School proved much less of a problem than previously. There was no question now of a Special Class. I knew enough English and was sufficiently familiar with the rituals of school life to survive, though (sensibly enough I suppose) I was put into a class a year below my age group. Moreover, on my first day I did not look such a freak as I had when I arrived in the playground of the school in Canterbury. I had long before acquired the required paraphernalia, including a curious green oil-cloth cape to wear on days of torrential rain.
Both teachers and pupils at my new school were more welcoming; they seemed a little more relaxed than those gnarled and sinewy inhabitants of Hurlstone Park. They were less suspicious, inspecting me with something of the wide-eyed curiosity of country people. They found me very strange, of course, but since they lived on the edge of a city which they rarely visited, but which contained very peculiar people, their surprise was gentler, rather muted. They were less intense, slower moving, much less streetwise than the pupils of Canterbury Public School, many of whom were, in all probability, victims of hardship, unemployment and violence. Epping was a more prosperous place. No-one seemed particularly wealthy (or if people were, they were careful to hide it) but no-one seemed underfed or poorly clothed. In this very ordinary, rather dull world I attempted to invent a personality for myself based on what I understood to be the most desirable characteristics of Australian boyhood.
I must have cut a curious figure. I was shorter and darker than the mostly long-limbed, fair-haired boys of Epping. My speech was still heavily marked by the open vowels, separation of syllables and lack of accentuation that make it so hard for Hungarian-speaking people to acquire the stresses, intonations and elisions of Australian English. Though my vocabulary and command of grammar had improved greatly, I was still confused about idiom, especially the elaborate rules of schoolboy slang with its subtle distinctions and gradations. I was entirely ignorant, for instance, about the mythology and hierarchy of cicadas. I could never remember whether a Black Prince was more of a find than a Greengrocer—and in any event, I loathed flying creatures of any kind. I caused much hilarity by confusing a full-back with a wicketkeeper. I got into a hopeless muddle over the taxonomy of marbles. Yet for all that I tried to swagger and lope like the freckled heroes of the playground. I did my best to imitate their slurred diphthong-ridden speech. I invented anecdotes of family life that were parodies of things I had heard people say in the playground. Yeah, my Dad made heaps on the SP last Satdy. Geez it was beaut at Terrigal. Of course my bike has gears, whaddaya think? I was tolerated with an innate courtesy, but I fooled no-one. The other boys allowed me to tag along, largely ignoring me, a clown in the retinue of the great ones of the earth. Occasionally they would throw a crumb of recognition at me, but I was, and have remained to an extent ever since, on the outside, never entirely a citizen of the world in which I lived.
That surrogate existence was, nevertheless, preferable to the alternative, remaining within the confines of the exile’s world, where the children of my parents’ acquaintances were expected to preserve the polite rituals of well brought-up Central European children. I dreaded our mercifully infrequent visits to Rose Bay or Bellevue Hill. I hated having to be polite to our hosts and then to be sent off to play with the children of the household. In part I envied their expensive toys, their nice rooms, their talk of trips in the family car and holidays in the Blue Mountains. I came to feel increasingly isolated from their way of life. One family we visited on Saturdays or Sundays insisted that their children receive us in the uniforms of their expensive private schools. Such sartorial behaviour in Epping would have raised hoots of derision. In Rose Bay or Bellevue Hill my drill shorts and cotton shirt (for I quickly outgrew my New York finery) caused these children to look down their noses at me. These days I occasionally catch sight of the boy—now a balding man in his fifties—in the streets. We pass each other without a flicker of recognition. I see on these occasions the absurd vision of a child on a stifling summer afternoon neatly rigged out in his Cranbrook uniform—jacket, tie and hat—being told by his parents to play with me nicely until it was time to come in for strudel and kugelhopf.
Caught between confusing and contradictory claims which I could not in any way reconcile, when my search for acceptance became less and less distinguishable from discarding old ways, I found consolation, as always, in the world of illusions. I no longer read those well-thumbed Hungarian romances that sustained me in Hurlstone Park. I had not yet discovered music, which was to be a source of fantasy and consolation in later years. Biggies and his like—which was what the decent Australian boy I ached to become read—failed, on the other hand, to engage my interest. I discovered, however, the wonders of Saturday afternoons at the local picture show. This provided an escape from my humdrum life, a brief period of grace during which I could feel entirely at one with my Australian ‘friends’, accepted at last, even if only provisionally.
The cinema opposite the railway station in Epping served generous fare for threepence—a feature film, a couple of serials, at least one cartoon and, from time to time, a live magic show. The features were mostly Westerns, with the occasional and delightful surprise, like the Technicolor version of The Phantom of the Opera which fuelled my opera-mania with its elaborately staged pastiche of Russian grand opera. The serials were of the Superman, Batman or Nasty Nazis variety. Unfortunately I never managed to see every episode of any one of these serials because at some point in the cycle I would be obliged to accompany my parents (with loud and frequent protests) on those dreaded visits to Rose Bay or Bellevue Hill.
