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.

Early memories

Here are the opening paragraphs of my memoirs. Do these grab and hold your interest?  After reading these do you want to read any more?

Dust. Red-brown dust, on the ground, in the sky, inside the house, outside the house, dust everywhere, on everything, in everything. 

It’s my earliest memory, from when I was about three or four years old, in the summer of 1929-30, or perhaps 1930-31. Once when I had been put down for my afternoon sleep I got off my bed, padded across the linoleum leaving footprints in the dust, and climbed on top of the couch under my bedroom window, pulled aside the curtain and looked out over a bare paddock from which wisps of dust whirled slowly, lazily up into the cloudless blue sky. Why, I wondered, did it fly up into the air like this? The back yard of our house was dusty, I kicked it up with every step. Roarey, our red setter, rolled in it and shook himself as if shaking off water after a swim, though he carried a lot of it into his doggy-smelling kennel too and my clothes got covered in it when I crawled in after him. Behind our car as my father drove over bumpy country roads, a brown smoke-screen of dust obscuring everything. It was always hot, dry, dusty. The rare and fleeting moments when it was cool, green, damp, and muddy seemed unnatural.  My fragmentary memories make my early life seem like the biblical myth of human beginnings.  I came from dust. 

South Australia is a scorched, brown country.   Inland, creeks and rivers are rare; many are just meandering traces,  sandy creases on the flat landscape with occasional stagnant or sluggish pools of murky water or nothing but hot sand,  the memory of water marked by sparse lines of scruffy gum trees. When rain falls it is sometimes monsoon-like in ferocity, and can transform these arid remnants into raging flash floods.  In 1955, I was lucky to escape one when I misjudged the depth and force of water as I tried to ford a creek in the mid-north of South Australia near Clare.  I felt my little car being lifted, floating, tilting alarmingly with the water lapping against the door only inches from my elbow.  Then miraculously the car struck land again, righted itself, and using the battery to turn the engine, I managed to get out of harm’s way up on the bank, where, shocked and shaking, I dried out the distributor and got the car started and on its way again. That was one of several early near misses when my life could have ended before it had even become interesting and worth-while.

One long river that never runs dry wanders westward across the south-east corner of the continent from the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. It forms the border between New South Wales and Victoria before flowing on into South Australia. This is the River Murray. After a few hundred miles it ends its westward wanderings and turns south towards the sea. Rather nearer the end than the beginning of this part of its journey to the salt marsh shallows of Lake Alexandrina that separate it from the Southern Ocean, there are several little twists and turns. In the early days  the settlers came to the river bank here to crutch their sheep - to castrate them and cut off their tails. So this place on the River Murray got its name – Tailem Bend.

Here, in September of 1926, I was born, the son of Raymond Jack Last and Vera Estelle Last, neé  Judell. I’m told I was a sickly child weighing little more than three pounds, born prematurely and saved from an untimely death, my mother said, by the unseasonable heat which sustained me as though I were in an incubator. There is another story passed on to me by an attending nurse many years later, that I was one of twins, the other being stillborn. My mother died before I had heard this story so I couldn’t ask her. My parents were estranged  when I was born, my father absent from the scene, and when I asked him many years later he denied it - but he was not there and the nurse was, so who is to say? If it is true it might explain some unresolved longings I have felt all my life, a curious sense of incompleteness. 

Whatever the facts about this story, I carry a permanent reminder of my birthplace in Tailem Bend on the banks of the River Murray: My mother gave me my middle name, Murray, to commemorate the fact. 

My father graduated from the  University of Adelaide medical school in 1924 and, having completed his year of internship, was working at Tailem Bend as a locum tenens, a relieving doctor.  Soon after I was born, he settled in general practice in Booleroo Centre, a dusty little town in the wheat-growing district about 180 miles north of the city of Adelaide. My mother and I, joined a little over three years later by my younger brother Peter, lived on and off in Booleroo until the early 1930s when my parents'  faltering marriage finally failed altogether, and my mother took us away from Booleroo Centre to return to her parents' home in Adelaide.

