The only thing Jose regretted about me, she told me, was that she’d never see me as a ‘young man’. I couldn’t understand this at the time.
‘Yes, you will, Jose, yes you will!’
Is There a Psychiatrist in the House?
By age four, I was a logical child. For my first Crackernight, given the obvious danger of burns to the skin, even from sparklers, I’d insisted on being provided with not only a skivvy, woollen cardigan, gloves and beanie but also the protective goggles of Mr Reece from a neighbouring street. The eyes, above all, had to be shielded.
When I was adequately armoured, Crackernight kicked off in the backyard; my father, brother and two sisters all lighting fireworks. I promptly broke down in tears and had to scurry back inside – all the sparks, whooshes and bangs were too much for me. There it all was, so fiery and beautiful, and there I was, scared and ashamed and missing out on it. I’d been looking forward to it more than Christmas and that only made it worse!
With me stricken in the kitchen, Mum tried to make me feel better by pretending to be a fairy with a sparkler. I can still see her above me now. That lovely woman made the cutest balletic movements and chirping ‘fairy’ sounds. Though I knew she was trying to help me, to show me there was little life-threatening danger, her kind effort only made me cry harder, for it showed me that I hadn’t the slightest reason to be crying yet still was. That, in fact, was what I was bawling about.
I managed, over the course of an hour or so, to control my mortal fear. As it happened, my confidence with the gift of Prometheus, God of Fire, came by accident. On the back door step, blazing sparkler in hand, I realised I had left Mr Reece’s goggles in the kitchen and that it made no difference; it was protection I didn’t need. Then my big sister Frances let the glowing sparkles touch the skin of her bare hand. I took my gloves off and did the same. I suppose I was being nothing but naively logical. Fire burnt you.
My earliest notion of Crackernight, when still too young to be part of it, had been of a skyrocket up on the mantelpiece during the lead-up to the big night. The following year, there were a lot of fireworks up on the mantelpiece – a myriad of sizes, colours and designs – yet no skyrocket. I asked why not and was told they’d been made against the law as ‘one had gone through a kid’s head’. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant at the time. I had a mental picture of it going in cleanly to one side of his eye, as if in slow motion, and exiting just as cleanly out the back of his head. I hoped he was all right after the experience.
My friend Steve lived just a few streets away. My parents knew his parents through church. He was the same age as me and we became firm playmates. He had slightly wavy black hair and big hazel eyes. My big sisters used to call them ‘soulful’. My first impression of him, however, was of the huge bandage on his foot which meant, as he was confined to his room, we couldn’t go out and play that first time. It was soon after Crackernight and I listened on in awe as Steve told me how one of the skyrockets had been lit then fell over, shot across the grass and hit him. Unlike the poor kid mentioned above, it only hit little Steve on the foot, which suffered burns and bruising.
‘Jeeeez … Did it hurt?’
‘Like anything!’
‘Did ya cry?’
‘Like anything.’
The fact that he didn’t mind admitting it really impressed me. Up until then, for me, ‘bravery’ meant being hurt and not crying, but here was a new type of bravery: the courage to tell someone else that you did cry. At least, it was a type of bravery I felt infinitely more capable of than the ‘standard’ version.
Isn’t it amazing how a brand new kitten can chase a big dog down the side of the house as it doesn’t realise yet it’s supposed to be afraid. It would seem I’d already realised. Older kids broke their legs, broke their arms – my brother did. Fell off the top of a slippery dip. He said it hurt so much at the time that he couldn’t feel it. After his first day back at school he came home with a huge smile on his face, his plaster cast covered in a hundred textacoloured signatures. All across the suburbs, kids were getting burnt, even killed on Crackernight and I bet none of them were ever afraid.
Sarah White, the girl next door, was never scared at Crackernight. A curly blonde, her face seemed set in a permanent expression of squinting laughter, usually at me. For a thrill the rest of the year, she used to climb to the top of the Hills Hoist. I used to jump off the street gutter (!) And yes, her mother was still ribbing me about that years later. Evidently, I knocked on her front door one day dressed in a Robin suit – Robin as in Batman. Until I was given this for my fourth birthday, I used to get around everywhere with an old tea towel draped around my neck for a cape, but on that day I had the genuine gear on and I meant business. She must have been well used to me by that time.
