Without Love I Am Nothing

thoughts.

Chapter 1

The Cost of Unforgiveness

Unforgiveness may cause greater collateral damage than most people realize. I will tell you some details of my life to help you understand the effect that unforgiveness may have on others, especially children in the home. I grew up in a home that was destroyed through an event that occurred in the lives of my parents.

In this chapter, I am going to disclose some very personal information in regards to my family life and my parents in particular. I do so with the intention of honoring my parents and not discrediting them in any way. They made mistakes in their lives, as many of us have done, and I am only highlighting their story in an effort to help others who may be living in a similar scenario. I loved them very much and wished things could have been so different to what they were in our home when I was a young boy growing up.

My father, whose name was also Des, also, grew up in the Gympie area of Queensland, Australia. Gympie was a town that gained a reputation in the early days from the discovery of gold, but my Dad grew up on a family farm outside the town where he lived with his parents and four sisters.

When my Dad finished his schooling, he worked as a timber worker, felling large forestry trees to go to mills for use as furniture and paper products. When my Dad turned 18 years of age, he joined the Royal Australian Navy and served on many different ships that traveled to different parts of the world. His classification was that of an Airman. He served mainly on aircraft carriers and reached the rank of Chief Petty Officer. In the year 1948, he was transferred to the United Kingdom where he was to meet and fall in love with a vibrant and beautiful young woman named Mabel Marshall.

This beautiful young woman in another three years was to be my mother. Mum was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was about 17 years old when she and my Dad met, but apparently, they instantly fell in love. At some point, it became obvious that my Dad would have to return to Australia on his appointed ship. His term in the United Kingdom had ended. It was then that they decided they should get married. Mum would travel to Australia and they would get married here.

They were married in Sydney in 1950, and settled at a place called Nowra, which is approximately 100 miles south of Sydney. My father was stationed at the naval base near Nowra known as the Albatross. I was born at the Nowra Base hospital in 1951. Around the time of my first birthday, my Mum convinced my Dad to allow her to return to Scotland with me, as she felt so distant from family and friends.

My father’s family lived in Queensland some 700 miles away. Apparently, it was a real struggle for my mother as she felt quite alone at times and she needed family and friends around her.

Because of my mother wanting to return to Scotland with me, my Dad sought a discharge from the Navy so he could join us permanently in Scotland. Dad was initially denied a discharge from the Navy when he first applied in April 1954. It was during these times he was transferred to the Navy’s London Depot so he could be nearer his family, but was often transferred back to ships in Australia for long periods. This must have been especially difficult for my mother. It was also hard for us kids to understand why our father was hardly ever around. In the ensuing years, my sister Jan and brother Ken were born in Scotland and we all lived in a government housing apartment at number 3 Crewe Road Gardens, just outside Edinburgh. It was quite crowded in this small apartment. Our family consisted of my Mum’s parents, as well as my Mum’s sister Irene and her brother Raymond, whenever he was home from the Royal Marines.

I had a happy childhood from what I remember of those early years in Scotland. I loved it when it snowed, and still now remember playing at the end of a nearby soccer field, that had a steep hill, which my young mates who lived in the neighborhood and I would often use to slide down on our sleds.

We would also build snowmen in this park as well as have snowball fights in our street with lots of other kids. It was great fun.

Our family never had much money. As children, our parents provided us with the bare necessities. There were no fast food or multi-national takeaway food outlets in those days, with the exception of the local fish and chip shop that was commonplace in almost every suburb throughout Great Britain.

We sometimes had sweets from the local corner store when our families could afford it, but a regular treat that most kids in our street were given was something referred to as a pig and a poke. This was simply a small brown paper bag that contained enough sugar to cover its base, and a stalk of rhubarb that we would dunk into the bag of sugar and then eat the end of it and dunk it repeatedly until it was all gone. I would have been only around 4 years old at this time but I remember so much of what went on around my world.

I can recall my mother being pregnant again about a year or so after my sister Jan was born. I can also recall my disappointment when I was told that this baby boy had died during his birth.

