The Hub Of The Wheel

It may have been coincidence, it may have been divine or else demonic will, it may have been a catalyst, it may have been my imagination.  I do not know.  Whatever the reason, the arrival at school of the three Hirsch children coincided with a marked change in my outlook on life.  No longer were my perceptive faculties exclusively located above my neck.  My awareness of the things around me was now transmitted, at least as often, and sometimes indeed with exaggerated vividness and intensity, through my groin.

The proximity of Marlene Hirsch, for instance, had such a pronounced, indeed seismic, effect upon my equilibrium that I was sometimes hard-pressed to remain standing.

The Hirsches arrived in Elizabeth from Millicent, a small town in the south-eastern corner of South Australia, via Germany.  They all had scrupulously sculpted, exquisitely balanced features, alabaster skin, fair hair, and merry, lithesome eyes that seemed to promise either romance or adventure – or, in Marlene’s case, perhaps both.

Carl, the oldest of the Hirsches, was as tall as an adult, and extremely strongly built – a bit like Martin Starcevich, without the personality disorder.  I only ever saw Carl each morning and afternoon on the school bus because he was based, along with the other grade sevens, at the newly built extension to the school in Elizabeth Park, known as St Mary’s.

A year younger than Carl, Soren also commenced his time at the school at St Mary’s, and so my initial contact with him was limited.  However, when I too transferred to St Mary’s the following year, Soren and I became the firmest, if in some respects least likely, of friends. Shorter than his brother, but still quite tall for his age, Soren was exceptionally lean and wiry and, while in grade seven, was the focus of considerable adulation for being, by some measure, the fastest sprinter in the school.  He was also an extremely lively and amusing, if occasionally exasperating, companion.

Marlene Hirsch, alas, was never my companion, amusing, exasperating, or otherwise.  What she was, though, was the closest thing to feminine perfection I had ever seen.  Not that others would necessarily have agreed with me, but then perception of genuine beauty was, I somehow suspected, akin to divinely imbued, prophetic insight, and as such was accessible only to a rare few.

The closest thing to a direct personal encounter I ever experienced with Marlene came one Friday evening after football training when I was in grade six.  A group of about a dozen of us decided, for a reason or reasons I shall probably never now recall, to walk home together, dropping people off as we went, and essentially circumnavigating the entire north, north-west and west of the city in the process.  That, at any rate, was our declared intention.

Most members of the group were in grades five and six, but there were also a couple of grade sevens, Soren Hirsch and Francesco Viera, to whose incontrovertibly superior wisdom the rest of us, quite naturally, deferred.

In some respects, Soren and Francesco might almost have been a single entity, with Soren very much the controlling influence (though scarcely what could be called the brains of the operation).  Where Soren went, Francesco followed.  Whatever Soren said, Francesco agreed with, and would often repeat, like a faulty echo, merely changing one or two of the words, or their order, in a somewhat feeble gesture of autonomy.  On the rare occasions that Francesco felt sufficiently audacious or inspired to venture an original utterance of his own he would be careful to construct it in such a way as to permit effortlessly speedy modification should Soren’s reaction – which Francesco would continually, solicitously monitor – suggest in any way that this might be advisable.

One upshot of this was that Soren had comparatively little experience of, and equally little tolerance for, dissension.  Indeed, so used was he to getting his own way that, on the rare occasions that others elected not to defer to him, his reaction could be waywardly, even violently irrational.  You sometimes got the impression that Soren was much less interested in truth than he was in eliciting approbation.  If you disagreed with him, he took it as a personal affront, and his sense of personal betrayal was such that not even undeniable, categorical proof that he was wrong would sway him.
This, at least, is just about the only feasible explanation I can proffer for the bizarre sequence of events that Soren proceeded to orchestrate that Friday night.  “I know a quick way home,” he told us, as we exited St Thomas More’s by the main gate.  With that, he turned left, and headed due east, towards the Adelaide Hills – precisely the opposite direction from that in which most of our homes lay.

“Yes,” said Francesco, eager, as ever, to convey the impression that this was a plan to which he had contributed, “this is a really good short cut.”

Whether intrigued, amused, or simply acquiescent, we all dutifully followed.  Perhaps, we may have thought, among the unimaginable complexities to which life under Mother Christopher’s grade seven tutelage exposed you, was a technique for contravening certain supposedly inviolable physical laws.

