The amazing thing about these camps was the community service they provided, firstly to parents: Each camp was of one week’s duration in a mid-year school holiday of two weeks. I asked one kid what he’d be doing for the second week of his holiday. ‘Going on another camp,’ he said. What? Yes, his parents always sent him on two camps, more during longer Christmas holidays. Tons of kids did this, he assured me. Whether he went home at the end of the first week then on to the next camp, or skipped going home altogether and went straight to the next, or simply stayed where he was, I could not fathom. Clearly his parents had hit upon a way of keeping him supervised, washed, fed (and absent) for less money and less bother than they’d have to spend otherwise.
The second community service these camps provided was to kids like Jim Stone; namely, guaranteed sex. And they got it precisely because their parents were safely out of the way. Jim said that many girls went on the camps for one reason and one reason only. Yes, the camp supervisors did everything they could to stop what was going on but, well, where’s there’s a willy, there’s a way.
Nails
Now, I don’t mean to gross you out here, but with the onset of puberty, a bizarre schoolyard myth went around. It was the story of some schoolgirl, a girl ‘more developed’ than most, who’d come to grief by sticking a science lab test-tube up ‘you-know-where’. Where it had, of course, broken.
Did you ever hear that one?
I’ve spoken to a couple of people my own age who went to school at far-flung corners of the metropolitan area and heard exactly this same rumour. No matter the schoolyard in which they heard it, the story’s common point was that the unfortunate girl in question always attended ‘another school’. In hindsight, this pathetic fable bears the unmistakable mark of the Adam and Eve story, Eve copping it for taking the sexual initiative. Perhaps our first notion of the misogynous, I’d suggest this tale gave expression to our silent collective envy of the imagined sexual activity always going on ‘somewhere else’ and never involving us. It’s little wonder that the site of the story was always specifically ‘another school’, its victim ever a ‘bad girl’ no one knew personally.
Was it a symptom of our emerging sexuality overlapping with our childhood fascination for the grotesque? Whatever the truth may be, this suburban myth was yet another nail in the coffin of our innocence. I bet it’s still doing the rounds.
The Last Birthday Party
It was Sixth Class, my last year at Marist Brothers Eastwood, and Seamus O’Rourke’s mother put on an absolute beauty for us, during which I had my first ever go on ‘A Computer’. The theatre set were there plus a few others, all wearing conical party hats, and Mrs O’Rourke had laid out a table jam-packed with chocolate crackles, party pies, birthday cake, fizzy drinks and lollies of every type imaginable. We even had blow-out party horns. I was delighted at all this, not having expected it; we were supposed to be moving on from these things by now, more towards a craving for girls instead of sugar. At least, I dearly hoped my peers craved them as much as I did. But I was feeling no such solidarity with the theatre set. We hadn’t discussed girls yet, perhaps as the subject would have been a tad depressing. ‘Girls we know: nil.’ And there was certainly no solidarity to be had with Jim Stone. He wasn’t craving, he was getting.
After being dropped home that night, I was greeted by Mum in the kitchen.
‘Well, Juss, how’d it go? Have a good time?’
I marched up to her, defiantly happy.
‘Yes, I did,’ I insisted. ‘There were no girls there, but we had party hats and horns and lollies, all that kids’ stuff and, d’y’know, Mum, I wasn’t ashamed. It was great fun.’
‘Good for you!’ she cheered.
Still, even across the laughter of that brilliant birthday table, I’d had a conscious awareness of something slipping away. I knew that this was the Last Time. I felt even in the moment that Mrs O’Rourke was giving us our ‘last hurrah’.
So Long, Josie
She was living with us in our spare room at Howard Place now; Frances had since left home for the inner city. Every night while Mum was preparing tea, Josie would call to her from her armchair by the TV. She’d recently had a bowel cancer removed but lymphoma had been found. She was fading now, her voice very frail, each night being an exact replay of the previous.
‘Barb …’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘What is it for tea, love?’
Mum would reply, no matter the menu, Josie’s response always the same. ‘Oh … I don’t think I’ll have much.’ Sometimes Josie would call out to her daughter in the middle of the night, except she would call out, ‘Mum … Mum!’
