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Opinions And Comparisons

Smithfield Hostel was outwardly more austere and primitive than Glenelg, but despite – or perhaps partly because – of that, I loved it even more. We had moved to Smithfield after a couple of weeks in Glenelg because we had been promised a house in nearby Elizabeth West. It was also much more convenient for Dad, who had begun working at the Holden’s factory in Elizabeth.
If the set-up at Glenelg had resembled a holiday camp, Smithfield, with its green-painted hut complexes perched six feet above the ground on stilts, was more like an army encampment deep in some faraway tropical rain-forest – except that the surrounding terrain could scarcely have been less jungle-like. For one thing, there were hardly any trees, and, apart from the lime green of the camp huts themselves, the predominant colours were various shades of yellow and brown. It was – as I would later recite with captivated glee – ‘a sunburnt country’, a land still almost wholly in tune with, and in submission to, the elements.

Which, I somehow felt (if not quite thought), was how things ought to be.

When my dad complained, as he was wont to do, that everything was depressingly barren and parched compared to the lush green foliage of the English countryside, I somehow felt my feelings vindicated. Perhaps, at some level, I was beginning to rebel, but I like to imagine that I was beginning to see that most things in life were open to interpretation, were matters of belief not assurance.

My dad believed that green was an inherently more attractive colour than yellow and brown, whereas I could see beauty in both. However, there was a freshness and a novelty about the scorched Australian landscape that somehow rendered it, for the time being at least, more appealing.

The Allen Brothers

It was while we were staying at Smithfield Migrant Hostel that I first met the Allen brothers, Michael and Richard, who hailed originally from Nottingham. Michael – tall, and solidly constructed, with a grimly sardonic smile almost permanently contorting his features - was eight, but seemed much older. He had already resolved, to his own satisfaction, most of the major philosophical and practical quandaries of life, and tended to be openly impatient, and at times scornful, of anyone with differing views. He found my self-proclaimed belief in God particularly preposterous, and spent much time endeavouring, without success, to disabuse me of it.

The younger brother, Richard, was not quite six, and he and I hit it off immediately. We shared the same vigorously questing imagination and exploratory zeal, and many a happy hour was spent pursuing and inflicting temporary captivity – or worse – on small, comparatively defenceless invertebrates, racing one another across the nearby scrubland or sheep paddocks, or acting out scenes from our favourite cartoons. Much smaller and wirier than his brother, Richard evinced a lithe fluidity of movement that put one in mind of a cat, but in almost every other respect – playful ebullience, sociability, desire to be liked – he was more akin to a puppy dog. Carrying both comparisons further, he was adept at anything requiring guile or subterfuge, but was also prone, at times, to over-estimating his own ability, and to thereby pushing himself beyond his limits. This particular weakness was something Michael was all too often able to exploit in ways which reinforced the brothers’ already glaringly lop-sided pecking order.

The Allens, it emerged, were going to be our near neighbours in Elizabeth West, and Richard would go on to be my longest and, although it was not a term I would have used at the time, closest Australian friend. As time went on, our interests and passions evolved and developed in almost perfect synch, sometimes in ways that made almost everybody else seem like aliens. In seven years, I cannot recall a single harsh world being exchanged between us. It was in all respects a friendship made – and ultimately obliterated – in heaven.

As for Michael, however, he would go on to become something quite other than a friend.

The Milk Of Human Kindness

When I was seven years old, living in South Australia, I attended Broadmeadows Primary School for a few months. My class teacher there, Miss Jackson, was a singularly wonderful human being. In contrast to the overwhelming majority of teachers I was to come across in life, she actually seemed fond of children. Moreover, she appeared to understand us, to be interested in and empathise with our fears, desires, uncertainties and needs.

One day, as I scampered across the school playing fields in response to the morning bell, I tripped over and careered headlong into a large and extremely deep, muddy puddle. Coated in mud from the neck down, I could see no alternative but to slink back to Smithfield Migrant Hostel, where we were staying at the time, for some maternal reassurance and compassion. What I got instead was a severe scolding, followed by a hurried wash and change of clothes, and an injunction to “be more careful this time” as I was all but flung physically out of the door and back to school.

I reached my classroom more than an hour late, in a condition not far short of apoplectic terror, convinced that Miss Jackson was going to kill me. She was sitting at her desk, and everyone in the class had their heads down, writing. She turned her head to look at me as I entered the room, but said nothing. I shuffled across to her, and stutteringly tried to explain why I was late. “Come here,” she said, and with immense reluctance I moved closer, whereupon she swept me up in her arms, pressed her fragrant cheek against my still somewhat grimy one, and said, “That must have been awful”. Literally choked by a compound of unfamiliar emotions, it was all I could do to nod my head and splutter “Yes”.

