Romulus, My Father Read online

  As is often the case, things came to a head over an incident that was relatively trivial in itself. Both Hora and I particularly enjoyed a chicory coffee-substitute, but before he let me drink it he insisted that I drink a cup of milk, fresh from the cow. Generally I did so willingly, because I liked milk. But on one occasion I resisted. From her bedroom my mother heard me complaining and told Hora to leave me to do as I pleased, berating him with cutting sarcasm.

  ‘Shurrup!’ he shouted at her. ‘Not one more word. You should be here in the kitchen making your son’s breakfast and his sandwiches. Not me.’ Hora had had enough. He could barely control himself.

  ‘And who are you to give me orders?’ she yelled. The Commandant of Camp Frogmore?’

  ‘Listen to me,’ he warned, in a tone that left my mother in no doubt about how gravely the situation had deteriorated. ‘If you don’t leave this house today, I’ll take a stick and break all your bones. Leave! Now! Leave me alone with Raimond.’

  That afternoon my mother went to Lillie’s and Tom drove her to Castlemaine where she caught the train to Melbourne. For a short time she lived alone in South Yarra and then with Mitru in Burnley.

  After my mother left, things settled between Hora and me and we resumed our previously affectionate relationship, although it was somewhat changed because, in loco parentis, he sometimes found it necessary to smack me. ‘Pass auf mein lieber Fritz’ (Watch out my dear Fritz), he warned when I was sailing close to the wind. He worked hard to keep the farm going, cared for me and drove me to school on the motorbike when it rained.With their clay topsoil the roads became so treacherous that this was no small task. Every second weekend we washed eggs, for which he paid me at first a penny and later threepence per thousand. I saved to buy cement and bricks to build a cubbyhouse. As we lay in bed we talked for hours about how I should build it and with which materials, but after twenty thousand eggs I lost heart and spent my meagre earnings on comics.

  Hora and I lived together for three months while my father was in hospital. When he came home I was happy, but also a little sad. It was the only time I remember when my love for Hora and for my father caused confused emotions in me towards either. Jack, however, was simply elated. He raised his crest, danced and made an endless racket. He kissed my father and lay on his back to be stroked, all this literally for hours. Hora stayed for some weeks and then moved to Maryborough to take a room at an Italian wine bar which the locals called a wine saloon. He often came to visit and lived with us for a time when he was out of work.

  My father and I lived contentedly at Frogmore. We seldom quarrelled and when he punished me I usually accepted it as just. But although I did not resent his punishments I feared them, and so I was seldom inclined to admit that I had done wrong. This always made matters worse. He hated lying and believed that only a rigorous truthfulness could give a person the inner unity necessary for strength of character. He was particularly anxious about failings in my character because he feared that I would be like my mother. Like most Europeans he believed the basic elements of character were inherited and he and I were sufficiently different for him to suspect that mine had come from the other side of the family. Sometimes this anxiety made him particularly tender, but at other times it gave an hysterical edge to his anger. It flared when I took Schwaba’s aftershave and again when I took a cut-throat razor which he had brought from Germany.

  He didn’t shave with the razor, but kept it in its box wrapped in tissue paper. The craftsmanship and fine materials that went into its making impressed him and he often showed it to visitors, inviting their admiration for it. When he was in hospital with his broken leg, I took the razor to carve some wood. I hacked away cheerfully until I looked at the blade and noticed that its cutting edge was as serrated as a saw blade. I dared not put it back where I had found it because I knew what I would be in for when my father discovered it.

  Anxiously, I threw the razor in the dam.

  It was months before my father noticed that it had gone. Fortunately Hora was staying with us when he did. My father searched for the razor but soon suspected that I was responsible for its disappearance. He asked where it was. I said that I didn’t know. He asked me again, and then he realised I was lying.

  ‘Raimond, it doesn’t matter about the razor. But you must not lie. That is worse than any damage you might do. Even if you burn the house down, you must tell me the truth. If you do there will be no further trouble.’ He spoke calmly.

