Untwisted: The Story of My Life
Author: Paul Jennings
Date: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Non-Fiction; Autobiography; Memoir; Author
Description: Untwisted Sometimes, rather than making you laugh or cry out in surprise, a story will instead leave you wondering about human fragility ... In the telling of his own tale, children's author and screenwriter Paul Jennings demonstrates how seemingly small events can combine into a compelling drama. As if assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, he puts together fragments, memories and anecdotes to reveal the portrait of a complex and weathered soul. Untwisted is revealing, moving and very funny. For adults.
Publisher: Allen & Unwin

‘As generous, sensitive, perceptive and honest as its author, Untwisted is a fascinating collage. In deceptively simple prose, Paul Jennings uses key moments and events to make a vibrant, funny and moving picture of an amazing life. If you want to know what makes a writer, read this.’

Emily Rodda

‘This wry and moving account of a life, from humble beginnings in 1940s Britain to literary superstardom in Australia and worldwide, is ingeniously constructed, quietly confessional, sweetly endearing, and, of course, often wildly hilarious.’

Carmel Bird

‘Paul stands with O. Henry, Wodehouse and Dahl, the great short-story writers. The originality of his imagination and humour shine, but there is a wonderful darkness underneath. This memoir goes some way to explaining that darkness.’

Terry Denton

‘Courageous in his craft, Jennings is unafraid of the dark corners, drawing out stories that give voice to things absurd, peculiar and strange. Somehow, he’s able to take a reader’s hand — often a very young reader — and walk them through landscapes of vulnerability, finding tenderness and humour in the most unexpected places. In this, his memoir, Jennings gives us the story behind the storyteller, untwisting the threads of his own life with generosity, humility and candour. Untwisted is Jennings at his best — tall and twisted, terrifying and true. This is a tale most memorable. Has Paul Jennings been listed as a National Living Treasure yet? He should be.’

Gabbie Stroud, author of Teacher and Dear Parents ‘A bare-your-soul memoir with brutal honestly from a man who just keeps giving. A raw glimpse into the person and his craft. This book is a must for lovers of the children’s literature world and those who wish to contribute to it.’

Louise Park, author of 7 Steps to Get Your Child Reading ‘Poignant, courageous and sometimes funny, this is the story of a kind, gentle and deeply thoughtful man who is also one of Australia’s best-loved children’s authors. I read it in one sitting; it was just wonderful. Having read Paul’s kids’ books, I was surprised. He’s a beautiful writer for adults as well! And I got such a sense of Paul in his writing. It was like he was in this room talking to me about his life.’

Debra Van Tol, Penguin Australia

‘A personal invitation into the remarkable head of a quirky genius and one of Australia’s most beloved writers. Achingly honest, full of writing wisdom and insights for educators. Essential reading.’

Megan Daley, author of Raising Readers

‘Generations of Australians have grown up reading Paul Jennings’ deceptively simple tales. In Untwisted, Paul is telling a new story — that of the unique and varied chapters of his own life. Honest, raw and revealing, Paul’s story features the twists, turns and surprises we’ve come to expect of this iconic writer.’

Jane Godwin, author of When Rain Turns to Snow

First published by Allen & Unwin in 2020

Copyright © Lockley Lodge Pty Ltd, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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ISBN 978 1 76052 582 8
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For teaching resources, explore www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers

Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes Cover illustration by Geoff Kelly Back cover photo by Jack Wilkins Set by Sandra Nobes

Artwork, photographs and images reproduced with kind permission from Helen Ulmann (pvi), Penguin Random House Australia (p78), Geoff Kelly (p118), Mercury Newspaper, Hobart (p182), Terry Denton (p248). Article pp233–9 reproduced with kind permission from Magpies magazine. Every effort has been made to acknowledge the original source of copyright material contained in this book. In the event of any errors or omissions, the publisher will be glad to make necessary changes in future printings and editions.

www.pauljennings.com.au

To all the dear people who have helped me along the way but have not been mentioned in this book. Among them are many of my friends, office managers, publishers, editors, illustrators, book designers and publicists. You know who you are and so do I. Thank you so much for being there for me.

CONTENTS

1 IN SIGHT OF THE LIGHTHOUSE

2 COCONUT-SHY

3 GOOD SHOT

4 LITTLE DEVIL

5 HALF-MOON MURDERERS

6 ONE OF THE BEST

7 INVISIBLE BEES

8 BORN AGAIN

9 FOLLOWING THE STRING

10 CHALK AND TALK

11 AN OARLESS DINGHY

12 ‘I’M WITH AN AUTHOR’

13 INFLUENCES

14 FLYING HIGH

15 FIFTY FUNNY YEARS

16 AROUND THE TWIST

17 IN NEED OF HELP

18 FAIRYTALE COTTAGE

19 THE NUMINOUS

20 MY ARTHUR

21 HAPPY ENDINGS

AFTERWORD

A COMPLETE LIST OF BOOKS BY PAUL JENNINGS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

1

IN SIGHT OF THE LIGHTHOUSE

My marriage had come to an end. And there I was, suddenly a single father with four young children living in a dilapidated house perched on the edge of a wild cliff – a terrifying drop to the swelling Southern Ocean. Besides renovating our home, I was lecturing full-time and studying for my Masters degree.

‘I just can’t finish my research project,’ I said to Bruce Jeans, dean of the education faculty. He already knew of my family situation and was aware that I was an emotional wreck, close to a breakdown. He looked at me with concern.

‘Things are changing, Paul,’ he said. ‘The writing is on the wall. Deakin University is planning to take this place over and you’ll have no future here if you don’t get your Masters and then a PhD.’

He started to walk away but then he turned and gave me a sympathetic smile.

‘Is there anything else you could do?’

1983

Bruce was a man of great integrity who always called things the way they were. I could tell that he saw the disappointment on my face as I told him that I had to discontinue my studies. I loved lecturing and working with the other staff and students at the Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education, and I was also passionate about my two lecturing subjects – Reading Education and Children with Special Needs.

The loss of my marriage had left me barely able to function. The thought of losing my job as well filled me with despair. The future seemed bleak and hopeless.

My research project involved travelling around the state testing children with reading problems. Now I was faced with either making a contribution in a different way or losing my job. I needed something I could do at home in the evenings while I was looking after the kids.

Bruce was waiting patiently for my answer. He was never one to rush things. I had an answer but I knew that it was one that wouldn’t really fit into an academic gown.

‘I’d like to write fiction,’ I blurted out.

He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I elaborated, too quickly.

‘I’ve already published a couple of little educational books for reluctant readers. What if I wrote something for the wider trade market?’

He thought about it. I could see that he sensed my desperation.

‘Are there any writing courses you know of that you could take?’

My pulse quickened. I felt my face redden as I gabbled out my reply.

‘There’s a series of classes in short-story writing run by the Council of Adult Education in Melbourne. It’s once a week for a full term.’

The city was a three-and-a-half-hour drive away. That would mean a whole day away from work. He pursed his lips and lowered his voice.

‘Keep it quiet, but I’ll let you have a day off and an Institute car to drive there and back.’

I was euphoric. Even his next comment didn’t bring me down.

‘But if you don’t get published you will be finished here.’

I looked around at the other students in the room where the CAE class was held. We were a mixed, perhaps odd bunch, comprised (I later learned) of university students, single parents like me, pensioners and even a successful businessman. We all sat a little nervously waiting for the teacher.

She swept in, dressed in a flowing black robe and hood like a character from a fairytale. Mysterious and charismatic. It was Carmel Bird, well-known Australian novelist and literary figure. Her session turned out to be informative and fun. I recall her asking us to read the story ‘The Gift of the Magi’ by the American writer O. Henry. I already knew that the double twist at the end of this little tale was poignant and deeply moving. She had set us a high standard.

At the end of the session Carmel told us all to write a short piece and bring it to class the following week.

At this point in my life I had done plenty of academic writing, but this was something different. When you give a story to someone else to read, it is like sending out your love. If it is rejected it is a horrible experience. It takes courage to reveal your own soul to just one person, let alone put it into print. You make yourself incredibly vulnerable.

I admit it: the writing class was making me anxious. I went home and wrote an adult short story called ‘Unhappily Ever After’. It was fiction but based around my experience as a child when a cruel teacher regularly victimised me.

One thing I remembered Carmel saying was, ‘A short story should always end in a way that makes the reader gasp. If you can’t manage that then at least try for an “Ah ha”.’

The story ‘Unhappily Ever After’ had a twist that I hoped might meet this criterion.

At this point I would like to make a confession. I don’t know how to write a memoir. I’m already finding it quite difficult compared to writing fiction where authors can do whatever they like with the plot to make sure that it does indeed end with an ‘Ah ha’.

In a memoir the writer has most of the material in their lap. But there is no freedom to twist the plot because the past is already written. In order to cope with this restriction, I’m going to try to weave the narrative around, connecting ideas and themes so that there are some unresolved issues for the reader to look forward to – difficult, because true stories are told, not plotted.

At the beginning of lesson three, Carmel Bird plonked all of our efforts down on her desk and addressed the class.

‘Everyone has done well,’ she said. ‘But I’m going to read one of the stories out because it has some interesting features.’

I was trembling in anticipation.

Please let it be mine, I said to myself.

It was, and Carmel read it out with feeling.

After the class was finished and the students began to leave, she leaned over and whispered, ‘You are good.’

She left. I sat there stunned. It was as if that small sentence had never been uttered to me before. I floated blissfully out of the room and all the way down Collins Street to the car-park. I felt like a little man adrift in a dinghy at sea who has just caught sight of the lighthouse. Not safe, but in sight of salvation.

Carmel’s comment was one of the turning points in my life. I felt that I might just be able to publish in the general market like children’s authors Ivan Southall and Colin Thiele, whom I greatly admired. This might also mean that I could keep my job at the Institute and possibly even earn a few dollars at the same time. The future for me and my kids had brightened.

It was all I needed. Just someone to tell me that I could do it. I don’t know whether I would have gone on to submit stories to publishers if it wasn’t for those few words.

When I returned home with the story, I noticed that Carmel had scribbled a few pleasant comments in the margins. But there was also a negative one: You can’t say this.

I read the offending paragraph. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. I looked for split infinitives, or changes in tense, or ambiguous prose. Nothing. I was too embarrassed to ask Carmel – I didn’t want to reveal that a supposed expert in reading education couldn’t even find a simple mistake.

Many years later I learned that I was to be on a panel with Carmel at the Brisbane Writers Festival. By this time, I had more confidence and was perhaps a little more worldly-wise. I thought, I’m going to ask her what was wrong with that paragraph. I dug it out of my archives and to my great embarrassment immediately saw the problematic sentence:

The car jerked off.

I didn’t mention it when I met her at the festival.

It was in 1961, when I first entered teachers’ college, that I learned about the importance of encouraging children to follow their interests and dreams by telling them that they are ‘good’ in particular areas. There is nothing like a bit of positive reinforcement.

Since that first writing class I have looked back many times to see what other events might have led me to start believing that I had some ability in writing.

I hadn’t received much encouragement in my primary school years. I loved reading and I always had my nose in a book. But at school, Composition, as it was called, was not enjoyable. The kids were given topics such as A Day at The Beach and told to write a page or so. These would be taken up and returned covered in red marks indicating spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors.

My first positive bit of feedback came in Form One (Year Seven) when I was aged thirteen. The teacher wrote a sentence on the board:

A red light flashed through a chink in the wall.

We all had to write a composition around that sentence for homework. I made up a story where the red light was a signal for a car race to begin. I was the hero driving the winning vehicle.

The next day, our teacher, who clearly did not want to read thirty-two compositions, asked us to swap stories with our neighbour and look for faults in their story. I handed my work to the boy sitting next to me and he read it in silence. When he had finished, he said, ‘You copied that out of a book, Jennings.’

I was thrilled with his accusation. I had made the story up out of my own head. His words encouraged me to try to find a publisher for a piece of writing. I submitted my first story for publication at the age of thirteen. It was based on a real-life anecdote.

When my friend Robert Fox and I were twelve years old we made a small trailer out of a pram we had rescued from the local tip and affixed it to my bike. We packed it with a little tent and then, with our parents’ permission, set off for a few days’ camping next to the Goulburn River about eighty miles away.

It was a long, hard ride up the Black Spur and over the Great Dividing Range. On the first night we erected the tent on the lonely bank of the river and climbed inside. It began to rain. I stepped out into the darkness to take a leak and saw something that terrified me: a large tiger snake curled up nearby. I screamed and scrambled back into the tent, which did not have a sewn-in floor.

Shaking with fear, Foxy and I folded up our sleeping-bags and sat on them back to back. It was dark and the only light we had was a small torch. We passed it to each other, trying to illuminate the edge of the tent where it met the ground. Time passed. The torch began to fade and then died altogether. We shivered in the darkness, supporting ourselves with our palms flat on the ground and our heads touching the damp canvas above. Suddenly my worst fear seemed to have manifested itself.

‘Foxy,’ I said. ‘Something wet and cold is crawling across my hand.’

‘Sheeba,’ he whispered.

I couldn’t see a thing in the total blackness of the night.

I whispered to him, trying not to move.

‘Get a match and light it.’

Foxy fumbled for the matchbox and struck it. In the flickering flame we saw, sitting on the back of my hand, an enormous bullfrog.

We both screamed, not in fear of the frog but in terror of what might have been. We raced outside into the drizzling rain and furiously rode our bikes for several miles, until around midnight we came upon a closed general store. We sat there under the verandah, cold and wet, for the rest of the night.

When I returned home, I decided that I would write about this incident and try to get it published. I wrote the little adventure up in pencil in a school exercise book but wasn’t sure where to send it. I settled on a magazine my mother subscribed to – The Australian Women’s Weekly. I put the exercise book into the post and waited. I haunted the letterbox every day. I was so excited. About two weeks later I received it back with a polite rejection letter.

My confidence was shattered. This was the end of my emerging hopes of becoming an author.

Why did I give up so easily?

While both my parents considered actors to be rule-breaking, bohemian rebels, my mother loved books and poetry and respected authors as geniuses who lived in a world far above our middle-class place in society. The rejection letter confirmed this to me. Writers were few in number, unseen and unknown, possessing talents that seemed beyond my meagre abilities. I didn’t submit another piece of storytelling to a trade publisher until I was almost forty years old.

It’s true that in later years I had a passion for teaching children how to read. But my early burst of enthusiasm for writing vanished. At the end of secondary school, I was trying to make up my mind whether to be a clergyman or a soldier. The clergy appealed because I was a very pious boy. The army also attracted me because I was a sergeant in the school cadet corps. I loved all the saluting and shouting of orders and marching along with a band following.

‘Left, left, left right left. Jones, you are out of step.’

‘Platoon … halt.’

‘Order … arms.’

I never stopped to think that the ‘arms’ were .303 rifles powerful enough to kill an elephant. Looking back, I am amazed that fourteen-year-old boys could go home in the train with these weapons between their knees.

I can remember a couple of other incidents at school that a more confident child might have seen as signs of talent. The first of these I recall well, because in 1956 the Australian economy was in free-fall. People were going broke everywhere and the banks weren’t lending money. It was known as the credit squeeze.

An English teacher asked the class to break into small groups to write and perform a small play. My task was to write the script. I penned a fruity melodrama about a group of pirates who stole a Spanish doubloon, which, in return, was stolen from them. They suspected a pretty young woman who was hiding behind an aspidistra. The play was written in rhyming couplets. The title was The Doubloon of Death. Unfortunately, I no longer have the exercise book that I wrote it in but I can still remember four of the lines. It was my first attempt at writing a script.

Referring to the doubloon, one of the pirates says:

That fair maiden she doth scoff,

Could it be she’s whacked it off?

We’ll never lead a life of ease,

But suffer from the credit squeeze.

The kids thought the play was hilarious and the teacher was so impressed that he sent us to other classes to perform it again. It made me feel good, but a life as an author seemed an impossible goal. Little did I know that one day I would write the scripts for twenty-six episodes of the TV show Round the Twist, all of which would be based on my short stories.

Another incident occurred the following year when I was studying American History. Mr Fisher, the teacher concerned, was greatly liked despite one oddity. On our first day in his class he reached into his pocket, took out a piece of paper and blew his nose with it. We were all astounded at this unusual behaviour, which we guessed he must have brought with him from the USA. We had never seen a packet of tissues before; all we ever used to blow our noses were handkerchiefs, neatly ironed by our mothers.

But I remember Mr Fisher for something else that had a bigger impact on me. He held up my essay to the class and smiled.

He said, ‘Jennings has answered the question as well as anyone else but he has done it in half the number of words.’

This was news to me, but I was pleased at the compliment. I later recognised it as a skill that came easily to me. I always scored well in precis, where the task is to reduce a piece of prose to a specified smaller number of words. I didn’t know why I was good at this task, but it has been a feature of my writing for children ever since.

When it came to penning my first children’s book, I deliberately cut down the number of words that it took to tell the story. A children’s author has fewer words to choose from than one who writes for adults, and these words need to be relatively simple. In addition, the concepts involved should be appropriate to the experiences of the kids at whom the book is aimed.

There are a large number of factors involved in making the text easy to read; I’ll say more about these in a later chapter.

It’s just occurred to me that in writing about something to come I have instinctively put in a tease. I am baiting the reader’s interest. This is not a trick; it is a legitimate strategy for a storyteller to adopt. But I learned early on that it has to be done with care, subtlety and in a seemingly natural context.

I originally began this book by relating the events of my life in strict chronological order. But then I felt that these details weren’t interesting enough for the first page of my story so I decided to mix things up a bit and start with one of the defining moments in my life. These techniques don’t just apply to adult fiction. Just as much, if not more care is required for younger readers. I learned early on that writing fiction for children is not easy. A small incident illustrates this point nicely.

Just after my first book, Unreal!, was published in 1985, I was stopped in the street by an acquaintance who slapped his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I just read your book, mate. Not bad, not bad. It made me think, if Paul Jennings can write a kids’ book I can too. So, I’m having a go myself.’

I wished him well and he took his leave. A few months later I again met him in the street. And again, he slapped his hand on my shoulder. This time he had only one thing to say before he continued on:

‘Jeez, it’s hard, mate. Jeez, it’s hard.’

It was, and it still is. Even though I’ve written more than a hundred short stories I always think that I will never come up with another decent one. It’s agony. But it’s ecstasy too. I jump around with excited whoops if I think I have written something good. I hope that I’ll be doing it at the end of this book. It’s going to be a lot of work.

Enid Blyton claimed that she found writing for children easy. She could knock out a story in no time at all. She definitely had something special to offer. Her total sales figures exceed six hundred million books. But for me writing is a struggle. It’s really tough work and most of my colleagues think the same. Many an author of adult books has made the mistake of thinking that a quick dollar can be made by whipping up a short story for kids. Writing for children presents many problems in addition to those faced by authors of books for mature readers.

My feeling is that children’s authors need to be able to put themselves into the world of kids and know what fears, hopes and experiences they face. The plot has to be just as strong as or even stronger than one found in a book for adults. When I read a new novel myself, I will usually stay with it for about twenty pages before I give up. Children will often last only a few paragraphs or even just a few words before they put the book down, complaining that it is boring or too hard to read.

