Sweet & Sour

by Peter Corris

  In social terms, if not in technological ones, it was easier to be a teenage diabetic in the '50s than in the '90s. I knew no-one who drove a car and we gangly youths still rode bicycles everywhere, so I got the exercise necessary for diabetic control.

  Diet-wise, there were fewer temptations then than now. The fast-food 'outfalls' (as Andrew Denton calls them), were in the future and the range of ethnic restaurants on display today would have seemed like a fantasy. The only non-Anglo-Celtic eating for the working class was done in Chinese restaurants, and I was instructed to steer clear of these because the cooks used sugar and honey in the sauces and dishes. When I did finally venture boldly and defiantly into a suburban Chinese restaurant in the early '60s I found the food disgusting and was not encouraged to try again for some time. I knew nothing about the fine eating houses in Melbourne's Chinatown.

  In September 1959, aged almost 17-and-a-half, I had my first anniversary as a diabetic. I would have seen Dr Taft perhaps four times in the year and my report was good. I was filling in my test sheets in a desultory (and somewhat fraudulent) fashion, breaking my diet in minor ways from time to time, but basically still being a good diabetic. I was uninterested when told that a young woman who had lived next door had become diabetic during pregnancy. I felt no solidarity with other diabetics apart from the tennis players Bill Talbert and Ham Richardson, and that association was fast fading.

  The Matriculation examination was the crucial rite of passage for academically inclined kids. As it was conducted in the heat of November and December, in an unfamiliar place with tension running high, there was an increased risk of hypoglycaemia.

  By this time I had worked out that my emotional state, whether elation or depression, had an effect on blood glucose – but there was no way to do anything about it. Normally, I enjoyed examinations (except for French and Maths) and felt a quiet confidence, neither elation nor distress. But these exams might be different. I didn't notify a 'bulldog' (an invigilator – teachers earning a few extra quid) about my diabetes because, in those days, medical conditions were not taken into consideration. You sat the exam on the appointed day – sick, well or having your period – and that was that.

  I went off with my diabetic card and barley sugar in my pocket. At that time, public examinations still had a distinctly nineteenth-century feel. For the humanities subjects, nothing could be taken into the room except a pen. You sat in a huge hall with hundreds of other candidates and everything was designed to run like clockwork. The question papers were already on the desks, with the candidates' number, but they could not be turned over and read until the head 'bulldog' said so. Also provided were lined booklets, one side of the page only to be written on. Absolute silence was insisted upon and any attempt to communicate with another student brought instant disqualification.

  The bulldogs were formidable figures. Wearing academic gowns and stern expressions, they paraded up and down between the desks, continually trying to spot smuggled notes or coded information written on palms. All movement was suspicious. If you dropped something, you had to signal your intention to pick it up and were watched closely. Anyone wishing to go to the toilet had to ask permission and be accompanied by an invigilator. A warning buzzer was sounded 10 minutes before the end of the exam and when the final buzzer sounded it was pens down instantly.

  I had no trouble with hypos until the Geography paper. The day was very hot and I was late leaving home. I ran for my train, just made it, but it stopped for what seemed like an hour outside Richmond station and was late getting into Flinders Street. I ran for the tram and then ran from the stop through the gardens to the Exhibition Building, arriving puffed and distressed and just in time to be one of the last permitted to enter the hall.

  I should have realised something was wrong when it felt like a quarter of a mile walk to get to my seat. A distortion of spatial sense is one of the symptoms of hypoglycaemia. I was sweating, but the day was hot and I'd been running. (For no reason that I know, some diabetics have an inbuilt resistance to accepting that their blood sugar is low. I am one of them.)

  I turned the paper over and ran my eyes down it, looking for the topics I'd studied and the way the questions were posed. I was a dab hand at twisting questions my way and making use of every scrap of information I had. The paper looked easy. But I couldn't get started. I fiddled and fumbled, dropped my pen and was cautioned for picking it up unbidden. I made a start on the first question and then found myself thinking about tackling the second while leaving the first unfinished.

  This was nothing like my usual well-honed exam technique. Usually I allotted the appropriate amount of time to each question, finished within that span and left myself time for revision and polishing. I was alarmed by this departure from my tried-and-true method, and realised that I was having a hypo.

  Fortunately – and surprisingly, given the prevailing puritanism – chewing was permitted in the exams. I dug into my pocket and shovelled my mouth full of the barley sugar, paper wrappings and all. I chewed and sucked and swallowed and felt the sweat dry and some clarity return. I'm not sure how much time I lost but it could have been half-an-hour out of the three hours. I soldiered on, making the best of it and not finding any snags in the wording of the questions.

  Geography, as taught then, was mainly a matter of learning by rote how many frost-free days were required to grow maize; what landforms were created by vulcanicity and glaciation; what climatic pattern you had with average temperatures of X and average annual rainfall of Y. I had all this stuff at my fingertips and was very big on the river systems of the world and the characteristics of inland seas – still retained and useful these days for playing Trivial Pursuit against one of my daughters. I came out feeling that I had done pretty well.

  The next day I was back in the hated white overall wheeling cooked chooks around in the Myer Emporium for six quid a week.

