Working Class Boy

by Barnes, Jimmy

  It smelled of fresh cut wood and paint. There was a bath and a shower and a toilet built into the house. The boys had a separate room from the girls. We even had a small fireplace to remind us of Scotland. Mum was happy, everything was great. Mum was busy hanging things and moving what little furniture we owned around the house for the tenth time, much to my dad’s horror. He wanted to go out and find a drink somewhere. There was even food ready to eat. Life was looking up and again I felt like we were going to be all right. I felt like this most mornings, by the way, and normally that didn’t change until something went wrong later in the day. How long would it take this time?

  The sun was shining outside and I ran straight out to see where we were in this new world. There was a big paddock across the road from us and beyond that there was a train line. I heard a whistle blowing and spotted a train as it raced across the horizon. It was like a magnet to me. I would have to go across the paddock and check out the train lines when I got the chance.

  The rain had stopped but there was water everywhere in pools. There was mud in the yard where the builders had been working until the day we arrived. They must have left just before our truck got there. I could see tracks across the front yard, deep troughs where the wheels of the truck had fought their way out of the mud that gripped onto them like quicksand.

  Our street was neat and tidy in its layout, except for the mud. As I looked down the street I could see rows of houses, all nearly the same as ours. All new and waiting for families to arrive and breathe life into them. There were pale brown brick homes and red brick homes, in no certain order, some were bigger than ours and a couple seemed smaller. But they all looked roughly the same to me.

  A few of the houses were already occupied. There were cars parked on the street and some of the houses had lawns fighting to push their way up through the mud. I could see signs of other children living nearby: the odd bike leaning against a fence and a ball or two that had been left out in the rain overnight. I knew I would be fine here.

  Forty-five Heytesbury Road, Elizabeth West, was my home for the next few years. They would be some of the best and some of the worst years of my life so far. In those years life twisted and turned like none of us could have expected.

  Time passed, and Mum and Dad didn’t find their dream; in fact, things went from worse to much worse. The life lessons that they were supposed to hand down to us, didn’t come as they should have. Those lessons – like every other lesson – got lost in fear and violence and drunkenness. We never learned about hope or the chance of finding our dreams. That didn’t happen to families like ours. Dad drank more and gambled more, Mum tried harder until she had nothing left to give.

  * * *

  Elizabeth looked like such a great idea on paper. They called it the City of Tomorrow. Bring out a hungry workforce ready to seize an opportunity to start fresh new lives and put them in a place where there were factories for employment, schools for their kids and homes for them to live in happily ever after. What could go wrong? But everything seemed to go wrong, right from the start. The factories paid just enough to feed the families and if they were frugal enough, and if they didn’t drink at all, they might just scratch out a life. But when you throw in alcoholism and ignorance along with all the other problems that people brought with them from Britain, life fell apart for most of them pretty quickly.

  The families we knew had trouble making ends meet, mainly because of the drinking problems they all seemed to have. The ones who didn’t drink were doing a little better. The families whose parents were sober seemed to keep away from our type of people and even looked down on us. I can see why now. Don’t get me wrong. It was hard for all the families, even the sober ones. But somehow if the parents weren’t drinking all the money, things went a little smoother. Funny that, don’t you think?

  When I walked home with the kids from school who seemed to be doing better than us, it sometimes got uncomfortable.

  ‘Can I come into your place for a while and play? I’d like to see inside your house.’

  ‘My mum doesn’t want you . . . er . . . anybody to come in tonight. Sorry Jim, you’d better just go home.’

  ‘That’s okay, I’ve got things to do anyway.’

  And I would walk away feeling ashamed of myself and embarrassed that they didn’t like me.

  Some families drank more than others. My dad drank as much as any and we were struggling because of it. Dad would work hard trying to keep his drinking under control until pay day, then he would be gone. At the start of every week, Mum would work out a budget that might just feed us and clothe us, and then would have to scramble to make ends meet when Dad drank the budget. Many a time we would have gone hungry if Mum hadn’t whipped up something from nothing. Mums seem to be able to do that.

  Mum tried her best to make Elizabeth our home. She got out in the garden and planted a lawn and fruit trees. She planted candle pines in the driveway. I know that sounds grand but the driveway wasn’t that long, which didn’t bother us because we didn’t have a car. I’m not sure Dad knew how to drive. Later I would take little cones off the pines and use them as ninja weapons to throw at my sisters. They were hard and spiky and I could throw them from a distance and still have time to make a getaway – most of the time.

  Even Dad got involved in the planting. I remember one of the trees he planted was called a million-dollar peach. I can still hear him saying, ‘Aye, million-dollar peaches, kids. These are the best peaches you can get. It won’t be long till you’re eating them every day. You’ll be almost sick of them.’

  We stood listening to him with watering mouths. We would have been happy with any peaches. Two-dollar peaches, fifty-cent nectarines would have done. It didn’t matter what they were worth. We just wanted them, right now. But these did sound like something really special. Unfortunately, it took quite a few years for the trees to fruit and when they did, Dad had lost interest in them. The birds and bugs seemed to be the only ones who got to eat this glorious, expensive-sounding fruit. And by the time they were ripe enough for human consumption the best were already gone and all that was left had been half eaten.

