Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  Cricket

  The sport, not the insect. It’s like baseball on Valium. I never liked the game, and when I get hit hard in the breastbone with a solid red leather cricket ball during a school match, I find a fairly acceptable reason to bail on the sport forever. My dad, on the other hand, loves cricket and watches it on the telly ’til the day he dies.

  American programs

  I love the show Leave It to Beaver, but it leaves its scars. My mum thinks I look like “The Beaver.” Thank all that’s decent in the world I don’t live in the United States at this point. She takes a photo of me and enters me into a local “Beaver look-alike” contest. I’m pretty mortified, even at that age, and to add insult to injury, I don’t even win.

  Then there’s The Mickey Mouse Club. My parents see it as wholesome family entertainment. The host, Jimmie, looks like a human Howdy Doody, and a bunch of sweet, talented youngsters sing and dance like old vaudevillian adults. All I see is Annette and Cheryl—girls seemingly my own age with supernaturally large adolescent breasts pushing up though their tight Mouseketeer sweaters. None of the girls I know even have breasts yet. Walt Disney is no fool. Still, I have a local girl, the aforementioned Josephine, nearer and far more tangible to me, if less blessed in the chest department.

  Davy Crockett is Americana at its finest to a boy like me living out in the Colonies. My mum manages to make me a “coonskin” hat just like Davy’s for Christmas from an old fur coat she has. I don’t even know what a raccoon is. Could one kill you? I’m not sure. Probably, if it’s anything like the animals I’m familiar with.

  Another older woman

  A big dark blot on my idyllic life at the farmhouse occurs one afternoon when I wind up at the house of the twelve-year-old girl next door. I’m only eight at the time, so I have very little idea what’s really going on, but we wind up under her parents’ bed with her underwear round her knees and her hands tugging at my jeans, which are being held up by a prodigious, though probably quite tiny, erection. So far, so good. Then her parents come home. It is a dark, guilt-ridden day at the Springthorpe house when my parents are indignantly informed of their son’s deviant behavior with the neighbor’s innocent daughter. What? I feel very shamed by the reaction of the adults concerned.

  Later that night my dad tries to reassure me. He says something along the lines of, “It’s okay, don’t worry, son. And by the way … good on ya!” (an Aussie expression meaning “way to go”). Still, the incident leaves another scar related to sex—thank you, Victorian England and all your tweaked, ex-convict, deviant descendants.

  Adventures with animals

  Another dog fiasco: yes, another mauling of a stranger by one of our beloved canines. Not Elvis, thank Jesus. He continues to be the light of my life. The offender this time is the family Dalmatian, Freckles—she is sent packing. My parents decide that we should get something with fewer teeth. Living in the country as we do allows for a gentler, grazing-type, less rabies-prone creature. I opt for a lamb and get one a few months later. Stormy (because his wool is kind of a dirty gray color) runs up to me bleating his little greeting when I come home from school every day, after Elvis has had his way with me. He keeps the dried brown vegetation we laughingly call a “lawn” neatly clipped with his tiny choppers, and his poop is so small, even if you step in it you don’t notice. He is very cool.

  Unfortunately, as he grows, Stormy becomes more and more dependent on us humans. After my parents come home late and are forced to keep all the house lights off and change for bed surreptitiously for the hundredth time—because Stormy will start bleating for food or company as soon as he sees the slightest movement inside the house—they decide he has to go.

  I can’t believe it. Don’t they know what people do to sheep? They eat them, for Chrissakes! I am not about to have Stormy served up to some trucker one morning with his eggs … wait, that’s pork. Still, you get my drift. No one is going to eat my close personal friend. I cry and moan and plead, but my parents do not waver. In the end I have to accept their decision. One morning I get up and my woolly friend is gone. Stormy has left the building. My mum assures me that Dad has taken him to a farm where they’ve promised not to eat him. I soldier on.

  But you begin to see why I have animal issues.

