Is there such a thing as a porn licence?
Anyway, on your way down the Hume Highway, if you pass two blokes in a ‘65 Valiant filled to the brim with fireworks, dope and porn, you know where they’ve just been now, don’t you.
As Promised, Back Home In Toime For Tea
Well, thanks for joining me on our second-hand, home-painted, rusty old bike ride back to where we came from. I think the moment my childhood ended, physically, was the year my beloved surf mat was no longer a magic carpet.
It was our first morning at the beach on our annual summer holidays, my ‘growth spurt’ had just kicked in, and whereas the old surf mat had skimmed me along year after year as if on air, now it felt sluggish. Yes, puberty had pounced, and I had my first pimple.
‘Better not jump on the bed anymore, darling. You’re way too big for that now, aren’t you.’
It was good being little.
At age fourteen, I was trudging home from school late one afternoon, I’d just got off my sixth and final bus for the day and was walking up the laneway to Howard Place. Suddenly, from behind me, up the lane came a speeding motorcycle, on it the eldest member of the old McGinty gang. He whipped narrowly past me, in hot pursuit of him a police motorcycle. I never asked or found out what he’d done, I just hoped to God he got away, especially as he wasn’t a boy anymore; he was over eighteen now, the gang long disbanded, and if caught he’d be dealt with as an adult. I long wondered what happened to him. All I know is he was always nice to the little kid running behind begging to be taken along on Sunday afternoon adventures.
Luna Park reopened that year and I eagerly went back to the place I’d so cherished. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away and now I was big enough to go all by myself! It simply wasn’t the same. The Ghost Train, River Caves and Mirror Maze were all gone, and I think the Big Dipper as well. The park just felt empty without them.
Like two kids, my wife and I revisited Luna Park only recently and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves; however, we each noticed something very strange about the experience. Though laughing and screaming hilariously on some of the wilder rides, we had a conscious sensation of actually being scared, and in marked contrast to when we were little. On our way out, we both agreed this was because, as kids, we were simply more trusting; a fun-park ride was just a thing of fun. Ironically, whereas you might assume a child’s mind would be more susceptible to fear than an adult’s, precisely the opposite seemed true for us. Though you know the chances of a ride failing and flinging you off into Sydney Harbour are extremely remote, your ‘grown-up’ brain nevertheless informs you of the potential for danger; otherwise we wouldn’t have been scared. How the little kitten chases the big dog away …
All that remains for me is to tell you what I think I’ve learned from my childhood out in the suburbs, from the passing of Crackernight, from that blessed era and all the simple things that formed it.
See and appreciate the little things in life. Never waste anything, particularly time. Be grateful for a cold when you have one, for it is one of the best things in life you can have: a problem that will pass. Never miss an opportunity to give praise where it’s due. Be good to your mother. Equally, as it is writteneth in the Old Testament, ‘Do not loseth respect for your father when he loseth his mind’. (Just jokin’, just jokin’!) But most importantly, don’t hold back your fondness for things until they’re past – have a fondness for them now. You can always have a fondness for them later anyway. Two for the price of one.
A Final Look Back
Shortly before I left home at age twenty-one, my elder sister gave my father a little kitten for Christmas. He was an excellent little cat and retained his kitten ways his whole life. I named him Felix which soon became abbreviated to ‘Feel’. He was a Tonkinese, which actually means ‘Vietnamese’, as in the Bay of Tonkin. They’re a beautiful breed, elegant physically and highly sociable. In fact, Tonkinese cats are so interactive that the breed is actually used by aged care facilities in providing pet therapy for older people. Anyway, this cat talked. No kidding, you could ‘vocalise’ with it for hours.
‘How ya doin’, Feel?’
‘Meow.’
‘Have a good day, then?’
‘Meeeow …’
‘So, wanna watch telly with me?’
‘Meow.’
‘No talking during the show, now, only during the ads, okay?’
‘Mee-yow.’
By the way, he also fetched. Yes, like a dog. You could chuck a sponge across the kitchen floor, he’d spring and catch it in his teeth like a baseball fielder on speed, then trot it back to your feet and drop it for the next throw. He’d keep it up until you got tired of it. The amazing thing was, Feel’s unfailing responses to your voice, combined with his variations of tone, acted on the human imagination to make it sound like he actually was talking back to you. At least, he had the little kids in Howard Place convinced.
