Goodbye Crackernight

by Justin Sheedy

  ‘What?! Make him wet the bed?! You can’t be serious,’ I pleaded, in pain trying to stifle my laughter. ‘I’m perfectly serious. Works every time. Maybe we better just go and let his tent down instead.’

  Through Scouts I also encountered one of the nicest adults I’ve ever met, our troop leader. Though you could never stay out of trouble with the second-in-command (not even me and I was a goodie-goodie), our troop leader was a truly gentle man. Like a great teacher, Mr Crozer inspired you to be your best, and if he said you’d done something wrong, you believed him. He was a conservative man, probably a mid-level accountant, keen Rotarian and pillar of the Bible Belt north-west. Yes, he took exception to our lighting camp fires ten times the regulation size, but other than that, he just let us be boys. Though one morning while on a pitched camp, he taught us a practical lesson in moderation as a virtue …

  ‘Now, boys. A word to you all about the kerosene lantern in the toilet tent. I’m not pointing the finger, but I’ve noticed some boys seem to have been using it in the early hours and turning up the flame as high as it’ll go. Now, that may leave things all nice and bright for a while, but a too-high flame leaves soot deposits on the glass stem of the lantern. And there’s no point in that, is there, as all you get is the extra brightness cancelled out by the black soot and the chap after you can’t see what he’s, um, doing, so to speak.’ (Laughter from all.) ‘So, there you are, a moderate flame is all the light you need and the best for all concerned. There’s good lads.’

  When this man preached, you listened, as he preached nothing but balance.

  I fully planned to stay in the Scouts, particularly as I looked forward to the next level, ‘Venturers’. Where there were girls!

  Juliette was an outstanding Girl Guide. Outstanding for the peculiar distinction of never earning a single merit badge, for letting all the tents down on her first camp and being singularly drummed out of the movement.

  Involuntary Acts

  An excellent thing about the Marist Brothers was the way they fostered individual talent in the performing arts. Though perhaps ‘fostered’ isn’t quite the right word … They pressed you into service, and by way of stealth.

  In Fifth Class, a letter went home to all parents. It asked them to tick any number of boxes on a list indicating what their son might have an aptitude for – singing (solo/group), drama, musical instrument, musicals, mime, etc. It didn’t go into too much detail regarding what actual use they intended to make of the information, they just wanted to know for the record sort of thing as we were all new to the school. Mum and I ticked singing – group, not solo – also drama.

  I took the completed form to school and dutifully handed it in, a few days later receiving the summons to the junior principal’s office. Brother Kelly informed me that I would be joining the singing ensemble, the drama club, the next Gilbert and Sullivan production, and I probably wouldn’t have time to take up the recorder as I would be entering the Parramatta City Eisteddfod, ‘mime section’. The singing ensemble only ever met once, soon after which I was summoned to Brother Kelly’s office again. I would also be entering the Parramatta City Eisteddfod in the ‘solo singing’ section, lessons to begin once a week with a local music teacher for the next eight weeks. Oh, and I’d also be joining ‘The Marist Singers’, a small but long-running group who sang at local weddings and functions for a small fee per time, beige uniforms provided.

  In due course, I sang Nobody Loves a Little Ant, Boo Hoo at the eisteddfod, won a medal for second place in the mime, sang with The Marist Singers at weddings, also in the ‘key chorus’ in the Gilbert and Sullivan. The ‘massed’ chorus for Trial By Jury was the whole of Sixth Class, attendance compulsory.

  With the drama club, I rehearsed for something about Jonah and the whale, until it occurred to me that I had a Scout camp on the same afternoon as the upcoming performance.

  ‘Well,’ Brother Shannon winked at me, ‘you’ll be leaving it early, won’t you. Bloody Anglicans …’ I could see he wouldn’t be taking no for an answer.

