16
Memoirs of a pacifist smoker

‘Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.’

Mark Twain

Stanley Livingston had a new role: fatherhood. One of my first hazy memories after arriving on this planet is being held in my father’s tattooed forearms, where snakes curled around swords etched with words I was as yet unable to decipher: Death Before Dishonour. All I was able to do was poke and giggle at these inked souvenirs of war. One in particular always held my attention: a furry shape on the back of his left hand, only a couple of centimetres wide but in a most obvious position. It looked like a circle that had lost its way. I would later learn that it was the result of a late-night visit to a tattoo artist somewhere between the Suez Canal and Lebanon. Fuelled by the local beer, Stanley had insisted on creating and implementing a design of his own. He took the needle in the lathe-crushed fingers of his right hand, and in honour of his beloved Evelyn, valiantly attempted to depict a small heart on his left hand. What he woke up to the next morning was an unruly scab resembling a ringworm infection. Still, it was the thought that counted and Stanley wore this flawed little heart just below his sleeve for the rest of his days.

Those crushed fingers were a source of endless fascination. Stained a golden tan through decades of hand-rolling tobacco, this tips of three of them were as hard as rocks and bereft of nerve endings. Needles, nails and razor blades inserted into fingertips and presented to unsuspecting infants induced at once shock and delight. And this was twenty years before Freddy Krueger. Only one finger remained razor-blade free; like the fist-flattened septum in his nose, the tip of the third finger on his right hand held no bone and with a pinch the fingertip collapsed. It was like squashing a bug. Hours of fun for all the family.

Barely able to assume the bipedal position, cradled in two hairy arms held apart by a blue singlet, I distinctly remember my father singing to me. The words escaped me but the tune never left. As I hummed it to him in later life he instantly burst into song in his passable tenor voice.

Close your sleepy eyes, my little Buckaroo.

While the light of the western skies is shinin’ down on you.

Don’t you know it’s time for bed, another day is through.

So go to sleep, my little Buckaroo.

Stanley always loved a western, and he’d appropriated the tune from one of his favourites, the 1937 flick The Cherokee Strip. He also revealed that at the time he had taken a few liberties with the lyrics, and as my young eyes closed, the last subliminal line I would have heard was, ‘Go to sleep, you little bugger you.’

I was bilingual by the time I was five. I had to learn to speak fluent Stan. His archaic dialect generally went something like this: ‘I’m feeling a bit butcher’s hook so would one of you god-forbids grab some Oscar Asche, get on your Jimmy Pike, go down the Rosewall and Hoad and have a Captain Cook for some Jack and Jills. I’ll be on me Pat Malone having a Danny La Rue in the Edgar Britt-house if you want me.’

Rough translation: ‘I’m feeling ill. Could one of you kids grab some cash, get on your bike, go down the road and have a look for some pills. I’ll be on my own having a spew in the toilet if you want me.’

My father spoke English on occasion, but rarely did he stray from his native tongue.

The barber shop had barely changed since the war, and in the early 1960s every man still required a regular haircut, short back and sides. Cutthroat razors were sharpened on whetstones, honed on leather strops; combs were disinfected in jars of metho; uncurled flypaper strips buzzed with dying insects as the scissors of Ernies junior and senior clipped their way through the years. Barbering remained a reliable profession. While the pair of Ernies manned the barber’s chairs, Annie and Evelyn womaned the tobacconist booth. A glass and timber cabinet behind them held all the latest accoutrements for the modern male: Brylcreem, Californian Poppy, pipes, pipe-cleaners, pouches and tins of tobacco (Borkum Riff and Prince Albert), squirrel-hair shaving brushes, King Gillette blue razor blades, and a jar of lollies for other people’s children just out of arm’s reach: freckles, milk bottles, Metro gum, fake teeth, bullets and jersey caramels. Torture.

