Well of Life
Growing up gay in Melbourne and Canberra
by
Roderic Anderson
Copyright 2010 by Roderic Anderson
Smashwords Edition
“Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn
My lip the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur’d – “While you live
Drink! – for once dead you never shall return.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
10 September 1943
Free at last, a month and a day after my 18th birthday I almost skipped down the hill to Darling Railway Station without a backward glance. In Dunlop Street I passed the usual people going about their usual morning routine. Frail little Miss Dennis, dressed in a dirndl and a big broad-brimmed straw hat, was picking violets she sold to Irelands, the florists in the city. From across the road I could smell her garden that sparkled in the mild spring sunlight. Mrs Lewis, a vision in a fluffy pink dressing gown and slippers, with her peroxided hair in rollers, appeared on her front veranda, fussing over Bryan and Beryl, seeing them off to school. Old Mr Dowling, primly dressed in a dark suit, Homburg and gloves, and jauntily swinging his tightly furled umbrella, was setting off to sell suits at Ball and Welch’s. The throaty throb of Dr Carter’s Ford Mercury sounded from his driveway as it warmed up on petrol, which was strictly rationed, before he switched it to gas from the producer gas unit on a trailer behind it.
How could other people’s lives go on in the old familiar way while mine was being transformed. I felt like a cicada emerging from its chrysalis, spreading its wings. I had finally left home and was setting out on my own. Previously I had gone away without my parents or older sisters but only for holidays. This time I was taking off, probably forever. Mum, who I had left crying at the front gate, certainly thought so.
Traditionally the time for coming of age was one’s 21st birthday but during the Second World War, through necessity of recruiting fit young men for the armed services, this had been reduced to the 18th. This was the authorised age for leaving home and striking out on one’s own and if you joined the armed forces you were entitled to vote in the State and Commonwealth elections. Every boy looked forward to reaching this frontier he must cross to become a man.
I was on my way to join the Royal Australian Air Force as an aircrew trainee. Mum was sure I was going to my death. She felt she had faced death flying in a civil aeroplane from Melbourne to Canberra so what hope would I have when, besides the perils of air travel, I would be fired on by Germans or Japs. I had tried to allay her fears by telling her I was only going into camp at Somers about fifty miles away and would be home on leave every weekend but she still cried and went on about losing her last baby. Thank goodness Dad had persuaded her not to come with me to see me onto the troop train.
This being a special occasion I splashed my money on a first class ticket to Flinders Street. Sitting in a deep leather seat in a smoking compartment, puffing the pipe Dad had given me for my birthday, I began to have qualms about leaving home so cheerfully. Shouldn't I be grief stricken and remorseful? Thinking back over my childhood I supposed I'd had a happy one. I'd never really thought about it much. Most unhappy times had been at school and at the dentist's. At home things just went on fairly smoothly with a few ups and downs so I expect you'd say my childhood had been happy. I supposed too that I’d had a loving family, though they didn't gush all over me like in that Hollywood family film I had recently seen ─ You Can't Take it With You. Mum hated vulgarity and Dad despised Victorian sentimentality so they both believed any display of emotion to be vulgar and sentimental. I had never seen them even kiss each other except in greeting or farewell. I suppose as a baby I had been hugged and kissed but as far back as I could remember, never by any member of the family except when saying goodnight.
Mum often embarrassed me by asking, `Do you love me?' Of course I always answered `Yes’ but I avoided looking into her eyes when I did. All boys were supposed to love their mothers, weren't they? But I couldn’t honestly say I loved her. What was love? I really didn't know. I knew the remote general love of God and the mushy love in Hollywood films but that wasn't what I felt about Mum, or Dad either. l couldn't truthfully answer the question, `Do you love your parents?’ nor `Do your parents love you?’ and it didn't bother me. All I was sure of was that I was glad to get away and strike out on my own.
The Air Force recruiting posters bore the slogan: `Join the Air Force and Do a Man’s Job'. That’s what I was doing. No longer a child, I was putting away childish things like being tied to Mum's apron strings. I was about to be initiated into manhood and I was looking forward to it but as I looked out the train window at the back yards speeding backwards I couldn't help casting my mind back.
