Chapter 40 The End of an Era

                                                 Chapter 40   The End of an Era

Back at our respective homes, life settled down again after our big holiday. Dad rang me one evening to talk about the movie films he'd had developed and we were all dying to see them. I haven't seen them yet.

    Three weeks after our return, friends from our Lions Club where Peter was now a member, came to see us at our residence. I was in my kitchen talking to the wife when a phone call came through which Peter answered. Suddenly the wife made an excuse for them to leave and she and her husband hurried out.

     Peter looked grave, "Your dad's had a car accident and has a broken arm. He’s been taken to hospital, but they think we should come up."

    I don’t remember the 300 miles, only arriving at my parents’ house. We had the children on board so we must have collected them from school and kindergarten, and I must have packed a bag, but I suppose I was functioning on automatic. As we drove into their yard I saw Larry at the front in his work clothes standing alone, with his arms folded. He had a grim look on his face and as we drove in he slowly shook his head. I probably knew what that meant but refused to acknowledge it. I jumped out of the car and asked the question.

    He took me in his arms, "He's gone love, he’s gone." 

    I was devastated. It didn't seem possible that my father, the head of the family, that strong personality and leader of men, the one I consulted on any subject at any time, could be gone, never to return.

    The whole family had gathered in the lounge room, and our seven-year-old broke the silence with the naked curiosity of a child, "Did he die?"

    After my initial outpouring of grief the story unfolded. Dad had risen early, showered, and dressed to drive the half hour trip to Larry's farm. As he drove along the narrow, bitumen road, a neighbouring farmer in a four-wheel-drive with a bull bar on the front drove out of his farm gate and across the road, battering straight into the right-hand side of  Dad's car.  Owen, arriving first, was shocked to see the driver's seat totally torn out of its moorings and forced across to the passenger side. 

    Apparently the farmer had been preoccupied, browsing through the mail from his letterbox. His brother's farm was across the road and he was in the habit of driving straight across. Probably he rarely encountered another vehicle. Dad had not only sustained a broken right arm, but also a crushed spine and punctured lungs. Owen travelled into the hospital with him in the ambulance. 

    His last words to Owen were, "Look after your mum, Owen ."

    When the hospital casualty nurse called Mum she was only able to relate, "He’s had an accident and he’s got a broken arm," so Mum had taken her time and packed a bag for hospital. 

    She had reassured herself, "I'll be able to look after him, if it's just a broken arm."

    But when she got down to the hospital casualty department, she was asked to wait, and minutes later she heard a quick scuffling in the emergency room behind the curtain. Dad had arrested, and they could do nothing to save him. Ever after, she regretted taking her time like that, because she never got a chance to say goodbye.

    After all those thousands of miles he'd travelled, all the personal battles he'd grappled with, and all the traffic difficulties he'd overcome, it seemed a sad irony that he should die on a straight, bitumen, country road just a few miles from home. He was 67 years old.

    Travelling out to the graveside in the funeral car, I felt as if my whole chest and abdomen had been opened up with a large knife and was exposed. I resented the road workers at the side of the road who stood and watched us pass. At that moment I resented anyone who couldn't feel my pain. People came up to me at the graveside and took me in their arms, saying how sorry they were. But I couldn't respond, I felt numb and sick. And with my brain so fogged with grief, some of them I didn't even recognize.

    At the time Aunt Lulu and her second husband were down in Adelaide and they rushed home for Lulu to be with her younger sister. She made it home to Brisbane where she took ill. She was 77 years old, and the rushed trip home from Adelaide had been too much for her. Three weeks after Dad’s death, Lulu also died. My mother felt so alone. 

    She had lost not only her husband but her closest sister, and she would later say to me, "I just wanted to run and scream."

    Owen and his family had sold their home previously and were living in temporary accommodation, so they moved in with Mum for a couple of months. Eventually though, they needed to move on and find a place of their own.

    Mum set about rebuilding her life on her own, but at first she went through terrible depression, feeling lost and confused by the turmoil of emotions in her head.  One day she went to see Dad's doctor because, ‘he was an easy doctor to talk to.’

    His advice was, "If you can travel, go away for a while."

    Before Dad died Mum had started playing indoor bowls, and some of her bowls friends were joining a large bus tour to Perth in Western Australia, so she decided to join them. She found the trip difficult, but she forced herself to stay interested in what they were doing and to join in any activities. She did enjoy seeing new places and meeting new people, and their conversation helped her through. By the time she got home she found coping from day to day was a little easier.

                                                                            --0--

    Over the years she has talked a lot about the hard times on the farm, but almost always ends up with self recrimination. 

    She says things like, "Perhaps I was to blame too,” (for the arguments and my father's bad temper,)  and then she’ll go on more slowly... reminiscing pensively, "Perhaps, if I'd have supported him more instead of criticising, he'd have been better."

    During the violent arguments that my parents had when I was a little kid, Dad became louder and angrier. He'd lose self control and sometimes say nasty hurtful things about Mum's relatives. Unfortunately he never had a role model of good husband behaviour, only that of bad temper by his father and his uncles. Mum told me once when they were rowing, (before the farm days,) that he picked up a framed photograph of her nephew, (Alice’s  first son,) and smashed it in anger. He was probably a bit jealous of anyone Mum was fond of, and she always had a special closeness with Alice’s son because they had spent quite a few years growing up together.

