What a Ride!

By Stanley Fenton

So, an interesting journey which, inevitably, is drawing to a close. The events that probably have most influenced my life have been the early death of my mother, my involvement in the Vietnam War, the births of my two children, and my divorce. Mums death when I was eleven left a vacuum in the area of motherly love and marred my ability for many years to experience true love. Love is an inspiring quality but an unbearably painful one when it is taken from you. Vietnam? Its impact on me didnt begin to fully materialise until about twenty years later, and then I didnt recognise or didnt want to recognise what was going on. Guilt, regret, injustice, confusion, worthlessness, all descended on me. My marriage failed, my daughter rejected me, and I seriously contemplated suicide. I still have problems with it, and they are fuelled by the oft-repeated images of our overseas-based soldiers returning home in coffins. Im learning to handle it, but progress is slow. My two children are both magnificent, but geography inhibits contact with them my son lives in Belgium and my daughter in Brisbane. But relationships with both are good, and Ive established a better relationship with my ex-wife, Heather. Our divorce was, I believe, largely influenced by the effects of my Vietnam experience. For a critical period, my ability to relate reasonably to others was degraded and my problem-solving capacity was almost non-existent. Something had to give. I lashed out and everyone suffered.

What a ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483607368

Stanley Fenton

Stanley Fenton was born and raised on Lord Howe Island which he left at age fifteen to join the Royal Australian Air Force. Recruited as an apprentice, Fenton completed pilot training and was involved in the Vietnam war and Australia’s acquisition of the F111. Twenty years after his action in Vietnam, Fenton’s life began to unravel and he suffered severe post traumatic stress disorder. His marriage failed and he retreated to his birthplace where he became involved in local government. This is the story of that journey, one that describes the long-term devastating effects that war can have on an individual.

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Copyright © 2013 by Stanley Fenton.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2013904375

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/25/2013

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CONTENTS

Childhood

Technical Training And Commission

Pilot Training And Vietnam

Fighters And F111s

Staff College And Command

Civilian Life And Turmoil

Lord Howe Island

CHILDHOOD

A LL OF MY grandparents had died before my birth in 1941. Grandfather (Alex), on my father’s side, was a Scotsman who came to Australia from Dundee in the late 1880s. He spent time in Victoria, Tasmania, and Norfolk Island before finally settling on Lord Howe Island in about 1890. He married a girl from Melbourne, Mary Gabel, and they had four children: Carl, Agnes, Stanley (my dad), and Minnie, all born on Lord Howe. The pressures of remoteness and four young children were too much for Mary, and in 1906, she committed suicide. Rumour has it that the situation was exacerbated by Alex’s extramarital activities; he was apparently no saint and was keen to establish ‘friendships’ with various ladies. I am said to be not unlike my grandfather, but I stress, in appearance only.

People who settled on Lord Howe in those days did so pretty much as squatters, pegging out an area and working it as their own. As contact with the mainland was rare, self-sufficiency in all things was required and land-clearing became a priority. Grandfather claimed a sizeable area, about five hectares, adjacent to Blinkie Beach, the island’s surf beach. He built a house in about 1905, an American ‘Hudson’ kit home which still stands and is now on the National Heritage list. He remarried after Mary’s death, and he and his new wife, Ellen, had a son, Norman. As the five children aged, they each went their separate ways, with Stan and Agnes retaining interests in Grandfather’s property. Dad built a house on the land in 1939—I was born in that house in 1941 and live in it today.

I was the third of four children, Peter, Rosemary, me, then Robyn, in that order, to Stan and Elsie. Elsie, a very attractive lady, was a Sydney girl who Dad met while she was holidaying on Lord Howe. Life on the island would have been a huge culture shock for her after having been raised in Sydney, and she must have faced problems similar to those that were too much for my grandmother years before. My first memory was as a three-year-old being taken to Ned’s Beach by my cousin, Valerie, to watch the unloading of the cargo boat, which, during the war years, came only about once every three months. This, the only contact with the outside world, was a big event requiring the efforts of most of the adult male population. There was no ‘port’ as such, so the vessel had to anchor in deep water some distance offshore and unload her cargo into lighters manned by the islanders. Landing heavy, bulky items, such as vehicles, was naturally a tricky operation which was frequently compounded by bad weather. Injuries were often sustained and items lost in the process. In June 1918, the then cargo boat servicing the island, Makambo, ran aground on rocks near Ned’s Beach, and rats got ashore when the vessel was grounded. The rats multiplied rapidly and they remain an island problem—they have been responsible for the demise of several endemic island species and continually plunder the seeds of the Kentia palm, together with the produce of fruit and vegetable gardens.

I started school in 1946. There was no kindergarten—straight into Grade 1. We had only one teacher, Miss Bingley, and she had a fearsome reputation for intolerance of any deviation from a very narrow line of behaviour. I was being raised in a pretty strict household and I had no problems in absorbing her tuition, so she treated me well. The school was small, about twenty-five students in grades from 1 to 9. None of us wore shoes, and we rode bikes or walked to school. I learnt quickly and usually came first or second in my class. When the tide was low, I sometimes rode my bike along the beach to school, collecting spanner crabs or squids on the way. The freedom was fantastic, but I didn’t really appreciate it, as I didn’t know any different. Didn’t everybody live like this?

