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IN THE SHADOW OF THE STEELWORKS

I spent my childhood in Mayfield, a suburb of Newcastle, in the shadow of the BHP steelworks. From the end of our street, you could see, hear and smell the steam trains hauling coal from the mines to the furnaces. The constant clanking and hissing of an industrial city and the terrifying noise of steam hitting the molten steel in the blast furnace were part of our daily lives. We woke each morning to the sound of the BHP whistle alerting steelworkers to the change of shift. The local radio station notified workers of their rosters by broadcasting puzzling announcements like ‘Last man chartered pin boss.’

My father was a fireman. He was a handsome, quiet, loving father. One of my earliest memories is of wintertime in our draughty home at Mayfield. All of us huddled around the kerosene fireside heater – Dad in his fire-brigade uniform, resting his head in Mum’s lap as she stroked his hair, waiting till it was time to put on his metal garters and ride his bike to the fire station at Tighes Hill.

Dad didn’t seek other male friends or go to pubs or clubs. He was basically a shy man, not the blokey type. He didn’t play sport or follow any particular football team. His idea of a family picnic was to go picking field mushrooms or blackberries in the Hunter Valley, and then visit the cemeteries in little towns like Kearsley or Kurri looking for his ancestors. Mum was his best friend, and his four children, the fire brigade and the Labor Party were his life.

Poppa Plumbe, our mother’s father, had also been a fireman in Newcastle, retiring as station officer at inner-suburban Hamilton in 1962. Poppa’s brother Wally and his son Billy served in the brigade as well. We still have a photo from the Newcastle Herald of Poppa Plumbe sipping a cup of tea after a big fire, his brass chinstrap gleaming under his beautiful smile. Mum became a member of the Women’s Fire Auxiliary in 1941. They called us Newcastle’s first family of firefighters.

When I was little, I’d run along Newcastle beach behind Poppa, picking up pennies in the sand. He told us the pennies had been left for us by Jimmy Nimmy Snipper Whoppa. The mythical Jimmy Nimmy has been part of our family ever since.

After Poppa retired from the fire brigade, he and Grandma Plumbe moved to Belmont South on Lake Macquarie. The two of them led a blissful life there until Grandma died of bowel cancer in the mid-1960s. She was only 64.

When he wasn’t fishing or smoking fish in his shed, Poppa Plumbe would sing to us while Grandma knitted. The first song I can recall was ‘In the Good Ol’ Summertime’, which I learnt from Poppa. I sang it every day, at every event, usually two or three times in succession, until someone gently removed me from the spotlight. ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ was another favourite. Original Australian pop music was thin on the ground in the early 1950s.

Poppa Plumbe taught me ‘Botany Bay’ and ‘The Road to Gundagai’ and sang a song called ‘Umpty Doodle’, which I suspect he made up. He’d cross his legs so I could swing on his weathered brown feet – feet covered in scales from the day’s fishing on Belmont Bay with my uncle Bill. Both had lovely deep voices and knew every song in the world, or so I believed.

Grandma Plumbe had waist-long hair, which she plaited and coiled around her ears. She used to sing her own special sad song about Nellie, the best little girl in the whole wide world, who was ill and would die when the last leaf fell from the tree. A little boy who loved Nellie tied all the leaves to the tree so they wouldn’t fall and the wind wouldn’t blow them away. We loved the last verse where the little boy’s actions saved Nellie’s life.

Poppa patiently made fishing lines for all his grandchildren with a cork and small hooks. He spent hours untangling our lines on the big wooden wharves that lined Newcastle harbour. While he fished with his rod and reel, we dangled our lines in the water through the cracks between the giant sleepers. For years, Poppa would tell the story of how I caught a small eel when I was about five years old. I yelled at the top of my voice, ‘I’ve caught a bloody snake!’ Poppa carefully unhooked the eel from my line, and the whole family laughed at my outburst for years. I swore a lot as a kid, though my father and mother never did.

