Leeward Read online

  The year 1950 was our second last year of the primary school syllabus. Our new teacher was a nervous young man. We were the first class he had ever had – perhaps his last. He became ‘Beaky’ because of his nose. His classes were a rabble; he had difficulty speaking above the uproar. We began talking insurrection: our parents pay school fees; we’ll get them to get rid of this hopeless person, and so on. I was complicit in this hypocritical talk. He was replaced by a young teacher who stared us down. French classes with our new teacher, Mr Walters, were a surprise. He spoke French with strange nasalised vowels and a uvular ‘r’. It sounded very affected. Did French people really speak like this? Mr Walters was my first encounter with an intellectual – not a word I knew then. Despite this, he had a good control of our class.

  (In the 1980s I got to know Ray Walters again at the University of New South Wales, where he was a lecturer. I was teaching law in the commerce faculty. I had no sense of any age difference between us. It seemed bizarre that he was my teacher in primary school. Ray convened a book group and invited me to a discussion of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. I had the pale blue and red volumes of the Scott Moncrieff translation – considered superior to Proust’s original by Joseph Conrad. I sat in my office between classes, reading Proust – my third attempt. In about six weeks I read the 1500-odd magical pages from start to finish.)

  We were given weekly elocution lessons by Mrs Sheila Hancox – I think that was her name. Taking off her hat, which had a net veil, she made an entrance like a grande dame in long floral dresses. She had us deliver little speeches, while she sat on a chair on the dais, appraising and correcting. I decided to ‘improve’ my accent. By the end of the year, a boy I got on well with, who had a broad Scots accent, ribbed me for talking like a stuck-up English boy. For years afterwards I was asked ‘When did you come out from England?’

  My mother used to read to me from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. She liked to quote the mysterious count’s remark that ‘punctuality is the politeness of kings’. I started reading Dumas myself. On my tenth birthday my mother left on my bed twenty-four volumes of Dumas in a cardboard box. I could not believe it as I unfolded sheets of brown packing paper and extracted book after book with crimson cloth binding and gold lettering on the spine. She had only a small allowance from my father and must have bought these books out of the modest bequest from her farm labourer uncle John (as well as the Lipp piano for Diana’s piano lessons). That was the high point of my love affair with my mother.

  I became a fanatical reader – Dickens, Conan Doyle, Jeffery Farnol and Defoe (authors recommended by my mother) – as well as Dumas. One morning I was reading a book in the tram. As I got out and headed down the hill to Mosman Prep, still reading my book, I walked into a telegraph pole.

  In mid-1950, it was decided our class of forty was too big. (That may have contributed to the Beaky catastrophe.) Classes of about thirty-two were the norm. I was one of six boys chosen to move up to a class of older boys who were taught the 6th class primary school curriculum. We were to be given special tuition until we caught up. I had been six months younger than the average age of the other boys. I was now eighteen months younger, the baby of the class. One of the boys who moved up with me was David Raphael, who later became a tax lawyer, like me, and the only primary school friend who is still alive and with whom I have stayed in touch.

  A few boys in that class had some understanding of sex. Once our class went for a couple of days to the Blue Mountains. One evening we went on a bush walk beside some cascades, and were singing ‘Ten green bottles hanging on a wall…’ I overheard stifled guffaws as one boy recited to another: ‘Tom and Mary went to the dairy/ Tom pulled out his long and hairy…’ I did not hear the rest of the rhyme. It was disgusting and incomprehensible. Despite my sexual naivety, when I was playing the part of a girl in a school play, as we were about to go on stage I popped a couple of socks into my dress to simulate breasts. The boy who had the male role opposite me thought this was a great lark.

  At the end of 1950, most of our 6th class went off to secondary high schools – many to Shore School. About twelve of us stayed on and did our first year of high school at Mosman Prep. Our teacher was the deputy headmaster, Mr MacDougall, the plump, red-faced, easygoing son-in-law of Mr Yarnold. Thus 1951 was one of the pleasantest years in my school life.

