Seize the Day. A M (Jack) Harris
stooped to kiss Martin on the forehead. “I love you, grandad,” he whispered, through his tears. “I’ll come back. Just you wait for me.”
Later striding with Clarrie through the brisk morning I noticed how he sometimes put his hand to his pocket, feeling for the necktie. I was comforted to hope that somehow that little bundle of cloth from Martin’s past would bring Clarrie back to Buronga.
Chapter Four
Under Mary’s care, Martin clung to life but he died the day he was told that Clarrie had been killed in his first action in New Guinea. Martin was buried in the Mildura cemetery after a brief service in the main Catholic church. I did not realise that my mother had such a beautiful clear and full-powered soprano voice until she sang at the grave-site. I thought proudly, ‘That’s my mum!’ and afterwards when we held a wake at the shack on Buronga Ridge most of the neighbours made sure that the old man went out in style with Eileen singing again, accompanied by Shoofty on that violin of his, Luke on the fiddle, Rocky belting a drum and sometimes pumping his accordion with great gusto. The drinking and feasting never seemed to stop, with Enzio Clemenza contributing most of the viands, including many choice dishes and the wine, which he had held back in cared-for storage for just such an occasion.
I had no alternative afterwards, but to leave Buronga. I loved my mother and wanted to go along with her wishes, just to make sure that she never again turned to the destructive solace of heavy drinking. In Moonee Ponds I would be much nearer to her and Jock’s dairy farm in Gippsland which, while some way from Moonee Ponds, was many hours nearer than Buronga was from Melbourne.
I discovered paternal grandmother was a capricious and contradictory woman, carping and critical, who found fault with everyone and everything. Small and thin, she wore a tight bun of hair on the back of her head. She was a vegetarian and mostly served boiled cabbage, potato and carrots. Her husband was also thin; he was bald-headed, and so afraid of his wife that he was obsequious to her and everyone else. When I was introduced to my uncle Bernie, a big man built like my father Bonnie and I wondered how these grandparents had ever got together for what I had once heard Martin call the pleasures of the flesh. Marriage and living together, from what I had mostly observed when living on the ridge, was generally nothing but painful servitude for many women. But here, a kind and helpless man was dominated by an appalling female. When I met Bernie that son, I was told I was to help him on his milk run, just as I had with Rocky Daniels at Buronga. I was to give the five shillings a week that I was to receive, directly to that new grandmother of mine. I found the work hard, the hours long, but the running along with six crated bottles in one hand and a pail of milk in the other strengthened my body while the milk and cream supplemented my vegetarian meals. Bonnie was working in a nearby general store and she was able to bring me sandwiches and cake, which I enjoyed sitting up in bed in a darkened room, hidden from prying eyes.
That part of my life passed slowly and unpleasantly but I managed to get my Merit Certificate, much to Eileen’s pleasure. The only thing that gave me any sense of happiness from my schooling was that I had nice teachers who never strapped me when I fell asleep at lessons, exhausted from those early-morning milk runs. They seemed to understand that I was up at four to go on the milk run and go from that work direct to school. Those same teachers encouraged to get me out on the playing field at lunch time for a game of cricket and I became proficient at the game. But I was also reckless. One day, chasing a ball, I went under a boundary fence but ducked up too quickly and cut my head badly. I was cleaned up and bandaged but when I was taken home, the place was empty. So my teacher kindly took me to his home where his wife tucked me into a comfortable bed. For the first time since I had left Buronga I was encased in happiness, a feeling heightened by music I could hear being played on a machine. I later asked the lady looking after me the name of the music and she said it was ‘Finlandia’ by a man whose name I could not remember, but who years later I was able to track down and begin my love of classical music. That crack on my head was an incident that led to a pleasant discovery. Later on in life accidents that happened to me all led to better circumstances. Having finished my secondary school, Eileen enrolled me in a technical college where I studied hard for a few months. But Eileen apparently fell out with Jock, she had a furious argument with our paternal grandparents, and Bonnie and I found ourselves being bundled on the overnight train to Mildura. The following day we found ourselves happily back with Martin and Mary at Buronga. There may have been no technical school in Mildura so Eileen took me along for enrolment in the Mildura High School. After an interview I was wary about my future there for I had not studied algebra or science to the level of the Year Eleven students there. I worked hard but understood little, although in the English class I studied diligently and seemed to do well. That was until one day the teacher asked who could recite a sonnet. No one volunteered, but I put up my hand and was told to get on with it. I then launched into that endless verse about Mad Carew which I remembered well. I accompanied my words with all the movements and gestures I believed were necessary to the drama. ‘He returned before the dawn /His shirt and trousers torn/ A gash across his temple dripping red/’.
I grabbed at my shirt, pulled at my trousers, wiped all that blood from my temple, pounded on ‘When the ball was at its height/ On that still and tropic night/ The colonel’s daughter hurried to his bed/ The door was opened wide, the silver moonlight shining through/ An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew/ ‘
Plunging an imaginary knife deep into my chest I looked up, breathlessly awaiting to be applauded but the teacher looked very hard at me and asked if I did not know that a sonnet contained only fourteen lines. His remark was followed by derisive laughter that swamped over me in a humiliating flood and I sat heavily in my chair, knowing my school days would be over and in failure at the end of the year.
The following year I was employed for a few months as a house painter but when I told Mary that the man I worked for, a professional painter, was drinking a lot of the spirit we used to thin the oil-based paint, she took me from that work. Í never mentioned that my mother had once been drinking that same spirit! A few weeks after, I was back in Moonee Ponds living this time with Eileen and Bonnie. Some time later Eileen got me apprenticed to an engineering company working out of North Melbourne involved in supplying the armed forces with certain requirements, hence my military call-up deferment. I liked the work, the metallic hum of the factory and the schooling at the technical college, and I became a competent fitter and turner. Whenever I could get away I hurried back to Buronga, looking for love and that splendid Murray River.
Some time later Bonnie married Harold, the son of the shop man Bonnie worked for. He was a cheery person with a nice smile and a nature to match. Older than Bonnie, he became a surrogate father to me, helping me with problems at my work, with growing up and matters of the heart, and telling me about books I should read, for he was a scholarly person. I also had a girl friend named Doris. Harold advised me on such matters as safe sex not that he practised it as Bonnie was happily pregnant. So I was contented at home and at work and in love.
I was also progressing slowly through the preliminary rounds of boxing at the West Melbourne Stadium, getting a pound a round for each contest, which was nice money along with the small amount I received as an apprentice. Three years slipped by and I lost two important bouts in the boxing ring and so it was unlikely that I would promoted to the main events, and big money. At the same time Bonnie had the misfortune to lose her first child, a son called Brian, and I let go my lingering belief in that God my grandmother had cherished. When the Catholic priest, a fat, well-fed man with a flowery tongue, told Bonnie and Harold that God needed their child and he had been called to heaven to serve as one of his angels, I abandoned God. I had long had doubts about woman being created from a rib ripped out of Adam anyhow, and about that Ark with Noah who had fed and watered two of everything on board for forty days and nights of pouring rain. But Harold and Bonnie accepted the priest’s words and grew even closer together in their sorrow, but I was shut out of that embrace. Seeking comfort I tried to believe that some heavenly entity existed controlling events and our environment, for how else could there be a river like the Murray with its blue water and majestic silver trees?
Although I had received good marks at the technical college and a report noting that I was now entitled to a statuary increase in salary, my employer rudely refused my request for any more money. Troubled