MEMOIRS:
CHAPTER 6 END OF AN ERA
We left cake and sherry out for Santa.
Our plastic Christmas tree had already been up for a month and I spent a great deal of time under it prodding and poking the brightly coloured packages that had begun to appear.
I asked Sid and George and every patient and every staff member how many more sleeps there were till Christmas.
The final week went with agonising slowness.
On Christmas Eve we had candlelight carols with the patients in the front sunroom. My Mum played a little organ while my father conducted and crooned and cracked jokes with the old people. I was wide-eyed with excitement and wonder. There was punch and Christmas cake and many of the patients gave me little presents which I took with a marked lack of gratitude.
I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours trying to get to sleep. The thought that Santa would soon be parking his sleigh on our roof drove me into apoplexy.
I woke as soon as the first ray of sun hit my bedroom window and was straight into my slippers and dressing gown. The sherry had gone and crumbs of Christmas cake lay liberally scattered about. The Christmas tree was deep in presents that I stared at in breathless wonder. Everything was red and green and crisp and new.
Being an only child I suspect always gave me an advantage at Christmas. Not only were there loads of presents, but my parents tolerated a sunrise opening ceremony. They shuffled bleary eyed down the corridor while I ran around the house making squeaking noises.
Each present was unwrapped with a sense of breathless wonder and a cry of “Oh wow!” There were toys and socks and Matchbox cars and hankies and lollipops and bubble kits and Lego and The Cat in the Hat Beginner Book in French. One of the side effects of an anal retentive toilet upbringing was that I spent the next few days laying the presents out on my bed and looking at them, rather than breaking open the packaging and playing with them.
Christmas lunch was a steaming extravaganza of turkey and ham, baked potatoes and pumpkin, yorkshire pudding and gravy. The table was festooned in Mum’s once-a-year lace table cloth, silver cutlery and fine-cut waterford crystal. There were little bowls of mixed nuts, chocolate peanuts, crystalised ginger and grapes.
We broke bon-bons and put on silly hats and the adults read out the jokes.
Dessert was Christmas pudding and baked custard. Mum had liberally laced the pudding with half-pennies. It was good luck to find one. Dad’s party trick was to suddenly pull a face and then proceed to spit a series of twenty cent coins out of his mouth. He still does this trick every year, but it is performed with such gusto and panache that it doesn’t matter.
I fell asleep in the sunshine in front of the afternoon movie, some dross called Santa Clause Conquers the Martians. This film actually appears on every “Worst 10 Movies Ever Made” list, but to me it was a cinematic extravaganza.
·
The sixties finished in grand style. On New Year’s Eve, there was a warm breeze that smelled of earth and the night was inky black in the way that you only get far out in the country away from the city.
We put up strings of coloured lights in the gutters and railings and clothesline and the trees below the house. I blew up balloons until my lips felt like donuts.
Mum and the kitchen ladies spent the day making platters and taping plastic table cloths to the trestles spread across the garden. There were bottles of Ben Ean and Porfrey Pearl and Liebfrauwine and a big crystal bowl full of juice and ginger beer and mint. The glasses came out of boxes and they squeaked when you rubbed them.
The sun sank over the western hills like a dirty golden stain.
Our new year’s eve party involved all the staff and their families. The headlights of cars snaked across the valley in the twilight. George and Sid appeared through the back gate wearing clean shirts and hair swept back crisply with Brylcream. They lit torches around the garden, on the edges of the bull grass which fell away from the house like green carpet. The patients were spread under blankets and deck-style chairs across the lawn, with some of the older ones perched up against the glass in the upstairs balcony.
My job was to wander the crowd with a platter precariously covered in Jatz biscuits, cabanossi, sliced gherkins and cubes of cheese. For a change of pace I could also hand around either a bowl of cheezels or a fine crockery dish made up of three compartments, each with hand-painted portraits of aboriginal children in various poses, like hunting kangaroos and digging for pippies. In the first compartment was carrot sticks, in the second, celery sticks, and in the third, French onion dip that my mother made by mixing a carton of sour cream with a packet of French Onion soup.
There was lots of laughter and eating and men in shorts with long socks. We dragged our enormous record player out onto the balcony on an extension lead and played LPs by the Seekers and Cilla Black.
At about nine o’clock, there were fireworks.
Back then, we called them firecrackers.
These were not fireworks like you see today.