Having said all of the above, I would never discourage someone from having a try at writing for children. Are authors born with the ability to write and tell tales, or can these skills be learned? I don’t know the answer; I don’t think anyone does. Probably it’s a bit of both. However, in writing this memoir I am becoming more aware of many of the influences on my own life that led me to this path.

As I talk about my life, I intend to relate a lot of true stories. I am going to admit to many personal and literary mistakes. And as much as is possible I’m going to try to shine some light onto the unconscious fears, fumbles and foolish repressions that lie between the lines of my own books.

I’ve heard it said that a memoir should not contain reported speech because it seems unlikely that one can accurately remember dialogue from forty years ago. This is true, but it is also the case that certain words, sentences and brief exchanges can be burned into one’s brain as if they had been made permanent by a branding iron.

Here are a few sentences I remember my father, Arthur Jennings, speaking to me. The first two were uttered when I was six years old:

‘You will never be fit for anything but the workshop.’

‘Shut up. It’s all your fault.’

‘That was to teach you about electricity.’

‘You will never pass.’

‘You didn’t get honours.’

‘Have you got a match?’

‘The silly son always gets put into the clergy or the army.’

The above are all short sentences that have had a long life. I was deeply wounded by every one of my father’s comments. Here’s one I remember from my mother when I was about fifteen:

‘I think that girl in the library is sweet on you, Paul. She has good taste.’

My mother’s comment contained two little rewards. Firstly, the fact that she liked me and secondly, that the girl did too. Every child needs to get more ticks than crosses.

I’m starting to feel that another reason for using dialogue in my memoir relates to its function in storytelling. It simply makes the tale more alive when you can sometimes report a conversation with all its implications laid bare without comment.

It’s well known that the first page in a book is extremely important. Especially if we are going to write for kids. Here are a few first lines I have used in some of my children’s stories to try and attract their attention.

Lehman’s father sat still on his cane chair. Too still.

(FROM ‘NAILS’)

I, Adam Hill, agree to stand on the Wollaston Bridge at four o’clock and pull down my pants.

(FROM ‘MOONIES’)

The three travellers stared around nervously. They were alone. And lonely.

(From A DIFFERENT LAND)

The man next door buried his wife in the backyard.

(FROM ‘RINGING WET’)

The old box lay half buried in the sand. I wish that I had never seen it. I wish the storm hadn’t uncovered it. I wish we hadn’t dug it up. But it’s no good wishing. We did dig it up.

(FROM ‘KNOW ALL’)

Another strategy that I like to use with beginnings is to plant something that will have a pay-off later. But unlike a tease, it can be placed in such a way that it appears to be self-contained or relevant to the present happenings. Then when it pops up again with a different function it gives the reader a pleasant surprise. I find this particularly useful when I am trying for a trick ending.

I’ve become so aware of these plants in other people’s work that I can’t help noticing them in movies. It’s not wise to tell your wife something like, ‘That mouse is going to come back into the story again.’ I learned the hard way to keep such information to myself – no one will watch a movie with me these days unless I agree to keep my mouth shut.

If I use a first-person child’s voice and my readership is made up of children, I am aware that no child could have written like me. When I use it, the young readers unconsciously suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in a tale supposedly told by another child. I can get away with some sophisticated storytelling as long as the dialogue sounds authentic.

It seems to me that adults don’t usually want to read something that appears to have been written by a young person. I have done it elsewhere in this book but in the following chapter I will talk about my memories as a child with my adult voice and not take the risk of losing my sense of authority by adopting a childlike one.

But what’s really important to me at this moment is making the narrative engaging. Will I be able to pull it off when I tell my own story?

I hope so. All I can do is give it a try.

2

COCONUT-SHY

The little boy takes the rock-hard wooden ball and pulls his arm back until his hand is tucked neatly under his chin. The coconuts seem far away. He pushes the ball forward and releases his grip. It falls to his feet.

At first his brain is frozen with shock. He missed. The visions begin to flood in. His stomach churns with fear, guilt and despair. Tears tremble in his eyes. His knees begin to shake. Terror takes hold of him. He stands alone in a dangerous world. There is no one to help.

Or is there?

1947

I’ve had many letters from youngsters over the years, but perhaps the nicest of them, written by an eleven-year-old boy, simply said: Dear Paul Jennings, how come you know what it is like to be me?

I don’t know what it is like to be him, but I am aware that the worries and fears of my childhood were no different to those experienced by subsequent generations.

We didn’t have iPads and computers but we did have first days at school, and loneliness and longings and rejections and jealousies. If you can recall these feelings in yourself it will be easier to touch others.

I have often said that the boy in the story is always me. Some of the adults in my stories are me, too.

I’m sure that not everyone likes my writing style. Some aren’t attracted to contemporary fantasy; others are not fond of humour. Also, as with adult writing, a distinction is often made between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ fiction, two categories that are not easily defined and to my mind are somewhat pejorative.

I believe that deep emotions can be explored with humour. I try very hard to insert an emotional tug into my tales. I’ve had letters from adults and children who have cried over them.

The other day I walked past a school and saw a little boy shuffling around staring at the ground and kicking stones. He was all alone while the other kids were having fun. My heart went out to him and I told my companion what I was feeling. She said, ‘He’s probably rehearsing his acceptance speech for an award for excellent performance as school captain.’

She was joking, but I intuitively knew that her observation was wrong. I knew he had no one to play with and was trying to look like he didn’t care by kicking stones. If I put him in a story, I can handle his sadness but also make ridiculous, funny and amazing things happen to him and finish with a happy ending.

I still think about a little incident that happened in England when I was six years old, which involved both empathy and guilt.

After school the ice-cream van would be standing next to the front gate, playing tinkling music. How I longed for one of the icy treats. I had no money – neither did most of my friends. There were two boys who would walk home with me every day. I can’t remember their names, but I liked them. We would stand with tongues hanging out, watching the lucky rich kids go off licking their purchases.

One day, the unimaginable happened. My mother gave me money to buy some ice creams on the way home. ‘You can buy a friend one, too,’ she said. As I walked to school, I did my sums on the three coins that I was clutching – two threepenny pieces and one penny left over. With a sinking heart, I realised that there was only enough money for two ice creams. I worried about it all day – I agonised over it. One of my friends was going to miss out and I had to choose which one it was going to be. Of course, I could go without myself, but that would be unthinkable. But so was the thought of making one boy watch as the other two sucked and slurped their way home.

Pennies were large copper coins of little value. The ice-cream man had nothing to sell for such a small amount.

A two-shilling piece was about the same size as a penny but was made of silver and could buy many ice creams. Suddenly I saw a way out of my dilemma. I wrapped the single penny in silver paper and gave it to one of my friends.

‘The ice-cream man won’t know it’s not two shillings,’ I said. ‘And you’ll get change, too.’

The other boy and I, having spent our three penny coins, stood back watching our friend as he approached the front of the small queue. Nervously he handed over the forgery. The vendor took it, stared in disbelief at the silver-wrapped penny and threw it down inside the van. Then he charged out and chased my friend down the road, finally giving up in disgust.

I walked home guiltily. I told myself that I had done my best for the boy who had been chased. But my feelings had not extended far enough to deprive myself of an ice cream.

One of my early memories is about strong feelings for someone else – my mother, Phyllis. This event was one of total bewilderment and anxiety.

I’ve chosen to tell the incident in the present tense and third person. And I’ve called the main character ‘the boy’ rather than Paul. It somehow seems right for this piece. Or maybe I’m protecting myself from feelings that are still raw. I was five years old when this happened.

The boy’s mother walks slowly across their snow-covered backyard, wearily pulling her son behind her on his new home-made toboggan. They pass a glistening mound, which in another story could be the top of an ice fairy’s hideaway. But in fact, it is no more than their now-unneeded bomb shelter.

The boy is not enjoying his Christmas present – a toboggan made by his father out of wood and scrap metal. He feels guilty. The way his mother trudges forward reminds him of the poor old horses that drag the barges along a nearby canal. The horses are beasts of burden. And although he has not heard the word, he knows that he himself is a burden. He should be pulling his mother along on the toboggan. She must be so tired. She gives not a smile nor the smallest sign that she is enjoying her task.

He does not know that her brother has just killed himself. He doesn’t even know that she had a brother.

Nor does he know that for the rest of her life he will feel the need to make her happy. That her sorrow will always be his. That to make her laugh will give him much pleasure. And that her sighs will cause him such pain.

She trudges on, out of the backyard and past a small row of shops with their empty shelves. Although the war is over, rationing is still in place in Heston, England. Every day long lines form in front of the grocer’s, butcher’s and baker’s. Sweets and stockings are in short supply. Money is hard to get and houses even harder.

But there are still some pleasures in life. The snow melts and soon it is summer. And the boy has heard that there is a carnival in the park.

His mother ties a shilling in the corner of a handkerchief.

‘This is for the barber,’ she says. ‘Ask for short back and sides. Don’t forget to say please. And there will be threepence change. That is not for you. That is for me and Dad. That is our money. Do not spend the change.’

‘Or else,’ adds his father in a low voice. ‘And come straight home.’

The little boy takes the shortest way to the barber’s as he has been told. The man clips and snips without speaking.

When he is done, he takes the boy’s handkerchief, unties the shilling and replaces it with a smaller coin. He grins as he opens the door and hears laughter and merry-go-round music. The barber winks at the boy.

‘I’ll bet that threepence doesn’t last long,’ he says.

‘It’s not mine,’ says the boy.

‘Too bad,’ says the barber. ‘But at least you can take a look.’

The boy accepts his words.

‘At least I can look,’ he says to himself.

And what a sight it is. There is an enclosure with small petrol-driven cars. Lucky children are actually steering them. There is a row of wooden clown heads with open mouths into which you can drop table-tennis balls. There is fairy floss. And a helter-skelter – a big pole with a slide wrapped around it. It looks like a lighthouse. There is a merry-go-round with prancing horses. Lucky children are rising and falling with the organ music as they clutch the reins.

And there is a coconut-shy.

A man wearing an apron stands in front of seven coconuts. Each one sits on top of a small post. Behind the man are prizes.

The man suddenly thrusts a small, hard ball into the boy’s hand. ‘Have a go,’ he says. ‘Threepence a shot. You can’t miss.’

The boy’s imagination clicks into gear. He immediately starts to picture the possible scenarios. If he throws the ball and misses, he will have to arrive home minus the threepence. There will be outrage. There will be angry voices raised. There will be no tea. He will be sent to his bedroom in disgrace.

He shivers as he contemplates his mother’s silent looks. They can chill his bones as if he were buried naked in the snow.

The boy hands over his handkerchief and closes his small fingers around the ball. He looks at the coconut and then at the prizes packed on the shelves. Stuffed toys – bears and rabbits mostly. Jars of boiled sweets – liquorice blocks, bullseyes, jelly babies, sherbet bombs and more. And right up the top, pinned to the wall, a pound note.

He can’t miss, though. That’s what the man said. Grownups don’t lie. The man leads him to a white line marked on the grass. He is committed. A rash decision.

He thrusts the hard wooden ball out from under his chin and it drops to the ground not far from his feet. Silent tears run down his face. All is lost. The world seems to freeze. His mother and father will be united in their wrath.

A small group has gathered behind him. ‘Robbery,’ shouts a bald-headed man who has been watching the scene.

‘The poor little kid.’ He glares at the stall attendant and rolls up his sleeves. ‘Give him another go.’

‘Yeah,’ says a nearby woman. She points an accusing finger. ‘Fleecing a child.’

The attendant quickly gives the boy another ball.

‘Not there,’ says the bald man. He gently takes the boy’s free hand and leads him over the white line towards the coconuts.

‘Throw from here,’ he says, and then adds, ‘You can’t miss.’

This time it is true. The boy is so close that he could push the coconuts over with a finger if he wanted to. He thrusts the ball at a coconut, which totters and then tumbles from its post. A cheer goes up from behind him. The attendant, seeing the mood of the onlookers, reaches for a stuffed pink rabbit.

‘No, not that,’ says the bald man. He reaches up to the top shelf. He takes down a little box and gives it to the boy.

‘Here,’ he says. ‘This is your prize.’

The crowd murmurs approval and then dissipates. The boy is left looking at the small packet. His heart drops. That’s no good. His mother won’t want that. He has disobeyed. He is done for. Only threepence will save him from a terrible fate. If only he could wind back time. He ties his prize up in his handkerchief and slowly walks towards home.

He walks close by the edge of Heston Aerodrome. His home is just across the road from the fence and he has heard many stories from his parents about how dangerous it was to live there during the war. How his parents would shovel incendiary bombs out of the window when the Blitz was on. How they would hide in the bomb shelter in the backyard. They even tell him about a captured enemy plane that crashed onto their roof and destroyed Granny’s bedroom.

His father has told the stories so many times that the boy has lost interest in them. But he has not lost interest in the American soldiers and airmen who still work inside the aerodrome. Sometimes they drive through the gates in trucks that are huge and noisy and have slab-like radiators. The local kids hang around in groups waiting for them. These children are older than the boy by several years. They are here again today, swarming like bees.

And beyond them, growling down the road, is a Chevy Blitz wagon.

‘Chewing gum, chewing gum,’ shouts the mob.

American chewing gum is not like the sugar-coated English pellets. American chewing gum is wrapped in silver paper and is a delicious, flat strip of heaven. Not that the boy has ever tasted it. But the reports are good. It is said that one strip can retain flavour for at least a day of chewing. Even more.

The boy stands at the back and watches silently. A khaki arm stretches out of the left window of the truck and tosses something. A silver flash briefly glints in the air and is gone. The crowd implodes into a screaming heap of children scrabbling and fighting on their knees for the prize. They kick and pull and swear. Suddenly silence falls. They stand and look around. Who has it? What criminal has found the gum? They stare at each other accusingly, looking for any signs of chewing or sucking.

The boy opens his mouth wide to show that it is empty, just in case someone thinks he has it.

A cry goes up. ‘There. Up there.’

One of the older boys is climbing a tall tree. He is moving fast. Finally, he reaches the last substantial limb. He can go no further. He slings a leg over the branch and begins to chew in a provocative manner, mocking the mob below. They howl and roar and jump up at the branches like dogs baying at a treed squirrel. But no one tries to follow.

The boy walks away from the scene slowly. He is glad that he did not catch that chewing gum when it was thrown out by the Yankee airman. He knows without a doubt that his jaws would have been prised open and the gum unceremoniously extracted.

He heads for home. He is totally aware that when he arrives there will be no forgiveness for spending the threepence. But it’s better than the rule of the mob.

Just.

His mother takes the handkerchief from his tightly clenched fingers and sees that something is wrapped inside. Something that is not threepence. She raises an eyebrow but says nothing. She slowly unwraps the handkerchief and holds out the packet on the palm of her hand.

‘I won it on the coconut-shy,’ the boy exclaims. He stutters the words, holding back tears. ‘The man said I couldn’t miss. Threepence a go.’

A silence. It lasts for a split second but to the boy it seems like it will never end. His father erupts.

‘Smokes. A packet of fags.’

He snatches them from his wife’s outstretched hand.

‘Player’s Navy Cut. My favourite. Good boy. Well done. You can’t get them anywhere.’

His mother stares at her son with narrowed eyes but she says nothing. She also glares at her husband.

The boy can’t believe it. He has been saved. He walks up the narrow stairs to the safety of his bedroom. Saved but not happy. It isn’t right. If you do something bad and it turns out well, you shouldn’t get away with it. He knows that had the prize been a stuffed pink rabbit he would have been punished. You never know what the rules are. Parents should say what they mean. And do what they say.

He enters his bedroom and picks up his beloved Rupert Bear book. Then he closes the door to keep out the world. It is dangerous out there.

Even on my first day at school some eighteen months earlier, my strong feelings about adult ‘injustice’ had been evident.

The teacher gave all the new children a slate and a piece of chalk and told us to draw a circle. She then walked around inspecting the results.

‘That is not a circle,’ she said to me. ‘A circle is round. You have drawn an oval.’

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I just knew that she was annoyed.

Next, we were lined up and told to hold out our hands for fingernail inspection. I passed the examination but one small boy received a whack on the back of his hands with a ruler.

‘Filthy,’ was all the teacher said.

Later, at playtime, I found myself in a yard full of yelling, laughing, playful children. I knew no one. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t like this.’

So, I walked out of the gate and went home. My mother said nothing, but it wasn’t long before the teacher arrived and I was unceremoniously taken back to school. I was made to stand on the platform and say, ‘I’m sorry for running away, boys and girls.’

Inside my head I was furious. I wasn’t sorry. Not one bit. She was forcing me to tell a lie.

Forty years later, popular English author Allan Ahlberg took me to visit the Black Country Living Museum in Birmingham. It was the re-creation of an industrial town from the previous century. There were many exhibits – a blacksmith’s barn, a sweet stall, a butcher’s shop and a small carnival with … a coconut-shy.

A man was shouting at passers-by trying to get some action going.

He placed a small wooden ball in my hand and I started to tremble. I threw the ball … and missed. I laughed because this time there was no one to punish me for spending the change. But feelings of apprehension began to grow, and I quickly hurried away with Allan following.

The history museum also had a replica of a traditional school from bygone years. About twenty tourists, including Allan and me, were led into the schoolroom and told to sit down at the desks and play the roles of students from the past. We were given a slate each and a piece of chalk. Before writing anything, we were told to line up for fingernail inspection. My whole body began to shake.

‘I can’t do it,’ I said to Allan.

‘Me neither,’ he replied.

We fled from the classroom.

Outside, we shook our heads. We were both children’s authors. Grown men. We had become infants again. I believe that you can’t write for kids unless you are sometimes seized in this awful, beautiful way. I was a full-grown man, totally distressed by this playful schoolroom re-enactment. These feelings, while upsetting, are a goldmine for children’s authors.

Love is probably one of our strongest emotions and I have not shied away from this in my books. Most children love their parents and their siblings and their friends and they understand what it is. In the next chapter I will talk about someone in England I had a special love for.

3

GOOD SHOT

Two nights before we left England to sail for Australia, I had a dream that I was tumbling down the stairs in our small house.

At the bottom, instead of the narrow hallway, was a wide sea filled with huge ships. Down the steps I went, head over heels. Just before I hit the water I woke in a sweat.

The next night I had an almost identical dream. I remember thinking that I had never had the same dream twice before.

1949

When I was six, the person I loved even more than my mother was my Granny, Pamela Richardson. She had wrinkled jowls like a bulldog and she was marvellous. She taught me to whistle and to toss coins, things I was desperate to do. She also took me for walks through the park. I liked to play a trick on her. I would locate a piece of dog poo on the side of the path. Granny would feign interest and hurry over to look at what I had found. When she saw the poo, she would crinkle up her nose and waddle away in pretend disgust. ‘Eugh, urgh,’ she would cry. I used to think that she was a bit silly to always fall for the trick, but how I loved it.

I recall sitting on the roof of our coal shed one day with our cat, Prodger, and thinking about the fact that we were going to live ‘abroad’. I was certain that every minute of my future life would be filled with wondrous ramblings in a brightly coloured world like that of Rupert Bear. In Australia there would be eccentric scientists, mermaids, people in rice fields wearing conical hats, camels, fairies and pretty Girl Guides who would assist in times of trouble. I didn’t pause to think that Prodger would not be coming with us. But I knew that Granny’s ticket had already been bought.

