The Good Boy Page 5
My father was a ‘general practitioner’, the traditional sort of family doctor in the suburbs. His surgery was open for consultations between 9 and 10.30, 2 and 3, and 6.30 and 7.30 (making an appointment was unheard of in those days and patients just queued up along the bench in the waiting room or at busy times overflowed into the front garden). After morning surgery my father would usually come into the house and have a cup of morning-tea and then set off in the car on his morning rounds, visiting patients in the local hospital or small nursing-homes and those at home who were too sick or too feeble to come into the surgery. A similar routine of afternoon rounds would follow afternoon surgery (with a short pause for afternoon-tea with the family).
Sometimes, when the rounds involved a longer-than-usual drive such as a visit to patients ‘out in the country’, my sister and I would be allowed to go with my father. The area where we lived was, in 1940, more or less the outer edge of the city and some patients lived on ‘acreage’ or small farms to the east, in between the urban growth slowly taking place around the stations along the main south-eastern railway line. I don’t think there were any doctors based between our outer suburb and the then country town of Dandenong: Springvale was serviced by the doctors from Dandenong, and Clayton by my father and his colleagues. Dad had patients living on small farms at Clayton that now form part of the Monash University campus. My sister and I were supposed to wait quietly in the car while my father went into the patient’s house, and for the most part I think we did. We had strict instructions not to open the doors nor get out of the car. To while away the time we often played at ‘driving’ the car (which sometimes became an aeroplane and we the pilots, sometimes a train engine and we the crew) and sometimes people would come out from the house being visited and would be nice to the doctor’s children, chatting to us with the window wound down.
My abiding memory of these visits is of the respect and even affection shown for my father by these people. I think that the experience underlined for me the message we were always given at home, to think of others and it probably kindled in me the ambition to do things when I grew up that would, like my father’s work, help others. Of course, as a child I was probably also attracted by the prospect of being praised for my actions: the phrases ‘what a good boy’ and ‘what a little gentleman’ and ‘just like his father’ were music to my ears. The fact that both parents were trained members of what are now termed caring professions (medicine and nursing) perhaps inevitably oriented me more towards being helpful than towards being financially successful, towards idealism rather than towards realism. Money matters were never discussed in front of us as children and I had no idea that our comfortable lifestyle depended on the amount of money my father’s work brought in.
On one of these country visits my sister and I were sitting in the car while Dad went into the house to his patient. Growing a bit bored we opened the car door … precisely why I do not recall and, as if for our disobedience, we were invaded by a large, smelly, noisy white billygoat which had somehow broken free of the long leash attached to the farm gatepost. My sister and I could not get the animal to retreat and were more scared of it than of the expected scolding for having opened the door. When Dad eventually emerged from the farmhouse after seeing his patient he had to summon help to prise the animal out of the car.
We could accompany Dad on his rounds only before we started school, of course, and only in daylight. He was often called out at night and we would not know of this until next day, if at all. My father was fairly deaf in his right ear and so my mother persuaded him that he should normally sleep on his left side. As a result, he did not hear the bedside phone ring in the dead of night and my mother, who slept on the phone-table side of the bed, would answer the phone, filter the calls, and virtually decide whether or not to wake my father. I don’t suppose she was really able to save him from many midnight call-outs, but they both enjoyed telling this little story of their teamwork when the question of out-of-hours calls came up with their friends (and it often seemed to, as many of their friends were also doctors and nurses).
Working from home was in those days the norm for most doctors, only a small number having their surgery or rooms at a large hospital or in Collins Street, where most of Melbourne’s specialists were established. I think my mother was never really keen on having ‘the public’, i.e. the patients, sauntering up the garden path at virtually any time of day or night, even though they did veer off to the side of the house where a surgery and waiting room adjoining the house had been built shortly after I was born. The system did mean, however, that we children saw much more of our father than would otherwise have been the case; we had all our meals together including lunch and afternoon-tea, and we were on hand and able to go with him for a drive on calls taking him into the country … or even into the city, where he sometimes went to visit patients who had had to be taken to one of the major hospitals. As we lived in the catchment area of the Alfred Hospital, that was the one most visited and as many of my father’s patients were Catholic, St Vincent’s and St Benedict’s (which later became the Cabrini Hospital) were also on the list.
Another fascinating destination was the Good Shepherd Convent a couple of kilometres from our house (and since demolished and replaced by the Chadstone Centre, the largest shopping mall in the country). The convent was a huge, grey building set well back from the road and surrounded by a high grey wall and acres of farmland. The path from the front door to the front gate had been replaced by a long masonry ‘tunnel’ or enclosed walkway at the end of which was a massive outer front door opening directly on to the footpath. There was a ‘Judas’ or small grilled window in the door, so that when answering a ringing of the doorbell the nun inside could slide open the wooden panel, look through the grill at the visitor, and decide whether or not to open the door. The door always seemed to open almost immediately for my father (who had probably been telephoned and asked to call) and I had visions of a little nun roller-skating down the tunnel’s highly polished tile floor from the convent proper to the door and breathlessly opening it to my father. I often wondered how long less-distinguished visitors had to wait, and longed to see someone arrive, ring the bell, and be turned away … but that never happened.