  When I was much younger I had lost a penny, when I agreed to play ‘Heads I win, tails you lose’. I had now taught myself a few tricks. During the lunch hour, we played a geographical game. If one of us said ‘Assam’ the next person had to find a place beginning with M. If the reply was ‘Madras’, the reply to the reply might be ‘Sussex’. A place name ending with X was always a problem for the next boy whose turn it was, although we all knew some obscure place names beginning with X, such as Xaquixaguana. I had a place name which I saved up. When asked to respond to ‘Middlesex’ by a smiling boy who was confident all the X’s were exhausted, I replied ‘Xcalax’. I spelled the name. There was an incredulous silence. I opened the lid of my desk and produced a battered red nineteenth century atlas my father had picked up at auction. It was starting to fall apart. I pointed to ‘Xcalax’ in the index – a place in South America.

  Another boy and I were given special coaching by ‘Tibby’ Yarnold, as we were sitting for a scholarship to Shore later in the year. Tibby loved the classics. He concentrated on polishing up our Latin. He could see I was fascinated by ancient history and gave me Sayce’s 1889 book The Hittites. One of the prizes he chose for me at the end of the year was Guerber’s Myths of Greece and Rome. I fell in love with the ancient gods and heroes and treasured this in my high school years.

  Mr Yarnold and I shared a connection, which I discovered years later. I do not know if he was aware of it. His father was the Anglican rector at Christ Church Lavender Bay. In 1891 his father recruited my grandfather to go on a mission to New Guinea as the carpenter, and was a witness on the death certificate when my grandfather came back later in the year, extremely ill with malaria, and died just after his return.

  I was an unbaptised war baby. Mosman Prep was Anglican and we went to chapel once a week at St Clement’s, a large red-brick church next to the school. I enjoyed a few of the more rousing hymns and was vaguely intrigued by the change in colour of the church’s cloth vestments with each liturgical season: white and gold, and at other times red or green. But I had the feeling this was all meaningless pomp, and I hated going down on my knees.

  As a boy soprano, it was suggested I join the regular choir at St Clement’s for the Sunday service. Perhaps because we lived a long way away, at McMahons Point, nothing came of this. I was secretly relieved. Churches were gloomy places.

  Parents (which meant mothers) were invited to come to our weekly chapel service. My mother was starved for female friends. She began appearing at the back of the church with a few other mothers. These mid-week services were one of her few social outlets. She could mix with other ladies of her own class (as she saw it). But these women had refrigerators and middle-class husbands, and lived in respectable neighbourhoods. She could not invite them back to her house.

  At the end of each term, there was a Sunday service which we had to attend with our families. My parents and Diana came. The church would be packed with the boys’ families and the usual members of the congregation. In my last year at Mosman Prep, 1951, I read the lesson from the Bible at these crowded services in my boy soprano voice and faux English accent. No one had explained to me that italicised words in the King James Bible were words added to the divine text by the translators. I puzzled over their significance and whether I should give them extra emphasis. I read the lessons, I hoped, with a graceful expression and an uneasy emphasis when I came to italicised words.

  My pride in being chosen as the lesson reader for these large end-of-term congregations was not spoiled by having become an atheist. One afternoon I was in my father’s fibro laundry, the ram-shackle two-room outhouse in th
e wasteland between the skinny house and ‘Fifty-three’. I was in the junk room that was not used as a laundry, and looking up at the sky through a dusty window. I was ten years old. I idly reasoned that if a passing cloud crossed the sun, this would tell me whether there was a God. I did not wait to see what happened to the cloud. I decided God did not exist.

  ‘FIFTY-THREE’

  Perhaps like many childhoods, some images from my McMahons Point ‘latency phase’ seem to come from a time when I was just barely awake. One night we shone a powerful torch across the bay at the railway yards next to Luna Park, and saw a dim gleam answer back from the blank windows of a darkened train.

  On another very still night we rowed across to a submarine moored beside the railway yards. We were scrambling up and boarding when naval officers appeared and warned us to leave. Puffing up my seven-year-old lungs, I uttered boastful threats.

