You Never Met My Father (19 page)

The following day he was taken by ambulance to his mysterious hospital in Melbourne.

His records show that on the 15th of September, 1963, he was admitted to the Portland Hospital after an overdose of barbiturates and was treated with a gastric lavage and recovered consciousness within eight hours. He was discharged the following morning, but readmitted a few hours later after another overdose. I knew nothing of this. He must have arrived home while I was at school. He was treated again and transferred to the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital.

His Portland GP, Dr Beavis, revealed the circumstances in a letter accompanying Denny to the hospital:

Thank you for taking this man. Yesterday he is said to have poisoned his pet dog with Amytal 100mg tabs, then arrived up here (of his own free will) & gradually lost consciousness. He must have taken 15-20 of the amytal tabs.

He was washed out and recovered in about 8 hours. Th is morning he lashed out at the matron, who admits however that she may have provoked him.

This morning we were going to give him some traction for the lumbo vascal disc lesion (genuine enough) but unfortunately cancelled it, as I wascalled to the labour ward, and this made the patient more unmanageable. He went home in a taxi and immediately consumed a fair no. of Sparine tabs (100mg). He was brought here about 1 hr after & and I washed him out again…During this he struggled violently.

At the moment he is semi-conscious…

He has a wonderful wife who is very faithful & apparently some very good kids.

This final comment seems rather gratuitous, given the letter was directed to medical staff in Melbourne. Perhaps it was a wistful appeal, a wish and a prayer for the experts to do something, on the strength of a foreboding. If so, Dr Beavis was rather prescient. He was to feel the wrath of Denny soon enough.

The medical superintendent at Heidelberg wanted to place my father at the Repatriation Department's Bundoora Mental Hospital, which housed those ex-servicemen classified insane:
We feel
[Sparkes]
now requires longer term hospitalisation for his own protection
.

He was certified to Bundoora.

Before being transferred, he absconded.

We again got on with our lives without Denny.

Pat continued her job at Borthwicks, where she packed cuts of meat for export on a cold production line. In the evening we still strung labels, although with my father gone the financial imperative had eased somewhat. On Sunday nights in the lounge room, Pat tuned into a radio program featuring old-time dance music and tried to teach me the Waltz, the Pride of Erin and the Fox Trot.

“It's one, two, three, kick, back, two, three,” she'd say. “Again. Yeah, you've almost got it. Don't give up yet.”

She enjoyed our sessions together. It reminded her of a time when she was young and her father used to take her to Saturday night dances in small public halls around Gippsland.

“He was an MC, a good MC, too. People loved him. He was the band leader as well. He used to play his button accordion. You should've heard him. All them old time tunes. Your Auntie Barb and I used to dance along with all these old blokes, even though we were just girls.”

I tried to imagine her at dances—then and later when Denny was courting her—but it was easier to imagine her walking on the moon. Her life, for as long as I had witnessed it, was unfairly devoid of leisure. Now and then she got the chance to listen to the football or a cricket match on the radio, or she came to watch me play sport. But most of her time was taken up with work and looking after us. Taking on the task of teaching me to dance must have been a bittersweet experience, reminding her of a life she had once led that had passed her by and was now beyond her reach. These days she had only a gauche son to partner her.

It was an occasion when I was aware of her as a person or, more to the point, having once been a person rather than a drudge and mother. Her youthful beauty had faded. The heavy physical work she did, the long hours she worked and all her worries had seen to that. She was well over thirty. The makeup she wore now seemed to be hiding, rather than highlighting, her features.

There was pathos in her attempts to teach me how to dance, of which I was aware but never quite understood at the time, just as when I heard her singing to herself once in a while, pathos that alluded to loss and abandonment.

These dance lessons, alas, turned out to be a waste of time. Despite her best efforts she couldn't overcome what she called my two left feet.

“You better stick to footy,” she said with a chuckle. “You'll be a champion at that one day.”

“Do you think so?” I replied hopefully.

