The Ant-Midas Touch

All too conscious today of the pain of ostracism, of being invisible, emotionally castrated, undesired.

Why is it that whenever I look at a watch, or clock, the time is thirteen minutes past the hour?

Why is it that everything I touch turns to shit before my eyes?

Too much medication and not enough fornication.

I've seldom felt so sick.

Getting In Tune With The World

When the day finally came for us to take possession of our new home in Elizabeth West there was considerable excitement, mingled with relief. Richard and Michael moved with their parents the same day, to a house just two doors away around the corner, which you could more easily reach by clambering over an intervening iron fence.

My parents, it later emerged, celebrated our arrival in a time-honoured manner, but I was in a somewhat less celebratory frame of mind, as I had the impending prospect of starting at a new school to look forward to. It was a Saturday when we moved into our new home, and on the following Monday I was scheduled to commence at St Thomas More Primary School in Elizabeth North. My father had arranged for a near neighbour, Mr Bouwmeester, a Dutch gentleman whom he had met at Sunday Mass, to drive me to school on my first day, along with his son Aloysius and daughter Gabrielle, who were already pupils there themselves. Mr Bouwmeester was a short, thin, scrupulously clean man with slightly thinning brown hair, an amiable smile, and who wore an unusual, to my eyes, square-framed pair of spectacles. By strange coincidence, he worked at Glenelg Migrant Hostel, which was where he would be travelling after he dropped us off a kilometre or son from the school. He spoke English with a pronounced Dutch accent, but Gabrielle and Aloysius sounded like dinkum Aussies.

Despite being more than a year older than me, Aloysius was at least four or five centimetres shorter. He was the sort of boy who, without trying or even wanting to, could uncover latent maternal feelings even in hearts grown cold through years of cynicism, dissatisfaction and disappointment, as I would soon discover. He had what is sometimes called a natural charm, and his striking good looks – blond hair, blue eyes, perfectly balanced facial features – were reinforced by impeccable grooming. Not even Jeeves could have found fault with the way he was turned out.

Some idea of the alarmingly alien nature of his mindset can be gauged from the fact that the first thing he did on arriving home from school each afternoon was to clean his shoes until they shone, in preparation for the next day. Indeed, although he was wearing a vibrant red duffle coat when we first met, it was his iridescent black shoes that really caught the eye. He was superficially friendly enough to me, but I sensed that he was acutely conscious of our age difference, and was anxious to ensure that so was I. Over time, however, and for a variety of reasons, this would change.

Gabrielle, who was twelve, was in her final year of primary school. She too wore a duffle coat, but the fact that it was dark grey gave a stark indication of a key difference between her and her brother. Although it would be misleading in the extreme to call her plain, she was nevertheless as unostentatious in both demeanour and appearance as Aloysius was foppish. She also struck me as a genuinely kind-hearted person who seemed keenly aware that attending a new school for the first time was likely to be, for me, a highly nerve-wracking experience.

When we arrived at the school, Aloysius went off immediately to join his friends, but Gabrielle took the time to take me on a quick tour of the various classrooms and outbuildings before introducing me to Mrs Deliquin, my class teacher.

Mrs Deliquin proved to be a strict, but not unkind, teacher. At any rate, she manifested none of the random cruelty I was soon to encounter elsewhere. Her approach was simple but effective, and she seemed genuinely to want us to learn. Consequently, unlike the majority of teachers I was to come across, she tended to explain things in detail, and repeatedly, in a variety of different ways, until she felt confident that we all understood. In some subjects, such as English, this often ended up becoming rather boring, but in Maths it was a godsend. In the end of year exams I finished among the top ten in the class in Maths for the first and only time in my school career, and this was certainly no coincidence. Rather, it was a vindication of Mrs Delinquin’s measured, and almost uniquely patient, approach.

My first half a year or so at St Thomas More’s was a predominantly happy time. I made friends, gradually learned to speak ‘Australian’, and became increasingly immersed in, and in tune with, a world that had quickly shed any initial sense of strangeness to become entirely familiar and congenial.

The Great Divide

Purely by chance, the majority of the houses on our side of the road seemed to be occupied by British families, while those on the opposite side were mainly home to Australians. In the house opposite but one to ours on the right lived a woman called Margaret, who had been the first person to welcome us when we arrived. She and my mum soon became good friends, and I would often arrive home from school to find them both sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, chattering incessantly, and shrieking from time to time with high-pitched, almost manic laughter.

Margaret had two children, Paul, aged five, and three year old Beverley. I sometimes played with Paul, while Beverley became one of my sister’s best friends. I never saw Margaret’s husband, and so I naturally assumed that he worked nights, just as my dad on occasions had to. Consequently, whenever I visited Margaret’s house to play with Paul, I made sure I was as quiet as possible, for fear of disturbing his sleeping dad.

I later learned that my solicitude had been entirely unnecessary, as Margaret was, in fact, rearing her children alone. I assumed this made her a widow, but my mum explained that sometimes things were not that straightforward. Such was the cocoon of pseudo-respectability in which I existed in those days that it was several years before I came to appreciate that Paul and Beverley in fact had different fathers, to neither of whom their mother had ever actually been married.

The principal attraction of Margaret’s house was its preponderance of animal guests (although I sometimes got the impression that it was really Margaret and the kids who were the guests). In the back garden there were rabbits, guinea pigs and a stumpy tailed lizard called Colin, while the kitchen sink was home to an enormous fish known as Sam that Beverley and Paul used to lift out onto the draining board to stroke. While in the sink, the poor animal had no room to move, let alone swim, and used simply to lie there, curled up with its perpetually gaping mouth almost touching its tail. I kept expecting to hear that it had died, and been ceremonially served up with roast potatoes and vegetables or a crisp green salad, but I never did. For all I know, it’s there to this day.

Next door to Margaret, and directly opposite us, lived a boy called Colin, whom I soon befriended. He was a couple of years older than me, with unkempt, jet black hair, and enough freckles to have made a profitable business out of selling them. The freckles were so compacted that at a distance Colin seemed to have a perfect sun tan. His nickname for me was ‘Shrimp’, which I never really understood, as I was nearly as tall as he was, if rather less well-developed.

I think it was Colin who introduced me to footy. He had a plastic football that we used to kick to one another, initially in one or other of our front gardens, and later, as I grew more proficient, across the road from garden to garden. My kicking was pretty haphazard at this stage, and often I would fail to make the distance, or the ball would skew off the side of my foot and land either in Margaret’s garden or, more rarely, the garden at the other side. If Margaret happened to be in her garden when the ball landed there she would swoop on it with all the panache of a Lindsay Head or Johnny Cahill, and kick it back to me, usually with unerring accuracy. As she did so she would often playfully taunt me with “Ratbags to the backlines!” or some other such castigation, whereupon I would set my teeth in concentration, determined to prove her wrong – and invariably either stub my toe while attempting to kick, or propel a grubber straight into our garden fence.

From time to time, Colin also used to like to play one-on-one, which usually resulted in me being covered in dirt and grass stains, barely able to move from soreness, and grinning almost maniacally from ear to ear. In later life, only orgasms would come close to producing the level of pleasure I felt after those early inductions into a game I would soon come to regard with a devotional fervour that evoked a genuinely religious sense of transcendence.

On the morning of the 1965 grand final, Colin told me that he would be going to the match in order to watch his dad, who would be playing for Port. I just laughed at what was clearly a somewhat pathetic attempt to tease me. After all, I saw Colin’s dad – a frail, balding, bespectacled man who looked older than my own dad – arriving home from work some nights, and if he was a league footballer then I was a mashed potato.

Once again, as with Margaret’s non-existent husband, the truth took a long time to register, and even then I was unable to get to the bottom of the matter because Colin and the two adults with whom he lived had long since moved away.

The Death Of Santa Claus Part 1

Our near neighbours the Allen brothers may only have been separated from one another by a couple of years chronologically, but in terms of outlook, behaviour and character they could scarcely have been more different. Michael was determinedly self-reliant, at times seemingly almost to the point of xenophobia. There was an intrinsic aggressiveness verging on brutality about him that suggested a deep-set disappointment with the world, or at least with his own experience of it. Over time, this intensified, and became, for me, an intermittent source of real uneasiness, and even, on one occasion, outright terror.

Richard, by contrast, exuded a kind of puppy dog gregariousness to which it was hard not to be drawn. Like me, he had an insatiable curiosity about the world, and his place in it, which was never sullied by the kind of cynicism exhibited, and at times luxuriated in, by his brother. Occasionally, indeed, it felt as though Richard was actually my brother, not Michael’s – the brother I had never, or only very briefly, had.

Michael’s and Richard’s parents, who preferred to be known as Eddie and Janet rather than the more usual ‘Mr. and Mrs Allen’, seemed to me to be partners in a much fuller sense than my own parents had ever been. They not only appeared to enjoy one another’s company, but they actually did things together, such as going out to a restaurant, a club, or to the cinema, drive-in or theatre. They even went away on annual family holidays. On Sunday afternoons during winter, Eddie would play soccer for his works team, and Janet would invariably accompany him. Often, Richard and I would tag along as well, although watching a game of soccer was the very last thing on our agenda. In the early days, we would spend our afternoons climbing trees, or searching for insects and lizards if the weather was warm enough, or staging mock ninja fights. Before very long, however, such childish pursuits were cast aside as we both became consumed with an insatiable passion for footy, and thereafter we devoted our time to honing our kicking and handling skills, engaging in one-on-one contests, or re-enacting incidents from the matches we had watched on television the previous night.

