Hellbent: Ces Waters & Me

by Margaret Wentworth

  When dad was incarcerated in Strangeways Prison for three months on a drunk-driving charge I was delighted. A respite. Mum insisted I accompanied her on once-a-month visits. We sat in glass booths like telephone boxes and talked through a wire mesh.

  At first dad was very reserved. He asked mum how she was getting on without him. She said she was managing, and deflected the conversation back to his experiences. Dad told her he’d been given a good job as an orderly in the prison hospital. Dad was thrilled about this because it put him in close contact with a lot of murderers. These dangerous offenders were placed under observation in the hospital to detect any physical or psychological abnormalities which may have some bearing on the crime committed. Dad was excited to tell us that he’d made the acquaintance of Buck Ruxton, a Lancashire doctor who’d murdered his wife. He explained in great detail that while Ruxton chopped her to pieces in the bathroom, the maid entered. So she too had to be disposed of in the same gruesome manner.

  While dad was rambling, I was trying to poke a pin with a red head on it through the wire mesh. Goodness knows why. The mesh was too fine to allow the pin through, but I persisted. Dad’s voice petered out as he watched me doing this. For a few beats there was a deadly silence. I looked up into dad’s face, fearing the usual explosion of irritation. Instead, I was surprised to see tears rolling down his cheeks. He simply said, ‘Save it for me.’ I looked to mum who was staring affectionately into his dark moist eyes, soaking up the gentle humanity that weeks of sobriety had produced.

  Soon dad had the company of Tony. Both were behind bars thanks to too much alcohol and too little sense. After a drinking binge, Tony broke into a warehouse, stole a side of bacon and put it in a pram. Then he swayed and staggered along the street pushing the pram and singing, ‘This little piggy went to market …’ Not surprisingly he was soon pulled over. Because of his form, Tony was given a hefty 18-months.

  Dad’s sentence ended about May 1936, when Buck Ruxton was hanged. I suppose mum was pleased to have dad home again, goodness knows why. The first thing dad did on his return was head for the pub to boast to all his mates about his experiences inside. Sylvia and I took to the streets again, predicting the inevitable.

  Dad’s regular drinking partner was Bob Armstrong. Bob lived with Eunice. One afternoon a frantic Eunice came banging on our door. The noise woke dad up; he’d spent a heavy morning down at the pub with Bob and was trying to sleep it off. However, his annoyance turned to concern when Eunice cried out, ‘Please, quick, Bob’s gone barmy!’

  Bob had carried a table and some provisions from his house to Brunswick Street, two blocks away. He’d placed the table on the tram lines and was cutting bread for the local kids! Curious pedestrians had gathered to watch him. They couldn’t work out what was going on. Only Eunice and my family knew he’d gone bonkers with the booze. Bob’s table was stopping the trams and by the time we arrived, he was causing a commotion. The police eventually carted him off. Bob was ordered to get medical treatment but thought this a sissy thing to do. At the first opportunity he was down at the St George and the Dragon pub again.

  One morning, Sylvia’s treasured Scots doll went missing. We couldn’t find it anywhere. Sylvia was very distressed. Dad dismissed it, saying robbers must have taken it. It wasn’t until some time later that a chance conversation with a friend revealed to my mum what really happened. To gain favours with the landlord of the pub, dad had given Sylvia’s doll as a present for his daughter. To me, that must have been the most absolute act of selfishness. My little sister cried for weeks afterwards.

  We revelled in the Christmas school holidays. Despite the icy chill of winter, kids would wander the streets trying to amuse themselves. Most of us didn’t have toys so we had to invent games. I’d tie a piece of thin string or heavy cotton to the knocker of a door. Then I’d roll out the thread across the narrow road and secure it to a door knocker on the opposite side. There would be just enough slack so it wouldn’t snap if one door was opened. I’d knock on one, then hide and wait for the occupant to open their door. The thread would pull taut and lift the knocker on the opposite door from its resting position. Seeing no one there, the occupant would close their door and the consequent slack released the knocker across the road. Knock, knock. So eventually you’d get a very funny situation where people on opposite sides of the road would keep opening their doors to catch the mischief-making kid.

