CHAPTER 25

Austerity Christmas

The sun rose early on Christmas Day, but not before me. It was summertime, of course, and the silly Yanks kept telling us we should be blanketed in snow. I picked my way carefully through the party debris. The house stank of cigarettes and stale beer and there were overflowing ashtrays and plates filled with butts everywhere. Goodness knows how many empty beer bottles. It was a mess. I made it to the kitchen and thankfully there was a pillowslip hanging on the kitchen cupboard with a big yacht sticking out the top. Gee! What else was in my Christmas stocking?

Neither Mum nor her bed mate would listen when I said Santa had been. I went back to bed for the longest hour and tried again. Still no luck. What the heck, I don’t need them. I get up every morning and make my breakfast. I can open my Christmas presents. I emptied the stocking. There was a packet of almonds and raisins that tasted stale, a new blue bathing suit with a snazzy silver buckle and two oranges which would come in handy but didn’t seem like real Christmas gifts. Then came a pair of khaki shorts and a matching shirt. Another parcel revealed two pairs of underpants and two singlets. More disappointment.

Where were the toys? The year before I’d got a flash motorbike and sidecar. Clothes didn’t count as Christmas presents and other kids had oranges whenever they wanted them. But at least I had the yacht. I ran water in the bath not caring about the noise. When it was deep, I put the yacht in. It turned over and floated upside down. Bugger. What kind of bloody present is that? We never used to swear as kids, but this was really mean. It was the Christmas that wasn’t. Now I understood the government’s austerity program: Christmas advertising had been cut, there were no Father Christmases in the stores, and the whole Yuletide season had been discouraged with minimal store window displays. Prime Minister Curtin suggested adults exchange gifts of war-savings stamps, which gave Mum a big laugh. ‘I’d settle for some Melbourne beer and decent ciggies.’

Toys were considered unessential. People spoke dreamily of when you could buy a new bicycle or a sleeping doll. Musical instruments were no longer manufactured and neither was sporting equipment. Instead of playing with new toys, Laurie and I had fighter plane dog fights. We knew the planes from the breakfast cereal boxes which had cut-out models of all the army, navy and air force hardware. There were Spitfires, Hurricanes, Kittyhawks, Mosquitoes, Messerschmitts and Zeros. Spitfires were our favourites although Grandpa said the Hurricanes were best. He said the American Kittyhawks were pretty useless – because of their thick armour they were slow and heavy. However, the RAAF were thrilled when the Americans supplied them Kittyhawks. They’d suffered terrible losses with their inadequate Australian-built Wirraways. Now Aussie pilots were a match for the dirty Jap Zeros, and Laurie and I delighted in shooting them down in flames. When the RAAF got Spitfires, it was even better. Real Spitties!

Laurie and I loved aeroplanes. We always looked up to identify a plane when it flew over. One of our games was to make a parachute by tying strings to the corners of our hankies and then tying the other ends to a good-sized weight. We’d roll them up and then chuck them as high as we could so they would open and float back down. We had to be careful how we folded our parachutes otherwise they wouldn’t open properly. No-one wanted to be responsible for ‘packing a Roman candle’, a parachute that didn’t open. We also made kites, but it was difficult to get good crossbars. It was common to see kites and parachutes caught in telephone wires. We made footballs of rolled-up newspaper tied off with string which fell apart in the rain but were easily replaced. Our footpaths were made of big paving stones and when walking on them we used to chant: ‘Step on a crack and break Hitler’s back.’

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‘Working mothers are a problem,’ the paper said. ‘With them at work and no organised childcare, there is a rise in delinquency with thousands of kids roaming the streets and suffering neglect.’ Laurie and I played on the street, but we weren’t doing anything naughty if you didn’t count stealing fruit from neighbours’ trees. We were looking forward to next year when we would go to big school.

In fact, sending me to big school was Mum’s answer to the childcare problem. It didn’t matter that I was four years old; I would be five soon and I was bright for my age. I’d already experienced six months of kindergarten so I knew the ropes. Besides, my mate Laurie was going to big school also, and we could go together.