Uncle Stan hardly looked up from his cards to say, ‘Well, strike me lucky, it’s Min an’ Jack! Hang on till we finish this hand; Ed’s just opened the jackpot.’
Auntie Gert, who seemed to be tipsy and who stank of Californian Poppy, embraced us all affectionately enough, but then looked at me and burst into a shrill peal of laughter, and said, ‘For God’s sake, Min, why do you keep dressing him up in them there velvet collars? The kid looks a real little sis!’
Mother mumbled something, and I saw Dad’s face grow even darker, and then I was escorted to the bedroom. I never heard what the visit was all about, but on the way home my parents would not say one word to each other, and that night I could hear them quarrelling violently in their bedroom.
Probably Jack and I had been moved out of the sleep-out by this time and given beds of our own in the tiny room we shared opposite the kitchen.
The reason for this was that the character of the house had changed again. Mother had finally taken her discharge from the hospital and had given up nursing – professionally, at any rate – and Stubby and Aleck and Gabby Dixon and all the others had gone away, and all that remained to remind us of the war were Bert, who stayed on with us because he was engaged to Jean, and his crutches and artificial legs, and the German gas-mask on the hallstand, and albums full of snapshots, and Dad’s bronchial cough.
With Mother’s return to civilian life, Granny had gone back to her travelling – I think she was in New Zealand at this time, on some mysterious business concerned with the Duthies – and the second bedroom was now occupied by two old spinster sisters of my father. We accepted as quite normal the fact that they were invalids. As a result of cataracts, Aunt Lizzie had become totally blind and she also must have been in a condition of near-paralysis for she seemed to spend most of her waking time between an invalid wheel-chair and a depressing toilet-commode, and Dad always had to lift her in and out of bed when she had to sleep or get up. Her sister was Auntie Gin. (It was axiomatic in the fixed nomenclature of the family that one was Aunt and the other was Auntie. I never realized, until I read her funeral notice in The Age, that Gin stood for Virginia.)
She had been born a deaf-mute and suffered from arthritis. She could do nothing much about the first affliction, but for the second she always wore little bands of grey flannel sewn around her wrists, and when the pain in her joints was really severe she taped lily leaves around her legs, which bulged and wrinkled her black lisle stockings and gave her an extraordinary appearance. But she never worried about how she looked. She was always cheerful and gay. She taught me the deaf-and-dumb language and to read her own flying, flickering fingers, and we had long pointless conversations together. They were pretty unobtrusive, the two old ladies, and eventually they both died in our house, but I cannot recall which of them went first.
I do know that they were both alive when Granny returned to us, because this involved yet another rearrangement of domestic space and Jack and I had to move back to the sleep-out.
Emma had really intended only a short visit, because, although well into her eighties by this time, she was still very spry and considered that she had years of globe-trotting ahead of her. Unfortunately, on her return from New Zealand she jumped off a tramcar while it was still moving. I had often seen her do this, very blithely, at Kooyong Road corner – she detested the convention of waiting for the tram actually to stop – but this time she was carrying a portmanteau in her hand, and it must have affected her balance for she came down heavily and fractured both thighs and her pelvis. An ambulance brought her from the hospital to our house, but as she was eighty-four when this happened she never walked again.
To the very end I was the only one she would always send up to Grimwade’s sweet shop for her daily bottle of lemonade. It was sold then in bottles that were stoppered by small glass marbles, which had to be pushed in with the thumb. I would do this for her and she would nod and say, ‘Thank you, Davy. Ah well, it cuts the phlegm,’ she would say, ‘it cuts the phlegm.’
More than seven years after her accident she was finally carried from our house in a silver-mounted coffin, with the forged picture of the Grafton in her custody, and a pleased smile on her shrivelled little monkey face.
Jean, by this time, had married Bert and moved into a house, almost the twin of ours, which faced us from the opposite side of the street. Jack and I were back in a bedroom. For the first time since I had been born, the house called Avalon was occupied solely by the Meredith family.
3
During this time, of course, one was becoming more and more aware of an overpowering exterior world that existed beyond the house and those who occupied it. This world, without boundaries or specific definition or safety, spread forever, flat and diffuse, monotonous yet inimical, pieced together in a dull geometry of dull houses behind silver-painted fences of wire or splintery palings or picket fences and hedges of privet and cypress and lantana; and all these sad, tidy habitations had names like Sans Souci and The Gables and Emoh Ruo (which I always took to be a Maori name until I learnt that it was only ‘Our Home’ spelt backwards) and The Rest and Nirvana and, of course, other Avalons beside ours, for this was a very popular name which would occur once in very nearly every block. Most of the streets were named after long-dead councillors of the municipality or for battles in the Crimean or Boer wars. All the way through to the city proper there was nothing to break the drab flatness of this unadventurous repetition except the club flags flying over the grandstands of some football ground or other, or a particular factory smokestack that impressed by its height or shape or the amount of reek it gave off, or the grimy brick wall of the Rosella Jams and Pickles Factory with the cloth-capped girls working and chattering behind the railway-sooted windows.
