Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  One of my father’s favourite holiday outings was to go see Mickey, by then hanging from a dead branch behind thick, muted glass in the South Australian Museum. But I could never take my eyes off the places where Mickey’s hair had fallen out, making his skin look cruelly bare. The last time I went to the museum with my father, I was surprised to find Mickey still there in his dark and dingy exhibit, just as I remembered him from my childhood.

  My father’s enthusiasm for Mickey and the stories he told us about the monkey’s journey to Australia, even though they were pretty funny, couldn’t win me over. Poor Mickey just looked neglected and sad. Even as a child it seemed like I was looking into an open coffin.

  Four

  As he sat on the shore gazing at the horizon, my father, under the trance of his Captain Jamieson, dreamed of endless skies, unknown ports and peoples. He wanted to be taken somewhere very far away and have experiences very different from those he knew. From an early age, he strapped his buggy to his pony and set out along the rocky path from the farm to the ocean’s edge.

  It turns out my parents shared a common dream for escape and rebellion. My father’s day of freedom finally came when he was sixteen. He took a job with the Adelaide Steamship Company, working his way up and down the coast of Australia on large cargo ships. Hauling goods from one end of Australia to the other was not for the faint-hearted. The crew was small and each of them a lot older than my father, who was really still just a boy. He was the rookie but he loved it.

  Despite the modesty of the family’s home and life on the farm, when it came time for my father to go to school he had been sent to one of Adelaide’s most expensive boarding schools, Scotch College. There he learned to speak like a stuck-up mummy’s boy. The other members of his crew, hardened sailors vehemently on the side of the working class, quickly beat out any sense of entitlement my father may have brought aboard.

  It wasn’t long before my father was rolling his own cigarettes. He stopped introducing himself as Richard – he was now Dick.

  In 1953, aged eighteen, he joined the Royal Australian Navy. The navy claimed his heart even before he set sail, outfitting him with his white dress uniforms and blue work ones, along with all his other gear, for free. He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Free’ never stopped being my father’s favourite word. ‘Discounted’, ‘reduced’ and ‘bargain’ were others, surpassed only by ‘fire sale’, which opened up in his mind the opportunity for bartering. He loved almost nothing better than feeling like he’d got the upper hand in a negotiation, and he was very good at it. Of course, within a few years he would have an unfair advantage in any transaction. Usually he refused to play that card, but when it came to a deal, who could fleece a cripple?

  In the navy he took on the specialties of navigation, demolition and diving. When he went diving, he wore an old-fashioned diving suit with a big round metal helmet that I imagined made him look like he’d stuck his head in a fishbowl. More than being in the water, he loved the demolition work. What eighteen-year-old boy wouldn’t? Sometimes they came ashore and he got to blow up railway lines with dynamite to practise derailing enemy trains. I thought that sounded like a lot of fun when he told me about it.

  My father’s happiest days were at sea. He never stopped telling me and my brother that. We spent many weekends going to visit old ports and looking at beat-up, rusty boats. Our father wasn’t into shiny and new; he liked old things with good stories to tell. He certainly had one.

  He was two years at sea when that fever and lethargy struck, the captain sending him ashore, where he was looked after by his mother’s sister, his aunt Molly. What happened that day he felt recovered enough to go on a short errand became part of our family’s folklore.

  After he called over his shoulder, ‘I’ll only be gone an hour,’ he walked out into the bright light. He filled his lungs with air. After weeks of delirium, he could sense he’d be back at sea soon. He felt good.

  He didn’t go far from the house. Just as he’d promised, he was returning from his trip to the post office less than an hour later. Even so, after so long in bed he felt tired from the simple exertion of walking and planned to go straight back to resting.

  However, just before he reached the corner of his aunt’s street, he saw a woman struggling up a flight of stairs with two heavy suitcases. He called out, offering to help. She put down her bags and said, ‘Thank you. That’s very kind of you. I’ve packed too much.’

  My father bent over to lift the bags and struggled to carry them up the stairs to her door. The moment he put them down and they said goodbye, he knew he’d made a mistake. He felt faint and nauseated. He gripped the railing tight as he walked back down the stairs.

  The following morning, when he went to reach for the glass of water on his nightstand, he could not move.

  It’s a particularly cruel twist to my father’s story that polio got him on its way out. As far as everyone was concerned, the disease had been beaten after the introduction of the Salk polio vaccine. A national immunisation effort had been rolled out the year before but since polio usually only affects children, my father, past the danger years, hadn’t been given the vaccine.

  As he slept, in eight quietly vicious hours, polio took all movement from my father’s long legs, his arms, his hands and then – the final blow on the list of devastations – it collapsed his lungs.

  It wasn’t just one thing that went wrong that day when he arrived at the hospital. As is often the way, a number of factors came together to shape my father’s destiny. He was a sailor ashore, caught in the middle of a perfect storm.

  In 1928, Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw invented the iron lung, which was initially called a ‘tank respirator’ or ‘Drinker respirator’. Drinker and Shaw’s first machine used air pumps from two vacuum cleaners, powered by an electric motor. The pumps changed the pressure inside an airtight metal box, pushing and sucking oxygen in and out of the lungs of the person lying inside, breathing for them. It was originally designed as treatment for coal-gas poisoning but was quickly identified as life-saving for polio victims as well.

