My Cousin Mick
©1999
I have pieced this story together
from recollections of my husband, who really did have a cousin called Mick.
Allowing for the vagaries of memory, what you are about to read is a factual account
of Mick’s life; or to be more exact, the part of his life Bob knew about.
It was 1947: two years after the end
of the second world war, and the year of the last major polio epidemic to hit
Australia. Dr. Jonas Salk was even then working on his famous vaccine. In ten
years’ time Poliomyelitis would be no more than a bad memory for all but those
in third-world countries.
In the
sleepy small-town city Brisbane was in those days, the disease struck at
random. At Margate, where we lived with my Nan and Pop Parsons, who ran a
boarding house by the bay, it passed everyone in our extended family
by—everyone but my cousin Mick.
His was a
severe case, and he lay at death's door for three weeks as the doctor, with his
mother and mine, battled night and day to save him. At last the disease ran its
course, and Mick, top student of his class, thinker, inventor, and sportsman,
was left almost completely paralysed. After extensive therapy, he could move
his head and the fingers of one hand, and that was all. No amount of massage,
hot fomentations or manipulation ever made any difference. He was to spend the
rest of his life—a relatively long one, given his condition, in a wheelchair.
Now this
sounds like a sad story, but somehow it wasn't.
Strangers
meeting Mick for the first time would struggle to hide their dismay and pity at
his condition. Five minutes in his company, however, was enough time for him to
work his magic. They soon forgot any ideas they might have been entertaining
about a helpless cripple in a wheelchair , and accepted, like the rest of us,
that Mick was—just Mick.
In 1948, my
Dad, and Uncle George, Mum's brother, left Brisbane on bicycles to ride the two-hundred-odd
miles to Hervey Bay. Good jobs were scarce in Brisbane for two returned
soldiers three years after the war, and they had a chance of a timber-cutting
job on Fraser Island. They wrote back with such glowing reports of the unspoilt
beauty and tranquillity of the area, not to mention job prospects in
timber-cutting and saw-milling, that before too long we'd all moved up to
Hervey Bay to join them.
I was just
a baby, less than a year old, when Mick was struck down with Polio, and only
two years old when we moved to the Bay, so I don't remember much about those
early years.
I have no
doubt that Mick must have suffered, coming to terms with what had happened to
him, but if so, he sent out no signals of self-pity, and I never knew about it.
My memories of Mick are of a remarkable young man with a wicked sense of
humour, who lived life to the full, achieving more in his life-time than many
an able-bodied person has managed. With the help of a couple of mates he went
everywhere and did everything anyone else did, and sometimes he took me and his
brother, Ronnie, with him.
Ronnie and
I spent a lot of time with Mick. He'd make up fantastic stories for us,
complete with sound effects, and if ever we were bored, Mick always had an idea
for something interesting to do. Like he said, he had plenty of time to think
up ideas. He taught us how to make bamboo boats with jam-tin paddle-wheels
powered by wound-up rubber bands made from strips of old bicycle tyres. He also
taught us to make Aboriginal throwing sticks for our home-made spears so we
could hurl them with added velocity at the banana trees in the back yard.
Unfortunately, with the extra power, we split the banana trees to pieces. Dad
wasn't the least bit impressed.
To be fair,
that was one of the few times Mick got us into trouble, though inadvertently we
repaid him many times over. Ronnie and I managed to get him into any number of
awkward situations, and I'm sorry to say we didn't always stick around to help
him out of the trouble we'd gotten him into. Like the time we literally dropped
Mick in the shit. (Well, almost.)
Aunty Lil
was having a septic system put in so she could have an indoor toilet to help
with Mick's care. This was the first septic system to be installed in the whole
of the bay, and we watched the process with deep fascination. The workmen were
digging this deep, mysterious, enormous
hole—and when they downed tools and went home, we just had to satisfy our curiosity.
Pushing
Mick's chair over to the edge, we peered down. It was deep, alright.
Suddenly,
the edge began to crumble, and the wheels of Mick's chair to slip. Ronnie, who was
a spindly little weed of eight, and me, a year older and not much stronger,
struggled in vain to pull him back from the brink, but, slowly, inexorably, the
chair tipped further and further—past the point of no return. Finally, Mick and
wheelchair were precipitated into the muddy bottom of the pit.
Ronnie and
I looked at each other in dismay, and with one accord, bolted. There was no way
we could get him out of there unaided, and we weren't sticking around to cop
the consequences. We'd be skinned alive!
Off we ran,
as fast as our legs could carry us, Mick's cries ringing in our ears:
“Come back,
you little bastards!”
Poor Aunty
Lil had to enlist the help of a couple of strong neighbours to haul Mick out of
the hole. Fortunately, he wasn't badly hurt—just a few scrapes and bruises—so
Ronnie and I got to keep our skins, except for a couple of bruises of our own
from the hiding we both got.
Not long
after that we were together at the Guy Fawkes Night celebrations, in the days
when people were still allowed to let off their own fireworks. We put our box
of assorted crackers under Mick's wheelchair, for safe-keeping, or so we
thought at the time. Ronnie, fumbling around in the dark to make his selection,
decided it was too much trouble to look for the torch and lit up a sparkler
instead. He rummaged around, sparkler in hand, and—you guessed it—dropped a
red-hot ember straight into the box.
It was a
brief but spectacular display.
Rockets,
catherine wheels, fountains and bungers whizzed, wheeled and rocketed out from
under Mick's chair. They went south, north, east, west and every direction in
between, and everyone ran for cover while Mick sat there helpless, unable to
move so much as a muscle. Though not so helpless we couldn’t hear his roar of
rage over the noise of the fire crackers:
“Ronnie,
you little bastard, I'll bloody kill you!”