Memories of my early childhood at Booleroo Centre are like bubbles that form and burst, isolated from each other in time and place, not forming a coherent pattern of sequentially unfolding events.  Many of my memories are dark and unhappy – tears, shouting, tense silences, parents who ignored me, or used me, I now realize, as a psychological weapon in their domestic conflict of mutual hatred.  That toxic atmosphere left my childhood scarred with wounds that took decades to heal. Perhaps some of those wounds never healed, and the flaws  I can identify in my character are there in whole or in part as a result  There are some happy memories from that time too of course, and puzzling ones, some that lingered for many years until I forgot them or solved the riddles of misunderstood words and phrases.

Here are some of those memory bubbles and some of the puzzles.  

Ray and Vera Last with baby John Last aged about 9 months, 
probably in Booleroo, 1927

My bedroom was decorated with prints from the Gumnut Babies, an original Australian creation, a colour comic-book series that came out in large format with stories beneath a series of comic strips. I don’t remember seeing that book any time after I was able to read. (I saw one like it in an antiquarian book shop in Sydney in the 1980s, at an astronomically high price).  My walls held several large coloured pictures of the Gumnut Babies, chubby little elves with topknots and a stalk sticking up.  The sinister Bad Banksia Man lurked in a corner of one of the pictures on the wall.  I tried not to look at him or catch his evil eye.  The Gumnut babies were probably the inspiration for my imaginary playmates, Bee and Bay, who went everywhere with me.  I had to hold doors open for them to pass through, had to tell grown-ups not to trip over them.  Bee and Bay went away and never came back once I had a baby brother old enough to play with me.
                                                                                                                       

 The Gumnut babies, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (sic) ensconced in gum nut cups.  They wore no clothes and their  chubby naked bottoms have an erotic quality, whether deliberate or  unintended I know not                                                                                                                                                                                                                  













(Below) The Bad Banksia Man running away with one of the Gumnut Babies whose fate can only be guessed in a nasty nightmare

We traveled in an open car with celluloid side curtains that were taken off on hot days so the air flowed through and ruffled my hair as well as bringing in dust that got in my eyes and up my nose. Driving from the house where we lived on the edge of the town to the main street of Booleroo Centre, to the bank, the post office, the hospital, I jumped up and down on the back seat, and was ordered by my father to sit down. Metal struts held the canvas roof in place, making convenient hand-holds for a little boy's fingers. I think it was a Chevrolet tourer, and that it was dark blue under the dust that I cleared away by tracing patterns with my fingers. 

John Last aged about 2

We drove from Booleroo along the winding Gorge Road to the seaside at Port Germain. Porch a-main. Why was it called a porch, where you went into a house? It wasn't a porch, it was a beach, a wide sandy beach where we sat in the shade of a big red white and blue striped umbrella or under the long jetty, with little pools of water at the base of the wooden pylons supporting the jetty, where the movement of the tides had gouged holes in the sand. These were times to paddle in the warm shallows, dig in the sand, and  recover from the carsickness that always marred those journeys from Booleroo to Port Germain. Why was the sand so white on top and black just below the surface?  My Uncle Lester told me it was rotting seaweed that made it black.  I have a vivid olfactory memory of seaweed drying in the hot sun, a pleasantly acrid antiseptic smell, rather like some of the smells from my father's surgery.

Driving from Adelaide up the Great North Road, another rough road; the heat got more intense as we drove north. Why "Great"? It was a long journey taking all day, on a bumpy narrow highway only intermittently paved, and with many ruts and holes, a far cry from its namesake in England – though that too I remember as winding, and not very smooth in the 1950s, before the expressway was built. Why so many memories of car travel? I suppose there must have been a lot of it, both locally in and around the town where my parents lived, and back and forth between there and Adelaide. I don’t remember many conversations though, and have an impression that often my father and mother were silent, had nothing to say to each other even on the longest journeys.

