Father's Footprint

Father’s Footprint

“Watch Out for Slippery Rocks”

For years as youngsters my brother and I thought our father’s name was Bruce, after all that was what everyone - neighbours, extended family, workmates - called him. Then we learned his name was actually William Bruce and everyone called him Bruce because his father’s name was also William. That’s just what they did here in Australia back in the day, named a son after the father then proceeded to call the son by his middle name, there was no William II or William Junior. I never knew my grandfather William, a handsome half-Indian immigrant who had been brought to Australia by his father Arthur who was a very English military type who had worked on the construction of the Indian Railway. William died from encephalitis when my dad was a young boy of seven, perhaps that was the defining event that shaped the young lad’s future.

Dad grew up in the era between World Wars 1 and 2 in a house full of women. He did however have a bachelor uncle who took on the role of father figure, able to teach him all about cricket, soldiers and steam engines. But alas, Uncle Frank had no experience in close relationships with women so was unable to impart any advice or knowledge to his nephew. Dad’s mother, my Nanna, was a stern, undemonstrative and unapproachable woman who ran a butcher’s shop not far from their home in Balgowlah, a leafy suburb of the northern beaches of Sydney. She struggled with bringing up my father and his little sister, even with the help of all her sisters, one of whom lived in the home with them. Dear Great Aunt Milly, a sweet little lady (with a generous amount of facial hair which I commented on when I was a very small girl, much to my mother’s absolute horror), a spinster who had also never been in an intimate relationship so similarly had no way of teaching him about marriage, love and being “head of the family”.

Dad was an intelligent man but an under-achiever. As he grew up he left school and took on the role of head of the family and started an apprenticeship as a hairdresser/wigmaker. I’m not sure how long that lasted but obviously long enough for him to think he had the skills and knowledge to cut my hair as a young child. The old “bowl cut” was very popular in the 1950’s. All my girlfriends and I have a great giggle when we compare photos of us as young girls with the seemingly mandatory bowl cut, often with a pretty bow placed behind the fringe by our mothers to try to add some feminine charm.

Dad met my beautiful mother in about 1950, courted and married her. They lived in a small one bedroom flat until I was about eighteen months old and my brother Gary was three. They then built a white weatherboard three bedroom house in a new subdivision just down the road from my mum’s parents’ home and a short bus ride to dad’s mother’s home at Balgowlah.

Then Dad really stepped up to the plate, he became what appeared to be the model husband, father, breadwinner. He became a career bus driver, not an easy job back then when there were young children in the house and he’d worked night shift and needed sleep, but it ended up being a great choice in career. The pay was pretty low so mum had to work in the local corner shop a couple of days a week to supplement the family income but we got through okay.

I absolutely adored my father, and what a great father he was considering he had no way of knowing what a father’s relationship with his children should be. As a toddler, when dad was working late, I would cry and refuse to go to sleep until I had seen him and eaten a bit of dinner off his plate. It was always dad coming in to soothe me after I’d had a nightmare, always dad waking me every four hours to take medicine when I was sick, always dad supporting me in my love for all animals, especially horses. I was obsessed and I worked on both my parents for years and years until he eventually bought me my pony when I was 13. Sorry about that mum and dad.

He was the best dad for my brother when we were growing up. He coached Gary’s cricket and baseball teams for many years. I wanted to be a boy so I could have all that time with my dad, so much so that I became an absolute tomboy and attended every practice session as if I was one of the team. God love my brother and all those boys for putting up with me pestering to have a bowl, bat or pitch. Some of the best times I had with my dad were when it was just us at home and he’d say “Come on Topsy, let’s go down the back for a pitch”. I’d wear my brother’s glove and dad would grab the catcher’s mitt out of the team kit and off we’d go down to the bottom of the back yard and throw for hours. I loved that so much. He would take us both up the road to a huge vacant block of land and we’d throw the Frisbee around, they were such great times filled with laughter. When he eventually bought a car we would traipse all over the place chasing steam trains, his obsession. I still to this day get a thrill when I see one.

