The Waters Under the Earth

My father was for years a remittance man in his own country. In earlier times, when Australia was a colony, wealthy British families sent their unruly sons here, and supported them by instalment, so long as they stayed on the far side of the world. My father’s family extended this tradition, in the late 1920s, within a place they thought of as itself an outpost, by forcing him to move 400 miles north of Sydney, to an isolated part of the coast of New South Wales. They bought him a plantation there, beyond a small town, up among the eucalyptus hillsides, and above an empty sea, on condition that he not return to the city. And when he risked losing this property, to further gambling and carousing, they set him up again, rather than have the embarrassment of him in the harbour-side avenues of Vaucluse.

It was apparently a torment for my father to be tethered outside Sydney, despite the perfect sub-tropical climate into which he had been sent. He knew the beauty of that place, Korora, but must have felt, in the folded heat of one of its steep valleys, of an afternoon, as if life had moved to another shore. Everything seemed embalmed in a bright stagnant fluid, where the occasional bubble broke loose, and that was all.

My mother, in telling me of the early days of her friendship with my father, whom she had met on the coast, remembered how whenever he began to slip beyond her into drunkenness he would mutter about the Metropole Hotel, which once stood at the centre of the city, and would name the mates he imagined lining the bar. All of them, she said, had easily lost contact with him.

When he did break the family’s edict and return to Sydney, on two or three occasions while his father lived, it was never unobtrusively enough. So my grandfather, a much tougher man than his son, although at times equally a drunkard, could at once have his will re-enforced on my father, through hired men, without even needing to appear. Within a day or two of arriving in town, my father was debarred and brusquely treated in all of the better drinking places. And then he was found: if not among the potted palms and marble of the Metropole or of Adams’s Hotel, at a bar somewhere, perhaps down by the produce markets, with some immediate cronies. He would have looked like a marionette that for the moment was able to hold itself upright on its own strings, as I have so often seen him, his face foolish with the effort of keeping its features in balance. Or he was found collapsed at a tram stop or in a park. Wherever it was, unknown hands hauled him to his feet, straightened him up, put a ticket into his pocket, and with his kitbag forgotten about, loaded him onto the early evening train from Central. All of this without his grasping the extent of the conspiracy ranged against him. He woke in the morning to the guard’s impatience, and was urged to step down onto a small platform, and he sat there on a bench until he came to himself, out among the wide-open paddocks, and in the immense light.

This used to happen long before his life with our family: it was after his first wife and children had gone, and had cut off all contact with him. He was then receiving a monthly allowance from his father, as a reminder of their agreement, which continued for years, even after the plantation was well able to pay.

My father never attempted to escape the constriction he felt in this arrangement by offering to leave Australia entirely. He must have known that he was too hampered in his ‘weakness for drink’ to be a traveller and survive in foreign places. He had read and reread his Robert Louis Stevenson, and so could have visualised himself becoming stranded and confused, as desperately lost as those men who had to live ‘on the beach’ at Papeete, in the story ‘The Ebb-Tide’.

From the time of his arrival at the plantation, when in his late twenties, my father’s only contact with his previous life was through letters from two of his sisters, who remained spinsters and who always lived together. One or other sister would correspond with him every fortnight, and as regularly he replied. He wrote to them in the week of his death, when in his seventies.

It was a strict condition of my aunts for these letters that nothing they might think ‘unpleasant’ and nothing complaining should be mentioned; otherwise, there would be a drawn-out silence. I became aware that such a punishment had occurred, more than once, when I was a boy, and I remember the anxiety my father then showed, in asking about or watching for the mail.

He himself entirely believed in his sisters’ ideal of reticence (since it accorded with his imaginings of himself as a ‘gentleman’), but it was part of his nature that he still must betray this – that he must cheat on any agreement. He felt, I suppose, that the odds were always too much against him. So his sisters, despite their implicit sympathy, had to be subtly reminded of how the all-but perfect trajectory of his decline – as things would undoubtedly go on – was a farce they too, in their time, had helped to stage. I think my father wished that everyone he could possibly incriminate in his failure, however unreasonably, should know of and carry an apportioned blame. Always in those letters of his, as I was later to read, he would manage to insinuate, with a seeming unconsciousness, details implying his frustration, and fleeting innuendoes about the past, and some fine casuistry, in his self-exoneration, before the long passages that served for smoothing-over, and his affectionate wishes.