Now, fireworks are a community event which you travel to. You go to the fireworks, usually on New Year’s but also at major events like, say, the opening of the Olympics or a grand-final. Sometimes, you have to get to the fireworks at eight in the morning just so you get a good spot. They take place over a park or harbour or river and are rated by the millions of dollars spent and the months they have taken to put together. Put together by Fireworks Professionals, they explode enormously up in the stratosphere, filling the sky and sending out shockwaves that make your ribs thump, rapidly drawing oohs and aahs from the assembled masses.
We bought our fireworks from the Italian man at the hamburger shop on Goulburn’s main street. They came in a gigantic clear plastic bag.
I remember bumping and rattling through the grove of trees in my mum’s Peugot 404, cradling the sacred stash on my lap, barely able to peer over the top, barely able to wrap my arms around the prize, barely able to breathe with anticipation. There were several kilos of gunpowder on top of me. If we crashed and the car caught fire, at least my final moments would have been colourful.
My parents bought the family pack, which did not contain the more hard-core and highly explosive po-has, throw-downs, bungers, tom thumbs and penny-whistles, each of which was a grenade waiting to take off part of a hand. It would be a few years before I was granted access to such exciting luxuries.
Inside the bag were conical green and yellow rainbow fountains, pinwheels of gold called sparkling splendour, several rods of rainbow shooters, assorted packs of sparklers, a collection of blue and red sky rockets, strange rhomboidal packages called fire jets, a myriad of other deliciously promising packages plus an exceptionally fat tube like a beer tankard on a wooden garden stake with the disturbingly obtuse name of Sky Blast Sky. Suffice to say, they were not Made In Australia.
Firecrackers back then had an exciting air of immediacy. People had to be pushed back behind an imaginary line for their own safety. Only specially designated adults could cross the line and carry matches, and even then, they were under the command of Whoever Was In Charge. There was always the thrill in the air that at any moment one of the Lighters would get too close at the wrong moment and as a consequence lose an eyebrow.
There was the smell of sulphur in the air and little silhouette-inducing flairs of matches in the darkness.
And then it was on.
Explosions of colour. Flashes of red, sprays of gold, eruptions of iridescent green. There were sudden slaps overhead, pops of colour flying through the dark and scary high-pitched squeals of rainbow fire which looked like… well… like rainbow fire and sounded like lobsters going into the pot.
The noise was not the deep rumbling of distant gigantic thunder as much as a succession of nasty and sudden percussions like the smacking of two wooden planks only centimetres in front of your face.
I spent a great deal of time on my mother’s lap, blinking in reflex and wincing in shock while the entire landscape and all the gasping faces on it lit up spasmodically in an array of different colours.
The pinwheels were strategically spaced on a row of garden stakes around the rose garden. They were supposed to be nailed loosely so that they spun and let out a galaxy shaped array of sparks. Unfortunately, neither my dad nor any of his pyromaniac offsiders quite grasped the physics behind the pinwheels. They hammered them in hard using three or four nails until they resembled butterflies in a display case.
“We don’t want any of these little beauties flying off and hitting any of the guests,” he would have said.
As a consequence, they just trembled, fizzed and spat in an unimpressive manner. Some of the garden stakes even fell over.
It was all wonderful, exciting and momentous.
And then, at some indeterminable moment at the peak of the festivities, my batteries simply ran out and I fell asleep on someone’s lap under a rug.
Later I found out that the grand-finale - the Sky Bang Sky - had gone up like a Viking 8 rocket. Apparently it launched out of the thick cement flower-pot quite well. It soared impressively upward for a few glorious moments before executing a smooth but alarming arc over the hospital like the long stroke on the lower case letter “n” before promptly returning to earth again, also just like a Viking 8 rocket.
It banged about in the car park for a bit to the squeals and yells of Goulburn’s finest citizens who were running off toward the conflagration to save their vehicles, before whizzing down the laundry path and exploding grandly at the lofty height of three feet above the vegetable garden.
Days later, it still looked like our rhubarb patch had been napalmed.
However, I don’t remember any of this. By this stage I was in my bed, like many of the patients who no doubt had had a glass or two from one of the many casks of moselle scattered in their midst.
·
The next morning I woke up in a bed in jammies I didn’t remember changing into.
Everyone else was asleep.
There was the slightest of dew outside, so I put on my slippers and wandered out on the morning grass which was flecked with the shrapnel of firecracker casings.
The food and glasses and platters had gone. The chairs were still scattered about in clusters like cattle in a field. The tablecloths were wet, flapping in a soft breeze. The only item of interest was a bucket filled with melted ice thick with wine bottle labels curled up like burnt leaves.
So I went back inside and put Camelot on the record player.
