by Barry Oakley
The phrase ‘late developer’ could have been invented for me. I still haven’t forgotten my shock when Dick Hughes explained to me how the sexual act was performed. We were both fourteen. Hughes had just learned the facts from his foreign correspondent father Richard, and arranged a meeting immediately. The conversation went something like this.
He: ‘The male does go into the female. We were right.’
Me: ‘From the rear, like dogs do it?’
He: ‘From the front.’
Me: ‘Face to face? Staring at one another? Are you sure?’
He: ‘I’m sure.’
Me: ‘Think of the embarrassment. It’d have to be done in the dark … so that’s what fucking means.’
He: ‘No. It means preparing to go to bed.’
Me: ‘And rape?’
He (authoritatively): ‘Clutching the private parts.’
I had then gone to the dusty medical books in our oak bookcase. (It was thought my father had once studied medicine, a myth he made no effort to dispel.) I saw in one of them clinical drawings of bodily organs, including the pudenda (gerundive form of pudere, to be ashamed). I was now trapped between two irreconcilable polarities. On the one hand the Pride of Erin and the Circular Waltz, and on the other the indecent internality of the dance’s ultimate end.
My Oblomovian condition was aggravated by what happened on one of the rare mornings I ventured up to the shops to do the messages (as they used to be called) for my mother. I was struck, as if by a dart, with the sight of Valerie G. Valerie lived round the corner from us, and in her school uniform had attracted only moderate attention. But this was the summer holidays, and she was now sixteen and had turned into something else. Was calyx right? Was that the word I’d learned at school for the leaves around a flower when in bud? Valerie’s uniform was a calyx, and out of it this striking creature had blossomed. I followed her in her golden summer garment at a due distance, like a dog. In days, dizziness had turned to love.
At this time I’d also become infatuated with literature. In matriculation, the saintly Brother Kilmartin, the best teaching Brother I’d ever had, had paid me a compliment that turned me crimson. ‘Mr Moloney,’ he’d said at the end of the final term, ‘has topped the class in English … Mr Oakley’s success may come later.’
Still unemployed, I bought a Penguin—A History of English Literature by B. Ifor Evans—from which, seated at a card table on our front verandah, I took notes. A topography emerged, a landscape. The further I penetrated into the book, the more altitude I gained. By the end, I felt like an alpinist looking over an entire territory, from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot.
Conflate late-adolescent romantic suspiration with literary aspiration and the result (I quote from a diary of the time) is beyond satire: I walked the warm streets with hopeful eyes—in vain, in vain. In recording occasional sightings, I succeeded in being embarrassing in two languages: Oui! Mutual regards. Je pouvais penser à rien d’autre. Fantasies flower: Put on père’s dressing gown and stood before the mirror, as if after a dramatic plane crash, with V watching.
The temporary trustees
By April my father, lubricated after one of his nightly visits to the South Yarra Club (to be punished with a dried-up dinner) announced it was time I got a job. He still had a faint hope I could be groomed to take over his business—A.E. Oakley, Real Estate Agents—and secured for me what he called a position with the Perpetual Trustee Company.
A ‘position’? I learned on my first day, when I pushed open the hissing glass doors and inhaled the catacomb odours of deceased estates, that this meant ‘office boy’. I was briskly welcomed by Miss Durant, a tall cassowary of a woman who ruled the front office. These were the days of desk blotters and inkwells, and it was going to be my job to fill them every morning. She produced large bottles of blue and red ink, with which I was to begin with the Managing Director’s office, continue along the ground floor (Trusts) then work my way up to Accounts and Property.
The Managing Director, impressively named W. Earle Orr, was too important to arrive early. His sanctuary was large and his desk presidential, though almost totally bare: two telephones, a leather-bound diary, and brass desk set with an imperial pair of pens. I tiptoed in, sniffing a stale-cigar bouquet of important business, performed my task, and tiptoed out.
When I returned later, three floors of inkwells filled, Miss Durant pranced towards me, holding up a typed letter. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a letter, Miss Durant.’
