Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  It was perfect. My father sent his brother to Bob with a message asking him to visit. When Bob arrived, my father didn’t bother with too many niceties before explaining the reason for the invitation. When my father needed something, he wasn’t shy in asking for it. Nor did he ever expect his demands to be refused. On the rare occasion they were, he either dug in deeper and became more insistent or he simply moved on to ask the next person. Bob didn’t need convincing. He agreed immediately.

  Over the following days, Bob sat beside my father and together they worked up a design for a machine that could operate in both directions – get him out of bed and into his chair and then the reverse, out of his chair and back into bed.

  After years of polio epidemic, just as there wasn’t an appropriate wheelchair for him, no such machine existed to help my father in even the most basic of ways. We’d invented locomotives, cars, heavy automated machinery. At the time we were on the way to putting a man on the moon. But a lifting machine?

  Bob sketched images of all kinds of contraptions in a notebook, making large and small modifications as they discussed mechanics, hydraulics and design. Bob and my father didn’t care what the machine might look like, they were only interested in functionality. Finally they settled upon a simple sketch, which Bob took to his workshop.

  A week later, he wheeled in a prototype made of thick metal pipes welded together with lead, producing seams that always reminded me of lumpy veins. Attached to the pipes were the hydraulics of an old Holden carjack, which worked as the hoist. My father was elated. He insisted they immediately try it out.

  ‘It’s going to work, Bob,’ he said. ‘Come on, hoist me up!’

  Bob was a little reluctant at first. ‘Ah, I’m not sure it’s a good idea just yet, Dick. I should do some more testing.’

  It wasn’t really that Bob was worried about the durability or safety of his machine – he’d taken good care with all the joints, and the pipes were an inch thick – but he’d never dealt physically with a crippled person.

  ‘Don’t be scared, Bob, you’re not going to break me,’ my father said, sensing the real source of Bob’s anxiety. ‘Just grab them and move them into place,’ he said, indicating his legs with his chin. ‘You don’t have to be gentle.’

  Even with instruction, it took a little while for Bob to get my father strapped in. But once he was in place, Bob took to the lever and our father lifted off the bed. It was like a magic trick. Had I been there, I would have jumped up and down and cheered.

  That prototype was in our family for more than forty years. It went up and down at least twice a day and never once malfunctioned. When my father died, we gave the lifting machine to another family taking care of someone with paralysis.

  Sometimes my brother hooked himself into the straps and tried to convince me to pump on the handle to hoist him up and down, but I didn’t think that was very funny and never agreed. The worst thing I could imagine was both my brother and father being in chairs. It wasn’t something to even joke about and whenever he suggested it I got mad and slammed the door behind me. He could work out how to pump it from where he was on his own.

  After these first weekends of freedom, my father was even more determined to get out of hospital permanently. With his custom wheelchair and his homemade lifting machine, at the age of twenty-two, his legs still in plaster, my father was released into the care of his parents.

  During the hospitalisation, my grandparents left the farm in the care of my father’s brother and moved into my grandmother’s family home, about fifteen minutes from the city centre. It was a large estate, big enough that Aunt Molly had built her own house in what used to be the family’s orchard. Gran’s father, my great-grandfather, had been a successful brewer, running beer up and down the Murray River. When his paddleboat caught fire, he decided that incident, and the unpredictability of the river’s capacity during droughts and floods, was a sign for change. He sold Dutton Breweries and took up farming.

  When they realised my father would never recover from polio, they bulldozed the grand colonial home of Gran and Aunt Molly’s childhood and built a modern blond-brick one with a block of six apartments at the back. The old house wouldn’t be practical for my father, who they assumed would live with them the rest of their lives; the new house was built with no steps. The apartment block at the back of the property supplemented the meagre profits from the farm, which had been given over to my uncle to manage, and gave them an assured and easy income while they tended to their youngest son.

  During the week, while my mother worked at the hospital, Gran and Aunt Molly looked after my father, but on the weekends my mother visited and took over his care. This was the next step in my parents’ courtship – my mother learning how to look after my father outside the structure and support of the hospital.

  One day my father was picked up in a government car and taken to the St Margaret’s Rehabilitation Centre for an assessment. The specialist there wheeled him in front of a manual typewriter and told him to hold his hands up above the machine and press the clunky keys. My father explained that he couldn’t lift his hands that high, let alone type. Then he explained that even if he could type, he had absolutely no wish to become a typist.

  My 22-year-old, unemployed – and seemingly unemployable – paralysed father had loftier ideas for his future.

  ‘Well, then,’ said the stunned doctor, ‘we simply can’t rehabilitate you!’

  My father argued that he should be given the £500 they would have spent on his rehabilitation so he could invest in a business. The doctor laughed.

  ‘I’m really grateful they refused me that money,’ he said when I expressed my outrage at the injustice of their denial. ‘It taught me immediately that if I wanted to do anything, I was going to have to do it myself.’

