Romulus, My Father Read online

  My mother came occasionally. When she was there, my father took the opportunity to work overtime when he did not work night shift. He would come home at about 9 p.m. to find that she had not cooked dinner for me. Sometimes he found her just staring into the fire. By the time he had prepared a meal, I was asleep at the table. Only when he recalled this do I remember him speaking bitterly about my mother. She must have suffered depressions, but at the time she appeared to me cheerful and vivacious, even when she lay in bed during the day, as she often did. When not at school, I spent many hours lying in bed with her, reading or talking, despite the fact that she refused to deny herself the pleasure of cleaning my ears with her bobby pins. I was glad of her physical, feminine presence, which comforted me more than food.

  Sometimes she was obviously and deeply depressed. Desperately lonely, she was glad of any conversation that came her way, as happened when Neil Mikkelsen came to the house and talked with her. He was one of the few people in the area who liked her, most having taken against her for her neglect of me. I doubt that they knew of her promiscuity, but they noticed how often she went away. My father’s devoted care of me contrasted obviously with her neglect and this fuelled the hostility towards her. Mikkelsen, however, was not a man given to judging others and he enjoyed her bright conversation as much as she enjoyed his company.

  Forty years later he remembered her vividly, her neat appearance and charming manner and described her as very intelligent and a ‘woman of substance’, meaning, I think, not merely that she was no scatterbrain, but that she had the arresting presence of someone who experienced the world with a thoughtful intensity. But the occasional conversation with a local farmer or trip to Maldon could not support her in her struggle against her demons.

  Late one winter’s night I was sitting talking with her as she lay in my bed. My father was in the kitchen. I noticed that her speech became slurred and assumed she was falling asleep. In words that were barely comprehensible she said that she loved me and wanted to say goodbye, that she would fall asleep and then die.

  I screamed for my father to come. She told him she had taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. He ran the half kilometre to Tom Lillie’s who took my mother to hospital in Maldon where they pumped out the contents of her stomach.Two days later she was released and returned to Frogmore.

  The road from Baringhup to Moolort was five hundred metres from Frogmore, connected to the house by a rough track. The taxi that brought my mother from Maldon left her at the junction of the road and the track, probably at her request. I first saw her when she was two hundred metres or so from the house, alone, small, frail, walking with an uncertain gait and distracted air. In that vast landscape with only crude wire fences and a rough track to mark a human impression on it she appeared forsaken. She looked to me as though she had returned from the dead, unsure about the value of the achievement.

  She made light of her attempted suicide to me, but her vivacity was gone. Preoccupied and uncommunicative, she lay in bed most days except for an hour or two when she went for walks. One evening, when she did not return from her walk, my father and I searched the paddocks calling to her, but heard no answer. Again my father ran to Lillie’s from where he phoned the police in Maldon. He feared she had killed herself. Later that night I stood knee-deep in the waters of a nearby swamp lit by searchlights as the police, my father, Lillie and others searched for her body.They did not find her and at about 3 a.m. everyone went home.

  In the morning she came back to Frogmore, bleeding from a deep triangular cut in one of her shins. She said she had injured herself falling over a log and, dispirited, had spent the night sleeping beside it. She went to bed offering no explanation, then or ever.

  Afterwards her behaviour exhibited a strange combination of lethargy and restlessness. Some days she stayed in bed, on others she went to Maldon, sometimes by taxi and sometimes with my father who drove her but did not stay. In Maldon she often visited a Polish couple, Mr and Mrs Smolak, who had come to Australia on the same ship as my parents. To them she complained about my father—that nothing she did satisfied him, not the way she peeled potatoes, not the way she cooked, not the way she did the washing and so on, although the truth is that she hardly did any of these things at all. She and my father were irritable, often angry, with one another. Sometimes she slept in his bed, sometimes in mine.

  A few weeks after the night she spent in the paddock, she returned to Melbourne to live again with Mitru. I wrote often to them, as often to Mitru as to my mother. My father wrote only when necessary, addressing my mother, ‘Dear Madam,’ and signing himself, ‘R. Gaita.’