  I’d also set fire to a piece of rag to make it smoulder, and push it through the letter box slit in a neighbour’s front door and smoke everybody out. Terrific fun. Who needed toys?

  My mates and I often spraffed for extra food, often off people as hungry as us. We’d go knocking on doors and sweetly asking, ‘Could you give us a piece of bread, lady, and a cup of water?’ It was blatant begging. Many times people in more affluent residential areas would invite us in and give us a big spread at the table.

  Bing, Bong and I ran down the All Saints mortuary steps and out the other end, pretending to be ghosts and boogies and making all sorts of funny noises. On one occasion the annoyed mortuary attendant locked one of the end doors, lay down on a slab and covered himself with a sheet. The three of us came charging in and discovered we couldn’t get out the other side. Suddenly a ghost-like apparition rose from the slab and stood blocking our escape. There was a distinctive bowel sound. Then he removed the sheet and shouted, ‘Get out of here!’ kicking one of us in the backside as we fled.

  9 Trout Stream

  Per Aspera Ad Astra

  Through Struggles to the Stars

  Queenwood School motto

  Ces bore with callipers. My burden was shyness.

  I was born in Melbourne but when I was only a baby, my parents settled in a very scenic, undulating area called Beauty Point in the north-shore Sydney suburb of Mosman. Our property was a child’s paradise: a multi-terraced garden with rocky outcrops providing secret places to hide in and large spreading trees to climb, leafy canopies that shaded flat green lawns I chased across, and twisting pathways I scootered down. The house itself was a simple brick structure, but from the verandah we could enjoy views of Middle Harbour. At the bottom of the hill, bush tracks led down to one of several harbour estuaries. We prised fresh oysters off the rocks or cooled off on hot summer days by splashing about in the local saltwater pool. A short drive took us to miles of golden beaches where we sunbaked and passionately bodysurfed on weekends.

  Unlike the grim Midland slum Ces was raised in, my childhood was bathed in fresh air, sunshine and freedom. Our house and car doors were left unlocked and us kids could roam the streets feeling safe. We were taught to trust the integrity of adults, teachers, even politicians. There was always plenty of food on our table and harmony and love in our household. In almost all respects, I was one of the luckiest girls in the world.

  But I was shy, painfully shy, and this condition cast a shadow over my early life. No amount of money or love could make the shyness go. I would feel my guts shrinking if someone paid me any attention. My skin would crawl. My heart thumped. My cheeks burned and went the brightest scarlet. I was extremely self-conscious and felt that people could see right through me, as if I were made of rice paper. Worse still, I felt they would not like what they saw, considering me inferior and worthless.

  Where I got these notions from I’ll never know. I come from a proud ancestry and can trace the family name back to the Norman Conquest. My great great grandfather was William Charles Wentworth, who was in the first party of adventurers to cross the Blue Mountains in the early nineteenth century. These mountains were a formidable barrier and their achievement opened up vast tracks of grazing land for settlers. William Charles also contributed much to the political thinking of the early Australian colony. In the 1960s it was considered very prestigious to be a Wentworth and many an adult would question me about it, much to my pride and embarrassment. These days, thankfully, nobody gives a damn.

  Dad instilled in us the idea that we represented an odd, eccentric line
of the family; we were the black sheep and therefore social rejects. This gave dad great pleasure as he hated the pretentious behaviour he observed in some of his richer and more socially-oriented relatives. Despite his kind and generous nature, dad was very antisocial. Like Ces, he loved animals but had little time for human beings. Visits to our household were so rare visitors put us all in a terrible flap. When we stepped inside our gate, we entered our own private world, immensely safe and predictable. I loved my home life. But a little voice kept telling me it had to end one day and then I would have to face my fears in the World Outside.

