I went to bed that night filled with joy and hope and anxiety. I had a father again. My jaw trembled at the thought of it.
The next day he was gone.
Had it been a dream?
There had been a disturbance in the night. What had happened? I was too afraid to ask.
“Where’s Dad?” Jean asked at breakfast.
Pat turned to me. I noticed she was wearing a lot of makeup on her face, trying to cover up some dark marks. “Go outside and play, darling,” she said to me, patting my head and steering me towards the door. “And take Carol with you, just for a while.”
Jean’s eyes sparkled.
I obeyed, fearful of the secret my older sister was about to learn.
Whatever my mother told her, Jean was honourable and kept it to herself.
Was it around this time that I began to experience a disturbing sensation that I thought of as my tiny-monster head? It started as a dream but often invaded my waking hours. I had no control over it, suffering it for years, any time of the night or day. It felt like my head shrank down to the size of an apple, putting enormous pressure on the organs within—my eyes, my ears, my tongue, my brain—and after a minute or two it suddenly expanded to the size and weight of a watermelon, accompanied by an onrush of nausea.
It happened less often when I was a teenager, and eventually stopped, but I can still evoke the sensation today, more than fifty years on. It was always vile and I’m glad it’s gone. I have no idea what caused it. I was too overcome by its weirdness whenever it happened to tell anybody about it.
THE PINES
Soon we left Kirkwall as well. The sheep station was being subdivided into five farms and put on the market. Angus Campbell wanted to retain Pat as his housekeeper on one of his other properties, closer to Portland. So we shifted to The Pines, where he ran cattle as well as sheep a few miles from a hamlet called Lyons. We never saw the old greyhound again, but Woollyofus, now a ram and too big to be kept as a pet, accompanied us south along with one of the farmhands who shifted into a cottage in Lyons. He looked after Woollyofus in an adjacent paddock.
The Pines was a contrast to Kirkwall, which had been vast and dry and flat. The new homestead was on a steep hill, a mile or so along a winding dirt road above the Crawford River. Dark pines towered over its narrow drive. When I stepped out of the ute I could hear the wind howling through the looming branches. The homestead was more imposing than Kirkwall, more European, which would have appealed to Campbell, who displayed an immoderate penchant for anything French, particularly its omelettes and wine. We shifted into an old bungalow behind the mansion, hidden discreetly from the main entrance. It had bedrooms and a living space but no kitchen to speak of. So Pat used the cooking facilities in the mansion.
I gradually settled into my new surroundings. I played around the mansion, which I easily imagined was haunted. I lay beneath the pines on a carpet of dry brown needles and stared up at the branches, which were like spiral staircases to a mysterious world. I dared not think of my father. But I suffered from his unexplained absence. And then I dared to think he had gone to another world.
Perhaps, like Jack-in-the-Beanstalk, whom my sister had told me about, I could visit it by ascending to the clouds. Sometimes I tried to climb a pine tree, but never got more than halfway before I lost my nerve, so never discovered what was at the top. I wasn’t as brave as Jack, who met an ogre. Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread! I could imagine my father as one of those.
On the ground I gathered cones in hessian sacks for our fireplace. I dug my first garden plot, collected cow manure and planted carrots, which made my mother chuckle since they were one of the vegetables I refused to eat, along with cabbage, silver beet, beetroot, spinach, cucumber, parsnip and turnip. Undeterred by my fastidious palate I watched in wonder their green tops break through the damp loam and develop into delicate foliage. Under Pat’s instruction I learnt how and why I had to thin them out. I squatted close beside her, our sides almost touching, and joyfully copied her movements. Learning. Learning. The discarded seedlings I put with the scraps we gave to chooks. I found other things to do: sweeping paths, washing windows, helping with chores.
Now and then we went to visit the new manager, who lived in a house on the farm with his wife and a baby. He would sit down at a piano and play some of my mother’s favourite tunes, like ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ or ‘Danny Boy’, while she sang along. And when he stopped to have a cup of tea, the piano kept on playing. These managers! They were magicians! The one at Kirkwall had spun a sixpence on a pinhead, while here at Th e Pines he could play a piano without touching the keys. Amused at my astonishment he eventually showed me some paper rolls with hundreds of small oblong holes punched in them. When the rolls were placed in a compartment of the piano, the keys would move in a certain order, just like they had been pressed by fingers, and a tune commenced. He said its proper name was ‘pianola’. It lifted once more my admiration for human ingenuity.
I started at my seventh or eighth school and was only in Grade 2. Pat took me and Jean down the dirt road to the highway in the ute where we caught a school bus a few more miles into Lyons.
Each day we passed the paddock where Woollyofus stayed. He was always eating grass and seemed content, not missing us at all. The school had two adjoining weatherboard rooms, a matching shelter shed, a corrugated-iron toilet block, and a patch of asphalt where every Monday morning, as in Apsley, the Australian flag was raised, the national anthem sung, and the oath of allegiance sworn. My patriotism flourished. And in class I returned to my habit of tracing maps of Australia. I also perfected my multiplication tables.
