The Good Boy (11 page)

Journalism was not, however, Nell's real passion. She was a free spirit, an educated, independent woman, something of a feminist, and at heart an artist. She painted in oils and in watercolour, mostly on canvas but also on silk, presenting her friends with exquisite hand-painted silk scarves; she drew with pencil, crayon and ink and often provided the drawings which appeared in the Children's section of the
Advertiser
as colouring competitions for the local youngsters. She had studied art at the National Gallery School of Art in Melbourne and was a member of the Victorian Artists Society for most of her life, regularly exhibiting her paintings at their Spring and Autumn shows. In 1953 the
Advertiser
sent her to London to report on the coronation of Elizabeth II, which she attended in Westminster Abbey. After completing that assignment, Nell took leave for three years and stayed on in Europe. She completed various courses at the Chelsea Art School and then, using London as a base, travelled extensively in Europe, contributing occasional articles on life there to the
Advertiser
and on aspects of art to various UK magazines. ‘From Barbizon to Bendigo' was one such article in which Nell traced the links between the Barbizon school of painters near Paris and Bendigo, where several important works by Corot hang in the Bendigo Art Gallery. In 1956 she returned to Bendigo and the
Advertiser
, just in time to give me a few tips on overseas travel before I myself set off for Europe in August of that year.

My holidays in Bendigo without the rest of the family began shortly after the start of World War II, when shortages of petrol (for cars) and of coal (for steam trains) saw limitations beginning to be placed on ‘non-essential' travel. Enquiries would be made around school holiday time to see if any family members or friends would be driving to Bendigo and would be able to take me with them. On one occasion the matron of the local hospital said that her widowed brother-in-law would be able to take me as far as Castlemaine, where he was the owner of the Great Northern Hotel near the station there.

When we arrived in Castlemaine I was treated (at age eight) like a guest of honour in the private part of the hotel. A silverservice dinner was ordered from a menu and I had a table to myself in the dining room where a uniformed waitress bustled about between the white starched napery, the potted palms and the few other guests. I was installed in a nice bedroom opening out on to a balcony overlooking the busy railway station and the endless parade of huffing and puffing steam trains. I felt a vague sense of unease as I climbed into the bed, with the coldness of the white starched sheets and the fact that for the first time in my life there was nobody there to tuck me in or to say ‘Goodnight'. Life was turning out to be a learning process, learning how to grow up and how to stand on one's own two feet. In the morning after a silver-service breakfast I was driven on to Bendigo and delivered safely to my grandparents.

My first precise memories of ‘The War', as World War II was spoken of then, are of workmen arriving to dig an air-raid trench in our back garden and to install black-out screens on the windows. At the same time all the street lights were fitted with metal shades which allowed only a narrow strip of light to be directed straight down to the footpath and none at all to brighten the surrounding area. Air-raid sirens were installed on the roofs of the police stations and other strategically placed buildings; their ‘test runs' sounded chillingly like the wailing sirens heard in the newsreels of the European War which we saw every time we went to the cinema. Our pantry cupboard in the kitchen was enlarged and stocked up with tinned food, and extra supplies of sheets and linen were brought in against the possibility that our house (where my parents, a doctor and a nurse lived) might need to become an emergency first aid post or dressing station. Petrol rationing was introduced. We began to see charcoal-burners and other strange contraptions attached to buses, cars and trucks to provide alternative forms of fuel. Air-raid shelters had also been dug in the school grounds at St Bede's; we primary school children thought it great fun to practise ‘air raids'. We had to move quickly but in an orderly fashion from the classroom to the shelter and there sit on the benches along the walls and chatter away until the ‘All Clear' sounded. There never were any real air raids in Melbourne and the shelters were fairly soon forgotten and left to slowly fill with rainwater.

