by Larry Writer
I said, ‘Yes he is … he’s been held up, that’s all. He’ll be here any minute.’
‘Well, I’m not waiting any longer. I’m off to the game.’
Around 3 pm, first grade kick-off time, my mother looked down from the window of our flat and called out to me to come back home. I replied angrily, ‘He is coming. He promised! I’m waiting right here.’ It was 6 pm, with the match long decided, when I had to admit Mum was right and, hurting badly, I skulked inside.
I had long before stopped believing anything my father said, but his no-show that day broke my heart. The fact that I can still remember it so vividly, and my shame when my mate just walked away, attests to that.
When I was five I started school at St Joseph’s, Camperdown. The year before, Mum had taken me along to an open day and I’d loved the thought of going to school and couldn’t wait. I still count some of the St Joseph’s kids as friends today.
We were blessed with a special teacher. Her name was Kay Tierney. She was beautiful and tall and had long blonde hair and would sit cross-legged on the mat with us all around her and play the guitar and sing to us in the sweetest voice. One favourite song was about a shoemaker named Johnny who sailed to sea and went to the war. Miss Tierney was my first love.
She also taught me a life lesson. It came in the form of a tale about two mice that fell into a vat of milk. Neither could swim. One soon gave in to despair and exhaustion and stopped flailing around and trying to climb up the side of the vat to safety, and he sank beneath the surface and drowned. The other didn’t pack it in. Although exhausted too, he kept kicking. He kicked so long and so hard that he churned that milk solid, into butter, and was able to stand up and scamper over the rim of the vat to safety. The moral: never give up, even when everything is against you. If you’re reading this, Kay, I hope you’ve had a great life.
Apart from Miss Tierney, probably the best thing about Camperdown was the Weston Biscuits factory. The aroma of baking biscuits that wafted from that old pile of bricks was sublime: warm, sweet and guaranteed to make your mouth water. When I was old enough to play out in the parks and streets of our suburb I joined a bunch of pretty wild kids, mostly from the Housing Commission blocks, and we did mischievous things. One of which was to prise open the gates of the Weston factory and pinch boxes of biscuits from the factory and the delivery trucks. My favourite was Wagon Wheels, big round biscuits with jam and chocolate coating which came individually wrapped in a colourful paper bag.
My mates and I were a ragtag and rugged bunch. We were into stealing, risking our lives and fighting – ourselves and others, including adults. Looking back now, I was as naughty as any of them, but I suspect I was just an average kid who’d been brutalised at home and the streets gave me a chance to get my own back. You had to be tough to survive Camperdown, just as you had to be to make it in Woolloomooloo, where we would move a few years later.
(I knew a boy in Camperdown named Peter Kelly whose grandmother lived in Woolloomooloo. He took me over to her place every now and then. Even at seven or eight I loved the ’Loo. To a kid from stultifying Camperdown it seemed an exotic, dangerous and exciting place. And Woolloomooloo’s racy allure was well and truly enhanced for me when I learned that a body had been found in the then-under-construction Eastern Suburbs Railway tunnel. Great subterranean tunnels were being blasted and drilled from Martin Place to Bondi Junction. Some kid named Donald Puddyfoot claimed to have found a dead body in one of the tunnels. He told us, ‘I swear to God, there’s a stiff hangin’ in the tunnel.’ We all dared each other to investigate. I wasn’t game and begged off. Others plunged in, hoping to see the corpse. It turned out there was a body deep inside, some poor soul who’d hanged himself.)
I was a square peg in a round hole, a sensitive kid with a tough front. I played hard, but just as I’d done when I was little, I also liked to sit alone and think things through. One pastime was to sit in my room at night with the lights switched off so no one could see me and gaze out my window onto the windows of the other flats in our horseshoe-shaped block. I would see people sitting alone at the kitchen table looking sad; see them drinking until they slumped unconscious on their couch in the silver glow of their TV; see couples arguing, kissing and cuddling, celebrating; see kids I knew doing kid stuff; see people changing the paper in the bird cage. I would look at their furnishings and fittings and get annoyed, for some reason, at their different coloured blinds.