“Sure do! Then nobody'll give two hoots whether you can do the Charlston or a tango or the flippin' ballet. Footy's the thing.”

For my twelfth birthday I received my first bicycle, which my mother had bought secretly on lay-by from the bicycle repair shop. She knew I had wanted one since learning to ride on my cousin's bike in South Portland. But how she had managed to afford it I had no idea.

“It's second-hand,” she apologised.

“It's great!” I said to let her know it didn't bother me at all. I knew we couldn't afford a new one. “Th at doesn't matter. It looks brand new.”

She grinned. “Good boy,” she said, gratefully, giving my head a pat. I was beginning to understand what a good person she was. With all the drama in her life the easiest thing in the world for her would have been to give up on decency, to neglect her kids, to hit the bottle, to smoke, to indulge in some way or other for any cheap gratification on offer. But she never abandoned the duty of looking after her children. She remained true to what she considered right and wrong. Whereas right and wrong rarely appeared on my father's radar, and when it did he took little notice of it.

The bike had a blue paint job, straight handlebars, hand brakes front and rear, and a free wheel. I spent weeks riding it all over town, down to the port, along the breakwaters, round and round the hard tennis courts next door, where I tested its turning circle until the tyres lost traction and I spilled onto the asphalt. But it was the country lanes I loved the most. Along these I felt like a bird. I pedalled with a fury until my lungs screamed. Freedom! I thought I'd burst with it! That bike was the best present I ever received.

My father reappeared shortly after and I was afraid my new gift would soon disappear. I kept it chained up at home, hoping to discourage him. And to his credit he never attempted to hock it. Perhaps my mother warned him it would be the last straw for their marriage if he did.

Regrettably, I finished primary school, where I was beginning to feel I belonged. Throughout the summer break I played alone. Against the sandstone wall of the church hall I hit a tennis ball, honing my skills. I climbed around the cypress hedges. I rode my bike a lot.

Around this time at last something positive happened to my mother. She befriended one of her fellow meat packers, Connie Yallock, who lived half a mile from us and owned a television. We started to visit a few times a week—Pat for the companionship, my sisters and I to watch TV. She, too, tied strings to labels to supplement her income. So we sat around watching shows like
Pick-a-Box
and
Bonanza
with cartons of labels at our feet. Connie was the first friend I ever knew my mother to have. Judging by their perms and rinses they were a similar age. She had four kids but no real husband. The man she had married, the father of her children, lived in another town with another woman. She endured the shame of it with dignity. There was always a gracious aura about her. She was very fond of Pat and was kind to me and my sisters. She never spoke a bad word about anyone, least of all her husband, who turned up now and then to claim his conjugal rights. I became friends with one of her sons, Gary, who was my age, being drawn together by the shameful burden of maverick fathers. He taught me how to shoot an air rifle, aiming at cans on top of fence posts and the occasional sparrow that strayed into range. In return I showed him my hideouts in the hedge around the tennis court.

Connie enjoyed a beer and was addicted to cigarettes, but both were private concerns rather than the focus of her social life. She impressed me with her quiet manner and her considered responses to questions regardless of how trivial they were. Perhaps I was too young to judge but she became my idea of a wise person. I was even more impressed when she treated my father with respect for no other reason than he was the husband of a friend, unlike my relatives in South Portland who used to criticise him mercilessly whenever the chance arose and pitied my mother for having married him.

To repay her kindness Denny did various favours, which included a regular supply of sleeping pills and other medications for colds and sprains and lumbago, which he acquired, gratis, on prescription. He did repairs around her house. Occasionally he ran errands. And once he gave her several cartons of the cigarettes, saying they had fallen off the back of a truck.

For a while we settled into a routine of visiting Connie three times a week. My father enjoyed these sessions as much as Pat did. It was a time when our lives were free of histrionics. Connie seemed to have a calming effect on Denny. He was always on his best behaviour. There was an aura of tranquillity about him. I began to think the storms had passed for good.

Then in January 1964, four months after his first attempt and just before I started high school, he took another overdose of pills.

