Mug Shots (2 page)

Operatic Melbourne

After Pearl Harbour and the Japanese drive south, trenches were dug in the parks, air raid shelters in the backyards, and Air Raid Wardens appointed to ensure windows were blacked out at night. Wooden shutters shielded the light of the trams, with their drivers' compartments in total darkness—you could hear but not see them. At night, Melbourne was a dark and scary place, a set for an opera that was never produced.

The Oakley family had moved from number eleven Montague Avenue to number four, directly opposite. But there was a grand finale beforehand. Number eleven had flaunted above its front gate a large banner on which was painted GRAND BAZAAR. FOOD FOR BRITAIN FUND. STALLS, LUCKY DIPS, RAFFLES. In an unprecedented display of communal feeling, neighbours had gathered in our lounge to organise it, chaired by the masterful Mr Reginald Green who'd been spared military service because he was in charge of much of Melbourne's electricity supply.

The highlight was Mr Green's creation in our garage (empty, because our father was away at the war). Spotlit at its end were portraits of Musso, Adolf and Tojo, all with the twisted evil look that Armstrong captured in his
Argus
cartoons. Get a tennis ball through one of their gaping maws and you won a prize. Overall, we raised an unprecedented thirty-three pounds ten shillings.

The Japanese might have been getting closer, but we'd already been invaded. American soldiers were everywhere. They crowded St Kilda's Esplanade, looking for diversions in this end-of-the-world city. They were polite, their uniforms were tailored (a painful contrast to the Australians' hessian bagginess), their staff cars were late-model Buicks, and if you rode your bike down to Fisherman's Bend and parked it by the airstrip fence, you could watch Kittyhawks, Lightnings and Bostons roar in a few feet over your head.

A rat-grey Messerschmitt 109 fighter was exhibited at Melbourne Town Hall, and you were allowed to climb into its cockpit—it was metallic and claustrophobic, and seemed to smell of Nazi Germany. Later in the war, a Japanese midget submarine also did a tour, and one could crawl into a confinement even more totalitarian. For a schoolboy, wartime Melbourne was pure excitement.

Ours and theirs

Perhaps the Axis Powers didn't worry us because we were living in a benign totalitarianism of our own, ruled by a dictator of our own—Archbishop Daniel Mannix. It was Mannix who Confirmed a church-full of schoolboys, followed it up with an interminable homily, and then tried to persuade us to pledge to abstain from one of the few permitted Catholic ­pleasures—alcohol—until we were twenty-one. ‘Stand up those boys manly enough to do it,' he said. Many stood, the intrepid did not, and I, in a posture that would perhaps prove typical, half-rose in a crouch.

Below Mannix in the authoritarian pyramid was the parish priest, and below that CBC St Kilda's headmaster, the urbane Brother Rooney, MA (a rare distinction then). One day early in 1945 Rooney told the assembly that people might be wondering what a big school like ours was doing for the war effort. He had the answer: a cadet unit.

Rooney had already filled me with dread with two earlier announcements: dancing and debating were arts we needed to learn. We trained for the first with our classmates as partners on the school handball court. (‘Boys,' said the mustachioed instructor, ‘once you learn you'll go dancing eight nights a week.') This was followed by anthropological ordeals with the girls from Presentation Convent, closely supervised—‘You, go and dance with that fat girl over there.' I never mastered the complex art of conversing, doing the Pride of Erin and concealing signs of sexual excitement all at the same time.

Debating was even more frightening. My maiden effort, in 1944, lives with me still. I went out the front with my little speech on helicopters ready, but couldn't raise my eyes to the class. Staring at the floor I declared, in a quavering voice, that they were now ‘a practical proposition'. I was right, but my delivery was without conviction, and the case was lost.

I failed to dance or debate, and now there were richer possibilities for failure: cadets. It was voluntary, but everyone had to join, and soon all the Leaving Certificate class—small boys and big boys, skinny boys and wide boys—were bagged in khaki sacking.