The police were called to our block many times to quell the daily domestic disturbances. Occasionally, something more serious occurred. One time, as I watched from the window of our flat, four or five squad cars and paddy wagons screamed up, sirens blaring. The officers piled out, guns drawn. Passers-by flung themselves to the ground. A resident’s door was smashed down and he was carted off in handcuffs. I didn’t know what he’d done, and I still don’t.
We haunted the sewers. We’d climb down into them from the street with our torches and walk for hours, as far as White Bay near Balmain. If a storm had struck while we were in those malodorous, mossy tunnels we would have drowned.
In 1965, my brother Stephen was born, and my sister Alison came along three years later. Now there were five of us sardined into the flat. Increasingly by now, my father was staying away on his benders. None of us knew where he went. To a pub, a club, a party at a private home … a lover’s place. All we knew was that when he returned three, four, five days later, he’d be dishevelled with his clothes rumpled and stained and his hair and beard shaggy, sick and sullen and smelling of liquor.
I was in fourth class at St Joseph’s, aged nine, and, in spite of all the angst and strife at home and a baby brother and sister who had soaked up a chunk of Mum’s available time, I was doing very well at my schoolwork. I was friendly with the boy who sat next to me in class. He was a good student, too. In fact, we tied for the top place in a big exam, achieving the same high mark. I was delighted, he was delighted. My mother was delighted. His mother was furious. Unable to accept that her son had not come first, and that he had to share the glory with another boy, namely me, this woman, a loud and overbearing type, complained to everyone who would listen that I was a cheat, that I had copied from her little lad and deprived him of the glory that was rightfully his. This hurt me, because Mum had been helping me with my homework and supporting me in every way, and the accusation that I had to cheat to succeed somehow devalued all her hard work on my behalf. The teacher decided that the best way to stop the whispering campaign that this woman – who was prominent at the school, serving on committees and in the tuck shop – had started was to separate us. When we sat for the next examination we were seated at opposite ends of the classroom. The marks came out. Once again I came top of the class. My erstwhile mate languished far behind. It turned out that he had been copying from me. To her credit, the boy’s mortified mother apologised to Mum.
That year, and in fifth class the following year, I got the best marks of my school career. I have kept some of my report cards: 98 per cent, 99 per cent ... par for the course. One April day my teacher handed me a folder filled with homework assignments and said, ‘I need you to have all these completed by July.’ I thought he’d said I had to complete them tonight. So I didn’t play that afternoon, I scurried right back to our flat, hunkered down at the glass cabinet in the living room that I couldn’t fit my legs under where I studied and did my homework, and completed the lot, three months’ worth of assignments, in a single night. I brought it all in the next day and gave it to my teacher and he was gobsmacked. He said, ‘ This is astonishing … How am I going to occupy you for the next three months?’
My penchant for risk-taking and injury continued. One rainy afternoon, I was on the swings in the playground near our flats, swinging as high as I could go, then at the apex of my swing, leaping off and seeing how far I could fly before crashing to earth. All well and good, until after one especially high and long leap I landed on a jagged piece of glass, the broken neck of a smashed bottle. Exc
ruciating pain, then I looked down and saw the bottle embedded in my foot. It must have penetrated a couple of centimetres. Blood gushed from the wound. I thought to myself, Okay, James, relax. Relax. I couldn’t pull the glass out because it was in so deep and, besides, the pouring rain and the gouting blood was making everything slippery. Finally I gripped the glass with two hands, took a huge breath, closed my eyes, yelled, and yanked the sharp shard out. The wound should have been stitched, but instead I hopped home and soaked my foot in the bath, Mum bandaged me up and after a couple of weeks’ hobbling I was okay.
