I'm hoping to do a series of seven pieces about my life, with a snapshot of the situation every decade. Here's the first instalment :
1953
In 1953, sixty years ago as I
write, I was eight years old. My youngest brother, Alan, was twelve months
old. Lester would turn three during the
year, Peter seven, and my older brother John would turn ten.
We lived at 97 Owen Street in
Woodville North, a north-western suburb of Adelaide. My Mum and Dad, Connie and
Ron, had lived there for ten years since the house (in fact, the whole suburb)
was built during World War II.
Our house was on the
south-eastern corner of Owen Street and Thirteenth Avenue. Google Maps and Streetview demonstrate
(2013) that the house still exists, as do quite a few of the fibro-clad and
tile-roofed clones that were its neighbours. The houses were built for people
employed in the munitions factory at nearby Finsbury, where Dad worked as an
engineer.
In 1953, the yard of our house
had a chook run, fruit trees and a vegetable garden. Obviously, my desire to
produce eggs, vegetables and fruit in my backyard stems from this period and I
like to think that Dad picked up the motivation from his own childhood in
Kalgoorlie, WA.
We had large lemon and fig trees
along the side fence, and in the back yard there were apple, peach and apricot
that I remember. A large stand of bamboo stood next to a garden shed by the
chookyard fence.
Perhaps when I was a year or so
older than this, we boys adopted the pastime of climbing onto the shed roof,
reaching high to grab a couple of bamboos and then swinging out to the ground
using the bending bamboo poles as a "parachute" to come back to earth. We probably would have argued about who was
playing the roles of Biggles, Algy and Ginger, the famous flying police from
the kids' radio serial, as we leapt from our burning plane just before it broke
up. Dad would not have been impressed by the wanton damage to bamboos which
could be used for bean or tomato trellises.
We had jobs to do, of course, and
both parents were strict about them, but we could find entertainment in obscure
places. In the garden shed, Dad built wooden bins to hold the chook feed, one
for wheat and one for bran and pollard, each similar in volume to, but not as
tall as, 200 litre drums. One of my
jobs was to mix bran and pollard (look it up!) with water and feed it to the
chooks each morning, along with some wheat; in the afternoons, change their
water, another dose of wheat, and collect the eggs. It was also fun, during
games of "hidey", to dive into the wheat bin as if the grains of
wheat were water and hide with just my head exposed above the wheat and the lid
closed over me! It was probably also scary, and this the reason I remember it!
I can't remember if we had a
rooster but we certainly had chickens at least once. One day I stayed home from
school because one of our chickens, a few days old, was sick, and I wanted to
look after it. The chick must have been almost dead, looking for a bucket to
kick, when Mum, as a last resort, got a teaspoon of brandy and held it so the
chicken had no choice but to immerse its beak in the brandy. Upon which, the
poor thing flopped over and died—it looked to me as if the brandy had killed
it, and Mum must have done some fast, soothing talking to comfort me.
Believe it or not, another job,
on the weekend when Dad was home, was to sit on the back lawn and pull out
onion weed. Dad had a thing about lawn perfection and ours had a long way to
go. The lawn mower pushed the tops of onion weed over rather than slice them
off, so we had to sit there and pull out the weeds one by one, being careful
not to leave behind the bulbs which would only proliferate. On a sunny day,
with the desire to be leaping about and otherwise playing boisterously, sitting
on a patch of onion weed for an hour was like being locked in a cell. I'm not
complaining, just saying!
Talking about jobs and strict
parents, I was drying the dishes once and complaining bitterly and at great
length, possibly because it was John's turn and he was doing homework; when Mum
had heard enough of my nonsense she wacked me on the head with a handful of
sudsy spoons—the injustice as much as the pain made me howl. Dad entered the
fray, disturbed from reading his paper in the lounge room, and I expected him
to support the aggrieved party, but of course he gave me a verbal lashing and I
had to just keep drying.
Our playground extended way
beyond the backyard as we got older.
