This was the year my elder sister started high school. While he was in hospital, Denny went to a resident social worker and requested funds for his daughter’s books and uniform. He was difficult and aggressive with the social worker, declaring that he didn’t want charity. He got angry when it was suggested he approach the Education Department, instead of the Repatriation Department, and stormed out of the office. He later returned to apologise for his behaviour. The Education Department was contacted, forms filled in, and some financial assistance rendered. From that point on, during his stay at the hospital he made several visits to the social worker, asking for payment for his ‘medical sustenance’, sometimes bringing with him other patients who were having financial problems, eager to assist them; eager for their gratitude. He was reluctant to talk to the social worker about his home life. If he had contact with his family in Portland it was done through his brother-in-law. The social worker noted that Pat did not correspond with him at all. After he had been in hospital for some weeks and the question of his discharge came up, he wrote to Pat again but received no reply.
He decided to tell the social worker about his life.
The story was very disjointed, he told it with half sentences, dismissing the rest of the sentence with a wave of his hand, a shrug of his shoulders or would put his hand to his head and say he couldn’t remember all the details…He then seemed to come to a blank in the story, he either wouldn’t or couldn’t remember how he ended up in hospital. He thought he might have beaten his wife up before he left and that was why she had not been in touch with him, but he seemed to think she had some justification for not wanting him back.
Eventually it was agreed that Pat should come to Melbourne at the Department’s expense to see both his doctor and the social worker.
The week Pat was due to visit Denny became very agitated. According to the social worker’s notes he rang her to see if all was well and to confirm her intention to keep the appointment. (In all my years living at home we never once had the phone connected, but maybe it was a pre-arranged call to her brother’s house.) The nurse believed he was told his children were all sick with hepatitis. (In our family only I have suffered hepatitis, and it wasn’t at this stage in my life.) Denny ‘promptly went AWL’. He returned the day Pat was due at the hospital. She wasn’t with him. Nor did she arrive later. The social worker completed her report with the following:
No contact has been made with the wife. It is understood that she feels she just could not go through the whole business of gaol sentences, etc. again. The man appears to realise this is his last chance and just how he will use it remains to be seen.
The social worker contacted his doctor in Portland who confirmed that things were bad between Denny and Pat. The doctor suggested the matter should be left to run its own course.
Th e social worker noted that Denny seemed very fond of his family.
He was discharged soon after, armed with a letter stating he was receiving treatment and that the staff genuinely believed he wanted a chance to ‘make good’.
But it seems that at some time the law caught up with him too. He later revealed to one of his medical officers that on more than one occasion he had spent time in the Portland lock-up for fraud.
MY ADOPTED FAMILY
While I was living at Percy Street I developed a death phobia. A cat that lived on the property had a large litter of kittens and one day the kids that lived in the bungalow drowned them all. I saw six tiny, sodden corpses floating in the laundry copper. The boy who taught me how to climb onto roofs and showed me his green poo was holding the seventh underwater with a triumphant smile, teaching me another thing: how easy it is for a delicate thing like life to be extinguished. I recoiled and raced inside to the sound of his laughter. In that instant I understood how fragile life was. Every night, after I went to bed and the light was turned off, I was transfixed by terror of a similar fate. Lying rigidly on my bed I endured panic attacks. I didn’t want to die before I grew up and grew old. In fact I didn’t want to die at all. Each night between gasps I chanted into a pillow that was damp with my tears, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die” , until I fell asleep. I was spared nightmares but each morning I woke exhausted from the dead weight of dreamlessness.
Ashamed I told nobody.
I was saved by Paul Walters, the vicar’s son. The Reverend Walters was the new minister at St Stephen’s Church of England, which was less than a block from our place. Although I can’t remember how I met Paul, we became inseparable friends and the vicarage was soon my second home—perhaps my first home. Until I met him I had never had a close friend. He was my first because he never asked about my father or his whereabouts, which spared me the humiliation of lying or admitting I didn’t know. My mother had sworn me to secrecy about his long stays in hospital—in what I had figured must have been a mental hospital.
