by Robert Drewe
It was at that moment, just before they decided to open their jaws and devour me, that I took control of the situation. No matter where I was, even if I was outside in the garden, I lay down, closed my eyes and kept very still. I didn’t blink or move a muscle. I played possum. I said to myself: I am a dry twig. I am a cold rock. I am dull grass. And it worked. The last thing I’d remember before I sent myself to sleep was the lions sniffing my body in bewilderment.
Then I’d wake, my heart thudding, lying in my actual bed in the sleep-out. I’d escaped again.
Lying awake at dawn in the filtered green light of the mulberry tree, I could hear a lion roaring across the river. At this quiet hour the river carried the sounds of hunger and frustration from the South Perth Zoo across the glassy estuary to me in my sleep-out on the farthest bank. Beside my cheek the mulberry branches rustled against the fly-wire. The lion kept up its rhythmic moaning cough until it faded into the waking hum of the day.
My lion anxiety affected this new pleasure I’d discovered: going to the pictures. I loved the Saturday children’s matinees at the local movie theatre, but there was a price to pay beyond the admission charged by Mr Palmer, the proprietor. I was scared of the MGM lion.
The start of any film by Metro Goldwyn Mayer had my heart beating faster. The afternoon’s main feature stood a good chance of being an MGM film, and it was always preceded by three or four MGM Tom and Jerry cartoons. That was a lot of lions. I spent a great deal of time ducking down in my seat or pretending I’d dropped the money for my OK Peanut Bar on the floor. Of course I didn’t let on to anyone that I was scared of Leo the Lion. But only when the trademark stopped roaring, turned into silent profile and faded into the opening credits could I begin to relax and enjoy myself.
But not fully. A source of general anxiety was Mr Palmer himself. To all the local boys he was Dalkeith’s most important and frightening citizen. Running the picture theatre was an awesome privilege. Mr Palmer took it very seriously, at least on Saturday afternoons.
During his evening – adult – sessions he was a cordial host. On Saturday afternoons, however, his mood ranged from stern to ferocious. He never relaxed. Every week before starting the matinee he stood in front of the screen, blew on a silver whistle, issued dire threats and declared his rules. No whistling or catcalling, no feet on the seats, no throwing sweets, no changing seats. Then, glowering along each row, as if committing the face of every boy to memory, he strode to the back of the theatre and grudgingly signalled the projectionist to begin.
The cacophony of whistles and cheers that greeted the lights going down was thrilling in its crazy courage. Another surge of joyful defiance greeted the first cartoon. (This was the cue for me to stop whistling and duck down to avoid the lion.) Depending on Mr Palmer’s degree of surprise at this weekly occurrence, he’d either blow several furious bursts on his whistle and threaten us again, or stop the film, turn the lights up and toss out four or five suspected catcallers.
A whispery hubbub followed this disturbing turn of events. For minutes there was a restless stalemate. Eventually both audience and proprietor subsided enough for the matinee to begin. For the rest of the afternoon Mr Palmer prowled the aisles, matching whistles with us, daring us to challenge the rules and cheer at the exciting bits or groan at the love scenes, raging at us while his torch beam sought the most piercing whistlers, the most abject groaners, the feet-on-the-seats heroes.
It was hard to completely give yourself over to Abbott and Costello, or Jeff Chandler as Cochise, the gallant Apache leader, in Broken Arrow, when Mr Palmer could materialise beside you, blow his whistle in your ear, shine his torch in your face, and growl, ‘Name, sonny?’ I loved the pictures but I always reeled out into the sunlight with a headache.
Mr Palmer resembled the high-waisted actor Buster Crabbe, whose ancient serials he was still screening. Buster Crabbe was a former American sports star but he made us snigger because in his tight safari shirts and interplanetary spacewear he displayed what we called ‘bosoms’.
Bosoms or no bosoms, he had the hero profession sewn up. One Saturday he’d be on the screen playing Jungle Jim, the next, Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Put a snug shirt on him and he was in business. Most Saturdays you were sure of seeing Buster Crabbe jiggling his way through some cliffhanger or other. He even played Tarzan a couple of times but we were loyal to Johnny Weissmuller and weren’t interested. We didn’t like the idea of seeing him with his shirt off.
