Mug Shots (3 page)

Speak to her, now!

And their strange son, I was about to learn, was a pyromaniac. ‘Come on out,' said Edwin, smiling in anticipation. I followed him and the barrelled Bingo to the front verandah, where there was a large stand of bamboo. He crouched down and flicked his cigarette lighter until he got a blaze started, and as it leaped up and spread he looked at me, then back at it, rapt. ‘The hose!' I shouted. ‘Get the hose!' But Edwin was a pyro connoisseur—he waited, then moved calmly to the hose, quelling the blaze just before the verandah went up. Would Valerie have noticed? Valerie had not.

But there were possibilities here, and my diary entry of the time is too bad not to quote:
In the midst of a purple summer twilight, my brother says there's a fire at Edwin's place. A thousand hopes spill my mind over. We hurry up; glow of golden fire in the overgrown garden. And the spectators!

Valerie was one of them, in a tight white sweater, with her silly little dog. And we were there, with our silly little dog. I worked my way into the crowd now forming as the fire moved into the overgrown thicket. It was creeping towards the house, where Edwin was exultantly waiting with the hose, and I was creeping towards Valerie, who now spoke, not to but at me, not really noticing.

‘The house'll go up.'

‘No, it wont,' I said, ‘he'll save it at the last minute. You watch.' She watched, we watched—together, watching!—as Edwin moved in on the blaze, doused it, then raised his hands over his head like a prizefighter.

The crowd was dispersing. Speak to her, quickly! I was saved by our dogs. In oblivious canine echoes of my fantasies, her little dog was having its hindquarters investigated by ours, only to have its advances snappily rejected. We had a little communal laugh in the dusk, and that was it, except for my diary. As my spirits went up, the prose continued downwards:
Oh joy! Unhurried ecstasy, words, and looks in the dim light.

Prone at last

Since I seemed suited to nothing else, teaching was all that was left. You gained entry to the profession by beginning as a student teacher. After an interview, a menacing memorandum arrived in the mail from one E.H. Wheeler, Secretary, Education Department. He wished to inform me that I had been appointed as a student teacher ON PROBATION at School No. 1896, Hornby Street, Windsor, subject to the conditions set out hereunder … ‘Should you not comply with these conditions, steps will be taken to dispense with your services, unless you can submit satisfactory reasons for your failure to do so … On taking up this appointment, you may claim a refund of the fare paid for travelling from your home address to the school, provided the cost is 5 shillings or over. Trains, trams or other established services must be used wherever practicable. Preference, however, should be given to trains.'

Hornby Street State School was a dismal Victorian pile down a side street in what was then the working-class suburb of Windsor. A student teacher, I soon learned, was neither. One stood on the platform facing the class and feeling foolish, while the teachers taught. The kids knew you were a nobody, and treated you accordingly, and the teachers often had you run errands. I was an office boy again.

There were two other student teachers, both girls. In my deprived state I was attracted to both of them, but crippled as I was by shyness it was up to them to make a move, and one of them, Jane, eventually did. Her parents, she told me, were away Saturday afternoons. Was this an invitation, or just general information?

‘Would it be … would it be possible … okay …?' I bumbled.

‘Oh, for God's sake,' said Jane, ‘come over.'

The next Saturday afternoon I told my mother I was going to see Dick Hughes. Tingling with erotic terror, I walked down Inkerman Road, turned a corner, paused at the gate of a dauntingly large house, and knocked. Jane welcomed me in a translucent muslin shift that failed to conceal the outline of her bra.

Jane was already an experienced drinker, and I was not. She parted the panels of a large cabinet, revealing an arsenal of bottles, their reflections vulgarly mirrored.

‘Pimm's? G&T?'

‘Pardon?'

‘Gin and tonic.'

‘Yes, please.' I'd never smelt gin before, let alone tasted it, and the combination unseated me. I offered her a Craven A to show I could be sophisticated too. ‘Try one of these,' she said, opening a box whose contents glowed brown and gold. I'd only just mastered the drawback, and inhaled an exotic Sobranie in the Humphrey Bogart manner. The room seemed to tremble slightly. I sipped at my G&T. The room now began a slow revolve, like a restaurant. Jane blew a perfect smoke ring. The couch too was moving, and I needed to lie on it. What began as a saunter ended with a rugby tackle. Prone at last!

‘You okay?'

‘Dizzy spell. Sorry.'

‘It's the Sobranie—they're strong.'

Jane sat on the couch beside me. Through half-closed eyes she had a vague resemblance to Rita Hayworth. She was smirking. Her girlfriends were going to hear about this.

‘Am I going round in circles, or is it the room?'

‘It's you, kid, it's you.'

‘You'd better stop me then.'

I put my hand on her freckled forearm and drew her, in the language of Millsing and Booning, towards me.

I was eighteen, and never been kissed. Eighteen, and never unzipped a dress. (‘It's at the back, darling.') I stared at her lacy Berlei, and then she turned away. Had I gone too far?

‘Undo them. Can you do that?'

