A Dusty Start
Dust. Red-brown dust,
on the ground, in the sky, inside the house, outside the house, dust
everywhere, on everything, in everything.
It’s my earliest
memory, from when I was about three or four years old. Once when I had been put
down for my day-sleep I got off my bed, padded across the linoleum leaving
footprints in the dust, and climbed on top of the couch under my bedroom
window, pulled aside the curtain and looked out over a bare paddock from which
wisps of dust whirled slowly, lazily up into the cloudless blue air. Why, I
wondered, did it fly up into the sky like this? The back yard of our house was
dusty, I kicked it up with every step. Rorey, our red setter, rolled in it and
shook himself as if shaking off water after a swim, though he carried a lot of
it into his doggy-smelling kennel and my clothes got covered in it when I
crawled in after him. Behind our car as my father drove over bumpy country
roads, a brown smoke-screen of dust obscuring everything. It was always hot,
dry, dusty. The rare and fleeting moments when it was cool, green, damp, and
muddy seemed unnatural. My fragmentary
memories make my early life seem like the biblical myth of human
beginnings. I came from dust. My life as
a toddler and small child was set in South Australia in the Dirty Thirties,
years of drought and financial depression; my earliest memories date from the
long summer of 1929-30.
South Australia is a
scorched, brown country. Inland, creeks
and rivers are rare; many are just meandering traces, sandy creases on the flat
landscape with occasional stagnant or sluggish pools of murky water or nothing
but hot sand, the memory of water marked
by sparse lines of scruffy gum trees. When rain falls it is sometimes monsoon-like
in ferocity, and can transform these arid remnants into raging flash
floods. In 1955, I was lucky to escape
one when I misjudged the depth and force of water as I tried to ford a creek in
the mid-north of South Australia. I felt
my little car being lifted, floating, tilting alarmingly with the water lapping
against the door only inches from my elbow.
Then miraculously the car struck land again, righted itself, and using
the battery to turn the engine, I managed to get out of harm’s way up on the
bank, where, shocked and shaking, I dried out the distributor and got the car
started and on its way again. That was one of several early near misses when my
life could have ended before it had become interesting and worth-while.
One long river that
never runs dry wanders westward across the south-east corner of the continent
from the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. It forms the border between New
South Wales and Victoria before flowing on into South Australia. This is the
River Murray. After a few hundred miles it ends its westward wanderings and
turns south towards the sea. Rather nearer the end than the beginning of this
part of its journey to the salt marsh shallows of Lake Alexandrina that
separate it from the Southern Ocean, there are several little twists and turns.
In the early days the settlers came to the river bank here to crutch their
sheep - to castrate them and cut off their tails. So this place on the River
Murray got its name – Tailem Bend.
Here, on September
22, 1926, I was born, the son of Raymond Jack Last and Vera Estelle Last,
neé Judell. I’m told I was a sickly
child weighing little more than three pounds, born prematurely and saved from
an untimely death, my mother said, by the unseasonable heat which sustained me
as though I were in an incubator. There is another story passed on to me by an
attending nurse many years later, that I was one of twins, the other being
stillborn. My mother died before I heard this story so I couldn’t ask her. My
parents were estranged when I was born, my father absent from the scene, and when
I asked him he denied it - but he was not there and the nurse was, so who is to
say? If it is true it might explain some unresolved longings I have felt all my
life, a curious sense of incompleteness.
Whatever the facts
about this story, I carry a permanent reminder of my birthplace in Tailem Bend
on the bank of the River Murray: My mother gave me my middle name, Murray, to
commemorate the fact. This middle name proved useful in Edinburgh in 2003. When
a committee was deliberating my nomination by the Usher Institute of Public
Health for the degree MD Honoris Causa at the University of Edinburgh, someone
on the committee remarked that the name ‘Murray’ indicated my connection to
Scotland. Perhaps it’s as well that I wasn’t there to reveal how I got that
name.
