The Story of Danny Dunn

by Bryce Courtenay

  Others may have described Balmain as poverty-stricken during the Great Depression and the ongoing misery of the thirties, but locals were largely unaware of their particular misfortune. While many of its working-class residents struggled more than most to survive – unemployment in Balmain was double the state average – they nevertheless possessed a peculiar and unreasoning pride: they came from Balmain and were therefore fiercely, even foolishly, tough and independent. ‘Balmain boys don’t cry’ epitomised the breed.

  They needed every bit of determination as the 1930s progressed. Moonlight flits were common – a huddle of cold and hungry urchins together with their desperate parents escaping down a dark street at midnight carrying between them everything they owned, unable to pay the rent or persuade the landlord to extend them any more credit. In winter people were reduced to rowing out at night to ships waiting to unload, dodging the water police, then stealing aboard like rats to pinch coal or vegetables from the holds. War veterans sold matches or busked outside pubs on harmonicas, playing the popular songs of the Great War and the roaring twenties. Men turned up at dawn to get a place in the labour queue, their stomachs rumbling or cramping with hunger after a dingo’s breakfast – a piss and a good look around.

  Balmain became a place of hungry, bronchial, barefoot children, many suffering from scabies. Paradoxically, the children attending school were well scrubbed, unlike those from other poverty-stricken neighbourhoods. Similarly Balmain men standing in the labour queues were, as a general rule, neatly shaved. This came about, not from fastidiousness, but because soap and shaving cream were stolen from the production line of the local Colgate Palmolive and Lever Brothers soap factories and handed out to friends and neighbours. There was always soap beside the tub, even if there was no food in the cupboard.

  But Brenda had been correct. Although poverty gripped the peninsula and per capita beer sales had dropped, pub patronage increased. Tired and defeated men could go to the pub and know that they were not alone; it was neutral territory, where they could share a middy or a seven, have a whinge and a joke and talk football or the race results at Wentworth Park and Harold Park or at Randwick. They could linger over a beer beside another bloke and forget the labour queue they would both be joining the following morning, competing for a dwindling supply of jobs.

  The Hero of Mafeking needed a lot of work if it was to become a decent pub, and although it had been cheap, repairs and renovations soon depleted the money in the bank, except for a small emergency reserve. In fact they went close to bankruptcy on several occasions. However, the resourceful Brenda, by skimping and saving, short-staffing, and working until she dropped as barmaid, cleaner, cellarwoman and publican, kept them afloat. She’d often enough wake with a start in the small hours of the morning, having collapsed from sheer exhaustion in the beer cellar, slumped against an eighteen-gallon kilderkin of beer. But somehow she contrived to build the pub’s popularity as well as enable her parents to save their farm.

  By the time the Depression had started to wane slightly towards the end of 1934, the Hero of Mafeking was considered one of the best of the thirty pubs on the peninsula. Brenda had introduced several innovations. In the main bar she got rid of the sawdust on the floor and, to the amusement of the competition, laid bright red and white checked linoleum and a couple of dozen three-legged bar stools along the length of the polished teak bar.

  ‘Stupid bitch. Wait until some drunk slips on his own vomit or beer slops and breaks his fucking neck.’

  She strategically placed three brightly painted firemen’s pails each filled with an inch or two of sawdust so that anyone feeling the urge to throw up could reach them quickly.

  Brenda made sure there were always fresh flowers in the parlour – the ladies bar – and laid a pretty rose-patterned carpet; she placed a couple of nice still-life prints on the wall together with a large glossy picture in an ornate gold stucco frame of the two royal princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret.

  The first counter lunches were offered at the Hero of Mafeking: threepence for a middy of beer, two thick slices of bread (twelve slices to the loaf), cheese, boiled mutton or German sausage. Other pubs followed suit, but their mostly male publicans did little else to raise the spirits of their patrons.

  Photographs of the great Balmain rugby-league players as well as other sportsmen of the past appeared on the walls of the main bar decently framed behind glass and not screwed permanently to the wall.

  ‘Mark my words, they won’t last ten minutes. Bludgers will soon have those under their jumpers and into the pawnbroker!’

