The Good Boy Page 9
Shortages of most things, even including bottled beer, and never-ending newscasts on the radio greatly worried my parents and our faithful Vera, especially in 1942 when Japan captured Singapore, bombed Darwin and sent a fleet towards Australia’s east coast. Vera’s reaction was to run towards my mother in the garden shouting, ‘They’re coming, they’re coming!’ Once Prime Minister Curtin had recalled the Australian troops dispatched to help the United Kingdom in its War with Germany, my father explained that the intervention of Australia’s new friend, the USA, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, had saved us from invasion.
When on leave, my mother’s brothers as well as many of their army, navy and air force mates made our house their Melbourne base. A distant Millane cousin in the US Navy stayed once; officers in the Dutch Navy who had become friends with my Uncle Bert posted to Dutch New Guinea came another time and several Indonesians in the Dutch Army and Navy, also friends of Bert, became quite frequent occupants of the spare beds in our house. My mother thought it proper for these ‘boys’ to sleep in a real bed with a soft mattress while they were on leave, so when there were more visitors than spare beds my sister, brother and I would sleep on the camp stretchers used on our caravan trips. If only one extra bed was needed, we risked having a bit of a squabble over who would have the adventure of sleeping on the stretcher. In fact, hardly a week went by without somebody in uniform being camped somewhere in the house, and my parents organising impromptu parties and singalongs around the piano in our living room for those lonely and no doubt traumatised young men. My mother loved music and was quite a good pianist herself. I used to pester her to play Mozart’s ‘La Marche Turque’ and other pieces she remembered from her Mary’s Mount days. Often an uncle or some other boy would play the violin and everyone else would sing, picking up the words of current popular songs like ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’, ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’ and slightly more martial ones like ‘Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major’, ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘The Trek Song’ and ‘Lilli Marlene’ – the latter being a little bit controversial as it was really a German song. These gatherings became quite multinational, multiracial and even multilingual, as my Uncle Bert was a gifted linguist and had quickly added Dutch, Malay and Indonesian to the French and German learned at school. As a result, he could chat away and sing along in any of those languages, making everybody relax and open their minds to different cultures. We noted how our parents made no distinction between their guests on grounds of colour, language, nationality or religion. I remember my mother laughingly but gently explaining to Vera, who came from a conservative and rather isolated part of the country, that it was not appropriate to offer ham sandwiches to the Indonesian boys as most of them were Muslim and did not want to eat pork but could be too polite to refuse.
I think that this brief contact with normal family life must have greatly helped those lonely soldiers, with several of those who survived the War remaining in touch with my parents long after it had ended. One of the young Indonesian officers, Amin, visited us shortly after the end of the War, when he had been brought to Melbourne from New Guinea before going back to Batavia.26 It must have been a cold August or September day as he had on a Dutch army coat that seemed bigger than him. He wanted in particular to see Peter, my younger brother. When Peter came into the room Amin opened his greatcoat and, with a grin almost the width of his face, revealed a captured Japanese officer’s sword which he presented to Peter, who had apparently expressed an interest in seeing one … or was it really presented to Dad, or to everyone in the house, as a token of thanks for the hospitality received over the years by all those foreign boys?
Up in Bendigo my grandfather died a few months after the bombing of Darwin and the submarine attack on Sydney27 and from then until the end of the War there were just my grandmother and my aunt in the big Bendigo house, with Joan, the maid, coming in five days a week. I continued to go there for my school term holidays and would hand over my ration books to my grandmother for use when we went shopping. There were separate books for sugar, tea, butter, meat and clothing, and the shopkeeper would carefully cut out the appropriate coupon with each item purchased.