There was really no traffic and we could wander freely. There was a park
on Thirteenth Avenue with a playground about a hundred metres from our
house. In the playground was what I
would call a plank swing (I haven't seen or heard of one since). It isn't easy
to describe so here's a picture of one from the internet (proving that they did
exist!)
The one in Thirteenth Avenue was
smaller but essentially the same design, the main features being the swinging
plank and the safety rails around it.
You can see why they no longer exist.
It was easy for young kids on the ground to lose concentration and be
belted in the back, or back of the head, by the plank. Accidents were common.
We played for hours at a time on
the plank swing. Often it was a ship with the ground being the sea; we were
sailors or pirates, having great fun climbing the rigging, walking the plank
and running around the decks (on the safety rails!) to avoid being caught by
the enemy. Leaping from the safety rails or dropping from the superstructure
onto the wildly swinging plank were especially daring moves and often ended in
tears!
There were another ten or so kids
living in the immediate surroundings and often many of us would get together.
We had several places away from parents' eyes. Across Owen Street, further
down, there was a vacant paddock (possibly a buffer zone between the houses and
the factories) with the remains of a cellar in it, all that was left of a house
from earlier times. The cellar, about the size of a large room with no roof,
was too deep to jump into, but we cut steps into the vertical clay sides to
gain access and then spent long periods, unseen by any adults passing by on the
nearby footpath, digging nooks and cupboards in the walls to hide our treasures,
helping ourselves to the stacks of packing cases that were abandoned in the
long grass of the urban paddock, and constructing elaborate games about gangs
of diamond thieves and other scenarios with plenty of scope for drama.
Across the road from our house,
the Nesbitts had a large block with a huge shed from which they ran a trucking
business. We sometimes played in the grease and oil of the shed and its
maintenance pit. But the best feature was a mezzanine floor filled with stacks
of tyres, a great place to play hidey—up there under the roof, with towers and
cubbies of tyres, it was mysterious and dark, a challenge just to get up there,
and I have a vague recollection of rats or mice. The aftermath was usually big
trouble for coming home with black clothes, hands and faces, looking like
mechanics after a twelve-hour shift.
Another of our pastimes (at least
for a brief period) was to play practical jokes. I suspect now that Dad told us
about doing these things when he was a kid and we had to try them. We had a
rosemary hedge along the low, side fence of the front yard—the hedge was cover
enough to hide us from passers-by on the footpath. We'd hide in the hedge with
a brick until someone came past. As the unsuspecting victim passed our hiding
place, we'd drop a coin on the brick. The perplexed pedestrian then spent time
searching for the coin and wondering how it could have been dropped, until our
giggles revealed us and we were yelled at, as invariably happened.
Another time we filled one of
Dad's used tobacco pouches with grass and left it in the middle of the road
while we hid behind the hedge to await developments. We missed the denouement,
however, because a car driver passed it, slammed on the brakes, backed up,
slammed on the brakes again, picked up the "tobacco" by leaning out
without getting out of the car, and then drove off! We were left wondering how
the driver would react to the disappointment, after expending all that effort,
and decided against repeating the experiment.
* *
* * *
Sixty years ago, we made our own
fun—there were no televisions or computers. (Our house had a wood stove, wood
heater for warmth, hot water in the laundry and bathroom, and a wringer and
copper.) The only electrical goods were a refrigerator and radios.
We had a console radio in the
lounge, with a large speaker I could put my ear against, sitting on the floor
in front of it. During the week, we listened every afternoon to the ABC
children's session, which included the Argonauts' Club (although we were
passive participants), and to various serials, including "Biggles",
my favourite, with its introduction of the old rotary aero engine starting up,
the engine rising to full throttle, and then the voice-over "The air
adventures of Biggles…".
But we must have had a mantle
radio in the kitchen as well, because I can remember listening to music there.
We had no dining room. The dining table was in the kitchen, along the wall
separating it from the lounge room and entrance. The sink was on the opposite,
outside wall, and the wood stove with its chimney, and fridge, were on the end,
front wall. It was a small room and I have no idea how seven of us, one in a
high chair, could have enjoyed meals there in 1953, but we did.