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| The only photo I have of me with both parents, Booleroo, early 1927 when I was 5-6 months old |
My father graduated
from the University of Adelaide medical school in 1924 and, having completed
his year of internship, was working at Tailem Bend as a locum tenens, a
relieving doctor. Soon after I was born,
he settled in general practice in Booleroo Centre, a dusty little town in the
wheat-growing district about 180 miles north of the city of Adelaide. My mother
and I, joined a little over three years later by my younger brother Peter,
lived on and off in Booleroo until the early 1930s when my parents' faltering
marriage finally failed altogether, and my mother took us away from Booleroo
Centre to return to her parents' home in Adelaide.
Memories of my early
childhood at Booleroo Centre are like bubbles that form and burst, isolated
from each other in time and place, not cohering or forming a pattern of
sequentially unfolding events. Many of
my memories are dark and unhappy – tears, shouting, tense silences, parents who
ignored me, or used me, I now realize, as a psychological weapon in their
domestic conflict of mutual hatred. That
toxic atmosphere left my childhood scarred with wounds that took decades to
heal. Perhaps some of those wounds never healed and the flaws I can identify in
my character are there wholly or partly as a result. There are some happy
memories from that time too of course, and puzzling ones, some that lingered
for many years until I forgot them or solved the riddles of misunderstood words
and phrases.
Here are some of
those memory bubbles and some of the puzzles.
 |
| Gumnuts at a stage show |
My bedroom was
decorated with prints from the Gumnut Babies, an original Australian creation,
a colour comic-book series that came out in broadsheet format with stories
beneath a series of comic strips. I don’t remember seeing that book any time
after I was able to read. (I saw one like it in an antiquarian book shop in
Sydney in the 1990s, selling for an astronomically high price). My walls held several large coloured pictures
of the Gumnut Babies, little elves with topknots and a stalk sticking up. The Gumnut babies were unclad and their
chubby bottoms gave them an erotic quality lost on small children but perhaps
appealing to the parents who read these stories to their little ones. The
sinister Bad Banksia Man lurked in a corner of one of the pictures on the
wall. I tried not to look at him or
catch his evil eye. The Gumnut babies
were probably the inspiration for my imaginary playmates, Bee and Bay, who went
everywhere with me. I had to hold doors
open for them to pass through, had to tell grown-ups not to trip over
them. Bee and Bay went away and never
came back once I had a baby brother old enough to play with me.
We traveled in an
open car with celluloid side curtains that were taken off on hot days so the
air flowed through and ruffled my hair as well as bringing in dust that got in
my eyes and up my nose. Driving from the house where we lived on the edge of
the town to the main street of Booleroo Centre, to the bank, the post office,
the hospital, I jumped up and down on the back seat, and was ordered by my
father to sit down. Metal struts held the canvas roof in place, making
convenient hand-holds for a little boy's fingers. I think it was a Chevrolet
tourer, and that it was dark blue under the dust that I cleared away by tracing
patterns with my fingers.
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| On the beach at Port Germain with my mother and Peter |
We drove from
Booleroo along the winding Gorge Road to the seaside at Port Germain. Porch a main. Why was it called a
porch, where you went into a house? It wasn't a porch, it was a beach, a wide
sandy beach where we sat in the shade of a big red white and blue striped
umbrella or under the long jetty with little pools of water at the base of the
wooden pylons supporting it, where the movement of the tides had gouged away
the sand. These were times to paddle in the warm shallows, dig in the sand, and
recover from the carsickness that marred those journeys from Booleroo to Port
Germain. Why was the sand so white on top and black just below the
surface? My Uncle Lester told me rotting
seaweed made it black. I have a vivid
olfactory memory of seaweed drying in the hot sun, an acrid antiseptic smell,
rather like some of the smells from my father's consulting room, called the surgery.
