Adam and I would stay up and watch war movies, then spend rainy Saturday mornings playing commandos up in the trees lining his street; these wet, cold conditions making it seem all the more like occupied France.
I had a ball at Adam’s, though his tiny sister used to get under our feet, causing me on one occasion to grow up a little and in an instant. We were trying to play pool, the little girl crawling under the table, reaching up and moving the balls, causing her usual havoc. We were making a lot of noise, the situation escalating to the point where I hollered, ‘Get … her … out!’ I then heard Mrs Cook cry out from the kitchen, exasperated, ‘She lives here, Justin!’
I stopped stone dead and realised I’d just been a complete dickhead, disrespectful of another’s space. The little girl had every right to be doing what she was doing, just being a little girl in her own home. Evidently I learned from the incident as I was invited to sleep over many times after that.
The only downside to sleep-overs was missing Friday night at home with Mum and Dad. At Howard Place, watching the comedy of Dave Allen had long been a Friday night institution, an absolutely essential part of which was me being all fixed up with a big mug of milky coffee. This had been a ritual since I was still too small to make one for myself yet and by the age of nine was part of my very fabric. The single time Frances forgot to make one for me, I burst into tears.
One long weekend, Adam Cook’s father took us on a cruiser on the Hawkesbury River. It was a great three days, but on that first Friday night I’d felt acutely homesick and I told Adam this. (Mr Cook took me seriously for a second, thinking I’d said ‘seasick’.) Clearly what Dave Allen and milky coffee embodied for me was security, as did Saturday nights cuddled up on the couch with Mum and Dad watching The Two Ronnies.
Juliette loved sleep-overs and had me entranced with her tales of the fluffy-pyjama frenzies that went on at her girlfriends’ homes. Tantalising to me were her accounts of short-sheeting beds, making up ghost stories and scaring her friends, writing notes and putting them under the boys’ bedroom door then giggling and running away. Damn, I wished I’d been there … Looking back on it, I think Juliette’s accounts awoke in me my first ever notion of ‘life passing me by’. I suspect a psychiatrist would call it ‘embryonic sexual envy’, a sense of that which you crave being something that only ever happens to other people.
One afternoon, Juliette rode over to Howard Place. She said she wanted to talk to me about something. We sat down on the street gutter.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I want to ask you about Steven,’ she replied.
‘Steve? What about him?’
‘I like him.’
‘So? So do I,’ I said.
‘No,’ her voice now softly intense, ‘I mean … I like him.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you think he might like me?’
Chapter Nine
Catch and Kiss
I think I got off to a bad start with girls. At St Mary’s, I’d made one fatal error in the game of ‘catch and kiss’ … I never let Sofia Raad catch me. Clearly I’d been running too fast. I should have slowed down! I so envied Juliette and Steve; they were together at the local state school and I don’t know if they still played ‘catch and kiss’ there, but they sure were holding hands a lot around me.
‘What about Genevieve?’ Steve suggested to me as we walked past her house. ‘You liked her, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
Juliette turned to Steve. ‘Genevieve’s gone.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Steve patted me on the shoulder. ‘Sorry, mate.’
I was terrified of girls though desperately wanting affection from them – a peck on the cheek; the warm, sweaty
hand of a sweetheart. My terror had possibly stemmed from the fact that, at St Mary’s, ‘catch and kiss’ had usually meant ‘catch and punch’. Maybe I should have taken my chances, feigned flight from Sofia Raad, pretended to strain my ankle, let her catch me up then turned to her and said, ‘Be gentle with me.’
Maybe instead of jumping up and down on the gravel in bare feet to impress Genevieve Guerlain, I should have just stood still and said, ‘Gee, I think you’re great. You’re so pretty and smart. Would you like to “go ‘round” with me?’ That was the term for it. If you had a girlfriend, you were ‘going ‘round’ with her. ‘Would you like to “go” with me?’ was another way of popping the question. Go where? Beats me … Unlike Steve and Juliette, I never went there.
