The Story of Danny Dunn

by Bryce Courtenay

  He knew that showing the house to Brenda was pointless. She would simply dismiss the idea with a sniff. Besides, she wanted them to build on the vacant block beside the Hero, which she’d recently acquired. Brenda had been in the business of running a pub for thirty-six years, and she’d started to talk about retiring in five or six years but taking it a little easier in the meantime. She wanted more leisure to enjoy her two granddaughters, especially as she’d worked so hard throughout Danny’s childhood. While she didn’t expect Danny to become a publican or take over the day-to-day running of the pub, she wanted him to supervise the business, which she and Half Dunn intended leaving to the twins. In order to keep an eye on the manager and staff, Danny and Helen would need to be close by; next door would be ideal. So, without consulting them, she’d purchased the vacant lot.

  Curiously, over the years Helen had shown an unexpected interest in how the place was run. She’d help behind the bar if there was a crisis and would laughingly explain that she saw it as an exercise in social anthropology. ‘For the adult males, it’s the tribal meeting hut where many of the discussions and decisions that involve the community take place, and where kava, or its equivalent, is consumed in a ritual essential to the men of the tribe.’ Danny knew that Brenda hoped Helen’s interest would overcome her reluctance for the twins to grow up close to an alehouse.

  Danny knew that there was every possibility Helen would hate the broken-down old dump on the water and that his mother would win her over to the idea of building next door to the Hero. One thing was certain: Brenda wasn’t going to lend him any money to buy his harbour-side dream.

  So Danny decided to show the house to Franz before he took Helen to see it, hoping he would be able to tell her that Franz thought it a good buy, a good investment. Franz, in theory, believed deeply in real estate investment, and in waterfront properties. His parents already owned two in Coogee, a supposedly up-and-coming suburb, and Franz claimed they were both good long-term investments. Helen trusted his judgment, and if he agreed the house was a good buy, Danny knew she’d consider it. Danny no longer saw it as the wreck it indeed was; in his mind it had become a beautifully restored harbour-side mansion where the twins would grow up happy and healthy. Now all he had to do was make Helen see the same vision. A little enthusiasm from Franz, the would-be property investor, might be very useful.

  However, Franz was appalled at the sight of the crumbling sandstone edifice. ‘Danny, you’ve got to be out of your cotton-picking mind!’ he expostulated.

  ‘It’s absolute waterfront,’ Danny protested. ‘Mate, where are you going to get that without paying through the nose in Sydney?’

  ‘There’s waterfront – that’s the Eastern Suburbs – and there’s cesspit-front – that’s here,’ Franz shot back. ‘I can see three fucking factories belching out smoke from here and a street with houses that look like Armageddon has already arrived. You’d have to look hard to find a place as bad as this in the Old Testament, even during the plagues of Egypt!’

  ‘It’s going to go for a song, and over the years the neighbourhood will improve,’ Danny persisted.

  ‘Take a look, Danny. I grant you, this was once a nice house, a very nice house . . . maybe a hundred years ago.’ He paused. ‘That was the last time this neighbourhood was a good location. It’s cheap because nobody wants to live in an industrial slum. Take my advice: rule one in life is, if you make any dough, you move out of a shit hole like this one to the east or, at a pinch, to the north, across the Harbour Bridge!’

  ‘Hey, steady on, mate. I grew up in Balmain. You’re talking about the salt of the earth.’

  ‘Yeah, well, what can I say if you want to toil in a salt mine? Danny, you can’t be serious!’

  ‘I can have a boatshed at my front door. Where can you have that in the Eastern Suburbs?’ Danny persisted.

  ‘Boat!’ Franz looked genuinely shocked. ‘You didn’t say boat, did you? Please tell me you’re not going to buy a boat.’ His consternation was real. ‘Fuck! Why don’t you just tear up five-pound notes, throw them in the harbour and watch them float through the heads and out to sea?’

  ‘No, mate, not a yacht. A new skiff – Whitehall, seventeen-footer. Get me around the harbour faster.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the ferry? Only a dumb Mick would row somewhere when he can catch the ferry for a couple of bob.’

