I doubt if I contributed much to his boxing career, but he did win the school lightweight championship, and then a fool of a sports master decided that the winners of the separate divisions should fight an elimination series to determine the ‘School Champion’. It ended up with Jack matched for the finals against the best school heavyweight, Snowy Bretherton, a giant of a senior, six feet tall and virtually a grown man. This bout was fixed as the highlight in the programme of School Exhibition Week, when parents were invited to see the students’ work for the year.
Mother, who detested fighting, had not been told about the bout, and Jack had delegated to me the task of keeping her occupied during fight time. She was in the commercial art room proudly examining my exhibit – a ‘poster’ for Palmolive Soap which I had traced and copied very carefully from a full-page advertisement in an American magazine – when a woman neighbour of ours, Mrs Gillon, came rushing into the classroom screaming blue murder. ‘Mrs Meredith!’ she cried. ‘Mrs Meredith, they’re killing your boy Jack! Come quickly, Mrs Meredith! They’re killing your boy!’
They were midway through the seventh round when Mother reached the boxing ring. Jack was still upright, but his chest and stomach and legs were red with blood, and he was practically out on his feet, although still weakly throwing punches, and Snowy Bretherton, grim-faced and merciless, with a black eye and a split lip, was coldly circling him and cutting him to pieces. Mother climbed right into the ring, and with her umbrella attacked both Bretherton and the idiotic sports master who had instigated and was refereeing the hopelessly unequal fight. The bout ended at once in pandemonium and immense confusion, and with Jack unconscious on the mat. My shame and humiliation at my mother’s behaviour were almost overwhelming.
Six months later Jack tackled Snowy Bretherton again on a vacant lot behind the timber-yard, and this time he knocked Bretherton out.
There were fights then – usually without benefit of the Marquis of Queensberry’s rules – almost every day. In the streets, on the vacant lots, in the school yards. I would avoid them whenever I could. The only fight I ever won at school was on the football field one lunch recess.
It was against Harry Meade, who had become the butt of our form partly because he was a tale-bearer, but mostly because his parents would keep sending notes to the teachers pointing out that the boy was ‘delicate’. Occasionally he would throw fits and froth at the mouth. None of us then knew anything about epilepsy: we regarded these paroxysms as a deliberate act which Meade would put on to prove this ridiculous business about his being ‘delicate’.
I no longer remember the cause of our quarrel, but I do know that the fight that ensued was an absolute victory for me. Meade had no idea of boxing at all. He would blunder up with his arms flailing and his eyes tightly closed, and all I had to do was to step to one side and hit him as he staggered past me. I hit him and hit him and hit him until his face was covered with blood and he had fallen whimpering and twitching to the ground. His fists never once touched me.
As I was standing there in the circle of boys, flushed with triumph, I saw Jack approaching. I looked across for his approbation, but his face was hard and set.
He pushed through the ring of boys, looked down for a long moment at the disgraced sprawl of the loser, then came across to me.
‘Why did you have to fight him?’ he said.
‘Well, he started it …’ I began to protest.
‘That kid’s crook, you knew that,’ he said. ‘You could have killed him.’
‘I tell you he started it.’
‘Why didn’t you just hit him once then?’ he said fiercely. ‘That poor little bastard couldn’t fight his way out of a brown-paper bag! What the hell do you think you were trying to prove, you dirty stinking little tike, going after him like that!’
With that he slapped me right across the face, very hard, and turned on his heel and walked away. The boys began to disperse, sniggering a little shamefacedly, and I just stood there looking down at Harry Meade, while two of his mates brought water from the tap and washed his face.
There was a curious little sequel to this. About a week after the fight Harry Meade gave me a present of a silver trumpet. Well, that was what I called it, but it wasn’t a trumpet really, and it wasn’t silver; it was nickel-plated and it was part of one of those bulb-horns they used on the old motor-cars. I was very proud of it, partly because you could blow tunes through it and partly because it was, symbolically, Harry Meade’s truce and tribute to me.
