by Peter Corris
Always bookish, I retreated more and more into the world of fiction, where everything was so much more exciting and vibrant than in the world around me. I discovered the crime novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and learned to admire their laconic, tough heroes. I greatly appreciated Chandler's wit and found his books amusing as well as gripping. 'It was a blonde,' he wrote, 'a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.' I yearned after blondes and had no time for bishops or stained glass windows. Everything about Chandler's choice of words appealed to me and, much later, when I came to write detective novels myself, I at first imitated him slavishly.
Hemingway became a great favourite and I quickly acquired secondhand paperback copies of all his novels and story collections, which I still have. His heroes, I recognised, were troubled, but their troubles seemed much more interesting and exotic than mine. I read, and was disturbed by, F Scott Fitzgerald. His characters seemed too close in spirit to me. I preferred Hemingway, realists like Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis, and romantics like Ion Idriess.
I improved as a scholar as I spent less time on sport. I got high marks across the board, especially in History and English, in the term exams, and easily passed all six subjects for the Leaving Certificate. At the beginning of the year I had applied for, and was awarded, a £50 bursary from the Victorian Education Department. My sister had left school at 15 and only the winning of the bursary enabled me to stay for the extra year.
There was no tradition of higher education in our family. There were no bookshelves in the house. Apart from my mother's library books, kept neatly on her bedside table, the only books were a set of encyclopaedias, the complete works of Henry Lawson and a picture book about the First World War, kept in a cupboard in the hall. Money was short. Children were expected to go out to work after obtaining respectable qualifications and to pay for their keep.
My parents' plan was for me to leave school without matriculating and attend a Primary Teacher's College. University was not even thought of and I would then have had only the vaguest idea of what a university was. I would have known more about Oxford, Cambridge and Yale from my reading than about the University of Melbourne – then the only university in the state. But the diabetes was a spanner in the works. At that time diabetics were not accepted into the State Public Service. The fear was probably of hypos in front of a class and the risk of burdening the pension scheme. So a teaching career was out.
An uncle suggested that advertising might be the direction for me to follow and during the last term I went to a couple of interviews at agencies seeking juniors. I mentioned this to some of my teachers, who expressed surprise that I was not going into the sixth form. My good performance in the final exams evidently attracted some attention. Melbourne High was proud of its academic record and was in an annual competition with the public schools (the word used in the English sense in Victoria) for results in the Matriculation examination. I was considered a candidate for First Class Honours in two History subjects, Geography and English, and efforts were made to keep me at school.
The headmaster was W M ('Bill') Woodfull, the former Australian test cricket captain, 'a pre-eminent leader of men', as cricket writer Ray Robinson said. He was an austere figure who drove an elegant grey MG saloon car and wore immaculate dark suits. The 'head' did no teaching and was only visible at assemblies or when punishment was being meted out. Two years before, when a prefect had reported me for some minor infringement, he had given me a dressing down and detention.
Shortly before the end of the school year, I was summoned into Mr Woodfull's presence.
He had been grey and stern the first time, every inch the Methodist minister's son. His thin lips and pale eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles rebuked me as I stood in front of his desk. This time I was invited to sit and his tone and manner were kindly. He said that my teachers thought I should be given the chance to matriculate and that there was an Old Boys' scholarship available, worth £60, which would also pay for books. He wrote a note to my parents. They were impressed, but my father was resistant to the idea that his six-foot son, who was going on for 17 years of age, should continue to be a schoolboy.
My parents were products of The Great Depression. Though neither had been out of work at the time, both had siblings who had been and both knew many people who had struggled and some who had gone under. Their fixation was security, which explains the preference for the teaching service for me and a large insurance office for my sister. To my father, the notion of education for its own sake had no meaning. I had already had three more years of schooling than him and had been offered jobs by advertising agencies; why look any further?
My mother, who had also left school after two years of secondary education and who had worked mainly in shops before marrying, was a reader. I suspect that she was impressed by the word 'matriculation' in the headmaster's note. She was somewhat socially ambitious, intensely protective of me, and had a broader vision of life's opportunities than my father. With some difficulty, she persuaded him to allow me to stay at school as a compensation for the misfortune that had befallen me. I was all for it. I wanted to put off entering the real world for as long as I possibly could.
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4Bad habits
'Light up a Viscount, a Viscount, a Viscount
Light up a Viscount, the best of them all…'
– cigarette advertising jingle
If I was to stay at school I was expected to work during the long vacation and contribute to the household expenses. At the end of my fifth year my father got me a job in the catering department of the Myer Emporium. The job involved unloading goods from trucks onto pallets and moving them up into the storeroom, squeezing oranges and taking the juice to the various bars around the store, taking chickens from the fifth-floor kitchen ovens to the rotisseries on the ground floor, and occasional stints cleaning up in the cafeteria and washing dishes.
