The Boy Behind the Curtain

by Tim Winton

  Eventually I broke free of the morning delivery. I did everything in my power to distance myself from the Minx. When I finally made friends and brought them home I denied all connection to the portly conveyance in the drive. Months later, when my mates took to squatting in the front yard to howl at their distorted reflections in Betsy’s double-D hubcaps, I was still huffing and bluffing, but no one bought my excuses. That car was a perpetual laugh at my expense. I feared it would do me permanent damage.

  Unlike most country boys, I wasn’t anxious to get my driver’s licence. For one thing, I had ghastly forebodings about having to learn in Betsy. While other kids kangaroo-hopped their mums’ Datsuns and dads’ farm utes up the main street, I’d be trundling along in something that looked like a slow-combustion stove. I was in no hurry to experience that.

  I wasn’t alone in my antipathy to Betsy. It was a rare patch of common ground between my younger siblings and me; we mounted a years-long campaign to convince Dad to put her out to pasture. I suggested we take her to a friend’s farm and give her a real Sam Peckinpah send-off: expend a couple of boxes of shotgun shells, maybe a Molotov cocktail if it wasn’t fire season. But Dad said Betsy was no trouble. In all these years he hadn’t had to spend a cent on her. No, it’d be a waste to let the Minx go. At the mere mention of her name a dreamy smile came to his face. I don’t think he had any special affection for the old bus – he’d come to enjoy the discomfort she produced in us, the goad to our youthful vanity. And it was true that car kicked on: you just turned the key, pressed the old-timey starter button and she sputtered to life.

  My last vivid memory of Betsy is of the day we moved back to the city after three years of exile. Before we left town we had a rare nosh-up at a Chinese joint. Then we hit the road, Mum and my sister and baby brother in the Falcon, my other brother and I hostages as much as passengers in the dreaded Minx. The day was brutally hot. It was a five-hour trip in a decent car, but in Betsy you could add another hour. The harvested paddocks either side of the highway were brown. We were shirtless. Dad wore his signature singlet, a saggy old thing whose days of whiteness were but a memory. The wind through the open windows was dry and fleecy and as the seats heated up beneath us they released the stench of church halls, courthouses, railway waiting-rooms: odours of weariness, boredom and advanced age.

  From boyhood I had known my father to be a man of kindly nature but irritable bowel. And for him, Chinese was not ideal road fodder. So it was no surprise when, about three hours into the journey, he pulled over, snatched a handful of tissues from the glove box and vaulted across a farm fence for the shelter of some piled logs. Accustomed to this sort of behaviour, my brother and I sat in our customary bovine silence as the engine ticked and the pong of old people rose from the upholstery. Eventually our father returned at a jog, trailing a comet-tail of flies, tucking the singlet back into his shorts as he came. He got in, turned the key, pressed the endlessly embarrassing starter button and off we went, at 36 miles per hour. Which may have been quite a clip in the days of Menzies, but not so impressive to a teenager in 1975. It certainly wasn’t enough to blow the flies clear of the cabin.

  A few metres down the road I caught a whiff of something vile. Worse than old people, this was the smell of death. It seemed that four hundred flies were onto something. I tried to bring this to Dad’s attention but, like his gaze, his mind was fixed firmly on the road. The stink got worse. My brother began to whinge, but the old man wasn’t having any of it. Once he was on the bitumen he was hard to stop. He drove on with the baking wind in his face, squinting through the blowflies, noticing nothing, conceding less, until my brother began to gag. Even then Dad smelt nothing, but the prospect of a puker had him standing on the brakes. He reefed Betsy to the road’s edge, and given the stiffness of the suspension and the trolley-like steering, it was a manoeuvre as jerky and sped-up as a scene from an Ealing comedy.

  The moment Dad got out the offending stench went with him. Which seemed significant. A rapid examination of his person – conducted, of course, in full view of the rural motoring public – established the unpalatable facts, the finer details of which needn’t be gone into here. Suffice it to say that in the event of an unscheduled roadside comfort stop, a long and saggy singlet is not helpful attire. Dad had brought a stowaway aboard. It will surprise nobody to learn that with a shortage of water and no more tissues available the remainder of the trip was a test of character for all.

