by Graeme Leith
I had joined the Boy Scouts before Dad died. It was a Salvation Army troop, so it was Protestant. The leaders were very good to me at the time of his death and helped me through that. To my astonishment, at the funeral for my ex-wife more than twenty years later, a man emerged from the group of mourners, shook my hand using the ‘scouts’ grip’, reminded me that he was my old scoutmaster from the early 1950s, told me he had read the death and funeral notice in the paper, and had come along to show support—a great and selfless gesture which left me dumbstruck. To my discredit I never contacted Jack Bott to thank him. It would have been easy, too, as there wouldn’t have been many by that name in the Melbourne phone book.
Scouting was good for us boys; it provided physical exercise, mental stimulation, a sense of camaraderie, and responsibility as part of a team and as individuals. We had many great adventures. The leaders had bought an old tray truck, a 1929 Chevrolet with a canvas canopy over the tray, and into that we shoved as many wooden benches as were required for the number of scouts to be accommodated. Included were all the canvas tents, the big oval Dixie billies for cooking, the food, and then our personal backpacks for the hiking to come. The old truck would wheeze its way to our projected camping destination, as far away as the Grampians or, one year, Wilsons Promontory—a long enough drive today, but it must have taken eight or nine hours in that old Chevy, with a top speed of 50 miles an hour, stopping before the largest hills so that all of us boys could get out and push.
At our camping sites we’d construct rope bridges, flying foxes, even a Roman catapult, then use these things in mock combat. It’s quite possible that scouting has been dumbed down a bit these days; maybe they’re not even allowed to cook anymore in case they burn themselves on the campfire!
Back then we shared cooking duties and if anybody showed the skills required, mainly those of campfire management and timing, then they got the chef’s job and the other kids got to peel things and scour out the Dixies. I’d had some experience at cooking when Mum was occasionally confined to bed—usually preceding childbirth—and I would trot up and down our long dark hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom with further instructions for the ginger, the chocolate or, the ultimate culinary challenge, the steamed fruit pudding! Steamed cape cod with mashed potato and peas, scrambled eggs, French toast fried in dripping, pancakes, dumplings with golden syrup, jellies and even homemade ice-cream, were produced in this manner by our mother–son partnership; a strong bond was forged between us which remained for the rest of our time together.
It must have been due to the skills I’d acquired and the associated hubris that led me to produce the pancake that later entered the lore of the scout troop and was referred to reverently as the ‘Warrandyte Flip’. We were camped on a cool creek there, for it was a hot few days, and we had some supplies left over at the end of the trip. There was an excess of butter, self-raising flour, condensed milk, eggs, sugar, quite a lot of cocoa and some sultanas. I was quartermaster cook on the day of departure and so was able to allow myself the indulgence of experimentation and observe the ‘waste not, want not’ philosophy instilled into us by parents who’d lived through the Depression. So I combined the lot into a Dixie, except the butter, which was used liberally to fry the pancakes in the huge pans. They were a spectacular success and the memory of the cocoa–chocolate flavour, the gentle yielding texture of the sultanas and the buttery velvety mouthfeel is as alive to me today as is the later love of experimenting with different blends of grape varieties, fruit from different vineyards, all the variables that make winemaking so fascinating.
The art of selling newspapers
We were living in the old family house in Preston. The house was an anachronism even then, surrounded as it was by old ironbark trees and the remnants of an orchard. It was Dad’s turn now to die in the front room, and Mum’s unhappy duty to pave his way to the next life. He didn’t know what was wrong with him until a fortnight before his dreadful death but he had tried every form of treatment he thought might help—massage, Chinese herbs, acupuncture . . . I was certainly aware of the deterioration of his health and there’s a small but vivid illustration of the severity of his illness that’s stuck in my mind ever since.
At the time I was selling newspapers after school at a corner in Northcote, in close proximity to the tram workshops where trams were built and repaired by Australians, before somebody had a better idea. The Herald truck dropped off the papers just before we arrived from school on our bicycles. Our job was to cut the big bundles open and distribute them to the various workshops before knock-off time—often a close thing as we finished school a few miles away at four o’clock and knock-off time was four-thirty. The men would hurry past the stacks of Heralds, grab one if they wanted it and fling their fourpences at the honesty box. We’d collect the contents along with any unsold papers, which we then sold at the tram stop on the corner.
Often we’d board the tram to make the transactions, and if paper-buyers took too long fumbling for their change we’d have to leap out at quite high speeds, or if the speed was too great, stay on the tram until the next stop. There was a large and aggressive lad selling papers at the next tram stop who resented us selling to customers who would otherwise have been his; he’d give us a thump if we were unable to find an adult to shelter behind before catching the next tram back to our corner. (Years later I had a motorcycle for sale and this lad came to my house as a potential purchaser. He had not become bigger or stronger in the intervening years, but I had. I had also acquired some boxing skills at various scout camps. Upon recognising him, I announced who I was and gave him a belting in the driveway of my mother’s house. Revenge was sweet, indeed.)
