for Bob

He’s standing on a ladder pruning a tree by the back fence when he slips sideways and lands heavily on the ground. Although he’s in pain, he convinces his wife to drag him on a sheet of cardboard to the back door where he hopes to pull himself up onto the steps. It takes her more than two hours to get him there but only a few minutes after that to realise the injury is worse than they thought. A short while later she calls an ambulance.
Bob and Nan are neighbours who live across the road and in the beginning there’s a chance he might not return home, that he might not walk again, as his hip’s been broken in the fall. The joint is shattered. For an 83 year old man, the situation is bleak. When we visit him in hospital a couple of days later, he’s tense and pale. He can barely move. He says he can’t sleep. Even with the pills they’ve given him, the pain’s too great. He lies on his back on a layer of pillows in the quiet, white room like a man waiting on a miracle.

He’s been able to wait before. During the second world war he sheltered for some hours in a waterway beneath his parents house in Holland while Nazi officers searched the rooms above and the streets nearby looking for young men for the work camps. Bob stayed calm. “I was wet through,” he says, “but I had to keep still. For everyone’s sake I didn’t move.”

He’s also told me of a time his canoe capsized in Westernport bay and he clung to wreckage with his son-in-law before swimming three kilometres across a cold, deep channel to the shore. They reached French Island after midnight, walked barefoot across rocks and mud and sheltered in a disused guard house until they were found.

Bob begins moving about on his legs again, slowly and with great effort but enough for him to be transferred to a rehabilitation centre. After a couple of weeks there, his son brings him home. He’s given a large wheeled walking frame to help him get about the house but it is unwieldy and Bob is tired and he spends most of the day in the lounge room lying on a foam mattress on the couch. It’s hard to see him like this. He is a man who has always been busy with a chisel or drill in his hands. Now the slow pace of his recovery reduces his day to coffee cups and long pauses while he adjusts pillows and positions. Sometimes when we’re talking he finds it difficult to remember words and says his English is not as good as it used to be. He remembers things by thinking in Dutch and then converting back to English.. “De-arg-nosis” he says, “it’s like your diagnosis” and he uses that term to tell me how the local doctor has always been correct when treating both him and his wife “He’s a good man” . We swap a line from an old song, Que sera sera that he asks me to find in one of the dictionaries he keeps in a cabinet. Que sera sera, what will be will be. He likes that phrase he says, because it gives him a good attitude.

Over the next month or so, a little more mobility returns and Bob begins walking to the door on crutches to greet me when I come. .He tells me his plan, how he’s setting his sight on being a lot better “in a little while.” “By degree,” he says “it’ll happen by degree.” But he’s not always so positive.

When Easter comes and there’s not much change in his condition, he says he wonders how patient he can be. “I’m an impatient man” he tells me. “I want to be doing things, not sitting around all day. I like to do things for myself.”



His hip has mended as much as it can but it seems that in the process of his moving about the joint has been forced higher than it should be and now the socket is unable to take much weight. He finds it impossible to stand for more than a couple of minutes without experiencing intense pain. One leg is now permanently shorter than the other. An operation for a hip replacement is the next thing to consider.

He’s worried about Nan too. When she leaves the room to get something from the kitchen, he says she can no longer read and that she tells him there are wavy lines at the corners of her vision.
“I’ve got to look after her.”
Then yesterday morning, a little more than six months after the fall, he phones and asks if it will be alright to visit. I make a cake and straighten up the lounge room. I wonder if the couch will be too soft for him. At 2.30 the bell rings and when I answer it, find them both there, hats and coats on, standing at the door like two pale sunflowers. Nan is holding a packet of Dutch chocolates and Bob leaning on his crutches beside her is carrying a plant for the garden.
It is a triumphant sight.