‘Hello there, Justin. How are you this morning?’ ‘Very well, thank you, Mrs White. I just jumped off the gutter!’ Then I took her down the driveway and showed her it was true. An amazing feat! And even better, it was repeatable!
Preschool
How come you don’t go? My mum lets me go,’ smirked Sarah. ‘I’ve been going all year and I’m going next year too! Preschool’s more fun than anything!’ The place lived up to every bit of its promise. There were vast, low tanks of purple coloured water with plastic boats in them. You submerged a clear plastic, two-gallon bottle, watched the bubbles and brought up a ‘purple potion’. Wow! The senior woman of the place – a great big, matron type – would pound away on an old upright piano and we’d all sing along.
We were shown how to make pancakes by a younger woman whom I thought was very beautiful. She had long, straight brown hair and always wore knee-high boots, also beads and many bangles on her wrists which would jangle during ‘dancing time’, where the way she moved was graceful and calming to me. She then let us go elbow deep into vats of warm paint mixture and smear wild spectrums of colour all over the centre’s glass windowpanes. (I had no idea this woman was tacking us on to the very tail end of the psychedelic era.)
So I couldn’t understand it when, one morning just like any other, Sarah’s mother drove us to the place and when I got out of their car, Sarah began crying and screaming. ‘I won’t go! I won’t – I won’t – I won’t! Don’t make me!’
Standing there gobsmacked, watching it all unfold, I thought, you idiot. You said you loved preschool and you’ve been going a whole year already. How could you hate it all of a sudden? I watched on as the ‘matron’ had to come out of the centre, cross the road to where we were parked by the milk bar and carry Sarah in howling and kicking under her vast arm. I felt sorry for Sarah though I suppose she felt sorry for me over a certain string of gutter-jump incidents. However, on that morning, I received my first ever conscious notion of complete bullshit. And a sense of relief that it wasn’t coming from me.
I took to preschool like a duck to water. Okay, more like a ‘spaceman-fascist-style arbiter’ to water. I had a keen sense of fashion by this time, ever since the red hat. One morning, I arrived early to find the younger woman had made ‘space helmets’ for us out of sheets of newspaper stapled together with a hole to look through cut out of one side. I put mine on, climbed up on the monkey bars and as the other kids arrived started hollering out that they could only come up on the spaceship if they had long sleeves and pants like a spacesuit had. Luckily kids love make-believe and they just went along with my broadcast: ‘This is a lunar module! If you’ve got a spacesuit on, you can come up on it!’ No one told me to get nicked. Being a bright winter’s morning, they all had long sleeves and pants on anyway.
Hell, I wasn’t as bad as Angus. My first bully. Poor kid, he had calliper irons on his legs and an anger problem. Perpetually pissed off, one morning he simply decreed that no one could use the woodwork table, and no one was about to argue with him. Tools were downed. That is, until he was quietly but firmly persuaded by one of the women to reassess his decision. He was soon making the rounds, advising all the children that it was okay for th
em to use it now, and everyone started happily hammering nails into the table once again.
I had never poked fun at Angus for his calliper irons. My mother had told me to be sorry for children like that and to be grateful I wasn’t one of them. Angus must have copped a lot of shit by the age of four. Either that or he was just plain angry that he could never ride a bike around North Epping with all the other kids …
Bikes
Not only did they give your devilish plans speed and manoeuvrability, they turned the still heat of a summer’s day into a gentle breeze and meant a playmate was never far.
One afternoon, while still limited to a tricycle, I looked on at all the other kids zooming around the cul-de-sac at light speed. It was my first experience of acute envy. Their effortless, two-wheeled, fluid movement seemed something beyond my grasp.