  But, with some rare exceptions, the patrons did no such thing. They responded well to being treated decently. Having a beer at the Hero became a pleasant experience, and to be banned for bad behaviour was considered a genuine disgrace.

  Far and away Brenda’s greatest innovation was her ladies’ soiree. She invited the neighbourhood housewives to congregate in the shade of the pub’s back verandah each weekday afternoon to enjoy one another’s company while darning, mending, shelling peas or peeling potatoes for the family’s evening meal. The single schooner of shandy that lasted each of them through the afternoon was free twice a week and half the usual fourpence on the other three weekdays.

  ‘Silly drongo! Soon go broke handing out them free drinks to the sheilas!’

  At this very popular afternoon gathering, involving at any time two or three dozen women, Brenda would be rewarded for her generosity with all the gossip, hard news and rumour from around the peninsula. No one in Balmain could scratch his bum without her knowing, and anything the opposition tried she’d know about, often before it happened.

  To his credit Half Dunn had never objected to the financial help she gave her family, even when they’d been pretty skint themselves. Brenda never forgot that, accepting him for the lazy, bullshitting, useless lump of pomaded and nattily dressed lard he in fact was. In the end drinkers regarded him as a fixture, someone never short of a word, a cheeky remark, a clever quip or the latest joke.

  By 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, the Hero was solidly in the black and Brenda’s reputation as a publican was at an all-time high. But the day she declared that, come what may, Danny wasn’t going to the Olympic trials, many of the chairs on the back verandah of the pub remained empty, despite it being a free shandy day. Brenda was shocked. She had come to regard the women as friends and confidantes, but the empty seats symbolised a general disapproval. The women were appalled by her decision; they could never have afforded and would never have dared to make it themselves, and some thought she was giving herself airs.

  Opportunities for working-class boys in Balmain were few and far between: they could excel as sportsmen or be selected to go to Fort Street Boys High School. It ultimately meant the opportunity for a decent job in the city, a clean job where you wore a white shirt, collar and tie, shone your shoes every morning and came home with clean fingernails, or with an honourable ink stain on your second and third fingers where you held your Croxley fountain pen. On a rare occasion it meant a scholarship to Sydney University. Even by proxy, Fort Street and sport made a big difference to how folk felt about themselves.

  The alternative for a young bloke who wasn’t super bright or couldn’t kick a football, swim like a flaming porpoise, race a bike at the velodrome or go ten rounds in the ring at Rushcutters Bay Stadium was to follow his old man into the Colgate-Palmolive or Lever Brothers soap factories, the iron foundry, the ferry repair workshops or as a trainee crane driver at Walsh Bay. That is, if he was lucky enough to get an apprenticeship and didn’t end up as a common labourer shovelling shit and guts at the Flemington abattoir, working at the chemical factory or as a labourer on the wharves, repairing the roads or, worst of all, working on the coal loader.

  Danny was already at Fort Street and clearly a superior athlete; to most folk such good fortune would not only guarantee their son’s future but their own as well. Publicl
y the men denounced Brenda for denying the community the reflected glory of a favourite Balmain son’s fame, and the women protested by staying away from the soiree. But Brenda maintained a stubborn silence on the subject.

  The water-polo delegation assembled on a vacant block behind the backyard of the Hero of Mafeking around four-thirty one Tuesday afternoon. A Hero regular among them was sent to coax Half Dunn out of the pub, so as not to alert Brenda, who would probably give them the benefit of her acerbic tongue. Half Dunn, who only left his reinforced stool to take a piss, would be urged to slip out the back of the pub to the meeting spot in the vacant lot.

  The plan wasn’t quite as simple as it seemed. Half Dunn weighed over twenty stone, and by four o’clock already had eight schooners sloshing around in his enormous belly. A thirty-yard waddle in the late-afternoon sun was asking a fair bit. Then there were his two-tone patent-leather shoes to consider; they were for display purposes only, not for walking on rough, stony ground.

  However, Half Dunn knew he couldn’t refuse the invitation, for if he did, he’d look weak as piss. Furthermore, while everyone knew and accepted that Brenda ran the pub and made the business decisions, it went without saying that a man was still the boss in his own home. Brenda never put him down in public and so the delegation would have no reason to suspect any different. This was, after all, a family decision, not pub business, and they had every right to assume that, as her husband, he could come down on her like a ton of bricks; certainly demand she change her mind.