  When the ambulance men handed over my father on a stretcher, the hospital’s machines were in the locked storeroom. Why they hadn’t been more insistent that the matron bring the key before her next shift, or didn’t send someone to her house to get the key, or simply hatchet the door down themselves, I never understood.

  Instead, the nurses held their vigil that first night. Without them, there is no doubt my father would have died.

  Surprisingly, considering the havoc it wreaked on so many young lives during its three decades of epidemic, polio is not a very efficient disease. It is rapidly killed by heat, formaldehyde, chlorine and ultraviolet light. Ninety per cent of polio infections cause no symptoms at all, with the rest experiencing nothing much more than fever and lethargy. Only about 1 per cent of infected individuals will suffer any lasting manifestation of the disease, such as the wasting of limbs.

  My father, however, had such a severe presentation of polio, nobody thought he could survive it. I had never heard of the medical term for his condition, bulbospinal polio. My father certainly never described it that way to me. When my brother and I were growing up, he rarely discussed his condition or mentioned the word polio. But now I know bulbospinal polio describes patients who present with both brainstem (bulbar) and spinal cord symptoms.

  My father always believed that it was carrying that woman’s suitcases up the stairs that did him in. He surmised that the strain of lifting such a heavy weight when his immune system was still so weakened and vulnerable allowed the lurking virus to take hold.

  My father’s story, as he always told it to me, had it that if that simple series of events had not taken place he would have been one of the 99 per cent in whom the disease leaves no lasting mark.

  Whether it was his act of kindness that tipped him over the edge, I will never know. But my father, like anyone whose sense of meaning in the world is suddenl
y and seemingly inexplicably devastated, needed a narrative. He needed to explain to himself what had happened. The story of the suitcases helped him go on but it also shielded him, and all of us, from the more painful reality.

  This story, so large in my mind from the day it was first told to me, set me to thinking that my father believed he had brought his fate upon himself. No matter how subtle he intended it to be, that was the message I took away. He did something and there were consequences.

  Sometimes when I walked along the footpath beside my father, I imagined the woman with the suitcases walking behind us, feeling sorry for the children of the cripple, oblivious of her role in putting him in that chair.

  Having someone to hold accountable makes it easier to comprehend life’s surprises than if they’re random strikes. In the beginning, I didn’t have a narrative for the numbness in my legs. I swirled around in a dizzying frenzy of unanswered questions. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with me. It didn’t look exactly like anything they had seen before, so any question I asked was met with an indefinite answer.

  It was easy, then, to adopt my father’s way of thinking about what had happened to me. Over time the idea settled in that I, too, had brought whatever this was upon myself. Deep inside I felt that I was paying for my choices in life, that this affliction was entirely of my own making. Had I lived a more traditional life, a stress-free one, less on-the-edge, none of this would have happened. Just like him, I was to blame.

  Five

  During the initial weeks of his hospitalisation, my father was in and out of consciousness. No one but his mother thought he’d come through it. Even so, those young nurses opened the lid of his iron lung and stared down reality to give my father his daily physical therapy.

  Every few hours they diligently moved his limbs, which had been put into plasters to avoid deformity. They pushed and pulled any way they could in the hope that his arms, legs and hands might maintain some movement. When he was conscious to feel it, he described the pain as the worst he’d ever had. In the early stages of polio, when the virus is active and on the attack, it inflames the entire nervous system, turning each nerve ending into a red-raw transmitter of agony.

  The valiant efforts of those nurses saved my father’s fingers from claw-hand deformity and preserved some movement in them. I always thought my father had beautiful hands, even if they didn’t work very well.

  He was fed through a tube. Nurses sometimes asked what he thought about the future. It couldn’t have looked bright from where anyone stood. The doctors never hid or sugar-coated their prognosis. He couldn’t and wouldn’t survive. They told my grandparents he’d be dead within the year. But that was not my father. He was a fighter and he gave this battle all he had.

  As he explained it, his recovery was in large part down to the fact that he saw the whole thing as an adventure, some new challenge to experience fully, no matter its horrors. Instead of asking himself ‘Why me?’ he thought, ‘Why not me?’

  It turns out ‘Why not me?’ is the very best question to ask yourself at the worst moment in your life. With that question on your lips and in your head, your eyes are set to the horizon and, before you’ve even made your first move, you have taken a step to clawing your way back to life.

  ‘Why not me?’ means you can live. You can be happy. Most importantly, in my father’s case, it meant he could seduce a nurse, no matter how unlikely that might be in the circumstances.

  ‘Why not me?’ means you have curiosity, and that’s the same thing that had drawn my father to the sea four years earlier – a new port every few days, different horizons, each demanding reorientation. My father liked change and he liked challenges, and polio gave him a large dose of both. When he was told he’d never walk again he told us his second thought was ‘This will be interesting.’

  It’s ironic that, in the end, it wasn’t the open seas that took my father on his life’s biggest adventure, it was the disease that constrained and stilled him.

