Don't Judge the Kitten Heels by T E Storm

My stories are seasoned with the salt and pepper of reality yet are spiced with the intricate curry flavours of fiction. Whilst the events that loosely inspired this blog may have happened, it’s what’s imagined that’s entertaining. Although Storm’s adventures, chronicled in ‘Don’t Judge the Kitten Heels’, have ceased, for the time being at least, Jakob’s tale, ‘Don’t Judge the Bare Feet’ has begun.

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The Choice

I wasn’t running away from Lena.  I just wasn’t sure what our future would be.  I invited two St George girls to the pictures and on innocent picnics at the riverbank.  My thoughts kept steering towards Lena though.  Unfortunately, Robyn’s letters continued to arrive.  I was so confused!  Robyn admitted our tryst had been more heated than she anticipated.  She dreaded the confession; she felt she had to make to the priest to receive absolution for her supposed guilt.  She begged me to drive down to Dubbo.  She wanted to discuss our future with me.  I reluctantly agreed and thought if I saw her, we could resolve this emotional tug of war.

One Friday night, soon after my arrival at St George, I made the horrendous drive.  It took close to eight hours.  I drove in the darkness over gravel roads through kangaroo country.  I feared colliding with one of those animals.  They could hop out from anyway.  Luckily, a local girl needed a lift to Gilgandra on route.  She kept me company and awake.  I arrived at Dubbo about one on Saturday morning.

Robyn’s parents met me briefly, told Robyn to show me to my room and returned to bed.  I returned from the bathroom in my pyjamas, exhausted and ready to collapse.  I found Robyn waiting in my room and not for talking either.  I begged her to behave and to leave.  I didn’t want her father to kick me out and have nowhere else to sleep.  Robyn didn’t give up easily.  She attempted to ensnare me again on Saturday night.  She had no desire to restrain herself!  On Sunday morning, she dragged me down to the local Catholic church to meet the priest.  I quivered in my boots!

Robyn thought we should become engaged immediately and marry quickly.  At the age of twenty-two, she believed she was ‘on the shelf’.  I couldn’t believe I had landed myself in this trap.  The actual time we had spent together was a few days.  Alas, this girl wouldn’t be dissuaded from her irrational demand.  She added she’d sacrifice anything I asked, except her Catholic faith, to marry me.  Suddenly, I had a religious revelation.  My romantic confusion evaporated immediately.  I knew I couldn’t marry a Catholic.  My parents wouldn’t permit it.  Everybody who knew me, family, friends and community would treat me as a pariah.  My beloved Aunt Beris had suffered this.  Besides, I didn’t want a huge clan of children, which most Catholic families had.  I kept these thoughts to myself and said my goodbye.

As I began the long trip back to St George, heaven opened and disgorged heavy rain upon me.  The drive was hellish.  I nearly lost control of my car several times on the slippery, muddy roads.  Twelve hours later, I arrived home grateful to be alive.  No way would I drive to Dubbo again!  I was resolute I’d untie this entanglement and wrote the difficult letter to Robyn the next day.  At the time, I felt guilty that I possibly broke her heart, but with the wisdom of later maturity, I’m not sure I did.

From that moment, I resolved I was a strictly one girl guy.  I also decided neither of the St George girls weren’t for me.  Lena was though!  I just had no idea how we could be together.  I thought my dalliance with Robyn was best hidden in my memories though I did keep a faded black and white photograph of her cutting her twenty-first birthday cake as a memento.  Even though Lena and I weren’t an ‘item’ at the time, I knew I had made a mistake.  I didn’t have the courage to admit it however.  Still, Lena and her sister had danced their way down the eastern coast of Australia to Tasmania, quite some distance.  Lena opted to keep whatever happened on her holiday as her business.  Thus, the same rule applied to me.

I didn’t know what Lena had thought when she saw me running towards her a few weeks on Queen Street in Brisbane waving Balonne Council’s telegram.  She’d have seen my excited face with a grin to match.  In the euphoria of the moment, I may have picked her up and swung her around.  That said a cloud of uncertainty did rise over our relationship.  I hadn’t considered if she’d be willing to come with me or not.  Once I had moved to St George, she and I wrote to each other at least weekly.  That was a huge effort on my part because I found writing and expressing myself troublesome.  I was a numbers man not a wordsmith.  Soon, I was returning to Brisbane every few weeks to spend weekends with her.

With all my doubts gone, I concluded Lena should be part of my future and me part of hers.  We just needed a plan to make this happen.

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Escape

My life had spiralled out of my control.  The fling with Robyn had changed its course.  I was now headed towards self destruction.  Despite Robyn’s hold over me, I knew in my heart and in my head, she wasn’t Lena.  Lena had returned from gallivanting around the country.  She was keen to resume our relationship; yet she had become a different girl.  She had developed a better sense of herself and of what she wanted from life.  Her eagerness to tie our knot had dissipated.  I also realised how much I had missed her.

I physically appeared at work daily but had succumbed mentally to the monotony my assigned tasks involved.  To complete my apprenticeship, there were another two years of such boredom to endure.  Then some interesting work might come my way and my wages would marginally improve.  I struggled to meet my car repayments and couldn’t manage to pay what Mother asked for board.  Thankfully, Lena never expected much from me.  My studies were slipping behind.  A full night’s sleep was a rare occasion.  Late night college commutes to home and the weekend dances left me exhausted.  I just wanted ‘out’ of everything and a different life.  Somewhere deep inside me, a metaphoric explosion was amassing.  Up to this point in my life, I had fought to succeed at every challenge thrown at me.  I wouldn’t allow myself to fail now!

College had begun for the third year.  On Sunday afternoons, Phil and I studied together on my parents’ veranda.  So, one such afternoon, he and I verbally tossed about my dilemmas.  We discussed the fortunes of our work colleagues, who had extricated themselves from their Railway indentures.  Dad’s ‘Sunday Truth’ lay on the table upside down near us.  This newspaper was a working class rag.  My eyes mindlessly glanced at an advertisement hidden amongst the various unsavoury classifieds on its back page.  It was for a job, but not the sort of job that belonged in this rag.

Balonne Shire Council had advertised for a ‘draughtsman’, spelt in the English way not the Australian, at St George.  I had never heard of this place.  I commented, I didn’t care where the job was located.  It was somewhere else to where I currently was.  Nowhere could be worse except Dubbo of course!  I dug out my old school atlas and found the remote spot of St George.  Fortunately, it was in Queensland though hundreds of miles away in the west.  I noticed it was close to Dirranbandi where I had travelled as a child.  Consequently, I thought St George couldn’t be too bad a place.  Phil and I mulled over the problem that I wasn’t yet a fully qualified draftsman.  We agreed I should apply anyway.  I grabbed a sheet of paper and promptly wrote an application letter.  This I mailed the next day before I could doubt my decision.  I then filed the job to the back of my mind; as I believed it to be a hopeless cause.

One afternoon some weeks later, the Bethania Station Master hollered to my father at the train station.  ‘Hey Arthur, a telegram arrived for your boy.’  Dad was flummoxed because telegrams usually meant bad news.  Fortunately, national service hadn’t rebegan.  I hadn’t mentioned the job to him.  The stationmaster added, ‘Jakob has been offered a very well paid job.’  The sum of money mentioned confounded both the Station Master and Dad.  The Station Master didn’t earn anywhere near the amount despite his years of service to the Railway.  My father was much further down the financial pecking order than him.  Later that night, Dad handed me the telegram.  Balonne Shire Council had offered me a salary approximately three times my Railway wages of £1,444pa.  I couldn’t believe the offer nor the money.  I hadn’t even had a telephone call about the role nor an interview.

Of course, I instantly decided to accept.  There was one hitch however, quite an insurmountable one.  The Railway could legally refuse to release me from my indenture.  I wrote a very polite resignation letter with every grovel word I could insert.  The next morning, I was so nervous; my legs felt like jelly and my stomach squeamish.  My financial survival was on the line.  I handed my resignation to my supervisor.  Later, the Section Engineer summoned me.  He looked me up and down then glared at me.  The air was frigid.  He grunted something unintelligible.  A few hours later, a message filtered down through the ranks that he had approved my request.  I hot footed to the post office to send a telegram to accept the Council’s job.

A couple weeks later, I stood before the whole Chief Engineer’s Office for my send off.  The hat had made the circuit.  People generally kicked in two shillings each.  The Chief Clerk handed me the hat proceeds and made a belittling speech.  He said I’d fail in my new role and wouldn’t be welcome back in Railway.  As I had yet to develop confidence in myself and abilities, his words bruised my fledging ego badly.

My move to St George was fraught with risk.  I had accepted a job I wasn’t qualified to hold.  The world was also changing around me and was an uncertain place.  The Vietnam War was underway and Australia had joined in 1962.  At Easter, 1963, I drove my new car into the Outback where I was hours from anywhere civilised.  In fact, I had carried a four gallon drum of fuel with me in case I couldn’t refuel on route.  I arrived mid afternoon on Easter Monday.  The environment was dry.  Though summer had gone, its heat lingered.  I knew nobody and left one girl I really liked.  At least, St George was miles from both Lena and Robyn.  Perhaps, the distance would give me some perspective about my romantic entanglements and how to untangle them.

I drove around the town before pulling up outside the boarding house.  Whilst the town was primitive, it was clean and well laid out.  I decided I’d make it my place.  I felt free, free to determine where my life went from here.

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Ambush

Christmas 1962 was coming.  My second year with the Railway and at college would soon finish.  Thus, my annual leave was due.  Lena was away travelling.  We had agreed to put our relationship on hold.  I hadn’t any issue with this except that I was bored.  Hence, I decided I’d go on a holiday too.  Though, I didn’t want to tramp on trains again!  My good mate, study buddy and fellow cricketer, Phil, was also eager to escape somewhere.  He, another cadet engineer with the Chief Engineer’s Office, wanted some space from a typist in the Clerk’s Office.  Alas, neither of us had much money.

I suggested a Roylen Cruise around the Whitsunday Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.  Whilst Roylen Cruises weren’t like today’s luxury ones, they were popular.  The cruise company had converted some World War Two torpedo boats for tourist use.  These accommodated twenty-four paying passengers plus staff.  With their small bunk berths, the boats weren’t known for their comfort.  They certainly didn’t accommodate couples and families.  Consequently, they were my generation’s party boats for young singles.  With summer being cyclone season with potentially rough seas, these cruises were currently cheap and affordable to skint lads like us.  With meals included, we only needed to budget for a drink or two each a day.  So, we booked a ten day cruise and planned to use our annual rail passes to travel to Mackay, the cruise’s departure point.

Our excitement on our first day immediately evaporated.  Phil and I thought we had chosen the worst holiday ever.  The winds from a cyclone’s tail whipped the sea up into a hellish turmoil.  Soon, nearly all the paying passengers were seasick.  I had never seen skin so green before.  Luckily, I wasn’t ill.  Consequently, I was recruited to the bucket crew.  This wasn’t fun either.  The bucket crew threw buckets of seawater over the unfortunates, who didn’t reach the boat’s side to spew.  The crew then handed the dredged unfortunates empty buckets if they were too sick to move.  I gave a very ill girl from Dubbo a bucket but didn’t introduce myself.