  To this day my father refuses to attribute the disappearance of the 1954 Hillman Minx to this little misadventure. But I believe that after it he saw Betsy in a different light. The rest of us had always associated that car with foulness, ridicule and lingering shame, and it was as if the scales had finally fallen from his eyes – or perhaps his nose. While he denies this, the vagueness with which he speaks of Betsy’s retirement is telling. Neither he nor any other member of our family can fix a date to her demise or the circumstances under which she left our employ. She certainly didn’t get the paddock shoot-up I’d dreamt of. For all her sturdiness, her grey, implacable utility, she faded away without valediction. Her replacement, a pinky-brown ’59 Austin Lancer, was no filly either but at least, as everyone agreed, she had some poke. Betsy had been supplanted by a frisky cousin, a dame with colour left in her cheeks, and daggy as she seemed, the Austin was a bit of a giggle. Old, yes, but not socially catastrophic.

  Still and all, even if in her dullness Betsy epitomized the Menzian era whence she sprang, she saw out the Malayan Emergency, the Vietnam War, the space race and the Whitlam revolution. In our time of instant obsolescence, her endurance is sobering, and as I age I wonder if perhaps I was a little hasty to spurn her. We’re such merciless judges in our youth. And she’d be a vintage ride now. But I have to admit that if I came upon her tomorrow, abandoned in a cow paddock, I’d set fire to her in a heartbeat. Provided, of course, it wasn’t fire season.

  Twice on Sundays

  Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell

  There God is dwelling too.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  And like the sea, God was silent.

  Shusaku Endo

  I

  When I was a kid Sunday evenings were melancholy. With the precious weekend spent and school looming, it was as if a sea mist had rolled in. An otherwise boisterous household grew reticent. Sunday tea was always the most desultory meal of our week. With soup or mince on toast balanced in our laps, we ate in languid silence in front of the black-and-white TV. For all their homely gags and canned laughter, shows like Green Acres and Petticoat Junction barely raised a chuckle from us. It wasn’t that we were too sophisti­cated to laugh at this fare, or such good Calvinists that laughter had gone the way of beer and cards, it was just that the epic effort of Sunday had begun to take its toll. We weren’t sad or sullen, we were conserving energy, because by six p.m. we were all out on our feet.

  Tea was little more than a ringside squirt and a flick of the trainer’s towel because, knackered though we were, Sunday had plenty of fight left in it; there were more rounds to contend with. There’d be no Sunday Night Movie for us. We had the evening gospel service to stagger through yet – always a strenuous affair. Then there was Fellowship Tea, ostensibly a social occasion but in truth another opportunity to ‘witness’ to newcomers and bring them to the brink of salvation. Which was nobody’s idea of a casual warm-down. So we were a long way short of putting Sunday to the canvas. Any kid who senses the weekend slipping through his fingers knows this creeping sense of loss. Ours was complicated by knowing so much more was still required of us, for in order to finish the job, fight the fight and run the race, you had to give your all. And we’d have blown an O-ring for Jesus.

  By the sixties, churchgoing was no longer a mainstream practice in Australia. If you were more than a weddings-and-Christmas family, it was something you were expected to do discreetly, without bothering anybody, which was difficult if you were evangelical fundamentalists because the cosmic meter was running and we were
geared to spreading the Good News while there was still time. So, as a twice-on-Sundays outfit, we definitely stood out. We were unaccountably and unreasonably churchy, and given that some of us did Sunday school and pastoral visitation on the Sabbath as well as church, the twice-on-Sundays label probably sold us short. We were odd bods, and knew it. Still, our neighbours, who were typically squeamish about God-botherers, were mostly quite tolerant. They had us pegged as weirdos, but the persecution we’d been trained to expect never seemed to materialize.

