Chapter 4: Maryborough Still – Loose Ends Tied Up.
Memories
Kisses: Toads, bees, garden forks.
My stepfather kept four beehives spaced along the backyard fence
In his vegetable garden;
Among the pumpkins and potatoes, and the toads that came at night
To sit so patiently before the beehives
In a loose semi-circle, like the audience at an outdoor play.
When tired bees returned home after dark,
Or lazy drones were cast out from the hive, their conceptual duties done,
The toads would strike,
Flicking out long tongues to give the deadly kiss to
All and any bees that they could catch.
It was the way of Mother Nature,
Providing food for all her children up and down the food chain.
This did not sit well with the beekeeper –
He saw that bees were useful in his life, but toads were not.
He hunted down the toads by the light of a kerosene lantern,
Using a three-pronged pitchfork,
Cruelly kissing all the toads that came within his reach
Until the others all hopped ponderously away.
Torquay Beach, Thongs and Drowning
Just before I made it to my teenage years, I almost didn’t.
We had ventured down to Hervey Bay, my Mother, stepfather, and I,
With visitors, early twenties, who may or may not have been relatives;
We stopped for swimming and for picnic lunching at Torquay Beach.
I felt all grown-up among this company, and so,
When they all went in to swim, I tagged along;
My oldies stayed up on the shore, under the shade of tall pine trees;
He reading the Sunday paper, my Mother setting out the lunch.
I was a poor and awkward swimmer at the best of times;
And we had rarely ever visited the ocean.
Still, I thought, no matter, this water is safe, and calm, and shallow;
Enclosed by thick mesh netting to keep out sharks and other nasty sea-things.
When our visitors wandered, splashing, laughing, into slightly deeper water,
I followed, just a step or two behind. I took one step too many, and
Found myself swallowing water every second breath,
As each succeeding wave rolled in;
I stood on tiptoes, and I tried to jump up and down in time with the rising sea.
I had not the common sense to turn and stumble back towards the shore
In my unreasoned panic I feared that, if I turned my back upon the ocean.
I would die.
Just as I was about to sink forever into the shallow depths,
I had a revelation in my mind;
My past life did not flash before my eyes at supersonic speed,
But I cursed the fact that I had gone into the water barefoot –
If only I had worn my thongs I would have been quite tall enough
To not have drowned.
At that moment, one of our guests turned round,
Assessed the situation, and dragged me back to shore,
Where I suffered the indignity of lying face-down on the sand
While fierce hands drove the water from my lungs.
My stepfather, when he was told, laughed, and called me stupid.
After our guests departed from our home,
He gave me a buckle-end belting
To remind me not to drown.
Let me apologise at the outset, for not sticking rigorously to the plan so confidently set out in the Introduction to this work. It is simply not possible for me to write to a plan when wisps of memory float into my mind AFTER I have written about a particular part of my life.
This chapter relates several unconnected snippets from my growing years, which all seem, to me, to shed some light on my character and that of my stepfather Ern.
I seem to have had an affinity for getting into deep water, as instanced in the opening poem, and also, when I was seven or eight, I slipped into the Brisbane River from a boat ramp at Mowbray Park in East Brisbane. Ern belted me for that, too.
Me and my temper: From my youngest years until my late twenties, I had a ferocious temper. I have it still, but it almost never surfaces any more.
My brother Les and I never got on particularly well during our teenaged years, and one day he totally enraged me with some forgotten taunt, while I was mowing the back lawn with the hand-pushed mower. I chased him with passion and purpose, until he just beat me into the laundry at the back of the house. At this time, I am genuinely happy that I didn’t take half his foot off, but I clearly recall that, at the time, I was most disappointed to have let him get away.
My incredible memory for trivia: Francie Jones, a nurse, was a friend of the family, and sometimes looked after Les and me. One day she asked Les (about 7 years) and me (5 or 6): ‘What’s the difference between a post office box and an elephant’s bottom?’ We didn’t know. She looked at us seriously, said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t send you to post a letter’, and roared with laughter. Who says that I can’t remember jokes?
The horse fearer: When I was 13, Ern dropped off a mattress to the Titelbachs who lived at Granville on a large property, with horses. While the adults chatted, Mr Titelbach suggested that Cec might like to give me a little horse ride. It was NOT a little horse! Cec, with smooth and soothing words, put me atop an unsaddled back of a giant beast, and there I was, fear of heights and all, about 40 metres from the ground (okay – it seemed like forty metres to me). Cec then yelled at the horse while smacking it on the rump, and away I went, unskilled, unprepared, and unhappy. After about three years, Cec called the horse back, and we arrived back with me in front of the horse, my arms wrapped around its neck, the two of us staring, eyeball to eyeball, each terrified. I have never ridden a horse since (not that I actually rode that one – I just moved around a lot on its back). Cec was famous for one other talent, according to the BAD set at high school – apparently he could balance a spanner somewhere on his person that one does not discuss in mixed company.
Brother Les leaves home: Les performed much better than I in his Junior Certificate, and he was offered a position with the Post Master General’s office, as a trainee Postal Clerk. He set off for Brisbane, to board with Brother Bert and his wife Carmel, early in 1959. I hoped this might improve my rocky relationship with Ern, but that never happened.
My Bicycle: I did get a bicycle, in January 1959, when I was 14, thanks to the Maryborough City Council kerbside clean-up. Mrs Hilliard, an elderly lady, lived across the road from Ern’s mattress-making shop. During the kerbside clean-up, she put out various bits of junk, and … an old bicycle frame, It had no pedals, brakes, chain, wheels, tyres, bell or lights, but Ern said that Mrs Hilliard, if I asked nicely, might give it to me. I owned a bicycle!
