Whatever Remains

by Penny F. Graham

  I was also beginning to realise there was a world outside the family circle. I began to see grave discrepancies in Denis’s stories, to wonder at our way of life, to question some of his decisions regarding our future. Over time, our small family slowly began to divide into two camps: a father and his two sons, and me.

  I would slowly start the process of disentangling myself emotionally from the family. From the time of our arrival back in Australia, my total and unshakeable adoration of my father had crumbled and our relationship would never be unreservedly close again.

  I would also develop a mind of my own, a strong sense of independence and a desire not to be governed by my overprotective and overpowering parent. I wanted to live my life on my terms, not his. By the time I was 20, I was training to become a dental nurse after a disappointing end to my formal schooling. I had met a quiet, gentle, ‘steady’ young man and wanted to become engaged. Denis wasn’t happy with my choice and I was sent off to see a bit of Australia and told to perhaps reconsider, from a distance, my choice of future husband.

  I headed to Canberra, a city I had never seen, to visit my brother Tony. This time I was travelling alone.

  Part Three

  The tears would be over now, and by the time Father had grasped my third toe, I would start reciting with him:

  And this little piggie had roast beef …

  Chapter 10

  A new city and a new life, Australia 1962–1976

  The bus brought me into Canberra as dawn broke one early spring morning. Through sleep-deprived eyes, I gazed at the massed pink and white blossoms of the cherry trees lining the road as we drove into the city. Soft pink blooms against a strengthening blue sky — a new day, a new city and a new life.

  The wide yellow grass plains and purple hills of Canberra charmed me. I would stay a while, I thought, before continuing on my way to Sydney. No need to hurry away. I would get to know the place first. I was 20 years old, away from home and family for the first time and determined to have a good time. And I did.

  Work was easy to come by in those days. I presented myself to the Public Service and asked if there were any jobs available. They asked me what I liked to do and I said in all naiveté, ‘I love to read.’ So they offered me a job in the National Library of Australia. What a happy choice. I worked in the Australian Reference Section, which combined my main loves: history and literature. My boss was a wonderful, and for her day, very progressive woman who introduced me to new ways of thinking, new ideas and exciting opportunities. All this and they paid me too.

  The rivers run slowly in this part of the country, meandering through open grasslands or through the more hilly treed uplands of the Brindabella Ranges. The Cotter River in particular presents many perfect places for picnics and barbecues along its winding banks. I met my husband-to-be just before my 21st birthday. A group of us were picnicking on the banks of the Cotter, and I noticed with interest this rather serious young man. We wandered upriver talking, getting to know one another. I saw stability, honesty and a kind and generous nature in him. My passion for the nice young man I had left in Perth began to fade. Two years later, early in 1965, we were married in St John’s Church, Reid. I was 22 years old, Lindsay was 23.

  During those two years, Denis came to join Tony and me in Canberra and then my brother Derek came just before our wedding. So once again our family was, if not living together, all together in the same city.

  After our wedding, the firm Lindsay was working for transferred him back to Sydney. I was happy enough to move, to distance myself again from family until I felt confident enough to stand on my own two feet as a married woman. Sydney was to be a major culture shock. It was a stunning city on a beautiful harbour, but if you live in the outer suburbs, know no-one, have a limited income and no family for support, life could be isolating and lonely. Our first ‘married home’ was a small rented flat, a few bright sunny rooms at the back of a house in a pleasant street in Chatswood. It was convenient for Lindsay, who worked in North Sydney, and for me as I worked only minutes away at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital. Shopping expeditions were a short stroll to the Chatswood shops with a market basket over the arm.

  Six months later, when we realised that I was pregnant with our first child, we decided sadly that our small apartment amongst the azalea and camellia blossoms was not suitable for raising a family. So our first house hunt began. We would like to have stayed in the area, but it was way out of our price range.

  During the few months of searching, the circle of financially possible homes took us further out, and we ended up buying in the outer suburb of Thornleigh. It was a small, poorly built white-painted timber house with three small bedrooms, a combined lounge-dining room and a single carport. But the price was manageable — £6,125 — and the house looked over a valley of pleasant tree-lined streets.

  What joy there was when our first child was born, a boy we called Christopher. When our second son Stephen arrived 20 months later, I felt we were now truly a family. We had both wanted a large family. Lindsay, who was the eldest of six children, had spent a miserable two and a half years at boarding school before moving to a country high school and leaving home at age 16 to attend university in Sydney. He felt that he had missed out on much of the fun a large family can bring and wanted his children to have that experience.

  I had yearned for a large extended family of my own: grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins; something that I had never had. My childhood had been the poorer and lonelier for it. My brothers had each other and their relationship with our father had always been very close. But my relationship with him had varied from adoration as a young child, to a deepening sense of apprehension, confusion and distrust as an adult. And my mother was, by now, just a distant memory.

