Working Class Boy

by Barnes, Jimmy

  I got a message from one of the trainers asking me to be involved in an exhibition boxing match at the local school. I hadn’t done this before, but how hard could it be? You walk around the ring and wink at a few chicks and throw a few punches. I’d watched lots of fights and I thought I could do it. They told me that the guy I was to fight had just started training and I would have to take it easy on him. Cool, I’d dance around the ring and float like a butterfly and all that good stuff that I’d heard boxers say. And do my best not to embarrass the poor young guy too much. Simple.

  ‘Look, I’m very busy but I’ll do it just this once,’ I said as if I had a busy schedule.

  They were right, he had just started boxing, but within a month he was state champion. He was an absolute natural, one of the most natural fighters my trainer had ever seen. I made it through three, three-minute rounds with him. It was the longest nine minutes of my life. If it had gone any longer you could have sold advertising space on the soles of my shoes.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before I went in there?’ I spluttered through my newly fattened lips. ‘You sent me into the ring with a killer and let him beat the shit out of me.’

  I gave up boxing that day and started fighting dirty.

  * * *

  Mum and Reg moved away from Elizabeth again, and rather than change schools I moved in with friends of the family – Aunty Mary and Uncle Eddie, who I’d stayed with before, when times were really rough with Dad. We all wanted my school marks, which had gone rapidly downhill since joining a co-ed school, to improve and Mum and Reg thought moving would not help that cause. Besides, I was slipping back into life in Elizabeth again.

  Aunty Mary was the mother of one of Mum’s mates. She tried to save me whenever she could. She took me to stay at her house in Broadmeadows, just across the paddock from where we lived in the old days. Aunty Mary’s house was exactly the same as most of the houses that made up Elizabeth. A small, grey, three-bedroom duplex. From the outside they all basically looked the same. Some had nice gardens and some looked like bomb sites. Aunty Mary’s was somewhere in the middle. She was too old to work in the garden as much as she would have liked but you could tell that she cared. She kept the garden tidy and had a few roses growing in the yard.

  Inside, the house was like a lot of other Scottish homes. Clean, but nothing fancy. Aunty Mary would scrub the floors until they were so clean you could eat off them. She had crocheted toilet roll holders and doilies to place her ornaments on. There were tartan dolls and black-and-white dogs, the kind you saw on whisky bottles, sitting on the mantelpiece. She was sweet, as was Eddie. They were both quite old, and had a grown-up son named John.

  There were no fights in Aunty Mary’s house. She was a tough and loving old lady. She reminded me a bit of what my mum would have been like without all the problems that alcohol brought into her life. Uncle Eddie drank but Mary ran the house with an iron fist. Neither Eddie nor John ever said a bad word to her and when she said to stop drinking, they would. It was quiet and peaceful.

  At night the four of us would sit and watch television and have tea and toast with Anchovette or pepper steak spread before bed. Uncle Eddie worked and we would all be up early getting ready for work and school. I would leave just after he did and walk across the paddock to high school. This worked well for me as it took less than half an hour to get there. So I would be at school on time, fed and ready to work. Well, that was in theory. The reality was I was in a co-ed school and rapidly losing focus. So sometimes I didn’t get there on time or ready to work. Sometimes I met people on the way to school and got sidetracked. But most days I made it eventually.

  Aunty Mary seemed a lonely old soul as Eddie and John spent a lot of time at the pub after work, so she loved having me around. I’d get home from school and she’d be sitting at the kitchen table with her only other friend, Billy the budgie, sitting on her shoulder, talking to it like it was a child. ‘Oh you’re a beautiful wee boy, aren’t you, Bill? Come on, gie us a wee kiss. What a boy! Mwaa, mwaa.’

  As soon as I walked through the door she would put Billy carefully back into his cage and find something to feed me and then sit and tell me about her day. ‘No too much happened the day, Jim. I just sat wi’ ma wee bird and drank tea,’ she’d say. ‘I’ve cooked mince for Eddie and you for dinner. I know you love it.’

  Then we would talk about everything and nothing. She would ask about my mum and dad, as if she knew stuff that I didn’t. It was a little strange sometimes and I was not always sure I knew where the conversations were heading. But she never said a bad word about them; there was just something in her tone that made me feel that she didn’t really like them both.

  ‘Your mum’s had a lot of problems you know, son. But we’ve all got problems, Jim, it’s just how you cope wi’ them that matters.’

  She was always worried about her son John too. Life wasn’t easy for him. He was a lovely chap but he spoke with a terrible stutter. He had very few friends and was struggling with life. His parents loved him and cared for him but they were from Glasgow and probably had their own problems to deal with.

  One dark, rainy night when John was walking home from the pub someone ran him down with a car, which didn’t stop. He was left lying in the middle of the road bleeding and alone and was hit by a second car. They didn’t stop either. I can’t imagine what was going through his head as he lay there on the road. Maybe he was happy it was over, I don’t know. I like to think he was out cold and didn’t know what happened.

