You Never Met My Father (18 page)

While we never went without a meal, or a present for that matter, it came at a personal cost. Pat had to hide the wages she earned and face abuse from Denny. Sometimes when she refused to hand money over he crossed the line from verbal threats to physical abuse, leaving her bruised and cringing.

She would plead with him to stop, as if gentle words might bring him to his senses.

“I can't Denny, I've got to feed the kids,” she'd say, nursing a swollen jaw. “If I had any spare I'd give it to you.”

It was usually enough to deter him.

As far as I know his own monetary contributions were meagre and sporadic, often given one day and retrieved the next. Even our presents were fair game to him.

One Christmas to my delight I received a wristwatch. It had luminous hands and a tiny window that displayed the date, which changed automatically each day. It changed seven times before disappearing from the dressing table where I left it each night before I went to bed.

Fearing burglars had stolen it I informed my mother.

“Denny's taken it, love, to hock.” She sighed and gave one of my arms a consolatory squeeze. “Jean's too.”

“What's ‘hock'?”

Again she sighed. She puckered her lips. Her embarrassment was acute. “It's a way of borrowing money, from what they call a pawnbroker. Ever heard of them?”

I nodded.

“You swap something of yours for a loan,” she went on. “If you don't pay it back with interest, this pawnbroker fellow sells your stuff.”

It sounded desperate and shameful.

“Please, love, don't bother him about it,” she pleaded. “If he doesn't get it back, I'll buy you another one as soon as I can.”

An opportunity arose to earn a little extra. Pat heard that Borthwicks hired people to tie strings to labels, for which they would be paid piece rates. The exact amount eludes me but I remember it being a pittance, perhaps a shilling for every hundred. Nevertheless, Pat began to bring home boxes and in the evening the entire family sat in the lounge room under a stark light bulb, threading strings through the eyelets on the labels while listening to the radio. Even Denny participated, yielding to the logic of the cash flow.

Perhaps the experience depressed him. Or it was the current affairs programs on the radio that used to make him mutter and curse, from which I gathered he blamed the government for all his woes. Each night he took medication to help him sleep. Yet in the morning he looked gaunt and tired, as if he had spent the night awake. Throughout the day he scowled and muttered away at no one in particular and the world in general.

His mood was always better when he was working. But work on the wharves was intermittent. When he tried other jobs, they never lasted more than a few days. And even in work he had no luck.

One job was on a construction site in the port. SAFCOL was building a fish factory near an obsolete breakwater, which had been converted into a dock for the trawling fleet. When he told us about this job it struck us all as a great opportunity. He was back in his old trade as a builder. We held our breath, hoping he would last. But he was only there a few days when he blacked out and fell ten feet from a scaffold to the ground. Miraculously, he landed upright.

I learned later that the impact crushed a couple of discs in his lower spine. His ability to work had always depended on his physical well-being. He had been a carpenter, a soldier, a labourer, a wharfie, where brawn was required. He wasn't vain, but he was proud of his strength. It was the one genuine thing about him. He must have been devastated. The accident meant an end to his working life. He wasn't yet forty.

I don't remember it happening.

It dismays me now to think I have forgotten. What had I become by the age of eleven that I would pay such little heed to his catastrophe? Was I starting to live in a kind of denial?

In recent years, when I had access to his files, I discovered more.

His local doctor wrote that Denny had ‘aggravated a probably already existing lumbosacral disc degeneration'.

He developed severe headaches and saw black spots in front of his eyes and again had feelings of unreality. Curiously he kept working for about a week but then had an argument with his boss and quit. Eventually he received some compensation through the courts but most if not all of it went to pay off his debts. Denny later told me the ‘blood-sucking' lawyer took most of it.

Six weeks after his accident he was back at the Repatriation Hospital in Heidelberg, with ‘terrific headaches', apparently from his medication, and complaining about being ‘allergic' to noise, to his boss and to work. He repeatedly asked the medical officer questions like:
Why can't I stand work? Why do I dislike people? Why do I get feelings of unreality? Why do I drop my fork at the table?

He was back there a month later, on the 19th of February, 1963, and his medical officer noted that Denny was very pleased with himself, was working whenever he could find a job, and was off all medication. He told the medical officer that Pat was delighted with him, and he was no longer allergic to noise. But he felt drowsy all day.

In early March he reported that he'd had a few drinks and once more caused problems at home and told his boss ‘what to do with his job'. Two weeks later he was in the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital for an extended period. He told his medical officer on the 14th of March that Pat had kicked him out and called him useless, ‘with which he in part agreed'. (Did he go to the hospital because he had nowhere else to stay?) He added that his wife and children detested him.
“
I'm no use to them and they're right. I haven't been for years.” He also revealed that he wasn't having sex with Pat. Once he had admitted their sexual relations had deteriorated, he must have feared his sexuality might be questioned, because he ‘spontaneously stated he was not a homosexual, never played with little boys, [but had] “seen it” in the army'.

During his stay he undertook occupational therapy. His clinical report states that on initial contact he appeared depressed and sullen
,
and wasn't relating with staff or patients, but within a week he had become co-operative and over-anxious to please. He participated in all the department's activities. Three weeks after he first attended the sessions he was still co-operative and helpful. He liked to offer others advice. His therapist remarked he had ‘a marked influence on other patients'. But by early the following month his attitude was beginning to change. He was affecting the group dynamics, becoming intolerant towards the other patients and irritable when he was unable to enact his own plans for the day.