  I knew that my father valued truthfulness above most things, and that he would never willingly lie, but I found it hard to believe that if I simply admitted that I had carved wood with his beloved razor I would escape punishment. When he said that I would even escape punishment for burning the house down provided I freely admitted to it, my incredulity put me beyond the reach of his powers of persuasion. So I continued to deny all knowledge of what had happened to the razor.

  Three things fed my father’s anger: his knowledge that I was lying, his fear for my character and his dismay that he had lost something precious. He smacked me so hard that it actually hurt while he did it, rather than afterwards, despite all the drama and commotion.

  Within a couple of minutes, Hora intervened. ‘Come now, Gaita. That’s enough.’

  My father ignored him, but was sufficiently distracted to loosen his grip on my wrist. I broke free and ran from the house into the paddock where I stayed until evening, returning only when my father called repeatedly into the darkness for me to come to dinner. I knew that he would not call me to eat and then smack me—at least not while he could keep his temper—and I trusted Hora to protect me if he lost it. All the next day my father searched for his razor. I roamed the paddocks again, for I knew that he could break into a rage at any moment.

  For years he asked me what I did with the razor. I never told him.

  By this time conditions at Frogmore had become ever more primitive, but my father and I did not mind. The house had deteriorated. Some of the joists under the floor in the hallway, the kitchen and the bedroom had given way and, in those areas, the floor had sunk below the bottom of the skirting boards. The summers were hot and the house became unbearable, driving us to sleep on a mattress under the verandah. The winters were sharp, with frosts lasting sometimes until ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. The water froze at the tap in the tank, so we filled basins the night before. In the morning, stripped to the waist, we broke the ice and washed ourselves.

  We cooked on a one-burner kerosene stove, lighting the wood-fired stove only when it was cold, and even then only occasionally. The cooking was as basic as the facility on which we did it. I cooked breakfast because I rose at 6 a.m. to listen to ‘Sunrise Trail’, a country and western program to which I often sent requests, and dinner because I could prepare it while my father worked. Our meals were not distinguished for their variety. For breakfast we invariably had two fresh eggs and coffee although I had to drink at least two cups of fresh milk before I was permitted coffee. For dinner we often ate a variation on potato soup: potato soup with meat, with baked beans, with green peas, with sweet corn, and so on. Domestic duties, washing dishes, sweeping the floor and so on, fell to me, as did the tasks of feeding the hens and collecting the eggs.

  Now that his broken leg had mended, my father decided he had had enough of poultry farming. He was, after all, a fine blacksmith. Tom Lillie had a blacksmith shop and he allowed my father to use it, charging him only for power, on condition that my father do such blacksmithing jobs as Lillie asked of him—mending gates, ploughs and so on. The blacksmith shop was small. One part of it was just large enough to house a tractor which drove an electricity generator, and the other part, used by my father, was not much bigger. It had a forge and anvil, but my father did not often use the forge. He made very little of the classical, hammer-beaten, ironwork in which he took such pride and which he crafted so superbly. Instead he made wroughtiron furniture, fly-wire doors, window screens, coffee tables and such things, which had become
fashionable in the fifties and whose steel could be turned cold by hand, in suitable jigs. It was not the work he most wanted to do, but he was very happy to be working at his trade again.

  When he first came home from hospital, his leg in plaster, my father was unable to ride the Sunbeam; it was far too heavy. He attached a U-shaped steel mount to the Bantam on which he could rest his leg and, with it stiffly to the front, level with the middle of the wheel, he rode to Castlemaine or to Maryborough for supplies, returning sometimes with sugar sacks over each shoulder, a sack on the petrol tank and a box or two of fruit tied to the back pillion.

  Each week he went into town and bought copious amounts of fruit, often by the caseload. I was unrestricted in the amount of fruit I was permitted to eat and took full advantage of it. Sometimes my father bought a rainbow cake which I especially enjoyed eating in bed on the weekends while reading my comics.