Why so many memories
of car travel? I suppose there must have been a lot of it, both locally in and
near the town where my parents lived, and back and forth between there and
Adelaide. I don’t remember any conversations, and have an impression that often
my father and mother had nothing to say to each other even on the longest
journeys.
On a night-time trip
back to Booleroo from the Mahood's property, a sheep station at Melrose in the
foothills of the Flinders Ranges, I heard the words bush and ranges and thought
they had said bush rangers, evil, violent men who robbed coaches and presumably
cars too, and I was terrified under a rug on the back seat of the car as it
bumped along. How old was I then? Four?
Peter was in a basket on the front seat so I must have been very young. How did
I know about bush rangers at that early age?
Someone must have mentioned them in conversation, and this fragment of
partially heard and misunderstood information had stayed with me.
A party of grown-ups
went bird-nesting, climbing up the trunks of ring-barked bare trees. Someone
took my hand, pushed it into hollows too small for a grown-up’s hand, to feel
for nestling budgerigars, rosellas, galahs, and sulphur-crested cockatoos. We
had a galah and a sulphur-crested cockatoo in the yard at Booleroo as well as
the red setter, Rorey. The birds had names too, but I have forgotten what they
were.
 |
| Rorey with John, aged about 3, Booleroo 1929-30 |
The inside of Rorey's
kennel smelt doggy and was as big as Dawdie Mahood’s doll's house. We went often to the Mahood’s spacious
homestead near Melrose. It was from there that one cool day when the grass was
green so it must have been late winter or early spring, August or September, we
went on a snake-killing drive, which I watched in fear with grown-ups from a
safe distance while a group of young men and teen-aged boys thrashed at the
long grass, driving snakes out to be killed. My father killed a snake in the
driveway of our house, blasted its head off with a loud explosion from his
shotgun, a great black snake, extremely venomous, its body writhing and
twisting it seemed for hours after it was dead and harmless. The little son of
the local Methodist minister, a child about my age at the time of his death a
year or so earlier, had died from snakebite. The whole district hated and
feared snakes. That little boy’s toy train set, a memorial icon of sorts, was
high on a shelf in one of the rooms in their house, but although I could look
at it I wasn’t allowed to play with it.
Yabbying was a
seasonal country pastime. We caught yabbies, freshwater crayfish or shrimps, in
a little stream somewhere in that part of the world where streams are
rare. Probably that too was near
Melrose, on the Mahood's palatial property. Something nipped my fingers as I
trailed them in the cool creek water and they stung for hours but I didn’t
complain. I felt brave keeping my suffering to myself.
Once I awoke at night
and the back veranda of the house was alive with big blue crabs, rustling
skittering things that crawled across the cement floor of the laundry from a
large wet hessian bag, then were gathered unceremoniously and with great
hilarity by raucous grown-ups, and dumped into a boiling copper cauldron in the
laundry. These crabs came from Port Germain or Port Pirie, the smelting and
mining town that also was within driving distance of Booleroo Centre. I came
out of my bedroom in my pyjamas to look at the crabs, blinking in the glare of
the back veranda lights. Was it that night somebody gave me a glass of beer to
sip? It was a frothy bitter drink that put me off beer until I was well into my
twenties. The crabs were blue, but their shells were red or pink next day when
I saw what remained of a mighty feast attended by who knows how many friends
and neighbours. How had that happened? Later I saw the same thing with
crayfish. Ah! crayfish! That's a whole
series of other memories from later in childhood, and feasts at Auntie Katie
Saunders’ home at Henley Beach, when I was old enough to know, or to work out
for myself, that cooking induced chemical changes which made the shells change
colour from blue or purple to red.