By some
miracle, he escaped unscathed—not so much as singed—and as the smoke died away,
we all crept shame-facedly out of our hiding places. When you think about it,
though, it’s no wonder fire-works were eventually banned, except in the hands
of the experts.
Though Mick extracted every ounce of
enjoyment out of life he could, it wasn't all fun and games. He wanted to
achieve something, and here he had a couple of important things going for him.
First, he could still use his right
hand, and therefore he could write. In the days before the sophisticated
equipment now available to make life easier for the disabled, that was a big
advantage. He had no use of his right arm, but could walk his fingers across
the table to pick up his pen, then walk them to the paper to write.
Second, he still had his marvellous
brain, with all its inventive capabilities.
He completed matriculation, with high
marks and then studied accountancy. Once qualified, he talked his father into
going in with him to buy a small sawmill, and he was up and away. With his
business acumen and imaginative ideas for expansion, the mill thrived, and he
made himself and his family very wealthy. Mick used to say, “When people come
into my office and feel sorry for me because I'm in a wheelchair, it's money in
the bank!”
But, like I said, it wasn’t all work
and no play.
From the time he could afford to, he
always owned a set of wheels, and with the help of a couple of different mates
to do the driving, went anywhere he felt like. He and Allan travelled to
Cooktown and back in his first car, an old Anglia Tourer with a leaky rag-top
roof, when the road wasn't much better than a goat track. And almost every
year, he and one of his mates would travel to Phillip Island to watch the motor
bike races, camping by the roadside on the way.
Then, he bought a new blue and white
Austin Lancer, and had it hotted up with dual carbies and a racing cam. Once
when he and his mate Neville were coming back from Brisbane through the Gunalda
Range, a blue and white Lancer exactly the same as Mick's overtook them. At
Mick's urging, Neville pulled alongside, and neck and neck they raced down the
range towards the Gunalda pub. (Very reprehensible, I know.)
Just then, a drunk staggered out of
the pub, reeling in the middle of the road. As the two identical blue and white
vehicles sped past him, one on either side, he stared after them in befuddled
amazement.
“I reckon he thinks he's seeing
double!” chuckled Mick, as the bewildered drunk staggered back into the pub.
Another time, he and Neville were
parked outside the post office in Main Street, when a bloke came out, walked
out to a shiny new motor bike, hopped on the seat and rode off. “How did he do
that?” asked Mick? “He didn't have to kick-start it or anything—chase him,
Neville, so we can find out!” So they pursued the poor bloke all over town,
yelling out “Stop!” and scaring the hell out of him. “ He didn't want us to
catch up to him, that’s for sure. I reckon he thought we were a couple of
maniacs,” Mick said later when he told us the story.
Eventually, they ran their quarry to
ground, and he was able to satisfy his curiosity. It was the first key-start
Honda Dream motor cycle ever seen in the bay.
Mick and his mates would sometimes
call around to take me and Ronnie shooting, fishing or swimming. One memorable
Sunday, they dropped by to take us for a drive with them to a favourite
swimming hole at Brooweena Creek.
It was a beautiful clear creek,
swift-flowing along a shallow bottom but with a number of large, deep
swimming-holes. Our favourite spot was through the bush and around a double
bend a mile or so above the public picnic area—nice and secluded so we could
strip off and skinny-dip. Mick wasn’t left out: his mates would throw him into
a big truck tyre and he’d bob around on top of the water, happy as Larry to be
included in the fun.
This particular day, we were having a
water fight, totally engrossed in the battle with no thought for anything
except to defend ourselves from attack, when suddenly Ronnie cried, “Where's
Mick?”
Frantically looking around, we spied
him about half a mile away, skimming rapidly along with the current, and headed
around the bend towards the picnic area. We leapt out of the water and tore off
along the banks in hot pursuit, but our efforts were wasted. Mick disappeared
out of sight around the first bend.
Now, while skinny-dipping has always
been a favourite occupation of people in their misspent youth, at that time it
wasn’t exactly publicly acceptable. Mick, unable to use his arms and legs, was
frantic to stop himself from drifting around the next bend to be revealed in
his naked glory to all those unsuspecting family picnickers. I don't know how
he did it, but when we galloped around the bend to find him safely aground at
the banks of the creek, his story was “I never knew before today that you can
use your arse-hole as a suction cap to hang onto the bottom of a creek-bed!”
Mick had his serious side as well.
Most Saturday nights, he’d call by my place and I'd wheel him in his chair to
the picture theatre at Pialba. After the movies, we'd stop to gaze at the stars
and ponder on the meaning of life. I'll always remember those nights, and the spectacular
sight of the Milky Way in the days before streetlights. And I’ll especially
remember Mick’s words of wisdom. He gave me much good advice in the years I
knew him, not all of which I took, to my regret.
At seventeen, two years in the Bank
behind me, and soon to go to New Guinea, I called in to see him, burning with
enthusiasm for some land I'd seen at Palm Beach in Sydney—steep one acre blocks
that ran down to the water, and on sale for eight hundred pounds.
He urged me to go ahead and buy a
block if I could afford it. But when I broached the subject with my Dad, he
said “Bloody stupid idea—what would a kid your age want to tie himself down
with a debt like that for?”
I'm sorry to say I listened to Dad.
After a happy and successful life,
which included marriage to a lovely girl named Vonnie, Mick died not long
before his fortieth birthday. Though it's been many years since his death—more
than I care to count—I'll always remember and miss him, friend, mentor and
ratbag that he was.
THE END