The Good Boy Read online

  Dad and I made another visit to the docks to see a big, grey troopship at the end of World War II. This time it was the Stirling Castle, a Union Castle Line ship which normally stuck to the Southampton-Cape Town run but had come to Australian waters with the happier task of repatriating troops and civilians.

  By the end of 1940, however, I had my very own first trip by ship. My father’s mother was holidaying at Queenscliff and Vera, our wonderful general factotum, took my sister and me to visit her. We left home early in the morning by train, travelling into the city, and then at Flinders Street Station we changed to the ‘Blue Train’13 which took us down to Port Melbourne and right out onto Station Pier. There we boarded the PS Weeroona, of the Huddart Parker line, and at about 9.30 a.m. the ship set off down Port Phillip Bay to Queenscliff, across the Rip to Sorrento, back to Queenscliff and then back to Melbourne to arrive by about 6 p.m.

  We got off at Queenscliff and spent a couple of hours with my grandmother until the ship came back from Sorrento when we got on board for the return trip. I don’t remember much about the visit to Queenscliff but I do remember the ship. The Weeroona was of about 1600 tons, a small ship but a big ferry (she was more properly referred to as a paddle-driven pleasure steamer). There were no cabins, just two decks of seats, promenades, a big lounge room or rather a ballroom with a dance floor in the middle, a bandstand, a shop and a big cafe/restaurant.

  As the Weeroona pulled away from Station Pier, her paddles clunk-clunking as they beat the waters of the bay, the ship’s band played tunes such as ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Dee-Ay’, ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, and particularly ‘Goodbye, Melbourne Town’, the words and tune of which Vera must have explained to us and which I still remember to this day:

  Goodbye Melbourne town,

  Melbourne town goodbye.

  I am leaving you today

  For a country far away.

  Though today I’m stony broke

  Without a single crown

  If I make a fortune

  I’ll come back and spend it

  In dear old Melbourne town!

  In the middle of the ship, between the two big beige funnels, was what would now be described as an atrium, except that on the Weeroona you looked down rather than up … down at the engines. And this was the amazing thing: the Weeroona was a paddle steamer, with a large paddle-box on each side amidships and what the passengers were able to see down there were the two giant pistons or crankshafts, all gleaming steel and throbbing power. They lay parallel to the ship’s sides, one forward of the centreline and one aft, each one driven by an independent boiler and steam turbine. (The Weeroona had two funnels, burned coal, and made lots of thick, black smoke!) The business end of each crankshaft was attached to the drive shaft of a paddle: they were able to work in unison, to drive the ship forward or backwards, and they could work separately, one in forward and one in reverse, so that the Weeroona was extremely manoeuvrable, needed no tugs, and could virtually spin around like a top. As a child I did not of course know all this, but I can still recall the mixture of fear and excitement I felt on seeing and hearing those great oily shining steel arms and giant fists clenching the drive shafts and punching, pounding their way down the bay.

  Only about a mile or so out from Port Melbourne we steamed past the Gellibrand Light, a few hundred yards away on our right.14 An extraordinary structure, it was both lighthouse and lighthouse keeper’s residence, an octagonal building sitting on wooden piles driven into the sea bed. There was a white-painted railing all around, with in the middle a normal-looking weatherboard house from which emerged, as we passed, a housewife complete with white apron and carrying a large basket of washing which she proceeded to hang out on the clothesline on the deck … which was her front verandah. Rising up from the centre of this otherwise ordinary-looking house was a tall metal and glass tower, at the top of which was the lantern-chamber housing the rotating light which guided ships up the bay and into the port. There and then I decided that I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper and to live on the Gellibrand Pile Light.

  Not far from the Light the Weeroona steamed a mere hundred yards or so past the wreck of the Kakariki, a cargo ship which had sunk in a collision with another vessel three years earlier and which seemed to have just settled down to sit on the sea bed in a not very deep part of the bay. We had a good look at the top of the funnel and masts as we steamed by and my enthusiasm for a life at sea may have been dampened a little by this cautionary sight.