Under my bedroom
window was a piece of furniture that remained with us for many years, a set of
three wooden crates nailed together, with a hinged lid, the whole covered with
bluish paisley patterned linen. This was the box-couch. Later in childhood it
was the repository for small boys’ treasures, my Meccano and Dinkey Toys,
Peter’s train set, lead soldiers, toy animals, comics. Dividing the
compartments between Peter and me led to quarrels, when Peter complained that I
had more than my fair share. Peter often complained that I had more than my
fair share, but I don’t think it was so. Anyway, I was older, had been there
longer and logic dictated that I was bound to have collected more things in my
three and a bit extra years. At Booleroo
when I was a toddler, the box-couch was high enough so that when I climbed on
top of it I could look out the window, over wheat paddocks towards distant blue
hills..
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| A young golfer: John with his father, c 1929 |
There were golf games
at Booleroo and at Melrose with Gar Mahood, and garballs - golfballs - that he
made disappear behind his ear or mine, then plucked them out of my nose. A
photo shows that I first held a golf-club in those days, learnt how to hold it
when young enough so that I have always had an easy, fluent swing that made me
better at golf than any other sports. In the late 1950s Gar Mahood , retired by
then to a seafront flat at Henley Beach, was my patient during his terminal
illness, and was bewitched by my likeness to his friend, my father.
My father made a huge
kite of brown paper. Huge to me anyway as I knelt at one end of it while my
father, the only time I remember that he played with me, tinkered with the
struts and anchored the paper at the other end, fully six feet away in my
memory, perhaps not quite so big in reality, but large enough so that with the
string stretched taut it required all an adult’s strength to hold it in check
when the kite was flown in a strong wind in the paddock behind our house. We
sent messages up the string, pieces of paper cut out and slipped over the
string and carried up by the wind. Then the string broke and the kite flew far
away out of sight. I tramped with others across a field of stubble in search of
it, and we found it, torn and broken, far away beyond a dam at the other end of
the paddock. This must have been in winter; it was a drizzly bleak day, there
was muddy water in the dam and nobody wanted to get wet. This was perhaps when
I was four or five years old.
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| Towing the Express Wagon |
There was a
four-wheeled trolley, the Express Wagon, made of wood with metal wheels, and
the words "Express Wagon" painted in yellow on its shiny red sides.
Those words, "Express Wagon" painted on the side of the little
trolley, barely big enough for me to sit in and be pulled along, have even now
for me after more than 80 years, the emotional resonance that
"Rosebud" had for Citizen Kane in Orson Wells’s famous movie. There
is a photo of me sitting on a tricycle pulling the Express Wagon in the yard of
our house in Booleroo, when I was about 3½ or 4 years old.
I was learning words
voraciously then, and wondered about the connection between Express Wagon on my
little red trolley and State Express on red tins that had held cigarettes and
had the hypnotic tang of tobacco, sometimes also layers of fine silver foil and
tissue paper when opened while I inhaled the aroma as somebody taught me to do
- preparing for the future time when like everybody else I would be smoking
cigarettes instead of merely inhaling the aroma of tobacco. Express and red are
permanently linked by these associations, and the word ‘express’ was one of the
first words I recognized, before I learnt to read. The Express Wagon, or one
like it, remained part of childhood for years, through the later years at
Brighton where it was certainly a different one, but still called the Express
Wagon.
Those were hard
times, the years of the Great Depression. Years of drought too, with storms of
red dust filling the air, the nostrils, making Rorey rust-coloured. My mother
tried to seal the house against the dust, but it got in anyway, covering the
cream carpet in the living-room, a carpet that followed us to later homes at
Brighton and Glenelg. On windy days, the dried leaves of date palm trees
rustled. Twigs and dead branches, sometimes bigger than I was, tumbled down
from the gum trees at the entrance to the driveway from the road in front of
the house.
Men came to the door
begging meals, were willing to do any sort of odd job for a crust of bread -
chop wood, clean the car, shift heavy loads. Their faces were weather-beaten,
lined and dirty, their eyes angry, or, I now realize, sad, defeated. Some
carried their belongings in a roll slung over one shoulder, the traditional
Australian swagman's style. They smelled stale and sweaty, a different kind of
body odour from that of a maid who took me one day when she was off duty to
visit her girl friend, and was joined by two men – young men, I suppose, as the
two girls were also, but seeming old to me like the swagmen, and wicked,
talking of and doing something I didn’t understand but that seemed a bad thing
to do, though I didn’t see clearly what it was.
