Why Should He Put out My Light?: A Story of Incest, and the Subsequent Ramifications

Copyright © 2016 by Kassandra Paige.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016915030

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-1747-2

                Softcover        978-1-5245-1746-5

                eBook             978-1-5245-1748-9

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Rev. date: 09/08/2016

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Contents

MY BEGINNINGS

THE DREAM

THE ACCIDENT

MY EXCURSION

MY HOSPITAL ‘HOME’

BILL, THE SPERM DONOR

THE SECRET

UNEXPECTED VISITOR

HIS ACCIDENT

MY FAMILY AND GRANDPARENTS

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

MOVING ON

MY INNOCENT BOYFRIENDS

THE CHURCH

DEAN

A CHILD IS BORN

ANOTHER WEDDING

WE MOVE AND MORE CHILDREN

STRUGGLES

WE HAVE TO SELL UP

SINGING GROUPS

THE CONSEQUENCES OF JEALOUSY

THE BAND

IT’S OVER

PICKING UP THE PIECES

ALEX

THE WEDDING

MUSIC DIRECTOR

SELLING THE HOME

MOVING IN FROM THE SEA

MY UNSEEN NEW PREMISES

THE ABUSE CONTINUES

LIFE GOES ON

MY HOBBIES

ALEX RETIRES

FRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS

ANOTHER BUCKET LIST TRIP

WINDA TELLS ME ALL

WOMEN, WOMEN, WOMEN

THAILAND

THE HOUSE GETS STARTED

THE NEIGHBOURLY VISIT

THE CONFESSION

THE PHILIPPINES

THE BROCCOLI BOX

THE DEMISE OF ANOTHER RELATIONSHIP

MEETING THE NEW LOVE

WORSE TO COME FOR ALEX

THE GREAT ESCAPE

VICTOR

RETROSPECTION

Dedicated to my four wonderful children, who’ve been there for me through the tough times, to my grandchildren who bring me much joy, and to my dearest friends with whom I’ve shared many special moments.

MY BEGINNINGS

I guess I fall into the category of ‘baby boomer’, because I was born in 1945 at the end of World War II. My mother, Jeannie, discovering she was pregnant, went ahead with a marriage of ‘convenience’, to minimise the scandal that would occur if she was to have me out of wedlock. She married my father, William, whom I shall refer to, from here on, as the sperm donor or Bill, because I cannot bring myself to refer to him as my father!

Bill purchased thirteen acres of land in a country town a couple of hours drive from the main city in New South Wales, Australia, and their first ‘home’ was a tent, erected in one of the clearings on the property. There was no electricity available, no town water, and the camping conditions were extremely rustic. This was to be our first abode for a couple of years until Bill built the family home. We bathed in one of the freshwater creeks running through the middle of the acreage, which was home to thousands of leeches and other types of life enjoying the pristine waters. Because the property was a natural rainforest, it was truly beautiful. Tree ferns grew in abundance, so thick their canopy almost blocked out the sky in places. Fallen tree trunks were strewn here and there, covered with the greenest, thickest moss, and on them sprouted all types of fungi, from white through to bright orange. There was an abundance of stick insects, cicadas, millions of butterflies, moths, frogs, snakes, spiders, many variations of birds, from the tiniest sparrows to the big owls, which scared me each night with their spooky, hooting call echoing through the valley. I’d hop into bed and ram the pillow over my head to try to block out their haunting night calls. I was absolutely sure as I grew older that they were the ghosts of dead people! Half of the acreage was flat, good for building and farming, and the other half, rising to a steep hill, was thick with gum trees, and covered in vines. Beautiful flora sprouted their foliage and thrived in the natural, untouched soil.

You can imagine it was a difficult life for my mother, with a little baby, living under these conditions. This property was a natural ‘frog hollow’, with heavy frosts in the bitter winters and stinking heat in the summers. Sometimes the heat would go on for days and days, with not much of a breeze, as the hollow was protected by a big mountain immediately to the east and also to the north, with a smaller elevation to the south. It really was a hollow.