Superficially alluring though this thought was, I was sufficiently mature at eleven to realise that truth, however multi-layered, did not include compartments labelled ‘paranormal’ or ‘sublime’.  More likely, I imagined, Soren simply had some kind of ruse, or practical joke, in mind.

And so we trundled on, ignoring the fact that the hitherto distant hills, which lay in the opposite direction from home, were gradually getting closer.  However, when the road along which we were walking began discernibly to slope upwards, Barry Ryan’s trust for one was ruptured.  “This ain’t the way home,” he announced, his tone of voice perhaps a touch less conciliatory than he intended.
Soren said, “It’s just a different way, Bazza,” which Francesco reinforced with “Yeah, Bazza, it’s a short cut.”

But Barry Ryan had come to a stop, his normally quite defiant chin having now become positively rebellious.  “Home’s back that way,” he insisted, pointing behind him, and endeavouring to elicit, with a plaintive stare, the support of others in the group.  “Well, ain’t it?”

No one answered, although Gary Fowler, who looked across a little uncertainly at his older brother, Graham, seemed on the verge of it.

Technically, of course, Bazza undoubtedly had a point, and I am sure that each and every one of us knew it.  However, at some other level we were aware that if we were to allow ourselves to be guided and constrained by technicalities we would end up living pretty charmless, denuded lives.  And so, as though inextricably enmeshed in a collective cobweb of anticipation, we avoided Bazza’s eyes, and guilelessly succumbed to the only kind of life experience that can, when all is said and done, redeem.

“See, Bazza, nothing to worry about,” said Soren, with slightly excessive fervour.

“No worries, Bazza,” added Francesco, with a grim smirk that may have been his version of a reassuring smile.

When we finally reached the boundaries of civilisation Soren cheerily informed us, without missing a beat, that now it was time to turn left.

So we did.

“Who’s gunner win tomorrow, Bazza?” I asked, referring to the big interstate football match in Adelaide that several of us were planning to attend.  In truth, I was not remotely interested in Bazza’s answer, but I imagined that by diverting his attention from the objective reality of our plight I might, in some way, reinforce the solidarity of the group.

“The Vics, of course,” he replied.  “Without Big Bill we’ll get crucified in the rucks.  Their rovers are better too.  And Royce Hart’ll probably kick seven or eight on Elleway.”  He stuck his chin out, as he almost always did, to reinforce, or else to challenge.

This last was too much, however.  “No way!” I demurred, caught up in the topic despite myself.  “Ron’ll be ‘way too tough for that weedy Tasmanian poofter!”  I was consciously eschewing eloquence in order to forge a more elemental connection, sensing perhaps that Bazza needed to find an alternative outlet for his simmering rage.

“Nah,” he retorted.  “Elleway only looks good for Port cos all the full forwards in the league are useless.”

“Eric Freeman’s a good full forward.”

“Yeah, but he plays for Port, and ‘sides, you’re just biased.”

“What about Sashy then?”

Bazza nearly choked on phlegm.  “That great lump of lard!”

But we had reached another pivotal point in our pilgrimage, as Soren breezily announced, “Left here, fellas.”

“Now you’ll see,” said Francesco, who may even have believed it.  However, if he had hoped that his words might provoke an inquisitive craning of necks, he was to be disappointed.

At long last, however, we appeared to be walking downhill.

Bazza and I continued to talk about the footy, with the Fowler brothers, who were also intending to go to the match, occasionally joining in as well.

The sun had set by the time we reached Elizabeth North Shopping Centre, which lies a mere half a kilometre or so from St Thomas More’s.  However, by resorting to Soren’s short-cut it had taken us somewhere in excess of an hour and a half to get there.

“This is me,” said Bazza, who lived just a couple of streets away from the shopping complex.  He was terse-lipped and pale, and studiously avoided eye contact with everyone as he hurriedly effected what no doubt felt like an escape.

Stephen Owen, John Conolly and a couple of others were quick to follow, although their homes lay at least a couple of kilometres away to the south.  I engaged in what I hoped was a surreptitious but meaningful exchange of glances with The Politician and the Fowler brothers, my nearest neighbours in Elizabeth West, but any precipitate action on our part was speedily circumvented by Soren, who said, “Not far to go now, fellas.  This way.”

