I’m feeling a mite peculiar. The house looked exactly the same. The bush didn’t, but it nevertheless pushed back into me the sense of pure and tangled adventure in which I seemed to mostly live, those days. Of course we age. We get old and we die. But how many of us regress like this, to the other side of the planet, to revisit ourselves at a distance of three decades and 12,000 miles? My head’s what, I don’t know, no; the feeling’s not in my head, it’s in my lungs. Creeping up into the pipes of my face.
We drive to the school. Higgy’s borrowed a car from the daughter of his sister, and her husband, Tommy, a lilac girly car with ‘Hot Shot’ written on the side. Three burly blokes inside it. What does he think we look like? I’m laughing. I put my bush-hat on and tie a bandanna around my neck just to look a little gayer. Think about buying a bushy fake moustache. We drive out to the old school and I go into reception where a nice lady, after I’ve explained to her what I’m doing there, tells me to come back later, after the kids have gone, which is understandable. The leathery green leaves of the plants, the prehistoric-looking ferns. I’m seeing these things again. The long sloping hill that leads up to the school; I remember my grandfather walking up that hill in the intense heat, dripping with sweat, carrying a bag full of ice-cold Coke to meet us after school.
I go to Wanneroo shops. There’s the hairdressers where Tony got his ear pierced. There used to be steps here with two thin parallel ramps up them for pushchairs; I would ride at them full pelt on my bike, shoot off them at the top. Only a few inches wide, these ramps, and steep, so, if your aim wasn’t perfect and speed not enough, you’d smash into the steps. They’ve been concreted over, now. The butcher’s shop at their crest is now a Cole’s supermarket. I went to that butcher’s with my grandad, who gave the butcher far too much of the unfamilar money; I corrected him, and the butcher told my grandad not to bring me with him, next time.
The supermarket where I won $1 on a scratchcard is still there. I bought an item for 99c and told the checkout lady to keep the change. I was punched in the nose outside these shops; I’d been winding a bigger boy up all day, throwing spiky seed-pods at him, poking fun. So he punched me. I bled profusely. He later turned up at my parent’s house, on his own, to offer an apology, after which he became a mate. Seems like I was punched in the nose a lot in Oz.
We drive out to Mullaloo Groyne, a spit of land that used to be linked to the mainland by a bridge, but has now been turned into an isthmus. We would fish from the groyne, watch the seals and porpoises swimming beneath the bridge. Tony caught a catfish, which stung him. We’d catch rock cod, fearsome things with giant jagged teeth; the first time Nick Macleod reeled one in, he screamed and dropped his rod. The arrangement of the rocks is exactly the same as it was. Contours, shapes, all as I recall. The abutting beach used to be a carpark with a shack which sold icecream. We’d run to it yelping over the hot sand and tarmac. Now there’s a green sward with trees and a basketball court and a surf club and a caff at which we eat Moroccan-spiced chicken burgers on a terrace overlooking the sea and drink Kilkenny beer. The waitress is Irish. Look where I am. Look what I am, and what I’m doing.
Back to the school. I return to reception, re-meet the lady I met earlier. First thing I do is ask her if she has any record of a Mrs Finkelstein. She checks and says no. Is there any way I can track her down? Again, no. Probably not. I think about ringing all the Finkelsteins in the phone directory. I’d love to see her again. Let her know how important she was to my development. I’ll never forget Mrs Finkelstein. Before this trip, I’d entertained thoughts of meeting her, buying her a meal, telling her that she made such an impression on the ten-year-old me that the forty-year-old me has travelled the planet just to tell her so. I’ve longed, always, to tell her so. I’ve never forgotten her. But it seems like I won’t be able to do that; seems like she’ll be impossible to track down. She’ll be in her late fifties now, early sixties. Might not want to be disturbed, even if I could find her. Might be dead. In my memory she’ll always be the way she was when I was ten.