Possibly the closest I ever got to this magical ‘somewhere’ was with Patricia Faith; specifically, down the back seat of her father’s car. It was her birthday party, we were playing hide-andseek, and it was quite a moment for me. She was nice looking, but she wasn’t like Sofia Raad. Not at all. In fact, in the intimacy of our hiding spot, she told me she thought Sofia Raad was a complete idiot.
I’d recently given Sofia a ring. It was of gold metal with a fake opal crowning it. It had belonged to my sister Frances. She kept it in a velvet-lined wooden box. I thought it was very beautiful, asked if I could have it so I could present it to Sofia, and Frances said yes.
The next morning at school I gave it to Sofia, hoping for great things. She told me she didn’t like me anymore. Now she liked Damon McKellar, so nerr. I couldn’t understand it. I still loved her … She’d said she wanted to marry me as early as kindergarten. Her idea. Now I had lost her.
Plus a ring. She kept that.
That afternoon, I went into Frances’ room on the pretext of having one of our little chats and promptly broke down in tears. She hugged me as I told her all about it – Sofia, Genevieve, everything.
Passing Frances’ door, Bridget rolled her eyes and scoffed, ‘Gohh! You’re too old to be crying.’
Frances, God bless her, squeezed me tighter and defended, ‘No! Don’t ever say that! You’re never too old to have a good cry.’
What I Did For Love
I devised a plan. I detested Rugby League with every fibre of my being; however, in order to impress and attract the opposite sex, I joined the St Mary’s under-10s side.
It was purgatory. I hated the weekly training sessions, I hated missing the cartoons on Saturday mornings, I hated the games, I hated being called a complete un-co by the other kids, I hated the coach. But it would all be worth it just for that single minute at the end of the season when my name would be called out in front of the class and I could go up on the platform to collect my pennant. Also, wearing the team jersey around Howard Place would surely impress Miss Genevieve Guerlain if I ever saw her again.
But most of all I hated the Balmain Police Boys Rugby League Club, who showed me what fear actually smelt like. For an under-10-years side, they were ferocious, professional and employed terror as a weapon. Attila the Hun would have done well on the sideline as a talent scout. Indeed, it seemed Attila the Hun was on the sideline, as the thundering screams of their parents only made these nine-year-olds seem scarier. They were twice as good as any side in the competition and left St Mary’s for dead.
So, where does the smell of fear come into it? Well, they smeared our dressing-room with Dencorub to scare the shit out of us before every match. Or else they put it on so thickly it permeated the solid concrete between our dressing-room and theirs. Either way, it worked.
Female suitors that first year? Nil.
I signed up for the under-11s.
Childhood Smells
Smell is such a strong trigger for memory.
I started taking solo bike rides around Epping, riding home to Howard Place through so many smoky Sunday afternoons. Owing to the long-gone practice of burning off fallen leaves, shrouds of blue smoke veiled the suburb every Sunday evening during autumn. I’ve often wondered why the burn-off smoke so agreed with my senses. Maybe it meant I was going home, even though on an inexorable collision course with Seven’s Big League, for that dreary inevitability would be balanced by the prospect of Mum being there and glad to see me, and with a delicious dinner simmeri
ng. Maybe it meant autumn, and autumn meant Crackernight was approaching.
There were many other smells that confirmed you were growing up in the suburbs …
Sometimes we’d go to church early on a Saturday evening and, coming out an hour later, the spicy-sweet smell of Chinese food hung heavily in the air. We’d drive over the rail bridge and on to a Saturday night heaven of ‘Chinese and Australian meals’ down on Beecroft Road. The restaurant actually offered steak and chips for what the menu called ‘our plain-eating friends’. But not our family. No, we indulged in really authentic Chinese fare including beef in black-bean sauce, Mongolian lamb, sweet and sour pork, honey king prawns, chicken chow mein, the obligatory dish with the flame in the middle and, naturally, fried ice-cream to finish. I’d marvel as my father sipped nothing less than Crown Lager. I loved the luxurious look of those tall golden bottles, also the feel of the maroon velour wallpaper and the perpetual revolution of Mao’s lazy Susan.