One memorable night he took us to Sydney Harbour at North Sydney to look for water rats. It was obviously something his Uncle Frank had done with him. It was dark, the water was lapping at the rocks, he was warning us to be careful and watch out for slippery rocks. We were struggling to see anything then he spotted one and yelled, “There’s one!”, took off out of sight around a bend hopping from rock to rock. We thought we’d just wait for him to come back then heard an exclamation, a thud and a splash. A few minutes later a rather sheepish bedraggled looking figure with water dripping from his hair and clothes came back into our sight. Gary and I just looked at each other and burst out laughing, dad eventually joining in when we simultaneously shouted at him “Watch out for slippery rocks!!”. It became a family joke.

He thankfully had a great sense of humour and really never stayed angry with us. I love the way he used to say to me “This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you” as he whacked me around the legs with his leather belt. Yeah, right dad. I must admit I deserved to be chastised, once again getting home two hours late from primary school because I’d spotted a horse kilometres away from the top of the hill and just had to go and see it. That drove my mother to distraction, I did it one time too often, she must have been so worried. Dad thought he was just doing his duty as head of the household. Amongst all these wonderful memories of a happy childhood are others of unsettling times, scary times, confusing times. Who was my father really? Was it this perfect father who loved us and guided us and indulged us? Or was it the other father who reared his head more and more often as his marriage crumbled around him? The other one who would snatch the phone out of my mother’s hand and slam it angrily back in its cradle, the other one who would drive my grandmother to church angrily crunching through the gears and screeching around corners, the other one who drove my friend home after a play date at my place and drove over a pigeon who didn’t have time to get out of the way and didn’t try to apologise or console me, the sensitive little girl sobbing in the back seat who had looked back and seen the pigeon momentarily still alive sitting on the road bobbing its head while its back end was flattened? The other father who destroyed the horse he’d made for me out of a twelve and a half gallon drum on wooden legs and painted brown and white, throwing it down the bank into the creek that ran just the other side of our back fence, or the other ugly one who impacted my life subconsciously for many years by telling me the one thing a father should never say to the daughter who adored and trusted him. I now know that my dad was an alcoholic. He didn’t drink alone at home, he would go to the pub after work and come home drunk. What came first? Was the alcoholism a cause or a side effect of the marriage breakdown?

Dad couldn’t make my mum happy, they’re both gone now so I can’t ask the questions I wish I had. My mum was a victim of child sexual abuse, she didn’t mention it until about fifteen years before she died. She honestly thought that victims should just “get over it”. I reeled in shock when she told me that one night as we were watching the news together. I was an adult with two teenage sons of my own at the time. I questioned her as to how she could possibly think that, this beautiful soft soul I thought I knew. An uncle of hers, who lived in a separate house but on the same farm as her grandparents when she was just a little girl in the early 1930’s, was the perpetrator. I now know that somehow that experience in her young life impacted her to the extent that she couldn’t find happiness with my dad because of something that wasn’t meeting her needs. I’m sure she wouldn’t be able to tell me what that something was and it’s not for me to judge her for finding love and happiness with someone other than my father. After their eventual horrible divorce she remarried, to a friend of dad’s, and they were together until the day he died in his 70’s. I’m not saying she found blissful happiness in that marriage either, he also had childhood stuff that caused him to often bomb that relationship, but my mum adored him nonetheless.

I’m pretty sure that, looking back on the night my father said those haunting words to me, it was more than likely another night he had come home from work drunk. Gary would have been about nine or ten and I would have been about eight. We were fed and bathed, homework done, ready for bed and sitting in front of the television when dad got home from work. After happily greeting him we were once again mesmerised by whatever was on the telly and I’m presuming that dad ate his dinner at the table and went to the kitchen to clean up. I find it hard to explain why those words affected me so deeply throughout my whole life and I did not even understand it until I was a grown woman in my 50s.

I am aware that a lot of people would think that I shouldn’t have been upset at what he said to me, that I should have just let those words wash over me and melt away, that they’re just words and he was probably drunk and didn’t mean it. I need to say that I was not upset when he said it, I just took it as something true, as gospel because after all, my father had said it so it must be fact, right? It was deeply lodged in my brain.