There is an
association in my mind between swagmen and my father's massive (to my small
person) X-ray machine, with sparks that shot out of it. Swagmen and that
sparking X-ray machine are linked memories. Perhaps there was once a swagman
patient whom I accompanied into the surgery for an X-ray. I remember chanting
"Nux Vomica" - the name of a drug in prescriptions my father
dispensed, and I remember handling shiny surgical instruments that had
mysterious uses. I have two or three of those instruments today, including a
pair of small curved surgical scissors, never discarded despite multiple moves
around the world, that I’ve used for many years to trim my finger-nails.
Close by the house at
Booleroo was a wheat paddock. One day three of us squatted in the middle in a
place where we had flattened a shelter amid the tall wheat sheaves, away from
inquisitive adult eyes, and shared secrets. The others were two girls a few
years older than I, one called Nancy, the other her friend or perhaps her
sister. The secret we shared was as old as children's curiosity. They were very
firm with me. I had to take down my pants and show them what I had between my
legs; they in turn would show me what was between their legs. This we all three
did very solemnly and so far as I recall, no touching of each other's parts. My
pants were attached to my shirt by buttons that held me together, and at that
time I was too young to manage buttons so Nancy did it for me. Nancy and I were
playmates. She occasionally took me to school with her when I was about four
years old. I sat on a seat in the back
of her classroom; but the seat had no back-rest, and when I leant back, the
seat tipped me onto my head on the floor, a frightening and painful experience
that made me cry; Nancy had to take me home, sobbing, and she was crying too.
Years later when I was a medical student, Nancy was the staff nurse in charge
of one of the wards at the Royal Adelaide Hospital; we knew each other politely
as grown-ups by then, not having met since I was about 4 or 5 and she about 8
or 9. I never reminded her, nor she me, that we had seen each other's private
parts long ago. She had become a fine handsome woman, a dedicated nurse.
Some varieties of
carbonated soft drinks came then in bottles that were sealed with a rubber ring
and a clear glass marble stopper; one broke the seal by pushing the marble down
a little, then the contents could be poured into a glass, frothing excitingly.
I coveted these shiny marbles. In my innocent curiosity, I formed the notion
that all bottles contained marbles, and I could collect as many as my heart
desired by breaking enough bottles. There were crates of bottles in a shed
behind the house, medicine bottles that my father used for the potions that he
dispensed for his patients. One day when I was about 5 years old I had an orgy
of bottle-breaking, discovering to my disappointment that none of these bottles
contained marbles after all. But I kept on trying to find one that did until a
whole crate of bottles lay scattered around the yard in shards of glass. I got
a terrible beating for this misguided attempt to accumulate a collection of
marbles. My father didn’t listen to my explanation, instead commanded me to
find a suitable stick to be flogged with. I found a thick, heavy one; and he
gave me a thrashing such as I have never had again, all the while
misunderstanding my motives for breaking the bottles. Perhaps he believed that it was an episode in
the smouldering warfare with my mother. Towards the end of his life I asked him
one day if he remembered giving me that beating, or the time I ‘helped’ him
make a kite. Sad to say, he remembered neither of these events that loom large
in memories of my early childhood.
His anger at me for
breaking his medicine bottles seemed to persist for a long time, erupting
periodically when I did other clever things. I discovered that I could use the
length of a picture book held in my hand to extend my reach far enough to turn
off the light switch and plunge his den into darkness. He cuffed my ears for
that, and perhaps swore at me. My mother seized me and ran out of the room,
crying, clutching me to her breast. There must have been many other episodes of
tension, for that entire period of my life is shrouded in feelings of anger,
rage, tears, unhappiness. Some memories of that period date back to before I
was toilet-trained. One day at the
hospital I soiled myself, walked bandy-legged, uncomfortable, smelling of shit
and feeling horribly embarrassed into a room beside the operating theatre where
my father shouted angrily at me from where he was slouched on a sofa, sharing a
cigarette with a woman not my mother. Perhaps I had caught them in flagrante.
