Heart Trouble Begins

The pain stabbed across my chest as I walked up Toorak Road toward my car.

It was like a belt being pulled tight around my heart which was pumping harder to keep up the flow of blood.

I stopped and held onto the iron fence rail next to me, waiting for the throbbing to subside.

It was November ’93 and over the previous month or so the pain had worsened.

I was under a lot of stress. My job, as Coordinator of the Watchdog Association, had brought me in contact with corruption at many levels of society, and my sense of frustration and anger had, I thought, brought about  a metaphysical, not a physical result.

‘Go to the doctor, Sweetheart,’ my wife Rosemary had urged.

At first I resisted. I couldn’t see the point. I wasn’t dying. It would go away, I thought. I just needed to slow down.

But it didn’t. I said nothing to my work mates. I didn’t want to promote any feeling of ill-health.

Then there were other messages.

Andrew was obviously planning to write the whole story of his heart problems but got no further at this time. He had a very successful triple bypass and valve replacement in 1995, by which time we were living near Murwillumbah, NSW — Rosemary

At what point do you blow the whistle on wrongdoing?

How many of you can say that you have never turned a blind eye to wrongdoing?

One of my personal passions is honesty. It’s got me into a lot of trouble and brought me a lot of ridicule. 

[On the following occasion, though, Andrew was wise enough to stay out of trouble while still blowing the whistle. — Rosemary.]

On May 27^th 1976 I was taken down to the Melbourne docks by an import/export agent. I was producing corporate newsletters and was talking to the agent about the possibility of publishing a newsletter for his Company.

The dock visit was a kind of familiarisation process, and as we walked toward the gates of the container terminal I had no idea that my visit would produce an investigation by a Melbourne newspaper and eventually initiate discussions in the Victorian Parliament.

The agent told me he would introduce me as a businessman  interested in setting up an import/export business. What I saw and learned that day stunned me, and without drawing too much attention t myself I took notes. I watched as a union delegate, hidden among boxes, pilfered some goods, men sitting around drinking coffee while trucks turned up outside waiting to be loaded. We hunted for four consignments but couldn’t find them. I observed a system in chaos and workers who took advantage of it.

At the time I was also Melbourne correspondent for a nationally circulated management newsletter called ‘Interprobe’ and my first reaction was to write an article for it exposing what was going on.

But then I realised I couldn’t do that for two reasons —  1, such a story could jeopardise the business of the agent who to the depot and 2,  my own safety could be at risk.

I sat on the story for two months. Then a newspaper article announced that the Prices Justification Tribunal was to investigate container terminal handling charges.

I rang Phillip Luker, the editor of Interprobe, and told him about the story. I suggested he report it as if a Melbourne businessman had rung in the details. I faxed the story to Sydney on July 14. It was to be published two days later.

I had just finished reading Bernstein and Woodward’s report of Watergate, ‘All the President’s Men’, the most amazing piece of investigative journalism of the century, and as the movie was on in Melbourne I decided to see it on the Thursday.

On the way to the theatre I bought an early edition of the Melbourne Herald and there, on the front page, was ‘DOCK MEN BRIBED — CLAIM’, the full story picked up from Interprobe.

As a result The Herald mounted its own investigation, running stories on waterside corruption for over a month, during which time the union put a black ban on newsprint being delivered to The Herald, and the journalist involved, Lawrence Money, had a phone call to his silent number at 2am one morning, threatening his life.

It was an incredibly exciting experience for me as a freelance journalist.


[In 1976 Andrew would have been 47 years old. I believe he was always a Labour voter until late in life when he voted Green, and he understood the importance of trade unions, so this whole experience must have been very shocking and confronting for him. — Rosemary.]

Episodes in the Story of Andrew's Life

Andrew has been dead just over two years. I have begun going through his notebooks to select pieces of writing to include here, as an episodic version of the autobiography he always meant to write. I won't even attempt to post things in chronological order, but treat them as self-contained stories which can stand alone and/or enhance each other.