I have heard the story quite often from relatives in Scotland of the time that I wandered off by myself at the ripe old age of five and could not be found. After many hours of searching I was located, standing at the end of a huge wharf at the shipping docks some four miles from our home.

It was suggested that I was looking for my Dad’s ship to come in, as I was just staring out to sea. It must have given the family a bit of a fright not knowing what had happened to me at that time.

Our father was eventually granted a discharge from the Navy in 1956, and rejoined his family in Scotland, only this time he was going to stay with us permanently. In fact, he got a job driving double-decker buses around Edinburgh.

The weather in Scotland can turn quite nasty, especially in the winter months. Some days the sun was not visible in the sky until around ten in the morning and at three in the afternoon darkness would creep up very quickly. Regular snowfalls were the order of the day, along with sleet and very damp and cold conditions. These were not ideal conditions for a sufferer of a chronic lung condition, such as that with which my Dad was diagnosed.

His condition became so severe that doctors told him that unless he moved to a warmer and drier climate his life expectancy would be dramatically shortened.

This would have been a major concern for both my Mum and Dad, as my father was only about 30 years of age at the time. Before we knew it, we were on board a ship back to Australia. The year was 1959. I had just turned 8 years of age. As young as I was at the time, I will never forget this journey, mainly due to the terrible experience with seasickness that we all experienced. Our cabin was below water level, and it was closed in and confined. When one of us became ill, it usually led to the lot of us being afflicted. I think it took about six weeks to complete the entire journey back then, so we did not have much choice but to get familiar with the conditions.

The ship had its own swimming pool and I recall learning to swim on the way to Australia, so there were some positives that came out of this long journey. We also had one stopover on the way out at a little Middle-Eastern town called Aden. Now Aden was not the Garden of Eden. In fact, I remember it as a little place with smelly goats running around everywhere. When those goats died, they were just left on the ground to rot. The skeletons of these animals seemed to be everywhere you looked.

I was pleased to get back on board the ship, and be on our merry way once again.

When we finally arrived back in Australia, we moved in with my Dad’s sister Iris and her husband Jim, who lived in the suburb of Ashgrove in Brisbane.

They were a great couple, this Aunt and Uncle of mine. They were to have a huge influence on my life in the years to come. They were the most genuine people you could ever want to know. We stayed with them for a while and then went to live at my Grandmother’s house at Bald Hills on the northern outskirts of Brisbane. This area was mostly a farming community at this time, but due to expansion, it is now one of the more popular residential areas of northern Brisbane.

I was very close to my Grandmother especially. Even now, I remember the day she died as though it was yesterday. In fact, my Dad’s mother was the only person I knew whose birthday fell on Christmas day. I would have been about fourteen at the time she died and when she passed away, I felt like I had lost my closest friend. 

Such was the influence that this wonderful woman had on my life.

We eventually moved into an apartment building on the Redcliffe Peninsula, it was small but it was finally a place of our own. There was my Mum, Dad, my sister Jan, and our brother Ken, who made up our family at this time. A new brother in Steve would soon be born, and the youngest brother, Paul would come along a few years later.

Our mother had a job working at the nursing home, which was right next door to where we lived, and our Dad had managed to get a job with the local Fire Brigade. In the next couple of years, we were able to move in to a house at 120 Main Street Scarborough, which gave us a lot more room. We never knew what it was like to have so much space. Our backyard was wonderful. We had two huge mango trees that not only produced great fruit, but also were fantastic for us to spend our day climbing on. It was just recently that I was in this area and was surprised to find this humble little home still standing, with the huge mango trees in the backyard, more than forty-five years after we lived there. This particular area had recently undergone massive development and that little cottage was surrounded by brand new high-rise apartments.

My parents enrolled me at a nearby Catholic boy’s college, and I was to encounter cruelty and fear at a level that I had never previously experienced. There may have been many good things happening at this school, but for me personally, the negatives certainly out-weighed any positives about the place.

I recall one Christian Brother who seemed to take a personal dislike to me, and set upon me violently at any given opportunity. One particular day when I could not do something correct in respect to my schoolwork, he made me stand on top of my desk. Then he took my school