Annie and Ernie Snr had watched the bulk of their children grow up, marry and create babies that boomed, but this little nest was far from empty. This Tardis of a shop seemed far bigger on the inside than the outside. As a boy I witnessed an endless cast of larger-than-life souls come and go: salesmen, ex-boxers, magicians, prospectors, the literate and illiterate, saints and scoundrels. The only thing they had in common was hair in need of cutting. By the mid-sixties total occupancy was steady at seven: Annie, Ernie Snr, Stanley and Evelyn, their two children, and Jack Lonsdale, the heartbroken deserter, living in an alcove on a fold-out canvas bunk, only metres away from the stairs under which he’d hidden during the war. Stanley rode an old Speedwell bike to his work. He never owned a car—he didn’t need one. The six o’clock swill had ended in 1955, and Stanley was living within spitting distance of the only journey he made apart from the ride to work: the short walk across the road to the Tennyson Hotel.

Spittoons were a thing of the past by the time I made my entrance, but old habits die hard, and many men continued to expel huge gobs onto the tiled floor. As a boy it was my job to sweep up the hair at day’s end. Using a broom with soft black bristles, I would sweep the offcuts into a hirsute mountain larger than myself, a veritable Cousin It of a pile. The job was made harder by bristles getting stuck in pools of spit. The hillock of hair was taken down the back and burnt off in a 44-gallon drum, the smell of the burning hair competing with the waft of unrefrigerated fish from the fish and chip shop on the right, and the stench of vegetables rotting in the sun behind the fruit and vegetable store on the left. The two Ernies were surrounded by Nick the Fruiterer and Con the Fishmonger.

Our family no doubt added to the olfactorial environment as we had no shower, no running hot water, and hands and face were washed once a day in the small sink in the kitchen. The old round wooden table was still in the kitchen, more splinter now than wood; the Early Kooka gas stove hadn’t moved; the old leadlight cabinet had shed more of its lead; the corrugated-iron roof had lost most of its nails and leaked when it rained—or, more to the point, rained when it leaked. The so-called living room still contained the pianola and the pedal-powered Singer sewing machine whose treadle my brother and I gave a good thrashing. The glass-topped table was the only object in good condition, kept as it always had been for Christmas feasts.

The bathroom, or more to the point the room with the bath, still housed the concrete industrial tubs we had bathed in as infants. Their high grey walls unnerved us, but they were never as scary as that old claw-footed bath surrounded by cobwebs and blackened brick walls. The entire household bathed once a week, in the same water, boiled in a new addition: a gas copper that held enough water for one bathful. All hands took turns ferrying buckets of scalding water to the tub. Then it was adults first, one by one, until it was our turn. Playing with my boats in tepid water shared with my brother was less than relaxing, especially as we were surrounded by numerous black-eyed spiders and the odd cockroach. The toilet hadn’t been cleaned since the war, and it wasn’t clean then. It remained a lonely outpost, dark and ridden with spider’s webs, the bowl the colour of neglected teeth. The old coathanger and newspaper hadn’t yet been replaced by soft tissue. I’m sure a close examination of my anus would reveal ink traces of all the news that mattered from the fifties and sixties.

The all-pervading smell was tobacco smoke. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life but in my youth I passively inhaled a nimbus of the stuff. There was no warning not to—in fact, I was actively encouraged. As I sat cross-legged among discarded hair on the floor of the shop, the men would hand me a fag, but never offer a light. These were training cigarettes. Sitting there in my very own child-size blue wife-beater singlet, I was one of the men—all I needed was fire. I wasn’t allowed to play with matches, just cigarettes. We could even purchase candy cigarettes with a raspberry-tipped lit end to suck on, but I never had the urge to light up. I did, however, remain a heavy passive smoker for most of my adult working life, working small clubs well into the nineties before my lungs were saved by a quantum shift in public perception. Quanta are fairly quick to shift when people start dropping dead, and change can be even swifter when governments realise how much it costs to keep those blackened lungs inflated. Yet to this day, if I get my hands on an increasingly rare cigarette, I’ll sit cross-legged on the floor, snap it in half, and savour the smell of the raw weed. Mind you, the owner of the cigarette generally isn’t too happy with me.