‘Your father writes such clever letters,’ Margaret, my favourite aunt, said to me, with an edge I thought, during one of my childhood visits to Sydney. I saw she had an example of these in hand, and was skimming it warily – sipping it, as though with lips that tested something hot. Then she appreciated aloud a passage of his elaborate prose, and sighed quickly over a nicely-turned anecdote, before folding it all firmly away. (His sisters’ letters to him, none of which my mother kept, would have been full of family chauvinism, and of the sentimentalities of positive thinking.)

I was in my forties, and Margaret, the last of that family, had died, when I discovered the manner in which my father had written to his sisters. I sat on the stripped-off mattress in her room, now at a nursing home, sorting through her papers, and I recognised of a sudden a shockingly gnarled, ornate handwriting, that was like twisted matchsticks. The bundled letters were all from the late fifties and early sixties, and had apparently been kept because they mentioned some small triumphs of his, when we were living in government housing on the edge of a country town – with his flowers, in the local agricultural show, or his garden, photographed for the council’s calendar, or for the butcher’s – and sometimes of mine, at school, or of my brothers’, their more practical achievements. (These were much contrasted with mine, to my disadvantage, I was still pained to see.) And as I read those pages they seemed to belly like sails in my hands, in their gusts of self-pity and frustration.

My father belonged among the generations of Australians whose ideal of behaviour was their image of an English gentleman. The gentleman was proverbial in this country until the nineteen-fifties, invoked in homes, in schools, in the streets. (As a boy, I heard a prostitute in Sydney shout after someone, ‘You ain’t no gentleman!’) Those who experienced this ideal through their imaginative reading, as my father did, were surely the most susceptible to it. (My father was never influenced by the precepts of his family; he might have been slightly more so by those of his private school.) Obviously, he wanted to conform to the gentlemanly image, or at least to some part of it, for the sake of his self-respect, but what was unusual about him was the intensity of the fantasy he created around this idea of himself. It was something he single-mindedly reaffirmed, in all of his rituals, every day. Although, the gentleman as someone considerate of others was not his concern; it was only the gentleman as possessing a certain manner, a style, that preoccupied him.

On his first plantation, which was already established when my grandfather bought it, mainly with banana palms, but also with mango and papaya trees, my father could leave nearly all of the work to labourers. He spent most of the day on the verandah of his ‘bungalow’, as he would have liked to think of that tin-roofed weatherboard shack, with verandahs along two of its sides, giving occasional instructions to a foreman. The place had a galvanised-iron watertank, on a wooden stand, and a vegetable garden close by. Built on posts at the front, it stood almost in the shiny, steaming plantation, which rose abruptly on the hillside behind it – a horde of upright, broad leaves, quickly-tattered, quickly replaced, each one like the flourish of a man-sized New Guinea shield. Downhill, there was a view across an orange dirt road, through a widening, forested valley, with its cannon-bursts of dark eucalyptus foliage rising onto the sky, out to a vast sea.

On those verandahs, moving from the sun, my father spent his days reading, having had sent from libraries, or on account from second-hand dealers, many literary novels, and some histories, biographies, and Latin classics. With his legs out in a planter’s chair and a glass on the arm beside him, he paced himself so as not to become fully drunk until late afternoon, or else not until he was in the town, at the bar.

These habits of my father were known to the man who would become my maternal grandfather, and to his grown sons, at the next plantation, further into the hills. (All of the hillsides around there, in the coastal range, had their northern ridges and gullies, to about two-thirds of their height, taken over by banana plantations, in orderly rows, below the dark-blue, corroded skyline of eucalyptus forest.) That next family, as well as being growers, were the district’s produce carriers, who shifted truck-loads of fruit to the railway. They would regularly call on my father, either to load-up, or for payment, or with some neighbourly advice. Being hard-working German on the husband’s side, Scottish on the wife’s, they were derisive at the dinner table about what they saw as the profligacy and pretension of my father’s way of life. This was how my mother, twenty-one at the time, coming home on her days off from working as a housekeeper in another town, first heard of her future husband.

