Romulus, My Father Read online

  As soon as my father arrived at the camp in May 1950, he asked the man who greeted new arrivals whether there were any other Romanians. He was told there were two brothers, Pantelimon and Dumitru (Mitru) Hora. He sought them out and they quickly became friends.

  Pantelimon was twenty-four and Mitru twenty-two. They were well educated, having completed high school in Romania, but they had been denied university study because they refused to join the Communist Party groups which would have entitled them to scholarships. When the communists took power, they quickly installed party members as informers to be on the lookout for anyone who had an independent mind and spirit. Realising what was in store for anyone who valued freedom and justice, Pantelimon decided to escape, urging his brother to join him, before the weight of communism’s oppressive apparatus fell upon both of them. They fled to Yugoslavia, were repatriated, imprisoned and fled again, this time successfully. From Yugoslavia they fled to Italy where they lived for a time in refugee camps until they secured a passage to Australia.

  Pantelimon, whom my father always referred to as Hora during the course of their lifelong friendship (and as I will from now on), was taller and stronger in character than Mitru and carried him through moments of weakness during their escape. They were both striking-looking men. Hora was particularly handsome. His high forehead, his large eyes and his mouth gave his face an aspect that reminded me in later years of Albert Camus, whereas the considerably shorter Mitru, with his slightly Asiatic eyes, slicked-down black hair and soft voice, reminded me of Peter Lorre.

  I called Hora grosse Danciu and Mitru kleine Danciu, Danciu being a humorous Romanian term for a gipsy. Hora had studied German in Romania so he spoke German with me and Romanian with my father. Mitru knew virtually no German, so he and I managed without language until we were able to converse in a halting English. My father befriended both brothers, but from the beginning his friendship with Hora went deeper.

  Perhaps for good reason, or perhaps merely as an expression of their prejudice against ‘New Australians’ (as immigrants were called), the authorities responsible for assigning jobs at the camp chose not to utilise the many skills of the foreign workers who were almost invariably given menial manual tasks. They were called ‘The Balts’ by most Australians in the area because so many of them came from the Baltic countries. In the case of my father, this unusually gifted man was set to work with a pick and shovel. He noted how incompetent some of the Australian tradesmen were, especially the welders, but not with resentment or anger, more with incredulous irony. He—and in this he was a typical immigrant of the time—had long come to accept what fate dealt him and felt no resentment or indignation, or any other response which depended on the assumption that he was owed something better. But this resignation did not extinguish his young dreams of a new life and so he saw his two years of bondage as a short interim, reasonably exacted in return for a passage he could never have afforded.

  During this time I rarely saw my father. Tensions existed between him and my mother, dating back to Germany, and deepened by her romances with other men on board ship and now also in the camp at Bonegilla. News of her infidelities travelled to Cairn Curran. More than once my father was told, ‘Control your wife, she is stealing our husbands.’ When a woman from Bonegilla visited her husband in Cairn Curran, she told my father that I was neglected and running wild. He had no alternative but to bring me to Cairn Curran even though children were not permitted. He pleaded with the camp authorities and reluctantly they allowed me to stay with him, but on condition that it was for no longer than a month.

  At the time my father was working on the main wall of the reservoir, a kilometre or so from the camp. Work proceeded day and night. Sometimes my father was assigned to day shift, sometimes to night. He and Hora worked alternate shifts so that one of them could always care for me. At his request, my father was transferred to a job cleaning the lavatories in the camp so that he could be near me.

  After a couple of months the authorities at Baringhup reminded him of the condition under which he had been permitted to bring me there. My father pleaded that he had no alternative, no other accommodation and that he could not leave me with my mother. They listened with sympathy, but insisted that this was a camp for men only, that the regulations prohibited children, that they feared that in making an exception for me they had already set a precedent and that, anyhow, the conditions were hardly suitable for a four-year-old child. They urged him to send me to a children’s home, but he found that unthinkable. Matters drifted for another month or more.

