Goodbye Crackernight

by Justin Sheedy

  The most bullied kid in the year was also one of the nicest. I don’t know exactly how he got into the school as, constitutionally, you were supposed to be at least a practising Catholic, but no kid better exemplified Riverview’s professed tenets of Christian altruism than Benjamin Solomon. No kid more deserved to be there. He was kind, charming, talented, with the maturity of a uni student. Maybe that was what Roland Stokes didn’t like about him.

  In any case, it turned out I had something over the toughs. To my immense relief, whereas these kids found Latin difficult, I found it easy. My first day had been rendered a little less terrifying by my Latin teacher, Mr Gorsham, whose manner I found calming and reassuring. He explained the elemental structure of the language in clear and accessible terms, telling us not to worry about something that seemed so daunting as he would be spoon-feeding us.

  ‘Boys. When I was but a lad, my mother said to me, “Gorsham, are you able to swim? No? Then follow me”. Mother then took me up in an aircraft over the Pacific Ocean and, opening the door, said, “Gorsham, now you will learn to swim”. This, boys, is an approach to teaching with which I have never agreed.’ I felt ten feet tall the day he confided in me that I was doing rather well. It was Mr Gorsham who corrected a point of religious instruction I’d much earlier been instilled with. Sister Stigmata

  had spat venom about the Roman centurion who, when Christ on the cross begged that He was thirsty, had lifted a mean sponge soaked in vinegar to Christ’s mouth instead of refreshing water. Can you imagine that, children?! Can you imagine the evil of this man, this spiteful, hateful man intent only on increasing the suffering of Our Lord in His darkest hour? I seem to remember she salivated when she reeled this off.

  Mr Gorsham, however, saw the affair a little differently …

  ‘You see, boys, the translation of the original Latin informs us that “vinegar” was in fact the “ordinary wine” the Roman soldiers were given to drink instead of the local water, presumably as it was either in short supply or poisoned by the angry Judeans whose country they were occupying. As a result, it seems quite clear that the centurion was offering Christ no less than what he himself drank, and that he was, in all probability, a compassionate man.’

  At this point I had a teacher who, unlike Mr Gorsham, was an extremely strict man – feared, in fact. Though a disciplinarian, he commanded respect, by contrast to the infamous Mrs Storch, because he was also an outstanding teacher. His lessons still benefit me on a daily basis, probably more than any other single teacher I’ve ever had. He was also the single reason I never became a teacher, specifically, as he warned us against ever, ever considering such a dismal occupation. At last report, he was still there. New Riverview boys should be grateful that he is. His name was Mr Renoir. His lessons?

  Classic English Grammar.

  The boarders were the perfect group-think unit. They might have been decent enough guys individually, but put them all together and they played this unified ‘role’ of ‘us against them’, ‘them’ being the ‘Day Boys’ like me – lesser, transient beings, less legitimate, as if ‘only here for the day’. They called us ‘Day Bugs’, this culture of opposition being actively encouraged by the boarding house staff as it maintained order amongst the boarders by focusing them on an arbitrary enemy. Their number one rule was ‘don’t stand out’, a key to survival even amongst their own number. I must have broken this rule in some way. During art class, a granite-faced kid from Dubbo named McBone cornered me, evidently having been elected to cut me down to size. I knew he wanted to intimidate me, but this was a few weeks into the term and I was ready for it.

  ‘Y’think y’sumthin’ speshal, don’cha, Sheedy … Think y’better th’n us … Wull, y’not.’ Looking him hard in the eye, I smiled, thinking: you don’t matter. My reply was masterful. A gem of acerbic eloquence.

  ‘Eat shit.’

  I never had any problem with him after that, or with any of the boarders in my year.

