WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 3

Boys Didn’t Have Depression

Somewhere on Bobby’s Hill there was a collection of blue granite boulders that suited me perfectly. The hill rose beside the house where I grew up, its lower slopes covered in wattles until, near the boundary at perhaps ninety per cent of the climb, they gave way to a grove of gums on the neighbouring property. Among those wattles and granite rocks were any number of places where a boy in his early teens could disappear without actually going very far at all.

I was perched among those rocks one day checking the fence line for evidence of rabbits and hoping, with considerably more enthusiasm, that I might find signs of a fox. I could see the house from where I sat, although anyone looking from the house would have struggled to see me, and that was part of the attraction of the place. I could watch without particularly being watched, and for reasons I didn’t understand then and perhaps only partly understand now, I became very good at that.

My sister knew roughly where I was even if she couldn’t see me. Her voice carried up through the wattles as she called one word into the bush, a word that probably meant far more to me than I was ever going to let her know.

“Chicken,” she yelled, and then yelled it again because siblings possess an instinctive understanding of when they have found the precise spot at which to insert the knife. I remained among the rocks, able to see her while she couldn’t see me, making like I was ignoring the whole performance.

There was a story behind the word, of course. There is always a story behind the words that manage to survive in your head for more than half a century, particularly when thousands of apparently more important ones have disappeared without leaving so much as a forwarding address.

A few days earlier I had been at Pony Club when a bully had taken exception to something I was doing. Whatever offence I had committed has long since vanished from memory, which probably tells you something about its importance, but his response has survived rather better. He wanted a fight, I wasn’t interested in giving him one, and somewhere in proceedings he bloodied my nose while calling me a chicken for refusing to defend myself.

I didn’t retaliate, but neither did I do whatever it was he wanted me to do. There was blood on the ground and, from the perspective of teenage masculinity, presumably sufficient evidence for a verdict to be delivered: he had hit me, I had not hit him back, therefore I was a chicken. Apparently the prosecution could rest.

The physical injury wasn’t particularly significant because I had been hurt before and would be hurt plenty of times afterwards. Horses, cricket balls, farm life and young male stupidity provide quite an efficient injury-production system when combined properly, and a bloody nose hardly qualified for its own chapter. What lingered was the word, although I doubt I would have described it that way at the time.

A few days later my sister had witnessed enough of the original incident to know precisely which button she was pressing as she stood below Bobby’s Hill yelling “chicken” into the wattles. I could see her from my position among the rocks while she couldn’t see me, and I stayed where I was, checking the fence line and watching the world below. Whatever I might have called the feeling then, I knew I didn’t want that particular wound opened again.

I don’t remember sitting on Bobby’s Hill feeling sorry for myself. I don’t remember analysing whether I had been humiliated, frightened or angry, and I certainly don’t remember wondering whether the incident had damaged my self-esteem. Had anybody suggested such an exercise, I suspect I would have regarded them as slightly deranged because feelings weren’t things we gathered around the kitchen table to identify and discuss.

You got on with whatever came next because that was simply what happened. It wasn’t a slogan Dad had printed and stuck on the refrigerator, nor some carefully articulated Banks family philosophy handed from one generation to another; it was simply the operating system of the household, installed without documentation and apparently without any expectation that anybody might want to use another one.

Dad was about as emotionally approachable as the blue granite I was sitting on. Paul Simon’s I Am a Rock (1965 – from the album The Paul Simon Song Book) has always seemed to me to describe him rather well, not because Dad ever announced such a philosophy but because vulnerability simply wasn’t something I remember seeing from him. I don’t remember seeing him frightened, openly hurt or emotionally exposed, and when the world irritated him his preferred outlet was anger.

It is the ending of Simon’s song that has always made the connection particularly strong for me. The man in the song has effectively convinced himself that isolation is protection, that if nobody gets close enough then nobody gets the opportunity to hurt him, and that the safest emotional position is to need nobody in the first place. By the time the song reaches its conclusion, the rock and the island are no longer simply images of strength; they have become a defence system, built around the proposition that feeling nothing is preferable to risking the pain that comes from feeling something.

