Out of Tune (3 page)

When Peter saw Rae, who was seventeen years his junior, he fell for her at first sight, an attraction and love that was to
remain steadfast for the rest of his life. My mother, then eighteen, was exceptionally pretty, with dark wavy hair and brown
eyes. Peter was short and stocky. He had a round face and wore glasses, which were often perched on top of his head; he had
thick curly hair (similar to David’s) that was to thin out over the years, and clear intelligent blue eyes that were completely
lacking in guile. He was of pleasant appearance, though not especially handsome. My mother tells me she found him good-looking,
and was dazzled by his charm and fascinating conversation, and was happy to accept his invitation to dance.

My father courted her assiduously for five years, of which they went out for three, until they got married in 1944. According
to my mother, my father had a few girlfriends before he met her, and she had been out with a few boys, too, but once they
met they had eyes only for each other.

“I had other proposals of marriage,” my mother told my brother Leslie and me recently, “but I wanted to marry only him, and
he wanted to marry only me. He was helpful and considerate, whether in carrying my bags, taking me shopping, buying me flowers,
or going out and buying me oranges and squeezing fresh juice for me. He was very solicitous and used to treat me like a queen.”

About their marriage she said, “Peter was a very good husband. More than this he was also a good friend. When I met him I
was actually pretty run down, worried day and night about my family in Poland, and working extremely hard to save money to
bring them out to safety. Peter would comfort me; he was so tender and reassuring. He used to call me his little ‘
Pupechka
’ [a word derived from Polish, meaning ‘doll’]. He was like a rock of stability and loyalty to me. And he remained so throughout
the rest of his life.”

Initially my mother’s father thought Peter might be a bit too old for her but in the end he gave his permission for them to
get married. The wedding, in the Carlton Orthodox synagogue in April 1944, was small, with about thirty guests, and was followed
by a reception in a nearby hall. “It was the happiest day of my life—the only sad note was the absence of our missing families
in Europe,” my father told me many years later. After more than a quarter century of wandering, Pinchas Elias Helfgott had
finally found a wife he loved and was ready to start a new life with a family of his own.

I
was born in March 1945, the eldest of five children. Next came David, born two years and two months later in May 1947. Leslie
arrived in 1951, Suzie in 1953, and Louise, who is fourteen years my junior, in 1959. Unlike elder children in some families,
who can be jealous of younger arrivals, we were all very excited and thrilled about each new addition to the family. The atmosphere
in our house was warm and vital and we all got on well with one another. David and I in particular were very close and did
many things together from an early age.

In accordance with Jewish custom, David was named after my father’s father and I was named after my father’s mother, Malka,
which means “queen” in Hebrew. However, growing up in Australia, it was thought best to anglicize my name, so I became Margaret,
which is actually on my birth certificate although Malka remains my Hebrew name. My second name, Chaya, is that of my maternal
grandmother and is also Hebrew. It means “life.” David is both my brother’s Hebrew and English name, and he wasn’t given a
middle name.

Some of my earliest memories, from when I was about three years old, are of my father singing me lullabies as he gently rocked
me to sleep. His and my favorite was “Ma Curly-Headed Babby,” which is a wonderful old African-American plantation song. My
father would take me on his knees and hold me in his arms and sing me its sweet-sounding words and melody. He seemed to know
instinctively how to put a young child to sleep with the sounds of the music.

Although my father had left school at fourteen when he ran away from Poland, he had a great respect for education. He was
an autodidact—most of the knowledge that he acquired was through his own interest and motivation—and he read a great deal.
His native languages were first Yiddish and then Polish, and he had taught himself to read and write in English in his twenties.
He loved reading books on physics, astronomy, nature, and so on. He encouraged all of his children to read, not only factual
books but great literature, too—French writers such as Rolland, Zola, and Flaubert and Russian novelists such as Tolstoy,
Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky. The love of reading that my father instilled in me as a child has continued to this day, and I still
read at least one novel every week, as well as much nonfiction.

The extent of my father’s self-education was remarkable. He came from a background that was in many ways unworldly. Until
he ran away he had been to a
heder
, a Jewish religious school at which practically no secular studies were taught. His own father’s reading was mainly limited
to the Torah (the five books of Moses) and the Talmud (the collection of writings constituting Jewish civil and religious
laws). Yet Peter was very intellectual, very musical; he was creative, an inventor, a passionate lover of life, and an idealist.
At the same time, he was very conscious that he should help my mother with the cooking and shopping. He had felt uncomfortable
as a child in Kamyk, where his father spent much of the day praying while his mother did all the housework.

He was always teaching us things, but in a very natural way. He used to point at the stars and tell us about astronomy. He
told us which was the closest star, how many light-years away it was, what it was called. He explained how the atom is constructed
and about molecules and protons and neutrons. And all this he taught us at a very young age, when I was about ten. He had
a remarkable ability to explain even the most difficult and complicated scientific facts in a very clear and comprehensible
way, and we would understand in an instant what he was talking about. We would sit around the kitchen table and he would draw
us a chart on a piece of paper. Once I remember him cutting up a cake as a way of trying to explain how the atom could be
split. “Isn’t it incredible?” he would say, his eyes lighting up with awe as we sat there gripped. I tried to imagine just
how minute these little particles that we couldn’t even see were. I often wish that the teachers I had later had explained
things as well as my father did when we were children.