2
My first home, a small timber house in Studley Park Road, Kew, stood on a narrow block of land that sloped down towards the Yarra River. The land beside it was vacant bush with two walks leading to the stream. The one on the left my two older sisters named the moo cow way because it cut through a dairy farm that had a Jersey herd with a warm friendly milky smell I loved, and on the right the magpie way, fragrant with eucalyptus and wattle, where magpies carolled in the gum trees and in the nesting season they swooped down and attacked passers by. I enjoyed being taken for walks or driven in my pusher along both these routes but I was never allowed to go near the water. Another outing was along Studley Park Road down to Kew Junction when Mummy went shopping there.
From our house I could see across the river to a thick forest of scrubby gum trees, wild, without any houses or other buildings but the eastern skyline was dominated by the Kew Lunatic Asylum with a high wall and towers at the corners. When I was naughty my mother and her maid, Maudie, threatened to send me to this mad house.
While Mummy was nursing me, or so she told me much later, she often listened through the headphones of Daddy's crystal wireless set to Dr A E Floyd's music broadcasts on 3AR. She used to hold one headphone to my ear and I would gurgle happily listening to Mozart and Schubert before falling asleep. Mummy also told me ─ not until I was old enough to know what the word meant ─ that I had been born prematurely and was unable to suckle, though I made up for it later. She said that in the hospital when the nurses brought me in to her I looked like a skinned rabbit and my breath reeked of brandy that they had fed me through an eye dropper. On the day when I should normally have been born I seized her nipple in gummy jaws and hardly let go until I was reluctantly weaned. I thrived so well she called me `Podge’. When the time came to wean me I flatly refused everything but Mummy's tit and spat her lovingly prepared milk sago and apple puree in her face or threw them on the floor.
Raheen, the palace of the Roman Catholic Archbishop, Dr Mannix, was almost next door. I loved to watch Mr Mannikin, as I called him, in his square cap and long black dress, drive past sitting up straight In the back of his long black motor car and waving to me. As soon as I could walk, whenever I got the chance I would run away from home, out the front gate and into the large grounds of Raheen where sometimes I would meet His Reverence, immensely tall in his long black cassock, tending his marigolds.
My parents' house had few flowers, mainly trees and shrubs behind a saltbush hedge that Daddy had planted. Every house had a hedge, usually privet or cypress but he thought we should have an Australian one. Though I liked its silver grey colour I wished he had made it of shrubs without such a fishy odour. My favourite smell came from the lemon scented gum tree in the front garden and I loved its bare trunk and boughs with leaves only at the end of them.
Whenever we went out Mum always insisted on my wearing a hat which, because I had such a boof head, she had to have specially made ─ usually a blue Caesarine sou-wester. I refused to wear them and threw every hat she bought me out of my pusher and when I felt I had outgrown my teddy I threw him over the neighbours' fences but much to my disgust, they always retrieved and returned him. I thought hats and teddy bears (which after all were really dolls) were strictly for girls.
* * *
When Mummy and Daddy went on a trip to Sydney they took my tsisters, Lucie and Joy, with them but because, in their opinion, I was too young to travel they left me with Grandma Andrews and Auntie Ethel ─ Nanna and Bepples ─ who were holidaying on Phillip Island and offered to have me stay with them. I delighted in snuggling into Nanna's big bosom and clinging to the bun on the top of her head and I loved Bepples' gentle voice and soft wavy hair. I scarcely missed my parents, and my sisters not at all.
There I had my first sight of the sea: an enormous bath of water stretching as far as I could see. It fascinated me but soon I became bored with paddling on the edge and I would have waddled out of my depth if Bepples hadn't restrained me. She envied the way I tanned without burning, calling me 'Bepples' little velvet legs'.
I spent my earliest years surrounded by adoring women. Being the youngest child and the only son, besides having doting parents and Bepples I had two devoted grandmas and numerous like minded unmarried aunties. But, apart from the distant figure of Mr Mannikin and Daddy's friends who sometimes came to the house, the only male in my life was my father, yet I really hardly knew him. He was an artist, completely involved in his work, who believed bringing up children was women's work so I didn't see very much of him. Both my grandfathers had died before I was born. When Daddy's men friends called I went out of my way to attract their attention, climbing onto their knees and interrupting their serious discussions until Mummy or Maudie came and forcibly removed me.
* * *
Not much traffic passed along Studley Park Road but enough to prevent my being allowed to cross it on my own. Most vehicles were horse drawn but motor delivery vans from the big city shops and a few taxis and private cars puttered past and what Lucie called `the cardboard bus', because of its orange-brown colour, ran between the electric tram at Kew Junction and the cable tram that ran along Johnson Street. Safely escorted across the road by Maudie, I then ran along the other side to play in the Hume Pipe Gardens ─ a 1920s version of a modern adventure playground with my two sisters and the Hume girls whose father had these gardens built out of pipes made in his factory.
