The Good Boy (8 page)

Sing a song of Melbourne!

Money by the sack!

Fifteen hundred squatters

Squatting in Toorak.

Heaven all about them;

Hear the angels sing

‘Strictly no admittance here:

God Save the King'!
¹⁹

One mansion I particularly remember was called Nareeb; it was in Kooyong Road and had been built in 1888 during the boom of ‘Marvellous Melbourne'. It had a front fence that must have been close to 200 metres long
²⁰
with, at one end, a monumental entrance, two beautiful wrought-iron gates set back in a crescent-shaped masonry wall, the pillars at the inner and outer ends of the curving walls being surmounted by curiously shaped wrought-iron lanterns. Behind the high front fence was a double row of evergreen trees (cedar? pine? monkeypuzzle?) which would have provided an impenetrable screen, had they not by then been so tall that the bottom three or four metres of their trunks were bereft of branches and greenery. As a result one could, from the bus, glimpse the house a hundred metres or so beyond the trees, its classic-revival architecture partly hidden by a veil of Virginia Creeper, green in spring and summer, russet in autumn, and a spidery grey network of tendrils in winter. The place made me think of Dickens's
Great Expectations
and of that mysterious, cobweb-covered house, Satis, and its owner, Miss Havisham.

The then-owners of Nareeb, two spinster daughters of a nineteenth-century gold-rush millionaire, eventually died and in 1964 the property was sold. The two Rolls Royce cars and a huge collection of antique furniture (there were 35 rooms including a ballroom, drawing room, music room, library, dining room, parlour and seven main bedrooms) were auctioned at Joels. Despite public outcry, the house was demolished, the trees cut down, and the land subdivided into a street and 24 housing lots … only the wonderful wrought-iron gates survived and were moved to the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne where they now guard the Domain Road entrance.

Another great house we used to pass each day was Werndrew, in Irving Road. Much of its land had by then been sold off to developers and the house itself could easily be seen from the street. Its most striking feature was the beautiful pillared entrance and the large cupola, or dome, in the centre of the house – apparently over the ballroom, built by an indulgent father to help launch his daughters into society in the 1880s. Next door, on the south side, was another mansion, Southdean, this one still surrounded by an enormous and well-tended garden, and sporting a wrap-around, pillared, double-storeyed verandah, all hidden behind an immaculately-clipped cypress hedge. This was the property of the three bachelor brothers Connibere, well-known philanthropists in the city. Sir George and Sir Charles having died in the 1940s, there was only Mr Ernest left to enjoy its splendours by the time I started observing the place from my bus window. Alas, Southdean and Werndrew met the same fate as Nareeb and nothing remains of them now … except, perhaps, in the minds of passers-by like me, a memory of something beautiful, of what can be achieved in domestic architecture – money and council regulations permitting.

Further along the bus route we used to pass the more modern 1920s homes of the Coles family, which I always thought of as mansion-size versions of English thatched cottages. Both were, in a word, pretty; two-storeyed with an irregular roof of tiles made to look like wooden shingles, tall curling chimneys, diamond-paned casement windows and beautiful ‘cottage' gardens made them look so homely, despite their size. Cranlana, the home of the Myer family in Clendon Road, along which we walked when going from St Kevin's to St Peter's (the Toorak parish church) was an early 1900s mansion, set well back from the road in a huge formal garden and behind another set of beautiful wrought-iron gates. Further along Clendon Road and nearer to the Toorak station (where the workers rather than the squatters and merchant princes lived) were Coonac, once a Baillieu home, and Mandeville Hall, built in 1878 as the home of one Joseph Clarke but as of 1926 the Loreto convent and secondary school for girls. Coonac had been battered and bruised during wartime use by a government department but Mandeville Hall had been carefully maintained by the nuns.

When in 1967 I visited my mother's cousin, a nun there, I was stunned by the grand entrance hall and the elegantly furnished drawing room. She delighted in pointing out that the large stained-glass window on the first landing of the grand staircase had the letters ‘J C' worked into the decoration, originally the initials of the owner but now interpreted by the nuns as standing for the
new
lord of the manor, Jesus Christ!