The night before our boat was due to sail for Australia, Granny also had a dream. She took it seriously as she always did, being interested in matters concerning the numinous. She considered herself to be ‘fey’ and in contact with an inner spiritual world. Her dream was about her own death, and signalled that she would die aboard the ship on the passage to Australia. She changed her mind and refused to come with us.

I never saw her again. Neither did my mother. The separation affected me badly as a child. And, of course, my mother missed her terribly. She never really got over leaving ‘home’. Her sadness also weighed heavily on me during the coming years.

In my book A Different Boy I described the life of a young lad who stowed away on a migrant ship after escaping from a boys’ home (a borstal, as my father used to call them). Life in the boys’ home was based on my experiences as a young teacher at Turana Youth Training Centre in Melbourne in the 1960s.

The background material for the migrant ship in the story was the Ranchi, the converted merchant cruiser in which my family sailed to Australia. I described some of the real-life shipboard events in A Different Boy but the really useful part for me as a writer was the physical detail – I hardly had to do any research at all.

The first day out at sea a lot of the children on board were seasick. They were all assembled in a cleared part of the dining room for ‘school’. It wasn’t really school because there was only one teacher for scores of children of all ages – a very pleasant young physical-education teacher named Miss Helen, whose job was mainly to keep us busy and out of our parents’ hair. We were all given paper bags to vomit into if the need arose. My younger sister, Ruth, and I both felt queasy but fortunately did not have to make a deposit into the bags.

‘When we reach the Suez Canal,’ said Miss Helen, trying to cheer us up, ‘we are going to have a fancy-dress party. Someone will win a lovely prize – a whole bag of sweets.’ I immediately saw myself as a pirate with an eye patch, cutlass, three-pointed hat and shiny buckles. Everyone would be amazed at my splendour. And I really wanted that bag of sweets.

My mother began to worry about the event. ‘How on earth will we get costumes?’ she said. ‘All our things are in storage and there’s no sewing machine available.’

‘Ghosts,’ said my father. ‘Cut eye holes in a couple of sheets.’

I was dismayed at this suggestion. Not only would it be claustrophobic in a sheet, but no one would know who I was. I didn’t want to be an anonymous ghost. I wanted to win. And I wanted to be seen. I was a shy little boy and I’m aware that this seems a contradiction. Perhaps it was an unconscious perception that a costume and an audience allow an ordinary person to become spectacular.

‘I want to be a pirate,’ I said again.

‘There’s no chance of that,’ I was told. ‘Think yourself lucky that we’ve got a couple of old sheets.’

When we reached the Suez Canal the ship berthed and strange people came on board. Men wearing red hats like upturned pot plants with tassels on top hurried about the deck.

‘Stay in the cabin,’ said my father. ‘Or you might be kidnapped.’

We were locked in while my parents went outside to check on the action. It was very disappointing not to be allowed out, but the thought of abduction by men who spoke in a strange language kept Ruth and me subdued. We had a deck cabin and could sense the excitement through the window. People were milling around and staring over the side of the ship at something we couldn’t see. We were desperate to find out what was going on.

Finally, the strange men disappeared and we were allowed on deck. Ruth and I hung over the railing and stared at the amazing sight below. Small dinghies laden with produce nuzzled up to the ship like piglets sucking on a sow. Passengers lowered money in cane baskets on ropes and were rewarded with vegetables, trinkets, coconuts and exotic items of clothing.

Boys with naked, glistening skin ducked beneath the surface for pennies, which they stored in their mouths. Some parents on the deck gave their children coins that they tossed gleefully into the water below. I was so envious of those naked boys diving for pennies without supervision – no school, no Sunday-best clothes to have to wear – total freedom in a sunny paradise. I wished I was one of them. I looked forward to it in Australia.

My father lowered some coins in a basket and hauled up his purchase – a coconut. We hurried back to the cabin to enjoy the feast. None of us had ever actually tasted one before. He pierced a hole in the end of the husky shell and let the juice dribble into a glass. We all bent forward expectantly and then suddenly screwed up our faces as a horrible stench filled our nostrils.

‘It’s rotten,’ shouted my father.

Without a second’s hesitation he grabbed the coconut and raced out of the cabin. We all hurriedly followed him back to the railing. Far below, the seller of the coconut was rowing towards the shore as fast as he could go.

‘You lousy bugger,’ my father yelled at the retreating figure.

To my astonishment I saw that he was going to throw the coconut at the peddler. My father heaved it in the direction of the disappearing dinghy. It made a high arc and then began to descend, faster and faster. For a second it looked as if the hairy missile was going to hit its target but instead it splashed into the water next to the flimsy craft. The rower turned and looked up. A wide grin broke across his weathered face. Then he put his back to the oars. Scores of other faces creased with amused smiles stared up at us from the boats below.

I looked at my father. It was one of the few times I admired him.

‘That was a terrific shot,’ I said. ‘You just missed.’

The day of the fancy-dress party dawned and my anxiety grew. No costumes had been sewn. Even the worn-out sheets had not made an appearance. Instead my father and mother were writing words on large pieces of paper.

‘What’s this?’ I exclaimed.

‘You’ll see.’

Half an hour before the party I was still in my everyday clothes.

My father began pinning the pieces of paper onto me. My mother did the same for Ruth.

‘We’ll never win,’ I said gloomily. ‘What are we supposed to be?’

‘Trust me,’ said my mother. ‘Everyone will love you.’

I couldn’t read most of the words because they were too long and hard. But I noticed that Ruth had the word ‘grog’ written on one of her paper signs.

We were led along the deck to the dining room. I was filled with misery. As we approached, I saw all the other children lined up waiting at the door. One girl was dressed as a witch. A boy was Tarzan. Most of the others were ghosts, who stood in silent and dismayed anonymity.

I felt a little heartened but I knew that Tarzan would win for the boys and the witch would be the best girl.

The dressed-up children entered the dining room one at time and received polite applause from the adults, who were by now seated at the tables. Ruth and I had to go in together, holding hands. I felt absolutely stupid and embarrassed, but to my amazement we were greeted with cheers and whistles.

And we won a bag of sweets between us. I was pleased with this, of course. But the applause was really for something I didn’t understand. Back in the cabin my father explained it to me.

‘You were ENGLAND,’ he said, holding up the biggest piece of paper. He read out the signs.

ENGLAND

RAIN, SLEET AND SNOW | NO FAGS
RATIONING | NO JOBS
NO GROG | NO MEAT
NO PETROL | NO HOUSING

My mother pointed to my sister. ‘You were AUSTRALIA.’ She read out Ruth’s signs excitedly.

AUSTRALIA

SUN, SANDALS AND FUN | PLENTY OF FAGS
NO RATIONING | PLENTY OF PETROL
ALL THE GROG YOU CAN DRINK | JOBS WITH GOOD PAY
TWO-INCH STEAKS | NEW HOUSES

I looked at my father blankly. ‘That’s why everyone is on this boat,’ he exclaimed. ‘We’re going to the land of plenty.’ I shook my head. I was glad that we won the sweets, but I didn’t get it.

A pirate would have been better.

In a contemplative mood, I went outside and looked to where the sun was just starting to drown in a golden sea. Suddenly I knew without a doubt that if I died, everyone and everything would die with me and there would be nothing left. Without me none of it could or should exist. A strange thought indeed for a quiet little book lover.

Many years later, when I was over forty years old, I told my boss Bruce Jeans at the Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education how I had once thought that the whole world would vanish if I died.

He said, ‘How do you know it won’t?’

I was astounded at this response from a brilliant man who was head of our faculty. I went home and thought about it for a while. Anything is possible. That was a good thought for a person trying to come up with some amazing stories to write. I pondered the afterlife and what it might be like.

Later I wrote a story called ‘Wake Up to Yourself’, about a boy who has to choose between staying with his dead brother, whom he meets in a dream, or waking up and returning to the real world to be with his lonely, pregnant mother. Sometimes children whose parents have divorced are forced to make a similar decision but their dilemma is real. By making the problem fantasy I can avoid presenting the world as a bleak and frightening place. I usually finish with happy endings but if I don’t, I follow the well-known rule that at the very least, the story must end in hope.

It was hope that brought the passengers on the Ranchi to Australia. And it was hope that helped me and my sister when the headwinds became a little stronger than we might have liked.

4

LITTLE DEVIL

I will never forget what I felt as I gazed out from inside the lifebuoy. I was trying to put a brave face on it, but my left ear was hurting terribly. The photographer had jammed my hat down over it and I was too shy to complain. I tried to look happy because he was telling me to. A picture might be worth a thousand words but the one on the opposite page doesn’t show what I was thinking about the man who took this one.

Later, as I looked over the ship’s railing at South Melbourne Dock, I could see that Australia did not have any mermaids, camels, mad scientists or fairies, and there wasn’t a hot-air balloon in sight. It was raining and cold as we drove along Beaconsfield Parade. It was not like the places that Rupert Bear visited. There were no minarets, pyramids or igloos. All the houses seemed just as uninteresting as the ones in England.

Nothing exciting. Or so I thought.

1949–1955

Initially, I found this new land to be disappointing and worrying. I suffered from loneliness and a feeling of alienation. I’m well aware that refugees and people from non-English-speaking countries had it harder than us. After all, we shared a king and a language, and as my father proudly proclaimed, ‘If you are English you are Australian and that’s all there is to it.’

But that wasn’t all there was to it for my mother, Ruth and me. We felt lonely and different. English migrants did not generally settle in groups in particular suburbs in the same way that immigrants from Italy, Greece and other European countries did. I was the only boy at Bentleigh West State School who had an English accent.

And who wore shoes and not boots. My mother said that boots were ‘working class’ and wouldn’t allow me to wear them. And I had to wear a little ‘bib and brace’ pair of overalls and not short trousers and a shirt like the others.

Adding to my troubles was the fact that Britain was not the flavour of the month after the war. Churchill had refused to return the favour and send troops to Australia in its time of danger. America had come to the rescue and now the kids at school loved everything about and from the USA, which my parents certainly did not. The other boys admired the American cars which had extravagant tail fins and boots as long as the bonnets. Or should I say trunks as long as the hoods.

Ruth and I were a great comfort to each other. At first, we had no friends at all. Granny wasn’t with us. It was scary. What if our parents died? We would be alone in this new world that didn’t even have bombed-out houses to play in. We used to pray every night that Mum and Dad would not die.

I once told this story to a well-known writer of young adult fiction. He said, ‘I used to pray every night that my parents would die.’

There is always someone who is worse off than you.

My sister often looks back and reminds me of one incident when something bewildering and scary happened. Ruth was only six and a half at that time so I would have been around eight. I don’t know why neither of us handed this matter over to our parents. The main thing I remember is my own indignation.

There was a family living in the street behind us that had a boy who would sit all day on their front porch calling out to passers-by in garbled, unrecognisable speech. I used to feel sorry for him but didn’t know why he couldn’t talk properly. The boy’s father worked as a glazier. One day, when Ruth was kept home in bed suffering from a cold, this man arrived to replace a window in the room where she was resting. He suddenly pulled down his trousers and exposed himself to her.

She kept quiet about it until I came home from school. I was outraged when she told me what he had done. We were always close and I loved her very much.

Although I was terrified, I immediately went around to the man’s house and found myself knocking on his front door. His wife opened it. She told me that her husband was not home and asked me what I wanted. I explained to her what he had done.

‘He showed his winkle to my little sister,’ I said in an outraged voice.

She responded with a shocked look and hesitated as if not sure what to say to me. Even though I was trembling with fear and just a small boy, I could tell by the woman’s confused expression that I had uttered something unspeakable and had wounded her grievously.

Without saying a word, she slowly shut the door in my face.

I left with a mixture of guilt, uncertainty and anger. I felt sorry for the woman. But not her husband.

Two days after this incident I walked past their house and saw that it was totally empty. They had gone. I knew, in some way, that it was because of what I had told the man’s wife. The son (who I now think was probably profoundly deaf) and his mother had fled from their home and it was my fault.

I can remember feeling that the man’s behaviour was something that could not be mentioned. It was part of a horrible secret world in which adults allowed each other to behave in a way that could not be challenged. It was not for us to question them.

As my father sometimes said, ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’

I have no idea where I got the courage to go to the flasher’s home and try to confront him. I always felt that I should look after Ruth. She would follow me around when I was with other boys and I wouldn’t let them send her away.

On most weekends, some of the boys in the neighbourhood would pick up teams for a game of Australian Rules football. I didn’t know the slightest thing about the Victorian Football League or the conventions of the game. At ‘home’ the ball had been round, not oval (I had learned the difference by this time). I remember being told that I was allocated to the ‘half-back pocket’. I took up a position next to our team’s goalpost and everybody laughed. I vividly remember heading off the field and walking home slowly, thinking, I’ll never play that stupid game again.

I never did play it again, unless compelled by a higher authority. Sometimes after I had graduated to secondary school I would nick off from footy practice and hide in the library, where the librarian was willing to pretend that she didn’t know what I was up to. Her silent acceptance of this rule-breaking might have been due to the fact that I belonged to her library committee. These furtive visits finally ended when the head teacher found me there, took me to his office and gave me three strokes of the cane.

I have never been one for contact team sports but in my early primary school days I played Hoppo Bumpo, British Bulldog and Relievo with the other boys. I was a fast runner and I enjoyed these speedy competitions, which we played on the boys’ dusty playground at lunchtime. The girls played on their bitumen-covered yard with hoops, skipping ropes and packs of swap cards.

Every day at home my mother would leave empty milk bottles at the gate. The milkman would arrive in his horse-drawn cart and replace the bottles with full ones. Each bottle had an inch or so of cream floating on the top. My mother would remove the cream and whip it up into a topping for ‘pudding’.

The milkman’s horse would sometimes deposit a steaming pile of manure on the road. Mum would make Ruth and me go out and scoop it up with a shovel and brush and put it around the vegetables growing in the back garden.

We hated doing this. Other people might see us. It was embarrassing. We went out reluctantly.

‘Hurry up,’ my mother would say. ‘Before the lady next door gets it.’

The English way of speaking was a major problem for me at school. I was humiliated by being told that I talked ‘funny’. I gained an Australian accent within months. My mother was disappointed.

She said, ‘You sound so common now.’

I quickly learned that to be accepted I had to learn the lingo – ‘g’day’, ‘how ya goin’, mate?’ and ‘hoo-roo’ were all expressions I quickly acquired. I also learned ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘ridgy-didge’.

Soon Australia was home to me. But it never was for my mother. She always pined for England.

As I got older, I made friends with other boys in the street – state school kids, who were mostly Protestants. The Catholic students could be identified by their blue shirts and we told each other that they were taught by crabby nuns who gave them the cuts (the strap) for not praying enough. If we met up with Catholic boys, we sometimes threw stones at each other.

I was soon part of a little gang that went everywhere at will. Into paddocks, wading in creeks and drains, getting up to mischief.

On weekends we would set off ‘exploring’ and didn’t come back until dark. We were not allowed to go near the railway line. We did, though. We would creep up to the tracks and put pennies on the rails. After the train had gone by, the coins would be twice their original size.

At other times we would explore Skull Cave. We named this concrete drain after the home of comic-book hero The Phantom. It went for miles and miles under the streets. We took candles and small kerosene lamps with us. Our voices echoed in the gloom. After we became sick of it, we would climb up metal ladders attached to the curved walls and emerge from a grate into a street far from home.

We also climbed over neighbours’ fences and let out their chickens. The owners would rush around trying to get them back in before they disappeared down the road or were run over by a car. Once a man who lived nearby came and told my father what I had done. He said I was a little devil. I pretended to be asleep but my father shook me until I opened my eyes and got out of bed. I was made to say sorry. My mother wouldn’t talk to me. She just stared at me with cold eyes. She did that for days and I was not allowed to go ‘exploring’ for two weeks.

What interests me now, looking back on those times, is how there seemed to be two different Pauls. One became the leader of a little gang of boys who wandered the suburbs in a bold, cocky manner and the other was a frightened, nervous child who wanted to fit in and was often filled with guilt and shame.

We had our own hens in the backyard and occasionally my father would kill one for us to eat. It was my job to hold the chicken by the legs while he decapitated it with an axe. I was appalled by the procedure. I hated the spurting blood and the way the headless chicken would run around for several minutes after it was dead.

It was also my job to pluck the chook afterwards in the laundry sink. I can still recall the horrible smell of wet feathers mixed with blood. I was instructed not to tear the chicken’s skin as it spoilt the roast. It was difficult to do this because the large feathers were firmly attached, especially those in the wings. I can’t find the words to describe how revolting this process was to me. But I was powerless, like all children; a small person in a world of giants.

My father said that during the war he knew a man in England who took the floor out of his Austin Seven because it was rotten. The man was so poor he couldn’t afford to fix it. One day during the war when rationing was on, this man ran over the top of a chicken by accident and it flapped up into the car and died. He said it was delicious.

Over the years my father told and re-told this story. On the first telling it was one chook. Then it was two, then five. I realised that the more chickens there were, the more people laughed. I used to sit there thinking, ‘You liar, there was only one chook.’

In those young years I was outraged when adults did not tell the truth. They were breaking their own rules.

But now, I have to confess that I am a bit of an exaggerator myself. So is Ruth, although she tries to deny it. I don’t like to think that I am similar to my father, but I have come to realise that I caught (or inherited) his way of exaggerating events. It is a great tool for a writer of fiction. I never admired much about my father, but he could tell a good story – I have to give him that.

Once, in those early years when I was very small, for some unknown reason I took a pin and scratched the word ‘Ruth’ in the varnish of the windowsill in my parents’ bedroom. I knew they would blame Ruth and they did. My mother was furious with her and wouldn’t believe that she hadn’t done it.

‘Why would Paul write your name there?’ she said. ‘He would scratch his own.’

Ruth’s tear-filled eyes overwhelmed me. After all, I loved her dearly. She was an innocent little thing. And now she was suffering because of me.

‘I did it,’ I mumbled.

I don’t remember the punishment – only the crime. It’s amazing how one’s conscience can continue to dish out chronic pain long after the misdeed is forgotten by everyone else. In retrospect I think that I actually did it to see if the ruse would work rather than from any intention to hurt Ruth.

My mother always told the truth and she brought us up to do the same. She said that she could tell if we were fibbing by looking into our eyes. Even a little white lie was forbidden. But on one occasion I didn’t want her to know the truth because she would be hurt and upset.

When I was twelve years old there was to be a breakup party at school before the Christmas holidays. Every kid brought delicious food from home to share. Chocolate éclairs, bottles of lemonade, fairy cakes, cream buns and butterfly cakes.

Mum had baked a butter cake especially for me to take. ‘Let me know how it goes down,’ she said. I walked to school slowly. I wasn’t sure that anyone would like my mother’s solid-looking offering, which had neither cream nor icing. I worried about it.

The one thing that is worse than suffering pain and humiliation yourself is watching someone you love experiencing those feelings.

