CHAPTER 36

I Am a Catholic

My father still hadn’t found a job, so Grandma suggested he do some work for her – she needed a dressmaking manual to sell to students. He could write, couldn’t he?

It was not easy for Dad working at the dressmaking school. He was a blusher and was flustered seeing Grandma’s students in their underwear. His embarrassment embarrassed the girls. I used to watch in shame when my parents met other couples and the husbands kissed my mum, but my shy dad just stood there awkwardly not kissing the other wives. I vowed I would grow up to be a kisser. Not that I thought I would like kissing, it was just that I didn’t want to grow up to look a bloody galoot like my father.

Dad and Grandma produced a dressmaking manual of 77 foolscap pages. For the text, Dad cut the wax stencils using a typewriter, and for the drawings, he used a stylus. Then the pages were printed on a Gestetner; when I was there, he let me turn the handle and I had to be very careful. If I went too fast the pages wouldn’t get enough ink; if I went too slow, I’d be told to get a move on. ‘We haven’t got all day you know,’ Dad would say. I look at the page headed Pantette and wonder at his thoughts as he drew a pattern that required the hip and crotch measurements. The book had many line drawings of intimate women’s apparel.

Mum and I go to Grandma’s school weekends to help assemble these manuals. We cover every surface including the huge table and 30 wooden chairs. We would start with the back page and make a circuit of the room slowly compiling the manual page by page. Dolman sleeve, leg-of-mutton sleeve and on it went. Straight skirt, flared skirt, round skirt. We had to lay the pages very neatly on top of one another because Dad had to take them to a printer to be bound and the edges guillotined.

Ultimately, the manuals were sold to Grandma’s students for a guinea each. We did 200 at a time, a couple of hundred guineas, good money for Dad for a few weeks’ work. But Mum was never happy; she wanted Dad to have a ‘proper office job’.

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One day at school I am whisked out of class and taken to the principal’s office. What have I done? Going to the principal’s office only meant one thing to me: punishment. Not that I had ever been punished at school, but I knew the score.

Arriving, I am surprised to see my father. What’s going on? Unbelievably, the headmaster tells me I’m leaving. I’m going to Xavier College, whatever that is. I’m to take all my stuff home. I look to my father for reassurance, but he doesn’t meet my eye. I am dismissed back to the classroom, and no one knows what has transpired except me. I am a bit excited, and a bit scared. What’s college, and why didn’t my parents give me any warning? When I get home, I find out Xavier is a Catholic school with frightfully expensive fees and Grandma is paying.

Mum doesn’t want me to be a Catholic. Remembering not fitting in at Tocumwal Convent, I don’t either. What are my friends going to say? Laurie and I have thrown stones at Catholics for years, now I’m told I am one. I AM A CATHOLIC. My father is Catholic. My grandma is Catholic and even my cousins are Catholics. My dad’s father isn’t Catholic or Uncle Rob, and Mum’s parents aren’t. They’re all PROTESTANTS.

We park Grandma’s Mercury on the big circular driveway as I observe the imposing grounds with awe. And this is just Burke Hall, Xavier’s junior school. Grandma is excited and takes me by the hand, pulling me after her. ‘Come on, Peter,’ she says as we climb the impressive steps to the veranda. ‘This is your new school.’ Dad brings up the rear, but Mum’s not with us. ‘If you think I’m going to some bloody Catholic school to meet some bloody Catholic priest then you’ve got another bloody thing coming,’ she said.

Grandma tightens the grip on my hand as she rings the gleaming brass buzzer on the stained-glass door. We’re standing on a verandah as long as a tennis court and we can see halfway across Melbourne. It is splendid and scary. A housekeeper ushers us into the office with a fireplace and bookshelves to the ceiling. French doors open to a beautiful cricket oval. A man in black with a white collar comes to meet us. He smiles and we all smile back, but I am not so sure we’re going to be friends.