By the 23rd of May there is a note from his medical officer:
I am afraid he is an itinerant psychopath, manifesting his oral needs in an aggressive & immature fashion. He is rapidly reaching a stage where he seems to have a grudge on society—refuses assistance in a practical way & looks for the easy way out.

What is meant by ‘itinerant psychopath' and ‘oral needs'? I am unsure. But the hostile tone is unmistakable. On the same day, Denny signed a release form stating he was being discharged at his own request against medical advice.

Bizarrely, amongst the documents for this period of hospitalisation there appears an employment reference from a building contractor from Warrandyte, a town on the outskirts of Melbourne, claiming to have known my father for three years. He said he had employed him for approximately six months on a large building project, and added:
[Denny] was a very good worker and willing to do anything he was asked, cheerfully. His habits were very good and if he did any drinking it was during the weekend in moderation.

There is no explanation for its appearance in his medical records, and I can only guess that Denny presented it as evidence of his sobriety and work ethic, which throughout his relationship with the Repatriation Department was under question from the professionals he dealt with. The authenticity of the reference I'm unable to establish. The signatory, Ian W. McKellar, and my father's relationship to him, remains a mystery to me. How had the building contractor known Denny for three years? When had he employed him? Was he really a building contractor? Yet the reference might be genuine. During the years we lived at Daisy's place, my father was away from home for lengthy periods without me knowing where he was. If my mother knew, she never enlightened me.

I discovered from his medical files that around this time attempts were made by the Repatriation Department to shift all of us to Melbourne. There was a job lined up for Denny in the suburb of Burwood. Was it with McKellar? There was mention of buying a house in Croydon, which required a deposit of £400. But at the last minute Denny turned it all down.

It appears that the Department acknowledged that his back injury was partially due to his military service. This note was in his file by September:
I am pleased to advise that the Repatriation Board has decided that incapacity resulting from Disc Degeneration Lumbo-Sacral joint is due to your war service. This decision operates from 30/5/63.

There is no line of reasoning given for this decision, so I can only assume that it ran something like this: his blackouts were due to what happened to him in Japan, perhaps his fall down the flight of stairs or the hit on the head with a plank. He blacked out on the scaffold at SAFCOL where he was working and damaged his spine. So, what happened in Japan led to his spinal injury.

Denny must have thought the pension he had been hustling so long for was in the next mail.

One day, when he was out of hospital and at home, I was returning from school with the son of the Methodist minister at the church next to our place. My dog Sailor came out to greet me coming up the lane. My awkward companion went to pat her but grabbed her by the throat. She responded in kind, leaving teeth marks around his Adam's apple.

Denny insisted Sailor had to go before she killed someone. It took a day for him to hatch a plan. By Sunday morning she was no longer with us. He told me he had taken her to a farm overnight where she would be out of everyone's way.

I didn't believe him but said nothing. I was devastated. Sailor and I had become inseparable. She was my only real companion.

I hid in the hedge and wept. I should have gone to church, but as the tears ebbed I decided against it. Instead I walked down to the port and found a spot on the old breakwater, amongst the broken concrete blocks, to mope. I stayed there most of the day, crying over my dog. She had been a wonderful friend. And now I would never see her again. Eventually I got hungry and headed home.

When I arrived, there was nobody around. The house was quiet. Pat had scribbled a note and left it on the kitchen table. Denny had swallowed a lot of sleeping tablets and she had taken him up to the hospital. I was to help myself to lunch. There were cans of spaghetti and baked beans in the cupboard, and bread in the crock. She would be home before tea. I was not to worry. Everything would be all right.

I had no idea where my sisters were.

When my mother arrived home with my sisters it was obvious she had been crying. Her makeup, which she must have put on in a hurry, was messy. He lips were dry.

“Your dad'll be all right,” she said. “Where have you been? We were all worried sick.”

My sisters glared at me.

Within days a rumour reached me—from the vicar via Paul— that my father had killed Sailor. According to Paul, the Reverend Walters claimed that Denny had put sleeping tablets in the dog food as an experiment. He had buried her in the early hours of the morning and spun me a story so I wouldn't be too upset.

An experiment? For his own suicide attempt? And how did the vicar know all this? (Nowadays, more familiar with the workings of the adult mind, I imagine the vicar had merely made a rather cynical guess.)

I was reluctant to believe it. Instead, I took offence. I thought I detected a derogatory tone as Paul delivered his father's accusation. I felt betrayed by the vicar and his son. Later I interpreted the whole unfortunate affair as another blow to my friendship with Paul, who, anyway, was now in high school a year more than me and had established a new circle of friends. It signalled the end of my close association with his family, if not the rest of Christianity.

Before I heard the rumour, my mother wanted to take me to visit my father.

“Why?” I was nervous about seeing him after an overdose. I thought he was mad.

“I think he'd like to see you.”

He was in a padded cell in the small psychiatric ward, wearing a straight jacket, which looked like a heavy-duty shirt worn back to front. I was shocked to see him bound like that, his arms and hands concealed inside canvas sleeves, which were tied, left to right, around his waist. It seemed like an adaptation of some medieval punishment. He grinned at me and said something about how ridiculous and unnecessary his situation was.

Going home, my mother said. “He'll be all right in a day or two. They should just leave him alone, let him calm down. Fancy putting him in one of those things, as if he was a lunatic.”