The kids helped our teacher, Mr Wheeler, shove the desks to one side and put all the food we had brought on a trestle. Mum’s cake stood there solidly in the centre of the yummy cream sponges and the chocolate bits of fluff.

‘Don’t make hogs of yourselves,’ said Mr Wheeler.

This was the signal for everyone to do just that. The kids fell on the feast greedily while Mr Wheeler pretended not to see. My mother’s butter cake towered over the table like the Rock of Gibraltar. Not one person took a slice. The cake was totally ignored. I felt humiliated for my mother. Somehow or another I managed to eat a huge slice myself.

At the end of the party I quickly grabbed the remainder of Mum’s cake and walked home with it. Now I had a problem. I didn’t know what to do with it. If I took the cake home, Mum’s feelings would be terribly hurt and there was no way I could dump it and then tell a lie. I would be caught out for sure. She would see it in my eyes.

Just then I saw a dog, a skinny greyhound-cross. I took Mum’s cake out of my backpack.

‘Here you go, boy,’ I said.

The poor mongrel gulped the cake down hungrily and then skulked off into the bushes.

As I walked the rest of the way home, I wondered about what I could tell Mum. As soon as I entered the door, she raised the topic.

‘How did the cake go?’ she said.

‘Good,’ I answered, looking her straight in the eye. ‘Every bit was eaten.’

Sometimes having a way with words can be useful.

When we first arrived in Australia my father could not find a job. In England he had been a factory manager but here he found nothing to equal that. He was offered a position delivering large blocks of ice from house to house. Everyone we knew had an ice-chest to keep their meat and milk cool. The delivery man carried the heavy blocks of ice into the kitchen on top of a hessian sack draped across one shoulder.

My father refused the position.

He said, ‘Everyone will have a fridge one day and then I will be out of a job again.’

We all laughed. Only rich people had fridges.

But he was right. He eventually got a job as foreman and then manager at Lindberg Foster, a manufacturer of refrigerators. We were the first people in the street to get one.

Once I remember him having a heated exchange with my mother. I was sitting on the porch one evening when he stormed out in fury, supposedly to check on the night shift.

‘What’s the matter, Dad?’ I asked.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘It’s all your fault.’

I had no idea what he was talking about. Now I sometimes wonder if my mother had been sticking up for me in some way, trying to make him a little softer.

My mind goes back to that time he told me that I would never be fit for anything but the workshop. A labourer on the factory floor was the lowest of the low to him. I knew that I was a disappointment to him but I never knew why.

5

HALF-MOON MURDERERS

When I was seven years old, I used to walk home from Cubs with an older boy called Jake. He lived closer to the meeting hall than I did. One night as we walked through the dark streets, he said to me, ‘There are full-moon murderers. They kill people.’

I said, ‘But not kids, they wouldn’t kill kids, we don’t have money or anything.’

Jake replied, ‘They are mad. They can’t help it. They just do it. To anyone. They are lunatics.’

I looked up at the sky nervously. ‘It’s not a full moon,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘There are half-moon murderers too.’

He turned into the gate of his house and left me to walk home alone. I was terrified. I hurried along in the middle of the road just in case a half-moon murderer should jump out from one of the dark driveways next to the footpath.

1950–1955

After the night of the half-moon murderers, I became frightened that a man might be hiding under my bed. At home, my sister Ruth and I were not allowed to sleep with our lights on and the thought that an unknown person might come crawling out of the gloom was terrifying. So was the prospect of cowering under the covers not knowing if someone was there. I fell into the habit of rolling an old tennis ball beneath the bed. If it came out the other side, I knew I was safe. One night the ball failed to appear. I lay sleepless for hours, shivering with fear. In the morning I checked and found the ball wedged against a pair of underpants.

My fear was misplaced but it was very real. My parents often left my sister and me alone in our bedrooms while they went out for the night. I still recall lying there listening to a train approaching on the nearby line. I used to think that if there was a murderer in the house, he wouldn’t kill me while the train was passing because the driver of the train would know about it. It was completely irrational, but even today I experience a little feeling of hope as a far-off train approaches and the beginnings of apprehension as its uncaring rumblings fade into the distance.

As adults we often treat such feelings as silly or inconsequential. But to children they can be as real as a confrontation with an actual psychopath with a knife might be to us. Fear and a lack of knowledge inhabit our early years. I believe that if we write about these emotions sensitively and knowingly, our young readers see themselves in the story and relate to it.

In his brilliant 1979 television screenplay, Blue Remembered Hills, author and screenwriter Dennis Potter came up with an ingenious idea. He wrote a story using a technique he had developed earlier. It was about a group of children alone in a forest. In the opening scenes, we come to realise that adult actors are taking the parts of children. Seeing grown men and women treating each other the way some kids do in real life makes the viewer aware that schoolyard ‘pranks’ can be devastating to the youngsters involved.

I remember from my own days at Bentleigh West State School that it was quite common for two boys to get into a dispute, wrestling with each other and even swinging punches. It would sometimes end with the victor pinning the loser to the ground and spitting in his face. In those days it did not seem to arouse much concern among ‘grown-ups’.

These days, however, we are aware that even such a small thing as Jake telling me untrue stories about full-moon murderers can have lasting effects. The notion of ‘madness’ disturbed me for many years. Jake did not become my friend but another boy at Cubs named Timothy did. Many years after an incident involving him occurred, I wondered if I could get a story from it. To make this distant anecdote seem a little bit closer and more immediate I’m going to write in first person present tense.

Timothy and I are dressed in our Cubs uniform and participating in a ‘Bob-a-Job’ fundraiser. The boys from the 3rd Moorabbin Troop are in pairs, door-knocking the streets and offering to do any household job for a shilling. So far, we have swept a footpath for an elderly gentleman and weeded a garden bed for a young woman. Now we stand outside another closed door and knock. We are not nervous. The whole thing is a great adventure.

‘Yes?’ says a rather prim middle-aged lady. We explain our mission. She thinks for a bit and then crooks her finger.

We follow her into the backyard and she presents us with a mattock and a shovel. She points.

‘Bury him,’ she says.

We stare in horror. There is a fat brown-and-white dog lying on its side. Its eyes are open, opaque and staring blindly. Further adding to the ghastliness of the sight is a piece of poo sticking out of the dead dog’s backside. The ground is gravelly and the digging proves to be hard going. But finally, we scrape out a shallow hole, bury the poor animal and depart quickly with our shilling.

Some sixty years later I was sitting in my study wondering how to develop that little incident into a piece of fiction.

I knew that I was onto something in my search for a story. The loss of a dog or any pet is enormous to anyone, but it is especially profound for a child. I had to pick the age of my readers carefully and be very sensitive about how I told the tale. I thought that twelve to fourteen years of age might be the appropriate target. I started to jot down other experiences I could remember about dogs. These could turn into the skeletal outlines of possible plot strands.

My mind wandered back to the time when I lived in our old house on the cliff. One of my own children had a dog named Sold. We purchased him from a pet shop and told the owner we would call back to pick him up. When we returned his collar had a label with the word SOLD written on it.

Every school day Sold was left alone to wander through the surrounding farms and paddocks. Any farmer will tell you that this is not a good thing to do. One day I received a furious call from a neighbour who lived a couple of kilometres up the road. It was Jenny, the wife of a friend of mine who was away at a conference. Sold had arrived and killed two of her children’s three pet ducklings.

I stuttered profuse and confused apologies and told her that I would come straight away.

It was a terrible scene. The dead ducklings lay wet and cold in their pen. Sold whimpered fearfully on the end of a rope. Jenny was upset and just holding back from shouting at me. She led me inside and I saw the one remaining duckling in a small cardboard box in front of their gas heater. It was only just alive. We sat together staring at this last little bit of hope. I can’t express how wretched I felt.

‘Brent is only five,’ she said. ‘What are we going to tell him and his sisters when they get home?’

I kept uttering words of apology but I knew they were useless. Worse than that, they were annoying.

She gently picked up the remaining duckling and looked at me accusingly. Its neck dangled down from her hand.

‘It’s dead,’ she said in a flat voice.

I was filled with even more guilt and shame. I love kids. My whole life had centred on them. I imagined one of hers pointing at me and saying, ‘Murderer.’

‘Where did you get the ducklings?’ I asked desperately.

‘Bruce Wicking’s place.’

‘Has he got any more?’

She brightened just a little. ‘He might have.’

I jumped into the car and drove too quickly to Bruce’s small farm. I explained what had happened and he smiled.

‘Come with me.’ Oh, wow. There was a mother duck and two ducklings.

‘You can have them both,’ he said.

‘I need three,’ I replied.

He shook his head.

I drove back with the large mother duck and its two remaining ducklings securely tucked into a cardboard box.

Jenny was only slightly mollified.

‘I’ll still have to tell the children what happened,’ she said. ‘How can I explain the whopping big mother?’

I gave another pathetic apology and untied Sold.

‘Take the dead ones with you,’ she said.

I jumped into the car and drove home along the road between the farms. What to do with the dead ducklings? I wound down the window, grabbed them one at a time and tossed them over the car roof onto the grass verge on the passenger’s side of the road.

Too late, I saw a car behind me, driven by another neighbour with an amazed look on his face. The whole thing was a disaster.

I waited until the next day to ask how the children had responded to the loss of a duckling and the arrival of the mother.

Jenny was quite matter-of-fact in her reply.

‘Brent just looked at it and said, “Jeez, that one’s grown.”’

As you can imagine, I’ve had a lot of fun at dinner parties with that story over the years. Someone recently told me that they’d read it elsewhere in a novel but I swear that it is true.

Looking back from my writer’s desk I know that this is a great yarn and I will have to use it. I now have two anecdotes from my own life to put into my planned story.

How will the dog die in this tale? A car accident is a possibility. I remember another incident – an accident in which I played a small part.

Many years after the duck story I was living in the leafy Dandenong Ranges. I was driving with my office manager down a steep, winding road. The bitumen was covered in white hail. I knew that this was a dangerous situation – the hailstones were like ball bearings, and a touch on the brakes could send the car skidding over the edge of the road and down the wooded cliff face. I drove very slowly and carefully with the gearbox set in four-wheel drive. Suddenly a small red sedan overtook me at speed and disappeared around the corner.

‘Sheeba,’ I said. ‘What is he thinking?’

Clearly the car was out of control. When I rounded the bend there was no sign of it. I knew that it had gone over the edge. I stopped and found skid marks. Far below I could see a red smudge standing out against the white hail and green leaves of the forest. My office manager picked up her brick-sized mobile phone and called for an ambulance while I carefully climbed down towards the wrecked car. It was an awful feeling – I had to hurry but I was in a terrible funk over what I might find. Dreadful images filled my head. I imagined a mangled body and bones poking out through the torn flesh of twisted legs.

Finally, I reached the car, which had crashed into a tree. The driver was conscious but slumped across the steering wheel. He was shivering and groaning but had no obvious wounds and could talk to me sensibly. I scrambled back up to my car and grabbed a blanket. I returned and put it around him and tried to engage him in talk. After what seemed like hours, the ambulance came and the paramedics stretchered him back to the road. I never saw the man (or my blanket) again.

I decided to put the feelings and the location involved in that incident into my novella, A Different Dog. I embellished the tale. That’s okay. The final story would be mostly fiction.

In my early outlines I inserted a dog into the scene. It is found dead by my main character, a boy who climbs down to the crashed car.

But as I scribbled out the first outlines, I wasn’t happy about the feel of the thing. I couldn’t bring myself to kill off the dog. I came up with a different idea – the man could be dead and the dog still alive. The dog will rush off into the forest with the boy following. The boy becomes lost as, charged with deep feeling for the poor animal, he chases after it. A totally different plot.

I have had characters die in my stories before but not close-up with vivid descriptions and emotions like the ones I was going to describe here. Despite this, I decided to go with my gut feeling. If I treated the story carefully, twelve-to fourteen-year-old readers could handle this scene. I was also thinking of something else. In my mind other related incidents were swirling.

Timothy, the boy I did the Bob-a-Job day with, was my first friend in Australia and I loved him. He was quiet, thoughtful and curious about everything. A great reader. Once when I was on holidays with him and his family, we were running along a beach. I was faster than him. We wrestled on the sand – I beat him. We did handstands – I lasted longer. We climbed to the top of a sand dune – I got there first.

I remember boasting, ‘I’m better than you at everything.’ Even as the words came out of my mouth, I felt ashamed of them. Timothy said nothing in reply. A little while later we came upon the remains of a ruined pier, a row of poles stretching out into the ocean. A single beam was left connecting each one. Timothy started walking along it and I followed.

It was like walking on a wooden tightrope high above the water. After a bit I fell to my knees and began crawling back to the shore – I have always been terrified by heights and I was shaking with fear. I felt that I was a coward. Timothy continued another hundred metres to the end of the pier with his hands in his pockets.

We walked back along the beach in silence. Finally, he said just one thing, almost modestly, ‘I’m better at heights.’

In my book A Different Dog I made my young character walk that broken pier. But unlike the real story, I put the runaway dog with him and turned the pier into a ruined bridge across a river. I also added the incident about the dead ducks, but left out the funny punchline because I was going for poignancy rather than humour. You sometimes need a little sadness in order to strengthen joy.

The dog that Timothy and I buried, the one that started the whole thing, was left out of this book altogether and I have never written about the incident. But as far as I can work out, that’s where my story originated. I left my mind open to wander among memories and fantasies and perhaps even end up in that place where other, forgotten life stories are buried. The ability to let one’s mind wander fancifully is a great asset for a writer. Images can sometimes flash unbidden and wonderfully into your mind. Sometimes, on the other hand, they can be troubling.

Areas of expertise or special life skills can be extremely useful when writing fiction. I have always admired the way John Mortimer used his experiences as a lawyer to let the readers into the day-to-day life of a barrister’s office. This background in which old Rumpole solves criminal cases is almost as interesting to the reader as the plots.

A Different Dog was received very well and most reviews included generous comments about concepts such as courage, disability, loneliness, being different and not having a voice. My story began as a series of events. The themes come from somewhere deep inside me – but unlike my plots, they are not planned.

I usually begin a plot by jotting possible scenes down in point form in an old exercise book, making notes to myself as I go. Often, I will start writing the story without knowing the ending, although I prefer to have the completed story outlined before I start. I remain flexible as I begin to write. My former publisher, and editor of more than thirty-five years, Julie Watts, once said to me that she was always surprised how much I change a story on the way through or in subsequent drafts.

Every author is different in this regard. The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do it when and how you like. I have a set of guidelines for how I write but I’m aware that there are no rules that cannot be broken.

I have taken a long time to answer the question that is most asked of children’s authors – where do you get your ideas? I’ve looked at my own life trying to find a ‘good’ answer.

Images, incidents, memories, smells, thoughts, feelings, guilt and pain. Just some of the words that can be given to the jumble that makes up the human mind – a word which itself is still beyond definition.

6

ONE OF THE BEST

Mr Wheeler was definitely one of the best. He was young and enthusiastic. He was an adventurer and a romantic. He was a mountain climber and a lover of the Australian bush. He showed us slides of his travels in Antarctica and taught us wonderful songs. We worshipped him. School without fear. School with laughter and fun. Every other kid in that place envied us.

Twenty-five years after the photo opposite was taken, I started as a lecturer at Burwood State College. I leafed through the handbook to see who was on the staff. To my amazement I saw Mr Wheeler’s name there. On the first day I made my way to his office. And there he was. Still as kind and modest as ever.

‘You gave me the happiest year of my life,’ I exclaimed. ‘I can never thank you enough. We all loved you.’

I told him how he saved me from going mad. We both had tears in our eyes.

Good teachers don’t know how many lives they have saved from misery. Or how many children they inspired and helped. We don’t get many chances to thank them, which is a pity. I think that teaching should be the most hallowed occupation in the world.

1950–1955

I have been told that the first thing many psychologists ask themselves when they meet a troubled client is, ‘What age is this person stuck at?’ I heard one prominent family therapist suggest that Donald Trump is firmly fixed at age three.

Children’s authors often discuss a similar question. And it is this: ‘Do we write for a particular age group that represents a time when we were psychologically damaged ourselves?’

Naturally I have thought about this many times. I have written books for children aged from five to fifteen, but if pressed I would have to say that my most popular stories appeal to readers around eleven years of age.

What happened to me at this age? Plenty. It was the year I spent in the classroom of Mr Brown.

I know Brownie hates me. And I hate him. Every day he gives five or six of the boys the cuts. And most days I am in the line-up, standing on the platform waiting for him to give me three hard whangs on the hand with the dirty big leather strap he hangs on a nail on the side of his cupboard.

The big kids reckon that by law, the teachers can give you up to six whacks, but no more. You never know how many you are going to get and it makes your knees knock while you are waiting for your turn. If you pull your hand away you will get even more. You can’t cry because everyone will see you. I think he wants you to cry but I don’t know why. He smiles while he whacks you. Only the boys get the strap. He is always nice to the girls.

Humphries, who is a kid I like a lot, told me that Brownie drops a pencil on the floor and looks up the girls’ dresses when he bends down to pick it up. I didn’t believe him at first but then I saw him do it. A teacher. It can’t be true but it is.

Every day when I ride to school it is the same. I feel sick. I am scared. There is another whole day to get through never knowing when I will get it. I always sing the same song to myself as I pedal. I don’t know why but it makes me feel a tiny bit better.

Bald-head Brown went to town,

Riding on a pony.

Stuck a feather up his bum,

And called it macaroni.

My mother says to give Brownie a break because he was nearly killed in the war. She says she heard a story that he was standing on the deck of a cruiser when a bomb fell just in front of his feet and went through the deck and exploded inside the ship.

My father, on hearing about my troubles, says that when he was a kid himself and got the strap at school his father would give it to him again when he got home. In other words, ‘Behave yourself and don’t complain.’

Humphries reckons that his dad is going to bash Brownie up and every day we wait for it to happen. But it never does.

All day in school I feel sick in my stomach. Yesterday was really bad. We were meant to be drawing a picture of a poem about daffodils. We have been learning to say it. I was sucking the end of a red pencil and pressing it against my forehead while I was thinking. I noticed that Brownie was watching me. Oh, no.

‘Jennings,’ he yelled. ‘You have got the measles.’

Then he looked closer.

‘Red pencil, you idiot.’ He dragged me out to the front of the class. I didn’t know why. But then I worked it out. There were red dots on my face. I held out my hand. It was shaking.

‘Keep still,’ he yelled.

Oh, it hurt. My eyes were watering. It was not crying but I don’t know what it was. He gave me four cuts. It wasn’t fair. It hurt so much. I did not know about the red dots. There was no one to help. There never is. It is just you and a big man.

That was yesterday. It is poetry again today. And this time we have to say it. Some kids will have to go out the front and say a verse each. Please let it be someone else. Under the desk I rub my hands with this lump of rosin that has been going around. It is yellow stuff like tree sap. Some kids reckon it comes from whales but I don’t know. It is supposed to stop the strap from hurting.

‘Jennings,’ says Brownie. ‘Come out the front and recite the poem.’

Oh, no, no, no. Everyone is looking. Every boy is glad it is not him. My stomach is swirling around like jelly. I am trembling. My socks are hanging down and he has got the blackboard ruler in one hand. It is three feet long. Thirty-six inches. One yard. I don’t know why I am saying this to myself. God please save me.