“I bet you could do with some milk now, couldn’t you?” she asked and, not waiting for an answer, got to her feet, took me by the hand, and led me out of the room, along a succession of corridors, then out across the playground to the staffroom, where our morning recess cartons of milk were stored when they first arrived. She sat me in an armchair, brought me milk, and said, “You stay here and rest until recess, OK? Then, if you’re feeling better, you can go outside and play.”

After receiving a second carton of milk during recess I ventured out into the playground on limbs grown light with exhilaration and relief.

Miss Jackson’s attitude and reaction should not really have surprised me. Looking back, I cannot recall her ever admonishing one of her pupils. If we did something inappropriate, wrong or inadequately she never told us we were ‘bad’, but she had a subtle way of conveying her disappointment, and this was usually sufficient to get us to amend or improve our behaviour. Her love of learning (and of us) was such that we felt energised and inspired, and most of us genuinely wanted to learn, both for the obvious senses of joy and fulfilment it yielded, and out of a wish to please Miss Jackson. Most of the teachers I was to encounter in life appeared anxious to suppress the natural vitality and exuberance found in the overwhelming majority of children. They were motivated, in the main, by fear, distrust, and the desire for a peaceful life. Miss Jackson, on the other hand, regarded our inherent joie de vivre as genuinely precious, as something to be cherished, cultivated and harnessed. It was obvious that she had retained her own inner sparkle to a much greater extent than most other adults, and perhaps this was partly why we tended to respond to her so positively.

On the afternoon of my final day at the school she called me up to the front of the class and, with her arm around me, spent about half an hour talking about various things: my family, where I was going to live, what I wanted to be when I grew up. She asked me whether I had enjoyed being in her class, to which I of course said “Yes”. Then she gave me a final squeeze and said, “I won’t forget you. I hope you won’t forget me.”

I doubt very much that Miss Jackson, or whatever she is known as today – if, indeed, she is still alive – can remember more than a small percentage of the children to whom she proffered those presumably standard words of farewell. (They were definitely standard while I was there, at any rate, because I had witnessed the same ritual enacted on several occasions with other children before it became my turn.) I, however, still think of her occasionally, and her memory is a welcome antidote to the peremptory bouts of cynicism by which I find myself so frequently assailed.

2a

A bald, emaciated caterpillar strains at something not quite reachable, totters semi-transfixed within an endless nanosecond of confused belief. Then falls, forever.

I too was once a coiled spring of pregnant possibility, my outward form contorted into a shape suggestive of supplication, horror or surrender. I crawled inside an empty, disused drainpipe that had somehow been provided, or forgotten, and was thus enabled to escape the kind of scrutiny we all must sometimes face, if only in our half-remembered dreams.

In mine there was a girl whose hair might fleetingly caress my naked skin if only I forgot to understand, if only I was innocent.

But too much comprehension made me penitential, and so I haplessly emerged to accept my sentence.

Suffocated into disfunction then by terrors too incoherent and frenzied to be named, I sat examining that same bare skin in the feeble hope that I might somehow miraculously transcend it. I wished, with silent earnestness, for another life, another me, outside the constant cycle of confused regret, beyond the omnipresent disarray of my desires, ambitions and beliefs.

Sometimes, summoned up from deep within, another me in fact does emerge, intent on a spurious kind of resistance or self-protection, and I am forced to stand back in dumb acquiescence, complicit in a different type of fatalism to that which normally constrains me. Were I to intervene, the whole house of cards would tumble irretrievably down, and even the last vestiges of my sanity and solace would be lost.

And so, instead, I merely sit, and try to watch, a victim as much as an agent of my bemused, importunate rememberings.

Meeting Charlie Brown

The sound of heavy rain falling on a tin roof remains one of my fondest memories. On this particular Saturday, it had started raining in the early hours of the morning, and did not finally abate until midway through the afternoon. At that point Mum said that I could go out to play if I wanted, but not to get all muddy, and to return home straight away if it started to rain again.

About a hundred metres up the road from us, and on the opposite side, was a large expanse of waste ground I had informally christened ‘The Dump’. It was an ideal playing area, rendered all the more attractive to me on this particular occasion by the existence of a large number of rain puddles, one of which must have measured a good five metres by three. Ignoring my mother’s injunction ‘not to get all muddy’ I had soon miraculously transformed myself into a prehistoric duck-billed dinosaur, and was happily splashing about from one primeval lagoon to another.

At first, I had the entire Dump to myself, but it was not long before another boy arrived, looking uncannily like Paddington Bear, in a blue sou’wester, bright red Wellington boots, and yellow rain hat. He seemed about my age, or perhaps slightly younger, and he was stooping down beside a rain puddle, apparently examining something.

