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.

The Ghosts of Christmases Passed

I loved Christmas as a kid.  The whole day was one big present.  The weeks of excitement and anticipation were fantastic and the memories are powerful and sunk deep into my psyche.   When my own kids were born we tried to make it the same for them and only they can answer whether it was or not and this post is about my reflections of my childhood Christmases.   The good times that lurk in the shadows and seem probably much better looking backwards than they did then, although they were pretty special.

Decembers were the time when the days warmed up and the north winds sometimes blew so hard they could suck the moisture from you as soon as you stepped outside the door.  This was the herald of Christmas in our part of the world.

The tree would go up in the early days of the month and it was a family affair - those very same decorations that lived on that tree year after year for more than half a century were lovingly wrapped in tissue paper each year by Mum and packed away, and this year when we were cleaning out her place after her passing we again unwrapped them and shared them amongst the three of us.  On my tree this year is a bird, one of three, that were the favourites of my two sisters and I, that we used to argue about who would put them where.

And with the winds and heat would come the Christmas cards.  Each of us kids received them from aunties and uncles and cousins, and how exciting it was to rush to the letter box after hearing the postmans whistle to see what he would bring.  They would then be hung across the windows on bits of wool and it seemed like there were always 100 or more each year which we would also reply to.   That appears to be one of the lost arts of Christmas, I guess social media, texting and emails have bumped that tradition aside.

Each year we would visit Father Christmas at Myer.  In those days the only store was in the city because it was well before any of the shopping malls were built in the suburbs.    Mum would dress us in our Sunday best and we'd trek into the city in her old Vauxhall, line up to see the magic in the Myer Christmas windows and then make our way to the toy department to see Father Christmas.  I was sometimes confused that he looked a little bit different each time I saw him but I knew that he would be visiting me on Christmas Eve.

We would then go and do most of our Christmas shopping in Coles and walk up and down the aisles picking out stuff we thought our cousins would like, because we would buy something for every one of them.  Guns for the boys, dolls for the girls, Enid Blyton and Biggles books, California poppy hair oil or brylcreem for those who were a bit older and for the oldest ones the old chestnuts socks or hankies.

And when the night came we'd leave out biscuits and cheese and Dad would insist on leaving him a bottle of beer, not sure whether it was for Father Christmas or the reindeer, but each Christmas morning it was standing on the hearth of the fireplace bone dry.   I remember the year we had the briquette heater put into the fireplace cavity I was really worried that he wouldn't be able to get down the chimney so I insisted that Mum leave the front door open.

The sacks would be placed side by side on the hearth and we also found them at Mum's place recently, faded and somewhat tattered but lovingly folded and kept as the echoes of our childhood continued to resonate with us.

Oh the excitement of Christmas Eve was unbearable.   I'd toss and turn for hours thinking I would never get to sleep and then suddenly it would be time to wake up.  I'd creep into Karen's room and later Debra's wake them both and rush up to the loungeroom.  Before we touched anything though we'd rush back down to Mum and Dad's room yelling at the tops of our voices "He's been!  He's been!"

So what did we get?   Well it's a little too long ago to remember these things in chronological order but some of the things I remember are a triang train set, a fort with cowboys and indians, a scalextrix car racing set.    Each year their would be a book and I still have two Tarzan and two Eagle Annuals that turned up in my sack on various occasions.   Always there would be some clothes, usually some sort of short sleeved shirt and shorts that I wore on Christmas Day and most years new bathers because on Boxing Day we'd be off on a camping holiday.

When the sacks were emptied we'd exchange our own gifts and then rush outside to see if the rest of the neighbourhood was awake.  There would always be kids out and about on brand new bikes or scooters.  Then we'd do the rounds of the neighbourhood with gifts for the other kids and collecting more presents ourselves.

Some time late morning after a few drinks with neighbours we'd be in the car and off to Merlynston for Christmas with the Joyce's and then onto the Smith's for dinner in Brunswick.   By the time we'd get back home on Christmas night we's be lugging home a boot full of presents and be exhausted.  Usually Mum would be driving because Dad would inevitably be under the weather.

