What was so terrifying about these suburbs was that they accepted their mediocrity. They were worse than slums. They betrayed nothing of anger or revolt or resentment; they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty; they had no suffering, because they had mortgaged this right simply to secure a sad acceptance of a suburban respectability that ranked them socially a step or two higher than the true, dangerous slums of Fitzroy or Collingwood.
In this world Jack and I were left pretty much to our own devices for a few years. Apart from seeing that we attended school, did our homework, ate everything that was placed on our plates at meals, minded our table manners, had butter on our bread or jam on our bread but not both, and never answered back, Dad and Mother seemed to pay very little attention to what we did. Occasionally Jack would be thrashed for fighting or coming home late, or I would be snapped at by Dad for ‘always having your damned nose in a book’, but otherwise there was little control of us and no guidance.
It was a long time before I understood the extent of their own preoccupations.
Mother was often sick and suffered a great deal from migraine – one realized only later that it was the time of her menopause – and I suppose there must have been a racking psychological malaise with it, an aching nostalgia for the importance and the brave excitements of her nursing days. For all those vanished Sunday night sing-songs when she had sat at the piano and her devoted Digger friends had roared out the chorus of ‘The Rose of No Man’s Land’, and smiled down at her and lifted their beer glasses in a toast when they came to the lines:
Mid the wars great curse
Stands the Red Cross nurse:
For she’s the Rose of No Man’s Land.
… and when she had put on her best starched uniform and gone to the Garden Party at Government House to receive her medal … when our house, in fact – and perhaps more than we ever realized of Mother’s entire being – was cemented in the solidarity of a great and mutual experience that could only be expressed in such songs as these, and in badinage exchanged in bad soldier-French, and in the interminably repeated and curiously esoteric jokes about saps and support-trenches and furphies and bedpans and whizzbangs and entrenching tools.
But what I realize now, although I never did at the time, is that my father, too, was oppressed by the intimidating factors of fear and change. By disillusionment and ill-health, too. As is often the case with big, strong, athletic men, he was an extreme hypochondriac, and he had convinced himself that the severe bronchitis which plagued him could only be attributed to the German gas he had swallowed at Vimy Ridge. He was too afraid to go to a doctor about it, so he lived with a constant fear that his lungs were decaying, and that he might die at any time, without warning.
In his state of mind one can only suppose that he must have been darkly and profoundly disturbed by the years-long procession through our house of Mother’s ‘waifs and strays’ – those shattered former comrades-in-arms who would have been a constant and sinister reminder of the price of glory. And glory itself had curdled in the tram sheds. With him, the edge had long since worn off war-time camaraderie, and although he still occasionally attended club meetings of the Returned Soldiers’ League his sarcasm and pigheadedness always got him into arguments and he invariably came home drunk and irritable.
Moreover, he was frustrated by his failure to have made anything of his life – he could see no possible advancement in his trade beyond the position of depot foreman, which involved very little more pay but a great deal more responsibility – and this had made him morose, intolerant, bitter and violently bad-tempered. Most of his displeasure and resentment he focused upon Mother. He had altogether lost patience with her role of Florence Nightingale to the halt and the lame, even though two of the three who were in our house at this time were his own sisters. My memories of the period all have the tint of nightmare.
One must allow for time’s foreshortening, but I can hardly recall a night when I was not wakened in panic by the stormy violence of my parents’ quarrels. Often Mother would run from the house in the dead of night, swearing never to return, and there was one specially terrible occasion when Jack and I were awakened in the sleep-out by the sound of Mother, who was outside in the rain and the darkness, whimpering like an animal as she tried to crawl into hiding beneath the Dollicus. A few moments later the sleep-out door was pushed open, and my father peered in. He was muttering to himself and grunting, a gigantic black silhouette against the dim diffusion of light from the vestibule – he was sixfeet-three then and weighed over sixteen stone – and in his hand he had the service revolver from the drawer in the bedroom wardrobe. He stood there for a few seconds and then he closed the door and went out into the back yard, and we listened to him stumbling around and cursing near the woodshed and behind the sycamore-tree. We could still hear Mother sobbing very softly, for she was really only inches away from us on the other side of the flywire screen, but Dad failed to see her crouched beneath the black, dripping creeper, and he came inside again, and we could hear him searching through the house and knocking things over.
Across from me on the thin mattress Jack was grinding his teeth and swearing under his breath, and once he muttered, ‘One day I’m going to kill that bastard!’
Then we heard the front door slam. I was too paralysed by terror to move, but Jack got up from the mattress and went out and made Mother come inside. I heard him take her into the kitchen. She was sobbing and choking. I kept my face buried in the pillow and my eyes tightly closed.
Everything finally grew quiet, and the vestibule light went out, and Jack came back to bed.
‘What was the matter?’ I whispered fearfully.
‘Ah, it’s him,’ he said. ‘That bastard, the Old Man. He frightens her to death. She says she’s goin’ to run away. She was goin’ on in there about she’s got to run away. She won’t, though.’
I just lay there, shivering.
‘I cooked her up some cocoa an’ made her go to bed,’ he said. ‘She’ll be all right in the mornin’.’