Sometimes, of an evening, Eddie and Janet would go out together, just like my mum had told me she and my dad used to do before they were married. On such occasions, Michael and Richard would be left in the ostensible care of my parents, which in practical terms meant that I would be presented with a marathon evening of play, discussion and, if Barbara was allowed to stay up late as well, sister-baiting.

Despite being an avowed atheist, and always being anxious to present an image of himself as an unequivocally rational being, Michael was, in actual fact, a creature of considerable inner contradiction, tension and confusion. He appeared to derive a substantial amount of pleasure from scaring, confusing and upsetting those younger or weaker than himself, and my sister was one of his favoured victims. However, although some of the methods he used might loosely have been described as having a basis in logic, most manifestly did not. For example, he was extremely keen on ghost stories, many of which were told in the first person, and presented not as fiction, but as events that he, and sometimes his brother Richard also, had actually experienced. Typically, Michael would insist that most if not all the lights in the room were turned off in order to produce the desired ambience, and the tales tended to feature much in the way of moaning and wailing, coupled with sudden bangs and other loud noises, all of which were guaranteed, before long, to reduce my sister to a quivering, near hysterical mess. One particular story, which featured the Allens being forced to spend the night alone in a deserted castle haunted by the headless ghost of Ann Boleyn, caused Barbara to have nightmares for months afterwards, but despite – or perhaps, perversely, because of – this, she always seemed eager to hear more such tales.

One of Michael’s biggest coups came when he systematically dismantled Barbara’s faith in Father Christmas. Barbara would have been aged just over three and a half at the time. We were at the Allens’ house on this occasion, and Michael was in an overtly confrontational mood. Richard, Barbara and I were discussing what presents we would like for Christmas, and Barbara said something about writing a letter to Santa Claus (or, more likely, getting me to write such a letter for her). Michael snorted with contempt. “There’s no such person as Santa,” he said. “Your mum and dad buy your presents from the shops.”

Richard, obviously a little taken aback by this unprovoked assault, hissed warningly, “No, Michael……..”

But Michael said, “Shut up – she deserves to know.” And then, to Barbara. “Your parents lie to you about Father Christmas. He’s just make believe, like Cinderella or Snow White or the three little pigs. Ask John.”

Barbara looked at me with a mixture of silent entreaty and defiance.

Gee, thanks Michael, I thought, as, somewhat feebly, I endeavoured to balance frankness with a brotherly solicitude for my sister’s emotional well-being. “Why would Mum and Dad lie to you?” I asked.

“To keep you as their baby," Michael interjected. "To keep control over you. Is that what you want, to go on being Mummy’s little baby, sucking a dummy and wetting your nappy all your life?”

Barbara, who still secretly sucked a dummy, and who on occasion also wet the bed, judiciously elected to say nothing.

Michael, however, sensing that he was on the verge of a kill, was relentless, and he proceeded, with painstaking logic and clarity, to dismantle, piece by piece, the now tottering edifice of my sister’s faith in ‘The Santa Claus Myth’, destroying in the process an integral aspect of her nascent, hitherto undiluted perception of the numinous. Much of what he said was, in all probability, beyond my sister’s understanding, but even at this early age she boasted a questing and analytical mind, and could see that some of Michael’s arguments were incontrovertible. When he had finished, Barbara sat quietly sucking her thumb, obviously somewhat cowed and shaken, but determined not to show it.

Michael, however, was not satisfied with simply undermining my sister’s trust in her parents, and sense of childish wonder. Wanting to strike while the iron was still hot, he moved on to what he saw as another cornerstone of human dependence, ignorance and immaturity. “It’s just the same with God,” he told her. “He’s just a fairy story, too.”

“He is not so a fairy story!” retorted Barbara, sure this time that she was being teased. “God lives in heaven,” she added, authoritatively.

“Oh, yeah? And where’s heaven?”

Barbara pointed solemnly upwards.

“On the roof?”

“No, silly! Up above the sky.”

“Above the sky?”

She nodded.

“But there’s nothing above the sky. The sky’s above everything, and goes on forever. Scientists have proved it with their telescopes.”

But Barbara was having none of it. “He’s up above the sky, like magic – and you’re just a stupid boy!”

Nevertheless, her unquestioning assurance had been shaken, and it would not be very long before her faith in God would suffer the same fate as her belief in the existence of Santa Claus.

Snowy The Rabbit

Richard and Michael had pets. There were the dogs, Lucy and Billy, and up to three cats at any one time. Then of course there were Paul and Beverley with their unique exotic menagerie, while our next door neighbours, Alf and Gwen, had Kim, the pure white Samoyed.

All of which constituted, to Barbara and me, a real bone of contention. “Why can’t we have a pet?” we’d demand repeatedly, usually of Mum who, we intuitively realised, was the parent with the ultimate veto on such matters. Besides, we knew she was quite besotted with Kim. (“What about a Samoyed, Mum?”)

“Pets are hard work,” she’d say. “They don’t simply look after themselves.”

This, I knew, was true. As a three year old I had had two pet goldfish, Freddie and Feefie, but in all the confusion, excitement and upheaval surrounding the birth of my sister, they had been completely forgotten about, and had died.

However, I was older now, I reasoned, and sufficiently responsible to be able to take care of a pet, even one a good deal more responsive, communicative and intelligent than a fish.

In the end, in a gesture which, in hindsight, I can interpret as plainly palliative, my mum, astonishingly, relented. I arrived home from school one afternoon to find a large wooden hutch in the back garden. Inside was a pure white rabbit which, while not the dog or cat I had really wanted, was unquestionably a pet.

“We’ll call him Snowy,” I decided at once.

“Snowy-Snowball!” countered my sister, in a plaintive whine. For some reason, she regarded the rabbit as hers, and hers alone, and would continue doing so regardless of being told otherwise.

Although Snowy/Snowy-Snowball would doubtless have been happier with a harem of pliant does at his disposal (not to mention a single, unequivocal name), he appeared to be reasonably contented (at any rate, as far as it is possible to judge such things with rodents). He had plenty to eat, enjoyed the run of the back garden for much of the day, and was relaxed when handled (other than by my dad, who for some reason seemed to imagine that rabbits enjoyed being picked up by the ears).

One morning, however, we awoke to find that Snowy had seen fit to abscond, and was nowhere to be found. Dad consoled my sister by assuring her that Snowy was probably fine; he had no doubt gone to join his wild bunny friends out in the bush. By this stage, however, Barbara had become more or less immune to parental platitudes, and tended to turn to me whenever she wanted an unvarnished version of things. “Where’s my bunny gone?” she asked me.

“He wasn’t your bunny!” I retorted, and, with considerable relish, went on to tell her that I imagined Snowy (“Snowy-Snowball!”) had either been run over by a car or else killed by a dog or cat.

After receiving this intelligence with surprising equanimity, Barbara nodded thoughtfully, then declared, “It’s his own silly fault for running away”.

Nevertheless, I suspect she nurtured a vague hope that she might awake one morning to find him nestling cosily in the corner of his hutch. After a couple of weeks or so, however, it was clear even to Barbara that Snowy-Snowball would not be returning. It was then that we decided to put in a joint bid for a replacement – “one that can live in the house,” we suggested, “so it won’t run away”.

Unfortunately, Mum was not so easily cajoled this time. In fact, the task proved impossible. She merely sat back (she seemed to be doing an awful lot of sitting these days), hugged her enormous belly, and said, “I’m afraid there’s going to be a much more important new addition soon”.

Barbara looked mystified, but I knew exactly what Mum was on about. I looked resentfully down at Barbara, recalling the time when she had been an “important new addition”. Considering the way that things had turned out since, I would much have preferred a puppy, and as I reflected on the likely contents of my mum’s gargantuan stomach I found it difficult to suppress a flicker of resentment and unease.

Strangers In A Strange Land

When Mike and Jimmy suddenly showed up unannounced at the start of the summer school holidays it felt as if we had been invaded by aliens. Jimmy had been a near neighbour in Liverpool, while his friend Mike was from the infamous Scotland Road, and spoke with machine gun rapidity in an almost impenetrable accent. Both in their early twenties, they had decided to take a working holiday in Australia before resigning themselves to lives of grim predictability and routine, interspersed with brief occasional moments of forgetfulness.

My mum, who was only a little older than them herself, and who alone of the four of us was seriously missing England, was unequivocally delighted by their arrival, and insisted that they remain with us for several days.

Neither Mike nor Jimmy had much time for kids, although Mike did occasionally make an effort. “Betyerdedpleezdtheblueswuntheleagueehwack?” he would say, punching me playfully on the arm, aware that I, like him, was, at least ostensibly, an Evertonian.

In truth, however, although Dad had informed me of Everton’s championship success, it was not something that had made all that much of an impression on me. Nevertheless, I agreed politely that, yeah, it was great.

Jimmy, by contrast, seldom if ever addressed me directly, making me feel as if I was either invisible, or else some kind of common, but not particularly useful, household item, such as an egg separator. Instead, he spent most of his waking time in the kitchen with Mum, both of them smoking incessantly, drinking endless cups of tea, and laughing uproariously at shared reminiscences. Sometimes Gwen, Margaret or Maureen would show up, and my mum would revel in the role of interpreter. I especially enjoyed it when Maureen came; she would often bring a stack of 45s, which Mum would play on her recently purchased pride and joy, a new, deluxe, state of the art, Radio-Rentals radiogramme. To this day, I cannot listen to Elvis Presley, Frank Ifield, Johnny Cash, Chubby Checker, Helen Shapiro, Billy Fury, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly or Eddie Cochran without recalling that intimate, somehow almost surreal kitchen scene: Barbara and I on the floor, playing with Lego or toy farm animals or model cars, and the adults at the table, swathed in cigarette smoke, and laughter, and the all too brief shared illusion that life was, after all, worthwhile.