Paul was a solid, good-looking, laconic lad with a thick crop of hair and a nonchalant smile. Being a year older than me, he could be slightly condescending. He was very intelligent and knowledgeable. Despite his father’s vocation he wasn’t particularly religious, although he participated in all the rituals his father requested. He donned a blue cassock to sing in the choir when needed, a red cassock when he served as an altar boy. But he never gave the impression he was committed one hundred percent.
Soon I was involved in the church services as well, only with a great deal more zeal than Paul. When it dawned on me what heaven promised I became the most pious lad in all of Christendom. I clung to my new-found faith like a lifebuoy. My debilitating panic attacks soon ended. Over the next few years I learnt the Catechism, sang in the choir, served at the altar and seriously wondered whether God had me earmarked for the Anglican ministry. If I had doubts I put them down to my newness to religion. I expected them to disappear as I opened my heart further. Here was something that gave meaning to all the chaos I saw in the world, the senselessness of life, its cruelties. It was comforting, too, to have a father in heaven when there was little sign of one on the earth.
St Stephen’s was a bluestone church, built in the 1850s. Its design was grandiose but when Portland was passed over as the capital of a new colony on the southern coast of the mainland, episcopal funds dried up and it was never completed. Instead of stately bluestone, its back wall was made of corrugated iron. Resting in the grounds was a huge bell donated by Edward Henty, the first squatter in the district. It still needed consecration and a belfry. The interior of the church, if you faced the altar, was a sumptuous homage to Almighty God. There were polished timber pews, red carpet down the aisle and splendid lancet-arch windows with stained-glass images of the Apostles. The carved altar had tall candlesticks and, above the communion rail, a pendant oil lamp hanging on a long chain from the lofty heights. There were choir stalls outside the chancel, a huge pipe organ hidden next to it, a pulpit to one side and a brass-eagle bible stand in the southern wing, as well as a font for baptisms. It was easy to feel meek and therefore blessed in such a temple.
The vicarage was more prosaic: a modern, double-storey, brick house behind the church, not as grand as Angus Campbell’s dwellings but larger than most I had been in. It needed to be. The Walters had four children.
They were a happy family. The Reverend and Mrs Walters were rather formal but they doted on their children. They took them to beaches and sports events. They helped them make ice cream and ginger beer. They took them on holidays every year. They bankrolled their hobbies.
Paul had several. Stamps were one. He had accrued an impressive collection from all over the world. He kept them under cellophane in albums, arranged in alphabetical order according to nationality. It was through stamps I discovered countries had different names to the ones I knew and currencies I had never heard of. He encouraged me to start a collection too. Then he turned to another hobby—model aeroplanes.
I waited awhile, wondering how much time should elapse before I could follow his lead without seeming too much un
der his spell. I watched him assemble Meschermidts, Stukers, Spitfires and Lancaster Bombers from plastic kits he bought in a dingy toyshop on Julia Street. He had an eye for detail and a steady hand. He never had parts left over or poorly aligned sections. Wings were stuck in the right places, flaps moved up and down, propellers turned. His models matched perfectly the illustrations on the boxes.
When I begged my mother to buy me one she found the money somewhere. And she also gave me a sixpence a week to buy Boys Own magazines, like the ones Paul collected, full of brave adventurous lads.
When I first tried to assemble a model aeroplane, a Spitfire, I made a mess with the glue. I watched in dismay as it oozed from the gaps when I pressed sections against each other. It stuck my fingers together and its fumes left me dizzy. The finished product inevitably was second-rate. Unlike Paul’s, which looked ready to fly, mine could have had been something shot from the sky.
He used to grimace at my collection.