This will not be the version Andrew would have produced if he'd been able to edit and revise. Luckily he was a naturally good writer, so it will be readable anyway. I will do only minimal editing where absolutely necessary. I will add notes at times.

I trust you will find the posts interesting.

— Rosemary

I WANT MY LIFE BACK

(written in 2009)

Sitting at my computer, looking back over the seventy-fours years of my life, I am aware of a kaleidoscope of memories, each with its own emotional content, some joyful, some fearful,  some coloured with prejudice, some full of rage.  And as these memories float past I think that if I were given a second chance there would be many things I would change. And so I decide:

I WANT MY LIFE BACK to find out more about my parents.  I know so little about them.  I know they were both born into rich English families.  My Dad, Stuart Edward Wade,  was born in Sheffield, England, on February 12, 1892.1  He was the youngest of a family of fourteen.  I often tried to imagine that...trying to make yourself heard over thirteen others.  According to his birth certificate his father, Robert Wade, was a Machine Knife Works Manager.  Mum was born in the same year and was the youngest of a family of eleven.  Her father was an ironmonger, probably the equivalent of a hardware merchant today.  Big families were the thing in those days, but unfortunately neither set of  parents knew how to express their feelings or demonstrate love.  Mum told me once that when she wanted to speak with her father she would knock on his study door and say: "Excuse me, Sir." 2

  And so this suppression of feelings was passed on to both my brother Ian and myself and, as a consequence, we didn’t know how to relate to people and both our first marriages failed.

When Dad was 20, his eldest sister, who was then 39, suggested that he go to Newfoundland as a missionary.  He didn't have any formal training in religious affairs and was given the job on the understanding he would teach Sunday School and assist the minister.  He once told me that, during a severe winter there, two children were lost in a snow storm, and he led a search party and found them kneeling together in prayer position, frozen stiff. 

            Apparently Dad did some preaching, and he said that when he preached he could make the congregation laugh or cry.  Trouble was, he didn't believe in God, nor in what he was doing.  He left after two years.  It was 1915 and he was twenty-three. 

            There was a lot of pressure on young men at that time to join the army.  The war was not going well and there were posters all around the country with a photograph of Lord Kitchener pointing, and the headline: YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!  Dad didn't believe in shooting people, .but those who didn’t join up received a white feather in their letterbox, the label of a coward.  Dad joined the Royal Army Medical Corps.   He told me once that in the front line, when he was ordered to fire, he used to shoot up into the air.  I still find that incredible.  Imagine being in a trench, the Germans are charging in full battle cry, the stench from the rotting bodies strewn across the ground in front of the trench is nauseating, and you're pointing your gun in the air.  I’m still not sure what to make of that attitude: was he completely nuts or very courageous?  Actually I don’t think he was either.

            The British Army at the time was shooting deserters at a great rate and although he wasn't a deserter, somewhere along the way I learned that Dad had been court-martialled for cowardice. It was only hearsay but knowing what I know now about that conflict, if it’s true, I can only assume he went to pieces.  In 1916 alone the Battle of the Somme, it is estimated,  claimed 1,300,000 Allied and German casualties. In total there were over ten million men killed in World War 1.3 Over the past few years I have read many books, watched TV programs and movies about WW1, and am still astonished that anyone came out of it and that those who did had any sanity at all.

            When Dad was alive I bitterly resented him because of his remoteness.  We never hugged or kissed.  Nor did we have any rapport.  What changed my attitude about my Dad was a rebirthing session I had in 1953 (Rebirthing is a powerful healing technique that releases energy – as thoughts, memories and experiences held in the subconscious and the musculature of the body).  I recalled a past life in which I was his (dad’s) best friend.  I went back into the trenches with him and discovered he wasn't a coward at all.   I was mortally wounded and I fell into a shell hole.  Stuart (Dad) came to rescue me.  When I died he huddled down in the mud next to me, too distraught to move.  The officer-in-charge thought he was hiding. 

