She told me that when Joanie got her first period she stormed around the house, furious, ranting about the indignity of it. ‘It’s awful!’ she yelled, as Nan King trailed behind, consolatory. ‘I’m not having this for the rest of my life!’
Mum, meanwhile, sat in her room, perplexed: what was the use of complaining about your period? ‘I couldn’t wait to get mine,’ she said. ‘It would mean I was a woman.’
CHAPTER THREE
Dad wasn’t a particularly gifted footballer: the fact that his left leg was two inches shorter than his right leg didn’t help. (He played in a built-up boot.) He was, on the other hand, fifteen stone and bullock-strong, with triangular shoulders and pecs like paving stones. He also had another thing going for him: he didn’t give up.
He lifted weights, did neck-strengthening exercises and ran miles and miles of jogs and sprints, going and going, on dismal floodlit fields, in the rain, on freezing evenings, lungs burning, legs like jelly. By the mid-1950s, he was, as one newspaper put it, ‘an exuberant, speedy, non-stop forward, a fine specimen of an athlete . . . By general consent, the best front row forward in Australian rugby union.’
Rugby was the perfect game for Dad. It appealed to his sense of the epic, to his fanaticism, the mania of his spirit. He also loved the contact. Yes, soccer required skill – ‘it’s the most skilful game of all’, he used to say – but his was not a life lacking for tests of skill, what with the demands of doctoring, the crucial equivocations on this treatment or that. No, what Dad hungered for on a playing field was fire, blood and broken things. Once, he was playing against Rex Mossop, the future sports commentator, when Mossop targeted one of his team’s players. Dad convened his players at the break, told them they were now to target Mossop, mercilessly, at the bottom of every ruck and in the core of every maul, in loose play, off the play; wherever they found him, they would flog him. They would make sure he never forgot this match. Another time, Dad ran right across the field to where an opposing player was being talked to by the referee, and decked that player. (He was suspended for two weeks.) ‘I guess I went a little bit mad,’ he said later.
He excelled in club games. He captained Sydney University for years, leading them to a historic streak of grand final wins, from 1951 to 1955. He later captained Eastern Suburbs. In 1952, even before he had played for New South Wales, he was selected for Australia on a tour to New Zealand; the captain was his old school friend, John Solomon.
The year after that, he toured with the Wallabies in South Africa, where he played mainly off the bench, as a reserve – what he called, with a strange, reverse pride, ‘a dirt tracker’, because he followed behind, in the ‘dirt track’ left by the first call prop, who was then Nick Shehadie. Rugby is a religion in South Africa, and the Wallabies were treated as if they had descended from the sky. The press covered their every move: there were handshakes with the prime minister, visits to zoos to pat lion cubs, coaching clinics at schools, ‘donkey derbies’ and a ‘tribal dance’, where, according to the papers, the visitors were treated to ‘the vibrant dancing of darkest Africa’. There were rides in rickshaws hauled by ‘happy natives’. The crowds were biblical: seventy thousand at Ellis Park in Johannesburg. They flocked from everywhere for the matches, by rail and sea, bearing gifts, as if in tribute, of fruit and biltong. When the Wallabies played in Port Elizabeth, there was not an empty hotel bed within ninety miles.
Dad brought back things from these tours: football songs, intestinal parasites, a three-inch-thick leather-bound album of photos and press clippings, presented to each player by the Transvaal Chamber of Mines. He also brought back a little bag of diamonds, given to him by de Beers during a tour of their mines. Dad didn’t want to pay duty on them coming back into Australia, so he had the diamonds sewn into the lining of his touring jacket. He gave some to his mother and the rest he had made into Mum’s engagement ring.
Dad also went hunting in South Africa. He ended up shooting a springbok and a blesbok, the heads of which he had mounted and shipped back to Australia. Later on, he hung them on our dining room wall at home. Together with the oak table and silver candelabra, the ’boks lent the room a pleasantly Edwardian feel. As a boy, they mesmerised me. Where were the rest of their bodies? (Behind the wall? Hanging out the back of the house?) They had mouldering ears and glass eyes, coy little grins and big black horns that curved around like question marks. As we got older, we teased Dad about shooting them. ‘How could you?’ we would say. ‘You monster!’ Dad didn’t mind; quite to the contrary. We all had our roles.