When I was very young, Grandma Plumbe told me that my great-great-grandmother had encountered a leprechaun back in Ireland. She understood that she had to outstare him to win his pot of gold, but the leprechaun tricked her. ‘What’s that behind you?’ he said. She foolishly looked around and the leprechaun vanished.

I often dreamed about the lost pot of gold and all that we could never have because she looked away. ‘Bloody Grandma,’ I’d mutter under my breath. Grandma Plumbe said I had the devil on my shoulder. Each time she said it, I’d defiantly knock him off both shoulders, not sure which one he was sitting on.

There were seven of us in our home in Nelson Street, Mayfield: Mum and Dad, my big sister Margaret, little brother Ray, baby sister Kathy, Dad’s mother Nanna and me. For a while there was also Toby, the neighbourhood dog, who belonged to everyone. One day, a young boy riding past on a bicycle stopped, cuddled Toby and told us the dog used to live at his place. Toby would adopt a family for a while, then move on when the children grew up. Like most dogs of the time, he was a mongrel breed – a bit like us.

Sunlight flooded through the purple glass in our front door onto the mustard carpet in the hallway. On Saturday mornings we’d often polish the doorknobs with Brasso, supervised by Nanna. A rickety table in the hallway balanced a heavy black phone with a ring that would wake the dead. My brother Ray spent hours in his room, a tiny converted pantry we called the ‘boxometer’, with his arms behind his head and legs up the wall.

When Nanna played bowls, she powdered her nose in the tiny bathroom mirror and put on a white uniform. We helped her polish her bowls with old nylon stockings. I remember Margaret frantically trying to clear steam from the bathroom so the gossamer would stick to her beehive hair.

When we were kids, we often visited Dad at his work. A big red fire engine with the word ‘Dennis’ on the front took up all the space at the station. We climbed onto the running board and up into the driver’s seat, our imaginations running wild. There were long bench seats on either side where the firefighters sat, no doubt clinging for their lives as the siren screamed out along the winding streets through the suburbs of Newcastle. Standing in line on the cement floor were the brigade’s highly polished black leather knee-high boots. Brass-button uniforms and leather-pouched axes hung neatly along the walls, and polished brass helmets shone on their hooks, all waiting patiently for the next call-out.

Kathy, my younger sister, accidentally set fire to the family garage one day. Many years later, she confessed that she and a friend had been pretending to smoke cigarettes with straw from a broom. Poor Dad was deeply embarrassed when he was called in as part of the fire brigade to put out a fire in his own back yard. Fortunately, the asbestos-clad garage was saved, and fire didn’t get to the kerosene and petrol stored there.

Dad grew beautiful flowers and vegetables. At Nelson Street, there were frangipanis and camellias surrounding the front lawn, and in the back the fragrance of sweet peas camouflaged the smell of the neighbours’ chook pen. We’d often find Dad on his knees in the garden wearing his old dark-blue Greek beret, cultivating his poppies and stocks.

In later years, the water authorities investigated Dad because they couldn’t fathom why his water bill was so low. The reason was that he never wasted water – or anything else, for that matter. He recycled the rinsing water from the washing machine for the garden, which meant the laundry was always crowded with buckets of water. He wore the same pair of fire-brigade-issued trousers and cardigan for decades. He melted scraps of soap into a larger cake for bathing. I asked him one day what he planned to do with an old square of cheese in the fridge. ‘Tile the bathroom,’ he replied with a quick smile over the top of his reading glasses. Everything was recycled and nothing was wasted, which I guess was symptomatic of Dad having lived through the Great Depression.

Our good friends and next-door neighbours were Polish, and one year they painted their house navy blue with purple trimmings. It wasn’t unusual to see the local bus slow down to look at this amazing colour scheme. Our playmate Mary – or Maryolika as I like to call her – lived there. Each day Agnes, her mum, would yell at her kids in Polish, ordering them to come home from our place for dinner. I knew exactly what she was saying. Maryolika is still part of our extended family.

We kids would while away hours on the grass, listening for Tiger Moths and other little biplanes that spluttered in the sky above our back yard. On washing day, I’d lie on the lawn waiting for crickets to poke through. Soapy water was supposed to kill them, but I suspect they lapped it up. I’d watch them go back down their holes to wait for the next soaping.