Jack Lonsdale stank more than anyone. A chain smoker working at the Botany tanneries, he constantly reeked of cured animal skin, beer and tobacco.

While we had no shortage of smells, what we didn’t have was carpet, a car, a phone, light fittings (just bare bulbs swinging from frayed cords), a television or a washing machine, and we had just the one electric power point. With the onslaught of modern electric appliances in the sixties, a tangle of extension cords and double adaptors grew to startling dimensions on the grey splintered wooden floor. A hole in the ceiling, which doubled as the upstairs floor, carried a cord to where a further mound of double adaptors powered Hornby trains and Scalextric race cars, to the delight of my brother and myself. With no other heating, an open fire in the main upstairs bedroom was put to good use, as were the wooden crates used for kindling courtesy of the fruit shop next door. No wonder the fruit lay rotting on the ground in the sun. The barber shop itself was our playground. When it was closed I’d sneak into that closet under the stairs and read by torchlight from a haystack of Parade magazines featuring women’s bare breasts. Black strips covered any hint of a nipple but it still made me the hero of the day when I smuggled one to school.

In the 1960s, Botany Road was the gateway to the city, and anyone of note arriving at the airport had to travel past the shop. We had a good view from the upstairs window, or you could join the crowds lining the streets to catch a glimpse of visiting luminaries. I sat on my uncle Jack’s shoulders in a cloud of his cigarette smoke as Lyndon Baines Johnson, the President of the United States of America, drove by, stopped at the corner of King Street and Botany Road, emerged from his car only metres away and waved to the adoring crowd amid a shower of ticker tape bearing the slogan ‘All the way with LBJ’. I was so excited I almost extinguished Jack’s cigarette.

I had been well aware of the president’s impending arrival. My fifth-grade teacher, Mr Amos, had been gearing up for it. He suggested the whole class go out into the school paddock where we were to create a big sign to welcome LBJ. Mr Amos wrote his proposed message in white chalk on the blackboard: ‘Go home Yankee imperialist and warmonger’. My classmates and I dutifully copied down the slogan. When we arrived home and were asked what we’d learned at school that day, most of us wanted our parents to tell us what an imperialist warmonger was. Not long after that, Mr Amos went AWL from Mascot Public School for good. No doubt he was discharged with ignominy. Looking back now, I feel privileged to have had my fragile eggshell mind subverted by Mr Amos.

The Royal Family drove by too many times to maintain interest, but I do remember being blessed by the Pope in 1970. Super 8 footage shot at the time clearly shows myself and Colin Davis, the local paperboy, standing in the centre of Botany Road as Pope Paul VI was driven by standing in an open-topped car, blessing Colin and me among others as he passed. On other days, open-backed trucks continuously rolled by, packed with freshly shorn and bleeding sheep on their way to the city abattoirs. Blue-aproned men dragged bloody carcasses from their vans across the pavement to the sawdusted floor of the butcher’s shop. Nick the Fruiterer entertained the local children by sawing the heads off his chickens with a bread knife, the scampering headless chooks terrorising the uninitiated.

When the Beatles drove past, we were too busy watching their progress live on our recently acquired black and white television to bother wandering to the window. Television arrived in Australia the year of my birth, but it remained for several years a luxury only for the wealthy. I will never forget the day Uncle Jack dragged a small wood-framed television up the stairs and into my grandparents’ bedroom. After locating a spare double adaptor, Jack plugged it in and there in glorious black and white was Killer Kowalski pinning Dominic DeNucci to the canvas with a step-over toehold. My brother and I were hooked.

Before the idiot box entered our lives, a favourite entertainment was sitting at the upstairs window on Saturday afternoons, perched with my grandmother, Annie, observing the idiots across the road at the Tennyson Hotel. At around five o’clock, a stream of men made their way out after a day of holding up the bar, heading home to their wives for tea. Most of the men we knew—they all had the same haircut. There was a ladies-only saloon next to the men’s, but we rarely saw anyone enter or leave.

