The Five Longest Years

One of the most visited posts on this blog is "When an old man dies a library burns down" and even now more than eight years after I wrote it people still visit.  Google those words and my blog appears as number one in the rankings for the phrase which is interesting for me if not for anyone else.  But the sentiments the words express are one of the main reasons why I started blogging in the first place, so that one day, my kids and their kids may know a bit about me through what I write.  

Woody Allen said that some people seek immortality by creating great works of art or writing great literature, he preferred to achieve immortality by not dying.   But for me this is no yearning for immortality.  It is more about the frustrations I have had as I've grown older about not asking my ancestors questions when I had the chance to.  So here hopefully lie some of the pages from the library that is me that may survive that inevitable burning down.  And in the first follow up to Deb's story let me fill in some of the gaps.

We moved to Box Hill South when I was around 18 months old.  It was a time when we still had an outdoor dunny and a potty under the bed for those night time wees that sometimes were needed.  We didn't have any electricity to the toilet so a night time visit needed a torch and most of the time it didn't work.  Far safer to use the potty because there was always plenty of spiders around as well.

The roads weren't made and the gutters were open ditches full of interesting things to collect and look at.  In spring and summer the grass grew head high and there were all sorts of caterpillars, butterflies and moths living in the tufts.   The water in the drains also had weird red worm like things waving in the current like little sea anenomes, but the biggest critters were the rats and Dad used to stand in Massey Street and pour a few gallons of petrol into the drains followed by a match.  The resulting whhoofff would see the rats scurry from the grass and scatter across the road.  I think the only thing it really did was drive the rats under the house.

In summer the grass yellowed and dried and in winter the puddles in the potholes froze.  We'd often put on the gumboots and go trampling through them splashing, making skid pans and generally getting filthy.

The world was a much smaller place in the years before I turned five.   It consisted of our house and one or two each side of it and a couple across the road.    There were the Hoogens across the road, Anthony around my age and Frances was Karens and I recall spending a lot of time playing with them.  There is a photo of the four of us in our back yard with buckets on our heads playing Zig and Zag [a couple of TV clowns for those too young to remember].   They moved away when I was about five, I sort of remember the time because I know Anthony went to St Scholasticas Catholic School on Burwood Road and I don't think I had yet started school.  I remember standing at the window watching them drive away and being devastated because my best friend was moving away.  In fact, at that time he was my only friend.

Lot's of things were home delivered, the dunny man would come and hoist the pan on his head and carry it out to his truck.  The best part of that visit was that for a short time, until the pan started to fill, the flies were a bit less thick around the back yard.   I have a vague memory of the smell but there was always a bottle of phenyl beside the sit that was liberally poured over the expulsions.

Mr Peowrie delivered our briquettes.   I remember him being a really old bloke in a really old truck who was strong as an ox and he'd bring in 10 or 12 hessian sacks of briquettes and pour them into a wood box Dad had built outside the back door.

Bread and milk were delivered separately by horse and cart.  It was exciting some morninggs being up early enough to listen to the clip clop of the horses as they trotted down the street, the milkman running from side to side collecting empty bottles and delivering full ones.

In summer there was the Loys lemonade man and Mr Whippy who were regular visitors.

The postman came on a red bike twice a day and if I remember correctly he also came on Saturdays.   At Christmas time Dad always left tips out for all of those who home delivered stuff to us.  For the men it was usually hald a dozen bottles fo beer, for the paper boy a few bob in an envelope.  He always said that if you looked after them at Christmas they'd look after you during the year.

The backyard was one playground and the old hills hoist was used a swing unless Mum caught us in which case it was used for drying clothes.   We had pedal cars and bikes and spent a lot of time riding them in circles around the house.

It's funny how five years back them seemed so much longer than five years now.

Unlike Karen and Debra, the latter of who didn't arrive in the family until I was seven so is absent from this tale, I had my own bedroom.   Mum and Dad put vintage car wall paper on my wall and I remember learning to count the cars on the patterns.   Funny I can also clearly remember the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams as they streamed in my window in the mornings and at night time I could hear the train whistles on the Box Hill line and the steam that came out of the factory at Bowater Scott up on Middleborough Road.

I have this vague memory of going for a walk with Pa Joyce and watching the fires in the Dandenongs in Melbourne's east.  We must have walked up to the Eley and Middleborough Road intersection because that is the only place we could have seen them from.

After I turned five the world expanded but that's a tale for another day

I was the green...

I haven't had time to write much in the last few days so I'm going to cheat a bit tonight by re-publishing an old post.  It maintains the nostalgic theme, gives me a chance to work on the article for this week whilst I'm waiting on Karen and Debra's posts.

For the original post please visit here or just read below.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Actually, I don't know what I was. When I was around 5 years old I don't think I had discovered either the Green Lantern or Green Arrow. Maybe I had started to take some notice of the Green Hornet on TV, but more likely my memory is playing tricks and it may have been a few years after that before I was thrilling to his exploits. Of course in those days TV for us in Australia was still in black and white so I had absolutely no idea why the Green Hornet was green, or even if some part of his costume was green.

So what the hell am I on about? Well like most kids in those days we actually played make believe games. Even pacman and space invaders were a future away so we spent a lot of time playing cowboys and indians, or, as in my case, pretending I was a superhero. My first superhero costume was a green square of cloth which I fastened around my neck with a large safety pin. This cloth actually doubled for a square of grass on which I could set up my farm or zoo animals with block fences, or which sometimes was used as a surface on which I could play marbles.