Two nights later we were playing in Carlingford Street and I lost the trumpet in the soft earth at the verge of the road: it was after nine o’clock at night when Jack came and found me. It was pitch dark and I was on my hands and knees, weeping, crawling round in the loose earth, feeling for the lost trumpet. I never found it.
Not long after this, Jack had his showdown with Dad. He went into the bathroom on the last day of the month to take his belting, and without a word of protest he shed his shirt and singlet and bent over the bath tub and accepted his punishment. When it was done he straightened up and faced Dad and said:
‘All right, Pop, that’s the last time you’re goin’ to whale into me like that. You try to lay that strop across me next month, an’ we’re goin’ to fight it out, see.’
Dad never thrashed him again.
When Jack told me about this later I said, ‘Did you tell him he had to stop hitting me, too?’
He looked at me very carefully, then said:
‘Christ almighty, nipper, you can fight your own battles, can’t you?’
But I couldn’t. My beatings continued, more ferociously than ever. They only ceased because one day my father went too far; he lambasted me so savagely that I fell unconscious into the bath tub, and the welts across my back made by the steel end of the razor-strop had to be treated by a doctor.
Mother called in Doctor Sheridan, who was on the panel for the Ancient Orders of Foresters’ Lodge, and who had been on the Western Front with Dad, and attached to the same division, and it was because of this old link they had that he didn’t make a police report. But he did warn Dad that if he was called in again he would have to go to the police about it, and Mother took a stand, too, and told Dad that she would ring for Doctor Sheridan the moment the bathroom punishments were resumed, whether I was badly hurt or not. So that was the last time it happened.
4
I never finished my last year at that technical school. I could never grasp more than the simplest mathematics and I was failed for the Intermediate Certificate, so unless I repeated a year and sat again for the examinations I was precluded from moving on to any higher form of education. In a way I half hoped that I would be given this second chance, but by this time I had turned fourteen and could legally go out to work. I accepted, passively enough, my parents’ decision that I should be apprenticed in commercial art to a lithographic firm in the city.
I had almost no interest in art then, commercial or otherwise, and remarkably little talent for it, and I am not sure that I even knew what lithography really was, but evidently there were no other applicants for the job, so I began work with the firm of Klebendorf and Hardt, a printing company which had been established by Germans seventy years before and still occupied its original premises in a tall, semi-derelict warren of a gaunt granite building in a narrow city lane opposite a pub which was supposed to be an exact replica of an old English coaching-inn (or so I always believed until I saw an old English coaching-inn).
My father signed indentures for six years’ apprenticeship, beginning at a wage of fifteen shillings a week, with annual rises of a similar amount, which would ensure that I would reach manhood earning five guineas a week, presumably as a skilled poster-lithographer, decorator of jam labels, and occasional designer of advertising showcards or tram-bills.
From my first earnings I had to buy my lunches, which I was able to reduce to a wholemeal bread-roll and a banana or two, and my ‘worker’s weekly’ railway ticket. Apart from two s
hillings, which I was permitted to keep, what was left over went into the family housekeeping. ‘Worker’s weeklies’ were a shilling or so cheaper than the ordinary ‘business weeklies’, but they were not supposed to be used by white collar workers and thus were not valid through the barriers of the city railway stations after ten minutes to eight in the mornings. So I was always at work an hour too early, before the lithographic studio was unlocked, but except on the cold winter mornings I never minded this much because something was always happening in the narrow lane. There would be down-and-outs scrounging through the rubbish-tins or searching along the gutters for cigarette butts, and I loved to watch the council rat-catchers at work with their strings of little fox-terriers, or the trucks unloading bales of paper or drums of litho-ink, and office windows opening, and very often there would be shirt-sleeved club servants grumbling to one another as they hosed the vomit off the pavement outside the ornate portico of the Savage Club.
Jack, of course, had been pushed out to earn money long before I left school. He had been sent to work with a suburban plumber named Fred Foley, whom Jack detested and resisted; if I was prepared to accept my destiny passively, my brother certainly was not. He learnt something of the trade, because he was quick at picking up things and he liked to learn, on the principle that ‘You can never tell what might come in handy one day’ – years later he could expertly fix drains or leaking taps or ‘wipe a joint’, and his soldering was something to see – but the impression he gave at home was that all he was learning was how to get drunk with his workmates on Friday pay afternoons and various ways of driving old Foley to the point of a nervous breakdown.
