Rose Boys, page 9
‘Your father was fantastic,’ Bird remembered. ‘The impression I got was that he was concerned about my welfare and my health, and that’s the only reason he came to see me. It made me emotional. That really got me in a bad way.’
Indeed, how characteristic of Dad to think about the eighteen-year-old boy from Tasmania who was on his own. It meant another hospital visit. Another long drive. Another pep talk.
As soon as Bird left hospital he visited Robert in the Austin. Bill Lawry, Robert’s first captain when he played for Victoria, was there. I may have been present that day, for I clearly remember one visit from Lawry. A Test match was being played; naturally, Robert was listening. When Doug Walters went out Lawry became animated and gesticulated excitedly, repeating the news several times. It was all, apparently, happening. I remember being quite amused by his performance. I wondered what the other patients thought.
Robert Bird behaved differently. He vividly recalls the traction, as we all do. ‘It was just terrible. He took it so well. Naturally I broke down. I think I held myself together while I was looking at him eye to eye, but I didn’t handle it at all well. Because I loved Rob. Unbeknownst to a lot of people we were really, really good mates. It shattered… I mean, my life was in tatters. I just couldn’t come to grips with it. You’ve got all these feelings of guilt, all that comes through. People would say to me you’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. Probably I didn’t—I don’t know—but I did.’
Scuttlebutt didn’t help. Collingwood is rife with intrigue at the best of times. After Robert’s accident the gossips went to town.
‘And then you had innuendo,’ Bird told me. ‘It was a football club, with a high-profile sportsman like Rob. The innuendo was very strong about what may have happened—who was driving even—all that sort of thing. Lots of people…’ He hesitated. ‘Somehow a rumour got out that I was driving. All that sort of stuff was happening.’
There was no respite, no social escape.
‘Another thing that used to irk me was that twelve months, two years, three years after the event, you’d go to a barbecue somewhere and you’d get introduced to somebody as the person who was in the car with Robert Rose. All that sort of crap.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I’ve never ever…I’ve kept a relationship with Robert and myself in my own mind, in my own life.’
Listening to Bird, feeling guilty about putting him through this, moved by his tribute and by his personal ordeal, I wasn’t at all surprised that his football had suffered, that he had ‘never really cracked it’, or that he had gone to Far North Queensland as soon as it was over. He too had been marked by that day.
I asked him about Robert’s mood before the accident. He didn’t think that Robert was under pressure because of his mid-season slump. ‘He wasn’t concerned about his form. He wasn’t hitting the panic button or anything like that. He knew he was having a bad trot, but it wasn’t really affecting him. It didn’t send him off. He took it on the chin.’
Bird mentioned Robert’s domestic problems. ‘He was troubled about his home life. Things weren’t good at home. He loved Salli, but he was living a single man’s life. Terry was young too.’ He paused before going on. ‘I don’t think he wanted out. I knew he was having troubles, but he thought it would just go on the way it was.’
Robert obviously confided in his young friend. Bird knew, for instance, that Terry had gone back to her parents just before the accident. ‘Robert thought they’d be all right. She’d be back. It was a volatile relationship. He never indicated to me that he thought he’d be better off out of there.’
In later years Robert Bird saw my brother whenever he came to Melbourne. They never discussed the accident. We agreed that Robert had managed to have a rich life, with his sport, his family and his friendships.
‘I’m fortunate that I’ve been part of it,’ Bird declared. ‘We were best mates, although we didn’t grow up together or knock about together during our adult lives. What we had was very special. I’m sure Rob would say the same.’
He last saw Robert in 1992, after a football game. ‘He was in good nick. He could still smoke. I didn’t see him at his worst, that’s for sure.’ Robert left his other companions to speak to Bird. ‘He made a point of having a good yarn with me.’ At one point Robert asked him to take him to the toilet and empty his catheter. It was as if they had never been separated by gravel or a major forward flexion force. ‘He was quite forthright about this. I took it as being a strong friendship.’
I thanked Bird for speaking to me so openly. He said it had been good for him—‘therapeutic’.