Mr Palmer didn’t like us laughing at Buster Crabbe’s bosoms either.
We were loyal to Johnny Weissmuller but we permitted Lex Barker to play Tarzan as well. I was a big Tarzan fan. Not a Tarzan film went by when Tarzan wasn’t pounced on by an angry lion or two in my full view. Strangely, while I hid from the trademark lion at the start of MGM’s Tarzan pictures, once the film got going I could boldly face every pouncing, slavering lion they threw at him – and at me. Actually, they helped me over my problem. Perhaps because Tarzan quickly despatched them. They looked like moth-eaten stuffed lions in no time.
On the weekdays following each Tarzan matinee I’d hurry home from school, take off my clothes and put on my school PE shorts, as the garment most approximating Tarzan’s loincloth. Then I’d pad around to Noeleen Ivimey’s house, climb into the jacaranda tree in her back yard and commence to beat my chest and give the Tarzan jungle cry.
Eventually Noeleen would appear at her laundry door wearing her swimming costume and with a monkey puppet on one hand. She would join me in the jacaranda, and we’d pat the monkey, re-enact the previous Saturday’s film and indulge in a ‘Me, Jane’, ‘You, Tarzan’ domestic routine for a while, until, as if at some silent signal, we’d jettison the monkey, climb down from the tree and assume the game’s next positions.
My position was the fence on one side of the yard, hers the other. Between us stretched the Congo in all its lion-infested savagery. Calling each other’s name, arms outflung, oblivious to vines, rivers and wild beasts, Tarzan and Jane would run through the jungle towards each other, until they met in the middle with a jarring impact and kissed on the mouth.
This stage of the Tarzan game, the urgent running at each other and the kissing, was vital to our plot. I found it strangely exciting – yet not quite as thrilling as I’d anticipated. The movies had made me expect something more of kissing on the mouth. Although honour demanded that I groan at film stars’ love scenes, I didn’t hate them at all. They just made me curious. I wondered whether Noeleen and I were romancing properly. Maybe you needed to be older than nine. I thought we should be running faster at each other, but we could hardly collide with any more force than we were already. Even at our present speeds we were getting headaches and bleeding lips.
Nevertheless I would have happily played our secret Tarzan game every day if Noeleen hadn’t spilled the beans. She gave Rosalie France the details. That was embarrassing enough. But Noeleen didn’t mention Tarzan. She said our game was called Sophisticated Lady. My ears burned just thinking about it. If Jane was the point of the game I didn’t want to play it any more.
For the first time I began to notice the way my parents behaved in the outside world and the way we lived together. Against the brighter, lighter background they seemed to stand out more.
My mother had more rules than before. In the summer they were mostly to do with avoiding polio. Stay away from crowds. Don’t swim in the river. Don’t eat shop-handled pies, hamburgers, fish and chips or sandwiches. Don’t touch things if you don’t know where they’ve been. Try not to handle coins. Don’t breathe strangers’ breath on the bus. These were hard ones.
The worst, however, under the no-crowds rule, was her ban on films. I could hardly bear it. Every Saturday Nick Howell sauntered off to the matinee shaking his head at my plight. Every week he generously dropped in on his way home to tell me why it was the most bloodthirsty or the funniest movie ever made. The memory made him shiver in wonder or brought tears of laughter. ‘You would’ve loved it!’ he insi
sted. He seemed to be resisting polio very effectively. He acted out The Lawless Breed and Seminole and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man with such relish I wouldn’t have minded his legs withering and his arms going floppy then and there.
Polio completely changed my mother’s attitude to the outdoors. Polio took over from boiling brain. Now she said all the time, ‘Go outside and get some fresh air,’ although ‘outside’ could be a hundred degrees. Even when the regular summer polio epidemics waned, the cinema ban wasn’t lifted so much as modified. Now I was allowed back, but only every second Saturday. She didn’t say why, but I presumed she thought it was halving my polio chances.
