Motorcycling and An Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)

Isn’t the Internet a powerful tool - I have been able to go into immigration archives and find my father’s original entry to Australia, the documents and declaration he completed and a photograph of him.

Dad demobilized from the US Army in 1945 and wound up on a bus to Nebraska…..many years later I joined the dots. Apparently his first wife, according to my aunt (Dad’s sister) did not settle too well in the USA. Dad last saw his sister in San Francisco when he put his wife and daughter on a ship back to Australia. Dad followed later, he had worked as a Dredgerman in San Francisco Bay, at Hunters Point. He lived in Barstow and Alameda.

It wasn’t until 1997, when I met my aunt in Indiana , that I first became aware I had a step-sister, or rather had had a step-sister. For in the same breath almost - when my Aunt told me and realized that I had no idea I didn’t know, she immediately remarked that my step-sister died when she was two and a half. That would seem to fit with a 1947 return to Australia, and perhaps without child.

Dad spoke of his first wife very little, and I don’t know if they ever did get back together after he arrived in Sydney in 1948. Dad remarked that his wife subsequently lived with a police detective, whether she ever remarried – I don’t know.

I do vaguely remember a young girl, I was about four or five, and she must have been eleven or twelve years old. Dad took us to Luna Park…..my half sister. I will never know.

I was born in 1952 and we lived in a rented house in Abbotsford, Sydney. I have several memories of the time. Mum worked as a switchboard operator at the General Post Office in Martin Place, and in those early years I was in a kindergarten and collected by a neighbour that lived down the street in the afternoon. Mum would get me when it was dark.

Dad was a labourer, he did not finish high school. In the early years he worked at the Pyrmont power house, I had pictures of him at the top of the big chimneys. In later years he was in steel construction as a rigger and helped in the build of what was to be the IBM building in Sydney on the immediate approach to the Harbour Bridge. In those early years when Dad came down to Australia he enjoyed himself, he was vice captain then captain of an eastern suburbs first grade baseball team, I looked at his team pictures and was very very proud of him, something that would impact upon me as a growing lad.

For whatever reason I remember we moved in with my Nan (Mum’s mother) around 1956 in Rozelle and I can vaguely remember seeing the Melbourne Olympic Games on television. Also, at Nan’s watching ‘Victory At Sea’ and ‘The Silent Service’ on the television something that no doubt later had an impact upon as well.

My first ever conflict with authority occurred at Balmain Primary School – I was a milk monitor handing out the small milk bottles at morning recess. I was accused of stealing a girl’s milk – she had given it to me. The battle-axe of a headmistress yelled at me. The following morning I took Spurt, Nan’s dog, and we sat up in the stacked timber at the timber yard down the street. Dad was furious, not because I wagged school but in order to get into the timber mill I crossed a large storm water canal – ah hum we could have been washed into the harbour but at six years old who thinks about those things, perhaps that may have been better than the old battle-axe. They had been looking for me all morning. I told him what happened at school. Apparently Dad took the bit between his teeth and sent me to school, strange though the head mistress was very good. Dad never told me what he did but I had a pretty good idea. ‘If my son said the girl gave him her milk bottle, then the girl gave him the milk bottle…’

On my tenth birthday we moved into a housing commission (state) home in the south west of Sydney a few hundred metres from the main Sydney to Melbourne - Hume Highway. By this time it was the sixth house (and last family home) and my fourth school. Three years earlier Mum lost my baby brother, he died a few hours after birth. It was shortly after this traumatic time for her that it became apparent something was wrong – epileptic fits were common.. Over the next three years Mum would have what at the time could best be described as ‘nervous breakdowns’. In 1961 my brother was born, and there are significant blackout spots I have as I can hardly recall his first five years.

Mum in the early 1960’s was constantly in and out of hospital and when she was in, up to five or six weeks at a time, I would visit her with my Dad on the weekends. For my father, my brother and me some ten years later we were told by a professor at the University of NSW that Mum had a massive brain tumor. I was in the navy by then and arrived home on compassionate leave from Perth, Dad had called me a few days earlier and told me: ‘if we go ahead with the operation she could lose some or all of her senses, or indeed not survive’ he asked me what I thought we should do. I told him let’s sleep on it and pray overnight. The following day we spoke on the telephone and we agreed to tumor ‘debulking procedure’ a dreadful description. The navy was great and got me home on the red eye flight from Perth and Mum had the operation that morning. A second procedure was required to remove post operative fluid build up, and then a snag – the fluid was going to be a constant. The professor put the case before medical students and a young graduate from Singapore suggested a ‘shunt valve’ beneath the skin behind Mum’s ear on the opposite side from where the tumor was removed. The result was that the valve could be slightly pressed and rubbed with the fingers and the fluid would evacuate to the small bowel. The prognosis was that the valve would be examined in a few years, and perhaps we would have Mum for five years.

Within six months of the procedure, Mum continued to have epileptic seizures – the horse accident from when she was a child was the probable originator, and sadly Mum had lost the ability to communicate coherently or recall names etc. Mum exceeded the five years by another twenty five and was taken with bowel cancer while in a nursing facility in Sydney in 2001.

My younger brother presented Dad and I with another set of issues……………