Dad walked out of the kitchen and he was angry. He obviously thought that we should have heard him washing up the dinner dishes in the kitchen and rushed out to wipe up for him. But we were little kids, we were immersed in the television, as if we’d even hear the banging and crashing of pots and pans and dishes in the kitchen sink and the angry muttering emanating from there. The next thing my head swivelled around as I heard dad’s angry footsteps coming from the kitchen across the wooden floors behind us. There was dad with a tea towel in his hand, scowling. His words went something like “Look at you two sitting there like statues.” I initially thought he was having a joke with us, having been completely oblivious to the passive-aggressive behaviour that had been going on in the kitchen. Then he looked me in the eye and said “But then statues are meant to be pretty, so you couldn’t be a statue, could you?”

I know, sounds like an innocuous comment, it did not affect me at all at the time, didn’t make me sad or heartbroken that my father didn’t think I was pretty, it was just another fact that my dad had shared with me. I had no idea that my psyche and behaviour would be governed by that one throwaway sentence coming from the man that I adored, worshipped, loved and trusted implicitly. The worst thing was that looks became so important to me subconsciously. Not my looks, I’d accepted what he told me, I mean everyone else’s looks. It’s not that I judged people by how they looked, it’s hard to explain, just that I probably noticed things about people that others who had grown up with a positive sense of self wouldn’t notice.

My father’s comment meant that I grew up feeling like no one would ever love me enough because I wasn’t pretty, that I’d never be good enough. I felt that the only way someone would love me was to be compliant and do whatever was asked or expected of me. All my life I constantly needed validation, I tried really hard at whatever sport I played so he would be proud of me, I lived with the need to feel wanted and desired by men, I didn’t say no when I should have because I was scared of rejection, all this from a few words said in a fit of spite by a drunken father who I absolutely know loved me.

Somewhere in my father’s young life was he made to feel less than perfect, maybe by a mother who always found fault, or by an uncle who had no idea how to make him feel worthy? Is that why he thought it was okay to say something so damaging to his daughter?

But I forgive my darling dad. He loved my boys, he loved my brother, he loved me.

The woman dad married when he was a very young looking forty years old, was the tender age of twenty one, only four years older than me. Unfortunately, she eventually drove a wedge between us all so deeply that I didn’t see my father for nine years before he died. It took a lot of years but she was successful in the end. She knew how to manipulate my dad, she knew how to become the only important thing in his life. She fell pregnant in her forties and had a son when dad was in his sixties. Then about ten years later he was told by her that she didn’t like the way he acted when he was around me and wanted him to stop spending time with me. That broke my heart. How he acted around me? Like a father and grandfather? He was terribly upset when relaying all this to me and I was so shattered, so confused. Why didn’t he stand up to her, why didn’t he stand up for me? After he retired from the buses he took on a job at a local high school setting up the rooms for the community college that held classes there at night. We had so many long telephone conversations when he was doing that job. Unbeknownst to my stepmother he would ring me from the office there a couple of nights a week and we’d talk for hours about all things, we thought the same way, had the same political ideology, he was interesting to talk to.

I loved him no matter what he said to me, I held no grudge against him for saying what he did, it didn’t occur to me that it was a nasty comment, to me it was just obviously the truth.

I would love to be able to say to him, “Thanks for everything dad. I wish with all my heart that you and mum had stayed in love and been together for the rest of your lives. Thanks for giving me love and happiness for as long as you did, thanks for cultivating my love of nature and animals, thanks for loving my pony Molly as much as I did, thanks for just being my dad and for forgiving me for forgetting your birthday on the 13th of January, 1978.”

A few nights after my father died he came to me in my sleep. In a dream I was walking along the road and there was my dad sitting on the bench seat at a bus stop. I sat next to him and we talked, he lay down on the bench and put his head in my lap and I was able to stroke his hair and tell him I loved him and missed him.