It was usually possible to get a corner seat in the train on the way home from school and I soon developed the habit of reading in the train; over the eight years that saw me making the trip I think I would have devoured more novels than in the rest of my life. Books like
Tom Brown's School Days
convinced me that life at St Kevin's was much pleasanter than life in an English public school, so I quickly settled in, had some wonderful teachers (including one rather grumpy old Brother who had taught my father in Ballarat and who, as the sportsmaster, never failed to tell me how my father had excelled at sport while I barely knew how to hold a cricket bat).

I think that my sister had a somewhat similar experience at Mary's Mount in that some of the nuns there had taught my mother and made it clear to Marie that she had high standards to emulate. The difference was, of course, that while I couldn't hold a candle to my father's sporting achievements, my sister was easily able to equal and then surpass anything her mother had done academically. By special arrangement with the Mother Superior, a visiting teacher was engaged to give private tuition to Marie in Chemistry and Physics, subjects not then available at Mary's Mount (as they were not considered necessary or perhaps even ‘suitable' for young ladies … and my sister was already planning to go on to study medicine after matriculating). Mary's Mount was less known for its focus on academic standards than for giving a well-rounded education balancing religious, social and academic issues, while St Pat's and St Kevin's, both run by the Irish Christian Brothers,
²¹
focused more sharply on the bread-and-butter issue of academic achievement and entry to the better paid levels of the work force.

When I look back at my schooldays, I realise that my happiest memories are of a handful of friends made, of half a dozen great teachers and of learning experiences thoroughly enjoyed. I loved everything in primary school, and in secondary school I loved History and Geography lessons, and English, French and Latin lessons; I quite enjoyed Religious Instruction and Physical Instruction (gym) and tolerated Maths and Science (but not being really interested I was not so good at them). We were never taught Art or Music and I have always regretted that. We were not taught any sport either, but were expected to play football or cricket one afternoon per week. I never could catch or kick or hit a ball and didn't really want to, so for me ‘Sports Afternoon' was the one part of the school week I loathed. In retrospect I think that this was unfortunate. I feel no guilt about my total lack of sporting prowess or even of interest in games, but I do regret that no teacher noticed that some students needed to be taught before they could be expected to play. Perhaps like Lady Catherine de Bourgh who, in
Pride and Prejudice
, listens to Elizabeth Bennett playing the pianoforte and opines that ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient,' I may have been a great football player had I ever been taught!

All but four of my teachers during twelve years at school were Brothers or nuns, all of whom were, I think, competent. I say this now at the end of my life after having trained as a teacher myself and after working with many competent and many incompetent teachers in Australia, England and France. One of the disadvantages of attending Catholic schools, at least in the 1950s, was that as there was no government funding at all and schools had to be self-supporting, class sizes were large and equipment was often poor. This lack of financial support was, however, usually compensated for by the skill, commitment and hard work of the teachers. Moreover, the stability and continuity of the teaching staff in the Catholic schools gave them an immense advantage: children could quickly feel personally secure and almost ‘with family' when they realised that some of their teachers had taught their elder siblings or cousins or even parents, if not in that particular school then in one of the other schools run by the same order of Brothers or nuns … and security is a vital component in the personal growth and development of the child. My twelve years passed without any hint or rumour of any form of sexual misconduct on the part of teachers with their pupils and I was amazed and saddened to learn, many years later, what had been going on in other schools.