“Nearly home,” embellished Francesco, whose complete and unequivocal faith in Soren was clearly such as to be independent of experience or circumstance.

And so our pilgrimage resumed, adhering, so far as I could tell, to no predetermined plan or structure, but nevertheless being embraced by Soren – and, to some extent by Francesco – as a kind of evocation of divine will.

With me, the Fowler brothers, and The Politician as the soon-to-be-incinerated sacrificial offerings.

We reached the railway crossing at Broadmeadows, which was about a kilometre away from where Soren and Francesco lived in Elizabeth Field.  The rest of us, though, still had four or five kilometres to go.

With uncharacteristic boldness Francesco, who perhaps gleaned a certain inspiration from having at last reached familiar territory, informed us that we were almost home.

“You might be,” returned The Politician testily.  “We’re still as far away from home as ever.”

But Soren, who presumably considered words superfluous in the face of such indefatigable logic, merely laughed, and Francesco, after evincing a momentary suggestion of discomfiture, joined in.
I, by this time, had immersed myself completely in what I had increasingly begun to perceive, if still somewhat imprecisely, as a kind of rite of passage.  I may even have been grinning.
Soren’s house proved to be almost identical to mine, at least superficially: west facing, red bricked, the trademark tin roof, and a front porch and veranda tacked on to the south wall like a wholly incongruous last minute afterthought.

As befitted tradition, we trooped around to the back of the house, whereupon Soren clambered onto the porch and rapped sharply on the fly door to attract attention.  Moments later his mother appeared, looking a trifle quizzical, but boasting a kindly, winsome smile that put me in mind, paradoxically, of Sister Damien.

My eyes did not linger long on Mrs. Hirsch, however, for peering around from behind her, still dressed in her school uniform, was Marlene, who was gazing unmistakably, or so I convinced myself, in my direction.

As Soren, somewhat ramblingly, and with minimal attention to the facts, attempted to provide his mother with an explanation of his lateness, I allowed myself to stand transfixed, slowly becoming enmeshed in a connection that I was scarcely able to believe was being forged.  A second or two spent staring into Marlene’s eyes was tantamount to a sliver of eternity, and seemed to yield a wordless explanation of all that was necessary.  Perhaps I realised even then that this is as close as we would ever come to being lovers in any conventional, fleshly sense, but the moment contained enough of an intimation of transcendence to sustain me for a life time.

To touch was not to love, I saw.  To touch was an act of desperation, a refusal to accept, and she and I would never, ever touch.

Mrs. Hirsch was addressing me now, her tone of voice at once implying solicitude, and complete obliviousness as to what, in every sense, had just transpired.  Feeling everything with almost too great an intensity to bear, I reassured her blithely, drawing flashes of approval from my beloved, so that ever after, without the sullying need for any kind of intercourse, our destinies, indeed our very cores, would be wholly, haplessly, inexorably intertwined.

For I was Johann Ulrich Voss, and she was Laura Trevelyan.  I was John Evelyn, confused, duplicitous, misled, alongside the vestal incorruptibility of his Margaret Godolphin.  We would die apart, unmourned and possibly unremembered by one another, but somehow still entrenched in that moment.

The rain had started by then, of course (“heavy ground – suit the Vics”), but I even succeeded in turning that to my advantage, with a glib parting shot that was the equivalent of a vow of eternal fidelity.  And so, embedded more deeply than ever in the reality that fate had seemingly proffered, I wandered home, reluctant even to speak, aware that henceforth only through silence and solitude would the true shape and contours of our marriage be affirmed.

By happy chance, I went to the following day’s football match alone, as all of my friends had been ‘grounded’ (The Politician for a full month!) for their collusion in Soren’s and Francesco’s Grand Tour.  Freed from distractions, I was able to concentrate exclusively on the on-field action, and as it went on the match developed, for me, into a kind of religious rite. The fact that I escaped the same censure as my fellow miscreants is almost impossible to credit unless you believe that our destinies are shaped either by fate, or by some divine or demonic will.

Which only goes to prove that the truth is not always as obvious or logically inferable as we would like to imagine.