The school is as I remember it, more or less. The assembly point was a square of tarmac beneath a roof, no walls, but now it’s enclosed and has a stage. I sit on that stage. The headmaster once gave the entire school detention, I can’t remember why, and we all had to sit under the roof until he allowed us to go. I absolutely hated it, but I did find a load of coins in the sand at the edge of the tarmac, which I surreptitiously pocketed. I remember the kangaroo, too, the huge kangaroo, bounding across the playing fields one lunch-time; the teachers screaming at the pupils to get inside, the panic and frantic delight, the huge and leaping beast. Parrots here, today, in the bushes and the trees. My classroom used to be split in two by a concertina divide, but now those two rooms are just one. It smells the same as it did. I breathe deeply in. What is that smell? Glue and carpet and whatever else. School-smell. Smell of the me I was.
There’s a row of stainless steel sinks attached to the outside of the classroom. The same sinks, unreplaced. How welcome they were on baking days. I bend at one and take a drink. A gap of three decades between two drinks of water.
Driving away from the school, down the coast road back into the city, a sadness creeps into me. No, it doesn’t creep – it blunders. It’s clumsy and abrupt and undeniable. I start to miss the younger me and mourn the death of him and mourn the gone years and I think of my grandfather, dead twenty years, and I think of Mrs Finkelstein and inexplicably I miss her with a sharp and sudden pain. Can you miss someone that you haven’t seen for thirty years? How? And I realise that I’m missing my girlfriend and I’m missing Wales and I’m missing my home and I feel very, very far away from where I want to be. I’m in the back of a lilac car on the Wanneroo Road into Perth and I’m full of yearning and empty holes. My grandfather; his laugh sounds in my ears. Mrs Finkelstein; the expression on her face when she saw what I was doing to the blowfly and the terrible sensation of my plummeting heart. I want to be home. On the other side of the planet, that’s where I long to be.
I will get drunk tonight, I think. I will drink to dead things, things that rot inside me and the world beyond my flesh, or of not rotting only then also resting under rich soil and pretty flowers and never to re-awaken in the forms in which I loved them, still love them. That’s how I feel, suddenly, on the northern outskirts of what is often referred to as the most isolated city on earth. Given that, and the fact that this place was once my home a long time ago, then I should’ve really found the correlative to my mood; if I was going to feel at home anywhere, at this moment, in this mood, then it should be here. But it isn’t. I feel abandoned and estranged within this skin.
We stop at Trig Beach. I go down to the rocks on the foreshore and sit on them and they look the same as they did all those years ago and the waves come in just the same, too. I find myself looking, outlandishly, for signs of familiarity concerning memory; for footprints of the younger me in the sand, for a sandcastle I might’ve made over a quarter of a century ago. As if the waves haven’t erased every final trace. I smoke a cigarette and bury the butt deep in the wet sand, so it’ll remain there longer, but that too has probably gone out to sea by the time I’m back in the car. Futile gesture anyway.
I don’t hear the words that I speak on the short journey back to Fremantle. I know I’m talking, but I don’t quite grasp what I’m saying. Back in my room at Rosie O’Grady’s pub I have a shower and then walk around the town; a second-hand bookshop has some of my books on its shelves, dog-eared and well-thumbed, evidently read several times over. I should be pleased by this. I speak to the girl and she tells me that that writer’s books are popular; his novels bounce off and back to the shelves regularly. I should be pleased by this. I return to Rosie O’Grady’s and start to drink. Higgy and Tony pick me up, we drive out to Higgy’s sister’s house, where she and Tommy have cooked a huge and superb roast dinner. After weeks of pies and clingfilmed sarnies, this food is heavenly. The wine goes down quickly and in great quantities.
There’s me, Higgy, his brother Jimmy, Tom, Tom Jr, Higgy’s sister Maggie, Tony, and a feller called Phil. I remember how, as a child, I would observe British people in Oz trying to export their culture, which meant full turkey dinners on a sweltering Christmas Day. And pud and custard. In forty-four degree heat. Ridiculous, But this food is now working very well on me and I’m necking wine by the bottle. We talk about Wales; Phil, a young Englishman, asks if I’ve ever been to Caldy Island. Not since I was a kid, I say. He tells me about the huge funfair there, the Ferris wheel and dodgems. Tony and I laugh.
