CHAPTER 35

Dad Leaves the Air Force

It seemed strange having a father. Sure, I had been born with one, despite what Mum called me when she was angry. However, I had not experienced living in a little suburban house seven days a week with a father.

Dad was reluctant to leave the air force. He considered going to Britain and getting involved in the air lift into West Berlin, but it would have been mad to live in post-war England with all the damage and rationing. His last flight is three hours and ten minutes from Schofields, near Sydney to Laverton, near Melbourne. He hangs up his helmet after 729 hours and 40 minutes of flying for the RAAF. He is discharged and his log book reads, ‘Appointment terminated at own request.’ Then he looks for work while we live on his deferred air force pay. No MG sportscar or soft drink factory for Dad.

Now nearly 10 years old, my life really changed with my dad at home. He decided to teach me to play the piano. He might have been a good pianist himself, but he was not a teacher. He would lie in bed on those cold, frosty mornings as I struggled to limber my little fingers around an impossible array of notes. He offered little encouragement. ‘Play it again,’ he’d shout. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, you bloody imbecile.’

Now Dad’s home we visit my grandma in Clifton Hill, where she lives at 117 Queens Parade with Pa and my Catholic cousins that I barely know. I love going there on the double-decker bus from Bourke Street in the city. Ideally, we sit in the front seat upstairs. What a view. Sometimes the bus would brush the branches of trees.

***

I liked my dad’s parents, who I call Grandma and Pa, not to get them mixed up with Mum’s Nana and Grandpa. They have a beaut house with a staircase and a banister we can slide down. Pa lives upstairs. He has an office with a big desk and a sunny balcony where I sit with him and admire Queens Parade, which is even wider than streets in the city. Grandma has made a bundle with her dressmaking school during the war and the money is still rolling in. All her life she’s scrimped and saved, but now she lavishes money on her home. She has even bought one of the first Bendix automatic washing machines – a huge change from a wood-fired copper. My mum is livid with jealousy.

Once, when I was little, before Pa hurt his back, he took me to St Kilda Beach on a tram and astounded me by collecting little shellfish off the pier he called pippies. Then he found an old tin can and boiled them in seawater on a little fire he made right there on the beach with driftwood. Always the practical man, Pa carried a dressmaker’s pin hidden in the lapel of his jacket to extract the cooked pippies from their shells. I was most impressed. He offered me some but I felt squeamish and declined.

When times were tough during the Depression, Pa had been a great rabbiter. He had a lovely .22 Winchester pump action rifle that held 15 bullets. It broke into two small sections by undoing a thumbscrew and fitted in a small bag. He used to take it on the short train journey into the country, then sit quietly near a rabbit warren smoking his pipe. When the rabbits came out of their burrows, he would shoot one dead, but not move until others came out again, when he would repeat the process. He would shoot two pair without budging, gut them and catch the train back to the city with welcome food during that frugal period.

There was a sadness about Pa that was never explained. When asked why he was called ‘Silent Bill’, my father always clammed up. It was as though he had disclosed a nasty family secret and could never talk about it. Perhaps it was to do with the falling out between Silent Bill and his brother, Tom. This could have involved Tom’s wife, Beau, who was a known beauty. While Tom was recognised as a bit of a ladies’ man, Beau was rumoured to like the fellas. Maybe Silent Bill was ashamed of family scandal. Of course, these things weren’t talked about in front of small boys.

However, I did know, after he hurt his back, Silent Bill was confined to his room overlooking Queens Parade. Uncle Tom passed his balcony daily and would always give his brother a bright hello; but Silent Bill, true to his name, never responded.

Until the falling out, Uncle Tom used to be my father’s hero. But out of loyalty to his father, Dad never spoke to Uncle Tom again. However, he told great stories about him: there was nothing Uncle Tom hadn’t done, or wouldn’t do; he reckoned he even knew Ned Kelly, Phar Lap and Kingsford Smith. When Dad was young, they’d had great escapades together: they would climb the fence and get into the footy for free; they once visited an American warship at Princes Pier, where Uncle Tom calmly took my father’s hand, walked to the head of the two-hour-long queue, introduced himself and my father to the marine at the head of the gangplank, and was welcomed aboard.

