It was in 1952 on one hot summer afternoon that was just waiting for the Fremantle Doctor (the sea breeze) to arrive when the kids bounded out of their classrooms ready to enjoy the fresh air and relative coolness of the playground and stopped in amazement. The quadrangle was filled with a mass of very strange kids who huddled there like a flock of sheep waiting mutely for the chopper. The inmates stared at the new mob of kids. There must have been about fifty or sixty of them and definitely not Aussies. Rude colonials, tall, rangy and almost as brown as the wide land they inhabited, the inmates pushed among the strangers marveling at everything about them.
Just about all of them were very short compared to the Australians and they were very, very white. Skinny hadn’t seen such white kids before and he even rubbed a boy’s skin to see if the white would come off. It didn’t. Then there was their clothing totally unfit for a Western Australian summer. Each and every one of them was wearing heavy shoes, thick woolen knee socks and equally thick coats and pants. Skinny and the other inmates wandered amongst them, sometimes asking a question and receiving back a reply in funny English. Skinny stopped in front of a taller and bigger boy. ‘Ey, you, where you comin’ from?’ ‘Liverpool,’ was the reply. ‘Where’s t’at,’ Skinny asked. ‘Great Britain.’ ‘You Protestant?’ was the next question ‘Of course not,’ was the answer ‘Why did you come all the way ‘ere, if you ain’t,’ Skinny demanded. ‘’Cause we are Catholic and Brother Conlon, that one over there came and told us that we were going on a long voyage to a sunny land. So we were put on this ship —’ ‘You liked t’at ship, plenty to eat? Did you get seasick?’ Skinny asked having seen that in a Bud Abbot and Lou Costello picture.’ ‘Not on my life, it was smooth sailing all the way and the food was better than we had at home.’ ‘Oh wus it,’ Skinny replied, mocking his accent. ‘An’ from your belly I bet that you got your share. What’s yer name anyway?’ ‘Leahy!’ ‘And yer Christian name is Beefy huh?’ The boy opened his mouth to reply; but Dicky had stopped talking to Brother Conlon who now clapped his hands and shouted:
‘This is Brother O’Doherty, the principal of Clontarf Boys’ Town and these are Brothers Doyle and Connolly. You know that you must address them as “sir” whenever they talk to you and they expect an answer. Now as it is so hot and you all must be sweltering in those heavy suits, get undressed.’
The boys were slow to react to this direct order and to make them obey Brother Doyle slapped his palm with his strap and shouted: ‘Undress!’
The inmates stood among them as they took off their clothes. “Beefy” was beefy or perhaps “Piggy” Skinny thought, for he reminded him of one with his yellow eyes and bristly straw coloured hair. He had a bit of muscle under his fat and bluey-white skin, but most of the others were puny. They really looked like they needed a good feed, but Skinny knew they wouldn’t be getting that there. He watched as Basher came among the new kids flicking the slower kids with his strap. ‘Right, now follow me and we’ll give you each a shower.’ They trotted off after him and Skinny and the other inmates took the opportunity to check out their clothing. Thieving might be against one of the Ten Commandments, but Skinny could always confess couldn’t he; but there was precious little to steal. Beefy only had a biscuit wrapped up in a handkerchief. Skinny couldn’t believe they had nothing. He turned out empty pockets and even ripped at the lining of a coat to see if anything was concealed there. Nothing; but between the lining and the outer fabric he saw a layer of rough hessian sacking and wondered what it was for.
Now Dicky appeared and ordered half a dozen kids to gather up the clothing and the others to get to the playground. Skinny was one of the chosen and with a pile of clothing in his arms he entered the room where long ago Balga had deposited his case. He dumped the clothes and poked among the cases. There was one that once might have been his. He opened it and saw a few old books and odd pieces of clothing. Skinny didn’t recognize anything and shut the case with the sudden feeling that he had lost something for ever. He realized that he was a bit like the English kids who were being stripped of all that was familiar. They would be feeling as strange as he had felt, strangers in a strange land and among monsters only too ready to give them a welcome into Clontarf (and Australia). Suddenly Skinny felt sorry for them, but pushed down the feeling as he left the room. Beefy’s biscuit tasted moldy and he spat it out.
With the arrival of the migrant kids the numbers of boys had doubled into almost two hundred. Skinny and other kids were crowded into the left wing with the bed wetters on the balcony alongside it. This wasn’t as quiet as his old one and was under the charge of a Brother Boulten who used to get the bed wetters up in the middle of the night to pee. Even this didn’t work for many of them and these he flogged for being sinners that were content to lie in their own water in spite of everything he did. In this dormitory Skinny made friends with Laurie Fields who slept in the bed next to him. He wasn’t liked by the other kids, but Skinny didn’t let this worry him. Brother Boulten had made him his pet and Laurie used to clean his room out as his morning chore. Skinny one morning came back to the dormitory to get a polisher and Laurie took him into Boulten’s room. He began his work by stripping the bed and giggled as he showed his friend a small stain. Skinny didn’t understand the joke. He didn’t know what a nocturnal emission was and just thought that the good brother had almost peed in his bed and thus might be a bed wetter himself. When he told Laurie this, the boy shrugged and smiled in a superior way. Skinny shrugged in turn and stared about the brother’s room. It was as bare as a dormitory. The man had little in the way of personal possessions.
Skinny’s friendship with Laurie ended when Tommy Cooper told him not to have anything to do with a brother’s pet. ‘Who cares,’ Skinny protested. ‘He’s in the bed next to me an’ our faces are usually only t’is far apart.’
‘Well, ‘e may be in ‘is bed now, but watch out or ‘e’ll be in yours soon,’ Tommy Cooper said darkly.