I think the table was pushed
against the wall between meals. At any rate, I can remember sitting at the
table, facing the wall, while shelling peas for the Sunday roast, and listening
to that mantle radio. It was the music, I am sure, which is the main character
in this memory. There were no frozen peas then and it was a regular Sunday job
to sit at the table with a colander of pea pods, a saucepan for the finished
product and newspaper sheets to collect the empty pods. I became adept at
splitting the pods with my fingernail and then shovelling the peas out of the
pod with my thumb into the saucepan.
As an aside, the Sunday roast was
often a leg of lamb, which in those days included the lower leg with the
wonderfully crisp bits on the bone, and of course the "knucklebone"
which I suppose was part of the knee joint and collected by us kids to use in
the game of knucklebones, before you could buy plastic "knuckles" in
the shops. When we had roast beef we also had Yorkshire pudding, a delicacy
which I haven't tasted since those days (it also made the meat go further and
becomes redundant in times of plenty), and it was during this time that I
learnt to make proper gravy, and this became my job from an early age.
The process of shelling peas was
made enjoyable by the accompaniment of mid-day Sunday radio. My recollection is
that the ABC had a program of listener requests and the fare was eclectic by
ABC standards. The music ranged from light classical (not exceeding four
minutes?) to country music. I'm guessing a little bit but I imagine the Blue
Danube Waltz or Flight of the Bumblebee interspersed with Mario
Lanza, Bing Crosby and Frankie Laine.
An unwavering memory is that I
heard Slim Dusty's Rusty It's Goodbye at this time, and Blue Eyes
Crying in the Rain, presumably sung by Hank Williams. There was also Tex
Morton, and another song that we heard over and over (every week?) was Bing
Crosby's When the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day). I have
a vague feeling that Rusty It's Goodbye ("By a lonely railway
station…") gave me my first intimation of the ramifications of death.
I think when I was eight that I
was taken in by novelty songs or lyrics with a gimmick, easy to remember and
join in. Songs that date from this time, of which I still know every word of
the lyrics, include (How much is that) Doggie in the Window, Hi-Lili,
Hi-Lo, Heart of My Heart and so on.
* *
* * *
At school, I was in grade three,
my final year in the infant section of the school before moving into the
primary school in grade four. School subjects had a simplicity that reflected
our uncomplicated life. We did arithmetic, not maths; English was
compartmentalised into composition, spelling, dictation and writing (hand-writing was a subject!); other
subjects were nature study, music, art and craft.
In grade three spelling we learnt
homophones like there and their; then in dictation the teacher
would dictate a sentence containing a homophone and we had to write it
correctly using the context to correctly spell the homophone. I was reasonably good at exercises that
relied mostly on memory such as dictation and times tables.
In nature study, I remember
keeping silkworms in a box in the classroom. They were fed exclusively on
mulberry leaves, and after hatching from black eggs the size of pinheads, they
grew into black-headed light-grey caterpillars the size of a grade three kid's
little finger; they then spun yellow cocoons of silk around themselves. We
later had our own silkworms at home and we unravelled the cocoons after soaking
them in water and produced little skeins of yellow silk. I can remember some of
these pressed between the pages of the dictionary for some time after.
We learnt, in art/craft, how to
do "tomboy" stitch, or french knitting, using a wooden cotton reel
with four nails fixed in one end around the hole. This produced four stitches
in a circle, creating a long tube of knitting which could be glued in a spiral
onto a cardboard circle to make a table mat!
In those days, children were
supplied with milk at morning recess, and it was a coup to be chosen as milk
monitor—to be trusted, to assume importance, and to get out of the last stages
of the lesson—to collect the crate of milk bottles and distribute them in the
porch. The bottles were miniature milk bottles, one third of a pint, with an
aluminium foil cap. We had a game of removing the cap without damaging it (not
easy) and then making it fly by holding the cap by the edge against the palm
with the other forefinger—with a flick of the forefinger, the bottle cap could
be made to spin and glide away like a flying saucer. Contests for longevity and
distance of flight were held—one of the few physical activities where I didn't
feel inferior.