That was Dad as I remember him. I cannot say what was going on inside him because he never gave me access to that part of himself, and it would be unfair for me to invent it now simply because a song provides a convenient explanation. What I can say is that the exterior was extraordinarily effective. Whatever disappointments, fears, regrets or hurts existed behind it stayed there, while the version presented to the rest of us was the man who dealt with what was in front of him and expected everyone else to do much the same.

There is something else in those final moments of the song that I understand differently now than I might have as a boy. Declaring yourself immune to pain does not necessarily mean pain has disappeared; sometimes it means you have developed a method for making certain nobody sees it. Dad’s method seemed to be hardness, self-reliance and, when pressure needed somewhere to go, anger. Whether anger protected him from other emotions or was simply the only emotion he felt comfortable displaying is something I cannot know, because asking him would have required precisely the sort of conversation our family didn’t have.

Perhaps that is the part of I Am a Rock that matters most to this story. Dad never sat me down and instructed me not to talk about fear, sadness, rejection or loneliness, and I don’t remember him ever saying that boys weren’t allowed to cry. He didn’t have to teach those things in words because children learn an extraordinary amount simply by watching what the adults around them do with life. I watched a man who appeared to need nobody emotionally, who seemed capable of absorbing whatever arrived and continuing forward, and whose most visible response when the pressure escaped was anger.

The irony, which I can see now but certainly couldn’t then, is that the rock on Bobby’s Hill and the rock in Paul Simon’s song offered much the same apparent bargain. Nothing could hurt granite because granite didn’t feel anything, and there was a certain attraction in that simplicity. Sitting among those boulders where I could see the house while nobody at the house could see me, I had no idea that I might already have been learning my own version of the same trick: not necessarily denying that something hurt, but making sure that whatever hurt remained safely on my side of the rock.

Mum wasn’t necessarily the counterweight to that because I remember her more as the perennial fence-sitter, although anger was hardly foreign to her either. Between them there wasn’t much chance that the Banks household was going to become an early prototype for family group therapy, and nobody was likely to call a meeting to determine how everybody was coping. We dealt with what was in front of us, sometimes loudly, sometimes physically and frequently without any discussion at all about what might be happening underneath.

One of the more familiar objects in our kitchen was the whip. It lived above the stove, stretched across two cupboard knobs, and it was as much a part of the family landscape as many of the other things in the room. Their reminder weapon was not usually voice, and when something required correction the whip could come down from above the stove and often did.

I am wary of looking backwards through modern eyes and manufacturing a childhood more dramatic than the one I remember. The whip was simply part of our household and, in the world in which we lived, we didn’t conduct seminars afterwards about the emotional consequences of its use. There were things you were required to do, there were consequences if you failed to do them, and then life moved on to whatever was next.

It is tempting, writing about it now, to make something of the fact that the whip sat above the kitchen stove, stretched across two cupboard knobs. It would be easy to turn it into some brooding symbol hanging there as a permanent warning to the Banks children, almost like a weapon mounted on the wall in an old western waiting for somebody to reach for it. That would make for dramatic writing, but it wouldn’t be particularly accurate because its position wasn’t about display or intimidation. It was there for the same practical reason other frequently used things were kept where they were kept: it was easy to get to.

And it was a weapon. There is little point dressing that word up simply because the standards of the time were different or because we accepted its presence without the analysis that might accompany it today. It wasn’t an ornament, a family heirloom or an empty threat that had acquired mythical status because somebody once waved it around. It was kept within reach because it was used, and when Mum or Dad decided a reminder was required, nobody needed to go searching through a cupboard or disappear into another room to find the means of delivering it.

That accessibility probably says more about its place in the household than anything deliberately threatening ever could. Nobody needed to point at the whip and say, “Behave yourself or else,” because everybody knew what it was for, just as we knew what the stove was for and what lived in the kitchen cupboards. It had become an object with a function, and its function was understood without explanation.

I don’t remember walking into the kitchen and being frightened by the sight of it hanging there. That would give the object a psychological presence in my childhood memory that I don’t think it actually possessed, because familiarity has an extraordinary ability to make almost anything ordinary. The whip belonged above the stove because that was where the whip belonged, and I doubt I gave its location any more philosophical consideration than I gave the location of the knives, saucepans or tea towels.

