Born at the beginning of the Second World War, I have memories that are unique to an Australian child of that era. Many of us didn’t know our fathers because they went off to England to help the British fend off the Germans, or to places like New Guinea to fight the Japanese. For several years I have been writing my memoir. Not having a father in my life for those first few years meant that when he did come home, I had great difficulty learning to relate to him. In this piece I have tried to portray something of that feeling.
This is the photo, which I think shows my fears on that day when a ‘strange’ man came back into my life.
Because this is a very personal story I’m not sure how it will be judged by others and I don’t know if it is suitable for anyone other than my family to read. I will greatly appreciate feedback from you, my friends and family.
This chapter is an introduction to my memoir which I have called ‘A Child of the War Years.’
Please let me know what you think.
GETTING TO KNOW MY DAD
As a small child I thought ‘Daddy’ was a photo on my mother’s dressing table. When other children had real, live fathers to kiss goodnight, I had only that photo, of a man with bushy eyebrows and ears that stuck out below a dark blue cap. He had kind eyes and a wide smile that showed off his straight white teeth. I wanted to know why he had a picture of a crown on his hat and wings like a bird sewn on the pocket of his jacket. Mummy told me that I should be very proud because he was in the Royal Australian Air Force and he was flying airplanes in a place far away, called England.
The one occasion when I was aware of a man (hopefully my father) visiting our home in Floreat, he arrived at the front door with a broom and flowers for my mother. They hugged and kissed, then raced off into my mother’s bedroom and I continued playing with my doll behind the lounge room chair.
The visit was probably when dad had short leave from Cunderdin or Geraldton, although, even when based in Subiaco he would have had to stay in barracks most of the time. I must have been about two, because in the June he was in Victoria and New South Wales, leaving from there for the UK.
I was three and a half when my father returned home. Mummy, Granny, Grandpa and some of my aunts were at the Perth Railway Station to meet him. My big cousin, John, rescued me from a forest of legs—more legs than I’d ever seen—running past me, making me turn around and around searching for the people I knew.
John lifted me up onto his shoulders and carried me towards the men getting off the train. They all looked the same, wearing their dark blue hats, dressed in their dark blue uniforms, some with extra wings on their sleeves, some with medals attached to the front of their jackets, all grinning and rushing forward with outstretched arms. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be excited about. Which one was my daddy?
When John handed me to a man who hugged and kissed me, I pulled away and called out for Mummy. This man had prickles on his face. My photo Daddy had a nice smooth face. I didn’t like being kissed by a strange man, especially not one who scratched my cheek. The man who I was supposed to call ‘Daddy’ gave me to my Pa, who held my hand but looked a bit cross with me.
‘Come on Vicki,’ he said. ‘Be a good girl. Don’t you know your daddy?’
I shook my head and hid behind my grandfather’s legs.
I have a photo of the three of us—Mummy, Daddy and me—taken that day in front of our house. I’m wearing my pink coat with a hood that covers my springy curls and Daddy is still in his uniform and cap. My mother is wearing a navy skirt and a short jacket. Her hair curls out from under a white hat, and her best black shoes with little heels make her a bit taller than usual. I’m standing between them. My mouth is smiling but my eyes are those of a worried little girl. For all my life till then, I was the centre of attention. Now, a man I didn’t know had come to take my precious mother’s devotion away from me, or at least that’s how I felt, especially as she now seemed to cling to him and to glow with happiness in his presence.
Out of uniform, his black wavy hair was thick. His skin turned brown as he mowed the lawn and chopped the wood and went off to work each day. His legs were covered with black bushy hairs too and his arms were strong as he twirled me round and lifted me up on his shoulders. Every night, when I was ready for bed, bathed and wearing my pink dressing gown, I would climb up on his lap to listen to the stories he told about his ‘little pink girl.’ I learnt to love him, but the prickly, furry thing on his face had to go.
The cot, where I’d slept in the room with my mother, was moved out into the passage way after I woke up one morning to hear my mother making scary noises and my father sounding like he was attacking her.
Daddy’s hands seemed huge, with sprouty black hairs on his fingers and near his wrists, and blisters that grew into tough, hardened layers on his palms and fingers. He scrubbed them with velvet soap and a nail brush each day after work so that Mummy and I wouldn’t complain about their roughness.
The Mizens were builders so, after the war, once he was discharged from the RAAF my father went back to building houses with his brothers, continuing the business that his father had started. His creative streak came out in what he could do with timber. The smell of timber, freshly cut into planks, ready to turn into a table, or cabinet, even skirting boards, doors or stair rails, brings back the sights and sounds of Dad in the workshop which was alongside Pop’s house in Subiaco.
The high pitched r-r-r of planks guided through the fast turning blades of the saw on the thick wooden bench, the precision of each line cut for window and door frames, the twisting and rolling of each piece intended for an upright support or the railing on a staircase, the piles of sawdust gathering on the concrete floor below. That smell means my dad.
Some Saturday mornings I was treated to a few hours on my own with him in the workshop, watching him engrossed in creation. The look, the feel, the smell of timber, he taught me to love. He’d spit on a freshly cut piece to show me how it would look when polished. The wavy grain of a jarrah door, the curly patterns formed by burls on a walnut tree, the rich browns of hardwoods, the patterns and tones of silky oak—I can’t resist stroking them, letting my hand feel again that warmth, that admiration for the man who became my dad.