On the golden afternoons when I could go to the pictures, I would walk to the cinema with one or two of the neighbourhood boys who tolerated me—but never of course with those pariahs, the Dunnicliffes—armed with the price of admission and a penny for sweets. Some phenomenally wealthy people had as much as threepence to spend on extras, but the penny I received was close to the going rate. We always sat in the stalls, well to the front. The upstairs, called the Lounge in the parlance of the day, though it charged the same admission, was the preserve of the despised private-school boys, mostly from Newington or Trinity. Nice girls were not allowed to go to the Epping pictures, which their mothers considered a very rough place. They usually went, under heavy supervision, to the more salubrious establishment in Eastwood, or even to the city, with afternoon tea at Cahills to follow.
On most Saturday afternoons the atmosphere inside the cinema was foetid. Several hundred excited children shouted, screamed and stamped their feet while consuming large quantities of Smith’s crisps, Jaffas and licorice straps—the last of which could also serve as efficient weapons. During interval the better-off resupplied themselves from the milk bar next door to the theatre. The people behind the counter could be seen bracing themselves for the onslaught of these small-scale barbarians. By the end of the performance the stink of perspiring bodies, the sour, fatty smell of potato crisps and the sickly-sweet perfume of musk had combined to produce an unforgettably nauseating odour. Often in the summer months, after walking home in the hot afternoon glare, excitedly reliving each moment of the show, I would become violently ill with a bilious headache that confined me to bed for much of Sunday.
Most of the films we saw were grainy black-and-white prints in the last stages of decay. They tore frequently, requiring a pause while the projectionist carried out repairs, which always occasioned a chorus of jeers and missiles from the stalls. But nothing could detract from the thrill and the enchantment of watching brave heroes defeat in single-handed combat an entire cavalry of Red Indians or the bulk of the Luftwaffe. We celebrated each Saturday afternoon the eternal victory of justice and nobility over the forces of darkness. Those flickering black-and-white images may not have had the allure of my glorious nights at the opera, of romantic moonlit scenes on the banks of the Nile or in a scented Japanese garden, but they were the next best thing. I shouted and yelled, jumped up and down, cheered and hissed with people who were tempor
arily my friends. In that world of illusions I had become accepted as a member of the tribe—even though by Monday morning I would be relegated to the ambiguous position of being neither inside nor outside, dwelling in a no-man’s-land between the alien and the accepted. These memories of the Saturday afternoon picture show are, for me, emblems of how far one may learn the language and the customs of other people—and also of the point beyond which you cannot claim to belong to your new world, no matter how expertly you have learnt to mimic its ways.
THE LIVING DEAD
Unlike those of us who came to Australia as children, many postwar migrants were too old to learn English with any measure of efficiency. They spent their years in Australia in almost complete isolation, indifferent to their surroundings, and, in many instances, totally ignorant of the society in which they nominally lived. My maternal grandmother, the companion of my days in Venice and at the Midget Theatre, was typical of these unfortunate people.
She arrived in 1949 after an extraordinarily difficult journey for a poorly-educated woman whose experience of the world had not extended farther than the railway line between Vienna and Budapest. In the company of another lady in her fifties, she travelled by train to Paris where they were taken under the wings of an agency charged with helping the thousands of people restlessly moving around Europe in those chaotic years. These people made sure that the two women reached their small hotel, in one of the streets near the Madeleine as far as we could gather from my grandmother’s rather confused accounts of her time in Paris. They took them to the Eiffel Tower, which my grandmother refused to ascend, and also (or so she insisted in the face of any suggestion that she might have been mistaken) to the Paris Opera, where she was outraged by the sight of all those naked women waving fans. She remarked that her father had been wise when he refused to allow her younger sister to accept a scholarship to the Vienna Opera School. If that was what opera was like, she was glad that there had been no naked showgirls in her family.
From Paris they travelled to Cherbourg for the five-day crossing to New York, third class on the Queen Elizabeth. They could not find their way to the dining saloon in the ship’s maze of passages and corridors and would have gone without food if their cabin-steward had not taken pity on them, supplying them with sandwiches and plates of cold meat. Members of another aid agency deposited them in their hotel room in New York, collecting them a few days later when it was time to leave for San Francisco. Otherwise they were ignored; they spent all their time in the hotel where, mercifully, the staff in the diner understood German. At least they had food. They did not dare to set foot into the hurly-burly of New York’s street-life. They travelled to Sydney from San Francisco on an interminable flight aboard a Pan American Clipper. When they arrived both of them said they had never imagined that the world could have been so large.
My grandmother lived in Sydney until she died in the same week that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Yet she might never have left that village on the border of Austria and Hungary where her father, in his gold-braided cap, supervised the transport of milk to Budapest and Vienna, and insisted that no daughter of his was to become a painted whore on a stage. Neither her experiences during that extraordinary voyage nor her years in Australia made any marked impression on her, or disturbed in any way her characteristic passivity. She remained as she had been all her life. I remember her as totally impassive when we huddled in air-raid shelters with bombs whining all around us, or when she sat beside me on the waters of a cardboard Venice. If anything, life in Australia aggravated that dominant aspect of her character. She lived with us in Epping, later in other parts of Sydney, wholly indifferent to her environment, her gaze turned inwards, perhaps to the world she had left behind, perhaps to the husband she had lost many years before. Nothing engaged her interest or stirred passion within her. She was one of the living dead.