After Mike and Jimmy had departed, I asked my mum, “Why’d they have such long hair? It looks sissy.”

“Because of the beetles,” she replied, but it would be a while before this apparent non-sequitur resolved itself into the seeds of a lifelong salve.

Life Is.......

Life is pain, frustration, disappointment, irritation, anti-climax, thwarted ambition, failure.

It is a shrivelled old man without any teeth attempting to eat an ice cream.

An open wound teeming with maggots.

A beautiful girl inside a dessicated hag.

A dessicated hag inside a beautiful girl.

A mirage.

Small wonder death seems so alluring.

Foghorn Leghorn

The only person at St Thomas More’s who seemed to take exception to my being English was Michael Barrett, a self-obsessed, somewhat effeminate boy who was in the grade above me. I found his hostility quite ironic given that, with his garishly ruddy complexion, he looked much more like the archetypal pommie than I did. Nevertheless, if his always scrupulously enunciated word was to be believed, he was actually from a town in New South Wales called Woomargama – a fact which I would later turn to my advantage, and his immense discomfort, on the football field.

Although he was older than me by more than a year, and bigger as well (at least at first), he never resorted to physical forms of harassment, preferring to focus on subtler, essentially psychological methods of intimidation. I found him more of an irritant than an object of real fear, although I was always careful not to overstep the mark when responding to his barbs, particularly before I had had my self-confidence bolstered to some extent by Colin’s programme of self-defence training (by which time, perhaps sensing that I was no longer the easy, unresisting target he had initially taken me for, he appeared to have lost his appetite for bullying).

Aside from his ugly red face, the most conspicuous thing about Michael Barrett’s appearance was his enormous nose, which in my view had a somewhat beak-like appearance. Predictably, this led to my referring to him as ‘Michael Parrot’, initially only under my breath or when talking about him behind his back, but later, after I had learned that he had nothing substantive with which to back up his tawdry jibes and cheap insults, to his face. By grades five and six I was openly referring to him by a wide range of ornithological appellations – ‘bird brain’, ‘chook face’, ‘Foghorn Leghorn’ – and was delighted to find each of them not only hitting home with a surprising degree of effectiveness, but being increasingly adopted by large numbers of both my, and his, classmates.

‘Foghorn Leghorn’ was perhaps the name that suited him best as he had a voice which, particularly when it was breaking during his last couple of months at the school, closely resembled that of the cartoon rooster. The last time I heard him using it he was pleading desperately for mercy, but more of that in its proper place.

On Not Wanting

Forced myself to go out, but only managed to get a few yards down the road before feeling compelled to return home. Once there, cocooned in reminiscences that have probably become increasingly bogus, I studiously refrained from wanting.

Lack of exercise has made me flatulent, and the house begins to reek of half digested vegetable matter.

How Not To Derail A Train

On some days, the footpath between Womma railway station and Elizabeth West was littered with woolly bear caterpillars, which presumably felt reassuringly safe and secure in the realisation that there were few predators that found them palatable. They had reckoned without me and the Fowler brothers, however. The object of Squash the Caterpillar was self-explanatory. With each step you took, you were required to convey at least one woolly bear caterpillar into oblivion. As soon as you failed to do this, you were ‘out’. Gary Fowler was impressively proficient at this game, often making it almost as far as his front gate without a single ill-directed step, leaving a two kilometre long trail of mutilated corpses of the arctiidae family in his wake. The game appealed to me on many levels. I found the ‘splat’ as you brought your foot down hard on each unsuspecting victim immensely satisfying. I was also intrigued by the thought of the split second transformation of something living into something dead. Many transformations were reversible – when you doused the candles on the altar after Mass on Sunday you knew that, come the next Sunday, they would be lit again – but when you squashed a caterpillar you were creating its ultimate, incontrovertible fate. After a while, however, the appeal of stamping repeatedly on helpless invertebrates began to pall, and I started to hanker after something more audacious and challenging.

One afternoon, as we were waiting at the Womma station level crossing for a train to pass, it came to me. “Why don’t we see if we can derail a train?” I suggested. Graham, the older of the Fowler brothers, looked a bit perplexed at that, but then turned scornful. “You’d end up in Borstal.” Gary, though, appeared intrigued “How’d we do it?” I said I knew a place, not far from the line, where some old railway sleepers had been discarded. “There must be about twenty of them,” I said. “We could pile them up across the rails and see what happens.” “OK,” said Gary, “when?” “Why not now?” I said, and so it was agreed – almost. “I don’t want anything to so with this,” said Graham, but he followed us just the same, and I could see that he was having a little trouble quelling his fascination, if not his outright admiration. “Let’s just try a couple at first,” I suggested, when we reached the ditch in which the sleepers were lying. “We can always try more if that doesn’t work.” Graham’s sense of horror suddenly resurfaced. “Work!” he almost shrieked. “What do you mean, work?” His normally flushed face had paled. He looked from Gary to me as if trying to discern a flicker of common sense in either of us. Then, exasperatedly, “You’re really planning to do this, aren’t you?” Gary and I ignored him. “You’re both crackers!” wailed Graham, but still he tagged along. Gary said, “Go home and suck your dummy if you’re scared,” and we both laughed.

Getting the sleepers up onto the track was hard work, and we ended up with mud all over our hands and the fronts of our school uniforms. However, we finally managed it, and, after dusting ourselves off as best we could, crouched down behind some nearby shrubbery to await developments. The first train to pass was travelling the wrong way, but a short while later we heard the distant wail of a horn emanating from down the line in the Adelaide direction, heralding the imminent arrival of our prey. It proved to be even better than we could have wished. The approaching train was a Bluebird, an express en route to Port Augusta. This meant that it would not stop at Womma, but would hurtle through at somewhere in the region of seventy miles per hour. Seconds before impact, the potential seriousness of what we had done finally hit me, and I was suddenly beset with qualms. What if the train actually was derailed, and people got injured, or even died? Gary and I would be murderers, condemned to a lifetime diet of bread and water, forced to do hard labour for the rest of our lives, or maybe even hanged.

For some unknowable reason, I imagined confessing my sin to Father Abfalter, who said, disinterestedly, “And are you truly sorry, my son?” “Yes, father.” “Very well. Now say a good act of contrition, and for your penance say two Our Fathers – one for each of the deceased – and a Hail Mary for every broken bone. How many did you say it was?”

“Ninety-seven, father.”

“Ninety-seven Hail Marys, then.”

There was a sudden, almost deafening bang and the sleeper on the far side went scudding along the rails for about ten yards before bouncing into the ditch which ran immediately adjacent to the tracks. Meanwhile, the sleeper nearer to us shot up into the air in our direction and, after contriving a lazy but quite spectacular somersault, came to rest, almost vertically, against one of the track-side fence posts. The Bluebird hurtled on without a pause, completely unscathed. As Gary’s eyes met mine, there was a brief glimmer of mutual alarm, and then, with exaggerated fervour, we both burst out laughing. Graham briefly glared at us with exaggerated disdain before striding purposefully off, as if frightened of being contaminated by proximity. “You’re both nuts!” he yelled back and, on reflection, perhaps he was right. We were also very relieved.

Colin To The Rescue

One day, I was walking back from Elizabeth West Shopping Centre with Colin, when we were approached by two boys, one of whom deliberately collided with me as we tried to skirt past them.

“Hey, watch it!” I protested, whereupon he slowly twisted his face into a sardonic grin, sidled up to me, and with his nose almost touching mine said, “Gunner make me, Pommie?”

He was about the same height as me, or perhaps slightly shorter, but with acres of puppy-fat. Both he and his mate, a gangly, angular-looking boy, who was staring in what he presumably thought was a menacing way at Colin, had crew-cuts. The short, thick-set one pushed me hard in the chest and said, “Why doncha go home, Pommie?”

“That’s just where I was going,” I replied, manifesting a brazenness I certainly did not feel, “at least till you got in the way.”

Clearly my response was not to his liking, for he grabbed the neck of my T-shirt and forced me up against a nearby garden fence. Meanwhile, just out of my line of sight, I heard a scuffle break out between Colin and the other boy.

“Why doncha stay in yer own fuckin’ country where they don’t mind the smell?” hissed my assailant, at which point, to my surprise as much as his, I kneed him in the vitals as hard as I could. Even as I was doing it, I was questioning my own wisdom, but I was determined not to suffer the same indignity as I had at the hands of Stevo’ and his chums. As it happened, fortune was smiling on me that day, for as I wriggled clear in what I fully expected would be a futile attempt to avoid the horrendous beating that lay in store for me, I saw to my surprise that the second of our assailants was already out of commission. He was crouching on the grass verge between the pavement and the road with his hands covering his face. He may have been moaning slightly. A couple of trickles of blood were beginning to ooze out between his fingers. The next thing I knew, Fatso was hurtling past me, and had collided, stomach first, with the garden fence. He barely had time to let out a gasp before Colin had seized him by the neck, somehow forced him down onto all fours, and rammed his face down hard against one of his, Colin’s, own knees, which he had been simultaneously thrusting sharply upwards. Fatso gurgled and whimpered, covering his badly wrecked nose with his hands. Colin flung him disdainfully aside and, turning to me, said, “OK, Shrimp?”

I nodded, feeling out of breath, but exhilarated.

“Let’s scoot then,” he proposed. “I feel a sudden need to wash me mits.”

