Working Class Boy

by Barnes, Jimmy

  They didn’t have a lot but they kept everything clean and in its place. The toilet was outside but it was clean and neat and not like the outside toilets I had seen anywhere else. There were no spiders and it had a light – I think so Grandpa could read his paper in there.

  The wallpaper had been on the walls of the house since Reg’s mum and dad bought the place forty or fifty years earlier. The whole house looked like it was from another time. A museum. The same pictures were on the wall as when Reg lived there as a child; if you moved them there was darker wallpaper underneath, that’s how long they’d hung there. He pointed them all out and told me who was who and what was what.

  ‘This was Uncle Billy as a young lad.’ It was like he slipped back to a time when his uncle was there with him. I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. His tone softened like he wanted to be back there again.

  ‘Life was tough back then, Jim. You know, my family had nothing but they worked hard and life was not too bad. You get nothing for nothing. You have to work hard. There’s no two ways about it. Just keep your head down and your bum up and things will work out for you.’

  ‘How long did you live here?’

  ‘All my life. I was born here and I’ll probably die here. It’s not big and fancy but we had everything we needed.’

  ‘Who’s that, Reg?’

  ‘That’s Aunty Flo. She was Grandpa’s sister. She was a wild one in her day, too.’

  ‘Did they all live in the Port?’

  ‘Every one of us. We played in the street outside and your Uncle Ted and Uncle John and I fished in the river. We knew everybody in the street. When we walked to school I’d see old Mrs Smith out in her yard. Every day she’d be out there watering the plants and looking down the street to see if she could see what the neighbours were up to. They’d yell out to her to mind her own bloody business. She knew what everyone else was doing. We all did really.’

  ‘Were there any gangs around here?’

  ‘No, not here. There were a few ratbags down at the wharf but they never came near us. Dad would’ve told them to piss off. They hung around the pubs down by the docks. There was some goings-on down there though, let me tell you. This was a working-class area, full of families, and we all watched out for each other.’

  This was the opposite of my life. We had moved from place to place, as if we were running from something. Every street was more dangerous than the next. But Reg never had to move. He never had to run away. It must have been good to be able to go and sit in the room you learned to read in, and just think. To play the piano that your father had taught you to play on, thirty years earlier, would have been so good. I wanted that in my life so much, but I could never feel like that. I would never be like that. I was a gypsy and I would never have a home.

  Don’t get me wrong; the house would have been spooky except that the family were so nice. I wouldn’t have liked to stay there alone at night. Reg’s family were all members of the Spiritualist Church. His grandmother was very religious and at one time was head of the church. But they weren’t practising when we met them.

  Reg’s family never tried to convert us to anything and I don’t think their church could have dealt with us anyway. But we knew that they believed in spirits. Things like that really grabbed my sister Linda’s attention. She was only thirteen or fourteen and wanted to find out all about it. Unfortunately, she went about it all the wrong way.

  Linda and a few of her school friends started playing with a homemade ouija board. I’m sure they were pushing the glass around the kitchen table, answering the questions they asked with the answers they wanted.

  ‘Does Linda have a boyfriend?’

  ‘See, I told you she did.’

  Now this was all fine, until one night when Mum and Reg were in bed. A few of her friends came over to get in touch with the other side. They asked me if I would join in, but I was way too scared. I didn’t even want to get in touch with the other side of the street.

  I was sitting in the lounge room, not far enough away for my liking. The lounge room and the kitchen were separated by a set of sliding doors, but I could hear them going through their usual questions.

  ‘Are there any boy ghosts here?’

  All the things you would expect them to ask. Suddenly things got very scary. Linda was asking a question when the glass flew across the room and smashed against the wall.

  ‘Hello’, I thought. ‘Is this a sign?’ I was already frightened, but I’m sure I turned even whiter than before.

  Linda sat with her head resting on the table, talking in a voice that I knew wasn’t her own. It was like watching The Exorcist but that movie had not come out yet.

  Next thing I knew she was up and running at the wall, smashing her head against it and putting a hole in the plaster. I had seen my dad, Jim, smash the plaster on walls before, but not with his own head. He smashed other people’s heads, even Mum’s head, into the wall. But this was much more frightening. Before I could look away Linda ran across the room and crashed into another wall. She was obviously being possessed by an interior decorator. Then she fell into a heap on the floor and started shaking like a leaf.

  Reg got up and helped her to bed and sent her friends home. Now in those days we didn’t have telephones so John ran up the road to ring a doctor.

  The doctor came around as quickly as he could. Linda was still a mess, shaking on the bed. The doctor took one look at her and said, ‘She’s having some sort of breakdown. I can give her a shot that will calm her down and make her sleep and we can see how she is tomorrow.’

  Then he left. The shot did nothing at all; in fact, she started to get more violent, shaking and sweating.

  By this time it was after midnight and we were all exhausted. We didn’t know what we were going to do. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Reg’s mum had arrived. No one had called her; remember, we didn’t live close by. She came in and said, ‘Linda needs me, and she had better come home with me,’ and off they went into the dark night.