These drills in the classroom and with the entire school body on a Monday morning where everyone chanted as one were a potent influence on my early years, especially since I had no close friends. I could call myself an Australian and feel I was one of millions. And I could experience a sense of belonging even when I was alone just by absorbing the atmosphere around me. That’s why my plastic template of Australia was one of my most precious possessions. And that’s why I proudly learnt by rote Dorothea McKellar’s patriotic poem, I love a sunburnt country…
Besides the collective aspects of schooling I pursued more personal interests. After eating the cheese or jam sandwiches that Pat had prepared for my lunch, I left the shelter shed and went beyond the patch of asphalt to an uneven piece of ground to observe butterflies and other insects or small animals like lizards that abounded in the long grass. I was also fond of lying on my back and finding images in the clouds while I pretended to be dozing.
If my mother was bored with the daily drudgery she undertook, like getting us ready for school, cooking for us, keeping our quarters clean, as well as the housework she did for Campbell, if she was upset by Denny’s absence, she kept it to herself. She seemed happier at The Pines than Kirkwall. She was only twenty-five miles from her family in Portland. Still, with a fallible memory, I can’t claim that we visited them or they came to see us. I have a recollection I associate with this time, of making sandcastles on a narrow beach between timber piers, although it might be from some other period, or it might be my imagination. If only I had kept a diary, but it was early days for me and writing. Maybe visits were made, or their proximity was enough to comfort my mother, or maybe other matters cheered her.
Still, she wasn’t destined for a cheerful life.
Perhaps things started to go wrong for her again the day I sprang from a hiding spot on the far side of the mansion as she walked past. So tremendous was the fright I gave her, she almost collapsed. She languished on a stone step while I fetched her a glass of water, and after she had recovered enough to smile feebly at my distress, she begged me never to ambush her again. I secretly vowed to devote the rest of my life to her, to redress my terrible misdemeanour.
Not long after, one of Campbell’s bulls knocked down five fences, in its endeavour to reach a few
cows, and had temporarily stopped in the home paddock next to our bungalow, another drama Pat could have done without, fearful it might harm us if it wasn’t quickly relocated. Perhaps it was an omen. It stayed for several days, but we were spared a goring.
Then a snake appeared outside the fly-wire kitchen door. From inside she watched it attempt to enter. It shimmied against the screen. She left by another door, found a spade, crept up behind, knocked it from the fly-wire and in a terrified frenzy chopped it into pieces. When I arrived an hour later she was still shaking. As I entered through the ruined screen door she asked me if it was there and if it was dead. Its pieces were still twitching. When I informed her, she taught me the saying ‘a snake never dies until sunset’.
After the school year finished, my sisters and I started preparing for Christmas. The manager produced a Christmas tree, taller than any I had ever seen. Pat handed us a box of decorations and even allowed me to climb the step ladder to attach the feature star, which represented, I had learnt, the star that led the Three Wise Men to the stable where Jesus was born.
My mother never went to church and never made us go to Sunday school, but she told us she believed in Jesus and had given us a Little Golden Book with the story about him.
Jesus seemed like a nice man and in the pictures he always glowed, so he was probably God’s son, like he said, because I’d never seen anyone else glow like that. And when he was a baby he was cute. He had a ring above his head that was called a halo, which was meant to let everyone know how good he was. Nobody I knew had a halo, so I guessed he was better than everyone else.
Christmas was his birthday so we were supposed to be very happy. But it wasn’t the Baby Jesus who made us happy so much as a nice old fellow with flowing white beard, who wore a red suit and was called Santa Claus, Santa for short. What his connection was to the Baby Jesus wasn’t clear but I wasn’t going to let that mystery spoil the occasion. It was like the Easter Bunny who came at the same time each year that Jesus died on the cross. The Easter Bunny seemed to come along just to cheer us up because death was a gloomy, spooky sort of thing, not the normal reason to have a holiday. But none of the stories I’d read about Jesus had the Easter Bunny in them. The other thing about Santa and the Easter Bunny was that you never got to see them when they dropped in; they just left their presents and were gone without even a ‘hello’, except maybe a written one, scribbled in a handwriting that looked just like my mother’s. It was to surprise you but you always knew they were coming.
Jean declared my query about rabbits laying eggs like chooks made no sense, and pretended to be privy to the Easter Bunny’s secrets. Th ere was one more mystery visitor: the tooth fairy that came whenever a tooth fell out as long as you put it in a glass of water. It never said ‘hello’ either but paid more visits than my father.
Early in the New Year the shearing started and Pat resumed her seasonal duties, preparing thermoses and lunches. The shearing sheds were on the other side of the homestead driveway, within easy walking distance. Angus Campbell was due to visit. I wondered if I would be chasing his golf balls down some of the steep hills.
At the height of the shearing, on a Saturday, Denny made another unannounced appearance, this time without gifts and in an irascible mood.
He arrived in the middle of the night and climbed through Jean’s bedroom window. Even in the darkness she recognised him and didn’t scream. Years later she told me about their brief exchange.
“Hello Dad.”
“Who are you?”
“Jean.”
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
It had been a genuine query. Most likely his confusion was due to weeks of shock treatment, which I knew nothing about for many years.