Needless to say, I was more in awe of Colin than ever after that. I begged him to show me how to defend myself properly, and he agreed. Although I realised that I would not have lasted ten seconds in a serious fight with someone as brutally effective as Colin, I nevertheless managed to master at least the rudiments of ‘fighting dirty’, and this not only bolstered my confidence, it also came in practically useful on more than one future occasion. To my shame, however, I only rarely utilised my new-found skills purely for self-protection, for as the years went by I acquired an arrogance that tended to be fuelled and reinforced by imposing my will on others, either by means of direct acts of violence, or the threat of such. There was something addictively alluring about having direct control over the experiences and destiny of another human being, however briefly. It was much better to be a schoolboy than a caterpillar.

On Not Learning How To Swim

I was swathed in sunlight, arms outstretched as though attached to an invisible cross, legs rotating haplessly, or perhaps determinedly. It was as though I could feel myself disappearing.

The swimming instructor, whose separate identity I had never properly allowed myself to imagine, was counting towards infinity: "Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four......."

As though such things were meaningful.

But as for me, swathed as I was in sunlight, simultaneously protected and imprisoned by a membrane wrought from my very essence, floating aimlessly and haplessly and hopefully.......

As for me.

Denouement loomed, cascading from the unblelievable swimming instructor's lips, a vibrant trout evading frantic bear's paws.

As "Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine" - an echo from another world, amazing and unseemly, my somehow not quite plausible limbs refusing to conform.

Until it came to me: the countdown was a prelude to a kind of birth, or rescue. Veneers, I saw, can almost always be destroyed.

But the spurious allure of treading water, swathed in sunlight, arms invisibly affixed, vision stymied - all of this was preferable, somehow, to the stark indignity of exposure.

Perhaps believing that our inability to swim derived from fear of water, she had got us to submerge ourselves, and then, aloof, uncaring, reassuring stopwatch tightly squeezed, had taunted us unmercifully:

"Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine......."

But I, deriving solace from my non-conformity, was still refusing to believe. I had, in fact, become defined by lack of faith. I would hang, and float, and waver, never rising. My very breath would become implausible, a kind of half-remembered legend, something mystical, subjective and surreal - a cipher. Ignoring what would soon become my destiny........

".....fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven......." Her voice grown wayward, almost querulous - perversely reassuring.

So I broke the surface, spluttering my angst, defiant breath unleashed in fulsome, agitated waves, a brutal, unrelenting reflex.

I did not ask for this, I thought. I neither wanted nor believed in it.

Yet here I am.

Alive.

Failing To Hit The Target

Aloysius’s mother was terrified of death, of which I suspect she had seen more than her fair share, and was energetically scrupulous in her efforts to extenuate its impact. She was Hungarian, and spoke hardly any English. As far as I know she never left the house, other than to work in the garden, and once a year, at Christmas, to attend a midnight Mass celebrated in Dutch (which she spoke fluently) at a church in Elizabeth South. She must have felt extremely isolated and vulnerable, with most of her life spent immersed in her housework or gardening, or lived vicariously through her family. Although she was kind-hearted enough in the main, the terror that was lurking just beneath the surface, and that you could sometimes see reflected in her eyes, would on occasion bubble up and issue forth with an uncontrollable potency that was quite alarming to behold.

She must have spent hours each day cleaning her home, which was always spotless, while her back garden was a veritable wonderland of burgeoning fecundity and colour. Once, on a visit there to play with Aloysius, I went to the lavatory, and, without realising it, accidentally overshot my target slightly. When Mrs B found out she reacted with such virulent fury that I genuinely feared for my life. For the only time in my experience she actually left her home as she herded me unceremoniously along the street and around the corner to my house, all the while berating me (I assume) in a mixture of Hungarian and Dutch, with the odd English phrase (“dirty dog-boy!”) thrown in. It was only actually during her faltering attempts to convey the nature of my crime to my mother that it dawned on me what I was alleged to have done. Mum frowned, shook her head ruefully, and tut-tutted with sufficient incredulity to get Mrs B, finally, to calm down, but I still somehow felt that she would only have been properly appeased if granted a front row seat at my public hanging, drawing and quartering.

“It was only a little drop of pee, Mum,” I said, after my accuser had left.

Trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smile, my mum replied, “Yes, I know, but I think it might be sensible to sit down next time to you have to go to the toilet at Aloysius’s. Either that, or hang on if you can until you get home.”

Wise words, which in recent years have assumed a new and hitherto unimagined significance for me, so much so that, almost every time I am forced to answer the call of nature in someone else's home, I find myself thinking of Aloysius's mother, and dutifully, with perhaps a touch of honest trepidation, sitting down.

A Malign Injunction

In grade three I sat next to David Starcevich, whose mother was the class teacher. I have no idea how experienced a teacher she was, but she gave the impression of being somewhat naïve, and you got the feeling that, had you wanted to, you could have got away with murder in her class. Some in fact did, but for whatever reason or reasons – perhaps, at least in part, because I sat beside her son – I was never inclined to wage war on her.

David Starcevich was an immense, lumbering boy with all the grace and facility of movement of a giant sloth, and a personality to match. Hardly surprisingly, we did not exactly hit it off. As far as David was concerned, I was a goody-goody, while he to me was just about the dullest human being I had ever come across. He was exceptionally intelligent, however, at least in the narrow sense acknowledged by the school authorities, and frequently vied with Mary Winterbottom and Katie Bowyer for the dubious honour of being named dux of the class. (It was a dubious honour in that most of the boys, and quite a few of the girls, were chary about being labelled a swot.)

David’s older brother, Martin, who was in grade seven, was, physically, the biggest boy at the school. He boasted the same levels of personal charm and grace as his younger sibling, but they were combined in his case with a demeanour that exuded real menace and malevolence, making him a source of genuine fear to boys of my age and younger. By all accounts, he was not averse to throwing his weight around, and the acknowledged most sensible policy when dealing with him was to remain as invisible as you could.

Consequently, when both of the Starcevich brothers sauntered out of an alleyway just in front of me as I was on my way from the bus-stop to school one morning, the first thing I sought was a place to hide. I was too late, however, for instead of walking on, the brothers had come to a halt, and turned to face me, almost as though they had actually been awaiting my arrival.

Caught between the urges to brazen it out and flee, I merely stood there, watching.

“This him?” said Martin to his brother.

David nodded.

Martin then addressed me. “Davey reckons you’re a goody-goody,” he said. “Are yer?”

Too scared to think of a cheeky riposte, I merely muttered “No”.

Martin harrumphed. “Dead naughty then, are yer?”

I looked away.

“Tell us what yerv done that’s naughty,” Martin persisted.

(Attempted train derailment, perhaps?)

“Well?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

Suddenly grabbing hold of me, Martin twisted me ‘round to face him, and then stooped down so that he was at my level, eyeballing me. “Bein’ good’s sissy,” he said, “and I don’t like sissies.” He shook me briefly, but hard. “Understand?”

When I said nothing, he shook me again, more vigorously. “I said understand?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled.

“Good. I’ll be gett’n regular reports off Davey, and if I don’t find out yerv been naughty soon, we’ll be having another talk, OK?”

“How will David know I’ve been naughty?” The words were out of my mouth almost before I was aware of it.

“What?”

“How will he know? He’ll only know if I get caught, and why would I want to do that?”

Martin looked momentarily flummoxed, a reaction I fully expected him to attempt to camouflage by giving me another shake. Instead, however, he said, “Do someth’n sneaky, yer mean?”

I nodded.

He thought about this for a moment, but then said, “Nah, yerv gotter get caught, and punished. Bein’ sneaky’s no different than bein’ good really. It only goes ter show yer a coward.”

“So I’ve got to be stupid, then, and get caught?” I replied (and nearly added, “like David”). “What’s the use of that? Half the fun’s in getting away with stuff.”

David, who so far had not said a word, chipped in then with, “This ain’t a discussion, Devaney – yer’ll do as yer told.”

Martin added, “Just be naughty, OK, and things’ll be fine.”

They sauntered off.

I pondered this superficially glib parting shot, and as time went on it began to seem more and more beguiling. By ‘being naughty’ I would be imposing my will on the world, rather than being brow-beaten and shaped by it. However, I was still convinced that it was only worth doing if you took measures to prevent yourself from being caught.

Mesozoic Era Musings

"The Mesozoic Era lasted a hundred and twenty million years,” I recited. “It was split into three periods – the Triassic period, the Jurassic period, and the Cretaceous period.”

Arthur ventured a brief nod. “When did the first birds come about?” he asked.

“Some time between the last years of the Triassic period, and the first years of the Jurassic.”

“What was the first bird called, and what does its name mean?”

“Archaeopteryx, and its name means ancient wing.”

“OK, now it’s my turn – ask me about dinosaurs.”

Arthur and I were reclining on the grass in a secluded corner of the school playing field. If Richard Allen was the nearest thing I had to a brother when I was at home, Arthur Holty was his equivalent at St Thomas More’s. Thinly built, with prominent nose and chin, and ice-white, spiky hair, Arthur, like Aloysius, came originally from Holland. He lived in Elizabeth Downs with his parents and baby brother Johann, and for the first two and a half years of my time at St Thomas More’s we were inseparable. Our principal shared passion was ‘How and Why Wonder Books’, which we collected and read avidly, often memorising entire sections and then testing one another on them.

Every few weeks we would be allowed to spend the weekend together, either at Arthur’s home or mine. At night, lying toe to toe in the same bed, we would endeavour to ward off sleep for as long as we could by insectivorously picking away at choice aspects of the arcane knowledge in which we both delighted.

