Leeward Read online

  The downstairs hall of the skinny house ended in our largest room. Our drawing room had two French doors opening onto a wooden veranda. Very occasionally we sat in a lounge suite with elaborately carved black wooden arms and crests, upholstered with a grey-blue, heavy-duty tapestry, or I might sit on the floor with a train set or playing snakes and ladders. There was a small black piano inherited from my mother’s mother, and later a yellowish walnut veneer upright Lipp, with brass candle holders, and two coats of arms on the gold painted soundboard.

  The piano was bought ceremoniously in 1949 with money bequeathed to my mother by her uncle John Cragin Rainer, a childless itinerant agricultural worker who had the same name as his operatic father. The Lipp was owned by a genteel old lady. Dressed in our best clothes, our family came to her Neutral Bay apartment, my father advising my mother, who was nervous about such an extravagant purchase, and the old lady expressing regret at giving it up. There was an undisclosed logic to my mother’s extravagance. Diana was recently out of hospital, where she had been treated for a congenital condition. She would be learning the piano. This was her reward – a reward that became a chore.

  My father was convinced a second-hand violin he bought at auction was a valuable instrument. He peered inside it with his eyeglass, looking for signs left by some famous maker. I was allowed to produce screeching sounds on it. My parents were not interested in paying for me to have lessons. I was a boy.

  On Sunday afternoons we listened to 78s on my father’s small HMV portable record player: the voice of the Australian tenor Peter Dawson or Christian Sinding’s piano piece, ‘Rustle of Spring’. My mother was embarrassed by my father’s favourite 78, which he played (I suspect) to provoke her:

  Hallelujah, I’m a bum,

  Hallelujah, bum again,

  Hallelujah, give us a handout

  To revive us again…

  We played hit songs from the 1920s such as ‘How about a little kiss Cecilia/ Just a kiss you’ll never miss Cecilia…’ I thought this song was idiotic but songs such as this reminded my mother of glamorous days before she met my father.

  The drawing room had a tall upright mirror with a gilt base that stood in the corner on a low L-shaped book case. My mother chose the books: Dickens, Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, one volume of HG Wells’s two-volume A Short History of the World, two bulky dark green volumes of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning and a slimmer grass-green volume, Mrs Browning’s Poems. Rather than their poems, my mother was more interested in the Brownings’ courtship – she used to talk about the 1934 film The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

  I was intrigued by a small nineteenth century volume with black and white illustrations and viridian green cloth binding. I insisted my mother read me stories from this jewel-like book. She had to make these up, as there was nothing in this book for a child, but I have no memory of any of these invented tales.

  A narrow stair led from the downstairs hall up to a small landing on which stood a rickety black lacquer side table, decorated with rural Chinese scenes. The landing was lit feebly at night by an electric globe hanging in a reddish-orange silk lampshade with tassels. Three rooms led off the landing. My sister had a large sunny bedroom at the back of the house facing the street. Next to it there was a bathroom with a hot water geyser – we had no running hot water. At the front of the house my parents slept in a bedroom where I also slept until the age of ten.

  My bed was stationed next to one of two glass French doors, opening onto a wooden veranda with a cast iron railing, looking out over Lavender Bay. The veranda shook when we stepped out onto it. My parents had an elaborate walnut veneer bedroom suite, purchased when they married and my father was flush with earnings from the Liberty. Their double bed stood in the centre of the room. I saw shapes like blurred human-sized mummies in the doors of my mother’s large wardrobe and Arthur Rackham grotesqueries in all the walnut veneer surfaces.

  My mother sometimes wore a Chinese blue and orange silk dressing gown. She also had an elaborate green silk gown embroidered with large roses, which I never saw her wear, though once I secretly slipped it on myself.