  Polio made my father an entrepreneur. In the late fifties and early sixties nobody dreamed that paid employment was possible for disabled people. It was unthinkable. History’s shameful truth is that disabled people were kept out of sight. They were not even called ‘people with a disability’, they were ‘cripples’, to be shunned. The idea that these cripples could contribute to society, or even that they had equal rights, was decades away.

  Then and there my father decided to change all that.

  He began by making tablemats and coasters using cork offcuts from Bob Todd’s workshop. My grandfather had a collection of old bank calendars featuring watercolour and pencil reproductions of South Australian historic buildings. After convincing my grandfather to hand over his prized collection, my father began the first of many business ventures.

  My brother and I got frustrated watching our father cutting carrots – even slicing an apple took him forever. So we were glad we weren’t there to watch as he sliced out the image from one of grandfather’s old calendars with a box cutter and a metal-edged wooden ruler.

  But he persevered and, once the picture was cut, he pasted it onto the cork base he’d had Bob Todd cut to size in his workshop. When the glue dried he varnished over the thick paper with a small brush. Then he called Gran to lift the tablemat off his tray and set it aside to dry. He applied five more coats of varnish to each.

  When the varnishing was finished, he had Gran place each mat facedown on his tray and painted the underside with glue. Then Gran helped him lay down green felt, which he smoothed out flat with his forearm so there were no air bubbles. Once they had dried, Grandfather trimmed the fabric tightly along the rim of the cork with Gran’s sewing shears, which were too heavy for my father to hold and he couldn’t have manoeuvred anyway.

  When he described the process to me and my brother one day, we rolled our eyes. ‘That must have taken forever!’ I exclaimed.

  My brother said, ‘I’m bored just listening to the story.’

  Perfection had been drilled into our father by the navy, but it was never more important than in those days after his release from hospital. He knew his life depended on whether the tablemats looked profession
al, not handmade by a cripple and bought only out of pity. So my childish declaration that it must have taken forever was right: each one took days to complete.

  The mats were sold in sets of six, so whatever he earned was a pittance for the time taken. But time was something he had a lot of and it was important to keep himself busy. Every such menial task served a bigger purpose. Freedom.

  My brother and I used to be tasked with setting out those mats for formal dinner parties. I can still remember the feel of them in my hand. Sometimes we took to either end of the long dining table and flicked the mats to each other – felt side down – so they skimmed fast across the shiny surface in our own game of air hockey.

  As my father wished he’d hung on to his radio, I wish I still had a set of those placemats. With every single mat, he was clawing his way out of dependency. He sent his mother out to department stores with the samples. She took orders, which he filled, and eventually he earned enough cash that he felt ready to propose to my mother.

  Eight

  The story of my parents’ early years together is almost a caricature of resilience and pluck. With a start-up loan from Gran and Grandfather, they bought what was then commonly called a ‘mixed business’, the Swan Library. Run out of a small shopfront on the busy King William Road, it included a deli, library and dry-cleaning service. It had a comic and magazine exchange as well as a more formal library, from which people borrowed books for sixpence each. Newer titles went out at a shilling apiece.

  They lived in a single room adjoining the shop with two old doors bolted together to separate the kitchen from the bedroom. On their third night they woke to an enormous crashing, which they thought was an earthquake. My father said their bed dropped through the floor on account of white ants, which had eaten through the floorboards. I don’t doubt there were white ants since my father had clearly bought a dump, but I do wonder if they were actually asleep.

  The backyard had a couple of dead cars in it, which my grandfather eventually cleared. They planted a good lawn and in time had quite a nice garden.

  There was no ‘caregiver’s support’, no electric wheelchairs, no fancy equipment beyond Bob’s homemade lifting machine and my father’s special pushchair. Apart from those two items, all they had was their wits, guts, good humour and love for each other. For quite a while that was enough.

  The business opened at 7.30 in the morning and closed at 9.30 at night. My father had been out of hospital for less than a year, so he was still weak, but each morning my mother bathed, dressed and fed him before pushing him into the shop. There he stayed until closing time, his legs in plasters sticking out straight in front of him, covered by a mohair rug. In between serving customers, my father read through the entire library, minus the Mills & Boon romances.

  Books again became his world, as much later they would become mine. His sea days may have been over but, with a book in hand, he could be out there aboard the Pequod, chasing down the great white whale, Moby Dick. His imagination took him places his body could no longer go. It saved his life.

  Even with the reading, he recalled, ‘It was still a long day. But this was freedom, so life was sweet for me.’

  He was fascinated by the customers who came to the store. Sitting in his chair, immobilised, he was a ready listener and, even if he hadn’t been, he was a captive audience. He knew all the gossip, along with the woes and infidelities of many marriages. He loved it. It passed the time and he learned the nuances of other people’s lives and psychologies.

  They say that people who lose their eyesight or hearing develop their other senses to help make up for the deficit. Our father couldn’t move but, in movement’s absence, he learned to watch and truly notice. He could read a person just by the way they walked. Often he’d ask me and my brother what we observed about a person who happened to be walking towards us.

