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  When we got back to Sydney there was no further discussion about cane farming, and my mother did not become a cane farmer’s wife.

  I woke up one morning months later. I was still sleeping in my parents’ bedroom. The sun was streaming in through the French doors from across Lavender Bay. I was quietly crying – crying for the memory of Queensland nights, the coral garden and the tropical blue water that was a marine desert.

  MOSMAN PREP

  My parents went to state schools, my father leaving school aged twelve and my mother aged thirteen. What happened I do not know, but my sister had a difficult time at her state primary school in North Sydney. My mother persuaded my father that Diana should go to Ravenswood Methodist Ladies’ College at Gordon. She then persuaded him to send me to Church of England Preparatory School, Mosman. I went to Anglican schools for my entire school life.

  Before I could be enrolled, we were interviewed by the headmaster AH (Tibby) Yarnold, then approaching eighty, who founded Mosman Prep in 1904. My mother, Diana and I went to his house in Mosman, where he lived with his pale-haired daughter and her husband, his deputy headmaster EC MacDougall, a plump man with bright red cheeks, who was marvellously good natured and adept at managing boys. While I was at primary school I did not realise how small Mr MacDougall was. We were all young and small. But even for primary school boys it was obvious Tibby was tiny and spider-like, with round spectacles that were large for his face. An outstanding scholar, he would have been headmaster of a top secondary school, except for his size. At our interview I announced: ‘I’ve seen the Devil’. My mother had to explain this was Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust.

  The Mosman Prep coat and navy blue cap carried an embroidered white and blue crest and the motto Non Nobis Solum – ‘not for ourselves alone’. In order to buy my uniform, we went to David Jones department store in the city. A uniformed attendant, twisting a brass handle back and forth, took us up in the lift, stopping and reciting the goods on each floor. I stood with my feet under an X-ray machine, to check the fit of my school shoes. I wriggled my toes and watched the bones move, lit up in a dim green light. On one of these David Jones visits, my sister and I discovered our mother’s fear of heights, as we egged her on to leave the shop by the escalator. She stood paralysed, watching the cascading steps, and called out to her mother. We retreated to the lift.

  I started school in 1946. The asphalt playground and red-brick and cream stucco castellations of the main building seemed gigantic. For a year my mother came with me on the tram to Mosman, a distance of 4 kilometres. She must also have accompanied me on the tram trip back home. From the start of my second year of primary school – I was then six and a half – I travelled by myself. Each day my mother gave me twopence for fares and a packed lunch in my small leather satchel and I set off, like a little adult, for the long walk up the hill to the tram stop outside North Sydney railway station.

  Many old toast-rack trams were still in service. The conductor swung along the outside running board, with the leisurely lope of a foxtrot dancer, peering into each compartment and announcing ‘Fez pleaz’ and thumbing tickets from a clipboard. He stowed the money in a leather pouch hanging from his shoulder. Penny tickets, which the children bought, had a pale yellow band. Home from school one afternoon, I proudly handed my mother back a penny. When the conductor swung past, opened the glass door and peered in, I had sat there, staring ahead. Never do that again, my mother told me.

  After school, walking home down Blues Point Road, I was aware of the stale reek of wine from a wine saloon. Glancing through the swing doors, I glimpsed women sitting at tables, each with a glass, often alone. Wine was a ladies’ drink and I assumed they were alcoholics. Occasionally I passed a drunk slumped in a backstreet gutter. I was ready to run for my life at any hint of trouble.

  McMahons Point had become working class. A few genteel people stayed on in fine old houses and gardens with harbour views. Old Mr and Mrs Bushell (from the Bushell’s Tea family) lived across the road from us and walked their two Scottie dogs, who wore tartan dog-coats in winter. Dark-skinned, pretty girls lived in a house at the top of the steps leading down to the Bushells. They walked around in shabby dresses with no shoes. A grey cat – a Russian blue – used to greet me on their brick front fence. I spent minutes stroking it, before walking down the last part of the hill.

