John and Jean took walks every evening on the asylum grounds at Beechworth; he loved nature and observed with an unhurried eye each unfolding flower and, in the gloaming, listened for the receding calls of birdlife as night fell. Jean fondly remembered ‘he always looked at the skies; and he adored the magpies’. John seemed more relaxed this time round at Beechworth, taking an active part in patient activities. The patients held a monthly dance and in a rush of egalitarianism John waltzed with his patients. It was a time when embracing a patient while doing the rumba was deemed normal, even ‘therapeutic’, if dancing can be reduced to such a dull clinical term. And it forged a humanising link between doctor and patient that seems forever lost.
For some time John was the lone doctor at Beechworth and, indeed, when the hospital chemist fell ill John was required to stir and mix and prepare his own prescriptions. It was a chemical artistry he seemed to take to. But of all the events that occurred during this time at Beechworth, one remains foremost, and it came about when an observant attendant noticed a peculiar bruise in a male patient as the patient prepared to take a shower.
Asylums were segregated strictly along gender lines. Half of the hospital was male; the other half female. The shower parade in the morning was an asylum ritual. Attendants would shout at patients to rise from their beds and take a shower. In this belligerent and blunt world, Christian names were dropped, beds were rattled and patients prodded to get going of a morning. Stripped naked, patients were herded together, and goaded towards a communal shower. The line shuffled forward, naked flesh visible to the attendants, who could look for any signs of disease such as a rash or head lice. On one particular morning, an attendant noted bruising at first in one patient, and then in several others. The attendant drew this observation to John’s attention.
John scrutinised, with a purposeful gaze, these blood-crimson welts on the skin of several men. The obvious and immediate conclusion he came to, or at least feared, was violence at the hands of some thuggish attendant. He returned to his cottage, Jean recalling his puzzlement: ‘I must find out if they have been injured by the attendants or given a belting.’ John examined, in his inquisitive way, all possible solutions. As he thought back to how his fingers gingerly pressed the soft flesh of these men, he rose to the occasion and another suggestion came to him: ‘Maybe it is a lack of [nutritious] food.’ It turned out to be an inspired hunch.
Jean remembers the appalling food prepared for patients, cooked in ‘great big boilers, huge boilers until everything tasted the same. I mean you couldn’t tell stewed pears from meat or from vegetables.’ John, experimentally minded, set about proving his suspicion that it was a lack of nutrients that led to the bruising. His methodical work revealed a lack of vitamin C in the food; the patients at Beechworth had scurvy. Scurvy, the dreaded disease of early mariners on the high seas—a disease of bloated flesh and swollen joints, loose teeth and soft bleeding gums—had taken root in asylums. John wrote to his father in Melbourne. Word spread quickly. This discovery was a gloriously symphonic moment in a young doctor’s life, and a turning point in the care of the mentally ill in Australia. Within a short time, the first dietician to be appointed in a Victorian mental hospital commenced work at Mont Park.
Not long after this, John and Jean returned to Melbourne and took up accommodation in the small asylum at Bundoora for returned servicemen, just over the road from Mont Park Hospital.
Two events marked the year of 1938 for John. The first, and most important, was the birth of John and Jean’s first child, Jack, on 25 October.
When Jean married, in line with the expectations of the era, her nursing career ended overnight. Whether she harboured ambitions to continue as a nurse we don’t know. But clearly this young woman who came second in her state nursing examinations was someone of fine intelligence. From the start of married life, Jean saw herself, as did everyone else, as an organised and capable homemaker.
The second event in 1938 was John’s completion of an MD, or ‘Doctor of Medicine’, a postgraduate degree in medicine. This extra study was not expected of a medical doctor but, if nothing else, it reflected an inner ambition to be a scientific psychiatrist. When Jean questioned the value of yet more study and whether this was common, John retorted: ‘Not in my department. But I still want it. You’re a better doctor if you’ve done this.’