  Sometimes the strain showed. My father was not quick to anger, but when his temper was aroused it could be fierce. Once it flared against me. We shared a room with a man whom I remember only as Schwaba. One day I took a small bottle of his aftershave outside and sprinkled it on the ground to see if it would make anything grow. When Schwaba missed it he accused me without hesitation and without asking me whether I was guilty. My father demanded to know if I had taken the bottle. I said that I had not, no doubt unconvincingly, because he smacked me. I stuck to my denial and, because he believed me to be lying, my father smacked me even harder. Still I refused to confess, and his anger grew till he could barely speak.

  Fortunately, Hora arrived. ‘That’s enough,’ he shouted to my father, but my father would not listen. Hora then intervened physically, taking me from my father and onto his knee. I was crying hysterically and Hora waited some time for me to be able to speak between heaving sobs.

  Curious to know whether I had taken the aftershave, he asked, ‘Raimond, how big was the bottle?’

  ‘Only so small.’

  The gap between my fingers measured about five centimetres. I could not believe that the theft of such a small bottle could justify such a huge punishment.

  My mother occasionally came to visit, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend whose husband was also at the camp. We walked in the hills and often swam in the river, me with a gallon tin as a flotation device, sealed with solder, properly shaped and strapped to my back. Photographs show her dressed elegantly. She was now twenty-two and in her swimsuit her figure showed full in beautiful womanhood. My father must have been heartbroken by his unfathomable, troubled, vivacious and unfaithful wife. Pressed again by the camp authorities, he accepted an offer to share a farmhouse, six kilometres west of Baringhup, with a Ukrainian couple and their son who was about my age. My mother agreed to join us there.

  The farmhouse was called Frogmore. It was situated in one hundred and sixty hectares of sheep-grazing country. Built in the 1860s it had passed through many hands until it was bought after World War II by a returned soldier under the provisions of a soldier-settlement grant. The owner came to suffer severely from diabetes which eventually made him blind and so he was unable to manage his farm. He lived with his wife in Castlemaine, and came every spring with his brothers to shear the sheep.

  Only seven and half metres square, the house had two bedrooms, a kitchen and living room. Verandahs ran along three sides and on one side there was a washhouse that doubled as a bathroom until a storm blew it away. On two sides the verandah posts ran down to brick walls a metre or so high, decoratively rendered in cement. The verandah wall at the front carried the name ‘Frogmore’ in raised cement letters painted green. A small bluestone dairy stood to the side of the house. The rent took twelve shillings from my father’s weekly labourer’s wage of between six and seven pounds.

  There was no electricity and no running water. A single kerosene lamp served us well. The one water tank ran dry in our first summer, and so my father installed a second one. Rats lived under the house and occasionally bit us in bed. Visiting us, Hora woke one night to find a large rat tugging at his elbow trying to make off with a piece of flesh. Long brown snakes came to eat the rats and for a time lived under the house, but they did not threaten us.

  The land around was mostly bare of trees although clumps could be seen everywhere in the middle distance. Red gums, ring-barked more than fif
ty years earlier, stood in a swamp covering a square kilometre to the north. Many varieties of waterbird were attracted to it. A dead red gum stood only a hundred metres from the house and became for my mother a symbol of her desolation. Peppercorns and cypresses surrounded the house on three sides, the fourth being open to the dam behind which was hidden by its banks. Shearing sheds, sheep pens and a milking shed stood on the other side of the dam. The peppercorns, to be found at almost every settlement in the area, were planted as though to mediate between local and European landscapes. The mid-green of their herringbone leaves evoked the colours of colder climates while their gnarled trunks and branches introduced one to the starkly delineated silhouettes of the native landscape.

  The stillness, normally enhanced by the rustle of the grass and the sound of insects, was broken when we first moved there by the distant roar of the heavy earthmoving equipment at Cairn Curran, four kilometres away as the crow flies. Half a kilometre to the south west, on the crest of a gentle hill, lay ‘Woodlands’, Tom Lillie’s farm where Tom lived with his wife Mary and her sister, Miss Jane Collard.

