Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Read online

  A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

  I began to talk like a Jew.

  I think I may well be a Jew.

  Sylvia Plath did not speak like a Jew, but like a well-educated lady from New England; I learned Yiddish and joined the Habimah players. I did not know if I had any Jewish blood or not, but I felt Jewish and I went out with Jewish boys. My father said once, when Peter Sapir came to take me to a dance, ‘Taking the princess out? You take good care of her.’ ‘He must be Jewish,’ said Peter. Oy weh.

  Another muddled notion that we children somehow got was that Daddy had gone jackerooing after he left school and wanted to go on the land, but his rich father refused him the nominal sum required to secure a lease, so Daddy severed relations with him and sold advertising space instead. Somehow he got himself to Adelaide, where he knew the young Robert Helpmann. And then to Melbourne where he met and married my mother. Then I was born, the war broke out and Daddy went away.

  I was five when my mother and I went by train to Spencer Street Station to bring Daddy home. I was sure I would recognise him from the photograph on the maple sideboard. This ikon showed a collection of distinguished features, dark hair brushed back from a high forehead, a relaxed smile, and an ironic glint in the eyes. I knew the exact proportion of the ears to the head, the precise bend in the narrow nose, the set of the long head on its square shoulders. We trailed up and down the platform peering into every face. The heavy skirts of the men’s greatcoats kept knocking me off my feet. The kissing, hugging knots of people began to gather up their belongings and disperse; the platform was emptying and still we hadn’t found Daddy. The war had lasted all my life and I had difficulty imagining how it could end. I began to drag my feet and day-dream, convinced that Daddy wasn’t there. Mother grabbed my arm, nearly wrenching it from its socket as she became more agitated, turning and hurrying hither and yon. Suddenly she stopped and dropped my arm. An old man was standing sightlessly by a pylon. His neck stuck scrawnily out of the collar of his grey-blue greatcoat. His eyes were sunken, his skin grey and loose. I ran up to look at Mother’s face. Surely she wasn’t going to take this old man instead of Daddy. She was standing with her head cocked, peering like a wary bird in the jaunty hat that she wore on her forehead like a crest. If she was shocked she made no sign. She bundled the old man up and took him home and a year later my sister was born.

  By then I had learned to match the old man’s features with the photograph and to admit that this distant, speechless wreck was indeed my father. I would rather have had one of the handsome big Americans who used to hang around my mother. So would she, I shouldn’t wonder, but she stuck to her commitment, with an ill grace, but faithfully.

  This is what I remember. It may be all wrong, but it cannot be irrelevant. I used to think that truth was single and error legion, but I know now that none of us grasps more than a little splinter of the truth. The blind men all observed the elephant correctly; their mistake was to infer an entire object consistent with the patch that came under their hands. I may make the same error—indeed I don’t see how I could avoid it—but I have no choice but to try to build up a picture of who my father might have been, if only because I have a lurking fear that a great wrong was done to him.

  And, however silly it sounds, I’m going to call him Daddy.

  I never called him Father because priests are called that. If Daddy hated anything as much as he hated carrots and dried fruit, it was priests. During the months of the siege of Malta, the only way of getting enough Vitamin C to ward off scurvy was to eat quantities of carrots and dried fruit. When the war was over, Daddy eschewed carrots and dried fruit forever. Malta had something to do with his passionate anti-clericalism too. On the rare occasions when he spoke of ‘overseas’ Daddy would tell us how poor and wretched the Maltese people were, while their priests were rubicund and fat. The people lived ten or twelve to a room, but the churches were vast, encrusted with gilding, crowded with painted plaster statues and miraculous gew-gaws. The priests were well-educated and worldly; the people illiterate, trusting and deeply religious. When Daddy went to India he must have realised that on the world scale of poverty the Maltese were very far from the bottom, but perhaps he thought if they could just get the priests off their backs they would be as rich as Australians. To my mind, having the British on their backs was a rather more serious problem for the Maltese, as it was getting their island bombed flat, but Daddy was not receptive to this heretical notion.