At one stage early in the War, my aunt used to take her turn one night each week as a volunteer plane spotter atop the lookout tower in Rosalind Park in Bendigo, where a rough shelter had been erected and where field glasses were supplied. I think that the futility of this exercise was soon recognised, as the spotters really had no proper equipment and no way of accurately identifying any aircraft, enemy or friendly, that they did manage to spot in the night sky. I used to see my aunt organising a thermos of tea and some sandwiches to take on her tour of duty and I always wanted to go with her … it seemed such fun to a schoolboy. Later there was a large wooden frame set up in the living room where my aunt and grandmother both spent some time most days weaving macramé camouflage nets which, when completed, were taken down to the Town Hall as a contribution to the War Effort. With three sons away at the War, my grandmother always wore as her sole piece of jewellery a small silver brooch issued by the Commonwealth to ‘mothers of the boys at the War’ and comprising a stylised rising sun from which was suspended a silver bar carrying three golden stars … one for each son enlisted. She was very lucky that the three sons all came home safely at War’s end.
The tide of war did gradually turn. Things became more cheerful and we were soon laughing as we played with the funny new banknotes the Japanese had planned to introduce once they had occupied Australia – crateloads of them must have been captured by the American/Australian forces after the battles off the east coast, with many of them brought home by the uncles and others as ‘souvenirs’.
Once the War was over my Uncle Bert, the youngest son, and by then 33, came home, resumed his job with the Bank of Australasia28 and lived with his mother and sister while working in the bank’s Bendigo branch. Bert enlivened the place. He seemed full of energy, whistling and singing around the house, teasing his kid sister Nell and my grandmother’s maid, Joan, and often gently chivvying his mother, to whom he was devoted, to get a move on … because of her rheumatism, she moved very slowly about the house. Bert always walked home from the bank for the midday meal, the main meal of the day, which Joan, who came in at 7.30 a.m. and left at 2 p.m. five days a week, always prepared and then shared (although like our Vera at home, she ate her meal in the kitchen while the family ate in the dining room). To return to the bank after lunch, Bert usually took a shortcut through Rosalind Park and Nell often walked with him as far as the Pall Mall gates of the park: the bank was across the road from the gates and Nell’s office in the Bendigo Advertiser building was just another block or so along Pall Mall.
After work of a summer evening Bert would often go swimming in the municipal baths in Rosalind Park or would play badminton or table tennis on the back lawn with another returned soldier and bank colleague, named Alan. As a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, I would join in if I was there and indeed these are my first memories of playing any sort of sport with people who did not instantly dismiss me as useless. Bert and Alan were always welcoming and great fun, so it was disappointing when after little more than a year the bank transferred Bert to a branch in Melbourne … and peace and quiet returned to my grandmother’s house in Bendigo.
I was encouraged to play with and socialise with local children, but my aunt and grandmother did not have many such contacts to suggest. There was a family who lived in the house over the back fence where the son, Terry, was four years older than I was and the daughter, Judy, at twelve, one year younger. I did go around for a first meeting which went off pretty well, it seemed to me, although they were more interested in rough and tumble games than I was. Then it was decided that we would climb their side fence and raid the apple-tree of the two elderly ladies who lived next door. We three were happily eating our stolen apples when Judy and Terry’s mother came upon us in her back garden … and immediately sent us around to the fr
ont door of the elderly ladies to confess our sin and to apologise. Somehow I lost interest in pursuing the contact, and by the next term holidays Judy and her family had moved away. My aunt had another try, this time sending me down the street to play with the children of a music-teaching friend of hers. In that household, however, ‘playing’ meant playing a musical instrument, and I was far from competent with the violin, which I was supposedly learning, while my new companions seemed able to play a variety of instruments very well indeed. I felt very inadequate and managed to get out of any repeat visits.