            I wish I'd known all this when Dad was alive.  It would have changed the nature of our relationship.  But I didn't, and if he'd told me I probably wouldn't have cared anyway.  Even now, fifty two years after his death, I still know very little of his life and what made him tick.

           

Dad married Florence Irene Hugh on August 7, 1920, in the Ronpell Park Wesleyan Church in Lambeth.4   I imagine there would have been a long engagement period, knowing how hung up with tradition their parents were.  I still have four photos of their wedding, which I found after Dad died.  One is of the best man and a bridesmaid, which has been torn in four.  Two others have been torn in half.5  In one the bride and groom are both smiling.  In the last one, which I've never looked at closely before, they are about to get into a car, dressed in their "going-away" clothes. Dad's expression suggests: "Come on old chap. Hurry it up. We want to get out of here!"  Dad looks pretty cool.  He’s dressed in what looks like a new suit and he has a cigarette in his left hand. A crowd of guests is watching.   Mum and Dad look very young and handsome. Never, in the part of their life I spent with them, did I see them so elegantly dressed.  Mum looks totally adorable and very cuddly.  I never thought of her like that. 

            After their marriage they decided to emigrate to New Zealand.  Half way across the English Channel their ship collided with a French liner and they lost all their belongings.6  It was a case of take to the lifeboats and return to England.  I imagine their parents, not being short of a quid, would have replaced the belongings they lost.  Either that or they were fully compensated by insurance.  Sometime later they embarked again, with the last stop this time, Melbourne,  not Auckland   Mum told me that they bought a restaurant in St Kilda, changed the colour scheme and lost all the clientele.  I asked my brother Ian about this but he had never heard that story.  Ian was born in 1924 and two years later he and Mum went back to England on a visit.  They stayed for six months.

I WANT MY LIFE BACK so I can say to my Dad that I understand now why he got drunk every Saturday when he came home from work. I know instinctively that his marriage to Mum wasn’t working.  How could it when they had both been brought up in such emotionally stultifying environments?  I know that situation well as many years later, following the emotionally deprived pattern of my parents, I married a woman who was incapable of responding to me sexually (and me to her) . And so Dad’s emotional and sexual frustration would have grown just as mine did all those years later.

I understand now why he tried to hit me when I wouldn’t do what he said.  Instead he broke his finger when I pulled away and his fingers hit the table instead of me.  I want him to know that I understand now why he couldn’t show any love for me and how I too have felt that same intense frustration of not being able to speak of what was going on inside me.  And on his deathbed I want to tell him I love him and that I forgive him for all those years in which he never hugged me and never said he loved me.

I WANT MY LIFE BACK so that I can change the world in which I lived to one of happiness and laughter, from one of sadness, frustration and struggle.  If only we could all see our lives in the same perspective as Scrooge did as he travelled back through time and was shown how his behaviour had affected all those around him.  I wasn’t like Scrooge.  I wasn’t mean and I wasn’t hateful toward people.  I was nothing.  I was an automaton acting out a life that wasn’t my own, saying things I didn’t feel, following others down paths that were theirs, not mine, because the denial of love had shut me down emotionally and cut me off from life itself, except of course for the rage that was always there, revealing itself unexpectedly.   Like the day  I set fire to the curtains in Mum and Dad’s bedroom.  I have no memory of what triggered that action.  I don’t think it was anything in particular, just a build-up of emotional frustration, for even though I was living in a family environment, I felt very much alone – and unloved.  I can go back easily to that room, partly blackened by fire, and remember standing in front of Mum and an insurance man, being asked to explain why I did it.  I didn't know why I did it then and I didn’t know what to say.  So I stood with my  head down, looking at the carpet and saying nothing.  It was twenty-two years later, in a session with a psychologist, that I understood that it was my repressed anger at my parents' inability to show any love for me that triggered my action.