“Which would have been harder to kill, ankylosaurus or stegosaurus?”

“Which planet would you most like to go to?”

“What book d’you reckon you’ll get next? I can’t decide between ‘The Polar Regions’ and ‘Lost Cities’.”

“I’ve already got ‘The Polar Regions’. You can borrow it if you like. Did you know that the Aurora Borealis is yellow and pink, but the Aurora Australis is green? I think I’m gunna get ‘Explorations and Discoveries’ next, or maybe ‘North American Indians’.”

And so on and so on, deep into the night, until one of us – usually Arthur – finally fell asleep.

My recollections of those weekend sojourns are closely tied up with memories of important and dramatic historic events. I was staying at Arthur’s when news came through of President Kennedy’s having been shot in Dallas. Likewise, I can recall sitting in Arthur’s living room watching grainy black and white TV coverage of Winston Churchill’s state funeral. In his thickly accented but fluent English, Arthur’s dad enjoined us ‘never to forget this moment’; the world, he said, was bidding good-bye to one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, if not of all time. Whether or not I agreed with this assessment, I have forgotten neither Mr Holty’s words, nor the setting in which they were proffered.

Childhood friendships can seem almost intractably intense and all-consuming, and yet ultimately they are as precarious as a house of cards. When Arthur and I were in grade five, Arthur’s parents decided to remove him from St Thomas More’s and send him instead to the local state primary school in Elizabeth Downs. After spending more time with Arthur during the preceding two and a half years than I had with almost anyone else, and having got to know him on as deep a level as I was probably capable of doing at the time, I was only ever to see him once more. That was on a Sunday afternoon more than two years later, when his parents paid an impromptu visit to mine. The intervening years had wrought considerable changes in both Arthur and me, and we were awkward and uncertain with one another, scarcely knowing what to say, or even what physical posture to adopt. In the end, I was relieved when he left, conscious perhaps at some level that, as is almost invariably the case in the end, the woolly bear caterpillar of our friendship had been peremptorily squashed beneath the jackboot of arbitrary circumstance.

The Day Of Judgement

One of the best things about my dad was that he gave Barbara and me plenty of what would nowadays be called ‘quality time’. He would take us for walks, read or make up stories, and play games, several of which could loosely be described as educational.

One of Dad’s favourite instructional games was called Day of Judgement, and involved his taking on the role of God, with Barbara and I as ourselves. We had to imagine that it was the Last Day, as popularly depicted in Christian myth, an impression my dad would seek to reinforce by blowing briefly on an imaginary trumpet (‘the last trump’) in order to summon the souls of everyone who had ever lived to gather before his throne (actually, a kitchen chair) and be judged. (Strictly speaking, it should have been an angel sounding the trumpet, and not God, but I pretended not to notice rather elementary faux pas.) You also had to imagine that Barbara and I were in the midst of an enormous multitude of dead souls (sic.), all awaiting their own individual hearings. I wondered to myself what mechanism God would use to determine who went first. Even if he decided to summon everyone in straight alphabetical order Barbara and I were destined for a wait of, oh, a couple of hundred years at least.

In the game of course, the two hundred year wait was ignored, and Barbara’s name was the first one called.

“Ah,” said God, kindly, as Barbara stepped forward, “I see that you are one of my precious little ones, and have yet to reach the age of reason. I see no sin in you, and so you can come and live forever with me in paradise.”

At this, Barbara climbed up onto God’s lap, and smiled beatifically down at me, her vagrant older brother, as I fought to contain a sudden surge of nervousness. The cause of my unease had been God’s mention of the age of reason, which was the age at which a person was deemed to be morally responsible for his or her sins. Moreover, once you had reached the age of reason, you were supposed to be capable of more or less any manner of wickedness. Given that the Catholic church had decreed that a child reached the age of reason at the age of seven, this meant that I now had a whole year of potential murder, highway robbery, grand larceny, adultery and attempted train derailment under my belt. There were other mortal sins, as well, some of which I might have committed without even knowing it (not that that would have been any excuse, of course).

Come to think of it, I was not entirely clear on what grand larceny and adultery, both of which Mrs Sindocic had mentioned during RE, were. For all I knew, I might already have committed both.

So there I stood, an eight year old grand larcenist and adulterer, not to mention attempted train derailer, awaiting the judgement of a God whom I was relieved to realise was actually only my father, and who could not really see into the innermost recesses of my depraved, sin-saturated soul.

“John Paul Devaney,” intoned the divine judge of all in a thick Liverpool accent, while my newly redeemed sister playfully tugged at the hairs issuing from one of his ears.

Half cautious, half amused, I shuffled forward to Face the Music.

“Hmm,” said God. “You, I see, unlike your sister, have already reached the age of reason, and although you have been a good boy on the whole you have nevertheless committed some sins – disobedience, lies, even one case of swearing.”

This last was in reference to the time a couple of weeks earlier when I had inadvertently let slip the word ‘bloody’, normally reserved for use when I was with my friends, in the delightfully astonished presence of my dad.

“I am afraid,” continued God, “that you are not quite ready yet to come and live with me in heaven, so I shall have to send you to purgatory for a while, so that you can be cleansed of your sin.”

“Oh, fuck!” I said spontaneously, then promptly clapped my hand to my mouth in horror.

If I was horrified, this was as nothing compared to the reaction of God, who appeared on the verge of an apoplectic fit. My sister meanwhile giggled appreciatively.

When God had finally managed to calm down, he asked, “Do you know what that word means?”

“Er,” I said, thinking quickly. “It’s a bit like flippin’ or bloomin’, isn’t it?” – citing a couple of the rather tame slang expletives favoured by my dad who, unlike my mum, never swore.

“No,” said God, sternly. “No – it’s not a bit like those words. It’s a very, very, very bad swear word, and you must never use it.”

“Is it?” I innocently asked, consciously assuming my most cherubic, choir-boy like facial expression. “But people use it all the time.”

“What people?”

“Mike and Jimmy used it,” I replied, which was certainly true. “And Mum, and you, and Mar-”

“When have you heard me use it? I never use it!”

“Don’t you? Oh, I thought you did.” (Actually, I knew very well that my dad never swore, but I could see no harm in endeavouring to cloud the waters a little.)

“No – I don’t – and neither must you. I’ll accept that you didn’t know how wrong it was, and I’ll let you off this once, but you must never, ever use it again. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said meekly, secretly delighted at the impact that the word, the meaning of which had only been taught to me a few weeks earlier by Aloysius, had had, and resolving to embellish my conversation – out of Dad’s hearing, of course – with it on a regular basis henceforth.

“Now, where were we?” mused the omnipotent one.

“You were just sending me to purgatory.”

“Oh, yes. I’m afraid your sins mean that you’re not yet ready to join me in paradise, and so I am going to have to send you to be purified in the flames of purgatory for a few thousand years.”

Once, on a mutual dare, Richard and I had poked our fingers into the flame of a lit match, which was an experience neither of us much cared for, and would be extremely unlikely to repeat. I tried to imagine the intense pain I had briefly experienced on a small part of my finger expanding to cover my whole body, and then going on, without abatement, for year after year after year.

And all for a few measly lies and a slightly less than optimal obedience record.

“Flames?” I said, disbelievingly. “A few thousand years?” God’s face was sympathetic; my sister was picking her nose. Ah well, in for a penny, in for a pound. “FUCK!” I yelled.

The Death Of Santa Claus Part 2

Some mornings I would awake to find that the atmosphere in my bedroom had congealed overnight, leaving me in a kind of cocoon or bubble of inertia. Inside my skull, my thoughts would seemingly resound, echo and reverberate. External sounds would become exaggerated and blurred, and I would be beset by a churning sense of nausea.

Everything, it seemed, was slowing down – which, nevertheless, still represented an acceleration of the actual state of things, in which the inevitable decline towards decay and dissolution was barely perceptible.

“What do you reckon happens when you die?” Michael asked my sister, intent upon her further enlightenment.

She considered for a moment, wary by now of his tricks. “They bury you in a graveyard,” she finally decided.

“And that’s it, is it? No more Barbara?”

“I go to live with God in heaven,” she ventured, almost reluctantly, smelling a trap.

“But you’re dead – how can you go and live anywhere?”

She struggled briefly to comprehend what Michael was getting at, before tentatively speculating, almost as a question, “My soul goes on living………”

“Your what?”

“Soul, silly! That keeps on living even after I die. It goes on forever.”

Michael produced an evil looking smirk. “OK, so where is it now, then – your soul?” He spat the final word out like a rotten piece of fruit.

She searched his face for some indication that he was making fun of her, but still being of an age when all smiles appear agreeable, acquired sufficient confidence to point meaningfully at her stomach. “In here,” she said.

“Inside your tummy?”

She nodded.

“All mixed up with your breakfast?”

Barbara briefly looked as though she was going to engender a retort, but she obviously thought better of it, because she nodded, albeit with scant conviction.

“So if I cut you open I’d be able to see your soul for myself, would I?”

“You’re not going to cut me open!” she exclaimed.

“No, of course I’m not – but just suppose.”

However, Barbara, who was growing tired of being forced to swim out of her depth, chose to erect an implicit barrier of sorts around herself by beginning, with single-minded determination, to suck her thumb.

“People have died and then come back to life, you know,” said Michael, coaxingly.

This was more familiar ground. “I know,” acknowledged Barbara. “Like Jesus.”

Michael, resisting the urge to spar with such an obvious non sequitur, remained focussed on his underlying point. “Much more recently than Jesus. They’ve died on operating tables – their hearts have stopped – and then the doctors have managed to resuscitate them.”

