So you blot them out, you throw these memories out of your life. You hope only that your child will grow up and be all right and manage to live a normal life. That tomorrow will be better than today.
I was terribly proud of Damon. He had such a wonderful spirit, he took all the pain and the mismanagement and the inconvenience and the lack of the things other little boys took for granted without ever complaining. I often thought it was a miracle that we’d somehow managed to bring up a child who was, I think, unique. But then, at eighteen, when his life seemed to be normalising as a young adult and his brains could compete and become more important in the scheme of things than his emasculated body, he had a bleed, just a normal, everyday bleed which required a normal, everyday transfusion.
It was probably a bright sunny afternoon when he would have taken the stuff out of the fridge just as he’d done any one of a thousand times before. He’d have carefully pulled the life-giving liquid into a syringe and then transfused himself. Only this time, instead of saving his life, it killed him. The arteries and veins that carried his lifeblood became the rivers of death.
All I seem to remember that was positive; about his childhood is the books. I don’t mean his childhood wasn’t positive; we were and he was always the world’s great optimist. It’s just that my memory won’t focus. It’s smudged with the horror of what happened and it refuses to recall the detail of the good times.
But I do clearly remember the books. We had a wonderful children’s library and we spent what cash we had on books for the kids. I recall with great joy the hours with Damon on my knee or cuddled on my lap as I’d read to him. He’d suck his thumb and hold his Blanky, the blue baby blanket that was finally reduced to a six-inch square of faded wool, against his cheek and we’d disappear into a story world. The world of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, with its fear-somely funny and superbly imaginative creatures, took possession of us. We’d find ourselves inside John Bir-ningham’s beautifully illustrated books, being shown around London’s streets and places of importance by a most dignified and respectable draft horse who had made it to the very top, all the way to becoming the Drum Horse in the Queen’s Household Cavalry. You could hear the clop, clop, clop on the cobblestones of his majestically shod feet. We learned gentleness from his kind, polite ways with all the people, big and small, humble and important, who lived on the route where he worked.
By the time he was seven, Damon actually knew several of the poems of Edward Lear off by heart. This was the early seventies and some wonderful children’s books were coming out of England and France. The Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter nexus was broken at last, and there was a renaissance in children’s literature, where some of the really good illustrators and graphic artists of the day became involved with truly imaginative children’s writing. Young literature, emerging from the doldrums of the fifties and sixties, took a giant leap forward for children. We made the most of the revolution, revelling in the new order without having to deny the old and wonderful world of children’s classics.
Books are therefore among the best memories remaining of the past. The hours spent inside their covers with Damon have remained untouched by the tragedy of his early adult life. They are as nice a memory as I can still carry. He loved books so very much and later, I think, they made much that was unbearable about Damon’s life tolerable for him and for me.
It’s funny how reading seems to have been so important. My mother, a rather eccentric lady, to put it mildly, and one who couldn’t be placed in the usual nana child-minding capacity, as she never did help in that way, or in most of the other roles nanas usually fill, nevertheless was kind and fed my three boys on a constant diet of English comics which in my mind have become an agglomeration of one giant Whizzer and Chips. Without fail, every Saturday, she’d arrive with all the traditional English comics. So dedicated was she in this regard that she still continued to deliver them when the kids were in their late teens and almost a decade after they’d given up reading them.
“Mum, they don’t need the comics you bring any more – they’ve grown out of them.” The point was that they were really quite expensive and she existed on a pension so that the comics represented quite a sacrifice on her part. I wanted her to use the money for herself to put on to another of the fifty or so lay-bys she would maintain at any given time.
“Nonsense,” she’d retort. “You used to read them. Victor got them.” She’d look vague. “That’s right, I still get them for him.” And she probably did, even though Victor was in his early thirties. My mother, once she got an idea into her head, was pretty hard to shift.