            In those early years my desire for love was all-consuming.  Love never came from where I expected - my parents -  but from my dog.  He was black and a bitzer. His name was Flip and he lavished love on me as I’d never experienced before, jumping on me excitedly whenever I walked out the back door.  Then one day he began running around the back garden at a furious pace.  He was unstoppable.  He ran and he ran, his tongue hanging out and his breathing becoming more and more laboured.  I remember how concerned I was for him.  Then, without warning, he keeled over – dead!  His heart had given out.  Turned out he had distemper.  We buried him by the back fence under a tall gum tree.  When the house was quiet that night I got out of bed and moved quietly to the bed opposite mine.  Ian was sound asleep on his side facing me.  I gently took hold of his shoulder and shook him.

‘Ian…Ian.  Wake up!’ I whispered.

In the half light I could just see his face.  His eyelids flew open and before he could speak I said: ‘Shhh.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Come outside; I need you to keep watch!.’

‘Why?’

‘Just come.’

We crept down the corridor and out the back door.  There was a shovel on the back verandah.  It was full moon.  We’d placed a wooden cross at the head of the grave.  I started to dig carefully.

‘What you doin’? Ian whispered with concern.

‘I want to make sure ‘e’s dead.’

I uncovered Flip’s body, then taking my pocket knife from my pyjama pocket, I pulled open the main blade and thrust it into him.  He didn’t shudder or react.  The blade slid out easily.  I shut the knife and pushed the earth on top of him.  Just as we reached the back door the moon went behind a cloud.  We clambered back into our beds and I fell into a fitful sleep.

            For me, this was the last straw. I had lost my best pal and I was really angry,  but I didn’t know how to express it.  Neither my Dad or my Mum showed any affection for me.  Mum seemed constantly afraid, afraid of what I didn’t know, except it came out in the way she mollycoddled me which filled me with resentment and frustration.

I spent the next forty-eight years in a blind fury, not that anyone knew.  Even I wasn’t aware just how angry I was.  The first hint of what was going on inside me occurred years later when I was a Life Line Counsellor.  One of the tutors came up to me one day and told me that I was a very angry person.  Who?  Not me.  She must be talking about someone else! 

I found out something important about my Dad by accident. It was on the morning after he died.  Sitting on a coffee table in the loungeroom was a diary.  I hadn’t seen it before. .  Mum  must have dug it out from somewhere.  It was Dad’s, written on the Somme during the First World War.   I flipped it open to a page with an entry I will never forget:  It was written in pencil.  "Went up to the front today." Then in strong, capital letters:  HELL!  HELL!  HELL!  I can still see those three words and the page they were written on.  They’ve been imbedded in my mind ever since.  It was just eight o’clock in the morning.  Dad had died four hours earlier.

Mum had woken me at 2am and I had stumbled down the corridor into my parents’ bedroom.  Dad lay on the bed, grey of face, breathing heavily,  staring at the ceiling. And grasping at what life he had left.

"Quickly," Mum said, "go over the road and phone Dr. Walker.  Tell her to come straight away."

            Mum was distraught and terrified.  The fear burned out of her eyes and sent me rushing out of the house.  We didn't have a phone.

            As I knocked tentatively on the front door of the imposing two-storey brick house opposite I was scared, not because Dad was dying but because Mum's terror had taken hold of me and I was numbed by something I didn't understand.

            Back home I sat by the bed watching Dad battle with death.   The doctor arrived and injected him with something to get him through the crisis but it had no effect.  His chest was heaving.  He was struggling to stay alive.  I understand that now, having had a similar heart condition.  There’s nothing you can do except wait for it to pass.  In Dad’s case it didn’t.  Unable to fight it any longer, he let go and a huge breath rushed from his body like the air leaving a blow-up bed.   The doctor tried to revive him with another injection.  But it was too late.  He was gone.

Mum was sitting huddled in a chair at the end of the bed.  I could see she was  scared.  She didn’t move, nor did she cry.  I was scared too and the fear had produced a numbness in me so I didn’t know what to think or how to act.   I didn't have him to hate any more and in the nights to follow I would lie awake at night, so terrified that I couldn’t move.           

