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.