‘A most important letter. Do you notice the signature?’ W. Earle Orr had signed it, in bronze ink. I’d put red ink in his blue inkwell, and vice versa. W. Earle Orr now appeared in his doorway, horn-rimmed and expensively suited. He was holding up a second letter, similarly signed. He shook his head, made a managerial roaring sound, then stormed back into his office.
Dreading the prospect of a career with the Perpetual Trustees, 1948.
Inexplicably, I was soon promoted to Front Counter, and a few weeks later became an Assistant Trusts Officer, and given a small desk behind the office of Mr Simmons, whom I was supposed to be Assisting. Simmons, who sported a fighter-pilot’s moustache (he’d been one) would push back a glazed window, hand me a will, and ask me to work out the tax payable on the estate.
It didn’t take long for him to realise he’d been saddled with a gawky seventeen-year-old incapable of understanding the principles of commerce. ‘You’re not cut out for this,’ he gritted through his little open window, and he was right. But neither was he. How could a man who had driven (his word) Spitfires adjust to a commercial necropolis, where correspondence (‘In reply to yours of the third ultimo …’) was copied in two colours, green for the running files and pink for the records, and stored in rows in the basement?
In the space between will and codicil, there’d be flick-the-cardboard—a diversion devised by two other ATOs who worked further along what they revelled in calling ‘the back passage’. One would frisbee the cardboard to the other, and then to me, and back again, sometimes going dangerously close to the top of the partition that separated the Trust Officers from us. One afternoon Tim Reidy, after a counter lunch, flicked too hard. The cardboard curved over the partition and caught Mr Appleby, deep in discussion with a client, across the cheek. Reidy was demoted to office boy.
Since I’d now shown incompetence in two fields, when I was summoned to the Assistant Manager’s office I hoped for the best—that I’d be fired. The aptly named Mr Wood, bald, bespectacled and bloodless, invited me to take a seat. The company had plans for me to do a university commerce course in the evenings at their expense. This was worse than the sack. ‘Well,’ he said, puzzled at my lack of response, ‘what do you say?’ I leaned back in my chair, trying to look flattered, lost my balance and did a backwards somersault onto the carpet. I didn’t have to say anything. He looked down at me, and I looked up at him. I wasn’t for business, and business wasn’t for me.
There’d only been one excitement in my six months at the Perpetual Trustees, and that was the trip in. By the time the roaring, bull-nosed Reo reached the Alma Road stop, it was packed. The foolhardy would make a leap at the bottom step, gain a foothold, and ride riskily into the city. My companion in foolhardiness was a young man called Edwin Shirley, who managed to do all of the above and light a cigarette at the same time.
Edwin was slow of thought and attenuated of body, but I had reason to cultivate him as we rode dangerously together on the bottom step of the bus. He lived in a rambling old house opposite Valerie’s. So when he invited me to call on him one Saturday afternoon, I accepted. With his fat dog Bingo waddling behind us, he showed me over the place, leading me eventually to his parents’ bedroom. Around three sides, piled along the floor, were rows of empty whisky bottles. Mr and Mrs Shirley, who used to dress in their best every Saturday afternoon and go to one of Melbourne’s best hotels, were alcoholics.
Speak to her, now!
And their strange son, I was about t
o learn, was a pyromaniac. ‘Come on out,’ said Edwin, smiling in anticipation. I followed him and the barrelled Bingo to the front verandah, where there was a large stand of bamboo. He crouched down and flicked his cigarette lighter until he got a blaze started, and as it leaped up and spread he looked at me, then back at it, rapt. ‘The hose!’ I shouted. ‘Get the hose!’ But Edwin was a pyro connoisseur—he waited, then moved calmly to the hose, quelling the blaze just before the verandah went up. Would Valerie have noticed? Valerie had not.
But there were possibilities here, and my diary entry of the time is too bad not to quote: In the midst of a purple summer twilight, my brother says there’s a fire at Edwin’s place. A thousand hopes spill my mind over. We hurry up; glow of golden fire in the overgrown garden. And the spectators!
Valerie was one of them, in a tight white sweater, with her silly little dog. And we were there, with our silly little dog. I worked my way into the crowd now forming as the fire moved into the overgrown thicket. It was creeping towards the house, where Edwin was exultantly waiting with the hose, and I was creeping towards Valerie, who now spoke, not to but at me, not really noticing.
