To my horror, things were slipping for me academically, the 3-hour public exam system into which we had just been plunged now working badly against me: In my hand-in assignment essays for English and History, I was managing near-perfect (and sometimes perfect) scores. By tragic contrast, I found I simply did not have it within me to deliver the same standard of essays in 3-hour exams. As hard as I tried to deliver what was necessary, my brain simply needed Time to deliver quality work. And with the advantage of time, it did deliver, and consistently. The Department of Education was just starting to introduce the beginnings of a fairer system which took account of handed-in work over an extended period of ‘Assessment’, but this scheme was in its infancy. Your HSC Mark was basically the result of 3-hour exams. And that meant Speed. Not Time.
‘Ah, but you’l shine at university,’ assured one teacher.
‘But, sir, I have to get in first…’
Naturally no one said, ‘Hmm… Of course, you could always be an author some day… Something almost no one finds the time to try and be… Though you might…’
Despite my rock and roll activities of the previous year, at the end of it I had come equal-first in Art. I can only assume that this recent academic prize plus a couple of others since my junior year reminded the school staff that I was a hard worker. But now something was going wrong. Something way wrong between my brain and what the new exam system required of it: My 89% average was slipping to 75. Which would not get me into the uni course I needed to begin the rest of my life.
It is a simple statement of fact, dear reader, that for me this was a nose-dive with no precedent in my life so far. In my whole life to this point I had excelled through a combination of badly wanting to and being blessed to be able to. Now my wings had just come off. And I was falling. And when you’re falling for the first time it’s very hard to grab onto anything that will stop you falling, like some sort of solution to the awful problem. And I felt not only the agony of first-time failure, but also the agony of letting down my parents. Whom I’d never let down before and had long hoped I never would.
Latin was getting harder too. Much harder: We were now reading the original works of the great Roman authors like Virgil and Livy, the Latin in which they wrote seeming a different language to the ‘schoolboy Latin’ we’d been exposed to for the past four years. Even Julius Caesar’s immortal ‘Commentaries’ had been straightforward by contrast; he’d been a soldier and politician, not a poet. Still, there was grounds for hope; for Years 11 and 12 we would be taught Latin by the most experienced teacher and priest in the entire school. Father Archie Brazier. He had been at Riverview since 1922.
By the age of 16, being the son of practising Catholics who’d taken me to church every Sunday since a baby, I’d known a few priests in my time. And my experience of them was of above-average human beings: ‘Men for others’, good men who embodied all that Riverview now professed to be about. I’d been educated by many such men and some were inspirational souls, even sometimes just in passing…
One day a young Jesuit priest academic visiting from Ireland delivered a lecture to us on the English text we were studying. This young man had magical powers: He could make Jane Austen seem alive and relevant to teenage boys. And after his special lecture he took a stroll through our part of the school playground at lunchtime, clearly to put himself in the way of any informal chats with us students as might occur. Spy-ing his intention, Max Van Cleef and I made a beeline for the young Jesuit, to find him not only friendly but somehow just as respectful towards us as we naturally were towards him. With his bookish spectacles and the black academic gown as worn by Jesuits, though his eyes were smiling ones he looked older than his years in the way of the intensely academic. He was inspiration on two legs; your superior with that rare and elevating way of speaking to you as if an equal.
Somewhere beyond his 70th year, Father Archie Brazier was a living legend at Riverview and for rich and varied reasons. For generations of boys, however, first and foremost amongst these reasons was that, somewhere back in the mists of time, he had shot someone’s cow. Shot it dead. With a .303 rifle.
With tonic-combed white hair, glasses and several chins, he was chunkily squat in his black robes in which he shuffled and never smiled. He spoke with a velvety croak, everything he said coming out for what it was: an iconic utterance as delivered to the same classroom of boys for the past fifty years. (If your grandfather had done Latin, Archie could refer to a small leather-bound book and tell you your grandfather’s score on the very same piece of Latin you were doing right now.)
