I’ve only been back to visit the grave once since then, after the stonemason finished carving Mum’s inscription. Her name was there: Everil Mary Taylor (nee Murray), and her dates 1921–2008, but I didn’t sense that she was there, and I wasn’t tempted to talk to her or catch her up with all my news. Actually, I had a powerful feeling that she had long ago fled the scene and that the question of where she belonged in death was still wide open. And I realised that this was probably nothing more than the price she’d had to pay for wandering so far from the place where she was born, that at some stage there was a point beyond which belonging was no longer an option. Her little medicine bottle full of dust was only an approximation of home, not the real thing, just like my burying her ashes was only a gesture at belonging, one that was bound to fail.
My father’s name was Leslie Gordon Taylor, but everyone knew him as Gordon or L.G., and we children sometimes called him Captain Taylor. I never knew where he came from because he kept it a secret. Even Mum didn’t know with any certainty. According to her, Dad’s account of his past varied so often she could never be sure if, or when, he was telling the truth. It was known that he grew up somewhere in Sydney, but we were never taken to see his childhood house, or to meet his family, and his parents came to visit only rarely when I was growing up, certainly not often enough to leave any lasting impression. I cannot even recall now what they looked like.
If he talked about his boyhood at all it was to say how unhappy he’d been, cooped up in a little suburban box with a mother and father who didn’t understand him, and no brothers and sisters to share his ordeal. He declared his father a bully and his mother a doormat, and told us he’d stormed out on them at the age of fifteen, never to return. He was vague about what happened next. There was a job as a jackaroo for some wealthy Victorian squatter, which ignited his love affair with horses, and where he might have picked up his patrician affectations—the cigar-smoking and the penchant for tailored clothes—although these could equally well have been acquired later, in the air force, where his character was truly forged, and where he grew his trademark handlebar moustache.
He was as hazy about his war as he was about his childhood. The air force to start with: it was obviously where his passion for flying began, and where his problem with authority emerged full-scale. He never said why he was thrown out, only that it probably saved his life, since so many of the other trainees had gone on to be blown to bits in the bombing raids over Germany. After that he simply got lucky, he said: one day he bumped into a recruiting officer for the British Army in India, who immediately convinced him to sign up for officer school. He duly shipped out to India for training. Six months later, his training complete, he expected to cross into Burma to fight the Japanese, but they surrendered before he could pack his jungle kit. I was never sure if he was pleased about this, or resentful, because it had deprived him of the chance to prove himself in combat. In any case, the end of the war saw him transported back to Australia anxious to launch his career in civil aviation as soon as possible, since flying was his true vocation.
Not that it was an easy calling. In the early days, when Dad was starting out, it was full of risks, all of which he seemed to relish. Along with travel. He couldn’t stay in one place for longer than a year or two, or in the same job. He appeared to be in a perennial state of high dudgeon about the incompetent way airlines were run, about the primacy of commercial pressures over everything else. He fought with almost everyone he ever worked for. As a result, we lived like gypsies, forever packing up and moving on, which suited Dad perfectly. He was at his best when he was leaving. It didn’t worry him if we had to change schools yet again, abandon friends and neighbours, repeatedly adapt to new surroundings. Anything, apparently, was better than settling down in some barren suburb like the one he’d escaped from as a teenager. That was Dad’s nightmare, the thing he feared the most. I think he would have preferred to die than end up back in the same place he had started out.
He was in his seventies before he started to examine his beginnings with anything like equanimity. Growing up, he had always had a suspicion that, given how unsatisfactory they were, his mother and father were not his true parents. He remembered another couple, periodic visitors to the house, who came from Glasgow and bore an air of old-world refinement, people to whom his mother and father had deferred. In the hope, no doubt, of confirming his theory, he chose them as the first quarry in his genealogical hunt.
‘They were called Auchincloss,’ my father told me. ‘There are five of them in the Glasgow phonebook. We’ve got to be related.’
He travelled to Glasgow, where he discovered the truth. It was not what he had hoped. The couple were not his parents, but his father’s relatives by marriage. And his father was not who he had said he was. Originally from Ireland, my grandfather had run away from a violent household at the age of fourteen or so, and ended up in Glasgow, where he changed his name from O’Neill to Taylor. An aunt took him in, and not long after that he joined the merchant navy and started travelling the world, eventually jumping ship in Sydney.
‘I never knew any of it,’ my father said. ‘I might have had more respect for him if I had.’
He showed me a tiny grey photograph of my grandfather scrubbing the deck of a ship.
‘He was just a kid,’ he said, the first kind word I’d ever heard him say about his father.
My father spent a week in Glasgow meeting relations he never knew he had. He came back changed. It would be too much to say that he was at peace—he was never at peace—but there was some sense that he had laid a few ghosts to rest and decided not to run so hard. There was also some recognition of the price we had all paid for his insistence on always moving.
‘It was tough on your mother,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame her for quitting when she did.’
He wrote to her asking for her forgiveness, but she didn’t reply. By then, I am sure, all her reserves of compassion for Dad were exhausted.
My father’s spiral into severe dementia probably started around the same time as my mother’s. I should have recognised the signs, but I saw so little of him that it was hard to keep track. By then he was living in Canberra, where he had seen out his working life as a mail sorter for Australia Post, and now lived on a modest pension at a hostel for public servants. I went to see him there a couple of times, and Shin and I once visited with the boys on our way to the snow for a holiday. Now and again, he would turn up in Brisbane and knock on our door.
‘Howdy,’ he’d say. ‘I was just in the area.’
He’d proffer a shopping bag or two of groceries. ‘I didn’t want these to rot in my room while I was away.’
He gave the boys volumes from his library about planes and the history of aviation and was miffed when they didn’t show proper appreciation.
‘I’ll take them back if you don’t want them,’ he said.
As much as he enjoyed spending time with us all, he was really in Brisbane to see Mum. At that time she was living in an independent living unit a short walk from our house. Within minutes of his arrival he’d bring up her name.