  ‘What can you tell me about that man in the blue vest?’ he’d say, pointing with his chin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ my brother would say. ‘He’s got brown hair?’ When he sensed my father saw something more, he’d object, ‘I don’t know anything about him.’

  Of course, our father then enjoyed telling us all he’d garnered. ‘They come across as arrogant, but that’s hiding a deep insecurity,’ he’d say, and we’d wonder how on earth you could tell that from a distance. However, sure enough, if we ever did get the opportunity to discover more about one of the people he’d sized up, we quickly came to realise our father had nailed it. As kids, it seemed to us that he had magical powers.

  One day, one of their regular customers asked if he could put a notice for a home he wanted to rent out in the shop window. My father agreed. When a prospective tenant came in to inquire about the advertisement, my father described the house and its owner, and arranged for them to meet. When the owner came in to report the successful leasing of his property, my father saw an opportunity.

  Shortly after, he began Llewellyn Letting Agency. In time it gained hundreds of clients. My father supplied index cards for handwritten property advertisements that were stuck to a noticeboard in the shop. He also placed formal ads in the local newspaper and kept a shoebox filled with corresponding cards describing the properties he managed, without ever having been inside them. He charged the homeowner a flat fee of five pounds, guaranteeing that he would find them a suitable tenant or give their money back.

  It was the early sixties when my mother became pregnant with my brother, Hugh. They held a ‘fire sale’ of all the books in the library, converting that room into a nursery.

  My father was sick with worry that the baby would be born with a deformity on account of his polio, even though doctors assured him that wasn’t possible. Still, he worried he was taking a huge risk. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one.

  To everyone’s quiet relief – none more than my father’s – as medically predicted, my brother was born with all his fingers and toes where they were meant to be.

  They bought what they thought was a ‘childproof’ cot, to be sure my brother would be secure when my mother was busy with my father or they were working in the shop together. One day she went for a short errand while my brother was asleep. She left the door of my brother’s room ajar and positioned my father’s chair so he could watch over him while he slept. The idea was that he’d be able to entertain Hugh from afar if he woke.

  Wake he did, but not as expected. About ten minutes after my mother’s departure, my brother appeared in his nappy at the foot of my father’s chair, having somehow escaped the cot.

  At this point of the story I always punched my brother in the arm, because I knew how embarrassed he was that it involved him being in a nappy.

  Particularly when it was just my father in the shop, my parents kept the store’s front door open to attract customers. Of course, after showing himself to my father, my brother headed straight for the open door.

  My father only had his voice to stop my brother from toddling out onto the main road, where trucks roared past and a car had recently killed their dog, Jordie, who’d escaped his leash. My father had been powerless to stop the dog running into traffic even though he’d been right there when it happened. Now the same fate was about to befall his son.

  No one passed by on the footpath or came into the shop. My father desperately tried to keep Hugh amused by talking to him. He even sang. But his chatter was no match for the draw of the stream of cars, buses and trucks thundering along the busy street, just steps away from the shop’s front door. My terrified father sat helpless as he watched his son wander out towards the footpath. He yelled, but that alone was unlikely to stop an eighteen-month-old boy whose eye had been caught by all the colour and movement just across the threshold.

  Perhaps it was the fear in my father’s voice, but for some reason Hugh stopped in the doorway and sat down on the step. He seemed perfectly happy watching the cars go by from there. My father kept up a constant stream of conversation, desperate to keep Hugh in his spot.

  There
they sat at their posts, my brother in his nappy on the step, my father in his chair about ten feet away, until a stranger came by. She scooped Hugh up in her arms and offered to take him home to her house until my mother returned. So relieved to see my brother safe, my father didn’t think to ask the woman’s name or get her address before she walked out of the store holding my brother over her shoulder.

  When my mother returned home and my father told her what had happened, and admitted he had no idea where their son was or whom he was with, my mother became hysterical. Two hours later, Hugh was returned, bathed and outfitted in brand-new clothes from a fancy store. That woman, Greta Begley, became my parents’ lifelong friend.

  Nine

  As I understood it, my mother’s anguish began with my birth. By now, they’d sold the shop and moved to a large family home in the quiet suburb of Dulwich.

  The often-told story was that my mother’s father had a fatal heart attack on 5 September 1965, hours before I was born. I was told that my grandfather’s last breath was snuffed out just before I took my first screaming gasp of air. Given the coincidence, my birthday was always both a celebration and a mourning.

  Muttee said losing her husband, Brink, was like losing her spine. But she found comfort imagining that her husband slipped his gentle soul into mine as our paths into being and oblivion crossed.

  My mother didn’t see it that way. She was never the same after his funeral.

  A poem written by my mother titled ‘Washing Up’ appears at the end of Muttee’s memoir, The Humble Folk. It describes Brink’s adoring love of Muttee, and how he looked at his wife longingly as she went about her daily chores. It’s a beautiful description of a man simply, truly and deeply in love with his wife. But the twist comes when, in parentheses, my mother writes that even then, forty years prior, in her very early teens, she was envious of that love, of that ‘dog’s eyes’ look.