On one particular Saturday, the men needed to negotiate roadworks outside the pub. A large trench had been dug only metres from the door of the saloon bar. Those not prepared, which was most, tumbled out of the bar and straight into the trench. Every time a man went down, my grandmother would let out a squeal and clap her hands. Eventually Jack stumbled out, heading home for a feed. He staggered forward, seemed to sense something, then staggered back, paused for a moment to focus, then staggered forward again. Somehow he teetered on the edge again and again, until at last he plummeted head-first into the hole. ‘Lord love a duck!’ Annie shrieked, with glee rather than concern. On reflection, I wonder why this woman didn’t call out a warning to her son. Perhaps it was to teach him a lesson. Perhaps he deserved it. This was the longest time Jack ever spent in a trench in his life, but eventually he emerged; bloodied but unperturbed, he gathered himself, as a drunken man does, and crossed the road grinning from ear to ear. When Annie opened the front door to her bloodied, battle-scarred son, Jack glanced down and, without lifting his head, raised his large brown eyes, much the way a puppy does when it’s just been caught having a crap on the carpet.

When sober, Jack was like a second father to us boys. When he was drunk we were wary—he seemed a lot happier but we sensed he wasn’t really being Uncle Jack, and we kept out of his way. Only much later did I consider that a single man, well into his fifties, still living at home with his mum and dad, with no room of his own and only a canvas bed for a possession, might feel on occasion the need to indulge in a beverage.

Every working day, Stanley Livingston awoke at 5 a.m., made his own breakfast, got on his pushbike and rode to the factory in Rosebery. He started at seven and knocked off at three, but he was never home before six—he was at the other office across the road. Stanley was a tool-setter but I never saw him set a tool. I was familiar with the factory from a Christmas party held in the canteen each year for all the workers’ children. My father once showed me around the place out of working hours. We passed hundreds of lockers where all those blue overalls lived until we came to the empty factory floor. It was vast. There were approximately three hundred lathes set row after row, and it was Stanley’s job to set and see to the wellbeing of these machines. It was completely silent at the time—I could only imagine the cacophony as hundreds of men worked the lathes.

While Stanley slaved away, I was down the road at Mascot Public School, the same school my mother and all her siblings had attended. The old air-raid shelters were still standing, grey with age and less of a target, some open on one side, some enclosed by hurricane wire, a cage for kids. We ate our school lunches in them on rainy days. I didn’t much like school. Bullying was rampant, but that was mostly limited to the teachers. I was thrashed with a cane on numerous occasions before I reached the age of ten. My parents never laid a hand on me but those teachers did. When they weren’t whipping you, they’d be propelling chalk dusters in your direction, or, my least favourite, dragging you out of class by the ear. I can still hear that peculiar crackling as cartilage was wrenched from skull. Apart from Mr Amos, who never laid a finger on any of us, they were callous monsters and monstresses. Ink wells, blue ink and blotting paper spelled trouble for a left-hander. No matter how carefully I wrote, the movement from left to right meant there was nothing left on the page but a blue smudge, which also appeared on my palm. My father had elegant handwriting and my mother’s was almost calligraphic. Appreciation of the written word and language was common among my parents’ generation. It wasn’t considered unmanly to write lyrical words in a fine hand. To the men of Stanley’s day, poetry was an accepted tool of courtship, whereas a boy spouting poetry in 1963 didn’t make too many friends.

As the 1960s progressed, the face of Botany Road changed. An arcade replaced the Ascot Cinema, and something called a supermarket took up the space of half a dozen smaller shops and sent others out of business. The barber shop held on like a loose baby tooth. As long as Ernie Snr was still breathing, the shop would survive. I remember Ernest Lonsdale’s last day on earth. Stanley and Jack carried him from the backyard clutching at his chest, before laying him out on the small bench in the shop. My brother and I stood silently by. I was eight years old. I don’t recall feeling any panic or sadness. Just before Ernie Snr breathed his last he beckoned his two grandsons over and asked those gathered around—Evelyn, Annie, Jack and Stanley—to move away. Ernest Lonsdale had a message to impart to us two boys, not meant for anyone else’s ears. I recall moving over to my grandfather: he was struggling for breath but he could still speak. He drew us close to him, and moments before he died, Ernie quietly whispered sage advice into our young ears—words meant for us to carry throughout our lives. No-one else in that room heard a thing, and neither my brother nor I will ever reveal what was passed on to us . . . because neither of us can remember what he said.