Keeping a toddler safe under these conditions would have been difficult. Brown snakes, Australia’s deadliest, were not scarce, and the bush was infested with ticks, not to even mention the mosquitoes and deadly spiders. If Mum didn’t want me to go near anything, she would place a piece of cut pumpkin with the seeds facing outward, near the object, and I wouldn’t go anywhere near it. For some reason I was petrified of this and would scream if it was placed near me. I hated the feel of the slimy, moist area where the seeds were. The pumpkin seeds created a natural taboo zone to me. Later on in my toddler years, I was petrified of a pump-up top some well-meaning person kindly gave me. Just the sound of that whirring would send me running, so when pumpkin was in short supply, the top was placed near the untouchables. It’s funny the different things children are scared of.

Sometime during those first couple of years, Bill started working on building us a home. It was a simple abode, made of asbestos fibro. It had a small kitchen, which housed a wood-burning stove, the top of which had to be blackened periodically; a smallish dining/lounge area; two reasonably sized bedrooms separated by a main hallway; and another hall, which housed a linen press and led past a bathroom to the right, to a side veranda not yet enclosed but did have a roof. Very pioneering in nature, the outhouses included a laundry, storage shed, a tank stand, and a toilet down the end of a pathway. That toilet seemed so far away when I was little, but in later years, when I returned to look at the house before it was demolished, it really wasn’t that far. Standing opposite the laundry building, the tank stand was comprised of six brick pillars, covered in lush staghorns and elkhorns, upon which sat a strong wooden slat base, which housed two big water tanks. I used to play ‘cubby house’ under that tank stand, and my dolly’s cupboards and cots all fitted beautifully. It too seemed incredibly small when I revisited. I wondered how I could ever have fitted stuff under there.

Mum was a typical country person, finishing her schooling early, as was common in those days, especially if you came from a poor family. Bill had met her when she worked for a soft-drink manufacturing company and they obviously fell in love, whatever that meant to Bill. She worked very hard after moving into the house, and I recall her scrubbing, polishing, and cooking cakes and desserts for the sperm donor, to keep him happy. He was a fastidious man, insisting everything to be just so. Pity help Mum if it wasn’t. Mum would seem to be on a never-ending round of polishing the linoleum floors (on her hands and knees) with some waxy gunk, which then had to be polished off till the linoleum shone, and the never-ending task of washing and boiling clothes in the outside laundry in a big copper pot mounted on bricks. She had to build a fire in the brick enclosure under the copper, to heat the water. The clothes were prodded and stirred with an old broom handle, to keep them moving in the bubbling, soapy water. The clothes wringer was a mangle of some sort, which was mounted on the dividing wall of double concrete tubs. Those tubs have now become popular as horse or cattle drinking troughs, but in those days, they served a very different purpose. When you threaded clothes through the wringers, if you weren’t careful to pull the clothes out the other side as soon as they peeped through, they would get caught, sending bits and pieces up and around the rollers, creating havoc. When I was old enough to help, my job was to take the clothes out of the cold-water tub with the blue bag in it, and feed them through the wringer. The blue bag in that rinse kept the whites whiter than white! Time and time again, I’d get the clothes tangled around the rollers. Mum would then undo a big screw knob on the top of the wringer, which would then separate the rollers, so the clothes could be untangled. Maybe I was more a hindrance than I was help! Eventually, when I was tall enough to reach, I could unscrew the knob myself, untangle the mess, and get things sorted out before Mum was aware.

Initially, because we didn’t have electricity, we’d eat by lamplight, usually consisting of a Primus lamp, which needed pumping up until it glowed blue, and then produced an eerie white light. Our hot-water system was primitive. What hot-water system? Boil the black kettle on the stove for washing up, and collect twigs and bits of wood for the chip heater to get some sort of hot bath. That chip heater was a ferocious animal, chewing through the wood and paper while it made filthy belching noises up the chimney. It would ‘woof, woof, woof’ like it was about to explode, and sometimes it actually rattled the bathroom windows, such was its force. I hated that chip heater! Consequently we’d all use the same bathwater with me being first, with threats to not wee in the water! Later, when more siblings arrived, I think the pecking order went youngest to oldest, so I lost out there. More than once, I accused my younger sibling of doing a wee in the bathwater! The bath was never filled because water was scarce. We’d bathe in maybe four inches of water, which is not a problem when you’re a small child.