It didn't kill him. He woke up in the late morning and staggered around town in his pyjamas. I remember my mother telling me he had been picked up by the police, sleepwalking, but whether it was this occasion or some other I can't be sure. I had assumed sleepwalking occurred in the middle of the night. Police accosted him at the football ground, which was a block from our house. He struggled with them. Dr Beavis was called to the scene, and while he attempted to calm his patient, perhaps with a tranquilizer, Denny punched him in the face. He dismantled a seat and threatened the police with an iron bar from its frame. More police were called. Eventually he was overwhelmed, put in a straightjacket again, and taken on a three-hour journey by ambulance to the Ballarat Psychiatric Hospital, whose admission sheet puts his diagnosis rather blandly as ‘an anti-social reaction'. It also states:
He went
berserk being brought into hospital.
The ambulance driver told staff that the police had found him wandering around the football ground drinking methylated spirits.

During the first day there he refused to communicate. Pat must have gone to see him shortly after, because the record states he accepted tea from her the following day when he was still groggy. He had bruising on his face and body, and pains in his chest, attributed to his struggle with the police. His corneal ulcer was bothering him. When he began to speak he said he had no memory of the drama on the previous day but denied ever drinking methylated spirits. Pat supported his claim, saying that he never drank any form of alcohol, that he had an aversion to it. He told the medical officer that he had been a ‘bludger' since his accident at work. He kept hearing voices from outside his head ‘above to the left' telling him he was no good. The doctors who treated him over the next couple of weeks made several references to the voices he could hear that told him he was worthless.

One medical officer commented that Denny was depressed because he was in a position where he had to do housework while his wife went out to work.
[He]
resents this very much but cannot do
anything about it because of chronic back disability
. The doctor noted that more than anything the patient wanted to work but two things conspired against him: his back injury and his police record. He didn't see any point in continuing to live. A week after admission a doctor noted that he seemed more settled mentally but required a few more days of further observation. The diagnosis shifted from ‘paranoid schizophrenic' to ‘more sociopathic than schizophrenic'.

Pat was interviewed. She was
‘
concerned and defensive about her husband—she loves him'. She admitted that Denny had a ‘bad temper, but he is alright if no one interferes. He gets over it'. She didn't understand why the police had ‘stirred him up'. She insisted that Denny didn't drink but had taken too many sleeping tablets because his inability to work ‘was getting him down'.

Throughout his hospitalisation my father denied any knowledge of the events that had led to his admission. At one point he stated that he was upset to learn he had hit Dr Beavis, although the medical officer noted that he didn't seem terribly disturbed about it, and cited the absence of empathy as evidence of sociopathic tendencies.

The final note to appear on his diagnostic sheet suggested Denny had had a ‘dissociative aggressive outburst' and recommended he stop using sleeping tablets and receive early treatment on his back.

The notes of the nursing staff for the same period offer further insight into his state of mind. The day after he was admitted he was fairly sociable and co-operative. The next day he was again co-operative and grateful for all that was being done for him. He was very sore and stiff and ate little food. Over the next week he attended art classes, spent most of his days in the recreation room, was rational, cheerful and willing to help with ward work. He sometimes helped with the washing up at meal times, and at one stage he cleaned the windows of the recreation room. But once when he was having trouble breathing and demanded to see a doctor, he became abusive when he was told he might have to wait. The day after Pat visited him for a second time, a week after his admission, the nurse noted, ‘patient appears to be much improved'. He was discharged the following day.

Within a month he seems to have gone back to the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. The medical reports written during February 1964 strike me as being rather hostile towards him. The Senior Specialist, Psychiatry, wrote on the 13th:
He is shallow, very immature, impulsive, hysteroid, aggressive and an inadequate psychopath.
But I have checked on the internet and it appears these are all part of the psychiatric lexicon. An ‘inadequate psychopath' isn't someone who never reaches their full personality-disorder potential but someone who is psychopathic about their inadequacies. The suggestion is that they are distinct from the aggressive psychopath, more passive. But it appears that my father qualified as both.