John was the only one of us who was not happy about Reg coming into our lives and he made sure we all knew about it. He would insult Reg and Mum to their faces and behind their backs. He refused to do anything they said and tried his best to disrupt our lives whenever he could. John wanted us all to be back together with Mum and Dad and be happy but I think he knew that could never happen.
Dad had always been John’s hero and John had always been my dad’s number one son. John worshipped Dad and the ground he walked on. None of us could say a bad word about him, no one could, unless they wanted to fight John. As much as Dad could do no wrong, it seemed Reg could do no right in John’s eyes. When we moved in with Reg, John went and lived with my dad not far from us in Semaphore.
They shared a little rundown one-bedroom flat that wasn’t really fit for a dog. The flat was a hovel and Dad was out of control. I didn’t spend much time with them at this apartment – it was cold and dirty and I would always want to leave as soon as I could. I didn’t want to go back to the horror story of a life that we had been living before. Dad knew it. When I say Dad was out of control I mean he was falling apart. He was depressed and drinking huge amounts of booze and hardly eating. But John stayed right by his side, caring for him and cleaning up after he’d passed out. John loved him so much and it was killing him to watch Dad descend to new lows. But it would all change for the two of them very soon.
Dad used to bring John to see us every couple of days and leave him with us for a few hours. John would tell us, ‘Things are great now. Dad and me are livin’ the dream. No one to answer to. We do whatever we want.’ None of us really believed him though. He was looking skinny and pale and he always seemed a bit sick. We were worried about him.
‘Dad and me are best mates.’ We believed him when he said that. We knew how much they loved each other. But he wasn’t grown up enough to help Dad sort out his life. Dad talked him into staying with us for a few days while he found out about a job. I was out on the front lawn when Dad and John pulled up in a cab.
‘See you later, Dad,’ he shouted as he jumped out of the cab, as happy as could be. He walked across the grass towards me. Next thing John turned quickly around to the cab as it drove away. I could see Dad crying in the back seat, looking at John as he left. John broke down; he knew he wouldn’t see his dad again and he ran down the road after the cab but it was gone.
We didn’t see Dad for about fourteen years after that and that really took its toll on John. I don’t think he has ever recovered. He had to stay with us and he made life as miserable as he could for Mum and Reg. He wouldn’t go to school and he wouldn’t get a job, he spent his life making their lives a living hell. Of course that had a profound effect on the rest of us kids too. Our perfect new life started to unravel and slowly our hopes drained away.
Reg and Mum tried to make John lift his game and get a job but he fought them every step of the way. Mum would get him out of bed whenever she could.
‘Right, up ye get. If you’re gonnae stay wi’ us you’re gonnae have tae learn tae carry yer weight,’ Mum barked at him like a sergeant major one day, but John didn’t respond to that kind of encouragement.
‘Come on, John lad. This is a family and we all need to do our bit to make things work. You’ve got to be a good example to your young brothers and sisters,’ Reg pleaded, trying to appeal to John’s sense of the right thing to do.
But John didn’t have one. ‘Leave me alone. I’m tryin’ tae get some sleep.’
‘If you don’t get oot of that bed I’m gonnae fuckin’ belt ye.’ Mum would try, getting more extreme.
‘Yeah. I’m really scared now. Just fuck off and shut the door.’
‘Come on, John, do the right thing by your mum. She’s trying really hard. Please, son.’
‘I’m not your son and if you don’t like it I’ll move out.’
Mum pushed him and badgered him until he appeared to give up.
‘Okay, shut the door and I’ll get up and look for a job.’
‘Good boy, I’ll put the kettle on,’ Reg said, thinking he had got through to him, and rushed off to make him breakfast before he left to go to work himself.
Mum went back to bed and continued shouting out orders to John. ‘I cannae hear ye. You’d better be up or you’re gonnae get it.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m up.’
John was still in bed but he had his foot out from under the covers, banging it on the floor, pretending he was walking around. This worked for a while until Mum caught on. Then she burst through the door with a bucket of water and threw it all over him. Unfortunately, we shared a room so this meant I was caught in the crossfire and ended up wet too. Then she walked back to her room, cursing and crying with frustration. John laughed, found a corner of the bed that was dry, curled up and went back to sleep. Reg went to work, disappointed in him, and John got out of bed after noon and went out to see his mates.
I didn’t like the way he behaved but I took note of how he got to do whatever he wanted. I didn’t start to act like him straight away but I got there eventually.
The time came for us to meet the rest of Reg’s family and Mum started to get nervous. Things seemed to change overnight.
Mum always had an inferiority complex. She started saying, ‘They’ll be toffs. They’re gonnae look down on us. We’re different tae them.’
She was sure that people only had to look at us and they would know we were no good. But we had to go to Reg’s young brother Tom’s twenty-first birthday party, no matter how weird Mum felt.
‘It’s what families do, love,’ Reg said as nicely as he could. ‘Well, they do in Australia anyway. Maybe it’s different where you came from but here, we’ve got to support our families.’
I began to worry again. Worry it would all go wrong and we would end up back where we started. We didn’t deserve a good life. We were losers, just like Mum feared, and we would end up in the gutter with the rest of the trash where we belonged.