Water usage was always a problem. Those two tanks only held so much, and when dry times came, I learned at a very early age to get the tomato stake or a broom handle, and tap up and down the rungs of the tank. When the noise changed, producing an echo sound to it, that indicated where the top of the water level was. There were times when the level had plummeted to only two or three rungs left in the tank. That’s when we really had to be careful of the wrigglers. Mosquitoes would breed in the top of the tank, which wasn’t too much of a problem as we drew water from the bottom, but when the levels got low, we’d have black, obscene little things swimming around in the water glass. To counteract this, we’d put a piece of gauze or an old nylon stocking over the tap outlet, secure it with a rubber band, and that would hopefully catch the little blighters. I’m absolutely certain I’ve drunk thousands of wrigglers during my early life. Oh well … free protein and I’m still alive to tell the tale!

My younger sister was born some twenty months after me. She was dark-haired like my mum and her side of the family, whereas I was very blonde, like Bill’s side of the family. He was one of seven children, born to my granny who loved to sit on the front veranda of her little cottage out on farmland, and play her piano accordion, singing ‘Tennessee Waltz’ in her screeching, uncultured voice. She sounded somewhat like old Granny Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies television show. I loved to mimic her, much to my mother’s amusement. Maybe that’s where I inherited my love of music? God help me that I would sing that badly! Mind you, she sang in tune, but the timbre of her voice needed a little help with resonance. She was a very handsome woman, rather than beautiful or pretty. Obviously she inherited her genes from her Polish-German mother.

One of Bill’s sisters, Aunty Louise, was very blonde and attractive and to me, she always had an air of class about her that I admired. She would repeatedly remind me, ‘God gave you to the wrong mother. He should have given you to me. You’re really my little girl!’ This of course, confused me somewhat, and I recall pestering my mother to tell me the truth, promising I would still love her anyway, even if she did adopt me from Aunty Louise. I just needed to know the truth! Was I adopted or what? Aunty Louise never had children, although not through the lack of trying. She miscarried on several occasions and that was very sad for her. Hence, I was ‘her’ child and she was, literally, made my godmother when I was christened. Her husband, Uncle Stan, was a gorgeous, hard-working man. He used to remind me of Rock Hudson, and Aunty Louise loved him to bits. I didn’t blame her. He was kind, gentle, and always smiling. He and his brother had a trucking company. They seemed to be always trundling out to the sand dunes, filling their tip-ups, and carting it somewhere. Later on, my uncle purchased a petrol station down on the highway. He loved having me call in to visit as well, which I did quite often after school, as I had to pass their home to get to mine further down the road. Aunty Louise would sit on her front porch, waving to us as we went by in the school bus.

I used to think their home was so posh, although in retrospect, it was quite ordinary. They had a nice comfy lounge suite I considered to be much nicer than our simple settee, and I recall a black sambo statue, holding a tray on which you could put keys, drinks, mail, and anything, I guess. They had a nicer bathroom than ours with electric hot water, but still had the toilet out the back! Because they had a separate lounge and dining room, it seemed a lot bigger than our home although still only two bedrooms. The laundry and back veranda were also enclosed. They also had a tennis court, and when I got older, I would play a game with my sister and friends. The drawback was that we had to re-roll the court with the big, heavy roller, and then re-mark the white lime lines at the end of the game. Aunty Louise would come and check the lines were straight, ready for her to play with her friends when they popped by for a game midweek. We took turns being the umpire and sitting up in the high seat at the side. There was also a covered grandstand area where those who were not playing could sit and watch the game. We sort of had our own Wimbledon set-up! I recall getting a beautiful new tennis racquet one Christmas.

Mum had friends she’d made at work, and through other venues. They were all called Aunty So-and-So, even though they were actually not related to me.

One of my very first recollections was when mum took me to visit one of her friends, Aunty Dot, who lived in a house high on a hill, above a large creek. I was about two, maybe two and a half, and as toddlers sometimes do, I wandered off whilst Mum was engaged in conversation with her friend. When Mum realised I was missing, she frantically started calling out, looking for me everywhere. She ran down to the creek, fearing the worst, but she must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when she eventually spotted me sitting in a rowing boat which had come loose from its rope mooring, and I was slowly drifting downstream. I’d managed to walk down the steep track, onto the wharf, hop into one of the boats (used for crossing the creek), and I was floating down the river. I think someone was looking after me that day. It could have been a tragedy. Maybe I actually was responsible for the mooring coming loose? Obviously, my guardian angels were watching over me and yes, I do believe in angels.