Within a year he progressed to a balsawood model that had a tiny petrol motor. I often accompanied him to a sports ground where he flew it. Standing in the middle of the oval he primed the motor with fuel from a miniature petrol can, found a smooth area for take-off and spun the propeller to fire up the motor. It sounded like a giant demented mosquito but flew spectacularly. Paul always maintained control with hand-held wires from the model. I was a mere spectator. I didn’t mind. He was my first real friend and I admired him. I adored him.
In the grounds of the vicarage we built an underground cubby, which was too claustrophobic for me to use, and another cubby in the gabled section of the garage roof, from which we ran a can-and-string telephone line to one of the upstairs rooms of the vicarage to relay urgent messages about enemy positions in our military saga fantasy.
I would visit Paul almost every day. I slipped into his family without being noticed. I was there for meals. I slept over whenever I could. I went on holidays with them to distant places. I felt closer to them than to my real family, which wasn’t quite a family anyway. I was like a young cuckoo, not the same shape or temperament as the rest of the brood but doing my best to remain inconspicuous, so I wouldn’t be thrown from the nest. I tried hard to be the vicar’s second son.
On weekends throughout summer we piled into their family car, a two-tone Austin station wagon, to be driven to Narrawong (which to amuse us the vicar called ‘Skinny Chinaman’) or to splendid Bridgewater Bay where we played in the open sea, or inspected rock pools for starfish and minnows, or played beach cricket. In all our games Paul led the way and I followed. When we got home from the beach, Mrs Walters put us in the upstairs bath together, and in a tub we filled to the brim Paul invented a new game, submarines, with our dicks doubling as essential pieces of wartime apparatus. Up periscope, down periscope. Paul had a more impressive periscope than I did.
Paul was the one to reveal the secret of sex to me. Apparently our periscopes had another, unfamiliar, use. He showed me a slim book the vicar had given him, after he had studied its contents thoroughly. The book was full of diagrams depicting men and women’s private parts, and in some diagrams the man’s ‘penis’, the official name for a dick, was erect and inside the woman. I observed each diagram, transfixed, unable to believe my eyes. The book claimed that babies were created this way. It was nothing short of preposterous. And nothing short of scandalous that a vicar gave such a book to his son!
I tried to imagine my mother and father doing what these diagrams suggested. Impossible! I thought of the vicar and Mrs Walters. Never! Surely the ‘crane theory of baby deliveries’, itself hard to believe, made more sense than this. It rocked my faith in God. How could The Almighty devise such a sordid and sinful beginning to life? But a small part of me obviously endorsed the whole idea. I thumbed through the book again and again, risking a catastrophic injury.
My faith took a hit only to be restored some months later when the vicar led a group of local church boys on excursion to the blowholes at Cape Bridgewater. It was a relatively benign evening. There were no great swells in the Southern Ocean. The vicar stood before us on the edge of cliffs that dropped thirty or forty metres straight into the sea, raised his arms as he would to praise the Lord and cried drolly, “Let us spray!”
We loved him when he made gently irreverent jokes like this. And our laughter would have been followed by attempts at puns of our own. But without warning a great wave rose up above the cliff and had us diving for safety. I gripped some craggy rocks as best I could and watched the Reverend in horror. With his eyes closed he hadn’t seen it coming. He was drenched but wasn’t swept away. In my eyes it was a miracle, and a warning not to mock the affairs of the Lord.
Oddly enough my trust in Reverend Walters was eroded by what (I have no doubt these days) were his good intentions. He used to take me away with his family to places like Melbourne and Mildura. Knowing my family couldn’t afford such holidays, he was simply acting on his charitable beliefs and had no idea what impact the trip to Mildura would have on me. Nor did he ever find out.
My mother was happy for me to go. She must have swallowed her pride, given me what pocket money she could, and made sure I packed clothes that wouldn’t embarrass her. She knew the Walters. She and my sisters came to church with me now and then. She liked to see me in altar-boy robes. She encouraged my church attendance, my Catechism classes and my eventual Confirmation. She had once told me she believed in Jesus and I had no reason to doubt her. I could see her from the chancel, sitting at a pew near the front, in a blue floral skirt and a tight white hat made from woven cane. My sisters alongside her were dressed just as primly. At home, however, God was never mentioned. Religion was a private matter in our house.