Izzie's First Swim

Izzie had her first swim this afternoon. The park where I took her for a walk has a small pond containing goldfish. Put one curious five month old poodle puppy on the bank of said pond within paw's reach of an especially large and juicy-looking goldfish and what do you get? One very wet, cold (air temp about 2 deg C) and shocked bundle of fur who probably won't be going swimming again anytime soon. When I got her home I dried her off, gave her a bowl of warm soya milk, wrapped her in a blanket and stuck her inside my fleece against my fat gut where she took fully 20 mins to stop shivering. By then she was also asleep, and soft dork that I am I let her remain in that condition, still huddled up against me in her blanket, for the ensuing two hours. At least I had my IPod handy to stifle the boredom. When she woke up she acted as if nothing untoward had happened and was up to her usual kinds of mischief within minutes.

The Last Day

There would, I knew, be times when I would lust after death with a fervour that was almost irresistible, but death would continue to elude me, preferring to hold back until my circumstances were of a sort likely to make its intervention optimally unpleasant.

Death is no-one's friend; it hates to be welcomed with open arms, and never responds to invitations.

Only when life had lulled me into acquiescence, optimism and equanimity would death arrive, and, without knocking, force its way into the supposed sanctuary of my innermost thoughts, where it would stand, twice as large as life, grinning avariciously, barring my only escape route.

This I knew, with irrevocable certainty.

But there would also be times when I would forget, or pretend it was not so, or convince myself that death was just a myth, like God, or the equality of the sexes, or Father Christmas.

Consequently, when the Last Day in which I had endeavoured so ardently and for so long not to believe finally arrived, I failed at first to perceive it for what it truly was. There was no angelic trumpet blast, and God did not descend in majesty from on high on his throne of judgement, but the unleashing of divine wrath was in the offing nevertheless.

From the moment I awoke, I was conscious of a subtle difference in the atmosphere: the air somehow felt taut, as though being stretched to its limit like an enormous piece of elastic, and as the day went on this impression was reinforced as my physical surroundings seemingly began first to wobble, and then to flicker in and out of focus, as though in response to the strain. At some point – I knew, although not when – everything would snap asunder, releasing hell fire, or purgatorial flame – it mattered little which – to engulf, eviscerate, and purify.

During the morning I mucked around, or at any rate went through the motions of mucking around, because when all was said and done I was still a young teenager, and hence still not wholly committed to acceptance. When the removal lorry lumbered around the corner into our street, however, and disgorged a quantity of nameless, faceless men who proceeded to take away our belongings, denial became almost impossible, and although the air temperature was in the high nineties, I felt chilled to the very marrow.

That afternoon, there were two of me, one palpable and active, the other disembodied and disowned, watching from afar in a state of mingled bemusement and regret. It was the ghostly me who climbed into the car when the time came for the drive to Outer Harbour, while the tangible me regarded the process with detachment and, perhaps, a small amount of derision, before, finally, turning away and re-entering the building that would always, at least to most intents and purposes, remain home.

Unrequited Passion

It's possible to love with passion for so long that you forget what it was that captivated you in the first place but you're unable to stop loving because the passion has acquired an impetus all its own that hurtles you onwards into spaces that only exist because the things in which you used to believe have disintegrated, leaving a gap that needs to be filled. The loved object becomes entirely irrelevant, other than in the theoretical sense of fuelling a distraction, of helping you forget - indeed, when all is said and done, of keeping you alive.

And no, you never or seldom get anything meaningful or encouraging back from the loved object, which if it had a personality and/or a will would almost certainly actively despise you anyway.

The Leaving Of Liverpool

It was the winter of the Great Freeze, and our train from Liverpool to London kept having to stop for long periods in order that snow could be removed from the line. I seem to recall that we had a whole compartment to ourselves, but other than that, and the repeated delays, I have no distinct memories of the journey. However, I can imagine my mum – to my dad’s thinly concealed disgruntlement – smoking incessantly in order to camouflage the intense feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and malaise with which must have been battling as she allowed herself to be peremptorily extricated from the only home she had known in twenty-eight years.

My dad, who had religion for his solace, and whose behaviour and conversation were invariably rooted in a very stark but narrow framework of moral certainty, would have suffered no such feelings of uneasiness. In all likelihood, he would have devoted considerable time to enlightening me about various aspects of our journey, as well as about the train on which we were travelling. Since his word was never to be doubted or questioned, I would have listened with genuine curiosity and interest, consigning to my short term memory arcane details of steam engine design, the names of the home grounds occupied by football teams in the towns and cities through which we passed, and other matters, probably of dubious validity, long since forgotten.