As Grandparents aged, and the days became to hard for them to host, we would have the lunch and dinner at our place in Box Hill, but as the cousins got older and partnered up the numbers coming gradually dwindled until the cycle began again with our own children.  And now I wait with some anticipation for the time when I too will be graced with Grandkids and have the wonder of Christmas rekindled.

Funny how little snapshots are appearing in my brain as I write this - the year I told Mum that I knew who Father Christmas really was and how I cried when I told her and she held me and said that it was OK there would always be a sack on the hearth for me as long as I wanted one, and there was until my little sister Deb finally fessed up to knowing the truth when I was around 17 years old.   I remember dropping my dacks and showing off my leopard skin jockettes, the first adult undies I had after years of white Y fronts and arguing that it didn't matter who I showed because they were just like bathers anyway.    I remember the year Nana and Grandad Smith gave us Mark 10 guns, complete with spring loaded rocket launchers and grenades and how we ran around the back laneways of Brunswick.    One really hot day when a bottle of loys softdrink sitting in the sun outside exploded and a shard of glass cut my chin.   I remember waking to the news of Cyclone Tracy wiping out Darwin in 1974.

Mostly I remember how lucky I was to have been in a time and place when we lacked for nothing, when even the hardest times still saw plenty of food on the table and gifts under the tree.   I lived a privileged life.

I wish all of you who read this a very Merry Christmas and hope that we don't lose sight of the fact that we also celebrate the birth of a special person who changed the world for the better more than 2000 years ago, and irrespective of what beliefs you hold you should remember that.

Summer Daze

Sitting here with the wind rising and facing another day of record rainfall across the state tomorrow after two decades of drought, got,me thinking about summers past.   I'm facing my first Christmas as an orphan, if a 53 year old man can be an orphan and the excitement of Christmas approaching is tempered with the knowledge that both Mum and Dad are gone now and this is my first summer without them.

I remember the long summer days at Richardson Street, the smell of cut grass, of apples fermenting on the ground beneath the two trees in the front yard, of the wonderful scent of petrichor as the summer thunder storms rolled in.   There was no daylight saving in those days, but we stayed outside late anyway.  No air conditioning, in the house, or at school, and in the cars we rolled the windows down, didn't press a button to keep them up and turn on the refrigeration.

Summer meant a crate of Loys softdrinks home delivered once a week, the weekend visits of Mr Whippy and chocolate coated ice cream cones.   It meant some beach visits where we'd tie meat to a string to catch crabs in rock pools at Ricketts Point.

It was hours spent in the Clark above ground pool, dragging ourselves in circles to create a whirlpool.  Dad shifted that pool to half a dozen different places in the yard.  We had no filter so he'd spend hours out there himself scooping leaves out and dosing it with chlorine that stung our eyes.

And on weekends were Dad's BBQ's, burnt sausages and the best hot chips you've ever tasted smothered in salt.

Summer meant a race with my sister Karen to see who could get the best tan.  There was no slip, slop, slap campaign in those days.  Instead we'd coat oursleves in coconut oil and lie on our towels on the footpath slowly basting in the heat.  I generally won, and have had a couple of skin cancers cut out since to prove it.

The days were long and hot, the nights cool with the chirping of crickets.  The days were simpler then before the times that meant there were too many summers to remember.

Cemeteries, Dairies and Nut Trees - Merlynston Part 1

So my earliest memories of space are of the immediate neighbourhood in Box Hill South.  If I may digress before I even get into this post, I found out this week that one of the blokes I now work with lived around the corner from me and in fact knew some of the kids I went to school with.  It is a small world.

And back then it was even smaller.  Childhood memories sometimes play like incomplete scenes in a movie and different days run into one another so we end up with an amalgam of images rather than distinct chapters and such are my memories of Merlynston.

Most people in Melbourne have never heard of this tiny suburb north of Coburg and on the edge of the Fawkner Cemetery.   For a time my Grandfather was a grave digger there and a Chapel is named after my Uncle who for a long time was on the Board of the cemetery trust.

I was born not far from there and Mum moved back into a bungalow at the back of my Grandparents place at 55 Orvieto Street after I was born whilst they were saving for their own home.   They had been living in a flat at Mordialloc for a few years. 