The sea calmed the next day.  Phil and I changed our opinion.  Idyllic islands, clear water and gorgeous young women in bathing suits surrounded us.  Some girls even wore bikinis; these being the height of fashion yet considered risqué.  Over the next nine days, the cruise visited the resorts of Hayman, Long, Dunk, South Mole and Brampton Islands as well as the uninhabited, pristine White Haven Beach.  Phil and I had the best time ever!  We ate well and drank vodkas and orange juice; a drink I wouldn’t touch now.  We swam, snorkelled, beachcombed over the coral reefs and beaches and fished (which was permitted then).  The reef and the fishes were a wonderment of colours beyond my imagination.  We teamed up with everybody else to launch cross boat raids on other Roylen boats anchored in the vicinity.  Everybody had brilliant fun dowsing each other’s boats with water using long fire hoses.  At night, the crew (except for the barman) made themselves scarce.  People switched to ‘quieter’ activities.  Couples formed and snuck off to secluded spots in the darkness.  Of course, I did too with a lass from Newcastle and enjoyed the uncomplicated magic of a holiday fling.  She and I understood this was a perfect moment in time that wouldn’t continue.

After the cruise, Phil and I stayed in Mackay for a night before catching a train back to reality.  I had said goodbye to the Newcastle lass and Phil his own farewell.  On our lonesome and at a loss for the evening, we decided to see if somebody else from the cruise was loitering around the waterfront.  We ran into the girl and her friend from Dubbo.  This girl, I had surreptitiously checked out whilst on the boat.  She wasn’t tall.  Yet, she had lovely curves that her swimsuit highlighted.  She introduced herself as Robyn.  I quickly discovered the girls were three years older than us.  They didn’t mind.  Instead, they asked us up to their unit for drinks.  They had a bottle of Pimms.  We didn’t care what they drank!  That night, the four of us sat on the carpet and talked about anything and everything for hours.  Eventually, Phil returned to our unit and Robyn’s friend crept off to bed.

I liked talking to Robyn.  She mentioned she was engaged with her wedding to happen soon.  Thus, this holiday was her last hurrah.  She said she was Catholic and committed to her faith.  Accordingly, she had taken a celibacy vow like many other Catholic girls did.  I, a Protestant lad, knew she couldn’t enjoy anything beyond a good night kiss.  Her fiancé was consequently very frustrated and grumpy.  I didn’t argue the point one way or the other.  Everybody had their own beliefs.  On that note and given the lateness, I stood to leave, wanting to grab some sleep.  I leant to give her a chaste kiss.  Alas, we became entangled together.  I didn’t see this coming!  After some time passed, I disentangled myself from her.  Robyn wrote down the Gold Coast address where she and her friend were booked to stay for the next week.  I left feeling bewildered.  I hadn’t experienced such physical fervency before.

I ruminated for the next two days on the train.  This girl bamboozled me!  She said one thing yet did the opposite.  Once at home, I immediately jumped into my car and decided to find Unit 308 Sea Breeze, Cavill Avenue, Surfers Paradise.  Robyn opened the door and inside I went to temptation.

I believed she saw me as a flitting fling, best remembered secretly yet never acknowledged publicly.  I assumed she’d return to her life and fiancé.  I’d never see her again like the lass from Newcastle; sad as that was.  I was wrong!  She wrote letters to me, and so frequently, I couldn’t keep up my replies.  Neither, I did have anything interesting to write.  Hers however were hair raising to me!

Robyn cancelled her wedding and ended her engagement.  She though hadn’t decided what to tell the guests.  She blamed me for this debacle and her consequent embarrassment.  She thought I should extricate her from it and restore her reputation.  In other words, I should uplift my life and join her in Dubbo.  I felt trapped!  I was merely a lad wearing men’s trousers!  I couldn’t understand why a very short tryst should determine her and my futures.  Nor could I grasp why the tryst was sufficient reason to ditch her fiancé, somebody she supposedly had loved.  Although my Brisbane life was disheartening, I couldn’t throw away the hard two years I’d endured towards my Railway apprenticeship and my college studies.  Dubbo offered me nothing.  Whilst I was barely treading ‘water’ with my job and studies, I didn’t want to drown in the unknown.  Besides, Lena would return soon.  I wished to dance with her more than anything else.

Before the brief respite of my summer holiday, I lived a mostly dismal existence (except for dancing).  Now a worse one had ambushed me with no apparent way out.

[testormblog]

Lena

I missed Lena!  I didn’t think I would.  I called her from call boxes often.  Whilst I still went dancing, I couldn’t shift this girl from my thoughts.  I didn’t take others home nor ask them on dates.

Lena reappeared on my scene.  So much happiness bubbled up inside me.  My lass was back!  Her aunt and uncle took her in.  Luckily for us, her aunt didn’t believe in an eleven o’clock curfew.

I quickly learnt that Lena was a determined lass.  She could be feisty when circumstances didn’t fall her way.  In little time at all, she decided I’d be her man for ‘keeps’.  I wasn’t so sure.  I couldn’t understand why other than for my Elvis like looks and fancy feet.  I didn’t earn enough to court her properly.  She kindly paid for her ticket when we saw a movie.  She earnt more than me yet was two years younger.  This sorely hurt my ego.  She worked as an accounting machinist at the State Government’s Mines Department.

Despite my misgivings, Lena and I were equally pegged.  We both came from the country; she from a small spit on the map a half day’s drive north of Brisbane.  Our families were humble and poor.  Her parents owned a small general store and ran the local telephone exchange.  They worked from dawn to evening.  Like me, despite her circumstances, she had completed junior high school.  I figured out fast she was smart too.  However, there was one big difference between us.  She had been blessed with a happy childhood.  Her parents loved each other, she and her siblings.

Lena invited me home to meet her parents.  I didn’t realise how earnest her aspirations were.  Once a month, she and her sister caught the train after work Friday to Isis Junction then connected with a rail motor to Childers.  They arrived at 8am Saturday morning when they were collected by their father.  Then, on Sunday, their parents drove them about half way back to Cooroy where they met the train to Brisbane.  The trip hardly seemed worth the effort.  So, one long weekend, I decided to go along for the train ride.  Lena was going home alone this time.  I’d have her attention for the whole weekend!  I had met other girls’ parents before yet had remained fancy free.

I liked Lena’s parents immediately.  Despite her aspirations, they didn’t treat me as anything but a friend.  They certainly didn’t give me the ‘third degree’.  Nor did they encroach on Lena’s and my ‘space’.  They were too busy serving customers in the shop and connecting calls on the telephone exchange.  To them, I appeared to be a clean cut, well spoken young man with polite manners.  I didn’t drink, swear or smoke.  I certainly didn’t allude to my dysfunctional family.

Lena’s mother struck me as being a genuine lady not a pretend one like my mother.  She clearly had been educated from the way she presented herself.  Lena’s father hadn’t had the same advantage in life.  However, he was of generous spirit and humour.  I noted they both worked hard and as a team, unlike my parents.  I also saw that they were the backbone of their small community.  Also, unlike my home, their house and shop were spotlessly clean and well run.  Lena’s mother prepared nicely presented, tasty meals.  My mother slopped whatever on a plate.  Meals were civilised affairs.  Everybody ate together and engaged in polite conversation.  On the Sunday, Lena’s mother packed a picnic.  Her father then drove us all in his new Holden FB station wagon to the beach at Pialba.  It was a real family outing where everybody, including Lena’s two younger siblings, enjoyed being together.  This was an entirely new experience for me as were the delectable delights spread on the picnic rug to eat.

I accompanied Lena home a few more times.  I was always made welcome.  Though one trip, Lena and I very nearly went to heaven on route.  The trip would become one of my scariest memories.  The Booyal publican offered Lena and I a lift from Brisbane.  That meant we’d arrive home earlier on Friday evening.  Well, the publican was blind drunk when he collected us.  On the way, he even stopped to tank up some more.  To our horror, the man insisted on driving at least one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour on the poorly constructed country roads.  We gripped the dash of his Ford Biscayne.  We had no seat beats.  When the Ford hit the old wooden bridges at speed, it jack knifed sideways and slid across them.  I volunteered multiple times that I could drive but to no avail.  We were both nauseous with fear on arrival in Booyal.  Never again, I said to Lena!

By the time Lena turned seventeen and I nineteen, she had grown serious about my long term intentions towards her.  It was 1962.  She thought we should marry but hadn’t thought about what our future together would be.  I however did.  My future didn’t hold much promise.  My job was soulless.  I lacked direction and purpose.  I had nothing to share with her!  Neither could my wage support both of us.  Yet, by law, Lena would lose her public service job on marriage.  She made me happy; my job and poverty didn’t!  So, whilst she was my girl; I wasn’t keen to make her my wife.  To me, our relationship was great as it was.  We had lots of fun together and no responsibilities.  To me, marriage meant yelling at and arguing with each other, as my parents did, usually about money.  I didn’t want that to be us.  I couldn’t grasp that married people could be happy together.

Neither did I comprehend how Lena felt about her life and prospects.  She didn’t admit that she lacked purpose too.  Society, government and families expected young women to marry.  That was their purpose.  Unless, they were born into wealth, they had no alternative.  Their intelligence was ignored.  In Lena’s case, her parents could only afford to send her elder sister to teachers’ college.  She felt transitory.  Lena boarded with relatives as she had done mostly since her early teens.  Whilst she liked the aunt and uncle she lived with now, her uncle was a war damaged man, both physically and psychologically.  To add to this, Lena wasn’t a city girl.  Yet, if she did return home to Booyal, she’d marry a farm labourer.  She really didn’t like rough working hands nor the thought of scrubbing filthy clothes.

Eventually, my reticence led to us having a huge argument over the telephone, one Saturday.  I said I wasn’t ready to think about marriage.  Lena interpreted that statement to mean I didn’t care for her.  To make the situation worse, I stood reeling in a public call box, publicly humiliated.  I felt emotionally shredded.  After some hours of aimless emotional turmoil, I jumped in my car and drove into Brisbane to see her.  I thought we could resolve our dilemma.  Her aunt met me with tears in her eyes.  This lady really liked me.  She explained that Lena had packed up her things and left with her parents twenty minutes before.  I jumped back in my car and sped after them.  An hour later, I caught them at Caboolture.  I flashed my lights at them.  Since there were only a few vehicles on the road, her father knew the vehicle behind was me thus stopped.  By the side of the road, I pleaded my case.  Lena’s parents understood my position and couldn’t see what Lena’s rush was.  They had married when Lena’s mother was twenty-three and her father thirty-five.  They were common sense people.  Whilst I thought my future looked glum, they thought it was better than that of a farm labourer’s.  I at least earned a steady wage; that kept hunger away.  They reasoned with Lena and decided she should go home with them.

Six weeks later, Lena returned with her younger sister in tow.  Her elder sister was the serious one; the younger sister was the fun one.  They rented a small flat.  Finally, Lena had her own place, her space and her rules.  She liked this independence.  She had a better sense of herself and had realised she had the ability to determine where her life led.  She began, with her elder sister, to plan a long trip travelling through Australia’s southern states.  Our relationship continued but at a slower pace.

At the time, we were two naïve kids on the cusp of adulthood where society and its norms were beginning to change around us.

[testormblog]

The Sweeter Gender

Girls everywhere competed for my attention.  Not only could I swing them around the dance floor, I had wheels to take them home!  In the country, they arrived with families, and in the city, on public transport.  Both of which finished up earlier than they wanted.

With Margaret gone from the scene and me nearly eighteen, I was looking for a girl with ‘moves’ like mine.  Just maybe, I’d call her mine too.  She wasn’t so easy to find, however.  Unfortunately, many girls’ feet didn’t cooperate in unison.  Those girls, who did, if they were ‘babes’, were chased by all the single lads.  These girls controlled this game of ‘cat and mouse’.  They may have been the ‘mice’, but they sometimes taunted likely lads like me.  They expected us to assert our interests then they played ‘hard to get’.  The country girls weren’t so coy but the Brisbane girls were.

