CHAPTER 17

Sweet Sherry

‘Mum, there’s a man at the door.’ I’d sort of forgotten about Dad. I think Mum had too. They never wrote letters and trunk telephone calls were considered a luxury beyond ordinary people’s pockets.

My dad had a couple of days leave and came home with his mate Alan. Now the photograph of Dad is back on the bookcase, in our hallway – the one with him in the uniform of flight lieutenant taken with Mum and me by a street photographer. Mum polishes the brass Buddha and the brass candlestick that routinely frame the photograph. A sombre picture of the Shrine of Remembrance commemorating World War I completes the setting. While she’s at it, she polishes the brass number 15 on our front door and the brass bell ringer.

Mum takes pride in having a well-kept house, but she despises housework. It is a conundrum she has solved by teaching me to be extremely neat and tidy and keeping me out of the house so I won’t mess it up. She spends the morning doing her housework so she can have the rest of the day off. ‘Why don’t you go outside and play?’ Mum says. But it’s not a question. She wants me to Get Out From Under Her Feet.

When Dad and Alan came home on leave, they hacked down the 2-foot-high grass around our house, then kicked a football up and down the street. The neighbours looked through parted curtains and probably made snide remarks about ‘sharing it around’.

Dad’s leave would have meant little to me except Mum suggested he take us on an overnight holiday to the sea. Perhaps she wanted a bit of space from Alan. More likely, she was concerned that a neighbour would not be able to control their ‘wagging tongue’. ‘It’ll be nice to get away.’

I’d never stayed in a hotel before and was enjoying the comforts of our modest suite while Mum did her duty with Dad in the bedroom. It was probably the same thing she’d been doing with the Yanks. I was familiar with the closed bedroom door.

Mum and Dad, like most Australians drinkers, enjoyed beer, and were stunned when the government cut beer production by a third early in the war. In the army, soldiers got a miserable two bottles a week ration. ‘Hardly enough to wet your whistle let alone last a week,’ the soldiers complained. With beer in such short supply, the hotels were selling it on the black market for huge profits. The Yanks didn’t mind the inflated price, they were well paid, but for Aussies it was an unaffordable luxury. Dad drank Victoria Bitter which he called VB. He despised the beer from the Geelong, Ballarat and Richmond breweries, but now he was grateful for any beer. Even ‘tiger’s piss’ as the Richmond product was called. Not that getting beer was a problem for Dad in the officer’s mess, there was plenty of morale-lifting ale for the air crews. However, on this leave, it looked like being sweet sherry or nothing.

At least Dad had arrived home with four packets of Turf – Mum’s favourites. Cigarettes were rationed like many things, particularly the corked tip ones that Mum favoured like Red Capstan and Craven A, which were a bit more expensive. She disliked Black and White and Blue Capstan; in fact, all the plain cigarettes. She says they’re common and the strong American ones are awful.

So, while Mum and Dad were squeaking the bed, I helped myself to a glug of sweet sherry. Not bad. I decided to have another. By the time they had finished their exercises, I’d had quite a nudge, but they didn’t notice – you know how preoccupied adults are. In the hotel dining room, overcome by an uncharacteristic burst of largesse, my father gave me a shiny shilling for the jukebox. Although I had never attempted such a feat before, my father, on his rather brief acquaintance, reckoned me a smart lad and equal to a jukebox. He was, however, unaware of the consequences of a large amount of sweet sherry on a small boy. I made it to the music with just a minor ricochet off an adjoining diner. ‘Clumsy oaf,’ muttered my father, purely from force of habit.

At the jukebox I encountered a bewildering array of lights and titles and in serious danger of collapse, I opted for ‘Put Another Nickel In’ to be repeated three times. Finding the juke box brightly lit and centrally located in the dining room had been easy, but finding my mother and unfamiliar father in semi-darkness was another matter. I set off in a likely direction, tripped over my own feet and fell full stretch unconscious on the floor. ‘Clumsy oaf,’ my father repeated.