Our suburb was a safe area, with very little through traffic, and I’d often run down through the paddock at the back of our home after Bill had finished building it, to play with local kids. The older lady who owned the paddock always reminded me to close the slip-rail gate when I took the shortcut through her property. The field was overgrown with long, lush grass and also harboured a huge blackberry bush, which was a hiding place for lots of snakes. The walking path went right next to the blackberry bush, but I wasn’t particularly scared of what was lurking in there. I’d actually stop and pick the blackberries closest to the path and eat them on the way to our home. We neighbourhood children played hopscotch and long jump, drawing the lines in the pale grey clay sand on the road outside our friends’ place, or laying down sticks to mark the lengths we jumped. When it rained, that pale grey clay was also perfect for me to sculpt creations for my long-suffering grandma. The clay was smooth and creamy, and was a perfect medium to produce the dozens of vases I would create, and paint with silver paint. Grandma would fill them with water and place a few little flowers in them. I’m sure they leaked, but she never let on to me. She always accepted my creations. I made vases in the shape of Dutch clogs or swans (you name it), like they were from some expensive store. I so loved my grandma. She always had fresh cake in her triple-decker cake tin, kept in the corner of her kitchen bench, and she was always very happy to see me. As a matter of fact, she’d pretend to be cross if I didn’t show up on any afternoon after school.

We children also played high jump, skipping games like ‘over the garden wall’, peppers, and that intricately difficult one with double ropes, both swirling over in opposite directions, which we had to manoeuvre through. We played jacks with plastic knuckles, marbles and fiddlesticks, long jump and hopscotch. Everything was pretty active, developing in us sturdy strong bones and healthy lungs.

We played all the games that children of that era played. We had drawing competitions, drawing in the soft grey sand on the ground, which we then rubbed out and started again. We invented make-believe cruises on the back of my great-uncle’s old Ford truck. To be allowed admission, you had to have a ticket, which was a leaf from a persimmon tree growing in my grandma’s yard, with our names scratched on it. This was serious stuff, you need to understand. No ticket, no ‘cruise’. We built our cubby houses around the base of a huge old gumtree, dividing it into separate ‘rooms’ between the exposed roots, and we used branches of leaves to create the roof. Our ability to invent was amazing. We cooked little meals on a small fire in Grandma’s backyard, with my toy saucepan set which Santa brought me one year. No one worried about us falling into the fire. We were quite capable and it was fun.

We had a friend who lived with my grandma when his parents couldn’t look after him. He was a few years older than me, but he always referred to my mother and aunt as his sisters and us as his cousins. When we cooked outside, he would eat the lion’s share of the food, and I’d go crying to Grandma because I was still hungry! He also considered himself a singer, but between you and me, it was absolutely woeful! Many a concert my poor grandparents and Aunty Joan would have to sit through. Grandma had green embossed-brocade heavy double curtains, dividing the lounge room from the hallway leading to her bedroom. They were perfect for aspiring actresses and singers. My grandma, Pop, and Aunty Joan were a wonderful, long-suffering, captive audience. After all, there was no television in those days, at least not in her house, nor mine, and not for many years to come.

As kids, we’d also play hidings in the bush with no fear of the brown or red-bellied black snakes, which were in abundance. No fear of horrid spiders. As a matter of fact, I recall our home having lots of black whitetail spiders living in the corners and cracks around the windows. I’m sure they would give a nasty bite, but my parents would just tell us not to touch them. We didn’t seem particularly worried by their existence but we were also taught to shake out our shoes every time before putting them on, just in case. Mum used to always keep a glass of water under her side of the bed in case she got thirsty in the middle of the night because she didn’t have a bedside table, and one night she actually drank a spider, which had crawled into the glass. Yikes!