But all those unhappy memories are blurred, jumbled and mostly incoherent.
I have no
recollections of the final breakup of my parents' marriage. For a while we
lived at my maternal grandparents' home, a gracious old place, 16 Northgate
Street, Unley Park. We had been there earlier to stay when I was only three,
before Peter was born. That was in the Unley Park Private Hospital, where I was
taken t
o visit my mother. I remember walking along Unley Road, just around the
corner from Northgate Street, with two women, one my Auntie Elsa, on the way to
see my mother in hospital, though I don’t remember whether that was when she
was there with toxemia of pregnancy and high blood pressure, or after Peter was
born. I was sent away about then to stay with the Statton family who had moved
from Booleroo to Clarendon in the hills south of Adelaide. At that time I was
not yet reliably continent, or had become incontinent because of emotional
stress, and I suffered acute embarrassment when I wet the bed.
 |
| John and Peter with Grandmother Rebecca Judell 16 Northgate Street, Unley Park, probably late 1930 |
The large garden of
the Northgate Street house was overgrown with weeds. A horse-trough of stagnant
water contained many wrigglers – mosquito larvae – and close by was a small
pond with tadpoles. There was a tennis court, but I think perhaps not in use at
that time though it had been earlier when my parents were courting. My
grandfather Leopold Judell died in 1927, and my grandmother Rebecca died in
1931 when I was about 4 ½ years old. I remember her as a tiny lady clad in
black who once gave me a very hot peppermint that I spat out as soon as I
could. There were frequent large family gatherings at the Northgate Street
house, though I seldom knew who was who. They all seemed very old to me, like
Auntie Rae, my grandmother’s sister, who wore a black ribbon around her neck to
disguise her wrinkles, and I seemed to be in their company much of the time,
except for rare occasions when I mingled with pre-adolescent cousins like Betsy
and Ross Ragless, and Barbie Saunders and her sister Peggy, who was already
sick and soon died of Hodgkin's disease.
At Northgate Street
the grown-ups sometimes read aloud to me: Peter Pan, and a childhood abbreviation
of Robinson Crusoe both of which I still have today, illustrated with
colour plates that prompted my cousin Betsy Ragless to dress, or undress, as
one of the pirates with her pink bloomers puffed out to resemble the
buccaneer's pantaloons in one of the pictures in the book. I hadn't started
school then, but knew the alphabet and puzzled out the meaning of words under
the plates in Peter Pan. This was before I was five years old. I had begun to read for myself before I was
six, and another pair of books from that period, the two volumes of poems by A.
A. Milne, When we were very young and Now we are six were a
precious part of my childhood, still safely stored in the bookshelves reserved
for my most valuable books. Who read
them to me? I don’t remember my mother
ever reading aloud to me, but Auntie Olive or Auntie Doris did, and soon I was
puzzling and sweating my way through the verses on my own. I was forever asking
questions that often the grown-ups didn’t or couldn’t answer. Except for Uncle
Lester, who was not often there but when he was, always bent down to my level
and patiently replied to my eager inquiries – why did the dust rise in the air,
how did a magnet, a motor-car work. He more than anyone else recognized my
hunger for knowledge and understanding. I am forever in his debt. I wanted to
find out so many things! That was the
time of greatest curiosity in my life, as it is in every small boy’s. How much
we would know, if only all those questions could be answered and the answers
stored in small children’s busy brains!