  Early in the following year when I came home from primary school one afternoon, my mother called me into the living room with, ‘Come and meet your Uncle Ray.’ My mother’s second youngest brother had, at age 23, set off to work his way around the world, leaving Melbourne on the Union Line’s Monowai for New Zealand in January 1934. After about a year working in New Zealand (mostly as a manager of one of those new-fangled ‘cinemas’ in Napier, the whole town virtually rebuilt in Art Deco style after the great 1931 earthquake), he had signed on as a stoker on a coal-burning German cargo ship, the Augsburg, shovelling his way to Europe. He spent four years working there, mostly in England (where he met and spent much time with his father’s brother, Joe). With World War II about to break out he had managed with great difficulty (as his Seaman’s Ticket had been issued by a German ship) to get a job as a steward on an Australia-bound British cargo-passenger ship, the Armidale. Here was Ray, a strikingly handsome man, surrounded with an aura of travel and adventure, sitting and chatting in our living room. I was spellbound and knew that if I did not make a nuisance of myself with fidgeting or questioning I would be allowed to stay and listen to his tales of travelling the world, of living and working in London, and of meeting my Great-Uncle Joe in England.

  The story I liked best, however, and one which I asked to be retold many a time over the years, was the one about my uncle’s arrival in Europe on board the Augsburg in June 1935. He had been on night watch as stoker and on finishing his shift he went up on deck for some fresh air and a smoke. After transiting the Panama Canal and crossing the Atlantic the Augsburg had entered the English Channel. Leaning on the rail and smoking Ray looked back and saw a large ship approaching from the west at speed. As the ship drew closer Ray realised it was going to pass the slow old Augsburg with no more than a few hundred yards between them. With dawn turning to day and the old Augsburg chugging up the Channel the great ship sped past with its unmistakeable streamlined white superstructure, three raked black-topped red funnels, tiered curved rear decks and gleaming black hull proclaiming it to be the French Line’s fabulous Normandie. At 80,000 tons and 32 knots, it was the largest, fastest and most luxurious ship in the world, racing home to France from her record-breaking maiden voyage to New York.

  Ray said that he had never seen anything as beautiful, powerful, and elegant as the Normandie had been that morning. He resolved that once he had found work and saved some money in England he would go to France and visit the country and people that had produced such a wonderful thing … and I made up my mind that I would one day go to France too and see the Normandie and the other wonderful creations of the faraway land that Ray described. Ray did manage a quick trip to Paris but the Normandie was in mid-Atlantic when he passed through her home port of Le Havre. He could not stop talking about the beauty of Paris, the tree-lined boulevards and the cheerful people … all enhanced in his mind’s eye, perhaps, by the contrast with the grimness of life in pre-war Depression-ridden, smogbound London. Alas, by the time I myself got to France the great Normandie was no more.

  Family outings when I was young involved more than excursions to Station Pier and the ships. My father’s mother, along with his sister, my Auntie Margaret, lived in a nearby suburb and on most weekends Dad would drive over after Sunday Mass, collect them, bring them to our house for Sunday dinner, and then drive them home again towards the end of the afternoon. We children usually went along too for the drive.

  This routine was sometimes varied in that after dinner we
might all drive to the Convent of Mercy in Coburg or Rosanna or Mornington, wherever Dad’s other sister, my Auntie May and a nun, happened to be stationed. I used to dread these visits as they involved long car trips (and I tended to get carsick) and required us to sit quietly on straight-backed chairs in highly polished and antiseptic convent parlours while the adults conversed endlessly about issues incomprehensible and people unknown. A small consolation was usually the very fine afternoon tea which the convents tended to produce, where economical but nonetheless interesting treats like daintily cut and wafer-thin slices of bread and butter, or somewhat thicker slices of bread covered with cream and sprinkled with sugar, or tiny home-made biscuits or, more rarely, fruit cake with almond icing, were served. I think I also enjoyed basking in the reflected glory of the deference always shown to my father by the nuns: it was always ‘Doctor this’ and ‘Doctor that’, ‘Good afternoon, Doctor’, ‘Goodbye, Doctor’ and so on. These convent visits were the only occasions on which my grandmother seemed to thaw just a tiny bit … not so far as to laugh or smile, mind you, but to look, just briefly, moderately confident and happy. I suspect now that she and I had then had something in common – the enjoyment of reflected glory – and I still feel sorry for the poor soul whose life was for the most part a sad one.

