Motorcycling and An Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)

How it came about I can’t be sure, but I think either my Dad or Aunt kept my school principal informed of the struggles occurring at home with Mum in and out of hospital. I was around eight years old when the principal handed me a box of matches and told me I was in charge of the school incinerator. Each lunch time a small group of us would round up all the garbage bins and bring them to the incinerator, I would run to the principals office and he would give me the box of matches, I would light the rubbish and return the matches to him. Each Thursday about mid afternoon when the incinerator cooled down I would be let out of class and a few of us would shovel the ashes to a wheel-barrow and dump it down the end of the playing field. We each would get two or three shillings a week. At the time we lived four houses away from the dead end of the street that backed onto the school playing oval, on the weekends I would look at the incinerator and feel proud that I was doing my bit for Dad and Mum.

When we moved to our home, when I was ten years old, instead of walking to the local school ten minutes away, I went in the other direction up to the highway and caught the bus each morning to school and home in the afternoon. It wasn’t because I liked burning rubbish or handing out the lunch orders from the shop across the main highway, it was because I needed to have structure and be organized. From around eight until thirteen years old I played soccer of a Saturday morning and we would train on a Thursday after school – I enjoyed getting on the evening bus, after soccer training with the grown ups.

Soccer as a young lad was a bit like my school grading, I was never in the top A-grade team or A-grade class, but always the B-grade even in the two and a half years of high school it was always one level down from the top. In sports however I was captain of my soccer team and when we moved to our home when I was ten, my soccer coach with his wife, daughter and son, would come and collect me on a Saturday morning for our soccer match – his son and I, we’d sit in the back of the FJ Holden Ute and just love sound of the exhaust..

When I was thirteen I stopped playing soccer and concentrated on basketball, training on a Saturday with the RSL youth league and playing on Monday nights in a large district competition. We had a wonderful coach and he would collect sometimes three or four of us from our homes. Though I tried very hard at school, I was being held back I by the difficulties at home, at high school however I loved basketball. I was the team captain and we would train on a Tuesday after school and play the school district competition on Wednesday mid afternoon.

My enthusiasm in sport carried on while in the Defence Force, at my initial training establishment as a young sailor playing a couple of times a week and for a few matches on a Saturday in a local Perth competition. Later playing for ‘Big Ships’ while in the fleet in Sydney, and representing Navy Inter-Service rugby in Perth, and later as a young officer playing for the Navy Air Station rugby team in Nowra. I also represented Navy in a Melbourne district basketball competition as a young sailor.

From the age of eight until I joined the navy when I was fifteen going on sixteen, the struggles at home were overwhelming. When I was fourteen, just before my fifteenth birthday I decided to leave school and join the navy. I was aware of an education program in the Navy and that was my key focus, to further my education, the Navy was the ship that would take me there.

The minimum age was fifteen and a half, I was a delivery boy after I left school for David Jones, a large retail store in Sydney, and each morning I would be up a 5.15am have breakfast and coffee with Dad then jog 2km to the railway station to get the 6.04am train to City Circle – St James Station. There were many delivery vans and I would not know which one I would be on from one day to the next. I reckon by the end of each day I would have run well over 20km, be it on the upper north shore suburbs or the inner eastern suburbs. I recall having lunch at Rushcutters Bay and looking out at the harbour and seeing the Daring Class Destroyer HMAS Vendetta coming up the harbour and laying just off Garden Island.

January came and I was going to turn fifteen and a half – I was too young by eleven days for the January intake.

So that month I joined the NSW Government Railway as a Junior Station Assistant, a ‘Relief Junior Station Assistant’ and like the delivery boy job, I was assigned to stations right across the Sydney metropolitan area, and at times in sole charge of small stations like Warwick Farm, Yennora, and Telopea. I worked some of the larger stations too, Canterbury, Licombe, Parramatta. I was in a class of about eight for the first three weeks and we were taught every thing from rail ticket sales both metropolitan, country and interstate, to parcels office procedures, oh and nothing about cleaning toilets that was purely on the job. The course was downtown, the only perk was I didn’t have to pay for my own rail fare.

I went back in the April to the recruiting office – ‘Sorry son, we can’t take you at the moment, your father will probably need you while your mother is still in hospital’. Mum was not well and still in and out of hospital, this was 1968 and it would be 1971 when she had the brain tumour removed. I have struggled for years but my younger brother, by nine years he does not come into my memory that much, though my Aunt was there every week for us….a story for another day when she would have to meet Dad at his work on a Friday lunch time to take his pay packet from him.

I carried on with the railways and there were many lessons to be learnt, the first one working for the general public, and if you can call it a lesson – cleaning some of the most disgusting toilets and station toilet blocks and black tarring urinals regularly.

It was June and I had applied the third time at the York Street, Sydney Recruiting Office, and was interviewed and asked how things had been with my Mum and what work I had been doing. The Petty Officer shook my hand and said ‘Well done son, I am sure your father is proud of you. You should get an answer in two weeks, be prepared to be on a train to Perth early next month.’

Having been over the greater metropolitan area I just spent a few weeks at my local railway station while the Station Assistant was on annual leave, this was bliss 11am to 7pm and no trains to catch clear across the city. I was then sent up the line to Cabramatta for a 3pm-11pm shift, when I arrived the Station Master read out the duties for me like it was a declaration of war, ‘You look after the down line [trains coming from the city on the way to Liverpool - Cabramatta was at a junction and so I had trains from Granville on one line and Regents Park on the other coming down the line.] You have also got the Parcels Office and there are a few items for the 4.30pm Parcel Van, out front I want you to sweep up all the cigarette butts at the bus stops and empty the bins before I leave at 5pm……’ With that he went back to his desk, called out to a female station assistant ‘Mary can you get me that tea now’, then was chuckling with another female station assistant who was sitting beside his desk. Well it didn’t take me too long to wake up to the situation and little muggings me was doing all the work. Within the hour or so the call came for a Relief to be sent up the line to Beralla, I said ‘I would be happy to go there on the next train and leave you with your girls.’– red rag to a bull comment and short of some physical abuse the Station Master lost the plot.

“Master, you see that train coming on the up line, I figure you have about two and half minutes to make up your mind who is going to Beralla…..”

The train pulled in I stepped straight into the Guards Compartment and told the train guard, ‘don’t let him come anywhere near me, I’m staying on this train to Fairfield.’

I got off at Fairfield and had to ride a bus home, had I gone up the Regents Park line I would have been okay and walked from the local station. The next morning I took my uniform and brass buttons down town and resigned immediately.

Within the week of leaving the railways my the letter arrived from the Navy and I was off to Perth in less than a fortnight. By this stage I had been out of school for a year, was physically fit, and had enough discipline to do the dirtiest jobs, and recognize idiots who take advantage of their positions of authority.

The next fifteen years were going to be the most rewarding and challenging times: from excelling in training and receiving the top award, to studying on the mess deck and doing English exams onboard while taking troops to Vietnam, to completing promotions exams to Leading Seaman, to be selected for an officer’s commission. And privately to encounter the bitter sweet of loves found and lost, to the final reality…who was this person in a uniform.