Occasionally Mummy or Daddy, or both, took me into town by the `cardboard' bus and then the cable tram along Johnson Street. The cable tram had two sections: in the front enclosed one, the `dummy', a man wearing a uniform with a peaked cap controlled two large levers sticking up in the middle, and an open section trailed behind. Daddy explained to me that the gripman drove the tram by using one lever to grip the moving cable under the road to make the tram move and the other lever worked the brake to make it stop. As I watched, every time he wanted to stop, the gripman took one lever in each hand and moved them in opposite directions, then when he wanted to go he moved them back again. I wondered what the brake broke when he applied it.
Once when we were all sitting in the open part, Mummy was clutching Joy and me as the tram swung round the corner into Bourke Street but Lucie wasn't holding on and nobody was holding her, so she was thrown out onto the road. We weren’t going fast and no other traffic passed so she wasn't seriously hurt. She only grazed her knee and got her best dress dirty but she bawled her head off and Mum and Dad had to comfort her until we all got out at Elizabeth Street.
* * *
When I was three Daddy bought a motor car, a long grey Lagonda tourer with a big nickel plated radiator and headlamps, celluloid side curtains and lizard skin seats that I was afraid would bite me. I was glad I always travelled on Maudie's lap, in the middle of the back seat between my sisters. Joy always had to be on the outside because she usually became car sick, and Lucie, being the eldest, was entitled to the other window seat. Often we went on weekend jaunts to seaside resorts: Balnarring on Western Port Bay, Portarlington and Queensciiff on the Bellarine Peninsula and even out to the ocean at Barwon Heads and Anglesea.
Once on the way to Balnarring, I stood up and, looking over Maudie's shoulder out the little oval back window, saw that the nickel rails of the luggage carrier were bare of luggage. The leather strap holding our cabin trunk had broken and the trunk had fallen off. I called out,`Daddy, our luggage has fallen off!’ and he had to turn the car round and go back looking for it. When we had found the big leather trunk and loaded it on again, the car wouldn't start, so while the rest of us sat on the grassy bank beside the road, he had to open the bonnet and tinker with the engine before we could start moving again. Though there weren't many cars, we often passed one broken down by the roadside.
One day Daddy drove me to the Exhibition Building where he worked in the Australian War Museum. I felt very important sitting beside him in the front and I could see so much more from there than I would have from my usual place in the back. The studio where he worked was gigantic, with great big doors, no windows in the walls but large ones in the high roof. Daddy joined Mr Bowles and Mr McCubbin, who I already knew from their frequent visits to our house. Mr Bowles, was a small man with a funny face that reminded me of the picture of a monkey on the cover of a story book of Mum's, and Mr McCubbin was big, fat and jolly.
I liked being in this men's world seeing them going about their work. As I watched, Daddy slapped wet plaster onto a wire netting framework and when it had set he arranged models of soldiers and guns he had made and Mr McCubbin painted in the background making a real battle scene. I was witnessing a miracle. It was like watching God create the world as Miss Montgomery had taught me in Sunday school kindergarten.
I was quite sure this act of creation would always be beyond me. I couldn't see myself becoming an artist. These men found it all so easy but I couldn't even draw a decent square and the only thing l could model in clay or plasticine was a sausage or a ball.
3
Soon after my fourth birthday Dad stopped going out to work and stayed home most of the time. I didn't know why nor understand what was going on but soon we moved house into Stanley Street that ran off Cotham Road, Kew, along the side of Trinity Grammar School and ended at the back of Xavier College.
Our place was a cottage in the grounds of a big house facing Stevenson Street. I realised that Dad and Mum were not as well off as they had been. I'd had a tearful farewell with Maudie who didn't live with us any more ─ Mum did all the housework now. I had to keep on wearing the same clothes after I had really grown out of them and Mum didn’t take me out nearly as much as before. Now it was usually with an auntie or grandma that I visited the zoo or the Botanical Gardens.
Once when I was out with Auntie Florence a spectacular rainbow arched across the sky. I was spellbound. 'How did that get there?' I asked her.
I suppose Auntie Florence had no more idea than I did, so she replied, 'God painted it.'
'Isn't He clever to do that with his left hand!'
