Life As I Know It (3 page)

Andrew, who was in Grade 1, was also proving difficult that morning. He was annoyed with Mum.

‘You never do reading at school,' he said. ‘Everybody else's mum does. I'm not going.'

‘I promise I'll come and read today if you go to school,' my mother said.

‘No. Not going.'

‘I promise.'

‘No. I'm not going.'

‘Well, you can stay in your room until I get home.'

With time getting away from them, Bernadette, Patrick and Margie climbed into the Ford station wagon. Maree didn't go with them as she'd been able to convince Dad to let her go to the races with him. There was a local Ballarat meeting on that day, which Therese was preparing to ride at.

The plan was for my dad to do the school run, but he got stuck on the phone on an important call and signalled to my mum that she would have to take them. Mum drove off along Kennedys Road. At the same time, a local mum was taking her kids to school, and collided with Mum's car at the Gillies Street corner, crashing into the driver's door.

The car rolled onto its side. The kids, who had minor injuries, were able to scramble out of the car but Mum lay motionless, her body hanging out of the driver's seat window.

Petrol spilled out everywhere.‘Everyone run, it's gonna blow!' Patrick yelled.

‘Pat, you need to come. There's been an accident.' Kenny Williams, a local trainer, went to fetch Dad. Dad knew by his expression it was bad news.

When Dad left, Therese and Maree were still at Home with Andrew, Cathy, Stevie and me, and they waited, sitting on the couch, not knowing what was going on. He came back about ten minutes later with Bernadette, Patrick and Margie. He walked in and all he did was shake his head. And they knew, straight away, that our Mum had been killed.

Father John Keane, the priest who has been closest to our family for many years and a wonderful friend of Dad's, came over. He still describes the moment with total sadness and devastation.

‘It was a terrible scene,' he says, in his Irish accent.

I think about my mother a lot. I feel she is always with me. But when I think about that specific moment, when she was taken, which I do from time to time, I don't think so much about an accident I was too young to remember, or of a mother I didn't know for long. I think of my dad and my brothers and sisters. I try to imagine what Dad was feeling. I can't imagine what it must be like to have someone you had made a life with, your best friend, your everything, gone—just gone. Then having to tell your children. If I feel like I'm doing it tough, I think about that and wonder how he got through it, while always retaining his positive attitude and his faith in life. It gives me so much strength, and perspective.

While I am deeply, deeply saddened by what happened I don't have a sense of loss. I know instead the sadness. And I think it is that feeling that has helped me to empathise with others. I don't have an imagined sense of my mother's personality. But I know she is my mother. And I know what a mother is, and what motherly love is. I know mothers. I watch mothers. My sisters are beautiful mothers. My mother's love is an ever-present spiritual love. And I know fatherly love. My father's love is spiritual, too, but I have lived
my life with my dad, I know him, and so that love, as tough as he can be, is immediate and real.

The older kids say that Dad became more openly affectionate after the accident, especially with us younger ones. Perhaps he was being gentler, more tender, because we didn't have a mother. Perhaps he was responding to his own grief, which I realise, as I get older, must have been profound.

At the time, my immediate needs were physical. Thankfully I took the bottle without hesitation. A local Irish woman from the parish looked after me, and then Bernadette, who was eleven at the time, took it upon herself to feed me through the night. As I was growing up, Therese then became the motherly figure for me and us all. She just took up the role, taking over the duties, making sure we had dinner, making sure everything was done. She definitely had plenty of little helpers to order around but it amazes me how she coped with that role at such a young age—and without warning.

When I first started to realise what had happened I was about four. The kids were giving me a terrible time, pulling my hair, and making my life a bit of a misery as brothers and sisters do. I yearned for Mum, for her protection.

My dad tells me the story that one night I was lying in bed with him and I'd decided that Mum would be the solution to my problems. She would make things right.

‘Can we go and dig her up?' I asked. ‘Then the kids won't pull my hair anymore.'

Some days I think my whingeing and complaining about being picked on became too much for Dad. He used to say he would run away from home if I didn't stop. That really scared me. But the next time someone was teasing me I went to tell Dad.

‘I'm sick of this whingeing,' he said. ‘I'm running away from home.' And he got in his car and off he went.

I was devastated. Who was going to look after us? I stood on our front verandah calling out for my other parent, ‘Mum, come back. Please come back!'

When my dad came home I was very angry with him. After that, whenever I was sad, I used to go to the verandah and call for Mum. I'm not sure if anyone heard me. Eventually I realised she was never coming back. This must have been heart wrenching for Dad. But he never showed it.

His approach wasn't a stoic position. And I cannot remember a single moment of self-pity. It was total acceptance, a deep-seated optimism, and a belief that all would work out for the good. Father Keane says that Dad is ‘a man of almighty faith', and throughout my life Dad has given me no reason to doubt that.

When I was younger he would tell me every day how much he loved Mum, what a lovely lady she was. He wished he'd told her that every day. He was very affectionate with me and we used to have a little ritual where he would hold his thumb and his index finger about an inch apart and say, ‘Your daddy loves you this much.' I would always say back to him, ‘No he doesn't, he loves me thiiiiiis much!' and hold my arms as wide as they would go.

My dad's outlook has had a massive impact on us all. He always thinks things can be fixed, that he can fix them. But then he says, ‘If you can't fix something with baling twine, you can't fix it.' He usually made things worse but he did always use baling twine for a belt. It did the trick.

When Mum died he knew we just needed to get on with it, and live life as best we could. I think the depth of that feeling of sadness for my father, and for my sisters and brothers, has contributed to how I understand life. I feel close to life. I try to have a sense of what's important. And I believe that things happen for a reason, even if at the time that reason is not obvious.