On a night-time trip back to Booleroo from the Mahood's property, a sheep station at Melrose in the foothills of the Flinders Ranges, I heard the words bush and ranges and thought they had said bush rangers, evil, violent men who robbed coaches and presumably cars too, and I was terrified under a rug on the back seat of the car as it bumped along. How old was I then?  Four? Peter was in a basket on the front seat so I must have been very young. How did I know about bush rangers at that early age?  Someone must have mentioned them in conversation, and this fragment of mis-heard information had stayed with me.

A party of grown-ups went bird-nesting, climbing up the trunks of bare trees – ring-barked, to kill the trees, making it easier to clear the land. Someone took my hand, pushed it into hollows too small for a grown-up’s hand, to feel for nestling budgerigars, rosellas, galahs, and sulphur-crested cockatoos. I was scared that a spider or worse still, a snake, might bite my fingers. We had a galah and a sulphur-crested cockatoo in the yard at Booleroo as well as the red setter, Roarey. The birds had names too, but I have forgotten what they were.

"Garpie" (Grandfather) Last with John and Peter in wheelbarrow, Booleroo, 1930 or early 1931

The limestone track from the road to the garage had mysterious bits of metal that glinted on the surface.  One was shaped like the outline of a large toy soldier on horseback, and I tried unsuccessfully to dig it out, leaving there eventually without ever discovering what it really was, probably a flattened piece of a kerosene drum that may have originally been put there to fill a pot-hole. Until years later, I wanted to go back to find out. I wanted to find out so many things!  That was the time of greatest curiosity in my life, as it is in every small boy’s. How much we would know, if only all those questions could be answered and the answers stored in busy small children’s brains!

John with Roarey our red setter, about 1930

The inside of Roarey's kennel smelt doggy and was as big as Dawdie Mahood’s doll's house. We   went often to the Mahood’s spacious homestead near Melrose. It was from there that one cool day when the grass was green so it must have been late winter or early spring, August perhaps, we went on a snake-killing drive, which I watched in fear with grown-ups from a safe distance while a group of young men and teen-aged boys thrashed at the long grass, driving snakes out to be killed. My father killed a snake in the driveway of our house, blasted its head off with a loud explosion from his shotgun, a great black snake, deadly poisonous, its body writhing and twisting it seemed for hours after it was dead and harmless. The little son of the local Methodist minister, a child about my age at the time of his death a year or so earlier, had died from snakebite. The whole district hated and feared snakes. That little boy’s toy train set, a memorial icon of sorts, was high on a shelf in one of the rooms in their house, but although I could look at it I wasn’t allowed to play with it.

Yabbying was a seasonal country pastime. We caught yabbies, freshwater crayfish, in a little stream somewhere in that part of the world where streams are rare.  Probably that too was on or near the Mahood's palatial property. Something nipped my fingers as I trailed them in the cool creek water and they stung for hours but I didn’t complain. I felt brave keeping my suffering to myself.

Once I awoke at night and the back verandah of the house was alive with big blue crabs, rustling skittering things that crawled across the cement floor of the laundry from a large wet hessian bag, then were gathered unceremoniously but with great hilarity by raucous grown-ups, and dumped into a boiling copper cauldron in the laundry. These crabs came from Port Germain or Port Pirie, the smelting and mining town that also was within driving distance of Booleroo Centre.  That night somebody gave me a glass of beer to sip, a frothy bitter drink that put me off beer until I was in my twenties. The crabs were blue, but their shells were red or pink next day when I saw what remained of a mighty feast attended by who knows how many friends and neighbours. How had that happened? Later I saw the same thing with crayfish. Ah! crayfish!  That's a whole series of other memories from later in childhood when I was old enough to know, or to work out for myself, that cooking induced chemical changes which made the shells change from blue or purple to red.