I awoke to the sounds of roars and wailing.
Terrified I sat bolt upright.
I heard my frightened mother pleading.
A wild accusatory voice sounded like it was spitting out poison. I didn’t understand all the words but they sounded bad. “You and that ugly fat bastard! Un-fucking-believable!”
I heard her indignant denials.
He roared again and something went crashing against the other side of my wall.
“Denny, don’t, don’t, please!”
I was convinced she was being murdered. There was a horrible gurgling sound followed by silence.
I fled under the bed and stayed there, expecting to be the next one murdered. I was shaking all night, out of fear as much as the cold from the lino floor. At some stage I wet myself but was too afraid to emerge to change my pyjamas.
I must have fallen asleep but awoke suddenly and shrieked when someone touched my leg.
“It’s all right, darling, it’s me,” my mother said softly. “What are you doing under there?”
“I thought I heard something in the night. I was scared.”
“It’s all right now. Come out.”
She must have noticed I’d wet myself. “Take these off,” she said, helping me out of my bottoms. “Get dressed before your father comes back.”
I shuddered and cried out when I caught sight of her battered face.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. Just have some breakfast and go and play outside. Just keep out of his way if you see him.”
I took some extra food for lunch into hiding, into a shed where hay was kept, feeling guilty, with my secret promise to protect her failing its first test. But to protect her from my father was a terrible duty. It seemed unnatural. And I was terrified of him. Through a crack in the shed wall I caught a glimpse of him, prowling like a hungry beast around the mansion. He seemed much bigger than I remembered, as if he were storing his rage in flesh and muscle. He looked like the criminal I had been told he was. He was far more fearsome than the bull that had stormed into the home paddock. It broke my heart that I should feel terrified of my father. I found a warm spot out of sight and willed myself to sleep.
Did he stay for long? My memory suggests he didn’t but, looking through his medical files decades later, I encountered a letter from Campbell to the Repatriation Department that suggested Denny was his employee. Perhaps his employment extended back to Kirkwall, for Denny received letters there between May and August 1959.
Late one afternoon, still keeping out of my father’s way, I heard Pat calling me in a desperate voice.
In trepidation I emerged and skulked over, brushing off bits of hay. Her face was still bad, from the initial beating or further attacks. The bruises were going yellow. But her swollen cheeks were dry. She dropped down to my level, took my hands and pressed them hard. Once again she was trembling. I could see the fear in her eyes.
“Your father’s just done something very bad, darlin’, and now he’s taken off in the car.” Her split bottom lip quivered. “I’ve got to go looking for him. Will you come with me? I need some company. Something might’ve happened to him.”
What she expected me to do if something had happened to him was left unspoken.
The bad thing my father had done (although I didn’t know this until I pieced together information that he and my mother revealed to me years later) was to break into Campbell’s cellar and steal most of the French wine, which he took to the shearing sheds and distributed amongst the shearers. It must have cost them The Pines contract, but, not insignificantly, it would have been an enormous fillip for their reputations within the shearing fraternity, which thrived on such stories, built legends around them. Sheep remained unshorn or half-shorn. One or two were inadvertently left in the sheep dip and drowned.
It was unfortunate, although not entirely unexpected, that the revelry occurred the same day Campbell arrived. He quickly figured, or more likely was told, what had happened, and in a fury confronted Denny, who by then was thoroughly intoxicated on the best wine money could buy. His face flushing with righteous indignation, Campbell ordered him off the property.
On the surface Denny’s action appeared delinquent and gratuitous, the behaviour of a man totally out of
control and driven by a mad suspicion of his wife’s infidelity. His drunkenness was certainly out of character. Throughout his life I never once saw him drinking. He certainly never kept beer in the fridge or joined our Uncle Fred, one of Pat’s brothers, in his binges while he lived with us when I was a teenager. Whatever prompted Denny’s mischief, it took an ominous turn, unleashing his hatred of Campbell and everything he stood for. For a long time when I was older I was inclined to consider the looting of the French wines a calculated, rather than entirely reckless, act. It was done with some symbolism in mind, if not for the shearers’ benefit, at least for his own satisfaction. He knew it was something Campbell would have understood— them and us—the class divide.
Foolishly he ignored the order to leave and invited Campbell to be his sparring partner instead. He refused to take no for an answer. He danced around and flailed his arms in a poor imitation of those steps he had learnt in the army for battalion boxing tournaments, prior to his tour of duty in Japan. But being drunk his fists missed their target. Campbell fled. Denny staggered after him. In a moment of inspired madness he changed course and commandeered the farm ute for the purpose of running over his adversary. He did some serious swerving and revving, which left deep ruts in the soft earth of the home paddock, without ever reaching Campbell, who for a portly man showed a remarkable turn of speed and agility, suffering no more than dented pride and muddied moleskins.
Denny sped recklessly off the property.
I had no idea whether the incident had just occurred or whether it had been hours before when Pat borrowed another farm vehicle and we went looking for him. Maybe she knew already what had happened to him. Maybe she feared the worst. Why else would she have imagined she could catch up to him?
You Never Met My Father Page 7