Inside Outside (15 page)

Finally, a note addressed to my parents was handed to me one day. At home, with the aid of a dictionary, we deciphered its message: I was to be transferred to a ‘Special Class', which everyone at the school, teachers and pupils alike, always referred to as the Idiots' Class. It consisted of a group of thirty or so children of widely varying ages and uniformly abysmal intellectual capacities who were sequestered in it until they reached school-leaving age. What became of them afterwards was, clearly, no concern of the authorities.

My classmates were a collection of largely amiable children, most of them far too handicapped and individual in their freakishness to be conscious of my difference. Several had obviously insisted on wearing clothes as idiosyncratic as mine had been during my first days at school. In retrospect I see them as an oasis of individuality in that undifferentiated, conformist world. They were able to evade the iron rules of convention because, in a sense, they were beyond the bounds of social norms, just as I, in my alienness, fell outside such confines.

Their eccentricities and disabilities revealed themselves in spectacular ways. One large girl spent most of the day sitting impassively at her desk without the least trace of a response or reaction to anything that went on around her, except when an attempt was made to teach us arithmetic. That brought her to life with a dazzling and vivacious display of mental-arithmetic skills. She was a virtuoso in reeling off answers to complicated sums in a clear, high-pitched voice wholly devoid of inflection—or so I got to learn in my last weeks in that class, when I had achieved a degree of understanding. One small boy would occasionally suffer convulsions; people rushed to place a solid object between his teeth once he started writhing and wriggling. A great hulk of a boy who sat next to me—his name was Clive—dribbled constantly from his gaping mouth. Another child threw up at least once a week. Others proved incapable of controlling their bladders; a squeal would, from time to time, go up in the classroom: ‘Sir, Neil's wet himself again!'

This chaotic world was supervised by a particularly clapped-out old man. He was even more decrepit and moth-eaten than the other teachers at the school, all of whom had obviously stayed on during the war years, getting older and older, more and more passive, incompetent and irresponsible, refusing to move aside for the hastily trained ex-servicemen who were clamouring for the right to be employed. The old teacher's attempts to suppress the frequent bouts of anarchy that periodically shook the classroom were purely ceremonial. The scene was Dickensian in its exaggerated grotesquerie. The teacher—I have long forgotten his name—would threaten the most dire and bloodcurdling of punishments if we didn't cut it out this moment, immediately. No-one paid any attention because many, like myself at first, did not understand much of what he was saying. He would wait with resignation for that mysterious moment when, as if by common consent, the uproar ceased, and the class was again seated quietly at its desks as models of exemplary behaviour. In those brief periods of truce, he would make an attempt to instruct us.

His pedagogic ambitions were, quite understandably, modest. He tried from time to time to teach us to chant the simpler tables, but only the silent girl was able to master their intricacies. He made occasional attempts to teach us how to spell some of the words in the thin, grey-covered primers in use at the time, or to get us to read in chorus a page from
The School Magazine
. None of his attempts met with much success; most of our days were taken up with various manual tasks—endlessly marbling sheets of paper, producing miles of French-knitting and hundreds of pom-poms in brightly coloured wool. We enjoyed that hugely; these were always the happiest and most peaceful of times. Sometimes we made simple wooden figures by gluing clothes pegs together, or coloured in crudely stencilled shapes on sheets of yellowing paper. From time to time he tried to teach us a few songs: ‘Ho-ro my nut brown maiden' and ‘The Maori's Lament'. Occasionally he would give up, staring vacantly through the grimy windows of the classroom at the powerlines outside, until the rising tide of anarchy made him leap to his feet to threaten us with the most fearful thrashings, which he never carried out.