But my memories of Merlynston don’t stretch back quite that far, they in fact begin on any one of dozens of weekends when we visited Nana and Pa which seemed to be at least fortnightly, usually on a Sunday.  Now here my cousins may in fact say that my memories of Orvieto Street may well differ from theirs but for me they are very vivid.

Pa would generally meet us on the front porch and usually he’d have a 2 shilling piece to give us.  Pa had his voice box removed after getting cancer of the larynx the year I was born and it was a source of grim fascination that he had a hole in his throat covered with a gauze square.  He sort of talked with a wheezing croak that was really hard for me to understand.   I wonder what his voice was like – did ne sing, did he have a baritone or tenor?

On the wall in the foyer was a crushed velvet belt containing badges that Pa had collected during his time with the New Zealand army in the First World War.  On a cabinet at the end was a photo of my Uncle Keith in uniform and I have this vague recollection of a photograph of the Queen.   On the side wall was a portrait of Nana’s Mum and Dad.

But it is the smell that stays with me mostly.  Nana would inevitably be baking and the smells of fresh scones and roasting meat would greet us as we walked inside the front door.  I loved the scones piping hot from the oven covered in melted butter and smothered in vegemite.

The lounge room to the left had a piano and Nana would sometimes sit down and play it for us and my favourite part were the big club chairs which I would perch myself in and read from the set of encyclopedia from a bookcase against one wall.   In later years Nana had a huge 26 inch black and white TV with a hard wired remote control.  I remember being fascinated by being able to actually sit in a chair and change a channel or turn the volume up and down.  It was to be years before we had one at home.

The back yard had a lemon tree which legend had it was well watered by the men of the family.  At the back of the yard was a wood shed and a chook house and if we were lucky, Pa would allow us to go down and collect the eggs.  There was a massive nut tree – walnuts I think – that dominated one corner of the yard and my cousins Paul and I spent a fair bit of time climbing it.

But the magic place was Pa’s garage which we used to sneak into and poke around.  It was full of tools and the cut down wagon that Pa used to push around the streets of Coburg whilst he collected beer bottles for return to the brewery.  I still marvel at him as an octogenarian with one leg shorter than the other because he got blown up in France in the First World War, and no voice box because he had it removed as a 72 year old, pushing a cart laden with hessian sacks full of beer bottles for miles oblivious to the traffic he was holding up.  In 1974 Pa was the first of my Grandparents to pass away and I have always counted myself lucky that I had all of them with me for so long.

There is much more to write about Merlynston and that will come shortly.  I have asked my sisters and cousins to make a contribution as well and will post them as they come.

The Boy of Summer

The exceitement began with Christmas Day but continued into Boxing Day when I was a kid.   That was the day that the holiday started.  For many years when we were kids the holiday destination was the Ball Caravan Park on the Murray River at Corowa.   For around 10 years I made that trek with Mum and Dad, my sisters and various other family and friends and we'd camp there for around four weeks every year.  That means that I spent around a year of my life in that town.

 

 Dad would pack up his old Ford Thames van with all of the gear and he and I would take off early Boxing Day morning.  Many times there'd be a deck chair set up inside the side door and my cousin Gavin or one of my mates, David Palmer for a couple of years, would sit in that chair in the back.   It wasn't illegal in those days, there were no requirments to wear seat belts and besides the van struggled to do 35 miles per hour meaning what is now a three hour trip took us around 7 or 8 in those days.

We went with all the comforts of home, carpet for the floor, an ice chest, chairs, gas stove, umbrellas and a foam mattress for me to sleep on in the back of the van.

It was a dry heat in Corowa, the plane trees shaded the camping ground and helped keep it relatively cool in the shade.   It didn't really matter because we spent most days at the pool which was adjacent to the camping ground, spending hours perfecting our bombing and horsie technique.  For those who don't know the terms that was a way of leaping into the water and causing the biggest possible splash without doing a belly whacker.  And when we weren't at the pool we were generally down at the river swimming or fishing.