The country girls wanted husbands.  On the last dance of the night, they’d quickly ditch their friends if potential contenders asked to drive them home.  This could be troublesome because they usually lived in the ‘sticks’, so quite distance away.  Since I always danced until the band called time, I often drove my last partner home.  In summer, the sun peeped above the horizon when we arrived there.  This potentially led to percussions for the lass, myself or both.  I thought a shotgun marriage was a hefty price to pay for that last dance.  One morning in Beaudesert, I watched a girl walk in a farmhouse’s front door and her father walk out the back door to go milking.

The city girls were more reserved with their intentions.  These girls attended the dances in small groups.  One of which would find a ride home for all of them.  We, lads, knew if you drove a girl home, you also drove her friends, who hadn’t ‘scored’, home too.  Some nights, I drove all over Brisbane until only my choice remained in the car.  Taking nurses home to the Brisbane General dormitory at 3am was especially tricky.  They always broke their curfew and had to climb over the two metre high gate in darkness.  I had to give them ‘legs up’.  Thankfully, security spotlights didn’t exist back then.  If, at the end of the dance, only one girl hopped in my car, I knew I could ask her for a date.

I played the ‘field’ at a hectic pace for more than a year, watching the sun rise most Saturday and Sunday mornings.  A girl, called Carol, drew my eyes the moment she appeared at the Blind Institute one night.  She came from Kin Kin, a small country town.  She had danced at the bush dances since childhood like me.  Carol only smiled at lads, who were brilliant dancers.  Fortunately, one was me!  From then on, she frequently but not exclusively danced with me when she sporadically came to the Blind.  Every single lad fought for her attention and fought even harder for the chance to drive her home.  I won the battle a few times.  Carol kissed like she danced!  Alas, I realised she was playing the field like the lads were.  I didn’t like that much.

Eventually, my frenetic life with work, second year engineering studies and dancing caught up with me.  I became ill with the mumps and was laid up in bed for a few weeks.  When I returned to the Blind in June, Carol was nowhere to be seen.  Standing at the door, I searched the room for another of my regular dancing partners.  My eyes fell on a girl in a tangerine taffeta dress.  She gave me the ‘look’, which meant ‘Come dance with me’.  I hadn’t seen her before.  The girl had shapely long legs and a slim figure.  Perhaps, she could dance, I thought.  Maybe, I could sweep her up in my arms before the other lads noticed her.

Oh my, could this girl dance!

We danced several dances together and introduced ourselves by first names only.  Her name was Lena.  Other than that, we really didn’t communicate.  I never told any girl too much about myself straight up.  Neither did I ask to take her home.  ‘Go slow’ was my modus operandi.  Besides, Lena would have thought me too forward.  The spark would be extinguished before it could be lit.

The next Saturday at the Blind, Lena turned up again.  She and I danced a few dances.  I didn’t volunteer her a lift home that night either.  I’d have ended up with her sister and friends too.  There wouldn’t have been the possibility of a sneaky kiss.  Besides, Carol had reappeared.  During the following week, Lena found her way into my thoughts.  I weighed up my chances with her and Carol.  Which girl should I pursue, that was a very good question!  The competition to win Carol was considerable.  If I won her, I’d always be watching out for my replacement.

On the fourth Saturday, I danced with Lena, I drove her home, and from then on, did so every Saturday night.  Fortunately, she lived close to the City, at a Methodist Church hostel for young women at Mitchelton.  Unfortunately, the hostel’s matron, an old spinster, stringently applied a curfew of 11pm, much to our chagrin.  Soon, I collected Lena beforehand too.  This meant we danced exclusively with each other all night.

One night, I telephoned Lena at the hostel to ask her for a date.  This was quite an undertaking as I had to do this from a public call box at college.  There was a queue of other lads behind me with the same mission on their minds.  Another girl answered the telephone.  She said Lena had been rushed to the Brisbane General Hospital in an ambulance.  Lena had to have emergency surgery for appendicitis.  I visited her at the hospital and found her in a public ward surrounded by a coterie of inquisitive old women.  She was very quiet.  She said her operation had been very traumatic.  It had left her abdomen severely scarred.  She added, she’d need to recuperate at home with her parents.  That meant she’d move out of the hostel and leave Brisbane.  She was uncertain about how this would affect ‘us’.

[testormblog]

Smooth Moves

My car enabled me to dance with twice as many girls on a Saturday night.  I began at one dance at 9pm then departed at 11.30pm to walk into the second at midnight for free.  Now that I had wheels, I decided to check out the City dances and meet girls I hadn’t known since puberty.  These dances started earlier at 8pm.  So I danced in the City until 11.30pm then hightailed it to a country dance.  During college breaks, I danced nearly every night in the City: Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at the Blind Institute, a few Wednesdays at the South Brisbane Library Hall and Thursdays at Cloudland.  At each venue, I hooked up with my favourite partners.  There always seemed to be new girls smiling at me too, hoping that one of my regulars had become irregular.  I’d dance with these lasses in a progressive like the Tap Gypsy Tap, and if they danced well, lined them up for later dances.

Dad’s cousins invited me to join them at the South Brisbane Library dances.  The girls weren’t good Lutherans either.  This dance hall was a classy joint.  The men wore tuxedoes and dinner suits and the women long ballroom dresses, a cut above our best clothes.  We thought we had stepped back in time to World War One when we saw the dance steps danced and heard the music played.  The crowd danced ‘old time’ sets with quadrilles, like the Lancers on their toes, and with balletic footwork.  The people were mostly fossils from the same era, reliving memories of their youth.  After a few times, I decided my moves were too fast for them.  Besides, unrelated girls beckoned me elsewhere.

The City dance halls had their own unique tempos where the beats of their music matched their dance programmes.  These were different to those of the country dances.  The Blind Institute, my favourite, played upbeat music with a fast rhythm to accompany Waltzes, the Foxtrot and the Quickstep.  It also dimmed the lights, which allowed a little sideline handholding.  The Blind’s band kept to a similar programme of roughly twenty different dances a night.  It always played Donnie Brooks’ song, Mission Bell, the crowd’s favourite.  About a hundred couples took to the floor for most dances.  However, the steps to the Jazz Waltz and Quick Step baffled most.  Only about ten couples tried and half of them should have sat it out.  Perhaps, these two dances had something to do with natural rhythm.  When I’d eventually find that girl with the right rhythm, the Jazz Waltz would become our lifelong favourite.

Cloudland was built to be dreamlike.  It had once been part of a fun park.  To go there, people caught a rickety, open air cable car.  They then walked through the dance hall’s iconic arch entry.  The hall had domed skylights, which the stars twinkled through, and chandeliers that sparkled.  Up above its specially sprung dance floor, there were private alcoves with luxury upholstered seating.  Its dances were posh affairs where a proper orchestra played slower downbeat music to complement the sophisticated New Vogue dances danced like the Swing Waltz.

Before long, I wanted to improve my moves.  I only knew ‘old time ballroom’ dances.  The dance hall grapevine said Sandy Robinson’s Dancing Academy was the place to go on a Saturday morning.  It held classes at the Ritz Ballroom at Petrie Bight where the City became the seedy nightspot of the Valley.  I thought the time was convenient.  The classes wouldn’t interfere with my Saturday nights nor Sunday cricket.  So, I rolled up alone and hoped to find a girl with two good feet.  The academy taught Latin American dances like the Rhumba, Samba and Cha Cha.  I thought learning these hot, new moves at a faster rhythm was super cool.  The faster beat was in line with the times.  I listened to Rock and Roll on the FJ’s radio nonstop.  The instructor split the students into small groups and gave a few quick lessons for the Rhumba.  He then separated the girls and boys to each end of the room.  On his signal, the boys broke into a stampede towards the girls and acted like cavemen.  They dragged their chosen girls off to the corners.  Such behaviour wasn’t my style!  I preferred to quietly observe the girls from a distance then choose.  Unfortunately, the remaining girls had short legs, rotund figures or no ability.  I already knew their leg length indicated their ability to dance.  Rotundness usually didn’t help their cause either.  Several stampedes later, I scored a dark, long haired, Spanish looking girl with ability and obviously Latin rhythm.

Unbeknownst to me, Sandy Robertson provided the background dancing troupe to Six O’clock Rock, shown on the ABC television channel on Saturday nights.  Johnny O’Keefe regularly appeared on the show.  After the band act, the Sandy Robertson dance clip appeared as the finale act.  Well, a few lessons later at the academy, a talent scout suddenly appeared and tapped my shoulder but not my partner’s.  He asked me and a few others to return for a filming take that afternoon.  I went along to the afternoon practices and film takes for a couple weeks.  Regrettably, my assigned partner wasn’t the best dancer so I was probably edited out of the film clips.  Then, the filming shifted to Tuesday nights at the television studio at Mt Cootha.  This conflicted with my Maths One class at college.  Alas, my television fame was sadly short lived.

My moves might have been smooth, but they weren’t going to give me a smooth ride through life.

[testormblog]

Dancing Feet

Whilst fashion was my mother’s god, dancing was her vice.  She, a Protestant, could attend country dances though social mores dictated she, a married woman, be accompanied.  Alas, my father wouldn’t take her.  The Lutheran Church considered dancing to be a heathen practice; but that wasn’t Dad’s argument.  Saturday evenings, he drank beer with his mates then went to bed early ready for Sunday cricket.  Their marriage had become an outward pretence to avoid social stigma.  They had no way out of it.

When Waterford Primary School decided to fundraise with a monthly dance, Mother’s footsteps picked up a beat.  The community hall had reopened with the rebuilt Logan River Bridge’s completion.  She could go dancing again.  She hadn’t been since my brother’s birth, a few years previous.  She could wear her fancy dresses and catch a few bygone boyfriends’ eyes.  Her quandary was how to avoid the local gossips’ scrutiny and consequent humiliation.  Besides, nasty gossip would destroy her dressmaking business.  So, her eyes fell my way, her only male blood relative.  I was ten years old.  Afterall, I should be going to the dance to support my school.  Country dances were family activities.  Her ploy, to teach me to dance, would protect her dignity perfectly.  This would become the one thing she’d teach me, I’d be grateful for, even if it became my vice too.

Just before 9pm, we walked to the community hall, one and half kilometres away, along a gravel road.  We returned the same way at 1.30am.  Mother carried her good shoes then hid her old ones outside the hall.  We left my annoying young brother sleeping at home with Dad.  Mother was happy for that rare moment!

Soon, we regularly attended the bimonthly school dances at the hall held by the Waterford and Logan Reserve Schools.  Various male somebodies in cars picked us up and dropped us off near home.  I kept my lips zipped.  The dances were popular.  No other local Saturday night entertainment existed.  At the suppers, everybody also caught up on news.  I looked forward to the thickly iced cakes.  Mother had never been so supportive of community activities before.

A pianist and an inebriated drummer played the music at the Waterford School dance.  I suspected Mother had a memorable history with the pianist’s husband.  Although she and he discreetly hid their mutual affections, she always saved a few dances for him.  He had to dance with somebody!  The locally acclaimed Watts family three piece band from Beenleigh fired up the dancefloor at the Logan Reserve School’s dance with its drummer, saxophonist and pianist.

Mother danced well enough for the local scene.  She held her posture straight and always looked elegant.  I learned her lessons and from somewhere unknown inherited natural grace.  When Mother didn’t dance with me, men vied for her attention.  If their hands or feet ever ventured where these shouldn’t, she ignored them for forevermore.