  Though I’m horrified when my pet sheep is taken from me, I have no compunction about lopping off the heads of the chickens we keep in a corner of our yard. We eat one every now and then for Sunday dinner. Merrily chopping off their heads is the start of a bloodlust that will later lead to full-scale mock-guillotine executions in my weird, certifiably insane adolescence. No real victims, mind you, but I will greatly enjoy pretending that my least favorite people are lined up in the stocks, ready for a healthy decapitation.

  We ace the chicken and then Dad lets its headless body flap around the yard until it flops over, gives a final kick or two, and is done. I then drop the body into a vat of boiling water in the funnel-web-spider- infested laundry room to help remove the feathers. (That God-awful smell will suddenly come back to me twenty-five years later at a big chicken dinner and consequently turn me off eating chicken for life.)

  Life in the bush

  I go to the “icebox” for food. Not the refrigerator … the “icebox.” It isn’t even plugged into the wall. My mum washes all our clothes in something we call the “copper kettle.” It is a huge vat filled with boiling water in which she mixes the laundry and a little soap around with a big wooden pole. She wrings the excess water from the soggy mass with the power of her own two hands, tosses the clothes into my old baby seat, and hangs them out in the hot sun to dry. By the way, those strong hands of my mum’s can deliver a hearty whack to the ass too. Mostly to me, my brother generally being less deserving of a thumping. We mow our dry, barren lawn with a rusty hand-pushed mower and beat at the flames of summer bushfires that lap at our wooden fence with old burlap bags.

  Thinking back on these days, it’s a wonder I didn’t strap on a six-gun, saddle up my hoss, and mosey on down to the general store to get me some hardtack. What century were we living in, anyway?

  Elvis and I frolic just as we are supposed to do. All through the long years from eight to ten he is my beloved dog. And they do seem long—in a good way, the way time stretches endlessly when you’re a kid. Holidays seem to last forever and school semesters even longer. My enthusiasm for school is slowly diminishing. Yet every day Elvis meets me at the gate, sleeps with me, eats with me, and never, ever bites anyone. A perfect dog for a perfect place and time. I tell you, it’s a Norman Rockwell moment. I am so happy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GIRLS, GUITARS, AND GLORY

  LONDON

  1960–1963

  That pure happiness doesn’t last long. It never does. Elvis has just reached manhood—well, doghood—when Dad comes home one night, all excited. Besides being a smart and charming man, my father is also very good at whatever he does. He has been charged with a major assignment: spearheading the introduction of computers into the Australian Army. He announces that—now that we are all securely settled in our home with fast friends and a warm, fuzzy feeling of belonging—we are moving to England! And although it will be a great adventure for us to see the world, sadly, the animals will not be sharing our joy or our journey.

  Are you kidding me? Leave Elvis behind and go to friggin’ England … where all the Pommie bastards are from? Leave my friends, my dog, my world … Miss Hamilton?

  What the hell!

  Other unpleasant surprises lie in store. We all get our vaccinations and they hurt like a bastard. Yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, hoof-and-mouth, every disease I’ve ever heard of plus a few more. My arm aches for weeks and I start to get really scared.

  Exactly where are we going that I need this much viral protection? I have no real sense where England is in relation to the holy ground of Oz. I do know that I have given plenty of shit to some English kids at school. Man, will those deeds ever come home to roost soon. It’s waiting for me,
just down the pike in the land of ice and snow. Talk about instant karma.

  I continue to plead and beg on Elvis’s and my own behalf. I campaign desperately for weeks. “Please let him come with us … please! I’ll walk him whenever you say. I’ll even pick up his poo, and you know how I feel about that. Well, maybe you don’t, but I will anyway.” My parents don’t budge. Eventually I have to, again, take it in the shorts. Defeated, I make a deal with one of my friends, Colin, to take Elvis for the rest of his life.

