Sunshine & Shadow
Page 1
For our mother. She gave us the only thing
she had to give – herself.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
James: Rocking horse years
James: Dreams die young
Stephen: Spiderman of Camperdown
James: Mean Street serenade
Stephen: Woolloomooloo lair
James: Between God and the Devil
Stephen: The end of innocence
James: Tramps like us
Stephen: Wild child
James: Changing course
James: Losing Mum
Stephen: Farewell to an angel
James: Family enforcer
Stephen: Into the ring
James: This sporting life
Stephen: For the defence
Stephen: Gloves off
James: Personal property
Stephen: The dawn patrol
James: Gypsy in the palace
Stephen: My lost years
James: Cutting ties
Stephen: Facing my demons
James: Brothers in arms
James: State of play
Alison: The little sister remembers
Stephen: Taking stock
James: Elegy for a champion
Alison: Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
[JAMES]
rocking horse years
I was named after my father. He was christened James but he was always known as Jimmy. I came to believe that bearing the same name as my father was a curse. I wanted no part of him, starting with his name. So in my own mind I have never been Jimmy, always James.
I was born on Christmas Day, 1960, at St Margaret’s Hospital in Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, in Sydney’s inner east.
Like many people born on 25 December, I have always felt a bit short-changed at having to share what should be my special day with someone as high profile as Jesus Christ. And instead of getting presents and cards at Christmas and on my birthday, I would get a joint Christmas–birthday gift. When I was young it annoyed me that everyone else got presents on my big day: it should be my presents, my cake, me blowing out candles, everyone singing to me. Even though since I’ve had children I’ve always made their birthdays special, I still dread my own.
The fates also ganged up on me for that other milestone in a young man’s life, my twenty-first birthday. That fell on the Christmas just two months before my mother, Florence Dack, died. Mum was riddled with cancer by then and I knew she would soon be leaving my life, and my sister’s and brother’s. We’d be left to fend for ourselves, and that realisation made me just too sad to think about any coming-of-age celebration.
My first home was a terrace house in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, that had been divided up into tiny flats. In 1960, Darlinghurst was far from the fashionable and sought-after location it is today; it was down-at-heel then, with unkempt, falling-down houses, and a lot of street crime and random violence, the perpetrators of which were usually drunk.
There was my mum, my father and me. Our flat, on the first floor of the terrace house, comprised a bedroom with an enclosed balcony. There was a communal kitchen and living room with a TV, and a bathroom that we shared with the other boarders and with the proprietor, Miss Shaw, who lived on the ground floor with her cat and dog, a blue cattle cross named Tuppy. The dunny was out in the backyard and not a lot of fun to visit on bleak and rainy mid-winter nights. The terrace house must have been worth a thousand or so dollars back then. Recently I sold a similar property not far from Miss Shaw’s for $1.5 million.
I suppose we had one of the better flats because we also had our own tiny bathroom, more a closet really, with a gas water heater. It was an ancient contraption. You had to turn on the gas, and then pass a lit match over the outlet from which the gas was hissing out. The gas would explode with a roar into a flame and if you happened to be standing too close you could say goodbye to your eyebrows. I was around two years old when I first became aware of this gas flame and I was sure it would blow the entire terrace to smithereens. It never failed to scare the life out of me when Mum lit it.
I have no memories of watching the communal TV set, probably because I was the only kid and the adults would have been watching the news, Bandstand or the races, which I wouldn’t have been interested in. What I liked was to have Mum read to me, which she found time to do every day, no matter how hard she was working at her job as a cleaner. She would sit by my cot and take me to wonderful imaginary lands, inhabited by fierce dragons and brave knights. I can still see her so vividly today, sitting in a chair beside my bed, holding a Snugglepot and Cuddlepie book with a blue and red cover. When she moved the book, the little bush creatures on the cover would dance about before my sleepy eyes, as if they were alive.
Mum also told me stories about her childhood. She was born and raised in Darlinghurst. One yarn that stuck in my mind was about a night when her family – her mother and father and, as was common in the 1940s, a whole tribe of siblings, maybe nine or ten – was getting ready for dinner. It was a special night because hamburgers were on the menu. One of Mum’s brothers became so excited at the prospect that he took off his belt and swung it wildly around in the air like a cowboy twirling his lariat. Unfortunately, the flying belt struck the naked light bulb in the kitchen, shattering it, and glass particles sprayed everywhere, including into the hamburger mince. There would be no burgers that night.
One day a small television set turned up in our flat in Liverpool Street. I don’t know how it got there. I’m pretty sure neither my mother nor my father, a wharfie at that stage, could afford such a luxury. I seem to recall that instead of watching the new television, I preferred to sit on my own and think or play make-believe games. Well, not exactly on my own. My constant companion was Yogi, a bedraggled teddy bear which I carted everywhere around the flat or when Mum took me out to the shops or to an aunt or uncle’s house. Whenever Mum washed Yogi in the laundry tub and hung him out to dry I would climb up on a stool and rescue him from the clothesline in the backyard and he’d soon become filthy again. Yogi was my little mate, and I came to depend on his friendship because I was often alone. Mum was busy doing housework or off cleaning an office or hospital ward. My father disappeared for days on end, drinking himself into a stupor. Even though I was only a toddler, I was aware that my old man had only two states: drunk and angry, or hung-over and morose.