            An associate of Dad's turned up the next morning and wrote an obituary which appeared in The Melbourne Herald that night.   Dad had been head artist at the Myer Emporium in Bourke Street, Melbourne, for 25 years. 

            It was August 15, 1951.  Dad was 59.  I was twenty two.

           

Brian Castro, in an article in The Australian Author7, described writing as ‘rebellion’.  Maybe that’s why I’m a writer.  My life has been one long rebellion, starting with that incident when I tried to burn the house down.

---

1 Birth Certificate

2 Conversation with Mum

3 O’Shea,Steven Back to the Front, Avon Books 1996

4 Marriage Certificate

5 Mum not only tore up these photographs but all the family photographs as well as the artwork for Dad’s book on phrenology. Many of the plates of his etchings also disappeared.

6 Conversation with parents

7 Castro,Brian, Song of the Pen, Australian Author, August 2003

ON THE SOMME

It was like a bad dream and I'll never forget it. I'd decided to have a rebirth* to get to the heart of some of the things that were affecting me. My father was one of them. My relationship with him had been traumatic. I was with Jenny Blackie, a trained rebirther, lying on a mattress on the floor while she sat on a chair looking down at me and I'd started breathing – deeply.

"What are you feeling?" she asked.

"I'm vibrating" I said. Then, as I breathed, I got a sharp pain like a stitch in my right side.

"What shape is it?

What a ridiculous question. But then I had an insight.

"It's vertical."

"What colour?"

Colour? How could a pain have a colour? But then I saw it. It was black!

"Ask it what it represents!"

Ask it? Seems crazy. I concentrated. Then the thought came up – my father.

"What about him?"

"I saw him and he looked lost."

"Why wasn't he stronger?"

"Why?" I puzzled over that. Then the answer came.

"Then I would have been!"

"Why wasn't he strong?" I saw his older sister, a big woman, standing over him.

"He was dominated by his older sister."

"So?"

"He was weak."

I kept breathing. Then I saw Dad in a bunker on the Somme. I didn't want to talk about it. But, well, there it was.

I see Dad. He's on the Somme in World War 1. He's in the RAMC.

Suddenly the emotion welled up inside me. I could see him in a bunker, huddled, terrified. I began to feel his terror. Then I was there, with him, hugging him to me.

"Dad! Dad! Don't be frightened. I'm here with you."

I was sobbing uncontrollably. He was a little boy and I had the strength. The shells were coming fast and exploding all around outside. There was no-one else there. We were alone. My whole body shook!

"CHRIST!" I cried out. "It's terrifying!"

The tears were pouring from me as my body was wracked with sobs for the man I was holding – the terrified man who was my father.

"I want to stop Jenny! I can't stand it!"

"You can't stop Andrew. You're having this experience to heal you! Stay with it," she pleaded.

It was so real. My Dad, there in my arms. My tears. They were real enough.

"I want him to go over the top. Do you know what I mean? Out of the trench toward the enemy."

I knew he had to do this.

"Dad! C'mon Dad! Pull yourself together! You must go!"

I kept urging him on. He got up, moved toward the ladder, looked back, then disappeared over the top, carrying a stretcher. I collapsed into a corner of the bunker, feeling on the one hand elated that I had made a man of him, but also feeling guilty that I had sent him to his death.

I was still sobbing and completely exhausted. Jenny wiped the tears from my eyes. My nasal passages were all blocked up and I was choking with emotion.

Then he came back. He was dressed in a white uniform as he had been when he left. He came down the ladder and sat with his back to me. I felt disconnected from him and completely free of his influence.

I was still crying and shaking and had difficulty in standing up. I had a pain in my back but not as bad as before.

Back on the bed, I couldn't stop crying.

"Breathe Andrew!" Jenny said.

