Leeward Page 12

  A few months later I overheard a dirty joke some boys were telling in class. I began to laugh. ‘Look, Boof ’s laughing’, one said in a kindly way. It was assumed I would not understand.

  I was well treated by most of my classmates and protected myself by a show of diffidence. One boy found me irritating and used to punch and bully me. I responded by taking no notice – the younger boy’s classic method of avoiding conflict. I was Diana’s younger brother and the youngest in the class, and became imprinted with the idea that I was younger than other people.

  I became an intellectual snob. I was soon to play no sport in a school where sport was supreme, and I had little contact with boys in lower streamed classes. In this way I came to believe that there were two races of human beings: people who were clever and those who were not.

  I was one of the poorer boys. Some were second-or third-generation Shore boys. I told myself that perhaps my father had more property than theirs, but I could not convince myself this counted for much. My father was working class and in his sixties. Their fathers were younger, and in the professions, or owned businesses.

  Some decent suits from his bachelor days still hung in my father’s lowboy, but his everyday wear was second-hand clothes, with frayed collars, picked up at auction. I was catching a train home with other boys and saw my father ahead of me in the carriage. I nodded as discreetly as I could to say hello, but in such a way my friends did not notice. I felt ashamed of myself – I could not say ‘That is my father over there’. He was discreet and did not give me away.

  I had been wearing the Shore boater for two or three months and was waiting for a train at North Sydney station. One of my new school friends asked, ‘Where do you live?’ ‘Gordon’, I replied, pleased I could say I lived in a respectable suburb (although the roof of our house was rusty).

  ‘How long have you lived there?’ ‘Nine months’, I replied. To keep the conversation flowing – I think my friend was just being polite – he asked, ‘Where did you live before then?’ ‘At McMahons Point.’ This was still a slum suburb in 1952, and Shore boys were familiar with McMahons Point as the suburb directly adjacent to the school. ‘Oh’, he said, realising he had made a mistake in asking this. He gallantly tried to retrieve an embarrassing situation. ‘It must have been just after you came out from England.’ He had assumed this from my posh English accent. I naively believed I always had to tell the truth. ‘No I’m not from England. It’s where I grew up.’ Walking back to North Sydney station one afternoon, I saw one of my father’s tenants passing in the opposite direction: Mrs Humphries, the widow whose white hair had purplish tints. I said hello, but did not raise my boater. Another pupil who was coming abreast turned to me: ‘Just because a woman’s old and poor doesn’t mean you don’t raise your hat’.

  In the year when the school performed the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Gondoliers my voice had yet to break and I was cast as a chorus girl. I came with my parents and sister, by tram, to the performance at the Cremorne Orpheum. As I entered the dressing room, a tart voice remarked, ‘Here come the boys whose parents don’t have cars’.

  Mr Yarnold, the headmaster at Mosman Prep, had suggested I learn Greek at Shore. The school told me it was not taught. But German was. My German teacher for the first two years was Daniel Fomenko, a Russian emigré. In the 1930s he walked across Russia with his wife into China, something he mentioned casually to our class. Only six or seven boys were learning German. ‘Fom’ sometimes closed his eyes as he taught us, already old, thin and with a yellow pallor.

  In my five years at the school, I got only one Saturday detention – from ‘Fom’, for talking in class. I decided I didn’t like poetry when our English master, Mr Grigg, tried to get us to learn Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by heart. He was ‘Darcy’ – with that given name he did not need a nickname. As my class master, Darcy set the assignment for my detention. It was an idyllic Saturday morning. The sun was streaming into the decrepit high-ceilinged nineteenth century classroom. I had to write an appreciation of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and was entranced, though I did not acknowledge this to myself at the time.

  Peter Jenkins (‘Tojo’) was my German teacher for the next three years. He had a real interest in the literature and language. In 1955 he arranged for me to be awarded the German prize, two 700-page volumes of Goethe’s poems and plays in a blue cloth binding. Over the next two years I read the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust in German, something I could not manage now.