My grandmother lived just across the train line from the restaurant and would sometimes take me there during the week.
She loved the attentiveness of the Chinese staff, the sweet ginger, and especially the clean white tablecloths. I would walk arm in arm with her there and back along her street, which always seemed so very dark and frosty. Her fake-fur coat arm felt warm and cosy, and it was my privilege to guide that grand old bird’s steps in the dark. In any case, you just had to follow your nose.
But perhaps the definitive smell of the suburbs was that of freshly cut grass, the only smell I know of as simultaneously comforting and nauseating.
On the subject of smell, there were always the farting competitions with my brother, of course. He had the bunk below me, and hot air rises. So he had a bit of an unfair advantage there.
Childhood Sounds
It was in Third Class that I started getting serious about music due to ABC Radio’s Sing Sing Sing. This was a superb sing-along program the whole class would tune in to once a week, also a child’s introduction to reading and appreciating music. My favourite songs included On Top of the World by The Carpenters, Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival and also Day by Day, that most emotive of songs from the rock opera Godspell. It almost made me cry to sing that one; I found something so very moving in its aspiration, ‘To see Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly, day by day …’ I was, in fact, profoundly touched by the nature of God that the song implied, a God so loving and so good that all He expects is that you keep trying.
A defining moment for me was hearing The Beatles for the first time. When that vinyl disk began to spin, the noise that came out of our old valve stereo gave me a complete body shiver. The record had arrived on unexpected loan from next door and there was a veritable magic in those tracks: Twist and Shout, Ya Cain’t Do Thaaat and I Saw Her Standing There. ‘Ah wohn … tew … three … fowwhhh!’
These songs had me in a voodoo rage, no mean feat as there was a hell of a lot of great music going on around me already, both from my brother and from the radio being on every morning in Howard Place. (This was the era of disposable pop music still being of such high quality that the record companies could throw out Monday’s masterpiece for Tuesday’s, and I heard it all whilst hurriedly pulling my socks on for school.) In any case, since the moment those Beatles songs entered my ears I have been bodily possessed by the Devil’s music and remain addicted to rock and roll in all its forms.
At this time my sister Bridget was old enough to have become a green eye-shadowed, pop music teeny-bopper, her then ambition in life being to marry Elton John. Years before Boy George made homosexuality an open matter, Elton John was accepted as a hetero heart-throb for young girls. I certainly didn’t know he was gay – I didn’t know what gay was. Gay meant ‘happy’. Nor could I define ‘transvestite’. With The Rocky Horror Picture Show in its first release, Frances bought the soundtrack. After just a few listens, I was quite competently belting out Sweet Transvestite to an unbelieving older sister. Evidently I had Tim Curry’s voice and posture down to a tee and in full theatrical register.
Star Wars!
For the majority of children growing up in mid seventies Australia, the greatest single cinema experience of that decade was, without a doubt, Star Wars. Transporting our minds to a parallel dimension, no greater emancipation from the reality of the suburbs could have been granted us.
It may come as a shock to the young Star Wars fans of today, but the first film in the series, Episode Four - A New Hope, came out nearly twenty years before they were born. It was in 1977 that we kids first zoomed alongside Luke Skywalker, fighting many a heroic cul-de-sac space battle with cricket-stump light-sabres. ‘Yes, an elegant weapon …’ Countless Jedi fingers were battered, the Empire gained many a bruised rib and, though the Force was always with us, the lure of the Dark Side was strong. Particularly when, mid spacebattle, you could smell that your mum was making your favourite thing for tea.
No film had been more massively anticipated by us. The first I’d heard of it was during a school excursion to the Hornsby Cinema. We were there to see Storm Boy, a charming Australian film about a young boy and his relationship with a pelican. It was during the movie previews, however, that the Star Wars logo exploded onto the screen. Accompanied by John Williams’ magnificent orchestral fanfare, a deep American voice promised that we’d soon be witnessing something to make the birth of Christ seem like a B-feature.