Family group on Henley Beach, 1929; L-R: Doris Judell, Elsa McRae, Katie Saunders, Vera Last (pregnant with Peter) John in front of her, Olave Judell, Malcolm McRae. The women were 5 of the 6 Judell sisters; 2 never married, probably because potential husbands died in the slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918

Under my bedroom window was a piece of furniture that remained with us for many years, a set of three wooden crates nailed together, with a hinged lid, the whole covered with bluish paisley patterned linen. This was the box-couch. Later in childhood it was the repository for small boys’ treasures, my Meccano and toy cars, Peter’s train set, lead soldiers, stuffed animals, comics. Dividing the compartments between Peter and me led to quarrels, when Peter complained that I had more than my fair share. Peter often complained that I had more than my fair share, but I don’t think it was so. Anyway, I was older, had been there longer and logic dictated that I was bound to have collected more things in my three and a bit extra years.  At Booleroo when I was a toddler, the box-couch was high enough so that when I climbed on top of it I could look out the window, over wheat paddocks towards distant blue hills..

Ray Last equipped for golf, with John aged 3, Booleroo

There were golf games at Booleroo and at Melrose with Gar Mahood, and garballs - golfballs - that he made disappear behind his ear or mine, then plucked out of my nose. A photo shows that I first held a golf-club in my hands in those days, learnt how to hold it when young enough so that I have always had an easy, fluent swing that made me better at golf than any other sports. (In the late 1950s Gar Mahood , retired by then to a seafront flat at Henley Beach, was my patient during his terminal illness, and was bewitched by my likeness to his friend, my father). 

My father made a huge kite of brown paper. Huge to me anyway as I knelt at one end of it while my father, the only time I remember that he played with me, tinkered with the struts and anchored the paper at the other end, fully six feet away in my memory, perhaps not quite so big in reality, but large enough so that with the string stretched taut it required all an adult’s strength to hold it in check when the kite was flown in a strong wind in the paddock behind our house. We sent messages up the string, pieces of paper cut out and slipped over the string and carried up by the wind. Then the string broke and the kite flew far away out of sight. I tramped with others across a field of stubble in search of it, and we found it, torn and broken, far away beyond a dam at the other end of the paddock. This must have been in winter; it was a drizzly bleak day, there was muddy water in the dam and nobody wanted to get wet. This was when I was 4 or 5 years old.

John, aged about 4,  towing the Express Wagon

There was a four-wheeled trolley, the Express Wagon, made of wood with metal wheels, and the words "Express Wagon" painted in yellow on its shiny red sides. Those words, "Express Wagon" painted on the side of the little trolley, barely big enough for me to sit in and be pulled along, have even now for me after 70 years, the emotional resonance that "Rosebud" had for Citizen Kane. There is a photo of me sitting on a tricycle pulling the Express Wagon in the yard of our house in Booleroo, when I was about 4 years old.. 

I was learning words voraciously then, and wondered about the connection between Express Wagon on my little red trolley and State Express on red tins that had held cigarettes and had the hypnotic tang of tobacco, sometimes also layers of fine silver foil and tissue paper when opened while I inhaled the aroma as somebody taught me to do - preparing for the future time when like everybody else I would be smoking cigarettes instead of merely inhaling the aroma of tobacco. Express and red are permanently linked by these associations. The Express Wagon, or one like it, remained part of childhood for years, through the later years at Brighton where it was certainly a different one, but still called the Express Wagon.

Those were hard times, the "Dirty Thirties," the years of the Great Depression. Years of drought too, with storms of red dust filling the air, the nostrils, making Roarey rust-coloured. My mother tried to seal the house against the dust, but it got in anyway, covering the cream carpet in the living-room, a carpet that followed us to later homes at Brighton and Glenelg. On windy days, the dried leaves of date palm trees rustled. Twigs and dead branches, sometimes bigger than I was, tumbled down from the gum trees at the entrance to the driveway from the road in front of the house.