  On the final day, I insist on taking Elvis to Colin’s house myself. No one is home there so I have to walk my boy down the long driveway, tie him to a post by the back gate, kiss him for the final time, and walk away from him forever. He howls mournfully because he knows. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it. The truth is, I deserted my best pal.

  He’s long dead now and I often wonder what kind of life he had after I went on to my new future in a foreign land. Did he miss me? Did he adapt to his new life? Was his spirit as broken as mine was? What happened to the pal I loved and was made to forsake? Deserting him leaves a lifelong hole in my heart that I still try to fill every time I see a dog—on the street, at an airport, at a Starbucks—it doesn’t matter where. Wherever I am, I get down on my knees to make myself his/her new best friend in a vain effort to heal the “Elvis wound” to my ten-year-old soul.

  At the time, I feel sure this move is due to my bad luck with dogs. If I hadn’t gotten Elvis, we’d probably all still be living in the little farmhouse at Broadmeadows in the middle of nowhere.

  The one saving grace is that we’re traveling to our new home by steamship, first class. The Australian Army may be sending us to hell in a hand-basket, but they are certainly doing it in style. We board the SS Orsova at the main pier in Melbourne on the appointed day. The ship is built more along the design lines of the Queen Mary and the Andrea Doria (thankfully, I don’t grasp the concept that ships can still sink) than of the floating hotels of today. Streamers fly, all the people wave, and friends shout out their last good-byes as we slowly pull away. It’s like a bloody movie. I think of Elvis one last time and then I’m on my way to jolly old England and some serious retribution from the Pommie bastards.

  My first morning at sea, I get up early and run down to the first-class dining hall, where I’m informed that all this food is free! Not that I’ve had to pay for much of anything up to this point in my life, but, come on … FREE? That’s the magic word, isn’t it? I grab two plates and proceed to fill them with a messy assortment of eggs, bacon, sausages, toast, mugs of hot chocolate, and anything else that looks vaguely edible. I scarf it all down and am returning to the buffet for a second free monstrous helping when I start to feel quite a little unwell. In fact, I sense that my whole breakfast may be quickly backing up.

  One of the stewards notices the color change in my face and asks, “You all right, lad?” I am light-years from “all right.” I fly up the stairs, race along the gangways, and burst into our cabin just in time to yak up the whole breakfast, plus dinner and lunch from the day before, all over my sleeping brother and his bunk. He is not pleased. For three days I don’t move from my own (much cleaner) bunk. I moan and hurl continuously, stopping only when I have purged my stomach of what must be everything I’ve ever eaten—all the way back to the crusty old dog poo from when I was three. And when I am done … I have my sea legs! I have never been seasick since. I may have scared my body into never throwing up again for fear I might hurl internal organs.

  For the next six weeks we sail leisurely from Melbourne to London on the high seas. I see the most amazing sights. We stop at ports I’ve never even heard of, in countries that are incredibly obscure to me, like India, Egypt, and Italy. Obviously geography is not a particularly strong subject for me in school. Where have all these countries been hiding? And do they all revolve around Australia like the planets around the sun, as most of us Aussies believe? So I learn geography the only way it should be learned … up close and on the ground.

  It is a journey of firsts in my young life: the first dark-skinned human beings I’ve ever seen. The first blind, legless beggar. First kids on the streets begging for cigarettes. My first limo, oxen, whale, dead person, camel, Egyptian Coca-Cola, dolphin, erupting volcano, hot Italian girl, turban, rupee, desert, pre-Christian city, servant, flying fish, Seventh Wonder of the World, and rickshaw. I am completely turned on by the world I am now seeing. Sailing through the Suez Canal before it becomes a political hotspot. Driving in an old bus through the dry Arab countryside before the possibility that we could all be blown to hell by terrorists. Visiting Ceylon in all its “raped by the British” glory before it was renamed Sri Lanka. Visiting India when there is still clean fresh water for everyone. Walking through Naples late at night and not, as we would be now, taking our lives in our hands.

