My Uncle Barney

I don’t know my Uncle Barney very well. He is my father’s younger brother. I saw some of him as a small child as he visited my parents quite often when they lived in Bexley North. He would sometimes bring alcohol as a present, despite my parents not drinking at the time. He would stay some days and disappear again for a while. He would occasionally come and take some of the alcohol when he went out with his girlfriend, which gave the girlfriend the idea my parents were raging alcoholics!

This girlfriend became his wife, and ironically she later became an alcoholic. They went to live in the Blue Mountains and Barney become an accountant and both he and his wife, Coral, became Salvation Army Officers. They had two children. They lived a very conventional life, apart from Coral’s increasing problem with alcohol.

Coral later died and eventually Barney remarried. There had been very little contact between him and my father for over twenty years, and the only time they talked was when their mother died. I have only seen him once since I was a little girl: I was attending an accounting convention and he was also there and I noticed his name and went over to him and introduced myself to him and his new wife. He looked liked a younger and burnished version of my father – very prosperous, large, carrying weight like my father, unlike Eddy, who was always thin.