I remember Annie cradling his head, and then he was gone. He died in the arms of Annie Lonsdale. She was wailing—I’d never heard anyone wail. She had lost the man she loved right in front of her eyes on a worn wooden bench, the bench where he had greeted thousands of customers as they waited for a trim and a shave from Mascot’s master barber. The year was 1964. From all reports it was a large funeral. My brother and I weren’t invited: children were not welcome at funerals in those days. Our cousin had to babysit us. Apparently over a thousand people turned out to see Ernie off. The traffic lights were turned off and the road blocked as the hearse was driven slowly down Botany Road where it stopped outside 1187 and the driver got out and saluted the barber shop.

Perhaps it was fitting that Ernie died at that time. He didn’t quite live to see the demise of his cherished profession, lost to the hands of hairdressers. He had watched as men’s hair encroached past the ears, but it had not quite yet reached the collar. Ernie Jnr wholeheartedly carried on the tradition with his mother, Annie, in the tobacconist booth, but before long, men’s hair had ventured far below the shoulder and customer numbers diminished.

Annie Lonsdale was born before the first aircraft left the ground, and she died nine days after the first man stepped on the moon. When Annie died quietly in her sleep in her bed above the shop in 1969, the barbering business was all but over. Hair had now reached the waist on some males—a musical was named after the stuff. My own hair was by this stage parted in the middle and tickling my shoulders. I hadn’t sat in the barber’s chair for some years. I was a modern teenager, a traitor to the family profession. The little loose tooth was about to be extracted. Evelyn, Stanley and we boys were the first to make a move. Evelyn had used her hard-earned riveting wage wisely and invested in a block of land, although at the time she’d bought it it was a block of swamp on the outskirts of the city in a suburb called Sans Souci. The block had cost her all of fifty pounds, a fortune during the war years. By 1970 the block was surrounded by middle-class nuclear families in what had become a sought-after beachside suburb. With Stanley’s war service loan, a double-fronted brick-veneer home was constructed and we left the old nest. I despised the suburbs. I missed the everyday circus of the barber shop, but for Evelyn and Stanley, who were not getting any younger, it brought a certain amount of comfort and security. Not to mention hot water, a bath, a shower and a toilet inside the house.

I missed Jack: he’d taken his canvas bed elsewhere. Jack had quit the tannery, secured work at the airport and purchased a small ground-floor apartment just a few hundred metres from the old shop. To everyone’s amazement, Jack remarried in 1991, at the age of seventy-four, to a woman called Ruby. Jack and Ruby shared the little flat in High Street. Not surprisingly, the marriage produced ‘no issue’. Jack was the exception to the rule to the very end. For the most part of his life an unmarried, childless, alcoholic low-income-earner, his body gave up the ghost in 1997, yet his liver had shown no sign of surrender. He beat the odds, and cheered the lives of two little surrogate sons along the way.

Ernie Jnr soldiered on for a while in the barber shop with his wife, Nellie, in the tobacconist role, but there was no future to be had. In early 1972 he packed up his scissors and closed the door at 1187, the last Lonsdale to do so, and moved back home to Revesby.

By the time we moved to the suburbs, the war in Vietnam was hitting its peak. It didn’t bode well for my brother and me. Working-class boys were top of the conscription list. Stanley was adamant we were not going to war. He was no conscientious objector, just a father determined his boys were not going to go through that particular South-East Asian hell. He swore that if we were called up he’d build a cave under the house and hide us there. He didn’t need to. Gough Whitlam put an end to conscription in December of 1972. My brother had just left high school; I had another year to go. I was slightly disappointed. I fancied the idea of an underground cave.