When we’d sold all our Heralds, or as many as we could, we’d ride back to Green’s Newsagency, count our money and then ride home, having assuaged our hunger with Wagon Wheels, White Knights or vanilla slices from the milk bar over the road, purchased with any tip money we had earned.
We needed to have the correct sum of money for the papers we’d sold and sometimes had to make that up with our own money. If there was a shortfall before Thursdays (paydays at the workshops), it was always compensated for on Fridays. Saturdays were miserable at ‘our corner’ as we didn’t have much passing trade. The first papers were delivered from the city end of St Georges Road, where the men waiting for their Sporting Globe would assemble, and so reached our rivals stationed there before us.
After some time we realised that the papers were delivered earlier to another corner on High Street, parallel to St Georges Road but some distance away, accessible via the tramway bridge known as The Hump over the railway line that ran between the two roads. So we had our Saturday papers delivered there and, after a hair-raising ride over The Hump with the papers wedged between the handlebars, were able to get our papers first and thus snooker the opposition, which pleased them not at all.
My new mate Marshy, who worked with me at the paper corner, was not only a Roman Catholic but also a Preston Tech boy, so he was an alien and an enemy on two counts, for there was enmity, too, between the students of Northcote High and Preston Tech schools. I was apprehensive when we were first paired together by the newsagent, but surprised and pleased to realise that he was human like the rest of us. We were soon great mates, sharing our workload with the corner and the ‘round’.
The round involved delivering the newspapers to nearby residences, and on one occasion two pretty sisters—who were waiting, to my surprise, for the delivery outside their house—teased me to the point of mortification. On the day before, a Sunday, I had ridden out with my mate, Bob, in the company of two girls from the same school and we had taken a spell beside a quiet and cool aqueduct to engage in some wondrous albeit fairly innocent petting. My first glimpse and touch of an almost naked female breast had evoked a complimentary but clumsy comment from me which was gleefully repeated verbatim by the pretty sisters.
Maybe I learned something about sisterhood then, or maybe not.
> Saturdays at the paper-selling corner were incredibly boring, and one day Marshy brought along an air rifle, which he had cut down with a hacksaw so he could conceal it between a sheaf of newspapers. In repeated acts of mindless vandalism we would shoot out the street light over the road every Saturday, for they’d replace the globe during the week. Once they put a bloke there to observe any wrongdoing, but we twigged and didn’t shoot the light out until after he’d gone home.
Anyway, back to Dad. One afternoon he drove back from the city in the big Chev Fleetmaster and spotted me selling papers. His face broke into a huge grin—he was so pleased to see me and obviously proud of me, his second son, selling papers to earn money for a new bike. But as he slowed and pulled into the kerb he scraped the beautiful mudguards of the car against the lamp-post. I was aghast.
‘Dad, Dad. You’ve hit the lamp-post!’
He was still grinning with delight at seeing me. ‘Don’t worry, son, that’s easily fixed.’
But I realised then that there was something wrong with my dad that wasn’t going to be easily fixed. Death and his funeral were not far away.
2
Rev heads
Victory enow for me
After Dad died we moved further out to suburban Reservoir, back to the new dream house where my parents had begun their married life together. My mother had left it to nurse her mother-in-law in Dad’s old and gloomy family house. It was now a longer haul up the hill from Northcote High School, a couple of miles further from the old house. I had my new bike by then, which had three-speed gears, but it was still hard work, particularly in winter when it was often raining and dark by the time we left the paper shop. The dynamo for the bike lights was an additional drag, so if there were no cars coming (on High Street, Preston, at 6.30 p.m.—those were the days!), I’d flip it off the tyre and put on a bit more speed. It was always good to get home and have a bowl of Scotch broth in front of the slow combustion stove while talking to Mum and the kids about the day’s activities.
I was not a good student, unlike my older brother, Ian, who was dux of Northcote High in Fifth and Sixth Form, two years ahead of me. I didn’t have his discipline or his ambition. I had jumped a form in primary school, doubtless for being a smartarse, so was always the youngest boy in my year, and can clearly remember in First Form heading off alone in the annual cross-country run for which I had trained fairly hard during lunchtimes and weekends. It was a handicap event and I was the only eleven-year-old in the school. Thus, embarrassingly, I had to set off alone thirty seconds ahead of the next age group. At the finish line an eternity later, the crowd was cheering for the Fifth and Sixth Formers who would be the winners. I came in fifth and that was more than pleasing to me but I was unnoticed by the crowd, even though I fell to the ground exhausted at the finish line. A kindly woman helped me up but the crowd continued to ignore me and cheered those who came in behind. But I didn’t care, I had tasted something close to victory: ’twas victory enow for me.
Academically, then, I dragged the chain and could never pass the two different maths subjects, usually getting 51 per cent for one and 49 per cent for the other. I just couldn’t get the hang of it, although later in life I had a job that demanded a mathematically dexterous brain, dealing with complex electrical circuitry; even winemaking calls for a bit of sums-in-the-head activity.