There were other tours: to Japan, in 1956, when he was vice-captain of the Australian Combined Universities team. The Japanese players screamed ‘Banzai!’ before kick-off. The Australians drank sake (all except Dad, who was then – unimaginable as it seems now – a teetotaller). There were dinners with Miss Japan, slapstick attempts to eat with chopsticks, the hosts looking politely away. It was cold. The Japanese put rice straw on the fields to protect them from the snow. At night the visitors were each presented with a geisha, but Dad swore he never touched one.
There were matches in Sydney against the touring Fijian side; the Fijians were huge, bounding men, untamed and ill-disciplined, who had until recently played in bare feet. Dad said that their afros were so bushy that when you packed down against them, you couldn’t see a thing.
The peak of his career came in 1957, when he played a blinder against the All Blacks at the Sydney Cricket Ground. There was a crowd of thirty thousand, with more than double that watching on TV. All three Sydney channels transmitted the match – the first rugby union international televised in Australia. Also playing that day was a young Colin ‘Pinetree’ Meads, perhaps the most famous All Black of all time. Later Dad would speak his name in awe.
Mum kept a report from that day, clipped from a New Zealand newspaper. ‘Elliott, who toured New Zealand in 1952 and South Africa in 1953, was the best of the Australian forwards. Had all the Australians packed like Elliott the result could have been different.’
When I first read this, I felt a little spurt of joy.
Dad injured himself, of course. I think that was part of the appeal of rugby: he actually enjoyed the pain. He fractured his ribs, he broke his nose, he bit through his tongue and had his right eyelid torn off. He broke his back and slipped discs. There were stitches and strains and dislocations. His face was opened up, repeatedly, and sewn back together. He was busted apart, all knobbly and uneven, with bumps in weird places, loose bits poking through like rocks under your sleeping bag. As a boy I remember thinking that if I hugged him hard enough, all those broken bits would stay together.
*
Dick Tooth, John Solomon, Dave Brockhoff, Wallaby legends all – they would become regular visitors to our home when I was a boy, filling the doorframe when they walked in or striding, godlike, on the beaches where we holidayed. They used to call one another ‘old cock’ or ‘old boy’, slap each other’s shoulders. The first thing Dad would do was mix them a drink. They were all different: some were shy, modest; others were loud; some were cryptic; they winked at me and told jokes I didn’t get. But they all loved Dad: you could see it in the way they looked at him. I liked them for that alone.
They often came over for dinner, filling the house with their plosive, blunderbuss greetings, oozing haleness like over-strong cologne, and their laughter, surgical and devastating, landing like air strikes after every punchline. They drank scotch and water, brandy and dry, gin and tonic. They turned the dining room into a furnace, roaring with grown-up energy.
One night, when I was about six, I wandered in dressed in my pyjamas, the soft flannelette ones with choo-choo trains on them. I was going to bed and wanted a hug from Dad. But when he spotted me, he pointed and yelled: ‘Take down your pants and show us your balls!’
The room went silent. The other men stopped talking.
‘Come on, sport, take ’em off!’
I ha
d no idea what to do. Maybe I should pull down my pants? But what would these men think of my balls, which were so small, so puny? What if my balls disappointed Dad, disappointed these men?
I stood there, mute, unmoving. I tucked my fingers into the waistband of my pants and was about to pull them down when Mum walked in from the kitchen.
‘Max! Don’t be so ridiculous!’ she said.
Dad roared with laughter, and the conversation resumed.
*
David Brockhoff – or, as Dad called him, ‘Brohko’, as in ‘loco’ – became a huge figure in Australian rugby. In 1979 he coached the Wallabies to a historic Bledisloe Cup victory in Sydney, at the SCG – the first time the All Blacks had been beaten in Australia since 1934. (Brohko and the team did laps of the SCG, carrying the cup, people in the crowd leaning over the fence, trying to touch them.)