It was my brother who eventually freed me from the tricycle’s earthly bonds. Being a logical child, I assumed that actually staying up on a bike was a physical impossibility. Surely, without training wheels it would fall over to one side. Pat had to walk along behind me as I rode, training wheels off, promising to hold on to the seat to stave off gravity. It worked! I didn’t fall to the right or the left; so far, so neurotically good.
‘Keep holding on, Pat! Keep holding on!’
‘I haven’t been holding on at all, dickhead!’
I looked back and saw that it was true. Pat had played the most wonderful confidence trick on me. I could ride.
As a result of this newfound mobility, for the first time ever I was ranging miles from Howard Place – best of all, with Steve. We rode together so often it wasn’t a case of my arriving at his house and asking if he might like to go for a ride; I’d simply turn up unannounced, tap on his window and say, ‘Let’s go.’
Coasting along the endless footpath, if ever I peered back behind me, there his smiling face would be, a gleam in his eyes as if on the verge of some significant discovery around the next corner. Half the time, we had no plan at all where we might be going; we just rode. Where we ended up was where we were going. Though sometimes I checked en route.
‘This way okay by you?’
‘Eh?’
‘Which way?’
‘Who cares?!’
Tears
My childhood was an exceptionally fortunate one. I never suffered abuse, I never suffered poverty, nor was I born into the Third World or a war zone. Indeed, my first experiences of deep sorrow bear out just how lucky my young existence was.
One rainy evening in my preschool year, I’d just got home from the pictures, as they were then called. Mrs White had taken Sarah and me to the city to see Mary Poppins. Mum was in the kitchen making dinner, back then called ‘tea’. I’d maintained my composure the whole way home, but coming into the kitchen and seeing Mum, I grabbed the skirts of her apron and began to sob like I’d just seen the Hindenburg go down.
‘What on earth’s the matter?!’ begged Mum, her arms instantly down around me. ‘Tell me all about it, darling.’
‘It was the … the pigeon woman in Mary Poppins’ I managed to blubber. ‘She was so poor … She had to pick dirty breadcrumbs off the ground, then sell them in bags. She was so old and alone, it was just so sad.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Mum soothed, a reassuring smile in her voice. ‘The pigeon woman probably sells lots of bags. And those pigeons in London have so much to eat, they’re all fat! I’ve seen them!’
I was inconsolable. The woman’s plight seemed real to me in a way that the Vietnamese boat people’s never had. For me, their black-and-white images on the telly every night remained black-and-white images. It had taken a fictional story to engage my emotion, and Technicolor.
Another early moment of deep sadness occurred while on holidays at Gerroa, our stay there memorable not so much for our visit to the famous blowhole as for the fact that it rained the whole week. There’d just been another storm, yet Dad and I were braving the beach. Walking along it, we came across a seagull on the sand. It was moving slightly except, strangely, it wasn’t sitting on the sand, it was lying on its side. I asked Dad why.
‘It’s mortally injured,’ he said, ‘probably in the storm.’ ‘What’s “mortally”?’ I asked, looking up at him. ‘Is that like “Italy”?’ ‘No. It means when something’s hurt so badly it’ll die soon.’ I looked down at the bird again. ‘Can we try and make it better?’
‘No. No, we can’t.’
‘Will it go to Heaven?’
‘Only people go to Heaven.’
I wondered where it would go, following as Dad took it down to the grey water’s edge, where he carefully drowned it.
‘But aren’t you killing it?’ I fretted. ‘Isn’t that wrong?’
‘It’s all right to kill this bird,’ he said as he let it go in the water. ‘I was just putting it out of its misery.’
I didn’t cry that time. I felt terrible inside though. I’d seen a few dead birds already at Howard Place, but this one had been dying and there’d been absolutely nothing I could do about it. At least I’d learnt something: instead of going to Heaven, birds went out to sea. I put this to Dad as we walked back up the sand. He said yes. I was five.
Juliette
I magine a brunette Shirley Temple with a mean streak and you’ve got her. Another early playmate of mine, she was the daughter of my parents’ oldest friends. They lived in Melbourne and we used to drive down and stay at their home.