  Our Latin teacher was Mr IF Jones, an unflappable man who took no notice of the dull rumble of a shot-put ball rolling under the desks across the parquet tiles. We tried this trick sparingly – so it could be explained as an innocent accident. This was a small-ish class, about fifteen boys, and he taught us the complex rules for scanning Latin verse. He had a large and beautiful garden on a hillside in Northbridge, looking out over a valley, and his son Alex was the boy who had explained sex to me.

  I fell in love with one of the Latin set texts from 1955: the fourth book of Virgil’s pastoral Georgics: the happy cornfields, the wind in the trees and the evening star; Virgil’s precise observation and lyricism that suddenly abandons bees and darkens, like the storm in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, when Virgil describes Orpheus vainly trying to bring Eurydice back from the underworld. I decided I too would write pastoral poems. How – I was unsure.

  In my second-last year our entire grade had a couple of lectures from a local doctor, Dr Dey. He was the general practitioner who had treated my sister as a child and had signed Bella’s death certificate. The last of his lectures was eagerly anticipated. He explained the facts of life, causing a few stifled guffaws. Then he announced that, from a medical viewpoint, masturbation was completely harmless. This was greeted with roars of relieved laughter and applause.

  I had an intense and unsatisfied curiosity about the female anatomy. For some reason, our home bookcase contained a couple of issues of Man magazine, a small Australian ‘girlie’ magazine. I used to gaze surreptitiously at its demure black-and-white photographs of naked young women. I also found a little pam-phlet explaining human reproduction and stared fascinated at a diagram of male and female reproductive organs.

  My father taught me chess. After I joined the school chess club, I studied some small books he had about openings and stratagems. I was soon playing in the chess team. In my second year at Shore, on the afternoon scheduled for our rugby practice I had to play in the inter-school chess competition. I was given a dispensation from rugby – the only boy in the school who played no sport at all. I regarded it as a great accolade. We played chess against a wide range of schools and trekked across Sydney after school in the car of one of the older boys – which was unusual. His family owned a flour mill.

  In 1953 when all of my class joined the army or air cadets I was too young to enlist. On Tuesday afternoons when the cadets were training, I sat in a classroom studying with the small group of senior boys who did not enlist. The following year I joined the air training corps or ATC. I’d heard we would get ice cream at training camp and the army cadets only got custard, and I preferred our navy blue uniform to their khaki. A myth was circulated that the army cadets were more manly than us. It conveniently ensured only a few applied for the limited places in the ATC.

  In the ATC, I learned how to shoot. I once flew upside down – the earth above us – when a pilot took me up in an old Wirraway and we ‘looped the loop’. The sensations were too novel – the huge gravity forces as we banked – to feel alarmed. My confusion about left and right meant my marching and drill skills were poor. When I heard the order ‘Left turn!’ I sometimes quickly consulted the small piece of graphite lodged in my right hand. In my final year, some external examiners were impressed by my histrionic commands to squads of younger boys and promoted me to flight sergeant. They were unaware of my poor co-ordination.

  My specialty was ordering a squad of air cadets to march across an aerodro
me. I watched them march to the perimeter and estimated how long my voice would take to reach them. When they could march no further, I shouted ‘about turn’ in my loudest megaphone-like voice, a fraction early. My command had to arrive when their left feet hit the ground.

  The training camps brought together boys from many backgrounds and we slept in long galvanised iron huts. A hand tapping on a metal cupboard in one of these huts was my introduction to rock-and-roll. ‘I’ve just heard this terrific piece,’ one of my hut mates said. He sang the lyrics of ‘Rock Around the Clock’, beating the rhythm out on the top of one of the metal cupboards where we stored our things. It had no resemblance to tin pan alley, which I hated. I was excited. I sensed this was something new and radical.

