You Never Met My Father (8 page)

Pat did her best to fortify her brood against the starker realities of our predicament. I was still too young to understand the burden she faced bringing us up alone, the loneliness she must have felt. She was in her early thirties, a woman in the prime of her life, whose husband at the very least must have been a disappointment. But if she had regrets or resentments she never revealed them to us. Looking back there seems to be moments when I was concerned about her emotional state. But how can I be certain these are genuine childhood responses rather than something I later hoped I had once felt, when I was old enough to appreciate what she had endured? Besides, if I had such moments they were fleeting and private, shared with nobody, neither sisters nor mother.

One of my memories of Pat at
Kirkwall
is of her dressed in a floral frock with a hem to the shins, wearing glasses on account of her poor eyesight, with white-frames to match her white handbag, her hair moderately short and permed, her cheeks powdered, her lips glistening pink or red. It was how she was whenever we went to town: to Apsley, the closest little community, or Naracoorte, just over the border into South Australia for any serious shopping. I never gave her appearance a second thought, suffering the impairment of familiarity, but she must have been attractive. If she turned heads or received lecherous remarks I was unaware of them. Sexuality was not yet part of my consciousness, despite my intimacy with the girl-next-door in Brisbane. Pat was a mother without a personality, except for maternal traits and, since she laughed at some of the things I did or said, an unsettling sense of humour. I feared there was callousness in her laughter, but I might have been mistaken, oversensitive as I was about my childish foibles, half the time unable to recognise affection. Much to my surprise she was also capable of fear. I saw it once.

She had permission to drive the farm ute whenever she went to town. On her return one day she saw something crossing the track to the homestead. “A bloody snake!” she cried, more in fear than hatred.

She deliberately tried to run over it. I was in the cabin with her and she asked me if she'd got it, by which she meant killed it. I looked through the rear window and told her I thought it was still wriggling. Her trembling hand struggled to find reverse.

She drove over it again, backwards and forwards, a dozen times or more, unconvinced by my eventual declaration of its demise. Finally, with the blood drained from her face, she stopped and parked as close to our quarters as possible.

She shepherded me indoors.

Still shaking when the manager dropped by sometime later, she asked if he had noticed any dead snake on the track. Judiciously he inquired about its length. She guessed about three foot. He shook his head. The one he had seen was at least that wide and nine foot long.

She laughed at his joke, recalled it now and then throughout her life, revealing an ability to be amused by her own dreads and fears.

I loved her incontrovertibly. She took care of us without complaint. If I was unaware of the emotional strain of her predicament, precociously I began to realise that she had twice the work of most mothers. I tried to help her, doing whatever odd jobs I could: fetching kindling for the stove, polishing shoes, sweeping the back porch, feeding scraps to the chooks, dusting the big empty rooms of the mansion. I even volunteered to milk the cow, something she had learnt herself as a child. And after she taught me I took on that responsibility too, with gusto, seduced by pungent bovine smells, the warmth of Daisy's yielding flank against my forehead as I reached for her rubbery teats, the harsh squirts against the metal pail. I would have liked to look after the sheep in the paddock adjacent to the mansion. Their smell, too, and their bleating, their silly woolly coats, far too thick for the climate, and little legs that made them run oddly appealed to me. But so far I was put in charge of only one, an orphan, and even that was not mine alone, merely a joint responsibility with my sisters, which we fed from a bottle, amazed at its appetite and wildly wiggling tail. I thought I could play a part when a farmhand moved them from one paddock to another, but I soon learned I could never compete with the clever farm dogs that already had that job.

Eventually the summer holidays came to an end. Jean and I were enrolled in the primary school in Apsley, but on the first school day we were cut off from the town by a grass fire that swept across the southern half of
Kirkwall
. Smoke rode on the sharp, unpredictable winds, leaving Pat fearful. She had lived through the '39 Black Friday Bushfire in Gippsland, in which scores of people lost their lives and the sun had been completely blocked out by menacing clouds of smoke. The manager and the farmhands were in the paddocks shifting sheep to safety, while volunteer firemen fought the blaze from trucks with huge square tanks, which intermittently pulled up at the homestead dam. While they refilled, the sense of crisis was palpable even to us children, who watched the sweating blackened men accept cordial and fruit cake from Pat, too preoccupied to indulge their usual rural courtesy. Jean told me and Carol these men were heroes, just like soldiers who went to war. And while Carol wanted to know what a ‘hero' was, I marched stiffly around the yard, saluting, imitating the Anzacs of Gallipoli.