My father was the government-appointed Medical Officer of the institution attached to the convent … a ‘home’ for young and old women ‘in trouble’. My parents were always a bit vague about the precise nature of this trouble. I slowly worked out that it included more than being orphaned and recalled my mother saying that ‘there were too many keys’ in use, that some of the girls had been referred to the home by the courts and that spending time in the institution was seen as a happier alternative to spending time in jail … I assumed that they had been caught stealing or throwing stones or something of that sort and much later on realised that prostitution was at that time a crime and that some of the inmates had been ‘working girls’.
The Good Shepherd nuns had been founded in France in the early 1800s with the mission of caring for poor and destitute girls, of which there were many in the years after the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the subsequent Bourbon Restoration. The aim was to provide a safe home and a basic education, and to teach skills which would enable the girls to earn a living when they ‘graduated’. The order’s first convent in Australia was established in 1863 on a large piece of farmland beside the Yarra in Abbotsford, Melbourne, and the nuns had soon taken into care over a hundred women and children. The place grew to become a huge establishment providing, a hundred years later, a home to over 1000 women and girls and 100 nuns. The Good Shepherd nuns had come at the invitation of Melbourne’s first archbishop, who was particularly concerned about the large numbers of women and children being more or less abandoned in the town by their menfolk and breadwinners who were heading off to the gold rushes in Ballarat and Bendigo. After twenty years at Abbotsford the nuns opened a branch in a small farming settlement on Dandenong Road beyond the eastern edge of
Melbourne. The branch was, I only recently discovered, destined to become a ‘Reformatory for Female Adolescents’ and was a very big place indeed by the time I came to visit it with my father in the 1940s. The convent stood on a hundred or so acres of land, some of which was used as a dairy farm where a herd of Friesian cows could sometimes be seen wending its way up the hill to the milking sheds, where the nun in charge, in her white habit with black veil, soon merged into the herd of black and white cows. There was a large flower garden in the front of the main building (but behind the perimeter wall) and a very large vegetable garden beyond the back wall. On another part of the property was a huge steam laundry, where many of the girls worked, and the big green vans with ‘Good Shepherd Laundry’ painted on each side in gold were seen all over Melbourne collecting the city’s dirty washing and returning the washed and ironed items a few days later. My grandparents availed themselves of a similar laundry service provided by the Good Shepherd convent in Bendigo, laundry services having become the main source of income for Good Shepherd homes all over Australia.
Three: Schooldays
There was a primary school known as St Anthony’s attached to the Good Shepherd convent, and when it came time for me to start school I was disappointed to find that that was not to be my destination. I loved the mysteriousness and vastness and silence of that great, grey place and the contrasting marble and stainedglass splendours of its huge chapel/church. I imagined that the primary school would share these wonders and did not know that in fact it was located in modest, even nondescript premises on the edge of the property. We lived right in the middle of town, and a new convent and primary school had been established just one block down the road in the year I was born. This convent had also been founded by a French order of nuns, an off-shoot of the Marists.15 Their convent near us was next door to the parish church and whenever there was no priest available to say early morning Mass in the convent chapel the twenty or so nuns in the community would take up the two front rows on the right-hand side of the parish church to attend the public Mass. I used to be intrigued at the way in which they avoided distractions and the temptation to look around, and at how they could still move surefootedly up to the altar rail to receive Communion, by unfolding their black veils forward to cover their faces almost as completely as do the burkhas of Muslim women.
Although the new primary school was next door to the convent and so only a few hundred metres or so down the road from our house, there was a bus stop across the road from our house and a bus service from there to the bayside suburb of Mentone, where the buses stopped outside the Brigidine16 convent and Kilbreda College. My mother had an aunt who was a nun in the Brigidine convent, so my sister and then I were sent the six miles by bus to start school ‘with family’ rather than to either of the two local convent schools. I now suspect that there were other issues involved in this decision; the possibility of contact with adolescents from the reformatory may have weighed against our attendance at St Anthony’s, and the just-built parish school across the road was a surprisingly modern and stark structure surrounded by a quite small, tree-less concreted playground in which crowds of seemingly unruly, poorly-dressed and perhaps poorly-fed children could be seen milling noisily around. Was it suitable for the local doctor’s children to join in? I wonder.