  Daddy’s loathing of priests went back further than Malta. When he was courting Mother, who was a Catholic, he had to take instruction in the faith. When the couple knocked on the door of the presbytery to ask the parish priest to do the honours, it was a suspiciously long time before the door opened to reveal the priest in his singlet and smelling strongly of liquor. Listening to Daddy tell it, and other stories of Maltese priests frequenting brothels, I despaired of Daddy’s salvation. I thought there was some conspiracy in heaven to scandalise my father, so that he would never enter the true Church but die a heathen and go to hell. The priests I confessed myself to were chaste, unworldly and sober, but Daddy had never met any of them.

  In fact Daddy’s agnosticism was one of the few surviving indications of a native strength of mind. He used to tell a story of collapsing in the street with pleurisy and waking up in a Catholic hospital where they were busy administering to him the last rites. According to him, the fierce pleasure he took in throwing the priests and nuns with all their regalia and sacramental impedimenta out of his room saved his life. When everything else in his brain had dissolved, he clung fast to his disbelief, which wasn’t easy seeing as everyone around him was a mick and praying hell-for-leather that he’d get the grace of final perseverance and be hauled to heaven.

  Another reason for not calling Daddy Father was the existence of ‘Father Gilhooley’. This imaginary personage was the principal of a reformatory, where the doors were perpetually open to receive us. Daddy invoked him whenever we showed some feeble sign of insubordination. He would demonstrate some of Father Gilhooley’s disciplinary methods, including a nasty rabbit-killer chop to the nape of the neck, which caused electric tingles along your arms and legs that curdled in your fingers and toes. Daddy would imply darkly that he knew Father Gilhooley very well. The only religion he professed, which he called Calathumpianism, had been imparted to him by Father Gilhooley. Other children have bogeymen to frighten them and have the seeds of racism sown in them forever. We had an Irish Catholic priest lying in wait for us, which was odd for we were part Irish and wholly Catholic ourselves. Perhaps Father Gilhooley is a clue to who Daddy really was, a fossil trapped in some layer of his subconscious.

  A clue to what? A clue to the man who courted my mother, to the half of my genetic inheritance, to a personality, a culture, a somebody I thought I could just glimpse from time to time. I never saw him read a book. His favourite music, indeed his only record, was Al Jolson’s greatest hits. Sometimes he would intone a little verse:

  Breathes there a man with soul so dead

  Who never to himself has said,

  This is my own, my native land…

  And he would sing in the shower,

  Hi think that Hi shall never seeng

  Ha powem lervly as er treeng!

  Or

  Ho Sole Mio,

  O gran divi dero

  and so on with nonsense words, or

  Ho for the weengs, for the weengs hof a derv…

  two octaves below the key he would have sung it in as a boy soprano, and ‘The Maori Farewell’ with the word ‘Tiddleypush’ where ‘goodbye’ should be. Not too many clues there. There was an elaborate family word-play on the phrase ‘Tosti partood’ (the tood to rhyme with wood) which I realised many years later was an encoded memory of Tosti’s ‘Farewell’. And another silly set of phrases to do with ‘bread dipped in bravery’, an incantation of unknown significance to us, but perhaps it meant something to Daddy. He would never answer when you asked him wha
t the time was, except to say, ‘Must be, look how dark it is.’ Every time.

  A man I was in love with met my father once at the St Kilda Cricket Club. Daddy was showing around a cheque I had sent him in payment of a debt and telling everyone what a clever daughter he had, the more surprisingly to me, as he had never given me to understand that he thought of Ph.D.s as any but long-haired rat-bags. As he was describing the scene, my friend added an observation that surprised and hurt me, ‘Your father’s not very bright, is he?’ I was mortified to think that the emptiness of my father’s head was obvious on first acquaintance. In that case it ought to have been obvious to my mother when she met him, unless he had been different then. The only man successfully to woo my mother, whose wit, if utterly undisciplined and often perverse, is certainly sharp, must have been clever, original, amusing, or interesting at least. Daddy was older than Mother to be sure, but how had he grown so rapidly senile? (You will be wondering why I did not simply ask my mother. Suffice it to say that for Mother language is a weapon rather than a means of communication.)

