All Balls and Glitter (4 page)

That unusual achievement was all due to my music teacher, Miss Shaw. She was an inspirational instructor, who gave me confidence and sincerely believed in my talent, and was extremely important in my musical development. Miss Shaw placed me in the recorder set that performed at Rotary Club meetings in the evenings. She also entered us into a competition that culminated with a concert at the Opera House.

Once I’d mastered the recorder, I moved on to my beloved French horn. I practised every day because I adored it. It was great to have a hobby that fulfilled and excited me. I also belonged to a gymnastics club at that time, which must have helped with my balance and strength when I eventually took up dancing, but it was never a passion for me. Nevertheless, I did rather well at it, receiving an award for best newcomer.

I was always jealous of Sue when she used to do jazz ballet classes next door. I was like Billy Elliot, peeping round the curtain that divided the boys’ class from that of the girls. When ‘Delta Dawn’ by Helen Reddy came out in 1973, I can remember Susan doing this chassé backstep to the song and, naturally, I tried to copy her. It seemed more fun to do something like that to music rather than strength training and walking on your hands.

Like Billy, I would discover my dancing talent in due course. Until then, I just had to bide my time, silently watching from the sidelines.

W
e didn’t spend that much time with my dad’s side of the family when we were growing up because they always lived in Western Australia, while we were generally based in New South Wales or Victoria, which are in south-eastern Australia.

The Horwood family were devout followers of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a branch of the Christian religion that believes the Sabbath day falls on a Saturday and that it should be strictly observed. Most branches of the family, led by my grandmother Phyllis (whom we all called Phonse), would keep the Sabbath sacred from sunset on Friday night to sunset on Saturday night, so there was no television or radio and no secular work. That’s the way my dad was brought up too, but he went so far the other way that we grew up watching him fight against religion, among other things.

Our family were removed from the religious influence of Phonse both by geography and Dad’s resolute rejection of it. My sisters and I would attend the local Sunday school, but Dad never went to services himself. In contrast, his sisters, Lorraine and Julie, are still very active in the Church and Lorraine’s eldest son, Paul, works at the Seventh-day Adventists’ Australian headquarters.

We were raised in the equivalent of the Church of England, which in Australia was called the Church of Christ. I was never interested in religion, partly because I found some of the teaching at Sunday school too bizarre for words.

In one lesson, we were asked, ‘What do you say if someone stops you and asks for directions?’ Well, one would think that the polite response would be to tell them which way to go, but not according to my Sunday school tutor. He said that the correct answer is: ‘There is only one way and that is to God.’ I remember sitting there thinking, ‘I can’t say that!’

It stuck with me, though. Every time anyone asks me how to get anywhere, I always think, ‘There is only one way and that is to God.’

The church-led Boys’ Brigade was quite big in Sydney so I decided to join, although I didn’t last very long there. Their motto was ‘Steadfast and Sure’ and the boys all wore a uniform and a cadet’s cap. I had to give up my gymnastics class to attend, but in retrospect, I should have stayed with the rings and the vaulting. I liked dressing up for the sessions, getting ready and having to polish the uniform’s buttons – the ‘showbiz’ side of it – but knuckling down to pitching tents and lighting fires wasn’t my thing. On one occasion I remember going on a hike when I was so unfit that I came back half a stone lighter – so at least that was a bonus.

The favourite game there was British Bulldog, where you split up into two teams and each group goes to either end of the hall. Then you try to reach your opponent’s side of the room, while they attempt to bring you down with a tackle. It’s like war. You have to bulldoze your way through and it’s basically an excuse for anyone who hates you to beat seven bells out of you.

One minute, we’d be knocking the crap out of each other and the next – because the Boys’ Brigade was run by the church – having a scripture lesson. I really wasn’t suited to either of those pursuits. The crunch came when I was supposed to be baptized. Beforehand, everyone was going up to the priest and receiving a blessing, but when it came to my turn, I got all nervous and freaked out. I refused to do it. Beside the pulpit there was a big stone bath with steps leading down to it. I thought you had to take off your clothes and climb into the bath in front of everyone
and then commit your whole life to God. Believe me, I wasn’t prepared to do either!