It was torture watching the trailer for the next week’s film, then listening to my friends excitedly anticipating it all week. The alternate-week rule ruined movie serials for me forever. That was the end of Superman, Batman, Hopalong Cassidy and Buck Rogers. Buster Crabbe was history.
My mother had more rules than before, but my father’s behaviour was like a different person’s. He was much more the boss. She told me he was now a big fish in a small pond. He seemed to me to be one of the people running Western Australia. When they struck oil in the north-west at Exmouth Gulf he was so excited I thought he’d won the lottery.
Considering he was only home for a couple of waking hours in the morning and evening he made his presence felt more. Everything about him was more. His voice and laugh were louder, his opinions firmer and his anger greater. You even had to wait longer in the morning before you could face going into the bathroom after him.
For the first time I noticed his mysterious morning ritual. It began with him locking the bathroom door and immediately flushing the toilet. Then he urgently tore up sheet after sheet of toilet paper. The tearing sound went on for so long it reminded me of the nesting frenzy of Ian Hodge’s ferrets. He tore up enough paper to wallpaper the room. He had to be lining the seat before he sat down. He must be giving himself a cushion of paper a foot high, I thought. But who else sat there? Only our family. He was protecting himself against the germs of his wife and children, shielding himself against the tender bottoms of his own babies! I was offended on behalf of us all.
I looked at my mother. She shrugged. ‘It’s something to do with the war,’ she said.
He also seemed to have acquired new sayings for the new place and his new job. He said for crying out loud! when he was getting agitated and by the same token when he was disagreeing with someone but wanted to appear reasonable. If someone had some knowledge, experience or skill, they were a full bottle. He was a full bottle on the rubber industry and the business world. He was also a full bottle on company behaviour and the unfairness of being passed over.
He never swore in front of us, but where other men with hurt feelings might respond with curses, he had an odd retort when he felt hardly done by or criticised. He delivered this peculiar saying with a fierce smile. It stung and then it stuck in your mind like the worst swearing.
Why don’t you go and dip your left eye in lukewarm fig jam?
When he directed his fig-jam reply at someone else it sounded weird but harmless enough. The first time he said it to me it still seemed silly but it didn’t make me laugh. It froze me in my tracks and it made me feel strange. I wondered if it was what the Baptists said instead of cursing.
It was dawning on me that my parents each had two names to suit their two personalities. There was Roy or Royce, and there was Dorothy or Dot.
My father’s name was Royce but he liked Roy. It was chummier and fitted the business world. The only ones who called him the longer Royce – his family in Melbourne – also called my mother the shorter, more common, Dot. On the other hand, my mother’s family had always called her Dorothy, which she preferred.
He looked like a Roy. He gave a distinctive Roy whistle, Whee-whew – like a wolf whistle with a shorter final note – when he came in the door each evening. We all whistled back at him, so there were these friendly Whee-whews coming at him from various rooms. When I was younger I liked to meet him before the whistle. I’d wait for him at the gate. He’d stop the Customline and I’d get in and sit on his knees and steer it into the garage.
He was never more a Roy than when he was speaking funny German after dinner, all guttural and sputtery, pretending to be Hitler in a fit. He was very much a Roy, too, when we persuaded him to play ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ on the harmonica or ‘I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover’ on the ukelele. We loved these rare boisterous times. Roy suited the gap in his front teeth, his loud laugh, sandy moustache and high-domed head. Roy was a full bottle on male games – poker, pontoon and punting. Roy patiently let our new baby sister, Janet, play hairdressers with his sparse locks. He didn’t complain when she brushed so hard over the skin of his head that it left scratches. She was the apple of his eye.
Roy called his workshop under the house the Doghouse. Descending into the Doghouse after Sunday lunch, Roy’s catch-cry was, ‘Help your mother with the washing-up.’ Emerging again, he impressed us with his carpentry: his bookcases, homework desks and cupboards. Like the wicked spin of his table-tennis serve, his eye for darts and carpet bowls, this skill seemed to arrive from nowhere.
