CHAPTER 8
Frank and Lilian
It was quiet at home on Thursday 13 May 1965, the day I left Adelaide for London. Quiet, except for Mum’s loud sobbing. Dad was at the bottom of his garden, crouched in the cool morning sun on his weeding stool beneath the orange tree he had planted when we moved in. His transistor was tuned in to horse-racing news, and a few magpies pecked in the grass. Dad’s weeding stool was one of his sanctuaries when Mum was upset or angry; other times, he sat in the car with a beer, reading westerns. Mum was never easily consoled, and Dad was no good at it anyway.
Dad got the worst of it when Mum was in a bad mood. He usually sat wordlessly, waiting for her mood to pass. The only time I saw him lose his temper was when Mal had left home, and we thought Mum would starve to death. She was so hard on him one day that he gave a sudden cry of rage, shoved his plate of food across the table, scattering peas and chips, and stormed upstairs. Mum was so shocked she apologised to him later, which was very out of character.
While Dad hid in his weeds, Duncan was on his bed looking solemn, and I was alone with Mum in my room, where she was making a ritual of stripping my bed, acting out her pain by eliminating all evidence of me from the home I was abandoning.
She removed everything — sheets, blankets, the single pillow — until there was only a naked mattress and an empty wardrobe and the bare blue walls I had painted myself. She did it slowly, folding and refolding into a perfectly neat pile, now and then sitting to sob some more. She was not a teary woman and never wept for effect, so it was shocking when she cried. Her body would shake and rock, her mouth would freeze into a wet gape, and her crying was like a scream.
The emotion of that day had been building for weeks. A couple of nights before, when I came home late after seeing a girl, she hammered on my chest with her fists and wept. ‘You’ve been out all night with that tart,’ she said. This was not entirely true; the night had not been so eventful as Mum appeared to think, and it was harsh describing my sweet friend Josephine as a tart. I stood there until she exhausted herself. Mum may have been a distant wife, but she was an intense mother.
My departure was no surprise to my parents. For four years, each Friday, I had collected my weekly pay from the cashier’s counter and made a deposit into a savings account at a bank branch across the street from the office. When I had enough, I was going to flee the bucolic comfort zone of Adelaide with my pal Rex Jory and head for London. I even took Mum’s advice on the return fare: ‘Make sure you have enough to get back if things go wrong.’
But in my mother’s dreams, I was going to marry, and stay in Adelaide. She had high hopes when I was seeing a lovely blonde with a double-barrelled name whose grandfather was a knight; but I liked her more than she liked me. But still Mum had hoped each date with a girl would anchor me. By the time I said goodbye to Josephine, Mum was in despair.
Adelaide was the first permanence of my parents’ adult life: a red-brick bungalow with white-framed windows, our own car in its own garage, the tidy concrete driveway Dad had laid himself, the garden he proudly created in the rich soil that had nurtured orchards and vineyards before houses like ours consumed it.
For me, a restless 21-year-old, it was bland suburbia, far from where I wanted to be. For them, it was a destination. Our home looked like a department store showroom with its Danish-style furniture and shiny blue Formica kitchen tops. It was impeccable, dustless, even soulless unless you accepted the deep but unclear importance that keeping it that clean represented to my mother. She was house-proud even when she wasn’t at home: years later, when we took her on holiday, she made the hotel beds before we checked out.
After so many rootless years, they needed the unthreatened rhythm of Adelaide. But it was their fault I was leaving. I had spent my childhood travelling the world with them. They had had enough of it, but I wasn’t ready to stop. London was 10,000 miles from Adelaide, but in 1965 it felt to me like the heart of life.
Australia, even in its own mind, was a far-flung British province. Some resented the old country, others felt deeply attached to its monarch and traditions. Australians could never read enough about Britain. Newspapers were full of the news and excitement of London. It was the height of Swinging London and Carnaby Street, and the dawn of what would be known as the ‘Permissive Society’, which, looking back on it, seems quaint. London, I had also decided, published the world’s best newspapers.
Adelaide, by comparison, was a Victorian freeze-frame, where the pubs closed at 6pm, and housewives dressed up to go shopping in the city, wearing hats and long white gloves. Everything exciting was happening somewhere else.
On our way to the ship, everyone was silent as Dad reversed down the drive in his Hillman Minx. I scraped that car when it was new and took it to a garage for a secret paint job. Dad spotted it right away doing the Sunday wash and got his revenge soon after when he found a nylon stocking on the back seat and showed it to Mum. I told her the truth — the girl took if off to walk on the beach — but she wasn’t convinced.