Men came to the door begging meals, were willing to do any sort of odd job for a crust of bread - chop wood, clean the car, shift heavy loads. Their faces were weather-beaten, lined and dirty, their eyes angry, or, I now realise, sad, defeated. Some carried their belongings in a roll slung over one shoulder, the traditional Australian swagman's style. They smelled stale and sweaty, a different kind of body odour from that of a maid who took me one day when she was off duty to visit her girl friend, and was joined by two men – young men, I suppose, as the two girls were also, but seeming old to me like the swagmen, and more wicked, talking of and doing something I didn’t understand but that seemed a bad thing to do, though I didn’t see clearly what it was.  

There is an association in my mind between swagmen and my father's consulting room ("surgery") and his massive (to my small person) Xray machine, with sparks that shot out of it. Swagmen and that sparking Xray machine are linked memories for some reason. Perhaps there was once a swagman patient whom I accompanied into the surgery for an Xray. I remember chanting "Nux Vomica" - the name of a drug in prescriptions my father dispensed, and I remember handling shiny surgical instruments that had mysterious uses. Eighty years later I have two or three of those instruments, including a pair of small curved surgical scissors, never discarded despite multiple moves around the world, that I use to trim my finger-nails.  

Close by the house at Booleroo was a wheat paddock. One day three of us squatted in the middle in a place where we had flattened a shelter amid the tall wheat sheaves, away from inquisitive adult eyes, and shared secrets. The others were two girls a few years older than I, one called Nancy, the other her friend or perhaps her sister. The secret we shared was as old as children's curiosity. They were very firm with me. I had to take down my pants and show them what I had between my legs; they in turn would show me what was between their legs. This we all three did with great solemnity and so far as I recall, no touching of each other's parts. My pants were attached to my shirt by buttons that held me together, and at this time I was too young to manage buttons so Nancy did it for me. Nancy occasionally took me to school with her when I was about four years old.  I sat on a seat in the back of her classroom; but the seat had no back-rest, and when I leant back, the seat tipped me onto my head on the floor, a frightening and painful experience that made me cry; Nancy had to take me home, sobbing, and she was crying too. Years later when I was a medical student, Nancy was the staff nurse in charge of one of the wards at the Royal Adelaide Hospital; we knew each other politely as grown-ups by then, not having met since I was about 5 and she about 8 or 9. I never reminded her, nor she me, that we had seen each other's private parts long ago. She had become a fine handsome woman, a dedicated nurse. 

Peter and John Last,  Booleroo, 1930

Some varieties of carbonated soft drinks came then in bottles that were sealed with a rubber ring and a clear glass marble stopper; one broke the seal by pushing the marble down a little, then the contents could be poured into a glass, frothing excitingly. I coveted these shiny marbles. In my innocent curiosity, I formed the notion that all bottles contained marbles, and I could collect as many as my heart desired by breaking enough bottles. There were crates of bottles in a shed behind the house, medicine bottles that my father used for the potions that he dispensed for his patients. One day when I was perhaps 5 years old, I had an orgy of bottle-breaking, discovering to my disappointment that none of these bottles contained marbles after all. But I kept on trying to find one that did until a whole crate of bottles lay scattered around the yard in shards of glass. I got a terrible beating for this mistaken attempt to accumulate a collection of marbles. My father didn’t listen to my explanation, instead commanded me to find a suitable stick to be flogged with. I found a thick, heavy one; and he gave me a thrashing such as I have never had again, all the while misunderstanding my motives for breaking the bottles.  Perhaps he believed that it was an episode in the smouldering warfare with my mother. Towards the end of his life I asked him one day if he remembered giving me that beating, or the time I ‘helped’ him make a kite. But he remembered neither of these events that loom large in my memories of early childhood.