Jack was never really sure at this time exactly what it was he did want to be, but a plumber certainly it was not. Sometimes he thought of himself as a sailor in the merchant service, going around the world in tramp steamers, or as a boundary rider on an outback cattle station, or as a patrol officer rounding up head hunters in New Guinea. He talked vaguely of joining the French Foreign Legion –everybody then was reading Beau Geste – or of going into boxing as a professional (a year or so later he did, in fact, win a State amateur lightweight championship), or of pushing off on his own as a gold prospector. Nothing came of these vague ambitions; he got his fun even out of plumbing, and, in any case, by this time his real interest was girls.
I was still attending school on the day he lost his job as a plumber, but I was in my room that afternoon trying to understand logarithms when he came in almost splitting with laughter. He flung himself on the bed and kept clutching the pillow and choking and roaring and it was several minutes before he could even tell me that he had ‘got the boot’. I had a clutch of panic wondering what Dad would say when he came home from the tram depot, and I asked him, rather nervously, how it had happened.
‘We had to clear the upstairs WCs in that big house of Britling’s down Ripponlea way,’ Jack explained chokingly. ‘One of the maids must’ve dropped an apple down, because three of the dunnies were choked. I had to take the taps and dies down to that silly old galoot Foley, and when I got there I saw that the stupid goat was standing with his head right under the open downpipe, looking up it to see what was wrong. Well, as it happened I was a bit caught short at the time, so I shot along to the top dunny like a rat up a rope, and had a bog, and pulled the chain, and, nipper, she was the bloody beautest bull’s-eye you’ve ever seen. The old bastard got it all over his face – the lot, bum-fodder and all, and a cigarette butt thrown in for good measure! Jesus, was he ropable!’
He had a variety of jobs after that – I cannot recall what they all were, but I know he never went back to plumbing, and then a few years later he left home to work on a wheat farm in the Wimmera.
But until that happened he added a frightening new dimension to my uncertainty, an abrasive torment that it took me years to get over. Sex …
I never knew anybody at that time who had read or even heard of Sigmund Freud. There were no Penguin editions or paperbacks then, and Freud’s was hardly the sort of information that would percolate through those picket fences or hedges of golden privet, or even find its way to a suburban panel doctor of the Loyal and Ancient Order of Foresters; and even some years later when I listened to people talking about complexes, inhibitions, frustrations, repressions, wish-fulfilments, and the libido, they seemed to be quoting an outlandish gibberish.
Jack had never heard of Freud either, but he saw sex early and clearly. It had no complications for him. It was merely another part of the adventure and hazard of living. He liked girls. And, what was perhaps more important, they liked Jack.
This was not only because of his reputation as a boxer, or a ‘sport’, or even as a ‘character’. At seventeen he was not much taller than he had been at school, although he was only an inch short of six feet, which was tall enough, but his body had filled out and toughened, and he had lost the awkward look he had once had. He had become a light, graceful dancer, and he walked well. Yet mostly, I think, it was his irrepressible audacity that captivated the girls. Anything he tackled was tackled with immense gusto, almost as if he had to eat life in huge gulps … while his appetite was strong … or before they cleared away the table. He seemed to meet everything full on; side-stepping was something he kept for the boxing ring. There were times, I am sure, when he carried his challenge to a point almost of flagrancy as a deliberate way of shocking the smug, the prim, the reproving. He seldom spoke a sentence to anybody without colouring it with the most extravagant slang and often with memorable images. I treasure some of his sayings even now, thirty years later. He would describe somebody as being ‘as silly as a two-bob watch’ or ‘dreary as bat shit’: of a notorious bore he said, ‘every story the bastard tells is as long as a wet week-end’ or, alternatively, ‘he’s just about as funny as a dead baby’s doll’. After the flat-chested flapper figure had become passé his succinct comment on poor Gwen Taidmarsh was, ‘She wears a sweater like it’s been hung on a nail twice’. Still my favourite is the comment he made once when he was convinced that Dad was trying to victimize him over something. ‘If the Old Man had to saw Jean Harlow in halves,’ he said bitterly, ‘he’d damn’ well see that I got the half that talks!’ He never wrote me a letter until after he had gone to the Wimmera: I remember being astonished by it: it was written in a near-copperplate hand, in an almost mid-Victorian prose style, and with hardly a hint of a colloquialism.