In the years when our friends the Browns came as well, Uncle Arthur would grab me by the two at some ungodly hour of the morning around dawn so that his sone Garaham and I could go fishing.  In the early years we would generally come back with a feed of redfin that we'd cook up fresh for breakfast.

As I got a little bit older I'd play golf.  I could be a student member with reciprocal rights to a lot of Melbourne Golf Courses for $5 per year which was a bargain even if I only played occasionally during the year.    I never played often enough to become any good at the game and I'm just as happy walking around a course these days and taking photos rather than trying to bash one of those little white balls.

My sister Karen and Shirley Brown were far more sociable than I was and they made plenty of friends up there over the years, much to Mum's chagrin because she didn't like them mixing with boys.  In fact every night she'd lace up their side of the tent so that they couldn't get out.  In those days though, tents didn't have floors so they simply waited a while then lifted the side and snuck out.   I remember one night Mum came and got me from the Van because she'd found them missing and I had to march around the park with here whilst she called out to them.  We eventually found them across the other side sitting down laughing with a group of young blokes.  Yes, Mum was over protective.

One year it absolutely poured with rain the whole time we were there.   Dad must have had to return to work early because I remember Mum had to dismantle the camp, pack up the van and drive us home.    The van boiled every 50 mile and we'd have to stop and refill the radiator.  It took us around 12 hours to get home that year.

I've written before about how Karen and I used to have a race to see who could get brownest the quickest.   Sunburn wasn't the horror story in those days that it is now.  We didn't cover up, in fact we wore as little as possible and lay out in the sun for hours at a time.  In Dad's words by the end of the holidays we were all as brown as berries.

As I tend to do on holidays, a lot of time was spent reading.   I remember that I bought the Robert E Howard Conan books one year at a book store up there which were my first introduction into the Sword and Scorcery genre.  I re-read the Lord of the Rings and the Dune trilogy one holiday and became a fan of Michael Moorcock in yet another year.  And I shouldn't forget the E E Doc Smith Lensman series.

Fo the most part they were good times.  I'm sure Mum and Dad chose Corowa because it was in New South Wales and therefore had poker machines in the local clubs.   But Dad continued to drink while we were away and the rows would also go on.  Often Mum would march over to the bowling club after Dad had disappeared for too many hours.  She wasn't averse to yelling and telling him what she thought in front of everyone figuring that embarassing him was the only way to get him to leave.  And she was right.

I think that was where I grew to hate New Years Eve because inevitably everyone would get pissed and so I'd hide in the van reading my books, venturing out when the clock struck midnight and quickly retiring after a fast Happy New Year to everyone.

What I liked best was that we were away from home, for a while the world was on hold.  No school work, no need to mow the lawns or polish the shoes.   I could do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.  read, fish, play golf, swim, all the things that made summers fun and school seem a long way off.    The year I went to univeristy was the year I stopped going to Corowa.  Holidays with mates were more important than holidays with Mum and Dad, and anyway, I had to work over the school holidays to earn enough money to see me through the next year.

Thus ended 10 years of summer school holidays with good memories far outweighing the bad.

Usher Nazis and Choo Choo Bars

Nana and Grandad Smith lived at 25 Davison Street, Brunswick when I was growing up.  It was a single fronted brick terrace house with blue stone cobbled gutters on the street and in the lane that ran down the back of the house.

As with Dad's family many of Mum's relatives lived in the same general vicinity and so when we visited their were always other members of the family present.  When I was a toddler my great-Grandmother Janet Woolley lived there and I still have memories of playing hide and seek where she would let me hide my head under her apron. It was out of sight out of mind, if I couldn't see anyone then obviously they couldn't see me either.

Nana's brother, Uncle Alf, who won the Military Medal in World War 1, had lung cancer and Nana nursed him until his death which seemed a long time coming at the time.  I don't remember too much about him but I did inherit his 3/4 size bed [a bit smaller than a double] and thought I was a king when I got into it.  It was the bed I slept in until I got married in 1982.  It never occured to me at the time that it was the bed an old uncle had died in.   Incidentally the citation for his medal states that it was awarded when he entered the trenches and captured thirty Turks alone.  Must have been a pretty gutsy effort.