I went over to investigate. “What are you doing?”

He looked around, and up at me. He had a thin face, with a pronounced hooked nose, large brown eyes topped by immense, bushy dark brown eyebrows, and a pointed chin surmounted by a small mouth that seemed to be slightly off-kilter. “I’m making a boat,” he said, and showed me a long, thin, vaguely boat-shaped piece of wood that he had been whittling away at with his pen-knife. His accent sounded American, but he seemed friendly enough. “Let’s see you sail it then,” I said, and, after contriving a few final refinements with his pen-knife, he obliged. Soon he had fashioned a boat for me as well and we were racing them across the rain puddles.

“What’s your favourite dinosaur?” I asked.

His mouth became even more uneven, and he screwed up his face slightly. “I’m not particularly interested in dinosaurs,” he informed me.

It was my turn to screw my face up as I attempted to come to terms with this incredible confession. Finally, in an attempt to reassure myself that I had not heard correctly, I blurted out, “How do you know when a brachiosaurus is asleep?”

The look he gave me suggested that he neither knew, nor cared.

“By the dinosnores!” I announced triumphantly, and erupted into laughter.

Once I had calmed down, the boy, who had steadfastly refrained from reacting in any way to my joke, got slowly to his feet, and said, “Let’s race our boats across that big puddle, shall we?” He began to wander off.

“Er…OK,” I said, running after him. As we squatted down next to the large puddle ready to start our race, I endeavoured to re-establish my credibility by asking him his name.

“Charlie Brown,” he said, “ and don’t laugh.”

“Why would I laugh?”

He looked discomfited. “You know – ‘cos of Peanuts.”

He had lost me completely by this point, but reluctant to diminish myself still further in his eyes, I laughed and said, “Oh….. yeah – of course……”

But he could tell I was still confused. “Haven’t you ever read Peanuts? Charlie Brown is the main character.”

I thought how clever and grown-up he seemed, using big words like ‘character’, which I was not entirely sure I understood. In the circumstances therefore, I felt it best to admit that no, I had never read, or even heard of, Peanuts.

Charlie, it emerged, was actually almost a full year older than me. He was not from America, although his accent was still suggesting as much on the day I last saw him, almost seven years later, but rather from Glasgow, in Scotland, where his parents and multifarious siblings still lived. He had come to Australia with his grandparents, and lived directly opposite The Dump, in a house just three doors along the road from ours.

“Why don’t you live with your mum and dad?” I asked.

“I like living with Gran and Pops,” he replied, in a tone of voice that made it clear he was not willing to explore the subject any further. Charlie remained an important part of my life throughout my stay in Australia, but I scarcely learned any more about his past than I did on that occasion. However, as already alluded to, he was not exactly a physically prepossessing specimen, and over the years he intermittently suffered from some quite debilitating bouts of ill-health, occasionally requiring hospitalisation; I therefore strongly suspect that the reason his parents were willing to consign him to the care of his grandparents was that a warmer climate had been recommended for him, for health-related reasons.

That first day, we played together happily for several hours, until it was beginning to grow dark. When an ancient-looking, child-sized woman with white hair appeared at the gate of one of the houses opposite, Charlie suddenly got to his feet, and announced, “I have to go – see ya!”

After walking about ten metres away, however, he slowed down, then stopped completely, and turned back to look at me. “Triceratops,” he said.

He certainly was a strange one, this Charlie Brown, I thought - and not for the last time - unable to hide the puzzlement from my features.

“My favourite dinosaur,” he explained. “It’s triceratops.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, feeling both relieved and reassured. I grinned widely. “Mine’s allosaurus,” I announced proudly.

I went home myself soon afterwards, content in the knowledge that I appeared to have made a good friend. As I was soon to discover, however, friendship could sometimes combine with perplexity and antagonism to produce a ménage-a-troi calculated to unnerve, unsettle and infuriate.

"What do you call three Catholics standing at a bus-stop?"

This incident actually happened, but I've altered the names of some of those involved.

There were three of us at the bus-stop, waiting to catch the bus home from school. Donna Brandhurst and Josephine Wilkinson, both of whom were in my class, were standing next to the bus-stop sign, talking to one another, while I was sitting on the pavement with my back to a telegraph pole.

A trio of boys in the uniform of nearby Elizabeth North Primary crossed the road just in front of us and started to head our way. As they approached, one of them gave a sudden snort of laughter, and said, “Hey fellas, what do you call three Catholics standing at a bus-stop?”

“Dunno, Stevo’, what do you call three Catholics standing at a bus-stop?”

“Unlucky!”

