Jack, untroubled by any such inhibitions, spent almost every night prowling the city like a tomcat. And the city was fiercely generating a life of its own that was exactly in key with his wild, gay, rebellious outlook. The Jazz Age had reached its crescendo: the wail and boop of saxophones, the twanging of ukuleles, and the mad jumping of the Charleston had even begun to invade the hitherto inviolate stuffiness of our suburbs. Beyond our neat hedged perimeters, the world suddenly seemed transformed into a jungle of iniquities, of violence, sex, flaunted revolt, alarming uncertainties. The newspapers reprimanded in editorials the wayward follies and excesses of the young, quoted hair-raising legal reports of teen-age girls who carried contraceptives in their handbags, spluttered about ‘companionate marriage’, lifted their circulations with shocking stories of scandalous goings-on in parked coupés and sedans, and screamed for the banning of books. Along St Kilda Esplanade and in the open parks policemen and Peeping Toms prowled with torches at the ready to catch flaming youth in the very act of burning. Swaggering through it all, with their heads held high, went the slim, flat-chested, emancipated, waistless girls wearing rouge and lipstick and with shingled hair – or, worse, the Eton crop – their skirts above their knees and their stockings rolled below. And in eager, effervescent pursuit, went my brother Jack, with brilliantine on his hair.
Dad had bought a second-hand Chevrolet, but he was a bad and hopelessly nervous driver, and this created a curious and paradoxical situation. Jack, who had driven the utility for Foley the plumber, could handle a car very competently, and he had nerves like steel. Dad liked to go by car to race meetings or football games on Saturday afternoons, but since the heavy traffic and the problem of finding a place to park would have torn his nerves to shreds he would make Jack do the driving. In return he was obliged, reluctantly and not too often, to allow Jack to take the car out on his own at night. Whenever this happened he would work himself up into a terrible state wondering what Jack actually might be doing in the car. He usually found out when he was cleaning the car on Sunday mornings, and he would come snorting in from the shed he had fixed up for a garage, his face a study, gingerly holding in his fingers some object which he had found on the floorboards or wedged in behind the seat cushions – hairpins or a rouge compact or a lipstick or a suspender torn from a girdle. His stormings and rantings never seemed to perturb Jack. Certainly they failed to discourage him. The trophies became still more spectacular. A silk stocking was found in the glove-box. A girl’s corselet was dragged from behind the back seat. And the day Dad found a pair of black rayon scanties trimmed with coffee-lace, a jazz garter of yellow and black silk, and an SSW brassière, all stuffed together into one of the side-pockets, I really thought he would have a stroke.
Jack just grinned. ‘Trophies,’ he said, and there was a lot of pride in the way he said it. ‘You know, Pop, I really brought them scanties home for you. I said to myself, you know, they’d be just the thing for Pop for wipin’ down the windscreen.’
A week later Dad nearly had a stroke again. We had visitors on Sunday afternoon, some of Dad’s friends from the Lodge, and they were taken, of course, into the front room. And there, under the glass dome on top of the pianola, with the old army biscuit and the wedding decorations, Jack’s trophies had been tastefully assembled – the garter and the brassière and the rayon scanties.
Whether Jack was out in the Chev or prowling afoot, he would always come home long after Dad or Mother had locked the house and gone to bed. I would hear the side gate furtively opening, then a scratching rustling through the ferns would herald the silent removal of the outer flywire screen, and Jack would crawl through the window and switch on the light and sit on the bed and give me a detailed account of his adventures. The more he shocked me, the better he was pleased: there was a fiendish implacability about what he regarded as vital indoctrination.
There was always a post-mortem next day, when Dad would try to determine what time he had come home, but the formula was unvarying.
‘You were damn’ late in last night, weren’t you?’ would be Dad’s aggressive opening.
‘Late? Oh, have a heart! I got in just a minute or two after you went to bed. I saw the front light go off just when I was comin’ down the street.’
‘Funny I didn’t hear you,’ Dad would say sarcastically.
‘You? You wouldn’t have heard a thing. You must’ve dropped off like a log. You were snorin’ like a trooper when I came in. Dave remarked on it. His light was still on. He was in bed reading.’