‘The house’ll go up.’
‘No, it wont,’ I said, ‘he’ll save it at the last minute. You watch.’ She watched, we watched—together, watching!—as Edwin moved in on the blaze, doused it, then raised his hands over his head like a prizefighter.
The crowd was dispersing. Speak to her, quickly! I was saved by our dogs. In oblivious canine echoes of my fantasies, her little dog was having its hindquarters investigated by ours, only to have its advances snappily rejected. We had a little communal laugh in the dusk, and that was it, except for my diary. As my spirits went up, the prose continued downwards: Oh joy! Unhurried ecstasy, words, and looks in the dim light.
Prone at last
Since I seemed suited to nothing else, teaching was all that was left. You gained entry to the profession by beginning as a student teacher. After an interview, a menacing memorandum arrived in the mail from one E.H. Wheeler, Secretary, Education Department. He wished to inform me that I had been appointed as a student teacher ON PROBATION at School No. 1896, Hornby Street, Windsor, subject to the conditions set out hereunder … ‘Should you not comply with these conditions, steps will be taken to dispense with your services, unless you can submit satisfactory reasons for your failure to do so … On taking up this appointment, you may claim a refund of the fare paid for travelling from your home address to the school, provided the cost is 5 shillings or over. Trains, trams or other established services must be used wherever practicable. Preference, however, should be given to trains.’
Hornby Street State School was a dismal Victorian pile down a side street in what was then the working-class suburb of Windsor. A student teacher, I soon learned, was neither. One stood on the platform facing the class and feeling foolish, while the teachers taught. The kids knew you were a nobody, and treated you accordingly, and the teachers often had you run errands. I was an office boy again.
There were two other student teachers, both girls. In my deprived state I was attracted to both of them, but crippled as I was by shyness it was up to them to make a move, and one of them, Jane, eventually did. Her parents, she told me, were away Saturday afternoons. Was this an invitation, or just general information?
‘Would it be … would it be possible … okay …?’ I bumbled.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Jane, ‘come over.’
The next Saturday afternoon I told my mother I was going to see Dick Hughes. Tingling with erotic terror, I walked down Inkerman Road, turned a corner, paused at the gate of a dauntingly large house, and knocked. Jane welcomed me in a translucent muslin shift that failed to conceal the outline of her bra.
Jane was already an experienced drinker, and I was not. She parted the panels of a large cabinet, revealing an arsenal of bottles, their reflections vulgarly mirrored.
‘Pimm’s? G&T?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Gin and tonic.’
‘Yes, please.’ I’d never smelt gin before, let alone tasted it, and the combination unseated me. I offered her a Craven A to show I could be sophisticated too. ‘Try one of these,’ she said, opening a box whose contents glowed brown and gold. I’d only just mastered the drawback, and inhaled an exotic Sobranie in the Humphrey Bogart manner. The room seemed to tremble slightly. I sipped at my G&T. The room now began a slow revolve, like a restaurant. Jane blew a perfect smoke ring. The couch too was moving, and I needed to lie on it. What began as a saunter ended with a rugby tackle. Prone at last!
‘You okay?’
‘Dizzy spell. Sorry.’
‘It’s the Sobranie—they’re strong.’
Jane sat on the couch beside me. Through half-closed eyes she had a vague resemblance to Rita Hayworth. She was smirking. Her girlfriends were going to hear about this.
‘Am I going round in circles, or is it the room?’
‘It’s you, kid, it’s you.’
‘You’d better stop me then.’
I put my hand on her freckled forearm and drew her, in the language of Millsing and Booning, towards me.
I was eighteen, and never been kissed. Eighteen, and never unzipped a dress. (‘It’s at the back, darling.’) I stared at her lacy Berlei, and then she turned away. Had I gone too far?
‘Undo them. Can you do that?’
‘Of course.’ My hands were shaking, and the hooks were tiny. ‘Sorry. I’m a naif.’
‘You’re a what?’
‘Naif—the noun from naive, the adjective.’
‘You’re good with words, I’ll give you that.’
‘It’s the only thing I’m good at.’
‘Wrap your nouns round these then.’