  The boarders not only played a role, they struck a ‘pose’: Whenever an impromptu group photo was about to be taken of them, they froze in this automatic still of ‘everything is ticketyboo’ for their parents back out on the farm, dropping it the moment the shutter had clicked. I only ever saw this ‘look’ when a photo was being taken of them but saw it so many times that it became clearly recognisable to me. As if stored in their cultural memory, it surfaced precisely on cue any time a camera was held up. (Recently, I received an Old Boys magazine in the post. On its front cover was a photo of boarders from 1903. It showed the same faces, the same pose.)

  I leapt at the chance to enter my first musical. These were very much a boarder thing (where one went, the rest followed), and rehearsals got them out of nightly study time. In fact, I was about the only Day Boy in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. That first production was marked for me by two things. Firstly, I won a part as one of the principal dancers. Secondly, a very strange thing happened halfway through rehearsals.

  One night I walked in to see McBone sitting up on the stage, a huge, friendly smile on his face as I approached. He called out to me.

  ‘Eh, Sheedy! I hear you’re alright!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re al-right!

  ‘I wasn’t sick …’

  Still smiling, he waved me away, his expression denoting that I couldn’t be expected to understand, but clearly some Bill had just been passed in the boarding house. In a nutshell, having decided not to take my father’s first-day advice, I had survived. I never put this to Dad, but at speech day it was made official.

  Just standing in that line of boys outside the Great Hall would have to have been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life till that time. There was a kind and ancient priest marshalling us all, clearly with fifty years’ experience in the annual ceremony. I had spent my first year in that big, intentionally scary institution and had not only survived but flourished within it. When my name was called, I walked up the stairs onto the stage. A retired Rear Admiral type presented me with my book prize, shook my hand and told me I was Dux of the Junior School. What was so satisfying, so relieving, was that, having been entered by my parents into The Establishment, I’d managed to show them I was worth it – I must be; a large crowd of subscribers to that establishment was clapping me. But more than that. I’d disobeyed my father and he had to say ‘well done’. Don’t worry, academically it was all downhill from there.

  I made some really good friends in my first year too, but that is another story. On the subject of friends, a smiling surprise was waiting for me at the Epping bus stop on the first morning of my second year.

  Steve.

  He and his parents had kept it a secret from me over the holidays, but he’d got into Riverview for Year 8. Now the 290 bus trip down Epping Road would be a daily pleasure.

  Play the Game

  Rugby Union was compulsory at Riverview. Every kid in the whole year had to play, from future Wallabies down to the nerds. Un-co? You will play the Great Game, ten teams in every year, from the “A”s to the “J”s. I never got to the top team, but my first year came as something of a shock to my brother and father as well as to myself.

  Evidently my time at St Mary’s trying in vain to impress Sofia Raad had paid off. Though a card-carrying nerd, I started scoring tries, one time sprinting the entire length of the field to go in under the posts. It was in the century-old blue-and-white striped jersey that I learnt an important lesson (listen up nerds everywhere): Even if you’re not particularly talented re ball skills etc., if you ever do get the ball, run like your life depends on it. Go like the fucking wind. Imagine there’s a vicious monster hot on your heels – whatever works for you – you’ll see results. Once you’re able to switch this image on like a light, your opposite number will be just slightly more scared of you than you are of him, and your own team will be passing you the ball more often. It worked for me, and sport is against my very nature.

  Even the school bullies were impr
essed: There were two country boarders who, as a pair, used to pick on me. Naturally they saw no shame in that, nor in the fact that they were older and bigger than me.

  In my second year, one night after training I was walking down the cloisters on my way to the late bus when, on his own for once, one of the bully duo saw me and called out to me. He seemed, however, a changed man. His tone and expression weren’t just polite; they exuded the respect of a subordinate. ‘Sheedy, I hear you’re in the “A”s!’

  This was Riverview’s equivalent of being a ‘made man’ in the Mafia. He was incorrect; I was only in the “C”s, but his mistake could only have been brought about in one way: my useful form in Saturday matches must have been observed, then talked about in the close-knit world of the boarding house, the ‘Chinese whisper’ effect having ‘promoted’ me to the top team. I should have replied, ‘Yes, I am. Now, kiss my arse, worm.’ I corrected him instead. Still, he withdrew as if there must be something in the rumour, never to give me any shit ever again.

