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.