Mum got more and more edgy as the party grew closer. She picked a few fights with Reg but he ignored her. When we were alone I asked him about it and he said, ‘Don’t worry love, it’s just like water off a duck’s back to me. Your mum has had a tough life and gets a bit stressed sometimes. She doesn’t mean to start fights.’
My dad would have killed her by this point so this was a whole new world to me. How could he be so patient? Not only that, he seemed to be trying to teach me about patience and how to be a good person too. Reg took the time to explain things. It was hard to take at first, but it got easier the longer we were together – until much later, when I stopped listening.
Reg had lived with his family at 74 Wellington Street in Alberton until he met my mum. The party was at his mum’s house – the house he was born in and would later want to die in. So we got dressed up in our best new clothes that Reg and Mum had bought for us so we would look good when we met the family.
Mum told us, ‘Be on your best behaviour or I’ll belt you. They’re gonnae look doon their noses at us as soon as they meet us. So don’t give them any excuses. And you John, don’t you start any trouble, or else.’ John was a bit of a hoodlum by this point.
Reg tried his best to reassure her that everything would be all right. But she was on guard and wasn’t in a good frame of mind to go anywhere, never mind to meet the in-laws. We were worried that things would go wrong before we had even left the house. It was like she was willing something to happen. But off we went. I think things started to get strained between her and Reg on the way but we carried on regardless.
The family and the guests were an unusual group, especially to a bunch of kids from Elizabeth. We had not really socialised at all outside of our Scottish friends. Australians seemed to be a different thing altogether. Some of the men wore badly fitting suits that smelled of mothballs, like they’d been dragged out of the cupboard that morning. I got the impression that these people didn’t dress up so often. These were going-out clothes and they mustn�
�t have gone out very much: the same clothes were dragged out for all special occasions, a twenty-first or a wedding or even a funeral. Others wore jeans with white shirts tucked quickly in and ties with loose knots that were tied too short. They weren’t stylish at all. These people were not like Mum and Dad’s old Scottish friends, who dressed up to go out on a Saturday night. They always wanted to look good, even when they got arrested.
We walked into the house and there on the table were all kinds of cakes and biscuits. I’d never seen so many before. Lamingtons and cupcakes. Chocolate sponges and trays of sandwiches. Curried egg and ham, cheese and tomato. These were not the things that were eaten at Scottish parties. The place smelled different from the homes I had been to in the past. It smelled Australian I guess, filled with the smell of Australian food. The women all sat inside the house and the men were out the back, down near the shed where they had set up a keg. If anyone set up a keg at a Scottish party, they were begging for a fight and it wouldn’t take long until our family started one.
The guests were a mix of blokes who worked at Kelvinator and bikies trying to look their best for their mate’s party. The only bikies we saw in Elizabeth were animals, so the whole family was on guard, waiting for trouble to start.
The women were dressed very conservatively compared to Mum’s mates. There were no plunging necklines or hip-hugging dresses. Floral patterns adorned dresses that looked like the women had made them themselves.
The language was different too. There was not another British accent to be heard anywhere. Their accents were nasal sounding and slightly coarse. The coarseness didn’t bother us but the sound of the voices was like fingernails on a blackboard to my Mum. She looked like a fish out of water – not wanting to sit in the house with the women and not feeling comfortable enough to go out to the yard with the men. They all seemed to be drinking beer. Some of the women mixed it with lemonade to act a little more ladylike but most just drank it by the schooner glass full. Mum would have killed for a whisky but I’m sure she was too uncomfortable to ask.
‘Can I get you a drink love?’ Reg asked her, trying to break the ice.
‘No, I don’t drink. You know that Reg,’ she said, just loud enough for the other women to hear. She sounded like she had a plum stuck in her mouth, trying to be as posh as possible.
‘Come on love, it’s a party. I might even have a shandy myself.’
‘No, I’ll be fine, thank you.’
I looked around the party and realised that we didn’t fit in there. We were trouble waiting to happen.
John, my brother, was sixteen or seventeen by this time. He was a bit of a mod and was dressed in a light salmon-coloured suit and platform shoes about four inches high. He couldn’t have worn anything more inappropriate for the company. The bikies wanted to kill him as soon as they saw him. I think that he wanted to kill them as soon as he arrived at the party too. So the whole thing was like a time-bomb, ticking, waiting to blow.
John was a real animal and probably could have cleaned up most of them but he had been warned to be good. So he didn’t retaliate when they started making snide remarks every time he walked past. If he went to get a drink one of them would make a comment.
‘Nice suit . . . do they make them for men?’
He just ignored them and kept walking. It must have been hard for him but he had been told. Well, it was all going well. That is, until my mum overheard them talking about him and all hell broke loose. She walked up to this big guy in a leather jacket and stood in front of him. Her head came up to his chest and he smiled at her in a condescending sort of way.
‘What’s wrong, lady?’
We felt a bit sorry for the poor guy because we knew what he was in for and he didn’t. Next thing she jumped up and headbutted him on the nose, knocking him to the ground in a pool of blood. Then she turned to attack his other poor bikie friends. She was in full fight or flight mode and nothing could stop her. She turned on Tom’s fiancée and hit her, then went for the rest of the family.