Juliette was the same age as me, but there the similarities ended. She was, by contrast to me, the opposite of a complete and utter wimp. Juliette was a tomboy which I suppose makes me the world’s first ever ‘tom girl’. Needless to say, my experiences with her could be described as teetering somewhere between sheer delight and abject terror.
‘Ever played “chicken”?’
‘No. How do you play it?’ I found myself asking – maybe it involved food.
‘I’ll show you. Follow me.’
She took me outside and got on her bike, directing me to her brother’s. I rode behind her down the street to where she stopped at the edge of a small cliff, a drop of about six feet to foliage below.
‘It’s easy,’ she explained. ‘We ride as fast as we can towards the edge. The one who stops last is the winner. The other one is the chicken.’
‘Do you know any other games?’
‘Chick-en! Chick-en!’
‘But my mum wouldn’t let me!’ I pleaded.
Juliette looked at me like I was from outer space. ‘Then we won’t ask her!’
I dug deep for a reply to this. None came. The game was on. I stopped really close to the edge too. Whether she meant to or not, I can’t say, but Juliette went off it. Never before had I seen anyone looking ecstatic minus half an eyebrow.
‘Chick-en! Chick-en!’
The single holiday her family took with us in Sydney was distinctive for two things. Firstly for the houseboat we shared on the Hawkesbury River, secondly, for the fact that Juliette was in trouble even before she arrived. It should have been routine for Juliette – she was always being lectured for not looking before she ran across the road – but this time it had been serious; she’d almost been run over by one of her father’s work colleagues and, in the confines of the houseboat, tensions ran high. Juliette was fuming about it. The man had told her father about it just before the office Christmas party where Santa handed out presents to the kids every year and Juliette had to miss out as punishment.
There was just so much to be impressed with about Juliette. Unlike me, she could work her parents’ record player, a feat I found quite stunning. Her parents had a vast record collection, my favourite of which was Georgy Girl by The Seekers. But even more impressive than Juliette’s hi-fi abilities was the fact that she actually owned a record! Yes, it was her very own possession and, boy, was she ever proud of it. The disc in question was none other than The Singing Nun and her swingin’ version of Koombyyah, to which we grooved.
Juliette was my sup
erior in all things. She told me they called her name on Romper Room all the time. Every day! So, nerrrr.
Chapter Two
Kindergarten
The next year, it wasn’t preschool anymore, it was ‘big’school. St Mary of Perpetual Asphalt! I’d be going all by myself too; Steve and Sarah would be going to the local state school.
On my first day, a bright, hot morning, I was sitting on the couch in my first school uniform waiting to be driven there by Mum. Dad had caught the train to work just for the occasion. I was so eager to get there that the wait felt like hours and I started to cry.
At long last, the great moment came, Mum taking me by the hand through the front gates of the school where the first thing I noticed was lots of children crying by their mothers. Mum gave me a kiss and said she’d see me in the afternoon. I almost ran up the steps of that building, armed with my first teacher’s name.
‘How are you this morning, Justin?’
‘Very well, thank you, Mrs Sweeney!’
I don’t know how she instantly knew my name. I certainly had no name tag. Maybe she’d been warned about me in advance? Maybe the identity of the Gutter Jump Kid was common knowledge? She showed me to a tiny wooden chair on which I sat down next to another boy. He said his name was Seamus though pronounced it ‘Shaymuth’. His voice sounded like he was pinching his nose as he spoke. ‘Woth yourth?’
‘Justin. Do you like Bugs Bunny?’
‘Never mith it.’
When Mum picked me up at the end of the day, there was a congratulatory present waiting for me on the back seat of the Valiant. A Matchbox toy car! This felt even nicer for the fact that I hadn’t expected it. Far from being an ordeal, for me the day had been its own reward. I was jubilant.
‘Well! How was it, Juss?’
‘I made a friend! His name’s Shaymuth.’
Goodbye Crackernight Page 2