Then, more pain. I found myself the target of a bully who also lived on the third floor of our block of flats. He was a couple of years older than me. I’d done nothing to him. I have no idea why he picked on me. Perhaps because he sensed the soft and lonely boy I tried to hide beneath a rapscallion façade. I was already tall then, and it’s possible that my premature height brought me to his attention. Whatever the reason, he had it in for me. Every day on my way home from school, he’d be lurking to shove, punch, kick, abuse and steal money from me. My mates, who loved being ringside for schoolyard fights and who’d yell ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ whenever one erupted, all said, ‘Dacky, you don’t have to put up with that shit. You’re a big, strong bloke. Just belt the prick.’ But I abhorred violence, and so I didn’t, at least not until my nemesis had made my life hell for another month or two. Then, suddenly, I’d had enough.
Flashpoint came in the schoolyard. A bunch of us were playing some game and he accused me of cheating. ‘No I didn’t,’ I protested.
‘You fucking did!’ he shot back, snarling and cocking his fists.
A crowd of kids gathered around, hoping for blood. I didn’t disappoint them. I punched him as hard as I could. A swift straight right to his mouth. He powdered. A forlorn and bewildered expression spread over his once-sneering face, and he dropped straight to his knees. Then he started wailing. Then he started to squeal. Jesus! I thought, astonished at the result of my single blow.
I knelt down beside where he lay curled up on the hot asphalt of the playground and I said to him, ‘Doesn’t feel too good, does it, mate? Get up and I’ll do it again.’ Where had this aggression come from? Had it welled from the bully’s and my old man’s mistreatment of me, or had I seen someone else acting tough, in a neighbourhood fight or perhaps a TV western and I was aping them? I wasn’t a natural-born fighter.
‘I’m telling my mother!’ the bully howled, tears staining his grimy cheeks.
‘Mate, you’ve been going at me for months, and finally I whack you back and you cry like a baby.’ He lay there sobbing, and the other kids all laughed.
He got me back. Well, not him. His eighteen-year-old mate. This bloke ambushed me and while the boy I’d hit looked on, his friend growled at me, ‘Like playing games, do you, Dack?’ He hit me on the chin so hard that my head flew back into the brick wall and I crumpled, damn near knocked out by the double impact.
The painful postscript apart, dealing with the bully taught me a valuable lesson. Mostly – not always, but mostly – bullies back off if you stand up to them. I found that through all my years in Camperdown and Woolloomooloo, playing rugby league and boxing, and in business. And usually there’s no need to belt the bully in the mouth. If you believe in yourself, a bully can sense that and usually he’ll look elsewhere for his sport.
My brother Stephen’s arrival didn’t really affect me. If I thought of him at all, I considered him a nice little boy, if a bit of a nuisance. Was I jealous that my mother now had to divide her attention between us? Undoubtedly.
The first I became truly aware of Steve, he was five and he damn-near killed himself. I was sitting on a swing in a playground outside our block of flats and there was a crowd of residents and passers-by pointing up in the air and gasping in shock and awe, like extras in a Spiderman movie. I looked up too, and Spiderman on this occasion was my brother. He was climbing, hand over hand, up the exterior drainpipe of the ten-storey block. He had climbed from ground level and now he was at the top, 40 metres above the ground. My heart was in my mouth as I saw him swing from the pipe onto the roof and stand there triumphantly, above us all. For what seemed half an hour but was only a few seconds, Steve teetered on the roof ledge, buffeted this way and that by a swirling, whipping wind. One false step and he would have fallen to his death. I could make out he was laughing and yelling. He didn’t seem to have a care in the world. When he recognised me in the crowd he gave a little wave. I ran back inside the block, caught the clanking old lift to the top floor, and tore out onto the roof where I hauled Stephen down from the ledge. I grabbed him by the hair and shoved him down the stairs and into the lift and into our flat. Now he was screaming, half in terror at what I was doing to him, half in exhilaration at his stunt. I was screaming, too, because I’d nearly lost my little brother. I spent the next three days in bed with a migraine headache.
That was the first time my brother risked his life. It would not be the last. No fear.