  The fourth storey of the skinny house was a desiccated room up a final narrow and dusty set of stairs – my father’s attic, where he repaired watches. I sometimes went there with him in the early evening, breathing in its hot acrid air, which had heated up during the day. I sat in a bay window on a wooden bench, looking east, across the water. Two other tiny, dusty windows with gothic arches looked north and south. The woodwork was sunbleached, painted a pale chalky green, and the wooden walls were papered with a nineteenth century wallpaper with a pattern of small flowers. A black eyeglass popped into his right eye socket and held there as if by magnetism, my father explained the workings of mainsprings and balance wheels, pointing out the jewels on which the small mechanisms pivoted.

  I had no interest in his explanations. But I was fascinated by the low bright light suspended over his work bench, illuminating the soft white cloth spread over it, with the watches and precision tools scattered across it, including a large gold fob watch and a cuttlefish shell used for soldering. There were old clocks, an amethyst necklace in a jewel case, and a broken ivory chess set with heraldic figures in white and red. A plywood box was filled with old postcards. I used to rummage through these, admiring postage stamps of the Australian states, dating back before federation, and glancing at handwritten messages from unknown people to unknown people.

  Early one morning I guiltily sneaked up into my father’s attic. He may have heard me fossicking about upstairs. I heard his feet shuffling up the creaking wooden stairs. He opened the attic door and gave me a look of quiet disapproval.

  He loved owning things. I have a list he wrote in blue-black ink on a small sheet of lined paper, from about 1960. The purpose is obscure:

  8 day

  (4) wall clocks (1) seth Thomas weight power

  English [illegible] (2) Mainspring Powered

  8 day mantel striking clock, WestMinster chime,

  Alarm clocks, small watchmakers bench,

  lathe, & Tools, foot power buff & emery wheel,

  (2) Portable Wireless, Violin, silver plated trombone,

  cameras, 1/4 Plate Reflex Zeiss 4.5 lens (2) Rolleiflex 2.8 & 3.8

  Telescopic Tripods, 6’ condenser, automatic focusing

  enlarger, paper hangers straight edge & brushes,

  Pocket Watch R. G. silver & nickel open face & hunters

  Ladies & Gents wrist watches movements

  ‘Omega’ english [illegible] & swiss fractional H.P. Elec Motors

  Tecnico lawn mower, Vacuum cleaners, Typist desk (Teak) & spring back chair, Tape recorder

  Elec radiators pressure cookers,

  aluminium Pots, pans, pictures, blankets

  sheets, lounge covers, curtains, bedspreads,

  carpet runners,

  12 flatette’s furniture?

  I have no idea where most of these objects went, but I still have the silver and nickel fob watch with a hunting scene.

  I slept on a horsehair mattress in a silky oak bed my father made. Although he extolled horsehair mattresses as firm and good for the posture of growing males, I grew up with rounded shoulders, not unlike his.

  Falling asleep at night, I heard the muted and distant screams from the Big Dipper across the bay as the roller-coaster clattered up the first steep climb and rocketed down, then around, and up and down diminishing crests. Most local children had been there but it was a forbidden place for my sister and me. My mother’s disapproval was cultural. A waste of money, said my father.

  The lights of Luna Park flickered on the water. As I shut my eyes I seemed to be in a large auditorium, with dim orange, green and reddish shapes revolving slowly as I subsided pleasantly into sleep. I was unaware of the sex, if any, my parents may or may not have had on the bed in the centre of the room. I did not know there was such a thing.

  THE LIBERTY

  As a child, I watche
d my father collecting pennies from the workmen he took on the Liberty from Lavender Bay to Balmain. One of the refrains of my childhood was his ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves’. My mother had an antiphonal response (perhaps not said when he was around), her sarcastic ‘Penny-wise, pound-foolish’. Her family, the Rainers, had been penny-foolish and pound-foolish.

  As well as learning about thrift and hard work from my father’s motor launch, I had my first exposure to bohemian life among his weekend picnickers, the family of Kleber Claux, anarchist and nudist.

  ‘Iris’, my father announced as we were breakfasting one morning years after he had sold his boat and we had moved from the McMahons Point houses, ‘I dreamt last night it was raining and I had to go down to the boat and empty all the rafts’.