If I wanted to go and visit one of my friends, Owen, who lived up the hill a little, I had to cross an old, moss-covered hollow log. My grandfather always warned me, ‘Watch out for the brown snake, girly. He sleeps in that log. As long as he’s asleep, leave him alone and you can walk over the log safely.’ I’d peer into that log to check the brown snake, one of Australia’s deadliest. Yep! He was asleep, and over I’d trot with not a worry. No way would I do that today. Maybe the snakes of that time knew we wouldn’t hurt them, and the children had a wonderful sense of trust and innocence, which, unfortunately, can be violated. Things were a lot more relaxed then with everybody knowing each other and, for the most part, were very friendly. That being said, it was a very quiet neighbourhood, but it hid some very dark secrets.

My Aunty Joan would sometimes take me by bus, into town to do a little shopping or run some errands. The route we had to take was quite hilly in parts, and there was one particular lady, Rose, morbidly obese, who used to catch the bus near the crest of a particular hill. My aunty explained to me that Rose had glandular problems, and that’s why she was so fat. At least that was the story Rose told to all and sundry.

On one particular day, my aunty and I were sitting right at the front of the bus near the doorway. Rose could not get her leg high enough to get into the bus door. The bus driver told her to walk a few yards up to the top of the hill, where it might be easier for her to enter from the ‘flat’. So she huffed and puffed her way to the top of the hill, where she found it easier to get her leg up onto the step, but then she just couldn’t fit through the door. The bus driver hopped out of his seat, out through his driver’s side door, and ran around to the passenger’s side, where he proceeded to push and shove the lady through the door. She, at this time, had to turn side-on in order to fit through, and of course, she was facing Aunty Joan and me. I started to laugh, much to my aunt’s horror. Aunty Joan had her hand firmly gripped around my arm and was squeezing it hard, trying to warn me to behave. It was so embarrassing for her and Rose, no doubt, but I couldn’t stop laughing! Well, what did they expect from a little tot?

As a youngster, I had regular friends I liked to play with, but my favourite friend lived immediately to the back of my yard. There were no fences around blocks of land. The housing blocks were large by today’s standards, and why did we need to fence them anyway? We all knew where our boundary lines were! What’s more, with thirteen acres of rainforest land, there’s no way we could fence that much. The only divider between the side of my yard and the back of his yard was a huge bank of old, decaying fallen trees. Either he’d climb over, or I’d climb to the top and call him to come and play. Victor was very handsome and, in my eyes, was more special than the other kids I played with. He always seemed to be softly spoken and gentle, especially with me. He was two weeks short of one year older than I, and I was always disappointed if he wasn’t available to play. He seemed more sensible and grown up somehow. When we saw him coming out of his house and walking to the corner to play with us, we’d all send up a loud cheer, ‘Hooray, Victor’s coming to play!’

The road where we as children would meet after school was full of potholes, and gullies, which flooded with water when it rained. Coming home from school, I would have to take off my shoes and socks, paddle through, and hope to God I got to the other side without being covered in giant leeches. I’ve never seen leeches that big ever since. Stretched out, they’d be about six inches long easily and about as fat as my little finger. I’d arrive home, only to discover later an irritating itch between two of my toes. Sure enough, a leech was the culprit, so after I stopped screaming hysterically, it was out with the salt pot to get them off. I hate leeches to this day. Abhor them. When it would rain heavily at my parents’ home, the back lawn would be alive with leeches, thousands of them looping their way through the grass, weaving a moving tapestry of brown and green. We also loved to find a strange, long worm-like creature, as thin as a piece of fishing line, with a visible head at one end. Some type of nematomorph, I suspect. We’d capture these and put them in a jar with creek water so we could watch them tie themselves into the most formidable knots, which we then tried to untangle. They would be over a foot long and they’d get themselves into the most intricate knots in the jam jars.

Because we owned a natural rainforest, we often played Tarzan, and tried to swing on the vines hanging from almost every tree. Right next door to our home was a ‘fairy grotto’, which had mossy grasses, a small trickling stream, which fed in from further up the road, and a number of huge willow trees which dangled their leaves into the water. It was a very cool spot on a very hot day, and we often had picnics there, taking a blanket and some food and playing ‘let’s pretend’. It later became a virtual cemetery for all the beloved pets that endeared themselves to us and then had to cross the Rainbow Bridge, because of some health problem such as tick bite, or old age.