Free Dying by Cory Taylor Page B

He duly shipped out
to India for training. Six months later, his training complete, he expected to cross
into Burma to fight the Japanese, but they surrendered before he could pack his jungle
kit. I was never sure if he was pleased about this, or resentful, because it had
deprived him of the chance to prove himself in combat. In any case, the end of the
war saw him transported back to Australia anxious to launch his career in civil
aviation as soon as possible, since flying was his true vocation.
    Not that it was an easy calling. In the early days, when Dad was starting out, it
was full of risks, all of which he seemed to relish. Along with travel. He couldn’t
stay in one place for longer than a year or two, or in the same job. He appeared
to be in a perennial state of high dudgeon about the incompetent way airlines were
run, about the primacy of commercial pressures over everything else. He fought with
almost everyone he ever worked for. As a result, we lived like gypsies, forever packing
up andmoving on, which suited Dad perfectly. He was at his best when he was leaving.
It didn’t worry him if we had to change schools yet again, abandon friends and neighbours,
repeatedly adapt to new surroundings. Anything, apparently, was better than settling
down in some barren suburb like the one he’d escaped from as a teenager. That was
Dad’s nightmare, the thing he feared the most. I think he would have preferred to
die than end up back in the same place he had started out.
    He was in his seventies before he started to examine his beginnings with anything
like equanimity. Growing up, he had always had a suspicion that, given how unsatisfactory
they were, his mother and father were not his true parents. He remembered another
couple, periodic visitors to the house, who came from Glasgow and bore an air of
old-world refinement, people to whom his mother and father had deferred. In the hope,
no doubt, of confirming his theory, he chose them as the first quarry in his genealogical
hunt.
    ‘They were called Auchincloss,’ my father told me. ‘There are five of them in the
Glasgow phonebook. We’ve got to be related.’
    He travelled to Glasgow, where he discovered the truth. It was not what he had hoped.
The couple were not his parents, but his father’s relatives by marriage. And his
father was not who he had said he was. Originally fromIreland, my grandfather had
run away from a violent household at the age of fourteen or so, and ended up in Glasgow,
where he changed his name from O’Neill to Taylor. An aunt took him in, and not long
after that he joined the merchant navy and started travelling the world, eventually
jumping ship in Sydney.
    ‘I never knew any of it,’ my father said. ‘I might have had more respect for him
if I had.’
    He showed me a tiny grey photograph of my grandfather scrubbing the deck of a ship.
    ‘He was just a kid,’ he said, the first kind word I’d ever heard him say about his
father.
    My father spent a week in Glasgow meeting relations he never knew he had. He came
back changed. It would be too much to say that he was at peace—he was never at peace—but
there was some sense that he had laid a few ghosts to rest and decided not to run
so hard. There was also some recognition of the price we had all paid for his insistence
on always moving.
    ‘It was tough on your mother,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame her for quitting when she
did.’
    He wrote to her asking for her forgiveness, but she didn’t reply. By then, I am sure,
all her reserves of compassion for Dad were exhausted.
    My father’s spiral into severe dementia probably started around the same time as
my mother’s. I should have recognised the signs, but I saw so little of him that
it was hard to keep track. By then he was living in Canberra, where he had seen out
his working life as a mail sorter for Australia Post, and now lived on a modest pension
at a hostel for public servants. I went to see him there a couple of times, and