You Never Met My Father
Graeme Sparkes
Published by Classic Author and Publishing Services Pty Ltd
Imprint of Jo Jo Publishing publishing
First published 2014
JoJo Publishing
‘Yarra’s Edge’
2203/80 Lorimer Street
Docklands VIC 3008
Australia
Email: [email protected] or visit www.classic-jojo.com
© Graeme Sparkes
All rights reserved. No part of this printed or video publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
JoJo Publishing
Editor: Julie Athanasiou
Designer / typesetter: Chameleon Print Design
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Sparkes, Graeme, 1951- author.
Title: You never met my father / Graeme Sparkes.
ISBN: 978-0-9925900-4-8 (eBook)
Subjects: Sparkes, Graeme, 1951–Childhood and youth.
Fathers and sons—Australia—Biography.
Mentally ill—Australia—Biography.
Compulsive gamblers—Australia—Biography.
Dewey Number: 306.8742
Digital edition published by
Port Campbell Press
www.portcampbellpress.com.au
Conversion by Winking Billy
For John.
2007
The young manager of Alice Springs Reptile Centre appeared flustered. The seating for her daily lecture was in disarray, moved by inconsiderate tourists. She ushered the gathering into another room and repositioned the plastic chairs into sensible arcing rows. Even then, on return, one or two still claimed the right to tweak her careful floor plan.
My mother clicked her tongue, as she often did when she disapproved of something. “You wonder how they were brought up, don’t you?” she said, loud enough for those around us to titter.
I led her to a chair, away from the disputed territory, to avoid smirking faces, which might have provoked further remarks about good manners.
Once everyone was seated the manager began her lecture. She found her rhythm and relaxed, speaking knowledgeably about her beloved creatures. She allowed some kids in the front row to handle a couple of sluggish lizards, and was about to introduce the star attraction when she anticipated another interruption.
“I’d ask anyone who’s got a phobia of snakes to leave before the next segment, please.” Her request came with an unintended sigh. “Too often someone panics when they see this little baby out of its enclosure.”
Nobody left.
She shrugged and made a fatalistic gesture as she went to fetch the resident python.
When she returned, the magnificent satin creature was draped across her shoulders and coiled around her arm, its diamond eyes searching for potential prey.
“I’m not feeling so well,” my mother murmured.
Her mouth and shoulders drooped. I’d forgotten her fear of snakes. But she had made no effort to leave. No doubt she didn’t want to cause a fuss.
On this trip she already considered herself a burden. She was eighty and getting frail, with a heart attack and triple bypass behind her. I had accompanied her to Central Australia, in particular to Ayer’s Rock, as she still called Uluru, because as far back as I could remember she had wanted to see it but never had the opportunity or enough savings while my father was alive.
With us was Sonia, my companion for so long that my mother referred to her as my wife. We had flown directly from Melbourne, hired a four-wheel-drive and spent a couple of days at Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Then we had driven to Kings Canyon and along the treacherous desert route to Hermannsburg and Palm Valley, before travelling on to Alice Springs, a distance in excess of a thousand kilometres. The journey home would be on the legendary outbacktrain, The Ghan, another of my mother’s cherished wishes.
She had walked a little at the base of Uluru, where the terrain was flat, but had found even the least arduous treks at Kata Tjuta and King’s Canyon daunting. I had planned this holiday some ten years earlier, but never with any urgency. A day or two after arriving I began to think I had delayed it far too long. She walked at a funereal pace and stopped often to rest. We had trouble finding shady spots for her to sit. She resisted drinking water, preferring to wait for a cup of tea back at the resort. When other tourists overtook us along the scorching tracks, I began to see her through their eyes and was astonished to discover an ailing octogenarian suffering in the desert heat. I could tell from their glances they thought I was an uncaring son. How could I explain to them that her age had crept up and taken me by surprise?
When the python appeared on the manager’s shoulders and my mother murmured she felt poorly, Sonia tried to get her to sip some water. But my mother was past caring. Her dentures protruded. She slumped towards my lap.
As well as her, I caught the teeth, and had the presence of mind to wrap them in some tissues, slip them into my pocket, out of sight, to preserve her dignity, while Sonia recklessly interrupted the speech to ask if there was a doctor present.
The manager had sensed it wasn’t going to be her day. She handed the python to her assistant, an alarmed work-experience student, and went to phone the paramedics.
I held my mother to prevent her falling, certain these were her final moments.