  When the news came, Uncle Eddie was already in bed but Aunty Mary and I were sitting up, waiting for him to come home. She would not sleep until she knew John was home safe. He was her angel. The police turned up late that night and gave her the news and she just fell apart. Her golden boy was gone. Uncle Eddie died not long after his son. Aunty Mary was never the same after that.

  I stayed with Aunty Mary for about three months. Enough time for me to complete the second term of high school before I moved back in with Mum and Reg and changed schools. I didn’t see Aunty Mary for years, but I know that staying with her was one of the good times in my life.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  everybody thought I was fearless

  Mum and Reg moved again, back to another part of Elizabeth. They were working their way around every part of the place. This time they moved to Elizabeth South. It was hard to get to my school in the west from there. I was beginning to get in trouble at that school anyway. So it was time to change again and rather than go too far I moved to Elizabeth High School, the roughest school in the area – and that was saying something.

  Our home in Elizabeth South was another housing trust house that looked the same as every other housing trust house. It was in an older part of the town, so there were a few more trees, but it was not a lot different from anywhere else. Still, it was only a short walk from the town centre, which meant I could get into more trouble if I wanted, and I often did.

  It was the start of term three in Year 9 by the time I went to my new school and it wasn’t long before I found new friends. These friends weren’t like the guys I knew at Le Fevre, or even at Elizabeth West High. They didn’t do any work at all. All they did was create havoc and cause the teachers grief. The school looked like something from a bad movie. It seemed every kid there was from a broken, dysfunctional home, and all the problems they had at home made study impossible. These kids were hooligans. By the time I moved there, so was I. My studious days were over. It didn’t help that this new school was co-ed like the last one, so I was completely distracted by girls again. We spent most of our day trying to impress the chicks – if we weren’t terrorising teachers or other students.

  We must have looked like extras from Blackboard Jungle. We all wore leather jackets and did whatever we wanted. Some of the teachers were quite young, on their first posting. They weren’t ready for what they had to face when they came across us. They would be enthusiastically teaching us English and our gang would be sitti
ng with our chairs tilted against the back wall of the class, showing no interest whatsoever. When they thought they were doing really well we would get up and walk to the fire escape near the front of the class and kick it open, walk out onto the oval and lie down and smoke cigarettes or pierce each other’s ears with needles.

  There were big fights in the schoolyard too. I soon found out that at Elizabeth High things were different. Everyone was much more vicious than I remembered and I had to sharpen my fighting skills very quickly to survive. The guys in this area didn’t think twice about stabbing people or kicking them half to death. In fact, they thought it was funny and did it as entertainment. I wasn’t like this, but I had to find a way to make them think that I was, before I was found out and became one of their victims.

  I learned something in that school that served me well: a barking dog doesn’t bite. In other words, the guy who seems the scariest, with the biggest mouth, isn’t always the best fighter. If he talked about fighting too much, he probably wasn’t that good at it. So I would always wait until the biggest, ugliest bloke pushed me around a little or mouthed off trying to impress the other guys and then I’d turn on him and give him a hiding. It was simple.

  ‘Hey, you, I’m going to bash your fucking head in, mate!’

  Bang! Before he had even finished the sentence I would be tearing into him, hitting him with everything I had. Everybody thought I was fearless but in fact it was the opposite – I was terrified. Pretty soon I was accepted into the gangs with the toughest kids in the area. I had them all bluffed. They thought I was an animal just like them so they would never push me. I could fight if I was cornered, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  Some of the teachers were very nice, like the English teacher we drove to the brink of a nervous breakdown. She was just a young woman trying to make a difference to some kids’ lives. ‘Today we will be reading poetry from . . .’

  Smash! Down went the fire escape again and four or five of us would walk out of the class onto the lawn and lie back in the sun. After a month with us I think she quit teaching. She probably never went back to it. Looking back on those days I feel ashamed of my behaviour, although I was one of the nicer students at the school. Some students beat up the teachers and the strangest thing was no one ever seemed to get expelled or even reprimanded. The school was just a place where we could gather and do whatever we liked. A meeting place for the gang.

  I think it was only there to get us out of our parents’ hair. In the few months I spent there I started caring less about what anyone thought of me and just did whatever I thought would be fun. My schoolwork went further down the drain. Don’t get me wrong – I was still a very quick learner. But the things I was learning now could have had me locked up, and the key thrown away.

  * * *

  The hard guy in our year was a guy called George. He was big, he was wild and he had no fear of anything or anybody. I worked out on the first day that if I was going to survive at this school, I would have to have him onside. He was a smartarse who wasn’t that likeable, but I was a smartarse too and I was smarter than him, or so I thought.

  He had the worst taste in music and he insisted on singing everywhere he went around the school. To make it even more unbearable he had a really bad singing voice. But he loved music, I could tell, and so did I. It wasn’t long before he and I were friends and I was playing some decent music to him. He, in the meantime, was scaring the other hoodlums away from me.

  After hanging around with George for a while I realised that he wasn’t dumb at all; he just didn’t care. Whatever had gone on in my life, had also gone on – maybe even worse – in his life. That’s why he didn’t give a fuck about anything. Under his brutal exterior there seemed to be a brutal interior. But I could talk to him and see the tears welling up in his eyes. I could play a song and he would have to pretend he wasn’t crying. I knew that underneath he was really a softie. We became good mates. We got each other into a lot of trouble but we watched each other’s back and where we lived nobody else did that.