  After the last chapel of my final year at Shore in 1956, as the boys filed out, I saw two small old men waiting on the path outside. At first I did not recognise them. Then I realised the tiniest was Mr Yarnold, now in his eighties. The larger of the two was Mr McDougall. When I was at Mosman Prep I had not realised he was so small. They shook my hand and seemed pleased with me. They would have known I had been a prefect in my final year and done well academically. My two old teachers were gratified with the success of their experiment when they promoted a ten-year-old into a class where he was eighteen months younger than the other boys.

  In 1955, when I moved into sixth form, the final year of secondary school, I was fourteen. The tradition was that a few final-year boys would form a team to compete in GPS debates. Although there was a master in charge, my recollection is that I effectively nominated myself as captain of debating. The school allowed boys a free hand to take over leadership roles. The exception was sport, where masters were coaches and the school’s reputation was at stake.

  In 1955 we chose our own team by consensus. The GPS debating competition was held in second term – in winter. Our first debate was at Riverview, a Jesuit boys’ school of sandstone buildings and its own astronomical observatory, set on the banks of the Lane Cove River. Shore was grander than Mosman Prep, and Riverview was grander than Shore.

  We walked down a long colonnade to the room where the debate was to be held; through doorways we glimpsed large fustian oil paintings of madonnas and saints. We were given the topic of the debate and a few minutes to prepare. A typical topic was ‘The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword’.

  The Riverview team was trained by Father Jones, who was said to be a former actor. Robert Hughes, the future writer and art critic, was the captain. He began his speech with a memorised quotation from GK Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc, and ended it with a similar quotation from a Catholic author. He had a suite of gestures. When he had an important point to make, he moved forward a step on the stage and raised his hand. Years later, standing in front of Sydney Harbour and talking about art in a TV program, he employed the same gesture. The two other speakers in the Riverview team had a similar style – although not as polished. We were thrashed.

  I resolved our school should emulate Riverview. In more junior years at Shore debating was non-existent. I pinned signs on the notice board to recruit younger pupils, and we soon had several teams. I co-opted the school’s tape recorder and recorded the boys so they could listen critically to themselves.

  At the end of the year I decided to repeat my final year, rather than start university at the age of fifteen. In 1956 I was made a prefect and continued as captain of debating. But as Protestant boys we never achieved the finesse of the Jesuit-trained Riverview debaters.

  My encounter with Robert Hughes in 1955 had a surprising Act II. In 1962 he was already famous as an artistic man-about-town in Sydney. By accident – we had read the same books and international journals – I became aware of three plagiarisms by Hughes in university publications: two poems and a drawing. I asked Bob Ellis, then co-editor of Sydney University’s student newspaper Honi Soit, if he would like an article about them.

  My article, bolstered with quotations from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, suggested the plagiarisms were an example of time travel. A Hughes poem published in 1957 and winner of a university poetry prize plagiarised a George Seferis poem written in 1936, and had an echo of a Dylan Thomas poem written in the 1940s. I wrote:

  Mr Hughes in 1957 was moving back to 1936 in order to reply to a poem yet to be written by Thomas. He was thus moving back in time to move forward in time.

  The journalist and poet Elizabeth Riddell devoted a page of the Sunday Mirror to the controversy with a full-length photograph of Hughes, wearing a dark suit and trilby, posed with a cigarette in one hand, and leaning against a brick wall (‘of a nearby box factory’ a friend cattily informed me). The photo was captioned:

  HUGHES ‘Geoffrey Lehmann is a malicious …’

  After drinking at the Royal George Hotel (a Sydney hotel with that name, not my grandfather’s former hotel in Melbourne), I bought an early edition of the newspaper. It was midnight. I read Riddell’s article as I was waiting in the underground station at Wynyard. My shock when I read the caption had gone by the time I was on the train home to Gordon. I could not be sued.

  Sitting in Vadim’s coffee shop in Potts Point some weeks later, I was approached by ‘Chester’ (Philip Graham), a fine poet and a friend of Hughes. He complimented me on my article being well written. Bob’s mother had been ill, he went on to explain, and Bob himself had been in hospital with a hernia and had a relapse when the article appeared. This was all said lightly and humorously. Chester continued: ‘Bob’s worried you might sue him for defamation. What he said to Elizabeth Riddell is that you were a malicious little prig. She misheard this as malicious little prick.’ I had assumed the word referred to by the dots was ‘shit’. I may have laughed. I said I did not believe in people suing each other.