I was, in fact, mightily surprised by the film when I went to see it. What I expected was an amazing futuristic experience beyond my wildest dreams. That I got, plus something I didn’t expect: the good old-fashioned story on which it all rested. At a time when I was just starting to realise what a ‘good old-fashioned story’ was, Star Wars provided me with the perfect example of one, plus with an inkling of all such a story can tell.
The film was a surprise from its opening credits. To me science fiction meant ‘the future’. And here I was being presented with something from ‘a long, long time ago …’ I expected marvellous special effects, and got them, but when I came out of the picture, my first reaction wasn’t, ‘Gee, great special effects,’ it was, ‘Gee, what a great story.’
I think the first release of Star Wars was such a powerful event for us not only because it was such a fantastic film but because we had to ‘keep it alive in our minds’, and out of necessity; 1977 was twenty years before DVDs were invented. Not even videotapes were widely available to the general public. If your family owned a home video recorder, your father was probably a film director and even if he was, you couldn’t just pop down to the local video store and rent a copy of Star Wars as Blockbuster didn’t exist yet either.
In this era before home video, many families owned small film projectors called ‘Super 8s’, but these were for screening mainly home movies. Cinema films were available on Super 8, but these films were not latest releases and no one I knew ever saw one. You might see a 16 mm film at a local hall or community club, but these were rare experiences and it would probably be a classic film. One in a million families might own a cinema-size 35 mm projector and might have been able to play Star Wars at home if the single home copy of it in the entire galaxy hadn’t been owned by its director, George Lucas. The point is, when Star Wars first came out, you went to the cinema and saw it once, maybe twice if your mum would take you again, but that was hardly heard of. Then, all you could do was re-run it in your brain. And you did this by acting the film out with your friends in the street. You might be given a Star Wars toy for your birthday or Christmas, but these weren’t PC or PlayStation games; they were miniature figurines and spaceships that came to life through the power of your own make-believe. You became Luke Skywalker himself and your X-Wing Fighter would chase your friend’s Tie-Fighter round the front yard, laser gun peiouw-peiouw-peiouw sounds courtesy of your own mouth. If you were unlucky, Darth Vader might surprise-attack you from behind, but you could always tell when he was because some other kid was breathing deeply in
your ear all of a sudden and saying, ‘The Force is strong in this one.’ We relied on our imagination. We had to.
DIY
I painted my first billycart pink, in fact from the very same tin I’d once used on my father’s hubcaps. In my childhood, fun was inexpensive, homemade and do-it-yourself, and my billycart stood as testament to this. Indeed, even by the 1970s, this icon of Australian childhood of the 1950s still reigned.
Dad and I constructed it in the garage out of wood, rope, old cushions and lawnmower wheels. Given all his work on the boat, Dad was excellent at carpentry and all things mechanical, and that billycart was my pride and joy. But the best thing about it?
It wasn’t second-hand!
Its parts may have been second-hand, but I could claim with the billycart something I never could with my bike or scooter: ‘first owner’ status. As it had been made at home, technically, my billycart was ‘new’.
Steve showed me his old scooter out in the garage. He hadn’t ridden it in ages, but he was still proud of it. This was clear to me from the book prize he showed me, the inscription reading, ‘1st Place – Best Scooter – North Epping Public School – 1974’. It had come to him second-hand from the mower shop down the road (not even from the bike shop!). It certainly didn’t matter to Steve; he’d found some old cans of enamel house paint, taken the second-hand scooter and ‘jazzed it up a bit’, just as Juliette had done with her bike. Then, on ‘Bring Your Favourite Toy to School Day’, Steve took his scooter, once again, ‘jazzed up’ with crepe paper and ribbons. With the decorations now long gone, it certainly didn’t look anything too special; at least, hardly first prize material. Clearly, Steve’s work had made all the difference. He’d made it special.
Goodbye Crackernight Page 11