His anger at me for breaking his medicine bottles seemed to persist for a long time, erupting periodically when I did other clever things. I discovered that I could use the length of a picture book held in my hand to extend my reach far enough to turn off the light switch and plunge his den into darkness. He cuffed my ears for that, and perhaps swore at me. My mother seized me and ran out of the room, crying, clutching me to her breast. There must have been many other episodes of tension, for that entire period of my life is shrouded in feelings of anger, rage, tears, unhappiness. Some memories of that period date back to before I was toilet-trained.  I remember soiling myself one day at the hospital, walking bandy-legged, uncomfortable, smelling of shit and feeling horribly embarrassed when my father shouted angrily at me from where he was slouched on a sofa, sharing a cigarette with a woman not my mother – perhaps I had  caught them in flagrante. But all those unhappy memories are blurred, jumbled and mostly incoherent.

I have no recollections of the final breakup of my parents' marriage. For a while we lived at my maternal grandparents' home, a gracious old place on Northgate Street, Unley Park. We had been there earlier to stay when I was only three, before Peter was born. That was in the Unley Park Private Hospital, where I was taken to visit my mother. I remember walking along Unley Road, just around the corner from Northgate Street, with two women, one my Auntie Elsa, on the way to see my mother in hospital, though I don’t know whether that was  when she was there with toxemia of pregnancy and high blood pressure, or after Peter was born. I was sent away about then to stay with the Methodist minister's family who had moved from Booleroo to Clarendon in the hills south of Adelaide. At that time I was not yet reliably continent, or had become incontinent because of the emotional stresses, and I suffered acute embarrassment when I wet the bed.  

The large garden of the Northgate Street house was overgrown with weeds. A horse-trough of stagnant water contained many wrigglers – mosquito larvae – and close by was a small pond with tadpoles. There was a tennis court, but I think perhaps not in use at that time though it had been earlier when my parents were courting. My grandfather Leopold Judell had died in 1927, and my grandmother Rebecca died in 1931 when I was about 4 ½ years old. I remember her as a tiny lady clad in black who once gave me a very hot peppermint that I spat out as soon as I could. There were frequent large family gatherings at the Northgate Street house, though I seldom knew who was who. They all seemed very old to me, like Auntie Rae, my grandmother’s sister, who wore a black ribbon around her neck to disguise her wrinkles, and I seemed to be in their company much of the time, except for rare occasions when I mingled with  pre-adolescent cousins like Betsy and Ross Ragless, and Barbie Saunders and her sister Peggy, who was already sick and soon died of Hodgkin's disease. 

John and Peter Last with grandmother Rebecca Judell, Northgate Street, Unley Park, 1930

At Northgate Street the grown-ups sometimes read aloud to me: Peter Pan, and a childhood abbreviation of Robinson Crusoe which I still have today, illustrated with colour plates that prompted my cousin Betsy Ragless to dress, or undress, as one of the pirates with her pink bloomers puffed out to resemble the buccaneer's pantaloons in one of the pictures in the book. I hadn't started school then, but knew the alphabet and puzzled out the meaning of words under the plates in Peter Pan. This was when I was about five years old.  I had begun to read for myself before I was six, and another pair of books from that period, the two volumes of poems by A. A. Milne, When we were very young and Now we are six were a precious part of my childhood, still safely stored in the bookshelves reserved for my most valuable books.  Who read them to me?  I don’t remember my mother ever reading aloud to me, but several aunts and cousins did, and soon I was puzzling and sweating my way through the verses on my own. I was always asking questions that often the grown-ups didn’t or couldn’t answer. Except for Uncle Lester, who was not often there but when he was, always bent down to my level and patiently replied to my eager inquiries – why did the dust rise in the air, how did a magnet, a motor-car work. He more than anyone else recognized my hunger for knowledge and understanding. I am forever in his debt. 

