Again, another sharp stab of pain. I thought about the word ‘wounded’ and how accurate it is to the feeling. I had a self-protective urge to stop reading but it was hard not to glance ahead, to see what happened when I finally arrived to celebrate my birthday. I soon came across the relevant letter: my mother described my birthday party, to which she’d invited some friends of her own and a couple of my old Sydney school friends, whom she described as ‘charming’. Next she talked about the ‘punishment’ of making all the arrangements, before casting ahead to the next day, when I would still be there:
Don’t for a moment think the punishment is finished. I still have to cook a roast and go to the theatre – right at the moment I feel four hundred and six.
So, it was a ‘punishment’ having me there?
In a letter two days later, after I’d departed, she talked about how I’d bought her a present, a cassette tape which she’d hated. She told Mr Phillipps that she’d already been able to swap it at the local music store.
He bought me a tape of some diabolical group of female singers, I honestly couldn’t stand it, so this morning I went to Double Bay early and prevailed on the good man to swap it, I must say it took all my powers of persuasion. In place of the agony, I got Mozart’s Violin Concertos K216 and K218 and the Adagio for Violin K261. I chose violin music because I thought it might encourage my very own violinist!
Mr Phillipps, I should note, played the violin.
I mentally skipped through the music I’d loved at the time. A diabolical group of female singers? Yes, that’s it: the McGarrigle sisters. I still love them.
There was a final letter dealing with my trip, written a few days later:
Poor Richard. I don’t mean to be unkind but it is bliss when it stops, actually it is not the boy’s fault this flat is just too small and ill equipped for anyone except you and me, we fit alright but then they could put me in a two foot by six box with you and my world would be right.
‘Bliss when it stops.’ Even with the Noosa sun streaming in through the windows, this particular phrase seemed a little hard to take – as if my mother was trying to prove her love to Mr Phillipps through a ritual disavowing of her son.
The sentence ‘My mother never really loved me’ is hard to write. I also don’t think it’s true. I think she loved me intermittently, as best she could. I think she really wanted a child. She went to such effort to achieve that child, it’s hard to imagine she wasn’t thrilled when I was born. Later on, after Mr Phillipps died, I think she may have loved, or at least needed, me once again.
And, to be honest, I quite like the mix of me. I have a personality in which a rock-solid self-confidence is layered with a bitter, questioning self-contempt. Maybe the combination is easy to explain: I was loved so well and so early in life, but by a substitute, temporary parent – my New Guinea mother, Danota – from whom I was suddenly removed. Danota gave me a crust of confidence, and then later I found Debra, and she reinforced that confidence – even if it remained shot through with self-doubt.
And – maybe this is self-serving – I have respect for both these characteristics: confidence and self-doubt.
To speak up for confidence for a moment: life is like riding a bike. Ride it nervously and it will amplify every miscalculation, throwing the overly anxious to the ground, but ride the bike with bravado and it will shrug off the most egregious of errors. It’s the forward propulsion that gives both a bike, and a life, its stability. Ergo: confidence and competence often travel hand in hand.
But here’s the difficulty: you also need some fear and self-doubt to ride the bike well. Evolution sensibly built these things into the package. It’s fear and self-doubt that told the tribe to post a sentry at night. It’s fear and self-doubt that remind us to double-check, to measure twice, to try harder. Fear and self-doubt are the angels of the second draft.
As for me, I’m stupidly confident (witness the radio) and also ridiculously anxious (ask Debra). Like my mother, I always feel the need to prove I am worthy of existence. I check my column five times on a Saturday to see how many people have shared it on Facebook. Every time I hit ‘refresh’ on the Sydney Morning Herald website, I feel poisoned, realising how unhealthy it is to be so anxious about what people think of me. Yet I have a beautiful family: two sons for whom I believe I am a good father, and a partner who has loved me with a protective fierceness since I was twenty-one.
Maybe, in a way, my personality is still formed by my grandfather’s criminality and my mother’s attempt to escape it, but I’m pretty sure the contagion, to the extent there’s a contagion, ends with me. I have snuffed it out. Maybe this is my real life achievement: to snuff out this thing.