  At our Naples port of call my mum, being a history freak, insists on a side trip to Pompeii. This venerable Roman city, along with most of its hapless residents who worked and lived at the foot of Vesuvius, an active volcano, was buried under boiling pumice and ash when Vesuvius exploded in 79 A.D. We wander through its cobbled streets and long-deserted houses, markets, and amphitheaters all afternoon. It is a beautiful place, and I start to acquire my mum’s love of history, though I probably don’t realize it at the time.

  A collective giggle goes up and there are a few assorted jokes from the men in our small tour group when we are brought to the door of Pompeii’s famous Roman-style brothel. The guide mentions that there are certain “wall paintings” inside and that the younger children might want to be left out in the freezing rain while the rest of the lucky miscreants get to go in and check them out. Obviously the ancient Romans were way cooler about this stuff than we are today.

  “You’ll have to wait out here, Richard,” says my mum and strolls inside with the rest of the group, including my brother! My mind works feverishly, trying to imagine what can possibly be inside that is so rude and forbidden that I am denied access. The guide mentioned “wall paintings.” Is there a depiction of a half-naked girl under her parents’ bed? Possibly an erotic poop queen or two? I have no idea, but my prepubescent libido reels with the possibilities. When I finally see the famous “wall paintings” many years later, I find the crude depictions of various sexual positions more comical and cartoonish than erotic. I realize that even at ten years old my mind was working to create a better pornography— and succeeding quite well.

  The big port of call for me is Cairo, Egypt. Ancient Egypt, actually. Although I take it in stride, it is a mind-numbing juxtaposition for me, one moment, to be pogoing down a dirt road in the Aussie bush and the next, walking into a room in the Cairo Museum that’s filled with the gleaming golden walls of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen’s burial chambers. My mum may have felt much the same, one minute sweeping the floors of our little farmhouse, the next getting off a camel beside the great pyramid of Khufu and stepping right into a pile of camel crap because she’d under-tipped her native guide. There’s a great photo of her, in her new sun hat, stomping angrily away from the camel and its smirking owner.

  If I had liked school better, I may have spared the world a few hit songs and gone on to become an eminent Egyptologist. It blew my mind that much. I have read everything on the Middle Kingdom, and the discovery of Tutankhamen’s burial chambers in particular, and I still go to any nearby museum featuring an exhibit of the treasures from that tomb. It’s weird, but every time I’ve gone to an exhibit of Tutankhamen’s belongings, something strange and almost supernatural has happened. But that’s a whole other subject and book. All right, yes, I believe I have some sort of past-life link to that time and place, okay?

  Thank God for all those painful vaccinations, because in true RS form I get off the ship in the squalid East African city of Djibouti and promptly step on a piece of grimy old wood that pierces my sandaled foot. My mum freaks out for a few minutes, but honestly, given the hideous crew cut and gaudy matching Hawaiian shirts she’s
inflicted on my brother and me for the trip, I find her reaction a little over the top. I get a slight fever, but I never throw up. Other than the time I’m busted for climbing up an outside “crew only” ladder to visit the dogs in cages by the base of the funnel of the ship (if I’d fallen, I’d have hit the water seventy-five feet below and been lost forever), everything goes swimmingly on the rest of our trip to the UK.

  We arrive at Southampton in December of 1959 and are booked into the Howard Hotel in central London. I secretly hope this isn’t a bad omen for me, given the whole “Howard the Coward” thing. London is the most astounding city I have ever seen. How could all those dopey Pommie bastards I’d known in school have come from such an amazing place? There is age to this city, serious age and history—even at ten years old I get that. And so much energy! The lights, the bustling crowds of Christmas shoppers, the red double-decker buses, the smell of diesel fumes, hawkers on frosty street corners selling really supercool tin toy airplanes that turn somersaults every few feet—“Mum. Can I have one?”

  “We’ll see. Maybe for Christmas.”