  The other thing Mum and Dad wanted to plant was corn and after a few months the backyard looked like a farm. Well, a really small farm if you shut one eye. We hadn’t eaten corn that much before and it didn’t take long until we all got sick of it. I think it was all we were eating.

  Later on, Mum tried to grow other vegetables besides corn, so that we would have something to eat when the wages didn’t arrive but they died pretty quickly. You need to look after the plants and water them. If you don’t they won’t grow to be any good, a lot like kids when I think about it. The pumpkins thrived; they took over the backyard for a while. We ate a lot of pumpkin for a little while there.

  Before long any interest in gardening was gone. Mum and Dad were back to only being interested in indoor pastimes again, like drinking and fighting.

  The house seemed to me to be quite big even though I know it wasn’t. There were four bedrooms, and a lounge and a kitchen of course. I remember Mum cooking in that kitchen. She had bought a pressure cooker and everything seemed to be cooked in it. Potatoes, cabbage, anything.

  The sound of the pressure building up was Tsh Tsh Tsh Tsh. It reminded me of the sprinkler on the football ovals at night.

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  ‘What’s for dinner the night?’ Dad would ask.

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  The noise of the pressure cooker was speeding up.

  ‘Cabbage and mince and totties.’

  ‘Again,’ he’d moan.

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  ‘You’ve always said ye loved it.’

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  ‘I do, but no every fuckin’ night.’

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  ‘And shut that pot up, it’s drivin’ me nuts.’

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  It seemed to get faster and faster.

  ‘I need it tae cook for
the kids. I’m cookin’ for them, no for you.’

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  ‘I don’t want yer food. I’m goin’ oot for a wee while.’ He was almost exploding himself, and would walk out.

  Bang the door would slam.

  Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .

  The pressure cooker seemed to be the soundtrack to their tempers, building and building until it was like a bomb waiting to blow. And then Mum would take off the lid from the top of the pressure valve and then,

  SHHHHHHHHHH.

  It was like the whole house had let out a big breath and we were finally ready to sit down and eat. John and I would line up fighting over who got to drink the juice from the cooking cabbage. It tasted like soup to us, salty and filling, and we were hungry.

  ‘You got it last night. It’s my turn,’ he’d shout.

  ‘No I didn’t, you did.’

  ‘Mum, he drank it last night, it’s my turn.’

  ‘Stop fightin’ and I’ll share it between the two o’ ye.’

  Mum would be pouring the hot water from the pot into the cups. With all the steam coming up from the cups you could hardly notice the tears in her eyes, but I could see them.

  We had no garage but that was fine because, as I said, we never had a car. Not one that actually ran anyway. For a while there was some old wreck sitting in the driveway that us kids would sit in and pretend we were driving around the country. I’m sure Dad always had grand ideas about fixing it up for the family, but the only thing handy about Dad was that he lived with us. He really wasn’t very good at fixing, hanging, painting, changing or growing anything. I’m not sure what he was good at but fighting and smooth talking. But damn he was good at both of those. When I think about it, I don’t think it would have been a good idea to get in a car with him anyway.

  Many years later I was doing Sixty Minutes for television and I went back to Elizabeth to stand outside and film the house we grew up in. The woman who lived there saw me and asked if I wanted to come in and look around. I said straight away, ‘I used to live here when I was really young.’

  She smiled at me and said, ‘I already knew that before I rented it.’

  When I walked in I couldn’t believe how small it was. This house was tiny. For us to have lived there with six kids and parents who couldn’t stand to be in the same room as each other was amazing. No wonder we all went crazy. The house looked a lot better than when we lived there and felt like a happier place.

  I told her that I felt glad to see that the place finally had a loving family living there. A house needs a family that loves to make it a home. She gave me a cuddle and I left.

  The house was a semi-detached and another family lived there, right next to us. The walls were thin and didn’t stand a chance of blocking the noise that went from house to house. We knew what they were eating; in fact, the walls were that thin we almost knew what they were thinking.

  I felt sorry for the neighbours not only because of the fights Mum and Dad had, but because of us kids. We were wild, always running in and out, slamming doors or stomping up and down the hallway shouting at each other.

  ‘Get lost, you’re a scab. Mum, he’s hitting me.’

  And so on. Maybe we weren’t that polite either. We would regularly climb onto the roof and run around up there. Especially me; I used to think that I was in the television show The Samurai and I’d climb up to the roof and jump off all the time. Sometimes onto my sisters; other times, if I was escaping some imaginary enemy, I would jump into the poor neighbours’ yard and scare the hell out of them.

  I thought I was a ninja and would throw things at people and hide up trees, waiting in ambush to spring onto an unsuspecting foe. I even made my own throwing stars out of cardboard. They weren’t very dangerous and they didn’t go very fast or far. Some of my friends made them out of the top of tin cans. I think they cut themselves up more just making them than they cut anyone else throwing them. But they were dangerous and they didn’t mind throwing them at anybody.