  There was a shortage of teachers after the war and our first teacher was Miss Janet Cooper, about eighteen years old. Sixty years later at an old boys’ reunion there were excited murmurs when her name was mentioned – I was not the only boy who had a childish crush on her. My one unhappy memory from her class is the little bully who sat next to me and stabbed my hand with a pencil. A tiny piece of graphite he left in the palm of my right hand is still there. As a left-hander who switched, I often did not know which hand was which. I used to consult the piece of graphite.

  Boys addressed each other by their surname and Miss Cooper was ‘Sir’. Our lady teacher in our next grade, an older woman who lacked the brunette glamour of Janet Cooper, was also ‘Sir’.

  In my third year there was an unpleasant surprise. We had no physical discipline from our lady teachers. Returned soldiers were still finding their way through teachers’ college and in 1948 we had a relic of the profession, a tyrannical old teacher in his seventies, with a high yellow skull and wisps of white hair stuck like raw wool to his head. He had a tobacco-stained moustache and hawked from the back of his throat. Mr Hall’s favourite expression was: ‘Stop that humbuggin’ about’. Boys who misbehaved were sent to the back of the class; they lowered their short pants a few inches, bent over and Mr Hall’s long cane swept and whistled through the air, delivering two or three ‘cuts’. I was caned a couple of times in this manner.

  The ultimate disciplinarian was the tiny and ancient headmaster. If an infringement was serious, the boy was told to go to Mr Yarnold’s office. This was a small book-lined room, where he sat reading, with a view through an open door to a small garden with a Rose of Sharon hibiscus covered with white flowers turning pink, like vanilla and strawberry ice creams. The boy presented himself and announced the prescribed punishment. Mr Yarnold stood up, and with no expression on his face took out his cane and delivered some short cuts to the outstretched hand.

  The toilet block was a windowless, roofed building. It had an entrance with no door, and stank of ammonia. During the mid-morning play lunch and lunch hour, we stood before a perpendicular sheet of black rusting iron, higher than our heads and long enough to accommodate eight boys peeing side by side. We competed to see whose urine went highest. Sitting on a toilet was something done behind a closed door in a cubicle, and the unsavoury product was quickly flushed away.

  Bottoms were our rudest body part, because what we did with them was hidden. Mention of ‘bottoms’ was greeted with a childish guffaw. A group of us was lingering after school in a large exercise shed where we used to swing back and forth across a set of monkey bars. A game of ‘Show us your bottom’ began. We took it in turns, briefly exposing ourselves. The plumpest boy tried to excuse himself. We had all humiliated ourselves and we cajoled and wheedled relentlessly until he gave in.

  ‘Shagging’ was something the six-and seven-year-olds did on the front playground. We did not know this word’s vernacular meaning. They enjoyed tickling; their most vulnerable spot was the genitals and they faced each other, feinting and parrying like fencers. Older boys enjoyed more grown-up forms of assault. ‘Itchy powder’ – hundreds of small seeds from the seed balls of plane trees – was stuffed down a boy’s collar from behind. The sadists delivered ‘rabbit killers’ with the edge of the hand to the back of an unsuspecting boy’s neck.

  Party invitations in envelopes would sometimes be handed around the classroom. The Mosman cinema was a popular venue. One boy’s father owned Mynor, the manufacturer of ‘Green Ice’ cordial (that I fed to Puss). During one party, we inspected the bottling factory. Another father owned Classic Comics – my copy of The Moon
stone was part of this series. He hired a double-decker bus to take all the children to a picnic ground. As the little boys scrambled up the back stairs to get the best seats on the top deck at the front, I decided their rushing was pointless and was the last to board. I was relieved my parents did not hold a class party for me.

  I used to travel on the tram with the only Mosman Prep boy living in the North Sydney region. Living in a ‘slum’ area was something we shared. Before going to his mother’s house, he was minded after school by his grandmother in one of a row of decayed workmen’s cottages, in a lane behind a large furniture shop. As she began washing him, standing in a basin on a table, I quickly said good-bye.

  The ‘lads’ of McMahons Point had competitions roaring down the steep hill of King George Street in home-made timber billy carts. A boy I’ll call ‘Lars’ lived with his parents in ‘Roma’, a large old white-painted residential from the Victorian era. Lars wanted my help with a money-making scheme that would let him buy the expensive ball-bearing wheels for one of these billy carts.