–That’s Barry Island, yer dozy bastard! Caldey Island’s a monastery!
Hilarity. I picture monks on the waltzers. Dressed in their habits carrying goldfish in plastic bags.
I sleep in the van, outside on the drive, in the drunken stupor I had every intention of reaching, after Wanneroo, the school, Trig Beach, everything. When I wake, I lie there for a while, wrapped in my sleeping-bag, waiting for some indication of how I feel. Still sad? I don’t know. I’m just alive. Hungover and alive. I get out and go into the house.
THEN
On December 17th, they move into a new house – 8 Elizabeth Road, in the suburb of Wanneroo. There begins to tickle and scratch inside the boy a thing which, in later years and after it has grown, adults will refer to as a ‘feistiness’, or a ‘delinquency’. He likes pulling wheelies on his Oddball bike. He gets into fights, during one of which he has his nose bloodied at the local shops. Another he arranges with a boy called Neil Bennett, in the gardens of the council offices after school; they desultorily shove each other for a bit as other boys watch and then just wander away from each other. A fried chicken franchise is opened in the shopping centre. The boy loves the food from there. He always will, even after he discovers how bad, verging on the poisonous, it is.
The father’s father visits and the children are overjoyed. They adore their grandfather (the mother’s father died ten days before the eldest child, Tony, was born). He takes them fishing to Mullaloo Groyne; such creatures they dredge from the sea. The catfish, the rock cod. Some men who they don’t know catch a small shark and cut it open and a baby shark falls out; our boy doesn’t witness this, but is told about it by his brother, and is deeply upset. It haunts his dreams. At the groyne they buy a dead barracuda off another fisherman and take it back to the boy’s mother who shrieks when she sees it. One day, Tony casts and a gull takes the bait in mid-air. Frantic flapping and squawking and awful gurgling. The grandfather reels it in and slowly and gently releases the hook and the bird flies away.
They have friends, Gary and Darren. Their father is called Roger, and is from Corby, their mother is Scottish and part-albino. They have a swimming pool in their garden. Gary catches a scorpion and nails it to a plank of wood and ants eat its insides. The boy studies the ants, marvels at how he can see them moving like little scurrying ghosts inside the eaten-out carapace.
The boy also has a new sister. She is tiny. She’s born on January 26th, which is Australia Day, 1977, at Subiako King Edward Hospital. 6 lb 4 oz. She is doted on. A photograph is taken; the grandfather, the dad, the children, the baby Nicola. All these generations so many thousands of miles away from their home excepting the newest, whose home is here. This is where she enters the world.
School: The boy is in Goolelal House. He does quite well at the subjects he likes, and atrociously in those he doesn’t. He wins awards; a merit award for ‘outstanding creative work in reading’, the wording of which puzzles him even then, although the irony probably passes him by. The certificate is stamped with an angelic choirboy being blessed. Another award is given to him because ‘his brain has worked overtime to achieve well in: Contract 54 points!’ The accompanying drawing here is an odd one of a Dennis the Menace type character looking mischievous. What was ‘Contract’? ‘Inspiration’ is a set task of a morning; the pupils are given a small blank booklet and asked to fill it with a story or essay or poem or whatever on a given theme. Marks are given out of three. The boy almost always attains full marks. He likes his teacher. She is called Mrs Finkelstein, she is young, pretty, and given to wearing, in the intense heat, white gossamer dresses which, in a sunbeam, opaquely reveal her underwear and bodily curves. The boy likes looking at her. He’s aware that he regards her in a very different way to that in which he regards, say, the dinner-ladies, but he doesn’t know why or what this means, only that when he looks at Mrs Finkelstein he feels a peculiar fluttering sensation somewhere inside his lower body. He looks at her a lot. Sometimes he finds himself inventing questions just so he can approach her desk and ask her and stand close to her and converse with her and smell her and make her smile. He’s also, like the other children, the boys especially, reached an age where he’s exploring notions of power; to this end, many children keep pet