'What do you mean, with his left hand?'
'Well Jesus always sits on God's right hand.'
* * *
In our new house I had a bedroom lined with horizontal boards freshly painted in bright glossy cream and a linoleum floor like in the kitchen and bathroom, its only furniture, a black iron bed and a cupboard. I felt it should have been the maid's room. Like my parents I had come down in the world but as Grandma Andrews, who had a huge stock of wise sayings, told me, 'It’s no use crying over spilt milk.' I would just have to 'grin and bear it’ and make the best of things.
Without a maid my mother was kept so busy with housework that she was becoming dependent on relations to keep me amused. So, although I was only four, I started school at Trinity Grammar, just across the street from our house, in Prep 1, taken by Miss Lambell who had known my father and his sisters when they lived in Geelong. I was the youngest and smallest boy in the school so I was called 'Inches' by the senior boys who adopted me as their mascot. To me they were just a frightening forest of grey serge trouser legs with grinning faces high above ─ until one of them swept me up and sat me on his shoulder. With one arm round his neck and the other hand clutching his hair I felt triumphant.
Even in Prep 1 we had divinity lessons. I was told about God the Father and learned to recite The Lord's Prayer: 'Our Father which art in heaven ... ' I associated my father with God. Daddy didn't live in heaven above the clouds and he didn't have a long white beard but he was all-powerful and all knowing. He had always been a protective tower of strength and even Mummy treated him with great respect. Often when I asked her to do something she would tell me I would have to wait until Daddy came home and she would ask him whether she could or I should ask him myself. Sometimes he spoke to me harshly and even smacked me but afterwards I always knew he had been right.
For me Dad could do no wrong. Until one day when I was watching him working on the motor car he withdrew his head from under the bonnet, spat angrily on the ground and exclaimed,' Damn!'
I was shocked. Spitting was a low disgusting habit and I had been ticked off for saying 'heck!' and 'dash!'. 'Damn' was an unspeakable word. Dad had broken two rules of good behaviour. I was sadly disillusioned. Soon after this he had to sell the car and, like his blameless reputation, it vanished from my life.
* * *
At the end of year speech-night I was awarded a prize (for divinity of all things) ─ a book of Norse myths and legends ─ and recited a poem that began:
I have a thittle shadow
That goes in and out with me
Though what can be the use of him
Is more than I can see
He follows me about all day …
after which, to enormous applause, I peed my pants, leaving a puddle on the stage.
* * *
Soon we moved house again to the neighbouring suburb of Hawthorn to live briefly in half of a sprawling old house in Power Street, with a big veranda and bright red geraniums growing outside and a very bright lady, Miss Vize, living in the other half of the house. Mum called her a `flapper’, whatever that was supposed to mean. She wore rouge, lipstick, kiss curls and short skirts, smoked cigarettes through a long ivory holder and she drove a little red sports car.
While we were staying there Dad did two paintings: one of the veranda and garden and the other of the red geraniums in a vase the same colour as the chest of the peacock in the zoo. From then on these hung over the mantelpiece and the long yellow bookcase in every house we lived in. Next we moved into a dingy old place, grey and gloomy, inside and out, also in Hawthorn, opposite St Columb’s Church.
I didn’t like that depressing house but I enjoyed having free run of the church grounds across the road where Lucie, Joy and I used to play with the Deasey children ─ Denison, Alison and Desmond ─ from the vicarage. I treated the churchyard as my own playground where I could escape from grown ups telling me what to do and what not to do. It had gravel paths where I could ride my tricycle safe from being run over by horses and carts and motor cars. Once in the middle of a wedding service, I rode round the church singing Onward Christian Soldiers at the top of my powerful voice until the verger chased me away and sent me home in disgrace.
I liked the Deaseys and the church grounds and at the end of the street, across Burwood Road, was Miss Hooper’s lolly shop where I could buy an ice cream whenever I had a penny to spend. It was full of treasures like Ali Baba’s cave: large globe jars of multicoloured boiled lollies, chocolate bars in silver paper, cellophane-wrapped caramels, red and white striped peppermint sticks, Castlemaine rock, glistening amber barley sugar and a glass-covered display tray divided into separate compartments for all kinds of little lollies. After I had made my selection she popped them into a little white paper bag. On entering the shop, I stepped on a magic door mat. When I did so a bell rang, a pair of curtains parted and Miss Hooper appeared like a genie. I fully expected her to say, 'What is your pleasure, Oh master.' but she always knew I only wanted a penny ice cream in a cone which she usually handed me without a word.