The Police Citizens Youth Club at Woolloomooloo is a huge part of my life today. In many ways it has been my saviour. Yet my first connection with a Police Boys Club, as PCYCs were called when I was a kid, was a nightmare. I was ten when I joined Glebe Police Boys Club. Stephen came along, too. He was five. I was attracted by the trampoline there, and they played touch footy in the grounds. The Police Boys Club organisation also owned a place called Camp MacKay at Kurrajong, north-west of Sydney. Camp MacKay, a ‘boys’ health camp’, provided an opportunity for city kids to experience life in the bush. There were paddocks and a creek to swim in, lots of room to run and play. I put my name down to go, as did Stephen and a friend, and we were accepted to spend four days there.
My excitement when I plonked my little bag containing my toothbrush, cossies, towel and spare shorts and T-shirt on my bunk in the dormitory soon turned to terror when I was singled out by the probationary police constable who ruled our section of Camp MacKay. This bloke, for some reason, took an instant dislike to me. Maybe, as with the bully, my being taller than the other kids pissed him off. Certainly I’d done nothing to antagonise him or earn the brutality he dished out to me. To think I had escaped a brutal father at home only to find myself at the mercy of a brutal cop at Camp MacKay.
I was standing by my bunk when, without warning, the cop, who was in his twenties, strong and wiry, ran at me full pelt and shoulder-charged me. I crashed into the metal locker and then onto the floor where I lay dazed. He ordered me to stand up, and then he charged me again with the same result. Four times this sadistic psychopath knocked me down. Each time he grinned and winked at the other kids. They, Stephen included, stood there with aghast expressions but were too afraid to intercede on my behalf. Afterwards I cried myself to sleep, doing my best to sob softly so my friends couldn’t hear.
At breakfast next morning, the policeman started in on me where he had left off the night before. I was sitting at a table in the canteen with a bunch of boys when he strolled up and tipped my bowl of cereal and milk into my lap. Then he grabbed me by the hair and yanked me out of my chair and shouted, ‘Stand in the corner, you bloody little pig, until you learn to eat properly and not spill your food.’ I stood there alone in the canteen in despair, hearing the laughter and yelps of delight of everyone else enjoying their outdoor activities.
Two hours later he returned. The canteen was empty, except for the cop and me. He selected a heavy wooden broom from a cupboard and removed the brush at the end. He now had a club. He ordered me to turn around and face the wall. Then he took a run-up to give his attack added momentum and hit me on the backside with the broom as hard as he could. I was screaming in pain and fright. Then he did it again. I flung myself to the ground, howling and shrieking, ‘Someone! Help me! Please!’ I clutched my bum and pulled my pants down far enough to see that I had two bright red welts across it.
The policeman went to water. The furious expression on his face turned to terror as he seemed suddenly to realise that
he had overstepped the mark and might well find himself in serious trouble. He giggled apologetically, wanting to know why I was reacting so much to just a little harmless fun. He took a Cornetto ice cream from the freezer. ‘Here, mate, have this. You’ll feel better. I really didn’t mean to hurt you … I’ll give you another ice cream tomorrow if you don’t tell on me.’
I didn’t dob him in, not to my mum and certainly not to the police. I was too frightened. He was clearly one very mentally disturbed individual. I had no doubt that he would be capable of harming me if I reported him. How he ever came to be a policeman, why his vicious traits were not noticed in the screening process, defies belief.
Like anyone who suffers a frightful, humiliating experience, I tried to put the whole episode out of my mind. I forgot the cop and what he had done to me.
Forgot him until 2001, when I was shopping at Coles supermarket in Randwick, and suddenly, not 2 metres away, there was the cop. He had unkempt grey hair now, a big flabby gut and a haggard face. I felt a tingle of fear, then righteous fury. I marched up to him, and put my face close to his. He looked startled. I said, very quietly, ‘Do you recognise me?’ He said, ‘No.’
I said, ‘We met at Camp MacKay. About thirty years ago. Have a think … ’
He said, ‘Nah … sorry, mate. Don’t know you.’ But by the tremor of fear that flashed in his eyes I knew that he had recognised me. He spluttered something I couldn’t make out and attempted to push past me, but I stood in his way.