Looking back is different because the adult can see something the child had no reason to examine. The striking thing is not that my parents displayed a whip where their children could see it; they weren’t displaying it at all. The striking thing is that corporal punishment was sufficiently integrated into the ordinary running of the household that the implement used to deliver it was kept in the kitchen, immediately accessible, because there was every expectation that from time to time somebody would need to reach up and use it.

That doesn’t require me to recast Mum and Dad as monsters, nor does it require me to pretend the whip was harmless simply because its presence was normal to us. Both things can be true at once: it was an accepted part of the household I grew up in, and it was a physical weapon used when words were considered insufficient or perhaps unnecessary. Once the punishment was over there was no family conference, no discussion about what had led to it and certainly no exploration of how anybody felt about what had just happened.

Perhaps that is why the whip belongs in this chapter rather than merely in a collection of childhood recollections. Its significance to me now is not principally the pain it could inflict but the method it represented. Behaviour had consequences, correction was physical and immediate, and once the correction had been administered the matter was considered dealt with. You didn’t examine the hurt, either physical or otherwise; you absorbed the reminder, adjusted whatever had required adjusting and got on with whatever life presented next.

School occupied a curious place in all of this because, despite what later intelligence testing might suggest, education itself never seemed particularly important at home. In primary school I was extraordinarily good at the sort of rote learning that education then rewarded, and across Years Three to Six at Rye Park Public School I managed to lose only two marks. Two marks across all those years sounds to me now like something worthy of at least a small amount of parental satisfaction, but that wasn’t really how the equation worked.

Dad’s only remembered comments about those reports were to ask where the other two marks were. I don’t carry that memory as some great childhood trauma, but it is revealing when placed alongside everything else because there was a distinction between potential and requirement that seemed perfectly natural at the time. If you were capable of achieving something, achievement wasn’t necessarily cause for celebration; it was what should have happened.

Sport worked slightly differently because there was pleasure in the spoils, but the underlying equation wasn’t greatly different. At the equestrian level we had few peers, to the extent that potential opponents sometimes rang to find out which show we intended attending so they could choose another one where the competition might be a little less vehement. We didn’t win because the universe had recognised our specialness; we won because the horses were fit, properly fed and groomed, and because we practised until what had once required thought became automatic.

Apparently I practised some things so enthusiastically that I even did them in my sleep. Mum would later claim she watched me get out of bed one night and bowl eight imaginary overs down the cricket practice area beside the house before returning to bed, which suggests that even unconscious Jeff understood that improvement required repetition. Whether sleeping Jeff had a better line and length than the conscious version is something history has unfortunately failed to record.

Losing, therefore, wasn’t really part of the plan, but neither did failure necessarily require an emotional post-mortem. If something didn’t work, the obvious conclusion was that something needed improving, and the appropriate response was to work out what that something was and improve it. Opportunities that somebody else might have called failures became another chance to practise, prepare or simply become more bloody-minded about succeeding next time.

Years later, playing cricket for Sydney University, I would sometimes find myself bewildered by players who seemed prepared to surrender their wickets too easily. Some possessed considerably more natural talent than I did, yet when conditions became difficult I could sometimes survive where they couldn’t, because somewhere along the way I had developed an almost stubborn refusal to accept that the circumstances were entitled to beat me. At the time I probably regarded that as competitiveness, but looking backwards I can see the foundations had been laid much earlier.

The pattern was already familiar: if something went wrong, doing something about it made considerably more sense than sitting around feeling it. Even that observation is difficult to write without making childhood Jeff sound more emotionally disciplined than he really was, because discipline suggests a conscious choice. I am not convinced I felt all these great emotions rising inside me and deliberately suppressed them; I think it was simpler than that, because I lived in a world where examining them wasn’t part of the process.

That is where the title of this chapter becomes deliberately wrong, because of course boys had depression. Boys presumably had every variation of sadness, fear, loneliness, rejection, humiliation and despair available to the human species, because being born male did not provide some magical exemption from the workings of the brain. What I don’t remember is anybody in my childhood world using the word depression, and I certainly don’t remember anybody suggesting that a boy might need to examine how he was feeling.