In Form IV I had a wonderfully enthusiastic young Brother teaching me French and English. In those days English was taught as two subjects, English Expression and English Literature, and a pass in English Expression was essential to obtain an end-of-secondary-school certificate … and university entrance (Matriculation). While English Literature, at least in the form of popular novels and plays, interested most of the class, ‘Mac' (Brother McCarthy) skilfully convinced us that without an understanding of the mechanics, i.e. of English Expression, we would be severely disadvantaged in understanding what we read and even in expressing verbally or in writing our own thoughts. Hence the seeming trivia of spelling and parsing, the mastering of tenses and of punctuation and even the correct use of the apostrophe all took on new importance … and weekly exercises in composition, precis-writing and clear thinking became an intriguing challenge. This approach to English was also a sensible and easily understood explanation of the importance of mastering the mechanics of French. Until then, studying French had consisted of little more than every night learning ten words of French vocabulary plus one of the seemingly endless list of irregular verbs, and struggling during the day to put together, or to decipher, tricky sentences. Mac stressed that French was a living language just like English, that a hundred million people in the world spoke it effortlessly every day, and that there was a whole, new literature and culture out there waiting to be discovered … if we would only master the basics! He invited native French speakers to the school (I had never seen a real live Frenchman until then), had us listen each week to ‘French for Schools' on the radio, encouraged us to become involved in the Alliance Française in Melbourne and even introduced us to the worlds of French cuisine and French cinema. I cannot swear that he urged us to go to the touring version of the
Folies Bergères
which played at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne that year (with tenor Jean Sablon and his hit song ‘Le Fiacre') but he certainly enlivened French classes as no other teacher ever did. I was hooked, and remain a Francophile into my twilight years.

Mac was transferred to another Brothers' college the following year, to my regret, and a new Headmaster arrived at St Kevin's to replace the outgoing Brother, who had been getting along very well with my father and whose transfer came as quite a surprise. I later learned that the outgoing Headmaster had been ‘demoted' because a senior Brother on an inspection visit had discovered that he did not always get up for early morning Mass. For this he was considered by his superiors to be giving a bad example to the other Brothers in the house. Ironically enough, the ex-Headmaster shortly thereafter left the Christian Brothers, studied to become a priest, and was in due course appointed a Parish Priest in a neighbouring diocese … and able to say Mass, rather than to attend it, at whatever hour of the morning he pleased. Rather inexplicably, unless it was from some sort of solidarity with my father's choice of friends, I resented the new Brother's appointment, and let my feelings show. I also bridled at a remark of his soon after his arrival that while Rostrevor College in Adelaide (where he had previously been stationed) was the leading Catholic boys college in that city, Xavier College, being a Jesuit college, was the leading Catholic boys college in Melbourne … rather than St Kevin's. I saw this remark as disloyalty to St Kevin's and to the Christian Brothers, so for two years I waged a quiet war of resistance, never allowing myself to acknowledge the new Headmaster's gifts as a teacher or his skills in school administration. Brother gave as good as he got, while always treating me fairly and patiently, despite my simmering hostility. I often recall what may well have been his final piece of advice to me, and his only veiled reference to my war campaign: ‘Understand this, John, the world is not black and white, as you seem to think; it is very, very grey.' How right he was and how much time and energy I and others like me have wasted in not accepting that fact of life, in trying to classify everyone and everything as either ‘good' or ‘bad', ‘right' or ‘wrong' and in trying to force square pegs into round holes.

Schooldays are, for fortunate Western children, interwoven with holidays, and for many children the planning of coming holidays and the remembering of ones completed constitute major incentives to getting through the routine of the school day. My sister, brother and I did not need to find paid holiday employment until our mid-teens and enjoyed what I now see was a rather indulgent and easy lifestyle. Once we had started school our holidays were, of course, restricted by the school timetable.

The term holidays, two weeks off in May and again in September, as well as the six or seven weeks of the Christmas holidays each summer, were often spent away from Melbourne, as my parents thought it desirable to give us city children some good, fresh, country air. Sometimes this was achieved by going caravanning, and a couple of times we rented a house at the beach, once in Mentone and once at Edithvale; another time it was a house in the Dandenongs between Monbulk and Olinda, but I doubt that that sort of holiday was very restful for my mother, who ended up doing more housework and cooking on holiday than at home. The house at Mentone was a large, rambling, verandahed turn-of-the-century rendered brick place with a huge front garden and sweeping lawn, one on which I can still remember rolling in the warm summer evenings. The smell of the warm mown grass and its soft touch to my arms and legs, the sensation of my body rolling, rolling, free of any control or contact other than the pleasurable smell and feel of the grass, was perhaps the first awakening of sensuality in me.