As part of his postgraduate study John was required to dissect a human brain. So a wet human brain stored in a chamber pot found its way into the Cade household. A freshly cut brain sloshing about on her dining room table was not part of Jean’s notion of a newlywed’s household but, in negotiations that would become commonplace, John got his way. The brain and the lingering smell of its pungent preservative was a vivid memory Jean could easily recall 50 years after the event. When Jean’s girlfriends got wind of her engagement to a doctor studying psychiatry, they sniggered behind raised hands. ‘All my friends said to me’, whispered Jean as if talking about a murder, ‘“You’re going to marry a psychiatrist in a mental hospital!” and I would say with a superior attitude with my nose in the air, “Only for a little while and then he’s going into private practice”.’
Secretly Jean was irritated with John’s lack of interest in private work, social respectability and the capacity to earn more money. Jean overheard the smirking wives of private psychiatrists talk snidely of doctors like John ‘as the poor little slum boys; they had no money; no one knew them; they had no name’, whereas their own husbands were all in plush private practices in Collins Street. Sixty years later, in the late 1990s, Jean could still mimic the superior-sounding socialites of Melbourne she endured in her early married life. With a high-pitched mocking affectation and nose raised to the ceiling, she crowed: ‘Oooooh! You’re married to a loony-bin doctor!’
The private psychiatrists might have seen themselves as the cream of society but to John, they curdled before his eyes. More than ever, he was determined to remain a doctor who worked inside an asylum, attracted by ‘the unrivalled opportunities’ and ‘the wealth of clinical material’ in mental hospitals to study mental illness
In April 1939, John became a founding member of an association of Victorian mental hospital doctors dedicated to doing experimental studies to improve the lot of patients. Between July 1939 and September 1940 he was extremely productive, generating two research publications outside his usual work. One of them broke new ground in Australia, involving an unlikely pairing between a mental hospital doctor, and two noted medical researchers. One of John’s partners was Frank Macfarlane Burnet, later to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine; another was Dora Lush, who was to die tragically during the Second World War as a result of a laboratory accident.
Events overtook any aspiration of John’s to undertake further medical research. On 3 September 1939, Australia’s Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, had declared that the nation was at war with Germany.
John was just a few weeks short of his 28th birthday when he enlisted. Filial duty was partly to blame. While a medical student, ‘My father, a pillar of Empire . . . had urged me to join the Melbourne University Rifles and . . . I dutifully agreed.’ But to enlist in the army and leave Australia was altogether more difficult. John was torn. ‘I didn’t want to be dragged into it.’ Having been a member of the Citizen Military Forces for several years, one evening ‘we were summoned, to stand strictly to attention’ when John and his unit were ‘berated . . . for our laggard cowardice in not joining the AIF’, the Australian Imperial Force:
We were dumbfounded. The PM had told us not to be in a hurry. Australia was in no danger (this was Pig Iron Bob), remember, who was flogging Australian iron ore to the Nips, who slung it back at us less than two years later. So incensed were we by this tirade that we joined the AIF en masse only a few days later.
I had to go down to the Caulfield Racecourse reception centre. There was a tall, handsome young man immediately in front of me in the queue of recruits, sporting a toothbrush moustache. I could not have known that
he was [Dr] John Park, an Empire Games sprinter . . .
It was the first time John had clapped eyes on Dr John Park. They were to become the closest of friends during their time in the army.
Several days later, Captain John Cade, now fully measured-up for his uniform, prepared Jean for the lengthy aliquots of time he would be away from home—training at the army camps near Seymour, at Torquay and at Bonegilla near Albury. In mid-July, when the 8th Division of the AIF formed, John commenced full-time with the Army.
Meanwhile, heavily pregnant, Jean set about scouring suburban Melbourne for a family home. When on leave from the army, John—in his freshly pressed army uniform—came to inspect her choices. In the end, they settled on the middle-class suburban enclave of Eaglemont, house number 38, in a street called The Righi. John and Jean’s second child, David, was born on 14 August 1940, and The Righi would be home to Jean and her two boys while John was overseas.