  Our life at Frogmore was spartan, but I never felt that we were poor, although I think we were judged so by others. My father had often told me of his childhood and that informed my sense of what poverty was. It wasn’t merely that we had so much more than he did as a child. More importantly, we were in need of nothing, nor did we forgo anything we desired because it was beyond our means—with the exception, for a considerable time, of a car. Apart from the car, I do not remember asking for something only to be told that we could not afford it. True, I did not ask for much, but then I had no need to. I was always adequately clothed and fed, and rich in what I most enjoyed—fruit. (Later, when I went to boarding school, my father opened an account with a fruit shop from where I bought, each week, almost twice the amount of fruit permitted the other boys.)

  Nonetheless, I looked forward to treats at Lillie’s. The farm was originally owned by Mrs Lillie and her sister Miss Collard, who inherited it from their father. Its fine stone house was surrounded on all sides by verandahs. It had a large kitchen with a long table and a comforting, big iron stove. Mrs Lillie and Miss Collard often invited me to morning or afternoon tea, always served in teacups on saucers and with cake or scones. Miss Collard made toast for me on a long wire fork placed near an open door of the stove, then served it dripping with butter she had made. She gave me recipes for cakes which I baked on the rare occasions when we lit the stove. At least ten years younger than Mrs Lillie, who was already eighty when I first met her, she did most of the cooking. She also chopped the wood, looked after the hens and collected the eggs.

  Stooped and a little shrivelled, she had, nonetheless, a very determined walk. Her heavily lined, leathery face showed her strong character and her eyes were bright, signalling her readiness for banter and mischief. But though her mind was sharp she was inclined to be vague. Once Hora came from Maryborough, calling first at Lillie’s house, dressed in slacks and a jacket. He spoke to Miss Collard who greeted him warmly, saying how nice it was to see him after all this time. Hora went to Frogmore, changed into shorts and a singlet and then returned to Lillie’s a couple of hours later. Miss Collard greeted him again. ‘How nice to see you after all this time.’

  At first he thought that she had forgotten that she had seen him only two hours before. He then realised that she took him for a different man on each occasion.

  I often accompanied Miss Collard while she did her chores and talked for hours with her. When she went out she always wore an old brown stockman’s hat. Jack liked to land on it and, whenever he could get sufficient purchase, take off with it. It was the only time I heard her swear. ‘Damn Cocky,’ she cursed under her breath. To soothe her anger at Jack, I ran as quickly as I could to retrieve her hat, usually no more than a hundred metres away.

  Despite the fact that she disliked swearing, Miss Collard was not a prude. Once I fell from my bicycle and the handlebar penetrated my leg to a depth of two or three centimetres, high on my inner thigh. When I came home from the Maldon hospital where I was stitched up, Miss Collard asked to see the wound. I showed her.

  Her eyes widened and twinkled. ‘Ooh Ah!’ she said. ‘You are very lucky.You nearly lost it. What would you do then?’

  Gently she put her hands between my legs to make sure that I had not lost it. Then she poked me and went off laughing.

  I spent much more time with Miss Collard than with Mrs Lillie, but Mrs Lillie was also kind to me and I was fond of her. Miss Collard went to bed at the same time as her hens. So did Tom who, on one occasion, when the woodpile caught fire around 5.30 on a winter’s afternoon, had to be woken to put it out. On some evenings when my father came late from Melbourne, I stayed with Mrs Lillie, who happily sat up with me and chatted. I first heard Elvis Presley singing ‘All Shook Up’ on the radio on one such evening and I noticed her bemused tolerance at my enthusiasm for this kind of music.

  Mrs Lillie and Miss Collard were naturally kind women, but their kindness to me was coloured by pity, as was the case with most women in the area who felt sorry for me growing up without a mother. My father strictly enforced his belief that I should be polite, especially to my elders, and his success in this encouraged their generosity. He was never short of offers for women to care for me. Almost always he declined them, but he was gratified and proud that they came. His pride was accentuated by his fear that without a woman’s love and attention I would grow wild and illmannered. His anxieties about this came to a head over an incident that occurred when I was eleven.