I loved these Uncle Tom stories, especially how he lost his heart to a Salvation Army trombonist and immediately joined the Sally Corps to woo her. And how during the Depression he was a debt collector, but did it with style. He painted the words Debt Collector on the back of a white rubber raincoat, and stood outside the debtor’s home ringing a large bell yelling ‘debt collector’ in his big voice. An embarrassed housewife would cough up even if it meant the family going without food. Anything to be rid of him. ‘He wasn’t a hard man,’ my father said. ‘Just had a family to feed.’

Strangely, although my father admired his uncle, he followed in his father’s footsteps and was shy and fearful of authority, be they priests, police, teachers or women. Although this changed when he was drinking.

Pa wasn’t a Catholic, and Mum liked him for that. It gave her a bond with him, as he was sympathetic to someone like herself who did not share the faith. My cousins were good little Catholics: Louise, the oldest, had red hair like me but was a year younger; her brother, Kelvin, younger still, let me ride his wonderful toy car that was chain-driven and could go fast over their paved backyard. Christine was a sweet infant and coped with being the baby of the gang. They were fun to play with and always had brand new toys.

***

I initially liked going to the football with Dad, particularly when Collingwood was playing Carlton. Then, my cousin’s father, Uncle Rob would come with us. He was a Carlton fan and they would have a couple of beers and enjoy the rivalry between their teams. Sometimes when there was just Dad and me, he would get into arguments with other men about umpiring decisions. They would tell him, ‘Go bag your head, you mug.’ ‘You haven’t got a bloody clue, mate.’ ‘How’d you like a bloody good punch in the gob?’ Dad would go quiet, and I would feel uncomfortable because I thought he was scared. I wanted him to bash them up.

Now when Dad and I visited Grandma on the way to the footy, I’d be having more fun playing with my cousins than going to the game with Dad. Grandma would tell him to leave me and call back afterwards. Dad wasn’t pleased, but he could not deny Grandma. He said he loved her, which sounded rather mushy; big men weren’t supposed to talk about love.

Invariably, Grandma would give us money to cross the Parade to a milk bar that sold Coca-Cola, which was rare in Melbourne. There was no pedestrian crossing or traffic lights between Grandma’s and the milk bar, and she would tell us to be careful not to get run over crossing the six lanes of traffic. There weren’t so many cars then and drivers would stop rather than run over a little kid.

We’d buy Cokes and ice creams and lollies, and come home and play some more. If it was raining, we’d play in the huge lounge room that had once been Aunty Moyra’s beauty salon and Grandma’s dressmaking room. Now it had beautiful wall-to-wall carpet with venetian blinds and big sofas with lovely cushions. We used to move all the furniture around and take off the cushions to build forts and cubbies. No-one minded that we had fun.

Grandma also had three-dimensional colour slides that you put into a viewer to see. There were pictures from all around the world, but the ones we liked best were the native women with bare breasts. We used to look for the breast photos in Pa’s National Geographic magazines as well. Grandpa had lots of good magazines with shiny coloured pages that came from America and I drooled over the car advertisements. I’d already decided that I would buy a Buick when I got big, or maybe an Oldsmobile.

***

Grandma’s Mercury V8 was back on the road and Uncle Rob used it. Dad could borrow it too, but he had to take the bus to Clifton Hill to pick it up. Mum was not happy. ‘How come Moyra and Rob get everything? They’ve even got an automatic washing machine and we only have a copper.’ It didn’t help that Dad would tell her that his sister kept house for their mother and father, did all the cooking, cleaning and washing, and had three kids to look after. Mum wasn’t prepared to be reasonable. And when Mum was unhappy, she shared it with her nearest and dearest.

She decided Dad and his mates were quite inadequate compared to the Yanks. She wanted what she saw at the pictures. She had thought it was fantasy, but now she had met some Yanks and knew they were real just like the movie stars with their nice clothes, beautiful manners, charming ways and bottomless pockets.