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.