Glenelg

Here is another abridged episode from my memoirs

                                                                  7 Olive Street, Glenelg

My mother, Vera Last, as she was in the 1940s

In November 1939 my mother bought a brick bungalow at 7 Olive Street, Glenelg, close to Jetty Road along which the trams went to Victoria Square in the heart of Adelaide. This was a move from country to metropolitan area.  Brighton, just three miles away, was a seaside village outside the city limits as they then were. Our new home was about as far from the beach as we had been in Brighton, but close to a busy main street, many shops, and subtly citified by the knowledge that the city was less than half an hour away by fast electric tram. It was the first place I acknowledge as a real home, for which even after all these years I feel affection.

It faced west. Across the front a garage was built onto the side abutting the dining-room. Behind a small front verandah was the living-room; the other front room was my mother's bedroom with a walk-in clothes closet. There was a maid's room between the dining-room and the kitchen, and we had a live-in maid, a plump young woman called Kathleen, for the first 2 years that we lived there. Along the hall was my bedroom, with access through a window to the back verandah, fully enclosed by mosquito-proof wire mesh netting; I slept out on this verandah for most of the year, going back and forth through the window rather than all the way around through the bathroom or the kitchen. Next to my bedroom along the corridor was the bathroom, and at the far end was Peter's bedroom, which was a glassed-in sunroom. A laundry room at the back opened off the verandah, next to the kitchen. It was a well-designed home ideally suited to our needs; I bless my mother's perspicacity in buying it when real estate values were at rock bottom because of the uncertainties associated with the war. In the back yard there was a small shed for garden tools. Later it housed all manner of odds and ends that were part of boys' hobbies, mostly mine - for example, the mice that I bred for a while.

 John and Peter Last, about 1940

There was a lawn tennis court, though at the time we moved in this was not surrounded, as it needed to be, by netting. Later this lawn tennis court was much used by my medical student friends. When the war news got worse after the Japanese conquest of so many places in Australia's near north, my mother exhibited characteristics that make Jewish mothers a legend: she insisted that we had to have an air-raid shelter; furthermore, that this must be built at the far end of the tennis court, to be as far from the house as possible, and so as not to encroach on any of the precious vegetable garden. Of all my mother's reactions to the stresses and strains of everyday life, this air-raid shelter may have been the most spectacular, at any rate until many years later when my impending marriage threatened to upset the placid world of mother and son that she thought was secure by then.

If my memory of those early years at Glenelg and the unusable lawn tennis court with its air-raid shelter, is slightly sad, my recollection of the fruit and vegetable garden is full of affection for a lost paradise. Like all fruit gardens in South Australia it was incredibly bountiful. We had fresh fruit and fresh vegetables in all seasons. We grew potatoes, lettuce, beans, peas, spinach, carrots, parsnips, asparagus. A lemon tree provided fresh lemons all year long. We had all the stone fruit of that region, apricots, plums, peaches, nectarines. There were strawberries, raspberries. Around the fences along the back of the property and the brushwood fence between the vegetable garden and the tennis court there were grape vines. Over the fence from our next door neighbours’ were the branches of a huge mulberry tree which was the first to bear fruit, starting in late October or early November; from then until late May there was always at least one tree bearing fruit, as well as the grape vines which yielded from late November until March or early April.

We kept chickens for our own eggs, and a fresh-killed old bird that had stopped laying provided roast dinner on many a Sunday. It was my job to chop off the chicken's head, a task I never enjoyed because it was my job also to feed the birds and they were my friends by the time I had to kill them. After I had killed them, they had to be dowsed in boiling water then cleaned and plucked, a job that sometimes was Peter's.

I lived at 7 Olive Street Glenelg from the beginning of 1940 until I left home to go to England in the winter of 1951. These were the years in which I passed through adolescence and became a young man, years of academic success at school, and successful completion of the medical course. They were years of widening social horizons, burgeoning friendships, a few tentative attempts to develop bonds of affection with girls, of trying rather unsuccessfully to come to grips with the adult world. They were also years of emotional, social and psychological disturbance from which I did not fully recover until after I had made a happy and fulfilling marriage.

That house, its tennis court and so far as I could see, all the garden, survived intact when I looked at it during my 1986 visit to South Australia, but it had gone when Wendy and I strolled around to see it again on a later visit to Adelaide in the early 1990s – like many other older homes, it and its garden had been swallowed up in a new development, a settlement for senior citizens.               

 I started at the Anglican boys’ school, St. Peter's College, in February 1939, aided by a small scholarship, without which private school education would have been beyond our reach. “Saints” to all who went there, is just east of the city of Adelaide; it was established early in the colonial era and by the time I started there in 1939 it had become the nearest equivalent in Adelaide to an English public school - though it differed from English public schools in having students who almost all lived at home and commuted daily to classes. Only a small minority of the boys, about 120 out of about 1200, were boarders. The ambience of the school, and some of the teachers whom I encountered there, had a profound and beneficial influence upon my life both in shaping my intellectual development and in molding my values and beliefs, in ways that it is difficult retrospectively to trace, yet these experiences marked me forever.

 Chapel and classrooms, St Peter's College

St Peters College followed the English public school custom of having classes in each subject that were taught by specialists, some of whom were exceptionally able. The best of them were "Crusty" Gillam who taught physics, Bill Pigott (chemistry), "Lags" Symons and "Mate" Sharpe who taught mathematics, and my English teachers, Martin Ketley and especially the senior English teacher, the dignified and delightful "Cammie" Cameron.  Over them all presided an outstanding headmaster, the Reverend Guy Pentreath, who taught in a formal way only Divinity, but whose influence permeated the entire school; moreover, he frequently and informally mingled with the boys, becoming, by the time I was in my last two years there, my mentor and friend in a very real sense. There were many extracurricular activities. The most important for me were the junior and senior literary societies, which among other things introduced me to some of the problems of producing a magazine. I was never an editor of the school magazine, but was on the fringes of the production for much of my time in the senior school - getting acquainted with activities that would later become a prominent part of my life.

Cricket match on the main oval at St Peter's College 

The communal life of the boys at the school was generally relaxed, though there were cliques and some snobbishness. We sorted ourselves easily enough into groups that got along well with each other, in my case a group that included a few whom I had first met at the kindergarten run by the Misses Fleming, as well as others who went on from Saints to the University of Adelaide Medical School, so our lives were intertwined over more than ten years. Some have remained life long friends, although the ties now are tenuous. Some became famous: Don Dunstan was Premier of South Australia for years. Some played a larger part in my life than others. One flamboyant character died young in a traffic crash that was in view of his risk-taking approach to life, entirely predictable.

