A Life of Pride. Alan G Pride
Mum begged me to stay until I’d finished my apprenticeship, pointing out that I could get a job anywhere after that. I did as she asked. I’d already broken off a serious affair with a Catholic girl, Maree, because Mum wanted me to. Nowadays there’s not so much prejudice between Catholics and Protestants, but it was rampant in Broken Hill in the 1940s.*
By 1951, though, I’d drifted into an engagement with a nice Protestant girl, Joy; even bought a block of land in Wills Street for £175, to build a house on. As my 21st birthday got closer, I realised I could be stuck in Broken Hill forever and I wanted adventure! So I sold the block, put off Joy as best I could and bought a ticket to England on the Orient Line ship, Orion.
[*Marilyn writes: ' Joy saw Dad off from Melbourne, so obviously wasn't too offended at his having delayed or cancelled their engagement. The Catholic- Protestant divide he talks about affected others in the family and later generations, too: Reg and Ethel were opposed to Gloria's marriage to Tom Pinder because his family were Catholics; Ethel refused to go to her granddaughter Marie's wedding in 1966 because the groom, Larry Separovich, came from a Catholic family. Dad expected his daughter Jenny, in the 1980s, to break off her engagement to Ralph Sellaro because his family were Catholics.' ]
Back then, air travel was only for the rich, not for a youth whose income for the 1950-51 financial year had been £847, including £100 tax. A bunk in a tiny six-berth cabin on the Orion’s lowest deck, near the propeller, would cost me £78; an airflight would have been about £2000. It’s the other way round now, flying is cheap and sailing is dear!
There was amazement when my friends realised I was actually going, “But, but, the LEAD BONUS!” they squawked; as though this extra money for the chance of getting lead-poisoning in the mines, was worth a lifetime stuck in Broken Hill, and “You’ll soon be back.” Well, as I’d said to the cop, no one tells me what to do. I was even more determined. I didn’t even stay long enough to sit my final exam for the driving of electrical motors, taking a letter of recommendation from my teacher instead. I had to get vaccinated against smallpox, cholera, typhoid and paratyphoid and wait to make sure the vaccines had taken. I sadly sold the Norton. We’d done so many miles together!
All this inspired my workmate, Reg Appellkamp, to leave town with me. Our plans were so unusual for Broken Hill in those days, that we got our photos and an article in ‘The Conveyor’, the mines’ in-house magazine.
Chapter 16
Off To See the World
We left at 5p.m on August 29th, 1951 – my 21st birthday. A crowd of friends and relatives saw us off from Broken Hill Airport. On the flight to Sydney in a DC3, I sat next to a girl called June Gough, who later became the famous singer, June Bronhill. (Her family used to live next door to us and I would pinch grapes off their grapevine.) We arrived at Mascot four hours later, thrilled by the sight of Sydney by night from the air.
The ship sailed five days later for a voyage of six weeks, via Sri Lanka, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea and up the Suez Canal. We were a couple of country boys, free at last and loving every minute of it. The calm weather, flying fish, exotic ports and bargain shopping; the other ships we passed, like the Orontes and the Pettah. We stared at the busy military camps along the Suez Canal and the Egyptian civilians jumping up and down along the banks, exposing themselves to us! They detested the English.
Our next stops were at Naples, Marseilles and Gibraltar, beautiful ports, but still militarised after the war and showing a lot of bomb damage. We saw a dozen or more hulks of ships on the banks of Marseilles Harbour, sunk during the war, including the hulk of the Orient Line’s Orford.
We finally set foot in England on October 10, after more than five weeks at sea. What with all our impulsive shopping and sightseeing, Reg and I had only 30/- between us. We went into a bar near the docks at Tilbury to consider our next move, me wearing my ‘Broken Hill teenage best’ clothes: wide-bottomed trousers, embroidered black and yellow shirt, chunky-heeled western boots and a trilby hat. A seedy-looking bloke sidled up to me and muttered, “What’s yer racket?” Obviously he took me for a gangster. I was taken aback, sure that I was the last word in style!
We caught a train into London. Someone told us that Paddington was a good place for accommodation, so I pawned my nice silver cigarette case and lighter for £7. Off we went, knocking on doors asking for lodgings. Funny, all these women along the street would say, “No!” and slam the doors. Finally, a helpful woman explained to these naïve boys that we were actually in a street of brothels.
That certainly wasn’t what we wanted, so we kept walking and finally came to a B&B sign in Stanhope Terrace. For £2/5- a week, we got an attic room with a roof so low that we had to bend over to put our shirts on. It didn’t matter though; next day we got work at Handley Page aircraft factory in Cricklewood, me as a fitter and turner and Reg as my assistant, just like back home. So soon after the war, there were plenty of jobs around.
Our hours would be 8 a.m ‘till 5.45 p.m. At morning tea time, we headed to the canteen and the first person I spoke to there was a pretty young London girl, Patricia Varney. Naturally I chatted her up and she liked what she saw. Not because I was a cheeky young bloke and fancied myself as a chick magnet, but because she’d just been to the pictures and seen the dramatic ‘40,000 Horsemen’ starring Chips Rafferty, about the Aussies in World War I.
This made me seem more glamorous than the English boys she’d been dating, she told me later.
Outside work hours, I threw myself into sightseeing, movies and dances. I didn't dance much myself, it was just that dances were the best places to meet girls. The weather was still mild and the London people couldn’t do enough for Reg and I when they found that we were ‘fair-dinkum Aussies’ from ‘Down Under’. I remember the election night of October 25th. I walked from Paddington to Westminster Bridge, and back through packed streets with cheering crowds, smoke-bombs and traffic jams, as Winston Churchill was elected Prime Minister.
By early December, Reg and I had left Paddington for a much more comfortable flat closer to the factory – and to Pat, who lived with her mother in a tiny flat in Finchley Lane. I dated other English girls, but soon she was number one. She’d had a much harder upbringing than mine, being evacuated as a tiny kid out of London during the Blitz, sent to stay with an abusive family up north, and at other times taken into the Underground train tunnels with her parents to shelter from the bombs. (Because of that, she always hated being in small, closed spaces.) She remembered being carried through the London streets by her father, with the bombed city in flames all around them.
Her parents had separated and she and her mother had to work hard to make ends meet. Now they were both at the factory canteen, serving tea out of huge pots with the milk already mixed in. (They thought it funny that I expected to add my own milk.) I was soon having lots of good meals at their place, luckily for me, since I’d been spoilt by my mother and never taught to cook anything. Smoked cod, boiled in water, was the best I could do; that, or eating out at the cheap Lyon’s cafes.
Chapter 17
Two Desert Boys See Snow
A week of that December I spent seeing a bit of Europe with my friend, Allan Ireland, a NSW swimming champion, and his wife Beryl. I’d served my apprenticeship