‘It’s happened,’ he concluded. ‘It’s a part of my life. It’s always been there. Despite the fact that Robert has passed away nothing has really changed in my relationship with him. Our mateship never changed. I just remember the good times and I remember how lucky I was and how unlucky he was. That’s the bane of it. It could have been either of us, it could have been both of us, it could have been all of us. I didn’t turn to God or anything like that, but I’ve got my own things to live with about it.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s the most terrible thing. It’s been with me all the time. And so has Rob. And I know how strong he is, how strong he was. He’s a bloody marvel. The way he handled it is just extraordinary.’
As we would all, each in his or her own time and way, discover.
4
WARD SEVEN
Mum and I returned to the hospital later in the morning. Robert was conscious, his manner unchanged. Everyone was waiting for Dad to get home. How Robert must have longed to see the old chap, as he called him. At midday he was anaesthetised and his neck gently manipulated back into place. The dislocation was greatly reduced. Nevertheless, Robert was still in danger. The risk of respiratory failure was heightened because he was a smoker.
We spent the rest of the day at Crosby Drive. Family friends and neighbours kept dropping in. The telephone rang constantly. No one expected good news. I took most of the calls so that Mum wouldn’t have to talk to people. Our Mallee relations rang, disbelieving. When Marie and Barbara arrived, the three of us talked quietly in the kitchen while making endless pots of tea for the visitors. Norelle’s mother slumped on to a sofa with mine, both crying. She told us that Norelle had just rung from the country where she was honeymooning. The newlyweds had panicked after spotting a newspaper banner that read ‘ROSE TRAGEDY’. Throughout the day journalists kept ringing up to find out how Robert was and when Dad was due back. We heard from an unidentified journalist at Maxwell Newton’s dubious Sunday Observer. Mum told him that no one wanted to be interviewed, and thought no more of it.
Our cousin Tom Rose arranged a visit from the local minister. My parents were nominally Christian, but none of us had worshipped in a church for years. Robert’s religion was innocent as willow and shaped like a cricket ball. Our churchgoing didn’t revive after the accident.
We asked Marie and Barbara to stay the night. The four of us went to bed early. I remember laughing with Barbara as we all took it in turns using the bathroom. I felt a thin bat’s squeak of guilt about this levity. How could we joke while Robert lay on the other side of town, with ‘destruction of terror in his voice’? How could we ever laugh or gossip or forget what had happened? It was the first twinge of guilt about my own unfettered state.
I slept badly. Tranquil nights were a thing of the past. My dreams were horrible, violent. Morning brought no drowsy insouciance before the killing realisation. I thought about Robert the moment I woke up. It was as if the accident had happened weeks ago and I had accepted it. Later in the morning we drove to Tullamarine where we joined Kevin and Ralph Rose. Ralph, my youngest uncle, was due to become a father again that afternoon. His wife had already gone into labour. Dad’s plane was delayed. Everyone felt nervous about seeing him again. Pressmen were there but didn’t harass us.
Then the gates opened and Dad rushed over to us. He cried bitterly as he embraced Mum. When he came over to me he tapped me on the back and said, ‘Bad luck, Pete’. I recalled my uneasiness the previous Sunday when he had left to go overseas. We walked briskly to the car and Dad began to calm down. He said he felt better now that he could talk to someone. He had flown home alone. The long journey had been particularly hard.
All Dad knew was what his brother had told him. Kevin, direct as Dr Burke, had said that Robert would never walk again. Dad refused to believe him. We drove straight to the hospital and walked up the hill to Ward Seven. The Herald devoted another front page to Dad’s homecoming. He is photographed striding into the spinal injuries unit with that purposeful, arm-waving gait of his. ‘Bob Rose, one of football’s all-time greats, came home from the US today, tired and unshaved.’ It must have been the first time Dad, normally well-groomed, had gone out without a shave.
Dad wanted to speak to Dr Burke before seeing Robert. He asked him about the outlook. Dr Burke was just as frank as Kevin. Dad was flabbergasted. Paralysis is anathema to all of us, but especially to athletes. Dad found it incredible that it could be irreversible from the outset. My father is an intrepid man. As a footballer he was renowned for his tenacity. Not tall, he attacked the ball and anyone in his path with a ferocity that galvanised less talented team-mates and that still makes people shudder. Winning, overcoming, never squibbing were moral necessities. Writing in 1955, Alf Brown said, ‘He seems to glory in heavy clashes’. He often played with serious injuries, because the restful alternative went against his code. Persistence had never let him down. How, therefore, could he digest Dr Burke’s terse prognosis? How could he accept that a mishap in the night, a millisecond on a country road, couldn’t be fixed by slog and guts and will power? It was inhuman. It was against nature.