I have tried to reconstruct the way my intellectual life and my sense of values developed. I think the interaction with others at Saints laid the foundations for skepticism and flexibility of attitudes towards many aspects of life and social organization. Yet this did not happen to all of us; some at least were then and have remained rigid and uncompromising in their view of life. I was fortunate to be among those who responded favorably to the message in the school's traditional Chapel reading of the Lesson, which was from Chapter 13 of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, or Chapter 8 of the Gospel according to St Luke, the parable of the Sower:

...Behold, a sower went forth to sow; and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside and the fowls came and devoured them up; some fell upon stony places where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they had no deepness of earth; and when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away; and some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit ...

The aim at Saints was to ensure that as many of us as possible had ears to hear, and were good ground for the seed to spring up and bare fruit. I was lucky, I suppose, to fall in with others like myself. We talked a great deal about our work over lunches that we mostly took with us in brown paper bags or sometimes bought at the school tuck-shop. The balmy South Australian climate made it possible for us to relax in the open air on the lawns by the playing fields to eat our lunches and talk, talk about anything and everything. In the last year at school, when we had more free time to compensate for the heated pace of study, several of us spent those free periods in the library, delving into arcane works of scholarship on biology and astronomy, and there too we talked about anything and everything as we assimilated, digested, sorted, processed, information. It was in some scholarly ways the best year of my life, the year after I had made up my mind that I wanted to study medicine and become a doctor. Before this I had had no clear idea what I wanted to do with my life, and if anything I had some antipathy to medicine because it was my father's calling and I did not identify at all with him. I did well that last year, as I had done in prior years. I came high up on the Honours list, securing a government bursary to pay my tuition fees at the University; and I came third in the state in English Literature, just behind two friends from the radio program, Junior Forum, of which more below.

Football on the main oval at St Peter's College
(about 1942)

Many other things were memorable about Saints. There were intercollegiate sporting events against Prince Alfred College, the Methodist boy's school, especially the "Intercoll" football match - Aussie rules football of course, a fast, open game, often played by these fine athletic schoolboys as well as the older players in the semi-professional league matches. There were the Blue and White dances, at the end of the school year, late in November or early in December, in weather that was hot and balmy, and for boys who were acutely aware of girls, a tremulous occasion - but I was always too shy and insecure with girls to be a romantic success at these Blue and White dances (so called because of the colours of the school blazer, the customary dress for the event).

For me, there was another challenging intercollegiate contest, the Junior Forum, a radio quiz show, in which for some years I and one other boy represented Saints. (The other boy changed often; I was a fixture for some years because of my wide general knowledge and command of language). We were nominated by the junior English master, Martin Ketley, to whom I am eternally grateful for introducing me to this competition, which did so much to bolster my self-esteem. I was just about always able to answer the questions on a wide range of general knowledge, history, geography, literature; just about always able to give articulate answers to the "opinion" questions that made up the last third or so of each half-hour recorded session. 

John and Peter with Rusty in front of our home at 7 Olive Street, Glenelg, about 1941

Much of my insecurity and lack of self-confidence then was due to the fact that I had no father. He had become famous. His war-time exploits - getting torpedoed, becoming the Emperor Haile Selassie's personal physician - were faithfully passed on by his father to the local paper, the Adelaide Advertiser. It wasn't until my last year at Saints that I could bring myself to accept the fact of family breakup, and neither then nor for many years did I lose the sense of guilt that in some mysterious way the marital breakdown was my fault.

                       

The school years were a period of exploration and growing knowledge of the natural world - not necessarily accompanied by very good understanding.  Both at home and away during holidays, there were so many aspects of the world that aroused my interest and curiosity. I was fascinated by small things, like trails of ants on their way to a source of food, or struggling back to their nest with heavy loads of crumbs, dead insects, scraps of vegetable matter. On holidays, such as one that Peter and I had during a term break from school in 1940, at Bon-Bon Station on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, I explored the landscape, remembering what Uncle Lester had told me about the relationship of geology and scenery as I roamed over the red-dusty plains. I recognized laterite, knew how it eroded as the harsh temperature changes, the wind, the occasional torrential rains worked on its soft surface. At night we slept outside on a verandah at Bon-Bon, and lying awake I listened for the creaking and crackling sounds that the rocks made as their outer shell cooled and contracted more rapidly than the still-warm interior. I heard this strange sound that Uncle Lester had told me about; I also heard the lovely night song of willy-wagtails, which when the stars are bright as they were then, have a succession of calls at least as lovely and melodious as those of the nightingales I heard years later around Clare Hall Hospital near St Albans in Hertfordshire.

Looking east from the Adelaide Hills towards the alluvial plains of the River Murray

I was fascinated by big things too. During a summer holiday at Port Lincoln I tried my hand at making maps. The harbour there is interestingly shaped, with a long shallow bay on one side, an island across the entrance, a deep water harbour and channels for shipping ketches clearly marked by buoys. I drew a map, then looked at the real map - which was vastly different in dimensions and configuration from my attempt. I puzzled over how I might get better at this challenging task; but other interests supervened, and I didn't pursue this one. Hills and their many different shapes and textures, from the sand-dunes just beyond the tide line on the beach, the rolling soft contours of the Adelaide Hills that came down to the coast at Marino Rocks, to the jagged peaks of the Flinders Ranges and the flat-topped but higher mountains behind Sydney - why were they all so different? Uncle Lester told me, gave me the insights I sought between geology and scenery.
                                                                                   

The ancient rolling Adelaide Hills

John Last on fossilized coral rocks, Kangaroo Island, 1940

I began accumulating books during my time at Saints, already had quite a collection of Everymans and a few Penguins as well as many other books, by the time I left school. In those days I put the dates of purchase as well as my name on the flyleaf, and a few of the books from that time still survive on my shelves today, despite the attrition of several intercontinental moves. The survivors include some books on history and on natural history, that were not a formal part of the school curriculum but were a necessary part of my explorations of the world I lived in.

For a while, chemistry fascinated me. I had a little laboratory in my bedroom, and used it to carry out many experiments, until one day I made some bromine, a volatile dark-brown liquid with acrid fumes that gave me a severe bronchiolitis. My cousin Owen Bowering who was our family doctor, came to see me as I lay sick in bed, and, looking from my bed to the makeshift bench, retorts, bunsen burner and bottles of reagents across on the other side of the room, gently but firmly insisted that all this must be set up in some place where I didn't also have to sleep nights. I was tiring of chemistry by then anyway, so I had no objection to this edict; but a few remnants of the chemistry set survive even now, relics of that phase of my explorations of the physical world; they repose in my medical bag, having found another incarnation when later I had to test urine as a general practitioner.

The mice came next. We had no biology at school, but some of my friends who already had made up their minds on medical careers were studying genetics as an extracurricular option. I didn't do that, but I did acquire some surplus mice of various colours and varieties, and set about breeding them, albeit without much science. When that phase palled, I was supposed to dispose of the mice by some sort of painless euthanasia, but couldn't bring myself to do this; from then onward until I left home, from time to time one of the mouse-traps that my mother set in the pantry would yield a little black and white striped or albino mouse...

