The morning Gracie and I arrived home from Eritrea, we were greeted by Cath on crutches. We had barely caught up on our news over coffee before my mother called to say my father had been taken to hospital with a fractured pelvis.
So quickly I had been reminded that behind my own flimsiness of soul lay the sturdy souls of my parents, with their pride in stoicism through disaster, Depression, World War II, and all the rest. And their stoicism now bid fair to kill them, and last night’s drama was typical. In the small hours my father, returning from the toilet to his bedroom, had gone to look out of the living room window to see what ‘loud mongrel’ was arguing with a woman on the footpath outside and tripped on a rug. He’d obviously felt something structural break inside him, but he had a crazy bush theory that if you just stayed still, fractures and dislodgements would right themselves. It was a theory he had pursued while he was a rugby league player in our country town, his sisters begging him not to play while their mother was ill because they needed his unencumbered help. But he did play, and dislocated his collarbone. And he just pretended he hadn’t been injured, keeping it a secret from everyone until it knitted again. Lying on his living room floor last night, he’d decided to play the same game, and had not disturbed my mother, passing out occasionally under the shock and wafts of agony. Mad old bugger!
When my mother found him he had insisted she bring him around to our place, a quarter of an hour away, so he could sit and watch the sea and the ‘knitting’ could commence. Mum suggested calling an ambulance but he insisted that they were ‘needed for the sick’. In his world you had to be near death to deserve an ambulance. His was the generation of the walking wounded. He had given mail out to the wounded and the hale in North Africa, pocketing that of the dead for return to their kin at some future time. Their arms in a sling, their heads ringing and bandaged, soldiers had accepted letters from him with their free hand and opened them with their teeth.
Arguing against ambulances with my mother, he endured until he fainted. And now Mum was calling us for help, and she told us the ambulance had come and he could not help whimper and weep at last as they put him on a stretcher to take him to hospital, where X-rays showed the fractured pelvis.
In the little dairy and timber town where our family had lived when I was learning my letters in the sacristy of the town church – a classroom during the week, a vesting area for the priest on Sunday – my father had been the relieving postman. According to the men in his army postal section in North Africa, he was the ultimate postman, willing to die if necessary, though my mother and brother and I were waiting for him at home, to get a consoling and strengthening letter to the foot soldiers of the Australian 9th Division on the eve of desert action. Meanwhile my mother and brother and I had waited and prayed for his return home.
Everyone seemed to attest to this when I was small, when my returned father took us to distant Sydney suburbs to meet his men and their young wives. All these men told my mother, ‘What a character! He’d get us up to a brigade headquarters waiting in reserve, and we’d deliver the letters by hand, company by company. Everyone knew him. Everyone cheered up when they saw us arrive in the truck.’
My father once said that his great motivation as a postal sergeant was to get the letter in the hand of the possibly doomed soldier because ‘the poor buggers had been through enough’. In my father’s picture of things it was always the Depression, not imperial patriotism, that had driven men to enlist. Hitler had given these young men in the desert their job, and they were not to die at their work until all their mail was to hand. He himself declared that it was the Depression that had driven him to become a postman to the 9th Division. He believed it with considerable passion and might even have been testy to have the proposition challenged. But I know that my mother listened to the praise of his fortitude and determination with ambiguity. Because she was a veteran of the Depression too, and believed he had left her behind with two young children, myself and my brother, to voluntarily put his hand up for service overseas. And he was twenty-eight years old when he was sent to Africa, older than most recruits. The authorities had either dissuaded or ordered him away from his choice of being an infantryman, but he had still gone and seen the pyramids.
The question is, when leaving home could be justified by world events, why had he taken the choice of leaving home? In terms no outsider could condemn, nor, without being misunderstood, could his wife. This question still hangs over his bed now and I cannot quiz him straight out about it because for me he is the ultimate un-interviewable.
No question that the stories abounded whenever we visited his men. Not only of letters delivered to retreating men in Benghazi under the great assault of Hitler’s General Rommel in the spring of 1942, but during the great leap forward later in the year, running in letters to Ruweisat Ridge near Alam Halfa, where the world was beginning to prepare itself to turn against the great Teutonic tyrant. On one occasion, he and his men had all been caught by Stuka dive bombers and huddled together on the vibrating gravel of the desert coast. Previously they’d been forced to shelter from a German barrage, devoutly nuzzling the earth. One of his men, in a plain suburban house in the St George area of Sydney, commented over his beer that no one expects to survive a barrage once it begins – it is all too big; it fills your brain and you know you’re dead.
