CHAPTER THREE
Childhood - Part 2
1960 – 1965
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| L-R: John, me, Peter, Frances, Anne - at Redcliffe c. 1960 |
During school nights we’d have to line up, youngest to eldest, with books in hand for Dad to check our homework. Once a schoolteacher – always a schoolteacher. If we did well, we could do as we pleased. If not, we got extra tuition. The older we grew, the more taxing these lessons became. I was too scared to show him my report card once because it was less than favourable. I told him about it the following Sunday while he was umpiring a tennis match I was involved with. I didn’t do it that way to lessen the blow. I did it because I felt closer to him. He didn’t get angry. He simply put his arm around my shoulder and told me it was all right, that I could try harder next time. That was my father - a strange mix of a man. He was the consummate intellectual. If we wanted to know anything, from an obscure historical date to a mathematical equation, we only had to ask. On the rare occasions he didn’t know the answer he made it his job to find out.
In the evenings we’d gather around the wireless to listen to the serials. The classroom comedy Yes, What? was our favourite because we loved the wonderfully whacky excuses Greenbottle came up with to fend off his bumbling teacher, Dr Percy Pym. Afterwards, if time allowed, Mum played the piano while we sang our favourite songs. Mum loved the piano and while I didn’t mind it, I hated the practice it demanded. Thankfully, Dad stayed out of that. He probably would have had me pounding the keys until my fingers were stiff and sore. Mum, on the other hand, believed in teaching by example. Over the next few years I looked forward to piano lessons at school because my teacher was the wonderful and exotic Faye Guivarra who gained fame on television variety shows as "Candy Devine", a sultry jazz songstress. Later, I learned she had forged a great career for herself in Northern Ireland as a radio presenter, went on to marry her agent and had four children, one of whom is Brisbane's famed celebrity chef, Alastair McLeod. But Miss Guivarra's greatest gift to me was hope at a time when there was very little to be hopeful for.
In 1960, Dad bought a television set and our lives changed forever. Unfortunately, some things never changed and saying ‘The Rosary’ was one of them. It was a nightly ritual we couldn’t get out of it unless we were sick and we could only feign illness or pretend to be asleep so many times. Dad eventually got around our ploys by decreeing the prayers would be said before homework was checked, immediately after the nightly news on television. The volume dial was turned down as we kneeled in front of the little shrine Mum had created on a side table. A fifteen-inch statue of the Virgin Mary and holy pictures bought from Pelligrini’s held pride of place among flowers cut from the front garden. Only later did I learn Peter spent this time ‘watching TV’ through its reflection in the glass panes of Mum’s china cabinet. Trust him to find a way to enjoy that torturous ritual.
Dad was not a religious fanatic as such, but his faith certainly ruled his life – and ours. From my perspective, the Church controlled him mind, body and soul. Yet, in 1961, I saw a different side of him when two Jehovah’s Witnesses came a-calling. Instead of sending them on their way with a few harsh words he politely listened to their spiel while Mum tut-tutted in the background. She had no time for them. The pair must have thought they had a convert-in-the-making when Dad allowed them to finish without interruption. We watched in amazement. Surely this couldn’t be happening. Respecting his right of reply, they then stood in silence listening to the merits of Catholicism. When he had finished they conceded defeat and were turning to leave when he surprised them by inviting them into the house to continue the discussion, in comfort, at the kitchen table. Mum was far from happy to be asked to put the kettle on, but she did as Dad requested. She even put some of her home-baked biscuits on her best china plate before storming out of the room. My brothers and I watched intently as the debate went backwards and forwards like a ping-pong ball. No voices were raised, and no one except Mum got upset. An hour later, they rose, shook hands and walked out the door looking a lot happier than when they had arrived, despite having failed in their mission.
Around this time John and I were given our first sex education lessons. I knew they were Mum’s idea. She was canny enough to know one does not prevent something by hiding it away in some dark inaccessible corner. Still, my parents’ Catholic beliefs demanded we understood that sex outside marriage was sinful. I can still remember the flogging we received years earlier when Dad discovered us with the kids next door. It was innocent experimentation, but he exploded into a blind rage. Mum saw such things through different eyes. Fiercely proud of her Irish heritage, she told us wild tales of spectres, leprechauns and banshees. I didn’t know much about the faerie-folk back then but I did believe in ghosts. Dad was reluctant to discuss anything associated with the supernatural unless it concerned his beloved faith and he only felt comfortable talking about sexuality when he could reinforce the Church’s line on chastity. However, even a nun as formidable as Sister Terasita was no match for my father when it came to his love of fine literature. She had instructed us not to watch a film on television one night so naturally, that’s all we wanted to do. When I told Dad about it, he not only surprised me by allowing me to watch it, he sat up with me, ready to answer any question I may have. The film was The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In addition to her other attributes, Sister Teresita was a dreadful bigot. Her worst moment, though, was the time wedding bells from the Methodist church across the road drew our attention. Shamelessly, she told us, a class of impressionable thirteen-year-olds, that the bride would burn in Hell because she was “a Catholic girl marrying a Protestant boy in a Protestant church”. Growing up in a convent school in the 1950s was tantamount to terrorism. By the first grade we knew all about Hell. It was a place of damnation; a place from which no soul could escape; a place of unspeakable torment and hideous beasts.
