I grew up
into awareness 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. I would have enlisted,
put on a uniform and gone to war had it not ended when it did. It was a turbulent and often frightening
time. Newspaper headlines in the 1930s announced bloody conflicts in China,
Abyssinia, Spain, the rise of Nazism in Germany and its expanding European
conquests. In the early 1940s, 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 carefree and happy early childhood and very successful passage through
primary and secondary schools. I think
it must have been early in my Grade 3 year that we had a long and complex
standardized intelligence test. I completed this well before any of my
classmates, many of whom didn’t complete the test in the allocated time, and in
which I scored close to the maximum. This was a tremendous boost to my self
confidence
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Grade 2, Brighton Public School, 1933.
John Last fourth from left, front row |
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 12 and in
grade 6, in 1938. Aided by a scholarship I started at St Peter's College in
February 1939, and at the end of that year shortly after the outbreak of the
1939-45 world war, we moved from Brighton to Glenelg. I recall with affection
the names of teachers who stimulated me in those early years: Miss Burge who
had a club foot, a gentle lady who taught Grade 2; Eric Riley who taught Grade
3 and 4, fostered my love of books and stopped by to bring 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; Mr Andrews, a cross-looking man with a
blood-red mole on his nose (a haemangioma) taught Grade 5, and expanded and
consolidated the elementary mathematics of earlier grades. I can’t remember who taught Grade 6 – I think
we may have had a succession of relieving teachers that year. And then there were the
head teachers, first Mr. Dingle, whose severe demeanor intimidated many children but not me, and was replaced when
I was in Grade 5 by Mr. Rendall, who was benevolent, sensible, and had a very
pretty and very bright daughter who went on to the University of Adelaide at the
same time as I.
Although
I was emotionally bruised and scarred by the family breakup, the years at Brighton
were a fairly happy time. Next to our house was an empty paddock, with climbable gum 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, assorted
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 of 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 of course it was warm enough to swim for more than half
the year. One year my mother and I swam almost 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, several of 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 hungry
young mind. I had (and still have now) 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. It was by
chance not design that I read so many classics and modern books that had some
literary merit.
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| Beach holiday, 1934-35 |
There was
much open space, empty building 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.
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. When roads and houses had
been built close to the edge of the sea, protective walls had to be put up, and
soon the scouring action of the tides washed the sand away. 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 much of 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. Already I had the guilt feelings about my
parents’ divorce that grew stronger a few years later 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 withdrawn, shy, aggravated the stigma that in those days also
afflicted families broken by divorce. Sometimes I felt that I was an outcast of
society. This common syndrome wasn’t
recognized in those days, so my emotional turmoil went unrecognized, unappreciated
and untreated. I never shared my unhappy thoughts with anyone, least of all my
mother. Indeed, all this stayed inside me until I was well into middle
age. 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 the end of the jetty, 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 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 yellowtails that sometimes cruised in large
schools into the shallows near the shore. Once there was a terrifying sight, a
shark, 12-14 feet long, that we all gazed at in fear and horror. Some years before this a young woman had been taken by a shark. Her memorial is a drinking
fountain near the Arch of Remembrance (the memorial to the local men killed in
the Great War of 1914-18) 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, I think not until after the war.
A
flourishing row of agapanthus beside the driveway to the garage sheltered
innumerable snails, edible snails probably but the notion of eating escargot
was so exotic it would never have occurred even to the most sophisticated
residents of that little seaside village. 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 reaction. There was a large loquat tree that we could
climb. I sat high up in it with several other small children,
eating loquats and squashing ants. Sitting one day in that tree when I was
about 6 was the first time I became aware of the anatomical difference between
boys and girls. 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 Dinky-toy models could
achieve their maximum speed.
Next door
on the side away from the empty paddock, lived the Misses Kath and Millie Brown,
both spinsters perhaps because their boy friends didn’t come back from the
Great War; they gave piano lessons, so Bach, Boccherini, Chopin, were
background music on balmy summer evenings. Their niece, Helen, from Berri, 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 2-wheel bike
when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Our family doctor, old 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 a boy in my
class from one of those houses opposite ours 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 - Ruth Taylor, for
instance who lived around the corner on Wenlock Street where my cousin Janet
and her husband Ron Appleyard came to live 20 years later. My school friends included Rene Alice
Goldbeck, who shared with me the distinction of top place every year at school,
and later went through medical school with me.
Even when
we were 6 years old, my cousin Janet McRae was further ahead than me in sexual
sophistication. From then until we were about 11 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 with Dinky toy cars 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 sexual matters. 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.
 |
A typical family gathering, c. November 1939
Note army and navy uniforms |
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 Keith 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 Great War, jazz and popular music such as Cole Porter tunes, and
operatic arias sung mainly by Australian singers 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).
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John with Meccano excavator on front veranda
11 Jetty Road Brighton, 1938 |
 |
Peter & John Last with father Ray Last,
Brighton 1938 |
My other
creative activity in those years was building models with my Meccano set. By saving my pocket money I slowly 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.
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 at St Jude’s parish church? Probably I was 9 or 10,
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.
I was hungry
for any and all kinds 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.
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 when I was about 8 or 9 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 that I had added myself, and I would have liked to keep. Of course
had I done so, all 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, musicals with Fred Astaire, westerns with Hopalong 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 all of my friends still used. For once in my
life, a rare event outside the classroom, 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 later 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 at Jamestown, 160 miles north of Adelaide. 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 beaches, 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 a teen-ager 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 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 was and still
is in other cultures such as China and Japan.
As we
grew older the nature of our games began to change. In later childhood we
became hunters, stalking the songbirds and sparrows and starlings with
slingshots (for some reason called "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 slingshots 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.
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, run over 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 profound 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 Peter's dog.
My mother
maintained her social life despite the breakup of her marriage. She had tennis
and bridge parties for her friends. The lawn tennis court 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 spring of 1955 when I stopped on the way to
the club, to pick up a couple of hitch-hikers.
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.
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 room - 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 Woodroofe's
lemonade 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.
 |
| John with a fairy penguin, Kangaroo Island summer 1939-40 |
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. 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 place, 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 day, 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.
