Two Generations Read online

  TWO GENERATIONS

  A memoir of secrets, forgiveness and my father

  ANNE CONNOR

  First published in 2018 by Impact Press

  an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.impactpress.com.au

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  Copyright © Anne Connor 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Quote from Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges, © 2010 reprinted by permission of Nation Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Connor, Anne.

  Two generations: a memoir of secrets, forgiveness and my father / Anne Connor.

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-41-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-42-0 (ebook)

  Cover and internal design: Deborah Parry

  Cover images: Anne Connor

  For Bernie, Scarlett, Jock and Bess – with gratitude and love.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Parents

  Secrets

  Before the War

  The War

  After the War

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  References

  It can take six generations for suffering to work its way out of a family.

  ANON

  PREFACE

  BASED ON TRUE EVENTS and told from a daughter’s perspective, Two Generations alternates between reflection and dramatised reconstruction. Name changes and fictionalised characters and events have been introduced.

  During the Second World War, Jock Connor served in Darwin and Lae, New Guinea where he became involved in a tragic accident with ramifications that resonated within my family, but were not spoken of.

  My father’s life is not complete without my mother. Affected too by this secret, was her collusion with him a way of protecting her husband and children? Together, they built their life and raised their family.

  It is yet to play out how many generations will be affected.

  INTRODUCTION

  MY FATHER YELLED AT ME, ‘Come back here and close that door quietly.’

  I placed my hand on the door handle and slid the door on its worn runners until it made the slight thud it always made against the doorjamb. Still too loud. He pulled the door wide open, making a clunking sound when it stopped. ‘Close it again and don’t slam it.’

  ‘It didn’t slam.’ My voice was shaky and weak.

  He leaned his face closer to mine. ‘Don’t talk back. Close it.’ I blinked away the burning tears and slipped my hand through the handle again and moved the door until it was nearly closed, then paused and eased it against the doorjamb.

  Blood pounding in my head deafened me.

  My father yanked the door wide open one more time. ‘Close it.’ Shaking, I slipped my hand through the handle that made it harder to control the door – but, at last, success.

  No sound. I thought he’d be happy.

  But once more, he pulled the door wide open. ‘And again.’

  By this time, more sensitive to the door’s movement on its runners, I closed it in one hushed movement.

  ‘Don’t ever slam it again, do you hear me?’

  I stared up at him. Stop yelling, I begged him under my breath.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ He leaned over me again, ‘Answer me.’

  ‘No. I mean yes, I won’t slam it again, ever.’ Ever, ever, ever.

  His cheeks flushed and his chest moved with his breathing. He turned and walked back to the lounge room where he flopped back into his chair with a loud sigh. I tiptoed to my bedroom, curled up on my bed and cried.

  My father’s reaction to unexpected and loud noises confused and frightened me. Inexplicable, no-one ever spoke of it. Two decades after he died, I delved into his past and finally understood.

  PROLOGUE

  Lae, New Guinea, December 1943

  HE COULD SMELL ANTISEPTIC. Blood and bits of flesh and splintered bone still covered his face and throat, his ruined army shirt. He sat on the edge of the bed next to timber trestle tables neatly laid with surgical dressings and medical instruments. Stretcher after stretcher of bandaged and bloodied soldiers lined both sides of the long tent. Men moaned, a few cried. Rain hammered the canvas roof.

  He rested his elbows on his knees, leaned over and vomited. A beanpole of a medic materialised with a metal dish, too late. Regurgitated bully beef and bile soaked into the steamy, stinky mud. The soldier tried to stand, ‘Joe,’ he cried. His legs buckled, landing him in the muck. He curled up there and wept.

  Another medic appeared and the two men tried to lift the soldier back onto the stretcher.

  ‘Come on mate, lie down?’

  ‘No, no, no, can’t …’ Arms and legs stiffened. He lashed out, hitting both medics. Spit landed on the taller man’s chin. ‘Let me go, let me go.’

  ‘Settle down mate, doc will be here soon.’

  The soldier continued thrashing until a sharp jab stabbed his right arm.

  PARENTS

  1929

  My father

  LURED BY IMAGES OF Australia as a warm and sunny paradise, Jock Connor booked his ticket on the Hobson’s Bay.

  Posters showing verdant fruit blocks in Victoria’s northern town of Mildura, orange trees groaning under an abundance of juicy ripe fruit, enticed the emigrants to leave their grey, bleak cities such as Manchester, where Jock lived; their meagre existence of two and three families living together in cramped rooms on streets of similar two-storey, poky houses built jammed up next to one another, backyards with an outside loo and not much else.

  The brochures showed miles and miles of space, and just one house built on a quarter acre block; room for children to chase one another or for adults to grow vegetables and fruit trees in a climate of never-ending sunshine and mild winters. Compelled by the promise, the English filled migrant ships over and over again.

  He caught a train to Southampton followed by a bus to the dock.

  Passengers crammed onto the Hobson’s Bay and craned at the ship’s railing to catch the last glimpse of loved ones. Streamers flew as seamen pulled up anchor. The vessel slid away. Now inky water lapped against its sides and the ship’s horn sounded giving everyone a start. As the streamers snapped one by one, people on water and land rummaged in handbags or pockets for handkerchiefs to wave in the breeze.