• Rebirthing is a process in which, under the guidance of a trained rebirther, you breathe deeply and continually, oxygenating your brain and reviving memories that have long been buried in the subconscious and, in this case, to surface unconscious fears.

A SWITCH FROM THE NEGATIVE

I was into my 50s before I fell into 'new age' thinking. I was very conservative, mainly born of fear and the inability to express what I was really thinking and feeling, that as a result of a suppressed childhood in which I grew up not knowing what love was. My parents, born in the Victorian era had the same problem. My dad was very creative but never really learned the express it until in his late 40s which was too late because he was dead at 59. My mum was scared all her life and tried to protect me from the things she feared. So in the past 30 years I've attracted a lot of experiences each of which has moved me away from the negative to the positive, and let me tell you I had heaps of negativity. One of the first things I did once I had a taste of different way of looking at life was to sign up for a rebirthing course. I discovered much later that none of the participants wanted me on it. Twenty years plus down the track (about two weeks ago on June 23rd) after years of trying to think positively and change the negative aspects of my life I was led to a process that turned my life around.

Carol Ann Roberts (until recently known as Tyicia) who taught me Theta Healing, went through my belief systems and turned them upside down and then imbedded new ones. An amazing process. For instance one of my beliefs was: "I have no point of view" and she cancelled that and replaced it with: "I see with Divine eyes" Another one was: "I am a nobody!" which she changed to: "I am Source". When I say she changed it to, she reaches inside you and taps into your own source and comes up with your own truth. Another one which made us both laugh was "I am a disgusting ratbag" which became "I am most precious and unique" And she explained that we are all unique on a spiritual level, just as no snowflake is the same, from a Divine perspective we all have our own uniqueness.

There were a few others - nine in all, and for the next week my body and mind went through what I can only describe as "a rebirth" as it adjusted to these new truths. Throughout the following days I would say them to myself and this morning I woke feeling energetic and positive even though I didn't get to sleep until 2am. And I've become very calm and very clear about my direction.

DISCOVERING MYSELF

I was born in 1929, the year of the Great Depression. My parents, both the youngest of families of 11, had migrated to Australia in the early 20s. Their parents, from a rich, conservative aristocracy, had somehow failed to provide any love for my parents who became typical products of the Victorian era, unable to express their emotions.
As a result my own childhood was stunted emotionally and I was in a constant state of frustration. When I was five I even tried to burn our house down Right up until the time my mother died I felt emotionally imprisoned. And when I married it was to someone who had the same emotional problems I did. I’m still amazed that our marriage lasted 16 years. During the following eleven years, still feeling that I had not yet discovered my true potential, I began participating in personal development programs. In November, 1985 I assisted on a three-day personal development program in Melbourne Australia called “Money & You”. I was 56.
In a break I walked over to a table displaying all kinds of information about other courses available. A brochure about a residential program for teenagers called “Supercamp” leapt to my attention. As I started to read something happened which I can’t explain. My heart beat faster and I became very emotional. I walked back to my seat feeling excited. I didn’t know why, but I knew I had to find out more.
On the second day of the seminar, the facilitator, Robert Kiyosaki, announced that there would be a follow-on program called “Creating Wealth” in San Diego in six weeks. San Diego was the location of the headquarters of Supercamp. I thrust up my hand and said: ‘I think I’ll be there’. It was a crazy idea. I had no money and I was running a PR company that was only just making it financially.
I thought about nothing else for two weeks, then I borrowed the money for the airfare, told my business partner what I was doing (he thought I’d lost my marbles), advised Supercamp I was coming and booked into the seminar.
On the morning after the seminar I walked into the offices of Supercamp where I met its founder, Bobbi de Porter, and her staff. Bobbi showed me a video of the accelerated learning program and the results it was achieving in the lives of thousands of American teenagers. She was as enthusiastic as I was about bringing Supercamp Down Under. Three hours later I walked out of those offices in a state of high excitement.
By the time I got back home the word had spread and people came out of the woodwork to offer their support. In early January I set up a small committee to work on the detail and the negotiations with what would be our US partner and I invited a friend of mine, Jo Rawson, to help me set it up. We had regular meetings over the following six months until about early July when we came to the unhappy realisation that the economical and logistical problems associated with importing Supercamp into Australia were insurmountable. Reluctantly we abandoned the project.
We were extremely disappointed but the Universe wasn’t about to let us off the hook so easily. A couple of weeks later Kyosaki was back in town and I went to see him to get some advice about my business. No sooner had I walked through the door than I was introduced to an Hawaiian man called Vic Quitan who was associated with a similar program in Hawaii called “Winners Camp”. We were quickly in conversation. It was an accelerated learning program like Supercamp only on a smaller scale and was designed to assist 13 to 18 year-olds realise their true potential. I asked Vic if it would be possible for us to attend a program. He said yes. “So when is the next one?” I asked. “Monday” he said. This was Thursday. On the way home I phoned Jo to give her the news. The excitement was on again.
I caught a flight on Monday. Jo followed a couple of days later. It was one of the most extraordinary weeks of my life. The program had an emphasis on personal responsibility, confidence and self esteem as well as teaching a number of academic skills that help teenagers learn more quickly and without stress. There were 50 teenagers in the program, most from difficult family backgrounds. By the end of the week we were astonished by the changes in the teenagers and through them their parents.
The Hawaiian facilitators wanted to come to Australia to help us get our own program up and running and the following January six of them came down to facilitate the first “Discovery Program” in Australia with eighty-five teenagers in attendance. It was an outstanding success. Since then hundreds of teenagers and their families from around Australia have graduated from Discovery.
My own involvement with Discovery was short term but the feeling of euphoria around it still remains. For a while I wondered why me? Why did I choose to go down that track? Then it finally dawned on me that in the process of becoming so involved in healing the lives of teenagers I had healed myself.

