Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  By this time, he’d taken a few more trips to the US with Becky and seen that Australia was far behind in disability rights and allowing people with disabilities to participate in society fully and equally. He took it upon himself to right the wrong.

  Future generations of Australians have my father, and Becky in the wings making his work possible, to thank for helping to legislate for accessible public buildings, taxis that can transport people in wheelchairs, footpaths with ramps, accessible toilets. His tireless campaigning helped make it impossible not to hire someone with a disability if they were the best candidate for the job.

  I was in England in 1984, just when the country was being reimagined by its new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The Falklands War was on and the conflict over Northern Ireland had erupted into the streets of London. I was sometimes scared to catch the underground. The miners’ strike played out on television and in the papers every day.

  The nuclear situation was also escalating. I joined Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100, which promoted ‘the practice of civil disobedience in this time of utmost peril’, as Russell explained at the time of the Committee’s formation in 1961. I read Russell and then Steven Berkoff and Bertolt Brecht plays. I signed up for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

  In the spring of 1984 I was staying at Celia and Adrian’s cottage in Wales to discover some of my father’s Welsh heritage, but I hitchhiked back to London in early June to attend a demonstration around the G7 summit.

  The meeting was being held at Lancaster House on Pall Mall. Behind waist-high metal barricades stood a shoulder-to-shoulder line of bobbies blocking off the mall. The police faced us with blank faces. We watched one black limousine after another cruise down the red-paved boulevard with the leaders of the free world waving to us through the bulletproof windows.

  I looked up the road to see that further along the mall, the line of police thinned out. I walked casually up to where there was a gap between guards, jumped the barricade and made a run for it down the centre of Pall Mall. I made it a good distance before being stopped by the dappled chest of a police horse rearing up in front of me. A moment later officers had wrestled me to the ground, then handcuffed and escorted me into the back of a police van.

  My body was pulsing with adrenalin. When I looked out the little window through the metal bars I could see that my breakout run had drawn officers from their posts and a number of my friends had jumped the barricades. All of a sudden the police had ‘a situation’ on their hands. It wasn’t long before the back of the van was filled with other protesters.

  I don’t know why I wasn’t charged with an offence, but we were all let go with a warning. Later that night we went straight from the police lock-up to the nearest pub, where I was celebrated as something of a rebel hero.

  When Celia decided to open a second-hand bookstore on Archway Road, I helped her set it up and then worked in the store. It was called Ripping Yarns, specialising in old illustrated Boys’ Own and Girls’ Own titles, as well as literary works and other classic editions. The shop was always filled to overflowing and we had to put tables of cheap titles out on the footpath to make room. Celia and Adrian’s house became a warehouse of old books waiting for more shelf space in the store.

  Walk-in customers were fairly irregular, so after I had fulfilled my basic responsibilities – rearranging misshelved titles, sweeping the leaves and soot that came through under the front door and covered everything in a fine black mist – I read books.

  Some friends arrived from Australia around this time and we bought a blue Citroën 2CV for four hundred pounds in preparation for a road trip. Our destination was Northern Ireland. We never registered the car and got used to parking it wherever we wanted, shoving the parking infringements in the glove box, knowing there was no tracing them back to us.

  We headed out of London and drove our little car into the belly of a large ferry that took us across to the southern tip of Ireland. We stayed in Cork and other places en route to the north and whenever the question of where we were headed came up, people pleaded with us to reconsider our plans. We were determined.

  At one bed and breakfast, nestled right by the roaring winter sea, I decided to go for a swim. It was so cold I could hardly breathe in the water but I wanted to be invigorated by everything, including the trouble we were rushing into.

  We reached the border late in the night and as we sidled up to the bright lights of the checkpoint, I wondered where the guards were. It seemed to be a very brightly lit but otherwise innocuous, unmanned border crossing. Until I looked closer and realised just how menacing it actually was. There was a large brick building to our left. Thick steel prongs stuck out of the road in front of us. A booming voice came across loudspeakers hung from flagpoles on either side of the road, telling us to hold our passports against the windows of the car. As I held my Australian passport open against the cold glass, I noticed a line of soldiers in camouflage lying in a gutter, machine guns pointed at our heads.

  We hadn’t made a hotel booking in Belfast and it was well past curfew by the time we pulled into the city. A car had followed closely behind us from the border and we were spooked. We knocked on the doors of a few bed and breakfasts, but no one would let us in. After many attempts, we were finally welcomed at an inn by a spooky man who looked as if he’d stepped off the set of The Munsters. He wore a matted black toupee that sat too far forward on his head, making it hard for me to look him in the eye. When morning came, I didn’t want to stay for the complimentary breakfast.

  We drove through more checkpoints into the city to get food. We left the car like we often did in London – on the median strip. When we came back an hour later, the street was cordoned off by dozens of police vans, and helicopters hovered above with snipers hanging out over the side. Two large police dogs were inside the car. I felt sick.

