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.
