A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  But he could also now perceive his father’s addiction with some compassion:

  Looking back, it is hard that one should have to think in such terms of the man who fathered us, but the truth is that, after a few years of marriage and despite potentially good qualities, he had never been anything but a wretched nuisance to himself, to his wife and to us, his multiple progeny.

  From the terrified small boy who grew up in the dark shadows of domestic violence and who dreamed of being a writer, Leslie could reflect that his tally of published books was now nearly fifty. He’d carried off all the gongs, including the Order of Australia in 1981 for services to literature, the first ever Children’s Book of the Year Award – in 1946 – for Karrawingi the Emu, and in 1999 the NSW Premier’s Special Award for Services to Literature. His ‘practical and general encouragement to generations of Australian writers’ was acknowledged in his Premier’s Special Award and appreciated by many of those he mentored who became well known. Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland had once written: ‘A thousand sincere thanks to Leslie Rees from two people who learned a great deal from his wise direction and who valued his encouragement at a time when encouragement was all there was.’ In 1999 he also won the Townsville Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Award for his drama histories. The award he most valued was the honorary title of Australia’s best-loved children’s author.

  Ever passionate in dreaming up new titles and book ideas, he never stopped writing, right through his eighties and into his early nineties when he published his last new book, The Seagull Who Liked Cricket. (He liked cricket, too.) The typewriter sat permanently on the dining room table, the same table on which we had done our homework and which our parents had used for literary production and many a dinner party. Now it was covered by piles of paper: scruffy manila folders containing notes and concepts scribbled on bits of paper, correspondence awaiting answers and drafts of whatever work was in progress. If one was invited to dine with him at Balmoral, the literary detritus would be shifted to one end and an appropriate space cleared.

  In mining the rich but chaotic literary archive bequeathed to me, I came across a fragment in such tiny scrawl I could hardly discern some of the words. It was dated ‘late 1992’ – his eighty-seventh year. From it I detected him essaying another autobiography, perhaps this time a more contemplative one, far less emotionally controlled and private. It seemed he had reached the confidence of allowing the reader into his intimate reflections. He’d given this intended work the provisional title Boy of O Five in reference to 1905, the year of his birth. He wrote:

  ‘The power of the story lies in its being experienced through the imagination of both the teller and the receiver, its elements being an amalgam of common truths already apprehended plus of things newly conceived and transmitted in a creative continuity.’

  Mr X lies in bed thinking over the past, meanwhile gazing over his shelffuls of books.

  He thinks back to when he was a small boy, living in a slummy bungalow cottage with open verandahs giving space to rickety beds with thin worn blankets and homemade patchwork covers. It was here his first consciousness of boyhood began, of himself as a boy removed by seven years from the next older members of his family. Later he would realise how the very drabness and disorder and isolation of that islanded boy spurred the beginning of a life of break-away, of wanting to explore the perimeters of the wider world without restriction but while still needing to remain imbedded in the family matrix.

  He had never been able to part with a book, so they’d accumulated densely. When he had bought his apartment many years ago, he had put up his own shelves, up to the ceiling and stretching the length of a wall. And he had hundreds of books on all subjects. Novels were in the top row (once read they could rest in a less reachable space). Next down were books of poetry – Australian and general – (grimy from schooldays), travel books, collections of plays, essays and books of history. Eight long shelves of books, probably a thousand. They were arranged with minimum orderliness and chronology. He liked them that way, liked having his eye on the whole collection when he was searching for one particular reference. Many he’d had for nearly seventy years, not textbooks but special titles bought for a shilling or so in a second-hand shop with pocket money earned as a butcher’s delivery boy or doctor’s car cleaner.

  From his bed he smiled guiltily that in all that time he hadn’t yet got round to reading some of those early-bought treasures: always intended to, kept putting it off. All those books represented his life and trying to make some sense out of the facts, dilemmas and reality, the truth about the world and its people. Yes, of thinking and of word-enjoyment.

  But these were rather ponderous reflections. No need for them to throttle the simple fact that learning things (but not too deeply) had for him been sheer fun. A pity that too many items absorbed through one metaphorical ear went on to flirt with the corrugations of his brain and decided to journey to the other ear and out of it and be lost to him.

  He had always been given to this massive perambulation of the memory, re-tapping one phase of his experience after another, letting it flow through his head and senses: relationships with male friends, narrow escapes, adventures, wild phases with women after Coral had left (still readily desirable in image after so many years), the substance or magic of books, of a good film or painting or string quartet, Beethoven, Boccherini, Haydn, Hummel and of course Mozart, Mozart, Mozart. And The Brothers Karamazov, Chaucer, Milton (yes, he’d read the whole of Paradise Lost at age 16), de Maupassant, Pirandello, Goldsmith (‘wrote like an angel even if he talked liked Poor Poll’), the incredible quantitative record of the immortal Bard. The plays he’d seen in so many places, Moscow, New York, London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, Sydney: plays by Chekhov, O’Neill, George Bernard Shaw, Marlowe and Williamson.

