Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  I should probably feel resentment for my seven or eight months’ confinement in that Idiots’ Class. I have always found it hard, however, to whip up much anger. When I descended on that unsuspecting and unprepared school, which had never experienced anyone as exotic as I was in their eyes, they did, I suppose, the best they could for me. In contemporary Australia there are structures designed to help migrant children learn English and to adjust to their new environment and to alleviate, if that is possible, the anguish and distress most of them experience. Indeed, there are institutions designed specifically to encourage them to retain their native language and culture. Such things were undreamt of in 1947 when people like my parents and I represented the first trickle of non-English-speaking migrants to have reached the country for many years. What else could that decrepit and probably ill-funded institution have done with me? It was, after all, a small suburban school catering for families of no great educational ambition or sophistication, whose children would all leave school as soon as possible to work in factories or to marry at a pathetically early age to become careworn, prematurely aged grandmothers in their early thirties. I was for them no different from the incompetents who were marooned in that class, colouring-in and French-knitting their lives away, because I lacked, as they did, the skills on which the social and economic system was based.

  My physical appearance alone excited the curiosity of the people in that school. Otherwise they remained detached and uninterested; no-one showed any inclination to ask about the world I had left—even if I had been able to tell them about it at all coherently. They could not conceive that I was a refugee from Venice and the Midget Theatre, from nights at the opera, and from the arcane social rituals of prewar Central Europe. Such things were meaningless for them. My membership of the Special Class was merely a formal acknowledgement of the general predicament my parents and I faced—handicapped and disadvantaged through our inability to communicate, lacking those skills of language that provide the grounds for a community’s existence and self-definition. The Australia of 1947 could not have found tolerable the babel of tongues envisaged by the more idealistic contemporary advocates of multiculturalism.

  The school did not, as things turned out, have to face the one problem that would have emerged had we not moved from Hurlstone Park towards the end of the year. Imperceptibly, a miracle had started to occur. I was beginning to learn English, and therefore to possess some knowledge of the world it conveyed, reflected and interpreted. What would have happened if my parents had not found that flat in Epping, thereby allowing me to enter a more conventional stream of education, I have no way of imagining. No-one, as far as I could tell, ever left the Special Class—you stayed there until you had reached the age at which you could be cast out into the world as a well-trained French-knitter and paper-marbler. I dare say that something would have been done about me, for no doubt someone would have discovered that I had a capacity to learn, as most of my classmates sadly did not. Luckily I did not have to wait for that to occur.

  How that miracle began is impossible to distinguish from the broader process of learning—learning to recognise the sights, sounds, even the smells of Sydney as soon as some shape and pattern had begun to emerge from the jumble of impressions bombarding us in the course of our first days. I learnt more English, it seems to me, from people in the streets, from signs painted on shop-awnings, from newspaper-posters than I did from the little instruction I received at school. In consequence, the discovery of language is inseparable in my memory from the discovery of a place and its people, or at least those places and their inhabitants that our very restricted familiarity with Sydney offered. I learnt English in the streets and shops of Hurlstone Park, but even more significantly perhaps, from the vantage point of the Strand Arcade in the city.

  In their early months in Sydney my parents endeavoured to take up the threads of their old way of life. They lived off their capital while my father looked around for business opportunities. In order to do that you had to have an office. He rented an empty shop on an upper level of the Strand Arcade, a place that was not, at the time, the kitschy essay in nostalgia it has since become. The ‘office’ was furnished with a desk, two chairs and a metal clothes-rack. My parents spent a great deal of time in that dusty room waiting for opportunity to knock on the door. When it finally knocked, my father was lured into a disastrous venture that relieved him of the residue of our capital in a remarkably short time, forcing him to seek employment as a weaver on the night shift in a large mill, and my mother to learn industrial sewing. In the meantime, the office provided the vantage point from which I learnt a great deal about Sydney. I spent most of my spare time there, looking, wondering and absorbing.

  The Sydney we spied from the Strand Arcade has been eloquently recreated by Peter Carey in Illywhacker—he locates the Badgery Pet Emporium, that marvellous image of the noisy life of the city in the late forties, in the neighbourhood of the Pitt Street end of the arcade. We observed the chaotic street-life Carey celebrates in his novel. The pavements were crowded with narrow-eyed men in ill-fitting three-piece suits of heavy pinstripe cloth. Many wore sweat-stained pork-pie hats. Most of them carried cameras; they would snap you and hold out a card bearing the address of the studio where you could inspect your likeness. Most people ignored them; the footpaths were littered with discarded pieces of cardboard. The women were also distinguished by extraordinary headgear, grotesque confections, like ziggurats gone wrong, in straw, felt, braid and tulle. Years later my mother discovered the source of these hats in a subterranean salon where customers assembled their own fantasies from the raw material displayed in large containers scattered over the cavernous basement.

