantern?’ said Mrs Cranfield. She became convinced my father was clairvoyant.

  Otto was the only brother who continued as a tradesman. He married young and had no head for business. He said he liked to set up a line of nails on a rafter above his head – standing on a trestle – then drive them in, one after another, a single hammer blow for each nail.

  I do not know how my father became a contract boat driver for the Adelaide Steamship Company. His boyhood friend Archie Bryant worked for the company, but did not own his boat. Archie may have given my father the necessary introductions. In 1921, when he bought the Liberty, Leo was just short of thirty.

  Unlike Carl and Otto, my father did not became a Mason. He had a good-humoured contempt for the hocus pocus of their rituals. He picked up some passwords and signs from his brothers and enjoyed mystifying any Mason he came across by employing the handshake and exchanging some signs, then playing dumb. This was not un-Masonic, my father explained. Some Masons liked being a bit mysterious.

  As well as being spiritualistic mediums, my father’s second eldest sister May and her daughter Ursula Gwynne were Rosicrucians. May joined an exclusive female lodge, becoming a Master. The brothers ridiculed their long white robes. May was one of Canberra’s first tailors. My father was visiting her, when one afternoon a group went bathing in the Cotter River – a typical Australian river, short of water. May was sunbaking on the bank and furious when my father called out ‘May, come on in. Help the tide to rise.’

  ‘Otto’s the natty dresser’, my father would say, ‘and he doesn’t even own the roof over his head’. I suspect Otto was the family member who was most upset when the brothers found Annie’s will leaving the Walker Street house to Agnes. For forty years Otto lived in a rented flat in Walker Street, several doors down from Agnes, and reared a family there: a son and two daughters (all with dark-eyed good looks inherited from their mother, Winnie). He finally bought his own house in his mid-eighties with his share of Agnes’s estate, in a neighbourhood where his children already had houses.

  By the time I knew them Carl and Otto were two silver-haired, pink-faced old men with broad working-class Australian accents, both slightly built, like two peas from a pod – Carl with a bit more hair than Otto. Like them, my father was on the low side of medium height, his build a bit broader, more black in his hair and more tanned.

  Carl’s career as a spec builder petered out when he had enough money to stop working. He kept one of his spec houses and rented it out. He bought a narrow nineteenth century shop, three storeys high, on the Pacific Highway and set up the ground floor as a combination junk and antique shop. He rented out the two upper storeys to a widow. Carl sat in his shop all day, talking at length to anyone who called in – my mother called him a ‘gas bagger’ – and rarely sold anything. Late in the afternoon he would go home to Agnes, who cooked their dinner. His junk shop is now ‘The Cloisters’, an antique shop heritage-listed as: ‘A very unusual example of a three storey brick commercial in the Victorian Free Gothic style with decorative coloured brickwork…’

  Before his marriage, Leo went to horseraces on Saturdays and drank with the Buffaloes: a fraternal organisation originating in England. In 1932 the ‘Buffs’ or Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes presented him with a medal in a plush jewel box – a gilt horned buffalo’s head with red jewel eyes hanging from a pale blue ribbon. The medal was inscribed on the back: ‘Bro. L. Lehman For Services Rendered’.

  Before his marriage to my mother, my father may have had a friendship with a married woman – a story my sister heard from family members – but he apparently avoided entanglements until he began courting Iris, at about the time he was awarded the medal. The first years of the courtship were leisurely.

  When I mentioned this courtship in a poem about him, and quoted his statement that he was ‘waiting until she’d got some sense’, his reaction was: ‘Son, that’s dirt’. I did not publish the poem while he was alive.

  When he marr
ied he gave up drinking with the Buffs and lost a couple of stone in weight. He continued wearing suit trousers bought in his bachelor days, now much too wide around the waist.

  My father idolised Diana when she was born. At the christening, the wife of his friend Archie Bryant was my sister’s god-mother and gave Diana her 1300-page nineteenth century edition of Mrs Beeton’s cookery book. Mrs Bryant was good-hearted – my childhood memory is of a robust woman who laughed a lot – but she was not a person who could be my mother’s friend.