  Being so introspective and feeling so inadequate, it was not surprising that I had many fears. One of my main concerns was that my peers were much sharper and more knowledgeable than I. It was obvious I was mentally slow. I was a late talker and really didn’t make any sense of the world until I was about seven or eight years old. Then I was smart enough to come to the conclusion that the less I spoke, the less people would realise how little I knew about anything. So I was always a very quiet child.

  This suited my family very much. Noisy people were not encouraged.

  My mother was a warm and caring person who I adored. Before she became afflicted with Parkinsons disease, Joan was an attractive woman: tall, curvaceous and slim, with short wavy brown hair fading to grey, sparkling green eyes and a big loving smile. She had a soft, gentle personality and rarely raised her voice.

  Dad, Allan as others knew him, was of medium height with curly brown hair and a square jawline. He always wore thick glasses as he was shortsighted, and dressed in a conservative way. He lived within his intelligent head, quietly absorbed with electrical engineering, which he loved with a passion. His inventive mind was forever absorbed in research and development. He seemed happiest sitting among his family, puffing his pipe and lost in thought, his technical pencil poised over paper, waiting for inspiration. Our ginger cat Wooty would sit on dad’s lap and pummel his old pullover, purring in ecstasy.

  Trout fishing was dad’s favourite hobby. Holidays were spent camped by a stream in the hills behind the country town of Tumut, in the highland country of southern New South Wales. We bathed in icy streams and cooked trout dinners in a battered pan over an open fire. Everything we owned was dilapidated but treasured. So what if the tent leaked, the mosquito net had holes, the campbeds collapsed and the old car kept breaking down or getting punctures on the rough dirt country roads? Nothing really mattered so long as we had our health and the family was together.

  Dad gave me a love of nature for which I will always be grateful. We spent hours together collecting mosquito wrigglers in rock pools by the ocean to feed my pet tortoises. With the salt spray on our faces and the crash of waves against rocks, dad and I could lose ourselves inside our heads and shut out the rest of the world for as long as we wished.

  My eldest brother John, four years my senior, was a sweet lovely boy. Thick-set like dad and handsome, he was sensitive, gentle and caring. I never heard him say a bad word about anyone. John was an academic disaster and regularly failed exams, especially maths. In late teenage years he was not interested in girls, sport or rock music; he preferred watching TV cartoons such as Bugs Bunny. We wondered how he would cope with adulthood as he always had such a childlike innocence.

  Two years younger, my other brother Geoffrey was tall, very fair and thin. His sharp intelligence, clever wit and sporting prowess put him streets ahead of most of his peers. He breezed through schoolwork with little study and got a scholarship to Cranbrook, a prestigious private school. Geoffrey was only 18 months older than me so we played a lot together. I was never able to beat him at anything, which didn’t improve my self confidence. He enjoyed his supremacy and often treated me like a cat toying with a mouse.

  So I grew up as a tomboy, playing with boys and wearing my brothers’ hand-me-downs. Mum sewed up a few dresses for me but she had old-fashioned tastes and I felt uncomfortable in stiff pleats or frills. I also hated my short petal haircut which made me feel like an emu. I wasn’t in the least bit dainty; I was tall and clumsy and usually had bandaids plastered over my knees. I couldn’t really relate to girls and didn’t share most of their interests. For this reason it was perhaps unfortunate that I was sent to an all-girl school for 12 years, but it gave me a good education.

  Queenwood School was situated above the very scenic Balmoral Beach in Mosman, a private school which, in the 1960s, was dedicated to producing young ladies of refinement. In winter we wore grey gloves and a grey velvet hat, and our navy tunics had to be a respectable distance below our knees. Our headmistress, Miss Medway, was very protective of her flock and called the police if young men were seen lurking outside the school gates.

  At school I was the invisible student. I sat as far up the back as I could and never put up my hand to answer questions. If I was directly spoken to by the teachers I’d go red in the face and other students would stare at me and laugh, or whisper about me behind cupped hands. Being caught out with red cheeks was my worst nightmare so I went to extreme lengths to avoid the situation. I was terrified of people discovering how inadequate my brain was. It was as if it did not have all its nerve transmitters wired up properly. People perceived me as vague, sometimes positively dense, and this would make me feel even more isolated.