John’s life was about to unfold in an uncannily similar way to his father’s. And so, like the military reprise it was, John showed the world that he was no ‘coward’ and made final preparations to fight for his country.
PART 2
The
Interminable
Years
JOHN CADE: The war years
I was never posted as a psychiatrist. Any psychiatric duties were incidental to my general regimental medical responsibilities as the senior company commander in a Field Ambulance . . . For some reason—I hope it was because of my specialist inclinations—I early attracted the nickname of the ‘mad major’.
5
Captain John Cade said his final lingering goodbyes to Jean and his two small boys just outside The Righi. ‘Little did I think it would be five long years before I ever saw them again.’
Jack Cade was not yet three years old when his father left for war, David nearly six months. Today, Jack can take you back to the exact spot where he stood over 70 years ago watching his father leave. ‘It was right on this spot,’ he said, pointing to the driveway just outside the front gate. ‘Mum was there, holding David in her arms.’ From the driveway it is easy to sweep an eye along the sleepy suburban street, up a gentle incline and past the line of Federation-style houses; little has changed in over seven decades. Jack easily recaptures the vision of his uniformed father, neat and trim, striding along the footpath, lugging a suitcase, steadily ascending the slope of the street, not looking back at his wife and boys. With David in the crook of her arms, Jean peered up the street at her disappearing husband. Jack recalls his father’s khaki shape getting smaller and smaller, until his dad looked no more than a toy soldier. At the top of the street, in a blink, his father turned left and was gone.
Jack remembers all this from his childhood. No doubt his memory has been embroidered over time; but if emotion counts for something, and surely it must, that moment of departure in 1941 was relived as if it were yesterday.
When John arrived at Bonegilla army camp, just outside Albury, he found it ‘all bustle and preparation’. The younger recruits about him glowed with the anticipation of pulling out, ‘thrilled when the day arrived for us to leave camp’; an older John was more circumspect, and wrote to Jean whenever time allowed. When the time came to depart, John boarded the train with the rest of the 2/9th Field Ambulance—all impelled by their unifying belief in the need to protect Australia—and set forth for Sydney. The old rattler rocked and swayed its way through southern New South Wales, John remembering: ‘It was a miserable night journey packed as we were like sardines in ancient “dog-box” carriages.’ Threading through the outer suburbs of Sydney, the train slowed and slid like a serpent between houses, ‘the waving and cat-calls and long festoons of a certain essential toilet commodity trailing along the outside of the carriages . . .’ The groggy garrison finally pulled in at Darling Harbour and left behind their toilet-papered carriages; in no time they found themselves on a ferry in Sydney Harbour, cutting through the waves towards the Queen Mary, berthed and camouflaged just outside Taronga Park Zoo.
John stepped aboard the Queen Mary—a floating palace for the decadent in peacetime, now refitted as the world’s largest troop transport ship—and stood agog at its array of bronze statues and ‘Hollywoodian’ opulence. And then, in stiff competition with the officers streaming on board, he nabbed a first-class cabin. With typical Cade curiosity he studied a bidet, walking around it to better understand its function.
One of John’s first written observations on board is unexpectedly acerbic. ‘The stewards were enormously fat great Poms who could hardly pass each other in the corridors.’ And, when informed that the plump ‘Poms’ were a wealthy duo who ‘owned a row of houses in Plymouth’, he digs his dagger in deeper. ‘They were never tipped either.’
As the Queen Mary prepared to leave the harbour, the governor-general, came aboard with full pomp and wished the 6000 men well; a military band played and John, always the quietest of men, silently looked about him. His two brothers—Frank and David—were on other ships in this convoy, heading elsewhere to battle. The Queen Mary raised anchor and pulled out of Sydney Harbour on 4 February, their destination still unknown to most of the men on board. Along with her, a trifecta of accompanying ships—the Mauretania, the Nieuw Amsterdam and the Aquitania—sailed to war.