Garpie Last, with some misgivings, passed to me my father's microscope, and I gazed with wild surmise and other feelings like those of Stout Cortez silent upon a peak in Darien, as paramecia darted hither and thither, amebae sluggishly divided, and various other unnamable living objects swam into view in the drops of water I looked at. One day I masturbated and looked at a drop of my semen, saw with satisfaction my own spermatozoa purposelessly but vigorously swimming. By this time I was becoming firmer in my decision to go on from school to university and study medicine. The war was still on and there was a quota, which in my self-deprecatory way, I felt sure would exclude me; but I need never have worried, because when the results of the Leaving Honours examinations were published, there was my name among those in the top twenty in the state, high enough on the honours list to secure a place at the university, and a bursary that covered my tuition fees in full and provided a tiny allowance for books, etc.

Fred Cole's portrait photo of 7 Olive Street, Glenelg

Our next-door neighbour was a fat little old man, Fred Cole, a gifted photographer, retired by the time we came to live there, but still active. He took me under his wing and into his dark room, where I developed negatives and made prints of the pictures I took with my Kodak Baby Brownie. I had a good eye for composition, and a few of the pictures I took in those early days when enlarged and trimmed, were quite good compositions. There is a gum tree, its branches bent and twisted by prevailing winds, still preserved in one of my photo albums; for a while it was framed on my wall.  Before I left home I had moved up from the Baby Brownie to a more suitable camera for taking worth-while pictures, a Voigtlander that went with me to England in 1951.

Social horizons remained confined throughout the years at school, though they slowly expanded. I was (and still am) shy, retiring, did not form friendships easily. For a few years I was a member of a youth group at the Church of England, and went with other youngsters to a few dances and outings such as chop picnics (nowadays they are called barbecues); but when the others paired off, I was always left alone, and so after a while I stopped going to these functions. After the Japanese came into the war, local air-raid precautions became a prominent activity. I joined the ARP as a dispatch rider. On my bike, I would race madly about delivering urgent messages from one self-important middle-aged military reject in charge of an ARP station to another half a mile away. Thankfully, none of our rehearsals needed to be backed up by experience of the real thing. But through these ARP activities I came into contact with other youngsters of my own age and different social backgrounds, different religious persuasions - even, horror of horrors, Roman Catholics, those papists who were from a different world altogether, or so I had been led to believe. Of course they turned out to be exactly like me in values in all respects that mattered. Indeed, I took one of them to a Blue and White dance, and even cuddled up to her in the taxi that brought us safely home at the end of the evening (at about 10.30 pm, because her mother had insisted that she mustn't be late home, and we were doubtful whether we would be able to get a taxi later than this). 

Some of the extended family of Judell descendants, about 1942; Peter Last in front left, Vera Last, cousins David Judell, Trevor Judell, John Last, Janet McRae, second cousin Margo Salom; grown-up aunts, uncles, cousins mostly standing behind the youngsters  

                        Bob Daugherty and John Last


My friendship with Bob Daugherty began some time in those years. He was the son of Manxmen who kept one of the temperance hotels along the sea-front at Glenelg, and for some reason was viewed with reserve by my family. But he and I hit it off from early in our acquaintance, and fell into the habit of traveling to school together on the tram, of stopping off for a milk shake on the way home in the afternoon, hobnobbing with students from other schools - girls' schools as well as boys' - so this too widened my social and cultural horizons. At weekends, I often stopped by the shabby seafront temperance hotel run by Bob Daugherty's parents, and played poker or listened to the radio. But my mother kept me on a fairly short leash, questioning me closely if I was later home than usual from school without good reason, so my partaking of these innocent social encounters over a milk-shake on the way home from school were pretty short-duration activities, lasting in my case no more than half an hour, sometimes to the derision of the others who lingered on until late afternoon.  The struggle between id (surging hormones) and super-ego (my Jewish mother who knew so well how to lay on guilt trips) was no contest; super-ego won every time, but at the expense of a lot of self-esteem and considerable insecurity.

Another family gathering of descendants of Rebecca and Leopold Judell, this one at my mother's Glenelg home. John is 3rd from left standing, Peter on right in front, our mother behind Peter

Those years are crowded with auditory and olfactory memories. They were the years of the Hit Parade, of Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, In the Mood, Artie Shaw's clarinet solos on tunes like Begin the Beguine, Stardust, Frenesi. I can't clearly date the origins of my interest in popular music, but I remember that some time towards the end of the years at St. Peter's College, it was very important to hear the local radio weekly hit parade, called Tops of the Pops, and I as well as almost all of my classmates scornfully rejected the efforts of the music master to arouse our interest in classical music. That interest had been there earlier, just was suppressed for almost a decade from mid-adolescence until early in my sojourn in England when I went with other young Australians in London to the Proms, to Sadler’s Wells, where I saw Don Giovanni soon after arriving in London in 1951, and although I understood nothing of what was going on, I appreciated the glorious music.

The olfactory memories are more complex and difficult to analyze. Sea-smells and sand, close up, while lying spread-eagled, getting a suntan, may be the most powerful. No seaweed I've smelt in the northern hemisphere can evoke the memories associated with the beaches in South Australia. The sub-tropical sun bakes the dry seaweed washed up on the sand as hard as barbed wire eventually, but while it is getting there, it gives off hypnotic odours that evoke memories of carefree days at the seaside from infancy to late adolescence. There's the tang of burning eucalyptus leaves and twigs that we used to grill lamb chops (always chops!) at picnics in National Park near Belair in the Adelaide Hills. Chop picnics were a frequent weekend outing in childhood, often on Saturday from late morning to mid-afternoon. There are auditory memories from those outings too, the echoes that bounced back from the steep hillsides, the warble of magpies, the crazy laughter of kookaburras, the chatter of willy-wagtails. I wonder how many of these typically South Australian birds are left there now. Other odours are reminders of youth; the smell of sweaty male bodies that pervaded the changing-rooms where we stripped to swim (naked) in the school pool, or to put on, then take off our gear for P.T., football and cricket. I hated being forced to play both football and cricket, being no good at either; I can't remember now how it was I managed to evade them so often, perhaps because I was so awful that I was never better than second or third reserve for the lowest level team in my house. Those smells, therefore, are not such happy reminders, but reminders nonetheless of a careless youth gone forever. I would give a lot to smell again the tang of burning eucalyptus.