Dad provided the model without ever needing to explain it: things got done and life moved forward. Crying doesn’t occupy much space in my memories of adolescence, and neither does anybody asking me whether I was happy, whether something was worrying me or whether some disappointment had affected me more deeply than I was showing. Perhaps somebody did on some forgotten occasion, because memory is an unreliable archivist, but it wasn’t sufficiently common to leave an impression.

What did leave an impression, was solitude, although even that word risks making the experience sound sadder than I remember it being. Childhood became something of a silo, a place where I was simply me in a world in which I existed rather than necessarily factored. From time to time the doors opened and my siblings came inside, but that frequently ended in fights and, being the oldest, there seemed to be some unwritten expectation that I wasn’t entitled to win every one of them.

Eventually you repaired back into your own silo, where the walls became thicker and the world outside could continue doing whatever it was doing without requiring quite so much participation from you. That did not necessarily mean sitting alone feeling miserable, because the distinction I keep returning to is that I wasn’t spending much time feeling my way through life at all. I was living whatever life presented, responding to it and moving on to the next thing.

Bobby’s Hill was one physical version of that solitude, although I don’t want to burden those rocks with psychological significance they didn’t possess at the time. I went there because I liked going there, and there were rabbits to look for, the possibility of a fox, a fence to inspect and granite boulders from which I could simply watch. Being alone did not automatically mean being lonely, just as being surrounded by people did not automatically mean feeling part of them.

There were other places and other forms of the same thing. Horses offered their own world, sport offered another, and as I grew older there were increasingly environments in which I was surrounded by people without necessarily feeling that I belonged among them in quite the same way they belonged to one another. I navigated those worlds rather than participated in them, although I would not have had the language to describe the distinction then.

One way of navigating them was to become the village idiot, because humour gave me an entry point that didn’t require much explanation. I don’t remember consciously deciding to use it that way; you discover that people laugh, that laughter gives you a place in the group, and that being slightly ridiculous can sometimes be easier than trying to work out exactly where you fit. It also meant that public Jeff could become increasingly visible without anybody necessarily being invited very far into private Jeff.

My age contemporaries were often few and far between. On the showground I gravitated towards the open events because they were the challenge, which naturally meant competing in a world not neatly arranged around people my own age. Later, my earliest cricket in Sydney was with a team initially made up of mates of my boss’s son, again putting me among people older than me and requiring me to find a place in somebody else’s established world.

I became just good enough in enough areas to create another strange problem. Academically there had been signs of something approaching the child prodigy at primary school, although I certainly didn’t walk around thinking of myself that way, and sport offered similar glimpses of being capable of competing above the expected level. Yet being good enough to stand out isn’t necessarily the same thing as belonging, and being capable of succeeding doesn’t tell you what you are supposed to do with yourself when the competition finishes and everybody goes home.

Secondary school altered the academic trajectory because a bout of mumps interrupted the easy rote-learning progression I had enjoyed at primary school, and I never truly recovered that momentum. Partly that was because I don’t remember having much inclination to recover it, while schooling itself appeared to be something endured rather than particularly valued at home. Marks weren’t discussed, homework wasn’t enquired after and much of the time there wasn’t anybody around to enquire because I was gone.

Being gone didn’t mean missing, running away or engaging in some adolescent rebellion that would eventually become a television movie. I was simply somewhere else, often doing whatever interested me, existing in a world I could navigate without necessarily feeling any need to place myself at its centre. More and more, that seems to me to be the distinction: I existed within life without always feeling that I factored into it.

Girls eventually appeared, as girls have an inconvenient habit of doing in the lives of teenage boys, but even there the pattern wasn’t particularly different. There would be an initial meeting, attraction and then, often within a week or so, the waning. By the time those relationships existed my school friends had largely gone their separate ways, and there wasn’t another circle of mates waiting to hear the details.