M
Y DAD WAS
faced with the prospect of raising ten children on his own. The older ones were hard working and independent—they had to be—but Cathy was four, Stevie was two and had his own difficulties, and I was a baby. Dad's approach was remarkable.

He is the sunniest, most optimistic, fun-loving father you could imagine. He was always very tough on us, though, and he could get pretty angry—his voice would bellow through the house or across the yard. But he also loved to pull your leg, to tease you, and to test you. Despite the immense grief he must have been suffering, and the difficulty of being a single parent, he remained so positive, so confident, that we knew, if we got on with it, life would serve us well. Dad often says that despite the challenges, those years together at Home provided him with his most joyous memories.

I remember when I was really little, Dad used to piggyback us to bed.

‘Now, who's first?' he'd say, and he would put one of us on his back and gallop down the passageway to one of the bedrooms.

‘Who's next?' Eventually about five of us would be carried to bed in this way.

The older kids were simply amazing. Apart from riding and working in the stables, the girls got stuck into the housework. They took to the responsibilities without any apparent questioning or complaint because that's what needed to be done. It was the right thing to do, yet, they were so young themselves.

I used to give Therese a Mother's Day gift, usually some sort of ornament or something simple I thought she might like. Everyone else was buying their mothers Mother's Day gifts and she felt as close to being my mum as anyone did, so it just seemed normal to me at the time. Love and consideration for others produce resilience and a capacity for hard work. Perhaps the hard work was a way for everyone to deal with the grief. But when it came to the horses, even though it was relentless work, it was a field we all immediately took to.

We grew up with horses. We loved them foremost as animals, beautiful creatures with temperament and personality and character—sometimes easygoing, sometimes uptight, sometimes untalented, sometimes brilliant with so much promise. We learned to respect horses and to treat them with affection and compassion. That was Dad's way and it was our way. He'd loved horses since he was a little kid, and he passed that love on to us.

I can't remember life before horses. Horses were part of us, and being with them was as natural as breathing. I always wanted to ride.

‘Daaaad, when can I start riding?'

My older sisters were all riding. Brigid, Therese and Maree had begun their apprenticeships at fourteen and a half, the minimum age then. Therese was riding at Moonee Valley the day I was born. She had a nasty fall and broke her collarbone and the family joked that her fall had brought on my birth. I wanted to ride too. But Dad kept telling me I had to wait. I pestered and pestered.

‘Daaaad?'

When I was four, Dad put me on Wilbur, our very naughty black Shetland pony. I loved it—until I fell off. Dad had seen it all before.

‘You gotta get straight back on, Little Girl,' he said. ‘If you don't get back on now you'll never get back on.'

I had a headache from the fall and was a little bit hesitant because it hurt, but I got back on. From that day on, every time something went right I'd feel fantastic, but Dad would make sure I wasn't getting ahead of myself. And every time something went wrong, Dad was there to pick me up and help me and give me a word of advice.

I wanted to be a jockey. My mind was completely made up. And I didn't need to tell the others, they just knew. Part of my wanting to be a jockey was me wanting to be like the others—but I actually wanted to be better than them. Part of it was me wanting to be like Dad.

Wanting to be with horses wasn't just the vague idea of a young child, either. It wasn't that I
thought
I liked horses and riding and racing. I
knew
I did. I wanted to be with horses. I wanted to ride. And I knew I would eventually race.

Before I started school I was into it. After we'd eaten tea and had a game of cards in the evening, Dad would go to bed and he'd be lying there, about to fall asleep, and I'd go in and pick up his hand.

‘Dad, don't forget to wake me up in the morning,' I'd implore. ‘Please don't forget, Dad.' When I'd wake up and realise he'd already gone and the sun was coming up, I'd run to the stables to find him, half-crying: ‘Daaaad! Why didn't you wake me up? I told you to wake me up!'

If I was down at the stables I hoped Dad would put me on a horse and lead me round. Sometimes he would but often he was so busy that it would be a very quick ride, or no ride at all. Even if it was short, at least I was riding. I think I drove him mad and he
didn't wake me because it would have been easier for him if I was up at the house fast asleep.

The early hours never bothered me. Five o'clock in the morning, in the middle of a Ballarat winter, is not comfortable, but I didn't think about it. I wanted to be with the older kids, with the horses. Sometimes, though, they didn't want to be out there and they'd manufacture little tricks to get out of work.

Andrew used to sneak out with no boots on and run around the backyard in the frost, come back in and peel off his wet socks as if he'd been out there working hard. He'd say to the others still sleeping, ‘Wake up, don't be so lazy. Get up and do some work. I've been out working.' No one argued with him as his socks were wet. But when we were sitting around the table having breakfast, it didn't take long for everybody to work out that no one had sighted him at the stables and he was put back on the roster for cleaning the house.

Stevie and I were The Little Kids, and we were usually left to look after ourselves while the others were working in the mornings. We were like a single entity: ‘Where are The Little Kids?' ‘Anyone seen The Little Kids?' We'd get up and watch one of our favourite videos. Initially we had four:
Phar Lap
, a documentary about the champion horse Tulloch,
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
and
The Sound of Music
. Later came
The Wedding Singer, The Lion King
and
Dumb and Dumber
. I think we could act out all those movies we knew them so well. I'm not joking when I say that Stevie and I watched
Phar Lap
five hundred times, often at about 5.30 in the morning. The more I saw it, the more it fed my desire to be a jockey. I used to tell people, ‘I just want to win the Melbourne Cup.'