While my father visited a few times in that first year of our baby’s life, I can only remember one visit from my mother. She came when Dan was about six months old, and soon after arriving became distracted by our kitchen, which she believed was in urgent need of cleaning. She stayed about two hours and never went near the baby, instead busying herself pumping so much Spray n’Wipe into the stove-top that it stopped working for the next month. I know many people have a parent with a germ fetish but I don’t think many can claim a mother who has cleaned one of their appliances to death. I made a mental note to include her compulsive cleaning and compulsive baby-avoidance in my next round of ‘Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?.
My main focus, you’ll notice, still involved turning my mother into a reliable dinner-party anecdote, although I do think something started to shift in my attitude once I had my own child. I loved him so fiercely. I would do anything for him. I would never let him down. It was slightly unnerving contemplating how I’d failed to inspire the same feelings in my own parents.
I’ve discussed this moment with friends who had indifferent or downright rotten parents. Some have even admitted an urge to blame themselves for the fact that they were never properly loved. In bad moments, they would ask themselves: ‘Was there something about me that was difficult to love? Maybe I did something as a baby or a young child to repel the love they wanted to give me.’
The idea of a bad parent seems so wrong, so against the expected rules of the universe, that we can’t face the unfairness of it. We search for an alternative explanation, even if that involves cutting our own personality to pieces as we try to place the blame anywhere but where it belongs.
There must have been some self-confidence in my makeup because I never truly fell into this way of thinking. Mostly I thought myself a victim of bad luck. And if struck by a bout of ‘poor-me’, I’d cheer myself up by remembering a cartoon by Patrick Cook, one I’d torn from the National Times years before and kept inside my notebook.
In the sketch, a group of parents are looking through the window of a maternity ward. They are viewing a line of new babies, who lie swaddled in their cribs.
Says one baby to another: ‘I take it there’s a choice.’
That, for so many of us, seemed to sum up the situation. What happened was no fault of ours. We did nothing wrong. Through some error or oversight, we just didn’t get the family we’d ordered.
By this time, I’d risen through the ranks at the Sydney Morning Herald and was in the middle of a harried eighteen months as the paper’s News Editor, a job that involved working from nine in the morning until nine at night. It was an era when reporters would scream at the News Editor and the News Editor was required to scream back. One bloke was so angry about the story I’d assigned him, he picked up a metal office chair and smashed it so hard on the floor in front of me that two of the legs sheared off. He then, rather meekly, pulled out his wallet and offered to pay for the damage.
As a reward for surviving this battlefield of bleeding egos, I was handed a stint as European Correspondent, stationed in London. There was a house that came with the job and an office in a lane off Fleet Street. It was 1988 – the dying years of Thatcherism. The last time I’d been to the UK was when I was ensnared by Lionel, a period which also happened to coincide with the death throes of a government: in that case, the Callaghan Labour government of power blackouts, inflation and strikes. I specialised, it seemed, in the dying days of dyspeptic regimes. England was glorious, but only during the periods in which I chose not to visit.
As we settled into our new house, I remembered what I’d enjoyed from my first stay in England – the newspapers, the museums, the wit and intelligence so widely on display – and yet I also saw the British class system at work. The middle class and the working class spoke of each other with derision, treating each other like different species. The non-poshies would describe people who’d been to a school such as Eton with contempt, regarding them as undeserving winners of life’s lottery. The poshies would joke about having less posh friends to dinner: ‘Better watch out they don’t steal the silver.’ On radio and TV, southerners would make jokes about northerners. On one occasion Liverpool was named European City of Culture: this, according to one comedian, meant that when they stole the wheels off your car, they’d jack the thing up on a box of books. Funny, certainly, but still . . .
Of course, a lot of this has changed in the years since; Britain now is more relaxed about class, and generally more ebullient about life. It’s a happier place than it was in the late 1980s. But, back then, there were plenty of things about the English that made me feel uncomfortable.
I noticed the way class seemed to permeate everything: two classes on my train to work; two classes for the mail; the BBC even had two TV stations – BBC1, for the workers, with shows like ’Allo ’Allo! and EastEnders; BBC2, for the poshies, with a history of the Etruscan vase. Sometimes, trying to choose something to watch, Debra and I would find BBC1 too lowbrow for our taste, while the other was too highbrow. And then, of course, there were the accents – so differentiated, so precise, that people seemed to know your town, your class, and maybe even your school within a few seconds. Try picking the origins of the Australian billionaire James Packer based on the way he speaks: you’d have no idea that he represents four generations of money and power. If he were English, you’d be able to place him perfectly, probably down to the left or right dormitory at Eton.
I disliked, too, the way the poshies littered the language with words pronounced in ways wildly different to their spelling. With a slight surge of shame, I remember telephoning a professor at Magdalene College for a science story I was writing. All went well until, as part of checking his job title, I mentioned the college’s name.
‘It’s pronounced “Maudlyn”,’ the professor said after a withering moment of silence. For the rest of the interview he was rather frigid, treating me as a person of no standing; an ignoramus out of my depth.