I hated every minute of it and the pay was lousy – initially, from memory, £6.6 per week. I carried a paperback in my overalls and read during my breaks and illicitly snatched moments, trying to blot out the unpleasant reality.
There was a considerable amount of dishonesty all around – pilfering from the storeroom, watering-down of the coffee, adulteration of the 'fresh' orange juice with tinned extract. The rotisserie chicken counters were an outright scam. A few birds would turn on the spit inside a well-lit machine and finally be sold to lucky customers, but the great majority were cooked in fat up in the ovens, taken down and kept warm under the rotisserie and sold as the real thing. I knew, because I ladled the fat into the long trays, spiked the chickens to test whether they were cooked, prised them out of the grease if they had sat there too long and transported them on a trolley. People must have seen me unloading the chickens and taking away dirty trays but no customer ever protested.
In some ways the job was well suited to a diabetic. There was never any shortage of sugar around in case of a hypo. I had several as a result of working hard in a thick overall in the hot conditions but, of course, told no-one. We catering workers could eat very cheaply in the staff cafeteria, so there was abundant temptation. But I resisted – at that time I was a 'good' diabetic.
The only interesting thing about the job was the people I worked with. The store manager was Fred Taylor, obese and good-hearted, who treated his underlings well and was tolerant of my occasional need to take barley sugar and sit down for a rest. We talked football and cricket and films. He went to see the movie epic Ben-Hur soon after I had seen it.
'What did you think of it, Mr Taylor?'
He shook his head. 'Them Romans was a cruel mob.'
His 2-I-C was a Mrs Moir, a handsome middle-aged woman who wore her greying hair in a bun. Her manner was kindly, her smock was pink, her figure was good and I had fantasies about kissing her behind the shelves in the storeroom. I never did.
The cater
ing staff were a mixed bunch. There were several trolley-pushers who were distinctly intellectually handicapped and some who were expert shop-lifters and passers of goods – hams, tinned food, sweets and biscuits in bulk – to accomplices who took them out of the store. I turned a blind eye to the lurks but was too cowardly to participate in them.
Myers employed many migrants (or 'New Australians') who worked hard and were generally honest. A Lebanese kitchenhand tried to seduce me in the changing room, but I was shy and scarcely aware of what he meant.
From time to time I bought lottery tickets, hoping for a win that would release me from the boring job, but with no luck. I got up at seven, took my insulin, had breakfast, caught the train into the city with my father, worked from nine to 5.30 (nine to 12.00 on Saturdays) six days a week, and had a day and a half off before the dreary routine began again. I played a bit of tennis, read books, went to the beach and yearned to be back at school.
I sometimes travelled home with my father and saw how tired and stressed he was. The vacation job confirmed my belief that the real world was tedious and hateful.
With my scholarship money making a minor contribution, I went back to school and into the sixth form, studying English, British History, Modern History, Geography (which qualified for matriculating purposes as a science) and French. Only French gave me trouble; the others were a joy. In that year I discovered the real pleasures of the scholarly life. This was just as well because I had no life or pleasure of any other kind.
I worked hard and Mr Munday, the British History teacher, had high hopes for me. Ben (as we all called him, but never to his face) was a short, overweight round-faced man with a snarling voice and a crooked grin. Nothing about his appearance suggested his intellectual calibre; his was an aggressive, competitive nature and he saw the British History examination as a sort of boxing match to be won by one of his fighters. Mostly, he trained the Exhibition winner (the student who topped the state) and he did so in my year. He encouraged me to think of going to Melbourne University to become a secondary school teacher.
'The Education Department won't have me because I'm a diabetic,' I said.
'You could teach in the public schools.'
Now that was a thought, but one I kept to myself. I couldn't see my father agreeing to me being a student for another four years.
I played less sport than before because I was studying hard and because my tennis was now so bad. The only compensation from the diabetes was that I was excused from the cross-country run in 1959. This event, conducted towards the end of second term, involved a five-mile (eight kilometre) run along the banks of the Yarra. I was reasonably fast over distances up to 880 yards (a little over 800 metres) but hopeless after that. I hated the cross-country and seized the opportunity to duck it. The sports master was obliging because a student had dropped dead from heart failure the year before and the school did not want a repetition. This was the first time I used my disease to my advantage – malingered, you might say.
I stopped being a model schoolboy in the sixth form; until then I had been a complete conformist. I had enjoyed and taken such comfort in school that it had not occurred to me to question the rules. Now I did.
Then, as now, I hated choral singing. I absented myself from the compulsory practice sessions and nicked off from the house choral contest, held in the Melbourne Town Hall, by ducking into an arcade as we trooped up from Flinders Street station. I also used to wag it from Wednesday afternoon sport. Never good at or interested in swimming, I shot through from the house and inter-school contests.
On one of these escapades I was discovered, along with a couple of other delinquents, in the smoking compartment of a train, not wearing my cap or tie – and smoking. Happily, the teacher, Graeme Worral (later a colleague at Monash University) was also nicking off and was himself a smoker, so he didn't report us.