My father, often wanting to drink in the town at night, would afterwards have to drive back, along the highway, and then on a steep, dark road that was almost a lane. He usually gave up, along the way, pulling over by the roadside trees, and would sleep there until well into the morning; until the sun rose high enough from the sea to reach him, tilted beneath the undergrowth.

I don’t know how many accidents my father had, although he owned a series of cars – Buicks and Studebakers – but surprisingly none can have been too serious. All of this was later thought shameful, and a temptation of fate to speak lightly about, by my mother. She did say that he was a fool ever to have started out from the town on those evenings, or even to have left home, and admitted that he had had all kinds of mishaps on the way. Among these, I gathered, were his running into livestock, for which he was fined, pulling into places where he became bogged-down, and leaving the rear of the car too far out, when he had stopped, with a violent result.

There is one notorious story about his driving that was still raised in the town when I was a boy. I would hear people reminiscing and laughing over what they called his ‘last ride’. When I think of this story, I also think of the bushmen’s poem, ‘The Man from Snowy River’, which tells of a stockman careening on horseback down a precipitous, stony hillside in pursuit of wild horses, or of a valuable runaway among them, while the rest of the party reined back and held their breaths.

He sent the flint-stones flying, but the pony kept its feet,
It cleared the fallen timber in its stride,
And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat –
It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.
Through the stringybarks and saplings, on the rough and broken ground,
Down the hillside at a racing pace he went;
And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound
At the bottom of that terrible descent.

I think of this because my father’s ride was the very opposite of such an heroic one. It was bungling and inadvertent, risible, and quite useless – and yet it exemplifies something about him that was more than just these things. It was a debacle, but one that he must try to redeem, with a gesture.

On his way home that night, going too fast, my father drove his car over the side of the steep road and plunged down a forty-five degree slope through someone’s banana plantation. Swaying and sliding on the easily knocked-down palms, that are fibrous and slippery, these accumulating beneath him, he tobogganed all the way to within a few yards of a lighted back door, at the bottom of the long hill. In the sudden quietness, after the regular swishing fall of the swathe of trees, and the clang and scrape of the rear of his car on stony ground, a young woman had gradually appeared in the light, with a child caught up in her arms. My father is supposed to have struggled out of the car, which was prised apart from the earth like a mouth filled with a gag, and steadying himself on its open door to have raised his hat and said, with a slight bow – a slur was usually affected here, in the telling – ‘My dear madam, I stand – abjectly before – you to apologise for this un – forgivable but, I can assure you, quite – unintentional – intrusion.’ Or words of that kind. It sounds like him.

From then on, my father had to rely on his workmen, or on someone else, to drive him home. He did buy another car, but often on the day following a binge he would be at the roadside, hitching a lift – usually from one of my mother’s family – going to collect it.

When I was a child, my father had another plantation, in a different part of the district, about three miles inland from the town, and his solution to his transport problem in those days was to own an ex-racehorse (a very fine animal, it was said), which would bring him home, slumped in the saddle. God knows how he climbed on board, let alone stayed there. Getting him seated must have been done with much staggering about and hilarity, among his helpers, in the backyard of the pub. The horse trotted back, joggling its dozing rider, along the side of the road, through occasional headlights. It came in the left-open gate of the property, and strode upwards on a track through the paddocks, to our lighted front door, and neighed, and my mother would go out and drag my father from his place, his head dangling beside the mane. (He had often lost his hat; it was sometimes returned to him. ‘This your old man’s, missus?’) She was always as disgusted with him, I remember, as she was solicitous for ‘the poor creature’, the horse.