My children are both such fine young men. Daniel, now in his mid-twenties, sends me tapes of his radio program. He is hilarious and astute, respectful and warm, with a positive spirit. He loves his listeners and they love him. His program makes the world a better place, which is not always the case with radio. He owns a tumbledown house in the middle of town – a house so cheap that when I went and helped him fit a window lock, a friendly neighbour wandered over and said, ‘Mate, don’t over-capitalise.’
And Joe, the one with the Vegemite toast and the harmonicas, is now a young architect, his passion for building perhaps ignited by the structures that Debra and I, with our friend Philip, built in the bush. He is hilarious, like his brother, and another positive force in the world, creative and hard-working.
I don’t know what to make of the things that made me, but at least – after this strange better-late-than-never quest – I can accurately describe the mix of those things. There was a mother escaping a criminal father; a father who was uninterested but also fairly friendly; there was a loving substitute mother who gave me the gift of her child-centred Papuan culture; and there was an English teacher whose enthusiasm for Pepys was perhaps more self-interested than I understood at the time.
And I have some wonderful cousins – a set ignored, plus a set I didn’t even realise existed. Maybe that’s the most important outcome of my quest. I now know how important they are.
There’s a destructive myth that nearly all parents love their children; that every parent gives their child the unconditional love they deserve. We have a whole language around the inexorability of this love: it’s instinctive, we say, before going on to talk about cats with their kittens or cows with their calves. It’s built into our very DNA, we say, that a mother loves her children, and so does a father. And yet . . . Grab a group of your friends at a pub or dinner party and ask them: ‘Who feels they were given the love they deserved as a child?’ I don’t claim all of them will say ‘I didn’t get that love.’ Maybe 60 per cent will say, ‘My parents were not perfect, but, yes, they gave me the love that every child deserves.’ But I hazard that 40 per cent will say, ‘No, now you ask. Not me. I didn’t get anything like the love I would hope to give a child of my own.’
Parental love may be instinctive but there are so many barriers to its delivery. There’s gambling, or career obsession, or a mum who took too many pills, or a dad who lost his job and became subsumed with bitterness, or a billion other barriers much more bizarre. In my case, if this doesn’t sound too grand, perhaps it was the British class system and my mother’s efforts to escape it, together with my father’s drinking and their shared narcissism.
It doesn’t take much to create a barrier between the instinct and the act. Yet here’s what I find interesting: so many people had inadequate childhoods but we’re not all insane or self-harming or miserable. We just found the love we needed elsewhere. For me, it was Danota. Later: Canberra Youth Theatre, Steve Stephens, my partner Debra, her parents Max and Teresa, my boys.
This is the amazing resilience of humans. We are hungry for love and – mostly – we somehow find it.
Like all the players of Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?, I’m left with wounds, dealt out in childhood and mostly overcome.
They are still wounds, of course, but just
flesh wounds.
Acknowledgements
The leaping-off point for this story was a piece I wrote for Good Weekend, so thanks to the editor, Ben Naparstek. Odd hints of the story have also appeared in some of my other books: the Vegemite story, from In Bed with Jocasta, was too germane not to include.
The events are as I remember them, although others may recall them differently. I’ve tried to capture the rhythm and meaning of the conversations, although the exact words are my best effort. Like most people, I didn’t take contemporaneous shorthand notes, although some lines – ‘The natives did it’ – burn themselves into the mind with an intensity that allows me to claim them as word-for-word accurate.
Thanks to my friends who battled through an early version of the manuscript and helped me fashion the tale: Kate Holden, Philip Clark, Jenny McAsey and Michael Robotham. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the British writer Jeanette Winterson who kindly read an early draft – proof that loyalty runs deep in people with a link to Accrington.
In terms of researching the background history, thanks to both Dr Robert Lyneham and Professor Kara Swanson for helping me understand what birth via artificial insemination might have meant in 1958. Professor Swanson’s spiky journal article, from which I’ve quoted, is titled ‘Adultery by Doctor: Artificial Insemination, 1890–1945’.
The detail about life in 1950s Port Moresby largely comes from Ian Stuart’s history Port Moresby Yesterday and Today and from Jim Huxley’s memoir New Guinea Experience. For Florence Broadhurst, I relied on Helen O’Neill’s much-lauded biography.