My sisters were the first to occupy my thoughts. Would they forgive me for killing her, for fooling her into believing she could undertake such an arduous trip at her age? Since Melbourne she had been joking about how her local lawn bowls club were about to present her with a Super Veteran’s Medal. The ‘OBE’, she called it, ‘Over Bloody Eighty’, reminding us in her inimitable way that she was getting old. But this was no longer a laughing matter. I looked at the back of her head. Her grey hair, permed as it always had been, looked unhealthy and thin. And the skin on her neck was crinkled and redundant. A wave of premature grief swept over me. Don’t die like this, dear ol’ Mum. Not yet. So far from home. Not before our trip back on The Ghan. Not in my arms like this. Not on my watch, for goodness sake…
An odd thing happened when I met her at Melbourne Airport at the start of our trip. She insisted on showing me another medal, which had recently been sent to her, as a War Widow, by the Veterans Affairs Department, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. My father, who had been too young to be sent to the war, was posted to Japan with the Occupational Forces, not long after the Americans had dropped their second atomic bomb. No doubt the purpose of the gold-plated medal had been to honour those who had served our country. But my mother had been so indignant it wasn’t enough for her to tell me on the phone, as she had done several times; I had to view the object of her scorn, and by doing so, appreciate the intensity of her feelings. Still, I was surprised to see her with the over-sized, glittering thing amongst her hand luggage; it seemed so superfluous to a Central Australian excursion. I wondered whether she was beginning to lose her marbles. As she handed it to me, she repeated her telephone fulmination. “What good is this to me? What a waste of money! Why didn’t they spend it on something those poor boys they sent off to Japan needed. Gas masks or something. Denny might be alive today if they’d done that.”
Notwithstanding the uselessness of gas masks to the Occupational Forces, who moved amongst the radioactive ruins of Hiroshima, and the fact that the money spent on the medals was recent revenue, I understood her point. She was convinced his cancer was caused by exposure to radiation
. And the statistics seemed to back her up. But why such enduring rage? My father had been dead for over twenty years, and when he was alive he had made her life—our lives—a misery.
It often occurred to me that my mother thought Japan was the starting point for all the dramas that followed. And if he had behaved insufferably most of our lives together, what he had experienced there went a long way towards excusing him. One thing was certain, she was still loyal to him, two decades after his death. And I couldn’t understand it.
I could never talk frankly to her about him. Even after he was gone she wanted to protect him, which for her meant concealing the truth with vague statements about his misfortunes, his ‘dirty rotten luck’, as she called it.
Whether or not what happened was all down to luck, those years living with him had left me chronically anxious, not just when matters of importance or significant moments in my life arose, but over trivial matters done almost automatically, like washing dishes, shopping, going out to socialise, where I rushed to get ready, rushed from one thing to the next, worrying about time, worrying about what’s next to worry about, and in my haste, forgetting to do things or take things, rushing back to rectify omissions, forgetting other things, never doing anything or going anywhere calmly, prudently. When I looked back, that seemed to be the pattern of my life. I found it almost impossible to relax. Even sitting alone on a remote beach in summer holidays, as I did sometimes, watching the timeless approach of waves, contemplating the wonders of nature and life, anxious thoughts would intrude: shouldn’t I be somewhere else? Shouldn’t I be doing something more productive?
I don’t know whether it was justified but I blamed my father.
For many years I thought if I wrote down what I remembered of our life together, it would help me to understand him a little better, it might lay some ghosts to rest, it might even grant me some peace of mind. But I hesitated while my mother was alive. I wrote about other matters. I had doubts about my motives. I wanted to be published. She wouldn’t want people reading about our darker moments. She knew from experience they wouldn’t understand.
For the first time in my life I stroked her head. I hugged her to me.
When the paramedics arrived, they took her blood pressure, which was dangerously low, put her on a drip and a stretcher, and took her to the local hospital where they gave her an ECG.
It wasn’t her heart; she was just dehydrated.
Later in the day I returned to the Reptile Centre and apologised to the young manager, who was gracious despite a ruined lecture. She asked me where we were staying and sent flowers.
The next day my mother was well enough for the trip home on The Ghan.
Uncharacteristically, as we travelled through the arid land, she was mostly silent. But at one point, while Sonia was fetching coffee, she turned to me and, to my astonishment, said, “I’m glad you brought your son, John, down to meet me that one time”. She nodded sincerely to assure me that this wasn’t one of her occasional sarcastic comments. “I always wondered what he would be like. He looked just like you, you know. And he was quiet. A nice boy. A pity your father never met him.”
If she was expecting a response she never got one. She watched the desert for a while until her eyelids drooped and closed.
As we travelled south I thought about my son, already a father himself. He had grown up with another family, a loving family by all accounts. I had not known him until I was in my late forties.
A wave of regret swept over me as it always did when he entered my thoughts or dreams. I wondered what had prompted my mother to mention him.
I glanced at her as her head lolled with the rhythm of the train. Her days were nearly up. There were mysteries she would take with her to the grave. I had never really gotten to know her, except as a mother. I never knew what she thought of the rambling way I had lived my life, or what she thought of Claire, who was my son’s mother, to whom I was married for a while, or even what she thought of Sonia. I never understood her loyalty to my father. I had an urge, a longing, to ask her, but she was sleeping, an old woman’s moribund sleep, dreaming no doubt of earlier times. Her breath rasped and wheezed as dry as the desert wind outside.