Seconds later, having been wrenched unceremoniously to my feet, I found myself doubled over as one of the boys pinned my arms painfully behind my back, while another had me in a headlock. The third boy, the one who answered to Stevo’, then delivered a ferocious punch to my solar plexus.

Donna and Josephine looked over at us with scant interest.

Turning toward them, Stevo’ said, “Is it true that all Catholic girls wear black knickers?” They studiously ignored him. “Give us a look then,” wheedled Stevo’, “’cos if you don’t” – he sidled back in my direction – “I’ll thump him again.”

Moments later, having predictably still received no response from the girls, he did so, with added venom, and I felt as if I was going to throw up. After this had happened two or three more times, the boy who was pinning my arms behind me helpfully suggested, “Give him a blood nose, Stevo’.”

Stevo' looked only too ready to oblige, but I was saved by the arrival of our bus. “Let him go, fellas.” I was promptly released, although one of my captors kneed me fiercely in the back as he did so. “Same time tomorrow, kid?” ventured Stevo’, flicking my ear, as the three of them sauntered off.

Josephine and Donna, who throughout the encounter had not muttered a single word, went straight to the back of the bus after paying, while I sat near the front, clutching my stomach in pain, and forcing myself not to cry. The next afternoon I walked home from school, as I would continue to do until I moved to St Marys in Elizabeth Park three years later. I also conceived the unspoken resolution that the next time there was bullying to be done, it would not be me on the receiving end.

"I know it hurts - it's meant to!"

St Thomas More Roman Catholic Primary School was run by an order of nuns known, I can only assume either tongue in cheek or with somewhat perverse humour, as the Sisters of Mercy. The headmistress, Sister Mary Paul, typified their attitude and outlook.

I have no idea how old Sister Mary Paul was. To me, as a seven or eight year old, she seemed beyond age. The skin on her face was ghost white, with the texture of sandpaper, and she had tiny, pockmark eyes that seemed perpetually focussed on her own inner turmoil. If Aloysius’s mother was afraid of death, Sister Mary Paul was terrified of – and hated – life. The only time she aspired to any kind of observable energy or impetus was when she was inflicting pain. During morning assembly, for instance, she delighted in administering public canings. Her victims – always boys – would have been preselected for her by their respective class teachers, and would often be unaware of what was in store for them. As far as Sister Mary Paul was concerned, this only served to reinforce her feelings of relish and stimulation, because an unwary victim was somehow more vulnerable and helples than one who was mentally prepared, and correspondingly that much more likely to disintegrate into tears.

Once her array of victims had lined up before her, Sister Mary Paul’s slit-like reptilian eyes would actually open wide, and for a brief few seconds her desiccated body would be infused with animation and the re-ignition of long suppressed and unacknowledged sexual yearnings. I used to imagine her lying in her bathtub, crying with despair and rage at her drooping, crease-laden mammaries, and futilely feeling herself in a bid to rekindle some long obliterated vestige of warmth.

Sister Mary Paul’s cane was white with a red tip, like an enormous match. She put so much effort into caning that you thought – indeed hoped – that she might do herself an injury, but if she did she never let on.

“I know it hurts – it’s meant to!” were the trademark words with which she would cajole each of her hapless victims – a wholly redundant assertion that nevertheless somehow had the effect of exacerbating the humiliation being experienced.

One morning during assembly, Sister Mary Paul read out a letter that she had received from the mother of a classmate of mine, Anthony Lindner. In it, Anthony’s mother remarked that she was disappointed with her son’s performance in the recent mid-year exams, and would therefore be grateful if he could be encouraged to “buck up his ideas” by being given “a good hard smack or two”. Consequently, despite having done nothing specifically wrong, Anthony was required to submit himself, in front of the entire school, to the vituperative chastisement of the ostensible hand-maiden of the God of love and mercy, whose weathered face temporarily reflected His glory by contorting into a grin, or leer, implying near orgasmic gratification.

I myself would not have any first hand encounters with God’s ostensible hand-maiden until I was in grade six, and then only briefly However, in grade seven – which was the class that she herself taught – I would have enough encounters to leave me scarred for life.

I Dreamed I Was In Love

I dreamed I was in love and it felt real. Warm, fervent, palpable, moist.

Unrequited.

Then I fell asleep, and everything was all right.

Trudging Home From Tesco's

Trudging home from Tesco's, desiccated leaves crunching underfoot like wasted lives, I overheard clamorous shouts emanating from a distant rugby match, its participants presumably immersed, if briefly, in a shared reality even more surreal than mine.

In mine, escape is something purely theoretical, like equal rights for all, or the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

And yet, beyond all else, and in straight defiance of both empirical logic and experience, escape is everything I seek, and perhaps, when all the chaff is abandoned, the only thing worth seeking.