At first I got pretty upset that my mother wouldn’t do any of the things grandmothers are supposed to do. There were times when I would have given an arm and a leg just for a few hours away on my own. Because I never knew how Damon would wake up, or whether I’d get a call from school to pick him up around mid morning because of a bleed, it was nearly impossible to make plans, to have a normal life, to meet a girlfriend for lunch or take the afternoon off to visit the Art Gallery or go to a movie matinee.
I used to think it terribly unfair that my mother wouldn’t baby-sit or child-mind even for a couple of hours at a time and, I must admit, there were occasions when I felt pretty bitter about this. But Damon always welcomed her as though she was a special treat, even though she’d never stay longer than a few minutes. Huffing down the front path, yelling her arrival, with eight or ten assorted parcels in four string bags filled with shopping.
My mother went shopping every day of her life and Bryce once estimated that she must have walked at least six miles each day weighed down by parcels. He’d remark, “She’s the fittest old lady in Australia. When the time comes for her to die they’re going to have to take her heart out, place it on the pavement and beat it to silence with a stick!”
“Cooeee! Comics! All your favourites!” she’d yell coming down the garden path at the same time every Saturday morning. Damon would meet her at the front door and take the bundle of paper from her. “Gee thanks, nana!” he’d say, seeing it as the special Saturday event it was. Aware of how important the Saturday morning routine was to the old lady, Damon continued welcoming her at the front door, years after all the boys had given up reading comics. At sixteen, he gave the arrival of the comics the same welcome he’d given them as a six-year-old, knowing that my mother was well beyond redemption and that to refuse her gift of love would be hurtful while serving no useful purpose.
Damon would drop the comics off at Cranbrook Prep. on his way to school on Monday and, in the process, he became a big hero with the small kids who’d be waiting in anticipation at the gate. And so, I suppose, his nana’s comics continued to bring him pleasure.
During the war, when I was little, my mother used to take me to town to the then famous New South Wales Bookstall Library, where I’d sit in a huge old leather club chair, and I’d be given all the English magazines to read – Tatler, Town & Country, the London Illustrated News and Punch.
These wonderful magazines continued to exist throughout the war, though sometimes they were months out of date, and so also did the English comics. There was Girl’s Own and Girls’ Crystal, which I loved with every breath of my body. It was during this time that the English comic as a part of childhood was born in my mother’s heart. With the birth of her grandchildren she saw it as her absolute duty to continue what, in her mind, had become a very important family tradition.
I feel quite sure that my consequent love of Britain and the things of England, which has been so much a part of my life, was born at this time. When at twenty, like so many of my generation, I sailed on the P&O liner Arcadia for London for the mandatory two-year working visit to Britain I had already acquired a knowledge of the English nation and its history and culture which, I now realise, was well beyond what most Australians knew and which I still maintain with a fierce loyalty and unabashed love.
My father was English, an East End cockney Jew, who had be
en orphaned almost at birth and had been brought up in a home for boys. At eleven, he’d been sent to the Royal Navy cadet-training ship, HMS Conway. As I saw it, in the tradition of Drake and Raleigh, he had seen the world and fought for his King and country as a fourteen-year-old, able-bodied seaman in the Royal Navy during the First World War. My dad’s career was a bit hazy in my mind. Some bright, burnished bits fixed in my imagination and, from these, I constructed his naval career. For, while he wasn’t a quiet man, the conversation in our family was largely dominated by my mother and her parents, who lived with us; so he didn’t talk much about his past. The past in our house was a subject almost totally owned by my mother’s side of the family.
As I grew a little older I came to understand that my mother came from a good background, in fact, a moneyed background, and that she’d married somewhat beneath her. My grandpa, having “lost his fortune", had brought us all down to what seemed to be vaguely suggested as my dad’s level.
