Working Class Boy (17 page)

We walked into the house and there on the table were all kinds of cakes and biscuits. I'd never seen so many before. Lamingtons and cupcakes. Chocolate sponges and trays of sandwiches. Curried egg and ham, cheese and tomato. These were not the things that were eaten at Scottish parties. The place smelled different from the homes I had been to in the past. It smelled Australian I guess, filled with the smell of Australian food. The women all sat inside the house and the men were out the back, down near the shed where they had set up a keg. If anyone set up a keg at a Scottish party, they were begging for a fight and it wouldn't take long until our family started one.

The guests were a mix of blokes who worked at Kelvinator and bikies trying to look their best for their mate's party. The only bikies we saw in Elizabeth were animals, so the whole family was on guard, waiting for trouble to start.

The women were dressed very conservatively compared to Mum's mates. There were no plunging necklines or hip-hugging dresses. Floral patterns adorned dresses that looked like the women had made them themselves.

The language was different too. There was not another British accent to be heard anywhere. Their accents were nasal sounding and slightly coarse. The coarseness didn't bother us but the sound of the voices was like fingernails on a blackboard to my Mum. She looked like a fish out of water – not wanting to
sit in the house with the women and not feeling comfortable enough to go out to the yard with the men. They all seemed to be drinking beer. Some of the women mixed it with lemonade to act a little more ladylike but most just drank it by the schooner glass full. Mum would have killed for a whisky but I'm sure she was too uncomfortable to ask.

‘Can I get you a drink love?' Reg asked her, trying to break the ice.

‘No, I don't drink. You know that Reg,' she said, just loud enough for the other women to hear. She sounded like she had a plum stuck in her mouth, trying to be as posh as possible.

‘Come on love, it's a party. I might even have a shandy myself.'

‘No, I'll be fine, thank you.'

I looked around the party and realised that we didn't fit in there. We were trouble waiting to happen.

John, my brother, was sixteen or seventeen by this time. He was a bit of a mod and was dressed in a light salmon-coloured suit and platform shoes about four inches high. He couldn't have worn anything more inappropriate for the company. The bikies wanted to kill him as soon as they saw him. I think that he wanted to kill them as soon as he arrived at the party too. So the whole thing was like a time-bomb, ticking, waiting to blow.

John was a real animal and probably could have cleaned up most of them but he had been warned to be good. So he didn't retaliate when they started making snide remarks every time he walked past. If he went to get a drink one of them would make a comment.

‘Nice suit . . . do they make them for men?'

He just ignored them and kept walking. It must have been hard for him but he had been told. Well, it was all going well. That is, until my mum overheard them talking about him and all hell broke loose. She walked up to this big guy in a leather jacket
and stood in front of him. Her head came up to his chest and he smiled at her in a condescending sort of way.

‘What's wrong, lady?'

We felt a bit sorry for the poor guy because we knew what he was in for and he didn't. Next thing she jumped up and headbutted him on the nose, knocking him to the ground in a pool of blood. Then she turned to attack his other poor bikie friends. She was in full fight or flight mode and nothing could stop her. She turned on Tom's fiancée and hit her, then went for the rest of the family.

‘She's fucking crazy,' I heard someone say as the party came to a grinding halt and we left. They were whispering and pointing at us as we walked out and onto the street. One of Tom's friends, a guy named Tooley – who I will tell you more about later – helped us get out of the place. I'm still not sure if he was helping us or them. Either way it was time to leave.

Out on the street we were being dragged away with Mum screaming obscenities at Reg. ‘Your fuckin' family are a pack o' pigs. How dare they talk aboot ma kids!'

My whole world just flashed back to Scotland and being dragged outside in the snow. Life was imploding around us as we walked to find a bus to get away from there.

Reg came running after us, calling out to Mum, ‘Why are you blaming me? I'm on your side. Slow down. We'll sort it out. Everything will be all right.'

Mum wasn't listening. ‘Just fuck off, ya big streak o' nothin'. Go back tae yer own fuckin' family.'