  When my mother went back to Mitru, my father and I settled into life at Frogmore with four animals, Rusha the cow, Marta the cat, Orloff the dog and, most importantly, Jack the cockatoo.

  We bought Jack from a man in Maryborough who, I believe, caught him wild. My father could not bear to cage him so Jack flew free. He slept on the kitchen door which was always left open for him. The outer edge of the door became gnarled and rounded because he used it to climb to his roost. Newspapers were placed at the bottom to collect his droppings. A tin for his food was nailed to the top. Whenever we had coffee or tea, Jack climbed halfway down the door asking for a portion of bread to be dipped into it and given to him.

  Mostly he was quiet while inside, but he became excited during Jack Davey’s quiz show on the radio. At the beginning of the show and sometimes after commercial breaks, Davey would exclaim, ‘Hi Ho everybody!’, to which the contestants and audience would respond by shouting, ‘Hi Ho Jack!’ Whenever this happened, Jack pricked his ears, raised his crest and alternately shrieked and cried, ‘Hi Ho Jack!’ To amuse himself, he began to pick at the adjacent wall and soon ate his way through it. He did the same with one of the bottom panels in the front door even though it was almost always open for him to come in whenever he wanted.

  Marta was a feral cat whom we found in a rabbit burrow. She often sat on the front verandah. Jack liked to strut up to her, size her up, cock his head arrogantly and peck her. When he did this she looked at him with considerable contempt and swiped him across the beak with her paw. She could have had him for breakfast a few times over, but I suppose that his natural arrogance, his visible conviction that their master had placed him at the top of the animal hierarchy, convinced her that though she could put him down a peg or two she had better not go much further.

  Marta became pregnant to a wild cat and gave birth to five kittens, one a handsome tom, whom we called Billy. He and Jack accompanied us whenever we went into the paddocks, for rabbits or for wood. Jack would fly and then land on Billy’s back, flattening him under the sudden weight. They then tumbled playfully in the grass. Billy was the only cat Jack didn’t peck. When they were given milk, the cats would crowd around the bowl. Jack would go to each in turn and bite its ear, until all were gone save Billy. He would then have a sip or two of milk and go off, pleased with himself.

  Jack behaved like no other bird I have seen. His loyalty to my father was intense. My father petted him like a cat, turning him on his back and stroking him. Every morning he came to our bedroom. We knew he was on his way quite some time before he arrived. The house had sunk, causing the bedroom door to face downhill, and it tended to swing shut because of its own weight. Jack tried to push it open with his head, but he seldom succeeded the first time. He would get it partly open, try to squeeze through but would then be forced back as it closed on him. It often happened half a dozen times: we heard the slight squeak of the hinges and then the patter-patter of his feet as he beat a retreat. When he succeeded he climbed the bedstead and waited patiently until my father’s eyes opened, whereupon he immediately jumped into the bed, and from under the blankets repeatedly put his beak to my father’s lips, saying, ‘Tsk tsk tsk, tsk tsk tsk.’ I assumed it meant, ‘I love you.’

  As much as any dog, Jack had a clear sense of the hierarchy in the family. He treated me with some condescension, and occasionally bit me just b
ecause he felt like it. Even so, he was a joy to me, especially when he accompanied me to school, six kilometres away, flying a little, resting on my handlebars, then flying some more. During the day he flew around the schoolyard, and sometimes more widely in Baringhup, making what mischief he could—chewing up clothes pegs, and other things of that kind—which made me fear that someone would shoot him. After school he flew home with me.

  Eventually my father was forced to clip one of his wings because Tom Lillie threatened to shoot him for chewing up his new television antenna. Jack could still fly, but only in circles. Each time he took off with high hopes only to be forced, inexorably, into a circle whose radius was no more than fifty metres.