There was a long silence then, and I thought he had fallen asleep, but he must have been still thinking about it because after a while he said:
‘Ever thought how little Mum looks when she gets worked up like that? You know? Remember when she used to get herself all togged out in them nurse’s clothes of hers, with all that white starch over those big tits? She looked so damned huge then, after old Gran, I mean …’ His voice trailed away reflectively, and then he said, ‘I suppose it’s just we’re growin’.’
It would have been about this time that I began hiding myself in the big sea-chest – supposedly a relic of my grandfather’s days in the Red Jacket – which stood next to the pianola in what was variously called the Big Room, the Front Room, or the Dining-Room. I would climb into it and pull the lid down and try to work out ways of murdering my father without being found out or getting Mother into trouble.
The pianola, a big rosewood Aeolian Stroud, had replaced the piano during one of my school holidays, and although it was very impressive it never really dominated the room the way the old piano had with its curly brass candle-holders and its parapet of photographs and the lace fringe hanging over and all the crowd around it, singing. The last of Mother’s genteel attributes vanished with the coming of the pianola, because by this time she had given up her painting and once the pianola arrived she seldom played for us. The pianola effected other changes, too. The army biscuit from Cairo had been placed inside the glass dome which contained the decorations from various wedding cakes and other things like that and this collection had the place of honour on top of the pianola. New photographs – school groups and Jean’s boy friends and portraits of those who had ‘passed on’, like Auntie Gin and Aunt Lizzie – had replaced most of the older photographs. Some were still there: Dad as a young man at the oars of a racing shell, and the family group which had been taken before he went away to Gallipoli (Jack looked truculent in a lace collar, and Dad in his sapper’s uniform, a
nd me with a head of golden curls: the picture was hand-tinted, of course); but the picture of the Ceramic had gradually been pushed farther and farther to the back, and one day it dropped off and fell down behind the pianola and nobody ever bothered to retrieve it.
The front room was the formal room of the house and we children were never encouraged to use it. Long before, it had been the gay setting for the Welcome Home party and the Sunday night sing-songs, but those days had gone. Although it was referred to as the dining-room we never ate there, and I was always glad of this because it had come to be a rather intimidating apartment. It had bay-windows sealed off by heavy cretonne curtains and a long sofa across which no play of sunlight ever moved and a big sideboard cluttered with the cut-glass and EPNS of innumerable gifts and all the walls were crowded with Mother’s paintings of flowers in vases and landscapes she had never seen – snow scenes and Swiss lakes and thatched cottages.
In the centre of the room was a huge table covered by a fringed cloth of heavy autumnal pattern, around which Sunday afternoon visitors were stiffly seated, and upon which the dead in their coffins were laid out in state. I remember being taken in to meet embarrassed relatives in their Sunday best – ‘Say hallo to your Cousin Stell,’ I would be impatiently commanded; ‘Go on, don’t just stand there!’ – and I also recall the forced and frightening intrusions to pay final respects to the bloodless dead faces of Emma and Aunt Lizzie and Auntie Gin. (I saw my father, dead, in his coffin at last, on that very table, but this was not until many years later, for he lived to seventy-three, having died, not of German gas, but of a heart attack.)
The big table was reversible: one side was the dining-table but it could be turned over to make a half-size billiard-table. It had been bought at an auction sale to try to keep Jack out of the sordid billiard-saloons and pool-rooms along Glenhuntly Road. It was not very successful, for in these dens of iniquity Jack had achieved considerable skill with a cue, and once Dad realized that Jack could always give him a start and still beat him at billiards, snooker, or pin-pool, it went back to being a dining-table.
I suppose there was a sort of masochism in my going into this depressing room simply to experience the claustrophobic privacy of the old sea-chest, but I was obsessed at this time by a very real terror that Mother would be brought to such a point of resentment of her husband’s tyranny that she really would run away and leave us all. The prospect of such a thing happening was so firmly established in the chamber of uncertainties that seemed to be the dominant area of my mind that I felt any desperation would be justified if this could be prevented. In the stuffy, suffocating darkness of the sea-chest I would try to imagine what it would be like to be left unprotected against his ragings and injustices. Jack cursed and threatened, but he was still too small to do anything. There was no David against this Goliath, so I tried to work out other means. Nothing came of it, except that, in recent years, there have been several critics who have wondered why in all my books there is invariably some more-or-less symbolic cave scene.
I don’t want it to be thought that Dad was always brutal or that Mother was always weeping. Through all these images there is a scatter of improbable brightness, like raindrops falling through sunshine. There were Sunday mornings in the kitchen, or Saturday afternoons if there was to be a party, when Mother and Jean and Marj would be endlessly baking – scones and sausage-rolls and sponges and cream-puffs and rock cakes and queen cakes, and sometimes a tray of lamingtons especially for me. Mother would be at the gas stove, doing the roast and the pies and the queen pudding, and the girls would do their baking in the big black one-fire-stove which burnt box blocks we would order from the timber yard by the hundredweight. Jack and I were allowed to lick the mixing bowls. There were always curling-tongs heating on the top of the kitchen range, and somebody would be ironing underwear or dresses, and the two girls would have their hair in curling papers. Enmities and prejudices were forgotten and there was always a lot of joking and laughing and singing of popular songs; these were good days,
Even Dad would join in sometimes. There were odd strange days when he would surprise us all by getting out his old violin, and in a dusty haze of flying resin would play Irish jigs for us or the strange songs he liked to sing, like ‘Working With The Hot Asphalt’ or ‘McGinty’s Goat’.