  We agreed that Andrew, who was studying to be a lawyer and was by far the most respectable of us, should go talk to the police. Stepping out of the crowd and approaching the car, Andrew cut a Hugh Grant–like figure of cute sheepishness, as if to say, ‘Terribly sorry for this cock-up, officers.’ After a few minutes, arms began to wave and the dogs were called off. I have no idea what Andrew said, but we certainly toasted him at the pub later that evening.

  A few days later I was out wandering the streets on my own when a bomb alert sounded and everyone had to take cover indoors. I went into the closest shop, which happened to be a camera store, and spent almost all the money I had left buying a beautiful Pentax. At the end of the alert, I went out into the streets and started clicking off rolls of black-and-white Kodak film. I saw a burnt-out facade in the distance and made my way towards it, heading down a narrow alleyway that opened out onto the front of the blackened building. I held the camera up to my eye and started shooting.

  After about three clicks of the shutter, I was grabbed from behind.

  ‘Who the fook are you?’ said a male voice, the crook of his arm around my throat.

  ‘I’m Australian,’ was all I could think to say. I don’t remember what else I said but eventually he relaxed his grip to forcefully turn me around by my shoulders to face him.

  ‘Are you fookin’ insane?’ he yelled, splattering saliva into my face. ‘You’ll get yourself fookin’ killed carrying on like that.’

  After that trip, my politicisation was complete. I had found my cause.

  My mother’s had been her personal mission to save my father. For his part, my father took on discrimination where it impacted him and others like him. In London and Northern Ireland, I’d found a mission of my own.

  Twenty-six

  I returned to Sydney from London in 1985, fully intending to collect my belongings and turn straight back around. Adrian and Celia had offered for me to live with them and to help me get into a university in London.

  But when I arrived home, I realised I had missed my friends, and then I met a man I thought I was in love with, so I stalled.

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fter England, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the miners’ strike, I got involved with the organised left in Sydney. We called each other ‘comrade’ and were encouraged to become a family, although they wouldn’t have condoned that word. Family was nothing more than a bourgeois construct. Of course, I could relate to that idea. Like any kind of sect, the Socialist Workers Party discouraged fraternising with the outside world. We shared houses, became lovers (‘companions’), worked and socialised together. Other relationships fell away, although my best friend from Sydney, Brigid, stuck by me throughout. The party demanded commitment and dedication, honoured hard work and intelligence, and, for the first time in my life, I realised I had both.

  I became a ‘leader’, speaking at national conferences on topics like Recruitment and Radicalisation of Today’s Student Population. I devised strategies and campaigns to attract young people to the party and then mentored the new recruits in the ways of party life. I organised film nights, with films such as On the Waterfront and Apocalypse Now, and ran the projector from atop a ladder in a small room at the back of the meeting hall. Today, my memory of all of those films still runs through a square hole above an office door in Chippendale.

  We held dance nights with DJs who played eighties tunes that we could ascribe motivational meaning to. The Boomtown Rats were a favourite. Billy Bragg. Pretty much anything by British band UB40, who took their name from the unemployment form they had to fill out to get their benefits, stayed on repeat play. We danced and drank ourselves into political and sexual fervour.

  I designed flyers with my companion – a former classical trumpet player who gave up a professional music career for the party. His trumpet, along with the sheets of classical music that were his repertoire, was stored under our bed on account of it being an instrument of the ruling class. Together we wrote what we thought were hipper and more attractive slogans than the ones we’d read when we joined. The youth wing grew with comrades who believed we could change the world.

  After a while, I was invited to attend the party school in a suburb of Sydney, where I read Marx and Lenin along with about seven other students for about four months in a shared house owned by the party. It was a rigorous schooling of intensive reading. I read Lenin’s speeches and critiques of capitalism, but I did a lot of it lying in the sunshine in the backyard in a bikini. We were taught by a number of tenured academics who had left their positions to become bus or train drivers and worked in blue-collar unions to recruit disillusioned members of the proletariat.

  Once my Marxist education was complete, I was encouraged to put my learning into practice by going to work in a trade where I too could join a union and sway the minds of its blue-collar constituents. I tried out for the postal service but failed the exam miserably – and not on purpose. After that disappointment, I began working full-time for the party, which was good at accepting people’s strengths and weaknesses and milking them ruthlessly all the same.

  When I fell in with the socialists, I knew nothing about my father’s experience on ships with those hard-line seamen who taught him about injustice. But I became a good young comrade who rolled her own cigarettes, just like him. My father hadn’t joined a group or a party, but regarding social inequality he’d had his mind changed as forcefully and irrefutably as I had. We were around the same age when this radicalisation occurred, his on the deck of a ship out at sea, mine in an inner-city suburb wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

  A big part of our work for the party was selling the weekly newspaper Direct Action. I wasn’t a great fan of being on the streets, calling out slogans, but my sales were strong, so I was assigned a key spot outside a Woolworths in the centre of Sydney. There I could sell twenty to thirty papers in an hour.

  One day I was in my usual spot when I was hit hard from behind so forcefully I fell to the ground. It felt like a baseball bat, but it was the crutch of a long-haired one-legged man. Once I was down, he stood over me yelling obscenities, threatening he’d do it again if he ever saw me selling this communist filth again.