The most vivid memory I have of those very early Darlinghurst years was the great rocking horse catastrophe. I was three. Mum was down in the laundry washing, and she’d left me in our flat. I was mounted on my rocking horse, galloping over an imaginary prairie like Hopalong Cassidy. I galloped so hard that the rocking horse tumbled forward. I flew over its head and landed hard on the linoleum floor, and the heavy wooden horse smashed down on top of me. I cried and I screamed for Mum. She couldn’t hear me. I lay there, shocked and wailing and yelling my lungs out. I was in danger of drowning in a pool of my own drool.
After a bit it dawned on me that I hadn’t been hurt, and that I was perfectly capable of climbing out from under the wooden horse, but I wanted Mum to see that I’d fallen down and for her to pick me up and kiss me and tell me that I would be okay.
The minutes ticked by. Eventually I thought, Well, she’s not coming, and I extricated myself from under the rocking horse. I stood up, righted my noble steed, hopped back on and started rocking again. Maybe it’s a hindsight thing, but I distinctly recall that the realisation hit me like a brick, young as I was: from now on I would be in charge of my own destiny. No one else would pick me up when I fell down. I would just have to get on with it myself.
[JAMES]
dreams die young
When I was five, the three of us left Darlinghurst and moved into a ten-storey Housing Commission block across the road from the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Pyrmont Bridge Road, Camperdown, in the inner west of Sydney. It was an horrific place, grimy, mean and with an oppressive atmosphere born of the hard and impoverished lives of many of its residents. The plumbing and the wonky lift rattled and clanked all day and night. That block should have been demolished the day it was built. We lived in a shoebox of an apartment on the third floor. In it there was a little kitchen with a bench and sink, a dingy living room with a cramped balcony off it, and a hallway that led to two little bedrooms and a bathroom.
When we left that apartment I souvenired the flat number, 314, and I keep it close to this day to remind me of where I came from and why no loved one of mine will ever live in a place anything like it.
I have just one positive memory of my father. One positive memory, that’s it, and even that’s most likely bogus. He and I were walking down the street at Camperdown and I saw a toy fire engine in a shop window. I fell in love with that little red truck with the ladders and hoses on top and must have made that clear to him. A couple of days later I woke up to find the fire engine beside my bed. Did he buy it? I thought he did. He probably didn’t. More realistically, he would have mentioned it to Mum and, knowing her, she would have somehow conjured up the money, maybe worked an extra cleaning shift, and gone to the shop and bought the toy for me.
Bad memories of my old man? How much time have you got? When I remember one thing he did to me I still get a shudder of anger and revulsion deep in my gut. When I was five, I was fascinated by a little cartoon on the TV that they played most nights to fill in time between one show and another. In it a cartoon rocket ship was fired at the moon and it soared up through space and plonked onto the surface of the moon. The soundtrack that played as the rocket zoomed was the song ‘ Telstar’ by the instrumental band The Tornados: da da dah, da da da da da dahhh ... It was a catchy, rollicking tune that wormed its way into my head and simply refused to leave. It obsessed me. All day I’d hum it, and when the cartoon came on the TV I sat in front of the box transfixed, volume turned right up, imagining that it was me piloting that rocket ship.
In fact, this one day the volume was so loud that I failed to hear my father, who was drunk, yell at me from the next room to turn the bloody TV down. DA DA DAH, DA DA DA DA DA DAHHHH. My father stormed into the room and hit me in the back of my head as hard as he could. His blow sent me hurtling across the room and I lay in a weeping heap in the corner as, his face red and angrily contorted, he bellowed at me, ‘I told you to turn that fuckin’ TV down!’ When he left, I stumbled off to my bed and cried myself to sleep. Mum didn’t come to comfort me. I was upset that she didn’t and I felt she was siding with my father, but now I understand that she was just too frightened to take a stand against him. As soon as he left the house, she ran to my room and smothered me in hugs.
At this stage my father would have been nearing forty. He was born in England and, I learned later, he had a wife and children there before he abandoned them and came to live in Australia. He worked on the wharves, off and on, mostly off. He had sandy hair and was of medium height and was fairly handsome until the drink bloated and coarsened his features and gave him a beer belly. He told Mum and me that he had been a fine cricketer and soccer player in his youth. Perhaps; perhaps not. He had a loud voice and he shouted a lot. Occasionally he sang old English novelty songs, but even then, to my ears anyway, there was anger in his voice.
As well as being a drunk, he was a thief. He had a trick of going to the pub and reaching up to the radio, ostensibly to adjust the volume or change the station, but instead his reaching arm would change direction at the last moment and he would silkily snaffle a bottle of rum or whisky from the shelf and it would be sitting snug in the deep pocket of his coat before anyone noticed. If I was with him, he’d invariably give me a sly, gloating wink, and it made me sick.