He had a mania, also, for new popular fads. Crossword puzzles obsessed him for a long time; when this palled he became a fanatic about radio, first with the crystal-sets he used to build and then with valves and rheostats and superheterodynes and blueprints of new circuits. When he was engrossed in these pursuits he was much less severe with us, but even in these good times I always seemed to be unlucky.
I was twelve when the crossword puzzle mania hit Australia. There was a joke that went around the school: ‘a ball-bearing mousetrap in six letters’; the answer was ‘tomcat’. I didn’t see the point of the joke at all, but that night, to ingratiate myself with my father, I told it to him. ‘You filthy little swine!’ he bellowed, and dragged me to the bathroom. I didn’t know why I had been thrashed until Jack came home that night and explained it to me.
Exactly when, or why, Dad introduced his system of monthly punishments I no longer remember.2 We had always had summary punishment, of course, for offences immediately detected – a cuffing around the ears or a slash with a stick or a strap – but Dad’s new system was to punish for the offences which had escaped his attention. So on the last day of every month Jack and I would be summoned in turn to the bathroom and the door would be locked and each of us would be questioned on the sins which we had committed and which he had not found out about. This interrogation was the merest formality; whether we admitted to crimes or desperately swore our innocence it was just the same; we were punished for the offences which, he said, he knew we must have committed and had to lie about. We then had to take our shirts and singlets off and bend over the enamelled bath-tub while he thrashed us with his razor-strop. In the blind rages of these days he seemed not to care about the strength he possessed nor the injury he inflicted; more often than not it was the metal end of the strop that was used against our backs.
This went on for several years, and God knows what damage it did to me psychologically. I remember that from about the twentieth of every month I would behave with the innocence of a saint and the sycophancy of a French courtier in a desperate attempt to prove my rectitude. It made no difference. I was beaten anyway.
It must have been this cruelty that really launched Jack on his fighting career. By this time it had been decided that Jack and I would have to ‘learn a trade’ so that we could both get out to work and bring money home. We were sent to a technical school for this training. Jack, it had been ruled, would be a plumber. And Mother vicariously satisfied some ambition in herself by decreeing that I should become an artist. I had a certain aptitude for tracing and copying things, and this certainly qualified as ‘art’ according to the standards of Mother’s training in oils and pen-painting, and I was written down accordingly for special courses in ‘commercial art’, which largely consisted of lettering, the drawing of solid objects, and the slavish copying of selected travel posters and advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Although at class and in examinations Jack was really the cleverer of the two of us, he was only a year ahead of me at this school, although three years my senior, he having fallen so far behind at the State school we had attended because of his truancies, insubordination, and general wilfulness. At the technical school we did part of a basic High School course – mathematics, algebra, geometry, English, chemistry, and so on – and the rest of the time we devoted to our ‘special classes’. I would go to the commercial art school and Jack to the plumbing, gasfitting, and sheetmetal workshops. Neither of us had much interest in these special courses.
Jack was far more concerned with sport. He was an opening batsman in the school cricket eleven and a member of the football eighteen – we played a curious and immodera
tely rough game of football known as ‘Australian Rules’; there were eighteen players in each team, the game was played on a huge oval and was divided into four quarters of twenty-five minutes each – but his real interest was in boxing, and at about this time he had decided to enter for the school championships. He used to practise ‘shadow boxing’ in our back yard, and he bought himself a punching-ball and gloves, and then he began to use me as his sparring partner.
There was a very great disparity between us at this time. I was still small for my age, chubby, soft, pink and fearful. Jack was fairly tall and rangy, with blue eyes, a beaky nose, and disorderly cornsilk hair; the sort of hair which hinted at premature baldness. His mouth was wide and full, but it could set in a hard, tight line when he was angry, like the jaws of a trap. He had ears which, in his own words, ‘stuck out like jug handles’. There was a gawky, awkward look about his bodily movements, but it was dangerous to bank on this for I never knew anybody as fast on his feet or as quick with his hands in a boxing ring or a street brawl. He was wiry rather than strong and there was a savage, whipping sting to his punches. He always spoke slowly, with his eyes on the person he was addressing, as if his words and phrases had to be shaped according to the effect he was producing.
As his sparring partner I was hopeless. At first he used to treat me gently enough, only tapping at me with his gloves, and chiding me for my cowardice or my lack of skill or my obtuseness in not following his instructions, but eventually he must have felt that I needed to be toughened up, because every now and then he would really hit me. Often he brought blood from my nose or made me realize what it was like to be winded by a right jab, he loosened a tooth, he blackened my eye, and once he knocked me unconscious with that vicious straight left of his. I began to dread the Saturday mornings of sparring practice almost as much as I dreaded the end-of-the-month appointments with Dad in the bathroom.
My Brother Jack Page 6