The beaming white liner that was taking us away, SS Orcades, was at Port Adelaide. Everyone came aboard with Rex and me to see our windowless two-bunk cabin. There was no anti-terrorist security then, and the ship was full of people saying goodbye.
In the 1960s, before flying was routine, there was no quick way to Britain, except for the wealthy, and therefore no mercifully swift farewell in the airport terminal. A ship’s departure was ceremonial. And very long.
Orcades crept away from the dockside in slow motion, with a soulful, shuddering blast of its horn. The air was thick and bright with thousands of coloured streamers connecting passengers on deck with people they were leaving. Farewell streamers were a tradition in the days of big ocean liners, and every departure had an atmosphere of festive sadness.
As the ship edged away, the streamers tightened and then broke. Their happy colours became streaks of litter in the harbour’s water. Shouts from the disappearing docks slowly died in the throbbing of the ship’s engines. I feel bad now remembering how delighted I was to be leaving, and how I wished the ship would hurry up.
My family stood together in a tight group. Mum clutched the broken streamers and cried. Her hair, not yet grey, was permed in place for the occasion. Mal had her arm in Mum’s. Dad, hands in his pocket, looked dazed. Duncan, who was 16, looked abandoned. He told me later that Mum wouldn’t leave until the ship had vanished over the horizon. I don’t know how Dad felt. I didn’t know how he felt about most things. Mum’s big emotions crowded out his.
From that day, we were a long-distance family. They visited me in London and the United States, and I went home again, but never for long. I felt guilty about this, and tried to make up for it by visiting them more as they grew older.
My quiet father was an onlooker in my upbringing. I don’t remember a moment of advice from him, or much reproof. I remember, once or twice, when he put me to bed, feeling the brush of his moustache when he kissed me goodnight. He only hit me once, lightly across the back of the head with a rolled newspaper when we were crossing a street on the way to the cinema. I can’t remember why, but it was a shocking moment. When we entered the cinema, a song was playing with the lyric, ‘Oh, my papa, to me he was so wonderful’. He was, in his muted way. He didn’t often use words to show his feelings. He made things for people he loved. When I was interested in amateur dramatics, he built me a beautiful box for my stage make-up with my name carved on the lid. When Mum wouldn’t let me have a sheath knife, he carved a full-size Bowie knife from a log. Mal and Duncan both have furniture he made. There was never any ceremony. He would make something and quietly present it.
For years, he did the football pools. We would study his face for any signal of success as he listened to the results on his radio. These were given gravity by the solemn lilt of the presenter’s voice and the glorious names of competing teams: Tranmere Rovers, Heart of Midlothian, Partick Thistle, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Hamilton Academical, Stenhousemuir. The biggest Littlewoods prize was £75,000. We were overjoyed the day Dad won £11.
Dad was short, about five foot five, with an oversized, beaky nose. On parade, he marched in the back row so he could skip to catch up without breaking everyone’s stride. He stroked his moustache perpetually while reading his Zane Grey westerns. He read every inch of the newspapers. Long after I became a journalist, he would catch me out spotting stories I had missed. On payday, when he came home happier than usual, he would throw banknotes into the air.
Lilian, my mum, was extremely sharp, but not particularly knowledgeable, or curious about the world. She did not read much, but loved crosswords, was unbeatable at Scrabble, and could quote long passages from the Bible and snatches of poetry learned long ago. With her energy, fury, and inarticulate ambition, she was not easy to live with. She had a hard edge, which showed in her dark and frightening eyes when she was angry. When upset, she sometimes shouted, and her vocabulary could be educational for a boy; other times, she would sink into sulks that lasted for days. It wasn’t always clear what she was angry about. Sometimes she was wound up so tightly any small thing made her snap.
Mum was on the front line of every battle: difficult neighbours, inept schools, and whenever Army high-ups messed up our accommodation or travel arrangements. When she argued with our neighbour in Germany about a shared garden, she dug up the entire lawn and planted vegetables. It was a land grab. Mum might have been a little mad, but people didn’t mess with her.
In our house, she made the rules. She hit me often, but never with real intent. She mostly used one of her shoes, and, whenever she raised it in anger, I fled. When she caught me, cowering in the corner of a room, she would be satisfied with one swipe so long as I followed it with a cooperative cry of pain.