In class, when pressed by us one day, as he was by the boys of every year, he told us, in his velvety croak, the story of the Cow…
Until some thirty years before our time, a herd of dairy cows grazed the length and breadth of the vast Riverview estate, the cows allowed to wander wherever they liked by their custodian, an old Irish brother (the male equivalent of a nun). Between the college’s grand main building and the Lane Cove River lay the college’s iconic rose garden, Archie its founder and curator. Having previously lodged protests with the ancient brother re his cows wandering into the rose garden and trampling it, one day from his high bedroom window of the main building Archie sighted yet another cow amongst his roses. Rifle Shooting being an official school sport at the time, Archie descended into the bowels of the sandstone building, wherein lay the college’s Army Cadets ‘armoury’. This he unlocked and from it took one of its military-grade Lee-Enfield .303 rifles which he loaded with live ammunition. Rising out of the building’s bowels once again, at considerable distance from the cow Archie took aim. And fired. Apparently to no effect; the cow still stood. Approaching the beast he saw he had in fact hit it right between the eyes. It stood there stone dead. As to the school’s response to his lethal act, Archie either didn’t elaborate to us or muttered inaudibly, however croaking as usual: ‘And now, perhaps, we ought do a little Latin…’
The Latin we had to translate was mind-bogglingly hard, and me a boy who had once won the Latin Prize…
Every noun in Latin has twelve different possible endings depending on whether it’s singular or plural and its place in the sentence. And there are five separate key groups of nouns, each group with a different set of endings. Oh, and adjectives change their endings to match the nouns. With me so far?
Every verb has six possible endings multiplied by whether it’s present, past imperfect, past perfect, future, future perfect or plu-perfect multiplied by whether it’s active, passive, indicative or subjunctive. Multiply that by there being four separate key groups of verbs, each group with a different set of endings. Still with me?
Each key group of nouns and verbs has a page of rules and, famously, three pages of exceptions to those rules. Yet most brain haemorrhaging of all was this…
With the Latin ‘authors’ like Virgil and Livy, for poetic reasons the words in any sentence can be placed in any order. For example, the subject ‘cat’ in ‘The cat sat on the mat’ can be placed as in ‘On the mat the cat sat’ but try finding the cat when the sentence is three lines long.
Cryptic? It was like trying to crack an unending Enigma code. Which I would need to crack or see my future go down the toilet. Yet despite that prospect and the way it made my present feel like the first level of Hell, all I could do was the best I could and try to remain positive that it would all be alright in the end as I was a 16-year-old with a metric shitload of good intention. I didn’t cry myself to sleep every night. Not every night anyway. Though every night I struggled to sleep praying for dreams of a bright future.
And I did not feel I could ask for the sanity-saving help of the priest who shot the cow, particularly when time was at such a premium in his classes, suspended as they were on a daily basis by his wild and prolonged coughing fits as an inveterate smoker. Advanced Angina Pectoris, whispered the boy next to me, a future medical student.
To this day I look back on Archie Brazier with sadness and regret.
I just wish I had felt able to ask him for the help I needed.
The Enchanted City
* * *
A private helicopter landed on Riverview’s 1st Field; to pick up the school’s 8th richest boy.
The school term holidays had arrived.
I needed them like a lifeboat in a shipwreck.
Steve had a long-distance girlfriend in Melbourne. Considered Australia’s ‘second city’, on our nation’s cold far south-east coast Melbourne lacked the natural beauty of Sydney with its harbour and beaches, and as a result of its national inferiority complex had long since over-compensated to become our first city in terms of cultural and social vibrancy. This had been apparent to me since a tiny boy: My father regularly watching Melbourne’s ‘Aussie Rules’ football matches on Saturday afternoon TV, the unmistakable fever-pitch crowd atmosphere of these broadcasts caused me to ask, ‘Is that their “Grand Final” match then?’ (For U.S. readers, think your Superbowl.) No, my father replied, this was every Saturday in Melbourne.
