Deborah Forster

At Mont Park, for a long time the empty Larundel hospital was abandoned. I went there years ago to see it as an adult, in memory of my Pa. The walls were broken, and it seemed the ghosts were near.  They fly like birds, you know, diving into the wreckage of the hospital as if it were an old ship, diving for answers and memories. The graffiti was black and cryptic and somehow anger seeped through the stillness, though really it was a feeling of being lost. Everything was broken there, windows, stoves, the occasional chair and then suddenly, a sink with taps and a plug all in working order. The wind entered everywhere along with rats and possums. People had séances, scaring themselves silly at the idea of the poor sad place, holding hands and summoning the dead, but the dead are always busy getting on and then the weeds took over.

The Larundel mental asylum was a ruin on the outer northern suburbs of Melbourne and now it’s a housing development that looks brand new and (I suppose) minus ghosts.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, died there of a heart attack. He’d been in the army during the war, and in the sixties, a routine hospital check-up discovered something minor was wrong with his heart. He was offered an experimental operation to correct it. The operation failed. They left him without oxygen for too long and when he awoke, he was no longer Pa. He was brain damaged so they put him in a lunatic asylum.

The one photograph at the hospital shows us kids in the rising heat of one those many Sunday mornings holding Mum’s hands. We were in our best clothes. She had cleaned our school shoes so that no one would think us mad or poor or even not neat enough. Madness might stay away from the respectable, it was reasoned.

Who took the snap? Must have been Dad. Though I never remember him there.

Pa was shuffled around various Repatriation hospitals, and we went to them all; the adults called them the Repats.

This one had long roofed walkways across green lawns, hazy in the heat. I remember light glinting off the grass. The green was a pure thing. A child sees the green and just wants to run. Once we did run and we came back to see our grandfather smiling. ‘My big baby,’ he said to me. Maybe it was his last smile. Pa no longer ate it seemed. Other patients pushed him around, stole anything. Bruises bloomed all over his thin arms. His face was flayed with fine red shaving cuts, some wider and leaking from where the nurse had messed up his shave.  His hands were loose and cold, nothing like I remembered them, warm and strong. His trousers hung off him and another patient’s thick belt, (way too big) had missed the belt loops. We held his hands, but he didn’t notice. Some drug had him. He was only fifty-five. I’m older than him now. My mother was crying. Later, I knew that as sobbing.

When he was five Pa (Bert Somerton) arrived in Melbourne from England. With just his mother and two brothers. A huge liner, berthed in Liverpool and took them to Melbourne. Sandy boys from Birmingham, they grew up to look and sound like Jack Thompson.  His mother Annie Munro  had left her husband William, a railway porter, behind. Pa never knew why. She re-married soon after arriving here,( though I wonder if she was divorced). Mum suspected there was prior knowledge of the new husband. Speculation again. When I was born, Annie showed up with three brand new baby dresses, an unheard of extravagance. Was Annie light-fingered? Maybe.

Nan (Eileen), Pa’s wife, was small and dark-haired and funny. She was twelve years older than Pa  and they were working on a property in the Wimmera, where she as a cook and he was a carpenter.  They married,  when he was in his early twenties, and she was mid-thirties which even today might be remarked upon. Perhaps they got pregnant. I don’t know. It was never discussed. They moved to Swan Hill, and he worked with a builder. And there they had my mother who became an only child in a place she would describe as paradise with tennis. In the holidays, she’d race home every day to grab something to eat and hit the church courts again.  After school, they’d be hitting up again. If it rained, the kids would come to Mum’s house and Nan would let them slide up and down the passage on pillows. Mum won the lottery with her parents. Pa would bring her presents when he came home from work and hide them by the front gate, then go in and say ‘someone’s left something for you’ with a smile. It would be a ribbon, or some coloured pencils or some chalk.

At 28, Pa and his brothers went to World War II with the Australian army.

Nan and mum moved to a shared house in South Melbourne where their time in the shared kitchen was measured as TS Eliot said ‘with coffee spoons’. It was sad and different and there was much fear.

Pa always barracked for South Melbourne, and he said that was because it was the only club with a swan. It reminded him of Swan Hill.

In the war he was an ambulance driver, also a sapper for a while and  near the end of the war, got shot in the calf at Crete. They patched him up and he was kept in the hospital. After seven long years, he came home to his wife and child. My mother had been seven when he left and now she was fourteen. Time for a job for the youngster.

He combed his hair and went into town by train in his best clothes and got her an apprenticeship at Georges in the city. She became a spectacular dressmaker.

They lived in Seddon now. And so did we. In the summer evenings, when he was still only 45 or 46, he’d come to collect me as a baby and take me for a walk in the pram to the Mona Castle hotel where he would have one beer, and I’d be given a tiny bit of chocolate. He liked to show me off, mum said.  She’d be making tea, and she always knew about the chocolate (because I’d sick it up) but she didn’t say anything. I wish I remembered it. Mum said he’d often pick up a crayfish wrapped in newspaper from some bloke at the pub and under his arm it would go. Everyone got a taste of it.

Each weekday Pa rode his bike to a cricket bat factory in Seddon, not far from home. He made bats by hand, one for a member of the Australian cricket team. The bike clips he put round his ankles to hold his cuffs down, were made of springy light metal like horseshoes.

Pa was always kind. He gave us bits of wood to sand out in the shed when we were bored. And his hair stayed golden, combed, and parted. He didn’t age until Mont Park and then, in no time, he was gone into the stillness.