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.

The Ant-Midas Touch

All too conscious today of the pain of ostracism, of being invisible, emotionally castrated, undesired.

Why is it that whenever I look at a watch, or clock, the time is thirteen minutes past the hour?

Why is it that everything I touch turns to shit before my eyes?

Too much medication and not enough fornication.

I've seldom felt so sick.

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.

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.