But I detested that St Columb's Street house. Besides being dingy, far worse, I had no proper bedroom. My bed was a Roman style couch of dark-stained wood smelling of cheap varnish, with an ugly orange and brown cotton cover that I loathed, in a sort of passageway, with no windows and a smelly asphalt floor between the main part of the house and Dad's studio. I felt it was like sleeping in the street.
4
Though Mum was old fashioned and disliked change she was always ready to make any change she thought in the best interests of her family. Fortunately she hated that house in St Columb's Street as much as I did. The only reason we had gone to live there was because it had a big room that Dad could use as a studio. She didn't see why he couldn't work in it while we lived in more pleasant surroundings somewhere else. So after we had all happily spent the Easter holidays in a rented cottage, Carrick, at Portarlington, Mum persuaded him to let her stay on there with us kids. He could live in the studio in St Columb's Street, coming to stay with us at weekends.
This suited me. I liked the Portarlington cottage that provided me with a proper bedroom and was right on the waterfront ─ only a strip of natural grassland, the common, separated it from a safe swimming beach in a secluded little bay with interesting places to explore. The promontory of black rocks forming one side of the bay had several pools harbouring a collection of fascinating wild life ─ limpets, sea urchins, star fish, crabs, sea anemones, and small fish.
On the other side of the bay opposite the rocks was a mound of black earth and old sea shells that Mum told me was an Aboriginal midden. The Blackfellows had come here for goodness knows how many years and this had been their rubbish tip. Though I had seen only pictures of Blacks, never a live one, I could picture them huddling over a fire, cooking the shell fish they had collected and throwing the empty shells and other rubbish onto the mound.
The beach was usually deserted except for a few people digging up its deep deposit of shell grit, shovelling it into sacks and taking them away for their chooks. Banks of black dead seagrass, marking the high tide line, made a comfortable bed where I could lie and watch passing fishing boats, the daily bay steamer, Edina, that called at Portarlington on its way to and from Geelong, and wool and wheat ships sailing to England and Europe.
In the centre of the bay, high up the beach, Mr Finny lived in a motor- boat beside another bigger one he was building. I spent much of my time there with him. Besides liking his boat's strong odour of fish, tar and paint and the pungent smell of his pipe I loved Mr Finny's own personal manly sweaty smell. His company was a pleasant change from my mother and sisters'. From him I learned quite a few rude words I delighted shocking Mum with.
I started in Miss McCleod's Grade 2 at the local State School, carrying a little cardboard case in which Mum had packed my lunch, slate, slate pencils and a small oval tin, lacquered black with Mother Goose on the lid, containing a mouldy smelling wet sponge for cleaning my slate. I hated having to write on it. When I pressed on the pencil, moving it across the slate, it squealed, setting my teeth on edge.
In Miss McCleod’s class school was serious and earnest: writing, spelling, grammar and arithmetic. At Trinity Grammar it had been nearly all play and moving about. Here, all the time we had to sit up to attention in our desks except to go to the lavatory when you were really bursting. Rarely, as a special reward, Miss McCleod would read us a story.
One day at school I was wearing a new cardigan that Auntie Florence had knitted for me in heather mixture. I loved the smooth silky feel of its bone buttons and I was slipping them through my fingers under the desk instead of paying attention to Miss McCleod droning on about the past tense of verbs 'We must say, “I saw ", not “I seen". “I did", not “I done".' This wasn't new to me and my mind was far away thinking what I would say to Mr Finny when I was free.
Suddenly the droning stopped and Miss McCleod demanded sharply, 'Roddy Anderson! What are you doing under your desk?'
From her tone of voice and the expression on her face I knew she thought I was playing with my Tommy Tucker and she wouldn’t believe me if I told her it was only my cardigan buttons. So, blushing all over, I stammered as I always did when nervous, N...n… n nothing, M…M… Miss'. I often did play with my Tommy Tucker which, like the buttons, felt silky when I slipped it round my fingers. But Mum had told me this was bad. I often wanted to do it when I was with Mr Finny. But with Miss McCleod? Urgh!!
'You can't be playing with nothing! Answer me, truthfully. What are you playing with under the desk?'
'N… n… n… nothing, M... M… Miss.'
This interrogation continued with me stubbornly saying 'N ... n ... n nothing.'