He also taught us all to play chess. We would play with him or play among ourselves. These games were not only a lot of fun—we
often held friendly family competitions—but I think that in many ways they actually prepared us for life. Chess always requires
planning your next moves, charting out a course of action: life requires such forward-thinking, too. My father explained in
a fascinating way what each piece could do, what powers they were invested with. These games—David and myself, Dad and David,
Dad and myself, and so on—were an integral part of growing up in the Helfgott household.

My father’s great love of life extended to animals and nature, too. He would buy David and me all sorts of books on animals,
especially ones about the big cats (lions, tigers, leopards) and we all took a great deal of interest in the cat world. Our
house was always home to many ordinary domestic cats. At one stage we had six, including a mother cat that had litters from
time to time. As kids we spent a lot of time playing games with the kittens. David loved cats— they used to sit on top of
the piano while he played—and as an adult, he named his cats after composers, Debussy and Rachmaninoff.

And of course, above all, Dad taught us music, which I shall discuss in
Chapter 5
.

My father also placed great stress on the importance of physical education. David in particular became very strong physically.
He could walk up and down on his hands for about a half hour nonstop in the backyard. My father taught us how to do this and
David’s powers of balance were quite remarkable. Nowadays, David still does a lot of exercise; he goes swimming for lengthy
periods almost every day and is very fit.

As children, we were constantly doing somersaults and exercises. Cartwheels were my favorite—I imagined I was a Russian acrobat.
Later, in Perth, my father actually built a couple of parallel bars in the backyard. He used to whirl himself around them,
even though he was over fifty—he had learned how to do this in the circus. Though we didn’t manage that particular exercise,
David and I were very conscious of keeping fit. As far as I’m aware, the habit of walking on the hands was unique to our household
in Melbourne and also later in Perth. No doubt this helped David build up very strong hands for the piano.

We lived in a number of homes growing up, all of which were rented. It was in fact my brother Leslie who bought the first
Helfgott home years later in Perth—my father contributed to the cost of Leslie’s house but the bulk of it was paid by Leslie,
who earned the money by traveling to the north of the state to work as an electrician, which paid very well.

In Melbourne, we lived in an apartment on Glenhuntly Road in an area called Elsternwick. The apartment had a big living room
and a dining room connected by double glass doors, which my father removed in order to put up a swing. We had lots of fun
taking it in turns to swing around at home.

I also have particularly fond memories of Friday nights during my childhood. Friday night was always party night. Even though
he was a man of modest means, and often went through periods of financial hardship, my father would always arrive home from
work on a Friday night with sweets, cakes, soft drinks, chocolates, and all sorts of goodies, and we had these wonderful parties.
Dad wasn’t a religious person—in fact quite the opposite—but he nevertheless chose to hold the parties on Friday nights, when
Jewish families would come together for a meal at home to celebrate the beginning of the Sabbath.

We were really quite poor growing up. For many years, we didn’t even have sufficient gas or electricity for hot running water.
I remember as a child we could have a bath only once a week and had to make do with a wash in cold water on other days. Having
a bath was a big event and the whole procedure of preparing it took hours. We had to chop the wood in our backyard, stoke
up a fire, wait for about an hour until the water got hot, and then fill up a bath. My father did most of the work but we
helped with the chopping sometimes.

The first time we had hot water heated by gas was many years later when we moved to South Perth; it was like a miracle. Even
now I regard hot water as something to be treasured: the luxury of just turning on a tap and having hot water gush out. On
the other hand, chopping the wood was very good exercise and could be fun—except when the ax got stuck in the wood and my
father had to come and pry it out.

Although we may not have had all the little luxuries that many other people take for granted growing up, our childhood was
certainly never boring—there was music; there were political and philosophical discussions; there were animals, astronomy,
chess—always something interesting and lively going on. The atmosphere at home could hardly have contrasted more completely
with that depicted in
Shine
, where our house is portrayed as being very dark and oppressive. In the film, my father’s entrances are often accompanied
by ominous music and fearful glances. To describe my father as a “tyrant” or “brutal,” as critics and journalists who know
him only through the film have done, is a total travesty of the truth. To describe him as “slightly less lovable than Himmler”
or speaking like the “führer” is quite absurd.

In fact we had a lot of freedom as children, so much so that David and I used to draw all over the walls of the lounge with
crayons and pencils, making an absolute mess. But we were never told off for this. It didn’t seem to worry my parents and
they didn’t mention it.

We would go out quite often. My father’s mode of transportation was great fun, but rather hair-raising. He owned an old three-wheel
motorbike with a big passenger compartment (a sort of large boxlike container) attached to the back in which all the family
used to sit. Melbourne has a tram system and when we crossed the tram tracks, I sat in the back watching out for the trams,
terrified that one would come along and knock us over. I was about eight at the time, David about six, and Leslie two, and
I was always on guard for the family. Dad was a very skillful driver so although I was scared, I knew that nothing was going
to happen to us.

Mom, Dad, David, and myself often went to the ice-skating rink in Melbourne. We had great fun whizzing around and occasionally
falling over. David and I also loved going to the Saturday movie matinee. My parents would give us some pocket money to buy
tickets and an ice cream, and I would take my little brother by the hand and we would trot off very happily to the movie theater
every Saturday afternoon to see wonderful films such as
Francis the Talking Mule
and
Lassie Come Home
.