  As if it was not bad enough that outsiders could see my father as an agreeable dimwit, at home I had undeniable proof that he was feeble. When Mother’s frustration boiled over and she lit into me with anything she could lay her hands on, Daddy would ‘keep out of it’, even though he was sitting reading the paper in the next room where the thud of blows was clearly audible. His response to Mother’s goading was always the same, silence and distance. ‘It takes two to quarrel,’ he would say, apparently unaware that I could not go off to my club until the mad dog in the kitchen had stopped foaming at the mouth. I suppose he thought I could take it, and he was right, but I thought him weak and craven. Nevertheless I could not forgive my mother for calling him ‘a senile old goat’, as she often did.

  That my father never once struck or reviled me was reason enough for me to love him, but I could not respect him. Not until the terrible months of his decline, when his suburban character armour fell away and I could dimly see the grand ruin which was his mind. Mother kept away from him, but he never ceased to ask for her. She treated him abominably, but he never uttered a disloyal word about her. He died in love with her, an achievement which she doubtless credits to herself. Only when he was dead did we begin to have some idea of the devastation that he had suffered.

  He died of advanced athero-sclerosis of the brain. He had no cancer, no heart disease, no blood-pressure disorder. Only his mind was aged, prematurely turned to porridge. What if he had been a strong, intelligent, brave and energetic man before he was needed to fight a war? And sent home when they had done with him, old and broken before his time? Would that not explain my mother’s furious frustration? What if he was deliberately broken, broken say by electro-convulsive therapy during those two years in Deolali? What if he spoke so little of the war and of his life before it because he simply couldn’t remember it?

  There are men who were treated for anxiety neurosis by electro-convulsive therapy, or deep narcosis, the sleep cure, who completely forgot the cataclysm that sent their synapses gibbering out of control. The treatments made them stop weeping and stammering, made them manageable, silent, obedient. Who cared if they stopped laughing as long as they stopped crying? A zombie, provided he is neatly dressed, punctual and punctilious, is a useful individual in our society. He pays his taxes, commutes every day, does meaningless monotonous work and does not complain. And if he no longer dances with his little daughter held high on his shoulder, or makes up nonsense games for her to play, or puts her to sleep when she is tearful and overtired, if he does not hear her nervous vomiting in the night because he is too drugged to wake, who will give a damn? The child like him is ‘highly-strung’; the inherent defect runs in their genes. What runs in our genes, Daddy, is humanity, which will not survive except by extraordinary shifts in this inhuman world.

  In this most Christian world

  poets are all Jews

  Daddy told me a story once about the war in which there was a decoding machine. He said he was a Secret and Confidential Publications Officer in Malta. The programme the British called Ultra, by which they exploited information arising from their knowledge of the German Enigma machine, remained a military secret for years after the war ended. What if Daddy broke down while he was privy to this most important secret and had to be debriefed by shock therapy? Brainwashed, in other words. By the allies. It seems a mad suspicion, but once it has been entertained I have no choice but to investigate it. What if his brain turned to slush as a long-term consequence of his drug therapy or shock treatment? What if his relationship with me was jettisoned because it was part of a period in his life that he was made to forget? The mere suspicion of an injustice so terrible is unbearable.

  All the Australians who served overseas had a difficult war. They were assailed by culture shock, appalled by the poverty and inequality that they encountered for the first time, too far from home to touch base for years on end, a despised rabble among the fighting forces. Thousands of them came home to live out their lives as walking wounded, carrying out their masculine duties in a sort of dream, trying not to hear the children who asked, ‘Mummy, why does that man have to sleep in your bed?’ Australians don’t whinge. There was no way these damaged men could explain their incapacity for normal emotional experience except by complaining and they would not complain. But their children must.