My father was not by a long way the only drunkard on the roads in that place and time. I can see, from a later period, his sudden complete soberness, one morning, after a neighbour told us the news about three of his drinking mates, with whom he had been the night before. These men, riding in one car after closing time, in heavy fog, had missed the approach to a bridge, burst through guide-posts, and gone straight down into deep water. All were drowned; all had had families. My father came home that night incoherent from celebrating their memory.

As for his other interest, which always came off second-best, his reading, it would still be fair to say that he was formidably well-read. This seems the right word for such a jealously-possessed distinction; for such condescending knowledge. He used to hint (as I visualised it) at many mysterious corridors he had been down, in a great, rambling house of books, which was his by right of long and solitary habitation. At times, for me, who was interested, he would briefly open a room I imagined there, take something from a shelf, reminisce aloud over it, then put it back, and put off the light.

When I wanted to read these books, almost all of them had gone – they were ‘lost’ he said, which meant sold-off, mostly, or eaten by white ants, or mildewed, or abandoned in moving.

Over the years, I gathered a lot about my father’s reading. It had been done mainly in the time of his exile, or earlier, when he had had more youthful avidity. He was able to refer, I learned, to the whole rugged landscape of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, for instance – he could recount the plots of Quentin Durwood, Ivanhoe, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy, Waverley, and probably others, because his family had owned a set of these, out of nationalistic pride. Under questioning, as I grew up, I also found he was able to make knowledgeable remarks about seemingly anything by Fielding, Jane Austen, Dickens (whose most quoted book was Pickwick Papers), Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Kipling, Hardy. He revered, above all, Stevenson, for his style, and particularly The Master of Ballantrae, but he commended everything by that author, including the stories and essays, and what I later found very minor books, Catriona, St Ives, The Black Arrow. Conrad, too, was spoken of reverently – a tone that only books could elicit from him – and Bennett; but also Galsworthy, Wells and Maugham. He admired at least the first few novels by D.H. Lawrence. However, he had a particular dislike for James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield – he detested, I should think, modernist self-consciousness. In his last years I can remember him reading Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Patrick White and Pasternak’s Nobel Prize novel Dr Zhivago (though normally he had no time for anything translated). Of books in the British tradition, the one he most often ended up calling his favourite was Vanity Fair. Anything he really liked he read repeatedly, always in a manner that suggested he was merely glancing down the page, in search of something, before quickly turning it over. He appeared genuinely not to enjoy lighter fiction. Among American authors, I found, over the years, he had read Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain (including the less usual novels), at least some of Henry James, and, not long after they appeared, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. He quoted most often, of course, from Poe, the most theatrical of them.

Remembering this last-mentioned enthusiasm, I took him, when he was aged and in the nursing home, in the early seventies, a collection of Poe’s short stories which was apparently my idea, at the time, of invalid’s food. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, accepting this, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ – ‘I know something about that sort of experience.’ The allusion, to being buried alive with only sherry for comfort, was the one reference he ever made to me about his ‘banishment’. I knew the whole story, however, by then, and it seemed, on the day, that this remark was a little too self-serving, too self-dramatising, too sentimental to let pass. Before I could consider, I had retorted with an adaptation of the first line of the story, in our old quoting, competitive way – ‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato they had borne as they best could,’ I reminded him. He looked startled, and immediately ashamed, and after a moment said, ‘I think ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’ is the one I would like to read again. Thank you for bringing this.’ Poetry was not his usual reading, although he had a good memory for many passages of it. These he admitted came mainly from anthologies, like Palgrave’s or Wavell’s. He seems to have read, in their own books, only a couple of the more boisterous, ‘manly’ poets. Browning and Kipling (whose very names seem participles), and also A.E. Housman. I have heard him declaim, for seemingly no reason, while walking in the house: ‘What’s become of Waring/ Since he gave us all the slip,/ Chose land-travel or seafaring…/ Rather than pace up and down/ Any longer London town?’ Or in an exaggerated, sententious tone: ‘As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man –/ There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:/ That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,/ And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire…’

(Of course, I found the exact form of his allusions, and who they were from, and was reminded of most of them, only much later, in my own browsing.)

