The girl of the family boarded in Sydney, unfortunately for her, at an establishment where red hair, freckles and a forthright spirit were frowned upon. Despite her experiences, this girl remained ever a lovely soul towards me, even by my teens, and although getting only sufficient marks to enter Nursing, she did so well at it they let her enter Medicine. I imagine she is out there, to this day, a truly caring doctor.
Five-Star Family World Trips
Juliette’s family and mine went on a few holiday trips together, driving our highly un-airconditioned Valiants all over country New South Wales or Victoria, complete with Juliette’s dog. If only Juliette had been with me that time in Dubbo, ‘The Incident’ may never have occurred, my sister Bridget may have turned out mentally stable after all. Who can say? The point is, Juliette made holidays fun for me and we loved each one we took together.
For one thing, they were such lavish financial extravaganzas: we’d explore abandoned houses, find old bottles, run around with the dog and go to the beach. Indeed, on one trip, I discovered my lifelong fascination for laundry chutes. The rented house we were staying in had one between floors, the first I’d ever seen, and we were (just) still small enough to fit down it. To us, it was a ‘secret passage’. But best of all, no grown-up could chase us down it! Down to the laundry, the laundry, Juliette, and freedom!
I think it might be termed a ‘Low Excitement Threshold’. Having grown up in single-storey houses only, I found double-storey houses nothing short of exotic, and for reasons which remain slightly mysterious to me. Was it an early fetish for complexity? Perhaps it was for the same reason that young children find a double-bunk infinitely more desirable than an ordinary bed, a multilayered cake more mouth-watering than a single. All I can tell you is I never found a Big Mac appealing because it might be ‘big’ but because it had two layers, five if you count the buns. In any case, for me, a laundry chute may as well have been a portal between two dimensions. As far as ‘dimensions’ go, ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ may not have been what you’d call mind-blowing. They were, however, the best dimensions going on the South Coast.
Night of Nights
After my initial near-disaster, I came to wonderful terms with Crackernight. It was cold and beautiful. For once my father was letting me play with fire. From cracker to cracker, you never quite knew what you’d get. I revelled in the golden glow of the Roman candles, the showers of sparks and the ‘Awwwhhhs’, willing it to go on for ever. I think the most magical recurring moment of the whole experience was when, the fuse having been lit, it started to hiss. That tantalising moment just before the boom. I felt the exquisite thrill of cracker after cracker, despite every display bringing the box one closer to empty, to the commencement of the 364-day wait until next time. Till the end, there seemed always another cracker left, another brilliant, fiery bonus.
Mr Simpson from across the road presented us with a skyrocket! Presumably left over from a previous year, with great ceremony it was placed, lit, its fuse hissed and it whizzed up into the night sky. We held our breaths in anticipation of its explosion. We kept holding our breaths. The explosion never came. We scoured the area for it, though it was never found. It was the last skyrocket I ever saw.
But then it was over to Steve’s house where Crackernight was a great big street party! All the families up and down his street had gathered in someone’s front yard and took it in turn to let their crackers off, everybody sharing the thrill of everybody else’s fireworks. Needless to say, with so many bags of them in one place, the display took blissful hours. Hard to pick a favourite – I had so many – perhaps the coloured ball-shooters. These were thin cardboard tubes about twenty inches long which shot out multicoloured fiery balls one after the other. Red! Green! Blue! Purple! Red! Green! Blue! Purple! I saw more of those splendid things go off on that one night than in all my future Crackernights put together. For sheer beauty, though, it was the Roman candles, and their shimmering gold.
By contrast, some crackers weren’t so much for visual display as for pure bang value. These included bungers, thunders, po-hahs and Tom Thumbs, all simply explosive charges of various sizes and crimson in colour. All crimson as ‘Explosive Devices’ must be that colour by law (?) In any case, such was my euphoric state that night that I hardly noticed they were no longer there. It was the first ever year they’d not been available, relegating them, from that night on, to a bygone era.
Aptly, my big sisters had referred to bungers as ‘penny’ bungers, and that’s pre-decimal. As a matter of fact, by the time they disappeared, I was still considered too young to handle them, and I hadn’t resisted the ban. What so transfixed me at that age was the visual display. That spellbinding brightness! Those colours out of the loveliest dream.
Chapter Five
Good Boy, Bad Boy
I think the time I’d made Nathan Silk cry had stuck with me. I’d never cut it as a bully, except maybe on a very small scale.
I became a terroriser of ants.
But all murderous tyrants are brought to justice in the end. One hot morning at St Mary’s, I was dobbed on. A cohort of girls had marched into Sister Stigmata’s office and informed her that I was burning ants with a magnifying glass. I saw them quite clearly as they quick-filed along the verandah above me, a righteous look on the face of Patricia Faith at their head. I put the magnifying glass away and braced for the inevitable, only to be mightily surprised.
Sister Stigmata was a nun of the old school and a strict disciplinarian. I stood before her in her office, expecting the worst. But this religious relic peered hard at me through her spectacles and said, ‘Remember what I was saying to the class last week about “leaders”? Well, this time I’ll let you off because that’s what I think you are.’