That bed had one other unfortunate accident.  At my 21st Birthday, Dad had invited a young bloke he worked with.  He was always bringing home people he'd met for meals and the obligatory sharing of the beer.  Unfortunately this bloke got absolutely paralytic and was put to sleep in my bed which he promptly wet.   Took days for the mattress to dry.

But as I sometimes do, I'll move from the digression back to the topic at hand, which I should have said early on is about what we did in Brunswick on Saturday afternoons.  Often if we weren't at the footy watching our beloved blues play at Princes Park, we would be sent off to the pictures at the Padua Theatre in Sydney Road, Brunswick.    It was a big deal for little kids to walk to those places by themselves in those days and generally there were at least four of us, Karen and I and our cousins Gavin, Kerry and Phillip at various times.

This was a typical art deco theatre of the time, the stalls down below and the expensive seats where the more well off could sit up top in the dress circle.

The Padua had been built by Hoyts in 1937 and was closed in 1968 much to our sorrow.   It was then leased to a couple of Itialian blokes Tony and Franco Zeccola who re-opened it in August 1969 as the Metropolitan playing Italian language films which wasn't much help to us.    This continued until December 1981 when the doors closed for the last time before it was demolished in January and February of 1982.

A full page article in The Argus Newspaper in Melbourne was published on 23rd July 1937 announcing the opening.   It seated 2000 people, had such luxuries as foot warmers, air conditioning and a crying room for children.  The first weeks entertainment included Charles Rainsford and his Swing Orchestra on stage with screening of the Errol Flynn and Olivia De Haviland movie The Charge of the Light Brigade.   The paper also announced that there would be short screening of the Walt Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon Mickey's Circus in full colour.

In 1954 a cinemascope camera system was installed which allowed the display of wide screen movies and I can remember one in particular that stuck in my mind.  How the West was Won was a mind blowing movie on the big screen at the time.

But I had other favourites that still stick in my mind to this day.   Such classics as Snow White and the Three Stooges.

Ivanhoe.

The Black Knight

And what was a trip to the pictures without lollies. Favourites were White Knights and Choo Choo Bars which turned your entire mouth black and which would last almost the entire movie they were so chewy. And of course there were the boxes of jaffas. I wasn't one for rolling them down the aisle, much better to eat them but maybe the reason for rolling them was in the hope that an usher Nazi might step on some and fall over.

When the theatre opened in 1937 The Argus reported that the entire work force was male.  Certainly by the time we were going in the mid sixties many of the usherettes were women.  I am pretty sure that they were women, but some of them had mustaches that would have made Groucho Marx proud, and voices that reminded me of the bad guys in the World War 2 movies.  "Feet off Seat" and "Quiet Down" were growled at the kids whilst London Blitz Spotlights were shone into our faces.  I truly thought they may have been Nazis in disguise and I feared for the lives of the kids who were occasionally grabbed by the ear and escorted out never to be seen again.  Woe betide anyone who was actually found to be in the wrong seat.  I was pretty certain that such a heinous offence must have meant the gas chamber or hanging for them.

What movies stick in your mind from your childhood?

Of Chow Food and Other Things

Shopping was very different when I was a kid.  There were no large suburban shopping malls, no Friday night, all day Saturday nor Sunday Shopping.  In fact it was even hard to find a petrol station open on a Sunday or a milk bar open after midday if they were open at all.

In the sixties much of the shopping was done at local strip shopping centres.  For us that meant Bennettswood on the corner of Station Street and Burwood Road, well before it was divided and became Burwood Highway.  Everything we needed was there, a Foodland grocery store, a green grocers, a butchers, a newsagent, a milk bar, a fish and chip shop and a Chinese food shop.

There were no supermarkets.  Grocery stores were where you went to buy bottled, canned and packaged food and if Mum didn't go to Bennettswood we'd go to Box Hill and go to what I think was Permewans in Station Street.   The groceries were brought home either in string bags that Mum had taken with her or in a box collected from a pile inside the store.