I didn’t bring friends into those relationships because, in truth, there weren’t really friends available to bring into them. Whatever disappointment followed their ending therefore remained largely where everything else remained, inside the silo, although even writing that now risks suggesting I spent hours examining my broken teenage heart. I don’t remember doing anything of the sort because another day arrived, something else required doing and attention moved with it.

Alcohol didn’t provide the alternative emotional language either. We experimented as teenagers and, by Year Twelve, occasionally retired to the local pub we called Hungry’s for a counter lunch and a can of Courage Draught. There were no great drunken nights of collective emotional revelation, partly because we all lived too far apart to organise the sort of teenage debauchery later generations apparently managed with much greater logistical efficiency.

Then came the HSC and the Air Force, two events capable of carrying much more weight elsewhere in this story than I want to place upon them here. I had imagined a direction for my life and, within a relatively short period, that direction ceased to exist in the form I had expected. The emotion I can identify most clearly now is not devastation so much as loss of direction, although I doubt I would have spent much time even giving it that name then.

The response was practical because practical responses were what I understood. If the HSC result wasn’t sufficient for the future I wanted, there was night school, and if I didn’t want to spend my life herding sheep I needed to do whatever came next. Whatever disappointment existed had to make room for action because life had presented another problem and problems were there to be dealt with.

That sounds almost admirable when written from the comfortable distance of more than fifty years. It can be made to resemble resilience, determination and a refusal to surrender, and there was undoubtedly some of all three. There was also another possibility sitting quietly beside them, one I find more interesting now because I am not sure where one ended and the other began: perhaps I simply didn’t know how to do anything else.

Life was endured, floating between anecdotes, experienced as much as lived. Something happened, I responded to it, another thing happened and I responded to that, while somewhere along the way I became increasingly capable of stepping outside myself and watching the whole performance continue. It is an odd sensation to describe because it wasn’t necessarily unpleasant; sometimes it simply seemed easier to watch life happening than to decide exactly how I felt about being in the middle of it.

There is an Alice Cooper recording of I’m Always Chasing Rainbows (1976 from the album Alice Cooper Goes to Hell) that has always resonated with me, particularly the sense I take from it of somebody watching the world drift by. I don’t need the lyrics to explain it more precisely than that because the feeling is familiar enough, and sometimes I seem to have spent considerable parts of my life watching Jeff Banks go about the business of being Jeff Banks. The clouds drifted past, life moved underneath them and I moved with it.

That Jeff could compete and he could win, but he could also make people laugh when laughter gave him somewhere to belong. He could get bloodied at Pony Club and refuse to give the bully the fight he wanted, then disappear onto Bobby’s Hill where he could watch the house without the house watching him. He could lose the future he thought he was heading towards, enrol at night school and begin constructing another one because there was no obvious value in sitting around waiting for the old future to come back.

What I cannot honestly do is look back at that boy and diagnose him with depression. I don’t know that he was depressed, and I am not even convinced that unhappy is the right word because he had good times, successes, adventures, horses, cricket, places to explore and a bloody great hill beside the house where rabbits and foxes might leave evidence for him to discover. To impose depression retrospectively simply because I know what happened later would be to rewrite the boy in order to make the man’s story tidier.

What I can recognise is the architecture that would remain familiar. There was the silo, the instinct to retreat rather than explain, to act rather than examine, to improve rather than mourn, and to make people laugh rather than invite them too far inside. There was also an emerging ability to function in whatever world presented itself while remaining, in some strange way, slightly separate from the bloke doing the functioning.

Decades later, when depression finally acquired a name in my life, I would have to learn a language for things childhood Jeff had never been required to describe. I would eventually be asked questions about moods, anger, sleep, motivation and feelings, and discover that “Fine” was not always considered a sufficiently detailed clinical assessment. That story belongs further down the road, because the boy on Bobby’s Hill had no reason to know that road existed.

He was still sitting among the blue granite and wattles, just below the gums, checking the fence line and hoping for a fox while somewhere below him his sister called him a chicken. He could see her while she couldn’t see him, and he didn’t come down to explain that the word had hurt because I doubt it occurred to him that explaining it was something a person might do. There were rabbits to look for, a fence to check and, sooner or later, another day waiting to be got on with.