by Biff Ward
The possum! Come on, kids. Come on.
He shot the rattly window up and scooped us into one arm each. We gazed at the brown button eyes which stared at us from the heart-shaped leaves of the apricot tree.
Get the biscuits, he whispered in my ear.
I slid off his knee and tiptoed to the kitchen. Mum drifted past me towards the back door, new cigarette to mouth. Dad gave us a biscuit each but it was me, the older, pushy one, who climbed out onto the sill and reached forward, frightening the possum.
In the corner of the dining room near the kitchen stood an ice-chest. It was serviced by a block of ice about the size of a besser brick which came in the back of a noisy little truck. The ice-man parked on the fence-line where our house met next door, then leapt from the driver’s seat and ran to the back of the truck, opened the heavy door, grabbed his carrying implement, fixed the curved prongs at either end of an ice brick and jogged, the weight of the ice pulling down on the prongs, up the path beside our house yelling ‘Ice’ like a yodel, ‘Yice-ah’. He paused at the back door, then jiggled around the kitchen table to the ice-chest where he opened the top, eased the block in, shouted goodbye and ran out.
Sometimes the ice-holding system sprang a leak and water dripped into the food which was stored in a compartment below. When this happened Dad bought packets of Juicy Fruit gum and enjoined Mark and me to chew. It felt like a party because it was the only time we were allowed to have gum. He might become impatient: Come on: chew faster! and burst out laughing at our champing jaws. He used the wads of wet gum to plug the leak.
He liked to tell the story about finding me, aged three or four, standing in front of the ice-chest hoeing into a chop. Mum would smile distantly while Dad roared with laughter. I don’t know how often it happened but the taste and sublime juiciness of raw red meat from that time remains in my saliva glands.
In spite of this liking for fun, there was always about him a sense of purpose. On a normal day, he was at his desk after school, away from it for the few hours of making dinner, washing up, getting us bathed and reading to us in bed, then he’d be gone again, back to the desk. It was the same on weekend afternoons and evenings. His attitude was that there were jobs to do, to get out of the way, so that he could get on to the big one, the one that really mattered, the one he was always planning. I wasn’t aware of him completing a Masters degree at this time, but I began to appreciate the magnitude of his ambitions when he wrote a textbook, Man Makes History, for first year Social Studies. I was eight or nine as I watched pages of text rendered magical by timelines and drawings showing how axe-heads led to aeroplanes. A lesser job, the kind he liked to dispatch quickly, was a contract with Sanitarium to write historical blurbs about the Pacific, which were printed on cards that kids collected with their cornflakes. He also wrote a second-year history text and assembled a high-school poetry collection. He always worked hard and I never heard him say he was too busy or too tired. He did not whinge.
Me, about four, with Dad, snapped by a street photographer
Dad was also active in the Communist Party. Our Mosman in the 1940s and early 1950s was mapped by The Party. That was how the grown-ups spoke of it: The Party. These were the Communists and their close friends, the people who read Tribune and talked politics. What I remember best were the occasional gatherings at our place—I think of soiree, but it was daylight and after standing about while they greeted each other, they sat. Men, all men, in my memory. Perhaps they were having a branch meeting in the period when Dad was president of the local Mosman branch.
They made a circle with cups of tea or beers on a Saturday afternoon and they talked. It was more than talk, with that word’s looseness and sense of chatter. This was focused and intense, it was conversation where the speakers all stuck to the topic. Yet the topic jumped from Korea to American imperialism to Menzies or the miners’ strike and from The Party to meetings and plans for more meetings.
A few times, I tried to hang around in the living room when they arrived, my blonde head up to their chests. Dad said gruffly, Outside, darling. Go outside and play.
I moved to the door while they settled into armchairs. When Dad turned away, I sank to the floor beside the sofa, out of sight. They started their talk, those male voices stringing power-lines across the room, building a grid. He must have known I was there, but because I was invisible, asking nothing, I was allowed to stay. The beams of sunlight slanting onto the cream wall above the bookshelves were drawn down to the centre of the rust-red rug, as though a cauldron sat there gathering their combustible words. It felt to me as though their ideas and getting the mix right mattered more to them than anything.
In the Howard years, when pundits spoke of the ‘chattering classes’, I often recalled those afternoons when my father and his friends struggled to set the world to rights. The personal was not political in those days. The personal was your own business but the political was the map of the world, the newspaper every morning and the evening news at 7 p.m. out of the radio. The political also lit the adults like torches when they talked about what was going on, what was really going on, what was going on behind the news.
When whole families visited each other, the men conversed and the women danced a difficult polka between the children, the other women and the men’s talk, the talk that must not be interrupted. Some of the mothers in The Party households might produce a music box or some art materials for making a watercolour mess, rather than say, Go outside and play. Others listened to the men but they also had their own stories to tell. They ran art classes for children after school. They agitated for local kindergartens. They were active in the Parents and Citizens and they organised parties and picnics to keep everyone’s spirit up. What they did, in fact, was build community, or try to, in a time of picket fences and fraught privacy.
I loved being around these women and wished Mum would join in, but she fixed her face in the suggestion of a smile and smoked and looked out an open door. She was remote from everyone.