Brohko frightened me. He had a voice that could trigger avalanches and a bounding, elastic, puppyish energy, like a toy you couldn’t turn off. He worked for Tip Top, the bread company. Whenever he came to our house, he kissed Mum on the cheek, called her ‘Rosie darling’, and gave her loaves of bread. His wife, Claire, whispered when she talked, as if to compensate for Brohko’s volume. Our two families holidayed together in summer at their fibro shack in Pittwater, long hot, salty-aired nights spent wading in the shallows, stirring phosphorescence around our ankles.
One day Brohko took me fishing; Mum must have asked him to look after me.
‘We’ll go out there in my boat,’ he said, pointing to the other side of Pittwater, ‘and we’ll catch a sack of fish.’ He gestured to a hessian bag in the back of his dinghy. ‘What do you think of that?’
I wasn’t thinking much, actually: I was feeling small, as light as dust. Brohko was trying to help. But where was Dad? I had a vague idea that he was not well, but I couldn’t tell Brohko that. And so the hours passed in a kind of naked silence, the glare like glass shards, tongues of chop lapping at the boat. I wanted to thank him, but I didn’t know how.
Maybe we caught some fish, I’m not sure. What I mostly remember is getting one of Brohko’s handlines horribly tangled. It was the worst thing I could have done. I wanted to be a man, to catch fish, not mess things up. Brohko was lovely about it – he couldn’t have cared less. But as we motored back to shore, my line cobbled like a bird’s nest in the bottom of the boat, I burned hot with shame.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dad and Mum were married on 6 April 1956, a Friday. The ceremony was at St Mark’s in Darling Point. Mum wore a gown made of white silk organza and a string of Mikimoto pearls that Dad had brought back from Japan. She had a tulle veil held in place by a wreath of lilies-of-the-valley. Dad was wearing a black tuxedo and white gloves. In the wedding photos, he’s smiling so hard it looks as if his head might explode.
The reception was at The Australian Golf Club in Kensington. The first toast went to the Queen, then the bride and groom. They ate a fish mornay, fruit cocktails and something called a ‘chocolate volcano’. For their honeymoon they drove up the coast on a ‘motoring holiday’ to the Gold Coast, stopping to fish along the way.
Dad had by now left university, graduating with second-class honours in 1955. He was appointed a junior resident to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown, where Mum also worked, as a cardiographer. As it happened, this would represent the apex of her career; she was subsumed soon after by full-time motherhood.
Working together was handy. Dad and Mum saw each other often for quick lunches, sneaky meet-ups in the hallways and tearooms. One lunchtime, when Dad wasn’t free, Mum decided to sunbake in one of the hospital’s inner courtyards. Dad was on the top floor, working, when he happened to poke his head out the window and see her below. He got a surgical glove, filled it with water and dropped it out the window, aiming for Mum, who was lying face-up. It was hurtling towards her, gaining speed, when suddenly Dad realised it might kill her. ‘Rosie!’ he screamed at the last moment. She moved. The balloon exploded right next to her head.
In 1958 they had Rob. Dad was beside himself, but Mum felt nothing. She had looked forward to being a mother: she had assumed she would be good at it, that the pieces would fall into place. But when Rob came along – pug-faced, slimy-haired, sallow – she regarded him as a foreign object, a mildly unwelcome surprise guest. She lay in the maternity ward, surrounded by radiant mums and gurgling newborns, feeling like an impostor. Then, one afternoon, the doctor came in, grim-faced: Rob was severely jaundiced and required a full blood transfusion. At these words, something inside Mum awoke, her maternal instinct roaring into life. Please, please, don’t let him die: anything but that.
*
Mum and Dad lived on the ground floor of a duplex, right on the water, in Darling Point. Mum painted a mural on the kitchen wall (which was later torn down). It was a tiny place, quiet and isolated, with broad glass doors leading onto a strip of grass, beautiful during the day, spooky at night. An old man lived above them. Dad was then coaching Sydney University’s rugby team. If he wasn’t working night shift at the hospital, he’d be out until ten pm at training, leaving Mum alone with the baby, waiting up, staring into the dark beyond the windows. The old man from upstairs would appear suddenly, ghosting by on the grass outside and she would jump out of her skin. She mentioned to Dad that she was afraid. I don’t think she expected him to change much, to come home earlier or stop doing what he was doing, but what she did expect was understanding, maybe some support or, at the very least, sympathy. But Dad was indifferent. What was he to do? He had obligations. The hospital, football. Mum was incensed, and they argued. Indeed, they argued so badly that Mum moved out, returning to her parents’ place in Vaucluse. Dad got the shock of his life and went running after her, convincing her to return. He could be very convincing when he wanted.