  I was certainly no football star – far from it – but during one match I experienced one of the most surprising, most elevating moments of my entire life. I was playing wing position, we were poised about ten yards from the opposition try-line and the ball was just about to come out of the scrum in our favour. I heard the voice of a parent calling out to his son on the opposing team, ‘Watch out for that wing, watch out for him!’ Then I realised he was warning his son, their wing – my opposite number – about me.

  I still couldn’t chuck a cricket ball, though. At least, I’d always been convinced that I couldn’t … until one afternoon out the front of Howard Place, I found that, in fact, I could. I don’t know why this was, but I could never do it naturally; I had to be taught. Sort of like an accident survivor having to relearn basic motor skills except I’d never had the actual accident.

  Pat showed me. It was in the flick of the wrist, he demonstrated, not in my natural ‘shot-put’ attempted way. After just five minutes’ tuition, amazed at my latent ability, I was throwing that cricket ball so accurately and so hard at him that it hurt his hand to catch. ‘Ow!’ he said a few times. ‘You don’t have to throw it that hard!’

  The Music of the Suburbs

  One signature note of the suburbs and of a childhood long behind was the sound of kookaburras. The happy insanity of their laughter, divine Lunatic of Birds! Visually, they had a noble and commanding presence – they killed snakes – yet they never took themselves too seriously, their sound somehow uniquely Australian in its brash charisma. Ironically, this bird which I’ve always thought could be our country’s national symbol instead of some listless road-kill, was also heard during the midday movie, specifically, whenever a Tarzan movie came on. Then the sound of the North Epping Kookaburra became the signature sound of ‘deepest, darkest Africa’. Quite an achievement, I think, considering the kookaburra is found no further north than New Guinea. I wonder if they’re still laughing out there in Epping, over the white noise of the crickets.

  I spent many hours on the back verandah just looking at the birds, often with binoculars. One Sunday afternoon, I’d been sitting there for quite a while and the light was fading. The sunset was behind me, its last rays touching the birds that flew over now and then. Night was coming on, the birds seemed to be departing, and for some reason I thought – I even said it aloud to myself – I’ll always remember this. The moment touched me, and I had to choke back a tear. I was thirteen and didn’t want my family to see. Besides, thirteen was too old to be crying anymore.

  The other key sound of the suburbs was, of course, the lawnmower. Dad was always mowing. How ironic it was that a million families had opted for the ‘peace and quiet of the suburbs’, only to have Dad faithfully massacre it every Sunday morning. Each weekend after Mass, Dad would wheel it out of the garage and fire up that aural terrorist, otherwise called ‘the Victa’. No birdsong could survive it. I heard, one time, a gang of indignant kookaburras with megaphones had a go though promptly chucked in the towel.

  This infernal racket may to some extent explain my lifelong aversion to the smell of freshly cut grass. Either that or the jobs Dad would get my brother and me to do in its midst. We had a pebble driveway with a giant red gum over it and one time he made my brother pick all the tiny leaves out of the pebbles. I had to pick out all the tiny sticks. It was clearly a pointless task, given the infinity it would take to complete.

  Why were we being punished?

  For asking why we were being punished?

  Goodbye, Crackernight …

  You could still get fireworks that year, but mostly pissy little ones that put out a loud whistle and that was all.

  The last cracker I ever bought was a blazing parachute that I taped up into a bomb. By this time the quality of the available fireworks was dropping fast and this seemed the best use I could make of it. I let it off in the cul-de-sac in the middle of the afternoon. So, Crackernight ended with a whimper? No, with a pretty decent bang, as it happened. At least, the next-door neighbours’ dog thought so. I’d never seen that old labrador move faster.

  The next year, Crackernight was gone. For the first time in living memory, on the Queen’s Birthday weekend, Howard Place was silent. A street which, once the site of Australia’s largest fireworks factory, must have thundered every night of the year to the sound of research and development.