The bright red Nestlé chocolate vending machines on suburban railway station platforms, where the insertion of one penny would see the machine deliver a red-and-gold-wrapped bar of milk chocolate, stopped operating and were eventually removed. Chocolate in any form became a rarity as most of it, along with most of the coffee, was sent to be used by the troops as emergency rations. While milk continued to be available for sale to the public (at three pence per pint bottle) cream was not, being used to make butter which was in turn tightly rationed so as to make supplies available for the troops. Food and clothing were rationed, electricity was in short supply occasioning frequent blackouts and all neon signs and electric advertising were turned off. Men in army, navy and air force uniforms began to be seen everywhere, and the Caulfield Racecourse, the Royal Melbourne Showgrounds, the St Kilda Football Ground, the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton and numerous other large public places and buildings were taken over for military purposes. My mother's three younger brothers enlisted soon after the entry of Japan into the war. Seeing them off on troop trains leaving Spencer Street Station for training in the north (mostly in Queensland) as a stage in posting to ‘the islands' (mostly New Guinea and Borneo), as well as seeing them off after the leave which all three were eventually given, became part of the family routine.

Shortages of most things, even including bottled beer, and never-ending newscasts on the radio greatly worried my parents and our faithful Vera, especially in 1942 when Japan captured Singapore, bombed Darwin and sent a fleet towards Australia's east coast. Vera's reaction was to run towards my mother in the garden shouting, ‘They're coming, they're coming!' Once Prime Minister Curtin had recalled the Australian troops dispatched to help the United Kingdom in its War with Germany, my father explained that the intervention of Australia's new friend, the USA, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, had saved us from invasion.

When on leave, my mother's brothers as well as many of their army, navy and air force mates made our house their Melbourne base. A distant Millane cousin in the US Navy stayed once; officers in the Dutch Navy who had become friends with my Uncle Bert posted to Dutch New Guinea came another time and several Indonesians in the Dutch Army and Navy, also friends of Bert, became quite frequent occupants of the spare beds in our house. My mother thought it proper for these ‘boys' to sleep in a real bed with a soft mattress while they were on leave, so when there were more visitors than spare beds my sister, brother and I would sleep on the camp stretchers used on our caravan trips. If only one extra bed was needed, we risked having a bit of a squabble over who would have the adventure of sleeping on the stretcher. In fact, hardly a week went by without somebody in uniform being camped somewhere in the house, and my parents organising impromptu parties and singalongs around the piano in our living room for those lonely and no doubt traumatised young men. My mother loved music and was quite a good pianist herself. I used to pester her to play Mozart's ‘La Marche Turque' and other pieces she remembered from her Mary's Mount days. Often an uncle or some other boy would play the violin and everyone else would sing, picking up the words of current popular songs like ‘I've Got Sixpence', ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket' and slightly more martial ones like ‘Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major', ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye', ‘The White Cliffs of Dover', ‘The Trek Song' and ‘Lilli Marlene' – the latter being a little bit controversial as it was really a German song. These gatherings became quite multinational, multiracial and even multilingual, as my Uncle Bert was a gifted linguist and had quickly added Dutch, Malay and Indonesian to the French and German learned at school. As a result, he could chat away and sing along in any of those languages, making everybody relax and open their minds to different cultures. We noted how our parents made no distinction between their guests on grounds of colour, language, nationality or religion. I remember my mother laughingly but gently explaining to Vera, who came from a conservative and rather isolated part of the country, that it was not appropriate to offer ham sandwiches to the Indonesian boys as most of them were Muslim and did not want to eat pork but could be too polite to refuse.

I think that this brief contact with normal family life must have greatly helped those lonely soldiers, with several of those who survived the War remaining in touch with my parents long after it had ended. One of the young Indonesian officers, Amin, visited us shortly after the end of the War, when he had been brought to Melbourne from New Guinea before going back to Batavia.
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It must have been a cold August or September day as he had on a Dutch army coat that seemed bigger than him. He wanted in particular to see Peter, my younger brother. When Peter came into the room Amin opened his greatcoat and, with a grin almost the width of his face, revealed a captured Japanese officer's sword which he presented to Peter, who had apparently expressed an interest in seeing one … or was it really presented to Dad, or to everyone in the house, as a token of thanks for the hospitality received over the years by all those foreign boys?