  I don’t know what I shall find on the other side of Daddy’s curtain of silence. Perhaps he was after all a pompous ass, a dimwit or a coward. Perhaps he was a criminal, a traitor, a sexual deviant even. What I saw in his eyes that day in the hostel, the same spectre that looked at me out of the mirror in my parents’ bedroom, struck me like a blow in the face. The most unbearable thought of all is that shame was planted in my father’s heart and, all the time that he was heroically holding the fragments of his life together, he thought he was hiding from our censure.

  It is a wise child that knows her own father. I knew as I held my father’s old hand in my own, its exact replica, and watched my own skull emerging through his transparent skin, that I am my father’s daughter. Now that he can be hurt no more, it is time to find out what that means.

  Tuscany, December 1986

  Outside the window the poplars rustle:

  ‘Your king is on this earth no more.’

  AKHMATOVA, ‘THE GREY-EYED KING’

  Many people, probably most of the people on this planet, take special spiritual precautions before a journey. Old ladies in Italy never allow the train to pull out of the station before they have crossed themselves and uttered a swift prayer for a safe arrival. I embarked on the most important quest of my life without so much as crossing my fingers or touching wood. The only ritual I engaged in was the prodigal pouring out of money to acquire an airline ticket from London to Melbourne, with a stopover in Italy.

  Nothing was amiss in my little Tuscan house. My housekeeper was less unwell than usual, and her husband had not had an accident for months. My old Tuscan cat sat in the amber sunlight and warmed his nephritic bones, and at night crept smelling of bracken and leaf-mould into my bed and lay against my side with his claws carefully tucked under my bare arm where they could flex with glee without piercing anything but sheets.

  In my desk I found the old notebook in which I had begun to plot The Female Eunuch. I turned to a blank page and began to write:

  Here we go. Daddy, in at the deep end. I discover, Papa, that I am like you in one thing at least. I hate remembering. There are days when I wander for hours in a spacious sewer of memory. And there are other days when memories stick up like dark spars in a sunlit river and I feel myself dragged under by them, struggling in darkness while the sparkling present slides over my head. These stubs of half-rotten lumber catch up junk, pieces of string too short to use, stoppers from vanished bottles, and choke my mind with them. I never remember you giving me advice or encouragement, but I can remember you singing:

  Pack up all my cares and woe,
>
  Here I go,

  Swinging low,

  Bye bye blackbird.

  Where my honey waits for me.

  Sugar’s sweet,

  So is she,

  Bye bye blackbird.

  Not a soul to love or understand me,

  All those hard luck stories they all hand me,

  Make my bed, light the light,

  I’ll be home, late tonight,

  Blackbird bye bye.

  Useless to ask what it all means. You can’t treat such gibberish as oracular. Some children can remember their fathers reciting Urdu poetry or Marlowe, or teaching them to recognise birds and butterflies, to spot trains, to play chess or cricket. But you, Daddy dear? Not a curve-ball, not a cover-drive, not a card-trick. Not a maxim. Not a saw, adage or proverb. Except ‘You’re big enough and ugly enough to take care of yourself.’ This is my Enchiridion Militis, my soldier’s breastplate. This and ‘Bye bye blackbird’.

  Sometimes I love you,

  Sometimes I hate you,

  But when I hate you,

  It’s ’cos I love you.

  This section of the notebook ends: ‘How shall I keep sane during this pilgrimage, Daddy?’ I can almost hear Daddy saying, ‘It’s news to me that you were sane when it started.’ Daddy once stopped a friend in the street and said to her about my mother, ‘She’s mad of course.’ He probably thought my genes were all my mother’s, despite my Greer face. Probably thought we were all mad but he. But no, the sedatives in the bathroom cupboard were his, not ours. Except when the hospital put me on the same ones, Tropinal, for nervous exhaustion. Daddy’s own disease. Bone of your bone, Daddy. You shall not escape me.