A SEXUAL ENCOUNTER

Many years ago I joined the Australian Aids Council to see whether I could eliminate my hang-ups about gay people.

At the very first meeting I attended, the facilitator asked us to number off - 1,2,1,2, 1,2, then he told the "ones" to leave the room.

'Now I want you to play a game', he said to the rest of us. 'When your partner comes back you're to imagine you have the "hots" for this person and play it out for all you're worth.'

Oh my God! Me? A super conservative who'd never done anything outrageous in his entire life act like a gay guy? I felt queasy in the stomach and my mouth went dry. I was petrified by what was about to happen. I needn't have worried.

The "ones" filed back in. I wondered what instructions they had received. My partner sat down next to me and began to talk. But I wasn't listening. I gulped, looked him straight in the eyes and putting one hand on his thigh, told him how attracted I was to him.

His eyes widened. He temporarily stopped his spiel, and before I knew it I had fallen into the part. 'John', I said, 'I think you're really special. I'd really like to have a relationship with you.' Poor fellow. He was gay. I wasn't. He didn't know which way to look and became increasingly nervous and agitated.

When the facilitator called a halt and John learned that it was all a game, he was so relieved he nearly slid out of his chair onto the floor.

As for me, from that day my hang-ups about gays vanished.

CHILDHOOD: TWO

My childhood was a nightmare. I didn't know who I was and I spent my time trying to please everybody or being terrified of everybody. In class I was too scared to speak for fear of making an ass of myself. I don't remember much about State School except that I felt like an oddity. To make up for my shyness I worked hard and was noticed by the principal. But I was soon in trouble. There was a game we played call "cock fights". Don't know why it was called that as it had nothing to do with 'cocks'or penises. The game consisted of splitting up into two teams and forming pairs. I can't remember whether the girls took part. I suspect not. So the boys paired up and one boy hopping on the shoulders of his partner. Then, on a signal we would charge the other team and try and dislodge the boy on the shoulders of your opponent. It was good fun although it often resulted in someone getting hurt. The thing is we were not permitted to play it and one day at the lunchtime assembly all those who were playing cockfights during the lunch hour were told to step forward. I didn't. I was too scared. But then one of my class...turned around and pointing straight at me shouted: 'He was playing too!' I was a wimp, already taking on the mantle of my parents. I still remember the shame of that moment. I can't imagine how I expected not to be found out. I must also have been very dumb.

