"Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend" — Albert Camus
Despite my father’s warnings against placing too much faith in friendship, I am convinced that good friends can be better than family. My father’s distrust of non-family can be attributed to the betrayals and deceit spawned by a war that shadowed his childhood.
My father’s allegiance to family was especially evident in his unwavering support for a man who, by my father’s words, treated his hunting hounds better than his son. But as my father often told me, "most fathers where like that back then". Nothing, not even the absence of friendship, could shake my dad’s faith in his father’s love.
My father reciprocated this strange love by expecting my mum to care for his aging father after he joined us in Melbourne from Greece in the early 1960s. My mother’s situation was such that it became virtually impossibly for her to form friendships beyond the patriarchal realm on account of her full time factory work and domestic duties. Even if she were free to form friendships, most women in our neighborhood were too burdened by domestic responsibilities to manage the luxury of friendship.
I don’t think my father and grandfather were ever friends. There was respect and there was love, but there was no friendship — not in the way I understood it anyway. Their relationship brought them pain, frustration, guilt and even joy. I know this because I was caught in the middle of my father’s struggle to reconcile friendship with paternal loyalty.
It was around the time when I began to form my own relationships that I came to understand that no child brought up in a relatively free, secure and safe place like Australia could possibly comprehend the war-mangled logic of family allegiances.
Ironically, it was out of my father’s suspicion and distrust of friends that attracted me to the idea friendship. The thought of having friends beyond family became especially appealing after I began to attend my local primary school back in 1969. Despite my reluctance to let go of my mother’s hand on my first day at school, I was put at ease by the warm smile and reassuring words of a woman who would spend more time with me in that year than my father and mother.
My primary school teacher