Jack would turn to me blandly, I would nod endorsement of the lie, and, more often than not, Dad’s spleen would be transferred to me.
‘You and your blasted books!’ he would snarl. ‘All you’re doing, my lad, is muddling your mind and ruining your eyesight. Why the devil don’t you get out and do something.’
‘Just what I keep telling him,’ Jack would say. ‘He ought to go out and pick up a sheila.’
‘At his age. What damn’ good would that do him?’
‘Well, it’d be better than sitting around a bedroom all night with those sonky mates of his.’
This was one of the root sources of Jack’s hostility. My ‘sonky mates’ were three boys who had been in my year at the technical school; we were united by the double bond of being uninterested in girls and of all having failed to pass for the Intermediate Certificate. Jack had no time for any of them. Bob Hawkes wore his hair too long – ‘like a sissy’ – took violin lessons, suffered from asthma, and was interested in classical music. Bill Bardswell played with model electric railways and didn’t believe in sport. Ronnie Curtis sang in the St Catherine’s church choir, still collected cigarette cards, and lisped. Since I already had crazy ideas about everything which Jack regarded as normal and necessary, and because I was always reading books, my brother’s dread was that this companionship would turn me into a homosexual. It was entirely his dread: I was not aware at that time, nor for years afterwards, that homosexuality existed. (The scurrilous jingle on the subject which was current in those days was known to almost everybody in Australia, but it happened to concern a certain aberrated musical comedy and vaudeville singer, so that for all my adolescence and youth I firmly believed that ‘homosexual’ was only a fancy word for a female impersonator.)
For quite a while the four of us stuck together anyway, in spite of Jack’s hostility. They would come round on their bicycles every night after supper, and we would go to my bedroom and shut the door. There was a sad, desperate innocence about it all. We shared a deep guilt at having failed at school, we had all been sent out to jobs in which we were barely interested, we had no idea where we were going, but somehow it seemed imperative that we must try to ‘better’ ourselves, and it seemed to us that this could be achieved only by groping for some sort of education that had passed us by. Since there was nobody to guide us we would contend with each other in ‘discovering’ important authors – Ibsen and Chekhov and Tolstoy, Balzac and Flaubert, Gibbon and Defoe (never Shakespeare or Keats or Milton, crucified victims on the three crosses crowning the Golgotha of Australian education), and everything we read was above our heads. But it excited us. We went on groping and pretending.
Gradually, however, a secret desire began to germinate in my mind. I wanted to write. It began with poems, but they were very strange poems to emerge out of the Melbourne suburbs, because I had read Heimskringla and become obsessed by the Viking sagas and I filled whole exercise-books with bad verses about berserk fighting men and beaked longships filled with corpses:
Wildly they rolled, tightly locked on seas riven,
Bound in war’s embrace, the black ship and red:
Corpse-ring was theirs, for the raven, unshriven,
Had croaked in the night for the Skardaborg dead.
I kept the exercise-books hidden in my mattress, in case Jack should find them. I knew that as poetry the stuff was worthless, yet the exercise-books represented a privacy which I felt to be important … too important to
survive Jack’s derision.
It never occurred to me that Jack, for all his crudity and insensitivity, might have been right, and I wrong. I could not have realized then that I was beginning to fabricate a pattern which I would continue to work on for years to come, a pattern of evasion, where I could establish my own sense of belief and of security only in some area of the imagination that was as remote in time and place as the Norse longships, and as dissociated from the troubling present that existed all around me. Fumblingly, hardly even conscious of what I was doing, I was setting out to try to side-step a world I didn’t have the courage to face.
But Jack still refused to side-step anything, even the baffling nature of his own brother.
‘You’ve got to get rid of those sonky bloody cobbers of yours,’ he said to me one night. ‘The way you lot are heading you’ll end up a bunch of tonks. Why the blazes don’t you get out and chase a tart or two?’
‘Because I don’t want to.’
‘It wouldn’t hurt you just to try.’
‘You know I can’t stand girls. I don’t want to try.’
‘Oh, don’t come the raw prawn with me! How can you say you can’t stand ’em when you’ve never even touched one! Jesus, they’re not going to bite you!’