  We observed this world with fascination, but because we had almost no means of comprehending it—being unable to read what the newspaper-posters were saying or to understand what the paperboys were shouting—we experienced a strange sense of voyeurism. We saw a busy, crowded street-life without much idea of the reason for this hectic activity. In Budapest, a few months earlier, it had been different: there my parents were a part of that equally frenetic scurrying. They too were trying to survive in the confusion of those postwar months. It took some time for us to realise that those narrow-eyed, hollow-cheeked photographers, with curiously distracted expressions on their faces, were returned servicemen desperately trying to make a living with their cameras and pieces of cardboard at a time of widespread unemployment.

  At length, however, perplexity was gradually transformed into familiarity. We began to discern a pattern in this seething throng. We got to recognise the faces of the news-vendors on the corner of King Street. The milk bar in Martin Place where a lady virtuoso attracted admiring crowds as she poured milkshakes in a creamy stream from metal containers held high above her head became one of our favourite haunts. We learnt to say ‘Tschocolat milk-shek pliz’. We began to grow familiar with the intricacies of the city: we knew where to get certain trams, which trains went from Wynyard and which from St James; we discovered the secrets of the various ferry routes—the large steamers to Manly, the little boats that scudded to the other side of the Harbour, and those which went to all sorts of mysterious and perplexing places.

  Eventually the confusing meaninglessness of this world began to be changed into some form of coherence, something that could be understood and tamed. We began to learn the words essential to daily existence. We knew where to go for bread and what the word for bread was; we were no longer restricted to buying only what we could point at. More complex symbols or linguistic forms gradually yielded their secrets, but always in a haphazard manner. We were great cinema-goers in those years. One of the marvels of the cinema is that you can understand and enjoy a great deal of what it has to offer, even if you comprehend practically none of the dialogue. Even advertising-posters contributed to our education. You had only to glance at one of them pasted to the wall of a cinema to know that it was advertising Gone with the Wind—now we knew the word for wind. One cur
ious feature of these posters puzzled us and no amount of guesswork would solve their riddle. What was the purpose of those shapes printed in the corners which contained the letter G or A? We discovered their meaning one day when I was refused admission to the Embassy in Castlereagh Street. ‘For General Exhibition’ and ‘For Adults Only’ entered our lexicon.

  That is how I learnt English; not by any system of instruction but through the piecing together of an infinite number of small, insignificant details, often becoming familiar with peripheral, at times recondite, phrases and expressions well before the essentials were mastered. Slowly the layers of knowledge, the intersection of language and experience, increased. In harmony with the acquisition of language—indeed in a way quite inseparable from it—came a greater familiarity with the world it conveyed. Once more, this was achieved in a wholly random manner. For instance, we soon discovered the beaches in that torrid summer and autumn of 1947, and indulged in the Central-European worship of sunbathing, not recognising the ferocity of the Australian sun, and thus getting burnt to a frazzle on several painful occasions. For some reason, though, the beach we favoured most was Cronulla, a long and inconvenient train trip from Hurlstone Park. Why had we not discovered Manly or Bondi? I remember that someone took us to Cronulla in a car; after that Cronulla was the place we knew and patronised. Much of what we did in those early months was haphazard or the product of whim, chance or ignorance. During our years in Epping, before the momentous day when my father took delivery of a beige Morris Minor, we used to go to Balmoral, which had become our favourite beach, by a roundabout, inconvenient and unreliable route, not realising that there were much easier ways of getting there, just because that was the way we had discovered during our first summer in Epping.

  While I was learning English in this laborious and inefficient manner, gradually outstripping the intellectual demands made on me by the Special Class, I embarked on another voyage of discovery: I became for a time a voracious reader. Although I had received almost no formal schooling before coming to Australia, my mother had taught me to read when I was about seven, and also to write after a fashion—though my handwriting has always been vile and difficult to read. I did not take to books, however, until those depressing months in Hurlstone Park, when I needed an escape from the boredom and the nastiness of life at school. Once again I attempted to find consolation in wildly romantic fantasies, the converse of the drab reality of my surroundings. My reading matter was, to say the least, curious. My parents had brought a few books with them—more were on the high seas with our furniture—which formed a staple of reading and re-reading until they were eventually swapped for other books. They were the usual romantic or sensationalist fiction relished by middle-class readers in Europe as much as in Australia. I read anything and everything. If my parents had any misgivings about the suitability of the books I was reading, wisely they said nothing. Dubious stuff was better, after all, than nothing.

  I devoured a weird selection of novels. Several were Ruritanian romances in a genre inspired by The Prisoner of Zenda. There were a couple of twenties society-sagas in which aristocractic gentlemen, who were usually called Ödön or Aristide, spent a great deal of time eyeing voluptuous demi-mondaines through gold-rimmed monocles. One particularly violent book—the source of several disturbed nights—was called Via Mala. It described the grim life of a family in a remote Swiss valley who were kept in the most abject bondage by a tyrannical patriarch, the owner of a sawmill. This nasty and brutal tale surfaced one evening not long ago when I watched a German film adaptation of the novel on satellite television in London. I slept peacefully that night.