  The harbour was a great conveyer of floating rubbish. Coke and timber turned up on our beach; also dead cats, rotting fruit, the odd coconut, and unidentifiable flotsam oily with grime. Towards the end of the war, a rusted-out naval mine, about 4 feet (1.2 m) in diameter, appeared on rocks at the far end of the beach and sat there for years, then was gone as mysteriously as it arrived. At low tide I used to scramble far out among seaweed-green rocks to visit the home of a green eel. It poked its head out, and quickly retracted.

  One night during World War II, a sandstone cliff-face collapsed. The rumble woke my parents and Diana. Next morning they stood at the top of this small cliff and looked down. Dislodged by the roots of a Port Jackson fig, large blocks of sandstone had fallen onto the bottom level beside the beach, dragging down sixty-year-old iron railings. The new yellow cliff face was soon smothered with Crofton weed – rank-smelling, with chocolate-red stems, dark triangular leaves and small, furry white flowers.

  I have no memory of the collapse. In my early childhood Diana and I picked bunches of nasturtiums at the cliff bottom – orange, yellow and crimson, with blotches and stripes. Along with white arum lilies, they grew in the damp soil among the fallen sandstone blocks. The pale green tangle of their stems brushed against my legs as I waded among them. I liked the way a silver dewdrop sat in the middle of each leaf.

  When we moved up the hill to the skinny house, I became obsessed with ‘Fifty-three’, our mansion next door. We did not ever live there. It became the life we never had.

  My father’s three-quarters of an acre (0.3 ha) was a botanical lost property office. Fruit trees were scattered across the various levels: a peach, a nectarine and a guava with small, acrid red fruit. A loquat with dark metallic leaves and barely edible yellow fruit grew beside the rocks I used to wash. The beautiful plants were mixed in with weeds – fleabane had prolific seeds and asthma weed had grey hairy leaves and thin brittle stems growing from cracks.

  This profusion of beautiful and less beautiful plants was the start of a life-long fascination. Each afternoon after catching the tram home from Mosman Prep, I began haunting a flower shop beside North Sydney railway station. I stared at the plants in the window. I wandered in and gazed at the colourful pictures on seed packets. The shop owner had a standard greeting for me: ‘How are you today, boss?’ The grounds of ‘Fifty-three’ were the epicentre of this botanical eclecticism. We did not speculate about who had planted all these trees and flowers. The original owners of the skinny house seem to have had a maritime connection – with their souvenir from Ben Boyd’s yacht. We assumed their descendants owned the three houses until my father bought them.

  Recently I searched up ‘Leddicott’. This was the name ‘Fifty-three’ had on the title deeds. It became the property of John Davies, a George Street draper, in the late 1870s. He named it after his father’s property in Shobdon, Herefordshire. His wife, Jane, was a colonial soprano and poet, whose nom-de-plume was ‘Desda’. She wrote a children’s book and the words for ‘Cooey! An Australian Song’.

  It seems Davies bought the skinny house and built ‘Leddicott’ on the vacant land next door. The cottage lower down the hill may already have been there, or was built as an afterthought. I suspect Desda may have been responsible for the great variety of plants which entranced me as a child.

  There was yet another name, ‘Bellevue’, on an embossed metal plate fitted to ‘Leddicott’s’ front gate. Had Desda argued for this more glamorous name? The iron gate was painted a fading green and stood between stone pillars with rounded tops. An asphalt path led past a stand of banana palms, masses of yellow chrysan-themums that flowered in autumn, and ended at a Norfolk Island pine. There, a flight of stone steps led up to the front door of ‘Fifty-three’, painted a faded green like the gate. The door had a yellow cut-glass handle and two long glass panes.

  I used to watch the striped yellow-green abdomens of hoverflies circling above a bed of shasta daisies and dwarf papyrus. Every year the banana palms produced only black, stunted fingers of fruit, and an apricot tree no fruit at all. Desda’s biggest mistake, if it was hers, was to plant a jacaranda which never flowered. Jacarandas are picky about salt air.