Our bread was delivered by horse and cart, and we paid for it with tokens; likewise the ice for the ice chest. The laundry was always piled high with dirty clothes, the copper boiling sheets with starch to stiffen them and a tub of Reckitt’s Blue to make them white. My clothes were hand-me-downs from Margaret, who’d inherited them from our older cousin Jan. I admired the way Mum could distinguish the dirty clothes from those that were simply old, even when they shared the same cupboard.

Material possessions were sparse, but love was in abundance. On Sundays, Mum and Dad’s double bed held all six of us and the newspapers as well.

Mum was more interested in James Joyce and Dylan Thomas than in matching our school socks. She sang and smiled her way through our childhood, never speaking a harsh word to anyone. Tunes such as ‘Stranger in Paradise’, ‘Whispering Hope’ and ‘On Moonlight Bay’ still transport me back to Nelson Street. Mum was always singing – everything from musicals to opera. One minute it was Nellie Forbush from the musical South Pacific, the next Joan Sutherland. Mum would sometimes drive us crazy by turning every sentence we uttered into a song. I embarrass myself doing the same thing today.

Before we had television, we’d stand on a chair to listen to the radio on top of the fridge. I can still smell the peculiar mix of heat and dust. Our favourites were Tarzan, Lost City of the Incas, When a Girl Marries, Portia Faces Life and Dad and Dave.

Our Aunty Betty, my father’s sister, eventually gave us a black-and-white vinyl-covered Pye telly. We suspected that it had fallen off the back of a truck in Kings Cross, probably followed by one of Aunty Betty’s friends from the gin rummy club. Dad was worried about its doubtful origin and wouldn’t have it repaired by a professional. When the power switch broke, he used a four-foot fence paling to hold down the ‘on’ button. The paling took up half the lounge room and remained in place for about five years. The telly was permanently on, humming away in the corner.

Mum cooked every night for fourteen people, because that’s how many would be sharing our table if we all brought someone home, which we often did. She cooked mock fish, cabbage rolls, rissoles, chops and a wide range of fresh vegetables. Mr Sneddon, our next-door neighbour, kept us supplied with fish from the ocean off Newcastle. Table manners didn’t extend much further than a knife and fork and a tablecloth. Everyone talked over everyone else. I stopped talking at some stage and just listened.

Mum and Dad found humour in everything. They were always laughing at themselves and creating comical stories about our everyday life. I remember one incident especially well, because it involved me. I was in third or fourth class at Islington Public School when our teacher, Mr Carter, introduced us to a tape recorder. It was magic to hear your own voice. The kids before me recited little poems or said their names, and then it came my turn.

The only poem I could recall was one that my grandparents taught me. It went something like this:

Who sat me on the icy pot and made me pee when I could not?

Me Mudder.

And when I reached the age of four and kissed the little boy next door,

Who stopped me when I wanted more?

Me Mudder.

And when at night the bed did squeak and I raised my little head to peek,

who yelled at me to go to sleep?

Me Fudda.

I can’t remember if any of the other kids laughed. I think Mr Carter enjoyed it – and he didn’t stop me or turn the machine off. Unfortunately, when I got home from school I learnt that my elder sister Margaret was in the next classroom and heard it all, much to her horror. Mum and Dad made it family history. Other parents might have chastised their children for such indiscretions, but I suspect Mum and Dad had worked out a way of teaching us without punishment.

All our names were abbreviated, which left me with Hell. Looking back, I suspect I was hell to live with. I was the second-eldest daughter; my brother Ray, the only son, was born just sixteen months after me. I must have been a bit put out and jealous, but you don’t know what that is when you’re a kid. I once encouraged Ray to eat a mouldy old bread bun I’d found on the first day of our holidays in a rented cottage at Nords Wharf. He was too young to know better, and I knew I shouldn’t have done it. As we grew older, I was the sibling who dared to say naughty things whenever anyone egged me on. My vocabulary included terrible swear words like ‘bloody bugger’ and, of course, ‘hell’.