  Strangely enough, though I had trouble putting words together in speech, I did very well at exams and was usually placed in the class with all the brightest students. This pleased me as I thought that my secret hadn’t been discovered yet, though it put more pressure on me to remain silent. When I was told that the following day I would have to give a talk out the front of the class, I shrank so much inside that my stomach became a hard knot of tension. I’d break out in a cold sweat at the thought of being the centre of attention. Invariably I’d be physically sick the next morning and allowed to stay home. I watched Neil Armstrong climb down from Apollo 11 and disturb the virgin moondust as he made that ‘great leap for mankind’ on one such day.

  I was involved in endless avoidance behaviour. I showed some talent at sport but when I was invited to participate at the district school level I declined through fear of either doing well and getting noticed, or doing badly and letting the team down. When the school bus dropped me off at the local shopping centre, I would walk down the empty lane at the rear to avoid the main street where all the other school children gathered in giggling, chattering groups, secretly admiring their reflections in the shop windows. The trouble I went to not to be noticed was considerable and sometimes required very careful planning.

  Shyness resulted in my inability to tell one of Geoffrey’s friends, Jimmy, that I adored him. Over the whole span of my childhood he was one of the few outsiders who my brothers and I enjoyed playing with. Unlike Geoffrey, he treated me with such respect I melted. In his presence I was unable to make eye contact with him without blushing and couldn’t convey the slightest admiration for him because kind, sincere words kept sticking in my throat. Geoff told me one day that Jimmy hated me, and I cried myself to sleep for nights afterwards. (Years later, Geoffrey admitted he had made this up just to annoy his little sister; however, by that stage, I had given up on romance because Jimmy hadn’t invited me to the school ball, despite his mother mentioning to mine that we would make a perfect match.) I envied my girlfriend Annie because she would describe exciting encounters with long-haired guitarists from the rock scene. My other friend Lyn was a confident beauty with a more practical down-to-earth nature. She had no shortage of male admirers, even when she was 12. Had I more guts I would have confronted Jimmy with my feelings and taken more control off my life. As it was, I silently waited for that phone to ring. But it never did.

  Then my brother died. My bittersweet childhood had come to an abrupt end.

  10 Stardust

  It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man’s insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.


  Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America

  When Ces was 12, he had a teacher at Mansfield Street School who he, gallantly, named ‘Miss H’.

  Miss H was 25, had a great figure, and, one day, I was sitting next to my best mate, Harry Hunt, flicking through girlie magazines.

  On this occasion I thought Miss H had tumbled to what we were doing, so I stuck the book down my trousers. I was whispering something to Harry when Miss H said sternly, ‘Come to the front, Cecil Waters!’ She wrote on the blackboard, ‘Cecil Waters will stay behind after school and help me clear out the cupboard.’ The idea was that all the class could see I was being punished. I don’t know why she bothered; half the class couldn’t read anyway.

  Miss H waited until everyone had left the room and then took me to a long cupboard in the corner. It had wide doors and innumerable shelves packed with exercise books of students’ work. My task was to move the books from one side of the cupboard to the other. She looked at the bulge under my jumper and asked, ‘What’s that you’ve got down there?’ She lifted my jumper and pulled the mag out of my pants. ‘Well, I am surprised at you; now, have you got another one down there?’

  I innocently shook my head. Suddenly, her hand slid right down inside my pants. A shock wave catapulted through me as my mind tried to assess whether this was the act of friend or foe. Then, with warm gentle fingers, she began to caress my hat-trick. The room started spinning. She had a bit of a play; it was both gorgeous and terrifying. I knelt down on the floor to sort out the books in a right state, terrified to death as nothing like this had happened before. She gently masturbated me but I didn’t have an orgasm; instead there was a kind of burning sensation which hurt. I accepted this discomfort as my initiation into manhood. I was thrilled.