  Margaret Cohen – the poet Douglas Stewart’s wife – did a pen-and-ink drawing of the front door of ‘Fifty-three’ just before the house was demolished (the Stewarts’s wedding gift when I married in 1969). It shows a cast-iron railing panel with a distinctive ‘flower’ – perhaps a stylised waratah – as its centre-piece. A cast-iron balcony railing with these panels surrounded three sides of the upper storey and much of the ground floor.

  My father used to bowl a tennis ball to me – tennis balls were less likely to break a window – when we played cricket on the ground floor veranda. This was paved with black and salmon- coloured tessellated tiles. I patted the ball back with my ‘Bert Oldfield’ cricket bat – a birthday gift.

  My father kept a close watch for encroachments on our southern boundary with a slipway. When Diana and I picked nasturtiums by the beach, we were aware of men moving about in the cavernous works, the sound of hammering, the piercing light from a welding torch, a motor starting up and throbbing as a boat was slowly hauled up. On special occasions an ungainly man in a full rubber diving suit, swaying from side to side, descended into the water to carry out repairs, breathing from a compressed- air hose.

  Each year my father pruned a pussy willow hedge that stood between the garden of the skinny house and ‘Fifty-three’. Along from this hedge, three hollyhocks – yellow, white and a deep double pink – were fed by the stream that leaked through his cellars and emerged as seepage over a rounded rock shelf. They crawled with bees in summer.

  Birds loved my father’s vegetable beds. He cut large cat faces out of tin and painted them black, with white whiskers, staring eyes and laughing mouths, then dangled them from poles in the beds. The birds took no notice. He next suspended a large trawl net above his beds. In the morning he walked out on our front bedroom balcony (that trembled when you stepped on it) and pulled on a hundred feet (30 m) of rope. The beds were down a steep hill from the skinny house. Birds flew up as the net rose and fell.

  I was never punished. I was four or five. My father was away somewhere on his boat. A patch of cannas, with bright yellow flowers, grew near the beach. The sappy plants towered over my head and I ran through a jungle of intersecting paths, trampling them, obsessed – I couldn’t stop – until I had flattened them all. I was astonished and scared. Later in the day my father’s boat came back. I stood shamefaced among the slaughtered stems. He laughed: I’d done some good work, he said.

  I was now a couple of years older. A friend and I daubed ourselves with tar from a pot of warm tar left by the slipway workers. I was panicking when I traipsed up the hill for the evening meal. I got a mild reprimand from my mother, who lit the hot water geyser in the bathroom and had to scrub it all off. There were tar marks on the side of the bath for weeks.

  For thirty years my father’s eldest brother Carl, a small inoffensive man with white hair, had been courting Lily, who had fine white facial hairs. When this odd cou
ple visited, Lily gave us tea cups and saucers from her workplace, a wholesaler – seconds of expensive brands, slightly chipped or cracked. Afterwards my mother was scornful about these gifts and pointed out that Carl was a former admirer of Hitler.

  My father used to invite Carl for inspection tours of his vegetable beds. One day he suggested Carl should help himself to some parsnips. I hated their strong flavour. My father was pottering elsewhere, and I kept egging Carl on to take more. Carl looked at me doubtfully, but did not stop. In the end he had a big armful of long creamy-white roots and green leaves and not one plant was left in the bed. When my father caught up with us, Carl nodded at me: ‘The boy told me to take them.’

  The respectability of roses was reassuring for my mother. She planted three tea-roses in the front garden of the skinny house. I hated one of these. ‘President Hoover’ had creamy, spiral flowers like old women with heavy make-up. I did not associate my mother with older women, and thought she was beautiful, despite her thin lips.

  I never saw her unclothed but I could not avoid seeing her ageing body imprisoned in bulky undergarments: flesh-coloured brassieres and corsets, and big ugly bloomers. Every morning, as I shared their bedroom, I heard my father snoring – a stentorian snore, that rose to a strangling crescendo, stopped, then started again. When I asked him how old he was, his reply, year after year, was a joke: ‘Son, I’m twenty-five’. I worried about my parents’ mortality.