I was later to learn that the loss of the big house with maids and the considerable fortune came about through gambling. Though my grandpa had been a big gambler, what had finally brought the family undone was my uncle Benny, my mother’s brother. Completely indulged as a young man, he had finally “gone bad", taking my grandpa’s fortune down with him and having to leave the country for reasons that remained unspoken and unclear. I remember him only as a worldly, sophisticated, delightful and generous uncle, who, with his wife, Aunty Sarah, a huge, very plain woman, ran a prominent Sydney restaurant and indulged me hopelessly.
Nevertheless, despite all this, my mother’s side remained the respectable one. Perhaps this was by default as my dad’s side was practically nonexistent. While he had two brothers and a sister in London, they’d all been raised in separate orphanages and so they shared no common background and no continuity or the inevitable mythology that goes with being a family.
All my dad had as a claim to fame was that his dad, before disaster had struck, had owned a Gentleman’s Smoking Shop and had become known as the “Snuff King of London". Quite what this disaster was, which had torn the family apart, never became clear. Daddy was always pretty silent on the subject of his early life, which I now imagine must have been very hard in an orphanage in Edwardian England.
But I didn’t see it this way as a child. With the lack of hard information I substituted stuff of my own. As I accumulated information from the English magazines, comics and children’s books with which my mother force-fed me on visits to the Bookstall Library, I compiled a complete and satisfactory background for my dad. What I didn’t know about my daddy’s background I filled in from the things I read, taking the bits and pieces he gave me from time to time and fitting them into the landscape I had imagined of his life.
For instance, at the age of eight he’d won a prize for art which had been presented to him by Queen Alexandra, no doubt on a visit to the orphanage. But in my eyes this amounted practically to being a famous artist patronised by royalty and so I began to study English artists, Whistler and Constable and Turner, hoping that some day I might stumble across an early Jack Solomons. He’d also been middle-weight boxing champion of the Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet and, while stationed at Gibraltar, had won a medal in the fleet marathon. Most importantly, he had visited Archangel in an English warship supporting the Tsar and the “Whites” during the Russian revolution in 1917, firing at the wooden onion-domed churches where the “Reds” had taken refuge.
It was here where the incident of the famous frozen words occurred. In telling the story of the Reds hidden in onion-domed churches, my daddy had mentioned that the temperature was well below zero and that the words froze in your mouth. I’d immediately imagined As and Bs and Qs and Zs, in fact all the letters of the alphabet, emerging from the sailors’ lips, formed in ice and tinkling like crystal as they fell to the steel deck of the great, grey battleship and shattered into tiny shards. I think it might have been this incident in Archangel which caused me to become interested in Russia so that, among other things, I knew about Tsar Nicholas’s son being a haemophiliac.
By such strange devices are we conditioned and moulded. I know that, in turn, I passed on my love of England and Europe and its culture to my children and, in particular, to Damon. I would spend hours reading to him or telling him of Renaissance art or showing him the works of the great English artists. I’d take him on imagined trips, travelling through the pages of books where we’d visit all the famous places, so that he became familiar with the Tate and the National Gallery and the Louvre and the Vatican. We’d examine the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in an art book borrowed from the Woollahra Library and I’d talk of Michelangelo or of Titian and Raphael, Cellini or, even earlier, Botticelli and his Birth of Venus, of how they all painted under the patronage of the Popes, Doges and constantly squabbling noble families, Roman, Venetian and Florentine. We’d spend months caught up in the intrigues of the Renaissance court and in the machinations of the Borgia, the Medici and the Borghese families who produced popes, kings, generals and alliances at the drop of a pair of silk or velvet pantaloons. We’d visit Greece and Rome and the ancient Assyrian and Byzantine empires and we had a good knowledge of the world of the ancient Egyptians through the pages of the ever-present books.
When finally, in the months before his death, we visited the British Museum, Damon seemed almost to know the layout and where to expect to find the various empires. It was the same for the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Parthenon in Rome and a dozen, different, great, architectural and cultural shrines on the Continent.