We not only had a great-aunt who was a nun in the convent in Mentone but we also had one of my mother’s cousins, Miss Ellie Sullivan, who came to the convent one day a week as a visiting teacher. Ellie made her living as an elocution teacher (nowadays I suppose this specialisation is referred to as Speech and Drama). She had private students who called at her house in North Melbourne for lessons and she visited a number of schools where she both took classes and gave private lessons to individuals. When I was in Grades one and two at the Brigidine Convent in Mentone, Miss Sullivan must have taken only the secondary school level for classes, as I don’t remember her in front of my class. She did, however, have responsibility for the drama part of the end-of-year productions or Annual School Concert put on by the whole school, and I remember taking part in two of them. In a dramatised version of what I suppose was Little Red Riding Hood, I was the wolf. No dialogue was involved – I just had to come on stage, on all fours, dressed in an extraordinarily realistic-looking and rather frightening black wolf ‘s outfit, with big white teeth and bright red tongue lolling out of the jaws. My task was to creep towards centre stage, be shot by the hero, and then to roll on my back with all four paws pointing heavenwards in death. I was not very keen on the part, particularly not on being shot, and it took some coaxing for me to continue. I can still hear the producer, Miss Sullivan, losing her temper at a rehearsal and shouting, ‘Where’s that bloody wolf?’ Perhaps the good nuns overlooked this outburst because Ellie was the niece of a nun in the convent and she was there again for the following year’s production … and I was too! I don’t remember the name or story of this production but for my second stage appearance I was dressed in the black soutane, with purple buttons and purple sash, of a bishop. I had a nice gold pectoral cross on a gold chain and a purple biretta ( both items of episcopal regalia kindly loaned for the occasion by the then Bishop of Ballarat, a friend of a friend of my mother). I quite liked this outfit, and then and there decided that I would be a real bishop when I grew up. Again, as I recall, I had nothing to say and had just to walk slowly and look solemn … and not to move my head too much lest the biretta, far too big for me and accordingly partly stuffed with paper, slipped down over my face and blinded me. Perhaps that is what did happen as I do remember falling flat on my face on stage, developing an egg-sized lump on my forehead and being cosseted by an anxious nun. I can still see Miss Sullivan standing in the middle of the hall in producer mode, bosom heaving, arms waving, long blonde hair slightly awry, her voice carrying like a trumpet-blast as she drilled her little performers and her accident-prone young relative.
I had three years of schooling with the nuns in Mentone and then, as co-education did not extend beyond Prep, Grades One and Two at that time, moved on to St Bede’s College, run by the De La Salle Brothers,17 a few more bus stops down the road from the convent and just across the street from the beach. At St Bede’s I was taught in Grades Three and Four by an elderly but very lively Brother Malachy, who placed great emphasis on spelling and multiplication tables and sitting up straight in class in silence, arms folded, and on lining up neatly and in silence outside the classroom … an old-fashioned disciplinarian, I suppose. As I found that I was able to do whatever was expected of me in the classroom, I enjoyed school and rarely had to join the queue of boys lining up to hold out their left hand for a punitive whack from Brother’s strap or ruler.
There was, however, one poor soul in the class who never seemed to do things correctly, either schoolwork or behaviour, and was forever in the queue. This chap, Norman, was twice the size of any of the other boys, several years older, a boarder and was repeating the year. (Much later on I realised that poor Norman must have suffered from a then-undiagnosed handicap and was not simply the ‘slow learner’ he seemed to us to be.) One day Norman was particularly slow and just could not add up the column of figures Brother had put on the blackboard. Or would not, according to Brother, who for once seemed to lose his temper and all sense of proportion, finally ordering Norman to drop his trousers, bend over the front desk, and be belted on his bare backside. The rest of the class of nine-year-old boys watched in stunned silence while Norman tearfully did as he was told. Then Brother presumably came to his senses and suddenly said, ‘All right, that will do, go back to your place …’ which Norman did, adjusting his clothes as he shuffled back to his desk, soon resuming his usual sunny smile and getting on with his day. I can still recall my own fascination at the scene, a vague feeling of guilt that I was enjoying something that was wrong, and my disappointment that Norman never actually did bare his backside for the beating. I now wonder whether this had been for me the first awakening of sexual arousal and even of an interest in
mild S and M?
In Grade Five I was taught by a much younger Brother Matthew, whom I quickly grew to admire as an interesting teacher … and a handsome young man. Brother Matthew placed great emphasis on reading, and while others in the class may have still been struggling to acquire the skill, I was already at the stage of reading easily and for enjoyment. Brother often read to us, as well as requiring individual pupils to read aloud to the class, and I can still remember his calm, deep voice and the delight of hearing its changing shades in his expressive storytelling. Brother Matthew introduced us to poetry, too, and again showed us how the sounds of the words and the rhythm of the lines could be as interesting as the meaning of the poem. He read Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ to us and we (or at least I and some of the class) delighted in learning off by heart great slabs of it and of other similarly musical poems, A. B. Patterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’ among them.