On the trip to Mildura the Reverend Walters had driven through the night. It was dawn when I awoke on the back seat. We were already in the river town. Paul and a couple of his sisters were asleep next to me. The vicar was driving around, looking for the house he had organised for our stay. Only half-awake I thought we were still travelling north but we must have been going in some other direction.
Maintaining my bearings in those days was extremely important to me, although I couldn’t say why. Perhaps knowing which way was north meant I knew where home was. Mine wasn’t much of a home but it was less scary than none.
Disorientated, I was convinced Mildura was on the north side of the river, despite evidence to the contrary that Paul produced: his road map, his trusty compass, his precocious confidence.
I wasn’t thinking cardinal points while we were having fun—playing in the Murray River on sweltering days, travelling its wide brown waters on an historic paddle steamer, eating ice-cream, climbing on vintage tractors in the riverside park and visiting museums—but when we left a week later the disquieting sensation returned. I was sure the Reverend was driving further north instead of south, heading away from home.
I sat in dumb apprehension, staring from the car window, trying to get some bearings, too scared to ask in case he thought I was being disrespectful.
When we arrived back in Portland the evidence before my eyes should have ended the doubts. But my false sense of direction prevailed. The Reverend dropped me outside a place that looked identical to my home, right down to the mother who appeared at the gate.
How could I be sure that she and the entire town weren’t fakes?
My anxiety was high. I had nobody to turn to, nobody to ask, nobody to help, nobody to rescue me. My trust of the Walters family, including Paul, vanished. Paul snorted derisively when I asked in a whisper if we were in the right place. He must have known; must have been part of the conspiracy to fool me. I felt abandoned. Worse, I felt they had somehow become aware of my secret yearning to be a part of their family, and had decided to get rid of me once and for all. I wanted to tell them that I was aware of what was happening. But I feared the consequences, feared punishment, feared something worse. So I pretended to be unconcerned. As long as they didn’t suspect I knew what was happening to me, I thought
I would be safe. Eventually, if I were clever enough, I would devise a strategy to get back home.
The disturbing doubts lingered for months. I kept looking for evidence that this town I had come to was fake but spotted nothing out of place. I thought it was ingenious; an exact replica in every respect. My family was a perfect imitation. I couldn’t fault it. The woman being my mother might as well have been her. She looked the same, acted the same, treated me the same. The girls, likewise, were just like my sisters. I looked for minor details that could easily have been overlooked by the conspirators, like the initials I had scratched surreptitiously onto a fence post with a pocket knife a few weeks before the holiday, or a shilling I had hidden under a rock, but these and others I checked were there. I went further afield, down to the harbour where I knew of a crude skull and crossbones painted onto a rock at the end of an old fishermen’s breakwater. Still there. So too the piece of nylon rope I had tied to a rusting iron peg near the old lighthouse. Everything was consistent with what had been. Sometimes I turned around swiftly, trying to catch sight of someone relaxing, momentarily dropping their role in the deception. But everyone remained in character.
I began to think I was being punished for my sins, my disloyalty to my mother and sisters. When the tiny-monster head sensation recurred, I was convinced God had decided the fake home was not punitive enough. My head expanded and contracted beyond my control. It made me nauseous and scared. Maybe I shouldn’t have ogled the drawings of what men and women do to have babies. Maybe that was the sin I was being punished for.
One day I developed an excruciating stomach pain, which wouldn’t go away. I feared someone had poisoned me: my mother or the Walters. The fake Pat pretended to be worried. She took me to hospital. The hospital staff ran tests on me but found nothing wrong. I stayed in a ward overnight, sure the nurses were part of the conspiracy and sure I was going to die. By morning the pain had gone. When Pat came to pick me up I thought I noticed the nurses sniggering and winking at her.
You Never Met My Father Page 10