I had heard this term before. My dad had called Reg the same thing. Glaswegians, as I said earlier, are not known for being tall, so they don't feel comfortable around tall people. I'm sure they have lots of insults to describe anyone over five foot ten but ‘a big streak o' nothin'' was the popular choice for my mum and dad. Had they used it together when, in happier times, they shouted it
abusively at a tall person they both didn't like? I'm not sure but it is almost romantic to think so.

Reg would not leave; he stayed with us. We ended up back at our house thinking that life was back the way it used to be. Reg helped calm down everything, including Mum, and eventually we all got to bed.

Next day he told his parents he was disgusted with Tom's friends' behaviour and the way they treated his new family. His parents were very sorry about the whole thing and even apologised. Good thing too because Mum wasn't going to. Things settled back down to normal. I'm not sure normal is the right word to use for our family. I do know this would never have happened in a Scottish family. A good Glaswegian family would have been fighting about it for years.

T
he Barnes family liked to sit around the house and drink tea and play cards. They would drink tea all day and night. If they weren't drinking it, they were making it. I remember hearing the phrase ‘put the kettle on, love' all the time I lived with Reg. He said it all the time, his dad and his mum said it and his Aunty Dorrie said it.

Aunty Dorrie must have been his dad's sister. All that side of the family were well over six foot tall and very thin. Aunty Dorrie was no exception; she was six foot two inches tall and thin but she looked like in her day she would have been very beautiful. She had very high cheekbones and long limbs and was very elegant-looking. As a young girl she would have been as sleek as a gazelle. I often wondered why she wasn't married. Maybe she'd had her heart broken or had a tragic loss or was going to be a nun or something. She was just like the rest of the family, very reserved and very nice – but she had a look of sadness about her.

Grandpa and Grandma Barnes, Aunty Dorrie and Reg were great euchre players. They taught us how to play too. So we
would go over to their house and drink tea and play cards. They didn't watch TV, so the house was always quiet except when someone won a game. I never saw them playing for money, just for points. They played from morning until night.

The only time the silence was broken – besides someone calling out for cards or making tea – was when Grandpa would sit down and play the piano. Now he never played that well, but it always sounded to me like what piano would have sounded like at a vaudeville show. He slapped the ivories, rather than tickled them. Looking back it reminds me a bit of Chico Marx playing the piano. Reg and Grandpa would sing along at the top of their voices to happy songs I'd never heard before. They must have been old Australian songs, I never heard anyone from Scotland sing them. The way they sang, you would think they were singing top forty songs. Reg would look at me to see if I recognised any of them. But I didn't. I don't think that they had bought a record since the 1940s, never mind anything in the top forties.

‘Come on,' they'd say, ‘you must know this one.' And Grandpa would tear into another song that Charlie Chaplin might have danced to in a silent movie. I would scratch my head and look blankly at them. But they were loud and funny and we always ended up laughing along with them.

Later on Reg brought the piano to our house and he used to play it every night. He played a lot better than his dad but the piano still sounded out of tune, just like it did when Grandpa played it. I'm not sure if it was the piano or his playing. The song I remember Reg playing most often was ‘Für Elise'. He played it every night. I think this was his way of escaping from all the worries he had inherited when he adopted us. He could slap the keys like his dad when he wanted to. Playing the piano seemed to take him back to his home and family in Port Adelaide. I could
see it on his face. He was distant but happy. It never lasted that long before he had to stop. Mum would always tell him to stop because she had something she wanted him to do. He didn't get a lot of rest, old Reg.

He always wanted to teach me the piano. ‘Come on, love,' he'd say to me, ‘give it a go. You'll thank me someday for this chance.'

But I wasn't interested. I wanted to play the guitar by then. Something louder. But Reg was right again – now I wish I had taken him up on the offer.

Reg's family were a caring, Australian working-class family. No airs and graces. They called a spade a spade. What you saw was what you got. But they were warm and open to us. They hardly drank as far as I could see and never had big fights. I didn't know what was going on, but in the back of my head I felt that surely this would all fall apart on me sooner or later. Everything always did.