The taller I grew; the keener the girls became to dance with me.  I spoke politely to them, held them respectfully and never stood on their feet.  I impressed them with reverse turns and double or triple pivots.  I promised each of them two or three dances a night.  This made them happy.  They dressed too fine to be wall flowers or worse to be groped all over by buffoons.  By thirteen, I hitched lifts with other families to the five dance halls within a thirty kilometre radius and had regular partners at each of these.  These halls ran their own programmes of old time dances.  I was keen to master the different dance steps and perhaps add my own spins.  With the Canberra Two Step, I added a reverse turn to my partners’ delights.  Mother couldn’t shut the door she opened!

When I was fourteen, a vibrant lass made a quick step towards me at the Logan Reserve School’s dance.  She was the pianist’s daughter, Margaret.  Though we didn’t dance exclusively with each other, we became the best duo on the floor, she with her musical ear and I with the leading feet.  Except once, when we attempted a pivot.  We slipped and ended up a tangle of bodies on the floor with our legs and Margaret’s dress in the air.  This earnt much laughter from the onlookers.  My school girlfriend, Lou Lou, probably heard about those antics.  Lou hated that she was forbidden to enjoy this form of fun.

When the annual ball season swung around, my calendar filled quickly.  Most local balls were held at the Beenleigh hall; it being large and grand by community standards.  The Masons, the Catholics and the Anglicans all organised debutante balls to introduce their young women to society.  The debutants were presented to high ranking clergy, in reality old codgers, and were photographed for the local newspaper.  These events were posh with the girls’ parents spending much money on beautiful gowns.  The girls also needed well mannered male escorts, who could dance.  Most knew I’d willingly oblige.  My fine figure and two dancing feet appeared to excuse me from owning a suit.  I just stepped away whilst they were presented.

By the time I was seventeen and Lou Lou a ‘has been’, Margaret was now really part of my scene with us seen on dates elsewhere.  Yet, every other young, single, local male competed for a night in her advance diary.  She was a ‘cracker’ of a girl in both looks and humour.  Alas, she was two years older than me.  The era dictated she find a husband yet I was too young to be one.  Neither did I want to be one.  I just wanted to dance with pretty girls and to show off my fancy footwork.  Besides, I couldn’t match the depth of my competitors’ pockets.  So, Margaret found herself a husband, a rather non descript fellow I thought.  Later in life, she sought me out at the school reunion and at a family funeral.  We politely conversed and smiled graciously at each other, wondering at what might have been.  Alas, my future wife would be an even better dancer.

[testormblog]

At the Railway’s Mercy

Nearly everybody including me, who lived beyond Brisbane’s boundaries, relied on trains for transportation.  Trams didn’t run outside the city’s perimeter.  Whilst motor vehicles had increased in number since the fifties, regional roads were still built for horse and cart traffic.  This reliance made the Railway a powerful organisation.  Such monopoly, its’ executives believed would continue forever.

The Railway treated its employees, passengers and freight customers alike with condescension.  It transported almost everything everywhere on its own timetable: the living, their animals, the dead and anything these needed for their existence and business.  It brought mail from all corners of the state to the General Post Office in Brisbane for sorting and onward travel.  People accepted their deliveries would arrive whenever and in whatever condition these eventually did, having passed through multiple pairs of hands.

The Railway’s lines crisscrossed the length and breadth of the state.  Even tinpot communities of a few hundred people had stations manned with staff and permanent track maintenance crews.  The Railway’s costs to operate as well as to maintain its infrastructure and to build more greatly exceeded the normal person’s comprehension.  Notwithstanding its volume of traffic, it didn’t earn a profit with the deficit of thousands of pounds footed by the taxpayers.  They didn’t complain.  Accordingly, the Railway saw no reason why it should change its antiquated, inefficient practices.

Every week day, I joined the thousands of its passengers.  Those days that I began my journey at Bethania Station, I waited for a suburban rattler pulled by a PB15 steam engine to arrive at 6.25 am.  Usually, the train came on time as it should have given that the station was its first stop.  I stepped up from the low platform on to a carriage’s running board and grabbed the metal handles to climb into one of the train’s six second class carriages.

Inside, I looked for the least dirty seat and brushed the coal dust from it.  Some people sat on the advertisement section of their newspapers.  I wasn’t sure which was worse on one’s backside, a coal smudge or an advertisement for unmentionables.  A few men smoked cigarettes and pipes even though the carriage may have been designated as nonsmoking.  Smoke was both outside and inside; there wasn’t any difference.  At least the nicotine smell cloaked the unwashed smell of some passengers.  The ticket snapper soon came along with the hope I was a fare evader.  This was not so and never so!  The guard leant out from the rear carriage and waited for the station master’s hand signal.  Upon receiving this, he waved his green flag and blew his whistle.  The engine driver released the mighty steam engine’s brakes and engaged its drive wheels.  The train lurched forward and began its slow thirty-two kilometre journey to South Brisbane Station.

As a child, I loved train rides to Brisbane.  As a young man, the opposite applied.  The route rarely varied so the daily scenes outside the carriage window didn’t either.  After thousands of journeys, I barely glanced at them anymore.  The constant clicky clack of the train’s steel wheels numbed my mind into a state of lethargy.  I usually battled to stay awake as one never knew what crooked characters were passengers too.  Everybody generally was suspicious of everybody else unless they knew them.  Consequently, I didn’t engage in conversations with strangers.  Whilst some people hid behind their newspapers, I didn’t take out a text book from my bag.  The train’s constant noise and movement as well as passenger interruptions made concentration difficult.

The journey was like a trip through history.  The train chugged through open country, over the Logan River and across the biggest bridge between Brisbane and Bethania.  Supposedly, steam engines faster than the PB15 were too heavy to cross the aging timber bridge.  The train stopped for a passenger at Loganlea sometimes.  This small farming hamlet existed as it did last century.  Onwards, the train steamed into the current century to Kingston, the area’s commercial hub where a prosperous butter factory operated and a once illustrious gold mine had existed.  Despite the fixed gold price, the mine hadn’t turned a profit.  Rumours lingered from its heyday that the miners themselves had pocketed the gold and become rich.  Alas, they left behind an environmental debacle for the politicians to resolve.  Next, at Woodridge, the train filled up with workers.  The place was posh in name only.  The government had encouraged migrants to settle there; yet had failed to plan a town or services for them.  This failure would condemn it and its residents to future impoverishment.

I absentmindedly watched more stations flit by.  At Runcorn, the foundations of the wartime military warehouses were still visible.  Later, the Bradford Kendall heavy machinery foundry would be built on them.  During World War Two, the surrounding suburbs had been the military’s manufacturing hub for equipment and armaments.  Onwards, the train chugged to Rocklea which perennial floods attempted to wash away.  It then picked up speed and ran express to South Brisbane.  At Moorooka, I glanced at the interstate goods yards, colloquially called Clapham Junction, where a long line of retired Bayer Garrett steam engines had been parked on a track indefinitely.  During the war, troops had erected a tent city close to here.  As the train passed Park Road Station, Boggo Road Gaol loomed above with its gloomy Victorian architecture, home to the perpetrators of heinous crimes.  At least, they saw the sunlight whilst working in the gardens.

The steam train thundered through the only tunnel on the route.  Anyone who forgot to raise the rattly glass windows beforehand ended up covered in soot and coal dust.  After nineteen stations, the train screeched to a halt at South Brisbane Station and disgorged hundreds of passengers.  A mass of bodies charged down the stairs to the street.  People boarded trams to the City or walked instead past the fish board, along the polluted Brisbane River and its docks then across Victoria Bridge.  The smell was nauseating.

Unfortunately, the whole return journey awaited me if I wasn’t at college that night.  I couldn’t believe that people endured this monotony for the duration of their working lives.  I wasn’t yet eighteen and had already decided I didn’t like adult life or the big city very much.  I also yearned for some respite from the Railway’s and its schedule’s control over my daily existence.  My childhood romance with it was waning.

[testormblog]

Where Can I Sleep?

The Station Master’s discovery of me asleep in the railway carriage forced me to find a bed in Brisbane for college nights.  If somebody else had found me like a copper, I could have been arrested for vagrancy even though I hadn’t intended to sleep overnight in the carriage.

Mother mentioned she had a friend at Sunnybank, who’d give me bed and breakfast for five shillings a night.  The minute Mother said ‘friend’, I should have been suspicious.  This friend I hadn’t heard of previously.  Mother had probably met this supposed friend on her most recent train trip to Brisbane.  My desperation won out however.  I could stumble into bed at eleven yet catch my usual train from Sunnybank station, much later at 7.30 am.  The arrangement seemed like a reasonable solution.

The next week, I walked from the train station with my small kit bag and a piece of paper with the address.  It was 10 pm.  Whilst I was familiar with the road, I didn’t know the house.  I arrived at the address and looked twice at the ramshackle hovel and its overgrown surrounds.  Surely not!  I knocked on the door because I had nowhere else to go.  The door creaked open a little.  A haggard, sixtyish year old woman, wearing a stained and holey dressing gown, peered through the crack.  She asked for the five shillings.  Some cats and dogs inside awoke and started up quite a melee.

The woman beckoned me inside.  My mother’s housekeeping was deficient but none was done here.  The squalid scene before me was worthy of a graphic horror movie and the smell of a rubbish dump.  Small furry creatures of varying sizes scurried away from my feet.  I smelt their verminous odour.  However, the cockroaches ruled the abode by sheer number.  A black and white television caught my attention.  My family couldn’t afford one of these.  I tried to see the picture playing on it but some cockroaches were holding a party on the rear side of the television’s glass screen.

I had no other option.  The trains were finished for the night.  Whilst I knew I wouldn’t sleep a wink; I couldn’t camp somewhere outside.  The streets weren’t safe.  Street lighting didn’t exist.  Dangers seemed to lurk in the shadows and made everybody fearful of darkness.  Besides, the night was cold and damp.  At a bare minimum, here I had shelter.  Neither was the woman a physical threat to me.

The woman showed me where the bathroom was and to a bed.  I gave the bathroom a miss.  No way was I going to shower in it.  Slimy used water filled the bathtub (which had the shower overhead) and the wash basin.  A multitude of roaches had committed suicide in both.  I took my trousers off and laid on top of the bed then counted the minutes one by one until morning.  When the first peep of dawn came, I silently escaped out the front door before the old hag stirred.  I wasn’t staying for my cooked breakfast; I had risked my constitution enough.  I tidied myself up as best as possible in the train station’s bathroom and hoped nobody would notice my appearance at work that day.  At least, the office’s omnipresent nicotine smoke cloud would obscure yesterday’s body odour.  Never again, I vowed to listen to Mother’s advice and never I did!

About the same time, I heard the Bethania Station Master’s daughter had married and bought with her husband a home at Salisbury.  Lorraine was a fine girl.  We had worked at the Bethania Refreshment Rooms together.  I thought the young couple might give me bed and breakfast for some extra income.  They were struggling financially too.  Well, Lorraine took pity on me and I was beyond grateful.  Perhaps, a kind word from her father helped.

The couple’s house was no more than a two bedroom wooden cottage purchased from the Housing Commission, a government scheme.  Still, it was clean and pleasant.  It also contained a bathroom complete with a proper toilet.