We were used to taking orders, but not from our classmates. The ambitious went off to do courses, and came back as cadet lieutenants in smart uniforms with Sam Browne belts across their chests and pips on the shoulders. The go-getters and the no-getters were now clearly defined, and every Friday ­afternoon the first were put in charge of the second.

We would assemble before portly Brother Lewis (‘Thunderbum') corseted in captain's uniform. He'd bark out orders (‘Hand away from your face, McCarthy!') then each platoon would stride into the adjoining Alma Park, where we were taught to slope and present arms, and sent on mindless marches round the oval.

This would build up to something even worse—cadet camp. What was the point if, a week before, Japan had surrendered? Never mind, we had a double holiday. We celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August, and on 16 August there was V-J Day. Victory was scrawled every­where, blackboards included. ‘People trickled into churches to give thanks,' admonished one newspaper, ‘but there was the usual sprinkling of exhibitionists who thrive on mass revelry and wallow in the licence of unrestrained behaviour … to sing Tipperary in an absurdly high key, to dance jitterbug-style in a cramped space, and play two-up in a laneway.'

A week later, the war over and everyone going home, we were under canvas at Watsonia Army Camp, maybe in training for the next one. The first night we returned to our straw-stuffed palliasses stunned. We'd just seen a hygiene film crude even by schoolboy standards. It showed a soldier with diarrhoea on a latrine, wiping himself clumsily afterwards, not washing his hands, then getting into a bread delivery van, where he sits on the loaves and has a smoke.

It was the beginning of a process of brutalisation that would last a week, and it started to come out in our language. There was no sentence in which fuck could not be used, as verb, noun, adjective or participle. One morning, at the rifle range, we were told not to touch the triggers of our 303s before receiving the command to fire. ‘These bullets are live fuckers,' warned the sergeant, showing a creative use of the word. Somehow, Dick Hughes's rifle went off. ‘What fucking fuckwit did that?' he shouted. The applications of the word seemed endless.

Sleep was difficult, discipline unrelenting, the food inedible. (Cook, ladling out treacly-brown curry into our pannikins: ‘This'll make you shit.' It did, but to the horror of middle-class sensitives like myself, the lavatory bowls were uncubicled. The shy had to take to the bushes or hang on and go in the dark.)

I celebrated my return to civilian life by going to the Palais to see Abbott and Costello in
Lost in a Harem
. How pleasant to escape to the Arabian kingdom of Barabeeha, ruled by the wicked sultan Nimativ (‘Take him to the dungeon! The damp one!'). And the beautiful Marilyn Maxwell, and Jimmy Dorsey's band marching through the bazaar in turbans. Apart from Churchill, Eisenhower and Curtin, no one did more for the war effort than Abbott and Costello. They made us laugh when that was what the world needed most.

The Christian Brothers defended

How to explain a regimen predicated on a God of love and mercy, where the Hail Mary was said every hour and the strap used in between? Where sanctity and savagery co-existed? The Brothers would have called it discipline, of the kind needed for the formation of the Christian gentleman. This fabled boy was neatly dressed in school uniform, his cap straight and his socks pulled up. He treated others with respect—especially girls, with whom he'd never contemplate going further than a passionless kiss on the cheek.

The Brothers were like disadvantaged parents, determined that their boys were going to do better—as doctors, lawyers, public servants, or, best of all, priests. They were hard on us because their lives depended on it. If we proved intractable to their shaping, their vocation meant nothing. They trained us like athletes, to win.

The notion of sacrifice in the Christian Brothers ideal is now virtually incomprehensible. I can still recall the cheap boarding-house smell of cabbage that hung around the back stairs of their residence. There was none of the glamour of priestliness in their calling. It was a life of plain food and plain rooms and weekend loneliness. No wife, no family, just the constant classroom grind: calculus, Bunsen burners, beam balances, isosceles triangles, the latent heat of fusion—all set within the demanding frame of Christian doctrine.

It was as relentless for them as it was for us, but because we were force-fed with the learning and literature of the Western world, we were, paradoxically, set free. The fact that a couple of them broke under the pressure and preyed on the students they were supposed to be educating makes what the majority managed to achieve all the more impressive.