‘Recite the last verse,’ he says.

Oh, no, the last verse. It is the hardest. I spent all night practising it. I start to say it.

‘For oft, when on my couch I sit’

Whang. He hits me on the back of the legs with the blackboard ruler. ‘Lie, idiot,’ he yells. ‘Not sit. The man is ill.’

‘In vacant or in pencil mood,’

Whang, whack, whang. Three times. It hurts so much. ‘Ow,’ I yell. This time I’m weeping proper tears.

‘Pensive,’ he shouts. ‘Pensive, not pencil.’

‘They flash upon that inside eye

Which is the kiss of solitude.’

Whang, whack, whang. I have never felt pain like this before. Help me God.

‘Inward eye,’ he yells. ‘And bliss, not kiss.’

‘And then my heart with pleasure fills

And prances with the daffodils.’

Wham. The hardest hit of all.

‘Dances, fool. Dances.’

I limp back to my desk. The backs of my legs feel like I have run though flames.

When I get home Mum says, ‘How did you get those bruises?’

I tell her.

She says, ‘I am coming to talk to the headmaster tomorrow.’

I don’t know if this is good or bad. I am worried. Very worried. What will they do after she is gone?

The next morning all the kids in Grade Five march into school in twos. I am at the back. Brownie is behind me. As we go up the stairs he says, ‘Jennings, pull up your socks.’

I pull them up. I know why he said it. I just know.

After lunch a monitor comes to the door and gives a note to Brownie.

‘Jennings,’ he says. ‘Report to the office.’

I am worried. I have never been into the headmaster’s little room before. He is sitting behind his desk. My mother is standing in front of it. She is dressed in her best Sunday clothes.

The headmaster gets up and orders me to pull down my socks. He looks at my legs and tells me to go.

When I get home my mother says only one thing. She smiles at me and pats my head.

‘I’m sorry, Paul, but the headmaster said he would never take the part of a child against a teacher.’

That is all my mother says. But Brownie does not touch me again. Not until the last day of school when he gives me the cuts once. The rosin doesn’t work. It just makes it worse.

The next year there is a rumour that Brownie has gone to work at the correspondence school.

Although my father did not seem interested in my world, he did take me into his. And I was totally enamoured with it. He became works manager at Macro Engineering, a firm in West Melbourne that made heavy road-making machinery. He was boss of the factory floor and let me wander around the place beneath the overhead cranes and among the press drills, lathes and men welding huge sheets of steel.

I loved talking to these workers, who didn’t seem to mind downing tools and conversing with the boss’s eleven-year-old son. I don’t think that he really wanted me there because he would go into his office or walk around supervising the men, totally ignoring me until it was time to go home. My guess is that my mum needed a break from me in the school holidays.

My father tried to be ‘one of the men’, but to me his manner always seemed stiff and formal compared to their easy, teasing ways. I have a photo of him after a fishing trip he went on with the foreman and two machinists. They were standing next to a small boat each holding a large snapper. My father was the only one wearing a suit and tie.

He always called the owners of the factory ‘sir’ and laughed very loudly at their jokes. I think he longed to be part of both worlds and ended up belonging to neither.

One Christmas our family was invited to a party at the home of Sydney Menzies, one of the two owners of the company. At the party, Sydney’s brother, Bob Menzies – prime minister of Australia – was standing by the fireplace chatting to a group of men. I remember being overawed by the splendid house, these powerful men and one of the glamorous teenage nieces who had been allocated the job of entertaining the visiting children.

She gave me a dazzling smile and asked, ‘What sort of music do you like?’

I nervously plucked a word from my sparse musical vocabulary. She really was amazingly beautiful. I could feel myself blushing.

‘Jazz,’ I said.

Her smile grew even bigger. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed. ‘So do I. Who do you like?’

I searched my mind desperately.

‘Elvis Presley,’ I answered.

The smile vanished and I could see that she knew I was an idiot.

My father’s chance to become employed at the top level in a big factory finally presented itself. He applied for a job as senior manager of Pope Products Limited, a manufacturer of washing machines and refrigerators located in far-off Adelaide. His application was successful and he rushed over there on his own and bought a house for us in Glenelg, on the (then) outskirts of the suburbs.

My mother didn’t even get to see the house before the purchase. And she didn’t want to go. She had already made the big move from England and the thought of another change was overwhelming. She loved our modest garden, which she had planted out with English flowers and shrubs.

When we arrived, she was disappointed, to say the least. She hated the house, which was smaller than the one we had left. The garden consisted of bare, dry, cracked clay without a single plant in it. Once again, she had no friends and was left alone every day in what she saw as an alien environment. She collapsed into sullen despair. Her misery was palpable. So was mine. I was terribly unhappy. It’s hard to break into a new school in the middle of the year – I wandered around at lunchtime trying to make friends and hoping that no one would notice my status as an isolate.

Mr Brown’s beatings would have been better than the loneliness of that crowded school playground. It’s still the same for today’s children who sometimes have no friends. Loneliness appears in many if not most of my stories as one of my unconsciously generated themes.

While Ruth and I had no weapon to defend ourselves against our father’s self-centred, controlling personality, my mother had one – her unhappiness, which was apparent for the whole time we were in Adelaide. It wore him down, but it increased my feelings of concern and love for her. I was still only a child, but I remember thinking to myself that when I grew up and married, I would never make a woman live somewhere she didn’t want to.

My father only lasted four months. He couldn’t take my mother’s dark depression and we sold up and moved back to Moorabbin. When he returned to his old job his previous position as works manager had been taken by the foreman who once worked for him. The reversal of status would have been a crushing blow.

I was totally concerned with my own problems including the return to Bentleigh West State School. I was back in Mr Brown’s classroom. It was misery. But at least I had friends there. And it was close to the end of the year. After the Christmas break, I found that I had a new teacher, one of the nicest people I have ever met. The wonderful Mr Wheeler. He gave me the loveliest time of my school life. He was definitely ‘one of the best’.

7

INVISIBLE BEES

Every time I go into the garage with my father it starts. The more I try to stop it, the more it happens. I don’t know which is worse, the thoughts, or thinking about the thoughts. I know that my father believes I’m a fool. If he knew what was going on inside my brain, he would be absolutely convinced of it. The last thing I could ever do is kill someone.

I am a gofer – go fer this and go fer that. It’s the hammer. The hammer always brings the invisible stinging bees. Little bites. Little thoughts, all happening inside my head. I can’t pick up a hammer without getting stung.

I hate these brain pictures, I hate them, I hate them. I must be insane. I don’t want to hit him over the head with it. Just the thought of it makes me tremble.

1954–1970

I was eleven years old when the bee stings first made themselves felt. Every weekend I had to work with my father in his garage. I loathed it. He would send me to sort through his box of rusty nuts and bolts. ‘Get me a five-sixteenth Whitworth,’ he would order. I had no idea what a Whitworth thread looked like. I would keep presenting him with different-sized bolts and getting scornful rejections until I finally found the right one. I had no idea that the measurement referred to five-sixteenths of an inch. At other times he would send me to look for his tape measure or some tool. I would search and search to no avail.

‘It might be in your pocket, Dad,’ I would say tentatively.

He always shook his head in annoyance when I suggested this. He wouldn’t even pat his boiler suit to check before sending me on this errand. Inevitably he would locate it in his pocket and continue on without a word.

The bees and their terrible stings started invading my consciousness sometime after the lawnmower incident. My father was changing the spark plug in his Ransome grass-cutter. He called me over.

‘Hang onto this,’ he said. I grabbed the end of the high-tension lead that he was holding out.

‘Now pinch the end of the spark plug with your other hand,’ he said.

I did as I was told. He pulled vigorously on the starter cord and turned the lawnmower engine over. A million little hammers pummelled my body from within. The pain was excruciating.

‘That’s to teach you about electricity,’ he said.

He had given me an electric shock on purpose. I somehow knew that it wasn’t to teach me about electricity. But I just wasn’t sure what it was about.

I knew that something was wrong between my father and me, but I thought it was my fault. It didn’t occur to me that he disliked me. I knew that I didn’t like being with him and I felt guilty about this. All the other boys I knew adored their fathers. They even boasted about them.

There was one time when I had a small insight – a glimpse as to what might be going wrong between us. I used to go into my parents’ bedroom to comb my hair using their dressing-table mirror. I had thick black hair and I would flick it back vigorously with the comb. He was in bed behind me and in the mirror, I saw him staring at me with a strange look on his face. He had an expression like that of someone who had just seen their worst enemy win the lottery. I had a feeling that I had taken something away from him but I didn’t know what.

A little after this, he bought a Mark Three, Ford Zephyr. It was a beautiful car. He was so proud of it. On one occasion I was sitting in the back holding my school pencil box. Inside it among the pencils was a one-sided razor blade used for sharpening broken pencils. For some reason unknown to me at the time, I made a small incision in the leather seat. I hoped he wouldn’t notice it. But he did.

He ranted and raved about it for weeks, but I had no explanation to give him. I felt guilty. I knew it was wrong.

Why, why, why did I do it?

Well, I guess unconsciously I might have been getting back at him where it hurt most, but I was definitely not aware of this at age eleven.

Every winter a truck would deliver a couple of tons of firewood and dump it on our nature strip. It was my job to cart the enormous logs around to the backyard and split them. It was incredibly hard work for an eleven-year-old boy, especially in the early days when I had to use an axe, which would often stick firmly in the surface of a sawn log and take great effort to remove. Later, my father bought a Canadian wood-splitter, which was like an axe with a much wider cutting edge that would either split the log or bounce back off it.

I began to sense that the difficult jobs he gave me and his uncaring manner were excessive but I had nothing with which to compare his behaviour. Protesting was not an option. My resentment began to be replaced by feelings of revulsion.

Not long after the electric shock incident, my father was bending down working on a piece of machinery. I felt an image flash through my head. Image is not the right word, but it is hard to find the correct one. Urge? That’s not it either. Thought? Still not right.

A sort of self-generated mind-picture of myself whacking him on the head with the hammer would pop into my consciousness. It hurt. Not physically, but it really was the mental equivalent of a bee sting. Emotionally painful. And terrifying. I was appalled, ashamed and frightened that such a thing could enter my mind. How could I think of killing my own father?

This was the beginning of one of the most painful periods of my life. These inner images ruined my teenage years and beyond. They started to happen every time I went into that garage with him. I began to pass the hammer to him by holding onto the head and not the handle, in case an irresistible, mad impulse seized me and made me smack him on the skull with it.

There was no way I could stop these terrifying thought pictures. This made my anxiety turn into self-punishing terror. I knew that I couldn’t tell anyone about this problem. I would be diagnosed as insane. I would be put in an asylum. I would have to leave school and be taken away from home. No one must ever know. My earlier infantile fears that a full-moon murderer – a lunatic, a madman – might suddenly appear and kill me for no reason were suddenly replaced by something much worse. What if my mind had been corrupted and some malevolent force had taken it over? What if I was the insane murderer?

So, I told no one. I had no idea why this was happening to me. The only explanation was madness. These flashes of unwanted thought caused me almost unbearable suffering for many years. Oh, it was agony. Oh, it was frightening. This problem followed me into middle age. I couldn’t pick up a hammer without this terrible intrusion exploding silently into my consciousness. Besides the constant little stings it was the unspeakable thought that I might, like the fictional full-moon murderer, one day let fly with the hammer.

In 2009, when I was sixty-four, I decided to write a novel about it for adolescent readers. In my book The Nest I recreated my father’s garage and a boy who suffered there as his gofer. It was the truth, as far as I am able to know it, clothed in fiction. And my story had a plot and a realistic resolution that I hoped would be interesting and perhaps even useful to anyone experiencing a similar thing.

It was a difficult book to write. I hope it did some good. That’s one of the wonderful things about being a writer. If your story has touched just one heart somewhere it has all been worthwhile.

My father loved English cars – they were his passion. He only ever had one at a time but they were always polished like trophies. I remember him saying, ‘I’d really like a Jaguar. I could afford to buy one but not to run it. They really use up the petrol.’

I didn’t believe that he could afford a Jaguar. Only rich people drove them.

At one time my father put a deposit down on a new Ford Consul. There was a shortage of these cars. The dealer let my father down and sold the one promised to him to someone else for a higher price. My father was furious and bought himself a Standard Vanguard from a different dealer instead. The following year there was a fall on the stock market. No one was buying cars. My father went to the original Ford dealer and pretended to be interested in making a purchase. He haggled and argued with enormous energy. I was so embarrassed that I went outside and sat in the car. Finally, he came out.

‘I got him down a thousand pounds,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Then I told him where he could stick it.’

One perplexing problem I have never been able to solve is the issue of blame. I attribute a lot of my problems to my father. And then I feel guilty for blaming him. After all, he didn’t choose to have a narcissistic personality. His own mother died when he was eleven and he was raised by his three sisters and a dominating, humourless father. I have often wondered why my mother put up with his self-centred behaviour. She seemed to love him, especially towards the end of her life. She used to speak affectionately of him.

Mum once told me that on the first night of their marriage my father kept his false teeth in for the whole night. But that was as long as he lasted. After that they went into a glass of water next to his bed. I used to hate the way he would push them half out of his mouth and fish around under them with his tongue trying to find a seed or other irritating speck of food.

(I didn’t realise until my editor pointed it out that in the preceding two paragraphs, I started out trying to understand my father, only to veer back towards my original revulsion for him. These days it is accepted that many adolescents will go through a phase of critically rejecting their parents or even having feelings of revulsion. Usually they get over it as they grow older and their bonds become stronger than ever. But I never recovered from these feelings of disgust. Right up until the day of his death I hated myself for having them.)

I only ever saw my mother call my father out once. She was helping him while he was hanging wallpaper. He started snapping at her the way he did at me. Complaining and criticising. She suddenly threw a wet brush at him and stalked off. She wouldn’t talk to him for a month. Not a word. Her silence hit him badly but she stubbornly refused his apologies.

In the end, Ruth’s husband, who was an Anglican curate, was called in. He talked her into relenting.

I don’t know what brought my parents together in the first place. Maybe Mum was getting a bit desperate. There weren’t too many single men around during the war. I do know that she wasn’t the first woman he proposed to.

Mary, whom I was one day destined to meet, was a small, gentle woman who lived in Great Ouseburn, the little Yorkshire village where my father had also been born. She led a protected life with her parents and had not been further than a few miles away from the village. She was devout and never missed church. She prayed every day and did her Christian duty towards the Lord and her parents. She told my sister that she had never been with a man but she loved the dashing Arthur, who had made it big-time in London and raced around on his Norton motorbike. She explained that she couldn’t marry him as she had to look after her aged parents until they died.

‘I am so sorry, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I love you but they are both very ill. I might not be free for years.’

So, sometime after Mary rejected him, Arthur met Phyllis and they were married. Nine months after that she gave birth to me, and eighteen months later to my sister, Ruth.

I am nervous because sitting opposite me, next to Ruth, is my first girlfriend, Helen. She has not met my parents and has been invited to Sunday dinner on my sixteenth birthday. My mother is making a careful assessment of her. Helen doesn’t seem worried. I want us all to make a big impression. We are all dressed up in our Sunday best.

My father is, for the thousandth time, telling the funny, highly exaggerated story about the time he had to take a leak in the night forest of the Australian bush (fifty years later I pinched the story and used it in my book A Different Land). My mother is hiding her feelings with silence. I can see that she doesn’t like Helen.

After he finishes the yarn, my father pauses, leans sideways and raises one buttock slightly off his chair.

Surely he is not going to do it. Not in front of Helen. Please don’t, please don’t, I silently implore. Not in front of Helen. No, no, no.

But he does. Arthur Jennings lets out a loud, moist, burbling fart.

This rude interruption passes without comment or acknowledgement. Perhaps a slight hint of amusement or disgust passed across Helen’s face. Oh, the shame of it. I feel myself blushing. No one else’s father farts at the table like this.

He never, ever, makes this foul noise and smell in front of his own friends or his bosses Syd Menzies and Jack (JB) Brockhouse. I look pleadingly at my mother, but no help is coming. It is just as if the incident was no more than a polite cough.

Never in this family has any single one of his thoughtless acts been mentioned. The explanation for this lies somewhere in the set of secret rules that had once allowed a man to expose himself to my sister and a teacher to assault me with a blackboard ruler. To accuse the perpetrator is silently deemed to be an offence. And in Kafkaesque bizarreness, the complainant is helpless because the rules will never be acknowledged to exist.

My father’s offences were minor compared to the ones mentioned above, but his behaviour projected a feeling that he would suffer greatly if confronted. This aura of vulnerability mixed with implied power exercises a particular kind of passive control. I have known people to stay for years with a partner like this. It is hard to claim the right to one’s own life from such a person.

Would the day ever come when I would confront my father over his behaviour? Yes, but not in a way I could have predicted.

The conversation at the table changes. Now, for some reason, we are talking about lighthouses and whether or not people can actually live inside them.

‘Your brother lived inside a lighthouse,’ my father says to my mother.

A chill seems to pass through the room.

My mother’s eyes narrow. Her silence is frosty. Her glare is one that could and should have been thrown at him after the fart. She too is unable or unwilling to confront him. But I can see that something has been said that should not have been said.

Ruth and I exchange a puzzled look but say nothing. What brother? Our mother doesn’t have a brother. A beloved sister, Bessie, left behind in England, yes. And Granny. But a brother?

What is going on here?

This incident, like the fart and sex, was protected by another unspoken family rule, which said that feelings and painful memories were private matters to be kept firmly inside one’s own head.

It took me many years to realise why my mother was so miserable when she pulled five-year-old me on a toboggan on Christmas Day in England. Now I could look back and understand that the misery she felt was nothing to do with me.

When I finally heard the whole story of her brother’s suicide it gave some context to my mother’s life. In order to escape the horror of it all, the family fled to Australia. But there is nowhere one can run to escape such pain. A geographical move can possibly help some people but to many others they will be trying to cope with demons far away from home and the people who love them. And that can be even harder.

8

BORN AGAIN

I was eleven years old when my religious life really started. Ruth and I grew into two very devout teenagers. My parents didn’t have to worry about us using dope or engaging in premarital sex. They were just incredibly annoyed and disappointed because we were too religious.

Saying grace as a family was definitely not on the menu at our house. I sometimes smile when I think of my parents scowling at Ruth and me at the dinner table as we bowed our heads silently over our own meals. In the end my mother got sick of our piety as we as we went through our little ceremony.

‘Oh, all right then, you two,’ she said. ‘Have it your way. Say it out loud.’ We did.

‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.’

Ruth and I were delighted with this. We were getting closer to bringing our parents to Jesus.

1954–1959

There was no dancing, drinking or premarital sex allowed by the evangelical rules in our church. In our teenage years we all laughed at the old joke that we didn’t believe in sex because it might lead to dancing. But we rarely disobeyed the strict demands of this religious community. These dictates stayed with me into my late twenties, when I stopped believing. Then I began to resent the prohibitions that had prevented me experiencing some of the more liberated behaviours that would have been open to me.