Next holidays, perhaps in desperation, my aunt asked me to go down the street and to help an elderly lady friend of hers, Miss Inez Abbott, to pick fruit in her garden. This turned out to be quite an experience. The Abbott family had made a fortune in the tanning business in the late nineteenth century and Inez’s father had been a member of Colonial Parliament for many years before becoming a senator for Victoria in the new Federal Parliament. The Abbots were important people in Bendigo; they had a large house out of town near one of the tanneries, and a handsome townhouse at the bottom of Rowan Street in the city. By the time I met Miss Abbott in her late sixties, she lived alone and was well on the way to eccentricity. She was tall and solid, with longish greying-brown hair elaborately and artistically swept up in a complicated version of a ‘French roll’. She was always well dressed and wore a gold-rimmed pince-nez attached to a black ribbon somehow fastened to her ample bosom, when not perched on her nose. I had never seen a pince-nez before and was fascinated by this aristocratic piece of equipment. I suggested to my aunt, my grandmother and even my father, who all used reading glasses, that they switch to a pince-nez … but alas, none did. Miss Abbott, being a young ‘gell’ of good family, had never had to work but she had studied painting extensively in Australia and France, where she had lived for nearly twenty years in Paris and in Provence, successfully exhibiting her work in Paris and becoming a very accomplished artist. Indeed one of her paintings was said to be hanging in the Louvre, or was it in the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. (My grandmother said, with that quizzical little smile of hers, that in the 1920s the gallery in Paris had approached the Australian Federal Government for examples of the work of Australian artists, and Inez’s father, the senator, had been able to offer one of his daughter’s works for the French gallery’s collection, at no cost.) Each year, when the big old flowering gum in front of the Capitol Theatre in Bendigo was covered in its deep-red blossoms, Miss Abbott would set up her easel and stool and, with an artist’s smock over her usual clothes and an outsized straw hat perched on her head to protect that nez from the sun, she would paint the scene, taking a couple of days to do it. She would sit there in busy View Street, seemingly oblivious of the passing trams, traffic and pedestrians. I wonder what became of those paintings! I believe some of them are now in the Gallery but as far as I know, Miss Abbott never sold any of her work nor gave any of it away.
I knew all this about Miss Abbott before I somewhat nervously rang her front doorbell and offered to help pick fruit. The door opened an inch or two and a very sharp grey eye examined me while I explained who I was and why I was there. She let me in. Did she say, ‘Come in, boy’? I can’t be sure that she said anything just then, but she did address me as ‘boy’ whenever she spoke to me. I had only ever met the term in Dickens’ novels and was startled to hear it applied to me. She rather brusquely led me through the house to the back garden and pointed to a huge old peach tree, laden with fruit. ‘Can you pick that?’ she asked. I thought I could, provided I was given a ladder to reach the fruit.
I propped the ladder against the outbuilding beside which the tree stood and on the roof of which many of the branches rested. I climbed onto the roof and started picking peaches for all I was worth, with Miss Abbot supervising from ground level. ‘To your right, boy,’ and ‘above your head, boy,’ and so on were fired up at me whenever I wavered in my choice of fruit to pick. We filled several baskets before it was time for me to climb down and enjoy, so I supposed, at least a glass of lemonade. In heading across the shed roof back to the ladder, however, I inadvertently stepped on an area where the rafters were rotten, the corrugated iron gave way under me and I partially disappeared from Miss Abbott’s sight. I dropped the basket of peaches, which went tumbling everywhere, grabbed at the sheeting at the edge of the hole, cut my hand and then managed to grip a stout piece of timber and haul myself to safety, inwardly cursing the rotten old roof and the silly old woman who had sent me up on to it.
‘You bloody fool!’ was all Miss Abbott said. There was no lemonade, no proffered handkerchief to bind up my cut hand, not even a few peaches to take home. I was shown through the house and out the front door as if I were a dangerous intruder. My grandmother, stifling her amusement, had one of those ‘I told you so’ smiles when told the story, and my aunt, whose idea it had been to offer my services, sort of apologised for Miss Abbott, saying that poor Inez by then had very few social contacts and had no experience of handling young people.