One day the little Vietnamese girls who’d recently moved in were sitting in a tree across the road from my father as he weeded the lawn. Felix was, as usual, sitting with him as if keeping him company. I heard Dad comment to Feel about what ‘funny little birds they were over in that tree’. The little girls started to laugh and protest that they weren’t birds at all, but then Feel started to join in the dialogue.
The next day was a Monday and my sister Bridget was at home alone. She’s a teacher and it was school holidays. She answered a knock at the front door and looked down to see a respectable crowd of little kids. The ‘little birds’ clearly had something to prove. ‘Um, excuse us, but could we please show our friends the talking cat?’
Maybe it all continues out there, just as it did for us long ago. Maybe the suburbs still ring, as they once did, with the sound of laughter, with fun that cost nothing until Mum called out, ‘Tea!’ and with bicycle bells. Perhaps there is a new generation of children out there, now a multicultural one, having just as much Heaven as we had.
Somehow, without all the fireworks. They had a talking cat for a while there anyway. (I wonder if he ever told them about his mendaria?) Goodbye, Crackernight.
Epilogue
'Your mother needs you.’
Since my parents retired to the country about five years ago, I’ve visited them each Christmas and Easter. Recently I visited them at short notice, however. Every year, Mum is moving a little bit more slowly (as is to be expected of all our parents), but she’d just been diagnosed with tenosynovitis, a condition causing a painful inflammation of the tendons in her right arm. My wife adores my mother. In the same instant as hearing the bad news, she said I must fly up immediately and be with her – do some cooking, give my favourite old girl a laugh, something I’ve always shared with Mum. At this time it might be, as ever, the best medicine.
They live in Alstonville, a pleasant country town on the Far North Coast of New South Wales. Nestled up in the hills about half an hour inland from the beaches of Ballina, or an hour south of Byron Bay, its altitude and merciful sea breezes keep Alstonville cool while townships on the sugar cane flats or further inland swelter in the year-long summer.
Their house is a few minutes out of the main town in countryside of rolling green. After driving along tree-lined ways, at the end of their street is ‘Summerhill’, well named by Mum, its verandahs looking out over the wide, lush valley surrounding it. I arrived the next afternoon, as always, passing a small black-and-white photograph in the entry hall, a very old one of Josie and her husband Ray.
That night, Mum and Dad and I had a lovely dinner together, laughing how, with Mum’s joints starting to fail, she was now ‘officially’ an old woman. Yes, she had finally become her mother, she reflected.
After dinner, getting myself a Scotch from the drinks cabinet, I passed the photo of my grandmother once more, but this time I stopped and looked at it more closely. In the photograph, it’s as if they’ve just arrived at some glittering occasion; at least, as ‘glittering’ as anything they would ever be invited to. O
n her husband’s arm, Josie is beaming. Behind those horn-rimmed spectacles, her eyes are thrilled and happy, her hair just as it always was to me as a little boy – curly and white – back when I used to hug her as often as I told her how much I loved her, which was constantly.
I took my Scotch out into the TV room, where Mum and Dad and I started watching a movie, an old favourite of mine and one I’d really been looking forward to. What I couldn’t understand then was that, after about half an hour of it, waves of sleepiness came over me, and me a lifelong night owl! It was an excellent film, I hadn’t risen particularly early, yet I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I felt a bit of a wimp. Here’s them in their early seventies, me a strapping thirty-something, and it’s Mum who’s supposed to be all ancient, infirm and sleepy. I apologised to them, gave Mum a hug, Dad a manly squeeze of the shoulder and excused myself.
Closing the door of my room, I lay down on the bed, determined at least to start the new book I’d brought up with me. I must have nodded off a dozen times during the introduction. When finally I got as far as page one, I resigned to sleep, switched off the bedside lamp and rolled over. I felt a bit restless for a while but then became cool and blissfully comfortable. In fact, I felt cool enough to pull the blanket over me even though this was the end of midsummer and I’ve always hated the heat. My last awareness was of feeling acutely cosy and safe.
They say we can dream a thousand dreams in a night. Sometimes I dream of running but not getting anywhere, sometimes of sitting my final exams at school without ever having attended any of the subjects, sometimes (my personal favourite) of being in a shopping mall and realising I have no clothes on. But not tonight. Tonight would bring a dream unlike any other I’ve ever known. A vision clearer, a mental and physical sensation more vivid than any dream I can remember.