1951
BESIEGING POLICE DEFIED BY ARMED MAN DETECTIVES PARLEY
These were headlines from The Argus (Melbourne) on the 30th of November, 1951. The front page of newspapers across Australia bore similar news.
The gunman was Denny Sparkes, my father.
A man went berserk with a gun in a barricaded house…and held off all who tried to approach…The occupants were driven out, into the arms of horrified neighbours. A volley of murderous curses followed them down the narrow street. For the provincial Tasmanian city of Launceston, in the fragile post-war years, such a forcible seizure undermined the hope of a peaceful future after the carnage in the Pacific and Europe. Startled police arrived.
All available Launceston detectives secreted themselves in adjoining houses to watch for Sparkes to make a move.
He threatened to shoot anyone who came near, including his two brothers who had been summoned to negotiate. One of them was too angry to be helpful. The other chan ged his name when interviewed by the press. In accordance with the social mores of the day, my hapless mother, the one person who might have calmed my father, was kept away. He stormed around the house raising and lowering blinds, smashing windows, upturning furniture. In a rage he fired through the front door, narrowly missing the renamed brother who, with a young turk detective, had crept onto the porch and appealed to him to be sensible and come out. But nothing was further from his mind. Then, no doubt in light of his unfortunate military record, the army appeared. Warrant Officers met with police to discuss the possibility of dislodging him with tear gas and smoke grenades. Children milled around. Th ese were innocent times.
About 50 small children stood in the street, 100 yards from the house until scattered by police about an hour and a half later.
One reckless boy ran onto the verandah of the house, probably on a dare. Innocent times, pre-television days, with no live footage to view from the safety and comfort of a lounge room. Families drove up in taxis and private cars to witness the unfolding drama.
Many of them left hurriedly when another shot was fired at 7.30pm…
It would be a long night, the start of a long conflict, one that would last a lifetime…with authorities, with society, with himself… No, I’m wrong to called it ‘the start’…that, surely, came much earlier.
THE EARLY YEARS
As I was growing up my father rarely revealed details of his early life, those years before my birth, and even less about his family. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that he began to open up a little. Prior to that the only answer he offered, when I badgered him, was that his grandfather had been a remittance man, a disgraced English aristocrat banished to the colonies, and his great-grandmother had been the famous Tasmanian, Truganini. In my younger years I was gullible enough to believe anything he told me.
I didn’t badger him often, only when I was sure it was relatively safe to do so. In temperament he was unpredictable. It took a special moment, a lull in the storm, to dare a minor interrogation. In looks he rivalled the Hollywood beaux of the thirties and forties, with his impeccable wavy coiffure, luminous blue eyes and disarming smile, almost a poster boy like the local lad, Errol Flynn. But he had a minor physical flaw, which fascinated me as a child and led me to believe there was something not quite right about him: the absence of a left nipple. I was yet to learn it was the least of his oddities. He told me it had been shot off during the war—a remark I didn’t doubt until he admitted years later that he had never seen active service.
According to one of his cousins at his funeral he had been a wild child who grew to be a suave teenager, a charming lad to all the adults he knew (except his own father who had never been charmed by anyone), respected by men who had witnessed his boxing prowess, admired by women for his good looks. But something momentous happ
ened to him while he was in Japan with the Commonwealth Occupational Forces. He was repatriated early, developed a ferocious temper, suffered dramatic mood swings and was prone to violent outbursts. He became an insomniac. He once told me that on his return to Launceston he went without sleep for eight months. A young man, barely an adult, probably dressed in unkempt clothes, his eyes gleaming madly, and his hair wild with neglect. Each night he wandered the streets into the early hours, which included a lonely journey up an unlit path beside the Cataract Gorge, until he came to a swinging footbridge, where he conversed with an equally restless apparition.
Who was the apparition? Some other self he might have been had he not joined the army? Did he tell it what had happened to him in Japan?
Did he say he was posted to Nagasaki, where he was caught stealing blankets from a US Army depot with the intention of distributing them amongst orphans wandering the ruined streets? Did he add that American MPs with no respect for his charitable work beat him up or, rather, threw him down a flight of stairs, doing permanent damage to the unique matter inside his head?
I heard such a story from my mother or father when I was young. But the Commonwealth Forces were never in Nagasaki. They were in the western prefectures, which included Hiroshima and Kure.
Decades later I discovered a different version. I was surfing the net one day when, to my astonishment, I found a number of newspaper articles on my father in the National Library’s digital archive that dealt with some of his misdemeanours from the late forties and early fifties. At one of his reported trials, his mental health was raised by the defence counsel, who stated he had been beaten over the head with a plank of wood by a Korean soldier in Japan. It was information given under oath but I had my doubts. I had never heard of Koreans being part of the Occupational Forces and a search for evidence of it in books and online revealed nothing.
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