  So his little room that was a cave was also a dream museum. Yes, the drums would so often beat and the sounds roll. And how he thanked his stars forever that he’d acquired this greatest gift … the power to open the door – to revel in the output of most centuries and most cultures and countries … even the popular idiom of the present day too, though much of it escaped his understanding.

  He rose, legged it into his shorts and set off for his morning walk around the bay.

  The dawn was just breaking. And what a dawn. Because he was looking towards the east or northeast, the many tethered yachts were all seen in black – bobbing black against the creeping pink light flooding the sky and the great width of water. Beyond those waters, the curve of the coastal hills was also black and above them stern grey clouds were, at their higher edges, burnished with red-gold, strips and masses of living fire. And above them the pale blue sky arching over towards him.

  26

  Small Volumes

  It was the last year of the twentieth century and my father was battling pneumonia.

  After he had been some weeks in hospital, it became clear to me that he was too frail to go home. Although recovered, the illness had cost him his sparkle and physical vigour: his signature lust for life. I now had to do the second hardest thing I have ever had to do as a daughter: I had to tell him there was no option but the respite care I had arranged at a retirement hostel. He would need to go there to be cared for and get proper meals.

  ‘But oh I want to go back home,’ he pleaded. ‘How long will I have to stay there?’

  I doubted he would ever be able to live in his Balmoral unit again.

  He was desolate. The respite room was a rhomboid-shaped chamber with interior-looking windows. There was little space for anything besides a bed and chair. The walls and furnishings were a bleak indeterminate shade. He could have his meals there or go down to the dining room and sit with others at a small table.

  He hated it. He hated it with a passion. He hated the fact that well-meaning staff told him when to take his pills. He hated sitting for meals with a group of people he had never met and with who
m he had few common interests. He hated that there was no ‘good conversation’ (one of the joys of life he prized above all others). He hated being boxed in, his freedom lost, and that he could not see the stars.

  I grieved for him and carried the burden of being the agent of his distress. He was a man of the outdoors; he craved fresh air and light; he was a walker, a swimmer, a delighter in nature in all its tiny detail and vast expanses. Now to be confined to this small room in an alien place, none of the objects of his richly lived life around him, nothing to identify him, to give him meaning or purpose or the strength to go on … It was a terrible incarceration.

  My father had an ebullient nature. He passed on to all who would listen his belief in what he called ‘the bump of wonder’. His theory was that the bump of wonder gave life its savour – it was the salt that brought out the flavour of all things wise and wonderful. The bump of wonder was a mixture of curiosity and delight in all creation.

  His challenge now was to turn his confinement in respite care into a channel for small joys, thus making life endurable again. He came up with a plan. He found there was an hourly bus that passed the hostel and went down the hill to the beach. As soon as he was strong enough, he set up a pattern of catching the two o’clock bus down Raglan Street so he could spend a couple of hours sitting in his own home with his beloved collection of books, pictures, objets d’art and memorabilia around him, gazing out on the blue waters of Middle Harbour and musing over his life and loves and many adventures. At five o’clock he would catch the bus up the hill and be back at the hostel in time for tea. This way he established a bearable compromise. He had not been irrevocably torn from his former life – he could still touch it and feel it and take pleasure in its familiar detail.

  Some afternoons I would pick him up from the hostel and we’d go down to his place in my car. On one occasion, I felt oppressed by the way everything was gathering dust. The air seemed thick with it. Even when he had lived there, my father had always vigorously refused to have anyone in to help him clean or do anything else. He preferred to do it himself, he said. He couldn’t bear the interruption to his time and concentration. However, his attention to the cleaning became more and more cursory and now that there was no-one living in the apartment full-time, it was apparent that something should be done.

  With reformist zeal, I got out the ancient Electrolux and began to thrash around the floors with it, complaining about the state things were in. Suddenly my father became very agitated. His blue eyes were blazing, his voice rising.

  ‘Stop. Stop. Don’t waste time on that! Put it away.’

  ‘But, Dad, the place needs cleaning.’

  ‘Now is not the time. I’ve got something I want to show you.’

  My father was usually very slow to anger. He had the mildest of tempers, so I was shocked. With some resentment, I bent down and turned off the machine.

  My father’s urgency, his irritation were palpable. When I look back now, I realise that from his perspective, the wisdom of his years, he knew that there would always be mess and detritus in human lives, but that the small moments when two people could share things of tender memory, precious detail and enduring love are rare and to be fought for.

  Over the inert frame of the vacuum cleaner he passed me a small leather-bound book, the size of a pocket diary.

  ‘Darling, I want to tell you about Coral. I want to tell you about our love for each other.’

  He was speaking as if it were yesterday. He went to his oak bookcase with its leadlight glass doors, the first piece of furniture he had ever owned. In it he kept all the first editions and author copies of the many books he had written, along with precious signed volumes by other writers.

  He pulled out another small book and passed it to me.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you. You know when I left Western Australia to go to London, we exchanged these little books. We had each written in them verses of poetry to read to help us endure our separation.’