  New Taboos

  In my first year at the Marist Brothers, though he’d transferred to a different boys’ school, my old friend Joe Bashir invited me, and only me, to his birthday party. This was excellent, but not nearly as excellent as the surprise that awaited me there. Joe, through his younger sister still at St Mary’s, had sent invitations to the two most desired girls from our old class, which they eagerly accepted. The delectable Sofia Raad was there waiting for me along with Paula Hanna who’d arrived late at the school to become the single ever rival for Sofia’s crown. It was a magical afternoon – we had Lebanese food and did disco dancing. At first, I was astounded that the girls wanted to dance with me. Yet they did. I was wearing a trendy Hawaiian shirt, all was eminently cool, the girls were relaxed and grooving, a perfect day in one’s life.

  The weird thing was the fallout from it. I found out a week later from Joe that, according to his little sister, these two girls got absolute hell from the rest of the girls in their year just for accepting the invitation. It caused a minor scandal. For Joe, now at another school and therefore completely immune to any social consequences from the uninvited girls, had broken the new law …

  Kids’ parties had stopped being of mixed gender from about the beginning of Fourth Class. I can only assume this was because, even by that time, the social complications of our new sexuality were becoming silently apparent to us. One girl in the class was now seen as prettier than the others, a certain boy as cutest. One girl had confidence, one was desperately shy though desperately wanting to hold hands with the boy who didn’t know she existed. Hence our parents had kept our parties single-gender one year all of a sudden, and I think us kids were tacitly relieved. It kept things simple for a last little while, and though I’d have loved to have still had girls at birthday parties, their new absence at least provided a compromise; it put off having to deal with the inevitable quite yet. I didn’t want parties to be single-sex, but at least they’d been some kind of refuge from the new tension of the playground, from competition and jealousy, from new insecurities.

  And here I’d been at Joe’s party with everything as I ideally wanted it. The day had gone brilliantly for the four of us. So, I just can’t understand how or why I didn’t follow up on the occasion. Why? Why?! Why?! I’m sure I imagined something would flow on from then …

  It simply didn’t.

  But I learnt something, if a little too late. And here it is, my Golden Rule for All Boys: Beautiful girls may want it to happen (Sofia and Paula clearly did), but they never make it happen. They have no need to.

  You do.

  A Trip to the Seaside

  Towards the end of Fifth Class, Mr Curtin gave me a week off school. Mum was taking Josie for a special holiday and Josie had said she wanted me to come on it with them. Our destination? The marvellous Port Stephens Country Club, about three hours’ drive north of Sydney. Jose was really excited about it. She’d never been there but had evidently always wanted to, and the girls at the Epping Senior Citizens’ Club had raved about the place. It was supposed to be quite glamorous, even luxurious. I felt excited too and privileged to be going, just me, Mum and Jose. We’d never been on a trip like this before, and the food was supposed to be glorious!

  As we drove north out of Sydney, it didn’t matter that the afternoon had started to drizzle; my spirits were high and I loved the rain. By the outskirts of Newcastle it was dark early, and passing the giant silhouettes of the BHP works was fascinating. I couldn’t see much of the Port Stephens area once we reached it, the light long gone. Arriving at our destination finally, it was pouring with rain, and the much-vaunted kitchen had closed.

  The place is currently a first-class holiday establishment, fully restored and redeveloped. In 1979 it was not. If The Wizard of Oz had been my first experience of something that delivered on the promise of its hype, then the Port Stephens Country Club was probably my first experience of the complete opposite. Maybe
it had been considered up-market in 1942 (it must have been – General Douglas MacArthur had considered using it as his HQ against the Japanese), but by 1979 … well, let’s just say it had seen better days. At best I’d say the accommodation part of the place was something out of The Shining, if a little dimmer. I bit my lip, desperately hoping that Josie didn’t feel deflated. Surely the food the next day would make up for it. The old girls at the senior citizens’ club had said the spread they put on here was ‘de-luxe’. By that time I’d been exposed to some actual good food, so my expectations ran high.

  I think it’s fair to say that, by 1979, most of Australia was still a few years off realising what was just starting to happen in their own country, cuisine-wise. Well, all I can say is, the Port Stephens Country Club was a good thirty years behind the rest of Australia. The house speciality seemed to be toast. Less said, the better. Except for the ‘centrepiece’ of the vast dining hall that morning: an enormous, crimson-painted ham with paper frills. At least, I think it was ham … It might have been papier-mâché. Even Mum squinted uncomprehendingly as we passed it.