And so all Damon’s life, we built up an expectation of Europe and the Grand Tour we would surely make together when he’d finished studying medicine at university.
When Celeste went to Italy just after Damon’s wisdom teeth were extracted and a week before he went into hospital with Salmonella, he was already well-informed. He was eager when she returned to know more, to hear her first-hand version of Europe and its endless treasures and to store up more detail and titillate his imagination for the time when he would travel to the other side of the world to see the European world for himself.
And so, in a sense, it had all begun with English comics and my dad’s art prize from the hands of Queen Alexandra herself. From such tiny beginnings and with the help of my own rather scatty mother, I’d fed my own mind and then, later, the minds of my children. So, in the process, I was able to indulge my own love for art and for England and, a finger’s breadth away from it on the map, the Europe and Russia of my semitic forefathers.
This is what I remember most about the good side of bringing up this beautiful child. He was passionate to know more, excited at the idea of belonging to a continuity of culture and tradition and the ongoing process of beauty. He was always astonished by what man had achieved or might yet achieve.
Bryce is an amazingly positive person who doesn’t take kindly to the idea of defeat and I have no doubt he passed some of this sense of one’s own worth to Damon. But I often think that the knowledge of Damon’s own continuity and the astonishing achievement of his particular Anglo-Judaeo-European lineage also gave him a sense of destiny, the feeling that, despite his physical handicap, he was an important part of the universal process of creativity and that there was a reason for his having been created.
It was little enough to give him and, in the giving, I gained immeasurably in return. But now, with his life gone out of my own, it has become Damon’s gift to me, Damon with his bruises and his sticky-up hair and his bright eyes and his calliper that gave him a sort of stiff leaning-to-one-side walk.
Will the grieving for him never stop?
Twenty-seven
The Mighty Damon Kicks the Door in. A Nighmare Brush with the CIA. The Great Boxing Day Escape.
AIDS is a series of severe shocks. No sooner has the victim recovered from one disease when another takes its place. It is as though the various diseases are competing to see which can do the most damage in the shortest possible ti
me. AIDS is about watching the pieces fall off. The body slowly disintegrates, things that worked yesterday don’t work today. There seems to be little warning, diseases come in the night and are fullblown by the morning. Tongues don’t work, bowels don’t work, bladders don’t work, ears don’t work, lungs don’t work, joints don’t work, even eyelashes fall out! One night you get into bed with perfectly good eyelashes and in the morning they’re not there, scattered like puppy hairs across your pillow. Later, even eyes, no longer able to hide behind a curtain of dark lashes, are blinded, perhaps to shut out the last of what’s left of the shitty world.
But of all these disasters the attack on the mind is the worst. One day you begin to sense that your mind is not working as well as it should, but this happens more slowly, this creeps up on you so that you are not aware of what’s happening and you become bemused at the everyday world around you.
The first time I sensed anything was wrong was in mid November, 1989, when Damon came up the hill to our apartment from Bondi. The ten-minute walk would normally have taken a lot longer than this for Damon had he attempted it at all. “Dad, I made it here in ten minutes. Good eh?” Damon announced as I opened the door to him.
He was barefoot and wore an old pair of shorts and a very dirty T-shirt. His hair, what was left of it, was tufted and greasy and his nails were black with grime. On his wrist was a metal and leather bracelet about two inches wide, simply a band of metal wrapped around a leather strap. It seemed huge, even gross on his fragile arm, more like an impediment than an amulet. This too was strange; Damon usually wore a copper bracelet because of rheumatism or arthritis. Now he’d replaced this with the wide, cheap-looking, metal bracelet of nondescript design.
“Christ, what happened to you?” I asked.
Damon, because he was so aware of his body, always wore long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Walking barefoot simply wasn’t possible; his feet were deformed from the years of bleeding and he wore orthotics in his shoes just to get around. Now he seemed to be walking, though admittedly slightly lopsidedly but with comparative ease.
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