It was the end of an era.
The seventies had begun.
Our plastic Christmas tree had already been up for a month and I spent a great deal of time under it prodding and poking the brightly coloured packages that had begun to appear.
I asked Sid and George and every patient and every staff member how many more sleeps there were till Christmas.
The final week went with agonising slowness.
On Christmas Eve we had candlelight carols with the patients in the front sunroom. My Mum played a little organ while my father conducted and crooned and cracked jokes with the old people. I was wide-eyed with excitement and wonder. There was punch and Christmas cake and many of the patients gave me little presents which I took with a marked lack of gratitude.
I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours trying to get to sleep. The thought that Santa would soon be parking his sleigh on our roof drove me into apoplexy.
I woke as soon as the first ray of sun hit my bedroom window and was straight into my slippers and dressing gown. The sherry had gone and crumbs of Christmas cake lay liberally scattered about. The Christmas tree was deep in presents that I stared at in breathless wonder. Everything was red and green and crisp and new.
Being an only child I suspect always gave me an advantage at Christmas. Not only were there loads of presents, but my parents tolerated a sunrise opening ceremony. They shuffled bleary eyed down the corridor while I ran around the house making squeaking noises.
Each present was unwrapped with a sense of breathless wonder and a cry of “Oh wow!” There were toys and socks and Matchbox cars and hankies and lollipops and bubble kits and Lego and The Cat in the Hat Beginner Book in French. One of the side effects of an anal retentive toilet upbringing was that I spent the next few days laying the presents out on my bed and looking at them, rather than breaking open the packaging and playing with them.
Christmas lunch was a steaming extravaganza of turkey and ham, baked potatoes and pumpkin, yorkshire pudding and gravy. The table was festooned in Mum’s once-a-year lace table cloth, silver cutlery and fine-cut waterford crystal. There were little bowls of mixed nuts, chocolate peanuts, crystalised ginger and grapes.
We broke bon-bons and put on silly hats and the adults read out the jokes.
Dessert was Christmas pudding and baked custard. Mum had liberally laced the pudding with half-pennies. It was good luck to find one. Dad’s party trick was to suddenly pull a face and then proceed to spit a series of twenty cent coins out of his mouth. He still does this trick every year, but it is performed with such gusto and panache that it doesn’t matter.
I fell asleep in the sunshine in front of the afternoon movie, some dross called Santa Clause Conquers the Martians. This film actually appears on every “Worst 10 Movies Ever Made” list, but to me it was a cinematic extravaganza.
·
The sixties finished in grand style. On New Year’s Eve, there was a warm breeze that smelled of earth and the night was inky black in the way that you only get far out in the country away from the city.
We put up strings of coloured lights in the gutters and railings and clothesline and the trees below the house. I blew up balloons until my lips felt like donuts.
Mum and the kitchen ladies spent the day making platters and taping plastic table cloths to the trestles spread across the garden. There were bottles of Ben Ean and Porfrey Pearl and Liebfrauwine and a big crystal bowl full of juice and ginger beer and mint. The glasses came out of boxes and they squeaked when you rubbed them.
The sun sank over the western hills like a dirty golden stain.
Our new year’s eve party involved all the staff and their families. The headlights of cars snaked across the valley in the twilight. George and Sid appeared through the back gate wearing clean shirts and hair swept back crisply with Brylcream. They lit torches around the garden, on the edges of the bull grass which fell away from the house like green carpet. The patients were spread under blankets and deck-style chairs across the lawn, with some of the older ones perched up against the glass in the upstairs balcony.
My job was to wander the crowd with a platter precariously covered in Jatz biscuits, cabanossi, sliced gherkins and cubes of cheese. For a change of pace I could also hand around either a bowl of cheezels or a fine crockery dish made up of three compartments, each with hand-painted portraits of aboriginal children in various poses, like hunting kangaroos and digging for pippies. In the first compartment was carrot sticks, in the second, celery sticks, and in the third, French onion dip that my mother made by mixing a carton of sour cream with a packet of French Onion soup.
There was lots of laughter and eating and men in shorts with long socks. We dragged our enormous record player out onto the balcony on an extension lead and played LPs by the Seekers and Cilla Black.
At about nine o’clock, there were fireworks.
Back then, we called them firecrackers.
These were not fireworks like you see today.
