CHAPTER 8

Neighbours

In West Brunswick, we lived on a T-intersection opposite my new friend Laurie Whiteside who I played with. He never came to our dump, but I liked his place better because his mum let us have fun. We’d have terrific pillow fights and make lots of noise and jump up and down on his bed. His mum would come in and say, ‘Looks like Whelan the Wrecker’s been here.’ Then she’d give us bread and jam and yummy cordial. Laurie was very lucky. Another terrific thing about Laurie was, his father had a car with a gas burner on the back so it didn’t need petrol. He would light a fire in the fire box using charcoal and in about 20 minutes an evil-smelling gas was ready to be piped to the car’s engine. One arvo when he had to quote on a job, he took us with him with Laurie and I sitting on the front seat. It was my first ride in a car. I was thrilled.

The only other car on our street belonged to our next-door neighbour, Mr Thompson. He had a fancy 1936 Willys and a few times I went with him to the garage for the gallon of rationed petrol he was entitled to. I watched with delight as the petrol was pumped by hand into the overhead glass measure where it swished and bubbled around, looking a lot like pee. When Mr Thompson turned on the car’s ignition, a blue and a red light lit up on the dashboard. Laurie’s father’s car was really old, without any dashboard lights, and the speedo only went up to 70 miles per hour. Mr Thompson’s went up to 100 miles per hour and unlike the gas burner, it started immediately. Just imagine, 100 miles per hour.

He didn’t go to war because he drove the electric trains around Melbourne’s suburbs which was an essential service. Because Laurie’s father was a carpenter, he didn’t go either. He had a dispensation because we also needed carpenters for essential services. When I saw his funny eye, I thought that was the reason. Laurie told me his dad was driving nails when he miss-hit one and it flew right into his eye. ‘It could have killed him,’ Laurie said. ‘He was very lucky.’

Mum said he was lucky all right because he didn’t have to fight. Her brother, Max, who had nearly finished his apprenticeship with the State Electricity Commission, had just joined the air force. All the men were joining up. Mum was angry about the ones who stayed home. She reckoned some men changed their jobs to essential service work just so they wouldn’t have to go. ‘The hide of them,’ she said. ‘They’re such cowardly buggers.’ I think being married had made her bitter about everything, but she made me feel everything was my fault.

Sometimes men who didn’t go to the war received white feathers in the mail. Even worse, they would be given them in public. Women wore badges on their chests with a star for each member of their family in service. Mum didn’t wear one for Dad. She thought they were a bit corny and not attractive like her jewellery.

A little kid on our street caught polio. When Laurie and I went to visit him, his mother told us not to go into his room because it was a very contagious virus. We looked at him from the bedroom door, but he was lying so still I was frightened. I thought he was dead. Mum hated the thought of me getting polio. ‘Looking after a paralysed kid is the last thing I want to do.’ She made me a little pouch with a block of Vicks VapoRub that I had to wear around my neck to protect me from the virus. It was smelly and I didn’t like it. ‘Don’t you dare take it off,’ she said. In 1938, there had been a severe outbreak; Melbourne schools were closed and prams banned from public transport. Kids badly infected struggled to breathe and were put in an iron lung in hospital. There was no cure and many children wore metal braces on their legs for the rest of their lives. Some died.

Pearl Thompson lived next door to us with her parents. She worked in the ammunition factory at Maribyrnong, where she was getting three times the wages she got working in a shop. She said it was monotonous except for an occasional terrible accident; but bad news about accidents was censored, they weren’t supposed to talk about them. There were posters in the factory that said, ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’. When I asked what ‘loose lips’ were, Mum told me to stop flapping my ears and get outside and play.

Pearl’s kitchen window was opposite ours, just eight feet away. When she came home from work, she’d give Mum a yell through the window. ‘Heh, Ev. Feel like a snort?’ This was music to Mum’s ears; she never said no. One night when they were sitting at our kitchen table with a drink and a ciggie, Mum said, ‘I’m ready for the scrap heap. Why can’t I be nice and slim like you, Pearl? You’re so lucky you’ve got a good paying job and you don’t have a kid to look after 24 hours a day, not to mention living in this dump. Take a look at it, will you?’

No doubt Appleby Crescent was spartan. No sink in the kitchen, not even a tap. An upright gas stove and an unusable rusted-out wood stove beside it under an old chimney. When I was warming milk for my breakfast cereal, I used to stand on a chair and cover the saucepan with my hands so no soot would fall in.

We had two kettles: a little one for making tea and a big one for washing up. We washed dishes in the wash-house on the back verandah, where we also washed our clothes. That’s where I slept in what my mother called the sleep-out. It was freezing in winter because it just had fly-wire on the top half of the wall. Mum said I couldn’t be cold because I had four army blankets on the bed, but she tucked them in so tight and they were so heavy I could never snuggle into them. Our toilet was also on the back verandah. I hadn’t learnt to use the big toilet yet, but I could climb up on the seat to pull the chain and flush my little potty.

Pearl was sympathetic to my mum. ‘You look all in, Ev. Why don’t you take a Bex and have a good lie down? Peter can come and have tea with us.’ I liked the prospect of tea with Pearl and her mum and dad. Mrs Thompson made lovely jelly with banana in it and knew how to make custard. My Nana did too. We never had sweets at our dump because Mum didn’t have a sweet tooth. She said they weren’t good for us and would rot our teeth. Her false teeth were such a big secret, she’d kill me if she knew I was telling you about them. Mr Thompson had false teeth and he’d take them out and threaten to bite me. He was funny, and he had a big cage of lovebirds that he let me feed.

While other kids came home to feasts of bread and jam and glasses of milk, Mum told me that it would be dinner time soon – yeah, in about two or three hours – and I should not spoil my appetite. After Mum’s meals I always felt hungry; I never felt full unless I had been to Nana’s. Even as a little kid, I could see that Nana had her priorities right – she spent her money on food, not beer and fags like Mum. However, every summer I had a feast. The big nectarine tree outside my sleep-out window was loaded with fruit and I used to eat and eat and eat and Mum didn’t seem to know or care. And our neighbours had plums, apricots and peaches hanging over their fences. That was why I liked summer so much – there was always plenty to eat.

A couple of doors up the street we had a neighbour who was a police detective in the vice squad. He often had his picture in Truth newspaper, usually leading some poor mug in handcuffs to the lock up. ‘Everyone’s scared of him,’ Mum said. ‘We know he’s a tough bastard.’

In his front garden he had an ornamental stork. One night after many drinks, Mum and Pearl decided it would be a good joke to put an empty beer bottle in a baby’s nappy and hang it from the stork’s beak. I imagined them both tipsy-toeing up the street at midnight. For days after Mum was on tenterhooks that the cop was going to pound on our front door and give her a piece of his mind.

Mum hated the police, particularly after being caught with her pants down. ‘I was just having a pee behind a tree in Albert Park,’ she recalled. ‘We’d had a few beers and I was busting. The rotten bugger had the bloody cheek to say he could charge me with indecent exposure. Bloody cops, they’re all the same. I wouldn’t trust one as far as I could kick him.’

I just wished my mum was not so embarrassing. I knew our neighbours were talking about us.