  In my last year at Mosman Prep our art teacher took us on weekends to paint landscapes en plein air and encouraged us to paint in oils. He introduced us to modern art and I felt free to give green faces to portraits of imaginary people. A black metal Winsor & Newton paintbox with gilt decorations had sat in my father’s main workshop for years. It came with brushes, tubes of oil paint and a wooden artist’s palette which slid in and out. My father gave me this coveted box. We bought more tubes of oil colours. I was intoxicated by the scent of linseed oil and Payne’s grey becoming translucent as it was spread across a white ground. The density of oil paints fascinated me: ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, and best of all, viridian. I loved the sable brush – how it soaked up the paint – and the fine brush that could delineate an eyelash (not something I ever achieved).

  My father seemed to have known a painter called Mr Bray for a long time, perhaps from the artists’ picnics on the Liberty, and took me to his house. Mr Bray painted gumtrees and paddocks in bland colours and gave me a lightly sketched landscape on Masonite I was to complete, as an exercise. I thought it had no feeling and did nothing to it.

  We also visited an Italian lady my father knew from the auctions. She had a backyard orchard and rooms full of oil paintings of flowers and fruit, some her own, and other paintings she had restored, all very stereotyped. I was a critical eleven-year-old, and began to realise I could not draw well enough. There were many bad artists and I did not want to become one of them.

  I loved the dust and clutter of auction rooms when we went there, father and son, in the school holidays. There was a call for bids on an old chaise longue, with carved oak feet, broken springs and torn faux leather fabric. For me, it was love at first sight. ‘Dad, get that.’ ‘Sold to Leo’, Mr Ellis called out. For years it stood, unloved in the upstairs hall of Number Fifty-three. But it had a secret admirer. I knew one day it would be mine.

  An assortment of characters known by their initials and nicknames frequented Mr Ellis’s auction room in Bridge Street. ‘Dee Why’, a swarthy shifty-looking man in his mid-fifties, had a furniture and junk shop at Dee Why, now a charity op-shop. My father was bidding for a large red Cassell’s German dictionary I wanted. ‘Dee Why’ began bidding against my father, and forced the price up to thirty-one shillings. I touched my father’s arm. I whispered this was more than the new price. ‘Sold to Dee Why’, Mr Ellis announced as he brought down the hammer.

  In the morning we shaved together, using his collection of cut-throat razors, dating back to the nineteenth century, and a leather strop which rolled up into a decorated silver-plated scroll. Every few days we nicked ourselves. Blood showed through the lather and we applied styptic pencil to the cut.

  Leo loved collecting. He taught Diana and me to play the old-fashioned card game cribbage. We kept the score using an antique cribbage board with tiny ivory pegs. He had an early twentieth century stereoscope with more than fifty stereoscopic views, and a nineteenth century ‘therapeutic’ electric shock machine with a steel and brass mechanism in a wooden case. I later entertained friends at dinner parties with both devices.

  He was not fussed about having a poet as a son and often left books of poetry from the auction room on my bed, nineteenth century editions of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, W Mackworth Praed and Thomas Hood. I once heard Bill Hart-Smith read a surprisingly frank poem by the New Zealander James K Baxter about his father. I began writing poems about Leo and he began telling me stories, opening with a comment such as: ‘Son, here’s something you can use…’

  A developer made an offer for his McMahons Point properties in the late 1950s – enough to buy thirty terrace houses. This may have been conditional on development approvals, and my father would have had to pay out his protected tenants. Becoming very rich was something abstract, and his three houses were tangible wealth. He stalled. When his land was rezoned as harbour foreshore, its value halved. He was cash-poor for the rest of his life and entering into a slow decline.

  When I started at university, we stopped our weekend expeditions to Sydney’s beaches. My father went back to his old love, the racetrack. He sat for hours reading newspaper form guides with his second-hand glasses, his brow furrowed and a pencil in his hand underlining likely winners. At the end of each Saturday he came home, clutching his form guide, usually rueful. ‘Here’, he would say, showing me the underlined names of winning horses he had not backed. Either he wrote the wrong number on the betting paper or overheard the bet of someone in the queue ahead of him. My father urged me to come with him to the races. I didn’t.

  Leo’s love of horse racing once inspired Iris to a rhetorical outburst at the kitchen table: ‘Our life would make a book. Look at your father. He spends hours writing down the names of horses. He thinks he’s going to make a packet. Money’s no use to him.