Languor and longing

When the tea had been consumed, Oblomov raised himself upon his elbow and came within an ace of getting out of bed. Glancing at his slippers, he even began to extend a foot in that direction, but then withdrew it.

At the beginning of 1948, convinced by the four honours I'd gained in the matriculation examination that I was destined for higher things, I resembled Goncharov's fictional Russian aristocrat, who spent the first 150 pages of the novel in bed.

Freed from the disciplines of school and study, I aestivated (
OED
: ‘to spend the summer in a state of stupor'). I was too old for Luna Park and St Kilda Beach, but not old enough for anything else.

Girls filled me with terror. I peeped through the gaps in the paling fence at Heather, who pranced about in tight tops and shorts. Worse—her bathroom was above our bedroom window, and the sound of her singing as she showered, her bosomy ­pinkness diffused by the frosted glass, tormented me nightly.

The phrase ‘late developer' could have been invented for me. I still haven't forgotten my shock when Dick Hughes explained to me how the sexual act was performed. We were both fourteen. Hughes had just learned the facts from his foreign correspondent father Richard, and arranged a meeting immediately. The conversation went something like this.

He: ‘The male does go into the female. We were right.'

Me: ‘From the rear, like dogs do it?'

He: ‘From the front.'

Me: ‘Face to face? Staring at one another? Are you sure?'

He: ‘I'm sure.'

Me: ‘Think of the embarrassment. It'd have to be done in the dark … so that's what fucking means.'

He: ‘No. It means preparing to go to bed.'

Me: ‘And rape?'

He (authoritatively): ‘Clutching the private parts.'

I had then gone to the dusty medical books in our oak ­bookcase. (It was thought my father had once studied medicine, a myth he made no effort to dispel.) I saw in one of them clinical drawings of bodily organs, including the pudenda (gerundive form of pudere, to be ashamed). I was now trapped between two irreconcilable polarities. On the one hand the Pride of Erin and the Circular Waltz, and on the other the indecent internality of the dance's ultimate end.

My Oblomovian condition was aggravated by what happened on one of the rare mornings I ventured up to the shops to do the messages (as they used to be called) for my mother. I was struck, as if by a dart, with the sight of Valerie G. Valerie lived round the corner from us, and in her school uniform had attracted only moderate attention. But this was the summer ­holidays, and she was now sixteen and had turned into something else. Was calyx right? Was that the word I'd learned at school for the leaves around a flower when in bud? Valerie's uniform was a calyx, and out of it this striking creature had blossomed. I followed her in her golden summer garment at a due distance, like a dog. In days, dizziness had turned to love.

At this time I'd also become infatuated with literature. In matriculation, the saintly Brother Kilmartin, the best teaching Brother I'd ever had, had paid me a compliment that turned me crimson. ‘Mr Moloney,' he'd said at the end of the final term, ‘has topped the class in English … Mr Oakley's success may come later.'

Still unemployed, I bought a Penguin—
A History of English Literature
by B. Ifor Evans—from which, seated at a card table on our front verandah, I took notes. A topography emerged, a landscape. The further I penetrated into the book, the more altitude I gained. By the end, I felt like an alpinist looking over an entire territory, from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot.

Conflate late-adolescent romantic suspiration with literary aspiration and the result (I quote from a diary of the time) is beyond satire:
I walked the warm streets with hopeful eyes
—
in vain, in vain
. In recording occasional sightings, I succeeded in being embarrassing in two languages:
Oui! Mutual regards. Je pouvais penser à rien d'autre
. Fantasies flower:
Put on père's dressing gown and stood before the mirror, as if after a dramatic plane crash, with V watching.

The temporary trustees

By April my father, lubricated after one of his nightly visits to the South Yarra Club (to be punished with a dried-up dinner) announced it was time I got a job. He still had a faint hope I could be groomed to take over his business—A.E. Oakley, Real Estate Agents—and secured for me what he called a position with the Perpetual Trustee Company.