Unfortunately, I had no money except £40 (this was well before the introduction of decimal currency) in my bank account, and Ern said I could only use a little of that.
Fortunately, for my birthday, my brothers all came to the rescue (except for Allan – he was off overseas in the navy). Les gave the money for a bell, Bert the brakes, Jim the pedals and light, and Austin the wheels and tyres. I bought the chain, and spent the rest of my money at Wilcox’s Bicycle Shop, getting the machine assembled. At age 15, I owned a working bicycle. (Which I took to Brisbane, and rode it until the day it was stolen from the bicycle rack at Graceville Railway Station – a solid green framed Imperial, much sentimental value, small reward offered; no questions asked).
Injuries and illnesses of my youth: When I was 8 I spent a little time in hospital with the mumps. At age 11, when Les and I were home alone while Mother and Ern were on holiday, I tripped over a chicken coop in the Kruger’s back yard one night during a game of tiggy. That left me with several stitches and a large scar high on my right arm, still clearly visible. It also resulted in a belting when Ern got home and found out what had happened. Later that year I broke some bones in my right foot when Les ran me into a garden post while we were playing soccer in the back yard. I went to school for three days, limping in agony, because Ern thought I was faking it. I hurt the foot again about a year later when Merv Stafford came over to play and knocked me into the side steps. Finally, in high school, I hung out with the BAD lads, because they found me a figure of amusement, with my smart mouth, and no one else really wanted much to do with me. As part of their high jinks, they shoved me into one of the galvanised metal rubbish bins, breaking my collar bone in the process. I don’t think that Les Winkle, the Deputy Principal, believed me when I said I fell into it. Ern was not happy either.
Me the aspiring radio announcer: I had always wanted to be a radio announcer, and somehow I was allowed to spend an early evening shift at Radio Station 4MB Maryborough, with Reg Evans, and announcer who had achieved minor local fame with a self-written ditty about an influenza epidemic, which was titled ‘It’s the Wog’.
Almost running away: Just after I turned 15, Ern and I were constantly at war with each other. Because he had all the power in the relationship, I felt immensely hard done by, and one night I decided to leave home. I didn’t have a lot of ideas as to what would happen next, but I had a bicycle, a knapsack with a few apples and potatoes, a box of matches, and a firm resolution. It seemed easy enough – I would cycle by night, and hide in hedges, caves, forests and ditches on farms during the day. Remember, I had very little experience or understanding of the world outside home, school, and the mattress shop. My Mother heard my quiet preparations, and talked (or rather bullied) me out of it.
Compassionate me, or emotional sook? Two of my primary school classmates, Barry Morrison and Ray Williams, and another lad I didn’t know had formed a band. Barry played piano, Ray drums, and the third band member guitar. One night, towards the end of 1959, they were to appear in a Talent Quest at a hall near the centre of town, and to me, it sounded incredibly exciting! I begged Ern to let me go, and eventually he relented, ‘just to keep him from sulking for a week’, he said.
He said he was worried because the workers at the power station at Howard, 16 miles away, had been on strike for weeks, and he thought that desperate men might do desperate acts (like stealing an antique bicycle from a 15 year-old. Yeah!)
The evening was a HUGE disappointment, because most of the acts consisted of small girls singing or dancing, small boys singing or reciting poetry badly, a few teenagers singing, dancing or playing music. However, one older man competed, with a Hawaiian guitar, making bird sounds and playing that dreamy island music. I thought he was fantastic, but almost no one clapped when he finished his act.
At the end of the concert, all the contestants crowded onto the stage, and this man looked like a giant among them, with his large belly and dirty white shirt. Barry’s band won second prize, and five pounds, I forget who was third, and some tall and skinny girl won for an awful version of ‘My Little Corner of the World’.
On my way back to the police station, where I had parked my bike, I saw the man and his guitar a little way ahead of me, so I hurried, trying to catch him and tell him how good he was. I was just a few yards behind him when he turned right into Kent Street and, in the street light; I saw that he was crying. This was a touch scary for me, so I walked on to where the bike was parked.
As I rode home, I saw the man a couple of blocks ahead. It was the road to Howard, and I realised, with a shock, that he was probably one of the striking workers, and that he would walk all the way home to Howard.
I rode home as fast as I could, and cried myself to sleep.
Summing up: So, at just sixteen, I was a short, socially unskilled boy, with a truly amazing array of pimples. I had very limited understanding of my peers, because I had never been allowed contact with them outside of school, and girls were a total mystery, because my last experience of them had been at primary school.
The following is the first part of a long, unfinished poem that I began to write in the 1970s.
Soldier, Coming Home Part 1
The kid from the working class
lost his father at the end
of the Second World War;
He was under six months old, at the time,
too young to feel tears, or grief, or loss.
His mother remarried, when the boy was two -
his strict, eccentric, stepfather
was the only dad he ever knew.
Education was hard for him;
he proved primary-school bright,
but he never quite meshed with his peers.
The family’s economic circumstances
deprived him of certain luxuries
his classmates enjoyed as normal parts of life.
Even into high school
he was the boy with the pudding-basin haircut;
the lad without lollies, or money;
the only student in short pants, in Junior Year.
He carried, unwillingly,
the burden of his stepfather’s principles :
he went to school to learn, and nothing more;
to gain an education which
would provide him with security
his folks had never had.
He spent sports days lonely,
hunched over books in a dark classroom;
under the eye of a reluctant teacher,
forced to stay and supervise
those extra lessons.
He never knew
the joy of winning, the pain of losing,
or how it felt to be part of a team.
His stepfather was an ardent pacifist;
the kid was the only boy in high school
not allowed to join the school cadets,
when his heart cried out for
a uniform, a rifle.