Recently these tales of my father had made a late revival when a man came to our place to clean our carpets. He was the nephew of one of my father’s men and said he had been raised on stories about my father. Because apart from the matter of delivering mail to the support areas, my father had been an expert in taking over bars that were supposedly open only to officers. I remembered those stories had also been popular on the Sunday afternoons of my childhood, my father finding a bar in Cairo or Alexandria and moving behind it to reassure the barman, ‘Don’t worry about a thing, Hamid, I’ll take over from here. Give yourself a break, son!’ Even Shepheard’s Hotel bar had not been immune from my father’s endeavours, and this was always the cause of the truest and longest laughter. The bushrangers taking over the bloody bars from the Pommy officers, waging a cultural war against the English whether Rommel was on the advance or in retreat.
But the carpet cleaner’s favourite story was about the day my father and his men had visited the pyramids from their nearby camp in the desert west of Cairo. And while they were at the pyramids they witnessed the arrival of an enormous, aircraft-carrier-sized vehicle belonging to King Farouk, king of Egypt and the Sudan, sovereign of Nubia, Kordofan and Darfur. Apparently, King Farouk was there to visit the site of some new archaeological discovery. Far ahead of him lay exile and death in Italy, but his biggest problem that day was that he needed the Allies to hang on to Egypt. He was nominally neutral and had covered his considerable hide by sending a note to Adolf Hitler saying that an invasion would be welcome. But he was not prepared for my father, who under pressure of a dare from his men, approached the king and asked him to give them a lift into Cairo in his car. Farouk was famous for the scale and the elegance of his cars’ carriage work. In any case, my father’s approach to Farouk did the trick and his entire section got a crammed lift back in the super cruiser limo to the centre of Cairo, where they were not supposed to be anyhow.
When my father finally came home we were living in Sydney, and I knew that behind his boisterous mien he was depressed. And though I understand it now I didn’t as a kid. All that driving about the desert, being shelled, being strafed, the sadness of delivering a letter to a soldier now dead, handing it instead to the man’s lieutenant or captain, in the consciousness that it was economic turpitude that had driven the addressee here and to supposedly immortal renown as a martyr! Thinking what did all that count for now? The brio of persuading a king, what did it account for in our suburb on the western line.
He had taken a vow, it seemed, not to have much to do with letters again. ‘I’m not going back to the bloody Post Office,’ I remember him telling my uncle Frankie as they drank beer together. I can well understand now that delivering a letter in a suburb could have only the most hollow meaning after he had managed to deliver one to a corporal newly arrived in Alexandria from the siege around Tobruk. What could plain suburban mail mean after that? And I remember my mother not liking him to see letters that arrived for us, especially bills to be paid, which induced in him almost a sense of being bullied. ‘Capitalist bastards!’ he would say if he saw such an envelope.
He had wanted me to be tough and clever like himself, but after he returned from the war he could see that I’d cosied too closely to my mother, a bookish woman, in so far as any women from her hometown on the north coast were bookish. A woman who asked questions beyond that issue of delivering mail at all costs.
As for me, I was the elder son. I was not given to the style of manhood as practised by my father in the desert. I did move around in a loose gang consisting of the kids on our block between Parramatta Road and the railway line. Meeting children from another block, we would organise a pair to fight each other, according to the traditions of the boxing films we saw at the picture house on Parramatta Road. One day my father saw me matched against a boy a year older than me, raising my hands unavailingly and, in his view, weakly. He did not understand that I was making a late attempt at negotiation. As I faced my opponent by a garage entryway on the pavement, my father came out of the house and said hello to all the boys, no animus in his voice, and then he bent to me and said, ‘You get into him, son! I don’t want to see your arms stuck out in that way. Just remember, you only have to get in one good punch and he’ll remember you for the rest of his life!’