I should probably feel resentment for my seven or eight months' confinement in that Idiots' Class. I have always found it hard, however, to whip up much anger. When I descended on that unsuspecting and unprepared school, which had never experienced anyone as exotic as I was in their eyes, they did, I suppose, the best they could for me. In contemporary Australia there are structures designed to help migrant children learn English and to adjust to their new environment and to alleviate, if that is possible, the anguish and distress most of them experience. Indeed, there are institutions designed specifically to encourage them to retain their native language and culture. Such things were undreamt of in 1947 when people like my parents and I represented the first trickle of non-English-speaking migrants to have reached the country for many years. What else could that decrepit and probably ill-funded institution have done with me? It was, after all, a small suburban school catering for families of no great educational ambition or sophistication, whose children would all leave school as soon as possible to work in factories or to marry at a pathetically early age to become careworn, prematurely aged grandmothers in their early thirties. I was for them no different from the incompetents who were marooned in that class, colouring-in and French-knitting their lives away, because I lacked, as they did, the skills on which the social and economic system was based.

My physical appearance alone excited the curiosity of the people in that school. Otherwise they remained detached and uninterested; no-one showed any inclination to ask about the world I had left—even if I had been able to tell them about it at all coherently. They could not conceive that I was a refugee from Venice and the Midget Theatre, from nights at the opera, and from the arcane social rituals of prewar Central Europe. Such things were meaningless for them. My membership of the Special Class was merely a formal acknowledgement of the general predicament my parents and I faced—handicapped and disadvantaged through our inability to communicate, lacking those skills of language that provide the grounds for a community's existence and self-definition. The Australia of 1947 could not have found tolerable the babel of tongues envisaged by the more idealistic contemporary advocates of multiculturalism.

The school did not, as things turned out, have to face the one problem that would have emerged had we not moved from Hurlstone Park towards the end of the year. Imperceptibly, a miracle had started to occur. I was beginning to learn English, and therefore to possess some knowledge of the world it conveyed, reflected and interpreted. What would have happened if my parents had not found that flat in Epping, thereby allowing me to enter a more conventional stream of education, I have no way of imagining. No-one, as far as I could tell, ever left the Special Class—you stayed there until you had reached the age at which you could be cast out into the world as a well-trained French-knitter and paper-marbler. I dare say that something would have been done about me, for no doubt someone would have discovered that I had a capacity to learn, as most of my classmates sadly did not. Luckily I did not have to wait for that to occur.

How that miracle began is impossible to distinguish from the broader process of learning—learning to recognise the sights, sounds, even the smells of Sydney as soon as some shape and pattern had begun to emerge from the jumble of impressions bombarding us in the course of our first days. I learnt more English, it seems to me, from people in the streets, from signs painted on shop-awnings, from newspaper-posters than I did from the little instruction I received at school. In consequence, the discovery of language is inseparable in my memory from the discovery of a place and its people, or at least those places and their inhabitants that our very restricted familiarity with Sydney offered. I learnt English in the streets and shops of Hurlstone Park, but even more significantly perhaps, from the vantage point of the Strand Arcade in the city.

In their early months in Sydney my parents endeavoured to take up the threads of their old way of life. They lived off their capital while my father looked around for business opportunities. In order to do that you had to have an office. He rented an empty shop on an upper level of the Strand Arcade, a place that was not, at the time, the kitschy essay in nostalgia it has since become. The ‘office' was furnished with a desk, two chairs and a metal clothes-rack. My parents spent a great deal of time in that dusty room waiting for opportunity to knock on the door. When it finally knocked, my father was lured into a disastrous venture that relieved him of the residue of our capital in a remarkably short time, forcing him to seek employment as a weaver on the night shift in a large mill, and my mother to learn industrial sewing. In the meantime, the office provided the vantage point from which I learnt a great deal about Sydney. I spent most of my spare time there, looking, wondering and absorbing.