Close before me was a woman, old yet completely healthy and in her element, her face as if poised on the verge of telling me the greatest single thing I’d ever heard. Without speaking, she said, ‘Yes! It’s me!’ She was dressed as if for the same ‘glittering’ occasion as in the hallway picture, but unlike the hallway picture, this one was in colour. It was a living, breathing picture, but most importantly, I was in it with her.
She wore a blue embroidered dress, the deep blue of looking out to sea from the beach on a perfectly clear afternoon, the material old-fashioned, thick and textured – I think they call it ‘brocade’. The hair crowning her head was curly but not of the same colour I’d known in my childhood, when it had been white as in the old photo. In the moment, I couldn’t say what colour it was exactly. I knew only that it was, like everything about her, radiantly beautiful.
Josie was silent yet ecstatic. And the hug we had! Unlike in countless prior dreams devoid of physical sensation, this hug I could feel. Imagine the bliss of embracing a long-lost friend and knowing that you’ll never be without them again, a heavenly certainty flowing through you and all around you that they will never, ever let you go from now on as there exists no reason to.
At about seven the next morning, I was sitting with Mum out on the east verandah, sipping tea, me still in my pyjamas, Mum in her old lady’s nightie. Together we were looking out at the beautiful fresh morning, at the flowers, trees, the valley, the glorious morning light.
Dad’s an early bird and even he wasn’t up and about yet. At seventy-three, his idea of a relaxing day off is still labouring in the garden from dawn till dusk. He’s mercurial, the result being a few acres that Don Burke would have done well to visit. By contrast, Mum’s idea of a relaxing day off, just like mine, is kicking back and taking it all in. And there it all was before us, the beauty of Dad’s work: the poinciana tree in red blossom, the pink bougainvilleas, dipladenias, orange pelargoniums, tibouchinas flowering purple, every coloured petal back-lit by the morning sun as were the dewdrops like diamonds on the grass. Beyond eucalypts, tree ferns and palms, the property falls away to the valley, mists moving between the deep greens of its camphor laurels, all touched by the morning glow.
The dream? Of course I’d completely forgotten it, as we do countless dreams. Mum and I were just sipping, chatting, laughing with our usual connection when a kookaburra nestled in the poinciana tree. And suddenly I remembered everything.
The dream.
Mum was entranced. I told her all about it, every detail, what I’d seen, heard, the way it had made me feel. Just when I thought I’d finished, I realised I hadn’t, paused a moment and turned to her.
‘She had golden hair.’ Mum’s eyes smiled at me. ‘Yes …’ then widened, ‘yes, she did. Before you were born.’ Oh, you know how I said my father only reveals the secrets of his life over the course of slow decades? Well, that afternoon he and I went down for a swim in the lagoon at Ballina, where it was all I could do to keep pace with him. Towelling off after an outdoor shower and following on from something we’d been talking about, I asked him if he’d ever been in the Scouts as a boy. You can imagine my surprise when Iron Man said no and told me why.
He said he’d been encouraged to, all right, but had been too afraid of the ‘rough boys’.
I sit on my balcony overlooking Sydney Harbour. It’s Saturday night, early evening, a beautiful dusk behind the Bridge. Juliette’s in the kitchen, where she should be. Okay, okay, I’m doing the cooking – she’s just mixing us a martini.
I got the girl, in the end.
PS Steve: ‘I don’t want you to use my real name in this, okay? I wanna be called ‘Gigantor’. Yeah. ‘Gigantor’ would be cool …’
Acknowledgements
In writing this book, my thanks must go to the following people: Juliette Ross and Steve ‘Gigantor’ Guthrie for allowing me to set down these memories of our childhood; Alison Quirk and Barney Potts for sharing with me reminiscences of their own; my parents, not only for the blessed childhood they provided me with but for reading and checking the manuscript for accuracy, a nauseating experience for them given the hornet’s nest of depressing memories it must surely have opened up for them; Ruth and Robert Ross for their help, faith and patience; Martin Edmond of the NSW Writers’ Centre Mentorship Program for his invaluable advice in helping shape the manuscript; Andrew Howard of Howard & Sons fireworks for his advice on the history of the company and of Howard Place. Also thanks to author Carol de Giere for her help and advice re third party copyright permission. But most of all, I thank my wife, for her herculean support during the writing, for reading every single section as it came and for celebrating the whole process with me from the moment I said, ‘Hey … I think I’ve actually got a good idea.’
Justin Sheedy
2009
Goodbye Crackernight Page 20