“Resu – what?”

“Bring them back to life. Start their hearts up again.”

Barbara looked both intrigued and a little confused at this point, and Michael, sensing he risked losing the initiative, moved swiftly to consolidate his position. “So these people know what it’s like to be dead,” he said, simply.

The room went quiet. Barbara was clearly on the verge of being overwhelmed by this entirely unexpected and quite remarkable piece of intelligence. Eventually, in a hushed tone of voice, she asked, “What did they say it’s like?”

Michael paused dramatically, presumably for effect, but succeeded only in completely sabotaging his whole offensive, going as it were from within a hair’s breadth of conquest, to the frustrating anti-climax of an unforeseen, but nevertheless unequivocal, stalemate. “They’ve all said the same thing,” he informed her, and paused again to magnify the tension. “It’s like a deep, deep sleep with no end.”

The taut atmosphere suddenly slackened. Richard and I, who knew better than to interrupt when Michael was waxing homiletic, looked across the room at one another with raised eyebrows – the self-proclaimed supreme logician had, it seemed, been unceremoniously hoist on his own petard.

Barbara may only have been four and a half, but she saw almost straight away that there was something seriously flawed about Michael’s pronouncement. “But there was an end,” she said. “They came back to life again.”

Suddenly aware of what he had done, Michael made a desperate last ditch attempt to change the thrust of his attack. “But none of them mentioned heaven,” he informed her, “or God. It was just – nothing.”

Barbara eyed him coolly, with diminished respect. You don’t know any more about death than anyone, her eyes said, while her voice announced, “I don’t want to talk about this any more.”

Later, when she and I were on our own, Barbara asked me what I thought would happen after she died. “We’ll all have a big party,” I told her, thereby simultaneously taking her mind off the matter as she mounted a furious assault on my person, and exempting myself from tendering the painful admission that I did not have the faintest idea.

It still seemed, however, that on those mornings when I awoke enmeshed in inertia, I was as close as I would ever come to some plausibly coherent insight. Five years later, as I sensed my inner vitality slowly bleeding out of me into the surrounding darkness at Outer Harbour, my intimation became unquestionable.

Monkey Business

When I first saw my new baby sister Angela she seemed too small to be human. My mum has been hoodwinked, I decided; the hospital staff had swapped the baby for a bald ukari, one of the red-faced South American monkeys I had recently seen at the Adelaide Zoo.

My theory broke down, however, when Mum pulled back the blanket that was wrapped around Angela’s head to reveal a dense thatch of jet black hair. Clearly, this was no monkey; it was, alas, another sister.

When Mum had first announced that she was ‘expecting’, my initial reaction had been one of disappointment. There goes my chance of having a puppy, I thought. After a while, however, I became reconciled to the idea, reasoning that to have a younger brother to boss around might actually be quite enjoyable – and, in its way, not unlike having a puppy.

The possibility of the baby turning out to be a girl did not enter my thoughts. It had been a girl last time; therefore it would be a boy this time. Anything else would be blatantly unfair.

Yet here I was, standing in the maternity ward at Gawler Hospital, while my mum proudly showed off her grotesque, red-faced, black-haired, purportedly female monkey-baby.

Purportedly female…….. that was it! Perhaps the doctors and nurses had made a mistake. After all, the baby was so diminutive that it’s willy must be virtually invisible.

I resolved to bide my time, and await an opportunity to inspect the evidence for myself – with a magnifying glass, if necessary.

The Joys Of Friendship

According to Mum, Angela was more precocious as a baby than either Barbara or I. She was certainly not wanting for stimulation. Barbara in particular seemed to regard her as a prized new addition to her collection of dolls and cuddly toys. She already had a doll which cried, as well as one that wet the bed, but now she had one that could do both, sometimes simultaneously, as well as producing spectacular quantities of poo.

Babies typically exhibit a keen interest in their surroundings, and in Angela’s case this was most pronounced, and especially so when she was outdoors. From a very early age, she would gaze around in apparent wonder and exhilaration at the enormity and ever varying splendour of the world, sometimes even eliciting an impromptu gurgle of pleasure.

At the age of eleven months she uttered her first word. Quickly learning that, whenever she did so, she was guaranteed an animated and appreciative reaction on the part of anyone within earshot, she began to utilise it almost unceasingly.

The word in question admirably summarised her view of the world; it was ‘Out’.

“Out!” she would declare as she was lifted from her cot in the morning.

“Out!” as she sat in her high chair, ignoring her breakfast.

“Out!” as she was required to perch on the pink plastic bowl, the purpose of which still eluded her.

“Out!” she would chant, with excited approval, as she was removed from her pyjamas, and dressed in clothing appropriate for the day ahead.

Angela’s desire to be outside in the open air was, it seemed, insatiable, all-consuming and ever present.

Almost equally insistent was her refusal to wear shoes, which she habitually, and with ever growing expertise, removed as soon as they were on her feet. If left entirely to her own devices, she would probably still be walking around barefoot to this day.

Angela’s first friend was David, the son of Gwen and Alf from next door. Actually, to call David a friend is somewhat misleading, as it implies equality of status, whereas for the most part he was accorded treatment more appropriate to a lackey – or, on those rare days when Angela was feeling particularly kindly disposed, perhaps a pet. Meagre of stature, and wholly amenable and guileless of temperament, David was admirably suited to his role, and no matter how many times he was verbally or physically maltreated, he seldom allowed his psychological or palpable bruises to keep him away from Angela’s prepossessing company for long.

Several months younger than Angela, David was also a somewhat slower developer, particularly linguistically. He had immense trouble articulating Angela’s name, for instance, which, for several months, was inexplicably pronounced ‘Faffy’. Equally inexplicably, Angela for a time seemed actually to prefer this rendering of her name, and would often use it when referring to herself.

As a youngster, Angela manifestly eschewed both the intellectual and the subliminal, adhering implacably to the straight forward maxim ‘might is right’. This attitude was particularly observable in her dealings with David. For the most part, the pair of them would play together quietly and peaceably. However, the moment you heard a conversation starting up you could rest assured that, within a matter of minutes, Angela’s Nietzschean propensities would be being given full, unmitigated rein. Eventually, the dialogue would generate a difference of opinion with which Angela would find herself unable to cope dialectically. There would then be a brief silence, presumably while she made a last effort to come up with a sufficiently telling verbal riposte, and then David would erupt into tears. Moments later you would hear the frenzied patter of his bare feet as he scurried homewards in pursuit of maternal consolation, all the while wailing pathetically “Faffy hit me!” Meanwhile Angela, looking relaxed and a trifle smug at having made her point so eloquently, would bide her time, confident that David would all too soon be back to resume their discussion, having sensibly adjusted his opinions to conform with hers.

One of Angela’s and David’s favourite topics of conversation was size.

“My mummy says I’m bigger than I was last week,” David would declare. “She measured me on the wall.”

With an amused, slightly indifferent smile, Angela would reply, “Yes, David, I can see you’re much bigger than you were."

“Soon I’ll be bigger than you! Soon I’ll be the biggest!” David would flex his non-existent biceps to emphasise his point.

“No,” Angela would respond. “You are big, David, but you’ll never be bigger than me.”

“Soon I’ll be as big as my daddy!” David would proclaim, eyes agape at what he clearly felt was an imminent prospect.

Angela would laugh, in a self-contained, somewhat patronising kind of way. David’s dad was six foot three inches of sheer muscle.

Blinded and intoxicated by the sheer magnificence of the future vista he had concocted, David would effectively beg Angela to bring him back down to earth with a thud. “Soon I’ll be bigger than you! Soon I’ll be able to bash you up!” And he would cavort around, adopting a succession of pugilistic and virile poses, until inevitably reminded of the utter absurdity of both his words and aspirations by Angela’s irrefutable fists.

Then “Mum!” he would howl. “Faffy hit me!”

None of this is to imply that Faffy did not know how or when to be deferential herself. If Barbara doted on her to the extent of treating her much like a favourite doll, the feelings were certainly, to some extent, reciprocated. Indeed, Angela seemed as keen to please and impress Barbara as she was to lord it over David. She also seemed to look up to me, perhaps sensing that, with my love of sports and other outdoor activities, I was something of a kindred spirit.

As for me, however, although I was pleased with the fact that Angela was a veritable tomboy, and certainly nothing like the cry-baby Barbara had tended to be at the same age, I nevertheless could not refrain from continuing to wish that she had possessed the extra appendage that would have made her, from my point of view, so much more amenable as a companion.

A Birthday Without Presents

My eighth birthday was on a Friday, and, as a treat, my dad had promised to take me to Salisbury, where the shops were open until nine o’clock at night, in order that I could choose a birthday present for myself. The colossal sum of two whole pounds had been set aside for this purpose – enough to purchase ten ‘How and Why Wonder Books’ had I been so inclined, although I was sure I would be able to find something even more tantalising if I looked long enough.

To be made a fuss of like this was especially agreeable given that my baby sister Angela, born less than two months previously, had occupied the undisputed central position in both my parents’ – and Barbara’s – affections for what I considered to be a grotesquely excessive period of time. After all, she did nothing all day except eat, sleep, cry, pee and poo – I could do all of that, and more.

During the train journey from Womma to Salisbury I did, I thought, a commendable job of keeping my churning sense of anticipation more or less in check. As things turned out, this was quite fortunate, for no sooner had we disembarked from the train at Salisbury station than my dad informed me that he did not have sufficient money to give me the two pounds he had promised. He then endeavoured to console me by adding that he hoped to have it in a week’s time, but if I could not wait that long, he could afford to let me have ten shillings today instead.