Many of these sensual memories are complex and multidimensional. If I walk on soft damp grass with moisture oozing out at either side of my footprints, I recall the smell and feel of the playing fields at St. Peter's College on cold winter afternoons when my second-hand footy boots pinched my feet. I was uncomfortably aware of the pressure of the cleats on the soles of my feet, yet fascinated to see the imprints they made on the soft ground, to watch as the indentations slowly filled with water - then would be jolted into awareness of the game going on around me as the ball came in my direction and team-mates shouted at me to intercept (despite the bulk of the opposing team members bearing down on me). After all these years all the sights, sounds, smells of those afternoons are indelibly imprinted somewhere in my brain, three quarters of a century after the imprint of my football cleats has vanished forever. There are many such vivid memories, some of particular episodes, others like football afternoons, more general.

A particular recollection that involved all five senses is of the day I was attacked by magpies as I biked downhill on the way back to Brighton from Marino. It was a sunny spring day; one moment I hadn't a care in the world, the next I was aware simultaneously of a sharp pain in the back of my head, and the flapping wings, raucous squawking of two magpies whose nest I had inadvertently approached too closely. The thing to do, I knew, was to whirl something around my head when magpies attacked; I reached down with one hand to my bike pump, took it from its clips, and began whirling it around my head. But doing that with one hand while trying to steer my bike down a steep and bumpy track with the other proved beyond my powers of coordination; I lost control, the bike tipped me off, I came a terrible cropper, bit my lip, could taste my own blood as it poured out of my mouth; and as I lay on the ground, still feebly whirling the bike pump around my head vainly trying to keep the magpies from attacking my face and eyes, I could even smell them, smell their acrid feathery smell, looked straight at their angry eyes as they pecked at my face. I staggered to my feet, and dragging the bike with me, limped as fast as I could away from there, away far enough from their nest so that they left me to find my painful way home, the bike wheel buckled and scraping on the mudguard, my face bleeding, my legs and hands bruised. Despite this experience, my affection for magpies is undiminished. How delightful it would be too look out and hear a pair of them warbling on the branches of the tree outside my study, instead of the ugly big black crows that are there today!

But I was hard on birds for a few years when I was a boy. With a sling-shot (known for some reason as a shanghai) or an airgun I was a deadly accurate shot; I killed many song-birds and even more birds we regarded as virtually verminous, sparrows and starlings. It was mindless slaughter, killing for its own sake.

My sexual awakening took place during those school years at Glenelg, although my first seminal emission, first orgasm, came before we left Brighton. The flood of new and terrifying yet delightful feelings evoked by those early experiences of sexual arousal were unhappily complicated by terrible guilt, due to my mother's attitudes. From this distance it is impossible and silly to ascribe blame, but she carries a lot of responsibility for making my life miserable and oppressed by needless guilt for the furtive fumbling and sordid dampness of adolescent masturbation. She never discussed sex with me, nor asked anybody else to; there was no frank talk about it by any adult on whom I could lean or in whom I could confide. One of the gaps in my childhood was the complete absence of a male adult confidant. From my mother, and sometimes from others too, there was the subliminal message, in fact often very much out in the open, that anything and everything to do with sex was dirty, disgusting, something nice people just never did. But this didn't stop me from secretly masturbating, or from fantasizing.

My fantasies were based on the sort of innocuous men's magazines that were available in those days, magazines that had cartoons of scantily clad women; on advertisements for women's underwear in the newspapers; but never on real people. Most if not all of the boys among whom I circulated (though I was most often on the fringe, hardly ever right inside the group) learnt a little from each other, much if not all of it faulty or plain wrong. I think guilt about sex in general and masturbation in particular was nearly universal among my circle of friends. It is sad to look back on those far off years and recall how what ought to have been a happy and pleasurable introduction to the facts of life was blackened and made to seem "dirty" so unnecessarily by ignorant or prurient and small-minded adults. I hold this against my mother more than any of the other ways in which she failed me as a mother, because her attitudes made my life a lot less enjoyable than it otherwise might have been. I hope my children will never say as much of me, though I am sure I have failed them in all sorts of ways. To some extent, failure to learn about the facts of life in a straightforward and open way left a permanent mark on me. It certainly impaired very seriously my capability to form emotional relationships with other people, especially with girls of my own age when I was passing through adolescence. So perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, because otherwise I might have bonded to somebody else long before I met and fell in love with Wendy.     

Birthday celebrations

It's celebration enough to be alive still at such an advanced age as 86 years.  It's very pleasing to be able to report that my family found the occasion suitable for a gathering and several meals and other festivities.

David arrived here with Desre, Chris, and Chris's dog Max, in time for a leisurely Saturday lunch, which was memorable among other things for some very tasty pate that David made.  It's very pleasing to me, and to my palate, that David is such an excellent cook.  I don't take after him, so I'm always profoundly grateful for nourishment provided by my family, which in this context means Richard or David.  

Among the perks of being appointed to the Order of Canada is that one or two of the congratulatory letters I received came with gifts.  The CEO of the three 'Science' museums in Ottawa sent me a complimentary family pass to these museums - the Science Museum, the Aeronautics Museum, and the Museum of Agriculture.  Despite residence on Ottawa for more than 40 years, I've never been to the Museum of Agriculture.  We made up for this lapse on Saturday afternoon, with a visit to this museum, which I've driven past on countless occasions - it's on the road that runs through the Central Experimental Farm.  We saw horses, including huge, impressive Clydesdales, donkeys, cows, calves, sheep, goats, pigs, bees, and many of the implements of animal husbandry. I very much like the smells associated with farming.  The evening before I had looked at the delightful movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a lovely, loving tribute to life in modern India, which captures brilliantly the atmosphere, manners and mannerisms of India. The only thing missing from the movie was the smells of India.  Some of these smells were apparent in the spacious animal stalls in the Museum of Agriculture.  

There was time between leaving the museum and getting to Rebecca and Richard's home for dinner, to visit a couple of places where recliners are sold, because I had confessed to the family that I'm thinking of getting myself a recliner. We went on to R&R's where Richard provided as he usually does, a truly superb feast.  Eventually Jonathan drove Chris and me back to my pad.  Chris stayed with me because Rebecca has a new cat that is nervous around dogs. Max is a well-behaved little chap but he does yap from time to time so life was more peaceful at R&R's without him. And this provided a good reason for Chris to stay overnight with me, which delighted me.  It was very good indeed to have some quality time with Chris, for us to talk at leisure about several mutual interests.  I think Chris is an impressive young person who has matured considerably in the past year or so. 

Sunday morning we reconvened for Brunch - pancakes, bacon, sundry other tasty treats - at R&R's; then traveled across town to a store in the far east end that specializes in recliners.  They range in price from a few hundred dollars all the way up to $3000.  I don't think my arthritic spine and swollen ankles are worth $3000 but perhaps they warrant an investment of a few hundred.  I'll look at a few more, perhaps will buy one for a few hundred dollars. 