Salisbury was fifteen kilometres from the City and was considered to be a fringe suburb.  ‘Fringe’ was an overly polite description in its case.  It was nothing like its majestic counterpart in England.  It sat on a floodplain on which surrounding industry had sprung up as munitions factories in World War Two.  The Brisbane tram terminated at it at a terminus located amongst the industrial buildings.  Beyond these through some bushland and across a swampy creek was Lorraine’s house.  A bush track wound up a steep bank and through the swamp to there.  In daylight hours with people in the vicinity, the route was safe enough for an athletic young man.  At night time, it was perilous.  The factories’ surrounds were dimly lit and the swamp was cloaked in complete darkness.  Alas, the route was the only available path.  So being surefooted, I took my chances for a few nights and encountered nobody else.

Then one night, a middle aged, heavy set man rode the tram and alighted at the terminus too.  I didn’t make eye contact with him.  Other than him, I saw nothing unusual so began to weave my way through the maze of alleys between the buildings.  At a subliminal level, I felt a presence behind me.  All my muscles tensed.  I realised the man was following me.  He caught up to me as I neared the steep bank.  He said hello in a gravelly voice.  Given my rural upbringing, I treated all strangers with suspicion.  I was polite yet apprehensive.  I had never been propositioned before and couldn’t think what he'd want from me.  I hadn’t a spare penny to give him neither did I look as though I had.  Furthermore, if he were a thief, he’d have hit me on the back of the head rather than speak to me.  I feared he was going to murder me but couldn’t fathom why.  This man could easily overpower me.  I’d be defenceless against his bulk.  I increased my step size to put distance between us and thought quickly back to my childhood escapades in the bush.  My advantages were agility plus knowledge of the track despite the darkness and of the treacherous swamp.

I ran with my hair bristling on my neck.  The man came fast after me!  I knew exactly where some saplings had been laid in the mud to provide people with a firm footing and to save their shoes on their walk across the swamp.  A spot of moonlight shone for a moment at the crossing.  I sprang and my surefooted feet landed on the makeshift sapling plank perfectly and I continued to run.  My assailant didn’t land so!  He slipped and fell into the mud and murky water.  I sprinted faster than ever before to Lorraine’s place.  Somehow, I recognised that this man was evil.  I never used the track again nor caught the tram.  I resorted to the later train and the longer route home along the main roads though slept an hour less.

I needed a driver’s licence and wheels!

[testormblog]

Going Nowhere

Most children strive to grow up quickly to escape their boundaries.  I was no different.  Now sixteen years old, I was considered an adult.  Alas, the reverse happened to me; I became a prisoner not an escapee!  My life had become wretched and I was powerless to change it for the next five years of my indenture after my probation period finished.

Every day, I sweated at the Ipswich Workshops then lined up to required technical classes at the Ipswich Technical College, three nights a week and for a half day.  At least this meant I avoided the old codgers at the boarding house.  I only heard their loud snores as I flopped on to my lumpy bed, exhausted and utterly miserable.  Besides, I missed my beloved birds and had left them in Dad’s care.  I hated where I lived but couldn’t afford anywhere else.  My landlord demanded nearly all my wages.  He left me a few measly shillings for my train fares.

One shouldn’t give up hope.  I valiantly tried to keep it and searched for a chance to roll my dice of fortune again.  I read the available jobs listed in the Railway’s Workers Weekly when nobody was looking.  A couple months after I had started work, the Chief Engineer’s Office listed four cadet (apprentice) draftsman positions in Brisbane.  I thought one of these might be an escape route and quickly applied.  My Railway exam ranking secured me an interview and a position.  The top ranked guy scored another.  We virtually evaporated from the Workshops and reappeared in a huge drafting room of hundreds of desks in Brisbane City.  I never returned except once some sixty years later after the hell had met its own demise.

I felt like a jailbird released from prison, and its stepping stone the half way house, into better society.  I didn’t realise that life would be tough on the other side too.  I soon discovered that my electrical studies weren’t useful to a cadet draftsman.  The other cadets were enrolled in draftsman courses or engineering studies.  Thus, I needed to switch.  The Queensland Central Technical College had recently reviewed its engineering subjects, updated them for modern practices and rolled out its 1960 Engineering Diploma, a seven year course.  I decided to do it.  I started three months behind and had lots of catching up to do.  Alas, I was time poor.  I sat in the classroom from six to nine four nights a week and for a half day on Saturday.  On the nights, I waited a couple hours on a draughty train platform for the ‘Midnight Horror.  At 1 am, I staggered up the road to home for a woeful three hours sleep.  I was close to being a dead man walking.  One night, at 2 am, the Bethania Station Master on duty, fortunately one of Dad’s mates, found me asleep in a train carriage laid over for the night.  His daughter, who lived closer to the City, took pity on me and took me in.  I kept my head down at work and college.  I miraculously survived and passed every engineering subject that year.

At work, I went from a place where men swore in English to one where they swore in foreign languages, predominantly Russian.  Whilst the bosses were Australian, many workers were White Russians, post war escapees from Red Russia.  These men chain smoked foul smelling pipes and cigarettes.  A metre thick smoke cloud hovered over everybody, constrained above by the ceiling.  The room was a death cell whether one smoked or not.  Doubtlessly, a lad looking for acceptance by his colleagues, I smoked a few packets of Camel and Rothmans.  I had tasted nothing as disgusting as these cheap cigarettes.  Thus, I didn’t smoke much outside the office nor could I afford to, thus I evaded this addiction.

Everybody in the Chief Engineer’s Office worked silently and diligently unlike their brethren in the Workshops.  No pranks happened here!  I was eager to learn whatever I could.  However, nobody sought to teach me anything.  The men were immersed in whatever segment of infrastructure they had to design.  Being a cadet, they trusted me to do no more than trace their pencil designs on cartridge paper on to blue linen in Indian ink.  These tracings became the blue prints for the manufacture of componentry.  I traced various shaped steel components, scaled to dimensions, for the foundry at the Workshops.  The task was monotonous and tedious due to the careful penmanship required.  For two and a half years, I never drew up any of my own design work.  Nor did my pitiful wage of less than ten pound a week increase.  I earnt marginally less at the Workshops.  Heavens, I could have earnt more birding.

The office bell clanged eight times a day, four times to start work and four times to stop it.  It first rang at 9 am and last at 5.06 pm.  It ruled my day!  As required, I signed on in a book at these times irrespective of when I really began or finished.  The 5.06 pm finishing time clashed with the South Brisbane train timetable.  In those days, no rail bridge connected Brisbane City to the Southside.  On my college free nights, I had fourteen minutes to sprint through the street crowd, down Adelaide Street to George Street then across the old Victoria Bridge, a kilometre and a half.  Missing the train meant at least a half hour wait for the next.  I, being a runner, usually beat the train by a minute if I wasn’t queued to sign the book.  Most of the men in the same predicament signed the book the following morning.  So, I did too.

One night, the Chief Clerk, a power hungry snake, laid a trap for us.  He worded up his team beforehand though.  Somebody leaked his intention but didn’t tell me nor another guy about it.  The next morning, the snake frog marched us two into the Chief Engineer’s office, a suite so palatial it widened my eyes.  I cast my eyes to the floor and stood stone still whilst the Chief Engineer harshly berated us for disobeying the Railway rule.

As my mother unwittingly taught me, take the heat, retreat yet note the score as outstanding and wait for the day to complete.  The chance would come.

Years into the future, a colleague would eventually be promoted to the Railway’s Chief Engineer.  We’d meet again across a desk with me employed by another organisation.  Between us would be a tender for a new rail bridge.  He’d fail to check the document thoroughly.  My allegiance would be to my then employer not to him nor the Railway.  I’d remember the timebook incident and my misery working for the Railway.  That day, the Railway would pay dearly, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth.

That office bell began to sound like the dead knell to me.  Older cadets were resigning.  Then the guy, who began with me, snagged a role with an oil company.  I knew I had to ‘write on the wall’ too despite my indenture and my Railway blood.

[testormblog]

False Promise

It was the end of 1959.  I was sixteen years old and needed to fund my existence.  There was no question, or choice depending on one’s opinion, about the job opportunities available to me.  Pop had and Dad still did work for the Railway; thus, I should too.  My only other option was casual labour on the local farms.

Dad asked George, his drinking mate, how I should apply for a proper job with the Railway.  George, being the Assistant Secretary to the Commissioner of Queensland Railways, was an important man.  He was Reggie’s father too and had a bit of a shine towards me.  He also knew I had buckled down when I had covered Reggie’s holiday leave as Beenleigh Station’s porter.  I had swept the trains and the platforms with super efficiency.  The Station Master had been astounded that I had wanted more jobs and handed over his paperwork to do.

George said I had two options: apply for a porter’s position at a station or sit the annual exam and hope to secure a trade apprenticeship.  Back then, the Railway was an organisation built on longevity where one started at the bottom.  My stint as a relief porter was enough time at the bottom for me!  So, I decided to sit the Railway exam.  Any apprenticeship would do; just a chance to jam my toe through the metaphoric doorway.  My situation was dire!  Otherwise, I’d be shovelling animal crap for a living.

I sat down amongst hundreds of young men in the Brisbane Central Technical College’ massive gymnasium.  Like me, most sweated with nervousness.  The morning, a hot Saturday in December, didn’t help.  Air conditioning was yet to be invented; the reek of body odour was putrid.  I noted the written exam was split evenly between Mathematics and English questions.  Whilst the Mathematics component wasn’t a worry; I had the willies about the English section.  If I had to write an essay, I was doomed!  Thankfully, it comprised of a dictation test and another for reading and comprehension.  I wasn’t a wordsmith but I could listen, recall what was said and read well.  I scribbled my answers quickly and prayed that my legibility and spelling were sufficient.  Afterwards, I put the wretched exam out of my mind and went birding to earn a few pounds.

Early in January, George strolled up to home smiling.  He told Dad my results and that I had placed fourth in Queensland, out of all the state’s testing centres.  My father was flabbergasted!  He didn’t know I had achieved an excellent Junior pass from high school.  Fourth meant I was fourth in line to choose from approximately one hundred apprenticeships on offer.  I was elated!  This was a huge step towards a solid future.  Better yet, I moved up to second position when the two top applicants chose options elsewhere.  I chose the second highest paid apprenticeship, that of an electrical fitter; the first being already taken.  I figuratively kissed those cows’ arses goodbye!  The four year indenture meant a meagre yet steady wage if I watched my own arse.

I started work at the Ipswich Railway Workshops.  I also took a room at a men’s boarding house in Ipswich and ate slop and potato during the week.  This rundown establishment was little more than a half way house for reprobates, who slept with their rum bottles.

Each morning, I caught the Workshops train with a thousand other men.  Unlike me, many didn’t pay their fares.  They jumped aboard from a disused platform when the train reversed to change points onto the Workshop Line.  Sometimes, they played ‘cat and mouse’ with the ticket snappers and risked penalty fares and fines.  To me, this exercise seemed counterproductive to the Railway as it delayed the train and the jobs scheduled that day.  Yet everybody still received full wages.

Upon walking through the Workshops gate, I discovered a place beyond my imagination.  The Workshops were a large sprawling complex of buildings.  Some were tall and long.  These accommodated massive steam engines, carriages, good wagons and overhead gantry cranes.  Many were built during the prior century although the machinery housed inside them was now powered with electricity.  Every trade had their designated workshop.  There were smithies, electricians, carpenters, upholsters and mechanical engineers to name some of the trades.  Here, steam engines and rail motors were serviced whilst carriages and goods wagons were constructed and repaired.  I was bedazzled by the locomotives, I’d see there: the Beyer Garett, PB15, C16, C17, C19 and tank engines.

The Workshops were regimented by Railway rules.  However, an underlying culture existed amongst the workers where nobody dobbed anybody in for breaking these.  The supervisors were incompetent; ignorant of their responsibilities to their jobs and their employees.  Given the Workshops enormity, men easily and purposefully lost themselves from 7 am to 4 pm.  Nobody looked for them.  On payday, they appeared.