  He was a pupil at the school attached to St Francis Xavier’s church, next to the railway station. He took me inside the dimly lit church one afternoon, dipped his fingers in holy water, crossed himself and genuflected. I realise now this was a small pantomime to impress me with his rectitude. Lars did not understand Protestants regarded Catholics as inherently dishonest, and this demonstration made me suspicious.

  He took me to meet friends of his, tough local boys, billy cart owners, crouched among lantana bushes on overgrown wasteland, and handing around a roll-your-own cigarette made with tobacco salvaged from cigarette butts. They insisted I take a puff and laughed when I coughed on the smoke. Lars suggested I have the name ‘Bashful’. I sensed this word was an insult, and was glad they did not bash me up.

  One winter morning Lars arrived at our house with a hand trolley. He was about to execute his plan, which I had not understood until then. We toured the neighbourhood and collected lengths of timber from old wood piles. He was a bossy boy and kept demanding ‘Bashful’ drag the trolley around while he knocked on doors and sold firewood to housewives. Even when an angrily shouting man chased us off his property, it did not occur to me we were selling stolen wood. I had no interest in the rewards Lars insisted he would give me. Dragging the trolley around was a chore and I disliked Lars’s bossiness.

  A few days later he invited me back to ‘Roma’. I waited in the grand, dilapidated central hall outside the door of his flat, and thought it was odd he did not ask me in to meet his parents. Lars may have worried I might blurt something out. Eventually he came out and handed me some purple Indian postage stamps and ‘cigarette cards’ – he knew I was interested in these. This was the final settling up he had planned. Lars was a boy with principles.

  I woke up in bed one morning a few weeks later and almost cried. Lars and I were thieves! Lars probably chose me as his accomplice because I was a naive private school boy, and he was tempted by my father’s piles of wood, the largest in Lavender Bay. But I must have made it clear they were not to be touched.

  ‘Cigarette cards’ were carefully folded cigarette packets, made to look like a card. Before World War II, actual cigarette cards depicting sportsmen, actresses, animals and birds were inserted into cigarette packets and keenly collected. With the World War II paper shortage this was discontinued and never resumed. So schoolboys began collecting empty cigarette packets and fashioning them into substitute cigarette cards – like other wartime substitutes.

  Among the cigarette packets Lars gave me was a double Three Threes State Express. Unlike the cheaper packs of ten, popular with working men, a double pack held twenty cigarettes. Lars’s double Three Threes was a nondescript dark crimson-red. But it was an absolute rarity – I had never seen one before. I knew I could sell this at school for sixpence – not something I told Lars.

  Until then boys at Mosman Prep had traded ‘cigarette cards’ in small isolated transactions. One morning I brought my entire collection to school. Boys swarmed around me as I sold them during the morning break and lunch hour. I typically sold for four or five pence a double packet of Clifton (moderately rare and glamorously blue), single packets of red or blue Capstan for a penny (these had a small ship’s capstan pictured in the right bottom corner and were a working man’s cigarette), a brown single Capstan for threepence (these were rare), and so on.

  Boys were attracted by the variety of packages. Kensitas showed a bow-tied waiter in a red circle holding out a pack on a plate. Craven ‘A’ was a red packet with a black cat’s head in a white ellipse. The most romantic pack was a double Player’s Navy Cut. A bearded sailor’s head was framed by a white lifebelt on a seascape at sunset – the only pack I ever coveted. I did not have one.

  Not long after the school lunch hour began, I had sold my entire collection. My takings were four shillings and eight pence halfpenny. As we went back into our classes, a ban on the sale of ‘cigarette cards’ was announced. This ban left me with an uneasy feeling. That was the end of my interest in ‘cigarette cards’ – once they had no monetary value.

  A few weeks later, a red and white object washed up on my father’s beach. It was a waterlogged cardboard replica of a Craven ‘A’ packet, about 2 feet (60 cm) high, a model from a tobacconist’s window display. A couple of months earlier, it would have astonished my schoolboy customers: worth two shillings at least. I picked it up reverently, examined its condition – it had the salt and oil slick smell of the harbour – then dropped it back on the beach, with the other flotsam and jetsam.