Dad thanked Dr Burke and walked into Ward Seven. Robert was perfectly composed. His first words to Dad were, ‘I don’t want to go on living if it means spending my life in bed’. Dad reassured him that the doctors expected him to be in a wheelchair within six months. Robert didn’t believe him. Like everyone, Dad remembers ‘the spikes’. The sight of the calipers ‘shook him to pieces’. He was astonished by Robert’s self-control.
Afterwards, we went into Dr Burke’s office and Dad briefed him about Robert’s reaction. Apropos of nothing, I said that the accident should have happened to me. Dr Burke remembered this when I interviewed him at Ivanhoe Manor. ‘You made the comment—I don’t know if you recall this—that it would have been better if the accident had happened to you because you could have coped with it better, being the academic one of the two and Robert the physical one.’ When I remarked that this was the sort of callow thing any teenage brother would have said, Dr Burke disagreed. ‘I thought it was a very poignant comment for a young brother to make. And you meant it.’
Outside, Dad spoke to reporters, including Ian McDonald, who would become a friend of Robert’s. Next to his story, titled ‘HOUR OF AGONY FOR A FATHER’, is a close-up photograph of my father. Dad’s eyes are dark and deep-set. They could have been gouged out by what he has seen and heard. His brow is furrowed, his mouth grim, almost angry. He is forty-five, my age now. McDonald writes: ‘Rose, haggard and unshaven…had just given Robert a pep talk…“I told him the family team would be fighting for him, but the future is up to how he fights…It’s a hell of a shock, but I was pleased to see that Robert is 100 per cent mentally.”’ Dad repeated this for the Herald. ‘Mentally Robert is 100 per cent alert.’ Mental impairment is what Dad had feared most during the ‘32-hour sleepless trip’.
We drove to the Yewers’ house in West Heidelberg. As always, this was full of people. Salli was naturally the centre of attention, even more so that day. A precocious child, she had a new trick to show us. She had begun to walk the day Robert stopped.
I was unnerved by the clamour, the exuberance. The men were drinking beer. They asked Dad about his trip. I felt uneasy and said nothing. Terry was still in a state of shock. She hadn’t slept since the accident. She talked about that night. She was staying with her parents when she got the news. It was a doctor at the Bacchus Marsh Hospital who rang, perhaps the same one who diagnosed quadriplegia. At first Terry refused to believe his story. She was used to hoax calls from Robert’s friends, who would ring in the early hours of the morning and invent bizarre excuses as to why he couldn’t come home. Terry thought it must have been another prank. Eventually the doctor, no doubt deeply mystified, convinced Terry that he was serious. She and her mother hurried to the Austin and saw Robert. He was quite calm. Terry was horrified by the bricks hanging from his shaven head. Dr Burke asked her how she was going to handle the press. Terry, inexperienced in this regard, said she would need help from Robert’s family. She telephoned Uncle Kevin.
Mum and Dad and I drove home from the Yewers’ in silence. The journey took about forty minutes. We were getting used to it. Sammy, perplexed by now, rotated on her little legs like a stumpy ballerina and hinted that she was hungry. Dad shaved and changed, then we decided to revisit Robert. As we left the house two men got out of a car on the street. They introduced themselves unctuously as journalists from the Sunday Observer and asked about Robert. Mum said we didn’t know any more than they did. The chatty one asked Dad if he could get them into Ward Seven so that they could get a photograph of Robert. Dad refused and we got into the car. They continued to pester us, leaning into the car, holding the doors open. I pushed the photographer and nearly broke his camera.
As we drove to the hospital we thought no more of this, though we knew the Sunday Observer had a vile reputation. Dad was used to media molestation. Before a grand final, or during one of Collingwood’s regular coups, our telephone would ring constantly with journalists desperate for a story. Most of them respected Dad and treated him decently; a few couldn’t be trusted to quote him accurately. Dad was polite and rarely impatient. Being a master of publicity, he knew that great caution was needed when dealing with journalists.