‘Leave me alone,’ I pleaded miserably.
On this I remained stubborn. That was easy enough. I had my pimples to consider and my awful lankiness. I was a clear inch taller than Jack now, but thirty pounds lighter, and I would go scarlet just thinking of the girls sniggering about me on Elwood beach. I had still to grow body hair, and at intervals my face would blotch unpleasantly with nerve rashes. I was constantly humiliated by the teasing of my sisters. All I asked was to be left alone.
And Jack had no intention of leaving me alone: the more stubborn I became the more brutally he would force his indoctrination on me. He made me read Beckett’s Budget, a sordid weekly newspaper which had rocketed into prominence almost overnight on its scandalously detailed stories of sex and crime and violence. Sometimes he was funny with it, like the night he moved around the bedroom pretending to be doubled up like a sufferer from lumbago. When I asked him what was the matter he said:
‘I got an attack of Coopay Crouch, that’s all.’
I just looked at him, not understanding.
‘Don’t you know what Coopay Crouch is?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘Well, it’s when you’re with a sheila in the front seat of a coupé, see, and you’ve got to get out in a hurry, and then you find you’ve buttoned your waistcoat to your fly. That’s Coopay Crouch, see.’
But usually there was nothing funny in his methods. He would ostentatiously show me the contraceptives he always carried in his wallet, explaining the technical difference between Sphinx brand and Black Cat. He would buy sets of dirty French postcards, not because of any element of pornography in his own character, but simply to shock me into some realization of what it was all about. He would deliberately lecture me on the use of sea-water as the only effective solvent for semen stains on one’s trousers. I grew more and more appalled. That must have been the only time in my life I ever came to hate my brother Jack.
5
The obvious escape was at work, and for a time I accepted this without questioning it.
Apart from two incredibly old Germans, all the artists employed by Klebendorf and Hardt, whether ‘creative’ or reproductive, worked in one huge studio. It was a grimy, high-ceilinged room with sooty windows on the western side overlooking the lane. The other three walls were lined from floor to rafters with pulpboard, so that the big twenty-four sheet posters we were printing could be pinned up there, for colour checking and matching.
A kind of strange exotic beauty had been imparted to these walls by a semi-accidental montage of overseas posters which for years had been pasted up on the pulpboard, presumably as outstanding examples of commercial art, and had since become exquisitely textured by the prickings of a million pins. I never realized then that there were museum pieces among them – one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘Jane Avril’ bills, and two by the Beggarstaff brothers, and some of the powerful huge lithographs of Brangwyn and Joseph Pennell – because most of the posters were from the British railway companies, Great Western and London North Eastern, usually by Fred Taylor or Frank Newbold, and from the very beginning it seemed wonderful to me to be working in that grubby, crowded, utilitarian place with the vision always before one’s eyes of Tintern Abbey and the front at Scarborough and the stained glass of York Minster and the chalk cliffs of Dover and the Welsh mountains and the fishing trawlers bucking out of Grimsby.
There were ten of us in the room, seven seniors, a journeyman lithographer just out of his indentures, and another apprentice as well as me. Each of us worked at a huge, sloping table, large enough to take the sixty-by-forty zinc plates which were used for lithographing the posters, and solid enough to support the heavy, smoothed, oatmeal-coloured stones on which the finer work was done. We sat on very high counting-house stools.
There was a rough division in that the best lithographers were all down the front, near old Joe Denton the head artist, and we two apprentices were down there also, so he could keep an eye on us and give us things to practise on. The other apprentice was his own son, ‘young’ Joe, who had also come from a technical school and who had just completed his first year. The places at the rear were occupied by those more concerned with the ‘creative’ side, which meant the designing of a new poster for some product, or labels for jams or canned fruit, or showcards commissioned by some client for his patent medicine or his oatmeal, or, when times were slack, ‘spec’ designs for posters or leaflets or cutouts which the company’s travellers would try to hawk around the town.