No one got sick in our house. Missing school or work was not an option. No cold, however severe, kept me at home. A morning vomit after something you ate? ‘You’ll be fine.’ Flu symptoms? ‘Here’s a glass of water — off you go.’ And off I would go, with an extra handkerchief and my nose stuffed with a lump of Vicks VapoRub.
For years, our home was a pocket of Prohibition. I had never seen Mum drink, but she did often tell a story of being sick once after too much crème de menthe. Whenever Dad arrived home with whisky on his breath, the atmosphere was combustible. I was a teenager when I found out most families had alcohol with Christmas dinner; we had water with our goose, followed by a cup of tea.
In Adelaide, however, the temperance was overwhelmed by our new Australian life. At first, my mother would react with alarm when guests, in the local tradition, arrived bearing bottles of chilled beer and flagons of wine. Meanwhile, her elder son was learning the ways of Australian newspapers, a world not known for abstinence.
I began arriving home dizzy after a couple of schooners in the Strathmore Hotel, next to the office. When Mum didn’t complain about my beers, Dad seized the moment and started lacing his coffee with whisky. Mum sat silent and scowling in front of the television.
I think my drinking gave Dad cover. He felt safer when we had a beer together. Dad was a master at retrieving a bottle of West End Bitter from the freezer just as it was beginning to crystallise. We would share one in the garden on a hot Sunday afternoon. Even Mum relented and was known to have an occasional shandy — one-quarter beer, three-quarters lemonade — but only ever one.
Mum didn’t drink, but was a helplessly hooked chain-smoker. The house was filled with tobacco accoutrements: cigarette holders, fancy table-lighters, ashtray souvenirs collected on our travels, and a wooden cigarette-box into which I would place neat rows of filter-tipped du Mauriers when guests were expected. Mum liked fancy cigarette brands; in Bootle, she had rolled her own or bought Woodbines. When she went out, I filled a brown leather-covered cigarette case for her handbag and topped up the fuel in her silver Ronson lighter. The fingers of her right hand were stained dark-brown and the insides of her teeth were black. The haze and smell in our house meant nothing to me. I never smoked, but on a train it made no difference to me whether I travelled in a smoking carriage or not.
After a heart attack at the age of 47, Mum quit, but a stroke 18 years later left her with slurred speech and a severe limp for the rest of her life.
She loved her children intensely, but the love didn’t overflow. I would wrap my arms around her while she washed the dishes, pressing my head against her back, and say, ‘Do you love me, Mum?’
Every time, her answer was the same: ‘Give me one good reason why I should.’
But I knew that’s what she would say, and I knew she was saying ‘yes’.
She was ambitious for her children, but she didn’t have big dreams for us. To her, success meant a secure job — any job — and a house in a nice neighbourhood, and a steady, safe, respectable, law-abiding life. That was far better than the wandering, out-of-control existence of an Army sergeant’s wife. Or living in Bootle.
She drove us hard at school. It was agony when I was eight and struggling to master the times-tables. She made me recite them over and over every night until I got them right, which I never quite did.
Duncan went to university, earned degrees, and became a teacher. I pressed on more haphazardly, but I knew I had pleased her the day she could show the neighbours a story in The News with my by-line. When Marilyn married a soldier, her heart must have sunk, but in the end the sergeant’s wife was happy to have a lieutenant colonel as a son-in-law.
She never wanted us to step out of line. ‘Don’t get into arguments at work — your father did that again and again,’ she would say. She was horrified when my first wife Mary and I provided accommodation for a friend fresh out of prison after serving six months for embezzlement. ‘You will disgrace the family,’ she said. ‘What if people find out?’
Her children meant more to her than her husband, and she was haunted, as we grew older, by the knowledge we would abandon her. She could never hide her distress when we found other people; no girlfriend or spouse was good enough.
Mary and I went to Adelaide for nearly a year in 1970. It was by far our longest visit, and Mum was desperate for us to stay, although she knew we never would. When we told her one evening that Mary was pregnant with our first child, she didn’t even smile or look up from her crossword. ‘I suppose you’ll be going back to England to have it,’ she said.
My parents’ marriage could not correctly be called fiery, with the fire only coming from one side. I remember a story — I think it was a TV comedy sketch — in which a man with a complaining wife had the ability to make himself go deaf. It was about my dad.