For Melbourne Cup Day 1980, Mum organised a special day at Howard Place just for Josie as this had always been an important annual occasion for her. Her younger sister, my Great Aunt Nell, was brought up from Lane Cove – Uncle Harry too. Helping Josie into her dress for the day, Mum noticed Josie’s choice.
‘But, Mum! Why don’t you wear your “best” dress today? There’s a darling …’ ‘Oh, no,’ Josie returned quite assuredly. ‘I’m keeping that one for best.’
One morning soon after, Mum went into Josie’s room with her breakfast (a cup of tea) and asked her how she was feeling. Josie stared at her, her face stressed and confused.
‘D’you know, Barb,’ she managed, ‘I don’t think I’m getting any better.’
Mum stopped, took a breath and answered her. ‘Well, love … I think that, one day not so far from now … you’ll be with God.’
Josie stared at her even harder. ‘What?!’ she begged. ‘In Heaven?’ Josie shook her head slightly, a look on her face as if actually sorry for Mum. ‘Oh, darling, don’t be silly. The astronauts have been up in space already. There’s nothing there.’
Though she found it very difficult to finish them, I made sure Josie had the prescribed number of glasses of water every day. I’d been told this was very important given her condition. One very humid night, I heard her call and went into her room to see what I could do for her. She said she was very hot and uncomfortable, so I went to the kitchen, moistened a dishcloth, draped it over the electric fan in her room and pointed it towards her. Though based on the principle of pioneering fridges, the ‘Coolgardie safe’ in fact, my system barely worked at all. But that’s all I could think to do. Our airconditioner wasn’t portable and was so bloody loud that if I’d turned it on she would never have got to sleep.
After about a month, Jose was taken to hospital to be brought back home a few days later. Getting home from school, I went in to see her. The woman in the bed before me was no longer the ‘big’ woman I’d always known. There was a bandage on her arm.
‘Hello, Jose, it’s me,’ I said softly, ‘Justin.’
Her eyes opened. ‘Oh,’ she uttered, trying to tilt her head up but unable to. ‘Hello, darling,’ she managed.
‘How are you feeling, Jose?’
‘The doctors took some marrow out of my arm. It was very painful.’ Each syllable seemed to hurt her. ‘I’m sorry, Jose.’ ‘That’s all right, darling. But I’m very tired now. I’ll have to try and go to sleep. Thank you for coming to see me …’ Her eyes had already closed again. ‘Okay, Jose. I’ll come and see you again in the morning.’ I paused a moment before withdrawing. ‘I love you, Jose.’ There was no further reply. It was our last conversation that I can remember.
The morning came when Mum called an ambulance. Jose was unconscious. Dad had already left for work, Pat for school, Brigitte for uni. I’d been allowed to stay at home.
The ambulance men wheeled Jose outside on a stretcher, Mum got in the ambulance with her and the doors were closed. I stood on the driveway, struck dumb as it pulled away, vaguely aware that Mrs White from next door was by my side.
A few nights later, Dad drove me and Mum to the place in Hornsby, something called ‘Palliative Care’. We went into a room where Jose was lying in a bed. She was still unconscious, but her face didn’t look like it was slee
ping; it looked stressed and in pain. I knew that she was here to die. All I could do was hold her hand in silence, which I did for about half an hour.
On our way home, something quite momentous happened: Dad took us to Pizza Hut. For the first time ever. He said I could have whatever I wanted. We didn’t speak about Jose, only about ordinary things – school, the restaurant, the food we were eating. Mum and Dad smiled at me through dinner, but their smiles were strange; supportive but uneasy at the same time.
When I got home from school the next day, Mum told me that Jose had passed away. It had been lymphoma.