Dad was a radio operator at the aeradio station. In 1931, he sent, by morse code, the first message from Lord Howe to Sydney via the newly installed communications system. The station was later manned by Dad and three other operators, who worked eight-hour shifts to keep it functioning twenty-four hours each day. Their main duties were to send hourly weather reports, all in morse code, to the weather bureau in Sydney, which used the information for aviation forecasts. Lord Howe is very close to the air routes between Sydney and Fiji, Hawaii, and the west coast of the United States, so in those days, without the benefits of satellite pictures and computers, Lord Howe weather data was invaluable to the airline operators that flew the routes. Dad would work a week of eight till four, then four till midnight, midnight till eight, and then have a few days off. He used to get pretty testy during the midnight-to-eight shift, but I eagerly awaited that week, because he often came home on his bike with some squid or a spanner crab. During the early hours of the mornings, he would walk the lagoon beach between his duties and collect the night’s offerings from the sea. Dad was a keen gardener and fisherman, and he was constantly assessing, generally accurately, the weather. He taught me much about all of those things.

Growing up on Lord Howe was a unique experience. There was a sense of freedom that would be difficult to duplicate in any other locality. As children, we roamed the beaches and the hills, swimming, surfing, fishing, and hunting (there were wild goats and pigs which had been released in the 1800s by visiting whalers), and there were no boundaries to our activities. Each household was largely self-sufficient, and we traded produce with our neighbours—we grew fruit and vegetables and raised cattle and chooks, and we supplemented our diet with fish and the eggs and meat of migratory birds that visited the island annually. Sooty terns (locally known as ‘wideawakes’—their call sounds like the word and they never seem to sleep), arrive in their thousands in July/August and lay their eggs in about October. In those days, they only settled on the outer islands, mainly the Admiralties to the north of the main island, and we collected the eggs from there by the bucketful. For a relatively small bird, the sooty tern has a surprisingly large egg, about two-thirds the size of a hen’s. It is covered in brown freckles, and when broken, the clear white surrounds an apricot-coloured yolk. The taste, fried or hard-boiled, while definitely ‘fishy’, is delightful. The mutton birds also arrived for the summer. They nested in burrows in the trees near the foreshore, and by about March/April, the chicks were plump. Dad and I often climbed over Transit Hill to the Little Mutton Bird Ground, where we would extend our arms down the burrows, usually about a metre deep, and feel for the chicks which would, in defence, peck at our hands. We could then grab them by the beak and extract them from the burrows. We sometimes encountered an adult which was not quite so compliant, and we then came away with a few injuries. For eating, the bird was prepared in a manner similar to that for a normal chicken (it was a bit smaller), and Mum would soak the pieces overnight in salty water, then fry them. The taste was quite strong, but it was tender and not unpleasant. These practices are now forbidden on Lord Howe, and all birdlife, with a few exceptions, is protected. Sooty tern numbers have increased dramatically in the last twenty years, and they now nest on much of the main island. They have ‘claimed’ the sand dune at Blinkie Beach, and to keep them out of the path of aircraft—the extended centreline of the runway bisects the dune—various measures have been taken. By 2012, it appeared that there was a compromise reached acceptable to the birds, CASA, and Qantas, and during the summer, a section of the dune was covered in red reflective bunting which repelled the birds. They were encouraged to settle at both ends of the dune and they did so in their thousands. Mutton birds, however, are in decline, mainly through losses to long-liners and the ingestion of non-digestible material, such as colourful plastic floating on the ocean, which attracts them as they hunt for their normal food. The parent birds regurgitate it and feed it to their chicks which eventually die.

We had no electricity, and water came from two 600-gallon storage tanks which collected rain from the roof of the house. We had running water (cold only) to the kitchen and the bathroom, and the toilet was a ‘long drop’ in the bush about fifty metres from the house. Lighting was provided by kerosene lanterns, and refrigeration, for much of my childhood, was non-existent. We had an ‘ice chest’, and when an item required cooling for a day or so, I was dispatched to the local butcher, who also made ice in large slabs, to collect a chunk. Common sense prevailed in those days—the ice was put in the top of the chest so that the cold air created naturally descended through the unit. This process was superseded by a kerosene-powered ‘Silent Knight’ refrigerator. We had a radio that drew power from a six-volt battery, and we all gathered around it each morning at breakfast to listen to the ABC breakfast programme and the news from Sydney. Mum was an accomplished pianist, and she had a piano which she often played for the enjoyment of all. She tried to teach me as a child, but I was more interested in outdoor activities and passed up a golden opportunity to learn. Sixty years later, I’m trying, with limited success, to remedy the situation on that same piano.

Showers were unknown to us, and we all took a nightly bath in a cast-iron tub that I found years later was, when I tried to move it, extremely heavy. We fed dried palm fronds and sticks down the throat of a chip heater, then at the right moment, turned the cold water tap on. The right moment was when the heater produced a ‘whoomp, whoomp, whoomp’ sound, indicating that the fire was intense enough to heat the water which emerged from a spout over the tub. There was a pecking order for bath entry based on age, so as number three in the children’s stakes, by the time my turn came, the water was dull and tepid. I welcomed times when Peter or Rose (or both) were absent, as it moved me up the order.

We had neither electricity nor gas, so all cooking was done on a wood-fired stove. We gathered dry wood from the surrounding undergrowth and chopped it into manageable pieces with an axe. Chainsaws were then unknown. The stove also served as a heater during winter and the kitchen was a popular spot on cold nights. The fire was kept burning from dawn till the evening, and with luck, there were still embers sufficient to restart the flame the next morning. It’s hard to imagine now, but Mum did her ironing using block irons that she heated on the stove. She had two which had detachable wooden handles that clicked into the tops so, when one cooled, she put that back on to the stove to reheat and clicked the handle into the other hot one. Temperature control was a bit problematic. Similarly, washing of clothes was a manual affair. The dirty clothes were placed in a water-filled copper tub positioned on the top of a forty-four-gallon drum. The drum, as well as having the top cut out to accommodate the tub, had a section cut out of the bottom