So finally the birthday weekend celebrations ended, the out-of-town contingent departed for Toronto and Kingston. It was a good weekend.  It would have been a near-pefect weekend if Wendy was still here to help me celebrate but in her absence it was about as good as it ever could be.

No photos to post but here's a sketch of my profile that Chris produced whenI wasn't looking

Brighton

I became aware of the world around me in the ominous decade of the 1930s and the war years of the early 1940s.  When the 1939-45 World War ended, I was entering adult life. Probably I would have enlisted and gone to war had it not ended when it did.  It was a turbulent and often frightening time. Newspaper headlines in the 30s announced bloody conflicts in China, Abyssinia, Spain, the rise of Nazism and its expanding European conquests. In the early 40s, we heard of our dispiriting defeats in every theatre of war until the tide began to turn in 1943.  I began a lifelong habit of scanning newspaper headlines when I was about ten. Against this background I had a mostly happy early childhood, first at Brighton then at Glenelg; and a successful passage through primary and secondary schools.

In 1932 my mother rented a modest but comfortable house at 11 Jetty Road, Brighton. I attended Brighton Public School, a 5-minute walk away, until I was twelve and in grade 6, in 1938. In 1939, war broke out, I started at St Peter's College, and we moved from Brighton to Glenelg. . I recall affectionately the names of teachers who stimulated me in those early years at Brighton Public School: Miss Burge who had a club foot, a gentle lady who taught Grade 2;  Eric Riley who taught Grade 3, fostered my love of books and brought my work home when I was sick, as rather often I was, with asthma and bronchitis; and who also taught me the rudiments of mathematics; and the head teachers, first Mr. Dingle, whose severe demeanor intimidated  many children but not me, then Mr. Rendall, who was benevolent, sensible, and had a daughter who went on to the University of Adelaide at the same time as I.

Grade 2, Brighton Public School, 1933; John Last is 4th from left in the front row; there was another class of Grade 2 made up entirely of girls

Although I was emotionally scarred by the family breakup, the years at Brighton were a  happy time. Next to our house was an empty paddock, with climbable trees in a row along the edge by the road. The one nearest the corner by our house was especially climbable. It had been pollarded and there was a  sheltered level space about six feet above the ground that made a natural lookout, fort, or hiding place, according to the needs of that day's games. Olive trees, bushes and gum trees were scattered throughout this paddock, a path led diagonally across from our corner to the row of shops on Brighton Road, opposite St. Jude's church which was next to the school. On the opposite corner on Jetty Road a couple hundred yards away was a little tuck-shop directly across from the school. Here I spent my pocket money  pennies on Rainbow Balls and Licorice Blocks. The sea and the jetty were a few hundred yards in the other direction, and it was warm enough to swim for more than half the year. One year my mother and I swam right through the winter. The only newsagent in Brighton was near the sea front, and here I could buy once or twice a year the annual volumes of the comics of the time, Buck Rogers, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, which appeared in the Australian Women's Weekly that my mother took regularly. At first these were the limits of my reading, but that soon changed. By the time I was in Grade 5, I was a regular patron at the local lending library, whose custodian, Miss Pascoe, became one of my best friends, introducing me to books that stimulated my eager young mind. I had my own copies of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, and others in an anthology, the Children’s Wonderbook. The library filled many gaps: the Biggles and Tarzan  books, Jeeves, Bertie Wooster and other unforgettable creations of P G Wodehouse, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie and other detective fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s. I read voraciously and indiscriminately, unable to distinguish quality from rubbish.

There was much open space, empty lots. One paddock had shrubs with stringy roots that tasted of licorice. On the wide sandy beach at low tide there were interesting pools that sometimes trapped small fish. A mile or so to the south, the hills came down to the coast at Marino Rocks where the rock pools contained even more interesting sea shells and small crabs.

John and Peter Last on an Adelaide beach in the summer of 1937-38








That wide sandy beach had almost all gone when I returned to Adelaide on visits in the 1970s and 1980s. Nobody then understood that sandy shorelines are dynamic, shifting things. Once roads and houses had been built close to the edge of the sea, protective walls had to be put up too; and soon the scouring action of the tides took the sand away. The beach had disappeared when I returned to Adelaide on a visit in the early 1970s. An oil refinery a few miles down the coast, domestic and toxic waste discharge into the sea, and unchecked urban sprawl had transformed that once lovely stretch of sandy shoreline into an ugly rocky scree beside the road that runs along the shore.  I was pleased to see on further visits in the late 1990s that the sand had come back, but it wasn’t as it had been when I was young. It looked dirty, and the sea had lost the translucent beauty of my childhood. I stood on the little rump of jetty that had replaced the longer one (destroyed in severe storms) and looked down into the water, unable to see very far beneath the surface, seeing none of the brightly coloured little tropical fish that had once teemed in those waters. All that remained were a few colourless darting shadows that looked like minnows. 

In my childhood it was a wonderful place with all sorts of fascinating things to see, do, explore. I had friends at Brighton Public School, but then as now, my ties to others were not strong and I spent a good deal of time on my own.  At home I read books voraciously, played with Meccano or model cars, and later made crystal set radio receivers. When out and about I preferred to explore on my own rather than as part of a group. Already I had the guilt feelings about my parents’ divorce that grew stronger as I entered and passed through adolescence.  I know now, but didn’t then, that children of divorced parents often are plagued by guilt, believing that they caused the breakup. Those unhappy thoughts made me shy, self-conscious, withdrawn. Sometimes I felt that I was an outcast of society.  This common syndrome wasn’t recognized in those days, so my emotional turmoil went unappreciated and untreated. I never shared my unhappy thoughts with anyone, least of all my mother. All this stayed inside me until I was middle aged.  Even when I was learning some psychiatry and later when I was doing epidemiological research  in Edinburgh with psychiatrists who became personal friends, I never brought these thoughts out into the open.

I fished from the jetty at Brighton, sometimes with a rod, mostly with a line and a couple of barbed hooks baited with fragments of raw meat. My favorite place was on a landing ramp near its end, warm sun on my back as I lay face down a few inches from the surface of the crystal-clear sea in which gaily coloured tropical fish swam as lazily as as I tried to catch them. I didn't particularly want to catch them – even if they were edible I would have had to gut and clean them, not one of my favorite pastimes. I caught squid (cuttlefish) too, learning quickly to let them remain below the surface until they had squirted out all their ink. The bait for squid was raw potato, and the tentacles of the squid then became the bait for larger fish. But it would have been unimaginable to catch really large fish, such as schools of yellowtails that sometimes cruised into the shallows. Once there was a terrifying sight, a shark, 12-14 feet long, that we all gazed at in fear and horror. Some years earlier a young woman had been taken by a shark. Her memorial is a drinking fountain near the Arch of Remembrance (the memorial to the 1914-18 war dead) at the base of the jetty. 