Now, fireworks are a community event which you travel to. You go to the fireworks, usually on New Year’s but also at major events like, say, the opening of the Olympics or a grand-final. Sometimes, you have to get to the fireworks at eight in the morning just so you get a good spot. They take place over a park or harbour or river and are rated by the millions of dollars spent and the months they have taken to put together. Put together by Fireworks Professionals, they explode enormously up in the stratosphere, filling the sky and sending out shockwaves that make your ribs thump, rapidly drawing oohs and aahs from the assembled masses.
We bought our fireworks from the Italian man at the hamburger shop on Goulburn’s main street. They came in a gigantic clear plastic bag.
I remember bumping and rattling through the grove of trees in my mum’s Peugot 404, cradling the sacred stash on my lap, barely able to peer over the top, barely able to wrap my arms around the prize, barely able to breathe with anticipation. There were several kilos of gunpowder on top of me. If we crashed and the car caught fire, at least my final moments would have been colourful.
My parents bought the family pack, which did not contain the more hard-core and highly explosive po-has, throw-downs, bungers, tom thumbs and penny-whistles, each of which was a grenade waiting to take off part of a hand. It would be a few years before I was granted access to such exciting luxuries.
Inside the bag were conical green and yellow rainbow fountains, pinwheels of gold called sparkling splendour, several rods of rainbow shooters, assorted packs of sparklers, a collection of blue and red sky rockets, strange rhomboidal packages called fire jets, a myriad of other deliciously promising packages plus an exceptionally fat tube like a beer tankard on a wooden garden stake with the disturbingly obtuse name of Sky Blast Sky. Suffice to say, they were not Made In Australia.
Firecrackers back then had an exciting air of immediacy. People had to be pushed back behind an imaginary line for their own safety. Only specially designated adults could cross the line and carry matches, and even then, they were under the command of Whoever Was In Charge. There was always the thrill in the air that at any moment one of the Lighters would get too close at the wrong moment and as a consequence lose an eyebrow.
There was the smell of sulphur in the air and little silhouette-inducing flairs of matches in the darkness.
And then it was on.
Explosions of colour. Flashes of red, sprays of gold, eruptions of iridescent green. There were sudden slaps overhead, pops of colour flying through the dark and scary high-pitched squeals of rainbow fire which looked like… well… like rainbow fire and sounded like lobsters going into the pot.
The noise was not the deep rumbling of distant gigantic thunder as much as a succession of nasty and sudden percussions like the smacking of two wooden planks only centimetres in front of your face.
I spent a great deal of time on my mother’s lap, blinking in reflex and wincing in shock while the entire landscape and all the gasping faces on it lit up spasmodically in an array of different colours.
The pinwheels were strategically spaced on a row of garden stakes around the rose garden. They were supposed to be nailed loosely so that they spun and let out a galaxy shaped array of sparks. Unfortunately, neither my dad nor any of his pyromaniac offsiders quite grasped the physics behind the pinwheels. They hammered them in hard using three or four nails until they resembled butterflies in a display case.
“We don’t want any of these little beauties flying off and hitting any of the guests,” he would have said.
As a consequence, they just trembled, fizzed and spat in an unimpressive manner. Some of the garden stakes even fell over.
It was all wonderful, exciting and momentous.
And then, at some indeterminable moment at the peak of the festivities, my batteries simply ran out and I fell asleep on someone’s lap under a rug.
Later I found out that the grand-finale - the Sky Bang Sky - had gone up like a Viking 8 rocket. Apparently it launched out of the thick cement flower-pot quite well. It soared impressively upward for a few glorious moments before executing a smooth but alarming arc over the hospital like the long stroke on the lower case letter “n” before promptly returning to earth again, also just like a Viking 8 rocket.
It banged about in the car park for a bit to the squeals and yells of Goulburn’s finest citizens who were running off toward the conflagration to save their vehicles, before whizzing down the laundry path and exploding grandly at the lofty height of three feet above the vegetable garden.
Days later, it still looked like our rhubarb patch had been napalmed.
However, I don’t remember any of this. By this stage I was in my bed, like many of the patients who no doubt had had a glass or two from one of the many casks of moselle scattered in their midst.
·
The next morning I woke up in a bed in jammies I didn’t remember changing into.
Everyone else was asleep.
There was the slightest of dew outside, so I put on my slippers and wandered out on the morning grass which was flecked with the shrapnel of firecracker casings.
The food and glasses and platters had gone. The chairs were still scattered about in clusters like cattle in a field. The tablecloths were wet, flapping in a soft breeze. The only item of interest was a bucket filled with melted ice thick with wine bottle labels curled up like burnt leaves.
So I went back inside and put Camelot on the record player.
It was the end of an era.
The seventies had begun.