The workshops were hot, noisy, dirty places and often smoky.  The foul smell of sulphur fumes intermingled with other noxious odours from metals and humans.  Men crafted by hand all the parts and tools their specific workshops required.  Safe work methods weren’t practiced.  The tasks were monotonous.  Men plodded along with the same task all day.  That was unless a foreign order arrived.  A foreign was somebody’s personal job like to rebuild their truck’s engine block.  I did what I was tasked to do; that being to manufacture small metal parts.  I was bored!

Accordingly, employees avoided constructive work wherever possible.  They pulled pranks in abundance.  Every new worker was initiated by a dunking in the water trough.  This was a frequent occurrence.  If the rookie resisted, he earnt a worse dunking and would be almost drowned.  I suffered my turn and miserably slogged around in my heavy wet overalls for the whole day.  However, far worse for us rookies were the unexpected dowses by the senior apprentices with their illegally manufactured water cannon device that they connected to the water fountain.

One day, when I was melting lead in a crucible, such an idiot appeared with the water cannon ready to dowse me.  His intention was exceedingly dangerous, potentially deadly.  I knew if water touched molten lead, the lead would explode!  Without any thought (I didn’t have time to think!), I threw a lead ingot round, about ten centimetres in diameter and a kilogram in weight, at him to divert his attention.  He didn’t catch it!  Yet, my throw, me being a cricket bowler, to my dismay was too accurate.  The ingot hit his arm and cut a deep gash.  Blood streamed from this.  He collapsed!  I was horrified and certain I’d be sacked.  His mates, who had looked on, carted him off to First Aid.  Later that day, he and his gang returned.  His arm was in a sling with the wound stitched up.  He commented that everybody should watch out for ingots falling off the bench.  The incident was buried!  Nobody targeted me with the water cannon again.

I thought Dad’s lot out on the train track was better than mine.  He worked in the fresh air and sunshine.  This fallacious promise of a decent future was really the shackle to lifelong drudgery in disguise.

[testormblog]

Lou Lou

By high school, I had grown into a confident lad with respect to the sweeter gender.  Mother had taken me to community dances from the age of seven.  By ten years old, I had mastered the steps to many ballroom dances.  By fourteen, I was sweeping young ladies off their feet.  Neither did they allow me to rest my feet.  Other local lads were clueless as to where they should put their feet and stepped on their partners’ toes.  Thus, when I walked through the high school’s gates, my eyes widened.  I saw attractive girls everywhere and soon realised many were smart.  Soon after, my election to House Captain guaranteed my popularity with them.

I had met Elizabeth, the pretty girl in my confirmation class, a few times to see movies together.  Though, I faded into her background afterwards.  She, being a couple years older, began to look for a marital prospect.  Alas, her little sister, Lou Lou, sought me out.  We were in the same year at high school.  She decided I’d be hers not her big sister’s.  She was prettier and more vibrant too.  Better yet, she possessed a rebellious streak.  Lou Lou ensnared me the moment I stared into her eyes.  Her lips curled into a saucy smile.  She knew she had won.

We thought we were the perfect match.  She and I were equally pegged in intelligence.  We were both born to local German families and shared the same religious faith.  What we didn’t expect was our families’ religious bigotry towards each other and our blossoming relationship.

Lou Lou’s parents were horrified she had hooked up with me.  Her father and uncle both served as church elders at local Lutheran churches.  Her family attended church services every Sunday whereas mine never did.  They were respectable people; my family wasn’t.  Between Dad’s irreligious weekend pursuits and his disreputable friendships along with Mother’s and my frequency at heathen dance halls, my morality was suspect.  My parents were deemed ignorant too.  They were barely capable of basic arithmetic.  Whereas Lou Lou’s Uncle Ernie was an educated man; he being the mathematics teacher at Beenleigh Primary.  Worse yet, this uncle and her aunt lived opposite us at Bethania and knew our comings and goings.  On the flipside, Lou Lou’s family home faced my aunt’s house in Beenleigh.  This led to her parents finding a reason to dislike my relative too.  To worsen the animosity, Ernie provoked me into a verbal brawl one day at Bethania Railway Station with false accusations about my bird enterprise.  These hurt me as I cared very much about my birds, their health and the cleanliness of their aviaries.

Despite our relationship being troublesome, we enjoyed its forbidden status.  We engineered apparently chance meetings to avoid suspicion.  We met up at the Brisbane Show away from local eyes.  We both belonged to Lutheran Youth and successfully escaped to the beach together for a few days under the guise of the annual camp at Coolum.  Afterward, we were eager for another escapade.  The Billy Graham Rally seemed a perfect opportunity for our subterfuge.  The irony of our duplicity made us laugh.

In 1959, the American Baptist evangelist, conducted a revival crusade around Australia to ‘save the youth’.  He was the religious equivalent of a charismatic rock star, who packed sports stadiums with naïve teenagers and filled them with hype.  In Brisbane, the local churches organised giant rallies by region and supplied bus transport to the Brisbane Exhibition Ground.  On our region’s designated night, about sixteen packed buses travelled from Beenleigh.  At the time, this was a considerable number of teenagers from the small rural area.

What a stage show!  Lou Lou and I squeezed between thousands of others to sit on the ground.  American gospel singers warmed up the crowd’s mood with their powerful voices.  We hadn’t heard music and songs like theirs before.  These captured our hearts and lifted our spirits.  Then, Billy Graham appeared on stage.  He glowed, probably with sweat.  His voice boomed from amplifiers all around us.  He delivered his sermon with theatrical frenzy.  He told us our souls would be eternally damned if we didn’t repent of our supposed sin and follow Christ’s teachings.  When the crowd’s hysteria reached its height, ushers appeared with milk buckets to extract cash from everybody.  At the sermon’s zenith, Graham called those attendees touched by God’s spirit to come forward and to pledge their lives to Christ.  Whilst I wasn’t caught up in the moment’s phrenzy, Lou Lou was.  I knew never to promise anything to anybody especially a preacher.  Still, I had to wait for Lou Lou to return from the long line of dedicatees.  Looking back, I’d wonder if these people would fulfil their pledges.

Unfortunately for Lou Lou and I, our damnation came the following day for not abiding by the teachings of another.  Our Form and Mathematics teacher, Mr Powell, had deliberately set us a compulsory assignment the prior day.  Of course, we hadn’t time to complete it.  Consequently, we suffered a severe reprimand in front of our class.  I suspected Mr Powell thought our relationship had become too intense and used the opportunity to make his opinion known.

We found meeting up at school socials problematic.  A few teachers had wised up to our ruses and had warned us to cool our relationship.  These warnings only warmed it up further.  One night after a school social, Mr Powell drove around Beenleigh searching for us.  Lou Lou and I evaded discovery by hiding in the shadow of a shop doorway.  This gave us such a thrill.

Soon after, we met up with another young couple for a double date.  After a night of just hanging out together, the other lad drove me home in his car in the wee hours of the morning.  My parents weren’t pleased!  They probably had received backlash that I was corrupting a church loving, god fearing girl; they perhaps realised the opposite was more likely true.

Both sets of parents put their feet firmly down.  Dad saw Lou Lou at Beenleigh Train Station and told her his thoughts quite bluntly.  He didn’t want her to ruin my future.

Our relationship waned then faltered after our junior exams.  Lou Lou started her senior studies at Salisbury High School.  Our flame briefly reignited then life sent us in different directions.  Lou Lou would never finish her studies and marry instead.  Sadly, she’d lose her husband young.  She’d marry again and end up with a blended tribe of multi-racial children, many adopted.  She’d keep her pledge and not inherit her family’s bigotry.

The irony of our relationship was that people’s perception of it didn’t equate to its reality.  It was driven by the excitement generated by our ruses.  Whilst I was enamoured with Lou Lou, I liked other girls too and still attended dances with my mother, much to Lou Lou’s disgust.  Hence, I never moved past holding her hand or kissing her.  If Lou Lou hadn’t been forbidden to enter a dance hall and had danced with me, our story may have ended differently.

[testormblog]

No Longer a Rapscallion

I could make a start in the world and not sit the scholarship exam at the end of grade seven.  It wasn’t compulsory.  My parents hadn’t sat it.  I supposed it would prove I had a brain.  I passed the exam easily making no effort to study beforehand.  I achieved a 72.4% pass with an excellent mathematics grade yet a mediocre English one.  Language skills, other than the ability to launch a verbal volley of expletives, weren’t important in my family.  My academic rival, Ronnie, sat with equal success.  We gleefully discovered in the newspaper the teacher’s daughter barely passed though.

My parents paid little heed to my achievement.  They instead were keen for me to find a proper job to contribute money to the household.  Dad had seen jobs at Evans Deakin Shipbuilders and Heavy Engineering advertised in the newspaper.  Its workshops were located at Rocklea, Brisbane’s industrial hub, next to the train line we often travelled.  So, Mother dragged me there in my Sunday best.  We found our way to a cheerless grey office and met a grizzled man wearing a short sleeve collared shirt complemented with a sad taste tie.  Mother sat and I stood nervously.  I kept my mouth shut least I raised Mother’s ire.  The man asked for my scholarship results.  He leaned back in his creaky chair and sized me up.

He spoke, ‘Mrs, I am sorry; I cannot in good conscience give your boy a job.  He is too bright to sweep the floor in this factory.  With a scholarship pass as good as this, he should go to high school.  You should be proud of him.’

Unfortunately, Mother only heard the man’s first sentence.  Her demeanour was like ice all the way home.  She had counted on my prospective wages.

Soon after, my parents made me an offer.  They’d feed me whilst I went to high school.  However, I’d need to fund my uniforms, text books and anything else from my money.  The uniforms were expensive yet compulsory.  They comprised of long trousers, school shirts, a tie, a felt hat, socks, leather shoes and a school blazer.  No longer was I a ragamuffin in whatever shirt and shorts I grabbed to wear.  I was a well dressed young man.  To give Mother credit, she’d always ensure my uniform was clean and ironed.  Perhaps, she was secretly chuffed in front of our neighbours that her son was going to high school.

I had no idea what people learnt at high school.  My older mate, Reggie, couldn’t tell me.  He finished primary school then went to work at the Railway.  I couldn’t discuss it with Ronnie either.  He was being sent to boarding school.  My parents knew nothing about it nor did any of my relatives.  I was the first of both family lines to go.  To begin with, I had an interview with Beenleigh High’s headmaster.  Whilst waiting for this, I spoke with another boy.  He told me he wanted to become an engineer.  I didn’t know anything about engineers.  The headmaster asked me into his office.  Again, I trembled with nervousness.  This man was about to determine my future.  He scanned my scholarship results then enquired what job would I like.  I simply told him I enjoyed woodwork and technical drawing.  He winked and wrote industrial on my enrolment form.

Initially, I felt like a nobody after I had finally grown into a somebody.  I sat learning subjects, I had little clue about, taught by different teachers.  In my previous grade, I had heard the same lessons for the six years before and wasn’t bothered to do any homework.  Now, I didn’t feel very smart.  Some of my classmates were though.  I kept a low profile.  Still, I had a face to save and had invested my precious savings.  Thus, I did my homework and studied hard for the seemingly endless exams.  Besides, I strove to win at whatever activity I attempted.  I wished with my whole soul for my name to be added to the school’s leader board at the end of junior.  My peers’ fierce competition drove me harder.  I even scaled back my bird enterprise to accommodate my efforts.