  I opened one of the books, holding it carefully in the palm of my hand.

  My father then took out a larger shiny black book held together with ribbon. ‘I’ve got something else for you. When I went on that long journey by ship from Australia to England, every night after dinner I went to my cabin and wrote a letter to Coral. Of course I couldn’t post them. But I wanted to tell her every little detail of what I was experiencing. Here they all are, all the letters I wrote to her on that voyage. When she eventually received them, she pasted them into this book. Now I’m giving it to you.’

  I took the book and opened it, seeing its pages stuck with small parchment papers crammed with lines of handwriting in faded black ink. I had not seen the letter-book before. I had no idea of its existence.

  My father’s face was now alight with the memory of the girl he had first loved more than seventy years ago and whom he had never stopped loving. He had never spoken to me of these matters before and he never would again.

  27

  A Place in the Sun

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said. These were our favourite pastimes: walking and talking.

  It was a Sydney winter’s day, the sun’s watery rays gilding the sparsely placed splashes of colour, the sky a pale dome of cerulean blue. A faint wind stirred the brush box and, here and there, a bloom (or was it a rosella?) lit the grey green leaves with a stab of vermilion.

  I found the wheelchair surprisingly heavy to push: even the slightest incline made me strain. This surprised me because the load seemed so fragile, so reduced: his form under a heavy jumper swayed with the movement of the chair, one hand inert on his lap, fingers curled, the other clutching his knee rug, which concealed a urinal bottle, just in case.

  I chose what looked like a shortish street opposite – squat houses facing onto cottage gardens but quiet, with no through traffic. The footpath looked relatively even and had grass on the verges. I chatted away as I pushed.

  Halfway along the block I parked the chair on the strip of grass and sat myself opposite on a low concrete wall. The owner of the wall looked up from sweeping her porch but seeing the chair and its tenuous contents, resumed her task. Thus we sat facing each other in the winter light. Nearby a eucalypt drooped its arms of tapering silvered leaves.

  He said, ‘My mind’s gone funny today. I’m having delusions.’ But he added with a laugh: ‘They’re not all unpleasant, you know. For instance, I can see your face – only it seems about ten feet wide.’

  I stood and picked a small spray of leaves from the tree. First I laid them on his lap. Then, fearing they might blow off, I placed them in his inert hand, curling the fingers over. But how much love can a few leaves convey?

  He looked long at them then looked at me, his eyes very blue. ‘It’s so lovely to be out in this wonderful sun after being cooped up inside.’ After the strain of speaking he slid into a little half-sleep, his head drooped forward.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s explore a bit further.’ The bumping of the chair along the uneven pavement seemed to rouse him and occasionally I had to stop and rest.

  The sun was now lower in the sky and a quiet, sharp wind began to move the leaves about.

  ‘I suppose we’d better head back before the wind gets too cold.’

  To get back, I had to navigate the chair across a busy road. I discovered there were little concrete ramps when you came to the corner, access ramps for small vehicles such as prams and strollers, perhaps even wheelchairs.

  The down ramp onto the road presented no problem: gravity took care of that. But, having crossed, I found I needed several goes at the up ramp. Nevertheless, I could not make headway. Dragging is easier than pushing so I turned the chair around. As I started to drag it up that very small incline I noticed my passenger had slumped forward, his head over his knees. His weight thus shifted, I found it impossible to move the wheelchair.

  ‘Hey,’ I sa
id, a trifle testily. ‘Dad. Just sit back and relax. Otherwise I can’t budge this thing.’ Cars were whizzing by.

  From the chair there was no response. With one foot on the rear cross-bars of the wheelchair to hold it on the slope and with one hand hanging onto the handle, I leaned forward and placed my arm diagonally across him, trying to move his weight even a fraction back onto the seat to balance the chair.

  The weight thudded gently back against the chair. But as I tried again to pull the chair up the small ramp, his weight shifted forward again, head on chest. Nothing for it but to lean over and place one arm tightly around his inert form to try to hold him in the chair then heave and haul with all my strength, one hand on the chair to guide its direction, up along that little incline and then along the straight until we reached the garden. Bent forward over him and holding him as tightly as I could, I propelled us both along the street in that ungainly embrace.

  I parked him in the late sun on a little terrace amid some wordless onlookers. His body seemed shrunken, sagging and askew in the chair. One hand still clutched the emergency bottle under the knee rug, the fingers of the other curled around the leaves on his lap.

  I raced inside and found the nurse, a young bloke with beefy arms.

  ‘I need some help,’ I said, my voice rising in desperation. ‘He’s nearly falling out of the wheelchair. I can’t seem to keep him in it. Come quickly.’

  ‘Probably had another little stroke,’ the nurse said matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll take a look in a tick.’

  Later, after my father had been transferred and was trussed up, his inert arm in a sling, the gate sides in place to keep him from falling out of his cot, he opened his blue eyes. He looked and looked into my face as if trying to drag recognition from some deep mire within.