  A few days afterwards at Vadim’s, as Hughes passed the table where I was sitting, he greeted me cheerfully: ‘Bonjour monsieur’.

  Hughes gave up writing poems – they had never been more than an occasional exercise – and also painting and sketching, which had been a more serious pursuit. Despite his facility and flair, there was a brittleness about his own work. He became the art critic for Time magazine, and was soon the most famous art critic of his generation. We later had a friend in common. She was surprised to find the walls of Hughes’s Manhattan apartment had no contemporary art except some works given to him by Bridget Riley. An art critic cannot collect art, he explained to her.

  In about 1977 Bob and I were both at an afternoon party at Barry Humphries’s flat in the Astor building in Macquarie Street. Our eyes met across the room, we waved to each other but did not speak. The only person who noticed our mutual salute was the art critic and artist Elwyn ( Jack) Lynn. He stared fixedly at Bob and me as we greeted each other. I doubt whether Bob even noticed Jack Lynn’s fixed gaze. I never saw Bob again.

  The teacher who was most influential in my life was a man then in his mid-fifties. He had small brown eyes twinkling with irony, silver hair, purple-red cheeks and a modestly protruding paunch. An excellent cricket coach, he had a dry way of speaking with a nasal country twang – he had been brought up in the Riverina. His name was Pat Eldershaw (‘Pat’ was how the boys referred to him – no nickname). I was astonished years later to discover his given names were Percy Hopetoun. School boys have an ability to winkle out awkward facts about their teachers. That his given name of Percy was not exploited is proof of the respect we had for Pat.

  In 2010 Pat’s son, John, published a memoir about him for family and friends: A Schoolmaster’s Life. Pat was born on 1 January 1901, when the Australian colonies became a federation on the first day of the twentieth century. He acquired his middle name from Lord Hopetoun, the federation’s first Governor-General, an imaginative way of celebrating the coincidence of a child’s birth on the nation’s birth date.

  Pat’s childhood was spent on ‘Mundawadra’, a 50 000 acre (20 200 ha) property owned by the Scottish Australian Company and managed by his father. Miles from the nearest town, there was a large weatherb
oard homestead and other buildings. Clothing and footwear arrived once a year in a large wooden case from Sydney. There was not much money but the children were educated by governesses paid for by the Scottish Australian Company. ‘We had riding, tennis, cricket, reading, music, indoor hobbies of all kinds…’

  The summers could be stiflingly hot but his mother had a garden ‘considered about the best in the district…’ There were visitors on Sundays and she went visiting on weekdays in a horse-drawn sulky with a hood.

  When she was at home she would frequently set out on a fishing excursion in the afternoon, walking to one of the deeper waterholes … her favourite fishing spots were at least a mile away. She thought nothing of walking there and back and on the return trip she was usually burdened by the weight of several fish – catfish and a kind of small mountain perch that she called minnows. She kept up a large correspondence with Queensland friends and played the piano every evening after tea for quite a long time.

  As a schoolboy I sensed Pat had this (for me) romantic childhood, although he did not talk about it in detail.

  At age fourteen, the time had come for Pat to go to secondary school. He travelled in a train for the first time. His father was Church of England and his mother Catholic. Shore was considered, but his mother had visited the newly established St Joseph’s College at Hunters Hill a few years earlier. Pat and a brother were sent there. It was ‘a sad decision’. Neither of them were as tough as the typical Joey’s boarder – mainly sons of country publicans – and the long-term effect was to make it impossible for Pat to become a headmaster. The headmasters of the prestigious Catholic schools were all in religious orders and the headmasters of Protestant schools were all born and bred Protestants. His birth name of Percy, a good if rather silly Protestant name, had not helped either, when it elided into the easy-going ‘Pat’, which could only belong to a Catholic.