  That first morning, I explored the place. Out the back was a large, old swimming pool, architecturally sort of early Hollywood art deco. There can be something creepy about old pools, can’t there. Well, this one was right out of Sunset Boulevard. William Holden floating face-down, the whole bit. Yet the resort glittered of an evening, with ‘activities’ put on for the guests every night after dinner. One night, they had a ‘silly hat competition’. You made a hat out of newspaper and stuck things to it. For me it was a novelty; no way I could know this was something from 1913. Jose loved the place. She was, in fact, in her element.

  A pillar of these occasions was a very cheerful old man named Jack, a semi-resident of the place whom everyone much admired. Tall and thin, he wore black tie every night, his white hair immaculately brilliantined. His thick, black-rimmed glasses, enormous hearing aid, the gold cigarette case he constantly tapped cigarettes on – everything about him seemed so ancient. The country club could not have possessed a more apt fixture. The one time I spoke to him, he called me ‘Tiger’.

  The days were sunny, if a little cold for that late in the year, and it felt really good being with Mum and Jose. We took trips to the beach, me swimming, Mum and Jose sitting talking on the sand. Each afternoon, we’d sit in the cane-chaired front lounge of the country club with a view of the bay, a room I found a very pleasant place to be. Mum and Jose would have a gin and tonic, for me a lemon squash which I’d pretend was a gin and tonic. I’d look forward to this moment each day. In truth, I felt in my own element, and Mum sensed it.

  ‘You like being here, Jus, don’t you,’ she smiled at me. ‘You really do.’ My ‘element’? Being ‘part of it’, feeling a little ‘grown-up’, sitting, talking, laughing with the two people I most loved in the world.

  Comfortable in her cane chair, Jose beamed. I’d been specially brought along for this holiday. I didn’t know Mum was giving Josie her last. I didn’t know she wasn’t well. In fact, neither did Mum.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part of It

  With Christmas upon us, our house was once again too full of guests for Jose to stay over on the night of Christmas Eve. As I’d stayed with her at her flat the year before so she wouldn’t be alone, this year my brother offered to do it, Dad picking them up and bringing them to Howard Place at the crack of dawn.

  Christmas Day was a bit of a madhouse but a good one. In the confusion, Jose was inadvertently served, instead of whisky and water, whisky and gin. I remember the moment and her exact expression on downing it.

  ‘That was the nicest whisky and water I ever tasted.’

  Jose loved to party. She had danced the charleston back in the roaring twenties. Her younger sister may have been considered the more beautiful, but Jose had never once been a wallflower. Fifty years later she made that point perfectly clear, and time after time.

  It was a frantic time for Mum, what with constant entertaining and elaborate dinners to prepare on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Christmas Night, Boxing Day and the days leading up to New Year. With our guests from England plus other relatives staying, I had to sleep on a stretcher bed in the living room for the duration, the stretcher being set up every night and put away every morning. It was standing room only.

  So I can easily understand Mum’s oversight on New Year’s Eve when finally someone else would be making it all happen for a change.

  ‘Uncle’ Gabe, who’d been best man at their wedding, had invited Mum and Dad to his home at Hunters Hill to see in the new year. Pat and I could come too plus any and all house guests. I’m sure if I’d asked for a sedative I’d have been given one, I was that excited. Another New Year’s Eve where I could stay up! And Uncle Gabe was a hilarious man. A leading Sydney urologist, he not only told willy jokes but played jazz piano:

  An old archaeologist, Throssle,

  He found a most marvellous fossil.

  He could tell by the bend and the knob on the end

  ‘Twas the Peter of Paul, the Apostle.

  Brigitte was out at a party somewhere and Frances was having some uni friends around to Howard Place. It was she who answered the phone call from Jose.

  ‘Frances here. Hello? Hey, will you lot keep it down a sec?! Hello?’

  ‘It’s Jose here, lovey.’

  ‘Oh, Jose … how are you?’