At home, Mark and I sometimes had to fold Party leaflets before we were allowed to go out and play.
Just this pile, Dad would say, putting a doorstep of papers in front of each of us at the dining table. Fold each one in half—like this. Then tuck it under the fruit bowl like this.
And there we’d sit, folding and tucking, with him doing the same. Perhaps Mum too. The blue crystal fruit bowl on the cream table would turn into an origami lotus, the piles transforming into petals in a great arc all around it.
Dad letter-boxed the leaflets all over our hilly suburb at night. Sometimes stones were thrown at him and people yelled abuse. I didn’t take it in, didn’t understand, until some stones, small rocks really, were thrown at our house. We heard crashes on the roof and there they were in the morning, half a dozen each the size of Dad’s large palm, dotting the tiny front yard where they’d rolled down from the tiles. One week it happened several times.
In Dad’s autobiography, he speaks of Margaret and I or we when talking of membership of The Party. I’m sure she was a paid-up member for a while, but it was his interest, his passion. I never once heard her talk politics.
What led him to join the Communist Party? In his autobiography, he states that: Marxist philosophy [is] still the best single guide there is to any understanding of historical and political change. In an oral interview he recorded for the National Library in 1986, he took a more personal tack, saying that he became left wing and joined because he was so deeply influenced by his father’s Christianity.
My father was a Methodist lay-preacher . . . And he was a very good scripture teacher . . . expounded it very well—that’s the only way I can explain why I was predisposed to radical ideas.
He goes on to say he was trying to reconcile the literal meaning of Christ’s reported words ‘Blessed are the poor’ etc etc and the bloody rich man will be lucky if he scrapes home, ever. I tended to take the Christian message that my father (whom I admired greatly) set such store by quite lite
rally . . .
Dad’s love for his father was, as love for a parent often is, a complex affair. In the boarding schools where he grew up, his father was not only the Headmaster but also preacher, teacher and Grand High Poo-bah. He depended on his father greatly and, at the same time, he abhorred much of what his father stood for—but valued his father’s purist Christian message which encapsulates social justice, and believes the meek shall (or should) inherit the earth.
My own first memory of Dad’s father Fred is from the trip we made to Adelaide when I was four. For most of that long summer holiday we stayed at Prince Alfred College where Fred was still the Headmaster. He and Grannie lived in the upper storeys of the tower that marks the front entrance to this day. Meals appeared in a hole in the wall, sent up from the kitchen four floors below. Mark and I had never heard of a dumb-waiter and we kept sticking our heads into the hole despite all the admonitions about danger, to see what was happening down there.
I remember standing in Grandpa’s study—a room which had Headmaster in gold lettering on the door—watching him sharpen a pencil. All was silent except for the scritchy sounds of his razorblade slicing flakes of wood, with tiny squeaks when the blade touched lead. Outside, summer heat thrummed on the green oval that rolled away from the window. When he’d finished, he circled the ball of his thumb around the shaved point which looked as smooth as if it had been in a teacher’s sharpening machine. Then he glanced at me and gave a slight smile, his lips moving upwards at one side of his mouth, his eyebrow rising. Lastly, he laid the pencil in its glistening glass tray.
Mark remembers Grandpa’s fob watch, how it lived in the tiny slit pocket of his waistcoat with a chain attached to a button. As Mark talks, I can see Grandpa taking the watch out without looking, flicking its lid open with his thumb and only then, when it lay face up in his palm, glancing down briefly before snapping it shut and putting it away.
When Dad and his sister Jean were active in the Anti-Fascist League at Adelaide University in the 1930s, Fred said to them one night, I wish you were dead.
I yelped with shock when I first heard it, this bitter howl of Fred’s inter-generational pain as he watched his children become different from him.
Grannie called Dad Softy but it was she who was soft: her body, her clothes, her grey hair parted in the centre and pinned up in a roll from one temple to the other across the nape of her neck, her hands as she cupped my face. She was influenced by her father’s Christian Socialism, so maybe she wasn’t so upset about her children’s stand against Fascism.
When I went to primary school, I found Dad’s politics even extended there. The boys’ and girls’ primary schools as well as the two high schools were all on one block. Everyone knew the deputy of the Boys’ Primary was named Mr Thompson because groups of boys followed him in the playground chanting, Thomo’s a Commo, Thomo’s a Commo. I imagined he and Dad were the only two teachers who were Commos. I didn’t know how Dad managed to not have anyone trail after him and I lived with a terror that they would start.
By fourth grade, I was having dreams in which I was naked in the playground, surrounded by crowing children and disapproving teachers. The circumstances altered, but the end was always the same: alone and taunted.
That year, I lost my new skipping rope at the school sports carnival. It had large wooden handles, painted blue with thin red stripes. The next day Mrs Bushell, she who had ridiculed my untidy hair, raised my rope above her head at the school assembly and said, Whose is this?
I put my hand up where I stood in the ranks of fourth graders.
She looked at me. Come out here, she said.
I moved to the centre aisle and walked between the ranks of girls watching me until I was at her feet, craning up to where she stood on a dais. She looked down at me, then raised her eyes to the rest of the school and paused theatrically.
