John Parkinson has more life experience than most people alive today, so it is significant that the face which haunts his thoughts is one of the first he ever encountered.
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The 96-year-old resident of BaptistCare Kularoo Centre in Forster was in the Australian Royal Navy from 1939-1951. An Abel Seaman, he is now the only surviving member of the four ships he served on during World War II.
John details the people encountered and the horrors endured in the years of his life spent at war, but it is the memory of a big old horse called Bill that leaps most clearly to the forefront of his mind.
“I grew up on a pig farm near Weston with four brothers and four sisters,” John explained, “we made our own bacon, ham and sausages.”
In a squashy three bedroom house, there wasn’t a lot of space, and the five boys shared one straw mattress, two down one end and three down the other, while the four girls shared another.
“It was very different back then, none of the boys had shoes and it was a three mile walk to school every day. We were so tough in our feet, we would run over rocks, frozen ground, everything.”
John recalls fondly a best friend of his younger years, a gentle old horse called Bill.
“He followed me everywhere. Wherever I went he would always be right behind me,” John said.
“We got all the food scraps from the hospital for the pigs, and I would collect all the apples out of the bin for Bill, he loved those apples.”
It was, for John, a most significant friendship, but alas, the interruption of a money-conscious father cut it short, an outcome that haunts John to this day.
“My father said to me one day, ‘I want you to take Bill to Maitland and sell him at the markets,’ and I said, ‘You can't do that, what does he do here that harms anyone? He eats a bit of grass and drinks a bit of water, he’s my horse!’” John explained.
“He said, ‘I don’t care if it’s your horse or not, you’ve got to take him.’”
So John set out on the four mile walk to the sale yards along the train line, barefoot, with Bill following close behind.
John was just five years old.
“I remember it all so clearly,” he said.
“I got to Maitland and found a man called Mr Enwright, he was the most gentle man. He said, ‘Look John, I’ll never be able to sell him, he’s too old,’ but I told him he had to, otherwise I knew Bill would go to the knackery.”
So John watched Bill walk around and around the sale yard, tears streaming down his face as hope of a sale faded. No one was buying him.
John just wanted to take him home, but he knew he couldn’t have him back now.
“All of a sudden, Bill didn’t come back around again. They said he had been sold, and sent me round to the office to collect the money,” John continued. “Mr Enwright gave me back my bridle, and all the money my precious horse had been sold for.
“It was just five pounds.”
When John returned home and told his father about the sale, his response was, ‘Well that’s better than nothing,’ but for John, it was little consolation.
“All I could think was, ‘I’ve lost my horse, he was worth nothing to anybody else but me’. And I never got over it,” he said.
“To this day, I’ve never gotten over it. You get attached to things, and that horse had never left me, he followed me everywhere, he trusted me, and they went and sold him for five pounds.”
And, though time has changed many things for John, brought him a wife, six children, and a life of adventure and experience, it has never erased the memory and strength of his friendship with a horse named Bill.