Jane undid herself expertly, releasing breasts enhanced by a few freckles. I gaped. I was speechless.
From then on I paid Jane regular visits. (‘You are close to Dick Hughes,’ said my mother.) I tried Pimm’s No. 1 Cup, rum and Coke, even crème de menthe, but never got further than having my way with her breasts. The richer fonts lower down (Rape of Lucrece) were out of bounds in 1949, and I was perfectly happy with what I got.
The code we had at the time, grading sexual success from one to ten, should not be taken amiss by feminists—it suggested girls’ sheer unattainability. One, I think, meant no more than actually talking to the girl of one’s desire, two the breakthrough of holding hands, three a kiss on the lips, four touching the covered breast, five the same exposed, and so on to the unimaginable heights of ten. When I confided my five to my alibi, Dick Hughes, he was impressed.
Whatever happened to Sloyd?
Despite my Saturday excitements, the weekdays were getting worse. By now I’d been assigned to fifth and sixth grades, where the kids were unbluffable. I’d stand on the platform staring at them, and they’d stare right back at me.
I had to witness occasional strappings, and the tendency of Mr Virtue, the diminutive headmaster, to lean across pubescent girls on the pretext of checking their work. When the teacher of either grade left the room, anarchy prevailed. I spent much of 1949 praying—that I’d not be left on my own in class, that the school might burn down, that I’d contract a painless long-term illness. I sometimes included requests that I’d have the courage to follow up with Valerie, my true love—or, if not, Heather, the girl next door would do. (‘Christ almighty,’ I imagined God the Father muttering to his Son, ‘isn’t Jane enough?’)
The extra-mural activities were just as bad. As part of our preparation for the trained Primary Teachers’ Certificate, there were Theory of Teaching (‘Write full notes of a first lesson to Grade IV on The Pronoun’), Penmanship (‘Write the following in a free running hand: “He did not see the starlight on the Laspur hills, Nor the far Afghan snow.”’), Music (based on the principles of Tonic Sol-fa) and Sloyd.
Sloyd, defined by the OED as ‘A system of instruction in elementary woodwork originally developed in Sweden’, was taught by a d
ust-coated cockney called Mr Monger, and the ineptitude first shown in my inability to do up shoelaces even in grade three was on display every fortnight. While others progressed to mulga ashtrays, I spent most of the course with cardboard desk blotters.
In the last weeks of this year of humiliations, the portly figure of R.G. Menzies leaned from his political parapet and saved me, and many others, by introducing Commonwealth Government Scholarships. As my matriculation results had been good, all that stood between me and remote, unknowable university was an interview.
In a suit now two sizes too small for me, with sleeves failing to cover my wrists, I faced an unnerving trio of interrogators. What was my attitude to teaching? Couldn’t get enough of it. What did I hope to gain from an Arts degree? More and better teaching. And in the wider, extra-curricular world? It would give shape to my life and thereby help me to shape students’ lives. And so your present life is shapeless? (This from a keen, white-haired lady who by now was scenting hypocrisy.) A word came to me, a wonderful word, a winning ace of a word: ‘Somewhat inchoate.’ The panel stopped staring at me, and stared at each other. I was in.
Months of Sundays
In the late forties, returned-soldier fathers, enjoying the novelty of car ownership, took their families on Sunday drives. Ours followed three ritual paths. My father preferred the Dandenongs—pristine mountains, as yet uninfested by suburbia. Once past Ringwood you were in Arthur Streeton territory; the towns—Olinda, Belgrave, Emerald—had names like birdsong. Their vowels and consonants were liquid, and carried the primeval smell of fern gullies within them. ‘I’m just popping in for a few minutes,’ our father would say, leaving his wife and two children waiting in the Hillman Minx outside each rural hotel (bona fide travellers permitted).
Sometimes we’d go to Port Melbourne, park overlooking Station Pier and look down at the ships, perhaps from an atavistic urge to escape the Melbourne Sunday, when places of amusement were closed and the streets deserted—except for Acland Street, behind Luna Park, where Jewish people gathered in lively groups and had coffee and cake, affording a frightening glimpse of what the Methodists called the Continental Sunday. Family life was not something carried on in cafes. Meals were best enjoyed in the privacy of the home.