  Between Linda and all the bills that my folks couldn’t pay, we stood a good chance of becoming the first family to be possessed and repossessed in the same day.

  I was completely freaked out by this point as were Reg and my mum. After Linda and Reg’s mum left, we all had trouble sleeping. I lay in bed with the light on in my room, and the one in the hallway on too, and jumped at every noise I heard.

  We didn’t hear from Reg’s mum for a week or two, except to say that Linda was all right and not to worry.

  When Linda came home she was calm and clear-eyed, which was strange as she had always been very wild and able to find trouble anywhere. But now she was chilled out. Of course, she was a teenage girl, so calm was not really the word for her, but for a young girl, especially one of our family, she was as calm as she could get.

  She was wearing a beautiful gold cross with rubies in it around her neck. Reg was very surprised by this. The last time he had seen this cross, it had been around his grandmother’s neck, the one who had been head of the Spiritualist Church. He hadn’t seen it in ages – in fact, not since she had died years earlier.

  He asked his mum about it and she said, ‘When Linda was recovering at my house, she kept asking who was the other woman who kept coming to see her.’

  This had them worried because no one else was seeing her. But Linda kept insisting, ‘I talk to this other woman every night.’

  Then once Linda was up and out of bed she spotted a photo on the wall and said to Grandma, ‘That’s her, that’s the woman who’s been coming into my room at night.’

  The woman in the photo was Reg’s grandmother, who had died a few years before we joined the family. Not only that, but Linda kept asking to go to her house, which was just down the street. They couldn’t work out how she even knew about this house.

  Before Reg’s grandmother had died she had hidden all her jewels in her house. The jewels had never been found, even though the family searched the place high an
d low. Reg’s parents took Linda to the house, which was in ruins by this point, and she ran straight in and pulled a panel from the wall. She obviously knew exactly where to go, which had them completely baffled. Inside was all of the grandmother’s jewellery and her treasures from the church, including the gold cross with rubies that she used to wear to church. They gave this cross to Linda and told her to wear it always. They told Reg that he had to watch over her too, as some very bad spirits wanted to hurt her and the cross would help keep them at bay.

  Reg’s grandmother had had a daughter called Linda, who’d died in Adelaide around the time our Linda was born in Scotland. Whether these two events were connected, I’m not sure, but it was spooky.

  Linda told us about seeing ghosts all over the Barnes house. She said she saw them every night and they even spoke with her. Maybe it was Aunty Dorrie, who did look like a ghost to me. If I had seen one, I would have been running down the road shrieking. I never wanted to see ghosts and I certainly never wanted to talk to them. I hoped that they didn’t want to talk to me either.

  Life went back to normal for the family – no more spirits and no playing with them – but we didn’t forget that night. It still has me rattled now, when I think back to it. Linda always wore the cross and for the next few years her life was good.

  It wasn’t long before we were thinking about going to our new school. The local school where we lived was called Mansfield Park Primary School. As usual I was scared about going, just because I had always been ashamed of my home and clothes and all that. Those feelings were still the same, even though I had a nice house and new clothes.

  I was in Grade 6, joining the class halfway through the year, so everyone but me knew everyone else. I sat down and the teacher said, ‘Class, this is our new pupil. His name is James Swan. Let’s make him feel welcome to the school. Right, let’s see who’s here and who’s not. Davis?’

  ‘Here, sir.’

  From the back row I heard a whiny voice: ‘James . . .’

  ‘Panopoulos.’

  ‘Here, sir.’

  ‘He’s a James . . . ooh . . .’ The voice was getting more annoying and I looked around to see a boy in the back row smirking at me. He was bigger than the other kids. He continued to taunt me whenever there was an opportunity. I wanted to get up and belt him but I couldn’t. Not on my first day.

  The teacher was too busy calling the roll to really care but every time the noise got out of hand he’d look up and say, ‘Right, keep it down. You’re not on the oval now. McCulloch?’

  ‘Here, sir.’

  ‘Stevens?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Jaammees . . .’ The boys in the back were laughing along with my tormentor.

  ‘Right you lot. Who’s laughing?’

  The back row sat up straight and acted as innocent as they could. The teacher had obviously dealt with these guys before and went back to what he was doing.

  ‘Cooper?’

  ‘Here, sir.’

  ‘Jaaammes . . .’

  I snapped, and turned around to face him. ‘Right, mate. After school.’

  ‘Ooh, I’m soo scared.’

  He sneered at me. The teacher finished roll call and went on with the lessons for the day.

  During the lunch break some of the nicer, gentler kids told me not to go near him as he was very vicious. He was a rocker or something like that; he wore desert boots and slicked his hair back. In my head I went through what was going to happen after school and I was a little worried.

  The final bell rang and the air was electric with excitement. All the kids in the class wanted to see what the new student would do when faced with the school bully. I walked out to the school gate and he was waiting for me with his sleeves rolled up and a smug look on his face. Before he could speak I ran at him and punched him to the ground. As he curled up in a ball I stood over him, kicking him.