After a time she came to have a few contacts with the world outside. Occasionally she would go to the pictures with us, and managed, at length, to understand enough English to be able to follow a film in a hazy sort of way. In later years television provided a distraction. She could also decipher bits and pieces of print in newspapers and magazines. But she never learnt to speak English, though she had managed by her last years to twist German into configurations that made some sense to English-speaking people. She never went out alone, never travelled farther than the odd day-trip in the car to the Blue Mountains or the Hawkesbury. Mostly she sat at home with the cat, talking to it at great length. She cooked (abominably); she did the mending, sewed occasionally; but most of her time was spent in front of the television, staring at the test pattern if nothing else was available. Sometimes she would go visiting with my parents, but even then, in the company of people of her own kind, she would merely sit and smile. She had lost interest in other people and in conversation. She had no curiosity, no interests. That smile saw her through the few occasions when she had to make a public appearance. I remember her on the day of my graduation, smiling mutely as we chatted with people on the lawn of the quadrangle.
Nevertheless, her life was happier than that of many elderly women who came to Australia in the years after the war. At least she was part of a family, and in the early years was able to make a contribution to its welfare. Others, though they lived with relatives, were isolated not merely from the world outside, but even within their own homes. For many years I had forgotten about one particularly unfortunate old lady until Elizabeth Jolley’s Milk and Honey raised her ghost for me. I remembered her when reading about the Heimbachs, Jolley’s sinister and tragic creatures, whom she places in a dark and mysterious house, where the windows are tightly shuttered to keep out the harsh Australian sunlight, so allowing them to preserve their carefully nurtured Viennese fantasy life of music and dumplings.
This old lady’s life was even more terrible and claustrophobic, largely because it lacked the macabre melodrama of Jolley’s powerful novel. She was probably well into her sixties when she arrived in Sydney to join her bachelor sons, both of whom had emigrated before the war. She lived with them behind perpetually drawn blinds in a small box of a house in a featureless northern suburb. In that half light she managed somehow to recreate the atmosphere, even the smell, of a bourgeois Central European apartment of prewar days. The furniture, as I remember it, was the usual humdrum stuff of the fifties, but she covered every table and the backs and arms of each chair with the elaborate cloths and doilies she kept on crocheting until she lost her sight entirely. The living room and the dining room contained far too much furniture, much more than was needed for three people. Photographs of long-dead relatives were placed on every available surface. The few pieces of silver and crystal she had saved from destruction were displayed on shelves, sideboards and occasional-tables. There were pouffes and footstools everywhere. Faded pictures in ornate frames hung from the walls. The smell of frying paprika and onion and the heady aroma of poppy seed strudel penetrated every corner of that oppressive little house.
Her sons, the ‘boys’, did not know what to do with their elderly and increasingly cantankerous mother. As far as their story could be pieced together, they had established for themselves, in the years before her arrival, a comfortably dull way of life. Rumour insisted that they were homosexuals, incestuously so according to some of the more evil tongues that wagged in the espresso-bars of Double Bay and North Sydney. Both held office jobs of some sort. They played bridge, collected stamps, went to concerts, and took holidays (always sharing a room, according to gossip) in seedy Katoomba guesthouses. They often quarrelled fiercely, with passionate intensity. They were, in a way, Patrick White’s Waldo and Arthur Brown with thick Hungarian accents.
The arrival of the old lady disturbed the delicate equilibrium of their relationship, which was as much sustained by waspish malice as by brotherly love. She was an intrusion into their carefully nurtured ceremonies of enmity and hate. She claimed too much of their attention. They could never be alone now. She never left the h
ouse, refusing to visit the doctor’s surgery, or to have her eyes tested when her ancient glasses were clearly no longer protection against accidents. She was always falling over things, bumping into the furniture that cluttered the house. On one occasion she had to remain lying on the floor for hours after one of these falls, until her sons returned from their Saturday morning shopping.
The boys’ intricately orchestrated quarrels became uncontrollable three-sided battles. Their mother rose to hysterical heights of vindictiveness as she turned now on one of her sons, now on the other, claiming allegiance from each, accusing both of ingratitude, attempting to come between them in her rage and frustration. One Sunday when my parents arrived for afternoon tea, they stood by the front door of the little fibro box, not knowing whether to ring the bell or to go away, while inside the old lady screamed with the voice of one possessed: ‘You want me to die! That’s what both of you want! You won’t have to wait long! I’m going to kill myself now, right now!’ There was a fearful clatter, my shaken parents reported after they had returned to our Epping flat, a noise of breaking glass, of crashing furniture, and above it all, the old lady could be heard cursing her sons, calling down eternal damnation on them, while they, bespectacled office-workers that they were, screeched: ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ My parents turned round and drove home, overcome by worry and guilt. ‘What could we have done,’ my father asked, ‘broken down the door?’
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