  Three and a bit years after moving into our home in Thornleigh, with two small boys and another on the way, we decided we needed something a bit bigger and more substantial than our little white house on the hill. We found just what we wanted; a solid unpretentious four-bedroom brand new house just a few kilometres away. Its sturdy straw-coloured brickwork glowed warmly in the sunlight, and it sat comfortably on a long flat piece of land that would, I imagined, do well as a play area for the children. The house was on the high side of a tree-lined street, and the surrounding houses looked well maintained in their neat gardens. And, joy upon joy, there was a small park at the end of the road where the boys could play. It was a good place for a young growing family.

  I was sorry to leave the garden at Thornleigh where I had worked so hard to produce the few shrubs and flowers that grew in the heavy Sydney clay. I was also sorry to be leaving our next-door neighbours, who had been so kind to us when we first moved in and on whom we had relied in times of need. I was not so sorry to leave the house. The first few years there had been hard. With little money, no car, no phone and the closest shop a very long and hilly walk away, I was happy to be moving to a more convenient location.

  Our new home was big enough to comfortably accommodate our increasing family. We now had a car and a phone, and I did not feel so isolated. The car, purchased at the knock-down price of £100 from a deceased estate, was a very elderly pale yellow FJ Holden. It had been bought to bring our first baby home from hospital. It continued to serve us well for many years, until its rusted worn-out underbelly finally gave way and it had to be towed away to a wrecker’s yard. This car was superseded by a series of old station wagons that had room for all the kids and lots of shopping and luggage in the back. On long journeys, if the younger children needed to sleep, we would put a mattress over the back and let them sleep there — no seat belts and children’s car seats in those days.

  Our next two children were also boys: Timothy, born in November 1970 not long after we settled into our new home, and our last child, Jeremy, born nearly four years later.

  A few months before Timothy’s birth, Denis made an unexpected announcement. He was to marry again. He had rung to tell me the news and it came as a c
omplete surprise as he had never mentioned to me having a close relationship with anyone. After so many years of being a widower, I was mystified as to why, now in his mid-60s, he had decided to once again marry. During that phone call and subsequent discussions, he was not particularly forthcoming about the whys and wherefores of his forthcoming marriage. I told him I would like to be at the ceremony, but he seemed very evasive about the exact date.

  At this time, Denis was principal of the Real Estate and Finance Corporation, a fledgling business he started which employed my brother Tony. Apparently the business was not faring well. Was he lonely, tired of his single life, worrying that his business was not making money and deciding it was time to cut his losses? Or making sure that he would have a companion in his old age? Whatever the reason, getting married was, for both of them, a disastrous decision. But none of us was to know that then. On 29 October 1970, he married Jean Denley in Canberra.

  I never got to know Jean well, but enough to consider her a pleasant woman with a kind heart and deep love for her new husband. When they married, Jean was a 63-year-old widow with one adult son. She and her first husband had owned a property outside Canberra and when he died, she had moved into a large comfortable home in suburban Canberra. It was to this house that Denis moved after their marriage. Being a busy mum and living in Sydney, I did not get to see much of them over the first year or so as we did not visit Canberra often. In spite of this, I slowly became aware that all was not well with the marriage.

  The relationship between Jean and Denis was escalating into an unpleasant battleground and within a year they had separated and subsequently divorced. I was told very little by Denis or my brothers of the separation or the unpleasant court case that followed. Many years later, I was to read newspaper articles that made me cringe with horror. Money, apparently, was the root of the problem. Denis received a loan or a gift from Jean, depending on who you believe, of a considerable sum of money just before they married. The matter ended in the Supreme Court, which decided that the transaction had been a loan and entered judgement in favour of Jean against Denis for the amount of the loan and costs. There was also trouble brewing as the animosity between the two families increased. Business dealings between Jean’s son and my brother Derek did not pan out well and would bring Derek to the notice of the Supreme Court.

  The unpleasantness that was to come in early 1972 was a thing of the future in those early days in our new home in West Pennant Hills. As we settled in, I got to know the other mums in the street and joined in the sorts of activities that young stay-at-home mums did in those days. Social tennis, where we would bring the kids and a packed morning tea and spend time in the open air chatting or getting a little exercise while giving the kids an opportunity to play. In the evening, if our husbands were home in time, we gathered, on a fortnightly basis, at each other’s homes for book club meetings that inevitably ended with a convivial cuppa and gossip about who was doing what in the neighbourhood. There were also weekly yoga classes — a ‘bring an exercise mat and leave your troubles at home’ get-together for the more active of us. The book club to broaden our minds, the yoga to help with the stress of being what we were: young inexperienced mums bringing up our children as best we could.

  By the time I was 32, I had four young children under nine, and an ambitious, hard-working and often-absent husband. After years of working long hours to further his career and eight years of part-time study, Lindsay realised that he was missing out on seeing his children grow. It was, we both agreed, time to make some life changes.