My father often referred to the short stories of Henry Lawson, and claimed their author was by far the best Australian writer, as long as he stayed with that medium. When my father was a boy, my grandfather had pointed out Lawson to him on a city street, whom they saw was cadging money for drinks from passers-by, and he told my father this was a great man, and had gone over and fervently pressed paper money into the writer’s hand. My father remembered Lawson’s buffoonish, bleary salute.

In my teenage years, my mother confided to me, prompted by some association – as she dabbed gentian violet on bleeding oyster cuts in my hands and knees, after I had come home from the beach – that my father had had one other diversion in his early days on the coast. She said he was known to have joined in nude swimming parties. I sustained for a little while the shocked pause she expected. Then I found, in answer to my irritating questions, that these were held at isolated coves along the coast and on the banks of creeks, in the summer evenings. The participants amounted to three or four men and the daughters of some local dairy farmers. The entire purpose of her telling me this was to say that such behaviour was disgusting, when people had ‘all that hair’ on their bodies. (This conversation would be the extent of my sexual education from her.) She also told me that my father had been known for ‘showing off’ on such occasions, but because of her relative lack of embarrassment with this part of the story – indeed, her slight relief – I think she believed she was referring to demonstrations of his famous swimming prowess.

(My father loved the surf, and would swim fearlessly in heavy breakers, at the town beach, when everyone else had obeyed the order to come out. My mother, who never learned to swim, could remember life-savers blowing whistles and gesturing furiously at him, a dark spot out among the smoky, crashing sea, and him ignoring them, until they got the belt-man ready. When he then walked nonchalantly up the beach and was berated by an official, he told this man, inappropriately, to ‘Bloody well mind your own business.’ People had stood around in towels, glaring at him, or grinning.)

Such a small town scandal as that about his nude swimming must have helped cause my mother’s long resistance to her suitor. But she told me at another time that for all his faults my father had never been ‘a ladies’ man’. I can imagine he was not – he could hardly have been considered fun by the sort of young woman who would join his friends and him naked on the beach: not by the normal, hedonistic, and therefore moody, essentially conservative country girl, of the time. Not with his disconcertingly educated demeanour, his elaborate but faintly mocking ‘good manners’, his looks that were too peculiar even to be called ugly. And not when he preferred to be drunk by the end of the evening.

My father’s ideal woman was the person who was always closest to him, from his point of view: his elder sister, Margaret. She was a spinster because of a broken engagement, and because of then having had to look after her invalid mother for years. But she was attractive, slim, witty, impeccable; ‘someone who never went out without gloves,’ as she was described to me. She was always referred to by my father as ‘a lady’. He used very cruelly and pointedly to say, at home, ‘My sister Margaret, who is a lady, of course…’

My father once told me that he could never be called a drunkard while ever his shoes were clean. He remained fastidious to the end about cleanliness and dress. In his country role, he wore pressed khaki cotton trousers and an immaculate white shirt (my mother’s work), a tweed jacket, often a tie, highly polished short riding boots or brogues, and a grey felt hat. He smoked constantly, mostly a pipe. One hand was always kept elegantly in the pocket of his jacket: wherever he was walking, even in the house, and even between courses at dinner, or while drinking tea, he would be idly turning over and over a lighter or some coins there.

His appearance was not only unusual for the care that he took with it. He had a long, bony face (which in age developed a warp, like an image in a flawed mirror), a great French aquiline nose, that had been broken, long ears, and an extraordinarily high-domed forehead. He looked like the classic illustrations of Sherlock Holmes, slightly caricatured; and he wore his hair, that receded at the temples, brushed back tightly in the Holmesian style. But this first general impressiveness was then spoiled, because beneath the striking brow his eyes were small, dark and wary, and his mouth was thin and hard. While his head was long and narrow, his body was barely of average height, for the time – about five foot eight inches – and was stocky and strong, when he was younger. He was always sun-browned, but close-up had fine dark freckled spots all over him, like foxing.