‘She’s fucking crazy,’ I heard someone say as the party came to a grinding halt and we left. They were whispering and pointing at us as we walked out and onto the street. One of Tom’s friends, a guy named Tooley – who I will tell you more about later – helped us get out of the place. I’m still not sure if he was helping us or them. Either way it was time to leave.
Out on the street we were being dragged away with Mum screaming obscenities at Reg. ‘Your fuckin’ family are a pack o’ pigs. How dare they talk aboot ma kids!’
My whole world just flashed back to Scotland and being dragged outside in the snow. Life was imploding around us as we walked to find a bus to get away from there.
Reg came running after us, calling out to Mum, ‘Why are you blaming me? I’m on your side. Slow down. We’ll sort it out. Everything will be all right.’
Mum wasn’t listening. ‘Just fuck off, ya big streak o’ nothin’. Go back tae yer own fuckin’ family.’
I had heard this term before. My dad had called Reg the same thing. Glaswegians, as I said earlier, are not known for being tall, so they don’t feel comfortable around tall people. I’m sure they have lots of insults to describe anyone over five foot ten but ‘a big streak o’ nothin’’ was the popular choice for my mum and dad. Had they used it together when, in happier times, they shouted it abusively at a tall person they both didn’t like? I’m not sure but it is almost romantic to think so.
Reg would not leave; he stayed with us. We ended up back at our house thinking that life was back the way it used to be. Reg helped calm down everything, including Mum, and eventually we all got to bed.
Next day he told his parents he was disgusted with Tom’s friends’ behaviour and the way they treated his new family. His parents were very sorry about the whole thing and even apologised. Good thing too because Mum wasn’t going to. Things settled back down to normal. I’m not sure normal is the right word to use for our family. I do know this would never have happened in a Scottish family. A good Glaswegian family would have been fighting about it for years.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
because I love you, son
The Barnes family liked to sit around the house and drink tea and play cards. They would drink tea all day and night. If they weren’t drinking it, they were making it. I remember hearing the phrase ‘put the kettle on, love’ all the time I lived with Reg. He said it all the time, his dad and his mum said it and his Aunty Dorrie said it.
Aunty Dorrie must have been his dad’s sister. All that side of the family were well over six foot tall and very thin. Aunty Dorrie was no exception; she was six foot two inches tall and thin but she looked like in her day she would have been very beautiful. She had very high cheekbones and long limbs and was very elegant-looking. As a young girl she would have been as sleek as a gazelle. I often wondered why she wasn’t married. Maybe she’d had her heart broken or had a tragic loss or was going to be a nun or something. She was just like the rest of the family, very reserved and very nice – but she had a look of sadness about her.
Grandpa and Grandma Barnes, Aunty Dorrie and Reg were great euchre players. They taught us how to play too. So we would go over to their house and drink tea and play cards. They didn’t watch TV, so the house was always quiet except when someone won a game. I never saw them playing for money, just for points. They played from morning until night.
The only time the silence was broken – besides someone calling out for cards or making tea – was when Grandpa would sit down and play the piano. Now he never played that well, but it always sounded to me like what piano would have sounded like at a vaudeville show. He slapped the ivories, rather than tickled them. Looking back it reminds me a bit of Chico Marx playing the piano. Reg and Grandpa would sing along at the top of their voices to happy songs I’d never heard before. They must have been old Australian songs, I never heard anyone from Scotland sing them. The way they sang, you would think they were singing top forty songs. Reg would look at me t
o see if I recognised any of them. But I didn’t. I don’t think that they had bought a record since the 1940s, never mind anything in the top forties.
‘Come on,’ they’d say, ‘you must know this one.’ And Grandpa would tear into another song that Charlie Chaplin might have danced to in a silent movie. I would scratch my head and look blankly at them. But they were loud and funny and we always ended up laughing along with them.
Later on Reg brought the piano to our house and he used to play it every night. He played a lot better than his dad but the piano still sounded out of tune, just like it did when Grandpa played it. I’m not sure if it was the piano or his playing. The song I remember Reg playing most often was ‘Für Elise’. He played it every night. I think this was his way of escaping from all the worries he had inherited when he adopted us. He could slap the keys like his dad when he wanted to. Playing the piano seemed to take him back to his home and family in Port Adelaide. I could see it on his face. He was distant but happy. It never lasted that long before he had to stop. Mum would always tell him to stop because she had something she wanted him to do. He didn’t get a lot of rest, old Reg.
He always wanted to teach me the piano. ‘Come on, love,’ he’d say to me, ‘give it a go. You’ll thank me someday for this chance.’
But I wasn’t interested. I wanted to play the guitar by then. Something louder. But Reg was right again – now I wish I had taken him up on the offer.
Reg’s family were a caring, Australian working-class family. No airs and graces. They called a spade a spade. What you saw was what you got. But they were warm and open to us. They hardly drank as far as I could see and never had big fights. I didn’t know what was going on, but in the back of my head I felt that surely this would all fall apart on me sooner or later. Everything always did.
Working Class Boy Page 17