Up in Bendigo my grandfather died a few months after the bombing of Darwin and the submarine attack on Sydney
²⁷
and from then until the end of the War there were just my grandmother and my aunt in the big Bendigo house, with Joan, the maid, coming in five days a week. I continued to go there for my school term holidays and would hand over my ration books to my grandmother for use when we went shopping. There were separate books for sugar, tea, butter, meat and clothing, and the shopkeeper would carefully cut out the appropriate coupon with each item purchased.

At one stage early in the War, my aunt used to take her turn one night each week as a volunteer plane spotter atop the lookout tower in Rosalind Park in Bendigo, where a rough shelter had been erected and where field glasses were supplied. I think that the futility of this exercise was soon recognised, as the spotters really had no proper equipment and no way of accurately identifying any aircraft, enemy or friendly, that they did manage to spot in the night sky. I used to see my aunt organising a thermos of tea and some sandwiches to take on her tour of duty and I always wanted to go with her … it seemed such fun to a schoolboy. Later there was a large wooden frame set up in the living room where my aunt and grandmother both spent some time most days weaving macramé camouflage nets which, when completed, were taken down to the Town Hall as a contribution to the War Effort. With three sons away at the War, my grandmother always wore as her sole piece of jewellery a small silver brooch issued by the Commonwealth to ‘mothers of the boys at the War' and comprising a stylised rising sun from which was suspended a silver bar carrying three golden stars … one for each son enlisted. She was very lucky that the three sons all came home safely at War's end.

The tide of war did gradually turn. Things became more cheerful and we were soon laughing as we played with the funny new banknotes the Japanese had planned to introduce once they had occupied Australia – crateloads of them must have been captured by the American/Australian forces after the battles off the east coast, with many of them brought home by the uncles and others as ‘souvenirs'.

Once the War was over my Uncle Bert, the youngest son, and by then 33, came home, resumed his job with the Bank of Australasia
²⁸
and lived with his mother and sister while working in the bank's Bendigo branch. Bert enlivened the place. He seemed full of energy, whistling and singing around the house, teasing his kid sister Nell and my grandmother's maid, Joan, and often gently chivvying his mother, to whom he was devoted, to get a move on … because of her rheumatism, she moved very slowly about the house. Bert always walked home from the bank for the midday meal, the main meal of the day, which Joan, who came in at 7.30 a.m. and left at 2 p.m. five days a week, always prepared and then shared (although like our Vera at home, she ate her meal in the kitchen while the family ate in the dining room). To return to the bank after lunch, Bert usually took a shortcut through Rosalind Park and Nell often walked with him as far as the Pall Mall gates of the park: the bank was across the road from the gates and Nell's office in the
Bendigo Advertiser
building was just another block or so along Pall Mall.

After work of a summer evening Bert would often go swimming in the municipal baths in Rosalind Park or would play badminton or table tennis on the back lawn with another returned soldier and bank colleague, named Alan. As a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, I would join in if I was there and indeed these are my first memories of playing any sort of sport with people who did not instantly dismiss me as useless. Bert and Alan were always welcoming and great fun, so it was disappointing when after little more than a year the bank transferred Bert to a branch in Melbourne … and peace and quiet returned to my grandmother's house in Bendigo.

I was encouraged to play with and socialise with local children, but my aunt and grandmother did not have many such contacts to suggest. There was a family who lived in the house over the back fence where the son, Terry, was four years older than I was and the daughter, Judy, at twelve, one year younger. I did go around for a first meeting which went off pretty well, it seemed to me, although they were more interested in rough and tumble games than I was. Then it was decided that we would climb their side fence and raid the apple-tree of the two elderly ladies who lived next door. We three were happily eating our stolen apples when Judy and Terry's mother came upon us in her back garden … and immediately sent us around to the front door of the elderly ladies to confess our sin and to apologise. Somehow I lost interest in pursuing the contact, and by the next term holidays Judy and her family had moved away. My aunt had another try, this time sending me down the street to play with the children of a music-teaching friend of hers. In that household, however, ‘playing' meant playing a musical instrument, and I was far from competent with the violin, which I was supposedly learning, while my new companions seemed able to play a variety of instruments very well indeed. I felt very inadequate and managed to get out of any repeat visits.