The drama ended overnight and we went off to school the following day. As we rode in the front of the ute with Pat, I saw an eagle standing next to the roadside fence on ground charred and denuded by fire, its head reaching the height of the top strand of barbed wire as it watched us pass. I cried out in awe but neither Pat nor Jean saw it. When I looked back it had gone. I thought it must have taken flight but the sky was empty. Jean suggested I had a vivid imagination. Had I imagined it? If so, it had the same substance as any other bird. I looked for it, slyly, privately, every day I went to school while I lived at
Kirkwall
, but never saw it again.

Flight. Again flight.

“To be real,” Jean instructed, employing her superior learning, “you need at least one witness.”

I devoted myself to my education, eager to learn about my country and the world I lived in. Each Monday morning we assembled outside our classroom, saluted the flag while it unravelled, sang
God Save the
Queen
, and repeated with sincerity the oath of loyalty—
I love God
and my country, I honour the flag, I serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey
my parents, teachers and the law
—a ceremony that established the appropriate degree of subservience for the rest of the school week, even if it begged the question about how to obey an absentee father.

I coveted my pencils, ruler, set square, compass and especially my plastic template of Australia with which I made copious maps, soon filling an entire exercise book. I enjoyed drilling the multiplication tables, chanting them with the other students like a tribal ritual, quickly memorising up to the twelve-times table. I liked to take my turn to read aloud in class. For Show-And-Tell I tried my best to impress. One morning I presented the skull our gardener had given Jean, not yet appreciating the grief such an act might cause the indigenous people of the district, if there were any left.

Jean was in Grade 4 while I was in Grade 2. My arithmetic was good enough to figure that by the time I made it to Grade 4 she would have reached Grade 6. I accepted stoically that she was always going to be brainier than me. Already she was three letters of the alphabet through a junior encyclopaedia. So I didn't dare challenge her assertions. Nor in matters of dispute between us could I match her negotiating skills. We argued over who would have the crust at the end of a loaf of bread to eat. We fought about it until she came up with a solution: she would have all of them for the next four years; after that, I could have them for as long as I liked, for the rest of my life if I wanted. She persuaded me I was getting the better deal and so I agreed, much to my regret next time we started a loaf of bread. I skulked around the yard and climbed a tree to brood. I resolved to be extra alert whenever I made a deal with her.

When the shearing started at
Kirkwall
Pat had to prepare morning teas and lunches and deliver these to the shearing shed, which was a mile from the homestead. She was busy keeping up with her routine, getting us up in the morning and ready for school, on top of which Angus Campbell, a majestic, snowy-haired, ruddy-faced creature in a yeoman's cap, moleskins and tweeds, arrived to oversee the shearing, expecting her to cook for him as well. He ordered French omelettes and declared he had tasted none better than hers, not even in Paris, in a land so far away it was breathtaking to think he had been there. We children were sent to raid the chookhouse to satisfy his appetite. And we had to keep our quarters tidy, get ready for school without our mother's assistance, prepare our own school lunches, and check to see that Carol had dressed herself properly, doing chores normally done by Pat.

On top of that I was assigned an onerous duty: fetching golf balls that Campbell slogged from one end of the home paddock to the other, a little while after his breakfast. I was sent to the far end with a bucket, while he stood at the edge of the homestead garden in strange pants, gloves and cap, relaxing the muscles in his bum with a wiggle, as he glanced in my direction. Then he swung the stick he was holding in a great arc and a little white ball soon whistled overhead. The war had started.
In-coming fire!
I had to remain vigilant. As I picked up one ball to put in the bucket, another landed nearby. I realised my duty was not only to collect his golf balls but to be his pin as well.