By now they had another child, Georgina – named after Dad’s father, George – shortly after which Dad was seconded, as a research assistant, to the Royal Brompton Hospital’s Institute of Diseases of the Chest, in London. They took a passenger ship, the SS Australis, in 1961, travelling steerage in a damp, airless cabin below the waterline, with a shared bathroom at the end of the corridor. Mum spent most of the trip in the bathroom, scrubbing shit from Rob and Gina’s cloth nappies, rinsing them in the sink, then wringing them out and hanging them to dry in the cabin. Dad, meanwhile, spent most of the time above deck, jogging endlessly around the boat, chatting to fellow passengers and playing quoits. Soon he had met a single woman with whom he flirted outrageously at meal times, infuriating Mum. Occasionally he’d pop down to the cabin, ‘just to check in, to see if you need anything, darling’.
The purser took a shine to Mum: he felt sorry for her. There is a photo of her in the cabin with Rob and Gina, above them a string of nappies like soggy prayer flags. You might assume Dad had taken the shot, but it was actually the purser.
Towards the end of the trip, Mum was going through Dad’s washing when she found a passport photo of the woman in the pocket of his pants. On the back it had a phone number and an address. She tore it into pieces and put it in the bin.
*
They had the time of their lives in England. They were young, in love, making new friends, seeing new things. Dad worked for the first ten months in Midhurst, at the King Edward VII Sanatorium, a grand heritage-listed building that looks like something out of Brideshead Revisited. There were learned specialists, pipe-smoking old dons and lots of interesting cases. One day the corpse of a young man arrived. He had just been in a car accident in the hedgerows, yet there wasn’t a mark on him. It was a mystery. The doctors prodded, poked, swapped theories. It turned out he’d been driving so fast that when he was forced to stop he jerked forward very suddenly, and his windpipe had been severed by the seatbelt.
After Midhurst they moved to London, where the people at Brompton Hospital had found them a flat. It was small place in Neville Street, six storeys up. At night, the pipes
froze; occasionally they burst, leaving them without water. The furniture was hospital cast-offs. Mum and Dad slept on two single cots that Dad strapped together for a double bed. Dad was happy: he played squash a lot and dabbled in rugby (the opposition told him to ‘go easy, old boy’, that he was playing too rough). Mum and he went to pubs; Dad had started drinking by now, something he blamed on Mum and her parents, who enjoyed a scotch and dry. Mum took care of the kids; for spare cash she painted tapestry canvases.
After a time they employed a German au pair called Garda and, later, a young Australian girl called Pauline. Pauline had big brown eyes and short dark hair. She loved food, and cold beer, and she read novels as if they were about to be banned. Mum liked her immediately.
Dad did his PhD in London. It took two-and-a-half years. The word monumental comes to mind – as in, an act of monumental scholarship. I see Dad sunk in long nights of silent labour on the lungs and their susceptibility to disease. He sliced up the raw organs, freshly harvested and glistening with mucus, injected them with suspensions of barium-gelatine, and studied them like a monk, poring, probing, paring apart. Mum would prepare dinner, as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb him. She would deliver cups of tea and keep the kids out of the way. Later, at night, Dad would sit on their living room floor – the only place big enough for his books and notes – and write and read, his face a mask, lost in the minutiae, a universe of friendless detail out of which he composed his thesis, six hundred and forty pages, a dense and prickly poetry of distal vessels, hilum and pleura, alveolar ducts, bronchial trees and axial arteries. I tried to read it once, just an abridged version, but it meant nothing to me. Nothing except that Dad knew things I didn’t know and couldn’t know; that he had a mystical power: the power to save lives.
Farewell to the Father Page 3