My old man had another rort, one that required an accomplice. He’d hatch a plan with a poker machine attendant in a club whereby my father would play the pokies for a short time and then put up his hand for the attendant, indicating that he’d hit the jackpot. His mate the attendant would hurry over, open the machine, spin the wheels so the four sevens or whatever were in alignment and the coins would come spilling out. They would split the stash and for the next month all our household expenses would be paid in twenty-cent coins from Dad’s big bag. He pulled these petty crimes as long as I could remember.
He pilfered our food from the wharves, coming home with bulk boxes of chocolates, a carton of two dozen ice creams, or a slab of meat that would last us three weeks. Into the fridge they’d go. Until I knew the truth, I wondered why we’d get all this food in one hit and then live on dripping and stale bread for the next two months.
He thought it a hoot to pluck stray dogs and cats from the streets and bring them home. The filthier and more flea-ridden they were, the better. They’d become part of the family and then disappear, to be replaced by another purloined pet.
My father did terrible damage to my mother and me, not that I didn’t have the knack of knocking myself around at times, like when I fell from my rocking horse. I was, as they say, injury prone in my childhood years. At around age five or six, I pulled a saucepan of boiling water off the stove and scalded my legs. I lay in bed for two weeks, unable to move, as Mum tended to my burns. Miraculously, I bear no scars.
I loved my mother for loving me, for her bravery, strength, hard work and her beauty, and although she is long gone, I love her today and will love her till I die. I think of her, her beautiful face and soft voice, her warm hugs. Memories flood back: how, when I was four or five, she would take me, holding my hand all the way, to the shops in nearby Glebe and Broadway.
She had the most beautiful singing voice. On the few occasions when there was happiness in her life, she would sing her favourite songs. Of all of these, the song she loved the best was ‘Red Roses For A Blue Lady’. She knew a lot about being blue.
Her only mistake was choosing the wrong man to fall in love with and marry, after he had swept the young and impressionable Florence Messiter off her feet with his smooth-talking charm when they first met in a pub in Maroubra. Had she met a good man, her life, and mine and my brother’s and sister’s, would have been so different. She unflinchingly took my old man’s physical and verbal abuse, his unwillingness to support her. She pressed on, being the best woman and mother that she could be. I often heard her crying, but never did she take out her despair on me. She was always loving and gentle. Nothing was too much trouble for me, her son.
We lived in poverty, but she was always well dressed – don’t ask me how she managed it – and she spoke beautifully, and had wonderful manners, which she taught me, and later my brother and sister. Today it is my habit to ask if I may be excused from the table, I unthinkingly stand when a woman enters a room, I give up my seat to a woman on the bus or train, when with a woman I walk closest to the kerb, and I won’t put up with men being uncouth in a woman’s presence. These things are second nature to me, because my mother made them so.
One night when I was seven, I was woken by shouting and wailing and the thwack, thwack of a fist hitting flesh. My father was screaming abuse at my mother and she was crying desperately for me to come and save her. To my shame, then and today, I shut my eyes tight and pretended I was asleep. I was petrified by fear. After what seemed an age, there was silence, broken occasionally by drunken snores and the soft moaning of my mother.
After an especially bad binge, my old man would sit sullenly at the kitchen table, shaking and groaning and reeking of grog, literally unable to speak. Then the promises to change would come thick and fast, and the vows to treat us better in future. ‘ Tomorrow morning, first thing, we’re going to the zoo,’ he declared one hung-over afternoon. Wanting to believe him, Mum a
nd I were up and dressed next morning bright and early. Of course, my father had rewarded himself for his magnanimous zoo plan by going straight out and getting plastered once more. As Mum and I sat in the kitchen champing to get going, he lay in his bed in an alcoholic stupor from which he did not emerge until nightfall.
Sometimes he’d attempt to make amends for his rotten behaviour to us by spouting on about all the presents he was going to buy us. ‘What would you like?’ he’d wheedle while shaking uncontrollably from last night’s alcoholic excesses. ‘Just say, and it’s yours. I promise!’ Once I told him I’d like a pushbike for Christmas. ‘Done!’ he crowed. Off I went, boasting to my pals in the neighbourhood that soon I’d be getting a bike just like they had. Of course, Christmas Day came and there was no bike. There were no presents. My old man had either not come home or was sleeping off his bingeing in his bed. I went down into the street and the kids all flocked around. ‘Well, where’s your bike, Dacky?’ I mumbled something about it being an imported bicycle that hadn’t turned up yet. ‘Bullshit!’ they chorused. ‘You’ve got no bike, and you ain’t never getting one!’
The kids were cruel, but their cruelty was nothing compared with my father’s. As I walked home disconsolately, I thought I would never trust that lying bastard’s word again.
Another time, after he had drunkenly hit Mum and shoved me to the floor, he tried to make amends by offering to take me to a first grade rugby league match the following day. He had to go out in the morning, he explained, but he would meet me at the corner of our street at 11.30, then we would go to the big match together. Oh, and it was fine if I asked a mate to join us and, of course, he would treat us to a pie and chips at the ground. I invited a pal and at 11.30 we were waiting at the corner. Midday came, then 12.30, 1 and 2 pm … no sign of my father. My friend said, ‘He ain’t coming.’