Sink or Swim , livre ebook

S ink or S wim
A Memoir
Saxby Pridmore
Austin Macauley Publishers
2021-05-28
Sink or Swim About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgement Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19
About the Author
Saxby Pridmore is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He was born at the end of the Second World War. In addition to psychiatry, he has specialist qualifications in addiction, pain management, neurology and public health. He was a champion boxer and is a successful poet. He was plagued by dyslexia and suffered head injury as a child. Home life was not easy, but he went on to achieve a successful academic career. He is married to Mary the Great and has two ‘excellent’ children. In 2006 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia.
“It might sound as if I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I’m not. I’m feeling grateful. These are the facts/events of a time.”
Dedication
To Mary, Emma and William
Copyright Information ©
Saxby Pridmore (2021)
The right of Saxby Pridmore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528910811 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528910828 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528911757 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2021)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgement
Thanks to The Advocate newspaper for taking a photograph of my mother, myself and two chow-chows, in 1958 (on the front cover).
Chapter 1
I was born in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, an island which is a State of Australia, in 1946.
The Second World War ended in 1945, so I was in the generation called ‘The Baby Boomers’ – there were lots of babies born in the years after our soldiers returned home. Everyone’s lives, the men who had ‘been away’ (all soldiers were men in those days) and their wives and sweethearts at home had been on hold for six years. Naturally, they made up for lost time.
Walter B. Pridmore, my father, had been to the war. As I was born a year after the war ended, the reader would assume that Dad had been on ‘active service’ up till the end and come back when ‘the boys’ was ‘demobbed’ (discharged). But nothing with my father was straightforward.
My grandfather was Walter H. Pridmore. He had some gipsy blood and was dark-eyed and skinned. He was born in the north of Tasmania and raised by a cruel mother. Walter H. came to live in Hobart. He was a highly intelligent fellow but could not read or write until taught by his first wife (Mary). Without training, he set himself up in a picture framing business. He had four children with Mary. Then he left her and married a 16-year-old person (Elsie) who worked in his progressively successful picture framing business.
My father did not speak to his father after my grandfather left the family home. Not speaking to people who had behaved disgracefully (and thus injured people you loved) was a common response in early twentieth-century Australia. It may still be so. In earlier days, it was certainly intended to identify and shame a sinner and simultaneously signal the moral outrage and superiority of the person refusing to speak.
My father was in his teens at an excellent private school in Hobart (The Hutchins School) when his family of origin broke up. He left school and went to work in the Cadbury Chocolate factory, a few miles up the Derwent River from Hobart. It is not clear why my father left school. Money was tight (I guess), but his younger sister and brother moved over and completed their schooling at a first-rate State Secondary School. When I asked my father why he had left school before finishing, his always serious face would become more so and he would say a few words with some sighing and glancing away into the distance. He would say something like, “In those days, things were different. Your Grandmother was on her own.” These ‘answers’ were not answers because they did not answer the questions asked, they clarified nothing. I would feel I was inferior, ungrateful (in some way) for asking and that Walter B. was a silent, long-suffering, (sighing, for some reason) hero.
My father, like his father, was an intelligent man, but he lacked the necessary personality features to make much use of his intelligence. He had one other gift and that was boxing. He was a short man but was able to dodge and weave around so that it was almost impossible to ‘lay a glove on him’. I saw this when he was teaching boxing in clubs in his 40s. He would stand in one spot and it would be impossible to hit him. (It was said of men with this gift, “He could stand on a handkerchief and you couldn’t hit him”.) When Walter B. was 16 years of age, he won a state professional boxing title. (In the pre-television ‘depression years’ of the 1930s, professional boxing was popular around the world.) He successfully defended his title 20 times. When he was 20 years of age, he ‘retired’. When I asked why he retired so young (these days professional boxers are still fighting in their mid-thirties), he would sigh and glance away into the distance and say, “I’d held it for four years.” I guessed he was saying that he grew tired of the effort, but he didn’t say so.
He wasn’t a man who bragged a lot. Although, he did arrange the appearance of superiority. There was a seldom-told story (you had to know and ask about it) about when he was working at the Cadbury factory and turned up with a black-eye from boxing. He said the foreman was very disapproving and told him this could not continue and he would have to give up boxing or give up working for Cadbury. With a touch of the rebel and determined hero, with no other income but a small amount to uncertain prize money, he gave up working for Cadbury.
Some strands will remain unplaited. It is not a story because it was never told. But a couple of times a decade in my early life, information emerged that after the boxing, Dad had spent some time in the Royal Australian Navy. At first, you thought it must have been during the war, although he only ever mentioned having been a soldier. When I asked, I was told, “Oh, that was a long time ago,” sigh, distance, silence. Mum said Dad didn’t want to talk about it. When my brother Walter B. (Junior) joined the Navy in the 1960s, my father was concerned that some naval person may draw a connection between Walter B. and Walter B. (Junior).
After my father died, a couple of pictures turned up – one of him in a navy uniform and another of the HMAS Voyager on which he served as a stoker - a pretty tough job - one shovels coal into a furious furnace in a swelteringly hot boiler room. Putting snippets together, I conclude that Walter B. joined the Royal Australian Navy sometime in the 30s. In those days (and possibly still), once you ‘signed-on’, you were committed to staying on for a predetermined number of years (usually at least six) and you could not leave just because you wanted to. The only way out was a medical discharge – doctors had to believe you were unfit for work. I believe Walter B. faked a mental disorder. I think he faked a problem with his memory.
Of course, people can fake the loss of the use of a limb or their memory. In stressful circumstances, people can temporarily lose the use of their limbs or their memory as part of a genuine mental disorder (rare these days). I believe Walter B. presented to the doctors with memory difficulties, which were either faked or the genuine symptoms of stress. It makes no real difference. He had been in a tough job; he left and chose to never clarify events.
At the start of the war, my father was 26 years of age, he was unemployed and claimed to have been ‘carrying my swag’ on the east coast of mainland Australia. ‘Swag’ has meant many things, from a thief’s haul to being ‘cool and groovy’. But in the nineteenth century and a little during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the swag was clothes and personal belongings wrapped in a blanket and carried by the owner. The swagman looked for work in country areas. Being disadvantaged and trying very hard, the swagman became a romanticised folk hero. I doubt my father was a hardcore ‘swaggie’, but he was certainly looking for work on the mainland at the start of the Second World War.
Australia declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 immediately following Britain’s declaration. Walter B. enlisted 30 days later. He was in Forbes, a small town in a wheat-growing area, 400 kilometers west of Sydney. When he arrived at the Town Hall at 9:00 am, as directed by an official postcard from the Australian Military Forces (now in my possession), he had a fistfight with another man to sort out who would be the first to ‘sign up’ in Forbs. My father won.
When you asked Dad about this event (I thought it was pretty heroic having a fight about who was going to be the first to go to fight for his country), he would chuckle briefly and say, “Oh, that was back before the war…” Well, of course, it was before the war! The impression was that he didn’t want to draw any attention to himself. My problem is that he was almost certainly t