Whilst I was acquainting myself with my new lowly status as a sub-junior, the sports house captain elections for the school’s two sports houses occurred.  I had been assigned to Lavarack House.  When the nominations were announced at school parade, I expected these to be juniors.  To my utter surprise, my name was called.  More surprisingly still, the students elected me.  So, I wasn’t a nobody after all!  My reputation on the sports field had preceded me.  I was thrust into a position of leadership, a scary proposition for an introverted lad.

I then needed to prove I was the sports star everybody thought I was.  I undertook to win the year’s cross country race.  I had been running from trouble for years!  I had grown into a tall lad too.  I trained surreptitiously after dark and ran up to six kilometres a night.  Somehow, I could keep pace without tiring.  In later life, I’d learn I had a slow heart rate, good for a long distance runner.  Sure enough, no other lads kept pace in that race with me.  I won that year and the next to inscribe my name in the school’s record book.  I was unbeatable in the mile races on the school’s sports days too.  The same happened with the high jump, which I really wanted to win.  My long legs ensured I cleared those bars effortlessly.  I was everybody’s sports star!  The following year, the students re-elected me as captain and elected me a school prefect too.  I had earnt respect and learnt this meant more than to win.

In junior year, the school chose me to role play Captain Logan alongside eight other students as convicts and four as soldiers in Beenleigh’s Centennial celebration to commemorate the State of Queensland’s first century in 1959.  I felt honoured!  This event was important to the community and reflected the struggles of local families, including mine, to build new lives in a foreign country.  I was given a replica Belltop Shako hat, a blue military style blazer with tails, white trousers and long black boots to wear.  The best part of my attire was the musket.  It was empty though!  I stood proudly on a whale boat whilst the ‘convicts’ rowed it up the Logan River.  A flotilla of small ships followed us and we all set anchor at Logan River Bridge.  Quite a spectacle!

As busy as these years were, I loved them.  I earnt my name on the school’s leader board and achieved six ‘A’s, two ‘B’s and a ‘C’ in English in my junior exams.  My teachers thought I should go on to senior at Salisbury High School.  I knew my luck was up however.  I realised my sport star days were finished too.  I accepted my fate without complaint.

Despite my family’s poverty and Mother’s dire foresight into my future, I had grown from a scruffy, unwanted boy into a self assured, polite young man.

[testormblog]

Straight Draw

I didn’t inherit my father’s love of horse races.  I saw Dad lose more than win.  I valued the money I earnt too much to squander it so.  In fact, Dad’s addiction, that was how I saw it, really irritated me as a child.  He commandeered the radio every Friday night to hear which horses were listed to run that Saturday.  Consequently, I missed sequential episodes of my radio stories.  Then all day Saturday, he listened to the races ran in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.  At the time, I found the race caller’s constant chatter annoying.  Later as an adult, I realised my father looked forward to little else in his modest life.  He worked hard labour in the heat, cold and dirt day in and day out.  He earnt his time listening to the radio whilst sitting in a cool spot on the veranda.

Later Saturday evening, whilst I worked, I overheard Dad’s conversations with his mates whilst they chugged beers in Mattie’s bar.  They analysed horses’ forms, their wins and losses, the qualities of the various race courses and the bookmakers’ odds.  Some horses ran well on dry tracks and others on wet.  Consequently, I knew everything there was to know about the sport.

When the Melbourne Cup Race approached annually, energetic discussions and an infectious air of excited anticipation invaded the bar.  The men spoke of little else in the six week leadup.  Twenty-four horses would line up for the most famous race in Australia and run three thousand two hundred metres, about two miles back then.  Not only would the men lay bets with the local but illegal starting price (called an ‘SP’) bookmaker on the day, they bought tickets in sweeps, which popped up at businesses around the community.  It seemed the only establishment not running a sweep was the church!  A sweep was akin to a blind lucky dip.  Lots of tickets were sold but only tickets were drawn for the number of horses in the race.  The remaining tickets lost out.

The Station Master at Bethania Railway Station organised the biggest sweep around.  He sold tickets for weeks ahead at two shillings each to anybody willing to cough up such an extravagant amount.  By comparison, two bob usually bought you five tickets in a raffle.  Nevertheless, all the local Railway men bought at least five tickets if not ten.

In 1957, this race fever caught me in its grip too.  I was fourteen and wanted to join in the men’s excitement.  I deliberated for several days if I should purchase one two shilling ticket.  I only earnt three shillings for my Saturday morning shift at the refreshment rooms.  Besides, my odds were extremely poor; one ticket versus the hundreds sold to score a horse then one horse against twenty-four to win one of the three places.  Foolishly, I did buy one ticket, just one.  I told nobody about my gamble and hid the ticket in my money tin.

The day before the Melbourne Cup, the Station Master drew the twenty-four horse names from all the tickets he had sold in front of a crowd of ticket holders.  I wasn’t present but my father was of course.  Dad arrived home miserable.  He grumbled he had lucked out again and hadn’t secured a horse in the draw.

He then said, with a quizzical look on his face, ‘Jakob, you drew a horse though.  It’s Straight Draw.  However, the odds of it winning aren’t good.  Sorry lad.’

I felt down too.  I had wasted two precious shillings.  That was a lesson to myself.  Nevertheless, I had a horse to cheer on tomorrow.

The next day, I thought of little else.  The race was scheduled to be run twenty minutes before school finished.  The school had no radio so the students couldn’t listen to it.  The school teacher wouldn’t have allowed this anyway.  Alas, news of which horses had placed in the Cup travelled quickly.  As I walked my bicycle to the school’s front gate, I heard somebody yell that Straight Draw had won the Melbourne Cup.  Excitement bubbled up inside me.  I had never been so excited before.  I couldn’t believe my luck to score the winning ticket.

Dad walked with me to see his mate, the Station Master.  Even he was beaming!

Some loitering locals weren’t impressed however that I had won the sweep.  They suggested not so politely that my ticket should be disqualified because I was a minor and not legally entitled to bet.

The Station Master firmly replied, ‘The boy bought his ticket fair and square with money he earnt like everybody else.’  He then handed me a considerable amount of dosh with a broad smile.

I didn’t know it yet; but I’d need that money soon.  It would help change the direction of my future.  My win certainly was a miracle.

[testormblog]

Learning the Tools

Grade seven was a paradoxical year for me.  On Saturdays, I pretended to be quiet and pious in confirmation class aside from my furtive winks at the pretty girl.  Yet on Wednesdays, I was as noisy as I could be, banging the hell out of timber boards or tin sheets with a hammer and real religious fervour.

Pop was a tools man.  Given I had lurked in his shadow since I began to walk, I wanted to be one too.  My Uncle Alan, a bridge carpenter, was one but Dad wasn’t.  It befuddled me that my father couldn’t drive a nail or use a screw driver.  Maybe, Dad’s fingers lacked the dexterity required.  Perhaps, I inherited my dexterity from Mother.  She certainly had it to thread needles.  Consequently, my father owned very few tools.  Pop had probably given Dad the hammer and the hand saw hidden away in our shed although he came by when anything in our house needed repair.

I often ogled Pop’s tools.  Alan stored his tools at Pop’s place too.  I was careful not to let my light fingers anywhere near those.  I learnt that tools were to men what jewellery was to women only useful.  Whenever Pop worked with his tools, I watched intently.  As I grew, he taught me their uses and how to handle them safely then let me help him.  Sometimes, we worked together with the cross cut saw to fell trees.  Young though I was, the saw was safer and easier to use with one of us at each end.

In my final two years of primary school, the Education Department gave me the opportunity to attend rural school one day a week at a much larger district school.  This scheme strove to prepare boys, without academic prospects due to their circumstances, for a trade, and girls for home duties in readiness for marriage.  Despite the government department’s dictum, my school teacher strongly discouraged me and other students from participation.  Fortunately, the decision was ours and our parents to make.  Since the Railway would issue me a travel pass, my parents didn’t care what I chose to do.  So, of course, I was going!  I was born to be a tools man.  Ronnie was going too.  His father didn’t mix his words with the school teacher.  With the two class brains absent, the dunderheads remained and only wished to do diddy squat.  Our school teacher found the situation quite an inconvenience.  For the other four days a week, he attempted to mentally intimidate us whenever possible in front of our classmates.  We knew his game and acted, as best as we could, like saints.

So, Ronnie and I caught the train to Beenleigh and walked the kilometre to the school. We were now thirteen and quite familiar with catching trains.  Children from a few other country schools joined us.  Before long, on our train trips home, an orange peel fight would erupt amongst everybody.  Fortunately, we jumped off at the first stop and escaped these and the usual reprimand from the guard.

The first day was a big deal for us.  We met the twenty plus other boys in our class.  We felt a bit lost to start with amongst so many strangers.  We had to find our way around the school too.  This had lots of buildings, numerous teachers and hundreds of students compared with our one room one teacher school with forty children from the age of five to fourteen.  It was really three schools in one, a primary, a secondary and the rural school with its two big sheds.  When I saw inside these sheds, my eyes opened in wonderment.  I wanted to use every tool in them.  I eyed the electric powered tools enthusiastically.  Pop didn’t own any of these!  One shed was set up for woodwork and the other for tin smithing and technical drawing.

I thought our teacher was an odd man.  Ronnie conferred.  We found his mannerisms strange.  Today, a person would say he was effeminate.  Back then, we, country lads, were innocent of different sexual orientations.  Soon after, I’d unfortunately see him drunk outside of school hours.  Sadly, the harsh social judgement of the community cost him his job.  The man didn’t act inappropriately or unkindly towards us or any boys we knew.

When the new teacher walked in, every single boy’s mouth gaped open in utter silence.  A real hero stood before us!  A very masculine one!  This teacher was Wally Walmsley, an all round cricketer and the coach for the Queensland Cricket Team.  Back then, cricketers worked in day jobs too.  This hero was a batsman capable of batting in any position and was a master of the leg break and googly bowling techniques.  Nobody played up in class!  Of course, we boys played cricket with him at lunch breaks.

In woodwork, I learnt joinery, in particular how to dove tail two pieces of wood together with intersecting cut teeth.  If one wanted to become a furniture or cabinet maker, they needed this skill.  I was just happy I could now repair things that broke at home.  The best thing I made was a sewing box with drawers, which I graciously gave to Mother.  I really enjoyed working with wood and was quite skilled at it given Pop’s earlier teaching.  I found tin smithing more difficult however.  Cutting tin sheets into patterned pieces and hammering these into the required shapes to make cake tins and billy cans was easy enough.  Alas, I struggled to solder the joins between the pieces of tin neatly.  Whilst this worried me at the time, I needn’t have been concerned.  I wasn’t destined to be a plumber.  Besides, soldering would soon become an obsolete skill when the fabrication of metal tanks and the connection of metal pipework ceased.

Alas, the moment I picked up my pencil and slid my set square and T square around a large sheet of paper in my technical drawing class, my imagination came alive and my ability shone.  I was already good at drawing.  I realised a plan was just the specifications for a pattern to construct something.  I knew about patterns and measurements.  I had watched Mother draft and cut out hundreds of patterns for the dresses she sewed her clients.  I also had a natural eye for perspective and could draw it in my diagrams.  Perhaps, my roaming up and down dale over the countryside had developed my spatial awareness.  Then, with my aptitude for mathematics, everything in technical drawing made sense.

I no longer knocked pieces of wood together in a haphazard way to build something.  I calculated the size and measurements for my projects and drew scaled plans with different drawings for their various elevations and perspectives.  I cut the timber or tin according to these plans and the scales required and built my projects.  I used my brain to design and my hands to construct.