  Half Dunn made it to the vacant block, panting heavily, his shirt wringing wet, pale-blue eyes blinking away the stinging sweat under his brilliantine-darkened ginger brush-over.

  ‘Yeah, good on ya, Mick. Thanks for coming,’ Tommy O’Hearn greeted him.

  ‘I’ve scuffed me fuckin’ shoe,’ Half Dunn replied, looking forlornly down at his left foot.

  ‘Yeah, righto. Spot o’ polish’ll fix that,’ O’Hearn replied, glancing at Half Dunn’s shoes. ‘Mate, we’d like to talk to you about your unfortunate decision.’

  ‘My decision? What decision?’ Half Dunn panted, mopping his face with a large white sweat-soaked handkerchief.

  ‘C’mon, mate,’ O’Hearn said impatiently. ‘Yer boy Danny . . . not goin’ to the Olympics.’

  ‘Brenda!’ Half Dunn replied by way of a one-word explanation. His wife’s name seemed to give off a firm, hard sound, like a heavy brass padlock snapping shut.

  ‘Yeah, mate, we know.’ O’Hearn waited for a further explanation.

  Half Dunn stuffed the hanky absently into his trouser pocket and stared at his buggered shoe, thinking, you can’t polish patent leather.

  ‘So?’ someone asked, breaking the silence.

  ‘I dunno, mate,’ Half Dunn said. Danny, the cause of this kerfuffle, wouldn’t have dreamed of bringing his disappointment over his mother’s decision to his old man, to use him as an ally in an attempt to make her change her mind, two against one. He had long since sussed his father out as a major crap artist. Although never openly disrespectful, he seldom if ever asked his opinion on anything.

  Last night Half Dunn’d heard the boy crying in his room upstairs, but knocking at the door and going in to offer him comfort was pointless. Brenda’s word was law. He knew he was piss-weak as a father, as a husband even worse. He’d willingly handed over any authority he might have once possessed a long time ago, although he couldn’t quite remember how that had happened. Take the Commercial. One moment he’d been happily propping up the bar in his childhood home, the next she was buying a pub in Balmain. ‘Sign here, dear,’ forefinger on a line appearing in the same place on several sheets of typed paper he hadn’t the energy to read or the nerve to question. ‘Sign here,’ was practically her maxim.

  It hurt. It hurt like hell having no particular purpose, sitting on his reinforced stool getting slowly pissed and crapping on to the customers from opening to closing time. He was, in his own eyes, a useless prick, but he no longer had any idea how he might assert himself. He wouldn’t have understood the term ‘emasculated’, but he knew how it felt.

  It wasn’t as if they ever quarrelled or even raised their voices. She’d simply say, ‘Yes, dear’ or ‘Never mind, dear’ or ‘Trust me, dear’, then go ahead and do as she’d originally intended. The worst part, in terms of the eventual outcome, was that she was seldom wrong.

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ he promised the men standing with their arms folded in front of him.

  ‘What, you haven’t already?’ someone asked, shaking his head in disbelief.

  ‘Jesus, mate,’ yet another exclaimed, his disdain obvious.

  O’Hearn, as the union shop steward, was accustomed to doing the talking and there was a grumble of disquiet beginning to come from the delegates. Any moment now, he knew, they were all going to be having a go at Half Dunn. He took a step closer to deliberately separate himself from the mob. It was basic union training – you own the mob, they don’t own you. ‘Glad to hear it. So tell me, watcha gunna say to the little missus?’

  Half Dunn looked at him alarmed; he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He was being pushed into a corner and didn’t like it, but he wasn’t game to object. ‘Er . . . I’ll . . .’