  My mother came from Bonegilla, as she had promised, to live with my father and me. The Ukrainian family departed within a few months, leaving us their two greyhound-cross dogs, Orloff and Vera. Vera was run over on the main road between Maldon and Maryborough, a couple of kilometres from the house. Orloff remained to be a wonderful companion to me.

  We bought furniture in Maryborough for the kitchen and bedrooms. The bedroom was just wide enough for a double bed for my parents, a single one for me and a dressing-table in between. The living room, slightly larger than the others, was not furnished, then or ever. It doubled for many things, mostly as a storeroom and sometimes as a bathroom, holding a free-standing bath which we brought in from outside and filled with buckets of hot water from a copper which stood where the washhouse had been. Between baths we washed in a deep basin.

  All conversation, which meant all living, occurred in the kitchen. The floors were untreated wood, grey from weathering and dirt, and sunk in places. Plank sheets, with no panels or even latches, made the inner doors. The ceilings were of timber, tongued and grooved, as were the inner walls.

  Primitive though the house was, it made it possible for my father to keep me rather than to send me to a home, and it offered the hope that our family might be reunited. He was glad to have my mother with us and hoped that she might settle into the responsibilities of being a wife and mother.

  It would have been an unrealistic hope in any circumstances but quite naive at Frogmore. A troubled city girl from Central Europe, she could not settle in a dilapidated farmhouse in a landscape that highlighted her isolation. She longed for company. We often went to the camp at Cairn Curran to visit friends, particularly the Horas, and sometimes they came to us. It was then that my mother began her affair with Mitru. I do not know if my father knew, but he must have suspected. She and Mitru were often together, not alone but with another couple, and I would sometimes be with them, walking in the hills or along the river.

  A photograph of the period shows Mitru lying under a tree on the river bank with me sitting on his chest, my mother beside us with the demeanour of a young woman with her man and child.

  A few months after we moved to Frogmore, before the main wall of the reservoir was finished, the government ran out of money for the project and everyone was laid off. My father found work at Patience & Nicholson (P&N), a tool factory in Maryborough. The Horas were sent to the salt works in Werribee, but after a short time Pantelimon found a job at P&N and sometimes lived with us at Frogmore.

  Mitru found work in Melbourne in the lost-property office at Spencer Street railway station. My mother joined him soon after, but they lived separately in Dalgety Street, St Kilda, he in a room at number 29 and she at number 5 in a bungalow at the back of a free-standing Victorian terrace which had been converted to a boarding house. I do not know why, but I went to live with my mother in 1951 and she and I lived in the bungalow until I returned to live with my father a year and a half later.

  During this period I became close to Mitru and very fond of him. He was gentle, quick to laughter and with a wit that showed the sharpness and delicacy of his intelligence. I did not then, or ever, fully know the degree of his pain. My mother had other lovers and he was tormented by jealousy. Sometimes he fought with them. He came to the bungalow one night, his face bloodied and his shirt and jacket torn. My mother and he quarrelled frequently over her infidelities. Mitru was also deeply troubled by the fact that she did not care properly for me, and that her careless spending undermined his capacity to do so. Unable to afford new sandshoes, he bought me a second-hand pair. ‘I could not even buy Raimond new shoes,’ he lamented to his brother.

  I roamed the streets of St Kilda with a school friend who lived in a boarding house nearby in Jackson Street. We took to petty thieving and begging, for threepence, sixpence and sometimes a shilling. I made efforts to ensure that neither my mother nor Mitru knew about it. Most often we spent the money on sweets or fish and chips, but I also had my eye on a Hopalong Cassidy six-shooter displayed in a window in a milk bar in Fitzroy Street. When I had accumulated enough (I cannot remember if it was one or two pounds) I went to buy it. The shopkeeper, suspicious of where I had obtained my money, grabbed me and called the police, to whom I confessed that I had begged for it. Better that than be thought guilty of stealing.