The fourth member of our party was my sister, Barbara. Despite still having a couple of months to go before her third birthday (making her almost four years younger than me) she had already begun to exhibit considerable independence of mind by steadfastly refusing to don the warped moral strait-jacket proffered with such disingenuous conviction by my dad. Despite his best attempts to get her to contort herself into the right shape to wriggle into it, she had made it clear that she preferred clothing of a less confining nature. At the time, I regarded her attitude as exemplifying the same kind of wanton self-regard that my dad had tacitly helped me to discern in my mum. Before too long, however, I would be envious of what I would begin to see as her superior sense of selfhood.

We spent the night in a warm, garishly colourful London hotel. In the morning, we sat all sat together at a table and ate breakfast, which was brought to us by servants who called my dad ‘sir’ and my mum ‘madam’. It was as if we were rich. Once breakfast was finished, we packed our things and caught the boat train to Tilbury.

My chief recollection of the three week voyage to Australia aboard the SS Stratheden is of almost continual, vibrantly iridescent sunlight. Even the Bay of Biscay, built up in my imagination from my dad’s words of foreboding as a likely place of shipwreck, was traversed with ease, beneath a sky of ardently omnipresent blue.

Whilst aboard the Stratheden I tasted cucumber and spinach for the first time, played quoits with my dad and Barbara, and splashed about in the shallow end of the ship’s swimming pool.

We stopped briefly at Port Said, Aden and Colombo. At Colombo I got off the ship for the first time since Tilbury, and we spent an entire afternoon meandering around the multi-coloured city streets, being almost deafened by a cacophony of human voices – hawkers, traders, the almost incessant exchange of greetings and farewells – and traffic noise. We returned to the ship in a rickshaw pulled by a nearly naked man whose muscles coursed and rippled conspicuously and constantly beneath his ebony skin.

A young Ceylonese girl and her parents boarded the ship at Colombo. She was about my age, with long dark hair hanging down to below waist level, and skin the colour and (I imagined) texture of dairy milk chocolate. Within moments of seeing her for the first time I had decided that she was far and away the most beautiful human being, or indeed thing, I had ever seen. The regal way in which she moved, combined with her irreproachable loveliness, convinced me that she was of royal birth, and I mentally dubbed her ‘The Indian Princess’. A few days into our voyage across the Indian Ocean, she appeared at the pool-side in a bottle green one piece swimming costume, and I experienced an unfamiliar but not unpleasant tautness in the pit of my abdomen, together with a brief surge of indeterminable yearning, and my assessment was reinforced.

The Indian Princess disembarked from the ship, and departed from my life, at Fremantle. Today she is probably fat, world-weary, looking forward to death, and never to be seen (or even worse, imagined) wearing a bathing costume, let alone going swimming - but who am I to talk?

Afflicted With Belief

Beliefs are not born of will; God afflicts us with them, in much the same way as He afflicts certain people with club feet, or cleft palates, or hair lips - and for broadly similar reasons.

There is nothing God enjoys more than a good laugh at humankind's expense; indeed, the main reason He created humanity in the first place was to reinforce and vivify, by way of observable contrast, His own perfection, majesty and omnipotence.

Consequently, God loves nothing more than failure, disappointment, imperfection, anti-climax, squalor, crass stupidity, confusion, madness, fundamentalism, death - all of which remind Him, continuously, in palpably, eloquently, inexorably hilarious ways, of just how incomparably great He is by comparison.

Escaping one's beliefs is even harder than escaping one's sexuality. I, for instance, do not believe in luck, but I do believe in fate - despite the fact that belief in either is equally, insanely irrational.

I also believe, with irreducible convinction, in the jealous God described above, although I know beyond all shadow or scintilla of doubt that all Gods are nothing other than human inventions.

This, when all is said and done, is the greatest, most uproariously funny joke of all - that, despite possessing a sensory apparatus capable only of perceiving things in black and white, we nevertheless find ourselves endeavouring to navigate our way through a universe in which all the really important bits have been highlighted (presumably by God) in yellow marker pen.

........

............

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.

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.