A ‘position'? I learned on my first day, when I pushed open the hissing glass doors and inhaled the catacomb odours of deceased estates, that this meant ‘office boy'. I was briskly welcomed by Miss Durant, a tall cassowary of a woman who ruled the front office. These were the days of desk blotters and inkwells, and it was going to be my job to fill them every morning. She produced large bottles of blue and red ink, with which I was to begin with the Managing Director's office, continue along the ground floor (Trusts) then work my way up to Accounts and Property.

The Managing Director, impressively named W. Earle Orr, was too important to arrive early. His sanctuary was large and his desk presidential, though almost totally bare: two telephones, a leather-bound diary, and brass desk set with an imperial pair of pens. I tiptoed in, sniffing a stale-cigar bouquet of important business, performed my task, and tiptoed out.

When I returned later, three floors of inkwells filled, Miss Durant pranced towards me, holding up a typed letter. ‘What is this?'

‘It's a letter, Miss Durant.'

‘A most important letter. Do you notice the signature?' W. Earle Orr had signed it, in bronze ink. I'd put red ink in his blue inkwell, and vice versa. W. Earle Orr now appeared in his doorway, horn-rimmed and expensively suited. He was holding up a second letter, similarly signed. He shook his head, made a managerial roaring sound, then stormed back into his office.

Dreading the prospect of a career with the Perpetual Trustees, 1948.

Inexplicably, I was soon promoted to Front Counter, and a few weeks later became an Assistant Trusts Officer, and given a small desk behind the office of Mr Simmons, whom I was ­supposed to be Assisting. Simmons, who sported a fighter-pilot's moustache (he'd been one) would push back a glazed window, hand me a will, and ask me to work out the tax payable on the estate.

It didn't take long for him to realise he'd been saddled with a gawky seventeen-year-old incapable of understanding the principles of commerce. ‘You're not cut out for this,' he gritted through his little open window, and he was right. But neither was he. How could a man who had driven (his word) Spitfires adjust to a commercial necropolis, where correspondence (‘In reply to yours of the third ultimo …') was copied in two colours, green for the running files and pink for the records, and stored in rows in the basement?

In the space between will and codicil, there'd be flick-the-cardboard—a diversion devised by two other ATOs who worked further along what they revelled in calling ‘the back passage'. One would frisbee the cardboard to the other, and then to me, and back again, sometimes going dangerously close to the top of the partition that separated the Trust Officers from us. One afternoon Tim Reidy, after a counter lunch, flicked too hard. The cardboard curved over the partition and caught Mr Appleby, deep in discussion with a client, across the cheek. Reidy was demoted to office boy.

Since I'd now shown incompetence in two fields, when I was summoned to the Assistant Manager's office I hoped for the best—that I'd be fired. The aptly named Mr Wood, bald, bespectacled and bloodless, invited me to take a seat. The company had plans for me to do a university commerce course in the ­evenings at their expense. This was worse than the sack. ‘Well,' he said, puzzled at my lack of response, ‘what do you say?' I leaned back in my chair, trying to look flattered, lost my balance and did a backwards somersault onto the carpet. I didn't have to say anything. He looked down at me, and I looked up at him. I wasn't for business, and business wasn't for me.

There'd only been one excitement in my six months at the Perpetual Trustees, and that was the trip in. By the time the roaring, bull-nosed Reo reached the Alma Road stop, it was packed. The foolhardy would make a leap at the bottom step, gain a foothold, and ride riskily into the city. My companion in foolhardiness was a young man called Edwin Shirley, who managed to do all of the above and light a cigarette at the same time.

Edwin was slow of thought and attenuated of body, but I had reason to cultivate him as we rode dangerously together on the bottom step of the bus. He lived in a rambling old house opposite Valerie's. So when he invited me to call on him one Saturday afternoon, I accepted. With his fat dog Bingo ­waddling behind us, he showed me over the place, leading me eventually to his parents' bedroom. Around three sides, piled along the floor, were rows of empty whisky bottles. Mr and Mrs Shirley, who used to dress in their best every Saturday afternoon and go to one of Melbourne's best hotels, were alcoholics.