  We also collected cicadas. They were deafening in summer, ‘Greengrocers’ in every tree and on every bush, so we had to block our ears. ‘Yellow Mondays’ were less prolific, and ‘Floury Bakers’ and ‘Cherry Noses’ were moderately rare. ‘Black Princes’, small and noisy, were a great prize. In wild bushland we occasionally heard a black ‘Double Drummer’, the bass baritone of cicadas, high up in a group of trees. Most of us thought it was cruel to keep cicadas in bottles. We loved to hold them, and feel their prickly feet crawl up our arms; then we threw them in the air and they took off like little rockets, croaking and peeing as they flew away.

  Primrose Park was a favourite place for cicadas and where we also played cricket in summer. I was an outer fieldsman, and for much of the time just stood there in a pleasant green haze. I was rarely asked to bowl and did not survive for long at the crease to bat. What was far more interesting was a disused sewer works at the end of the park, a vast concrete Babylonian ruin. Late in the afternoon some of us lingered after the stumps were pulled up. When the teachers were all gone, we headed for the sewer works, jumping down into old settling vats for human sewage, now harmless grass. We ran around, our voices echoing among the concrete walls and tunnels until it was time to go home, trudging up the hill as the sun declined in a dusty, peach-coloured sky.

  In winter we played rugby union. I became inner centre in the backs. This was where I could do least harm. My role was simply to receive the ball, run with it a short distance and pass it to the outer centre, who passed it to the wing. Wings were speedy. For a few weeks I became mildly notorious as a tackler, running and throwing myself in a crouching position at the thighs of a boy from the opposing team who was running with the ball. I later lost my nerve. I chipped a tooth, tackling too high. ‘It serves you right’, the referee told me.

  Mr O’Brien, a cheerful, no-nonsense thirty-year-old, taught us in my fourth year of primary school. We started Latin and French, pronounced in a healthy, Australian way. ‘Dans’, for example, was pronounced ‘danz’. I shared a desk with Alan Bishop, a gentle, thoughtful boy with a round face and red hair (the future husband of a well-known Australian politician, Bronwyn). After school we sometimes went back to his house in Mosman. He had a bike – a novelty for me.

  On the last day of the year we went on a class expedition to Taronga Zoo. We had our report books to take home, little books with bright blue covers and a dozen pages showing ou
r progress from month to month, signed by teachers and the headmaster. Alan and I were leaning over a metal fence to look down at a rocky pit inhabited by a tribe of spider monkeys. Alan’s report book was sitting in his shirt pocket and fell into the monkey pit. A spider monkey sidled up stealthily, attracted by the bright blue cover. Little hands picked it up and tore it in shreds. Alan burst into tears. I wondered what he would tell his parents. Alan had no memory of this event when he had become a judge and I reminded him forty years later.

  I was walking up to Spit Junction with a new friend after school. He began talking about how rich his family was. He asked for a loan, explaining how he would soon be able to pay me back. I had been taught to expect strict honesty – he need not have given me this long-winded explanation. I had a two shilling coin in my pocket – a significant sum for me – and handed this to him. In the following weeks I asked several times for my money back. He ignored me. I learned a lesson from Lars and this boy. I was careless about money only once later in my life.

  Another friend was Christopher Tadgell. Waiting in a queue for a school bus, we were discussing Strauss waltzes. As a nine-year-old Wagnerian, I argued Strauss waltzes were not serious enough to be good music. Christopher disagreed. He enjoyed waltzes. In 1982 we caught up again at an Australian High Commission dinner in New Delhi. He was preparing The History of Architecture in India. Christopher has published over twenty books on the history of architecture. One Amazon reviewer writes: ‘Tadgell gives equal weight to all cultures…’

  Mosman Prep appreciated music. We learned the Jacobite song ‘Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling./ Charlie is my darling, the young Chevalier.’ It did not occur to anyone this song was seditious. One afternoon the whole school gathered in the large assembly hall and we heard the 1812 Overture from a small portable gramophone. It was very rousing. We went to concerts for schools in the Sydney Town Hall. When the orchestra began Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers there was a ripple of soprano excitement, girls and unbroken boys’ voices whispering: it was the theme of a radio serial, The Search for the Golden Boomerang.