  ‘Can I make a suggestion,’ the shop steward cut in firmly – it wasn’t a question. ‘You’re going to point out to your good wife that half . . . no, more than half the blokes who drink at the Hero, at your pub, support the water-polo team. That’s half the flamin’ profits if I’m not greatly mistaken! I mean, if they should decide to drink at any of the other twenty-nine pubs we’ve got on the peninsula . . .’ He paused to let his meaning sink in, then stabbed his forefinger at Half Dunn and added, ‘We’re disappointed see, very bloody disappointed, and disappointed people who have been let down badly can get very cranky, know what I’m hintin’ at, mate? They’ve been known to change their mind about where they drink. Get my drift?’

  ‘Yeah, righto,’ Half Dunn growled in an attempt at bravado. Despite his misgivings, he was annoyed that the union man felt it necessary to labour the point. ‘I got the fucking message the first time.’

  ‘Good on ya, matey. Just wanted to make sure. We’ll send someone over in the morning to get the good news,’ O’Hearn said, smiling. Reaching out he squeezed Half Dunn reassuringly on the shoulder, his thumb sinking to the base knuckle and still not meeting any muscle. Pulling it out of the layer of blubber under the wet shirt made a small sucking sound. He rubbed his glistening thumb absently down the leg of his blue King Gee overalls and Half Dunn saw the pink blotches on the back of his hand where he’d been burnt by the raw caustic soda used for making soap. He also picked up the rank smell of sheep tallow that permeated the skin of workers at the Olive and the Lever Brothers soap factory, especially when they perspired. The union man grinned, then winked. ‘Might even buy you a beer, hey?’ His expression changed suddenly to a quizzical frown. ‘You’re not gunna let the side down now, are ya, mate? Balmain’s depending on you to come through for the water-polo team.’

  ‘I don’t need your fucking free grog, I own a fucking pub!’ Half Dunn blustered.

  ‘You’ll need somethin’ a damn sight stronger to drink if you don’t have some good news termorra, big boy,’ one of the blokes laughed.

  ‘Nah, she’ll be right,’ O’Hearn said confidently, ushering them with a sweep of both hands towards the entrance to the vacant lot.

  They began to shuffle away, two of them touching him lightly on the cuff of his sleeve, the only part of his sweat-soaked shirt not clinging opaquely to his enormous ginger-haired pink-skinned chest above his trouser line. Half Dunn wasn’t sure whether this gesture was meant to be an additional threat or an encouragement. Both smelled of sheep fat.

  Half Dunn stood alone for a while, trying to think. The afternoon sun was beginning to sting his scalp, burning through the wisps of pasted-down ginger hair. Partially formed thoughts misted
and dissolved like passing clouds. Where do I start? A wave of panic swept over him. How? When? Jesus! Fuck! How do I put it to her? Make her see the consequences. She won’t like losing customers one little bit. Fucking O’Hearn’s right. Customers, that’s the key. Do it at tea, with the boy at the kitchen table? Nah, if Danny blubs she’ll blame me. They’ll both agree I’m shickered. Tell her tonight in bed? No good. It’s her private time to read the new Women’s Weekly. She’s up at sparrow fart . . . tackle her then. Good idea. She won’t expect me to be up. Make her a cuppa. Catch her unawares.

  He glanced up to see the three magpies gliding in to land on the backyard fence on their late afternoon Sao-biscuit run. Shit, she’ll be out the back any moment emptying her pinafore pocket. Shoe’s fucking ruined!

  Even at fifteen, Danny Dunn was becoming a ‘somebody’, moreover a very fortunate somebody. Not only was he a brilliant young sportsman, he was also one of the select few who’d made it to Fort Street from primary school. His exam marks were good and there wasn’t any doubt that he’d pass. But, of course Brenda wanted to make sure he obtained university entrance level once he matriculated. Going to the Olympic trials and then maybe the Olympics would undoubtedly distract him from his studies, and Half Dunn knew Brenda wouldn’t have a bar of that. Over my dead body, mate! She was fanatical about her precious son going to university. It was the major reason they’d left Wagga. Just about the major reason for everything she did. Unlike the rest of Balmain, the football crowd included, even if the water-polo team won gold in Germany and gave Danny a hero’s welcome and a street parade, he knew she couldn’t have given a fuck, if, in the process, he hadn’t made it into Sydney University. And that was the basic problem. Her way of thinking wasn’t the way the peninsula saw things. Her values were not the same as theirs. He could clearly understand their resentment.