They didn't have a lot but they kept everything clean and in its place. The toilet was outside but it was clean and neat and not like the outside toilets I had seen anywhere else. There were no spiders and it had a light – I think so Grandpa could read his paper in there.

The wallpaper had been on the walls of the house since Reg's mum and dad bought the place forty or fifty years earlier. The whole house looked like it was from another time. A museum. The same pictures were on the wall as when Reg lived there as a child; if you moved them there was darker wallpaper underneath, that's how long they'd hung there. He pointed them all out and told me who was who and what was what.

‘This was Uncle Billy as a young lad.' It was like he slipped back to a time when his uncle was there with him. I could see
it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. His tone softened like he wanted to be back there again.

‘Life was tough back then, Jim. You know, my family had nothing but they worked hard and life was not too bad. You get nothing for nothing. You have to work hard. There's no two ways about it. Just keep your head down and your bum up and things will work out for you.'

‘How long did you live here?'

‘All my life. I was born here and I'll probably die here. It's not big and fancy but we had everything we needed.'

‘Who's that, Reg?'

‘That's Aunty Flo. She was Grandpa's sister. She was a wild one in her day, too.'

‘Did they all live in the Port?'

‘Every one of us. We played in the street outside and your Uncle Ted and Uncle John and I fished in the river. We knew everybody in the street. When we walked to school I'd see old Mrs Smith out in her yard. Every day she'd be out there watering the plants and looking down the street to see if she could see what the neighbours were up to. They'd yell out to her to mind her own bloody business. She knew what everyone else was doing. We all did really.'

‘Were there any gangs around here?'

‘No, not here. There were a few ratbags down at the wharf but they never came near us. Dad would've told them to piss off. They hung around the pubs down by the docks. There was some goings-on down there though, let me tell you. This was a working-class area, full of families, and we all watched out for each other.'

This was the opposite of my life. We had moved from place to place, as if we were running from something. Every street was more dangerous than the next. But Reg never had to move. He never had to run away. It must have been good to be able to go
and sit in the room you learned to read in, and just think. To play the piano that your father had taught you to play on, thirty years earlier, would have been so good. I wanted that in my life so much, but I could never feel like that. I would never be like that. I was a gypsy and I would never have a home.

Don't get me wrong; the house would have been spooky except that the family were so nice. I wouldn't have liked to stay there alone at night. Reg's family were all members of the Spiritualist Church. His grandmother was very religious and at one time was head of the church. But they weren't practising when we met them.

Reg's family never tried to convert us to anything and I don't think their church could have dealt with us anyway. But we knew that they believed in spirits. Things like that really grabbed my sister Linda's attention. She was only thirteen or fourteen and wanted to find out all about it. Unfortunately, she went about it all the wrong way.

Linda and a few of her school friends started playing with a homemade ouija board. I'm sure they were pushing the glass around the kitchen table, answering the questions they asked with the answers they wanted.

‘Does Linda have a boyfriend?'

‘See, I told you she did.'

Now this was all fine, until one night when Mum and Reg were in bed. A few of her friends came over to get in touch with the other side. They asked me if I would join in, but I was way too scared. I didn't even want to get in touch with the other side of the street.

I was sitting in the lounge room, not far enough away for my liking. The lounge room and the kitchen were separated by a set of sliding doors, but I could hear them going through their usual questions.

‘Are there any boy ghosts here?'

All the things you would expect them to ask. Suddenly things got very scary. Linda was asking a question when the glass flew across the room and smashed against the wall.

‘Hello', I thought. ‘Is this a sign?' I was already frightened, but I'm sure I turned even whiter than before.

Linda sat with her head resting on the table, talking in a voice that I knew wasn't her own. It was like watching
The Exorcist
but that movie had not come out yet.

Next thing I knew she was up and running at the wall, smashing her head against it and putting a hole in the plaster. I had seen my dad, Jim, smash the plaster on walls before, but not with his own head. He smashed other people's heads, even Mum's head, into the wall. But this was much more frightening. Before I could look away Linda ran across the room and crashed into another wall. She was obviously being possessed by an interior decorator. Then she fell into a heap on the floor and started shaking like a leaf.