Soon after leaving the port of Fremantle, the convoy’s first stop, the Queen Mary peeled away from the remaining ships, which were headed for the Middle East, and, in a lumbering arc, rounded the rear of the other vessels and powered her way towards Singapore. The last memory John had of this moment was of listening to the trumpeting calls and fading cheers of the men on board the remaining three ships as the Queen Mary churned her way northwards.
Life on board the palatial Queen Mary was rather bizarre for a warship—deck games during the day, dancing at night. Dr John Park, now the closest of friends with John, and eye-catchingly handsome, was a beacon for the heavily outnumbered female nurses. John Cade mischievously wrote to Jean about John Park and his amorous endeavours:
Great goings-on tonight. There is a dance and the competition promises to be extraordinarily keen as there are about fifty nurses and twelve times that number of officers. It’s amusing to watch the jockeying for positions. Our glamour boy has been putting in some good spade work all day and we are watching the fruit of his labours with the greatest of interest.
As tropical waters were entered, John caught sight of flying fish; within minutes the national pastime of a casual wager was underway. Men crowded towards the ship’s railings, eagerly taking odds and laying down cash on how far the next fish could fling itself out of the waves. Meanwhile, inside, John was required to give repeated and tedious medical lectures to the men. Later in life he groaned: ‘I gave endless lectures on tropical medicine and venereal disease among the prostitutes of South East Asia. We issued condoms and mercury ointment. The padres preached. The commanding officers commanded. Result nil.’ At least that was the consequence of all that lecturing and preaching once the men hit shore and the sniff of sex was in the air.
The Queen Mary docked at the wharfs of Singapore on 18 February. At the water’s edge, stick-legged vendors surrounded the men, the piquant aromas from their spiced foods foreign to Australian nostrils. These new scents soon mixed with the heavy air of wet and decay from the ‘stinking hot and humid’ jungle, nearly overwhelming the Australians. By now John’s once-fresh uniform stuck to him like a leech and he had to peel away the moist clothing that sucked on his skin; although constantly wet, he never felt clean. Clad in Bombay Bloomers, the men wandered the streets before taking a train from Singapore to Malaya. The northwards-bound train chugged ‘through the jungle most of the night, most of us sleepless and standing and savouring the strange smells of the tropics’ before arriving at their destination, Port Dickson, on the western edge of the Malay Peninsula. Weary and dripping wet, they stepped from the train at 3 am, and marched to their barracks five kilometres away, arriving before dawn and, as John wrote, ‘th
ankfully threw down our gear to collapse on the hard concrete floors for an hour or two . . .’
John acclimatised as best he could to the tropics, preparing his men for the inevitable injuries and illnesses of war. There remains a wonderful photograph from this time of anticipation. It shows John kitted out in full khaki uniform—short-sleeved shirt and knee-length shorts—standing on the deck of an open timber verandah. It is a steamy tropical day and his clothes are drenched with sweat. John’s admiring eyes are fixed on his great friend, Dr John Park, who stands a few metres away—lithe and athletic—ready to attack an imaginary Japanese soldier. John Park brandishes a bayonet, dealing death to his imagined foe. With his pencil-thin moustache and twinkling eyes, Park is a dead ringer for Errol Flynn, and grinning like a buccaneer on the high seas, he is just about ready to skewer the villain and whisk away the girl.
Once in Malaya it didn’t take long for the ill and injured to accumulate. Men, unused to the tropics, quickly succumbed to fungal infections. ‘Infection of the crutch and scrotum areas was known as dhobi itch . . . nasty dull red itchy rash with a slightly raised edge spreading steadily outwards’ and tinea of the feet crippled soldiers; and then, of course, there was ‘VD, the curse of all armies’.
One of John’s roles as an officer was to weed out the unfit for war, even at this late stage of proceedings. Sometimes this was for physical reasons, sometimes psychological, occasionally moral. John was a compassionate man, but as much as he supported the underdog and the ill, he detested the spineless:
Finding Sanity Page 4