I rode my bike all over the vineyards and orchards of the district, and into the hills to the National Park. It seemed like long-distance exploration in those days, and the distances were considerable for a small boy. Now all that lovely country is carved up into suburban plots of land with rows of humdrum bungalows everywhere, the orchards, vineyards, the almond blossom, the sour-sobs that made the paddocks yellow every spring, all long gone. It was like Tom Sawyer’s boyhood, in an idyllic setting, a nearly perfect climate, a bountiful land that yielded abundant fruit, vegetables, grown in our own garden, and more delivered to the door by tradesmen eager for custom in hard depression times. There was a plague of rabbits in Australia then, and a horse-drawn cart came by laden with little furry carcases, the Rabbit-man chanting the prices melodiously. Milk came to the door too, ladled from a large metal cannister into my mother's china jug. Milk was not delivered in sealed bottles in the years we lived at Brighton. 

A flourishing row of agapanthus beside the driveway to the garage sheltered innumerable snails. Behind the house was a lawn tennis court, and behind the garage an apricot and a couple of almond trees. The husks of the almonds gave me terrible allergies, once an almost lethal anaphylactic reaction.  There was a large loquat tree that we could climb. I sat high up in it more than once with several other small children, eating loquats and squashing ants. There were grape vines all around one end of the wire mesh that surrounded the tennis court; we had a lemon tree, and plum, peach, nectarine trees that were standard in all South Australian gardens. I made a track for my model cars to run downhill on a mound of clay behind the garage, and spent many happy hours modifying the grades and curves so my Dinkey-toy model cars could achieve their maximum speed. As I grew into a mature and responsible 8 or 9 year old, I did more to help my mother in the garden and in the house, and running errands, delivering messages to her friends among our neighbours.

Next door, on the side away from the empty paddock, lived the Misses Kath and Millie Brown; they gave piano lessons; so Boccherini, Bach, Chopin, were background music on balmy summer evenings. Their niece, Helen, from a fruit-growing town on the River Murray, lived with them while she went to Walford Girls’ School in Adelaide, and she taught me to ride a two-wheel bike when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Our family doctor, Matt Goode, lived across the street, which was convenient because I was rather often sick with asthma and bronchitis. Most other houses on the other side of Jetty Road were very ordinary, several not much better than slums, and we didn't mingle with the people who lived in them. Even those who went to Brighton Public School were not part of our circle of friends and acquaintances. Once one of these boys had a seizure heralding the onset of meningitis, and he soon died, but I can't remember his name, as I can those of other small boys and girls from farther afield, and the names of my mother's friends who lived nearby, many with children I played with.  Rene Alice Goldbeck with whom I shared top place at school every year went on to medical school in the same year as I and is part of a small circle of friends, the long-lived survivors who like me have remained in the land of the living into our 9th decade.

Janet McRae, 1933

Even when we were six years old, my cousin Janet McRae was further ahead than me in sexual sophistication. From then, while we were still at the old Judell family home at Northgate Street, until we were about eleven and approaching adolescence, she and I occasionally played "doctor" –  always at her instigation, and always just a one-way game, in which I had to examine the lower part of her belly. She would bare this for my inspection, encouraging me to push my hand hard into the soft flesh between her navel and her little hairless mount (but never lower, and always with her legs tightly clasped together). In that kindly climate we often went naked or nearly naked on hot days. I have happy memories of playing quite naked on the front verandah of our house at Brighton, as well as other memories of times coming home from picnics in the hills when Janet and I cuddled together under a rug in the back of the car, and she would take my hand, guiding it always to this fascinating lower part of her belly. She was curious too about my penis, and liked to look at it as it got stiff under her gaze, but never touched it. These innocent exploratory games were the only sex education I ever had. My mother had the customary reluctance of those times to talk, perhaps even to think about matters sexual. Neither then nor later did I ever have any formal instruction about sex, not even in medical school, where it was assumed that we already knew about these things.

John and Peter Last, 1933

Television had not been invented. Radio was the main form of canned home entertainment, and that sparingly. The McRaes, Uncle Malcolm, Auntie Elsa and cousin Janet, had a portable wind-up gramophone and a few records that we sometimes played when we visited them. But all we had was a radio. Our first radio was a massive fretworked piece of furniture with a dial lit from behind (until the bulb burnt out). We had 5CL, which transmitted the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and three commercial stations, 5AD, run by the Adelaide Advertiser, 5DN which was affiliated with the afternoon paper, the News (owned and edited by Walter Murdoch, father of Rupert), and 5KA. There were a few soap operas, the Lux Radio Theatre (an Australian copy of the American version). Other programs that I remember fondly included the Hospital Half-hour, a morning request program, and Wilfred Thomas's Show, which carried tunes that still evoke memories of childhood, early twentieth century popular music, the songs of the first world war, jazz and popular music such as Cole Porter tunes, and operatic arias sung mainly by Australian singers like Peter Dawson and Gladys Moncrieff. I don't think we had any programs from outside Australia, probably not too much from outside Adelaide - radio in those days was a good patron of local artistic talent. About 1938 I built my first crystal set, and with headphones covering my ears, heard the magical clear sounds of the only two stations I was able to receive, 5AD and 5CL.  Perhaps because of a fault in the wiring scheme I followed, I couldn't get the other two stations but sometimes at night, miraculously I could hear faintly the sounds from distant radio stations in Melbourne.

John Last with a Meccano model excavator, complete with a plasticene model operator

My other creative activity in those years was building models with my Meccano set. I acquired a large number of parts for this, until by the time I was about ten I could make elaborate cranes and excavating machines. There are several photographs of me proudly standing beside some of these, one with Peter and my father, taken on the occasion of my father's visit to our home at Brighton shortly before he left South Australia in 1938; I was eleven when that picture was taken.

Ray Last with Peter and John Last in front garden 11 Jetty Road Brighton, 1938

There are many more stars in the Southern Hemisphere sky than in the north. On a moonless night away from artificial illumination it was easy to see one's way. How old was I when I was a choir-boy? Probably I was nine or ten, singing sweetly though unable to read music, and walking home after choir practice with other boys, the bright stars of the Milky Way made a vivid display, bright enough to see easily when there was neither moon nor street lights. The stupendous numbers of stars invoked a sense of wonder at the enormity of the universe. I was old enough to comprehend the world I lived in, had begun to read books like Sir James Jeans' The Mysterious Universe.  One night several of us walked into the cemetery behind St Jude's Church after choir practice, and sat on somebody's grave, engaging in learned conversation. I remarked that "Our sun was one of the stars of the Milky Way" - and was laughed at because the others said I talked like a professor.