  I have what may be the first certificate for the Liberty issued to my father, dated 1921, on a large cardboard sheet. It was to be ‘exhibited in a conspicuous part of the Motor Boat’ and lists the required number of life jackets, rafts and life buoys (stowed on the roof ) and the ‘local limits within which this motor boat is certified to ply for hire’.

  The Liberty had a white hull and brown superstructure. My father sat in a driver’s cabin at the front, almost on top of an eight-cylinder engine painted dark green, warm and throbbing and smelling of engine oil. There was an open-air back deck with a curved, ribbed wooden seat (licensed to seat eight). The main cabin had banks of seats (licensed to seat fifty-eight) and an out-of-tune honky-tonk piano with many dead notes. At the end of the day my father, who was the sole crewmember, tied his launch up at a stout timber mooring pile not far from his beach, and rowed ashore.

  The name Liberty symbolised freedom and proprietorship. My father had printed invoice forms headed ‘L. Lehman’ – the double N was reduced to a single N, as this made his name look less German – and endorsed with his phone number B2560. (This became XB2560 when Sydney phone numbers were about to exceed one hundred thousand.) He kept a record of his takings from year to year in blue-black copperplate in a small notebook. But he did not record his earnings from repairing watches (a trade he taught himself ).

  Eventually my father received a large ‘assets betterment’ assessment from the Tax Office for undisclosed income. As a child aged about nine, I accompanied him to the office of a Mr Bickford, a hail-fellow-well-met sort of man, and heard my father explain his undisclosed earnings. Mr Bickford was a bit rough, I thought.

  My father allowed me to witness all of this, perhaps so I did not repeat his mistake when I grew up. Filling in his tax return, he once pointed out it was prepared in accordance with the Income Tax and Social Services Contribution Act. ‘You see son, I pay tax now and I’m entitled later on to the old age pension.’ The promise of a universal old age pension made payment of income tax more attractive. The words ‘Social Services Contribution’ were later dropped from the title of the legislation, along with automatic entitlement to the pension. He never did receive it.

  Almost thirty years after our visits to Mr Bickford, I prepared the will of the company secretary of one of my largest clients. I had known him for some years, and we had become friends. He was a bachelor, on the board of a chamber music society and a trustee of an Anglican city church. While chatting – after he had signed his will – he mentioned he had known a Lehmann, who drove a launch around the harbour. He had helped with his tax affairs. I had a moment of sudden recognition.

  ‘Fred, that was my father! I used to come in with him to see you, when he had to pay that big fine to the Tax Office.’ Fred Jackson had tactfully not mentioned this. I suddenly realised he was the person I believed as a child was Mr Bickford (Fred’s employer at the time). My impression of Fred’s ‘roughness’ may have been play-acting to relax my working-class father.

  I have a memory of half a dozen or so boats at sunset careened in a placid reach of the inner harbour when for a few days each year the Liberty had its bottom scraped. At other times my father brought the boat ashore to his beach and worked on the hull himself. One afternoon when it was careened on his beach, he staged for family and friends a demonstration of the shockproof nature of watches that had Incabloc mechanisms, throwing and bouncing them off the hull.

  He built a long wooden photographic enlarger (mentioned in his itemised list) and developed and printed his own photographs in the dim red light of his darkroom. Long exposure times were needed for night photography. For a year or so he tried to photograph the Harbour Bridge at night, with its lights reflected in completely still water. One night the harbour was like a sheet of glass for some minutes and the photograph was perfect. He sold the prints to a local shop. On nights like those, when there was no wind and the harbour was still, lying in my small bed at ‘Ivanhoe’ I could hear the lions at Taronga Zoo, several miles and bays away, their roars carrying across the water.

  My father’s photography may have been an adjunct to his boat business – to sell photographs to his weekend picnickers. This would explain his professional-sized Zeiss camera with its glass negatives and black silk shutter – a horizontal slit as the aperture.