Music in grade three was provided
by the ABC schools' broadcasts and the loudspeaker above the blackboard. Let's
Join In started about this time and I can still remember how we were taught
to sing songs by imitation and repetition. One of the earliest songs I have a
memory of learning is O Susannah ("I come from Alabama with my
banjo on my knee…"). In the next few years, I went on to sing in the
school choir—we practised at lunch time and then sang in a massed schools'
choir of maybe a thousand voices at the Woodville Town Hall—and play in the
fife band. I learnt to play Men of Harlech on the fife, a tune that
means nothing otherwise, but every note is still in the brain.
Every Monday morning we had a
school assembly at which we saluted the flag and promised to obey our queen,
and then marched inside to the sounds of the fifes and drums of the school band.
As an aside, it turns out that our current national flag only became official
in 1953, not a long tradition! And speaking of our queen, she was crowned
(coronated?) in 1953 and we students were presented at a school assembly with a
medallion about the size of a twenty cent piece and a ribbon, to mark the
occasion. Special Australian stamps were printed, which I remember, but I had
to look it up to find that the common red one was worth 3½d (pronounced
"thruppence haypenny"), about two cents.
The "television" of
1953 was provided at school by "strip films". Sometimes we would be
ushered into a darkened classroom to watch what was basically a slide show. It
might be a geography lesson about the Egyptian pyramids, shown as black and
white stills on a portable screen. However, the photos were on a continuous
roll of 35mm film which could be rolled through a projector. The rolls of film,
about the size of cotton reels, were kept in little metal canisters and the
school had scores of them.
* *
* * *
1953 was a big year for us
because Mum and Dad bought a car, the first car they'd owned. It was a
brand-new pale-green Ford Consul, made in England. Dad had been working for
APAC at Finsbury, which evolved from the munitions factory, but in 1953 he became
production engineer, and later production manager, of the white-goods
manufacturer Kelvinator in Keswick. The car came with the new status.
Family photo, me on the left, taken in 1955 at Belair National Park
We all loved the fact that the
whole family could get out and do things.
I'm sure Mum loved to get out of the house. In those days, the car was
liberating. We went for many "Sunday drives" and picnics to places
like Golden Grove, Ti Tree Gully and Chain of Ponds. (Many of these places are
now wall-to-wall suburbs). Often we would just pull off a deserted back road under
a couple of gum trees and have a picnic—Mum and Dad on the rug, while five boys
went silly playing hidey, chasey, end-to-end footy or cricket on the road and
round the trees. Sometimes we would climb a fence and collect mushrooms.
Once I tore a strip of bark off a
tree at Golden Grove and was bitten on the finger by a spider. Of course we
kids knew enough to know that I was about to die, but Dad came to the rescue by nicking my finger with his pocket knife and sucking out the
"poison".
We started going to the drive-in
movies, the five boys all in our pyjamas. There was a drive-in on Grand
Junction Road, on the south side just east of Hanson Road. We saw Alan Ladd in Shane,
and another western hero was Rory Calhoun with his black, curly hair.
We also went to the Kilkenny and
Croydon cinemas, also in pyjamas, but it may have been a couple of years
later—I can distinctly remember the sleeping Lester and Alan being bundled back
into the car with dew on the windows and lots of shivering. I have no idea if
the movies were worth it!
For a time, we went to the
Central Market (or East End?), where Mum and Dad would do a week's shopping on
a Friday evening, while five boys in pyjamas played "I Spy" in the
car, on our best behaviour, waiting for an ice-cream or chocolates (or did we
already have sweets to last us an hour, like contented lambs with tails
swinging?).
* *
* * *
I went to Ridley Grove school
until the end of 1957. I think in the final exams I finished in the top three
in the school, and then went on to spend two years at Woodville High School. At the end of the decade we moved to Glenelg.
* *
* * *
Coming next... 1963.