John Last and Janet McRae, 1929 or 1930

I had quite a lot to do with several cousins then, most of all with the cousin closest to me in age, Janet McRae, who was just three months older than I (her birthday was the same day as then little Princess, now Queen Elizabeth). Janet and I went together to a kindergarten in a church hall at the end of Northgate Street, run by two sisters, the Misses Fleming (I recall the name after all these years!). Others who attended that kindergarten included three boys who like me later went on to St Peter's College and the Adelaide Medical School, so our lives were intertwined from early childhood. The most fun at kindergarten was playing in a sand tray, or cutting out paper shapes with scissors that had rounded ends so we couldn't stab ourselves or each other, or making plasticine models, a pastime that I got quite good at later, copying another cousin, Alan Saunders, whose models seemed to us to be magnificent. 

The interlude at Northgate Street was early in the Great Depression, a time of desperate hardship and an ominous time with rumblings of political troubles and threats of war. The conversations of the grown-ups in this partly Jewish household were full of foreboding, and some of their fears and dread unspoken thoughts communicated themselves to me. From a very early age I had a haunted sense of bad times coming, a feeling that has remained with me all my life – and sadly has been proved only too true on several occasions as the world entered on successive downward spirals of tension, confrontation, hostility and warfare. The household, like all others with sons old enough to fight in the Great War, was still in mourning in the early 1930s for "Lidie", Elias Judell, the favorite son who had not come back. He had been killed at Gallipoli in 1915. The youngest son, Ceddie (Cedric) had come back, bringing with him a wife, Dorise, a foreigner in ways, values, religion, disrupting the cohesion of this otherwise close-knit family. None of these nuances were comprehensible to me then (some still aren't) but they coloured the atmosphere of the Northgate Street house.

I don’t remember our final departure from the Judell family home and the sale of it and most of its contents at sacrifice prices in the depths of the depression early in the 1930s, after my grandmother Rebecca died. The house sold then for about £1300. It changed hands again in 1991 for over three quarters of a million dollars - a reflection of inflation as well as of rising land values as Adelaide turned from a small town into a city.

The stressful events of that time, a time of bereavement and mourning, and of financial crisis for the entire family, like other painful experiences of early childhood, are at least partly suppressed. There were tears, hushed voices, whispers. Something bad was happening.

Then, rather suddenly it seems to me now (or maybe I had been sent away again to stay with friends), my mother had left there and taken my brother Peter and me to live near the sea at Brighton, a seaside village some distance in those days from the suburban fringes of the small city of Adelaide. It was the beginning of a new and happier life.

Another driver's test

Earlier this week I had my 3rd periodic driver's test, a ritual I've had to undergo every two years since I reached 80 years of age. I was in a group of about 14-15 seniors, most taking the test for the first time, I and one other for our third time. It consisted of a group discussion lasting about an hour and a quarter in which the woman conducting the class walked among us, standing directly in front of each of us in turn and observing us closely - our demeanour, grooming, speech, how we reacted to her questions. Later she took one old lady aside and I heard her telling this old lady tactfully that she would be required to take a road test. Then there was a multiple choice set of 50 questions, half of these on rules of the road, the others on road signs - their shape, colour, what they say (which wasn't shown on the signs in the test). Pattern recognition and colour sense are important components of this skill.  I'm happy to say that I aced it, got 100% and completed the test before anybody else. I was pleased to have this evidence that the part of my brain involved in performing this test functions as well as ever.  It was reassuring after my observations lately that my short-term memory is deteriorating, a common neuropsychological finding among old people.  I went straight from the test centre to the licence bureau to renew my driver's licence for another 2 years.  However, I doubt whether I will continue to drive for another two years.  Although it's good to be able to pop out to a neighbourhood shop on the spur of the moment I don't enjoy driving nowadays. It probably makes sense to quit while I'm ahead, rather than wait for a more dramatic episode like a traffic crash to send me a signal that it's time for me to stop driving. I'm aware of a risk that if I stop driving I might tend to become more reclusive and solitary than I already am but I'm also aware that it's very easy to call a taxi; and that I'll probably save money.  Allowing for depreciation, insurance, etc, it costs about $4500 annually to maintain a car and it's unlikely that I'd spend that much a year on taxis.  The loss of autonomy is the hardest part of this life change to get used to. At least by thinking about it before it actually happens I might soften the impact.