blowflies. They’ll catch a drowsy blowfly and tie some cotton around its thorax and make of it a flying pet, tethered, on a cotton leash. When they grow bored they pull the knot tight and the fly falls in half. One day, the boy grows infatuated with his power over the blowflies and he pulls the wings off one and, as it scampers across his desk, tries to stab it with a compass. Absorbed in doing this, he is shocked to hear a gasp above him and he looks up and sees Mrs Finkelstein and in that instant he knows he’ll never forget the expression on her face. I’m very disappointed in you, she says. That’s sadistic. And if you don’t know what that means, go and look it up. I thought better of you. She crushes the crippled fly in a tissue and throws it in the bin and the boy, his face burning with shame, goes over to the little reference library corner and takes down a dictionary and flicks to the S section. Looks up ‘sadistic’. Reads: ‘the gaining of pleasure, sometimes sexual, from the suffering of others’. There is a furnace in his face. His heart, wet and heavy like mud, plunges into his feet. That she should think that of him. That she should see that in him. The shame is utter. He’ll never forget those words, this moment, her expression. Yet from such moments we grow and learn, and it is at this moment that the boy begins to become the man who will revisit this room thirty years later. From this moment on, the boy will understand the need to protect the vulnerable and the weak and to execrate the bully. There are times to come when he will fail in this, of course, and make mistakes, and, for a multitude of reasons, become for an instant a bully himself, but he’ll forever recall the fly and the shame and Mrs Finkelstein’s expression and the sensations of self-loathing which set his face and breast ablaze and that will be enough to steer and guide him away from the darker rewards of influence. This is all to come. Here, now, he tries to make amends with his teacher by being an exceptionally good pupil for her, by writing stories that entertain her and by looking after the weaker members of the class, and he makes amends with himself by surrendering to his wonder at nature and by becoming a member of the Western Australia Gould League, whose membership card reads:
GOULD LEAGUE PLEDGE
‘I promise I will protect all birds,
other animals and plants, except
those that are harmful, and I will not
collect birds’ eggs.’ Certificate of Membership
for 1977
Awarded to N Griffiths
C.F.H. Jenkins, M.A., President
Mrs. F. Sparkes, Secretary
He’ll keep this card forever. The organisation has a code, too, to which members must pledge to adhere, and which reads:
THE GOULD LEAGUER’S CODE
(a) I will learn and keep all wildlife protection laws.
(b) I will keep the Gould League Promise.
(c) I will not pick wild flowers except for study purposes.
(d) I will not destroy trees or plants unnecessarily.
(e) I will do my best at all times to prevent bushfires.
(f) I will obey the rules for the keeping of pets.
(g) I will leave the bush as tidy as I found it.
The last point puzzles him a bit; the bush he knows, the patch of it at the end of his road, could never be describe
d as ‘tidy’. It is chaotic and crazed and that’s why he likes it. It contains a burnt out tree with a hollow in its trunk against which he leans branches to make a den, in which he sleeps for a couple of days after reading a book called My Side of the Mountain, about a boy who runs away from home into the American wilderness and survives by building his own shelter and growing his own food etc. The fictional boy adopts a raccoon as a pet; the real boy adopts a grasshopper, which whirs away from him the first time he opens the matchbox. The fictional boy survives, at first, on hedgerow and woodland salads; the real boy eats a flower and has to spend a day in the school sickbay, throwing up (the headmaster is very amused at the boy’s declaration that he thought the flower was ‘quite edible’). The fictional boy roasts a trap-caught possum over a fire; our boy cooks some sausages in the aboriginal way, eats them half-raw and, again, is violently sick. When he’s found, the fictional boy is healthy, muscular, almost a man; the real boy, when he returns home to his worried-sick parents, is dirty, bedraggled, upset, stippled with ticks and crusted in crap and vomit. But he thinks he spotted a platypus in the billabong in the bush and a big part of him remains pleased with that, above all else.
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