  ‘Don’t start, or I’ll tell you about people who won’t use their car after sunset on Friday!’ Danny threatened.

  Despite himself Franz grinned. ‘Yeah, I know – your back, exercise. But you’ve already got a perfectly good rowboat, haven’t you?’

  ‘It’s too small. I want to take the twins out of a morning.’

  Franz looked at him warily. ‘Does Helen know about this?’

  ‘What – the house or the twins coming out with me?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘No. Not yet. Nor the new skiff. We don’t have a hundred and seventy-five quid available in the kitty, by any chance, do we?’ Danny asked hopefully.

  Franz sighed. ‘Mate, I can’t help it if you’ve had a sudden massive aberration and your brain has turned to mush, but count me out on both items. If you’ve made up your mind to live in a shithouse,’ he shrugged, throwing his arms wide, ‘what can I say? About the money for the boat, skiff, whatever, no, we don’t have that much in the kitty.’

  ‘Okay, but promise me one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You won’t tell Helen you’ve seen it.’ Danny hesitated. ‘Also, not a word about the new boat.’

  Franz sighed. ‘Mate, it’s Friday and it’s after five and I’m going to get into my car and drive home to my rented flat overlooking Bondi Beach, while I wait for a suitable house in my neighbourhood to come up for sale so that I can live in it while it matures into a decent investment. To tell Helen anything about this proposition of yours would be to revisit the humiliation I feel at having picked not only a goy but a schmuck to be my partner in chambers.’

  ‘It’s so good of you to give me your blessing . . . mate.’

  Franz bowed mockingly and turned to go back to his Morris Minor.

  ‘Why do you persist with that Pommy shitheap?’ Danny called, unable to resist a final shot. ‘Get rid of it. Buy a Holden – a fair dinkum Aussie car!’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Franz turned. ‘What was that about General Motors Holden?’ he called back.

  With time running out before Helen left, Danny finally summoned up the courage to broach the subject, expounding the virtues of a harbour-side dwelling, while going fairly light on the disadvantages of the one he was proposing. She agreed, though somewhat reluctantly, to view it. ‘Why don’t we invite Franz along? He’s always on about waterfront property, and he’s in commercial law and knows a bit about real estate.’

  Danny cleared this throat. ‘Hrrrmph! Later perhaps. I’ll arrange a private inspection. What say we see what you think first up, eh?’

  Danny’s heart sank when they entered the cold, damp building. It smelt overpoweringly of cats’ piss, with a distinct tincture of mould to emphasise the general atmosphere of despair and neglect. They discovered later that the Simpson women had kept fifteen cats, not counting the stray moggies that customarily dropped in for a feed, that turned the house into a cats’ toilet. Everywhere they looked there were stacks of newspapers, all, it seemed, the Sydney Morning Herald. The Simpson twins were obviously well brought up.

  The interior, in its own way, was much worse than the exterior. Everything they touched was dirty, damp, and stank of cat and decay. But, to his surprise, Helen simply adored it.

  ‘The furniture is mid-Victorian and only the best of its kind. If we can restore it, it will come up wonderfully,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘You sure, darling?’ Danny asked, unable to believe his ears.

  Every cupboard, sideboard and breakfront revealed more treasu
res: ornate chamber pots, bedroom jug-and-basin sets, five complete bone-china dinner services, beautiful copper pots, pans and kitchen utensils green with verdigris, antimacassars, doilies, embroidered tea cloths all stained with mildew. They found a canteen of Victorian silver cutlery, the bone handles on the knives loose and shrunken with age. Once-beautiful embroidered linen sheets were dappled with mildew. Hand-tinted colour portraits of ancient whiskered ancestors hung from the wall.

  ‘It’s like a combination of walking into an old newspaper repository and a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,’ Helen cried. ‘Oh, how divine!’

  ‘It’s a shitheap! I mean the contents, not the house,’ Danny added quickly.