  I would run around and hide in the paddock opposite our house. I thought I was really good at hiding like a ninja, until I realised that no one was looking for me. That’s why they never found me. That sort of took the shine off things, but I kept on playing regardless.

  One of the neighbours at the back of the house was a singer and had a hit on Adelaide radio covering something like ‘I Remember You’, the Frank Ifield song. Me and the other kids would sing it over the fence of his house as loud as we could. As soon as the back door opened we would be gone, not a trace of us anywhere. We thought it was cool for about five minutes to have a pop star living nearby and then we forgot all about it. I never heard his name again so I don’t think he had another hit. How fleeting was stardom in those days; not much has changed really.

  Of all the neighbours, the ones I seemed to get on with the best was a Dutch family three doors down. Billy was my friend and we played football and anything else we could think of together. I seemed to spend a lot of time at his house. I would even go in and sit with his parents when he and his sister weren’t there and they treated me just like one of their own. I remember even learning a little of the language from the dad. I can still count to ten in Dutch.

  They were a nice family and always made me feel welcome. I think that they were appalled by the behaviour of some of the other families in the street, including mine. They were very quiet and had a very neat, tidy house and neat and tidy lives, just like most of the Dutch people I know now. They had little windmills and clogs on their shelves to remind them of home. But they moved away, I hope to a better street with better neighbours.

  Dad got a cheap wooden shed from somewhere and he stuck it in the backyard for us to use as a cubbyhouse. This was not a tree house like you might see on Leave it to Beaver or any other American TV show, come to think of it. This was a shed that he nailed together with six-inch nails, so it had nails sticking out of the walls. If you weren’t careful you could rip a big hole in yourself. It was a Glaswegian cubbyhouse; you took your life in your hands just by standing in it. I don’t know where he got it; maybe it fell off the back of a truck. Lots of things seemed to fall off trucks in those days.

  There were no windows at all, just one door. It wasn’t very nice. My sisters tried to make it better but they could only do so much. They took over the shed completely and told me in no uncertain terms, ‘You’re not allowed in here at all. This is our house.’

  I wasn’t happy about this. So one day I decided I would get them back. There was a little hole I found on the roof while I was being a ninja and climbing on it when they weren’t there. I blocked the door so it was hard to get out in a hurry and then I climbed onto the roof as quietly as I could and threw stink bombs into it. They never expected me to do something as clever as that, so there was a lot of screaming and swearing and crying but eventually they fought their way out of the shed. Of course I was well gone by then, running down the road zig-zagging, with my knees bent just like the ninjas I had seen on television.

  I was not planning on returning until much later, when they had forgotten it had ever happened. My big mistake was that sisters never forget. This, it seemed, was the hard lesson I had to learn. And to make things worse, like I said, my sisters were much tougher than I was. I would pay for my shenanigans. I would pay a huge price. I got beaten up by them and their friends and then I had to be their slave for days, until they didn’t need or want me around. Then I was off the hook and could become a ninja again and return to jumping off roofs.

  As I mentioned before, the meal of choice for most Scottish families was mince and totties, which was basically boiled or mashed potato and mincemeat cooked with onions and carrots. Never mind haggis, I think this is the Scottish national dish. We ate it every day we could afford it, occasionally broken up by chips, baked beans and eggs, another Scottish staple. Mum made it particularly well but you know how it is, your mum’s food is always the best. I think it has to do with the love they pour into it. But it
got harder and harder for Mum to find the money to feed us or the love to put into it and some nights we would get chips and not much more than that.

  In fact, the plates were normally covered in chips – not the ones you could eat, unfortunately. Mum tried her best to keep the table nice but slowly the setting got sparser and sparser. The knives and forks no longer matched. Pieces were lost, thrown into the bin accidentally, or Mum and Dad had thrown them at each other as they stormed out of the house. We always drank out of cups. Mum and Dad saved the glasses for adults and booze. Cups were fine for water.

  Then there was the time my dad got chickens from someone at the pub. He probably won them in a bet. How you win chickens in a bet, I don’t know. What was he betting if he lost, the kids? But he decided that we were going to have the best eggs to eat in the street.

  ‘Okay kids, these wee feathery bastards will gie us fresh eggs every day,’ he told us.

  It reminded me of the peaches but I didn’t say anything. Mum and Dad always seemed to have these plans that they never followed through. Well, as I now know, in order to get eggs you have to feed the chickens. This is the basic principle of raising animals: you’ve got to feed them or they will die. If you don’t feed them chicken food, then you need to give them lots of scraps. Well, we didn’t have chicken food, we couldn’t afford it, and the only scraps we had, we ate ourselves.

  Over the few months that the poor chickens lived with us Dad would get drunk and go outside and talk to them. ‘Evening ladies. What a lovely night it is,’ he would say. ‘You’re all looking very nice tonight. Are you wearing your feathers differently? How’s the scratching in the yard going for you?’ I think it was easier than talking to any of us inside the house.