  Another variation of the Sunday routine was when Dad’s Auntie Jo, my grandmother’s step-sister, would come to dinner and spend the afternoon with us. She must have been one of the babies of her father’s second marriage that my grandmother got tired of caring for. In appearance, Auntie Jo was quite like my grandmother, tall and white-haired, although she wore hornrimmed glasses all the time (my grandmother used her goldrimmed glasses only for reading). Other differences were that Auntie Jo did not dress in black, wore a little make-up, smiled often and was altogether much more fun. She even seemed able to coax my grandmother into relaxing just a little and that lightened the cloud of disapproval that always seemed to surround my grandmother when with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Auntie Jo had spent her working life as a clerk in the Commonwealth Public Service, joining it in Melbourne before the federal capital was moved to Canberra. As a young woman she had, in 1911, gone to Western Australia by ship (and any story involving a ship of course got all my attention). She had been so seasick on the way across that she stayed on and worked in Perth until the transcontinental railway was completed. She returned to Melbourne in 1914 on one of the first trains to make the trip (which, with its changes of gauge and train in Kalgoorlie, Port Augusta and Adelaide, with steam engines and wooden, non-air-conditioned carriages, would have been quite an undertaking).

  For years and years Auntie Jo used to spend her leave from the Public Service on her brothers’ farms, cooking and housekeeping at harvest and shearing time. This involved long train trips to the country but Auntie Jo rarely spoke about herself and so remained something of a mystery to me. She had never married and for many years ‘had rooms at Mrs Turner’s’ in Albert Street, East Melbourne. I think that she gave much of her money and time to the poor. She would sometimes bring her needlework with her, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and carried in a large linen roll, and could talk and sew at the same time. The needlework was usually a set of vestments destined for some lucky priest, and Auntie Jo went to endless trouble making them beautiful enough to be worn at Mass. My mother referred to her as a ‘good woman’ and, considering whose step-sister she was, I think that was high praise.

  The Sunday afternoons that I really enjoyed were the ones when we all piled into the car and went for a drive in the country, usually to the hills, i.e. the Dandenongs east of Melbourne. Sometimes we would take a picnic afternoon tea with us, sometimes we would stop at tea rooms in the hills such as the Red Mill near Kallista, with its miniature red windmill perched on the roof, the Log Cabin at Mount Dandenong (and the building really was made of logs) or at the Pig and Whistle in Olinda (I never saw either pig or whistle and always wondered about the name). These places specialised in serving Devonshire teas, with large quantities of strawberry jam and fresh whipped cream; I have never since had a Devonshire tea of equal quality … even in Devon itself. These tea rooms usually had a wonderful log fire going, as except in summer the Dandenongs tend to be cool, and each seemed to have a fireplace wide enough to hold two or three huge logs blazing away.

  But I liked the picnic scenario the best. It often involved a walk through the bush when we would go looking for water and for firewood so that my father could get a fire going. Often in the Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenongs we would find a fastflowing creek which had to be crossed on stepping-stones or by balancing along a fallen tree-trunk improvising as a bridge. We would take the billy to the stream, carefully fill it with water and then, guided through the forest by the sound of family voices, make our way back to where the car was parked. My father would get the fire going and once the billy had boiled would sprinkle the tea in, add a couple of gum leaves, and instead of stirring the brew he would, with the lid still off, swing the billy in a great arc over his head, smiling at our amazement that not a drop would be spilled. We were too young to know about centrifugal forces and I think Dad always enjoyed this little bit of theatrics. My mother would usually stay at the car, unpacking the cakes and scones and sandwiches and minding my baby brother.

  Occasionally the drive went further afield than our usual haunts in the Dandenongs and there would be a picnic lunch and a major walk involved: the upper reaches of the Yarra River, Mount Macedon, and Hanging Rock with its mysterious pile of rocks and creepy caves were on the list of possible destinations. Sometimes the walk was turned into work (well, play work) in that we would take buckets and knives with us and go mushrooming, or blackberrying … according to the season and the location. Sometimes an unmarried aunt or uncle or school friend of my mother made up the party and would keep an eye on my sister and me as we walked through the bush.

