You Never Met My Father (9 page)

I was becoming sensitive about a lot of things. Other kids at school talked proudly about their dads, who were either farmers or worked in agricultural businesses. And they pestered me for details about mine. I never revealed he was probably in jail but repeated Pat's line about him being a salesman in Queensland. We had abandoned our habit of taking a false surname but I was still inclined to exaggerate or embellish a little, to protect myself and my sisters from the shame that would follow any true revelation. So they learned our father was making so much money it didn't make sense for him to be with us. When some clever dick wanted to know, if my father was so successful and rich, why we weren't with him and how come my mother was a housekeeper, I tried laughing it off to give the impression the question was ridiculous. Instead I sounded sneaky, which ruined my credibility and ended any desire to be close to my schoolmates. It bolstered the appeal of solitude.

Th ere was long white grass in the paddock next to the school where all the kids crawled and made secretive paths, which led from one fallen tree trunk to another, each a rampart or a hollow hiding place. In our games I played the rebel that nobody could find, without ever being certain anyone was looking.

A year had passed since I had last seen my father but it seemed a lifetime. Occasionally my mother talked fondly about him, with stories from a time before her marriage, stories that would appeal to a child's imagination.

“He used to swim around the Basin at the Gorge in Launceston,” she said on one occasion, when I was begging her to talk about him. “We were having a picnic there one day and he saw a duck in the water. He said he was going to catch it for dinner. So he got in and swam after it for two hours.”

I couldn't yet swim. “Two hours!”

“Yep, and guess what?”

“What, Mum, what?” I urged her to finish the story.

“The poor duck got so tired your father caught it.”

“But he didn't get tired?”

“Nope.”

“Did he kill it? Did you eat it?”

“No, love. He felt sorry for it and let it go.”

I was greatly impressed. I wanted more stories.

“We went roller skating one day,” she said on another occasion. “It had a split level rink, you know, with a top deck and a bottom deck and a ramp in between, joining them. The top deck had a rail to stop you falling, but your father crashed over it. I thought he'd killed himself.”

“He wasn't killed, was he?”

She laughed. “No, of course not, or you wouldn't be here, would you?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He landed on his feet and just kept skating.”

“Wow!”

“That's what I thought, love.”

In my mind my father had faded into a legend that bore little relation to the real world. He seemed like a wonderful man, good and strong and adventurous, just like a hero from the books my sister Jean liked reading to me.

Then one day he appeared without warning and was just as I remembered him, a handsome, broad-shouldered man with wavy hair parted neatly near the middle, an aquiline nose that was slightly oversized, and mocking blue eyes, standing in the doorway to my room. My heart nearly stopped. I wanted to rush up to him for a hug. But he made no gesture nor uttered a word to encourage me. Instead he handed me a large box, ruffled my hair with clumsy fingers and waited to see my delight as I opened it.

I don't know where my mother was.

Perhaps my obsession with the gift, a battery-operated toy car that I followed around my bedroom floor, denied me memories of him elsewhere in our quarters or anywhere on
Kirkwall
. But perhaps I'm suffering selective amnesia. I remember childhood banalities easily but little of the momentous return of my father, an event I used to pray for each evening. Did something traumatic or sinister happen, which I've willed into oblivion? I'm convinced a recollection I have of him declaring Angus Campbell “a money-hungry bastard who could at least offer me a job so I can be with my family” is a subsequent fancy, perhaps from my adolescence. But I definitely remember going with him to the pictures in one of the bigger towns near Apsley—Naracoorte or Edenhope—to see a Norman Wisdom film, which was so funny I screamed with laughter. And even when I didn't think it was funny I still laughed because he was laughing, so delighted was I that he was back with us.

I dared to glance at his profile in the dark. He was so close I could feel heat from his body. He was engrossed in the film, his eyes moist from laughing, reflecting the luminous screen, his mouth contorted in a wondrous grin, his head framed in cigarette smoke that wafted eerily through the theatre. The film had all his attention. He had forgotten me. My heart was a knot of disparate emotions. Near the end he upstaged the celluloid star when, howling and hooting, with tears running down his cheeks, his seat collapsed, adding his own riotous slapstick scene. The audience cheered him as he left.