`You must be playing with something. Show me what's in your hands.’ I innocently held up my empty hands. 'Then you must be playing with yourself! Come out here! I'll show you what happens to little boys who play with themselves and then tell lies about it.'
I went out to the teacher's table at the front of the class where I was whacked with a ruler twice on each hand and then had to spend the rest of the day sitting on a stool in the corner with my back to the class, my faith in authority and its justice destroyed forever.
* * *
The owner of our cottage, Colonel Steel, lived in a large villa, Oak Rest, next door. He was a gruff, irritable old man with a big waxed moustache but his wife was gentle and kind and I got on well with their youngest daughter, Rosie, who was my age. We played happily together, running in and out of each other’s house, walking along the beach, collecting seashells, seaweed and animal life.
One warm afternoon we were down near the Aboriginal midden. I had seen pictures of naked Blackfellows dancing corroborees and I was imagining them dancing round their fire near this midden when I noticed the door of Mr and Mrs Browne's (friends of Mum's) bathing box was open. Its unpainted timber that had weathered to silver grey had a sort of native look so I suggested to Rosie that we go inside and dance like the Blacks used to. Not knowing that her elder brother Ken was following us, we took off all our clothes and were ingenuously dancing together when Ken entered. Of course he reported us to his and Rosie's parents. Our little frolic was as guiltless as my playing with my cardigan buttons but I feared I might receive the same sort of punishment. However Colonel and Mrs Steel treated it as a joke, and Mum and Dad didn't mind, but my sisters teased me about it for years.
In his back yard Colonel Steel kept ducks which made a strong smell and he boiled up stinking mash for them in an old wash-house copper. My mother and sisters objected to this stench but I quite liked it, which Lucie and Joy said only went to show how vile boys are. If the stink got too strong I could pick rosemary from the hedges lining the paths, crush it in my hands and hold it to my nose.
Dad came down on the Edina every Saturday morning, usually with some treat for us from town. One weekend he brought me a little black puppy in his coat pocket. We decided to call him Inky. I was thrilled to bits with him but Mum objected to his piddling on the floor and my leaving it for her to clean up. And he brought fleas into the house. There was a plague of them in the back yard but by picking them off our ankles and legs after crossing the yard and then crushing them between fingernails we had managed to keep them outside until Inky arrived. This was what Mum called 'the last straw'. She hated the smells from the ducks and what with the fleas and missing Dad all through the week she said she was 'at the end of her tether'. Despite Miss McCleod I was enjoying living there but soon Mum decided to move back to town, which we did, leavinq Inky with the Steels.
5
Our new home was a half house in Wattle Road within walking distance of Dad's studio and across the road from Glenferrie State School, a squat red brick building with steel grilles on the windows like a prison and a small paved exercise yard/playground that had that vile asphalt smell I had grown to hate. The whole place stank of dusty asphalt, mouldy sandwich crusts and rotting orange peel and apple cores.
Because I was nervous about starting again in a new school my stuttering became worse, especially when I was excited. Mum told me to calm down and work out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it before I opened my mouth. I tried hard. It was a battle to stop blurting things out without thinking but eventually I succeeded. Gradually my stuttering stopped but at school I was considered slow witted because I took my time before I spoke up, joining in conversations and composing answers to questions.
When we were released from our classrooms at play times we were still confined in the cramped little yard where everyone shouted and squealed making a terrible din so I was glad to go home for lunch where I could get some peace and quiet. But sometimes when Mum had arranged to go out for the day I had to take sandwiches to school and spend lunchtime there enduring the noise and smells.
At this school I learned to play marbles which the other bigger boys always won. Although I realised that, being a beginner, I was a poor player, I suspected them of changing the rules so that I always lost my best agates but I was too scared of them to protest. I had already learnt from Grandma Andrews that, 'discretion is the better part of valour.'
* * *
Mum and Dad prided themselves on having lived in France and they tried to teach us some French. Almost as soon as I learned to count in English I could count up to 20 in French and loved to recite: Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix, onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf, Bang ! Dad and Mum often spoke a few French words at meals and before long I could say, `du pain, le beurre, la confiture, du fromage’ and `les pommes de terre.’ I also picked up a few French phrases: c’est la vie, esprit de corps, hors de combat, tout de suite, comme ca and savoir faire that Mum and Dad used regularly.
