Saturday, May 7, 2011

Portrait of Mother

I first became aware of her drinking problem as a young boy, running into her bedroom in the morning I would find her drinking an egg flip ( milk mixed with raw egg and a large shot of brandy) Before going out for the day to "see a man about a dog" she would say, this meant that she was going over the road to the pub.

Looking back I realized this was the call for help, but with my father already in his grave and her parents also fond of the bottle there was nobody of any maturity to offer help. I suspect loneliness caused her to start drinking to excess. Even when my father was still alive he would be away sixteen to eighteen hours running two surgeries and calling on patients. What with  regular nightly bombing raids and our dash to the air-raid shelter with saucepans on our heads she had more than enough to cope with.

By wars end  her drinking accelerated and no amount of logic could divert her from this chosen path. Hiding grief through a bottle is not  an uncommon problem. This was my last year of childhood as we never lived together again as a family. As an Australian by birth she was able to return on a troop ship, there was some half million soldiers waiting to return home, shipping took several years to reestablish it's timetable.

On arrival to find rental accommodation was near impossible due to the wartime restriction on building. The family was thus split up my sister and I were sent to a boarding school, while mother moved in a descending order of quality from hotel to hotel until her money ran out. With the little money she had she purchased a
half finished shack on Broken Bay north of Sydney. Still in need of some sort of income she rented small hamburger shop in Oxford Street Paddington ,hoping that Manual (you met him in the gambling blog) would do the cooking, he was in fact quite a good cook.Unfortunately he was arrested for reliving himself in a nearby doorway and received three months jail sentence. It was decided that my sister would serve on the tables while I would cook until Manual release. Not much skill is really needed to cook a hamburger on a large hot plate as most of you would know, mince along with some onion, tomatoes sometimes all in a bun.
Australian cafes in those days were fairly basic to say the least ,most only offered steak, lamb or pork chops, sausages and the famous mixed grill. This was generally served with a choice of one or two eggs, onions, tomatoes and so on with chips. This restricted menu did not seem to stop the possible combinations running to  two pages or more.

We kept this up for a few weeks ,until mother in a drunken state fell down the stairs and through the window at the bottom and had to be hospitalised. My sister and I retreated to the half built shack despite there being on running water or cooking facilities. The toilet consisted of a hole in the ground some way up the hilly block that I would have to tip into a hole once a month.As there was no road into the place I would row a wooden skiff the mile or so to the shop for supplies.To supplement our diet I built a wire fish trap out of netting that I would set each night,  in those days fish were plentiful.

On her discharge from hospital mother arrived still drink and when ever she ran out of alcohol would take to drinking  methylated spirit. After a few weeks of this she had a stroke and was taken to hospital and next day admitted to the Parramatta Mental Hospital. Alcoholics were treated then as mental patients rather than people needing treatment. Often they would remain locked up for years in these institutions with little or no effort to rehabilitate them. It would be some time before I saw mother again but when I visited her she was just sitting on an iron bed, blanked face, eyes staring wide all bunched up unable to straighten her limbs, her speech was inaudible. It was all very emotional and although I could not call her particular good mother ,I felt a very strong sense of responsibility, somehow I had to get her out.

No comments: