The only thing I could have imagined worse than being given school holiday homework was being given my school uniform for Christmas, a horrid fate which actually befell Sarah White next door and which provided me with my first ever working definition for ‘sacrilege’. It had been her father’s idea evidently. I simply couldn’t understand how any father could be so cruel. Your school uniform for Christmas?! The very symbol of ‘repugnant’ being presented to you as something desirable? Did he add insult to injury by wrapping it up in Christmas paper with a coloured bow? But more than that, did he give it every year? Did Mr White have the most immaculate sense of humour and it was an annual joke they shared? Did he actually love his daughter and they’d laugh heartily about it every Christmas morning?
Unfathomable.
Big Boy
Crackernight came around again and with it a lovely surprise. This year it was me lighting the crackers! I was nine. ‘You mean I can …? It’s okay if I …? (Exquisite pause.) ‘Youuu Beee-eauty!’ (Grandmother watching anxiously from just inside) ‘You be careful, Juddy! Barb, make sure he’s careful, will you?’
Yes. This was the moment. I had become … a ‘Big Boy’. It was absolutely bloody marvellous. Now I was the one to select the cracker, to delicately place it, take the match, strike it, put it to the fuse, see it take and start to hiss, then – whooossshhh – see the display of a million golden sparks that Justin made! Now I was Prometheus, God of Fire and Lighter of Crackers. What a magical moment. I felt truly ‘in control’ of something, and of something very deeply rewarding. I, personally, was the one making everybody go ‘Awwwhhh’, cracker after cracker after cracker.
This special night every year had up till now been something put on for me by others. Now I was the one putting it on for them, and, man, did the role agree with me.
Perhaps most rewarding of all was the new responsibility with which I had been commissioned; these were potentially dangerous objects and I had to make sure that danger remained only ‘potential’. That was the best part about the whole deal. My father was tacitly saying to me, ‘I trust you.’
Chapter Eight
Fun For Nothing
Anytime the street gutter was flooded and flowing after a rain shower, this was the time to eat Paddle Pops, a cheap and delicious ice-cream. We’d then use the Paddle Pop sticks for ‘stick races’ down the gutter. Luckily it always seemed to be raining. Even if it wasn’t, any schoolyard rubbish bin worth its salt contained a supply of other kids’ Paddle Pop sticks which we turned into boomerangs. They didn’t quite come back when thrown, but you could always have a Paddle Pop stick-boomerang-chucking war.
One of the most highly prized things you could ever receive was a new pair of sandshoes. They would likely be no more than a pair of Dunlop Volleys priced at around thirty dollars in today’s money. Unlike today’s sandshoes, they didn’t inflate, have indicator lights or in-built spirit levels. (These, I assume, inform the wearer whether they’re standing up or lying down.) Nor did they have GPS or say ‘Left, right, left, right …’ We survived without these technologies back in the seventies. Besides, Dunlop Volleys made you go faster. Much faster. As indeed did the ‘go-fast stripes’ on tracksuits, bikes, skateboards and toy cars.
Almost everything we did for fun cost little or no money. Over at Steve’s house, one of our favourite games was hideand-seek. Steve and I and his sisters used to play it with the kids across their street, and it was guaranteed fun though I think the singularly most fun thing I ever did at Steve’s house was sliding down a nearby grass hill on pieces of cardboard box that Steve’s father brought home from work. It was wintertime and we spent a string of Sunday afternoons on that hill, which was near vertical. I’d never been to the snow – I’d never seen snow – but on that grassy slope, I was bobsled champion. We even made cardboard Olympic gold medals.
Juliette’s idea of fun also cost nothing. Our favourite game together, playing commandos, quite simply encompassed all the key things that kept us happy; namely, make-believe, hiding, as well as climbing, running and jumping. Oh, she did have a cap gun, though … I remember it cost eighty cents.
I loved playing in the rain. Just rain or the promise of rain made things exciting, and it was free, as was jumping in puddles or making a dam in the swollen creek down the bush. I relished how the day could be dark under a rainy sky, for me the dramatic opposite of ‘normal’ conditions. One of my most treasured experiences was walking home after school as a thunderstorm was brewing; then, during the Sacrament of Afternoon Tea, seeing if the storm would erupt before Doctor Who came on. That scary Doctor Who theme always seemed perfect with thunder as a backdrop.
It always seemed to be raining in my childhood. I don’t mean to say it was always raining, just that it seemed to rain more regularly than now. More naturally, as if a boiling day would build up to a steaming crockpot of an afternoon, then break to a cooling downpour as surely as night would then follow. The weather seemed comfortingly cyclic back before we realised we were screwing the planet and there was no such thing as global warming.
The day of the heaviest downpour I ever remember saw me the most ‘in trouble’ I ever got. It was bucketing down, an utter deluge, the whole sky was falling. Naturally I ran straight out into it and, fully clothed, started dancing around the cul-desac. I couldn’t believe it could be raining this hard, all around me was white. It was ecstasy. That is, until a neighbour phoned Mum and Dad.
‘There is an insane child out on the street. We suspect it’s yours.’
I was called inside, profoundly soaked and completely happy. Mum and Dad were livid. Even my grandmother was angry at me, perhaps most upsetting; that had never happened before and never would again. ‘You could have gotten pneumonia!’ It was also the only time I can remember my parents truly yelling at me.
Later, Josie reassured me as I sobbed, though it didn’t make sense at the time: ‘They’re only angry at you because they love you.’
Neighbours
To some parents, the 1970s were ‘the permissive seventies’. Not my parents, of course. The parents I’m talking about lived next door. The Jacksons were corporate types, a bit younger than my own parents, and perfectly respectable. Except when they were throwing three-day pool parties.
To me, the Jacksons personified the gutsy, convivial Australian culture of the time as portrayed in a series of TV ads for Tooheys Beer. ‘How d’ya feel?’ The campaign celebrated the Australian character as an outdoors type, tanned and sporty with a brash sense of humour. This was the Jacksons and their friends down pat. They used to race 18-footer sailing boats out on Sydney Harbour at top competitive level, and did they know how to party! The riotous noise that came over the fence on those occasions sent my imagination wild. I don’t know what they actually got up to in there over those long weekends, but it sounded glorious!
Legendary in my mind were their friends Donna and Bazza. Though you could hear them from down the street, I never met or indeed ever saw ‘Donna and Bazza’, except that I heard about the time Mrs White went in there and was introduced to Bazza. The story was that, from an armchair, he languidly drew his eyes away from the TV, his gaze settling not on her face but on her chest. ‘Sorry. Not interested,’ he pronounced. ‘Tits too small.’ He then panned his attention back to the cricket.
I was only nine and I admired the Jacksons. They were kind, tolerant and spoke to me as if I was smart. And they knew how to live.
The La Salles certainly knew how to live. Keen nudists, they had a lot in common with my parents, except for this one aspect of their lifestyle. This couple were the same age as my parents, also committed members of the local Catholic Church parish, always helping out at school fetes or ‘wine bottlings’. Unlike my parents, however, they had clearly embraced tenets of the Beat Generation. They were ‘naturists’, though obviously made a point of putting their clothes back on whenever my parents went over for dinner … unless my parents harbour something they’re not telling me … (?)
> These were the people my parents consulted in order to determine if it was morally okay for my older sister to go and see Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar when they first came out as, in stark contrast to my parents, the La Salles were hip. Luckily for us, they were the kind of people who always said, ‘Yes. Why not?’, and meant it. It’s probable that these free-thinkers were an influence on my parents who, though they’d never join the ranks of the ‘Suburban Permissive’, taught me to respect the rights of others and that others don’t have to be just like you in order to deserve that respect.
The Suburban Unthinkable
Luckily for me, my parents’ marriage was a stable one. I was conscious of this as they could never be heard yelling at each other, as Genevieve Guerlain’s parents were rumoured to do. I heard them at it once and felt very sorry for them. Maybe my parents used the ‘cone of silence’, I’m not sure, but certainly one atom bomb was never to fall upon our house: D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
Impossible but true, Genevieve’s parents got divorced. The news of this was met with shocked disbelief. In 1970s suburban Australia, the ‘D’ word was something that happened on TV and only late at night. Or to non-Catholics, presumably. Going as I did to a Catholic school – and to the Little Sisters of No Mercy, no less – I had never heard of any child there whose family had known such a catastrophe. If such children existed, theirs was a secret shame.
In the Catholic Church, I don’t think they even recognised divorce. They had something else, a creative alternative called ‘annulment’. Rather than accept that any union consecrated in the eyes of the Lord be rent asunder, ‘annulment’ decreed that the union had never happened in the first place. Institutionalised denial for a fee. ‘It never happened’. And even then, both consenting parties had to be accompanied by their great-grandparents and an orang-outang.
With her parents’ split, Genevieve moved away. Her father stayed in Howard Place for a while and Genevieve would be back now and then, but my contact with her fell away to almost nothing.
How I’d wished I’d had some magic device for speeding up the years so she’d be old enough to recognise the look I could never help giving her. It would be a golden, wintry afternoon on the way home from school, her eyes would smile and I’d be old enough to touch her.
One afternoon that now would never be.
A Better Life
The uncontrollable sobbing fits I was now having at long last abated – I buried myself in the quest for knowledge: My family would sit down to watch a movie after tea only to find me, two hours later, still at the kitchen table, completely absorbed in our set of World Book Encyclopedias. Only Crackernight going on outside could have broken my concentration.
My father was fanatical about reading. Reading was the basis of knowledge, knowledge was the basis of education, and it was only education that had pulled him up out of the railyards where his father and grandfather had toiled. Many times he spoke of his commitment to giving me ‘something better than he had’ both in terms of material stability and life opportunities. This he gave me. But such conditions granted me one luxury I don’t think he’d foreseen. Around this time I was beginning to understand why I was ‘always in trouble’ at home, and I suppose Dad’s formative years would account for it.
Scenario one:
‘Turn the ship hard to port.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
Scenario two:
‘Turn the ship hard to port.’
‘Why, sir?’
‘A torpedo is coming.’
(BANG!)
Dad claimed never to have had the luxury of asking ‘why’, something equally foreign to his father and grandfather before him. As children and young adults, for them, he claimed, life was less about understanding the world around them, more about simple survival. Problematically for me, I was being brought up in an environment that provided me not only with the time and opportunity to ask why but also with an education that actively encouraged me to do so. Consequently, whereas I may have been a natural in the classroom, at home I never really stood a chance.
Goodbye, Little Boy
One Saturday afternoon, Mrs Smith (the ‘mine don’t eat that’ lady) took me and ‘hers’ to Macquarie Uni, where they put on classic films for children in one of the vast lecture auditoriums. We were there to see The Wizard of Oz. I had never seen it before, but I’d gleaned that this was something important and to be seen. In the dimmed auditorium, at the moment the film ‘turned colour’, I had my first experience of something spectacularly delivering on the promise of its hype. It was to be a magical film for me. My favourite was Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, comic genius on an adult’s level. This eternal character taught us not only that fear is normal but also that there is no bravery without it.
When the lights came up at intermission, Mrs Smith pointed out with distaste a kid in one of the rows down in front of us. He had a facial deformity that made his jaw abnormally extended.
‘Oh, that’s terrible,’ she said, except the tone in her voice wasn’t one of pity for the kid but one of repugnance at his being allowed in, and at ‘hers’ having to see this.
My mother always taught us to be protective of children born with abnormalities or disabilities. When, out of simple fun, I’d call my brother a ‘spastic’, Mum might join in the laughter briefly but would then rein us back. ‘You should never use that term in jest, boys. It could have been you born that way and you should always give thanks that you weren’t.’
As Mrs Smith drove us home, I said, ‘Hey, look. A Renault.’ My pronunciation of the word was promptly corrected. ‘No, Justin. Here in Australia we say “Renn-orlt”.’ (Surprise, surprise, ‘Peugeot’ was also pronounced ‘Pew-gott’.)
Mrs Smith was a real education. When over to play with her kids, she forced me to listen to her massacring old show-tunes on her piano. I say ‘forced’ as she hammered those keys so hard that I couldn’t have missed it down the street if I’d been hearing-impaired. Her kids just went on playing; they never even once seemed to notice the unholy rumpus. That much was clear to me, so I knew she couldn’t be playing for them, and there was no one else there but me. So I had no choice but to come inside and pretend to be impressed, then get back out of there as quickly as politeness might allow. She didn’t so much play for me, she played at me, gushing about ‘hers’ between songs.
‘Oh, my boys just love it when I play. They’re just so musical.’ ‘How can you tell?’ I found myself asking. ‘They don’t play any instruments.’ She paused. I never understood the words that then left her mouth. ‘Well, they’re just so rhythmic.’
Her husband liked to go down the local bowling club. He’d put on his club blazer and go down there. I don’t know if he ever played any actual bowls, but he was a pillar of the place, liked a beer, and people respected him. Mrs Smith wouldn’t let him go. One time she busted him trying to sneak out while she wasn’t looking – the blazer must have been the giveaway. I was still only nine when she shared with me, ‘He left me once …’
Soon after, I tentatively confided in Mum.
‘Mum …’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘Um … Mrs Smith’s a bit of a …’
Mum put a finger to her lip, stifling a laugh as she did. Her face had frozen in a nervous grin, but there was a glint of pride in her eyes. I think it was a conscious turning point for both of us. Yes, I was already ‘Cracker-Lighter’, a ‘Big Boy’, but this was something extra: the beginning of little ‘Person’, and the birth of ‘Discretion’.
It was also the beginning of my lifelong insomnia. One night, while staying over at the Smiths’ house, their eldest son Jethro persisted in talking to me quite vigorously as I struggled into tortured sleep. Nothing I could say would stop him. I turned the lights off. He just kept going.
‘It’s all about the number of cylinder strokes per spark, see, a two-stroke has two and a four-stroke has four. Betcha can’t guess which one’s better.’
‘I want to go to sleep
now, Jethro.’
‘Two-stroke’s much better for a mower any day. ‘Course, y’can’t use car petrol in a mower; the octane’s too high, an’ y’have t’use proper mower oil. Anyone who used sump oil’d be a nong!’
‘I’m very tired, Jethro.’
My next conscious awareness was of him sitting on the edge of his bed still talking to me as I woke into the first light of the next morning. To this day I’ll never know if he continued all the way through my uneasy dreams. I assume it was pure coincidence, but before that time, I’d fallen blissfully asleep every night like any other little kid. I never would again.
Jethro was the kid who could work a lawnmower. He was a really decent boy, honest and cheerful, but by the time he was inviting me around just so I could watch him mow the lawn, I’d started making excuses. All of a sudden I had too much homework. One time I actually took him to task about it. With hand signals, I made him turn the thing off.
‘Mate, why have you asked me over?’ I put to him. ‘You’re making me sit here while you mow the lawn. I’m sorry, but it’s boring.’
He was a nice kid. Unfortunately, by Third Class I was realising that I had absolutely nothing in common with him.
Sleep-overs!
Except for at the Smiths’ house, these were a source of immense excitement. Though only a mile or two from Howard Place, spending Friday nights at Adam Cook’s house was like visiting another country. Leaving the convent after the bell and going somewhere other than home held a special magic for me, but going to Adam’s was something extra. Even at the time, to me his home was an alternate reality. They were ‘rich’. They went skiing. They had a speedboat. They had a pool table! They had a dishwashing machine!
Goodbye Crackernight Page 10