Fortunately, we were able to stay with Robert for as long as we liked. He was in a corner of the long bright malodorous ward. He was quiet that afternoon. The tubes in his throat made it painful for him to swallow, so we removed the saliva and mucus in tissues. Robert’s bed was high and his neck utterly rigid, so he couldn’t look at us directly. A tilted mirror above his bed enabled him to see us. He smiled occasionally; he even made a joke. We told him about Ralph’s new son, his umpteenth cousin. Robert asked about the result of the two-day game between Collingwood and South Melbourne, the one he had played in the previous Saturday. We told him that Collingwood had collapsed to be all out for 121. We didn’t tell him that many of the players, distraught at what had happened during the week and playing without heart, as one reporter wrote, felt that the game should have been abandoned. Robert wouldn’t have approved of that.
It was apparent that the full impact of the accident hadn’t sunk in yet. Dr Burke had warned us that this kind of bravado can last for several weeks, especially if the patient is under intense scrutiny.
Needing a cigarette, I left the three of them and went outside. Terry was sitting on a bench, crying. When I went over and asked her what was wrong—another of my cogent questions—she said, ‘He’ll never make love to me again’. That was the first thing Robert said to her. Like many of us, Terry had no idea what quadriplegia meant. She had no experience with handicapped people, no knowledge of spinal injuries. Terry’s first interview had appeared that morning. ‘I don’t know what the future holds,’ she told Peter McFarline of the Age. ‘All I know is that I will be looking after Robert for a long, long time.’
I didn’t know what to say, how to console her. Terry was still tearful as the four of us walked down the steep road. None of us was aware of spies. As we got into the car one of the journalists from the Sunday Observer reappeared with his photographer. They had followed us to the hospital. This time they were less oily, more adamant. Elsie, normally the politest of women, slammed the door and told them to get away.
That evening Kevin and Pat Rose joined us, followed by Terry and Salli. We picked at some of the casseroles that neighbours had dropped in throughout the day. Mum was very upset. I took Sammy for a walk in the park and wept uncontrollably. Back at Crosby Drive, Terry broke down completely. The extreme days had begun—days of futility, days of grief. I couldn’t foresee an end to them. I kept wondering how we would have felt if Robert had been killed in the accident, if he hadn’t been granted this spiked extension—if it had all been over.
The next day my parents wanted to read all the newspapers. This troubled me. I couldn’t understand why they needed to look at grotesque images of the roofless Volkswagen or innocent photographs of their mobile son. What were they looking for? What further proof did they need?
The story in the Sunday Observer was dreadful. One glance at the headline told us how appalling it was going to be. Subtlety was never a feature of Maxwell Newton’s final, creepy editorship. It was a kind of gutter journalism rarely practised in Australia. When Rupert Murdoch started his national newspaper, the Australian, in 1964, Newton was the founding editor. Like several holders of that position, he didn’t last long. Some people still regard him as one of our most brilliant journalists. By the early 1970s any genius had begun to degenerate. He moved to Melbourne and started the Sunday Observer in opposition to David Syme and the Herald & Weekly Times. Its tabloid style soon became notorious. ‘MY BILL’S NOT A HOMO,’ screamed one headline, announcing an ‘exclusive interview’ with the wife of former Prime Minister William McMahon. To pay the printer, Newton was also publishing soft porn. Later, he turned to sex aids and pornographic books. His drug and alcohol consumption was ruinous. A few months before Robert’s accident he somehow survived an overdose of a hundred Mandrax and six bottles of Scotch.
While writing this book I had to hunt for a copy of the Observer article. It wasn’t in any of the scrapbooks. Mum had never looked at it again. Finally, Salli produced a copy. The front page is dominated by a plangent headline, ‘OUR AGONY—MUM TELLS’, next to a surreptitious photograph, taken with a telephoto lens, of Terry getting into the car after our walk through the hospital grounds. Worse follows on page three. There is a photograph of Mum comforting her distraught daughter-in-law. Next to this are two ‘exclusive stories’, supposedly written by my parents, with a cameo from Terry. It’s a wonder they didn’t drag in Millie! My mother’s fictitious story is the biggest. I won’t bother quoting much of it. The opening sentences will suffice: ‘Today I’ll be praying for my son Robert. I’ll ask God to give him the strength to fight and overcome his terrible injuries. I couldn’t keep the tears from my eyes when I saw Robert…’ And so it goes.
