Days 192 and 194

Early childhood memories

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From Mordialloc, we moved to Dandenong, a new house, 1 Bess Court.  It must have been around the time I started school, because the early memories of living there were going to Dandenong State School No. 1403.  Amazingly, the school number sticks in my mind all this time.

I remember thinking at the time that it was like a castle.  That might have been in 1958 or 1959 when I was 5 or 6 years old, and in pre-school. 

Where we lived was quite new, just up from the Dandenong Creek, and those fields from the bottom of our street were our playground.  We made friends and we all played together.

My father, at the time, worked at General Motors in the Dandenong factory, where they built cars.  For our holidays, he used to get a truck to deliver big wooden box sides, which we, in turn, with the other kids, built a large cubby house.  One caught the eye of the council building inspector, and we had to pull it down.  Why?  It was nearly three stories high!

That was some holiday project.

It also became what might be called a house of horrors.  We were always poor, my mother did not work, and we survived on what my father earned.  There were not enough bedrooms, and to make ends meet, we took in boarders. I know, for a while, I had to live outside in a tent until a bungalow was built onto the back of the house, when the outside toilet was moved inside.  I remember coming home from school one day and one of the male boarders was drunk after losing his job, and when my father came home, he sent him packing.  Another boarder we had, a lady named May, was with us for a while and once went on holiday with us.  For some reason, I always remember her being in a dressing gown.

My father, at one point, suffered a mental breakdown, but I had always believed it was a resurgence of malaria he caught when he was serving in New Guinea during the war.  There were also the memories of being sexually assaulted by my uncle for a period while living here.  It is a memory I have tried hard to forget.

There was also a period of domestic violence where my father would direct his anger at my older brother, and my mother tried to get between them and received some harsh treatment at his hands. And I remember hiding under my bed to get away from it.  We had no idea why he was like this, not then, but after his breakdown, things got better.

Oh, and every year, at Easter, we would paint the whole outside of the house.  As a six- or seven-year-old, I don’t think I was much of a help.

Other times we would go on holidays, packing the tent and ourselves into the car and taking off at short notice to places like Queenscliff, Adelaide, Lakes Entrance, and Wilson’s Promontory.

At some point, things must have got better.  I got to live in the bungalow, school proceeded to grade six, where I remember the teacher distinctly, Mr McPhee, a hard taskmaster, but he taught us well.

We got a bottle of milk every morning, I got lunches made by my mother that were inedible, and several classes and fellow students stuck in my mind, but curiously were forgotten for many years until now.  One, a boy named Andrew Stroud, who was English, I remember because he talked funny, and a girl, Elizabeth Llewellen, because she was nice to me.  I also remember skipping a grade, but I don’t know why.

But that didn’t last long. We moved, and it was a whole new, but not necessarily better world.

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Those memories will always be hazy. I was told once that what I remembered would not be the same as anyone else in the same house, and it is true. My brother’s memories of the same period are completely different. Somehow that didn’t surprise me.