Many years later, after I had become a published writer, I was overtaken by terrible bouts of depression. My therapist, Dr Peter O’Connor, observed, ‘You would never have survived the dynamics of your family if you had not had the support of the young people in that church group.’

His words were true. Despite some of the extreme views held by evangelicals at that time, the young people involved in our church were kind, thoughtful and fun-loving. I don’t recall witnessing homophobia, misogyny, racism or elitism. Naivety, yes. A failure to recognise that women did not have equal rights, yes. An ignorance about the troubles of people who were not heterosexuals, yes, that too. But in that congregation, anyone who joined was accepted and loved as long as they believed the dogma that was taught and kept quiet about any unacceptable doubts.

My ‘conversion’ happened shortly before my twelfth birthday, one Sunday after Evening Prayer. The curate who had taken the service in our old, faded wooden church asked me to stay behind as he wished to talk to me. My parents and Ruth went out and waited for me in the car.

The curate was a handsome and earnest young man. Tall with thick black hair and brilliant white teeth, which matched his high clerical collar. He opened his large Bible and began reading verses out to me. I can still remember them because over the following years they were drummed into us.

Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.

(John 3:3)

For God so loved the world that that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.

(John 3:16)

No man comes unto the Father but by me.

(John 14:6)

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

(Romans 3:23)

The curate spoke in a kindly but serious manner. I liked him because of his big, sincere smile. He explained that being born again meant admitting that you are a sinner and asking Jesus into your heart.

He said that right there, in the draughty vestry of this decaying church, I could be saved. All I had to do to obtain eternal life was pray aloud to Jesus, ask him to forgive my sins and come into my heart. Did I want to do it?

To be honest I didn’t. It was embarrassing. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. We both knelt on the worn floor and closed our eyes. I mumbled out a prayer just like he told me to.

We stood up. He shook my hand and told me that I was saved.

‘Never deny the Lord Jesus,’ he said. ‘Don’t be like Simon Peter, who denied him thrice. Don’t be shamed by the cock’s crow.’

I nodded and walked out into the dark night to join my parents in the car.

‘What did he want?’ my mother asked excitedly.

I didn’t want to say. It really was embarrassing. My parents thought of the church as something like a social club where you met other people similar to yourself. You didn’t take it too far. Uttering a personal prayer aloud in front of others was definitely not on. Instinctively, I knew all these things. I said nothing.

‘Did he get you to sign the pledge?’ asked my father.

I had no idea what this was but it sounded better than asking Jesus into your heart.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘Oh, that’s lovely, dear,’ said my mother. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

‘Bugger,’ said my father.

‘What’s it mean?’ I said.

‘It means,’ said my father, ‘that you’ve promised to never drink alcohol for the rest of your life. You’re a teetotaller.’

I didn’t care about not drinking beer like he did. It tasted awful. But inside my head I could hear the cock crowing. I had denied Jesus less than five minutes after asking him into my heart. And told a lie into the bargain.

I didn’t take a drink, though, until I was twenty-five years old. No one in our little group ever touched it.

My parents never mentioned sex to me or my sister. However, my father did take me to a ‘father and son’ evening in the church hall.

A visiting speaker addressed the packed room of preadolescent boys and their fathers. He had a pin-board to which he fixed geometric-looking diagrams of female and male anatomy. I couldn’t make any sense of these at all. At the end of his presentation he said that instead of calling for questions he would give out pieces of paper on which any boy could write a query. That way no one would know who had asked the questions and there would be no embarrassment.

I would never have raised my hand in that forum. But I felt safe writing a question down. I wrote on my knee, making sure that my father didn’t get to read what I had scribbled. The visiting speaker said, ‘Pass your papers along to the end of your row and I will walk down the aisle and collect them.’

I passed my question along. Oh, no, horror of horrors. I looked around desperately. Not one other person had written anything. My heart started beating furiously. What if I had asked something foolish? I tried to tell myself that other boys would have a similar query. But a chill was starting to creep through my bones.

The visiting speaker looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, son,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one, but you don’t mind if I read out your question, do you?’

What could I say? I shook my head somewhat reluctantly and he read it aloud.

‘How much do you put in?’

When he read it out every man in the room tried hard to stifle their amusement. I went cold all over. I realised that I had asked something stupid. I had never heard of the word ‘semen’. I thought he was talking about urine as the way to fertilise an ‘egg’.

My humiliation was complete.

On the way home my father said nothing about the evening at all. But I had seen him laughing with the other fathers over cups of coffee after the presentation. Were they laughing about me? I was sure they were.

Many years later I wrote a novel called How Hedley Hopkins Did a Dare. It was based on my own experiences with intellectually disabled children and I thought it was a rollicking story as well as covering a topic that might help improve attitudes towards disabled kids.

I decided to put in a scene where the main character, an eleven-year-old boy, has his first wet dream.

When I had finished the first draft, my editor and for years now also my publisher, Julie Watts, warned me that some schools might not like this passage. I insisted that it be left in.

For the first time I received letters of disapproval about one of my stories. Only two letters, but I knew there would be other parents and teachers who didn’t write but had similar feelings.

One well-known book distributor told me that she would not put the book into her basket to show school librarians when she did her sales rounds. She apologised, but said that she didn’t want to get school head teachers offside.

Did I make the wrong decision? That scene in the book probably did hurt sales to some extent. And I do have a duty to my publisher, editor, book designer and all the other people who have contributed their time and skills and made the financial investment in the book. Good sales figures matter to them as well as me. But looking back, I know that I made the decision thinking that preadolescent boys might be helped by it.

And I did receive some supportive letters about this passage. One of them in particular made me feel a little better. A father wrote to me from Canada and said, ‘My son would not discuss sexual matters with me. He ran away with his hands over his ears every time I tried to talk to him about anything to do with it. After he read your book, he wanted to discuss the wet-dream passage. He had thought that semen was urine and didn’t know how much to use.’

Even in the internet age it’s my belief that literature will always have a place in helping children discover things about themselves. But it shouldn’t be done in a didactic way. The Ten Commandments were drummed into us as children and I still think that they are a pretty good guide for life. Thou shalt not steal is accepted by most societies and to the best of my knowledge I have only ever broken it once. On the other hand, if I or my family were starving, I realise that I probably wouldn’t think twice about it.

When I was six, I stole an unopened packet of bobby pins. I nicked them from the lady next door when I was playing with her son. I gave them to my mother to cheer her up and it worked. She was delighted. For days she went on about it – praising and thanking me in an extravagant manner. Every time she patted me on the head, I felt guilty.

I told my mother that I had found the bobby pins on the footpath (another Commandment broken) but looking back, I often wonder if she guessed that I might have stolen them. I carried the guilt around like a weight on my shoulders for ages.

Many years later I wrote a humorous book called The Gizmo, which was beautifully illustrated by artist Keith McEwan. The boy in the story steals a brightly coloured gadget from a market stall. He doesn’t know what to do with it so he throws it away. Unfortunately, this gadget has magical powers and it follows him around like a guilty conscience causing all sorts of chaos.

I didn’t write this story to teach children not to steal. I just wanted to write about how it feels to have a guilty conscience and to share the thought that stealing can be self-punishing.

At the time of my religious ‘conversion’ at eleven years of age I was already attending Sunday School. After my rebirth the curate saw to it that I joined the Youth Fellowship. This was fun. We sang modern hymns and choruses and went on outings to the beach where the boys pushed each other off the pier or dunked girls by shoving their heads under the water.

As we grew older there were snow trips. We would all jam into the back of windowless furniture vans and sit on wobbly benches as we headed for the nearest peaks. The holiday camps were wonderful times and many friendships were made that became the centre of my life. To leave these people would have been an enormous blow. It would not have been possible to stay unless I embraced the full evangelical code so I entered it fully despite my doubts. There was much praying and giving of testimonies (telling stories about your experiences with Jesus) – activities in which I devoutly participated.

I loved the whole scene, even though the behavioural rules were strict. The older teenagers were told that if they had a girlfriend or boyfriend, they were not to spend time holding hands or talking together on hikes or during activities. We had to be on the lookout for new members or strangers coming along for the first time. Make them feel at home. Introduce them to Jesus.

After a couple of years, I was a leader of the Youth Fellowship and also a Sunday School teacher. My whole social life was built around these young people. Every Sunday it was Morning Prayer at church, then Sunday School. In the afternoon it was Youth Fellowship followed by the Evening Prayer service. After that it was a ‘Sing Song’ in the vicarage.

I tried to get Timothy to join but he declined.

‘I wish I could,’ he said. ‘You have so much fun and they are all really friendly. But it doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe in God.’

I told him that he could still come. But he wouldn’t. He was also growing a little reserved and withdrawn and we began to drift apart.

The atmosphere in the Melbourne Cricket Ground was incredibly moving. The huge crowd. The swelling music. The radiant faces. The goodwill and joy that swept through the crowd who had come to the Billy Graham Crusade. This charismatic preacher’s delivery was mesmerising. Every member of our Youth Fellowship adored him.

The crusades were claimed to be interdenominational but they were mostly supported by volunteers and clergy from the main Protestant churches.

It was just a month before my sixteenth birthday and I was too young to be one of the counsellors who would be ready and waiting to assist the penitents as they came forward to repent their sins, give their hearts to Jesus and thus be ‘born again’. Instead I was appointed to be an usher and show people to their seats. There was some nervousness among the faithful because it was known that busloads of Monash University students were going to mingle with the audience and then come forward and pretend to be converts.

The crowd grew so large that for the first time in the history of the MCG the overflow was allowed to sit on the grass. Towards the end of the service the choir began to sing the first lines of a beautiful and moving hymn, ‘Just as I Am’.

The melody, the lyrics and Billy Graham’s powerful sermon combined were deeply compelling. A sea of people seemed to float up out of their seats like corks on a rising tide. A great number were responding. It was clear that there were not enough counsellors to cope with all these prospective converts. Many of the ushers were co-opted to make up for the shortage.

And I was one of them.

Trembling with nerves, I asked God to help me in the task of leading a stranger to Jesus. I stepped forward, wondering which of the penitents would be allocated to me. Many of them were weeping silently. Would it be an older man? Or a woman who had borne many children? A professor, or perhaps a politician? I knew that I was not up to the task with any of them.

To my dismay, I was assigned to one of the Monash students. I recognised him from his picture in the newspapers. It was Albert Langer, the bearded, outspoken left-wing student activist who was a leading figure in many protests and demonstrations. How would I ever reach his heart? He had just come to stir us up.

He listened to me politely with a mischievous glint in his eyes as I pointed out the marked passages in my Bible. Then he said, ‘How do you know it’s not all just a syndrome?’

I had no idea what a syndrome was. And he knew it. He departed with a grin. I was aware that, intellectually, I was not his equal. He was a university student and I would never be bright enough to get into Monash, let alone pass the yearly exams or for that matter even finish secondary school.

The thing that was drummed into us at church was the importance of ‘bringing others to the Lord’. As teenagers we would go door-knocking and handing out little pamphlets called tracts. I remember one particular leaflet that we were given around the time that television first appeared in Australia. Our vicar was totally opposed to TV and gave us copies of a leaflet titled Hell’s Pipeline into the Home. It featured a picture of a television set with a ferocious snake curling out of the screen.

Most of us took this with a grain of salt because our parents already had TV at home and we not-so-secretly watched it. However, a year later, the vicar discovered that cricket and football programs were a lot more interesting on the television than the radio.

We smiled but said nothing when a brand-new pipeline from hell appeared in his lounge room. His son, who was my friend, told me that in addition to sport on weekends his father spent every night glued to the soapies.

By the time I was eighteen I was starting to have doubts like my friend Timothy. Once I woke up in the silence of the night and thought, It just can’t be true. I packed up my three underlined Bibles, Scripture Union notes and concordance and put them on the telephone table in the hall with a note telling Ruth that she could have them all. But by dawn I realised that most of the things and people I loved would be gone if I rejected my beliefs. I told myself that the Devil had been testing me. I hurriedly took my possessions back before Ruth woke up.

As I look back on my religious life, I don’t regret my involvement, even though I am no longer a believer. Years later, when I made the move to Warrnambool, I thought to myself, If I join the church down there when I arrive, I will instantly have a group of friends. It will make the transition so easy.

But by this time, I knew that in my heart I was an agnostic. My wife Carole was at a similar point in her life and we made the decision not to join a new congregation.

These days when I go to a church funeral or wedding I join in the singing with gusto and enjoy once again being bathed in those lovely feelings of comfort and hope. I still really miss it.

My mother did not like the evangelical side of our Anglican church. She was not happy with the way the vicar’s wife would form the ladies into a circle and then instruct each one to take her turn to offer a prayer out loud while all the others listened with bowed heads, finally pronouncing loud ‘Amens’. In England the Mothers’ Union had involved knitting and recipes and outings, not embarrassing prayers and personal testimonies about the Lord.

She was so lonely in this new land. When I was around eight years old, she told me that she had approached the mother of one of my friends after school and invited her in for a cup of tea. The woman had replied, ‘My social circle is full.’

I remember being so upset about this. I wished I could provide friends for her.

Finally, she did make one like-minded friend in the Mothers’ Union. They became very close and met almost daily for several years. Then one day I came home from school to hear my mother sobbing. Her dear friend had killed herself in a violent way and been discovered by her own daughter, who was the same age as me. My mother was beyond consolation.

9

FOLLOWING THE STRING

I was terribly upset when my father told me I would have to leave school. My friend Timothy was one year ahead of me and he failed his matriculation (Year Twelve). I was gobsmacked. He was so smart; he played chess well, he read all the time, he was always asking odd but extremely deep and interesting questions. When he failed, I was totally bewildered. I didn’t know that he had personal problems. Or that they could make you fail exams. Or worse.

At the time, my father said, ‘He’s smarter than you and he failed. So you’ll never pass. You’ll have to leave school at the end of the year.’ One of those assertions was correct – Timothy was smarter than me and I knew it.

I was very religious at school and wore my Crusaders Christian Society pin proudly. But what was I good for? Surprisingly, the vocational tests that I sat for indicated that the answer was teaching. I know I wasn’t the brightest person who left school that year. But I was definitely the most naive. So much so that I sometimes blush to think about it. Right from the first day at Frankston Teachers’ College my immaturity was obvious.

1961–1962

The campus was only a few years old and I was seventeen. I stared nervously at the scattered prefab buildings, which stood surrounded by a tea-tree forest. The finishing touches were still being put on a new double-storey student residence. I had arrived at least an hour early on this my first day. There was not another soul to be seen. On the wrought-iron gates was a sign that read:

NEW STUDENTS FOLLOW

THE PIECE OF STRING.

I did. The string took me along a dusty drive, past the student residences and up a set of concrete stairs to the entrance of the main teaching building.

I continued following the string along a deserted corridor, through the janitor’s storeroom, into another corridor and out the back door. Letting the string slide through my trembling fingers, I made my way across the football oval and onto an ever-narrowing track through the tea-trees. The string abruptly ended in a small clearing where the sad truth finally dawned on me. I had been taken for a ride – well, for a walk, anyway.

I was the only student who fell for the trick.

We were welcomed by the music lecturer. He lined all the new students up in the canteen and told us that as primary-school teachers we would have to take responsibility for every subject in the curriculum – arithmetic, science, physical education, reading, writing, spelling, poetry, English, social studies, geography and, of course, music.

‘Your main instrument for teaching singing is your own voice,’ he said. ‘You will all learn to sing on your own in front of the class. Starting now.’

I could feel my knees trembling and my throat beginning to dry. He pointed to the words of a song written on a blackboard – a Maori tune, ‘Pokarekare Ana’, New Zealand’s unofficial national anthem. He sang it to us several times. I admired his rendition. Unlike me, he had a beautiful voice and could hold a tune.

‘I am going to pick one of you to come out and sing the song,’ he said.

Please, oh please, don’t pick me. It would be so embarrassing to step out in front of everyone. I had done a lot of talking, debating and joking around in secondary school, but this was different. Singing in front of strangers? Never. I would look such a fool. Almost all of my fellow students were a year older than me. No one would want to befriend me. I looked at my shoes, trying to avoid his eyes. The music lecturer walked slowly along the line. He stopped in front of me, placed his hand on my shoulder and led me out to the front.

I faced the other students, who were either relieved or amused by my nervous croaking.

‘Not too bad,’ the music lecturer said unconvincingly. ‘The main thing is that you did it. You’ll all face a lot worse than that when you start teaching.’

He wasn’t wrong about that.

We had lectures on all the subjects that he mentioned but my favourite was English. We were given a novel to read – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I read it quickly and handed in my assignment with confidence.

I received an ‘F’ for my effort. I couldn’t believe it – a fail. The lecturer had written: Your little potted biographies are not what is required.

I had simply summarised the plot, being completely unaware that the book explored powerful themes. I realised that I was the only student who had failed and was deeply ashamed.

The English lecturer was pleasant when I spoke to her afterwards. Her words were kinder than the ones she had written to describe my essay.

‘What’s the book about, Paul?’ she asked.

‘It’s not about anything,’ I said. ‘It’s just a story.’

‘Not everyone likes a sermon,’ she said with a smile.

I think she knew that I had just become president of the college Christian Association. Or maybe she had noted some of my pious views in class. She was telling me that stories can influence our views and actions just as well, if not better, than the words of a preacher. I already loved books but her insights led me devour them passionately for their revelations about human nature.

In the following two years we studied Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Leo Tolstoy’s

Anna Karenina. I read them and many others hungrily – I couldn’t get enough.

Failing that assignment was a breakthrough moment. I had learned that most novels are about something. And I was on the path to finding out how to teach, but I still doubted my own abilities.

Something else happened in my first year that seemed to underline my view of myself as an underachiever.

One of the lecturers came to class with a handful of administrative forms, which he had been asked to fill in for each student. He didn’t want to do it himself so he handed them out for us to complete the details of our own histories.

Suddenly he panicked. He began snatching back the papers. A whisper went around the class that they contained the results of the intelligence tests we had all sat for as part of the selection process. Our IQ was written in there somewhere. We all began searching hurriedly for this piece of information.

And there it was. Oh, the disappointment. My intelligence quotient was 118, a bit above average. I was not going to get into MENSA with that. I was totally shattered and, knowing nothing about IQ tests at the time, became extremely dispirited by the revelation.

I do take a little comfort from the fact that IQ tests administered before the age of eighteen are unreliable. And also, in 1961 most of them did not measure many of the qualities that make us human. Beyond computational and cognitive intelligences are many others. I am rather attracted to Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences – he lists eight in total. These could be summarised as musical, visual, verbal, logical-mathematical, body-movement, interpersonal and naturalistic (nature).

At the time I didn’t know any of this, and so my result seemed to confirm my father’s view of me. It did not, however, dampen my enthusiasm for teaching. I loved working with the children in our practice placements.

I was inspired by the example of two primary-school teachers, Mr McPhail and Mr Pappas, who worked in different schools near the college. They were both considered to be ‘super teachers’. Every student wanted a placement with them. It was known that they arrived at school in the early hours of the morning to prepare exciting and stimulating lessons for the day. They were charismatic and enthusiastic. They loved teaching and the kids loved them. Their classrooms were decked out with the most creative works of art, all made by their lucky students. Both men had ‘Outstanding’ assessments from the district inspectors who regularly evaluated all teachers at the time. I decided that the best thing I could do was try to be as good as them.

