The Night My Father Died
There is always a point in a person’s life that one can look back to and feel it the turning point. The turning point in my life came when I was eight years of age. It was the night my father died.
I vividly remember that night. My father was a young pastry cook and baker who had established his own business during the Depression. He purchased a large property and established, in the heart of Box Hill, a business employing many people. He had four young children. I was eight and the eldest. The other three were younger including our baby sister who had just been born.
My father had large debts, a heavy mortgage and some bad habits. He was a compulsive gambler and would bet on anything that moved including the traditional flies walking up a wall. He was also a heavy drinker. In those days of 1947 it wasn’t easy to get a drink in Box Hill. We were one of the communities in Melbourne that had always voted to remain “dry”. There were no hotels in Box Hill. There were no licensed restaurants, no taverns and no bottle shops. If a man wanted to drink alcohol he had to drive to Doncaster or to Blackburn or to some other distant place. Ours was a dry community and proud of its record.
My father was a popular man with other drinkers in the community because he had the ability to sense where there were some bottles of beer illegally available for sale. He knew all the “sly grog” joints. He knew how to buy beer at the back of the billiard saloon and from the old ramshackle wooden house off Turner Street where a man always had bottles in his laundry for sale at a price. Although illegal, these sly grog joints were the hope of the alcoholics in the community of whom the young pastry cook and baker was one.
My mother had her hands full with her husband. He worked odd hours. He started early in the morning in the bake house and drank into the late night.
On many occasions my father would be so drunk he was unable to walk up Bank Street to our home. On those nights, often about midnight, my mother would wake me and take me for company as we went out to look for Daddy.
On one night, which I can remember vividly, she woke me and asked if I would come with her down the street to “look for Daddy”. We walked down the hill in Miller Street and turned into Bank Street and under the one street light near the top of our hill, we saw the body of a man lying in the gutter. He had stumbled and fallen.
There were many times when we found him asleep on the ground with his back against the bake house wall keeping warm from the furnace within. We knew how to get him onto his feet and to place his arms around our shoulders and help him home while he called out to the world in general or else abused us. This night as we knelt beside him to lift him up, we both realized that he was very cold and very stiff.
I had never seen a dead person before.
Something was numb inside me. Neither my mother nor I could believe what had happened to my Dad, but she knew that something had to be done. It meant running half a mile down to the bake house to reach the only telephone that was in our area. We rang Dr. Kemp and went back home knowing that he would ring an undertaker. Dr. Kemp would examine him and pronounce death and the undertaker would take the body away.
We turned immediately to Dr. Kemp because he was the man in the community to whom everyone turned in time of need.
He was one of those doctors that came whenever you called him regardless of the time or the condition of the weather.
So on this night when we found the body of my father in the gutter of Bank Street he came out at midnight to comfort my mother.
After pronouncing my father dead and making arrangements for the removal of the body he spoke to my mother with his usual Scottish habit of calling her “lass”. His arm was around her and she wept on his shoulder. Then came the event which was to stay in my memory.
We lived in No.5 Miller Street, Box Hill, in half a small house with my grandmother, a frail little Scots lady who was slowly becoming demented. My mother was really having difficult in coping with her four young children, a demented mother in law and a husband who was a gambler and an alcoholic. On this night Dr. Kemp left her in the front room to cry alone and took me out to the back wash house where he might speak to me alone. The other members of the family were by now all up, together with the closest of our relatives and friends.
We had a wash house down a narrow concrete path at the rear of the house. It had a brick copper in a corner heated by a fire. Over the copper lid was one cold water tap. Next to it was a stone trough in which my mother would soak the clothes. On the end of the trough was the latest acquisition an adjustable hand wringer. I loved to work the big handle of the wringer as the clothes came out of the stone trough through the wringer with the water running back into the trough while the squeezed clothes dropped down to a cane basket on the floor beneath. They were then pegged on a long clothes line, held up by a wooden prop.
Dr. Kemp switched on the single globe that hung from the roof and looked at me. I had been crying and my eyes were red and wet with tears. I can remember it now as clearly as the day it happened sixty years ago. He took me by the shoulders and looked into my eight year old eyes and said “Gordon, you are now the man of the family. Your mother is going to need your help to bring up the other children. You cannot take over from your father, but you can take responsibility for yourself. I guess the first thing that you should learn is how to clean your shoes properly.”
He had noticed that on the lid of the copper were my school shoes covered with mud. They had been drying there. Then while he talked some more about life and death and the changes that come upon us all, he took a scrubbing brush from the wash trough and scrubbed off the mud using just a little water. Then while he talked to me about faith and about how God made us to live eternally, he showed me how to put shoe polish on the shoes, dipping the brush into the tin of “Nugget” black. He then put them aside to dry overnight. While he talked to me about heaven and eternal life he told me how to polish the shoes in the morning. “Now, I want you always to clean your shoes, and those of your brother and sisters, and to save your mother from that job.”
That night I had what we today would call “grief therapy counselling”. I also learnt to take responsibility for myself, and from that night on I have always cleaned my shoes.
The night my father died I took responsibility for myself as Dr. W.A. Kemp looked me in the eyes and told me about life and death, about faith and hope, and how to clean my shoes!
I really felt I became a man that night. I often reflected upon the influence of this doctor as I walked home up Bank Street alongside the railway line to the hill, and to 5 Miller Street, Box Hill, a great city that was still a village where the adults were kind and where the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