Steve’s girlfriend was one Germaine Upton-Pitt. Her uncle was a famous Australian painter and she intended to be one too. Steve had met her on a previous holiday at an island resort, they’d hit it off in a major way, and this holidays Steve was going to travel down and stay with her in Melbourne. I could come too, he enthused; her home was a castle of a house and her parents were really cool. On the first Saturday evening of our holidays, Steve and I resolved to put the idea to my parents…
Arriving at my home at Howard Place, we walked in on my parents having early evening drinks with their old friends, the La Salles, as described in Goodbye Crackernight, a pair of Macquarie University academics whose bohemian past lingered into their present. Keen nudists, though of course at their home not ours, this was the couple who always said, ‘Why not?’ and meant it.
‘It’ll be a great adventure for them,’ beamed Stan La Salle.
My father was caught on the back foot. ‘I suppose it’ll be alright,’ he winced.
‘’Course it will,’ vowed Stan. ‘A salami and a loaf of bread in their backpacks… You could even hitch-hike to Melbourne. We used to. Wonderful.’
My father was nonplussed. ‘Oh. …Well all-right then.’
My mother suggested the train. The very next day our tickets were booked.
The carriage we boarded at Sydney’s Central Station on Monday afternoon was of the old-fashioned ‘dog box’ type: with an aisle down one side of a line of wooden sliding door compartments. As I watched the outer suburbs of Sydney then the rolling hills of country New South Wales scroll by, across the dog box from me Steve’s eyes smiled their soulful smile and by the early evening we’d made friends with a grand old lady named Gladys who ashed her cigarette into a makeup compact-sized portable ash tray, which she then clipped shut and placed back in her purse.
When just a few years older than us, she told us, she had been a ‘grease monkey’ on the Avro Anson twin-engined aircraft that our ‘bomber boys’ had trained on all round Australia before going overseas to fly for Royal Air Force Bomber Command in World War Two. Her posting had been at an aerodrome called Forest Hill near Wagga Wagga. ‘The best days of my life, they were,’ she said, ‘the best days… And they were all such beautiful boys — just like you two…’ She peered out the carriage window, her hand unclipping her purse and just a bit shakily extracting another cigarette, lighting it with an ancient spirit fuel lighter before speaking again: ‘I never heard from any of them after that…’
That night Steve and I had chops and gravy at the long, long laminex counter of the train’s dining car with glasses of cheap red wine. We went back for a few more glasses too, later on — It seemed the dining car never closed, and it felt just slightly magical to be sipping red wine with a dear friend on a lamplit serpent winding its way through rural Australia in the middle of the night. I fell towards sleep by the window of our darkened compartment, beyond, the moonlit hills of Victoria passing by.
On arrival the next morning in Melbourne, we bid our farewells to Gladys — ‘Now you two have a lovely time, a lovely time, promise me you will,’ she said pressing her cheek to each of ours. We promised, the first thing of Melbourne to greet us being a poster pasted to the wall of the way leading out of the train station: With an archival picture of a girl in an enormous skirt, ‘50s Crazy Twist Party!’ it said. ‘All Welcome.’ ‘Only in Melbourne,’ I smiled to Steve. ‘Only in Melbourne,’ he smiled back. And there was our hostess. With the mostess.
Germaine had dyed black straight hair in a 1920s ‘short bob’, her grey eyes like a cat’s, her mouth a perpetual wry smile, her voice, velvet. The first ‘bohemian’ of my own age I had ever met, her presence gave me quiet butterflies.
As she and Steve chatted animatedly on the tram ride back to Germaine’s home in Toorak, I saw from the tram’s windows the cobblestoned alleyways of Melbourne, the ones down which I had once scootered with my childhood friend, Juliette. She was gone now, a few years back to Canada of all places, her family following her father’s scientific work there. I turned back to Steve and Germaine. They were both smiling at me.
‘We are going to have a fucking blast,’ winked Germaine.
‘…I could fucking use one,’ I returned.
Germaine sat back. ‘Oh, I like him,’ she purred. ‘Yes, I like him.’