One Christmas I was given a second-hand bicycle, which I rode for hours on end. Mr McGuinness across the road nicknamed me ‘Hell on Wheels’. I sped around Murray Square, which formed a loop with Nelson Street. I rode especially fast past Suzanne’s house, because she once pinched me for no reason. I pedalled furiously past the Amblers’, the Powers’, the Morrises’, the O’Neills’ and the Wisemans’.

On I cycled, past the Colemans’, the Carters’, the Sutcliffes’, the Partridges’, the Plumridges’, the Tuckers’ and Mr Pavier’s shop. One day someone baited all the dogs in the neighbourhood, including the Tuckers’ Alsatians, but Mr Pavier saved one of the Alsatians by pouring salt down its throat. His little shop had shelves with big red Arnott’s biscuit tins. I daydreamed about working in his shop and eating the lollies and biscuits. He wore a big white apron and had a grown-up daughter named Gloria; her photo hung above the piano.

School was something I looked forward to. It was fun to walk with the big kids and experience the ritual of standing on the loose boards of the overhead rail bridge at Islington, waiting to disappear in a cloud of steam from the passing coal trains. If we were lucky and the timing was right, a double-decker bus would cross the bridge just as the train was going underneath. Between them, they’d make the bridge shake, and shake the daylights out of us. On our way back from school, we’d stumble down a cliff face; there was barely a path but it was a shortcut home.

Our friends at Islington Public School came from all over the world. This gave us a rich upbringing. When a new pupil arrived from a far-flung country, Mr Carter would show us just where it was on the world map and tell us all about our new classmate’s birthplace. If a label was necessary, we called our new friends new Australians. They were never foreigners or immigrants in our home or school. I learnt to cook spaghetti bolognaise with garlic before any Australian dish.

My best friend, Lorraine, was an only child and very ladylike. Her dad was an Englishman and had the whitest skin. After seeing the movie Jedda, I nicknamed him Marbuck, but I never called him that to his face. It was fascinating watching Lorraine eat her school lunch. When I’d already finished, she’d still be slowly unwrapping the greaseproof paper to reveal perfect triangles of white peanut-butter and Vegemite sandwiches with their crusts neatly removed. This made no sense to me, as she still had curly dark hair.

We knew everyone in Nelson Street and Murray Square. They were all unique and colourful characters. Mrs Divall and her long-suffering sister–companion, Annie Attwood, gave us pocket money for odd jobs. Mrs Divall’s house was warm in the winter, a fire in the grate always fed by the coalscuttle. She loved to hear people playing her big old piano in her ‘dug-out’, as she called her living room.

One of the most enthusiastic pianists was her nephew Ronnie, a man in his thirties, with front teeth that protruded at right angles to his lips and a body that was racked with a form of palsy. He could barely walk or talk, but he played the piano for hours. He also taught my sister Kathy ten-pin bowling. Ronnie wore vast amounts of gold jewellery, drenched his wavy hair in Californian Poppy hair-oil and truly believed he was god’s gift to women. As part of our community, he knew many people loved him and so was comfortable with who he was.

Mum and Dad never made judgemental remarks about others who were different. Opposite us lived Douglas McGuinness, who had an intellectual disability. Come rain, hail or shine, he greeted everyone with ‘Ni Day.’ When he wasn’t looking, we threw little rocks to his side of the road, then the next day he’d throw them back to our side. He never hurt anyone or got angry.

When an Aboriginal family moved into the street, I remember Mum saying she loved the way they didn’t care about the people who didn’t like them. They lived, loved and played loudly. We were witness to the daily celebration of life in their home, unlike the curtained rooms of others we knew less well.

Two aunts stand out from my childhood in very different ways. They were a generation apart. Aunty Emma was Nanna’s sister and lived all her life in Main Road, Abermain, a mining village on the way to Cessnock, west of Newcastle. Everyone called her husband Banjo because his surname was Patterson. He drove coal trains from the mines and came home drunk most nights, singing at the top of his voice. They had a son named Willy, though Aunty Emma never spoke of him. One day when we were shopping with her at Kurri, she saw a man lying in the gutter and gave him a piece of her mind. Margaret asked her who it was. ‘My God-forsaken son, Candlewick Willy,’ Aunty Emma replied. Until then we had no idea they had a child.