English expression and literature were my strong suits, due largely to my voracious appetite for books. Ian and I were reading the William books when our friends were reading Enid Blyton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Conan Doyle when others were reading about the air adventures of Biggles. This familiarity with literature coupled with a lively imagination meant 90s were my usual marks for those subjects. I often achieved 90s for French, too, not that I was any good at it but because the class average was abysmal.
One year the class maths genius, to his bewilderment, received 51 per cent for Maths One and 96 per cent for French. I, on the other hand, got 96 per cent for Maths One and 51 per cent for French. When I suggested to the teacher the possibility of a mistake, he told me that was impossible and to go back to my desk. Perhaps that was when I first discovered that all is not right with the world—lesson number whatever . . .
I become a tradesman
Brother Ian was off to university but the academically inferior Graeme was not. Dad had died by then and there wouldn’t have been the money in any case, even if I’d had the capacity and the ambition. It was to be a trade for me at the end of Fourth Form. Dad had expressed his ambition for me to become a draftsman and I must have taken that to heart for my skills at trade drawing were sufficient for the teacher to criticise me for using a ruler to do my lettering. I had to do some examples for him to demonstrate that it was, indeed, done freehand.
An uncle, who was advising my mother on my career, asked me which trade I would like to pursue and my response was very positively for carpentry, since by then I had learned, in the company of a school mate, respectable skills in the making of model aeroplanes. We made them in the winter and flew them in the summer. So I knew I liked to work with wood.
In those days an aeroplane kit consisted of the appropriate sheets and blocks of balsa wood and a plan marked with all the various struts and spars, which were traced onto the balsa wood and cut out with a razor blade. All the component pieces were gradually pinned and glued together. When they had properly set and dried, they were carefully assembled and the plane—clad in its diaphanous paper skin, with several coats of ‘dope’ to toughen it, and rubber bands and the propeller added—was ready to fly.
Our most ambitious plane, which had taken us months to build, was so successful that it flew to an unexpected height and smashed into an overhead high-tension powerline and was thus destroyed. But I’ve never forgotten the exhilaration as we watched it soar towards the heavens like a caged bird released—until its untimely demise, and I bet that Jim Linton, if he’s still alive, hasn’t either.
It transpired that there were no carpentry apprenticeships available in our suburb but there was an apprenticeship for an electrical mechanic. I’d never had a great rapport with electricity and didn’t like it very much. If the electric lights on my pushbike played up, my mate John would fix them. Anyway, on the morning of 6 January 1955, at the age of fifteen, the first day on which I could legally commence an apprenticeship, I was in the workshop of a local electrical contractor, my new employer, making up ‘drops’ (those pieces of electrical flex that attach the wires in the ceiling to the suspended light globe beneath) and wondering if brass was a conductor of electricity. However, within months I was confidently wiring up houses; it used to take about a day to wire one up and another day after the house was plastered and painted to ‘fit it off ’ (that is, install the switches, power points and switchboard).
The boss soon realised that he could drop me off at a job with the rolls of cable and the tools. These were all hand tools for there were no electric drills on the site. In fact, there was no electricity on the jobs at all, so we apprentices put on muscle fairly quickly as we laboured with the brace and bit, the stocks and dies to thread the pipes, and the little hand drills for the final small screws to finish the job.
It wasn’t long before the boss also realised that I could drive a car, so he bought himself a new Holden and I would set off at age fifteen in the old Holden and do my jobs while he would do his, or other things. I would work like a whirling dervish, have a quick lunch then, for a glorious hour or so, belt that poor Holden around the dirt roads beyond the housing estates where we worked. How I loved that car! It must have cost the boss a few bob in tyres and petrol but he didn’t complain. After all, he was paying me three pounds and fifteen shillings a week (for four days’ work, the fifth day of the week being spent at trade school), and was getting a house wired and fitted for less than two quid in labour costs.
The boss started wearing his good gold watch and smoking Du Maurier cigarettes, an upmarket brand, but it all came to an end when Mum found out ab
out the driving and dobbed him in to the Apprenticeship Commission. I’m not sure that I ever forgave her for that. Mr Anderson, the gruff but fair inspector of apprenticeships, had to find me another position, for it was decided that my boss had made himself unfit as an employer of apprentices.
So I was off to my next employer, an electrical contractor in Collingwood where they specialised in industrial installations and electric motor repairs. But this was not to be my last term of employment as a ‘sparky’—in fact, someone later pointed out that I had set some sort of record for having had more employers over the duration of my apprenticeship than any other apprentice in Melbourne, and they’d had to print an extra page and add it to the indenture document.
The termination of my employment at this firm came about in the following manner. After repairing a motor we would paint it—one colour for the internal windings, visible through the end covers, and another colour for the actual external housing. There was a traditional formula for this, one that I was carefully observing when the very elderly and obviously demented founder of the firm walked past me on the way back to the office with his steaming cup of hot water to assist the digestion of his lunch and told me that I had the colour scheme wrong. This I hotly denied, claiming that only two days ago he had personally explained the different colour combinations to me—namely, that grey motors had red windings and that black motors had grey windings. To the great entertainment of my fellow employees in the workshop, an argument ensued.