  Of a Sunday morning we were up early – a locally distinguishing feature in itself. At eight-thirty, dressed in our best, we rounded up kids from the neighbourhood, packed them two by two into the back of the station wagon, and Dad drove them uphill to the local church. It wasn’t as if any of them were that excited to be going, but their hungover parents were grateful to have them out of the house for an hour, and the knowledge that my old man was a cop seemed to engender a rare compliance amongst these luckless junior heathens. From the church you couldn’t quite see the ocean but you could definitely smell it. Foregoing a morning at the beach was never a small sacrifice in a surf-mad suburb like Scarborough but in the summer, when the swell was up and the seductive briny air danced its seven veils through the foyer, there were mutinous mutterings in the pews.

  Sunday school began with communal singing. Which was a little like the warm-up we did at football training – hard laps done from a dead start. We arrived as a sleepy, resentful rabble and shambled into song without pleasure or discernible melody, but after a couple of numbers we were rolling; we had a sweat up, and we sounded like contenders. For some reason the species of rollicking tune we sang was called a chorus rather than a hymn. A hymn was a more complex affair and generally reserved for the church service proper. Of course tunes such as ‘Wide, Wide as the Ocean’ and ‘Give Me Oil in My Lamp’ were shockingly uncool. They belonged to an era as distant as the penny-farthing and the horsedrawn bathing machine, but somehow they grew on us, and momentarily liberated from our Anglo-antipodean reserve, we bellowed them until our faces glowed. If this wasn’t always a spiritual experience it was at least genuinely aerobic. The resulting endorphins helped get us through the bout of self-criticism and textual analysis that lay in store as we turned to our bibles.

  Scripture stories were my imaginative bread and butter. The best, of course, were from the Old Testament, though for all their colour and action they were morally incomprehensible. The violence of these ancient fables was darkly appealing, but beyond imagining myself as the plucky goatherd David with his giant-killing slingshot, there was rarely much in them for a boy to aspire to. I knew the first, very Jewish, bit of the Bible was sacred, but it hardly fanned the embers of idealism I felt smouldering within me before the onset of puberty. Only the Jesus stuff would do, because the Nazarene was the hero of all boyhood heroes. He wasn’t just good and brave and kind – he was mysterious, confounding, anarchic. I badly wanted to emulate him, but that was a rough road. Turning the other cheek, for instance – this was harder than killing giants. Harder, perhaps, because there were no legendary qualities involved. Nonviolence required ordinary human capacities, powers you already had but would rather not use. The parting of seas and chariots of fire seemed to happen in an impersonal and permanently exotic realm that could never make claims on you. But Jesus was another matter. He didn’t want the impossible – that was what was so awkward and yet so inspiring about him.

  Once we’d gotten through our communal exegesis and a bit of prompted pondering, there were prayers of abject supplication offered on our behalf, most of which I tuned out of or couldn’t follow. Finally the hour was rounded off with another rolling mawl of choruses that salved the troubled spirit, like a musical rub-down.

  With its debt to revivalist enthusiasm, our hardy Wesleyan singing generated a rare noise. You could have lit the city grid with it. The songs we bellowed were full of longing, triumph and giddy devotion, but their chief consolations were sensual. At eight or ten years old it’s tough having to crunch ethical and cosmic dilemmas as we did every Sunday morning. For example, if you had an evil thought, did that mean you’d already done something wrong? Was Jonah a good guy or a bad guy? Why did crazy-drunk Noah curse Ham for seeing him naked when it was obviously his own fault in the first place? And how come he could drink beer when our dads were supposed to be better than that? And who calls a kid Ham anyway? Some mornings my brain ached and my spirit fizzed with the strain. So it was a joy to close ranks in mutual shortcoming and ride the simpler wave of feeling in the hall. We were all hopeless failures and numbskulls, but when we sang hard enough we saw spots, our limbs tingled, and we managed to feel huggable and beloved. We were a team. Even if we were rubbish players, Jesus would give us a gallop around the paddock and we’d have a crack for Him.