  The police took me to my mother who showed appropriate surprise and indignation. When they went she smacked me, more because she was humiliated than because she was seriously troubled by what I had done. That night she told Mitru who did not reprimand me but spoke sorrowfully of what I might become. Coming so quickly after his humiliation at not being able to buy me new shoes, I think this convinced him that I would be better off with my father.

  I returned to Frogmore where, apart from periods at boarding school, I lived with my father for the next ten years.

  Soon after moving to Frogmore my father bought a small Bantam motorbike and later a large, heavy Sunbeam, which enabled him to travel more easily to work. As well as working at P&N, he worked on weekends as a farm labourer for Tom Lillie and for the Mikkelsens, one of the oldest farming families in the area, who owned a property four kilometres away. He ploughed Lillie’s fields with the tractor till late at night, but mostly he cut hay or helped with baling and stacking it.

  One day I was swimming with my mother, Mitru and some of their friends in Lillie’s dam. As we were coming home, upon reaching the crest of the hill and looking down at Frogmore, we noticed large black clouds of smoke and a dozen or so fire engines in Lillie’s paddock, less than fifty metres from the house. Thirty or so men were standing around the fire engines and when we came closer it became evident that my father was the focus of their hostile attention. He had been cutting hay with his scythe when he saw a snake go under a stook. Without thinking, responding with the instinct of an immigrant unused to the tinder-dry conditions of an Australian summer, he set fire to the stook in order to kill the snake.Within minutes the fire was beyond his control and consumed some twenty hectares of Lillie’s property. My father was mortified and humiliated, most deeply so when my mother and Mitru arrived with their friends. The local newspaper ridiculed the New Australian for his folly.

  He partially redeemed himself in the eyes of local farmers by his prompt action at an accident that occurred soon after. He was helping Neil Mikkelsen build a haystack. Mikkelsen was high on the ladder thatching the hay while my father passed sheaves to him. He leaned towards my father to take a sheaf when he fell heavily, more than four metres, onto his side. When my father reached him he was bleeding freely from the mouth.

  ‘I fell,’ Mikkelsen said quietly. His tone of dismayed resignation made it clear he believed he was finished.

  Softly, my father responded. ‘Yes,’ he said. Nothing more. He also believed that Mikkelsen was dying. It was a natural response to the blood coming from his mouth.

  Mik
kelsen fell unconscious, so my father poured water over him from a bucket to wake him and then cleared his throat of blood as far as he could. He wrapped him in a lined horse-rug, surrounded him with straw, positioned his head so that he would not drown in his blood and went for help on his motorcycle. Mikkelsen was taken by ambulance to hospital where he recovered. He and others attributed his survival to my father’s prompt and sensible action.

  My father worked shifts at P&N, unable to avoid it because the foreman threatened to sack him if he did not do so. As a consequence, I spent many nights alone at Frogmore. I was six years old and the nearest house was half a kilometre away. Naturally I was frightened.

  Before going to bed I had to go outside to brush my teeth at the tank and, if the moon was out, the dead red gums looked ghostly in its light. It was not hard for a child to imagine all kinds of creatures coming from the swamp, their path to the house lit by the moonlight shining silver on the grass. And when it was windy the house creaked in tones that would excite a fearful imagination in almost anyone. (One windy night, when she was visiting, my mother and I fled the house terrified. We ran down the road only to see a man coming towards us. Shrieking, we ran in the opposite direction until we realised from his shouts that it was Hora coming home from work in Maryborough.)

  I took the dogs to bed with me and listened to the radio until I fell asleep. Years later I heard someone speak contemptuously of how Aborigines slept with their dogs for comfort and warmth. I remembered how I had done the same, and was amused at the speaker’s stupid contempt. I doubt that I would have coped without the dogs.