CHAPTER 3

On the Way

In the footy season, with the novelty of married life wearing off, Dad would go to Victoria Park on Saturdays when Collingwood were playing at home, and after the game he’d visit his parents. Upstairs for a quick chat with his dad, then down to the kitchen where he’d knock back a couple of cold ones with his mum, who would slip him a fiver. He’d pick up some grog and fish ’n’ chips on the way home to Mum and he’d be in like Flynn on the innerspring.

One night, bingo, I was on the way! And this time it was fair dinkum.

Mum hated pregnancy, but at least she didn’t have to do the unpleasant sex thing anymore, and Dad spent more time at the pub. She was loath to accept maternity, particularly the daggy clothes. She longed for the days when after work she’d drunk at The Mitre, enjoyed dancing at the Palais and going to the pictures. Now she felt a frump. She blamed Dad, hated me and considered life had turned on her. Her priority was to get me out of her system. I was an alien. And she’d become a dowdy old hag.

I know when I am not wanted, but it is pretty hard to hide when you’re trapped in the womb. Mum was pretending I was not there, trying to hide me under her belt. Making new clothes as I got bigger, clever little panels, flowing bits.

Nobody was aware of the health risks of smoking and drinking on pregnant women in those days, but let me tell you, baby Peter felt nauseous, and was not impressed that his mum thought she was being sophisticated.

A month before I was due, Australia Day, 1938 commemorated 150 years of European settlement in Australia. Mum was confused when the Aborigines called it a ‘Day of Mourning’. They even had the cheek to place an advertisement in the paper which declared: ‘We have been here for thousands of years, and now you have almost exterminated us. However, there are enough of us left to expose the humbug. We ask for justice, decency, and fair play.’

I wanted to ask Mum, ‘What’s an Aborigine? Why do you call them Abos?’

‘Bloody boongs,’ she would have said. ‘They don’t know when they’re well off. All they ever think about is making babies and getting drunk.’ Mum would admit the babies were cute enough, like little golliwogs.

‘When you’re born, I’ll buy you a golliwog.’

‘What’s a golliwog?’

‘For gawd’s sake, stop asking questions and let me finish my ciggie in peace. You’re getting too damned big for your britches.’

It was true. I was getting cramped and I wanted out. Only a month to go and the less said about this pregnancy the better. I didn’t know who was the most miserable, Mum or me. Finally, I was so squashed I just had to leave. We took a taxi to the hospital. Mum was scared and getting pains. She pleaded for knockout drops; she wanted to be unconscious until it was over. She was no help pushing me out and finally I was yanked free with forceps.

Officially, I was delivered in suffering to this world at the Jessie McPherson Community Hospital in William Street, Melbourne at 2.58 a.m. on 17 February 1938. Arthur Fagan signed my birth certificate. It stated we lived at 11a Ormond Esplanade, Elwood in the City of St Kilda – an address many times grander than the actual two-bedroom flat. Astrologers were later to exclaim how Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Neptune were all in conjunction in Aquarius. Could it be a new Messiah? However, the stars seemed insignificant to the baby with forceps dents in his skull being yanked from a screaming mother after a hellish night.

Talk about a welcome. Mum told everyone the bloody doctor was an animal and that I nearly killed her. My head was too big, she reckoned. Visitors sympathised, realising Mum was feeling vulnerable emotionally and physically as she regained her strength after the birth.

I had been scheduled for February 16, my nana’s birthday. I should have been a gift for my nana – Her First Grandchild. Alas, I was a day late. ‘You never do anything bloody right, do you?’ Nana was hardly disappointed and loved me from the start. She gave me a little dog I called Booboo. He had a zip in the back for a hanky, which Mum told me not to use because it must be kept clean. Booboo had silky white hair and slept with me every night. I could talk to Booboo and he listened, not like Mum.

My birth was an important time in history. When Dad came to the hospital, I read the headline in the Herald tucked under his arm: ‘Herr Hitler Presents Ultimatum to Austria’. I feel a sense of foreboding. Could it be war? Mum was forever talking about bloody Adolph Hitler and bloody Signor Mussolini.

Dad remembered my birth date well because Australia had just finalised its Test Cricket team to tour England. Led by Bradman, they were pretty confident about batting, with high hopes Bill O’Reilly would get the wickets. They weren’t to know Sid Barnes would fracture his wrist playing deck games on the P&O ship Maloja during the six-week voyage to England.

‘What time was I born, Dad?’

‘Early in the morning,’ he’d say. ‘I wasn’t allowed to see you until visiting hours at seven that night, so I rode my bike to work as usual. After work I met my mate, Alan Marshal, for a few celebratory cold ones. Then he came with me to the hospital. You weren’t much to look at, you know; Alan said you looked like a chimp. He was such a funny bugger, especially when he had a few beers in him. Struth, could that man drink. I remember…’

Mum followed medical thinking that breastfeeding was primitive and played merry hell with a girl’s figure, which for Mum meant breasts; she didn’t want sagging titties after her baby had been swinging off them.

I was a Lactogen baby because as a modern miss Mum had read the formula made by Nestlé was superior to breast milk, and the four-hour feeding schedule was deemed an absolute necessity despite the tortuous protests of a lonely and hungry baby.

I suffered a bottle stuffed in my mouth in the solitary confinement of a bassinet, wrapped so tight I couldn’t move, really swaddled and bewildered. Most of this miserable time behind the bassinet’s bars, I was wet and lying in a porridge of my own poo.

My poo outraged Mum, it reminded her of her smelly infant siblings. She gagged at the sight of it and dry-retched at the smell. She commenced toilet training me on the way home from hospital. If there were awards, I might have been the new world champ with my name in the toilet training record book. Her clean-up jobs were rough and angry with an ongoing diatribe of you-disgusting-little-brute or you-filthy-little-pig, and accompanied by her wailing, ‘What have I done to deserve this? Why did this happen to me?’ Even to an infant the answer was evident: You had unprotected sex, you careless woman.

There is a certain lack of mutual respect in the mother–son relationship. It is true we did not immediately like one another. There were bound to be repercussions if Mum killed me, and the thought of me running away from home was enough to send shudders down my spine. Perhaps when I learnt to walk.