We also had a great headmaster (they were called headmasters then, although now I hear they are now called principals). His name was Mr Chrisophers. He was an energetic little bloke and for some reason he took a shine to me probably because I was a little bloke too. He used to organise excursions for the school and on one of these we went to Phillip Island, down the coast and were taken out in launches to circle a small island inhabited by very smelly seals which leapt into the water making ghastly.........

I had two embarrassing experiences at this school. The first was on the morning my mother delivered me and I lay on the floor outside the front entrance kicking, screaming and crying, putting on a bang-up show to convince everyone that this was a very bad idea. Fortunately I didn't succeed.

The other embarrassment was being put in a music class to play the violin at the insistence of my mother who constantly tried to live her life through me. The noises I made with the violin were appalling and it wasn't long before my pleadings to be taken out succeeded. Thank God! What a blessing.



1 comments:
Roger Carr said...

Never dawned on you that "cockfight" may have something to do with rooster fights?
October 18, 2007 1:39 AM

CHILDHOOD: ONE

I was born into the beginning of an economic mess. It was 1929, the start of The Great Depression. My Dad, Stuart Edward Wade, a veteran of WW1, was, like my Mum, a Pommie, and they'd come to Australia to find a new life. They didn't have a great start as the passenger ship they boarded was ploughed into by a French liner in the English Channel. They lost everything.

That ship was headed to New Zealand. The next one they caught was destined for Melbourne Australia. They knew no-one in Melbourne. It must have been tough. Dad tried various ways of making a living. The only one I really know about was his attempt to run a small restaurant in Collingwood or somewhere like that. He redecorated the whole place, changing the colour schemes to brighten it up and lost all his clientele.

Somehow he'd found himself a job at the Myer Emporium as an artist in the advertising department where he drew fascinating objects like kettles, saucepans and anything in fact that was for sale in the large department store. He proved, later in his life, that he was in fact quite brilliant as an artist when he drew portraits of world leaders in his book Making You. I've often wondered why he stuck it out. I can only assume his time on the Somme in the Royal Army Medical Corps had knocked the stuffing out of him.

When I was growing up I remember Dad would come home from work on a Saturday, after a session with his friends at the local Brighton Beach pub, and lie on the couch and fall asleep. He was no friend to me and I resented it deeply. War is a destroyer of mankind, both physically and mentally. No-one comes out of it scot-free.

Mum, Florence Irene Wade, was no friend to me either. Like Dad, she was the product of a large English family which crushed any feelings and suppressed all emotions. My mother went through life fearful of everything and laid most, if not all of her fears on me.

SUPPRESSION

This morning the world is different. It's different for me because I am seeing it differently. From a new perspective. I've been shown that I am wrong. For years I've been searching, trying to discover who I am. What am I doing here? Whatis my purpose? I expect most of us have these questions. And most people seem to brush them side and stumble on through life. My dad did that. But then my dad was very confused. He didn't know who he was.

Not that he didn't try hard enough. But life was against him. He was born at a time when it was almost impossible to be yourself. When everyone, in his country at least, was suppressed. It was the Victorian era.  Ask any psychologist about that and they'll tell you it was a time of rigid thinking, that stultified creative thinking and eventually led to the most horrific conflicts the world had ever seen — World War I where millions of men died needlessly because the world had lost asight of its humanity. And we're still suffering from that stupidity.

That conflict, of course, had its effect on me, through my dad.

For most of my life I too was very suppressed and couldn't relate to the opposite sex. When I finally did it was after a two-year stint seeing a psychologist.

But that as only the beginning of a long journey full of bumps and ravines and high mountains including divorce and a 19-year period in which I became a seminar junkie and began turn my life around.