By CASEY NEILL
GREG Dickson made a lasting impression on Margaret Ladner – and on Dandenong’s most disadvantaged.
Margaret worked for the council’s home care team and visited Greg once a week to help tend his house while he cared for his ailing wife Daphne, known as Zig.
“His wife got Alzheimer’s. Zig was a beautiful woman,” the Dandenong and District Benevolent Society manager said.
“He wouldn’t let anybody help him in the home and eventually they talked him into getting home help.
“I was told he might be difficult.
“I loved the man from the minute I first spoke to him.
“If I was off sick he wouldn’t have anybody else.”
Greg lived in a large home on Pultney Street.
“There was a window with a table and a chair. Every morning, there was a rose in a jar on the middle of the table,” Margaret said.
“When Zig woke up he’d have her breakfast and a rose.
“I could cry thinking of Greg Dickson, I really loved that man.
“I asked him why he wouldn’t put Zig in a nursing home, because he wouldn’t let me do anything for her.
“He said ‘She’s my wife. If it was me, she wouldn’t put me in a nursing home’.
“He was an amazing, amazing man.”
Margaret said they’d take smoko together.
“He didn’t smoke and I didn’t smoke. But he’d say ‘Smoko time, Scotty’ – because I’m Scottish he called me Scotty – and he’d put Scottish music on,” she said.
“These are the things the man did that nobody else would think of.
“And we’d sit there and he’d show me all the photos of the Dandenong Journal. He told me how it worked.”
One day they were speaking about awards and Greg revealed he’d been offered a Queen’s honour.
“He said ‘Margaret, I don’t need medals to say what kind of man I am’,” she said.
“I’ve never forgotten that.
“He turned it down.”
Margaret arrived to clean Greg’s house one Wednesday 22 years ago to find he’d died in his sleep.
“I stopped working. I knew I’d never find another Greg Dickson,” she said.
“Zig was put in hospital. I went up to see her.
“Her eyes lit up when she saw me and I thought ‘She knows I’ve got something to do with Greg’.
“She died three weeks later.”
Home care recipients weren’t permitted to give their carers gifts or include them in their will.
“He used to give me a cheque a month for the society. He knew I worked here one day a week,” she said.
“Before he died he told me he couldn’t leave me anything but he’d make sure there was a way to get through to me.
“He did.
“I’ll never forget that.
“When he died he left about $3000 a year here and it still comes in every year.”
The money usually arrives in November, in time to help pay for Christmas hampers.
“They’re $100 and I did about 600 hampers here one year,” Margaret said.
“Every little bit helps in here.”