  ‘It’s a mess, I grant you, a terrible one.’ She glanced up at Danny, eyes shining. ‘But not a hopeless one.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Danny exclaimed, still not believing what he was hearing. ‘Really and truly?’ he asked, using one of the twins’ expressions.

  Helen laughed. ‘Poor old dump. It’s a bit like your face, darling. Once it was probably much too handsome, now it’s been brutally battered, but I do believe we’ll be able to improve it so much that I’ll grow very fond of it.’

  The house came up for auction two days before Helen was due to depart. There were only two bidders – curiously enough the other was also a lawyer, though it turned out he was acting on behalf of a client. He seemed taken aback by the presence of Danny and Helen and it was obvious he’d expected to pick up the property for a song, because he withdrew when he saw they were determined to continue, and fortunately long before the bidding had reached a level that would have required more than the deposit they had saved.

  The result was that the property was knocked down in their favour for what seemed to them a bargain price, though probably most people would have disagreed. They even had a small amount over for clearing, cleaning and the first urgent repairs and renovations. Brenda guaranteed the loan, and Harry Farmer agreed to a mortgage, unable to resist pointing out that his common sense would probably have prevailed had he and Danny not both been Balmain Primary and Fort Street High boys and had Brenda not been an old and valued client who’d never required an overdraft.

  A week later, Franz handed Danny a cheque for one hundred and seventy-five pounds. ‘Buy your boat. A nice piece of city property changed hands last week – money for jam,’ he lied.

  ‘Thanks, Franz. I owe you.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Franz replied. ‘Just don’t drown the twins.’

  The ship took Helen to Port Suez, at the southern end of the Suez Canal, where she would travel overland to the dig. Danny showed the twins on a map the route she was taking, and every night he’d invent a bedtime story that was set in Egypt and involved Helen. On her return she was often totally mystified by a great many of their questions.

  By the time she got back four months later, looking tanned and fit, though a little too thin, the twins, out with Danny in the boat four days a week, were already old hands on the harbour. Helen was not pleased, so Danny took her to see Wee Georgie, who explained the almost uncapsizable qualities of the Whitehall skiff, and this, together with the obvious excitement of the twins, made her finally agree to allow Danny to continue the early-morning ritual.

  By the time the Melbourne Olympics arrived in late November, the twins were so accustomed to being out on the harbour at sparrow’s fart – a term Danny often used that sent them into gales of laughter, bending over, cupping their mouths and dancing in a circle – that they often woke him up before the alarm went off. Danny spoke constantly to them about swimming, preparing them for what was to come.

  During the Olympics, the twins were bathed and ready for bed by 6 p.m. each evening when the day’s results appeared on TV. Danny encouraged them to watch the swimming heats, yet another of his ploys, in the ridiculous hope that even at the age of five they would somehow soak up the Olympic dream. For days he’d made a huge fuss about Dawn Fraser swimming in the upcoming heats, and when she won the gold medal in the 100-metres freestyle final he’d practically gone berserk: ‘Look, look, kids!’ he yelled. Then, ‘Go, Dawnie! Go, girl! You’ve got it, it’s yours. Go, go, go! You beauty!’

  The twins, excited because he was, danced around crying, ‘You beauty!’

  ‘It’s ours, the gold medal’s ours! Dawnie belongs to us, to Balmain!’

  ‘Hooray!’ Sam cried.

  ‘It will be your turn one day, sweethearts!’ Danny said, hugging them to him.

  Despite all this excitement, the twins soon became bored, yawning, quibbling or plaintively demanding their bedtime story and bedtime song instead, a ritual he observed every night without fail. That is, until one evening when the rowing was shown. The girls became very excited. ‘Look, Daddy. Rowing, rowing!’ they chorused. The race was the final of the double sculls. As Mervyn Wood and Murray Riley crossed the finish line to win bronze, Danny suddenly realised, Jesus! The girls could just as easily represent Australia in the double sculls. Building up their strength and mental toughness for rowing would be much the same as training them to swim. Perhaps he could begin by training them as swimmers, then switch them to the double scull if it seemed they were not suited to swimming. He couldn’t lose! Danny had always imagined them powering home, Sam first, Gabby second, but now he saw them crossing the line as a team in the double skulls, a length ahead of the boat in second place.