A lifetime later I went back there and the horrible flatness of it all was just as real as ever, but far more depressing, since one no longer had the child’s exaggeration of scale to help it out. In that earlier time it was always possible to invent what in reality did not exist. There was a public golf links about two miles away from where we lived, and in the middle of it an ugly grass-grown mound that could not have been more than thirty or forty feet in height. Yet we would walk there often, through the unmitigated melancholy of those suburban streets, simply for the adventure of scaling its sides and playing at Everest mountaineers and pretending we had toboggans.
It must have been only very occasionally that we could experience a true adventure, like the day when Jack and I had gone down to collect mussels for old Granny from the piles of Point Ormond pier, and from the little jetty we saw the great storm which was to become known as the Brighton Cyclone charging towards us across the bay in a whip of white horses below a tumult of bruised purplish crepuscular cloud. Coming across the sea, the cloud would tear off in downward strips that would begin to gyrate madly and scoop the harbour waters high into the air. It was the first time I ever saw waterspouts. There were some scruffy allotments just inland from the pier, and on one of these were a number of big cement pipes, four feet in diameter, which were waiting to be sunk for side drains out of the Elwood Canal, and Jack and I hurried to one of these and crawled inside to shelter from the storm.
When the wind struck the whole earth shook, but neither of us really appreciated the violence of the cyclone (we found out only much later that it killed and injured quite a number of people) until we saw a T-model Ford, which had been parked beside the kerb without its hand-brake on, moving along the road with nobody inside it, just rolling along quite slowly and steadily, propelled by the violence of the wind, and we could see huge branches tearing off the trees and red tiles from the roofs of seaside houses flying against a ragged wet sky that screamed at us. Just then the big cement pipe we were hiding in began to move, trundling very slowly at first, then gathering momentum down a slight incline, so Jack hauled me out, and somehow we were able to get to the big kiosk-restaurant behind the point. It was packed with frightened people, and the proprietor, whom we had ne
ver thought of as a kindly man, was handing out free cakes and ice-cream to everyone, and bags of boiled lollies to the children. Then all at once there was a terrible noise and the whole roof of the kiosk vanished from above us, and the rain and chips of wood and stone and plaster pelted down, and everybody fled, jostling each other and shouting. It was just as well they did, for within ten minutes the whole kiosk was a flattened ruin. (The kiosk had been very Late Victorian, with imitation turrets and spires, and one of the spires remained for months in the top of a pine-tree, a hundred yards away from where the kiosk had been!)
Going home was difficult because the canal had overflowed and the roads were flooded torrents wherever the ground was low and the wind kept knocking us off our feet, but Jack, even so, pushed me in behind a huge rusty steel boiler that looked as if no power on earth could shift it, while he crawled along the gutter of Glenhuntly Road to where an Oldsmobile tourer was parked with the hood gone and the isinglass side-curtains torn away by the wind. After a great deal of effort, because he kept getting knocked flat by the wind, Jack managed to force the car door open, and then I saw what he was up to.
He released the hand-brake and crawled back to me on his belly, and we crouched side by side in the lee of the boiler and watched the Oldsmobile begin to move. It slowly gathered speed and went rolling away down the road, and lurched over the tram lines. It must have been doing fifteen miles an hour by the time it collided with a telegraph pole.
Looking back on those times, I find myself more and more impressed by the ‘pot luck’ quality of life in general and growing up in particular, at least as far as it applied in Australia. Although very likely it would have been much the same everywhere at that period of broken or changing values. Everything seemed so hopelessly unorganized: you just grew up and took pot luck on your chances.
I suspect that Jack was aware of this from the beginning. The first brief homily I ever remember his giving me went something like this: ‘Listen, nipper,’ he said – when we were schoolboys he never addressed me as David or Dave or Davy, but only as ‘nipper’ – ‘Listen, nipper, you got to have a go at it. Even if you know you can’t bloody win you still got to have a go. You’ll always be pissin’ into the wind, but that don’t mean it isn’t worth givin’ it a burl.’
Cynicism thrived then in the prevailing climate of disillusionment. People had found that it’s easy to smash down old standards, but a lot harder to build new ones in their place. Much bitterness had built up out of the war, and by the time I was about thirteen all the returned soldiers we knew had come to see the whole conflict as a monument of disorganization and waste and political chicanery. They had had their years in the trenches but the world of mufti to which they had returned had hardly become a place fit for heroes. Life, in their own words, was ‘a fair cow’. The war profiteers had grown richer than ever. Usually it was the man who had dodged the war who was now the boss. Returned Diggers were always coming to the door in those days selling shoelaces and matches. The soldier settlers who had wanted to go on the land usually found that the grants they were given were Mallee desert or backbreaking Gippsland scrub or acres of ringbarked trees that would take years to clear or scoured blocks around the dead shafts and mullock-heaps of the old gold diggings.
People then in those years of the mid-twenties did not appear to have much faith left in anything at all. Neither the Church of England nor the YMCA had emerged from the war with particular credit – the Salvation Army people seemed to be the only ones the soldiers still respected, so they would always buy the War Cry from the bonneted ‘Salvo lassies’ who went around the pubs on Saturday afternoons – and in Melbourne even the forces of law and order had come to be suspect as a result of the great police strike, which laid the whole city open to licence and anarchy.