If a week is a long time in politics, it is an eternity in the mind of an eight year old. Besides, the whole point of our trip to Salisbury was, I had been led to believe, to enable me to choose a birthday present for myself. Gravely disappointed though I was therefore, I nevertheless had little hesitation in selecting immediate gratification, however partial, over the unimaginably distant prospect of boundless wealth. Having spent most of the preceding week in a state of ever-increasing anticipation – the equivalent, if you like, of foreplay – and the journey from Womma to Salisbury in a condition of intense arousal, I had effectively passed the point of no return, and to deny myself satisfaction now might well be damaging to my health.

Or, at any rate, so I reasoned.

My dad was predictably scathing. “Patience is a virtue,” he advised me, and went on to lecture me, at length, on the enormous range of inimical consequences likely to stem from weakness of character. I barely listened. Wasn’t honesty a virtue too? Why then did you lie to me, Dad? And why did you wait until we’d got to Salisbury to tell me that you weren’t going to give me the two pounds you’d promised?

I thought of asking all these questions, but I knew better. My dad would only do what he always did, which was to transfer the burden of blame and guilt onto me, for in the special, idiosyncratic universe that he inhabited, he was never wrong.

It developed into a somewhat tortuous, guilt-ridden night, with my dad continually expressing his disappointment at my ‘weakness of will’ and lack of patience. He even accused me of being greedy, and “Greed is one of the seven deadly sins”, he somewhat sanctimoniously informed me. It seemed clear to me, even then, that the entire situation had been deliberately engineered by my dad as a kind of test, and that by failing it I was effectively declaring myself to be morally redundant. How many more thousands of years of purgatorial agony could I expect to endure now, I wondered?

So much for a happy birthday……….

In the end, despite trembling physically with reluctance, uncertainty and guilt, I spent my ten shillings on a small model train set with a basic track layout, but one that could be continually expanded. It may not have been precisely what I had imagined buying earlier, but it was much better than going home with nothing, I decided.

Over the next few weeks I managed to extract a surprising amount of amusement from my ostensibly unremarkable purchase. Included in the box with the train and its basic oval of track was a leaflet detailing all the other trains, track types and accessories that you could buy to expand your layout, and I began planning to do just that.

Before I could implement my plans, however, we received a fateful visit from the Holty family who, having learned of our new arrival, were anxious to engage in the protracted sequence of billings and cooings stipulated by society as an appropriate means of acknowledging such an event. Thus, while Arthur and I retired to my bedroom to conduct a prolonged discussion on dinosaurs, or astronomy, or the development of powered flight, the adults sat around drinking tea and deluding themselves that the cacophony of scarcely human sounds they saw fit to make for Angela’s benefit were actually anything other than palliatives for their own intense unease.

Angela, in any case, carried on sleeping, oblivious.

Meanwhile Barbara, temporarily deprived of her current favourite toy, consoled herself by playing ‘Mum’ to Johann, Arthur’s eighteen month old brother. In a credible effort to amuse him, she gave him some of my toy cars to play with, which he ignored, and then the small train set that I had purchased for my birthday, with which he was immediately, and obsessively, besotted.

Later, as the Holty family was preparing to depart, my mum pulled me discreetly to one side. “Johann really seems to like that little train set of yours,” she remarked. “Why don’t you give it to him?”

I blinked up at her, unsure I had heard correctly. Mum, it seemed, was suggesting that I give Johann my recently acquired train set, which I liked, simply on the grounds that he, Johann, also appeared to like it. Was that really how things worked? If I manifested a liking for Arthur’s latest ‘How and Why Wonder Book’, or Charlie’s bike, would they be obliged to give them to me? Or was it perhaps a peculiarly Dutch custom, like fathers kissing their grown sons as they bade good-bye to them of a morning?

Presumably suspecting that I found her logic somewhat less than wholly persuasive, Mum changed tack slightly, and said. “Oh, come on, you wouldn’t want to disappoint him, would you? He’s only little.”

Then he’s got a whole lifetime of big disappointments ahead of him, I thought, and it would do him no harm to start getting used to it.

At that moment, Mrs Holty came over, carrying Johann. “Ve vaunt to tenk Chon for de luffly trenset, don’t ve Johann?”

Mouth open, thoroughly bemused, I stood there gaping like a landed fish. Try as I might, I could not recall the point at which I had agreed to a transaction of such dubious equitability.

Sensing that my beneficence was perhaps a touch less unequivocal than she had been led to believe, she judiciously unfurled an olive branch: “Unt Chon shell heff a How unt Why book!”

Which, I could not prevent myself from thinking, was worth at least six bob less than the train set. Did she expect me to dance with glee?

However, it all became academic when Mum interjected, “Oh, we wouldn’t hear of it. John’s getting much too big for such babyish toys anyway, aren’t you, John?”

Yes, I thought, since buying the thing a couple of weeks ago I’ve virtually doubled in size……. However, conscious that the slight pressure which my mum had just begun applying to my upper arm was tantamount to an injunction to obeisance, I merely muttered, “Yes”.

After the Dutch raiding party had departed, Mum helpfully explained to me that, by giving my train set to Johann, I had demonstrated possibly the most important of all virtues, generosity. “Generosity,” she told me, in all apparent seriousness, “is its own reward.”

For once not daring to venture a retort (although a certain ‘F’ word was balanced tentatively on my tongue), I simply sighed, thinking that this was, in all probability, the single most ridiculous thing I had ever heard my mum say. With the benefit of more than forty years of experience and hindsight, however, I can now see that it was probably among the wisest, for generosity spawns the most enriching and ennobling gift of all: appreciation.

Deception As An Art Form

The Starcevich brothers continued to berate me for my alleged irreproachability from time to time, but their strange reluctance to reinforce their message by pugilistic means transformed them, in my eyes, from a real threat to a mere nuisance. This is not to suggest that I became entirely comfortable during my encounters with them, and I still endeavoured to avoid them whenever I could. But no amount of verbal aggression, however vitriolic or insistent, was ever going to get me to change my behaviour.

I was perfectly aware of the potential benefits to be gleaned from overt acts of misconduct, of course. For one thing, your status in the eyes of your peers could be enhanced no end, as could, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, your sense of self-esteem. However, I considered such rewards to be of negligible appeal compared with the feelings of achievement and superiority to be derived from ‘pulling a fast one’.

With that in mind, an important development during my time in grade three came with our introduction to the delights of cursive hand-writing. Right from the start, I was fascinated, both with the mechanical (but seemingly almost magical) process of conferring meaning on a blank page, and with the immense variation in potential ways to achieve this. Hand-writing, it seemed, was as uniquely distinctive an expression of personhood as physical appearance, finger prints, or the sound of the voice. This begged a question – how much of a person’s intrinsic self was embedded in such things? If I could somehow be made to look exactly like another person, would I thereby become that person? What if I learned to speak like them?

What if I learned to write like them?

Shortly after progressing to grade four, I began to spend hours with my collection of Mobil football photos, endeavouring to reproduce the footballers’ autographs. At first, I would trace them. Then, when I believed I had got the hang of the idiosyncrasies inherent in the letter shapes, as well as the flow and orientation of the words, I would start to do them freehand, slowly at first, then gradually faster and faster as the process became more natural and automatic. Initially, the standard of my attempts varied greatly – my ‘Lindsay Head’ was excellent, almost impossible to tell from the original; ‘Robert Martin’ and ‘Bob Edmonds’ were passable; but I found ‘Peter Anderson’ and ‘Terry Short’ almost impossible to master. In the end though, after hours and hours of painstaking effort, I could produce credible versions of all forty autographs in the series.

This was all very well in itself, but it was hard to imagine any practical use for my new-found ability, at any rate while it was restricted to reproducing the signatures of footballers. The hand-writing of my mum and dad, however, to which I next turned my attention, was another matter entirely.

The Wheel Of Fortune

My dad had been chosen to appear on Adelaide Tonight, as a contestant on 'The Wheel Of Fortune'. Even my four year old sister was allowed to stay up late to watch.

When Ernie Sigley introduced him, my dad looked surprisingly relaxed – much more so than I would have been. Was this a good sign, I wondered?

He sent the wheel of fortune spinning, and when it finally came to rest, Sigley announced, “Well, Barney, just listen to this. Answer this one question correctly, and you will receive” – cue musical fanfare, lasting several seconds longer than it ought to have – “luxury wall to wall carpets throughout your home!”

The audience dutifully ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’, while, in our living room, a look of unadulterated avarice briefly contorted my mum’s normally placid features.

Sigley hid behind a ludicrously exaggerated grin as he waited for the clamour from the audience to die down, then said. “And your question, Barney, is this.” He paused, his face grown suddenly solemn, and stared portentously into the camera. “In which year” – another melodramatic pause – “Barney, are you ready for this?”

“Sure thing, Ernie.”

“OK, Barney. Here it comes. In which year” – Sigley paused again, and may actually have winked at the camera this time – “was the Great Train Robbery?”

Close-up on my dad, who had immediately screwed up his face, either in concentration or from despair. Seconds passed.

“I’m going to have to press you, Barney…….”

Eyes tightly closed to emphasise his uncertainty (was he praying? was anybody listening?), Dad lurched at the answer like a drunk stabbing blindly at a wine bottle with an upside down corkscrew. “Nineteen…..sixty…two?”

There was a massive collective groan from the audience, while Sigley contrived an expression of smugness masquerading as compassion. “Oh, Barney, Barney, Barney!” he chortled-wailed. “So very close! It was actually nineteen sixty……..three.”