Amruta Slee from HarperCollins provided the best possible notes: demanding and insistent when things could be better; warm and encouraging when something happened to work. Any shortcomings in the manuscript are surely her fault, since I did nearly everything she suggested. My gratitude also to Amanda O’Connell for her copy editing.
Thanks most of all to my partner, Debra Oswald, for encouraging me, over many years, to write this. I’d been so fierce about limiting my mother and father’s sway over my life that I felt reluctant about spending a couple of years writing a book about a relationship which I’d so assiduously tried to slough aside. Then again, as Debra strenuously argued, the story is intriguing and, I hope, useful to other contestants in that world-wide game Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?. She helped create this book. And she rescued me.
I should also thank her for a lifetime of correcting my spelling. Mind you, if my mother hadn’t run off with my English teacher . . .
George Clooney’s Haircut
Richard Glover’s skewed stories of everyday life depict a world both weird and wry – in which Henry VIII provides marriage advice, JD Salinger celebrates tap water and naked French women bring forth a medical miracle. It’s also a world in which shampoo is eschewed, the second-rate is praised and George Clooney’s haircut can help save a relationship.
Bizarre yet commonplace, absurd yet warm-hearted, these stories will expose the true strangeness of the life you are living right now.
Why Men Are Necessary
Wickedly funny stories of everyday life, as heard on ABC Radio’s Thank God It’s Friday. Salute the sexy and feisty Jocasta; confront teenage rebellion in the form of a fish called Wanda; do battle with magpies the size of small fighter jets; try to work out which font you use when speaking the language of love; and find out what men really have to offer.
In Richard Glover’s stories, the day-to-day becomes vivid, magical and laugh-out-loud funny.
Desperate Husbands
Revisit Richard, the original desperate husband, and his partner, the fabulous but formidable Jocasta. And say hello to their teenage offspring – the Teutonic Batboy and his irrepressible younger brother, The Space Cadet. Desperate Husbands lifts the lid on so-called normal family life, and reveals its soulful, hilarious absurdity. Welcome to a world where household appliances conspire against their owners, fathers practise ballet in the hallway, and dead insects spell out an SOS on the kitchen floor.
About the Author
Richard Glover has written a number of bestselling books, including The Mud House, In Bed with Jocasta and George Clooney’s Haircut and Other Cries for Help. He writes a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald and presents the comedy program Thank God It’s Friday on ABC Local Radio. To find out more, visit www.richardglover.com.au
Praise for Richard Glover
‘Hilarious’ – Candida Baker
‘Heartbreaking and hilarious’ – Tracey Spicer
‘An Australian Seinfeld’ – Wil Anderson
‘Desperately, wickedly funny’ – Augusten Burroughs
‘Full-on, uncontrollable, laugh-till-you-weep stories’ – Geraldine Brooks
‘Glover is better than Proust. OK, maybe not better, but how often do you find yourself in a cold bath at midnight still chuckling over Proust’ – Debra Adelaide
Also by Richard Glover
Grin and Bear It
The P-Plate Parent
(with Angela Webber)
Laughing Stock
The Joy of Blokes
(with Angela Webber)
In Bed with Jocasta
The Dag’s Dictionary
Desperate Husbands
The Mud House
Why Men Are Necessary and More News from Nowhere
George Clooney’s Haircut and Other Cries for Help
For children
The Dirt Experiment
The Joke Trap
The No-Minute Noodler
Copyright
The ABC ‘Wave’ device is a trademark of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.
First published in Australia in 2015
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Richard Glover 2015
The right of Richard Glover to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978 0 7333 3432 0 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0502 5 (ebook : epub)
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Glover, Richard, author.
Flesh wounds / Richard Glover.
Glover, Richard.
Radio broadcasters – Australia – Biography.
Authors – Australia – Biography.
A823.3
Cover design by Hazel Lam, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images courtesy of Richard Glover
Author photograph by Marco Del Grande (Fairfax Syndication)
Page 207 Crown Copyright image, reproduced courtesy of The National Archives,
London, England
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