I went to bed that night filled with joy and hope and anxiety. I had a father again. My jaw trembled at the thought of it.

The next day he was gone.

Had it been a dream?

There had been a disturbance in the night. What had happened? I was too afraid to ask.

“Where's Dad?” Jean asked at breakfast.

Pat turned to me. I noticed she was wearing a lot of makeup on her face, trying to cover up some dark marks. “Go outside and play, darling,” she said to me, patting my head and steering me towards the door. “And take Carol with you, just for a while.”

Jean's eyes sparkled.

I obeyed, fearful of the secret my older sister was about to learn.

Whatever my mother told her, Jean was honourable and kept it to herself.

Was it around this time that I began to experience a disturbing sensation that I thought of as my tiny-monster head? It started as a dream but often invaded my waking hours. I had no control over it, suffering it for years, any time of the night or day. It felt like my head shrank down to the size of an apple, putting enormous pressure on the organs within—my eyes, my ears, my tongue, my brain—and after a minute or two it suddenly expanded to the size and weight of a watermelon, accompanied by an onrush of nausea.

It happened less often when I was a teenager, and eventually stopped, but I can still evoke the sensation today, more than fifty years on. It was always vile and I'm glad it's gone. I have no idea what caused it. I was too overcome by its weirdness whenever it happened to tell anybody about it.

Soon we left
Kirkwall
as well. The sheep station was being subdivided into five farms and put on the market. Angus Campbell wanted to retain Pat as his housekeeper on one of his other properties, closer to Portland. So we shifted to
Th
e Pines
, where he ran cattle as well as sheep a few miles from a hamlet called Lyons. We never saw the old greyhound again, but Woollyofus, now a ram and too big to be kept as a pet, accompanied us south along with one of the farmhands who shifted into a cottage in Lyons. He looked after Woollyofus in an adjacent paddock.

Th
e Pines
was a contrast to
Kirkwall
, which had been vast and dry and flat. The new homestead was on a steep hill, a mile or so along a winding dirt road above the Crawford River. Dark pines towered over its narrow drive. When I stepped out of the ute I could hear the wind howling through the looming branches. The homestead was more imposing than
Kirkwall
, more European, which would have appealed to Campbell, who displayed an immoderate penchant for anything French, particularly its omelettes and wine. We shifted into an old bungalow behind the mansion, hidden discreetly from the main entrance. It had bedrooms and a living space but no kitchen to speak of. So Pat used the cooking facilities in the mansion.

I gradually settled into my new surroundings. I played around the mansion, which I easily imagined was haunted. I lay beneath the pines on a carpet of dry brown needles and stared up at the branches, which were like spiral staircases to a mysterious world. I dared not think of my father. But I suffered from his unexplained absence. And then I dared to think he had gone to another world.

Perhaps, like Jack-in-the-Beanstalk, whom my sister had told me about, I could visit it by ascending to the clouds. Sometimes I tried to climb a pine tree, but never got more than halfway before I lost my nerve, so never discovered what was at the top. I wasn't as brave as Jack, who met an ogre.
Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he live or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread!
I could imagine my father as one of those.

On the ground I gathered cones in hessian sacks for our fireplace. I dug my first garden plot, collected cow manure and planted carrots, which made my mother chuckle since they were one of the vegetables I refused to eat, along with cabbage, silver beet, beetroot, spinach, cucumber, parsnip and turnip. Undeterred by my fastidious palate I watched in wonder their green tops break through the damp loam and develop into delicate foliage. Under Pat's instruction I learnt how and why I had to thin them out. I squatted close beside her, our sides almost touching, and joyfully copied her movements. Learning. Learning. The discarded seedlings I put with the scraps we gave to chooks. I found other things to do: sweeping paths, washing windows, helping with chores.

