An Albany Childhood – part 5

A turning point in my life came in the last year of primary school. David Booth was different – a teacher who made school fun, who breathed life and excitement into works of such as Kipling, C.S. Forester and Shelley, who introduced us to the Australian classics of Patterson and Lawson and delighted us with the tales of Crooked Mick of the Speewah. For the first time since I was seven, I felt respected by a teacher. He made me begin to believe in myself and he encouraged my art. At the end of the year, the whole of Grade 7 was tested, but this was a test of a different kind and when the results came out I was put into the top class for high school. From that moment on, I gained confidence, and school became more than just an escape from home.

In 1960 the old forts on top of Mt Clarence were nothing like the tourist attraction of today. At best, it could have been described as a curiosity of a bygone era when the British provided the guns to protect the port, which no one else ever seemed to want. As my friend’s Grandma said, ‘Too bloody far away from anywhere.’

The discovery that our first year of high school was to be spent at the forts brought deep disappointment. I had looked forward to attending the beautiful campus on the other side of Mount Clarence with its cloistered architecture, secluded courtyards and topiary hedges tended by the school gardener, Mr Colgate. In 1960, the number of baby boomers must have caught the education department by surprise. The school couldn’t accommodate us all. The top two forms were sent to the old wooden buildings on the hill. We were given a pep talk about how we were the clever, reliable students, trusted to be away from the supervision of the main campus. Little did the teachers know. Each morning, looking the picture of innocence, dressed in our blazers and boaters we were bussed up to the forts and spent the days mostly in the old barracks doing our lessons, but at every opportunity, we melted into the bush and ferreted through the forbidden tunnels and bunkers. The walls of these dark shelters whispered rumours of sexual exploits, and we deciphered the graffiti with glee.

Albany Senior High School

ASHS, for me, was a happy place and I remember all the teachers fondly, although that didn’t stop us from giving them a hard time. Domestic science was for girls only, which was one reason for disdain. Most of us were from working-class backgrounds; cooking, sewing and laundry were already part of our lives, and not a part we felt any passion for. We escaped this subject during our first year at the forts but in our second year, the cooking of a lamb chop or the ironing of a hanky was met with derision. During some of our classes, the usual patience of Mrs Dixon went up the chimney along with the smoke from our burnt offerings.

 Each morning, I met my friends in town and we walked passed CBC yelling to the boys on the way with such taunts as ‘Catholic dogs, sitting on logs’, then up the crusher track to school.

            At times, the boys were herded up to the pine forest and the girls to the quadrangle, a grassed space made private by the perimeter of tall Cyprus-like trees. There, the blue-stockinged, Miss Becket would both shock and amuse us, in her posh English accent, by giving such advice as to how to dispose of sanitary items.

         ‘Now gels, discretion, please. Heading for the toilets, twirling Modess around in the air is not the done thing.’

She also warned about boys. ‘Remember what they say, gels: Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.’

My English continued to be appalling but I needed it to matriculate and worked hard at it. At one stage Mr Trenberth encouraged me to send a story I had written to The Woman’s Weekly but I dismissed the idea as lunacy. Now I wonder at my the lack of self-confidence.

The stand-out for me was Mrs (Heather) Parry, our music and art teacher. With the help of other staff members, she organised a stunning production of The Mikado, which filled the town hall. Most of the senior students were involved in one way or another with costumes and scenery as well as the operetta itself. Reared on opera, I was overwhelmed with admiration for the voices and talents of many of the staff and students. I remember being especially impressed by the rich tenor voice of Mr Gregson, our deputy-head. When the curtain came down on my first experience of a live performance, it was a shock to find myself in the theatre with other mortals instead of the world into which I had been transported.

The Mikado

Mrs Parry also encouraged and fostered my art for which I will always be grateful. Our only point of conflict was her love of gladioli’s, which she produced ad-nauseam for the plant-life component of the curriculum. I hate gladioli’s to this day.

The town had two beautiful art-deco picture theatres: the Regent and the Empire. Most Saturday mornings we caught the bus to the matinee. Later it was Friday nights unless we were saving our pocket money for the Albany Show, the circus or bonfire night. We got our money’s worth at the pictures in those days. Firstly we sat through all the advertisements and took turns to ‘bags’ them. Next came the Movie-Time News, with the same urgent British male voice who made every news item sound like a revelation from the bible. I don’t remember any previews, but there were always two full-length pictures (the American word movie was adopted much later). An interval separated the screenings when we would go to the counter, or buy ice-creams and chocolates from an usher who came around with a little tray hanging from her neck. We could also get a pass-out and run up the street to the cafe where the sweets were cheaper.  When I look through a list of 1940s and 1950s movies there weren’t too many that we missed. Our favourites were the light and frothy from Hollywood where we could escape with June Allyson or Doris Day, but there were many memorable pictures that moved us to tears like The Red Shoes and Lassie Come Home. When my Grandmother returned from a visit to Scotland in the late 1950s and told us about how people could watch pictures in their lounge rooms via something called television, I couldn’t comprehend it.

 

An ‘Usherette’ at the ‘Pictures”

 My friend Val and I were conscientious students, both keen to gain good results for the Leaving Exam, both keen to gain a bursary for a teachers’ college in Perth. She lived close to town so we often studied at her house, occasionally creeping out of her bedroom window and down the Middleton Beach Stomp. Many of our classmates came from country towns, most of them boarding at The Rocks or The Priory. A couple of the country boys in our class had their own house down at Middleton Beach which we named The House of the Rising Sun, after the Animals hit that came out that year. In 1964 that house rang every weekend with the new pop music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and others. The neighbours must have sighed with relief when our childhoods ended with the exams in November and we drifted in different directions towards the rest of our lives.

Art remained part of my life and led me in many directions. Later in life, I decided to explore something that had puzzled me since childhood. Our mother was an inspiring, courageous, talented woman with a wicked sense of humour but underlying her strength was something else, something unspoken, something too hard to identify. I decided to explore back through four generations of my matrilineal line. When I did this I found much that had been left out of the family stories, I found a history of dire poverty and trauma. Could this have been the cause of the underlying fear and shame that I had sensed? I found the reasons for migration to Australia on the far side of the world and I found my great-grandmother Agnes. Agnes grabbed me and demanded that her story be told.

After I had completed my exhibition Connective Tissue, I followed her footsteps around Scotland. I retold her story in The White Apron, a novel that describes the strength and resilience that was needed for a working-class woman to survive the industrial revolution; a time when children died too often in an age deemed the slaughter of the innocents.

Gradually Agnes led me away from art and into writing, and exploring the lives other forgotten women.