It was usually a bit of a rush because the shops closed at 6 O'Clock.  Friday nights were also Fish and Chip night which were always bought at Bennettswood in a store run by a Greek Family just as the Green Grocers was down the road a bit.   Always there was a visit to the newsagent and Mum would buy herself Best Bets and Truth for the form guides so she could study them and before putting her bets on at the TAB on Saturdays and we three kids would get a comic.   I loved going home and scoffing the fish and chips while we watched Zig and Zag on TV then curling up in bed and being allowed to read my comics before Mum would come down and tell us to turn off the light.

Sometimes we would buy Chinese (Chow) food usually just dim sims and spring rolls for me because that was in the days before I liked fried rice and other Chinese cuisine.  But in those days you took your own saucepans into the store for the cooks to fill up.

In the days before Dad went to work at Uncle Ivan's Stockade Hotel as a second job, Saturday mornings were haircut day.  We'd drive down early park at the back of the shops near the Town Hall and then we'd have a footrace to the shops.  Me and Dad, just the two of us, him striding out like the professional sprinter he had been and me scurrying along flat out keeping up but always managing to beat him.  Thanks Dad for letting me win, but why did you insist I got the "college cut" haircut?

There was always a visit to the TAB in those early days too.  Later on when one opened in East Burwood on the corner of Middleborough and Burwood Roads we would head up there late on Saturday mornings.  Mum would usually also but Dad a dozen bottles of VB and herself a flagon of sherry in the bottle shop that opened near the TAB.  And if we were very lucky we might end up with another comic for the weekend as well.  As I got older and earnt some pocket money, or saved my lunch money from school [and that's another story] I'd buy a few more myself, keeping in mind that they were only 15 to 20 cents back then.

I remember Dad getting very excited when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet opened in Station Street Box Hill and sometimes we'd head down there and buy a bucket - no fancy burgers or wraps in those days, in fact, if memory serves me well, I'm  not even sure that you could get chips, so we'd also stop at the fish and chip shop and order a dollars worth there before coming home.  Dad would always say it was finger looking good.

At some time in the 70's Dad decided to change fish and chip shops after finding a Chinese owned store in Canterbury Road near the Middleborough Road corner.   For some reason it seemed fresher, certainly the batter was different, fluffy and crunchy.  I think Dad may have supplied the store with paper when has was a commercial traveller (or a salesman for those unfamiliar with that term).   Even there though, whilst the food was encased in clean white butchers paper the outer wrapping was always yesterdays newspapers.

Butchers, were different in those days too.   They were the only place you could get meat, none of it was pre-wrapped and the floors were always covered in saw dust.   The cool stores inside the shops held whole sides of lamb, beef and pork.   If you wanted chops or a leg of lamb it would be cut straight of the carcass in front of you.  No hiding out the back, sliced or sawn off, wrapped in paper and carried out in a string bag.

Home deliveries were done.  You could get your groceries delivered at little or no charge, the Loys man delivered lemonade, Mr Peowrie delivered our briquettes.  At some stage in the 60's, Mr Whippy appeared on our streets and we were often lucky enough to be given some money so we could rush out and get a choctop ice cream while the familiar tinny sound of Greensleeves was played over his loud speaker.  The doctor even did home visits in those days and I can remember Mum being laid up with migraine headaches and needing Dr Hewitt to visit and give her an injection.   On those days Aunty Hazel would sometimes look after us until Dad got home.

In October 1960 Chadstone Shopping Centre opened and it was at that time the first regional shopping centre in Melbourne and the largest in Australia.  Myer was down one end and Coles New World Supermarket at the other end of an open aired double sided strip of shops.   The thing I remember most about it was that it had escalators and they were the only ones outside the city.  At the bottom of them, up the Coles end was Tim the Toyman's, imagine a whole store dedicated to toys.  Karen and I collected little ceramic Disney characters.  I also got cowboys and indians, match box cars and lego on occasions and Karen got clothes for her Barbie dolls.  As I got older I graduated to Airfix models, firstly model aeroplanes and later on plastic model soldiers which I would spend hours painting in my bedroom.

Life somehow seemed less hectic then.  We didn't need 24 hour shopping.  We didn't need to have everything in one spot.  You knew the local shopkeepers by name and could find what you needed when you needed it without having to rush, even though things weren't open for as long.  Explain that one to me :)