Labour Day weekend

For more than 40 years the Labour Day weekend has been the most significant punctuation in my life, marking the steady progression of the seasons. It's usually excellent weather, late summer fullness of foliage, blowsiness almost, as fruit has ripened, local produce is plentiful, a feeling that life is worth living and there is abundant tangible evidence of this. it's a time of transition in the academic year, when teachers buff up their material, parents prepare their offspring for the new school year. For me, it's been the weekend when I take stock of what I've accomplished in the past 12 months and prepare myself to face the next 12 months, usually with a formidable list of things I have to do. During my active academic life I prepared a list of essential tasks, arranged if possible in some sort of priority with dates by which each task had to be completed: teaching assignments, research grant proposals, committee meetings, reports, papers, book chapters, lectures and seminars I had to get ready by specified dates - an intimidating list that always filled the whole of a long sheet of paper pinned to the bulletin board above my desk. For more than the first 30 years of that 40 year period, some time during the weekend, I wrote a sort of stock-taking letter to my family in Adelaide. This year instead of mailing it, I'll post it on my blog.

The list of 'Things to do' is shorter now, only a handful of assignments. I've been invited to reflect on the paper I still regard as my very best - "The Iceberg; Completing the Clinical Picture in General Practice"- which was published in Lancet in July 1963, fifty years ago next year. It is very gratifying that the concept I described and discussed in this paper has become part of the culture of epidemiology, and is still cited fifty years later. I can take a little credit for this, but the idea originated with my mentor Jerry Morris, and the title of the paper, the metaphor of the iceberg, was suggested by the eminent Lancet editor, Sir Theodore ("Robbie") Fox. His hand-written letter to me, accepting the paper with just one modification, making "The Iceberg" the title and my title a subtitle, is in the National Archives of Canada. I am in debt to Jerry Morris and Robbie Fox. The "Iceberg" established my reputation in epidemiology. I'm happy to have an opportunity to reflect on its significance fifty years after it was first published, happy to acknowledge again my two sources of inspiration, Jerry Morris and Robbie Fox, and happy that my reflections will be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

That's the first item on my list of "Things to do," followed in second place by a few lectures and seminars. The fire in my belly nowadays has subsided to glowing embers, but to judge from feedback at Waterloo 2 weeks ago, I can still catch and hold the attention of a room full of 80 or more master's students in this year's MPH class. I hope I can perform as well here in Ottawa later this month.

The third item on my "To do" list has been there for well over a year.  2012-2013 is the year I mean to lick my memoirs into shape and finally publish them, or rather distribute electronic copies to family members and friends.  Over the past 12 months or thereabouts I have posted excerpts on this blog, mostly abridged but otherwise unedited excerpts and free-standing "Traveller's Tales" describing places, people, and some of the experiences of my long, interesting, and thoroughly enjoyable life. Sometimes I've been able to illustrate these with my own photographs. Almost all the excerpts posted on my blog are rough and raw, need editing.  I began to write a first draft of memoirs about 25 years ago when my first grand-child Chris was about a year old and my daughter-in-law Dorothyanne gave Wendy and me a scrapbook, My Grandparents' Recollections  with spaces for photos and some very good questions for us to answer about our parents, grandparents, siblings, what life had been like when we were children, etc. Answering those questions prompted me to enlarge on what I wrote in the scrapbook.  The original plan had been for Wendy and me to wrote our collective memoirs, and a great sadness in my life is that she fell ill and died before that joint enterprise got off the ground. She had such a lovely, lively writing style that would have made our joint memoirs entertaining and irresistibly readable. The slabs of bad prose I've written without her input are too much like a textbook or a learned  article in a scientific journal, not enough like the story of a wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable life.  Be that as it may, the third item on my "To do" list - to bring these memoirs to closure - is highest priority.  I am beginning my final push on it this very weekend.