In retrospect, it’s clear Sister Stigmata was merely shunting me into acting like one. But I responded to it on the spot, consciously determining to spend the rest of my life being worthy of what she gave me, and of the notion she introduced me to, that of the blessed ‘Second Chance’.
Having decided by now to use my powers for good instead of evil, at home I was elevated to the lofty position of ‘Phone Monitor’. A post of high social importance, its duties required me to spring and answer the telephone if it rang while the family were watching telly. It always seemed to be Juliette’s mother for my mother. She’d call about every second night, and this was Melbourne to Sydney!
One night Mum got off the phone and said something to my father who then couldn’t stop laughing. I asked them what was so funny. As she answered me, Mum did her very best to keep her face looking all grave and serious – she really tried. Dad had to leave the room all of a sudden. Juliette had been sent out of class for telling fibs, specifically, for insisting in front of the whole class that she was, in fact, Dame Nellie Melba.
‘Why can’t you be a good girl like Justin?!’
The horror stories just kept coming up the phone line. Being dysfunctionally ahead of her entire class, Juliette’s teacher made her bring a book to read so she wouldn’t disrupt everyone else. The teacher then took issue with the reading material Juliette had brought: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was eight.
Punishment
How many times were you sent to detention in your entire school years?
I went once. I even remember what for. It was Second Class, we were in the art block, which was noisy as its walls were tiled for ease of cleaning. Mrs McMyer was about to release us for ‘little lunch’ and instructed us to sit up straight without one further sound, or be sent to detention. I shifted my chair minutely to test her threat and was sentenced within a nanosecond.
I was terrified.
My penal servitude was to begin a few hours later at the start of ‘big lunch’ for the natural term of which I was to do sums from the Betty and Jim book on the carpet of the library corridor. I suspect the two-hour anticipation leading up to it was intended as part of the punishment.
When the hour came, in mute pani
c, I was directed to go with Adam Cook, a hardened criminal and serial detentiongoer. ‘Follow him, he’s an expert.’ That’s verbatim what the teacher said, and with a smile. Even Adam was smiling. How I endured the ordeal, I’ll never know, but, my debt to society paid, I have been on the straight and narrow ever since.
Independence Days
One little lunch in Second Class, a kid called Carl Schulz had looked the wrong way or something during class and Mrs McMyer had ordered he stand with his back against a playground wall for the fifteen minutes of recess. I didn’t give it a thought; I didn’t know Carl too well, except that he seemed a happy-go-lucky kid and was well in with a ‘tough’ group of boys in the class. I’d finished my apple, the bell about to ring for the end of little lunch, when I noticed the fracas.
With his back to the wall as ordered by the teacher, therefore forbidden to move from the spot until the bell rang, Carl was surrounded by a semicircle of his so-called friends and was bawling his eyes out. By the time I arrived on the scene, they’d obviously tormented him so badly that his face was deep red and streaming with tears as he howled and begged them to stop. I thought: You pack of Judases! You’re supposed to be his friends!
Shimmying my way through them, I could see they were taunting him physically, lunging at Carl from all sides who, rather than disobey the teacher’s order, seemed tied to the wall by the waist.
‘Break it up! Break it up!’ I ordered, now sandwiched between Carl and the boys and turning to face them.
‘What? Ya love ‘im, do ya? Sheedy loves Ca-arl! Sheedy loves Ca-arl!’ began the chant. I’d just upped their fun into a ball.
I could see no playground duty teacher was arriving. I had to do something. Anything seemed better than nothing and the only reason Jimmy McCarthy got my punch in his stomach was that he’d been the closest. I suspect the only reason I didn’t get punched back was that the bell rang in that same instant and the place became a flood of kids heading back to class. Carl evacuated, as did the group, though not without sundry assertions regarding my gender. Even in the moment, I felt sorry about Jimmy, now doubled up in pain. I’d always liked him. But he’d been part of the group, I told myself, and I couldn’t take them all on. At least I hadn’t kicked him in the balls. That was against the rules.
Conversely, by Second Class I’d gained a cynicism for certain rules. Like the one that decreed the girls always got let out of class before the boys. In order to gain the very right to be let out of class at all, the boys had to sit up as straight as they possibly could, the sacred honour of being let out a millisecond before the rest of the boys going to the one who could sit up the straightest. Ironically, ‘the straightest’ meant the one who could most convincingly arch his young spine over the back of his chair, breath held, arms so tightly folded as if to induce a cerebral haemorrhage. I remember quite clearly just sitting up straight and still and watching Carl Schulz’s face beside me pointing to the ceiling and turning a terminal purple.
While respectful of authority, my first truly independent act was my lone abdication from Altar Boy Instruction Class. On invitation to this, the tough group almost wet themselves to accept. ‘Oh, pick me, Sister, pick me, pick me!’ If only I’d said to the young nun, ‘But, Sister, they’ll just fuck the whole thing up.’
Surely enough, at the initial unholy farce, as one they rendered any actual ‘instruction’ completely impossible. I think the nun was on the verge of tears. As chairs were knocked over and boys ran around the room, I sat at the back and thought: If you don’t wanna be here, why are you? You’re certainly stopping me from finding out what this is all about. It’s Friday afternoon; I’d be better watching cartoons.