Religion is a strange thing because although people are often brought up with it, and every official form you fill in asks you to which religion you belong, many of us no longer know what we believe in. I’ve read lots of books on the subject, including
The Road Less Travelled
and
Conversations with God
, and I find them fascinating. It’s nice to believe in something, as it gives people a sense of security, but I think you have to create your own path and make the right choices. I’m unclear as to what my religion is today and whether I actually believe in God or not. I’m still confused. You are taught to pray as a child and it never quite leaves you. I believe there is something else, but not one thing alone.

One day, I asked my grandmother, Phonse, what it meant to be a Seventh-day Adventist. She told me it meant that when you died, you would stay in the ground until Jesus came back to get you.

My grandmother’s fervent faith had come about as a result of a terrible childhood, and her eventual redemption from it.

When Phonse was nine years old, her mother died in childbirth, and she was put into a Catholic orphanage in Armidale, New South Wales with three of her sisters. The baby stayed in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where the family had lived. Although Phonse’s dad was still alive, he couldn’t look after her and her siblings because he didn’t have the resources. There was no other family to help out and he had to work away from home even more than my own dad had done with the navy. There was nowhere else for the girls to go.

The orphanage experience was abysmal. The food was shocking, and the girls had to get up at four in the morning to do the washing and hang it outside in all weathers, with no shoes to wear. They had to say a prayer when they got out of bed (which Phonse still does now) and go to Mass every morning, but in the
midst of all that religion, no love or affection was ever shown to the children.

In 1932, seven years after Phonse had joined the orphanage, her two brothers, aged nineteen and twenty-one, were working at a gold mine out at Bendigo, Victoria, which belonged to Phonse’s uncle. They promised each other that they would rescue their sisters as soon as they found their first big nugget.

Two weeks later, they discovered a huge one, bought an old Rugby car, and drove all the way to Armidale to collect their siblings. Phonse had been sent to work at a convent school at Gunnedah, NSW, so they picked her up on the way. When she met her brothers, she didn’t know who they were. They drove on and met the other girls, and then their dad got in the car and they didn’t recognize him either.

The last thing Phonse was told at the orphanage was: ‘Don’t forget you’re Catholic; don’t let them take away your religion.’ It turned out to be somewhat prophetic.

The brothers took the girls back to Bendigo. En route, they stayed at a hotel and the sisters, not knowing what a hotel was, got up at 5 a.m. to make the bed and clean the room. The younger ones also embarrassed their brothers because they had no idea how to use a knife and fork.

At Bendigo, arrangements were made for the girls to be looked after by a kindly local woman. She had recently become a Seventh-day Adventist, so she wouldn’t let the girls go to Mass and threw out their rosary beads. She had six grown sons of her own, but she doted on the girls. At last, they had a family and a lot of love and care. While the Catholic religion had, in their minds, brought them all that had been ghastly in their lives, the Seventh-day Adventist Church was where they received affection, compassion and attention.

For my father, the church was just another thing to rail against, but for Phonse it represented the best thing that had happened to her. It’s easy to see why she remains so devout.

Although Phonse is committed to the church, she is never judgemental or pious. She loves everybody and everybody loves her. Everything revolves around family and the heart – even the special routine that she taught me for drying myself when I got out of the bath.

‘Start with your feet and legs because they’re a long way away from your heart,’ she’d say. ‘Then you do your back and your arms and the last part of your body that you dry is your heart, because that is the warmest part.’

I still dry myself that way even after all these years.

Phonse’s cooking is amazing and she makes the best fishcakes in the world.

Phonse’s husband was my grandfather Revielle, who died in 1985. His complicated name was later abbreviated to Revel, and both my dad and I inherited it as a middle name. Our namesake was more rebel than Revel, refusing to toe the family line on religion. Often, when Phonse turned off the TV on a Friday night, he would switch it straight back on again. He was also something of a gambler.