Roy recalled for us boyish motorbike adventures in England. Roy had tapped rubber trees in Malaya. Roy had broken low-flying regulations to buzz my mother’s house and flash romantic messages to her while in pilot training. Roy had kept a pet sugar-glider possum in New Guinea. Roy talked about his possum but was quiet about the risks of being a bomber pilot in the New Guinea Highlands. In photos from the war zone he stood amongst feathered tribesmen and bare-breasted women cuddling piglets. He wore a jaunty cap, shorts, no shirt, a handlebar moustache and a pistol on his belt. The Flight-Lieutenant posing in front of his Boston Bomber was thin and brown. Dashing Roy.
Where Roy was most at home was in Saturday saloon bars with horseraces booming on the radio. Roy left me in the car with the Shell road map and Ford service manual while he strolled whistling into the din. The pilot relaxing after a tough sortie.
I became familiar with the asphalt carparks of many suburban pubs. Dalkeith’s boundaries were the Nedlands Park Hotel, with its mysterious sign, Biergarten, and the Continental Hotel (‘Mine Host Happy Harry Ward’). But I also knew the carparks of the Ocean Beach, Highway, Captain Stirling, Mosman Park, Brighton and Cottesloe hotels, even the Raffles across the river. Most of the Saturday carparks had views of glinting water – the river, the ocean, yachts and joyful swimmers. Slumped on the car seat, I watched excited children run by the car, taking short cuts across the carpark and through the stacked beer kegs, yelping at the hot asphalt underfoot, hurrying through the heat mirage to the water.
Roy called going into pubs ‘doing business’. He’d say, ‘Just going to see a man about a dog. I’ll only be a minute.’ He meant an hour or two. He brought out glasses of raspberry lemonade. It wasn’t too bad – he parked me in the shade.
We still had to watch ourselves, and were careful not to disagree with him, but it was usually all right when he was Roy. The one to look out for was Royce. Royce was Roy when agitated.
Royce came home late and brittle. (‘Oh, no!’ we’d whisper. ‘Whisky!’) The Dewar’s made him glittery and cool. Royce waited for an affront – but not for long – so he could let loose. Usually he found one in her silence. Then, with relief, it seemed, he took offence and huffed and stamped around the house while Billy and I lay low.
His specialty was indignantly departing rooms, then returning and leaving again, and slamming doors so hard that sand ran down the walls. The area of his agitated comings-and-goings would quickly expand, first the room, then the house, and eventually the district, as he leapt into the Customline in high dudgeon and sped off with tyres squealing for a circuit of the suburb, thinking up new grievances for his return – and departure again.
I didn’t block my ears. I strained to hear the Royce voice in the night. It made me more unsettled than scared, like a bad dream. I quickly r
ecognised the pattern: his late and jovial homecoming, her silence, his reaction, the stray word that became an argument, the bitter fight and the second, more savage, silence – the pause after some ultimate insult to his dignity. In this vacuum, while I tried to listen, my breaths became shallow sips of air. There! The slap, the running feet, the slamming bedroom door. I could go to sleep.
She looked both Dorothy and Dot to me – a Dorothy indoors, outdoors very much a Dot. Dorothy was the woman, the wife, the suburban mother, the Mrs Dunlop at the business functions. At breakfast, the silent one at the stove. Two thousand miles from home. Cooking but not eating. Who’d been crying.
In Dorothy mood she murmured to a friend on the telephone: ‘… Yet he’s never let a night go past when he hasn’t put his arm around me when we go to sleep.’ Overhearing this surprised me, considering the row the night before, but it made me feel better to hear it.
I didn’t know why she favoured Dorothy to Dot. Dorothy was the unsettled woman; Dot was the girl. Small, dark-haired, very tanned now, Dot ran everywhere. (Sprinting along the shore, she could easily catch me.) Dot made many friends; West Australians were fond of her and Dot loved Perth. Dot swam. Dot cartwheeled on the beach and did handstands. Dot had decided not to fear the sun; she was brown year-round. In the sandy landscape she was a busy little speck.
BUMPERS
By the time my family had dug its own hollow in the dunes and settled into what everyone called the West Australian Way of Life, a certainty had come into my own life. Every Christmas I received a pair of Dunlop Bumpers. Every Christmas Eve I went to sleep knowing the morning would bring the next size in Bumpers, and it did.