  Still, Jack went to Lillie’s. He walked the half kilometre even when my father was not there. On one occasion his heart was set on some flowers which had just bloomed. First he pecked off their heads, and then razed every one of them to ground level. Miss Collard had planted them and, enraged by his provocative vandalism, she was this time ready to shoot him. But when she saw that he could not fly because his wing was cut, she took pity on him and was more than a little impressed by the fact that he had walked from Frogmore. By the time he set off for home it was raining. When he arrived, his full wing was dragging on the ground, soaked and heavy, making him lopsided. He was a truly pitiable sight. Hora lit the fire especially for him and put a chair next to it so that he could perch on it to warm and dry himself.

  After some years with us Jack gave us a shock from which we never entirely recovered. He occasionally flew off for periods of up to a week with flocks of cockatoos that came through the area. After one such occasion Jack persisted in going to my father’s bed during the day, resistant to any attempts to call him away from it. One day when my father picked him up he found that he was sitting on an egg. Jack was a girl! We were bemused and delighted, but also so shocked that we could never bring ourselves to change his name or even to refer to him by his rightful gender. The egg failed to produce a baby cockatoo.

  As well as Jack and Marta there was Orloff, the dog. Like Jack he was a source of joy in my troubled childhood, but unlike Jack he comforted me in my sorrow and gave me a sense of security when I was afraid. Often when I came home from school he met me a kilometre or so from the house, and if I was walking he bounded up and knocked me over.

  Orloff was a dog of fine character but without much intelligence. He sometimes slept in the woolshed behind the dam. When we wanted him we whistled. Jack soon got the hang of it and whistled him of his own accord. Orloff would bound towards the house, and Jack would raise his crest and dance on the high chicken-wire fence screeching and mocking this loyal but foolish dog. It happened often, but Orloff never learned.

  He was accused of molesting sheep and survived a shooting, but one day we found him dead, bleeding from the mouth only yards from the house. Someone had fed him meat spiked with crushed glass. My father and I cried for him, and for many days I thought my chest would explode with grief.

  Rusha was our maverick cow, a blue-roan milking Shorthorn. She persistently broke through fences to run on the road, always doing so when she was about to calve. She gave us fine calves whom we always called ‘Bimbo’, and sufficient milk for me to drink at least six cups a day at my father’s insistence. At every opportunity she kicked over the bucket when we milked her and she yielded each drop resentfully. She chased me around the paddock whenever my father sent me to fetch her. I don’t know why he kept sending me, for she clearly had it in for me and, despite her breed, her horns were long and lethal.

  One day I was playing with toy cars on the wall of the dam. I must have been concentrating intensely, for when I looked up Rusha was charging me with her head down less than ten metres away. I dived through the fence immediately behind me, leaving some of my shirt and blood on the barbed wire. If the fence had not been so close, she would have killed me.

  Those were our animals during most of our stay at Frogmore.

  My father decided to start a poultry farm after he and Hora, together with many other men, were laid off from P&N. He bought almost a thousand laying hens and built sheds for them. At first they were unrestricted in their movements, but because they came into the house and shat in it (the door being open so that Jack could get in and out) my father built a chicken-wire fence around the house. With only that restriction, the hens roamed free and drove the snakes away.

  We sold our eggs to the Egg Board in Castlemaine. At first we washed them by hand, but since there were literally thousands of them at the end of each fortnight, my father built an egg-washing machine which we stored and operated in the living room. It was a simple machine, approximately three metres long, with a handle that operated two cloth-covered shafts running the length of the machine. Eggs were taken from warm soapy water, cleaned as they turned with one shaft and dried as they turned past towels on the other. Two people were needed to operate the machine efficiently, one to turn the handle and put the eggs onto the machine, the other to take them as they came off the rollers into a wire basket. I was usually assigned to the latter task.

  In the winter of 1954 Mitru and my mother came separately to Frogmore, he from Ballarat and she from Melbourne. They had quarrelled and they quarrelled again at Frogmore, with each other and with my father. Mitru decided it would be best for him to leave, so my father took him on the motorbike to Castlemaine station where he could catch a train to Melbourne. Agitated, my father rode at 130 kmh with Mitru complaining all the while that he would prefer to drive than to fly. In Castlemaine, my father went to the market and filled two sugar sacks with groceries and fruit. He slung one over each shoulder and rode home, again at speed. Over and again he asked himself why had it all turned out so? When would he be free of these troubles?