For me though it's most important purpose was that of a cape. With it pinned around my neck I could leap off tall buildings and break twigs in my bare hands. The tall building was an asbestos sheet outdoor dunny in our backyard, maybe eight foot high, spider infested and stinking of tubs full of wee and poo mixed with the tang of phenyl which was poured into the bowl in a fruitless attempt to disguise the smell.

There were blow flies the size of sparrows buzzing around that old shed constantly. Even winter failed to deter them and when you had to venture inside to actually sit on the pan it was inevitable that some of them got onto the floating muck then flew out occasionally landing on an arm or leg or maybe even your face as they fled out to spread typhoid and malaria to the other houses of Box Hill South. But I figured that was fair because the flies from their dunnies were probably regularly visiting us as well.

For me, the Green whatever I was, the roof of the shed was a skyscraper to be conquered, taller even than the ICI building which my Dad used to drive past on nearly every outing just so he could tell us proudly that it was the tallest building in Melbourne. I'm thinking now that I probably proudly wore the green cape because TV was black and white and I didn't know at the time that Superman's cape was actually red. If I had, I may have been a bit embarrassed to call myself the green whatever. Around the time I learnt to read and discovered comics I realised that Superman was in blue and red and so the green cape lost it's power and returned to the box of farm animals never to be brought out to fight for truth and justice ever again.

There were all sorts of magical things for sale in the comics but alas, you could only get them from America and most of them said that they would only accept mail orders from the US or Canada. So I missed out on the x-ray specs that would have allowed me to see through walls. I did wonder how you could turn back the power because when you looked at a person you didn't necessarily want to look at their skeletons or bodily organs, you just wanted to stop maybe at the underwear. I also missed out on that useful tool of learning how to throw my voice. I always thought that skill would be great if Mum had told me to turn out the light in bed at night when I actually wanted to keep reading. I could have hidden under the bed with a torch and thrown my voice to the pillow stuffed under the eiderdown and made it sound like I was actually snoring when she poked her head into my bedroom to check on me.

But the retirement of the green cape wasn't the end of my disguise days though, because around the time I started to see things in colour my Mum made me another cape. This one was black with a big red "Z" on the back of it and a press stud to clasp it around my neck. You have to admit that was far less dangerous than the big safety pin that had a habit of springing open at inappropriate times like when I was flying off the roof of the dunny or was about to bash the heads of Martians together just before they used their ray guns on the toilet seat, which as you can imagine would have caused all sorts of problems to any person who happened to be sitting on it at the time.

There was no such thing as political correctness in those days, in fact boys were encouraged to play with swords and guns, and if they weren't bought for us, we made them out of whatever we found lying around. Many was the time when the sheets hanging on the clothesline were battered with whatever bit of wood became my sword on that particular day. I could spend hours practising the Zorro "Z" on the washing pretending every striped towel was actually the fat gut of Sergeant Garcia.

The best weapon though was a bow and arrow. The arrows had suction cups on them that never actually suctioned onto anything, so if you actually got hit by one, you'd place it under your arm and hold it there whilst you did a graceful slow motion swan dive onto the ground feigning death. I have no idea how we never actually took out someones eye because there were times when we did remove the suction cups. I think the only thing that saved us from major injury was that the arrows were rarely straight and generally didn't hit what we were aiming at.

Sometime when I was maybe around 9 or 10 I became the proud owner of a hand me down Davy Crockett suit that an older cousin had grown out of. This came complete with a coonskin hat which I could wear jauntily just like Fess Parker did. I must admit to being a bit confused about how Fess Parker could be both Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone with his mate Mengo, the Oxford educated Cherokee. Now never for one minute did I think that my coonskin hat was actually made from coon skin. It may have been cat, or possum, more likely the hat part was some synthetic fur stuff. But the tail that hung off it was a real tail from some dead animal which reminded me of the dead things my elderly aunts used to wear around their shoulders to family events like weddings.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't considered etiquette to wear dead animals to things like funerals, and there always seemed to be lots of them in those days, possibly because of those sparrow sized blowflies that hung around the outdoor dunnies spreading disease. My aunts used to think they looked pretty good but let me tell you that some of those old fox stoles were looking a little the worst for wear by the 1960's.

My superhero days did continue for a while after the Zorro suit to. My cousin Gavin and I spent a lot of school holidays staying at my Nana's place in Brunswick. It was a working class suburb a world away from what it is today. The terrace houses were close together, the street gutters paved with huge blue stone flags and scattered amongst the houses were various small factories and warehouses many of which belonged to various aspects of the rag trade.

Gavin and I spent some days exploring the back lanes of the suburb and on one occasion came across what may have been a furniture factory. In rubbish bins out the front were off-cuts of vinyl which we helped ourselves to. These became vinyl armour which we sewed together and wore on arms and legs, as breastplates and with various types of facial disguises that ranged from a Zorro type mask through to a Ned Kelly full face mask with a slot cut out so we could see. I tried making a Batman type cowl but the nose piece made me look like Jimmy Durante or Pinocchio on a bad day, so whilst I had one mask with bat ears sticking up from it I gave up on trying to design the nose. Wearing that vinyl armour no sword or suction cupped arrow could hurt.

Was there a time when a boy wakes up and realises that the games of youth are forever lost in the past. I'm sure that for me there was never any conscious decision to stop playing these things, it was just that other things took over as past times. I graduated to toy soldiers from farm animals and from bows and arrows to basketball. Somewhere, somewhen the little boy became an older boy, the black cape and coon skin cap got relegated to the cupboard with the green cloth.