‘Of course.' My hands were shaking, and the hooks were tiny. ‘Sorry. I'm a naif.'

‘You're a what?'

‘Naif—the noun from naive, the adjective.'

‘You're good with words, I'll give you that.'

‘It's the only thing I'm good at.'

‘Wrap your nouns round these then.'

Jane undid herself expertly, releasing breasts enhanced by a few freckles. I gaped. I was speechless.

From then on I paid Jane regular visits. (‘You
are
close to Dick Hughes,' said my mother.) I tried Pimm's No. 1 Cup, rum and Coke, even crème de menthe, but never got further than having my way with her breasts. The richer fonts lower down (Rape of Lucrece) were out of bounds in 1949, and I was perfectly happy with what I got.

The code we had at the time, grading sexual success from one to ten, should not be taken amiss by feminists—it suggested girls' sheer unattainability. One, I think, meant no more than actually talking to the girl of one's desire, two the breakthrough of holding hands, three a kiss on the lips, four touching the covered breast, five the same exposed, and so on to the unimaginable heights of ten. When I confided my five to my alibi, Dick Hughes, he was impressed.

Whatever happened to Sloyd?

Despite my Saturday excitements, the weekdays were getting worse. By now I'd been assigned to fifth and sixth grades, where the kids were unbluffable. I'd stand on the platform staring at them, and they'd stare right back at me.

I had to witness occasional strappings, and the tendency of Mr Virtue, the diminutive headmaster, to lean across pubescent girls on the pretext of checking their work. When the teacher of either grade left the room, anarchy prevailed. I spent much of 1949 praying—that I'd not be left on my own in class, that the school might burn down, that I'd contract a painless long-term illness. I sometimes included requests that I'd have the courage to follow up with Valerie, my true love—or, if not, Heather, the girl next door would do. (‘Christ almighty,' I imagined God the Father muttering to his Son, ‘isn't Jane enough?')

The extra-mural activities were just as bad. As part of our preparation for the trained Primary Teachers' Certificate, there were Theory of Teaching (‘Write full notes of a first lesson to Grade IV on The Pronoun'), Penmanship (‘Write the following in a free running hand: “He did not see the starlight on the Laspur hills, Nor the far Afghan snow.”'), Music (based on the principles of Tonic Sol-fa) and Sloyd.

Sloyd, defined by the
OED
as ‘A system of instruction in elementary woodwork originally developed in Sweden', was taught by a dust-coated cockney called Mr Monger, and the ineptitude first shown in my inability to do up shoelaces even in grade three was on display every fortnight. While others progressed to mulga ashtrays, I spent most of the course with cardboard desk blotters.

In the last weeks of this year of humiliations, the portly figure of R.G. Menzies leaned from his political parapet and saved me, and many others, by introducing Commonwealth Government Scholarships. As my matriculation results had been good, all that stood between me and remote, unknowable university was an interview.

In a suit now two sizes too small for me, with sleeves failing to cover my wrists, I faced an unnerving trio of interrogators. What was my attitude to teaching? Couldn't get enough of it. What did I hope to gain from an Arts degree? More and better teaching. And in the wider, extra-curricular world? It would give shape to my life and thereby help me to shape students' lives. And so your present life is shapeless? (This from a keen, white-haired lady who by now was scenting hypocrisy.) A word came to me, a wonderful word, a winning ace of a word: ‘Somewhat inchoate.' The panel stopped staring at me, and stared at each other. I was in.

Months of Sundays

In the late forties, returned-soldier fathers, enjoying the novelty of car ownership, took their families on Sunday drives. Ours followed three ritual paths. My father preferred the Dandenongs—pristine mountains, as yet uninfested by suburbia. Once past Ringwood you were in Arthur Streeton territory; the towns—Olinda, Belgrave, Emerald—had names like birdsong. Their vowels and consonants were liquid, and carried the primeval smell of fern gullies within them. ‘I'm just popping in for a few minutes,' our father would say, leaving his wife and two children waiting in the Hillman Minx outside each rural hotel (bona fide travellers permitted).

Sometimes we'd go to Port Melbourne, park overlooking Station Pier and look down at the ships, perhaps from an ata­vistic urge to escape the Melbourne Sunday, when places of amusement were closed and the streets deserted—except for Acland Street, behind Luna Park, where Jewish people gathered in lively groups and had coffee and cake, affording a frightening glimpse of what the Methodists called the Continental Sunday. Family life was not something carried on in cafes. Meals were best enjoyed in the privacy of the home.

Option three was a trip to the city along St Kilda Road, then lined with mansions (since replaced by sterile shoeboxes). One continued into Swanston Street, where we'd peer up at the Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne's first skyscraper. ‘Fourteen floors,' said my father, as we took in this wonder. Then on to dubiously multicultural Carlton. ‘That's the university,' my father would say authoritatively, and we'd look over at this steepled enclave, where no Oakley had ever set foot, until a single word took me there.

Unexplored territory

When the time came in 1950 to leave suburbia (at least during the day) where Victas were turning grass into lawn and Hills hoists lifting white washing skyward, I encountered an unnerving absence. Eleven years of roll calls and regulations were replaced by total indifference. There were lectures and tutorials, but whether you went was your business. No one seemed to care what you wore or what you said.