At her funeral service, I found myself weirdly devoid of emotion. That is, until we exited the church and I saw her black coffin in the hearse outside. My loss of her then hit me like a steam train and I have never wept like that again. I felt pathetic bawling my eyes out in front of all the people now exiting the church. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop. I wished someone from my family would come and comfort me, a soothing word, a shoulder to hide my tears in. Oddly, no one did. So I felt abjectly alone, and that made it worse. I even heard the voice of a woman, a complete stranger to me, quietly but adamantly insisting to one of my parents: ‘Your son. He needs you.’ As the church was in the grounds of St Mary’s, I felt doubly pathetic in front of the little kids passing me on their way in to school, looking up at me, a bigger kid, crying like a baby. Only the unknown woman came by my side, her hand on my arm. ‘It’s alright … It’s alright,’ she said. ‘She’s at peace now.’ It was nearing the end of the school year 1980, a year I’ll always consider the end of my childhood.
One night a few weeks after the funeral, healthily relieved that Jose was in a better place now, Mum was preparing tea in the kitchen at Howard Place. It was just about the time when in good health, from her spot by the telly, Jose would have suggested they share their nightly whisky before Dad got home. In that moment, Mum told me, the thought crossed her mind: I wonder where Jose is right now …? In the next moment, Jose’s face appeared to her as if in her mind’s eye but very, very distinctly.
As for her level of credibility, my mother, though a practising Catholic, has no interest in the supernatural, doesn’t believe the Virgin Mary appears to South American hill-dwellers, she doesn’t even read the stars in Woman’s Day. She told me Jose’s face wasn’t happy, it wasn’t sad, it was simply intense and answered her question with the words, ‘Oh, Barb … if only you knew … if only you knew.’
A hallucination? All I can tell you is my mum was not and still is not a heavy drinker.
We had a quiet Christmas that year – no guests, just family. We were happy for Jose, grateful that her battle was over. Since the age of ten, I’d had a conscious sense of each carols by candlelight being a little less magical than the previous year’s. Now, I don’t assume that Mr Simpson, its host, had taken Jose’s passing into account, but that year the Howard Place institution was cancelled. And cancelled for good.
Till we meet again, Josie. I’ll pour us a Scotch and we’ll go out for a nice Chinese. Just me and my favourite old girl.
Chapter Fourteen
A New Decade
If, at Marist Brothers, I’d subjected the kids in my class to some second-rate plays and driven them mad with Captain Kremmin, it seems I’d displayed at least some redeeming traits. Mr Merritt had been fully aware that my parents were trying to get me into a school called ‘Riverview’ for Year 7, a fact that may explain what he wrote in his end-of-year report on me. There were three key ways of getting into Riverview. Firstly, if your father was an Old Boy and you’d been on the waiting list since birth. My father wasn’t and I hadn’t been. Secondly, if your father made a massive cash endowment to the school. (Just jokin’, just jokin’!) In any case, my father was a ‘poor’ dentist. Thirdly, if you could juggle soot. Which is what Mr Merritt’s report on me indicated, bless his cotton socks. Maybe he’d appreciated the fact I’d taken up a petition from the whole class urging him to join us at our end-of-year party at the rollerskating rink. Maybe he was lying through his teeth, determined that I be accepted to the new school so he could be rid of me once and for all. Maybe my classmates had been just as determined and had taken up a collection for the cash endowment. Who knows.
My brother read the report and said, ‘You could frame that.’ It began: ‘By now I’ve run out of superlatives’, and just got better with every line.
I sat the entrance exam for the new school, after which Mum and Dad took me into town to see Peter Weir’s Gallipoli. Then came the interview, which the whole family had to attend. Yes, they were all being interviewed.
A half hour into it, the Jesuit priest turned to me. ‘So, Justin. Would you say you’re “spiritual”?’ My brother rolled his eyes, huffing in disbelief at the question. Pretending he hadn’t, I followed on quite smoothly. ‘Well, Father … I pray almost every day … I do think about God a lot …’ I went on for a few minutes. Evidently my answer was deemed sufficient. I got in.