Lilian dominated her husband, but at the same time was powerless in the life he had chosen. Whenever and wherever the Army told my father to go, we followed. She had no choice but to take a back seat to his unglamorous, unpredictable job as a non-commissioned officer.
Most of the time, Mum appeared to disapprove of Dad, but it was impossible to know why. Maybe it was his gentle satisfaction with life, his low threshold of contentment, his quietness, and his pleasure in solitude; his hobbies — westerns, horse racing, gardening, and the exotic birds he bred for a few years in a big cage in the back garden. It wasn’t an ideal marriage. As a boy, I must have thought it was normal for loving grown-ups always to be in a temper with each other and to sleep in twin beds. That was before I learned their painful history.
In 1950, when I was six, and Mum was 36, she met a married Army butcher called Freddie. He had been posted to Egypt without his family, and Mum met him at a party in the sergeants’ mess.
Their affair must have been intense because, when Freddie went back to England, my mother followed him. She walked out on her husband of 15 years, and took her three children with her. It must have been an act born out of great and unexpected love, or desperate unhappiness. She can’t have had much money, so presumably had no doubt that she and Freddie were going to spend the rest of their lives together.
Mal was 14 and remembers Mum telling her what had happened and that she would have to decide whether to stay with Dad, or leave with her.
We lived for a year at Grandma’s in Bootle without seeing Dad once. I remember his absence, and I remember Mum being out at night so often and so late that I became terrified she might never return. I couldn’t sleep until I heard her laughing outside and saying good night to people.
I don’t know whether Mum changed her mind, or Freddie decided to stay with his wife, but at the end of that year, my parents reconciled.
Grandma must have known what was happening, but no one was going to tell a small boy, so the rift did not shatter me. I knew nothing about the reasons for Dad’s absence, or our year back in Bootle, for 60 years, until I questioned Mal for this book. By then, Mum and Dad had been dead many years. The news would have horrified me when I was younger, but by then I understood more of the foibles of life and marriage, and knew it was mostly impossible to judge the relationships of others. It didn’t cause me to question my parents’ love for me — I never questioned that — but it helped explain my mother’s torment and, possibly, Dad’s acquiescent approach to his marriage. I’ll never know now why she left, or if Dad’s conduct contributed to hers. There was never anything evidently romantic in their relationship that I could see, but it didn’t seem odd when I was a child, having grown up with it. Still, even though the Bruces and Hintons were never families to hang out their emotions and problems, it’s amazing I was never told. I’m not angry with anyone and, whatever went wrong then, they were together in the end for 60 years.
Mum calmed down a little and, in their later years, I finally saw my parents show affection. It was an easy fondness; they smiled at each other a lot and even touched, but I never saw them actually kiss or embrace. Dad was tenderly protective of Mum after her stroke, and when he died — seven years before Mum — she was bereft.
In their old age, they left Adelaide for Canberra, where Mal and Duncan lived with their families. In 2004, Mum died there, aged 90, in a nursing home, remembering Dad, her children, her sister Gladys, and her mother, but not much else. Afterwards, I found every letter I had sent her from London, those blue weight-saving ‘aerogrammes’, neatly preserved in a shoebox. She was buried, as she had wanted, in the same grave as Dad.
I last saw Dad in 1996, when he didn’t have long to live. He was sitting low in his high-backed chair, his tired old head resting on a white lace-trimmed antimacassar, chest heaving, and an ugly cylinder of oxygen at his side next to a tabletop of pill bottles. Every few moments, he took deep breaths from a mask. His old hands, scarred long ago by years with his kitchen knives, were now covered with marks left from skin cancer surgery. Through the French windows of the living room, he could see his plants and trees blooming beneath the Canberra sun, and the flower beds he would never touch again.
Of course, neither of us acknowledged we were together for the last time. He looked at me with his pale blue eyes, but it was only a glimpse; Dad’s looks never lingered.
I kissed him on the forehead, ‘See you, old man.’
‘Safe trip,’ he said.
Two months later, in a hospital bed, gasping but still lucid, he took hold of Duncan’s shirtfront. ‘I can’t take this any more,’ he said. Duncan spoke to his doctors and signed some papers. Dad died the next day. He was 86.
Back in Australia for his funeral, I found among his things a card addressed to me, dated 19 February 1945, my first birthday and four years before Duncan was born.
In it, he had written: ‘To my one and only son, wishing him all the wishes I’ve wished myself. Dad.’
I had never seen it until then.