Everyone knows that ‘Magdalene’ is ‘Maudlyn’ – that was his implication – but how was I supposed to know? How was anyone supposed to know? Presumably by growing up around people who themselves went to ‘Maudlyn’ – sidelining not only the hapless foreign correspondent but also the vast bulk of the British population.
To me, it seemed like a way of policing social class. Don’t get too uppity or you’ll fall into one of our traps. You’ll be invited to a house party in Berkeley Square and then ruin everything by not pronouncing it ‘Barkli’. You’ll be invited to dinner with the Cholmondeleys, without realising that, for no good reason, it’s pronounced ‘Chumley’.
True etiquette, and true class, I’ve always thought, is the opposite of this. Good manners are about making people feel more comfortable, not less comfortable. They’re about holding the ladder up against the castle wall, and helping someone over, rather than pushing it away.
Australia is hardly the classless society it sometimes claims to be, yet there’s not quite the same sense of people being born into a role in life – high or low – then sticking to it. Fascinated by the differences between Australia and Britain, I wrote quite often about the highs and lows of social class. Sometimes I’d determinedly pick someone from the aristocracy to interview, just for a chance to see where they lived. I loved the way their carpet was often threadbare and that – despite living in some huge mansion – their kitchen would be full of the second-cheapest brand in every category.
In one of my newspaper pieces I called it the ‘threadbare carpet index’ – claiming I could accurately plot someone’s aristocratic pedigree from the degree of wear and tear on the hall runner: the more tragic the carpet, the longer the aristocratic lineage. Sometimes, I’d note with glee, they sported leather patches on the elbows of their jackets, regarding life as a daily choice between new clothes and the plumbing in the west wing.
To investigate the other end of the class divide, I took Debra and eighteen-month-old Daniel to a Butlin’s seaside camp
– the traditional working-class holiday before cheap airfares lured the crowds to Spain.
We drove south through drizzling rain to the town of Bognor Regis and found a spot in the largest car-park I’d ever seen. We carried our bags towards the entrance, young Daniel riding high on my shoulders in a backpack. Ahead was a series of grim accommodation blocks, surrounded by high security fencing. It was hard to tell whether the fence was to stop the locals from entering, or to prevent the guests from leaving.
I thought to myself, It looks like a prisoner-of-war camp.
Debra, walking beside me, said, ‘It looks like a prisoner-of-war camp.’
As we carried our bags through the gate, I tried to reassure her. ‘Don’t prejudge it. Lots of ordinary British people come here. Thousands of them. They wouldn’t come if it wasn’t good. Trust me, this is going to be fun.’
We emerged into a central square in which hundreds of people stood in queues, open to the elements. It was unfair of us to compare it to a prisoner-of-war camp. Prisoner-of-war camps, however brutal, tend to be efficiently run. This was more like a refugee centre which had sprung up in the day or two after a natural disaster. Each family group was surrounded by a moat of kids and bags. Light rain was falling. We joined one of the queues, waiting like everyone else to be allocated a room.
Debra said, ‘I can’t believe these queues. This is going to take two hours.’
Again, I counselled calm. ‘These guys have been running holiday camps since the 1930s. I’m sure they have a system. I’m sure it won’t take two hours.’
It took two hours.
‘What’s weird,’ said Debra, after we had finally collected our key, ‘is that no one is complaining. They seem a bit miserable but not actually upset or indignant.’
This time around I didn’t remonstrate. Again, I’d already had the same thought. The way this business treated its customers like scum was baffling. So, too, the way these customers accepted the shoddy treatment, with an ‘It’s all we deserve’ shrug of acceptance.
We walked towards our room, past several large dining areas, which pumped out a smell of cabbage and stale fat. As part of booking in, we’d been allocated a meal time for breakfast, lunch and dinner – in each case, a fifteen-minute slot in which we could arrive and partake of all that was on offer. Suddenly the two hours of queuing didn’t seem so bad: with its assistance, we’d missed lunch.
We dropped our bags in the tiny, bleak room we’d been allocated. I lifted Daniel from my shoulders and the three of us began a tour of the camp.
As we set off, I wondered if this was the time to sing the praises of Butlin’s famous knobbly knee competitions or the even more famous Redcoats who would wander around, making jokes and chivvying everyone along.
Maybe not. The camp was tatty, dirty and broken down. There was nary a Redcoat in sight.
We reached the end of our walk and came across an ‘Entertainment Precinct’ that boasted a headline act: ‘The Butlin’s Zoo Train Ride’.
‘This might be fun,’ I said, with the eagerness of a person who knows he’s pushed his partner into a vast vat of shit, but has just located something that might serve as a rope.
‘Let’s give it a go,’ said Debra, with the optimism of a person drowning in shit who is keen to hear news of a rope, any rope, however questionable its utility.
The ‘Butlin’s Zoo Train Ride’ turned out to be a mini-train which looped through a field of grass. Beside the train tracks, fibreglass animals had been installed.
I know what you are thinking: ‘What’s wrong with that?’; ‘It sounds quite jolly’; ‘How perfect for your son, eighteen months old, didn’t you say?’