Which I went and did, taking away with me an important new notion: that of the Complete Waste of Time.
In another instance shortly after, all the boys were invited to try out at an athletics selection trial. This was a really auspicious event, held every year by the school’s athletics talent scout, a woman who’d won a bronze medal running in the Olympic Games in her younger years and who, despite being in her fifties, still looked svelte in a tracksuit. Once again, the tough group were rabidly enthusiastic and they were allowed a whole afternoon off classes to attend it. I’d put up my hand too, but of all the boys who had, I was the single one refused. I presumed that by this time I had been stamped ‘officially’ un-co and was sad about this as I really wanted to have a go. Anyway, off they all bounded to the local park to be put through their paces.
I suspected they’d hijack this one too. I actually said it to myself as I watched them go. And they did, all coming back in deep trouble for having mucked up and soundly wasted the lady’s valuable time. If I’d been allowed to go, I’d have been completely hopeless, also the single boy there to have taken it seriously.
The leader of the tough group was one Damon McKellar. Any individual description of him is not only impossible but pointless. The simple reason for this is that he projected no ‘individual’ characteristics; at least, none that I ever saw. It would actually detract from your understanding of who he was. For he and the ten or so other boys of the tough group seemed to act, move, speak and indeed think collectively. When they bullied and mocked, they did it in chorus.
For reducing any event like Altar Boy Instruction to pure chaos, they employed a ‘snowball’ system. Damon might throw a pencil at the back of a kid’s head, the kid would yelp, get up and turn around to see who’d thrown it. The nun would order him to sit down, the group now yelling, ‘Sit down! Sit down! Sit down!’ The nun now had to yell over them all to be quiet, at which point the kid would sit down, but his chair would be pulled away so he’d fall down on his bottom and start crying. Now a chorus of ‘Cry-baby Bunting’ would commence, a few of the group falling off their own chairs just for effect. With the nun in the first stages of mental collapse, Damon would throw a pencil at another kid’s head. It was perfect.
I never despised those boys individually – one on one they were fine – but I was starting to despise them as a group. Not that I didn’t feel the need to ‘belong’ …
Wait For Me! Wait For Me!
My brother Pat ran with a gang: the McGinty Boys.
They were a huge family of boys about whom Pat and I later joked that if they’d had a single brain cell between the lot of them they’d have mustered something approaching actual criminal potential. They were nice enough kids, all much older than me, except with the oddest addiction to mindless violence and destruction – destruction, mainly, of other people’s property usually, and always for its own sake. Their vehicle of choice: bikes. Their area of operation: ‘down the bush’. And yes, there’s always one, isn’t there. You gottit. I was the little kid running behind them begging to be taken along on their Sunday afternoon adventures.
A full account of their reign of wanton terror would have made Geiseric, King of the Vandals, wince. I watched on as they smashed a metal pole clean through the front and back windows of a freshly abandoned and very freshly stolen car. One time they broke into a deserted bread factory, started up all the conveyor belts and ran away. Another time they broke into the principal’s office of the local high school, called the police from it, took flight and watched on as the eldest of their number sauntered back into the playground to ask the cops what was going on, but not before one of them had realised he’d left his name-tagged jumper in the principal’s office and had to bolt back and get it. Yet the McGinty Boys and my brother remained ever one step ahead of the law.
Except for … one time …
Their last heroic operation saw them demolishing yet another stolen car – their thirteenth, I presume. A bushwalker saw them and called the police, who pounced. The trail of the McGinty Gang had finally been sniffed. They ran like hell. They got away too. It would have been the perfect crime. If only they hadn’t brought home with them the metal letters off the ‘F-OR-D’ and displayed them on our kitchen table back at Howard Place. I don’t know how word went around the cul-de-sac,
but it wasn’t from me.
My parents were overseas at the time and with me the youngest at eight, we were being minded by the grandmother of the Whites from next door. It was she who answered the door to the police.
A few weeks later, my parents, on re-entering the country, were greeted with ‘The News’. Luckily for the gang, the police had established that they had not in fact stolen the car; they’d only found and demolished it. Luckily for my brother, my father had a lawyer who convinced the magistrate that, as my father was a dentist, that meant my brother was ‘from a good family’. If only he’d known about stolen cars numbers one through twelve.
As the case was finally wrapped up, one day a police car parked for half a day outside our house while they interviewed the Whites. From Frances’ room, I peered through the blinds while she did her uni homework.
‘Why are they staying there?’ I put to her. ‘Hasn’t Pat been let off?’
She looked down to me, put her arm around my shoulders and advised, ‘Yes, he’s been let off. That’s just how they make you pay.’
Frances was always good for societal explanations like that, explanations which, one by one, were opening my eyes to the world around me. As each one came, I felt quietly exhilarated. It was, in fact, the exhilaration of growing up.
A White-bread World
I was growing up in one. Of course, at the time I had no awareness of the term, but my Melbourne stays with Juliette showed me a thing or two about my own world by contrast to hers.
Goodbye Crackernight Page 7