It was more a practical division than a hierarchical one – any of the designers was a perfectly capable lithographer, either on stone or zinc, and those around Joe Denton could always get away from the smell of gum arabic and Korn’s litho crayon and turn out a good original poster. It was just that each person had one little speciality that he could do a bit better than any of the others. With Barney Druce, the journeyman, it was lettering, with Paul Klein it was the human figure, with Tom Middleton it was an uncanny control over the Ben Day stipple screens, with old Joe Denton it was a miraculous, meticulous tidiness and a gift for judging and blending colours, which, after all, is the real wizardry of reproduction. Even Young Joe, with only a year’s training, had developed quite a skill in squaring up from the small original poster sketches the huge charcoal key-drawings on the twenty-four-sheet walls, which would then be rubbed down on to the separate zinc printing plates. In all the time that I was there I never came to be specially good at anything, but they were kindly people and not one of them ever deliberately made me feel my inferiority.
The grouping was mostly a convenience, because there was always a necessary interchange of basic materials – sponges, gum arabic, litho ink, and crayon at one end; poster colours, T-squares and matt board at the other – although no artist would ever lend his own brushes or stippling pens or hand-rest: they were most superstitious about their personal tools, and I doubt if any one of them would have trusted his favourite sable or No. 2 Gillott pen to Rembrandt himself.
All these things were in the smell of the big room, and the smell was locked forever inside those high grimed windows, the crayons and inks and colours and gum and T-squares and rat-dirt and acids and charcoal and stale bread and damp pasteboard and Jane Avril with her toe pointed and the black barges under the Brangwyn bridges.
The two artists excluded from the big room were both Germans. They seemed so incredibly old to me that I thought at first they must have been survivors of the pioneer establishment of seventy years before and that they had inhabited their frowsy little crannies from the day the building was completed. They were very much alike. Both were tiny, both had soft white whiskers and thin white hair, and pale pinkish skin, rather like the flesh of baby mice. Their eyes were so pa
le that they seemed to be almost washed away. They seldom spoke except to one another, either in German or in halting English, and their voices sounded like rubber squeegees sliding on glass. Their separate cubby-holes were not only at opposite corners of the building but were on different floors, yet they would always meet to eat their luncheon sandwiches together in the sunshine on the step beside the lorry-bay. They would chew on their Pork Fritz or liverwurst and never pay any attention to what was going on around them – it was usually just the printers, with square newspaper-hats on their heads, playing wall cricket with a tennis ball or football with a tied-up bundle of reject quad-crown, or the boys from the paper store flirting with some of the girls from the packaging department or the calendar room; they would just sit there side by side, like two tiny creatures out of a fairy-tale, talking to each other in sleepy nodding squeaks.
Yet these two frail old men were the true hierarchy of the place, old craftsmen from some other time that was still revered. Ludwig Steiner, a tempera painter, had been brought out from Dusseldorf fifty years before; Fritz Richter had come from Munich a year or two earlier with a shipload of lithographic stones from his own native Bavarian quarries. (These were the stones that Klebendorf and Hardt still used for the high quality work; decades of polishing and re-polishing had made them somewhat thinner than they were, but they had a silky, sensuous texture, and there was any number of good labels or Christmas cards in them yet.) Steiner only worked on very special commissions; otherwise he devoted his time to rich, incredibly detailed tempera paintings for calendar pictures. They were stereotyped subjects – women and children, animals, snow scenes, flower pieces, young lovers, autumn landscapes – but they were quite beautiful in their way, and in the attentive detail of their soft, glowing surfaces more closely related to Van Eyck or Botticelli, really, than to Claude Cranston who ran the calendar department. Steiner’s paintings were never sold outright. Cranston would select the best of them and they would be reproduced in four-colour half-tone and printed up in tens of thousands ‘on spec’ and then sold in small lots all over the country, usually to rural or suburban stores or grocery shops or wood-yards or chocolate manufacturers. A blank space would be left between Steiner’s picture and the place where the calendar-pad was pasted, and this, at no extra cost, was the area where the buyer’s name and advertising message would be printed. Something like Moran and Cato for Sacrifice Values or Consult J. J. Hiddlestone On All Pest and Vermin Problems. It seemed sad to me that Steiner’s pictures were always spoilt in this way.
My Brother Jack Page 8