  He’d be happier with scythes and oxen. He should have been a nomad. Or an Arab camel driver. I was born in the wrong place.’

  I had been ashamed for friends to meet my father when I was at school. This changed when I began writing poems about him. My father seemed to have a soft spot for Les Murray when they met, and later asked me if Les wanted to become a dairy farmer like his father. I said he did not. ‘I don’t blame the coot for that’, my father replied. The dairy farmer’s life was ‘no good’, their work never stopped from dawn to dusk ‘three hundred and sixty five days a year, and three hundred and sixty six days every leap year’. Only one job was worse – being a sanitary carter. My father could not abide ‘Robert’, and coined a pejorative nickname for him. Stephen Wilson was too exotic for Leo to classify.

  In the early 1960s he unexpectedly produced some bottles of ‘Great Western Champagne’ he had bought in the mid-1920s. This was a time when Australian wine companies could still call their wines ‘burgundy’ or ‘champagne’. He had been under the mistaken impression that wines such as this improved with age. We chilled the bottles. Uncorked, the wine was an unpromising brown-gold liquid with a faint bubble. Some of it had evaporated. I suspected it would taste like vinegar. By some quirk he had bought a sweet ‘champagne’, and the sugar acted as a preservative. These bottles were my first taste of an aged white. We drank this strange and beautiful wine in small incised crystal glasses.

  After he was banned from sleeping in the marital bedroom, Leo began sleeping during the week in the old marital bedroom of the skinny house. He came back to Gordon for the evening meal then set out in the train to sleep at McMahons Point. I was with him one night in the train.

  Leo: Where are you going son?

  Me: The Royal George Hotel.

  Leo: Where’s that? Me: Sussex Street. (Then a rough part of town.)

  Leo (in his mock pompous voice): Why don’t you drink at the Hotel Australia? (Then Sydney’s grandest hotel.)

  Me: A lot of poofs drink there, Dad.

  Leo (pausing to consider this): I never could work out why they were interested in the tan track.

  The ‘tan track’ became one of Les Murray’s favourite phrases when I reported this conversation.

  Carl’s shop was the destination for some of the items my father picked up at auctions. One of these was a large ice-making machine which sat in the shop window for years. Carl had a small cedar coffee table he was carving by hand, with elaborate curved legs. It seemed to be permanently unfinished. In many visits with my father over a decade, I did not notice any change in its appearance. The transactions between the two brothers were more an excuse to ‘gas bag’.
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  Carl was diabetic. One day he was dragging a sheet of galvanised iron through the streets of North Sydney to his sister’s Walker Street house. He gashed his heel on the iron, contracted gangrene and some weeks later died, intestate. As the businessman of the family, my father took out letters of administration, sold Carl’s two properties and distributed the estate among the next of kin.

  My father once brought home from the Bridge Street auction rooms some false breasts, wrapped in cellophane. He thought I might be amused. I put them in my briefcase to show friends. A few days went past and I had not shown them to anyone. I placed them in a rubbish bin – discreetly, out of sight of my mother and sister. In the back of my mind I had intended to show them to Jan Miller. She loved hearing about my father’s eccentricities. But she was dead.

  The false breasts were an aberration. He and I never talked about women or sex. The closest we came to it was a story from when he was a young man. He was drinking in a country pub and a dairy farmer asked him back to his farm for the weekend. When my father got there, the reason for the invitation became clear – the man had four daughters. One morning my father was watching through a window as one of the girls was milking a cow. Suddenly she stopped, caught a cow pat with a shovel, then resumed milking. ‘Now how did she know that was coming?’ my father asked. The real story was not the cow pat and shovel, but my father watching the girl through a window.

  In about 1965 Leo went to hospital with appendicitis. This hospitalisation was the prelude to his falling out with Archie Bryant, his friend since boyhood. Archie was a slightly built man with a bulbous purple nose and a humorous, ‘chirpy’ manner. While my father was hospitalised Archie visited twice a day.

  Not long after this, Archie was in hospital for several weeks with an eye illness. Leo visited him only twice. When Archie recovered, he complained, adding, ‘What’s more your brother died of malnutrition’.