  I looked up and all his friends were yelling at me, ‘That’s not right. You don’t fight fair.’

  I stopped and screamed back at them, ‘If you want to fight fair you’ve come to the wrong place. So fuck off.’

  And proceeded to give him a beating. No one ever picked a fight with me at that school again. It seemed that they didn’t fight the same way we did in Elizabeth and that was fine by me.

  Things went well at school after that. In fact, not long after that, I became captain of the soccer team; they obviously saw how well I could kick. It wasn’t long until I was top of the class too. All the old patterns of survival were working for me even though my circumstances had changed. When in doubt, lash out, and I did for many years to come.

  Around Wingfield where we lived, there seemed to be a lot of European immigrants – Italian, Greek and Polish and all different European people. I thought this was really cool and made friends with as many as I could. But when these kids came to school, the Australian kids would pick on them. I don’t know why because the Australian kids didn’t have any more than these kids had. The European families would be making salami and wine in the houses next door to working-class Australian families and this seemed to cause problems. Maybe because they wanted the wine, I don’t know.

  Their lunches were very different from those of the other kids at school and they were picked on because of it. The European kids’ lunches looked a thousand times better than ours. I couldn’t work it out. We would have Vegemite sandwiches and they would have prosciutto and provolone cheese, and olives and salami. I knew what lunch I wanted.

  I thought it was great and wished my folks could make salami and grow vegetables, but they didn’t. I ended up getting into fights at school again, sticking up for these little Italian and Greek kids, but I didn’t mind, I was happy to fight. I started to hang with these families more and more. It seemed to me that the Australian families were the ones with the problems, not the Italians or Greeks.

  The so-called normal Australian families around us seemed to have problems like we had had in Elizabeth. Not quite as extreme as we had experienced but similar. The dads were drinking too much. It might have been beer instead of whisky but they still drank too much. And there was violence in their homes too. I didn’t see this with the European families; maybe it was there too but I didn’t see it. They all seemed to work really hard and put all their money back into the family. That had to be good. So my world was expanding and I was beginning to realise that the world was a big place and not what it seemed to be from where I stood.

  * * *

  If you had told me that I would be leaning on a fence of a drive-in movie watching The Sound of Music even a year earlier, I would have laughed and then probably slapped you. We weren’t a musical sort of family. Of course I’d heard of movies like West Side Story but where we came from gangs didn’t dance to settle disputes unless it was on each other’s heads. But there I was, leaning on the fence humming along with the songs. If my mates in Elizabeth could see me now.

  ‘You’ve turned real soft, Jim. I reckon we should give you a hiding to toughen you up.’ That’s what they would be saying to me. No, they wouldn’t even be talking to me, just kicking me to bits. But I wasn’t in Elizabeth anymore. I thought that the gangs around Wingfield might have a dance-off instead of a fight. I felt safe. I felt positive. I wasn’t used to this.

  The voices of the people around Wingfield sounded different too. I was sure I’d heard a German accent a minute ago. Along with a Greek, and an Italian. A Russian and a Polish. I might have left the country, not just Elizabeth. They weren’t whining about everything being better somewhere else. They weren’t lying in the gutters, drunk. They were living life and loving their families. This was The Sound of Music. I must be dreaming.

  I had walked about a quarter of a mile from home and I was sitting on the ground with a bunch of kids I didn’t know outside the drive-in, watching a movie. And I wasn’t in any danger.

  Well, my musical taste might be a bit damaged but I’d live through it.

  So who had saved me from the
life I was leading? My mum had a lot to do with it. But I had a feeling that Reg Barnes had been my Julie Andrews. He’s the reason I felt safe. He was the reason I could walk the streets and not get beaten up. He was even the reason I knew the words to these songs. But he couldn’t be perfect, could he?

  * * *

  Around that time, I noticed the girls that were my age were beginning to change. They were getting curves and bumps and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The girls that is, not the bumps. No, you were right the first time – the bumps and the girls.

  I’d always liked girls and had even fancied girls for a long time but these were the girls in my class. Not only were they changing physically but they acted differently too. They seemed to think they had some sort of mystical control over boys. And they did – when there wasn’t a football around. If there was sport to be played, we managed to shake it off and leave them to themselves.

  The summer came, and suddenly outside the house smelled really bad. I thought that it would go away but it didn’t. The smell was there all day, every day. It smelled like dead animals and I remembered when we lived in Gepps Cross and the abattoir was across the road, through the forest, so I asked Reg what it was. He told me that an abattoir and tannery were just down the road. It seemed my life always ended up around slaughterhouses and here I was again.

  I walked down the road to have a look at it and found myself gagging the closer I got to the place. It was horrible. I couldn’t help thinking how bad the poor animals felt. I could sense fear in the air and being a person who had spent his life afraid, this really disturbed me. I ran home and tried not to think about what was going on up the road. But I couldn’t forget it as the smell lingered around, outside and inside the house.

  I knew because of the smell that our house wasn’t in the best area, so I spoke to Reg and he told me that when Mum and he went to get a house, this was all they could afford. The gloss started to peel away from my dream home.