  So we contemplated a move back to Canberra. It was the city where we had met and married and we both liked it. Lindsay’s mother had just remarried and moved to her husband’s Canberra home. So our children would get to know their grandfather, grandmother and uncles. The climate was healthy, the schools good. The Australian job market was strong in the 1970s and Lindsay believed he would not find it difficult to get a good job in Canberra. The Public Service was expanding again as the Whitlam era initiatives were still being implemented and the newly elected Coalition Government had many changes it wanted to make. The benefits seemed great, so move we did.

  The house sold quickly, and after a massive pack and clean-out of our solid dependable home, we set off on a misty evening heading out of Sydney for our new life in the nation’s capital.

  Chapter 11

  Return to Canberra, 1976–1987

  Canberra had an interesting history. In the early 20th century it changed from a sparsely inhabited rural area of New South Wales to become the nation’s federal capital. Nevertheless it remained a small country town prior to World War II; far more rural than urban in its nature and size, with little to mark it as Australia’s capital other than its Parliament House and the developing War Memorial. Its social centre remained the Kingston/Manuka area. During and after World War II, Canberra began to grow more rapidly. More and more government agencies moved to Canberra and the new centres of Woden, Belconnen and Tuggeranong were established to accommodate a growing population.

  In the first few months after our return to Canberra, I spent a lot of time looking at prospective houses. Canberra was in a rapid state of growth and the house market was tight. And what houses were available weren’t right for us. So we purchased land in a suburb on the then outer limits of the Tuggeranong Valley and close to the Murrumbidgee River. A home to suit our needs was designed and building began. The house had many large north-facing windows to let in the sunlight and the clean fresh air, and a large garden where children could play and grow.

  We moved into our new home just before Christmas 1977. A young growing family in a young growing suburb — we fitted in. There were plenty of children in our street for our children to play with, and young mums for me to make friends with. When our youngest started primary school, I got a part-time job in the undergraduate library at the Australian National University. Being mainly a book-stacker wasn’t terribly exciting, but it did allow me to see the children off to school in the mornings and be home in time to pick up the younger children from their primary school in the afternoon. Life, for me, was changing and certainly for the better.

  During the first year in our new home, something quite insignificant happened and maybe I read more into it than I sensibly should. A humble wisteria vine gave me a lesson in expectations that I have never forgotten.

  When we first moved in, our house was surrounded by clay — unforgiving, back-breakingly heavy, dark red clay. Slowly we nurtured it, fed and turned it, added to it and built it up until little by little it turned into something that resembled soil. One of the first plants I bought was a wisteria to give us shade from the hot summer sun over the back patio. I considered very carefully the various available species and finally chose a deep purple variety; a colour I thought would complement the golden-coloured brickwork and would look cool and shady on a summer day. I duly planted it into a pocket of new warm damp earth that I had so lovingly prepared. It grew and spread rapidly, twisting its strong tentacles round the pergola posts, spreading wide and full along the back of the house. After a few years it flowered.

  That spring the blossoms hung in a profusion of long strands, not the expected deep double purple, but an exquisite pearly white — looking like a fragile veil of bridal lace. How beautiful the blossoms looked, sparkling like snow in the early morning light as I put the kettle on for our first morning cup of tea. How I loved to see the blossoms break every spring, draping the back of the house in a veritable wedding veil. Despite the fact that the wisteria depleted the soil with its greedy appetite, twisted the pillars of the pergola with its strong arms and needed constant pruning to keep it in check, I loved that plant above all others in the garden. We don’t always get what we think we want, nor — as I was to find out in the years to come — can a label always be trusted.

  As the boys grew, and our life settled into its new pattern, we saw more of my family now that we all lived in the same city. Denis was a kind and conscient
ious grandfather — during school holidays he took the children on excursions, picnics and walks, the cinema — little outings that gave them something to do and to look forward to. He had a close relationship with them all, but especially the older two.

  For many years now, I had had an uneasy peace with my father. The adoration I had felt for him as a young child had well and truly evaporated and I began to see him as controlling and manipulative, a law unto himself. The lack of memorabilia or photos of his parents or siblings, his assertion that he was alone in the world, and seemingly happy to be so I had accepted as a child, but could not as an adult. What could be the reason for his alienation from his family, if that was what it was? I now realised he not only wanted to live life on his terms, but wanted his three children to live their lives on his terms as well.

  From childhood, I knew him to be a quietly spoken man with impeccable manners and old world attitudes. In his world, it was impolite to discuss money matters or business affairs, and it had been made very clear that it was unthinkable to challenge anything he told you! Denis had chosen to manipulate the history of his past to reflect his view of himself. But his history was also our history, and I believe we all have a right to a past.

  Now that I had a family of my own, I felt a great need to be able to tell our sons where they fitted in the world, who their forbears were and where they came from. The stories they had grown up with were, I strongly suspected, just fanciful tales.