  ‘Just ringing to see where you all are tonight.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got some friends over tonight, Jose.’

  ‘Where are Joseph and Barb?’

  ‘Ah … I think maybe I’d better phone them for you.’

  The first thing I knew about it was Jose turning up late at Hunters Hill, an unmistakable ‘what the?’ look on her face, Dad having paid for the taxi, Mum hugging her and apologising. But she’d made it in time and, arm in arm on Uncle Gabe’s balcony, Jose and I watched the Sydney Harbour fireworks in the distance. ‘This will be an important decade for you,’ she said. ‘You’ll turn twenty-one. You’ll be a young man.’

  I squeezed her arm in mine. ‘Love you, Jose.’

  ‘I love you too, Juddy. You know how much I love you, don’t you.’

  ‘Aren’t the fireworks beautiful …’

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  ‘Finishing’ School

  In the first week of January 1980, I was sent by my parents to stay at the Palm Beach holiday home of some old and very dear friends of theirs. In marked contrast to the Port Stephens Country Club, this was a seat of actual luxury. That my godfather was a psychiatrist is neither here nor there. He had a small empire of diversified business interests.

  I’d mainly be spending time with their son. I didn’t know him well, only through family occasions. He was a year older than me and went to an exclusive private school, the same one his father had. Indeed, just a boy from Epping, I felt like Pip in Great Expectations from my first moment there, for the difference between Xavier and me was not only vast, it was complete. He didn’t have toys, he had antiques, or very, very special toys. Replica guns, for example. A whole collection of them. Exact, life-size, working replicas of pistols, semiautomatic rifles, machine guns. They did everything except fire, though he didn’t marvel at them and play with them like a boy, like me. Rather, he handled them like a connoisseur. Which, indeed, he was. In hindsight, I wasn’t sent there to play at all but to learn.

  My first lesson was to be Dining Etiquette 101. At the evening meal, which they referred to as ‘dinner’, not ‘tea’, I found myself confronted with not just one knife, fork and spoon but with several of each and in varying shapes and sizes. Asking which I should use first, I was advised simply to start from the outside and work my way inwards as each course arrived. Easy enough … And I made it halfway through the soup without incident, I thought, until I realised that the cloth serviette to the left of my place was still rolled up and bound in its solid silver ring. Such an object was completely foreign to me. In Howard Place we
simply never used serviettes; we didn’t dribble or something … The father’s eyes held my expression of mute panic.

  ‘Well … use it,’ he directed. I complied and have used serviettes obsessive-compulsively at every meal to this very day.

  From dinner to dinner, the lessons kept coming through a process of my own careful observation and self-correction. The bowl of water with the lemon in it is not a drink. Never put the soup spoon entirely inside your mouth. It’s fine to gnaw on bones but using one hand only. Don’t put tomato sauce over everything – just a bit to one side of your plate in which you make discrete dabs. Alternate between your meat and vegetables – never finish all of one then the other. Your drink is to complement your food – never to be gulped down in one go. Don’t chew your fork, and many more. Then came dessert! But most importantly, from start to finish, even if feeling no actual need to touch the corner of your mouth with your serviette, three is the polite number of times per course.

  If I’m making this family sound pretentious, then it should be made clear that nothing could be further from the truth. They didn’t ‘pretend’ anything. They didn’t have to. They were

  ‘it’. The genuine article. Pretentious people are pretending to be them. The mother was eminently refined, composed in speech and action, also gracious and patient. I wouldn’t say they were a family of geniuses, but everything they did smacked of originality. The father verged on the eccentric, with firm opinions about many things, opinions I’d never heard before.

  ‘What do you think of this Mr Reagan?’ he challenged me across the breakfast table.

  ‘I’m not sure …’

  ‘Mr Ronald Reagan.’

  ‘Oh … him,’ I floundered.

  ‘You know this man could become President of the United States, don’t you. When he was Governor of California his main activity was walloping young students with the cheek to speak out against what they viewed as an immoral war. Before that he was an actor. Do you think a Hollywood actor should become president of a superpower?! I ask you.’