I’d found Riverview a scary place long before I knew I’d ever be going there. The eldest son of the Dubbo family had been a boarder at the college. Sometimes he’d stay with us on weekends and we’d drive him back there on a Sunday night. Once you entered the main gates it was a long, dark drive through the grounds, and the approaching lights of the place had seemed to me like some kind of jail. It had one beautiful building, though, its main building of classical sandstone. Indeed, a highly venerated priest and educator from St Joseph’s College, Riverview’s key rival, had once famously described Riverview’s Jesuit education as identical to this main building: ‘a beautiful facade’. This would remain to be seen. In any case, Riverview was mostly of the ‘soulless concrete slab’ style of architecture.
On the morning of my first day, Dad drove me there in our new 1981 Chrysler Sigma. The Valiant was gone. Surely enough, Greek families had lined up on the front lawn from early morning the day we sold it, the vomit pong still in the leather. I wonder whether it’s still on the road out there, still ponging. Probably is; the Val’s a dead reliable car.
I felt tense as we drove down Epping Road towards Lane Cove, the horizon thick with brown smog. It was a hot, humid morning and there was no airconditioning in the Sigma either. God, Epping Road, the traffic jam I’d have to suffer for the next six years.
As North Epping was indeed so many miles from anywhere, I’d have no less than six different buses to catch, three hours travel each day. On top of that, Riverview demanded sports training two nights a week including compulsory Rugby Union in winter. So no more Scouts, no graduation to Venturers and camping with girls, and none of my local friends were coming with me. At least I wasn’t a bloody boarder. About ten minutes out from my destination, Dad gave me his official ‘advice’: Fit in. Stay quiet. Don’t try and stand out.
Good advice maybe too, à la Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Fuck that, I thought. You didn’t send Pat here. Why are you sending me here? To be invisible?
What’s It All About?
In my first week at that huge and frightening place, science class had us doing Astronomy. In the course of my homework one night, I was outside on our driveway in Howard Place, matching up a textbook diagram of a vast triangle formed by three famous stars with the actual stars in the sky. My father came out and asked me what I was doing. I explained it to him, pointing out the three-star triangle on the page, then in the sky. He told me this was a complete waste of time, turned tail and went inside. I suppose he had a point. Time management became the key to academic survival by the end of secondary school. Still, what’s the point of astronomy anyway? Isn’t it about looking at stars? Nebulae? Galaxies? Supernovas? The infinite fireworks of the heavens? No?
The culture at Riverview seemed to agree with him. Not only did the place have acres of immaculately kept lawns that you weren’t allowed to walk on – out of bounds – it also had an observatory. A real observatory with domes and enormous telescopes! To which I was allowed entry not once in six
years.
It wasn’t all bad. Though I’d have some awful times there, I would have some excellent times and everything in between including five types of mediocre. Only one type of bully though …
The rich kind.
Welcome to the Jungle
Amo, Amas, Amat … Amamus, Amatis, Amant.’
'These things having been done, the Gauls turned their backs and fled into the wood.’
I’d expected Riverview to be different to Marist Brothers. It wasn’t. Just bigger. Also you could do things like Latin and Greek and they went on a lot about being ‘men for others’ and kept reminding you that your place at the school had locked ninety-nine boys out.
To describe my first day there, it would suffice to say that never before had I walked into such a hostile room. Yes, there were some great kids within it as in time I would discover, but man, were there some rabid pit bull terriers as well! These were the rich kids and boarders.
I’d always imagined that the ‘rich kids’ would be somehow genteel. Surely ‘toughs’ came from the wrong side of the tracks. These kids, however, the children of Australia’s top corporate magnates and their henchmen, had apparently been brought up with certain ideas about ‘success’ thrashed into them.
‘Son, might is right.’ (Whack!) ‘The weak are there for a reason.’ (Whack!) ‘Success is dominance of them.’ (Whack!)
The Form Master addressed us constantly about the evils of bullying, ‘knocking’ as it was officially (and more pleasantly) termed. The richest kid in the year was Roland Stokes. That he landed a punch on me in my first week didn’t mean much; Roland punched everybody. Brother Bernard confided in my mother that Roland’s problem was that he bitterly resented his father’s wealth. Wha’? No, I never understood that one either.
Goodbye Crackernight Page 18