But here’s the thing: the grass was uncut and the animals were not specially made for this purpose. They’d been purchased by some person – I assume he went by the title Camp Commandant – at an auction house for second-hand fibreglass animals. There were several large chickens, of the sort you might see outside a takeaway shop, some with slogans still affixed: ‘Chicken and Chips’, ‘Open til Late’. Mixed in were several small fibreglass horses, wrenched from one of those coinin-the-slot rides you’d see outside a supermarket, still suffering a pole through the head. And an elephant, souvenired from a car-wash, the trunk carrying the promise: ‘Jumbo’s – the Best Wash in Town’.
Other parents and children sat with us in the train, happy enough. No one seemed to think that it was all, as a poshie might say, ‘a bit second eleven’.
After our seven-minute trip on the world’s most pathetic minitrain, through the world’s most pathetic zoo, we returned to our, um, cell. We were fractious with each other, and with Dan, for about an hour, then decided to forfeit our deposit and drive back to London.
If only we’d stayed, who knows what victories we could have achieved in the knobbly knee competition?
During our year in England, it never occurred to me to try to chase down my mother’s abandoned relatives. That may seem odd, but I hope it represented a healthy impulse: a desire to focus on my own happy family and leave my mother’s troubled past alone.
It would be wrong, though, to say I didn’t think about her. Courtesy of my experiences, I started to comprehend why she had wanted to escape. Even a whole lifetime of lies might be worth it, if you could just avoid that zoo ride at Butlin’s.
Chapter Eight
Debra, Dan and I headed back to Australia and our old life in Marrickville: me working as a feature writer at the Sydney Morning Herald; Debra writing plays and TV shows. I began to feature Debra in my column, giving her a role as Jocasta, a straight-talking, sexy, intelligent Australian woman.
In other words, a role as herself.
I’d long before become tired of the way Australians depicted themselves: the men as boofhead Ockers, unable to show emotion; the women as long-suffering doormats. These stereotypes were unlike any Australians I knew. The men I knew were emotional, loyal, family focused and would cry at the drop of a hat. The women were strong, bordering on stroppy. Okay, stroppy may be overstating it. They were, however, great mothers, great partners, hilarious after two drinks, sexy as anything, smart as paint, and always keen to do their men the favour of refusing to take any crap. The character of Jocasta was an attempt to capture all of that.
The real Debra was kinder and more forgiving than the newspaper version, but most of Jocasta’s best lines in my Herald column were transcribed from life. I was Boswell to her Johnson. There was great pleasure in living with Debra – scribbling down her jokes – and it was a thrill being father to Dan.
The column gave me a chance to record the day-to-day detritus of life in a way that some colleagues thought a bit odd. Given a spot in the paper, why would you write about something so ‘lightweight’? Why not write about politics or world affairs? I had no answer for them at the time; I just had this impulse to record an ordinary family and how it worked. Whatever the advice to the contrary, it was an urge that was impossible to put aside. Psychoanalysing yourself is always a tricky task, but perhaps it’s obvious that, having been denied a humdrum ordinary childhood, I understood that such a thing was worth celebrating and recording.
Often I kept my Jocasta notebook out when Daniel was burbling away, certain I’d never be able to remember the startling logic of the three-year-old mind:
Daniel: (points to a large poster featuring a dog) What’s that dog?
Me: It’s on a poster – to sell paint.
Daniel: What paint?
Me: The paint that’s on the poster.
Daniel: What poster?
Me: The poster back there – the one with the dog.
Daniel: What dog?
Or another, when we were on a bus, looking at a store with a broken window:
Daniel: Who did that?
Me: Some naughty person.
Daniel: Which naughty person?
Me: Some naughty person we don’t know.
Daniel: It was Emma! It was Emma!
Me: No, someone else did it.
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Daniel: Did what?
Me: Broke the window.
Daniel: What window?
Me: The one in the shop.
Daniel: What shop?
Or while watching a Robin Hood video:
Daniel: Who’s that man there?
Me: It’s Robin Hood.
Daniel: But it’s a lady.
Me: Well, it’s a lady there now. But it was Robin Hood just a second ago.
Daniel: Where’s he gone?
Me: He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s right there. You just can’t see him at the moment.
Daniel: Why can’t I see him?
Me: Because the camera isn’t pointing at him, that’s why.
Daniel: Where’s the camera?
Me: Well, you can’t see that either.
Daniel: But I want to see the camera.
Me: Well, you can’t. But he’ll be back soon.
Daniel: Who will be?
Me: Robin Hood.
Daniel: Where’s he gone?
Sometimes, as I scribbled, I’d wonder whether my own parents would have taken pleasure in these tiny, banal moments of a young child’s life. Probably not. But I had.
When Daniel was four, we had a second child, Joe. When he was still tiny – a week or two old – my mother happened to be in Sydney for a meeting connected with her theatre company. She visited for morning tea, perching warily on our couch. I tried to act as if our family was normal; that my mother was normal.
I said, ‘Would you like to hold the baby, Mum?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know how to.’
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