  What prepares us for life’s defining moments? When mine arrived, I wasn’t prepared at all, despite my father’s example. What had he taught me if not the knowledge that you can think your way out of anything? How could I not know that I had two choices: sit and wallow or stand up and fight?

  Yet facing my own catastrophe, I just wanted to give up. When I found myself in hospital, I knew the question to ask was ‘Why not me?’, but it didn’t make me any more accepting or dull my rage. I didn’t want to fight. I’d been fighting all my life. I wanted to surrender.

  I took up smoking and lied on the doctor’s questionnaires about my daily consumption of alcohol. I’d always been an athlete, but I refused to do even the daily stretching exercises they recommended to stop ‘spasticity’ in my legs. I locked myself away in my apartment, wilfully turning all my stubbornness into making myself sicker, repeating the question ‘Why me?’ over and over, with each utterance burying any hope of grace deeper in the ground.

  When my brother found out that I’d been hospitalised because I couldn’t feel my legs, he rang me from Australia. I could hear he was crying. ‘We’re cursed,’ he said. ‘First Dad and now you.’

  I wanted to correct my brother. He wasn’t part of the we. My father and I were the cursed. As far as I could tell, my brother still had a bright, wheelchair-free future. But I kept my mouth shut.

  After about half an hour into our call, something jolted a memory in him. ‘Do you remember that Dad always said polio was the best thing that happened to him?’ he asked.

  I remembered. How could I forget that?

  ‘He honestly thought he wouldn’t have amounted to much had he lived life as an able-bodied person,’ he said, trying to get me to see the bright side. I remained silent. ‘He believed it, you know.’

  In my father’s case, it was an incident he observed as a young boy that taught him not to indulge in self-pity, no matter how brutal the blow.

  It’s a fact known among farmers that a standing crop of barley can be fatal for livestock if consumed in large quantities. The animals can’t digest the fibres, so most farms don’t cultivate both barley and livestock. But barley was one of the few crops that thrived on my grandparent’s rugged and sandy land, so my grandfather hatched a plan to have the two.

  My grandfather was an excellent fencer and his idea was to construct a sheep-proof, double-rung wire and wooden-post fence around a large field and plough it with barley seeds. My grandmother – being the true farmer of the household – was not convinced it was a good idea, but when she couldn’t dissuade him, she urged him to at least leave an extra-wide strip of unsown dirt alongside the fence. He could see her wisdom and did as she said before setting a modest flock of sheep in the adjoining paddock, confident the two were securely separated.

  Despite his diligent fencing, one night, when the barley had fully matured, its thick sweet scent proved too tempting for the animals. They broke through the wires, gorged themselves on the plump grains and were discovered at dawn by my grandfather, tipped on their sides, bellies bloated, with their legs out as straight and stiff as blow-up dolls’.

  My grandfather looked over the field long enough to take stock of his loss and then went to tend the cows. Once all the cows were milked and set out to pasture, he picked up his butchering knife from a dusty ledge in the shed and my father overheard him say with resignation, ‘Well, I’d better get to it, then.’

  He walked back to the barley field and spent the rest of the day at back- and heartbreaking work, skinning his dead flock.

  The incident wasn’t spoken about at dinner that night – that was not my grandparents’ way. But the air was full of recrimination and guilt. My grandmother seething with ‘I told you so’; my grandfather’s usually rod-straight shoulders slumped. His pride was hurt, but he loved his flock and losing them is what took the wind out of him.

  The next morning, while his brother Jim was in town selling the bloated, skinned carcasses for dog meat, my father counted 150 sheepskins.
They were hung out on the wire fences, which my grandfather had already restrung.

  Losing that number of sheep was devastating financially, but it was the emotional hit of that day that never left my father. Something small but significant had shifted in my grandfather. He’d been humiliated and, although most wouldn’t have noticed the small change, my father could tell the waft of it clung to him.

  It wasn’t until years later – facing his own catastrophe – that the lesson really hit home for my father. When tragedy strikes, ‘you can cuss and have words, but in the end, you simply have to get on with it, salvage what you can to the best of your ability and make the most of it. No matter how poor your options.’ He told me the story of the sheep every few years, just to make sure that the lesson stayed front of mind: we think the opposite is true, but life’s foundations are flimsy.

  As a child visiting my grandparent’s house, I loved to make enormous two- or three-deck houses of cards. The story about my grandfather reminded me of how, when I was building them, one wrong move, one gust of wind, one bad card placement, sent the whole lot tumbling down. And when it did, particularly when my brother walked into the room and started flapping his arms and jumping up and down, I grumbled and tried to punch him, but then I picked up each and every card and began resolutely building a different kind of house.

  I guessed that’s what my father did. After polio, he picked up what he could and built himself a different kind of house. As strange as it seems, what was happening to him as he lay inside that iron lung was more interesting to him than it was terrifying.

  But if you are born into a situation, you think it’s normal, no matter how strange and intriguing it is to the rest of the world. My father’s condition was so everyday that I wasn’t curious at all. He was what he was. So what if he was different to everyone else? To me, he was simply my father, wheelchair, contraptions and all.