My father and Bert both joined up as ‘Special Constables’, and each night after supper they would march off together, with Bert’s wooden leg squeaking, looking rather sheepish with their white armbands and the truncheons they had to carry, and with Mother’s final shouted injunction stinging in their ears:
‘Now don’t you two silly idiots get yourselves knocked about!’
Jack, who professed to be on the side of the looters and the smashers of shop windows and the hoodlum gangs who had taken advantage of the lawless situation all through the city, deeply resented the ‘Specials’, and when Bert came home one night after a street riot with his skull split open by a chunk of road metal, Jack said to me, ‘Serve him right, the bloody crawler! Pity the Old Man didn’t cop one too!’
The violence and disorderliness continued long after the police went back to duty. It was a wild time for the young. There seldom seemed to be much importance attached to education then, and one never heard anything about child guidance or the parental example. The State schools – the ones we went to, at any rate – were crowded, inefficient, and pretty brutal in their methods. We had a fifth-grade teacher who sent three boys of my class to hospital by hitting them across the head with a steel ruler, one because his tone was wrong during the part-singing of ‘The Harp That Once in Tara’s Hall’. (Eventually this teacher was sacked by the Education Department, but of my class eight ended up as gaolbirds – two with life sentences – one became an internationally known ‘con’ man, one committed suicide, and one, after a hectic career as a mobster in Squizzy Taylor’s gang, was hanged for murder.) The main aim was simply to get children through to the Qualifying Certificate, so they could get out to work at the age of fourteen. Nobody ever seemed to know what sort of job the ‘Qually’ qualified you for. There seemed to be more truant-officers than teachers and the truant-officers were thought of – by parents as well as by boys – as a kind of corps of pariah-bureaucrats with about the same standing as the despised municipal catchers of stray dogs who went about with their whips and nets and caged carts.
Large feuding gangs of young hooligans roamed everywhere around Melbourne looking for trouble. The two big rival gangs in our part of the suburbs were the Grey Caps and the Bludgers, each of them sixty to eighty strong. They were always attended by satellite groups of much smaller boys, who would set fire to cypress hedges or smear paint on gates or push blazing wads of oily waste into the post-boxes or take down their pants and do their excrements on the footpaths to show how bold they were. When the two gangs confronted each other there would almost always be a fight, and these attendant urchins would retreat to the rear to scream encouragement and to ‘keep nit’ for the approach of the police.
The gangs fought occasionally with razors, but more often with sticks and stones. There was one evening when these two forces came to grips almost in front of our house, and they ripped every wooden picket from the fence of Jean’s house across the street and began to belabour each other with the billets, and when Bert came out on to his front porch, to try to get to the house next door so that he could telephone for the police, he was hit on the head for the second time with a piece of road metal.
What baffled me for a long time was Jack’s real attitude to all this violence. He loved conflict as much as he hated authority, and he was about as undisciplined and pugnacious as any boy I ever knew, and at the time of the police strike he had certainly seemed to be on the side of the lawless. Yet he had nothing but loathing and contempt for these big, wild gangs that roamed the streets.
Once, in front of the entire Bludgers gang, he caught one of the show-off smaller children who was emptying his bowels on the pavement outside Cleland’s grocery shop – where Jack sometimes earned money as a casual delivery-boy – and he took the kid by the scruff of his neck and rubbed his face in it. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he calmly walked right through the crowd of sixty hefty young hooligans who were glowering at him. Not one of them lifted a hand.
Not so very long after this the Grey Caps deliberately pitched a half-brick through the plate-glass window of a dressmaker’s shop which employed a girl whom Jack at this time was ‘taking to the flicks’ – his amorous life began ve
ry early – and next morning Jack played truant from school and went to the brickyard where Dud Bennett, the leader of the Grey Caps, was working as a hod-carrier and stacker. Bennett was a stocky, thickset young tough, not appreciably taller than Jack but about six years older.
‘You’re the king-pin of that push that bashed in Miss Fogarty’s place last night, aren’t you?’ Jack said to him.
‘An’ wot if I am?’ Bennett put down his hod.
‘Miss Fogarty never did you any harm, and she got her big window smashed in.’
‘Yeah!’ Bennett grinned. ‘Someone chucked a brick.’
‘There’s nothing smart about chucking a brick,’ said Jack. ‘Have you and your gang of apes ever tried to chuck a punch?’
Bennett grinned again and spat on his hands and they squared off at each other, but Bennett never landed that punch. Jack landed three. The first bloodied the hod-carrier’s nose, the second blackened his left eye, and the third, a straight left, knocked him out. Jack brought him round by throwing him into the brickyard’s horse-trough, dragged him out again, hauled him upright, steadied him, then knocked him out all over again.
The foreman of the brickyard took a hat around among Bennett’s workmates and the five shillings and sixpence he collected he gave to Jack.
Jackie Meredith was beginning to get quite a reputation around our neighbourhood, and it was not long before both gangs were making overtures for him to join, but he paid no attention to them at all.
My Brother Jack Page 5
