CHAPTER 18

Spartan Homefront

As a little kid, I wasn’t aware how quaint our modest home in suburban West Brunswick appeared to the Yanks. Sure, Laurie and I called our homes dumps and joints, but we weren’t being critical. We didn’t know about central heating and who’d ever seen a household refrigerator? If people had a slow combustion stove it was considered pretty flash and meant they had hot water and a warm house. We did have a flush toilet on the back verandah that you could go to without getting wet, even when it was raining hard, and it had an electric light with a switch I could almost reach.

In our kitchen we had a single plug with a double adapter for our wireless, toaster, iron and radiator. The wireless was good company for Mum. The Andrews Sisters were her favourite. I used to sing ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ with her. One hot day when we’d taken the wireless out on the front verandah it got hit by lightning and scared us stiff. ‘Never again,’ Mum said.

The kitchen table had lino on top, which made it easy for me to clean with a damp rag. This was one of my jobs when I grew out of my high-chair and was big enough to sit on one of the four chairs for grown-ups. The ice chest had a drip tray that overflowed across the floor if I forgot to empty it. As man-of-the-house it was my responsibility, and failure meant a good hiding even before I cleaned up the mess. When I got a bit bigger, I made a hole in the kitchen floor with Dad’s old screw driver and a brick. It was a bit rough, but I cut a piece off our garden hose and stuck it through the floor. Even Mum was impressed that our melted ice water now disappeared under the house. We washed dishes in the concrete laundry troughs in the wash-house outside the kitchen. It took a while before I could reach the wash-up dish, even standing on my little stool, but Mum let me dry up.

Mum preferred simple meals using the griller and two pots: the big one for the potatoes and the small one for the peas or beans. She was very quick at mashing the potatoes with a special fork that was worn on one side from rubbing against the pot. She tried to teach me, but said I wasn’t any good. However, she let me open the tins of peas or beans, and I had to be careful not to cut myself on the jagged edges and get blood all over the place. When we could afford it, she’d cook steak or lamb chops on the griller, but usually it was sausages or rissoles. Sometimes boiled or scrambled eggs. The worst meals were brains or dried yellow cod that was so salty it had to be eaten with alternate sips of water.

Everyone else had the traditional weekend roast, but Mum said it wasn’t worth the trouble just for two of us. Very occasionally she relented and we’d have cold meat and bubble and squeak for tea on Monday. Bubble and squeak sounds exciting, but was just the leftover vegies from the roast dinner fried up with dripping. ‘A nice simple meal,’ Mum said.

Mum said she didn’t know how to make pastry, and she never cooked cakes or biscuits. We never had dessert either. ‘They rot your teeth,’ she said. Mum’s idea of a treat would be tomato soup out of a tin made with milk and served with toast. It was my job to make the toast and be very careful not to burn it; butter was rationed and Mum was the only one allowed to spread it. When there was no butter, we fried the bread in the meat fat. Mum was proud of her meat fat because she only saved the best beef dripping. We used to get a block of Kraft cheddar cheese from Sully’s nearly every week and another treat was toasted cheese sandwiches. I had to be very careful to peel all the silver paper off the cheese. It tasted awful.

Washing days meant boiling the copper and me stealing enough wood for the fire. Washing was supposed to happen on Mondays, but I don’t think that mattered to Mum; she wanted a good drying day. My big problem was wringing out the washing. I was all right helping Mum with the small things, but the big sheets off Mum’s innerspring mattress were difficult. After she’d rinsed them in in the concrete troughs, she’d put them in a bucket and take them to the clothesline in the backyard that was held up with a wooden clothes prop. (The props were branches off gum trees and cost a shilling at the woodyard.) Mum would give me one end of the sheet to hold while she wound up the other end. Trouble was, she was stronger than me and usually twisted the sheet right out of my hand and it fell in the long grass. That used to make her so mad, I can’t bear to think about it. Mum had a beaut story about a woman with long hair who had an electric clothes wringer. Her hair got caught in the wringer and it killed her. A terrible thing for Mum was if it rained and the washing didn’t dry. We couldn’t leave it on the line overnight because someone might steal it, and wet washing draped around the house put Mum in a bad mood, particularly if it rained all week.

Our Yankee friends were bemused that Melbourne’s toilets, and particularly the men’s public urinals, lacked handwashing facilities. They even thought our toilet on the back verandah was quaint, that it was strange we washed our hands in the wash-house and not the bathroom. We only washed our hands after a poo. Mum said that was important. But we never had to wash them after a pee unless you accidentally peed on yourself, which I was very careful not to do. Our toilet had a chain to release the flushing water from a tank high up on the wall, and it required an entirely different action to the one at Grandpa and Nana’s. There was a knack remembering all the different actions because if not done properly, the water would continue to run and someone would be cross (Mum) and someone would get into trouble (me).