Aunty Em had smelling salts in her bedroom, probably purchased from Mr Rawlings the travelling salesman. The salts were on standby in case someone had a fainting spell, but I suspect we kids sniffed them more often than Aunt Em. She had skinny, brown, hairless legs, which she rubbed with methylated spirits every night. If it was supposed to keep the hairs down, it never worked for me. I remember her using black polish to clean the coal-burning stove in her kitchen, wearing a floral apron and a scarf around her head. I can smell that polish just thinking about it. I used to feel sorry for the dunny collector who carried the full cans from the outdoor toilet on his shoulder, though he never complained.

Summer holidays in Abermain with Aunty Em were long and hot, but we cooled down in the afternoons by sitting on the white-painted concrete lions on her front veranda. She never let us out of her sight. Her house was immaculate compared to the chaos at Nelson Street.

I loved Aunt Em’s slippery clean bathtub, her velvet tablecloth with tassels, her chooks and ducks. The highlight of our holidays was shopping at Cessnock; a double ice cream and milkshake at the end of the day in the milk bar was worth waiting all year for.

Across the road was a stretch of bush that caught fire every sum-mer, and it was quite a sight to watch her fighting the fire, banging the sides of the house with a broom to dislodge the embers. When other members of my family were there, we could go on expeditions climbing nearby Mt Tumblebee. The only thing I remember about that mountain was that I never found any tumblebees.

Uncle Banjo had bloodshot eyes and smelt of beer and tobacco, but Aunty Em made sure he was cleaned up spick and span after work. He told us the story of how his fingers were blown off at Gallipoli. After he retired, he took up lawn bowls quite successfully with his remaining three fingers and he and Aunty Em became close again. Most important of all, they loved us and we knew it.

Aunty Betty was a different kettle of fish. She was my dad’s youngest sibling and his only sister. She had a flat in Springfield Avenue, in the heart of Kings Cross, and ran ‘The Roslyn’, a gin rummy club in nearby Roslyn Street. We thought she was rich, because she always seemed to have lots of money and caught taxis everywhere. My memories of her are of fur coats, stiletto heels, ruby-red nail polish, lipstick, perfume, scotch whisky, Craven A and Rothmans cigarettes. I still rather enjoy the smell of fresh cigarette tobacco, even though I don’t smoke, as it brings back memories of Aunty Betty.

Aunty Betty’s world seemed impossibly exotic and colourful to us kids – so much more exciting and sophisticated than our lives in Mayfield! Drag queens, gamblers, gangsters and prostitutes were her friends. When we visited during school holidays, we’d hang out the windows of her flat to watch the glamorous ladies of the night walk the pavement below us.

After her husband, Jack McKell, died very young of a heart attack, Aunty Betty had a succession of unpleasant beaus, who periodically came with her to visit us in Mayfield. Mum and Dad didn’t smoke, drink or gamble, but they weren’t wowsers. They loved Aunty Betty and welcomed all of her friends into our humble home. Aunty Betty taught Mum to cook exotic new dishes such as sweet and sour pork with pineapple. She looked on us as her children and lavished love on us.

Aunty Betty spent every Christmas with us. One Christmas, Dad went out to buy beer and Scotch for her. He gathered up the courage to walk into a hotel in Islington while Mum and the rest of us watched from the back of the car. We laughed ourselves silly when Dad opened the saloon door and a drunk man fell out. Rather than walk over him, Dad retreated to the safety of the car, where we teased him without mercy.

We had an interesting upbringing in Mayfield. The people in our neighbourhood reflected every shade of human life. The new Australians, the depressed, the paedophile, the mentally ill, the alcoholic, the returned soldiers, the dog-baiter, the disabled, the suicide, the Nazi, the molester, the neglected, the incestuous and the poor. Our parents never judged others or complained about their lives. We were sheltered and safe in our crowded little weatherboard home.