Despite his looks, my father was vain. He said on numerous occasions that a doctor in the army had remarked to him on never having previously seen a cranium so large and finely-shaped as his, and had taken its measurements. He was vain about his auburn hair, which shone like French-polished timber, and which he treated every day with Bay Rum and brushing, and about his well-kept hands – he always carried a nail file in his pocket. He was even vain about his feet, and once when drunk and in a good mood took off a shoe to draw his family’s attention to his foot’s elegant silhouette.

My father’s expression, at first sight, mixed intellectual penetration with arrogance, but this look was undermined, too, on acquaint­­­ance, as one became aware that beneath it there came and went a secretive discomfort. There was always about him the subtle embarrass­ment, the shiftiness, of his conscious moral weakness.

With his great facility for the cutting remark, with his instinct for one’s vulnerability, with the constant edge of cynicism beneath his politeness, he was not a prospect the ordinary country girl would have been quick to claim, nor an older woman, looking for comfort. My mother was only in her background an ordinary person.

Most striking of all my father’s attributes, for me, however, apart from his profligacy, was his sense of humour, which was copious and always surprising – although it was often so private as to be narcissistic. His humour usually passed everyone by, in the company he kept, but this never deterred him, at all. I discovered it was a good thing it was missed, many times, because of its dismissive implications.

I was curious about my father, and was struck by the things he said, and used to puzzle over them. As an adult, prompted by chance associations, I still sometimes recall his remarks, and only now see the point of many of them. His humour was almost invariably based in language, in puns and literary references. It was a solitary pleasure, like a crossword puzzle, employed for his self-regard. I think he enjoyed it when others were not able to understand him.

Once, my mother was haranguing my father, who was drunk, at the dinner table, and he took up some cutlery, to begin to eat. As he did so, he explained to me, in a stage whisper, ‘I can only look on this Gorgon in the bowl of my spoon.’

(While he enjoyed confronting others, he quickly withdrew if effectively confronted. He hated dissension.)

Another time, my father came into the kitchen, embarrassed after a heavy drinking bout; hungover, on a spring morning. Looking out of the window, at a brilliant frost, that made a golden patina on the paddocks, he sighed, in the hope of some leniency from my mother. ‘Look at all that,’ he said wearily – ‘much adew about nothing.’

In the fifties, when we lived in the town, my mother one night commented that she had seen a newly-arrived Jewish couple in the main street. She had seen them previously, and was interested because of having worked for a Jewish family, and because Jews were then almost unknown in the countryside. These new people had come to run a small motel, she had heard. They had a child, and were, my mother said, a close couple – she had been moved by the parents holding hands, though middle-aged, while out walking. My mother returned to this subject, in roundabout ways, over several nights. She imagined the newcomers must be refugees, they seemed so foreign. (The terrible revelations concerning the Jews that came with the end of the war were then not ten years behind us.) No doubt my father thought she was carrying on sentimentally, over this couple’s ‘display’, as he would have called it.

A few days after my mother’s remarks, I met my father by chance in the main street, after school. We never went out as a family, and it was unusual for me even to come across him, like this, while on an errand. He stepped out of the newsagent’s with a paper, already slightly stupefied by drink. ‘What are you up to, boy?’ he said, making a good- humoured public display. He took hold of the back of my neck with a cleft hand, as he often did, and walked me along the street a little. I could smell the beer, and tried for a moment to wriggle free. ‘I want you to go home,’ he announced redundantly, ‘and give your mother a hand. Help with preparing the dinner. Get the wood chopped for the bath…’ Just then there appeared before us the Jewish family, as they’d been described at home – their stockiness, heavy clothing, and round glasses. They were coming along under the awnings, among the shoppers. The small, walking child was a girl. My father paused, as they passed, touched his hat, and introduced himself politely, but with a detectable drunkenness. He invited the newcomer and his wife to the lounge bar for a drink, if they should be passing the hotel. (I remember this because I was embarrassed.) The strangers were startled, and impatient. The man shook his head, maybe muttered, looked away. All three continued moving, sidling past us. Perhaps this was because, despite his well-meaning tone, they were taken aback by my father’s introductory remark. Only recently I understood what he had said: it had seemed merely foolishness at the time. What he must really have commented was: ‘Ah, the duet – and the Jewette!’ Which is why, even though he had been ignored, I noticed that my father was, for the moment, pleased with himself.