Towards the end of the shearing season Pat took me to the shearing shed, a shimmering corrugated iron building with adjacent pens packed with sheep. Inside was a cacophony of bleats, shouts, curses and machines, a melee of men in navy-blue singlets, flailing clippers attached to long levers, dragging terrified sheep, scooping up fleeces, casting wool across tables; the stench of lanolin, men's sweat and diesel in my smarting nostrils. My heart raced. No schoolyard activity compared to this frenetic scene. Pat took the occasion to reveal that one of her father's occupations, beside dairy farmer, carter and nightsoil-man, had been shearer. My grandfather, whom I called Da, but was yet to meet, gained some substance, grew in stature.

Once the shearing was over, Pat, and so the rest of us, returned to our normal routines. I had made a few tentative friends amongst my classmates but outside school hours I rarely set eyes on them. I played on my own or with my sisters around the homestead. I observed Carol as she dressed the motionless old greyhound in doll's clothes and improvised a fence around him with garden stakes. I encouraged a game she initiated of head-butting the orphaned lamb, Woollyofus, which was sprouting horns, until Pat discovered in horror what was happening and warned us with a sobering tale about how one of her brothers had once witnessed a bull confront a ram. While the bigger beast was stamping and snorting and tossing its head around, the ram had taken the initiative and charged. With a sickening crack it laid the bull out cold. I had seen a bull on a farm near Portland and had been totally intimidated by its massive stature. I stared at Woollyofus with a surge of respect. Pat gave me the authority to be in charge of Carol whenever she was near him.

Carol was a cute kid. Next to my absent father she had the brightest blue eyes I'd ever seen and little ringlets in her hair, which Pat made with a wet comb and her fingers every morning. She seemed a bit dopey but that was probably because she was younger. I loved her smile, the way it gave her dimples, the way her eyes lit up. I started to feel very protective of her.

Pat was aware of our isolation and whenever she had time to spare she did her best to amuse us. Now and then she put us in the back of the ute, armed us with a straw broom and drove out to one of the back paddocks where a large male emu roamed. Whenever a vehicle entered its territory it charged over and attacked. It would run at twenty miles an hour right alongside the ute and try to peck at us, which brought the straw broom into play.

On some weekends, usually a Sunday afternoon, we were invited to the manager's house for a lunch of roast lamb, slaughtered on the farm a couple of days earlier.

I liked these afternoons because the manager and his wife always made an effort to entertain us with games and tricks. The one that impressed me the most was a sixpence spun on a needle. Before starting, the manager laid bets on his ability to do it. I boldly wagered a pound, a sum I had never possessed, sure that he would fail. The manager chuckled as he commenced an elaborate procedure, which involved two forks, a cork, a bottle, as well as the coin and the pin. In the end the coin, held in a slit of one half of the cork with the forks as a counterweight like a tightrope walker's pole, spun on the tip of the pin, which poked through the other half, plugged in the neck of the bottle. The coin and the forks spun for a long time after the initial twirl, like a helicopter rotor. Graciously he released me from my impossible wager. And I realised at an early age, even when you were sure to win, you were likely to lose.

My delight in such days was only tempered by the roast lamb. I had never seen any animal slaughtered for meat, but I had been to the shed where it happened, seen a flayed carcass hanging from a meat hook, its bloody head still attached but the greasy fleece discarded in a corner. The gruesome scene, with its menacing chorus of blowflies outside the fly wire, horrified me. Had I known then that you could survive without eating the flesh of slaughtered animals I would have exited a vegetarian. But my mother's obsession with feeding us meat twice a day, her insistence that it was necessary, convinced me that humans were condemned to a carnivorous life. I saw this as the dark side of our nature, a side that debased an otherwise noble creature.

I must have been an odd child in some ways. I felt fatherless, and the feeling left me shy and absent-minded, as if Denny's absence denied me confidence and kept me in a state of nervous expectancy. I didn't think I was the same as other kids. I knew I wasn't when I arrived at school forgetfully wearing my slippers or without the lunch my mother had made.