  As he watched people farewelling their loved ones, Jock thought of the bleak scene with his mother that morning. The memory haunted him no matter how hard he tried to suppress it. A light knock at first, then louder. He waited a moment more before opening the bedroom door into the darkened room with its musty odour from the damp walls. She was still in the double bed she shared with the two youngest, now downstairs, up and dressed; ready to walk their big brother to the train station. Jock had five younger siblings, Marie, Mona, Ivy, Alf and Jack, still at home. The three older girls Ada, Anne and Nelly had married and lived elsewhere.

  ‘I’m on my way now, Mother.’

  She turned to the wall, pulling the blanket over her head.

  ‘I’ll write,’ he said. ‘As soon as I arrive, I’ll write.’

  She didn’t move.

  Please turn over. Please look at me, he thought and tried again.

  ‘I’m off now, Mother, I’ll write.’ He waited at the door for a few moments, willing her to turn around, get out of bed, come and
put her arms around him, kiss him on the cheek and say, ‘I love you son, have a great trip.’

  ‘Goodbye now, Mother.’ He gently closed the door behind him, careful not to make a noise, stood in the darkened hallway and blinked away tears, not wanting his brothers and sisters witnessing such weakness.

  My mother told me this story during my growing years; it didn’t come from him. When I heard this I thought my grandmother Ada to be a hard, emotionless woman. But as I grew older and became a mother myself I empathised with the grief she must have experienced losing her eldest son to the other side of the world and not knowing whether she’d ever see him again. For years, Jock had been the major breadwinner in the family as Ada had lost her husband in an accident at work a decade earlier. How fearful she must have been, wondering what the future might hold for her and the other children without him. What a wretched scene; a mother and son’s sadness and the inexpressible chasm between them.

  He picked up the old suitcase Elsie, his neighbour, had given him and left the house.

  Mona, Ivy and Jack walked him to the train station and stood on the platform waving. He watched as they became smaller and smaller until the train chugged around a corner and they disappeared.

  He kept his coat buttoned so his improvised belt, an old tie, stayed hidden. The jacket had belonged to his father – a meagre inheritance. Worn at the elbows, frayed on the cuffs and collar, it had seen better days. He’d folded newspaper into the bottom of his shoes, something between the ground and his threadbare socks.

  As the Hobson’s Bay slipped away from the dock, Jock leaned on the rail and watched seagulls diving into the choppy waves. An onlooker might have thought him older than his twenty-three years. He had bright blue eyes and a frown between his eyebrows that obscured a childhood scar. Robust, but thin and wiry, he had worked as an adult while still a child.

  For years, he’d thought of leaving England. He yearned for a richer, warmer life where the sun shone for days at a time. The dank poverty of his existence was unbearable. With no other prospects, his quest turned to Australia. He dared hope for a better life for himself, even marry and have children. His mother and siblings might even follow. Then she’d know he’d made the right choice in leaving, and the dull sensation in the pit of his stomach every time he thought of her, might leave him for good.

  He looked back and Southampton appeared as a speck on the horizon. He hadn’t banked on feeling so alone. The sense of the impending departure had kept him going during the last long English winter. Now his dream had become a reality, his thoughts kept landing in a very different place.

  I must be a miserable sod; no-one to see me off this end and no-one at the other.

  My mother

  BESSIE BROWN GREW UP on a farm in Balliang near Geelong in Victoria. When she told me stories of her past, she described the house the same every time.

  My grandfather Tom had built their small cottage from planks of raw wood nailed together with a floor of rough timber. Rusted iron sheets formed the makeshift roof, which leaked in heavy downpours. Discarded kerosene tins and small logs littered a sloping veranda – tacked on as an afterthought. To close the front door, Bess had to lift and shove it in one movement. Gaps at the top and bottom allowed hot or cold winds to blow through the house, depending on the season. Three windows at the rear mirrored three at the front. Scrubby trees grew on either side of the house and a corroded iron gate leaned against a dead bush.

  Inside was dark. Pots and pans hanging from nails hammered into the walls created a dim halo over a black woodstove. To the left sat a table and six chairs. To the right, a bench forever covered in flour. Hessian curtains my grandmother Mary had sewed from sugar bags hung at the windows.

  Two bedrooms ran off to the left, one with an iron double bed where my grandparents slept, the second furnished with four single beds, pushed together for my mother and her siblings.

  Tom left his loaded guns by the front door.

  From the age of six, Bess milked cows before school. Winters were the worst. By the light of a kerosene lamp, she slipped on her clothes and boots before traipsing through the mud to the milking sheds, her face and fingers stinging from the icy wind. She’d place her rickety wooden stool next to the milker, close her eyes, lean her forehead against the cow’s warm side and rub her hands across its flank in an effort to bring circulation back into her numb fingers. She squeezed and pulled the heavy teats in rhythm with the dull sound of milk squirting into the metal bucket.

