The Godfather: Peter Corris on his father
I recently had an email from a friend saying he’d written his autobiography and wished he’d recorded his father’s memories of the area where they’d both grown up. He saw it as an opportunity missed for his project and the implication was that it would have been possible if he’d had the idea when his father was alive. When my father died in his mid-50s, I was 25; old enough, you might think, for us to have had such a man-to-man talk.
But that’s not the way it was in the Melbourne working class of the 1960s. You didn’t ask your father personal questions. As I’ve written in earlier columns, my father and I weren’t close. We were politically well-aligned, but far apart on minor social matters such as pegged pants, haircuts and music and important ones such as racial attitudes. He died well before I became a writer and in need of ‘material’. Had he survived longer and if the barriers between us had been broken down by experience on both sides, he might have become a useful ‘source’.
As it is, I know little about his early life. Tom Corris left school with the Merit Certificate at 14 and studied at night, while working in some kind of chemical factory, with a view to becoming an industrial chemist. This suggests that his school results had been good and that he had ambition. But working with chemicals made him ill and he abandoned this line of study and employment. For the rest of his life he worked in shops.
I wonder how he and his parents felt about this change, this lowering of his prospects. I remember him remarking once that he should have become a tradesman. He was a skilled carpenter. There was disappointment in the remark.
I have a photograph of him astride a motorbike along with his friend Harry Belfrage. He must have been in his very early 20s, which puts the date around 1935, near the height of the Depression. Tom is well dressed and the bike looks good. How did he afford it in those tough times; where did he and Harry go and what did they do? I’ll never know.
In 1939 my father, the manager of a general store, and my mother, pregnant with my sister, were in Stawell at the time of the ‘Black Friday’ bushfires that devastated parts of Victoria. My mother told me many years later that Tom made frequent trips into the danger zone driving supplies and carrying information to the fire fighters. I would have liked to hear about that. It sounds like good ‘material’ for fiction and would have increased my always wavering respect for him.
Tallish for the time at five-foot-ten, broad-shouldered and handsome with a fine head of hair of which he was rather vain, my father was ruled unfit for military service in World War II because of migraine headaches. My mother’s two brothers and three of her sisters’ husbands fought in the war, seeing heavy action in many different theatres. My father must often have been taken for a ‘conchie’, and I have a memory-dimmed sense that his brothers-in-law regarded Tom as somewhat different from themselves.
On this point I have a scrap of information. My father joked that he’d been in B Company – that is, be there when they leave and be there when they come back. I wonder what feelings lay behind that joke.
