I can remember the day that Paul was born, I was six years old and it was a very cold January day in England. He wasn’t quite the brother I had been waiting for, he was very small and sort of wrinkly and he seemed to be yellow. In later years I had come to realize that this was due to a slightly underactive liver which is fairly common in new born infants. In any event, to a six year old he didn’t look to have much potential as a new playmate.
Roll on a few years and Dayle and I had taught him to ride his bike which looked a little like one of those circus miniatures with tiny fat wheels. In the early sixties there was little in the way of electronic entertainment so most kids invented their own games and challenges. A favourite of ours was to take our bikes to the top of a local hill and roll down without touching the pedals, the one that traveled the furthest distance was the winner. So one day we invited Paul to take part in the challenge, as it happened the hill led into a Tee junction and part of the skill was to take the corner as fast as possible so that you could continue rolling along the street. Once we had started it soon occurred to Paul that he wasn’t going to win so he cheated by pedaling as hard as he could, needless to say he was going so fast when he reached the Tee junction he couldn’t actually take the corner. To this day I don’t know whether he made the decision or physics got the better of him, anyway Paul shot through a neighbor’s front hedge at a huge rate of knots and landed in a fish pond. Now the etiquette of the day prescribed that if you lost a ball in a neighbor’s property you had to knock on the door to ask for permission to retrieve it, being the eldest it was my job to knock on this door and ask for my brother back.
I just wish I knew which door to knock on today.
As we grew Dayle and I shared a curiosity for anything mechanical and we had soon amassed enough skills to invent and repair anything that resembled a machine. Paul was amazed at some of the things we would attempt and was always a willing onlooker; he had an incredible thirst for knowledge and, in a very short time, had learned our skills. I like to think that we became the real life McGiver brothers, we made some of the wackiest inventions you ever seen mostly out of recycled bits and pieces. It wasn’t uncommon for Mum to find that something around the house had mysteriously lost a critical piece, only for it to just as mysteriously turn up as part of the latest invention.
Well mate, we always thought we were invincible and could do anything, I just wish we could have fixed things this time.
During the course of his illness Paul would ring me and we would talk for hours about his medication, recent advances, alternative medicine, and the prospect of altering doses to get a better response. He never stopped asking questions and I am proud to say he never gave in.
On a lighter side he had this propensity (Paul would say there goes John with his verbal diarrhea again) for climbing and couldn’t resist clambering up the nearest tree whenever the thought would take him. I remember a day at a family barbeque he decided that he would climb a huge aloe vera plant in the front yard, (you may have seen the enormous stalk that grows out of the centre). He managed to get about halfway up when it snapped, down came Paul and the branch, when he got up he was covered in slimy aloe vera juice, he just shrugged his shoulders with a smile and opened another beer. That was Paul
He also loved fishing and on one of our famous fishing trips, fuelled by a few beers, he climbed a paperbark tree in the dead of night and started to sing the Caramello Koala song at the top of his voice. Once again the tree was not quite as robust as he had calculated and the branch snapped; propelling him 5 or 6 meters into some very long marsh grass. When we eventually found him he was laughing so much we had to drag him out of the weeds.
Paul was everything to me, a little bugger, a good mate, a comedian, a loving brother in law and uncle, a confidante, a colleague, but most of all, a fantastic brother.
We miss you mate.