I joined a shabby aristocracy that flaunted rollneck sweaters, duffle coats and sandals. In the University Caf we stirred the world around in our coffee cups and talked of Kafka. Suburbia had to be shed, and no one did it more spectacularly than Barry Humphries, who could be seen in the library studying like everyone else—only he did it with the back of his chair resting on the floor, his long legs waving in the air like a mantis.

I followed the smart money and skipped lectures, until I realised what I was missing. A.D. Hope, in a suit of blue serge even in summer, mumbling on Dostoevsky—memorably if you sat up close. How could this man, who dressed like an inspector of schools, and spoke as if we were sharing not a lecture but a secret, write poetry of such sensuality as
Imperial Adam
? ‘She promised on the turf of paradise/ Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;/ Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs.'

Or Ian Maxwell, a small man with an imperial head, intoning
Paradise Lost
from memory (‘He'll weep in a minute,' said the student next to me, who was repeating the subject.) Or A.R. Chisholm, an even smaller man with an even bigger head—a head that French erudition seemed to have enlarged, a head that had nodded and noted when listening to some of the giants of French literature, resulting in the following essay subject appearing on the noticeboard: ‘Paul Valery once said to me that the poet is himself unaware of some of the images that may radiate to the reader's mind. Discuss.' Or Vin Buckley, smaller still, and compensating with the gravity of his delivery as he opened up
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
for us, still glowing with the shock of the new.

I was entering not one realm but two. After a chance encounter up at the shops, when I was acknowledged, as a queen might a subject, I forced myself into a public phone booth, inhaled its stuffy metallic smells with some calming deep breathing, and dialled Valerie's number, praying I wouldn't get her terrifying Major-General father. Saved: Valerie answered. My suggestion we see Eisenstein's
Alexander Nevsky
at the New Theatre was met with a pause (puzzlement? incredulity?) and then ‘okay'.

Though it sounded like grudging agreement, I pressed on, and on the Saturday night I penetrated the G— living room in an ill-fitting gabardine overcoat, and faced the parents, who seemed to start back slightly, as if I were from another planet (I was).

We bussed it into town—my offhandedness a pretence, hers looking like the real thing. Would Eisenstein bond us? I'd seen
Alexander Nevsky
at the university, and told her it was the greatest film ever made, but when the Teutonic Knights advanced over the ice to Prokofiev's music, she laughed. I was offended, and she was bored. The evening was a failure. ‘What?' said Dick Hughes afterwards. ‘You didn't even get to two?' I'd escorted Valerie to her front gate, it was a moonlit night, and I hadn't even got to two.

Still, there was always the other realm, which gave itself to me at once. Thanks to my university tutors, the doors of the Great Hall of Literature were opened, and after a few preliminary struggles with syntax, I felt completely at home. Yeats was easy, Hopkins and Eliot more difficult. But once their codes were cracked and their meanings broken into, the effort made the pleasure even greater.

It was wonderful to listen to the poets, but the supreme music came from James Joyce. If the
Portrait
gleamed with newness, what could
Ulysses
possibly be like? I hurried into Cheshire's bookshop one Saturday morning and there it was, not long unbanned, between bare green wartime-economy edition boards. I can still remember taking it home on the red bus. It seemed to give off heat, like new-baked bread.

Unguided by introduction or commentary, I sailed through it in wonderment, missing much but getting the free-flowing gist. The old language had been turned into a new language, the old style smelted with something strange and the old respectability opened above and below. A skylight had appeared over the house of fiction, and underneath the literary drawing room a trapdoor gave on to a cellar where instinct and ribaldry ruled.

Ulysses
is probably responsible for more bad prose than any other novel, and a modest portion of it was mine. Stream-of-consciousness short stories were speedily sent off to
Melbourne University Magazine
, and just as speedily sent back. All now lost and forgotten, save for one surviving shard: ‘
He looked past Luna Park with its writhing switchbacks, past the oriental domes of the baths, to the spire-prick and chimney-poke of Melbourne city.
'

If Joyce was leading a literary revolution, Marxists were attempting the same in university politics. There were rousing lunchtime speeches from Labor Club luminaries like Ian Turner and Ken Gott, warning of the class war to come because of the immiseration of the proletariat—who, in the real world, seemed to be doing quite well.

The novelist Frank Hardy, notorious for his crudely carpentered
Power Without Glory
, was once brought in for extra munition. He put on a fiery performance. ‘It's people like you lot,' he shouted up at the students ranged around him, ‘who'll be the first to go.' That was his thesis and we had the antithesis—a shower of orange peel and paper aeroplanes. He wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

The Labor Club's noise eventually reached the ears of the Melbourne Establishment, which responded in the person of F.L. Edmunds, MLA for Hawthorn. As recalled by Max Marginson, he described university academics as ‘socialists, parlour pinks'—and in a pryotechnical final flourish, ‘dingoes crowing from their dunghills'.