Ruth was always top of her class at school. My father told her, ‘Paul wasn’t permitted to do matriculation so you won’t be allowed to either. That’s only fair.’

My mother took Ruth aside and gave her some advice. Referring to her own situation as a stay-at-home wife who never had a driving licence and spent her whole life cooking, washing and looking after a husband and two children, she said, ‘Don’t let this happen to you.’

Ruth wanted to be a doctor, but she was packed off to teachers’ college as well. When she graduated, like me, she also did matriculation at night school. Following that she went on to finish three degrees and ended up running her own university-based research centre where she also supervised PhD students.

Teachers’ college in those days was more like a high school than a university. Most students had done Year Twelve at school but, as I have said, a few of us hadn’t. There was a shortage of teachers because the system couldn’t cope with the influx of children later known as the Baby Boomers. The government was so desperate to fill the gaps that they accepted a small number of Year Eleven students into teachers’ colleges.

A uniform was available – a pale-blue jacket with a small pin shaped like a seahorse, the college emblem. I didn’t buy the jacket, but almost sixty years later I still have my pin.

The female students were not allowed to wear patent leather shoes or red dresses. It was believed that the shoes might reflect a view of the girls’ underwear and the red clothes were thought to inflame men’s passions. The male students were not allowed beards. Every Monday morning there was an assembly, where rules and events were announced. The women, who made up most of the students, sat in the centre and left rows of seats. The men sat in the right row. One poor man who decided to sit next to his girlfriend was made to stand and shamefully relocate himself among the men.

The music lecturer would lead the entire college in a few songs, which had been learned in class. On one occasion he led a rendition of one of Burl Ives’ numbers. This was a bit too much for the vice-principal, who stood and said scornfully, ‘“A Little Bitty Tear Let Me Down”. What a load of nonsense.’

In the 1960s, all the primary teachers’ college students were given a bursary by the Education Department. There were no fees. We received half a starting teacher’s wage for the two years of the course and accommodation in a catered hostel if we wanted it. I used the weekly payments together with what I earned from washing up in a cafe to buy my first car. When we graduated we were guaranteed a job for life. We had to nominate whether we would retire at age sixty or sixty-five for superannuation purposes. This caused much hilarity – we all thought that we would rather be dead than alive at age sixty.

Looking back from the age of seventy-seven, I am not critical of the content of the classes. We did learn to teach. It was a great, practically grounded course. The whole program was aimed at capturing the children’s attention by presenting well-prepared and interesting lessons. There was a big emphasis on the use of teaching aids. During practice-teaching rounds, students went into schools and taught prescribed lessons under the supervision of a senior classroom teacher. We went to enormous lengths to engage the children with introductory pictures, artefacts and homemade constructions.

On one occasion I was given a lesson to prepare on the topic of ‘Our Police Force’. I was to teach this lesson to Grade Six and I was extremely keen to get a good assessment. I went down to the Frankston Police Station and asked if they could lend me anything to use as a teaching aid. I was given a truncheon and a pair of handcuffs.

When I arrived in the school staffroom the teachers were delighted to see these objects. They grabbed the handcuffs and attached one clamp to a chair and the other to the wrist of one of the young female teachers. When the bell rang she had to face her students still attached to the chair. Everyone, including her, thought it was hilarious.

In a different school I was instructed to prepare a lesson on the topic of aviation. As a teaching aid I decided to make a zeppelin. My plan was to get a balloon, fill it with a lighter-than-air gas and attach a little basket underneath.

The first part of a lesson always had to be especially interesting. I planned to introduce the topic by floating this magical aircraft across the room. The supervising teacher would give me an ‘A’ for sure.

But where to get the gas, and what sort did one use? I approached the local service station and asked the mechanic if he had any gas that was lighter than air. He told me that he didn’t know – all he had was acetylene, which he used for welding. I asked him to fill up the balloon so we could see if it floated through the air. He obliged. The inflated balloon fell disappointingly to the ground.

At this stage I was living on the second floor of the students’ residence. I returned and showed the acetylene-filled balloon to my roommate, John.

‘How are you going to get rid of it?’ he said.

I grinned. ‘I’m going to hang it out of the window, tie a match to the end of a ruler and burn it off.’

He nodded approval and stood back. I lowered the balloon beneath the window, tied the match to the ruler and lowered it.

An enormous fireball sent me flying back across the room. The outside of the windows and some of the surrounding wall were blackened. My eyebrows were singed and all the hairs were burnt off my right arm.

A shocked group of students ran out from the dining room below and stared up at the sooty black stain above them. They were pointing and shouting in fear, shock and confusion. There was talk of a comet or rocket attack.

John and I quickly vacated the room and ran down the back fire-escape. We joined the bemused crowd below and shook our puzzled heads with the rest of them. No one ever got to the bottom of the mystery.

I abandoned the zeppelin idea for my lesson on aviation and made a child-sized aeroplane out of bamboo and papiermâché. The kids took turns sitting in it working the flaps. It was a good effort, but I only got a ‘B’.

When I was about to leave college at the end of my second year, I was summoned to the vice-principal’s office. He looked at me benignly.

He said, ‘We have a class of intellectually retarded children [his words] whose teacher is going on long-service leave for twelve months. The kids are aged from seven to fourteen. We thought you might like to teach them.’

I immediately agreed.

He added, ‘None of them can read.’

When he heard about this appointment, my second-year English lecturer summoned me to his office.

‘Don’t waste your talent on those kids,’ he said. ‘Don’t accept the posting.’

I admired this man very much and was surprised that he thought I had talent. He was a great lecturer and had an enormous enthusiasm for literature. But I knew he was wrong about these children. I had a view that the way we treat people with special needs was a measure of the society we lived in. I accepted the post with much excitement.

Apart from English, the subject I had most enjoyed was the teaching of reading. I had memories of the terrible time given to kids who couldn’t keep up when I was a child at Bentleigh West State School. They were mocked and even punished for falling behind.

In the 1950s most state schools did not have libraries. My Grade Six teacher asked every child in the class to bring one book to school and leave it on a shared library shelf for the year. For formal reading instruction at each grade level we all had a copy of the Victorian School Reader. These contained collections of poems, short stories and excerpts from well-established writers. Every kid in Grade Five had the fifth book and so on. The problem with this approach was that it assumed that every child in the class was reading at the same level. The whole class would open at the same page and a child would be asked to read a paragraph aloud.

‘Next,’ the teacher would bark. We all nervously scanned the page trying to work out which bit we would have to read.

‘What’s that word?’ we would whisper to our neighbour, worried that we might make a mistake. In Mr Brown’s class, children with reading problems were terrified that they might get the strap for their errors.

But in terms of content, the Victorian Readers were wonderful. Unlike the graded readers that replaced them, they contained ‘real’ stories.

The copy I still have contains writings from Mary Grant Bruce, Ethel Turner, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, John Masefield and Henry Lawson. I well remember Lawson’s poignant story ‘The Drover’s Wife’, about the lonely woman fighting for survival alone in a shack in the Australian bush. I didn’t feel that I was being taught a lesson when I read these pieces – I related to something about myself and the world around me and learned lessons of life without even knowing it.

On the other hand, there were a few problems with some of the stories. The book set for six-year-old children contained a story called ‘The Hobyars’. It was about some terrifying creatures who would creep up to the hut of an old man and woman, causing their dog to bark at night. In order to teach it a lesson they cut off its tail, then its legs and finally its head. Many of today’s older citizens can still recall night terrors caused by this yarn.

At teachers’ college one rule was emphasised and repeated frequently – the biggest sin in teaching is to be boring. I still believe it today and am convinced that it applies to the books we give children to read at school. If a child finds a book funny or interesting, that is reason enough for it to exist. They are learning to read and are having a good time. But we are hoping that they will eventually move on to books that also help them to grow into caring, balanced people – in other words, books that are about something.

I began my first teaching job still immature but with a great love of books and a desire to pass it on. Experience has taught me that kids catch the reading bug from other people, including their parents. Some schools still have a silent reading time in class where everyone, including the teacher, reads a book for pleasure.

The reading experience has to be made enjoyable. If there is one thing I’ve learned about children over the years it’s this: if they don’t like doing something it is almost impossible to get them to do it, and if they love an activity it is almost impossible to stop them.

If a parent tells me that their child secretly reads my stories under the covers with a torch at night, I always give the same reply:

‘You’re lucky. Pretend that you don’t know.’

On my very last day at Frankston Teachers’ College our final year marks were posted on the noticeboard. Most of my grades were pretty average. But I was rapt to see that I topped the year in Psychology. I was departing the place with a slightly better image of myself than I started with.

10

CHALK AND TALK

I was only nineteen years old when I started teaching at a large primary school in Frankston. As the most junior teacher in the school it fell to me to supervise the district teachers’ examinations, which were a requirement for promotion. I informed the group of middle-aged men that filed into my empty classroom that no possessions or books were allowed in the room. They grizzled and complained.

‘The last Oppo-grade teacher treated us with respect. We’re an experienced group of professionals.’

‘It will be done properly,’ I said. ‘No talking, and no leaving the room.’

They smirked and winked at each other. It was definitely the older lads versus me. After a few minutes a man with a nicotine-stained moustache stood and told me he had to use the loo. It was urgent. He left. Another man put up his hand. He wanted to use the toilet as well. I told him that he would have to wait until his friend had returned. More grumbling. After that they all went out one after another and I knew they were going out to check their textbooks. A bit later, one of them pointed to his exam paper and asked a question.

‘Excuse me, Mister Examiner. Can you tell me what the word enigma means?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. ‘I am not allowed to help people who are sitting the exam.’

There was much scoffing.

‘Yes,’ said another man. ‘That’s been puzzling me.’

‘Me too,’ joined in his friend. ‘Very puzzling.’

More voices were raised. ‘Puzzling, yes, most puzzling.’

A look of enlightenment crossed the questioner’s face. All of the others were grinning. What they didn’t know was: I couldn’t have answered that question even if I wanted to. I didn’t have any idea what the word enigma meant.

1963–1982

My first posting was known as an Opportunity Grade. In 1963 this concept seemed forward-thinking and compassionate, but in fact the whole idea was a great mistake. It was anything but an opportunity for the children involved.

The fifteen children were aged from seven to fourteen. The oldest was only five years younger than me. They all had learning disabilities and none of them could read at all. They were a delightful bunch of kids, well-behaved and enthusiastic about everything except reading and arithmetic.

At first, I was impressed by the fact that this special facility was provided within the boundaries of a ‘normal’ school. The aim was to integrate children with learning difficulties in a way that meant they would not stand out as being different.

But what actually happened was that they were stigmatised and spent the whole of lunchtime sitting fearfully on the steps of my classroom waiting to get back inside. Out in the playground, they were either ignored or mercilessly teased. In the end I let them stay in the room at lunchtimes if they wished to do so.

My classroom was in a freestanding hundred-year-old room that had formed the original school. It stood apart from the newer main building. This was at odds with the concept of integration. Some of the staff were against having the Opportunity Class there at all. They would tell their own students that if they misbehaved, they would be moved over into the ‘Oppo Grade’ as punishment.

Early on I was visited by two psychologists from the Curriculum and Research branch of the Education Department. I could see that they were appalled that a first-year teacher still in his teens and with no special training had been placed in charge of a class like this. They told me that they would come back to check on my progress. As they left, they gave me one piece of advice.

‘If you can find a book for each child that they can read, and want to read, you will at least have achieved something.’

I didn’t know it at the time, but they had set me a challenge that I would try to meet not just for that year, but for the rest of my working life.

I did manage to find a book for each child in the class that they could read. But the second bit of the challenge – a book that they wanted to read – was much harder. I had discovered something which was, at the time, a new concept – remedial readers. The idea was that the interest age of the books was high while the readability level was low. In other words, if the child was fourteen and could only read like a six-year-old, the content of the book would appeal to an older reader but the words would be simple and few.

In theory this worked. The subject matter of the stories accurately portrayed the lives of older children – canoeing, exploring, rock-climbing, chasing sheep, a scare in the night, and so on. But did the kids want to read them?

No.

I came to see that the plots of these little books were either absent or pathetic. Many years later I thought that I might be able to improve on them and I wrote four myself. They were taken up by two different educational publishers and sold to a limited market in specialist bookshops.

It wasn’t until these were published, with what I hoped were strong plots, that I realised they still contained a fatal flaw.

The following year I was appointed to another Opportunity Grade, this time in the country town of Kangaroo Flat. In this school the classroom, much to my disappointment, wasn’t even in the school grounds. It was in a church hall several streets away. I still had no formal training in ‘special education’ but was starting to realise how much I didn’t know. The kids here, once again, were lovely and I greatly enjoyed working with them. Twelve months passed quickly.

My next appointment was something different. An experience I will never forget: teaching behind the wire. Turana Youth Training Centre was an institution in Parkville, an inner suburb of Melbourne. It is still there today under a different name.

It was basically a prison school. The kids were not scared of me. I was scared of them. I had applied for the job but working there filled me with dread and fear.

And soon, another emotion started to stir in me. Anger. The neglect of the needs of children with learning disabilities combined with the disgraceful conditions I found at Turana were leading me to ponder the values of both the government and the society that allowed such unfairness to exist. In addition to this I was starting to wonder about the loving God that was also tolerating it.

Despite my growing scepticism, Christian notions of doing good had been behind my application for the job there.

The day after I finished teaching at Kangaroo Flat, I paid a visit to Turana to see what I was in for the following year. The head teacher, an elderly and weary man, showed me around after first letting me peruse the ‘Misdemeanours Book’. This listed the names of many boys with a description of the bad behaviour they had committed. I read the first few pages with a sinking heart.

Student A. Attacked teacher with Stanley knife.

Student B. Absconded.

Student C. Turned hose on teacher.

Student A. Destroyed teacher’s fountain pen.

Student C. Urinated on blackboard.

Student D. Obscenities.

Student A. Assaulted teacher with broom.

He noted my dismay without comment and then said, ‘Most of the boys are four or five years behind in their reading skills. They’re rough. And they will test you out. Big time. Most are in for criminal offences, although there are some orphans here too. The boys range from ten to fifteen years of age. After that they go to the senior school.’

I had passed this senior school on my way in. Along with a residential building it was inside a fence topped with barbed wire. Basically, the whole set-up for offenders over the age of fifteen was a high-security jail.

The head teacher pulled open a cupboard to reveal a tangle of large wooden blackboard protractors. Some fell onto the floor.

‘We get twenty of these every year,’ he said. ‘But none of the kids would be capable of measuring angles.’

‘What about books for reluctant readers?’ I asked. He shook his head and continued with his depressing story.

‘The Education Department doesn’t give us any chalk either. So we swap the protractors with the local high school for a few boxes of the stuff. We get one hundred pounds a year for everything, including books.’

He opened another cupboard.

‘I’ve just bought these with next year’s allocation.’

I stared in disbelief. The only books to be seen were the four volumes of Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. I doubted there would be one child in the school who could read even one page.

The junior school, where I was to teach, consisted of four pre-fabricated classrooms set in an L-shape. There was also a small assembly room and a lunch cubicle which served as an office for the head teacher. The whole junior section, including the school, was surrounded by a high wire fence, but the school itself was not locked down – escape was possible. The kids could bolt for the door and abscond if they wanted to.

Another classroom was set inside the residential remand section of the institution. This area was for young offenders awaiting their appearance before the court. I didn’t see this room until I was appointed to it a year after starting there. Nobody wanted to teach this class.

By now I was extremely apprehensive and wondered what I had got myself into. I spent the school holidays with a knot of anxiety tightening my stomach. When I arrived at Turana on the first school day of the new year I learned that the head teacher had died. He was gone. And so were Churchill’s splendid history books.

The new head teacher was younger than the previous one and had worked at Turana before. He was experienced and obviously a survivor. There were three other teachers, all new to the place. We were all nervous. I was to be second in charge as I was the only one who had a permanent appointment.

Our new boss looked at his staff, all wet behind the ears.

He said, ‘You have to control your own class. It’s no good bringing kids to me when they act up. If you do that you will get no respect from them. You won’t be able to give anyone the strap because they will just piss off if you try.’

My worst fears were realised. In this school, I was hopeless at controlling my class. It was like one of those situations you see in movies where the poor new teacher stands there helplessly while a riot is going on around him. The place was dreadful. The kids would fool around all day. Few of them made any attempt at schoolwork.

The other teachers fared no better than me. No matter what we tried to do to interest them, these unfortunate children saw us as the enemy.

There was a small swimming pool which was jokingly said to consist of twenty per cent urine. No teacher would be seen dead in it. If fights broke out when students were in the water, teachers just stood by and yelled out meaningless threats.

If the boys absconded from the institution, the police had no trouble spotting them because of their yellow hair which had been bleached by the massive amounts of chlorine that were regularly dumped into the pool.

In the first few months the head teacher was the only one of us who could control the boys. One look from him could silence the lot. But how did he do it?

On the first day he gathered all fifty boys together in one room. ‘We’re going to sing,’ he said.

He taught them a song called ‘The Blue Tail Fly’. They joined in loudly. One of the other teachers played the piano with averted eyes. He felt nice and safe behind his keyboard. We all knew that none of us could control this assembly and we were trembling at the prospect that we might be called on to take over.

However, all seemed well. I and the other two teachers stood watching safely from the back.

Suddenly the phone in the office rang. The head teacher nodded to me to go and answer it. I was glad to get out of the room. I went and picked up the receiver. The call was for him. My knees started to shake as I walked back to give him the news. I silently prayed that I would not have to take over the singing.

I was second in charge. I knew that I would.

He nodded and spoke to the boys. ‘Mr Jennings will take over.’

Oh, no, no, no, no. I could see grins appearing on the faces of the kids. They could smell blood. And I knew it was mine. I walked out to the front and started waving my hand in time with the piano (probably out of time would be a more accurate description). They boys took up the song again. One of them, named Simpkins, began singing in an exaggerated, booming voice. He substituted rude words. He hammed it up. Others joined in, laughing, pushing and shoving each other. They were making a complete fool of me.

I marched down to Simpkins and placed a hand on his shoulder.

‘Stop this nonsense,’ I ordered in the firmest voice I could manage.

Simpkins leaped up and in a flash he had me in a headlock. We fell to the floor, wrestling and struggling. The boys formed a ring, shouting and laughing. The scuffle seemed to go on for ages. It was so humiliating. A teacher scrabbling around with a child. And he was getting the better of me.

Finally, the head teacher returned. The boys scampered back to their seats. He called for silence. Simpkins was the last to return to his place. No mention of the scuffle was made. The head teacher started up the singing again and the boys joined in. Especially Simpkins. He once again started to put on a deep, silly voice, looking around for support.

The head teacher held up his hand.

‘Stop, boys. Stop.’ He cupped his hand behind one ear and said, ‘Someone here has a beautiful singing voice. I need to find out who it is.’

He started up the singing again and moved towards Simpkins, who had fallen silent and was slumping in embarrassment. The music continued and the head teacher smiled kindly down at him.

‘It’s John Simpkins. A beautiful, lovely singing voice. John, give us a solo.’