  An era had ended. Banished was my beloved Crackernight, a night which, if it was a big deal to me, had been an even bigger deal to my elder brother and sisters and bigger still to my parents: They used to get a half day off school to mark it, lucky bastards! For them it was called ‘Empire Day’ which from 1905 had replaced Guy Fawkes Night as the traditional annual date for letting off fireworks.

  Though I eagerly anticipated Crackernight every year, children of my parents’ generation used to prepare for it for many weeks, as did Josie’s generation before that. In local reserves, they would build pyramids of junk higher and higher each day to be lit as bonfires on the big night. Instituted to foster their sense of belonging to the British Empire, Empire Day was held on May 24, Queen Victoria’s birthday, though an effigy of Guy Fawkes was still thrown onto the fire in memory of his nearly successful attempt to blow up the English Parliament. (I like Fawkes’s mock epitaph: ‘The single individual ever to enter that building with honest intentions’.) To children of my parents’ generation, the night was so important that not even the Second World War could stand in its way. One night a year, the military blackout, the very real threat of air attack and invasion meant nothing. In fact, my mother remembers an effigy of Adolf Hitler being thrown onto the fire on at least one occasion.

  My grandmother certainly would never miss a second of Crackernight. Although her legs had been too unsteady to get her down the steps of our back verandah to the yard where we were setting off all the crackers, year after year there she’d be, perched keenly on the arm of her favourite chair just inside the verandah door. She always had us move it those precious inches closer to the entrance so she couldn’t possibly miss a thing. Good old Josie, always so desperately needing to be ‘part of it’.

  With changing attitudes, in 1958 the festival had been altered to ‘British Commonwealth Day’, then simply to ‘Commonwealth Day’ in 1966 when the date was also changed to June 11, the official birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. By my own childhood, Crackernight was simply accepted as the Saturday night of the June long weekend. There was a vague mention of the Queen in there somewhere, but who cared? It was about fireworks.

  Also by my day, the suburban sprawl had encroached on the paddocks and open reserves where my parents had once let off their fireworks. Accordingly, Crackernight had contracted to the enclosure of the backyard, and kids had started getting injured as a result. With the rising cost of public indemnity insurance, local schools started cancelling the event. It’s sad to think that with all its folk tradition and evolution, the whole history ended with me, with a dog being scared off.

&
nbsp; That’s, of course, if you don’t count the next year which, though it wasn’t technically Crackernight anymore, still ended with a bang. Well, not so much with a bang as with a case of temporary blindness resulting from a magnesium flare. John Vandermark got it for us. I don’t know where or how he got it. All I can tell you is it wasn’t Crackernight anymore and we were a bunch of teens in serious denial – John, Pat, me and Steve. On that final, unofficial Crackernight, with great ceremony the industrial strength magnesium flare was unwrapped in the backyard and lit. I had only partial vision for the next few hours.

  To fill the gap left by Crackernight, over the next few years Steve and I had no choice but to improvise – without Juliette, though; by this time she was more interested in ‘other things’, and by other things I mean older boys. But Steve and I pressed on, specifically, with metal piping, leaden fishing sinkers and gunpowder courtesy of John Vandermark once again. He was always good to us like that, a real provider.

  We would fire our ‘cracker-guns’ high over the rooftops of North Epping and wait for the satisfying clatter of lead on aluminium awnings: (Bang!) Expectant pause. Clatter-clatter-clatter-clatter … (Bang!) Expectant pause. Clatter-clatter-clatter-clatter …

  Except for one time: (Bang!) Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Wh —!

  We didn’t make any more cracker-guns after that.

  In this sad day and age, for fireworks you have to get in the car, drive all the way down to that jewel of our nation, Canberra, to something called Fyshwick, to be precise. There, incidentally, you can also pick up a supermarket trolley-load of marijuana and pornography at the same time. Oh, and then you have to pay for a fireworks licence for the right to light them back in Sydney.