  At sundown, Mary heated scrubbed rocks in the wood stove before wrapping them in cloth to make a warm parcel for each child’s bed. In the mornings, she made breakfast and carried large wooden trays piled with plates of eggs, bacon and toasted homemade bread to men employed on the farm. They came looking for food and board for a fair day’s work and built their own sleeping quarters – a lean-to attached to the milking shed – from kerosene tins hammered flat, timber and hessian bags.

  During the sweltering summers, Mary’s spirit dwindled as the north winds stripped the last drop of moisture from the ground, causing it to crack right open. Stands of eucalyptus dotted about the paddocks offered the cattle and sheep little shelter from the relentless sun. For miles parched land shimmered in the heat haze. A dam in the western paddock, the main water supply for grazing animals, too often dried to a puddle of sludge breeding swarms of mosquitoes. Livestock, wading too far in for relief, became bogged in the slurry and died a slow death, their bloated bodies half-sunk in the mud. Tom towed the ones he could to safety by wrapping one end of a rope around the horn of his saddle, the other encircling the cow’s middle.

  Life on the land was bleak in the early nineteen-hundreds. Mary had four babies in eight years; my mother Elizabeth, or Bess, then Frank, Honor and Tilly. Left weaker after each baby’s arrival, Mary became thin and drawn, her complexion sallow. Grey-streaked tendrils from her pinned-up hair fell over her face.

  To stop the ravages of the Australian sun during the long hot summers, Mary always wore a straw hat outdoors. Blowflies swarmed over food during the meals’ preparation. They hovered over dinner plates set at the table and landed on food caked on the babies’ faces. Tom had migrated from Ireland. Under the Australian sun, his face burned, peeled and burned again until he bought himself a wide-brimmed hat from Geelong’s general store. He wore his tweed jacket buttoned-up in winter and worked with his shirtsleeves rolled up in the scorching summer.

  As Bess and her siblings grew and helped around the farm, Mary’s strength improved. She enjoyed the in-between seasons – spring and autumn. At these times, Mary took the children on walks through the scrub and for picnics by the dam. Sandwiches with bread filled with sliced ham from one of their own pigs were cut, and lemons squeezed to make sugary lemonade. Mary wrapped lunch in a tablecloth she had embroidered with little girls in bonnets and long dresses, placing the food in a wicker basket.

  At the weir, Mary stretched out, under gum trees, on eiderdowns pulled from the children’s beds. The high sun’s rays filtered through the leaves, so different from the punishing summer sun. During these times, Bess noticed her mother’s spirit lift. Mary appeared at peace breathing in the bush smells and soft air as gentle breezes wafted up the valley.

  The children loved to play hide-and-seek. Mary spread out face down, on an eiderdown, with her forehead resting on her crossed arms and counted in a loud voice while the children scattered.

  ‘One hundred. Coming, ready or not.’

  She pretended she didn’t know where they were and wandered around saying, ‘I wonder where those children are. They must be somewhere. I hope they haven’t gone too far.’

  When the sport had run its course, the youngsters ran off to explore the bush, leaving their mother to rest in the benign sun, watching clouds scudding across the blue sky.

  Bess loved horses. She hadn’t long turned twelve the day she noticed a young stallion standing in the middle of the breaking-in yard. Not yet fully grown, he was more than a colt, and
chestnut brown with a white diamond on his forehead. She slipped under the railing and he backed off a few steps.

  ‘Hello, boy. You’re mighty handsome,’ she whispered. She recognised the signs of a brumby on full alert: eyes wide, ears flat, head high, breathing heavily. She stood still, holding her hand out, palm upwards. He raced off, raising a cloud of dust behind him. She took her time stepping backwards, not taking her eyes off him. Resting her elbows on the top of the railing, her chin cupped in her hands, she gazed at the steed; such a beauty.

  Each day before and after school, she visited him with a handful of hay dipped in molasses. He approached sniffing the sweet, pungent offering. His warm breath and his raspy tongue made her smile. She called him Brown Horse and stroked his sweaty neck. At first, he flinched, his muscles tensed, before he shook his head and settled.

  She softened her voice. ‘We can be mates. I won’t hurt you.’

  The whiff of feed and molasses lingered as she slipped through the fence.

  In time, he moved towards her, a small step, and allowed her to rub his velvety nose as he ate the sticky fodder and licked her hand clean. One day, she held the bridle close to his face. He inhaled and pulled back.

  ‘I won’t hurt you, cobber.’

  The next day, she moved closer, slipped the leather over his face and buckled the halter behind his ears, then led him around the enclosure, her voice calm and quiet. It wasn’t long before Bess realised he trusted her. In class she gazed out the window daydreaming of riding the brumby. She rushed home, leaving her sisters and brother dawdling along the track, and sprinted past the house on her way to the breaking-in yard – she froze. The stench of fresh horse manure filled the air. Her father was thrashing Brown Horse’s hindquarters with his pigskin crop while the foreman pulled hard on a rope tied around the young stallion’s neck. The brumby’s ears stayed pinned back flat, his eyes open wide. She wanted to yell, Stop, please stop. But knew such insolence might cause her father to turn the whip on her.