  My Great-Uncle Ray was one of these occasional weekend visitors, although he came more often in the evening to play cards than in the afternoon for a drive in the bush. He was the youngest child of my Great-Grandma Fanny Sullivan, and on leaving school he had gone on to join the bank, eventually rising to the level of Branch Manager. In his forties he had been sent (by ship, then the only available means of transport available) from Melbourne to Darwin to open his bank’s first branch in the Northern Territory. He had retired by the time I met him and rather exotically lived in St Kilda, by then a somewhat bohemian suburb of Melbourne. He lived ‘in rooms’, somewhat like a gentleman character from a novel by Dickens or Trollope, at first in a large red-brick place on Beaconsfield Parade called Hollywood, though it seemed to me much less glamorous than the name suggested, and then in The Gatwick on Fitzroy Street, a rather posh-looking establishment in those days with marble front steps and highly polished brass lamps at the entrance, quite in keeping with my image of a well-off man-about-town. (Half a century later The Gatwick was referred to in the Melbourne media as one of St Kilda’s most notorious drug dens and rooming houses!)

  Uncle Ray was a handsome, well-spoken and well-dressed man and he quite often came to our house to play solo with my parents and their friends. He had never married; it seems that presentable single males were as much needed then as they were in Jane Austen’s day, if not as potential husbands then at least to make up a table at cards. I was puzzled one day when my mother referred to Uncle Ray’s glass eye. I had never noticed any difference between his two eyes but my mother insisted that one of them was made of glass. I asked for more information and was told that he had been attacked in the street one night as he was walking home in St Kilda and had been lucky to escape with just cuts and bruises … and the loss of one eye. (Long afterwards I learned that Great-Uncle Ray was gay and had been the victim of ‘poofter bashing’, and that my parents had done all they could to help him recover and to continue a normal social life.)

  My parents were both quietly spoken people – shouting was just not done, and I think that the
y must have agreed to raise their children by giving a good example rather than by laying down the law. I can remember only one occasion when they argued and that was when we had returned by car from a visit to Auntie May in the convent at Kyneton, a country town 70 or so kilometres north of Melbourne. I was four or five, and had been violently carsick on the long drive home. Perhaps my sister had been too. My mother had cleaned us up and had organised a light tea (it must have been Vera’s Sunday off ) and then I saw my mother in the hallway thumping my father on the chest and saying it was all the fault of Auntie May, that the nuns had given us children so many sweets and so much afternoon tea that we had been sick. There were raised voices but no real shouting, and my father seemed to just hold my mother’s arms until she stopped complaining … but I was terrified! I had never seen them argue before and asked my sister whether we should go and get the neighbours or the police – someone – to stop them. My sister, a mere eighteen months older than I, airily replied that it was ‘nothing’, that grown-ups argued like that, and that we should just get on with tea and bed. So we did, and in the morning everything was, as she had foretold, back to normal.

  A normal morning meant that Vera’s alarm clock would go off at 6.45 a.m. and I would hear her getting up and then setting out the breakfast things in the kitchen. After having her own breakfast she would start on the day’s work, first of all going to the newsagent next door to collect the morning paper and then making a start on chores such as polishing the floors in the surgery and waiting room, lighting the copper and starting the washing. My mother got up soon after Vera and would wake us children and see that we were dressed and breakfasting at the kitchen table before she arranged and carried a big tray up the hall to my parents’ bedroom and gave my father breakfast in bed. This she did every morning in their twenty years of married life, with an exception being made on Sundays to allow for attendance at Mass. The menu never varied: a bowl of cornflakes with a small silver jug of hot milk; the silver sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers; a plate of bacon and eggs; a rack of toast; butter and marmalade; a pot of tea; the necessary cutlery … and a large white napkin in a silver serviette ring. My father would be sitting up in bed for this ritual and would tuck one corner of the napkin into his pyjama coat before eating. My sister and I would, if allowed by my mother, rush in before he had quite finished his bacon and eggs and beg for a ‘mopper’, a square of toast which he would impale on his fork, swirl around in the egg yolk, and extend to the favoured offspring. I think that this largesse was limited to one mopper per child per breakfast and that once the third child, my baby brother, came on the scene the ritual ended … or my mother would have had to serve my father a larger breakfast. With breakfast finished, my father would then read the paper, The Age, before getting up and heading in his black dressing gown (my mother’s was red, making them look more Stendhalian as a couple than they really were) for the bathroom, a shave, and the day’s work.