  Our family went on many of these weekend group picnics in the Liberty. The usual destination was ‘Fairyland’, a picnic ground owned by the Swan family in what is now Lane Cove National Park. The picnickers unwrapped cut lunches from dishcloths in baskets, and held egg-and-spoon and obstacle races in a large grassy area. My father used to call on the Swans, an elderly couple in their timber house set back from the picnic ground. They had a complicated gold-plated clock on a table – to my childish eyes a toy golden city, which emerged as its protective cloth was removed.

  Because the river was tidal, the Liberty often got stuck on the way back, late in the afternoon. Wearing a pair of old shorts, my father would jump into the river, wading up to his chest, investigating and pushing, watched by the boatload of picnickers. One of the men would be deputised to sit at the controls while my father called out instructions from the water.

  As the boat headed home at the end of the day, the mangroves of the Lane Cove River were left behind, and we were in the open waters of the harbour under a sky flecked with small orange clouds. I liked being in the front cabin with my father, beside the large, quietly vibrating green-painted engine. I pronounced engine as ‘injun’ and for years believed this was the correct pronunciation. ‘I can hear singing in the injun, Daddy.’ And I started singing to myself.

  ‘He’s singing. He’s tired,’ my father announced to my mother. I hated being told I was tired, and stopped.

  A group of artists and bohemians periodically hired the boat for weekend picnics. This group included a family who were nudists and artists’ models, the Claux family – my parents pronouncing their name as ‘Clocks’. My childhood memory of the Claux children is of beautiful dark-haired adolescents with striking eyes. The son exhibited in the Wynn Prize landscape competition when he was a teenager, and died in 1950 at the age of twenty-one. Deborah Beck’s book Hope in Hell has a 1948 photograph of the daughter, Moira. Naked to the waist, she is sitting surrounded by velvet drapery and holding a sword. The Claux family was my first exposure to the bohemian way of life.

  Christina Stead’s novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney describes a bohemian group going on a picnic in the late 1920s. I believe she is describing the same group my father began to take on picnics up the Lane Cove River in the 1920s, and which continued into the 1940s (but in the 1920s this group did not include the bearded nudist-anarchist Kleber Claux, who was yet to arrive in Australia). My father may be Stead’s ‘owner of the boat’. She wrote:

  They disembarked in some pleasure-grounds up the Lane Cove River … The sun set later on in a pomegranate sky; the smooth narrow river was like cloth of gold … When dark came rapidly … the owner of the boat lighted lanterns along the roof and they sat in the dark, feeling the breezes, listening to the creaking of wood and the lapping of the shore-water.

  The harbour was the great spectacle of my childhood. Its surface bri
ghtened and darkened with winds and clouds, and the sun moving across the sky. Boats went to and fro, their wakes washing noisily against the barnacled piles of wharves. From my father’s boat I used to watch water rats poking about under inner-harbour wharves – large whiskered animals in motley, some grey, some with dark pelts and light-coloured golden bellies, accosting each other and running about. I loved the shifting patterns of petrol spills on the water, like the rainbow hues of carnival glass.

  Mornings of thick fog were a muffled rhapsody, with fog horns blaring, some close by and others far away, a symphony of too much information jamming the ears, boats suddenly looming up out of the mist, and dampness settling on everything as droplets of moisture. My father meanwhile had to stay levelheaded and steer through great billows and apparitions of fog in the direction of Balmain. The harbour was his workplace, his face furrowed from peering ahead at the water, watching for what might be approaching or crossing his path. A one-man boat crew required agility: as a wharf approached, leaving the controls and throwing a rope to curl around a bollard.

  My father shouted a greeting to his friend Archie Bryant whenever their boats passed, Archie’s boat with its varnished forecastle smarter looking than my father’s with its dull brown paint. ‘Archie doesn’t own his boat’, was my father’s invariable comment.

  He used to point out the Adelaide Steamship Company’s Manunda, a large passenger ship with a single cream funnel – a hospital ship in the war. He explained the plimsoll marks on the sides of ships and encouraged me to follow him up rusty ladders onto their decks. As I stood on the edge of his boat which was moving and pitching, reaching across a treacherous strip of water in which I could not swim, I hated trying to get a grip on these ladders.