Читать книгу Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand - Douglas Galbraith - Страница 11

On a summer’s day in 1953, a young Joy Hill travelled from Perth to Bunbury to attend the Bunbury Rowing Club’s Coronation Weekend Dance. Joy was, by her own estimation, ‘always a dancer’, and she trod the boards with gusto. It was just before the interval as she lined up for the barn dance, her hair a little tousled and her face flushed, that Joy looked across the dance floor and saw a handsome young man talking to a group of friends.

‘He looks alright,’ she thought.

His name was Owen Salmon, and suddenly the Coronation Dance seemed a lot more interesting. In the months that followed, Joy spent more and more time in Bunbury with Owen, and before long, they were dancing at their wedding reception.

In 1956, Joy fell pregnant. ‘And that’, she says delicately, ‘was the end of the perfect marriage.’

•••

When anything went wrong with electricity in Western Australia, Owen was dispatched to fix it. Joy was ten days overdue with the apparently reticent Kim Salmon, sick of the sight of herself and everybody else, when the call came in to the Depot for Owen to head out — now. As Owen jumped in the truck the news reached him that Joy was to be induced. He drove hard for 160 miles north, knowing that Joy was heading for hospital in the opposite direction.

After a lengthy hospital stay, Joy was enduring a horrendous thirty hour labour, unable to get word to Owen on her slow, painful progress to delivering the future Godfather of Grunge. Owen was beside himself, worried about Joy, berating himself for being so far away, and juggling the 66,000 volts of power coursing around him as he worked.

Eventually the news reached him. His son, Kim Leith Salmon, was born. It was, almost literally, electrifying news. Owen turned his truck south and made for Bunbury.