The only non-Catholic girl in my class endured this prejudice on a regular basis. For Leigh, it started when our first grade teacher told her she could never go to Heaven because she wasn’t Catholic. The fact that Leigh wasn’t Catholic was entirely due to blatant discrimination on the part of the Church itself. Leigh was the youngest of three girls born to a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. When her mother was making arrangements for her baptism she found the eldest girl’s baptism had been recorded, but not the second girl’s. Her father’s investigations found the parish priest of the day decreed the girl’s baptism wasn’t really a baptism so he recorded it in a small notebook he then tossed unceremoniously into a desk drawer. His reasoning was that the eldest girl’s godparents were her father’s Catholic relatives whereas the second girl’s were Protestants like her mother. The first inkling Leigh had that something was amiss was when she overheard her father say something derogatory in response to hearing of Archbishop Duhig’s death in 1965.
Something about Leigh and her family always fascinated me. Her father was the local milkman who made his deliveries in an old-fashioned horse and cart. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was only because he couldn’t afford a van. The sound his horse made as its hooves struck the road clearly evoked a deep subconscious longing in me. I’d lie awake for hours waiting for that comforting sound and if I slept through I would be strangely upset. I can even remember getting up on a number of occasions to peer through the window in the hope of catching a glimpse of him as he made his early morning rounds. Years later, when Leigh and I were talking about this with a clairvoyant friend of mine, we learned we were sisters in a past life. Her father in this life was our father in that life. Some tragedy must have befallen him for me to wait so anxiously, desperately needing to hear the sound of his safe return from whatever had taken him out into the night.
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| Primary school photo c. 1962 with those who turned out to be significant people in my life. |
1963 was a seminal year for me. For one thing, on my thirteenth birthday I received a beautiful new bedroom suite and a room of my own! The latter was doubtlessly due to my habit of listening to Sydney
In 1963, the instrumental hit, Pipeline, by American group, The Chantays, stormed up the charts heralding the start of the surfing craze in Australia
We were eventually given permission to renovate a disused shed on the convent grounds. It was hard for me to imagine the nuns handing it over to a bunch of music-crazed teenagers without a fight and I am sure they didn’t. The parents whose homes we went to were wealthy parishioners who held considerable sway with Father Sheehan. Perhaps they’d had enough noise and responsibility. Father Sheehan was an old fuddy-duddy who had no time for teenagers, but his curate, Father Britton, did. He attended all our parties and not out of any misguided sense of duty. He genuinely loved dancing and being around young people. He was a former Anglican minister who converted to Catholicism after the death of his wife.
In August 1963, Granny died and was transferred to Brisbane
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| Sarah Warman (Granny) |
In November 1963, American president John F. Kennedy was assassinated and, like millions of other people throughout the world, my parents felt the loss as though a close relative had died. The world was indeed changing for just after I turned fourteen Mum allowed me to wear lipstick to Mass for the first time. She even applied it for me while Dad watched on in bemusement. The following morning Sister Teresita savagely grabbed my arm at school and punished me for daring to “appear so shamelessly in God’s house”. The fact I was then in high school and she was no longer my teacher made little difference.
By then, thankfully, The Beatles had swept everything else aside. I was so thrilled when the boys decorated our clubhouse with posters ‘borrowed’ from newsagency displays. The Beatles emerged at just the right time to whisk me off to a magical realm where everything is just the way you want it to be. I can still see myself seated at the school piano with Miss Guivarra beside me as I learned to play "She Loves You" knowing full well the nuns would never have approved! Life was getting touchy at home, too, with money getting tighter and tighter. Looking back, I don’t know how my parents managed with three of us at high school. But at fourteen, oblivious to their troubles, I spent my pocket money on teen magazines like 16, from which I cut pictures of the Liverpool lads to wallpaper my room. John and Ringo were funny and Paul was cute, but I was a George girl through and through. Some bright spark even came up with an evaluation of one’s personality by the Beatle they preferred. As a George girl, I was quiet and reflective, and it was true. I was also the same star sign as George, but whereas he was born on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, I was born on the cusp of Pisces and Aries.
On Monday, June 29th 1964, the greatest band in the world gave their first Brisbane
From Peter, I would later learn Dad had stood in a queue for hours to buy those highly prized tickets. I will never forget the night I found out John and I would be going. It was dinnertime and I had been sulking because I wouldn’t get a chance to see them. Dad had waited until the dishes were cleared away before wryly saying: “Oh, by the way, I have a couple of tickets to a bug show. Anyone interested?”
On Saturday, March 20th 1965, just two days after my fifteenth birthday, my father passed away. He had not been well for some time, but week after week our family doctor dismissed his headaches and other symptoms as nervous tension. Nevertheless, after seeing Dad doing something incongruous, Mum resorted to trickery to get him a second opinion. That doctor immediately referred Dad to a neurosurgeon who diagnosed massive tumours in his brain. The operation to remove the tumours was deemed successful despite him being in a coma, but severe cranial pressure saw him back under the surgeon’s knife within twenty-four hours. He didn’t survive the second operation.
When I first told Kathleen my thoughts about Dad reincarnating as my son, she told me if there was a way for him to return to me he would find it because he loved me so much. Actions speak louder than words. To be willing to stand in the autumn sun for hours on end, surrounded by screaming adolescents, told me my father loved me very much indeed. But how he managed it is beyond my ability to comprehend.
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