Revel, whom we called Mozza, taught me a lot of magic tricks. He used to tell me that if you placed your hands on someone’s temples, you could read minds, and I was totally sucked in by this. He would say, ‘Think of a number between one and ten,’ and then guess what it was by putting his hands on our heads. I couldn’t work out how he did it. Phonse confided the supposed secret: feel for the pulse and then count the beats. I was constantly putting my hands on people’s temples, but all I could sense was a normal pulse. I never discovered the real trick, although I believe it had something to do with an accomplice.

Mozza had a huge costume box. He would dress up as a clown for children’s parties, and then perform magic tricks. He had a penny-farthing that he used to ride around on. I used to borrow his clown outfit and dress up for parties in our naval
unit in Sydney. I had a disappearing egg-cup trick, which I loved doing, and could also use the magic rings. Anything that was to do with magic, I was really into. Magic tricks taught me that things weren’t always as they seemed and so I wanted to know more about the subject.

At family gatherings, such as Christmas, the kids always put on a concert – organized, naturally, by me. Christmases were generally spent with my mother’s family, the Lancasters, and particularly my nanna, Constance, whose house in Ballarat was a second home to us all.

While the grown-ups talked in the living room, the children would go into the front room and rehearse. We made up songs and played instruments, and performed plays and sketches. Susan and I were always the leads and Diane would get a small role, with the younger kids running on occasionally in the latter years.

The cousins would all get involved as well. Peter sang ‘Oh Currie Currie Ana, I Found a Squashed Banana’ (a schoolyard parody of the traditional Maori love song ‘Pokarekare Ana’) and then my Auntie June would get in on the act with her rendition of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ At Christmas, we always finished with a festive carol, which everyone would sing.

Susan and I looked forward to our little productions with great excitement, but as we got older, the cousins lost interest one by one and the family gatherings got smaller and smaller. Inevitably, the Christmas shows stopped.

Perhaps what we loved most about those days was the charade of a happy, united family, which hid the horror of everyday life with my father.

My dad, Philip Revel Horwood, was (and still is) an alcoholic – and an abusive one at that. As soon as he started drinking, we knew we were in for it, but we got used to it. We learned to live with the shouting and screaming, and simply turned a blind eye to it. We all knew that he was going to get aggressive. As we were kids, we just had to deal with it.

His position of lieutenant commander meant that he was away most of the time in the early part of my childhood, sometimes for stretches of ten months, and they were happy times at home. Ironically, though, we looked forward to his return because he always brought us great presents when he’d been away. He would come back laden with bikes or expensive gifts from faraway places and, to start with, we’d be happy to see him. When he was sober, he was a wonderful, charming man – a completely different person. But when he’d had too much to drink, he was an absolute nightmare.

My sisters and I were always the ones sent to fetch the beers from the kitchen, take the tops off them and set them up for him because he wouldn’t get out of his chair. We used to count how many he’d had because we always knew the seventh bottle was crucial. That’s when we knew there would be trouble.

The stages of his daily descent into rage were predictable. The first few beers would lead to funny antics, then to nagging self-righteousness, ending with ugly, abusive outbursts. This was a pattern we kids grew used to. Sometimes, we took advantage of this knowledge by poking fun at him during the merry stage, then we would tease and confront him during the ‘I love myself’ stage, when he started going on and on about how marvellous and mightily important he was. During the scary stage, I would retreat to my room, but Susan was often braver, standing up to him before she hid herself away.

The aggressive phase would last for an hour or two and then he’d fall asleep. His chin would drop and his teeth would fall on to his chest, and then we knew we could all relax. Occasionally, for a laugh, we would hide his teeth.

The abuse was mostly verbal, directed at anyone in the house, but more often than not it was my mum who bore the brunt. If we were in the living room, sitting on beanbags, he would kick us as he walked past, but we soon learned not to get in the way. And we also learned to shut up, not to complain and
not to open our mouths because that was asking for an earbashing. I spent a lot of time in my room when he was in this state, just avoiding him.