Reg got up and helped her to bed and sent her friends home. Now in those days we didn't have telephones so John ran up the road to ring a doctor.

The doctor came around as quickly as he could. Linda was still a mess, shaking on the bed. The doctor took one look at her and said, ‘She's having some sort of breakdown. I can give her a shot that will calm her down and make her sleep and we can see how she is tomorrow.'

Then he left. The shot did nothing at all; in fact, she started to get more violent, shaking and sweating.

By this time it was after midnight and we were all exhausted. We didn't know what we were going to do. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Reg's mum had arrived. No one had called her; remember, we didn't live close by. She came in and said, ‘Linda needs me, and she had better come home with me,' and off they went into the dark night.

Between Linda and all the bills that my folks couldn't pay, we stood a good chance of becoming the first family to be possessed and repossessed in the same day.

I was completely freaked out by this point as were Reg and my mum. After Linda and Reg's mum left, we all had trouble sleeping. I lay in bed with the light on in my room, and the one in the hallway on too, and jumped at every noise I heard.

We didn't hear from Reg's mum for a week or two, except to say that Linda was all right and not to worry.

When Linda came home she was calm and clear-eyed, which was strange as she had always been very wild and able to find trouble anywhere. But now she was chilled out. Of course, she was a teenage girl, so calm was not really the word for her, but for a young girl, especially one of our family, she was as calm as she could get.

She was wearing a beautiful gold cross with rubies in it around her neck. Reg was very surprised by this. The last time he had seen this cross, it had been around his grandmother's neck, the one who had been head of the Spiritualist Church. He hadn't seen it in ages – in fact, not since she had died years earlier.

He asked his mum about it and she said, ‘When Linda was recovering at my house, she kept asking who was the other woman who kept coming to see her.'

This had them worried because no one else was seeing her. But Linda kept insisting, ‘I talk to this other woman every night.'

Then once Linda was up and out of bed she spotted a photo on the wall and said to Grandma, ‘That's her, that's the woman who's been coming into my room at night.'

The woman in the photo was Reg's grandmother, who had died a few years before we joined the family. Not only that, but Linda kept asking to go to her house, which was just down the street. They couldn't work out how she even knew about this house.

Before Reg's grandmother had died she had hidden all her jewels in her house. The jewels had never been found, even though the family searched the place high and low. Reg's parents took Linda to the house, which was in ruins by this point, and she ran straight in and pulled a panel from the wall. She obviously knew exactly where to go, which had them completely baffled. Inside was all of the grandmother's jewellery and her treasures from the church, including the gold cross with rubies that she used to wear to church. They gave this cross to Linda and told her to wear it always. They told Reg that he had to watch over her too, as some very bad spirits wanted to hurt her and the cross would help keep them at bay.

Reg's grandmother had had a daughter called Linda, who'd died in Adelaide around the time our Linda was born in Scotland. Whether these two events were connected, I'm not sure, but it was spooky.

Linda told us about seeing ghosts all over the Barnes house. She said she saw them every night and they even spoke with her. Maybe it was Aunty Dorrie, who did look like a ghost to me. If I had seen one, I would have been running down the road shrieking. I never wanted to see ghosts and I certainly never wanted to talk to them. I hoped that they didn't want to talk to me either.

Life went back to normal for the family – no more spirits and no playing with them – but we didn't forget that night. It still has me rattled now, when I think back to it. Linda always wore the cross and for the next few years her life was good.

It wasn't long before we were thinking about going to our new school. The local school where we lived was called Mansfield Park Primary School. As usual I was scared about going, just because I had always been ashamed of my home and clothes and
all that. Those feelings were still the same, even though I had a nice house and new clothes.

I was in Grade 6, joining the class halfway through the year, so everyone but me knew everyone else. I sat down and the teacher said, ‘Class, this is our new pupil. His name is James Swan. Let's make him feel welcome to the school. Right, let's see who's here and who's not. Davis?'

‘Here, sir.'