I grew from wanting to be a tools man, who followed instructions, to be a design man, who determined the instructions.  I’d subsequently learn that draftsmen were the best paid of the trades too.

I had discovered my gift; a gift that would open the door to my future!

[testormblog]

Which Religion to Follow?

My family abided by three religions though Mother followed none.  Perhaps, fashion was hers.  She frequently made pilgrimages to Brisbane’s upmarket department stores, boutiques and draperies to stay abreast of clothing styles and fabrics.  Dad devoted his spare waking moments to racehorses and cricket.  Every Saturday, he either listened to, on the radio, or attended the races.  On Sundays, he played cricket from eight in the morning to ten at night.  Both activities finished with the drinking of beer with mates.  When the cricket and the horseraces were broadcast simultaneously on different radio channels, he never knew which to listen to.  He needed to be well informed on both; these being his main topics of conversation with Pop and his mates.

I didn’t find racehorses interesting.  I was never going to ride one!  Occasionally, I rode a cart horse or a draught horse at a slow clip clop speed if somebody helped me on to its back.  Besides, I worked out early that Dad’s devotion was financially ill founded.  Cricket though became more than a religion to me; it was a second language.  As a baby, I had listened to the summer broadcasts in my crib and knew all the rules by the time I could speak.  When I began running around the backyard, Dad bought me a bat and ball and taught me to play.  I grew to be a fervent worshipper of the sport, practicing my batting and bowling techniques religiously.

Don Bradman and his team of ‘Invincibles’ had won every game on the 1948 English tour.  The following year, he had retired.  This legendary man had begun his quick, meteoric rise from humble beginnings in the bush.  This gave hope to every Australian boy.  Each dreamt of being his replacement.  Me included!  I played a fierce game with my mates in the schoolyard, and as a young man, played for a representative team in South West Queensland.  As this team’s opening bowler, I struck fear into many opposition batsmen.  Unfortunately, my future path wouldn’t align with my dream and cricket would be sacrificed.

My family paid lip service to our third religion, the faith of our forefathers.  Nearly all the families in the community faithfully attended church each Sunday.  My family didn’t!  Most people married within their faiths and adhered to their families’ ethnic roots.  This wasn’t so with my parents.  Dad was born a Lutheran of Germanic stock whilst Mother claimed to be a Methodist of mixed English, Scottish and Germanic lineage.  She only stepped inside churches to admire the bridal and bridesmaid gowns she had sewed.  We were outcasts!  At home, we avoided all substance of religion in our daily lives.  This made me a religiously bemused child.

It also made me a very bored child on Sundays; these being very quiet.  With Dad gone, Mother retreated to her sewing room.  Nobody else worked.  Nobody chopped wood, felled trees or banged a hammer.  Only a few trains ran.  Any noise could be heard for miles.  Thus, I couldn’t conduct any of my spurious activities in the bush.  Besides, both Reggie and Ronnie were from religious families.  In fact, ninety-five percent of the children at my school were Lutheran and most attended Sunday School in the old German school building, built in the late 1800’s.  My parents, in their hypocrisy, decided I should go too to learn the values I should have learnt at home.  Perhaps, Nana and Pop gently encouraged this decision.  So, I went.  I obediently listened to the Bible stories and coloured in the paper pictures provided, improving my dexterity with pencils.  Though, I did skip the church service in favour of a roast lunch at Pop’s and Nana’s house.

Strangely, Pastor Reuter’s wife was one of Mother’s few friends despite Mother’s well known nasty and unchristian tongue.  This lady visited our house regularly.  I liked her and the pastor very much and often dropped by them at the parsonage.  They saved me stamps from their mail for my stamp collection.  I particularly treasured the envelopes and stamps from Germany.

As a child, I didn’t understand the pastor however.  He delivered fire and brimstone sermons with these focused on sin and repentance.  Those I heard frightened the gee willikers out of me.  He maintained the dour persona of an older man and always dressed in his black clerical attire.  He held himself aloof and detached from his parishioners and shunned most of the community’s social activities.  He never greeted or farewelled the congregation at church services.  He spoke to nobody before these either and departed during the last hymn.  Each week day, he promptly returned to his home office after his 8.15am drive to the train station for his mail.  Yet, he was responsible for dispensing spiritual guidance and compassion to those in need.  Perhaps, he was busy with three parishes to care for.

When I was twelve years old, the church’s Youth Society seemed to be a ‘happening’ group.  Its teenage members regularly travelled away to conferences and festivals.  The Society also played sports competitions against other church groups and fielded a table tennis team.  Of course, I was a natural with a racket.  Afterall, it was just a round bat held in a different position.  Alas, I had a significant hurdle to jump to join!

The church required a young person to confirm their faith to join the Society.  To do this, one attended half day religious instruction classes every Saturday for a year then struggled through a verbal examination held in front of the congregation.  At the time, I had just begun grade six at school and was two years under the usual age of fourteen.  I had already decided to study for my scholarship exams the following year.  Back then, these were voluntary with the consequence that most local students finishing primary school avoided them.  My mate and academic competitor, Ronnie, as well as another lad were in the same predicament.  So, we plucked up courage to ask Pastor Reuter if we could begin confirmation classes early.  The intransigent Church Council debated our request for a few weeks.  Fortunately, Ronnie’s father served as one of its senior elders and swayed the argument in our favour.

Unfortunately for us, Pastor Reuter extended our tuition or indoctrination, as some said, to eighteen months due to our age.  However, I didn’t mind.  He also combined all the students from his parishes into one class.  Here, I met a pretty girl from Beenleigh.

Whilst I later gave away my cricket ball, I did learn at church that God would always provide what I’d need (but not necessarily what I’d want).  Indeed, he would!

[testormblog]

The Outback

I thought Dad’s annual family rail pass to be a tremendous privilege.  So did he.  If only, he and Mother would visit interesting places.  I no longer wished to wade in Southport’s still water to Mother’s allowed depth of twenty centimetres.  Regrettably, Dad didn’t like leaving the local area except to go to his beloved races or Southport.  Perhaps, he believed he needed government permission.  Mother though wished to see outside our small corner of Queensland.  She had visited relatives scattered further afield.

Once, Dad did relent to Mother’s wishes.  He agreed we could take the train from Brisbane to Dirranbandi, though without my five year old brother.  I found this funny named place on the map in my purloined Queensland Rail Country Timetable Book, my Railway Bible.  We were going to the Outback!

The two days, we’d be away, didn’t seem a long time.  How wrong I’d be!  I was excited to be travelling a great distance, further than Toowoomba to where Mother and I had previously travelled.  I didn’t worry about where I’d sleep.  Afterall, one didn’t sleep on an adventure.

At 6 am, we caught the first City train, took a tram across the bridge from South Brisbane to Roma Street and connected with the mixed goods and passenger train to Dirranbandi.  The long train had goods wagons and first and second class carriages.  The carriages were identical except first class cost more.  Posh people didn’t want to sit with the riff raff, which was nearly everybody.  Dad’s pass entitled us to first class tickets and a whole compartment to ourselves.

The train’s C-16 steam engine made good time until it reached the base of the Great Dividing Range.  I loved the train’s rhythmic motion, its constant chugging noise and the whistles its engine driver blew.  I didn’t mind the coal soot that was sucked into our carriage.  I glued myself to the window.  I didn’t want the train to reach our destination.  That meant the wonderful sights flying past my window would end.

The Lockyer Valley’s market garden farms passed by.  Draught horses with ploughs toiled in paddocks.  Potatoes, cabbages and cauliflowers grew in orderly rows.  The pumpkin vines were disorderly, occupying whole paddocks.  The train crossed flowing creeks.  Everywhere was picturesque and green.  At Helidon, men coupled a second steam engine behind the guard’s van.  The front engine pulled and the rear engine pushed the train slowly around the mountain range’s bends.  I saw rainforest and waterfalls.  At Spring Bluff Train Station, close to the range’s top, I had a vast view of the valley below.

Then the train picked up speed until it arrived in Toowoomba.  At the city’s station, the second engine and some carriages were uncoupled.  Goods wagons were exchanged too.  A new crew started.  My family sat on a bench eating our packed lunch for the couple hours.

The train pulled out at dusk.  Darkness surrounded it; yet inside, it was dimly lit.  It crossed the Darling Downs wheatlands.  I had the strange sensation of moving through the blackness without having any sense of direction as to where I was going.  The train’s motion rocked me into a fitful sleep.  Each time it stopped at a station or a siding, I awoke with a start.  I peered through the window at wooden place name signs.  By the middle of the night, it chugged into the city of Warwick where more wagons were exchanged.

On and on the train travelled further west.  Just when I thought the night would never end, the sun peeped on the horizon at Inglewood.  I watched its fiery ball rise to heaven and paint the sky in brilliant orange.  The sky seemed wider here than at home and the sunrise more magnificent.

I was in the Outback!  The countryside was foreign to me.  Parched yellow grass and spangly grey bushes of lignum dotted the flat plains of black soil.  These stretched far and wide.  The creeks were dry beds of sand and the rivers mere streams.  The rivers’ names, the Macintyre, the Weir, the Moonie and the Balonne, meant nothing to me but later in life they’d indelibly inscribe themselves in my memory.

I thought the environment was inhospitable.  Yet, it was crowded with animals.  The land appeared to be rolling with mobs of hundreds of kangaroos hopping across it.  Before, I had only seen a kangaroo on the Australian penny.  Crows picked at the unlucky dead ones that had been caught in the railway fences.  Thousands of sheep grazed on the plains too, right up to the tracks.  Flocks of birds flew overhead.  To my delight, I saw a whole flock take off from the ground at once.  I identified galahs, budgerigars, cockatoos and quarrians.  If only I could trap some of these birds to take home.  So much money flew above me!

The train took on water and exchanged mail bags with stockmen on horseback at sidings and tinpot stations.  At Noondoo, it pulled up beside a huge homestead to offload supplies.  Amidst nowhere, a stockman waved the train down and boarded it carrying a saddle over his shoulder and meagre belongings in his hands.  His craggy face resembled the cracked earth of the plains.

The new day brought heat I hadn’t experienced before, and by midmorning, was burning hot.  When I jumped from the train in Dirranbandi at eleven o’clock, my eyeballs fried from the heat and glare.  On the platform, wool bales were stacked ready for loading.  The large station was a major hub in Australia’s wool empire during the 1950’s wool boom.  We were at the end of the line.  Dad felt homesick.  He had been away from home just over a day.  Fortunately for him, the train would depart for Brisbane in three hours’ time.

The town, if it could be called that, had two pubs, a few essential type businesses but nothing for us to see.  Dad went to Mc Gregor’s Hotel to quench his thirst and ease his homesickness whilst Mother and I found a cafe.  Good fortune shone on Dad there.  He stumbled upon the local police sergeant, whom he had gone to school with.

We departed on time at two.  Sunset happened at the same spot as sunrise.  Thus, I didn’t see the wheatfields on my return either.  After sixty hours travel, we arrived home in the clothes we started in.  Mother was keen to tell her clients she had travelled to places they hadn’t.  Dad swore he’d not leave home again.  I thought I’d never be lucky enough to go back.

Alas, those black soil plains wove a spell on me.  The saying, ‘Go west young man.’, wedged itself in the back of my mind.  When the chance to return came, I did.  Next time, I’d drive and would travel the route many times.  Thankfully, the round trip by road would be a shorter fourteen hours.

The Outback was a hot blooded temptress with a coin.  One side was marked fortune and the other, hardship.  I didn’t fear it.  The four years, I’d later spend in it, would determine how lucky I’d be in life.