  6Going off the rails

  Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men, but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

  Samuel Johnson (J Boswell, Tour to the Hebrides)

  The summer of 1959-60 is vivid in my memory. I hated the work in Myers, was in constant dispute with my father over such momentous matters as the width of trouser legs and the abilities of Elvis Presley, and was irked by the diabetic regimen. All novelty had long worn off and it was now a boring routine of insulin, testing my urine, avoiding hypos and eating dull meals.

  I began to go again to the tennis club on Sunday morning (the more interesting and competitive Saturday session was out because of my job) and worked at my game. Forbidden the back wall of the house, I practised against a wall of the spectator stand near to the tennis courts. I read books about tennis technique, experimented with grips and ball tosses, but it was no use. My timing was off. By the end of that summer I had virtually given the game away.

  As expected, Myers was a madhouse before Christmas. All floors were crammed with shoppers and the food counters did a roaring trade. I can't imagine how many fat-roasted chooks were sold as rotisserie chickens on Christmas Eve but it must have been thousands.

  I earned extra money by working late that night cleaning up in the kitchen and at the point of sale. It was hot, heavy work, there was no air-conditioning, and the kitchens and service lifts and working areas were like furnaces. I ate extra through the day but still had a severe hypo in the service lift. I was in a bad way for a while with the barley sugar not doing the job, so I grabbed and downed a bottle of Coca-Cola in the kitchen. I was astonished at how quickly the sugar-laden drink brought me to my senses.

  Denied the sweets, chocolates, cakes etc that went with the festivities, I was something of an object of pity over Christmas. We celebrated in the English (Scottish?) fashion with a roasted turkey and all the trimmings at lunch ('dinner'), but there was no gravy for me. Gravy had flour in it and could not be accurately measured. There were no second helpings of roast potatoes, either.

  The roast was followed by Christmas puddin
g my mother cooked in a cloth in the approved fashion and served with thick custard. The insertion of threepences and sixpences was still a feature because my brother was only 11 years old. I was denied the custard but not the pudding: in Conquest, the Diabetic Association magazine to which we subscribed (although I seldom read it), my mother had found a recipe for Christmas pudding with grated carrot for sweetness and substance. It sounds revolting, but was delicious – for me, the only pleasurable diabetic food.

  And I suppose I drank the lousy Boon Spa cordials.

  I did well in the Matriculation and, strangely enough, had my best result in Geography. I got a Commonwealth Scholarship which paid a small living allowance, and began an Arts degree at the University of Melbourne in 1960. Living at home, my mother prepared my meals and to some extent supervised other aspects of the diabetic life – testing, sterilisation of the equipment and so on. Though bored with the routines, I stuck to them.

  After a successful first year, I changed to Honours in History and English, which involved a heavy work load and more time spent in the university library. I was still paying fairly strict attention to my diet but it was difficult to get the right amounts and combinations of food when eating out. However, towards the end of the year I began to stay at the university a couple of nights a week and eat in the cafeteria. My standard meal was a bowl of plain rice with an ice cream mashed into it. It actually tasted good and was exactly six portions. It was also all I could afford.

  I learned that if I lived away from home I could get the full living allowance – enough to pay the fees at a residential college. Cameron Hazlehurst, a fellow Melbourne High student who had duly won the British Exhibition at the matriculation exams and was on his way to a brilliant first class Honours degree in History and Politics, told me I could get into Ormond College. How I wanted to, but I didn't see how I could manage the food angle. Bloody diabetes.

  With my first girlfriend at university I went to the first sub-titled film I'd ever seen: Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour. We sat near the back for the obvious reason and I discovered that I couldn't read the sub-titles: they were a blur. Three years of imperfectly controlled diabetes had taken a toll on my eyesight.

  This had a positive result. I was prescribed glasses to correct the damage, and my tennis improved. For the next 10 years I was able to play a respectable social game.

  This first serious relationship was threatened when my girlfriend's parents expressed hostility towards me on account of my diabetes. They entertained some false ideas about the disease, particularly that Type-1 diabetes is an inherited condition; not unnaturally, they didn't want their daughter saddled with an invalid.

  I did well in my second and third years there and, like some of the other ambitious Honours students, began to think in terms of tutorships and post-graduate scholarships leading to higher degrees. Diabetes was no barrier here.

  In my final year I began to play fast and loose with it. After a year of eating with friends, male and female, in the university colleges and occasionally in hangouts such as Gina's in Carlton, I was more relaxed about guessing the carbohydrate value of food set before me. I didn't actually break my diet, eat cakes etc – but if a Gina's crumbed cotaletta with dressed salad and chips, eaten with like-minded, ambitious History students, resulted in a high urine reading that night, what the hell? I had enjoyed the meal and the company and things could be set right the next day.

  Late in first term, I went to a History Department sherry party held in the Jessie Webb Library, a sacrosanct area reserved for Honours students, post-graduates and staff. The purpose, I suspect, was to look the final year Honours batch over as prospects for tutorships and post-graduate awards. I knew from novels that dry sherry was the right choice and as 'dry' signified 'not sweet', it was therefore OK for diabetics.