John Last with a fairy penguin, 1938

I was hungry for any and all sorts of knowledge, and soaked up everything I was taught at school, and more at home in our rather pathetic little collection of books, a battered old one-volume children's encyclopedia, some books that were my father's, even my grandfather's. Here I learnt about digging the Panama Canal, about the big ocean-going liners, too large and too important to come to a little backwater of a port such as the one we had in Adelaide. The largest ships we saw were modest cruise liners like the one that took Auntie Doris to England in 1937, a few freighters, and the Karatta, the little coastal steamer that went to Kangaroo Island.

A typical school report; I and a girl who came top of the girls had many like this





My Uncle Lester, my mother's oldest brother and the only one who had had a university education (geology and mining engineering) influenced me greatly. He sensed my hunger for knowledge and went out of his way to satisfy it. I think my values as well as my general knowledge owe a lot to the many talks we had. He told me many things whenever we met. Once there was a family picnic at Goolwa Beach on the south coast about 70 miles from Adelaide. Uncle Lester and I walked for miles along the beach. The breakers rolling in all the way from Antarctica, he said, created this beach, breaking down rocks into gritty gravel and sand, taking untold millions of years to do so.  He gave me a collection of rocks, minerals, crystals, ores and the like. I had a glass-topped case about three feet by four feet in which this collection was displayed. It was one of my treasured possessions until I left home to go to England in 1951. It was gone when I came back to Australia; my mother and Peter had dismantled it, and passed it on to Uncle Lester's grandchildren - a fitting way to dispose of it, but I would have preferred that they consulted me first, as there were a few particular treasures, including much that I had added myself, and would have liked to keep. Of course had I done so, it would have been long gone by now, in our many moves since those days.

   

On Saturday afternoons in the winter when it was too cold for the beach, I went to the pictures, a small assembly hall in the next block down towards the beach, beside the railway line close to the Brighton station. Here they showed such spectaculars as the Ziegfield Follies, westerns with Hoppalong Cassidy, and, most important, the serials, of which the best was Flash Gordon, who starred with his girl-friend Wilma (scantily clad, for the benefit of fathers accompanying their children, but her ample curves were wasted on us youngsters); and Flash Gordon's implacable evil enemy, Ming the Merciless.  All these, of course, were in black and white – colour movies didn’t appear until just before the war began in 1939. 

In our last two or three years at Brighton, a winter Saturday afternoon pastime was roller skating at a small cement arena about the size of a tennis court, at Seacliff, a mile or so south along the coast. One of my cousins gave me a pair of roller skates that he had outgrown.  These actually had wheels bolted to the soles of a pair of boots, very professional-looking, a great advance over the little-boy clamp-on skates that I had used up to that time, that most of my friends still used. For once in my life, a rarety, I was one-up on the others. 

These others were school friends, children of my mother's friends, and cousins near my own age, notably Janet McRae, David Judell (my brother's age, and one of his close friends). My cousin Viv Judell lived with us while she attended Adelaide University where she studied law. Her parents, Uncle Lester and Auntie Elsie, were then still living in the country at Orroroo. The children of my mother's friends included the Hardy brothers, Tom and David, who lived at Seacliff, far enough away to be out of reach for going home at lunch-time, so my mother provided lunches for them, no doubt for a small financial consideration. Their mother, Eileen Hardy was widowed quite early in life when her husband Tom, a wealthy wine-grower, was killed in an air crash in 1936. The Hardy brothers grew up to take over the family wine business and to become great yachtsmen: the youngest one, Jim (Sir James) was captain of the Australian team that unsuccessfully attempted several times to win the Americas Cup. As well as the Hardy brothers, there were the Mittons, Don who was my classmate, and a tribe of others; and the McPhersons, of whom Duncan was my classmate. David Jordan, Bob Culver, David Crosbie and John White were others in our class at school, and in or on the fringes of our circle. All of us regarded the district that included Brighton and Seacliff, the beach, the vineyards and orchards of the hinterland, as our property. We were very territorial, and strangers who ventured into our territory without explanation or excuse were enemies until proved otherwise. Strangers were few and far between in those days of extremely low mobility. Even to move in from another suburb was rare, and movement from another part of Australia was almost unknown. I was in about my third year at St Peter's College before I met anybody from another state, a raffish lad  from Tasmania, full of risque anecdotes, famous because he claimed to know the film star Errol Flynn who hailed from Tasmania. There were girls on the fringes of our world, sisters of the boys, but they hardly existed for us except perhaps as nuisances. Once when we were coming back at dusk from a picnic in the National Park, my mother stopped the car for some reason, and as it was on a slight slope it rolled back down into a ditch, throwing those of us inside all over each other. The others included two girls, sisters of friends of mine or daughters of my mother's friends, who were in our car. How embarrassing it was to have this "accident" (in which nobody was even bruised) shared by girls! 

Throughout those childhood years at Brighton, many other games and pastimes marked the passage of the seasons and the years. There were then, as there have been since mediaeval times in English cultural tradition, seasons for marbles, spinning tops, playground team games like leapfrog, and of course the seasonal ballgames, football and cricket. Girls, with whom we mingled hardly at all, had their own seasonal games, skipping rope and so forth. There were seasons too for knitting and for making rats' tails, a pastime for boys as well as girls, that consisted of making a long woolen rope-like ribbon by hooking wool over nails around the hole in a cotton-reel. Cotton-reels had another use: with a rubber band through the middle, twisted around a nail that anchored it at the far end, and lubricated by a slice of candle, then threaded through a pencil or a twig, behold, a tractor that could climb up and over obstacles such as a pile of schoolbooks. School children don't seem to do things like these any more, sad to say. Marbles required a bag for the collection used in the two sorts of games we played, both for keeps. I didn't do too badly at marbles, winning about as often as I lost, because I soon learnt how to avoid playing with the champions. We made kites too, though I don't recall this as a passion as it seems to have been in other cultures such as China and Japan.  

                                                                           

Peter and John in front of our home at 11 Jetty Road Brighton, about 1936



As we grew up, the nature of our games began to change. In later childhood, we became hunters, stalking the songbirds and semidomesticated sparrows and starlings with slingshots ("shanghais") or airguns. Our range widened as we became more confident on our bikes, until by the time we were approaching double figures we often rode up into the hills at Belair or Blackwood, or along the south coast to Marino Rocks.  

Some family homes we favoured, others we avoided. Our home was neither one nor the other; my mother would probably have liked to attract the gang of little boys to our place, but she may have put them off by being over-eager, or perhaps we didn't have much to offer them. Those who lived close by did drop in, but our home was never the headquarters of the collective pastimes that occupied the hours and days that we were out of school. The beach was the main attraction for the hot season, from October to March, and for a month or so on either end when the weather cooperated. Often at weekends in the summer there were tennis parties at our home, when my mother entertained her friends, sometimes bringing children who were in my own age group - and we would go off about our business, to the beach, to roam with shanghais to hunt birds, to climb trees. In the winter, sometimes I went with her to Marino golf club, just going along for the ride then taking off on my own or in company with other kids, exploring the hills that led down to the rocky shore. But I also spent a great deal of time on my own, reading.