  Between Maldon and Baringhup, on a thickly wooded stretch of road, his heavy Sunbeam developed speed wobble on a corner and became impossible to control. Rather than hit a tree he jumped from the motorbike at 100 kmh, crashing into the undergrowth. When he recovered consciousness he saw that his leg hung limply, held only by the skin, his shin bone protruding through. It was broken in three places. A passer-by took him to hospital in Maldon from where he was transferred by ambulance to Bendigo Base Hospital.

  A policeman came from Maldon to tell my mother. She went to Lillie’s to ask Tom if he would drive us to Bendigo. He agreed, but only reluctantly, so intense was his dislike of my mother. When we saw my father he was in considerable pain despite doses of morphine, and barely conscious.

  My mother was stricken with remorse, realising her part in the state of mind which caused him to speed. The next day, using the telephone at Lillie’s, she contacted Mitru who took the next train to Moolort and then walked the six kilometres to Frogmore. He stayed until his brother came, looking after the hens and riding my father’s other motorbike to Maryborough for supplies. I was nervous riding with Mitru and entreated him to slow down on the gravel roads. When I rode with my father, no matter how fast he drove, I always urged him to drive faster.

  Hora gave up his job in a knitting mill in North Melbourne and came to Frogmore to care for me and to look after the farm. Mitru had gone, but my mother was still there. Hora disliked her and did not respect her. During the three weeks or so that she stayed, his frustration with her grew intense because she did nothing to help care for me. He did everything: made my meals, washed my clothes and prepared my school lunches.

  It was a time when I was especially fond of oranges. Hora made sure that I had one to take to school each day. He stored them in the living room, and each day he packed one with my lunch. Soon he noticed that my mother was eating as many as I was and this made him angry. His anger was sharpened by the fact that he too had an intense desire for oranges at that time— perhaps because he had forbidden himself any—but had forgone the pleasure of eating even one. ‘Take one or two,’ he said to my mother. ‘But not so many. Leave them for Raimond.’

  It was not easy for Hora to bring those oranges to Fr
ogmore. The Sunbeam was wrecked and the Bantam was broken down. When he got the parts he needed to repair the Bantam from Castlemaine and had them laid out ready to work, Jack flew off with one and dropped it in the paddock where it was impossible to find. So Hora travelled by train to Maryborough from Moolort station. Each week he carried groceries, fruit and anything else we needed, in a heavy sack on his back from Moolort to Frogmore.

  My mother was unmoved by his efforts. When he reprimanded her for eating the oranges he had saved for me she abused him from the bedroom, calling him a dictator and a swine.

  Hora was particularly tense and disheartened at the time because a disease had attacked the hens. It caused their legs to weaken to the point where they could not stand and their beaks to twist, the top one in one direction, the bottom in the other, so they could not eat. As soon as a hen weakened, other hens rushed to peck it, often pulling out its entrails through its backside. The sight of hens running around the yard fleeing a merciless flock determined to peck out their innards was a wretched sight. Each day there were fifteen or twenty newly sick hens. Hora could not bear to kill them individually, so he buried them alive in order to prevent the disease from spreading to the entire flock. A few shovels of dirt covered the hens but they moved until the weight of earth made this impossible. The task, and especially the sight of the moving earth, sickened him.

  Hora’s low spirits over these and other matters heightened his impatience with my mother. The hostility between them created tension between him and me which my mother intentionally aggravated.

  ‘You are a swine,’ I told him one day. ‘Mummy says you are and Mitru says it too.’

  ‘What does your father say?’ he asked.

  ‘He said nothing,’ I replied, pleased that it was true, but annoyed that my honesty had denied me the chance to get the better of him. I knew that my father’s opinion was the one that mattered to Hora. Later he told my father that if I had said that he had also called him a swine, he would have left immediately for Melbourne.