  I was surprised to find how much I liked it and how it relaxed me. I chatted with Professor RM 'Max' Crawford, the Chair of the department who exuded Oxbridge sophistication and charm. Professor John La Nauze – 'Jack the Knife' – was harder going, but the sherry helped. I had never had such a good time in a social setting or performed, I felt, so well.

  This was the beginning of a dependency on alcohol which has ebbed and flowed and plays a part in my life even today. A few days after the sherry party I made my first venture into a pub in Grattan Street, opposite the university. I did not even know what to ask for and, pretending not to speak English well, I communicated by gesture that I wanted a beer.

  'A glass, mate?'

  'Yes, a glass.'

  I remember the taste of that first seven-ounce glass of fresh beer to this day. Like all kids, I had sampled the dregs at adult gatherings and found the stale, flat taste unappealing. This was different – this was magic, and I quickly learned the language: a pony, a glass and a pot.

  It was madness. The sugar content of full-strength beer was high and I drank it freely over the next 10 years. I must scarcely have had well-controlled diabetes for 24 hours during that time and I was to pay a high price for the indulgence. Meantime, however, there was the instant dividend of sociability and confidence – two things I had lacked all my life.

  I went to the pub with fellow students and the staff members who drank – that is, almost all of them. I continued to work hard and spent Saturdays in the university library or the Victorian State Library, but I always had a drink or two afterwards. I remember getting into a discussion after a tutorial with Evan Jones, a poet and lecturer in English, about boxing. It was a mutual interest rare among academics, but he told me that Yvor Winters, an American poet and critic whom I admired, was a boxing fan.

  We went to the pub and talked over many beers. I had a high capacity for alcohol and got only mildly drunk, but I forgot to eat and had a severe hypo on the train on the way home. The barley sugar pulled me out of it, but only just. I rinsed my mouth at the front garden tap and crept into the house. My parents knew nothing of my new life.

  I was playing tennis fairly regularly at the club and with university friends. The walk to the train station was almost a mile and I sometimes walked from Flinders Street station up to the university, another mile or more, to save on the tram fare. I suppose that all this activity compensated to some degree for the ill-judged meals and the beer, as I felt strong and well.

  7Sex in the sixties

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Which was rather late for me)

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles' first LP

  Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis

  Towards the end of second term in my final year I went to the annual history conference at a guest house in the Dandenongs, near Warburton. Conferences were opportunities for Honours students to strut their stuff by giving papers on various subjects – a bit earlier I had gone to a similar English department conference and given a paper on de Lampedusa's The Leopard – and an excuse to get away from home and to have sex. Established student couples used them as dirty weekends and others among staff and students hoped to do the same.

  I've forgotten the subject of my paper at the history conference, but I remember being introduced then to claret and edam cheese. Claret was dry wine I was told, sugar free, and I drank as much of it as I could afford. The cheese on biscuits I didn't bother to take into account for my diet.

  I was still living at home and my mother saw to it that I kept to my diet there, but outside the house it was a different matter altogether. My parents were teetotallers and non-smokers, but I was now earning a little extra money by tutoring high school students in the evening, and away from home I was drinking regularly and demonstrating my sophistication by smoking Senior Service cigarettes. Wine, bought in tall Wynvale flagons, was good and inexpensive; compared to the price they are today, cigarettes were also very cheap.

  At the conference, I shared a room with another student. One evening, probably emboldened by red wine, I playfully put my arms around a girl and bund
led her into the room. Margaret Brown, whom I'd known slightly for about a year, was one of the leading lights of the History Honours group. She was the girlfriend of another history student and my assault on her was purely in fun. She didn't resist and we half-embraced before I stepped away, embarrassed at having almost made a pass at a mate's girlfriend.

  To my surprise, Margaret rang me up a few days later and suggested we go out together, inevitably to a foreign film. I forget the title – I saw little of it. Margaret was tall and extremely handsome with magnificent brown hair and a slender, athletic figure. She and I had a good deal in common (and many differences, as it turned out).

  Her family was working class, living in Seddon, the suburb next to Yarraville, where I'd spent my early years. We were both products of the selective high system, Margaret having gone to University High School and done brilliantly in the Matriculation and in her early years at the university. Similarly, we were at odds with our families over education, lifestyle and our ambitions. My family knew nothing about my academic aspirations while Margaret's people, who knew she was attending the Secondary Teacher's College, were unaware that this meant she was enrolled for an Arts degree at the university.

  I was 21 and still a virgin. My last girlfriend had been a devout Anglican and chaste, while I was a convinced atheist. Our relationship had foundered on that difference (in fact she left me for a priest whom she ultimately married.) Margaret was agnostic and sexually vibrant and I fell in love with her. The fear of impotence that had haunted me for years was set aside.

  After the final Honours examination in Far Eastern History, the lecturer in the subject, Dr Jack Gregory, took the small class out to a meal in Chinatown. This was my first experience of good Chinese food and, while I've never become a devotee, I found the atmosphere exotic and interesting. Margaret and I often ate Chinese and I often had high urine sugar tests as a result. I was too happy and foolish to care.