Now and then we went to visit the new manager, who lived in a house on the farm with his wife and a baby. He would sit down at a piano and play some of my mother's favourite tunes, like ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling' or ‘Danny Boy', while she sang along. And when he stopped to have a cup of tea, the piano kept on playing. These managers! They were magicians! The one at
Kirkwall
had spun a sixpence on a pinhead, while here at
Th
e Pines
he could play a piano without touching the keys. Amused at my astonishment he eventually showed me some paper rolls with hundreds of small oblong holes punched in them. When the rolls were placed in a compartment of the piano, the keys would move in a certain order, just like they had been pressed by fingers, and a tune commenced. He said its proper name was ‘pianola'. It lifted once more my admiration for human ingenuity.

I started at my seventh or eighth school and was only in Grade 2. Pat took me and Jean down the dirt road to the highway in the ute where we caught a school bus a few more miles into Lyons.

Each day we passed the paddock where Woollyofus stayed. He was always eating grass and seemed content, not missing us at all. The school had two adjoining weatherboard rooms, a matching shelter shed, a corrugated-iron toilet block, and a patch of asphalt where every Monday morning, as in Apsley, the Australian flag was raised, the national anthem sung, and the oath of allegiance sworn. My patriotism flourished. And in class I returned to my habit of tracing maps of Australia. I also perfected my multiplication tables.

These drills in the classroom and with the entire school body on a Monday morning where everyone chanted as one were a potent influence on my early years, especially since I had no close friends. I could call myself an Australian and feel I was one of millions. And I could experience a sense of belonging even when I was alone just by absorbing the atmosphere around me. That's why my plastic template of Australia was one of my most precious possessions. And that's why I proudly learnt by rote Dorothea McKellar's patriotic poem,
I love a sunburnt country
…

Besides the collective aspects of schooling I pursued more personal interests. After eating the cheese or jam sandwiches that Pat had prepared for my lunch, I left the shelter shed and went beyond the patch of asphalt to an uneven piece of ground to observe butterflies and other insects or small animals like lizards that abounded in the long grass. I was also fond of lying on my back and finding images in the clouds while I pretended to be dozing.

If my mother was bored with the daily drudgery she undertook, like getting us ready for school, cooking for us, keeping our quarters clean, as well as the housework she did for Campbell, if she was upset by Denny's absence, she kept it to herself. She seemed happier at
Th
e Pines
than
Kirkwall
. She was only twenty-five miles from her family in Portland. Still, with a fallible memory, I can't claim that we visited them or they came to see us. I have a recollection I associate with this time, of making sandcastles on a narrow beach between timber piers, although it might be from some other period, or it might be my imagination. If only I had kept a diary, but it was early days for me and writing. Maybe visits were made, or their proximity was enough to comfort my mother, or maybe other matters cheered her.

Still, she wasn't destined for a cheerful life.

Perhaps things started to go wrong for her again the day I sprang from a hiding spot on the far side of the mansion as she walked past. So tremendous was the fright I gave her, she almost collapsed. She languished on a stone step while I fetched her a glass of water, and after she had recovered enough to smile feebly at
my
distress, she begged me never to ambush her again. I secretly vowed to devote the rest of my life to her, to redress my terrible misdemeanour.

Not long after, one of Campbell's bulls knocked down five fences, in its endeavour to reach a few cows, and had temporarily stopped in the home paddock next to our bungalow, another drama Pat could have done without, fearful it might harm us if it wasn't quickly relocated. Perhaps it was an omen. It stayed for several days, but we were spared a goring.

Then a snake appeared outside the fly-wire kitchen door. From inside she watched it attempt to enter. It shimmied against the screen. She left by another door, found a spade, crept up behind, knocked it from the fly-wire and in a terrified frenzy chopped it into pieces. When I arrived an hour later she was still shaking. As I entered through the ruined screen door she asked me if it was there and if it was dead. Its pieces were still twitching. When I informed her, she taught me the saying ‘a snake never dies until sunset'.