  The book that made the greatest impression on me, though, was an account of the life of Leonardo da Vinci. This was my favourite book; I must have read it a dozen times—I resolutely refused to consign it to the pile of books for barter—yet curiously I have forgotten both the title and the name of the author. I became enamoured of its lurid and no doubt quite fanciful images of Renaissance Italy; these exerted the same magical influence on me as those nights at the opera in the long-distant past of the previous year. I thrilled to the splendours and brutalities of that heroic world. I always envisaged its proud princes and arrogant popes, its brigands lurking on moonlit nights behind a majestic Palladian portico, and its courtesans waiting to ensnare their latest victims within the frame of a gilt proscenium arch, illuminated by the mystery of a theatrical illusion. Once more I was seduced by the highly-coloured fantasies of a world where people lived with intensity, meeting their fate with courage, bravado and even insouciance—an absolute contrast to the drab world of Hurlstone Park and Canterbury Public School, the pitted playground, the crumpled, often foul-smelling teachers in their soiled, sweat-stained clothes, their fingers brown with nicotine, their nails perpetually black with grime.

  The effect of this probably unhealthy influence on my emotional and intellectual development is not for me to judge. I know, however, that it played a major part in the alienation I felt from the world in which I was trapped—it also explains in all probability why, in later years, I came to relish the wonders of the more bloodthirsty of the Jacobean playwrights. What I experienced in those months in Hurlstone Park was probably no different from the experience of many imaginative children, but in my case the gulf between an unsatisfactory reality and a thrilling fantasy-life was, I believe, extreme. I became excessively conscious of the ugliness of my surroundings: the rows of mean cottages in treeless streets, the noisome ditch of the Cook’s River, the sagging wires slung between termite-infested poles, the sea of red roof-tiles baking in the harsh sunlight.

  I grew equally disgusted with the people around me, not only the crumpled teachers, the sinewy boys or the freaks of the Special Class, but also people like the enormous woman, shaking with fat, a cigarette always poking out of the corner of her mouth, who ran our fly-spattered corner-shop. These perfectly ordinary inhabitants of an everyday world filled me with loathing and a sense of anguish that became, or so I imagined, unbearable. Because my command of English was so rudimentary at the time, and my ability to communicate so imprecise and tentative, my despair and isolation were particularly aggravated because I was trapped within my introspective, indeed solipsistic world. If you cannot reach out to the people among whom you are forced to live, it is fatally easy to fall into the error of coming to believe that the lack is in them, that somehow they belong to an inferior order of being. That disastrous and arrogant mistake was to be repeated time and time again by people of my parents’ generation, often with appalling consequences, just as it was evident among the elderly customers of the Balkan Grill in London more than a decade after these times.

  Inevitably, I am giving here a very precise impression of a complex process which was accompanied by all kinds of doubt, emotional ambiguities and violent changes of mood. The development of these attitudes was neither simple nor direct, and, needless to say, it went by largely unnoticed at the time. Yet it had one curious consequence, apparently the obverse of the despairing sense of otherness I acquired in the course of those months. I was desperately eager to be accepted by people whose language I was beginning to master and habits to understand, because I could envisage no other life except their life. The only alternative to the joyless and mean-spirited world of the streets of Hurlstone Park was the hypocritical, caste-obsessed migrant society where children were expected to offer to kiss Aunti Klári’s hand and to employ the linguistic ceremonies of a stifling culture. I felt that I had nothing in common with that over-elaborate way of life. Only in the highly-coloured romances that I devoured during those months, or in the fascination with opera (which had to lie dormant for many years to come) could I safely acknowledge an essential part of my personality, one closer to ‘European’ models than I would have cared to admit at the time.

  Caught in these cross-currents, I embarked on an endeavour (which was to last until I was well into my twenties) to shed every outward sign that had anything to do with my life befo
re coming to Australia—that is to say, to lead a life of mimicry and parody. It may also be that I was eager to discard memories of what had been lost because, from the perspective of the late forties, I knew them to be irrecoverable. Perhaps I was merely perverse in subjecting myself to such all-encompassing voluntary amnesia. Whatever the truth, once I escaped from the Special Class with a minimal but working knowledge of everyday English—sufficient to camouflage the extent of my ignorance—I could address myself to the task of assimilation among the paspalum fields of Epping.

  Epping, where we lived until the year I left school, provided an ideal environment for the task of refashioning myself, for unlearning the experiences and discarding the heritage I had brought with me to Australia. Most importantly perhaps, my parents and I had our own home, inadequate though it was in many ways. Nevertheless we occupied a clearly-defined space which was ours as long as we continued to pay the rent and observed the unwritten conventions concerning the Dunnicliffes and their kind. We were no longer in the awkward situation of people living in rented rooms. Our landlady in Hurlstone Park, though a kindly and well-intentioned soul, had made it absolutely clear that she had first call on the kitchen and the bathroom—you could not sing out to her to hurry up before you burst. We spent much of our time keeping out of her way. In Epping we could shut the glass door of the kitchen that served as an entrance, assured of the privacy we needed to recuperate, to deal with our problems and anxieties, or to have noisy rows. This was a place we could live in. We had known better, but we had also known much worse. As a confirmation of our intention to settle, and probably also as a symbolic commemoration of the previous occasion on which we took occupation of a flat, we daubed the walls with fresh kalsomine before we moved in.