The Child of the Father

I am not one for maudlin introspection on this blog (I save it for drunken evenings) and felt a little uneasy about posting the eulogy to my father last week. Nonetheless I am going to beg your indulgence one more time. I promise to get back to buses, faeces, Belgians or politics in my next post.


My father passed a few weeks ago and naturally enough, he has been on my mind quite a deal since then. He was in his own way a fine man and I already hate myself a little for the qualification I put there. He was - almost at any price - dignified in the way he held himself and refused to justify himself. It’s a trait I have admired in others, but I always found it difficult in him.

He was a man of his age. His circumstances would be unimaginable today, but for him at his time they were not so unusual. His mother died when he was not yet five years old and his father (my grandfather) left the family to their own devices, with his siblings scattered among well-meaning friends of his church. It would be many years before he saw his siblings again and he never did see his father again while he was alive.

My understanding of his father - my grandfather - was that he was a drunk, but it seems that this was not the case. In the last several years my father managed to piece together his movements in the 10 or 12 years before my grandfather died. It seems that rather than being a drunk he was simply broken in a way that could not be remedied at that time.

My grandfather had left to fight in the Great War at around 25 years of age, a bright young man from a moderately successful family in a middle class kind of way. His own grandfather - Thomas - had been quite wealthy, a champion boxer who actually managed to do something useful with his money. Thomas owned some land in various parts of Victoria, at one point having a large plot of land on the edge of Melbourne in a suburb called ‘Carlton’.

By the time my grandfather had been born, the family fortunes had faded somewhat, but not diminished entirely. He went to war a young man, saw action in Europe and was hospitalised on several occasions, seemingly for mental conditions. We can only speculate on what he would have seen in action and I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to stand knee deep in filth and mud, your feet rotting because they cannot be dried, your heart pounding at every loud noise, your friends slowly dying around you from both enemies; military enemies and virulent disease, simply waiting to die. Australia, with a population of just 5 million, sent a little over 400,000 men to fight for King and Country in that war and more than half of them were killed or injured as a result. Better than one in eight were killed.

The war ended in 1918, but my grandfather was not repatriated to Australia until 1920, spending much of the intervening time in various English hospitals. Records are scarce, but it’s fairly clear that he was not a stable man when he returned to Australia and, as was the way of the world then, he was released back into a world of people that could not understand what he had seen and he was released without any support to speak of.

He married a few years later and from all accounts was a caring father to his children, but soon after the birth of my father, my grandmother fell ill. She died of tuberculosis within a few years and my grandfather was a broken man.

Little is known of his time away from the family until he died. I found the death certificate among my father’s possessions and it seems that when he passed away it was my father that was first notified and went to attend to his own father’s affairs. History repeats.

My grandfather’s death was ascribed to exposure, frostbite and advanced gangrene of the feet. He was described by the attending doctor as indigent. Many years later, at the request of my father and his sister, my grandfather was recognised as a casualty of the first world war.

My father was not an especially brilliant man. He was not gifted in any particular way, but he had a reserved kindness that made him much loved among his circle of friends. He was known to be careless with money and at times overly generous. In part at least, I think this was due to his terror of being rejected. He did not especially want to be liked I think, but he was terrified of being rejected, of being a burden, of overstaying his welcome.

I learned a little of this during the last two weeks as I have read through his papers. He was not much of a writer - I found his computer was disconnected and when I managed to reassemble it, it seems to have been last used in 2009. It was running XP. One of the last files that he had open was a word document titled “The True and Complete History of my Life”. It was written entirely in upper case and the fonts varied throughout the document, which stretched to one A4 page. Needless to say that it was far from complete.

I did learn more from some other documents he had compiled over time. He had birth and death certificates of various relatives and titles to plots of land long sold. Best of all, he had scribbled notes here and there on one thing or another.

I alluded in his eulogy to some difficult times that he had and to people that did evil to him. I found a little more about that too. Dad had been badly molested on at least two different occasions. The first time he was about seven years old and was taken from the street. When he mentions it, even in his scribblings, he makes only the vaguest of references, but from other relatives I was able to piece more together.

On the second occasion, while the physical effects were less severe, it seems that the perpetrator was a person he trusted and I suspect that this was more damaging to him. I can only wonder at the effect this would have had on him. Both of these happened in the years between when his mother died and when he finally settled in Melbourne more than 20 years later.

My father did not abandon his family, far from it, he went to great lengths to maintain contact, but despite a wide circle of friends, he was a very private man and had difficulty in forming close relationships with anyone. I think, in part at least, this was due to his experiences as a child and went hand in hand with his refusal to justify himself in any way.

In the opening line of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy lays down one of the great principles of family dynamics. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In my own family the unhappiness seems to spring from a propensity to tell the most vicious stories of absent family members.

For myself, stories about my family members have always been a bit dull. No imagination. I once tried to start a rumour that one of my uncles had fought with the Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea, purely on the basis that it would be more interesting than the usual fare, but it never really took off. Mostly it was along the lines of this one having a drinking problem, that one having a secret dalliance or the other one pretending to be someone they aint. Pretending to be someone you aint is the most heinous of crimes apparently.

