Little Adonis and the fruit box

11 July 2012

When my father was born his parents thanked God for the gift of a son. They named him Adonis, but for the first few years he was called Adonaki, Little Adonis.

Even his older sister knew that he was special. Her play revolved around amusing him and keeping him from harm. I have a photograph of him and my Aunty Milly. Wearing a white dress and ribbons in her hair, she sits on a simple wooden chair. My father is accorded his status in relation to her. Even though he is still a toddler and his nappy fills his playsuit, he is standing on a chair next to hers, so that he is much higher.

His hair is long and wild curls spring around his face. But, leaning precariously against the back of the chair, he looks worried. Was he afraid he'd fall? I still see that anxious look on his face sometimes, the way his eyes lift upwards, creasing his forehead in the centre. And I wonder about the things that concern him.

I carry mental snapshots of a few stories from my father's childhood that I've heard often. He's comfortable with the notion of himself as a small boy, always described as cheeky and resourceful, but often in trouble for one boyish prank or another.

But the stories peter out by the time he is a teenager, and I've only a vague, out-of-focus sense of who he was from then until he became a husband and father. There is a long period of time he skirts around. And I know, without being told, that there are secrets. I have contented myself with drawing conclusions about my father from what I've seen and heard myself.

Of his childhood, the stories he has given me have colour and sound like scenes from films, and when I place them side by side, they form a narrative that, I think, builds towards the inevitable silence around his youth and early adulthood. Like one brick upon another, they create a wall that may have kept my father out, or that he may have disappeared behind. Either way, I have barely seen the other side.

Out of this narrative, three things stand out. Three stories represent my father's early life, and they are beautiful and awful. But they are all I have. They feature, respectively, The Rocks, the jam sandwiches, and the fruit box.

The Rocks

My father was born in Sydney

ARTS AND CULTURE

Little Adonis and the fruit box

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