Her house was a castle, its high white walls green ivy-covered at the top of a steep driveway, standing there waiting for us in its grand entrance the castle’s smiling queen, Germaine’s mother: tall, slim and beautiful in late middle-age. Glowing at our arrival, she was warmth itself, and introduced us to her husband: a big, round man with a bald head and glasses who happened to be one of Melbourne’s leading orthopaedic surgeons. Before dinner on our first night the good doctor installed Steve and me in his study with a glass of dry Spanish sherry each to listen to his recording of The Singing Bowls of Tibet, and one or two other esoteric pieces…
‘I first heard this in the Himalayas,’ he said of one piece. ‘It sounds like tiny bits of sticks being rubbed together… I think you’ll find it interesting…’
High on the uppermost floor of the house was Germaine’s room where she and Steve and I talked and listened to music from her record collection late into the night. By candlelight infused with musky incense, I found Germaine liberating to talk to; she was sensual — hell, she was sexual — yet there was the most exhilarating openness between us, a candour, as if the normal adolescent barriers of gender just didn’t exist in that room. It was also just so relaxing, too, that the boundaries were comfortingly set between us and would be respected; our exhilarating hostess was Steve’s girl, and Steve’s trust was something I’d just as soon betray as betray myself.
And SO reassuring it was to feel that Steve and I could travel a thousand miles from home and land safely high up in the room of a girl who perfectly shared our need to REJECT the present, to thrive in active denial of the decade into which our adolescence had dumped us: First we listened to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, the first time I had ever heard its fusion of Dylan-esque maturity and high-polished 1965 pop-rock. And Germaine also played contemporary ‘retro’ sounds including a current American band called ‘The B52s’ who seemed to my ears a mix of 60s ‘girl group’ sounds, classic sci-fi movie atmospheres and something even stranger: In one of their songs, an arrestingly quirky number called Party Out of Bounds, the group’s male singer made the word ‘tactful’ one of the song’s key lyrics. Tactful. A word that had never before been contemplated let alone used in a rock and roll context. But just like all great rock bands, The B52s were defining rock by breaking its rules — at the same time as tipping a stylish hat to their influences.
Yet the best was yet to come for me with the new day, assured Germaine as I took my leave of her and Steve for my bedroom down the hall: She had a friend.
Who was coming over specially to meet me.
Madeleine.
That night as I climbed between its sheets the s
pare bed made up for me felt as if it had always been mine. The previous night in Sydney had been hot. Here down upon me through the room’s open window wafted a coolness with that reassuring herby smell of just after the rain though outside the sky twinkled with stars.
I opened my eyes happy. She arrived with the mid morning.
Her mousy brown straight hair was shaved short at the back though long at the front in a forward-swept bob-style fringe. Standing just slightly taller than me her body was slim and sporty in a pale, striped business shirt hanging loose over faded tapered blue jeans. She wore platform-heeled sandals, on one wrist a single silver bangle. Sweeping back her fringe her eyes were inviting and ever-so-slightly wicked.
‘I’m Madeleine,’ she said.
My reply may as well have been, ‘Er, look, I quite forget my own name right now but I sure am glad to meet you.’ Whatevever I managed, we ended up talking until late afternoon.
‘Germaine’s told me a lot about you,’ she said. ‘You seem just like the way you sounded.’
‘Is that a good thing?’ I pivoted.
She quelled a smile betraying a row of perfect white teeth, though it lingered in her eyes as she said softly, firmly: ‘We’re going on a date tomorrow, you and I. Be at the tram stop at Kew tomorrow morning at 10.’
I was on the dot.
Seeing me, she flew across the Melbourne highstreet towards me and, without a word, grabbed me by the hand and whisked me away. I was in love.
On immediate contact with it, Melbourne felt active not passive like Sydney. The Black Cat Café in Brunswick Street Fitzroy was sophisticated, bohemian, yet in a relaxed and unpretentious way. The place and its staff made you feel included, not appraised. Whereas in the ‘op shops’ of Sydney you might pick up some groovy collectable once in a blue moon if you were dead-lucky, here the stores displayed such an abundance of 60s-original sunglasses, rare records, antique glassware and classic movie posters that the only problem was the agony of choice.
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 7