We were lucky our dunny was undercover because most lavatories were outside. Toilet paper was a luxury. Grandpa used to cut the Melbourne telephone book into quarters, drill a hole through the corner of the segments and hang them from a nail in the lav. But he kept proper white toilet paper for tender bottoms like his; he had piles and they were a terrible business. He would take his pipe and the newspaper to the toilet and be gone for an hour. We would welcome him back as though he had been away on a trip. Nana said piles came from sitting on cold things, and she always put a cushion under me when I sat on their concrete garden seat.

At home we had proper toilet paper because Mum said Grandpa was nuts expecting people to wipe their arses on telephone book pages. When I went to the dunny at Nana’s, she said it was all right for me to use the white toilet paper, but to be careful not to use too much or tell Grandpa.

When our dunny paper was running low, Mum said I had a duty to tell her. She would go to the corner cupboard in our kitchen and from a high shelf produce a new roll. My job was to replace the old roll with the new and then roll the remnant off the old roll on to the new roll. It was quite complicated. ‘Make sure you do it properly,’ Mum warned.

***

The Americans were amazed our milk was not pasteurised and our cows weren’t tested for tuberculosis; their army ordered troops to only drink milk supplied in their camps. They were also alarmed that our milk was transported in bulk in unsterilised, unrefrigerated containers, especially in hot weather, and that it was served from the milko’s can into our billies with a dipper. How unhygienic. I admired the Yanks’ thirst for milk and ice cream. They were champion milkshake drinkers and they’d say, ‘It’s a pity you haven’t got a fridge because we could have ice cream.’ They saw us as backward. Not only was our bread unsliced, it was not even packaged and we ate fish ’n’ chips wrapped in newspaper.

And they were shocked that Melbourne still relied on horse-drawn carts to deliver bread and milk and remove garbage. The garbage carts were small because we had such a trivial amount to throw away. Individual vendors had horse-drawn carts for other services like sharpening knives, mending cooking pots or collecting old rags and bottles. There was a very elegant ice cream cart that would appear once every summer and every mother would be shamed into buying ice creams for their children.

When the bottle-O cart came, we were the champions. While most homes produced a few tomato sauce, vinegar and medicine bottles, we produced beer bottles by the dozen. It was my job to a keep a tally as the bottle-O made trip after trip down the side of our house where I had carefully stacked the bottles against the fence. While I was threatened with death if I drew any neighbourhood attention to my bottle stacking, the bottle-O was oblivious to the sensitivity of the situation as he made repeated noisy trips with a huge chaff bag full of clinking bottles slung over his shoulder. Sometimes there were would be a little leftover beer in a bottle and it would spill out and boy, oh boy, did it stink.

We had lilies growing in the sideway, the taller ones reaching over my head. Mum called them funeral flowers and didn’t like them, but they did hide the extent of our bottle collection. While I walked cautiously between them, the bottle-O cut a swathe. I audited his count – thirteen dozen and four. That’s 160 at a halfpenny each which equals 80 pence. Six twelves are seventy-two and eight over. The maths was awesome. ‘Bloody oath,’ the bottle-O agreed.

But we saw eye to eye – the total was a wondrous six shillings and eight pence, which he carefully counted into my hand, where it only had a brief rest before being bagged by my mother. She considered the money meagre reward for the humiliation she suffered as the neighbours saw our bottle collection revealed. In a fairer world, I would have hoped for some reward for my effort; however, my mother said, ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek. Get out of my sight before I box your ears.’

The baker’s cart was a thing of beauty, varnished brown with yellow scrolls around the sign. At the back was a little step from which the baker reached in to select a basket of his wares. Nothing was wrapped and the high-topped loaves were designed to be broken in half. ‘I’ll have half a Procera today,’ my mother might say in her most hoity-toity voice.

The baker usually left the rear door of his cart open for ease. While he was delivering to our place, I would reach into his cart and scoop a handful of warm yeasty bread from a halved loaf. I daren’t be caught. The baker would have no hesitation in giving me a cuff over the ear. It was okay for grown-ups to discipline someone else’s naughty kid. Another problem when stealing bread was the horse thinking I was the baker and moving on to the next house. Normally, the horse would respond when the baker yelled ‘whoa’ but mid-theft, I daren’t say anything, particularly with my gob stuffed full of soft bread. Raiding the ice cart was good too. A big lump of ice was the bee’s knees on a stinking hot day.

***

Mum bought me a black-and-white cocker spaniel called Prince. Even though it was barely summer, I had to pull dozens of burrs out of his fur every day, which wasn’t much fun. Sometimes Mum had to get her old scissors and cut away great clumps of them. The best bit was getting into his kennel. It was quite a squeeze through the little doorway, and almost impossible to get in if he was inside already. Once inside though it was warm and cosy even if it was a bit smelly. Mum said Prince was very valuable because he had a pedigree, so we had to be careful that he didn’t get out on the road. In our neighbourhood, dogs were allowed to roam the streets unless they were savage, but Prince and I both had to stay home.