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.