He was constantly alert for the chance of a pun or an allusion. It was as if he thought these were evidence of a superior inward life. Yet when, as a teenager, I cheekily responded to one of his word-plays by enquiring whether or not he agreed that the pun was the lowest form of humour, as the cliché had it, he said seriously, ‘I do, indeed.’ He continued: ‘It’s a pity that authors and critics don’t believe this, also. We would have been spared a great deal of James Joyce, if that were the case.’ (At the time, he somehow had Ulysses, which was banned in Australia, on his shelves.)

Strangely, it was this small passing admission which first made me conscious of my father’s deep pessimism about himself, beneath what I had taken to be an invulnerable conceit.

In his earlier days, after he had been living for more than ten years on the coast, my father thought he saw the way to escape his exile, when war was declared. He imagined he could exonerate himself by joining the army, and even win a sympathy that might be played upon – or such was my mother’s perception, at the time, which she always maintained. She was then still solidly resisting the ten years’ siege that he had laid about her. On hearing of the war, she came home to her parents from the city, where she had been working for almost the whole of the time she had known him – pursued there by his letters and telephone calls – only to find that he was rushing away, and into uniform. Almost immediately he regretted what he had done. ‘His feet became very chilly,’ my mother said, fifty years later, with a moonlight smile. ‘He thought the war would be over quickly. Misjudging his bets, as usual.’ Once under canvas, my father realised the fighting could go on for years, and because in 1939 he was thirty-seven, he need not have felt the pressure to be drafted, at all.

Soon there was talk around the Sydney Agricultural Show­ground, where he and many other troops were camped, that an overseas posting was imminent for his division. This news did win sympathy from my mother. The war seems to have played greatly on her religious, apocalyptic imagination. She agreed to come back to the city to visit him. And there, when they came out of a cinema one rainy evening, to hear newsboys shouting about some fresh disaster, my parents were suddenly overcome with emotion for each other, and declared themselves engaged.

Still, the wedding did not occur in a hurry: it was not performed until 1941, when my father was at last definitely about to embark, for New Guinea. My mother, in the meantime, withdrew again to her parents’ farm. She might have been prepared to lend an ear in my father’s troubles, but certainly no other organ.

Earlier, when my father had first joined up, and announced to his sisters where he was, a further extent of his miscalculation was revealed to him. His sisters let it be known that their father had recently collapsed and was now seriously ill in his bed, from which he refused to be moved. So my father at once requested leave, and went around in uniform to his boyhood home. But those same women, always so excusing, so blind-eyed in his direction (as long as nothing was actually spoken about), now had to be unmoved as servants, in conveying the old man’s refusal of anything to do with ‘some prodigal son’s return.’ My father was turned away by them, on the doorstep – as he was again immediately after the war, when his mother was dying. (It had become a family tradition by then, he explained to me, decades later. This was once at twilight, the confidential hour, on the verandah of the nursing home, during what I think of as the New Frankness, which came upon him and Margaret in their final years. He spoke flippantly, with a half smile, but above that he gave me a sharp, embarrassed glare.)

When my father left the North Coast, answering with such eagerness the call to arms, he put his property up for sale, without waiting for an outcome. It had only recently been transferred into his name – a premonitory, tax-avoiding gesture by his family. The first offer, clearly an opening move, was niggardly, for the large tract of land he owned, yet he accepted it. I suppose he was surrounded then by many drinking mates – people of his own ‘kind’, at last – in those transient days, before the plain of war, and needed money in his pockets to make an impression. My mother said that the troops camped in Sydney behaved ‘disgracefully’, whenever they went on leave.

Word of my father’s latest dereliction, the ‘throwing away’ of his land, reached my grandfather, who was a property speculator and real estate agent, through his connections, and it would have been this that caused him to harden his feelings against his enlisted and only son. It was certainly, my aunts believed, the cause of what almost immediately followed, the final hardening of his arteries.