I had quite a lot to
do with several cousins then, most of all with the cousin closest to me in age,
Janet McRae, who was just three months older than I (her birthday was the same
day as then little Princess, now Queen Elizabeth). Janet and I went together to
a kindergarten in a church hall at the end of Northgate Street, run by two
sisters, the Misses Fleming, perhaps spinsters because their boy friends had
been killed in the Great War of 1914-1918. Several others who attended that
kindergarten, and I, went on to St Peter's College and the Adelaide Medical
School, so our lives were intertwined from early childhood. The most fun was
playing in a sand tray, or cutting out paper shapes with scissors that had
rounded ends so we couldn't stab ourselves or each other, or making plasticine
models (a pastime that I got quite good at later, copying another cousin, Alan
Saunders, whose models seemed to us to be magnificent and probably were very
good).
The interlude at
Northgate Street was early in the Great Depression, a time of desperate
hardship and an ominous time with rumblings of coming political troubles. The
conversations of the grown-ups in this partly Jewish household were full of
foreboding, and some of their fears and dread unspoken thoughts communicated
themselves to me. From a very early age I had a haunted sense of bad times
coming, a feeling that has remained with me all my life, and sadly has proved
true on several occasions as the world entered successive downward spirals of
tension, confrontation, hostility and warfare. The household, like all others
with sons old enough to fight in the Great War, was still in mourning in the
early 1930s for "Lidie", Elias Judell, the favorite son who had not
come back. He had been killed at Gallipoli in 1915. On the other hand, the
youngest son, Ceddie (Cedric) had come back, bringing with him a wife, Dorise,
a foreigner in ways, values, religion, disrupting the cohesion of this
otherwise close-knit family. None of these nuances were comprehensible to me
then (some still aren't) but they coloured the atmosphere of the Northgate
Street house.
I don’t remember our
final departure from the Judell family home and the sale of it and most of its
contents at sacrifice prices in the depths of the depression early in the
1930s, after my grandmother Rebecca died. The house sold then for £1300. It
changed hands again in 1991 for over three quarters of a million dollars - a
reflection of inflation as well as of rising land values as Adelaide turned
from a small city into a regional metropolis.
The stressful events
of that time, a time of bereavement and mourning, and of financial crisis for
the entire family, like other painful experiences of early childhood, are at
least partly suppressed. There were tears, hushed voices, whispers. Something
bad was happening.
Then, rather suddenly
it seems to me now (or maybe I had been sent away again to stay with friends,
the Stattons perhaps), my mother had left there and taken my brother Peter and
me to live near the sea at Brighton, a seaside village some distance in those
days from the suburban fringes of the small city of Adelaide. It was the
beginning of a new and happier life.
[Reflecting on this
account in 1997, ten years after I first wrote it, I was struck by something
else, the absence of any memory of real affection – cuddles, kisses, loving
words – from either of my parents. Like
many children of divorced parents, my childhood was haunted by guilty feelings
– a syndrome now recognized and understood, but not comprehended in the early
1930s. It must have been my fault that my mother and father had parted. What
was it I had done? A show of genuine
affection from either or both of them would have dispelled those feelings. I
realize now that they had other preoccupations, in their minds I merely
existed, wasn’t bonded to them in the way that other children, like my school
friends, were bonded to their parents. I
didn’t know my father well until near the end of his life, and this was never
something he could or would talk about, but it became clear to me as I got to
know him that he lacked the ability to feel affection for anyone close to him.
My professional life took me away from my mother before I had learnt enough
about psychology or psychiatry to have any insight into the dynamics of
parent-child bonding, and she died before I ever had a chance to discover, had
I sought to do so, why she never cuddled and rarely kissed me. Perhaps this is
why the bonds of affection to her were weak enough for me to set off for a life
on the other side of the world without feeling that I was severing a precious
link. In many ways then, as ever since,
I felt closer to other blood relations – especially to my Uncle Lester and a
few cousins – than to my mother. After
much introspection and with the wisdom of long hindsight, I believe now that
those early affectionless years permanently shaped my personality, made me
withdrawn, shy and reluctant to form close friendships].