That incident taught me that, given a little luck, rules could be disobeyed with impunity, and not all of those charged with enforcing them took them seriously. As I also felt myself to be 'different' – having to stick needles in my leg in order to live and not being allowed to eat cakes – in some sense I felt that not all rules applied to me.
I took up smoking in 1959 and smoked, off and on, for the next 17 years. It was an act of rebellion: my father, like many ex-smokers, was violently opposed to the habit and I took to it partly in defiance of him. While at school and on a meagre allowance, I could only afford the occasional packet of 10 Capstan cork tips, (the cheapest brand on the market) but to buy and smoke them was still an assertion of independence from the house rules. It's hard to visualise now, but in those days, anyone big enough to get his or her money on the counter and state the brand could buy cigarettes.
The only recognised risk of smoking then was 'it will stunt your growth'. Already close to six feet tall, I had no worries on that score. In contrast to today's sports stars doing sincere anti-smoking advertisements, in the '50s they endorsed tobacco products, happy for their pictures to be on cards enclosed in cigarette packets. Footballers and cricketers were photographed with cigarettes to their lips, and no young Melbourne VFL supporter had any doubts why star South Melbourne forward Ron 'Smokey' Clegg was so nicknamed.
In any case, my fantasies of fighting for the World Welterweight Championship, of clearing seven feet in the high jump or playing Davis Cup for Australia were long, long behind me. I would be a physically flawed sophisticate, a cigarette smoker, a wearer of single-breasted suits, a schoolteacher.
5Six quid a week
For Value & Friendly Service
– motto of the Myer Emporium
Haemophiliacs and epileptics, I assume, can forget about their illnesses for decent stretches of time. Not so the diabetic. Although the disease is less troublesome than epilepsy and less life-threatening than haemophilia, it is there all the time.
The day begins with insulin and thereafter every mouthful of food and drink is a reminder of the condition. And, since diabetics must eat something at about three-hour intervals through the waking day, and most take two or more daily injections, the reminders are constant. I am told by Dr Gordon Ennis, a former partner of Dr Taft's, that in Finland, where the incidence of diabetes mellitis is high, some diabetics take six injections a day in an effort to get closer to the natural process of secretion from the pancreas. I now take three injections and it wouldn't trouble me greatly to take six if better control resulted.
In the 1950s, however, one injection was the rule; the aim was to make managing the disease as comfortable as possible, and this was assumed to mean a minimum of injections. It was a serious misjudgment and many diabetics who went blind and died young could have been saved by a different injection regimen. I have to think that they would gladly have pricked themselves more often to save their sight and lives.
Ideas about diet, too, were unsound. While it was beneficial to avoid sweets, cakes, puddings and the like, there was too much emphasis on 'free' food – being able to eat as much meat, cheese, butter and eggs as you liked. Many diabetic arteries, already adversely affected by the condition, must have been blocked solid by ingested fats.
From the age of 16 I ate no sugar and (in that pre-fluoride era) my teeth were relatively well-preserved as a result. I ate more fruit and vegetables than the average Australian, which was good, but too much animal fat – it was only by a lucky chance of genetic inheritance that I retained low cholesterol levels until the 1980s, when some real understanding of good diet came to the fore.
From the start, the dietary restrictions did not bother me much although I always felt free to interpret them in my own fashion. After the period in hospital and the spell at home getting used to things, my first venture out into the 'dangerous' world (my mother was nervous that I might 'hypo' getting off a train, crossing a road etc) was with my sister to see a film at a matinee session. I remember thinking High School Confidential, with Russ Tamblyn, John Drew Barrymore and the unforgettable Mamie Van Doren, was a pretty dopey pic
ture, but I liked the Jerry Lee Lewis title song. At interval – my 'afternoon portion' time – I had a single scoop of vanilla ice cream, as was permitted. I also ate the cone, which wasn't.
My mother invested a lot of effort and expense to make my food as palatable as possible. At that time, a meal consisted of a main course and a dessert. Consequently, my mother bought 'diabetic jellies', 'diabetic puddings', 'diabetic jams' and the like, all sweetened with saccharine and generally nasty.
Saccharine tablets were used to sweeten tea and coffee but I disliked the after-taste. Later, artificial sweeteners improved but I soon acquired the taste for unsweetened hot drinks.
The worst of all these products were the diabetic soft drinks manufactured solely by the Boon Spa Company. My uncle, Neil Barton, a returned soldier whom I greatly admired for his good humour, sporting ability and confidence, arrived one day with a crate of these artificially sweetened 'aerated waters'. (There were diabetics in his family so he knew a thing or two about the disease.) It was kind of him, but the cola and lime and lemonade were horrible, and I never took to them.
Uncle Neil was fond of a drink and I heard that he said of me at the time: 'Poor little bugger won't ever be able to go into a pub and have a beer.' Little did he know.