Did anyone see her with this rope? she asked, with the tiniest emphasis on the word ‘see’.
There was a tiny moment before several hands went up. Still she paused. Finally, she gave me the rope with ill-grace. And in that space, those few seconds that I stood in front of the whole school with her inference that I was lying, it came to me that she had done this because of Dad, that she must be one of the people who would like to see kids yelling Commo at him. With the wordless certainty of a nine-year-old, I knew that whatever Commo meant, I preferred it and all that Dad stood for, to her way. I saw that adults had choices.
In fifth grade Mrs Bushell was stand-in teacher for my class for a month. She told me my writing was disgusting. She grimaced when I got all the mental arithmetic right. She never called on me to answer a question. She talked more about my hair, what a mess it was. I watched the clouds through the window.
Away from school, the Communist business could actually be funny—like the day the man came to put on the telephone. Up until this day, we’d used the red wooden phone box on the corner. The phone took two pennies which made a satisfying clunk and crash as the phone gulped them down. We had long ago discovered that the flimsy metal sides of a roll of sticky-tape were the exact dimensions of the two pennies. It was a favourite game of ours to use the tartan-printed disks to ring any XM number—Exchange Mosman, presumably—we found in the phone book. We’d dial the number, listen spellbound to the ring-tones, sputter when someone answered, hang up with a crash and burst out of the phone box running and giggling hysterically, scared we might somehow get caught if we stayed in the box.
It had been decided that the phone, our very own phone, would be placed in the tiny room that held Dad’s desk, a three-quarter size spare bed and a large storage cupboard painted a disgusting khaki. This room was called The Study or The Spare-room, as suited the occasion. The day the man came, actually carrying the black phone in one hand and his bag of tools and cable in the other, Mark and I were home.
In here, said Mum, leading the way from the front door to the study. She pushed the door open and then, quickly, closed it with a whoosh.
Er, no, not there. She turned in the narrow hallway. The man stood back.
Er, here, up here, said Mum, and led him through the living room, past my room, to the main bedroom.
There, she said, pointing at Dad’s bedside table. Put it there.
Are you sure? the man asked.
Yes, she said, glancing back down the hall.
I crept back to the study and opened the door. The bed was covered with leaflets and booklets, the Communist ones. Dad must have been in the midst of sorting them. It made me think of the secret books, the row behind some other books on the lowest shelf in the living room which we were not to go near.
When Dad came home and heard the story of the phone, he laughed. He went and looked at the papers on the bed and laughed some more. Serves us right, he said. We’ll just get woken up by the bloody thing.
Mark and I hoped it would ring. Often. Our very own number, XM5929.
Most days we walked to school with Dad. Our route included a lane, a no-address place where Moreton Bay figs and Chinese elms hung over backyard fences and made a black tunnel, musty cold in winter, sweetly cool in summer. Often other kids tagged along. One morning, alerted by some change in his pace, I looked up and saw him rolling his eyes in the middle of the lane.
What are you doing?
Exercising, he said. Making my eyes strong.
Then he stopped and said, Look, like this . . .
He swung his eyes to the left, then to the right, then up, then down and finally around and around in fast circles.
Try that! he smiled at us, open-mouthed in front of him.
Do it again, we cried.
We all stared, transfixed by a grown-up who would make his eyes look stupid and let us watch. It became a fixture for a while. As we entered the lane, we’d start rolling our eyes or else just watch Dad, who would end up laughing so much at us gawping that he couldn’t do it anymore.
One day in the middle, the darkest part of the lane, he stopped and said, Watch
this. He put his kitbag carefully on the ground, undid his sports coat and raised himself to his full six foot one inch and stood completely still. Then he filled his lungs and launched himself vertically off the ground and, while up there, executed a scissor movement with his lower legs. At the same time he put his hands to his head, one as though shading his eyes to the front and the other doing the same at the back. It made him look as though he was running in opposite directions simultaneously, shielding his eyes from the sun whichever way he was going.
Again! Again! Do it again! we were both yelling at once.
He laughed. He paused. He did it again. Two, three times.
Enough! he panted. No more! He picked up his bag and we whooped along beside him, trying it ourselves, not believing our luck.
It was clear that he was different from other fathers. Apart from googly eye exercises, he thought nudity was natural and never owned a dressing gown. He sometimes gave us tastes of watered red wine. He knew how to ask, Did someone hurt your feelings? which is a question I never knew another adult to ask. He also didn’t talk about us—well, not in front of us. I noticed this because so many adults embarrassed their children by speaking about them as though they were invisible that it became clear to me that this was normal behaviour in other families.
While Mum’s strangeness roared soundlessly through our house and Dad hunkered at his desk, I lived as much as I could outside. The backyards all around were drenched in quietness—no motor-mowers then—just doves warbling, a comment through an open window, a line of a song from someone’s radio or an amiable shout from a kid playing. The hours after school and the delicious days of weekends and holidays were spent roaming our suburb with its tadpole grottoes, goat-hopping the harbour rocks and erecting forts in building sites with a flock of other kids. Dad gave us a mantra: be home by the time the street lights come on.