Our present house was no better than the one in St Columb's Street, or even worse, because we had only half of it and it was squeezed onto a small block of land barely leaving room for a narrow strip of garden in front, a small yard at the back and almost no space between the house and the fence either side. Across the passage lived a grumpy old woman, Mrs O'Connor, who was always calling, `Are you there, Mrs Anderson’ to complain about something. But at least I had a decent bedroom, though the window looked out on the neighbours' brick wall just a few feet away.
Soon after we moved to Wattle Road my teeth began to ache and I cried with the pain. Mum tried to ease it with Aspro but the agony persisted and even worsened so she took me to her dentist, Dr Fleming at his rooms in Burwood Road, beside the Hawthorn Town Hall. Both Lucie and Joy had been there and told me terrifying stories of how much it would hurt so I was scared stiff long before we even reached there.
While I was in the waiting room with Mum I could hear a patient in the surgery crying out In pain, making me more frightened than ever, and Mum’s nervous reassurances made me all the more afraid, so when my turn came she accompanied me into the torture chamber. Dr Fleming, tall and handsome, with black wavy hair and a thin moustache, and wearing a crisply-starched short white coat, fussed over her and, because I was too small for the patient's chair, sat me on a padded plank across the arms of it, pushed my head back, forced my mouth open and saying, 'Now this is not going to hurt at all,' bent over me and set to work with his silver probe. When he prodded the nerve of the sore tooth, I screeched in agony. He might as well have tapped me below the knee with a rubber mallet. My reflex was swift and strong. My foot shot out and kicked him fair in the balls.
'You beastly little boy!' he shouted, dropping his probe, and staggered back, clutching his crotch, his fine features distorted by pain.
I thought, I haven’t hurt you as much as you’ve hurt me and it’d be a good job if I had. I’m not going to let you near me again with that silver thing.
But despite my wailing protests, with Mum and the nurse holding my mouth open and my feet down, the dentist resumed his probing and diagnosed that several of my first teeth were decayed and, unless extracted, would infect my second teeth before they came through. He would extract the worst one now and when I had got over that and learned how to behave properly I must return to have the others out.
Having a tooth actually pulled out didn't hurt nearly as much as I expected but I was alarmed by the bleeding. At school other kids often had bloody noses and a few had cut themselves badly but this was the first time I had really bled and I was afraid I might bleed to death. All the way home I was whimpering and spitting blood into the gutter, getting no sympathy from Mum who carried on about how ashamed of me she was after all the trouble she had taken to teach me how to behave properly. She wouldn't be able to look Dr Fleming in the face again. The way she went on you'd think she was the one who'd had the toothache, suffered the indignity of the dentist's chair and was now in danger of bleeding to death. I told her, 'If you don't take me there again you won't have to.'
'I'm certainly not taking you again! Next time you go on your own.'
Before long another tooth ached and I began a long series of agonising trips to the dentist.
* * *
Our move to Wattle Road was intended to be only temporary. I knew both Mum and Dad hated the place and after only a few months there we moved to Surrey Hills, the same side of town as Kew and Hawthorn but several miles further out. It was really Mum who decided on the house there, though it was Dad who found it. In 1932 every second house had a 'For Sale' or 'To Let' sign sticking out over its front fence. With a glut of houses for sale at low prices on buyer's terms there were plenty to choose from.
All Dad wanted was one with a big room he could use as a studio and enough other rooms to accommodate his family. He liked this house in Mont Albert Road because it had a huge high ceilinged dining room that would make an excellent studio and what was meant to be the main bedroom could become the dining room leaving three good bedroorns: one for Mum and him, one for the girls and one for me. But what appealed to Mum was that, unlike the St Columb's Street and Wattle Road houses, this one was high up on a hill and had grace and charm with plenty of space inside and out. She had often complained about losing that home in Studley Park Road which had been all she could have wished for but she'd had to give up because it had no studio for Dad. The rented places we had lived in since had all been makeshifts but now this one seemed to provide everything we wanted, for Dad, herself and us children. In Glenferrie I hated both the house and the school and was pleased to move.
6
My new bedroom at the back of the house, across the passage from the kitchen, used to be the maid's room. In the passage outside it, high up on the wall, hung a board with a series of shutters which would drop down revealing a number. Every room in the house except mine had an electric bell push. When this was pressed the corresponding shutter would drop and a bell ring in the passage where the maid would have heard it from the kitchen or her room, looked at the board to see where the call was coming from and rushed there to answer it. The batteries were now flat so the system didn't work, which didn't matter since we had no maid.