    The worst row that I witnessed on the farm was when I saw my father put his hands to my mother's throat while he made some threatening remarks like, "I should choke you, you bitch!"

    I screamed out at him, "No Daddy! No!" 

    He sank to his knees and put his arms around me. "I wouldn't hurt your mother sweetheart," he said. Mum snorted disgustedly, and he flew back at her. 

    I was terrified, and in later years told Mum how I felt. But she simply scoffed at me for being frightened and weak. She had a tough constitution and she expected everyone around her to be tough, especially her children.

    She agonises a lot over Larry though, punishing herself for the discipline he suffered at the hands of his father, who often became violent and took it out on Larry, belting him and yelling at him. I think Larry still bears the scar on the back of his leg from where one day Dad  threw a stick at him. She also feels guilty for the workload Larry was expected to carry, riding a horse at eight years old and helping in the dairy from that age on, and then as he got older, running the dairy by himself. 

    For many years as I was growing up, Larry groaned in his sleep. It was the weirdest thing. Sometimes his groaning woke me in the early hours of the morning.  It started on a low note and gradually increased in volume getting louder and louder. It seemed to go forever and how he didn't need to take in a breath in that time is beyond me. It must have been a kind of night terror, because he had no memory of it the next day. Some times to stop the noise I clapped my hands, because a sudden noise seemed to do the trick. 

    But he’d complain the next day, "Don't clap like that, it wakes me up!" The groaning disappeared when he got married.

    There is also another incident in relation to Larry which I know haunts my mother still. One day there was a row involving the three of them. Larry, fourteen or so and probably just as difficult as young teens today, was crying and threatening to walk out. I remember Mum lashing out her hand to slap him. He was wearing the watch they had given him for finishing school and when he put his hand up to ward off the blow, she hit the watch and broke it. Mum never forgave herself for smashing his new watch and took it as a sign from God that she was in the wrong and was being punished. The guilt plagues her today. 

    Larry bears no grudges, "Most of it was my own fault.  It doesn't worry me."

    For Mum, Dad's worst drinking years were also a time when she was weighed down with so much housework, having had her last baby so late. She commenced menopause at forty-five, and there must have been some days when she felt very ill. A typical example when I look back, occurred one day at the hostel where I boarded during high school.

    A few of the girls, who had been up to the hospital to visit a relative, returned and told me, "Your mother is in hospital and she’s very ill." They had seen her just waking up from an anaesthetic. (No teeth in either!)

    I was in a terrible panic and rushed up there the next afternoon after school, only to be told by the charge sister, "No dear, your mother went home this morning."

    Getting permission to make a phone call home on the grounds my mother was ill, I found out Mum had been in for a curette. The girls from the school had jumped to the wrong conclusion. Again she scoffed at me for worrying.

    Her life was further aggravated by debilitating migraines during menopause, too. Sometimes she was in bed for two days, vomiting from the pain. I remember she took tablets that were called ‘Ergot.’ 

    She must have worried about herself because she often said things to me like, "Giddy darling, look, I could die tomorrow.”

     Appalled at the thought, I'd remonstrate, "No you won't, Mum!"

    "No, but if it ever happens, I want you to know what to do," she’d explain. "Don't you sit around mourning and crying. You get my jewellery and put it away, and don't let anyone  come up and take everything!" She was well aware what could happen in such a case.

      I have never forgotten those things, but at the time I didn't really want to discuss the possibility of my mother dying.

    Lulu was Mum’s closest sister, but she, for one, had a habit of cleaning out a family member’s house after they'd left this earth. She didn't want the stuff herself, but overanxious to help, frequently took loads of things to the dump...photos, small furniture, and bric-a-brac, or she would divide the stuff up amongst relevant family members.

    This was probably the reason why I often heard Mum remark, almost to herself, ‘I wonder what happened to that photo of....? ', or 'I always wanted that... I wonder what happened to it after...' 

    And a frequent comment I clearly remember, "I wonder what happened to that photo of us in those Oxford bags we used to wear.” Apparently it was one of herself with two of her sisters wearing very wide trousers called 'Oxford Bags.'

    When Mum first met my father, Lulu was one of his biggest critics, but as they got older, he and Lulu became good mates. They both had a great sense of humour, but my mother found it hard to be amused when she was always stuck in the kitchen waiting on them both while they counted out their respective tablets and discussed their respective illnesses, or Dad sat back in his chair and yarned to Lulu who was an appreciative audience, giggling and laughing at the jokes Mum had heard over and over again.


    Unfortunately for my mother, she received no compensation after Dad’s car accident, being given only the minimum value of the car from the insurance company. The man who caused the accident was not even fined by the police for a traffic violation. Although Mum doesn't bear any real grudge against him, she can't bring herself to speak to him. He sent flowers to the funeral but she never acknowledged the gesture. 




 Just at the time of their lives when they were becoming closer, holding hands as they walked around the street shopping, brought together by a shared lifetime of hardships and joy, the accident ripped them apart.


   Such is life.