In my father’s case he was known as a ‘problem gambler’. Indeed I can remember as a small boy going with him to the TAB and emerging with a string of tickets. It was many years before I was old enough to realise that most of his bets were for fifty cents. If he were especially confident he might bet a dollar and I remember on one occasion he told me that he had placed $5.00 on one particular horse.

It was a hobby he enjoyed for as long as I have known him. On Saturday morning he would stop by the TAB in the morning and place 12 or 15 bets, totalling up to about $10.00 and his Saturday afternoon would be spent listening to the races on the wireless. For my father there was the wireless (a slightly larger AKA contraption that ran on a large battery about the size of half a brick) and the tranny (a smaller device that he hung by a plastic strap). He was miffed when, later in life, tranny came to have another meaning.

So it was with some trepidation that I looked through his papers after he passed away. His reputation as a gambler was such that I expected that any money would have been frittered away. It was then, with not much surprise then that I discovered that his bank accounts added up to about the price of a very elderly second hand car. There was a ‘funeral plan’, a sort of exorbitant life insurance sold to the elderly so that they “won’t be a burden”. They are universally poor value and I wish they were outlawed, but it would be just the sort of thing that dad would do.

Again, it was without great surprise that I discovered that he had gotten quotes on these policies, but never taken them out.

Later I found a notepad that seemed to list his bets. As ever there were a string of bets each Saturday, the date neatly written, if a little shakily at the top of each page and the list of bets underneath it. Next to each bet a tick or a cross was placed and by each tick was an amount. I felt a touch wistful seeing this as I could remember him doing the same oh so many years ago.

There were far more crosses than ticks and this was not really surprising. My father never really followed the horses, he just bet on whatever name took his fancy. Still and all, I judged that he would be close to even on most days. It was a rare day that there wasn’t a winner in there somewhere.

The amounts of the bets were rather more than I remembered and it disturbed me to see bets of $100 and $200 appearing regularly. He was a pensioner and it seemed that he was gambling rather more than he should.

I asked him about his gambling once or twice and he shrugged off the question, telling me that he only bet what he could afford. I wasn’t convinced this was true, but he didn’t want to elaborate and I didn’t want to pry.

The next day I went to the bank with my brother to get the details of his accounts. He had an every-day account that his pension was paid in to and nearly every month if was drawn down to zero or close enough to it. He also had a savings account with about $1000 in it. I was a little startled to find that there was a third account with an amount large enough to buy a rather nice new car as opposed to the elderly second hand car that I had imagined. Over the next few days I found that he saved money to this account every month and that he had never withdrawn from it. He was an age pensioner and had no other source of income apart from the pension but somehow he managed to save each month.

Later that day I found another of his betting notepads and this one still had some old betting tickets in it. I realised that the bets weren’t $100 or $200, but $1.00 or $2.00. It seems that dad didn’t really hold much with the idea of inflation.

Over the next few days cleaning up the house, my brother and I found several hundred dollars in neatly bagged coins that he had stowed away in casserole dishes in various parts of the house. It occurred to me that this was not the habit of a problem gambler.

I remember this habit too from when I was a child. In those days he used to empty his pockets of a night and store away whatever coins he had. I guess it was another habit that he never lost.

I was surprised at the funeral at the number of people from the local town that came along. They spoke of him fondly and seemed to share one hobby or another with him. One fellow came into the service quietly and sat by himself. Afterward I asked him how he knew dad and he told me that they always arrived at the rowing machine at the same time. There was a small outdoor gym at the lake that dad used to walk around each morning. The chap told me that if he was there first, dad would walk circles around the gym area and they would chat about weather or sports or whatever the topic of the day might be. If dad arrived first they would do the opposite.

The day before the funeral, I stopped at a coffee shop in the town with my brother for some lunch. One of the waitresses seemed a bit wary of me for some reason and eventually came over to the table.

“Are you Bill Curran’s son?” she asked after apologising for interrupting. I told her I was and she gave her condolences. “You look just like him.” she said.

The day after the funeral I received a long, rambling and slightly humorous email. It was interesting and annoying at the same time and even slightly familiar. I realised the familiarity was because it was so similar to my own style of writing, full of digressions and wordplay, pompous and self-deprecating all at the same time.

The email was from my eldest daughter.

I wrote back to her, commenting that she wrote well, thereby managing to compliment myself as well as her. She replied that this was “just a rumour” and the deal was sealed.

No doubt over time there will be traits of me in my children as there are traits of my father in me. One of my traits is that I write and I am often asked why I write and sometimes the question is asked without kindness. That my answer is the same as many great writers says more about the habit of writing than it does about my own efforts. I write because it is so hard not to write.

I have sometimes wondered about this and wondered if any of my daughters will be similarly affected. If it turns out that it is my eldest that is affected, I suspect that she will be able to take over my ramblings fairly seamlessly.