My opponent was considering running, fearful my father would intervene yet and clip him on the ear. But my father again nodded to all the boys and went back inside. There were no favours for me. This was my education, and I understood he was right. He had always operated on the basis of getting in one good punch, and that was consolation for whatever else the world did to him.
I was right too, of course. Where was the sense of this one good punch if the world still battered you? I took the beating and my equivalent of the one good punch was not to cry or cringe until, by some mysterious signal, the fight was considered concluded by both our groups. I am not sure that I landed my father’s ideal punch, destined to be memorable unto death to the boy it impacted on.
When I started messing around with cameras in my mid-to-late teens, my father did not really approve. And yet, in the way I pursued my cinematic career, perhaps I was like him. Did anyone get in more than one good punch?
My father overcame the emergency of his fracture, but he needed perpetual care. We discussed whether his pleas to come home could be accommodated. Even his dream of sitting and watching the sea and lettings things knit seemed a better thing than being the object of the tiresome functions of being nursed and monitored. ‘I just want to go bloody home,’ he would say again and again, and my mother would look stricken, and Cath would be brave enough to be the first to say, ‘You have to get better first, Frank.’
My brother sagely reinforced Cath’s advice. For one thing we knew the old man would accept help from no one but my mother. He could not abide strange nurses being privy to his functions. He was private and fastidious, and did not want to be judged not to be. In the past Cath had gone to a lot of trouble consulting me and my mother about helpers of all kinds, marshalled from Veterans’ Affairs and the Benevolent Society, to help with the simplest processes of a household, but of each helper my father would proudly say, ‘Oh, I sacked her. We didn’t need her.’
The proposition we were living with was that he could not go home to die because it would kill my mother since she would be without helpers. So they put him in the section of the hospital to do with rehabilitation, and if rehabilitation was impossible he would go into palliative care. All of us tried to believe our line that we were getting him better so that he could go home, at least home to our place, if not to his own flat. But he must have known that he was in the ultimate process. This awareness that he was in anguish weighed with me. I was afflicted with an unfamiliar depression, as if the tragic conundrum involving my father were part of the same dismal fabric as the women of Serai border province now walking back to their desolated farms.
Dad was not always coherent during this time and some of the things he did and said were influenced by delusional medication. Since he’d refused to go back to his old job at the post office, he had worked in stores. He had a gift for retail, and should have opened his own stores, except he had a terror of being in debt. Debt was a phenomenon. The weight of debt and the hefty thought of it was something in which he never intended to participate, or even land one good punch on the way to defeat. That was the other thing I hadn’t noticed – that he took ultimate defeat for granted. And I didn’t understand what made him like that when he was a child of Australia, the Lucky Country, the Disneyland of Affluence. In any case, being dapper, he was always well turned out to sell the manchester or haberdashery that was his specialty.
In the hospital with him one afternoon a little iced water I was helping him to was spilled on his pyjama top. He was distressed by this, and motioned to his cupboard. By this stage he seemed to speak in affirmative or negative mmm sounds. I asked him what he wanted from the cupboard and pulled out the garments in it one by one, the thread-bare inventory of the very sick – a dressing gown, a spare pyjama set, his old grey dacks, and two laundered shirts. As I displayed one of the laundered shirts he made urgent noises of assent and I realised he wanted his shirt changed. How I wished a nurse was there to do it, or someone who was a doer by nature. It would be hard, given his weakness, for me to change his shirt. But I felt that he wanted me to be the one who was humble enough to do it, and that I should stand up to events, and just bloody well do it for him. I took his pyjama shirt off and saw the misshapen and ‘knitted’ collarbone, and the cavities around it from which his now scrawny neck rose. It all hurt him, of course, as we began the process he seemed to believe so necessary, his mmm sounds warning me both to be careful but to know that what we were doing was essential. He was beyond lifting both shoulders at once, and so I had to engage in gently manhandling one shoulder, then the other, to slowly deprive him of one shirt, and the working of his arms and shoulders back into another shirt, an exercise that exhausted him. At last this task of re-dressing my father reached its close and I did up the buttons down the front of the shirt.
‘There you are, flash as a rat with a gold tooth!’ I said, though I wanted to howl with the pain he no longer had a voice for, aware that, as well as changing his shirt, I had exhausted him.
It was his final exercise. They upped his morphine that evening and he died after midnight.