  And so, at the end of Sunday school, we were let out into the sunshine panting. By this stage there was just enough time for Dad to return the neighbours’ kids to their breakfasting post-coital parents, collect a few pensioners who were without transport, and get back in time for the eleven-o’clock. Left to my own devices I usually spent this period courting a girl I fancied. My method involved a lot of stone throwing. It was quite successful; we wound up married.

  Just on eleven a.m., moments before Mum had to come scouting for me, I drifted in with all the other kids and slid up beside my parents and siblings as the electric organ warbled the intro for the opening hymn, whereupon we stood as one to sing:

  Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow

  Praise Him, all creatures here below

  Praise Him above, ye heavenly host

  Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

  Written by Thomas Ken in 1674, this simple doxology had a strange and calming effect on me and I wasn’t alone in feeling its gentle force. Sunday by Sunday, the moment we began to sing it, a pacific mood descended on the hall. There were other hymns to follow but this one was special; it was a steadier. There was a lot to get through in a morning service – Scripture readings, prayers of intercession, sundry announcements, communion, the occasional baptism or musical interlude, and of course hymns aplenty. We rocked on our heels and swayed in rows, rubbing shoulders, friends and strangers alike, gorging on song like sailors victualling before a long and uncertain voyage, because the entire service thus far was but a preamble to the main event – the sermon.

  Our tradition measured itself by the quality of its preaching. The ‘message’, as we called it, was not a homily. Nor was it a cool collation of encouraging thoughts. And it certainly wasn’t a slice of scholarly insight wrapped in a homely reflection. It was a verbal reaming, a coach’s spray, a physical and mental ordeal you needed to endure and survive for your own good. Once the minister got to his feet and took the pulpit in both hands like a man at the wheel of a windjammer, we were all pilgrims and wayfarers in his hands. We sailed with him in search of enlightenment, heavenly treasure, and, in cases of epic length, deliverance by any means. Over the years I suppose I experienced every conceivable form of oratory. Some preachers whispered and cajoled. Others walked the boards, clawing the air. Many sweated and crooned, some wept. It was all the theatre I knew and it was quite a show.

  Some of these talks were inspirational. They could be haunting, even lyrical. They featured tales of degradation and courage, moments of searing illumination, and the best were masterful feats of Dickensian digression packed with outrageous sentimentality. They softened you up, stalked you around corners, and ended up as muggings of the first order. They scrambled your wits, reduced you to rubble, and left you to assemble yourself again as best you could in the aftermath. Not every sermon soared and roared; we heard our fair share of duds. Wallowing in the horse latitudes of doctrine, the worst of them were like tax seminars, or PowerPoint presentations about occupational health and safety. During some of these clunkers – on the mechanics of the Trinity, say, or the fun parts of predestination – time became as elastic as the limpets of gum I liked
to prise from beneath the pew and revive by means that don’t bear repeating here.

  After church we dropped everyone home, ate the roast lunch we called dinner and set out for an afternoon of family visitation. While not strictly parish business these visits were nevertheless occasions of intratribal witnessing. Every week there were various cousins and grandparents to be seen and few of these were believers. And if that wasn’t hard enough, they all seemed to live at a pioneering distance from one another.

  Farthest away were my mother’s parents who lived at Belmont, between the airport and the racetrack, where they were unknowns at the former and stalwarts at the latter. That side of the family thought we were a bunch of wowsers, a complete joke. And one Sunday when she’d drunk almost as much as Noah, my dear old Nanna Miff told me as much. Having caught me alone in the kitchen she dished this news up with relish. I was about nine at the time. I’ll never know why she picked me out for a bollocking, nor could I have any notion of how we’d trodden on her corns that particular afternoon, but she gave me a pasting. We were Jesus-creepers, fucking idiots, and why in God’s name couldn’t we have any fun? Sadie Mifflin was generally a stranger to remorse, but later that day, piqued by conscience or softened by subsequent beverages, she went rooting through her giant handbag to fish out a sagging Cherry Ripe, which she offered in silence as a sacrament of peace. And all I can say is that for a staunch puritan I was easily bought.

  After all these family visits, it was another hour in the car back across town to wash the stink of fags from our hair before we sat down to soup and mince in front of the telly.