Vera Last with Peter and John Last, and Rusty, the wire-haired terrier
7 Olive Street, Glenelg, 1940

We always had a dog. At Booleroo it had been Rorey the red setter. At Brighton our first dog was a hybrid of a fox terrier and something else that made him bigger, bouncier, an exuberant and cheerful animal who was very good at retrieving balls thrown far off into the distance. He came to an untimely end, mortally injured by a passing car. We wrapped him in a blanket that soon became stained with blood, and as I watched, his eyes lost that spark that meant life, and I knew he was dead. That was the first death I had seen and it made a lasting impression. Next came, Rusty, a wire-haired fox terrier hybrid, a smaller dog, for some years my best friend who appears in many photographs with me and with others in the family. He came with us from Brighton to Glenelg, where eventually he succumbed, as did so many dogs in Australia then, to canine distemper. He was replaced by Angus, a dun-coloured Scotch terrier who was my brother's dog.

Vera Last with John and Peter, Granite Island, Victor Harbor, 1938

My mother maintained her social life despite the breakup of her marriage. She had tennis and bridge parties for her friends. We had a lawn tennis court at Brighton, and this was used every weekend in the summer months except when it was too hot to play. In winter, my mother played golf, well enough despite being left-handed, to win some competitions. Among our treasures was the only cup she ever won, in a handicap competition. This cup resided in a place of honour over the fireplace in the dining-room. I took up golf too when I was about ten, and although I was never much good, I had a natural easy swing. Before we left Brighton, I was playing at the Marino Golf Club, to which I was to return many years later as a member - until one memorable day in the early spring of 1955 when I stopped on the way to the club, to pick up a couple of hitch-hikers...

Peter and John Last, 1934

In the years at Brighton, however, I was too young and neither proficient nor interested enough to develop a taste for playing sports, though watching sports once in a while was amusing. Australian Rules football is a splendid spectator sport. I sometimes watched it when we lived at Brighton, an occasional entertainment on winter Saturday afternoons. Watching cricket was part of childhood too, so cricket became part of my cultural heritage. I saw the last English touring team to come to Australia before the war, in the summer of 1938-39, watched part of a match against South Australia at the Adelaide Oval. The famous Australian batsman, Don Bradman, was a member of the South Australian side at the time, and of course we went there to see him, not the Englishmen Hammond, Hutton, and others.

John and Peter leaving 11 Jetty Road for Brighton Public School, 1935

Somewhere about middle childhood the bond of affection between  Peter and me began to be strained by sibling rivalry. It was largely a one-way rivalry: I always felt (and still feel) more affection for him than he seemed to have for me. He was prone to rages, and sometimes got rather violent. I made things worse by teasing him. Fortunately our interests had by then diverged so we were able to stay out of each other's way most of the time, although we did have to share the same bedroom - but a screened verandah opened off of it, and one of us, usually I, slept out there for much of the year. Once he locked our mother in the cellar because he was angry with her for some reason. This was when we were brewing our own ginger beer and there was always a risk of bottles exploding as the yeast fermented and produced more gas under pressure than the bottles could stand; my mother was quite frightened by that experience, and advised me not to push Peter too hard because of his bad temper. I think it was after this that he tried to brain me with a mallee root shaped like a club, and from then on I gave him a pretty wide berth for a while. There were many times when we were the best of friends. I was always very proud of his outstanding success at school, and glad he came after, not before me, so I didn’t have to live up to his superior performance.

Before we left Brighton I had begun to grow up. I started at St. Peter's College at the beginning of the school year in 1939. The first year at Saints, in the Preparatory School, brought some culture shocks as well as acquaintance with some splendid youngsters who were to become friends for life - insofar as it is possible to preserve bonds of friendship from so many thousand miles away. 

I travelled by train every day from Brighton to the city of Adelaide, through what was then open country containing vineyards, orchards, almond groves, for several miles. From Adelaide I went on by tram to the school, using funny little tramcars that rocked to and fro on a very short wheel-base. That first year I wore short pants for the last time, but before the end of the year I was maturing and beginning to be aware of girls. In the school holidays, my friend Robert Hecker and I went by train on a school excursion to Melbourne and on to Phillip Island, staying up all night both ways on this overnight train journey. On the way back, we shared a compartment with others who included girls, Valerie Bitmead (who sat with Robert Hecker) and Lois Riggs, who sat beside me. We held hands, and once or twice our cheeks touched - but not our lips. We felt both daring and romantic, and vowed to be true to each other forever. But like most young love, it didn't last.

It was the last year of an uneasy peace. The newspaper headlines describing the depredations of the Nazis were ominous, taking over space previously reserved for the Spanish Civil War or for the smouldering conflict that the Japanese were waging against the Chinese. I began reading newspapers regularly enough so that it became a habit. At the same time the news broadcasts on the radio began to acquire a sense of urgency. The other source of information was newsreels that came on at the Saturday afternoon matinees, immediately after the trailer for the next week's big picture, and before the serial. By 1938, it was impossible even for an eleven-or twelve-year-old to ignore the growing menace of impending war.

On September 3, 1939, my mother drove us from Brighton across to Henley Beach to Auntie Katie's home, a frequent Sunday outing. We sat silently listening as Neville Chamberlain announced, above the crackle and static of the short-wave, that we were at war with Germany. Auntie Katie and her family were Jewish, a fact I did not then appreciate though I was aware that they were taking in refugees from Germany and Austria. There was one there that night, a sad, balding man who had tears running down his face as Chamberlain spoke. I had never seen a man cry before. We drove this man back as far as Glenelg where we put him on a tram to the city, on a night of scudding clouds through which the stars were intermittently visible. It was cold, or at any rate I shivered, perhaps not from the cold. 

My form-master Mr White in the Prep School at St Peter's was in charge of the scouts, and filled with patriotic fervour, I saw him next day and said I wanted to "Join up" in the scouts. I remember the smile that flitted briefly over his usually stern face as I said this, and indeed I did "join up" in the school scout troop, soon going off to a camp in the Adelaide hills - but not with Mr White, who also joined up, in his case the RAAF. He was killed in action in the Battle of Britain. 

In 1993, I went back to Brighton. The house at 11 Jetty Road and those on either side were in process of being demolished to make way for a row of apartments running along where our tennis court and the Brown's back yard had been. The verandah and front rooms had already gone, I could see the glazed dark-brown bricks of the dining-room fireplace, ending at about waist level;  I had a vivid flashback recollection of roasting chestnuts, and making toast over the glowing coals of mallee roots in that fireplace, and my eyes filled with tears. By the next day the remains of that fireplace and everything else would be gone too, and nothing would remain of what had once been my home, a place that held so many happy memories.