  In a split second Danny clearly saw the path to fame and glory for his daughters. He’d never felt more certain about anything. It was the birth of an obsession, although to Danny it felt like an epiphany.

  Settlement for the house had occurred two weeks before Helen returned. It was the beginning of two years of weekends spent restoring it, seeking professional help only when they could afford it or were out of their depth. Bullnose was a retired bricklayer, and with Sammy as his barrow boy, the two old mates worked together, teaching Danny and Helen the tricks of the trowel, tuck-pointing and how to lay new damp courses, mix concrete and mortar, and do basic brickwork. They took a small weekly salary, topped up with a schooner every night of the week at the Hero, in addition to their customary six schooners each week in return for Danny’s massage. Wee Georgie gave up some of his precious time to restoring the original Baltic pine floorboards to beeswaxed perfection and also showed them how to varnish the old stair panelling and stair railings. Then he French-polished the cedar tables and helped restore the furniture. If they needed expert advice on just about anything, they told Half Dunn, who soon flushed out an artisan or somebody else who could advise them. When they discovered that the ornate ceiling moulding was soft from damp and mildew, Half Dunn produced a plasterer and moulder who had recently been employed to work on the Sydney Town Hall. He worked a veritable miracle and returned the mouldings to almost pristine condition.

  Half Dunn lost two stone gardening at weekends with Lachlan Brannan, who was going from strength to strength in the media department of George Patterson Advertising. They cleared the overgrown garden of lantana to discover another garden underneath that still possessed the bones of the original design and revealed several beds of glorious camellias, azaleas and, remarkably, an old-fashioned rose garden. Lachlan’s dad, now off the garbage trucks and working as a council gardener, miscalculated the number of rolls of turf required for an extension to the council gardens – by his own admission he’d never been good at sums – and miraculously the council truck dumped the makings of a large front lawn at the back gate after dark one Friday evening.

  On a hot summer’s day in January 1958, Helen, Danny and the twins moved into the mid-Victorian home. They gazed out at the magnificent view across the harbour from the French windows upstairs, over the tessellated verandah, which had been reproduced downstairs. From the front door and large windows they could look over Lachlan’s father’s sloping lawn and the original stone pathway and steps that led to the water’s edge and the glistening harbour beyond.
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br />   There were only two drawbacks. The factories were still pumping crap out into the harbour and pollution into the air, and the disturbances from the slum dwellings seemed to have increased. More of the broken-down housing seemed to be used to accommodate a floating population of single men and, more recently, women and children. Friday and Saturday nights were a living hell, with the drunken brawling in the street often continuing into the early hours. The worst was the so-called boarding house closest to them, a neglected factory manager’s double-storey building that seemed to contain a great many more boarders than the size of it suggested was humanly possible.

  Increasingly Danny realised that there was something very wrong, and on several occasions he complained to the council with little or no effect. He simply received a letter to say that they would look into the matter and nothing would change. After nearly a dozen or so complaints he realised that someone somewhere must have been on the take. He’d spoken to Half Dunn, who asked around and said, ‘Mate, you’re on a sticky wicket here. Local Labor – you know him, remember he was the shop steward who humiliated me over the water-polo fiasco when you were a lad, scuffed one of me two-tones that day – Tommy O’Hearn. He’s in it up to his eyebrows. He’s on the council. Refused a nomination to be mayor because he’s being nominated by Sussex Street to represent Labor in Balmain–Birchgrove at the next state elections, in effect a gift for past deeds well done. He’s working with someone from the outside, can’t find out who. But it goes right back to Labor headquarters in Sussex Street. The council is up to their eyeballs in it as well. They – whoever is behind this – are buying all the old shit boxes in the street, banging up plywood partitions and renting them as cheap accommodation for the down and outers.’

  Danny realised that Franz Landsman might yet prove to be right; they had a lovely harbour-front residence set on a beautiful half-acre block, but the location might prove to be a real-estate disaster.