As with his vocabulary, his appearance was almost blatantly offered for public consumption. He was an upstanding, good-looking youth, but he would plaster his hair down with cheap brilliantine and part it in the middle, and sometimes he would favour sideburns and a hairline moustache, and he began to wear white ties with a black shirt, and pearl-grey Oxford bags, and ox-blood or two-tone shoes. Part of this sartorial masquerade, possibly, may well have been his calculated incitement to riot.
‘Yeah, I know I look like a two-bob lair decked out like this,’ he once admitted to me cheerfully, as he trimmed his sideburns in the broken vestibule mirror. ‘But let me tell you something, nipper. This is the only rig-out that’ll always get the sheilas in. Let me tell you another thing – once they see you with a sheila, walkin’ around like this, there’s always some touchy pissant who gets all worked up about it and wants to knock your block off!’
Jack’s first tentative explorations of the feminine mystique had been completed before he was twelve – at which age, incidentally, he had stopped smoking ‘tailor-made’ cigarettes, on the ground that they were effete, and had taken to rolling his own – and he moved into the world of more advanced sex with a whole heart and a totally open mind. The prospect of ‘landing a sheila’ would fill him with the same kind of gluttonous rapture as a second or third helping of his favourite food, which continued to be Mother’s steamed jam roly-poly.
My feelings and attitudes were so totally opposed to his in every imaginable way that I would sometimes catch him looking at me and shaking his head in an utterly mystified way. At first he tried
to be tolerant or amused, but there were times when I would infuriate him to such a degree that I think he might have punched me but for the fact that he knew very well that for all my priggishness I was the only person who was loyal to him. I never told tales. Yet he still regarded me as a ‘bloody little sonk’, and for the next few years he continued to shock me with a ruthless consistency which I realized was deliberate only very much later.
He deplored the puritanical views I held about smoking and drinking, but it was on the question of girls that he most resented me.
‘You’re growing up to be a real bloody little wowser,’ he would say with an angry contempt, and I would blush to the roots of my hair, for in Jack’s bawdy and colourful lexicon wowser was the most despicable form of human or animal life. The wowser was the man who saw fleshly sin in every simple pleasure, who believed in the total observance of the Sabbath, who regarded sport as a device of the Devil, who grew apoplectic at the thought of males and females dancing together, who imagined the fiery pits of hellfire and brimstone yawning for all young people who smoked, drank, sang, or even laughed together.
I would writhe under his scorn – that there was more than a germ of truth in the charge made it no easier to bear – but I could do nothing about it. A girl could reduce me to an almost pathological state of dread and shyness. I would flush if one so much as glanced at me. I would become pink and stammering when a comfortable middle-aged housewife approached me in the street to ask directions to a city store or advice on a tram destination. Either of my two sisters could provoke me to the point of tears by deliberately baiting me until they could scream triumphantly:
‘Look! Just look at him! He’s blushing! Just look at him blushing!’
In the twelve months after I left school a dreadful, phenomenal thing happened, and in that year I grew eleven inches, and my grotesque skinniness, with the pimples that came about this time, made everything immeasurably worse. I stopped going swimming that summer because I was convinced that everybody on the beach was pointing out my skeletonic shape, that every giggle or guffaw or whisper was directed at me. I began secretly to buy physical culture magazines, but cancelled the order after I had taken three issues because the comparisons were so shattering. I saw myself as the perpetual figure captioned ‘Before’, never as the muscular Hercules captioned ‘After’. (This thin physique to some degree has remained with me; I still value a foreign correspondent’s licence which years after this was issued me in India. My physical description for some reason was to be entered on the card as ‘tall and gangling’ but a babu clerk typed it in as ‘tall and dangling’.)
My Brother Jack Page 7