‘Naw, not enough room,’ Skinny replied not understanding.
Tommy Cooper merely rolled his eyes at these words. When Skinny thought it over later, he knew there was something there that he didn’t get, but he avoided Laurie after that.
The English boys’ arrival caused a stir that upset Clontarf’s routine. With the doubling in numbers there weren’t enough brothers to supervise and the boys got to spent a lot of time out of classes down on the playground enjoying themselves in the disorganized fashion that O’Doherty so disliked. One working brother kept an eye on them as they played as they wished. The banks of the Swan were mostly covered with bulrushes, but next to a jetty that had been allowed to lapse into a dilapidated state under the R.A.A.F. was a small sandy beach, though a few yards into the water it became mud. Still it was nice to splash about in the tepid water and stare across the river at the other side wondering what magic might be there, even though apart from a house it seemed pretty much like their side. Well, what matter, they could always dream about lollipop trees for example.
Then one free afternoon, Skinny decided to see those lollipop trees. Boys over the years and months had made canoes out of single sheets of galvanised iron and hid them in the bulrushes. He poked around and found one, though it didn’t look very river worthy. Skinny caulked the nail holes with mud, got into it and using two pieces of board for hand paddles set off. Slish-slosh, the canoe rocked from side to side as he paddled. It was nice being out on the wide river and he was enjoying the serenity of it all, when the canoe rapidly began filling with water as the mud dissolved. Skinny was more than halfway across as the canoe began sinking. He couldn’t swim and surely must drown. Unable to do a thing about it he muttered an act of contrition as he waited for death. Scenes of his past life flashed before his eyes and Mum and his sister, Kylie, appeared before his eyes. The canoe sunk and he stood up. The river was extremely shallow.
Feeling a bit of a fool, Skinny upended the canoe, righted it, caulked the holes again, got in without capsizing and paddled to the row of convict posts. There he plugged the holes again and skimmed across the narrow channel to the bank. He saw the house, but no lollipop trees. ‘Well, I didn’t expect any,’ Skinny muttered to himself as he got into the canoe and paddled back with only two stops for caulking. At least he had had an adventure and from then on knew that when you were dying or thought you were dying your life flashed before your eyes exactly as they had said in some picture or other.
When Skinny returned to the playground the other boys had already been called up to the buildings. He rushed after them, expecting the worst; but all the kids were milling about the quadrangle. As he joined them, Brother O’Doherty came out of his office, frowned at the disorder and organized the boys into two teams to play a rough and tumble game based on Red Rover, but starting with all of one side in the middle. He called this game “Poms and Aussies” and divided the kids that way although the Aussies were much bigger and stronger than the English kids. With Dicky looking on, the Aussie boys got into the game flinging the Poms onto the concrete to win over and over again. They played for an hour or so until it was time for showers and then tea. After that they were all ordered to gather in the quadrangle where Dicky had Doyle read out a list of boys who were to be transferred to Bindoon the next day to relieve the overcrowding.
Half of the English kids were on the list and only six or so Australians, mainly working boys that were fifteen or sixteen and almost men. Skinny hadn’t been selected which was a cause for the great big grin that flashed over his dial.
He heard the name “Leahy” called and looked about the quadrangle to find the kid. He wasn’t the Beefy of a few days ago either, for he was bright red and his face was peeling in patches. ‘No more the white pig,’ Skinny thought and made his way over to him.
‘Ey, what happened to ya,’ Skinny flung the question at him and stepped on his toes, even though he was much bigger and older. Skinny had taking lessons from Tommy Cooper on how to be obnoxious. ‘What t’e sun got hold of you? At least ya kept yer shirt on and yer back should be all right.’
In answer to this, Beefy pulled up his shirt and Skinny saw that the cloth hadn’t prevented him from being burnt. In fact he had a fine mesh pattern all over his skin. ‘Perhaps you should be called “Ruddy” or “Bloody”,’ Skinny grinned at him, trying a joke in the Tommy Cooper style.
‘I hope that you get to England one time and you freeze your bloody balls off, you brass monkey,’ Beefy whispered fiercely. He too had quickly learnt not to draw the attention of the brothers down on him. Even a tap on his burnt skin would be agony and wisely he held Skinny’s hand away as he listened to him say: ‘Ya know ya goin’ to be a pioneer an’ build up the empire or Australia or somet’ing. You going to t’at Bindoon bush camp where t’e bloke t’at built up t’is place has begun t’e same t’ing again. I suppose t’at when he began t’is place it was virgin bush too. Anyway ya look strong enough to tote t’ose loads and build t’ose walls.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Beefy replied, refusing to be put off. ‘It’s not like that at all. Brother Conlon told us that it is really nice and we’ll get to learn how to farm. He said that there’s plenty of vacant land about and when we learn enough we can have our own farm.’
‘Farm, warm ya scum,’ broke in Tommy Cooper playing on words just as Skinny’s dear Mum had done. ‘Ya listen to them brothers, but keep it in that fat ‘ead of yers that they are all liars. They tell you one thing you better believe the opposite, ‘cause ya goin to get it.’
‘But they’re brothers,’ Beefy protested.
‘Yep and that means they got a dispensation from the Pope to lie.’
‘Ah, Tommy Cooper,’ Skinny in turn protested. He didn’t want to believe they were evil. They might hit him too much, but then often he deserved it.
Skinny found himself reassuring Beefy that Bindoon was a decent place which the boy believed until he reached there and found it terrible, got pneumonia and had to be returned to Clontarf for medical treatment in Perth. He never forgave Skinny for lying to him and it was one of the first things he brought up when he came back to Clontarf. Indeed he went on and on about it and Skinny might have decked him except he was too weak from his pneumonia so he just kicked him in the leg and raced away.