Dad nodded ruefully, as though he had actually known all along.

Then, as upbeat music started playing, Sigley went on. “But no contestant ever leaves Adelaide Tonight empty-handed – and so, Barney, as your consolation prize, we hope you’ll accept” – the camera cut to a pouting, glamorous-looking blonde woman, and then - too soon for me to get my hopes raised - started panning out slowly – “this beautiful, fake angora hearth rug!” The blonde woman helpfully indicated the microscopic, snow-white rectangle of carpet that had appeared in camera shot beside her, and ventured a winsome smile that she had no doubt spent hours perfecting in front of a mirror, or a lover.

And that, suddenly, was that.

“Bed time,” said Mum, looking resigned, if a trifle diminished. She, no doubt, was inured to disappointment and anti-climax, whereas to me they were comparatively unfamiliar. I went to bed feeling that something small and indefinable, but nevertheless important, had died within me, and despite what Michael Allen had claimed, once something had died there was never any possibility, ever ever ever, of resuscitation or revival.

The Death Of Santa Claus Part 3

I became an altar boy entirely because of the perks associated with the role. Only a few of these perks, such as the tips you invariably received for serving at a wedding or a funeral, were of a pecuniary nature. Most were more esoteric. I derived particular pleasure from occupying a central role in what, for many Catholics, was a highly intimate devotional experience, the partaking of the actual body of Christ in the Eucharist. When I held the communion plate up to the chin of Katie Bowyer or Anita George I felt as if I was somehow being granted brief, privileged access to the stark reality of their innermost emotions, thoughts and yearnings. Peering surreptitiously into their eyes, I believe I captured them in a moment of rare vulnerability and exposure; they were bare before me, and I had the potential either to molest or to assist. The fact that I invariably elected to assist did not in any way diminish the sense of power I felt. It was, in all respects, a compulsively visceral, unabashedly sexual thrill, and as such was infinitely preferable to mere money.

There were other, less intense fillips too. I enjoyed the fact that, unlike among my teachers at school, to whom I remained more or less invisible (although this was soon to change), I was clearly Father Abfalter’s favourite. This led to my being treated as a de facto ‘head altar boy’, which meant that any of the more interesting or responsible jobs – assisting at communion, ringing the bells, lighting and extinguishing the altar candles – were mine for the asking. It also meant that I was often given the task of training newcomers - a duty which ultimately, and irrevocably, succeeded in sabotaging my love affair with the cassock.

In Father Abfalter’s eyes, ringing the bells at appropriate times during Mass was an altar boy’s most important function. There were only about half a dozen such instances to remember, and yet it was amazing how often a boy would need a nudge from one of his fellows, or a glare from Father Abfalter, to remind him. I had a reputation for never forgetting, which is why Father Abfalter usually insisted that I had charge of the bells whenever I was assisting him. Father Chekovich, however, adopted a much more egalitarian approach, with sometimes comical results. On one occasion, a certain unnamed boy who features elsewhere in this story somehow contrived to ring the bells, loudly and pronouncedly, at a completely inappropriate time, eliciting a ripple of laughter from the congregation, and a bemused stare from Father Chekovich; afterwards, the priest saw fit to have a quiet word with him. Had Father Abfalter rather than Father Chekovich been officiating, the boy would probably have been excommunicated.

Perhaps my greatest achievement as an altar boy was to obliterate my sister Barbara’s religious faith. When she attended Mass with my dad the pair of them invariably used to sit near the rear of the church, which meant that my sister’s view of what was happening at the altar was restricted. When, during key moments in the service, she heard the faint tinkling of bells, she quite naturally assumed that this was God’s way of signalling his approbation. As soon as she discovered, courtesy of me, that there was nothing remotely divine going on after all, her perception of the nature of the universe was dramatically and irrevocably changed. The fact that my ostensible service of God had perversely succeeded in bolstering the ranks of the world’s agnostics appealed to me no end, as did the scarcely credible fact that my five year old sister had believed in a God who elected to employ campanological means when communicating directly with humankind.

Michael Allen might have managed to disabuse Barbara of her comparatively harmless belief in the red-suited, white-bearded old man who conferred presents on the world’s children at Christmas time, but by extricating her – albeit inadvertently - from the much more invidious mire of religious mumbo jumbo I had, I liked to think, rendered her a much more telling and enduring service.

The Kaliwara Ninjas

The climax of each school year was the Christmas concert, for which rehearsals sometimes began as early as April. In grade two we had done a traditional Nativity play, in which I played the role of a shepherd. The only thing I can remember about it is how itchy and hot I felt in the hessian sack I was required to wear, for reasons just as impossible to fathom now as they were back then.

From grade three onwards, the boys and girls, having passed the threshold of reason and thereby shed their youthful incorruptibility, performed separately, presumably to prevent the kind of prurient, inter-sex fraternisation so beloved of children of that age. In grade three, this meant the boys dressing up as frogs, and serenading the audience, comprised mostly of parents and other relatives, on the multifarious delights attendant on living in a pond, the obvious advantages of hopping over walking as a method of locomotion, reminiscences of life as a tadpole, and our overriding, but repeatedly thwarted, ambition to go-a-wooing (which I understood to mean producing a wooing noise, somewhat like an owl). I imagine the whole thing was utterly, transcendently dire. My dad, at least, appeared to think so.

“Did you like our singing?” I asked him proudly afterwards.

“It was terrible,” he informed me. “Out of tune, out of time, and flat.” (If honesty is, as some would maintain, unequalled among the virtues, my dad was, and remains, a veritable saint.) Then, perhaps realising that by being so brutally frank he ran the risk of upsetting me somewhat, or more likely out of a desire to be perceived as complimenting my mum’s needlework (she being within earshot), he added, “I liked the costumes, though.”

Ah yes, the costumes. In my view too, they were far and away the best thing about the 1964 St Thomas More Primary School Christmas Concert. A muted pea green in colour, they were single piece garments that covered the entire body except for the face and hands (which were suitably coated in matching green grease paint). To me, their use as frog costumes was of distinctly secondary importance to the purpose for which they had obviously been principally created, which was to provide me, to the measureless envy of most of my friends, with a custom-made, entirely authentic-looking ninja outfit.

For several years during the 1960s, imported Japanese TV programmes littered the airwaves. Of these, far and away the most appealing to the average eight or nine year old boy was Shintaro, which featured the adventures of the eponymous hero, a medieval Samurai, as he travelled around the country righting wrongs, the majority of which seemed to be perpetrated by evil ninjas. Helpfully, these ninjas always alerted you to their iniquitous intentions by wearing black. Supporting Shintaro in his quest were a band of honourable, white-robed ninjas, whose primary purpose seemed to be to highlight their master’s near illimitable combative prowess by means of their own, equally supreme, ineptitude.

Even as an eight year old I was fully aware that virtue, or its lack, did not conform to any straightforward colour code, and this was one reason that I was delighted to be breaking new ground by becoming, as far as I was aware, the first ever green ninja – or, to put it another way, the first ever ninja not to wear his morals on his sleeve.

Every ninja worth his or her salt (yes, there were even female ninjas) needs a secret society to which to belong, and it was here that the nascent organisational and creative talents of Michael Allen came to the fore. I have no idea what happened to Michael in later life, but at the age of nine or ten, before the onset of the overtly distasteful misogyny and inflated opinion of self which characterised his early adolescence, he gave every indication of having all the makings of a first rate impresario, stage manager, or even director. The most obvious evidence of this came via the regular concerts which we – he, Richard and I, plus Barbara on occasion – performed for his and Richard’s parents. These concerts, which tended to be loosely constructed hash-megandis of songs, short plays or sketches, and comedy routines, were all arranged and, where necessary, written or composed – with considerable adeptness and imagination – by Michael. He was also the only one of us to display more than a modicum of aptitude for performing, which makes the genial forbearance shown by Eddie and Janet, our regular (and indeed only) audience, all the more commendable.

Michael’s talents were also given full rein in the genesis and development of an organisation which, for a brief time, was the focus of considerable amounts of our energy and attention, the Kaliwara Ninjas. Deriving its name from the local playground and sports fields, membership of this society was open to all kids in our neighbourhood, providing they successfully completed a series of carefully devised ‘trials by ordeal’. The trials, which included things like drinking at one go a special ‘cocktail’ made to Michael’s own secret (and supremely foul-tasting) recipe, and squeezing the stem of a rose bush until blood oozed out between your fingers (my idea), seemed to have the surprising effect of putting off a number of potential initiates, including Charlie Brown and my sister. Aloysius, by contrast, who had an overtly bloodthirsty imagination, would certainly not have been repelled by the initiation tests per se – indeed, he would probably have come up with a few of his own that the rest of us might well have balked at – but the prospect of going home with dirty shoes or hands was simply not to be countenanced. Similarly Colin, as easily the toughest boy of our age in the neighbourhood, would undoubtedly have sailed through the initiation sequence without blinking, but make believe games of this sort were never his cup of tea. Moreover, as his family did not possess a TV set, he probably had no idea what ninjas were.

In the end, our much vaunted secret society comprised just three members: Michael (the Samurai), me (chief ninja), and Richard (honourable dogsbody). One Saturday morning, laden with supplies, weapons (wooden swords, and throwing stars fashioned out of tin lids), plus the sort of boundless, questing, insatiable curiosity and imagination that only childhood can elicit, we embarked on our maiden adventure. In our minds' eyes at least, this would take us far beyond the boundaries of civilisation, and deep into the uncharted chaos, hidden menace, and unprepossessing uncertainty of the region that Michael, in one of his less inspired moments, had christened The Badlands.