::sHaMoZzLe 
ViDEO Vault::MORE CAR ViDEOs
9th September 2006
I feel so sad about this news.
When we returned to Calgary in January 2000 from our 2.5 year expat
assignment, our younger son stayed on in Melbourne to do his last year
of high school there, and he lived with Peter and Bev Brock for that
year. They were so kind to him. But I'll go back to the beginning.
When our two sons had settled into their new school, they occasionally
had friends to sleep over at our house and they also slept over at
friends' houses. One of the friends who sometimes used to sleep over
with our older son was this kid called Rob Brock.
Then our older son had a couple of sleep overs at Rob's house. He came
back and told us some funny tales about the sleep overs. He said one
morning he was busy waking up and he was lying in bed with one eye open
and he saw this black and white dog walk past, and then the same dog
walked past in the same direction, but he hadn't seen it walk back the
other way, and then he saw the same dog walk past again, also without
having walked back. He said, "Um, Rob, you have this weird dog that
keeps walking past me in only one direction." Rob laughed, and said,
"That's not one dog. We have five dogs. They're siblings and they look
the same."
Our son also told us anecdotes about this acreage that Rob lived on
outside of the city. Well that's what we call that kind of property in
Canada. Our son said there was a main house and then there was a shack
in which Rob's granny and grandpa lived and another shack in which
Rob's grown up brother lived.
One day our older son said to me, "You know, Mom, Rob's dad is famous,"
and I said, "Oh is he? That's nice," and I carried on doing whatever it
was that I was doing and didn't give it another thought.
Then one day our son pointed to an advertisement on TV and said,
"That's Rob's dad." There was this handsome, distinguished man who
looked like an older version of Rob, and there was this blonde
twentysomething woman calling him "Brocky." Then our son said, "Now
do you believe me?" I was quite taken aback, and I said, "Yeah, I guess
I do."
Fast forward to the time when we were getting ready to come back to
Canada. Unbeknown to us our younger son had been hatching a plot to
stay behind and do Year 12 in Australia. He had asked my husband's
cousin, who is an immigration consultant in Melbourne, what
documentation he required to stay in Australia. He discovered that his
school did not have accreditation to have foreign students. He
persuaded the principal to apply for accreditation so that he would be
able to continue studying there. Then he lined up four classmates whose
families all would have been willing to host him for the year. His idea
was that if my husband and I didn't approve of the first family, he'd
move on to the second family on the list, and so on.
Then our younger son dropped this bomb on my husband and me a couple of
months before we were due to leave Australia. He invited us to a
meeting with his principal and teachers. To cut a long story short,
everything was already so well arranged, and the principal and teachers
were so enthusiastic about it, that any objections that my husband and
I might have had were addressed one by one.
We agreed to have afternoon tea with the family who were first on the
list of prospective host families. This turned out to be the family of
our younger son's classmate, Alex, who was the sister of our older
son's friend, Rob. When I phoned the Brocks to set up the meeting, Rob
and Alex's mom, Bev, laughed. She said, "We're finally allowed to talk
about this. We've been sworn to secrecy for months and months."
My husband and I drove out to the Brocks' acreage to meet Bev and
Peter. It was a magical place. They were vegans, and grew organic fruit
and vegetables. Their house and the grounds felt very spiritual, for
lack of a better word.
I got a chuckle out of the two "shacks" that our older son had told us
about, the ones in which Rob's recently deceased grandparents had lived
until recently and the one in which Rob's older brother, James, lived.
The "shacks" looked like lovely houses that any normal family would
have been delighted to live in. However, it was true that they were
smaller than the main house, which looked more like a mansion.
My husband and I immediately liked Bev and Peter, and felt no need to
move on to family number two on our son's list.
When we raised the issue of the expenses that the Brocks would incur in
housing and feeding our son for a year, Peter refused to accept any
financial compensation. He just waved his hand and said it was nothing.
Bev and Peter were very hospitable to our son. We got a shock half way
through the year when our son broke his wrist during a skateboarding
accident at school. Because of the time difference between Australia
and Canada and because it was an emergency, Bev had exercised the
written permission that my husband and I had given her and Peter in
advance to use their best judgement in the event of a medical
emergency. By the time she managed to get hold of me on the phone, the
orthopaedic surgery already had been done, and our son had a pin
through his wrist. I found it devastating to have an injured kid
thousands of miles away, but I knew Bev would give him lots of TLC,
which she certainly did.
Our son did very well in Year 12, and rejoined us in Canada. At that
point my husband and I sent to the Brock Foundation a cheque covering
what we thought our son's room and board for the year had been worth.
After that we exchanged letters with the Brocks at Christmas. Each of
their Christmas letters would arrive with a small extra touch, like a
pressed eucalyptus leaf.
We did not receive a response to our Christmas 2005 / New Year 2006
letter. We surmised the radio silence was the result of Bev and Peter's
May 2005 separation that other Australian friends had told us about.
At midnight last Thursday night, our older son phoned us from his
downtown Calgary apartment. He told us that he'd seen on an Internet
forum that Peter Brock had died in a car crash during a rally.
Ironically our younger son was vacationing in a hard to reach place on
Vancouver Island. I tried unsuccessfully to reach him on his cell
(mobile) phone. Then I sent him an e-mail on the off chance that he
would manage to pick up an e-mail message somehow. Astonishingly
enough, he e-mailed me back saying he'd received the message and was
terribly sad to hear the news. He's due back in Calgary tomorrow
(Sunday) night. We're looking forward to discussing the matter with
him, as we want every family member to participate in whatever
expression of sympathy we send to the Brock family.
Judy in
Calgary, Canada
sHaMoZzLe PAGE LOADS
This page is Hosted by sHaMoZzLe.com
Design©Copyright2005,2006,2007 sHaMoZzLe ABN 38 291 868 386
Contents copyright their respective owners