Perhaps as some sort of apology, the whole family was invited down to Miss Abbott’s for sherry before Sunday dinner when my parents were next in Bendigo. My mother, father, aunt and I were received in the front sitting room, crammed with quite beautiful furniture and antiques which must have looked much better in the larger rooms of the house in the country when Miss Abbott had been young. I was supplied with lemonade while the others enjoyed their sherry and biscuits. Miss Abbott was, as usual, immaculately coiffed and beautifully dressed, this time wearing some sort of tailored linen dress with light black and brown geometric motifs on a pale straw background. She seemed very at ease chatting with my father, deftly resisting my aunt’s attempts to steer the conversation around to Miss Abbott’s painting (there were several framed examples in the room) and seemingly oblivious of my mother’s clinically appraising eye. I, of course, the ‘boy’, was ignored. That was my last contact with Miss Abbott, although I did see her once or twice more sitting at her easel in View Street painting her favourite flowering gum. My mother concluded that Miss Abbott was not merely eccentric but drifting towards madness. My aunt (I know from my grandmother) tried to draw Miss Abbott out and back into social life, but without success. A few years later Miss Abbott was found on the floor of her hallway by the cleaning lady who came once a week; she had been dead for several days, having died there alone of a heart attack.
Another old lady with whom I had contact during my holidays in Bendigo was my grandmother’s neighbour, Miss Donovan. Maggie Donovan had started off her working life in the 1880s as a maid to Mrs John Crowley. The Crowleys had built the Shamrock Hotel and the Royal Princess Theatre in Bendigo and lived in some style in Marlborough House on the corner of Rowan and Wattle Streets, entertaining Dame Nellie Melba when she sang at the Princess, as well as most of the other notables who visited Bendigo, then in its ‘golden days’. When Mrs Crowley died, Miss Donovan was promoted to housekeeper and with the help of a ‘girl’ and a ‘man’, with the girl doing the housework and the man doing the outside work such as looking after the firewood (there were seven fireplaces, the woodfire stove, the boiler and the copper to keep supplied with wood) and the horses. Miss Donovan ran the house, did the cooking and looked after the widower and his two sons. John Crowley died in 1899 and the younger son, Cornelius, moved to Sydney after graduating in Medicine at the University of Melbourne while the elder son, William, by then a law graduate, stayed on in Bendigo and managed the family estate. Mr William Crowley never married. My aunt and grandparents moved into one of the seven houses adjoining the perimeter fence of the Crowley property in 1933, and became friendly with him. My father, when up from Melbourne on a visit to his in-laws, also called in on Mr Crowley; the younger brother and Dad had been in medical school together.
Fifty or so years later I purchased Marlborough House and, as an early retirement project, ran it for ten years as a bed-and-breakfast. My aunt, by then 85 and living in Melbourne, said with a sweet little smile that i
f she had ‘played her cards differently’ with Mr Crowley in 1933 (he died suddenly in 1937) she, not I, would have then been the owner of the Crowley home!
When young Mr Crowley died his will provided that Miss Donovan would continue to live in Marlborough House until she died, his estate paying all the bills and allowing her a comfortable income. In my memory of school holidays spent in Bendigo, Marlborough House was ‘Miss Donovan’s place’. Occasionally I would be sent next door with a message from my grandmother, and would have to brave Miss Donovan’s pet magpie which patrolled the back garden just as a dog might, eyeing the legs of nervous visitors and clicking its beak in a most intimidating way. It never did actually attack me, but always seemed to be about to … was it a master of the art of bluff, just having a bit of fun, or was it simply a well-trained security guard?
Sometimes from our back garden I would hear Miss Donovan singing to herself as she pottered about beyond the high dividing fence. Her house had a detached laundry where she would now and then light a fire under the old copper and make all sorts of strange soaps, oils and ointments, one of which (an intriguing orange-coloured cream that I was always tempted to try eating, it looked and smelled so good) was presented in a small white Pond’s face cream jar labelled ‘Miss Donovan’s Ointment’ and was apparently very helpful to my grandmother in reducing the pain of her rheumatism. Sometimes we would all go in to Miss Donovan’s for afternoon tea which for me would mean lemonade and a piece of heavily iced fruit cake – Miss Donovan was reputedly a great cook. Once, when Miss Donovan’s nephew Mick was staying with her and available to drive the Crowley car (gathering dust in the garage), my grandmother and I joined them and we all set off for a day’s picnic in the country.