The Sydney we spied from the Strand Arcade has been eloquently recreated by Peter Carey in
Illywhacker
—he locates the Badgery Pet Emporium, that marvellous image of the noisy life of the city in the late forties, in the neighbourhood of the Pitt Street end of the arcade. We observed the chaotic street-life Carey celebrates in his novel. The pavements were crowded with narrow-eyed men in ill-fitting three-piece suits of heavy pinstripe cloth. Many wore sweat-stained pork-pie hats. Most of them carried cameras; they would snap you and hold out a card bearing the address of the studio where you could inspect your likeness. Most people ignored them; the footpaths were littered with discarded pieces of cardboard. The women were also distinguished by extraordinary headgear, grotesque confections, like ziggurats gone wrong, in straw, felt, braid and tulle. Years later my mother discovered the source of these hats in a subterranean salon where customers assembled their own fantasies from the raw material displayed in large containers scattered over the cavernous basement.

We observed this world with fascination, but because we had almost no means of comprehending it—being unable to read what the newspaper-posters were saying or to understand what the paperboys were shouting—we experienced a strange sense of voyeurism. We saw a busy, crowded street-life without much idea of the reason for this hectic activity. In Budapest, a few months earlier, it had been different: there my parents were a part of that equally frenetic scurrying. They too were trying to survive in the confusion of those postwar months. It took some time for us to realise that those narrow-eyed, hollow-cheeked photographers, with curiously distracted expressions on their faces, were returned servicemen desperately trying to make a living with their cameras and pieces of cardboard at a time of widespread unemployment.

At length, however, perplexity was gradually transformed into familiarity. We began to discern a pattern in this seething throng. We got to recognise the faces of the news-vendors on the corner of King Street. The milk bar in Martin Place where a lady virtuoso attracted admiring crowds as she poured milkshakes in a creamy stream from metal containers held high above her head became one of our favourite haunts. We learnt to say ‘Tschocolat milk-shek pliz'. We began to grow familiar with the intricacies of the city: we knew where to get certain trams, which trains went from Wynyard and which from St James; we discovered the secrets of the various ferry routes—the large steamers to Manly, the little boats that scudded to the other side of the Harbour, and those which went to all sorts of mysterious and perplexing places.

Eventually the confusing meaninglessness of this world began to be changed into some form of coherence, something that could be understood and tamed. We began to learn the words essential to daily existence. We knew where to go for bread and what the word for bread was; we were no longer restricted to buying only what we could point at. More complex symbols or linguistic forms gradually yielded their secrets, but always in a haphazard manner. We were great cinema-goers in those years. One of the marvels of the cinema is that you can understand and enjoy a great deal of what it has to offer, even if you comprehend practically none of the dialogue. Even advertising-posters contributed to our education. You had only to glance at one of them pasted to the wall of a cinema to know that it was advertising
Gone with the Wind
—now we knew the word for wind. One curious feature of these posters puzzled us and no amount of guesswork would solve their riddle. What was the purpose of those shapes printed in the corners which contained the letter G or A? We discovered their meaning one day when I was refused admission to the Embassy in Castlereagh Street. ‘For General Exhibition' and ‘For Adults Only' entered our lexicon.

That is how I learnt English; not by any system of instruction but through the piecing together of an infinite number of small, insignificant details, often becoming familiar with peripheral, at times recondite, phrases and expressions well before the essentials were mastered. Slowly the layers of knowledge, the intersection of language and experience, increased. In harmony with the acquisition of language—indeed in a way quite inseparable from it—came a greater familiarity with the world it conveyed. Once more, this was achieved in a wholly random manner. For instance, we soon discovered the beaches in that torrid summer and autumn of 1947, and indulged in the Central-European worship of sunbathing, not recognising the ferocity of the Australian sun, and thus getting burnt to a frazzle on several painful occasions. For some reason, though, the beach we favoured most was Cronulla, a long and inconvenient train trip from Hurlstone Park. Why had we not discovered Manly or Bondi? I remember that someone took us to Cronulla in a car; after that Cronulla was the place we knew and patronised. Much of what we did in those early months was haphazard or the product of whim, chance or ignorance. During our years in Epping, before the momentous day when my father took delivery of a beige Morris Minor, we used to go to Balmoral, which had become our favourite beach, by a roundabout, inconvenient and unreliable route, not realising that there were much easier ways of getting there, just because that was the way we had discovered during our first summer in Epping.