  I was too cool to listen to pop music but George used to sing ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ all the time. Was he doing this to provoke people?

  ‘La la la . . . Sylvia such and such,’ he would sing in a voice that sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. ‘I love you whoever you are . . . la la la.’

  He would make up his own words, singing at the top of his voice while walking down the street, especially if we walked past girls. Then George would sing even louder and stare into their eyes, whether he knew them or not.

  His shirt was untucked and he walked with the kind of swagger that only a dangerous teenager can muster. Guys from the older gangs around the shops would sometimes get sick of him and have a go at him. They hated that song. But George would take them down. He was hard. At the start I hated that song too but now I really like it because it reminds me of George and his stupid antics. We would fight and drink and run amok all over Elizabeth and always managed not to get caught by the cops; we were too fast. No one else anywhere near our age could push us around or tell us what to do. We ran the place.

  I lost contact with George not long after I left that school and I was really sad to hear that soon after he died in a car wreck. He acted like a thug but underneath it all he was a good guy and deserved a better life. But he didn’t stand a chance from the start. He was never going to escape Elizabeth and I wondered if I would either.

  I can still hear him. ‘Sylvia . . . la la la.’

  In the meantime, my brother John had decided to join the army. I think that he was so out of control that it scared even him and he thought the army would straighten his life out. He wanted stability and routine and to feel safe. He later told me he wanted to buy a house of his own so he didn’t have to rely on anyone. Somewhere he could be safe from the world. The only way he could see himself doing that was to join the army and get a service loan. So, at a time when everyone else in the world was marching to stop the war, he marched straight in and saluted. I can imagine him saying, ‘Put me in, I’m ready to kill.’

  He went to basic training and things didn’t go as well as he expected. ‘Who the fuck are these people who think they can tell me what to do?’ No one told John what to do. ‘I’m out of here.’ He ran away from base. But it wasn’t long until they caught up with him. He was back and in trouble. But he pulled his head in and knuckled down to work even though he knew the army just didn’t suit him. How he thought that the army would work out for him when even high school discipline was too much for him was beyond me, but he tried. He was learning to be a cook for a short while. By this point he had already volunteered for Vietnam but his volatile nature at that time lead to his discharge before any active service. This suited John just fine. He went back to singing in the trenches of the Australian music scene and fighting hand to hand on the street. At least there you knew where you stood.

  John told us of many people he met during his time in the service of his country, including officers who were real psychopaths. People who didn’t feel anything for anyone, and who felt no remorse for anything or compassion for anybody. One of these people was a guy who I’ll call Shane. John had become close to him until the day that Shane went up to another soldier in the mess hall and stuck his thumb into the corner of his eye, popping it out onto his cheek and then smashing it on his face simply because he wanted his seat at the table. Now, John didn’t mind exaggerating a bit if it helped to make a good story even better. But when John told me about this I could tell that even he thought it was too much. So I don’t think he was embellishing at all.

  This guy was an absolute nutcase, but for some reason John had given him our address. And soon after John got out of the army he turned up at our door. John had told me that story and a few others about this psycho so I was afraid of him. He should have been locked away but instead he was at our door. Not only that, but it didn’t take that long until Mum asked him to move in with us.

  We seemed to have strange an
d dangerous people staying with us all the time. Mum said it was because she felt sorry for people and wanted to help them out but I’m not sure it was that simple. She liked to help people and had trouble saying no to anybody, a trait that her kids all seemed to inherit. But I think there were other reasons too. Maybe she needed other people around to help her put up with us or life in general. Maybe she didn’t want to be in the same house as Reg.

  Shane was a classic Australian conman and he had my mum conned. He was not a good-looking bloke but was brim full of confidence and smooth talked any vulnerable women that came within earshot. Reg didn’t want him anywhere around us. He could always pick the people we should avoid. He had no control over Mum though, so she just let whoever she wanted get in close.

  Mum and Linda in particular were taken in by this cheap conman; the rest of us had not a lot to do with him. John, in the meantime, hardly spent any time at all with him. I think John knew how dangerous Shane was and didn’t want to be responsible for him or anything he did.

  It wasn’t long until Shane was the chosen one in Mum’s eyes. She fell for his lies, hook, line and sinker. Pretty soon he had the run of the house, much to Reg’s dismay. He had something going on with Linda while they were both living in our house, even though Linda was only about seventeen. No one seemed to care but Reg.

  Soon he was getting drunk in the house and playing up with my sisters’ friends. This was not a good thing. But he could talk his way into anything.

  One day he asked if he could take me out to help him with some work. I had no idea what he had in mind. I’m sure Mum didn’t know either, but she agreed that I could go, and the next day, very early, there was Shane at the end of my bed. ‘Get up, Jim, we’ve got work to do.’

  We left the house before the sun came up and headed down to the docks near Port Adelaide. He had a bag with him, full of photos and videos.