  I was friendly with a large family, a mother, two daughters and three sons who lived in Baringhup. The mother was an alcoholic, deserted by her husband who was also one. Their house was even smaller than Frogmore and just as derelict. When the girls grew older young men come from Maldon and it was rumoured that the mother allowed them to sleep with her daughters once the beer started flowing, Originally I played cowboys and other such games with the boys, but later the older daughter awakened my interest in teenage things. Sex, of course, but also, or perhaps together with that, rock and roll. We were sitting on her verandah when the radio played Elvis Presley singing ‘Baby Let’s Play House’. It excited me and awakened emotions I had never felt before. She talked to me about Presley and gave me magazines with articles about him.

  I rode my bike furiously home to Frogmore. My father was in Melbourne and wouldn’t be back until the early hours of the morning. I read the magazines, cut out some pictures, pasted them into an exercise book, and wrote a passionate text praising rock and roll in general and Presley in particular, defending him from attack by older generations who feared him as a leading figure in a movement that would overturn their values. I covered the book in brown paper and wrote a provocative title on the cover. I do not remember it exactly but it was something like ‘Elvis Presley: Devil or Liberator?’ I left the book on the kitchen table and went to bed at around two in the morning. My father read it when he came home. Next morning he was almost as angry as when I took his razor. He tore up the book. How I could have written it? Was this what I was coming to?

  I said nothing.

  My defence of Presley did not offend my father’s sense of respectability as a bourgeois ideal, for he had no such sense. It offended his ideal of the respect owed by children to their elders. His understanding of that ideal, of how properly to behave, was quite untainted by the thought that one should strive for a social status which would enable one to look down on others. He had no wish to prevent me from seeing the girl who gave me the magazines which, together with Presley’s music, had fed my minor revolt against the adult world. And had I turned my back on her because her family was destitute and had yielded to the temptations of prostitution he would have been more disappointed in me than he was when he found my book.

  Although—or perhaps because—my father had worked so hard as a boy, he asked little of me. Tom Lillie believed I was lazy, and disliked me almost as much as he did my mother, thinking, perhaps, that I was like her. But the truth is that I had virtually no interest in farm life, preferring to read. I liked living in the country and especially liked farm animals, but not in the way farm
boys did. Conscious of this and of the fact that I was the only boy in the area who did not kill rabbits even though they were a destructive pest, I took my father’s rifle and went to a hill on the far side of Cairn Curran to shoot rabbits for our dinner and for the dog.

  I reached the hill in the mid-afternoon. For the first time in my life I was really alive to beauty, receiving a kind of shock from it. I had absorbed my father’s attitude to the countryside, especially to its scraggy trees, because he talked so often of the beautiful trees of Europe. But now, for me, the key to the beauty of the native trees lay in the light which so sharply delineated them against a dark blue sky. Possessed of that key, my perception of the landscape changed radically as when one sees the second image in an ambiguous drawing. The scraggy shapes and sparse foliage actually became the foci for my sense of its beauty and everything else fell into place—the primitive hills, the unsealed roads with their surfaces ranging from white through yellow to brown, looking as though they had been especially dusted to match the high, summer-coloured grasses. The landscape seemed to have a special beauty, disguised until I was ready for it; not a low and primitive form for which I had to make allowances, but subtle and refined. It was as though God had taken me to the back of his workshop and shown me something really special.

  It was inconceivable to me that I should now shoot a rabbit. The experience transformed my sense of life and the countryside, adding to both a sense of transcendence.

  On my return, a kilometre or so from home, I saw a crescent moon sitting directly above Frogmore. The surrounding trees were a dark clump amid the silver-coloured grasses. Even from that distance I could see the light of the kerosene lamp in the kitchen. There were no other signs of human habitation and the sight provoked a surge of affection for my primitive home. I arrived to find my father crazy with worry. He had noticed that the rifle was gone, but had no idea where I went.