  I had often seen him around the city before he attacked me. A one-legged man is hard to miss. I had imagined him to be a Vietnam veteran. He was about the right age. As I lay on the ground with my papers scattering in the wind, he continued his tirade against me before lurching across the road on his crutches at high speed. A man in a business suit helped me up and then chased the guy down. I’m not sure what he said after he grabbed the one-legged man by the shoulders to stop him, but the man in the suit returned to make sure I was alright. He urged me to call the police, even though I was quite sure he felt pretty much the same way about my political views as the one-legged man who had attacked me.

  The incident rattled me, just at a time when my commitment to the cause was wavering because I was starting to see that the party was as hierarchical and flawed as the systems it railed against. Something about the man in the suit’s actions tilted my way of looking at things. In the party, everything was black or white. You were either with us or against us, yet a man with clearly opposing views could put them aside to help me. It made a mark.

  While my formal ties with the hard-line left didn’t last more than a few years, I never let go of the idea of justice and social equality. I don’t think the party or reading Marx and Lenin instilled those ideals in me; I’d learned them long ago, standing beside my father in his wheelchair. Even a child knows what discrimination looks like.

  My father didn’t agree with the party’s politics, or with how I dressed during these years, which was mainly in a pair of ripped and patched jeans and flimsy excuses for tops. Once I turned up to meet him and Becky at a conference he was speaking at and he told me I looked like one of the whores outside on the strip.

  But he liked the broad strokes of my fervent political commitment – I was fighting for something I believed in, I was on the side of the underdog, and despite our estrangement he could see he’d still had an influence on me. Of course my mother influenced me in this regard too, her fight to save the parklands and her commitment to the feminist cause, the rallies where we shook our fists in support of women’s rights.

  After becoming disillusioned with the party, I got a real job, started missing meetings, broke up with my comrade boyfriend and eventually, after a few interventions by high-level members, resigned.

  I’d fallen in love with a bald, hard-drinking, hard-partying, six-foot-four Polish musician named Leszek, fifteen years my senior. He hated communists. And I’d had enough of selling newspapers on the streets and being beat up for it, fighting battles I knew we’d never win with slogans and mantras from 1917 Russia.

  Leszek was the frontman of a blues cover band called The Hippos. He played lead guitar and sang songs like ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘Shop Around’. He had a sonorous voice and played his black and white Fender guitar through a beautiful old Marshall valve amplifier. He was also a record producer, with gold records for his work with bands such as Midnight Oil and Spy vs Spy.

  I didn’t care that he had a number of teeth missing – he was the most handsome man I had ever met. Early in our relationship, my brother came along to one of his gigs and kept shouting into my ear over the music, ‘He’s one hell of an ugly guy, Caro!’ But even he came around.

  Leszek and I drank hard, played hard and argued hard. But I loved that he stood up to me. He wasn’t a yes-man, yet he was a gentleman. He opened doors and sang to me when he was on stage and at home.

  A few years later we were living together in Surry Hills and I became pregnant with our beloved son, Jack. I was happy pregnant, and stayed that way for ten months. Jack was a full month overdue when he was born on 6 May 1989, after a long and difficult labour. I always joked that it was Jack’s stubborn nature that had him stay put all that time. Why change the incredibly comfortable and easy arrangement he had going on? Now I wonder if it was that I didn’t want to let him go. Even before he was born I felt like this little human being was my life’s purpose and meaning. I wasn’t wrong.
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  During Jack’s first night in the world the nurses came in to insist I wake him up for feeding. I refused, sure that if he was hungry he’d wake of his own accord. His birth had been so intense, I figured he was about as exhausted as I was. My mother taught me the highly underrated restorative powers of sleep, so I didn’t care if they judged me an irresponsible, young and stupid mother; if my new baby needed to sleep, I would let him sleep. I may have been young, but I knew what was best for him. Of course when he woke up, I fed him. He thrived.

  A week or so later, my father, Becky, Morgan and Anna were on their way to the US to visit Becky’s parents with a stopover in Sydney. So Leszek and I took Jack to meet them at the airport. Jack was dressed in a red jumpsuit, wrapped in a blue cotton blanket. I gave him over to my father first. I placed my baby on my father’s tray and lifted his arm, as my mother had so often done for him to hold me, and watched as he cradled his first grandson. Morgan and Anna each nursed him on their laps – an uncle and aunt at ten and seven years old.

  I never questioned why they didn’t arrange a stopover that allowed them to leave the airport and spend proper time with their new grandson. Perhaps they could have stayed a day or two to see how we were getting along, but my father had his eyes set on something else, so we sat in the Qantas lounge together before their flight was called and we waved them off to America.

  Twenty-seven

  My relationship with Leszek changed after Jack was born. We were lucky that he was in a band that played five nights a week and earned very good money. He was a good provider and we lived in a lovely house with a backyard and two dogs. At first he made an effort to come straight home after shows. Often I’d still be awake, so we could have time alone together, and in the morning he’d get up to tend to Jack and make me tea. It was exactly the romantic idyll I’d dreamed of, but after a while it all changed.