The boy’s face was red. His peers were grinning at his discomfort. Not another peep was heard from him.

I stood at the back and shook my head. I remember thinking, I don’t know a thing about teaching.

But, in the end, I got the measure of the job. I brought in an engine from an old car and managed to interest some of the boys in taking it to pieces. I tried every trick in the book to win them over – I even drove three of them all the way to Mount Buffalo and back in one day in my little Austin A30 because they had never seen snow. I introduced woodwork and tried to teach reading and maths by getting the boys to design a hollow plywood surf-ski.

Reading could be taught, but for most boys, not with anything that looked like a schoolbook. Because most of them were reading well below their age level they could only manage books designed for younger readers. Most of them had suffered failure and ridicule in classrooms and there was no way they would put up with another dose of it. Their only defence against the pain was to cause trouble. Some of the students had talent and could read difficult fiction books as long as they were not mocked for doing so.

I used instruction manuals for balsa-wood planes or model cars. Football guides interested others. Cooking recipes and scandal newspapers like the now-defunct Truth with its crime reports and lurid stories and pictures. I even cut out some arithmetic problems from books for younger children and glued them inside sophisticated covers. At the time I felt a bit sneaky for doing this and worried that the boys might discover my deception. In later years this strategy was to help me solve the challenge set to me by the psychologists who visited my Opportunity Grade at the beginning of my career.

Turana was indeed a terrible place. I had no idea back then that one day I would write a novella titled A Different Boy with images and experiences based on my time there. When my publisher Erica Wagner saw the manuscript of that book, she said, ‘When I started to read this story, Paul, my heart fell. I thought it was going to be a miserable tale about a poor boy entirely set in the prison-like youth training centre. I was so pleased when he ran off at the end of the first chapter.’

I can’t bear to read stories or watch movies where the agony goes on and on right up until the end. Tension, yes. But unadulterated misery, no. I know that these types of tales can be good for us in order to appreciate the suffering of others. But I can’t cope with them – I’ve walked out of many movies including two excellent ones: Elephant Man and the New Zealand movie Once Were Warriors. Both contained great storytelling but I just couldn’t handle the pain.

Julie Watts, upon reading the first draft of A Different Boy, commented that the boy running away from the orphanage was a bit like me on my own first day of school in England. I love these little connections that, often unknown to me, find their way into my stories.

In A Different Boy I only give glimpses of the terrible truth – Turana was a disgraceful reflection of a part of Australian life at the time. If news reports are anything to go by, it’s not much better now. But certainly, in those days, anyone, including the teachers, would have been glad to get out of there. In my book, however, I make sure that the boy who runs off is going to end up in a good place.

In the remand class I taught in my second year at Turana, the boys would be brought to the door in handcuffs by the police and pushed into the room. They were often agitated and hostile. Fights and stubborn resistance often ensued. I was locked in with them without a key to the door. In case of danger there was a button I could press to summon help.

One day, a group of sullen older boys were shoved inside. They had just been arrested by the police for burglary. There was no way they were going to sit down and start doing arithmetic. They immediately began to act up and I became apprehensive, knowing that this was going to be an unpleasant and even violent day. I felt a sudden pain in the left side of my chest and then pins and needles in one arm. My left hand froze into a claw. I guessed I was having a heart attack.

I staggered to the wall and pressed the emergency button. An ambulance was called and I was stretchered out of the room as a curious mob of boys and staff looked down at me.

At the hospital I was given an injection and left alone. After about two hours a doctor in a white coat arrived, surrounded by a bunch of medical students. They asked me questions and seemed slightly amused about something, but no information was offered.

I was left there alone for another couple of hours. Finally, a nurse told me that I could go home.

I went straight to see my own GP. He smiled and said, ‘It was an attack of tetany. You panicked and over-breathed.

The excess of carbon dioxide froze your arm. Take a couple of days off and you will be okay.’

I didn’t. To the amazement of the boys who thought I might have died, I was back the next morning.

In those days, inspectors would arrive at every state school and watch each teacher give several lessons. They would sit at the back of the room and examine lesson plans and later quiz the head teacher about your performance during the year. After all this, the inspector would finally grade each teacher with a mark.

Possible marks were: OS (outstanding), VG (very good), G (good), S (satisfactory) and U (unsatisfactory). An OS was rarely given, but everyone in the state-wide Education Department wanted one because it inevitably led to accelerated promotion and more pay.

The inspector stayed with me for a whole day. Then he said, ‘You’re doing a great job in a very tough situation. I’m going to give you an OS. And I’m also going to give you a piece of advice. Get out of here. Two years is enough for anyone. Especially at your age. This place alters your perception of what’s normal. You’ll end up with a jaundiced view of children and human nature.’

Unfortunately, he was right. The whole of Turana was underfunded. There was no educational philosophy, nor attempts at rehabilitation for the boys except where individual teachers might give it a try. No support for residential officers. No special training.

There were some enthusiastic teachers and other staff members there and others who were not so good. All of the boys were victims. Many, like the orphans, began as innocents and ended up criminals. Everyone in the whole institution was just trying to survive.

Like most of the other teachers, I was exhausted. I took the inspector’s advice and applied for another position.

I left Turana Youth Training Centre with plenty of stories, many of which involved fear and apprehension both on my part and on that of the unfortunate boys who were sent there.

My next appointment turned out to be a piece of heaven: the Royal Children’s Hospital Orthopaedic Annex, a school for physically disabled children in Mount Eliza, Victoria.

This period not only set me on the road to a distant career in writing but provided me with many ideas and experiences that I would one day weave into my own stories.

It was indeed a place of hope and love without the slightest sign of cruelty or meanness of spirit. But there was suffering too, especially on the part of the children, all of whom had mobility issues. The students had pathologies that included cerebral palsy, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy and trauma injuries. There were also a few who had survived poliomyelitis infections. There were nine teachers, three of whom were men. A nurse looked after medical issues.

When I was introduced to my little class of seven students, I was extremely anxious. I could see that all of them were either in wheelchairs or had callipers, crutches or other walking aids. They stared at me with big smiles and I stared back with a nervous one. Not having any knowledge at all of the names or nature of their problems I whispered somewhat stupidly to the head teacher, ‘What’s wrong with them?’

He said, ‘Don’t worry about that. Just follow your heart.’

His name was Stan Spencer. All the children and the staff loved him for his generosity, leadership and patience.

Every day taxis would deliver the children to the bottom of a ramp leading into the school. The main building was set in a lovely garden surrounded by tea-trees and native bushes, which ran down to the edge of Port Phillip Bay. It was idyllic.

It fell to the male staff to lift the children out of the taxis and put them back in again at the end of the school day. Picking someone up and then bending over to lower them inside a car is hard on the back – but we had young backs. Some of the older girls found this embarrassing as they had to put an arm around the neck of a young man and be lifted into the vehicle.

There was a birthday cake to be consumed every week or so as it was the custom for the whole school to gather and celebrate each child’s birthday. Some of the children had a short life expectancy, which did add an underlying element of sadness to the place, but everything that could be done was done to give these kids a happy childhood.

One problem that became apparent to me was the difficulty that a lot of disabled kids have with communication. Children with cerebral palsy in particular may find it almost impossible to make themselves understood. And if they cannot control the movements of their hands and arms, writing and even pointing may be impossible. Even with today’s electronic aids, frustration and despair can take hold.

By the end of my second year at Mount Eliza I knew that I had to do further study. At the time the Education Department annually offered three scholarships for teachers to study for a diploma in speech therapy at Lincoln Institute in Melbourne. I applied for one and my application was successful. It was a generous award – release from teaching duties on full pay for three years. I was sad to leave this lovely place but pleased that I could gain some specialist skills. I completed the three-year diploma and then did a further year part-time to turn the diploma into degree.

The course only accepted thirty students a year and the scores required for entry were actually higher than those needed to get into medicine. There was no way I could have met that requirement. My night school studies had only resulted in a very ordinary matriculation certificate. In addition, I had no background at all in physics, chemistry or higher maths, all of which were needed.

I think I now know how I gained entrance. The Education Department had an arrangement with the Institute. They could pick three teachers a year who would receive a generous and much sought-after bursary to study there. I was probably selected because I had a good teaching record and had spent my first six years working with children in the area of ‘Special Education’.

I wrestled with the course, however. I spent nights of sweat and struggle trying to make sense of new and difficult concepts. My favourite part of the course was the clinical placements. I also loved Psychology. Linguistics was my biggest challenge – especially Chomsky’s ‘transformational grammar’, which I never really mastered.

When the course finished, I knew that my grades had not been great and I found this depressing but not discouraging. Somewhere deep inside were two alleviating feelings – optimism and enthusiasm for the job. It had been a wonderful course, which couldn’t have been more appropriate for someone who wanted to find ways to help reluctant readers. Looking back over my body of work, it’s easy to see the influence of my years as a speech therapist on the plots, themes and structures my stories contain.

I invited my father to my final graduation, where I received a Bachelor of Applied Science in Speech Pathology. He only made one comment: ‘You didn’t get honours.’

My short story ‘Without a Shirt’ was originally written about a boy with a stutter. After I had written it, I realised that if read aloud to a class, it might be humiliating to any child who suffered from this particular problem. So, I rewrote the story and invented a disorder which is nonexistent – a boy who can’t stop saying ‘without a shirt’ at the end of every sentence. When I wrote the scripts for Round the Twist I changed those three words to something even funnier – ‘without my pants’.

It is well known that people who stutter suffer more in certain situations. It all depends on the perceived stress level involved. Talking to a baby, for example, is not usually a problem. Standing up at a microphone and addressing an audience, on the other hand, can result in becoming stuck in an embarrassing way.

As part of the speech-therapy course, students would attend practical placements in clinics in order to observe qualified clinicians at work and sometimes, as the course continued, take part in treatments. I recall one such placement in a hospital clinic, where the therapist was running sessions for a group of men who stuttered. The therapist in charge was working with her clients on the problems they often encounter in shops.

The florist was the only place open. The men were told to go down one at a time and ask the owner the price of some flowers. They were to then come back and report on the success or otherwise of the strategies they had been taught.

Each man had a different story to tell when he returned. Some of them simply couldn’t get a word out. Others were able to get by with just a few repetitions of a particular speech sound. None were completely fluent. The fifth man to try had the most unusual story to report. He had been chased out of the shop by the owner, who thought that a group of men were playing practical jokes on him. The whole group had a great laugh over this.

On another clinical placement I was instructed to work with a boy suffering from elective mutism. He was mildly intellectually disabled but it was known that he could actually talk. I tried everything that I could think of to get him to speak but nothing worked. In the past six months he had never uttered a word. I even put some lollies in a jar, did up the lid very tightly and left it where he could see it. I waited for him to ask me for help. But he didn’t. He simply threw the jar against the wall and smashed it.

The supervising clinician suggested I take him for a walk and try to engage him in conversation. He was extremely difficult to manage on the walk. He kept running away and putting himself in danger by suddenly sprinting across the road. At one stage he bolted into the garden of a house and disappeared into the backyard. I approached the front door to alert the owner but it was unnecessary to do so. The boy came running out chased by an enormous Alsatian. He was yelling at the top of his lungs.

‘Dog, dog, dog.’

I managed to save him and returned to the clinic. I proudly told the therapist that I had got him to say the same word three times. Needless to say, I used this little event in a book – my first novel, How Hedley Hopkins Did a Dare.

In the late 1970s I received a visit from my old friend Timothy. The last time I had seen him was at the protest outside Pentridge Prison in 1967, the morning Ronald Ryan was to be hanged. Ryan had been found guilty of the murder of a prison guard, which had taken place during an attempted escape. Timothy was carrying a sign saying ‘RYAN MAY BE INNOCENT’. I remember some police officers scoffing at it. I also remember the hush that fell over the sea of protesters when the clock on the prison tower showed eight o’clock and we knew that the terrible sentence had been carried out.

Ronald Ryan was the last person to be hanged in Australia. State premier, Henry Bolte, had refused to commute the death sentence. There was much anger over this. One protester at the demonstration held up a sign saying ‘HANG BOLTE’ – a silly proposition seeing that most of us were there in opposition to capital punishment.

In a little private act of sublimated revenge, I bought a blue candle that had been made into a mocking effigy of Bolte’s head. I resolved to light the wick on the day that he lost office. By the time that happened the candle had faded to white. We all thought that he was never going to go. He became premier in 1955 and stayed in office for seventeen years.

I wasn’t to see Timothy again for more than ten years. When he visited me this time, he arrived at my house in a distressed state. He had become involved in left-wing politics and told me that he was friendly with Jim Cairns, former treasurer in the Whitlam Government. His story was jumbled and incoherent. Jim Cairns could no longer help him. Timothy didn’t know where to turn for help. He told me that ASIO, the Australian secret service, was after him and he was about to flee the country and fly to New Zealand. He mentioned the number and time of his flight repeatedly during our conversation. It was leaving the next morning.

He also mentioned several times that people were saying he was a homosexual but that it wasn’t true and that he had a girlfriend. I don’t remember my response to this. I hope it was something like, ‘It doesn’t matter if you are.’

Although, on thinking back to the time, it would seem that it did matter. In 1972, only a few years before Timothy came to see me, a gay lecturer at the University of Adelaide named George Duncan drowned after he was thrown into the Torrens River by a gang of men. The crime was widely believed to have been committed by members of the police force and the resulting public response led to South Australia becoming the first state to decriminalise homosexuality.

Because of Timothy’s agitated manner and the fact that he couldn’t really say what ASIO were after him for, I began to doubt his story. He seemed an unlikely candidate for the attention of a secret service agency. He kept saying, ‘Don’t tell my brother I’m leaving. Don’t tell my brother.’

Finally, he left, still distraught. I thought about it all night. I didn’t know what to do.

In the morning I rang his brother at the hospital where he worked as a radiologist. He was with a patient but a message was passed to him and he arranged for his wife to meet Timothy at the airport and take him home.

A week later I received a letter from Timothy. It simply said,

Thank you for doing what I told you not to.

I didn’t know how to take this.

I still don’t.

When I began working as a speech therapist I found it to be a challenging and satisfying experience. The job involved working with children individually in a well-supported clinic.

At the end of this period I could look back on twelve years of varied experiences working with children who had special needs. Now, I was itching to pass some of what I had learned on to others. I applied for a job lecturing at the Institute of Special Education at Burwood State College.

Working in such a place seemed like an impossible dream. To my absolute delight I was the successful applicant for the job.

All the students in this course were already qualified teachers wanting to upgrade their skills in one of four specialist areas – physical handicap, intellectual disability, visual impairment and hearing impairment. As a former speech therapist and teacher, I had some experience in most of these areas. I was assigned to lecture across the four majors with an emphasis in the areas of speech disorders and the teaching of reading to children who were struggling.

The entire program had been established by a wonderful man who had spent a lifetime working with disabled children. The staff were mostly young and extremely enthusiastic. In terms of qualifications held I came at the bottom of the staff list and was the most junior person there. I knew this and was very nervous about joining such an impressive list of academics. I imagined myself in the staffroom being unable to keep up with the high-flying conversations about the work of linguists, philosophers and psychologists like Vygotsky and others.

To my relief, I found that in the staffroom the other lecturers were more likely to be discussing TV soapies or the Saturday football. They were all kind to me and once again I had landed among a fantastic, highly motivated, ethical and devoted group of people.

I enrolled in a Bachelor of Education course and continued my own studies part-time at Monash University. This was a very happy period of my life – for three years.

During this time I had only one worry. The students seemed to like my lectures but I knew my academic background was weak. My matriculation marks had been mere passes. It had been similar at Frankston Teachers’ College and Lincoln Institute. I felt extremely vulnerable. I seemed to have made my father’s expectations come true. I felt like a fraud when I looked around at all my brilliant peers.

At the end of the first term at Monash University I received the results for my first subject. A colleague was standing with me as I opened the letter.

‘How did you go?’ she asked.

‘I got a “D”,’ I said proudly.

Her face fell and she said, ‘Oh, never mind.’

A bit later she stuck her head into my office, smiling broadly.

‘A “D” at Monash is a distinction, isn’t it?’

I felt so good. At the end of the course, which had six subjects, I received two credits, two distinctions and two high distinctions. I was starting to feel a little better about myself, but I already knew that I would need to do a Masters and a PhD if I wanted to progress further.

I enjoyed working at the Institute immensely. Everyone was committed to the needs of children with problems. The staffroom was full of laughter and fun. Then it all changed.

Unfortunately, someone came among us who caused divisions. Initially, he began to promote the careers of one group of staff over others. I was one of his favourites. In my naivete I was flattered. I thought the privileges he extended to me were rightly deserved. But finally I realised that he was sowing discord, which was ruining the place. It had been slowly dawning on me that in giving me prestigious positions on committees and other duties for which I was not really ready, he was not recognising my supposed abilities – he was recruiting me as an ally who would support his own advancement in the wider institution. The staffroom, once a joyful place, became a battleground.

This man was highly articulate. His vocabulary was extensive across a number of disciplines. But he was devoid of ideas. The students would listen to his rare presentations with looks of bewilderment. His words would fly over their heads, leaving them feeling that they knew nothing. But the truth was that the staff couldn’t understand what he was talking about either.

At one conference, where this man was addressing an audience of doctors, a surgeon who was sitting next to me said, ‘I can’t understand a word he is saying.’

I replied, ‘No one can.’

Finally, in my fourth year there I couldn’t stand the tensions he was creating among the staff. I loved the job but I had to say something. I went to his office and told him of my concerns. He stared at me impassively without replying. It was then that I said the fatal words:

‘If you are going to keep acting like this, I will resign.’

Predictably, he said, ‘That would be a good idea.’

I left, and that decision changed my life and led to me finally becoming a published author.

Some years later I wrote a story called ‘No Is Yes’. It was about a man with a fantastic vocabulary who decides to conduct a linguistic experiment on his own daughter. He brings her up in total isolation and teaches her the wrong names for common objects and words. For example, he tells her that the word for ‘salt’ is ‘pepper’. So when she asks for the salt he passes her the pepper, which is the label he has wrongly given her. Among the many words whose meanings he swaps are ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

If he was to ask, ‘Do you like being stung by a bee?’ she would answer, ‘Yes,’ because he had taught her that this was the correct word for ‘No’.

The girl finally escapes and falls in love with a boy who finds it hard to understand why she can’t talk properly.

At the end of the story her father’s house is burning down and he is trapped inside. A fireman asks the girl if there is anyone inside the house. She replies, ‘No.’

This story was published in my collection Quirky Tails under the Puffin Plus imprint, aimed at teenagers – but when this imprint was discontinued the book survived within the younger Puffin imprint. I’ve never had a complaint, but I sometimes think that younger children might access it and be taken to a place that is a little too dark.

The identity of the man who was the inspiration for the story is well hidden and the story is complete fiction. I didn’t write ‘No Is Yes’ to work out some personal angst. But he was a source of inspiration, if I could put it that way.

When I left my job at Burwood State College, I expected that I would never find another lecturing position without a Masters degree.

But I did – in the lovely coastal town of Warrnambool.

11

AN OARLESS DINGHY

The generator that supplied power to our dilapidated house was kept on a wonky trailer that I had made out of wood and the back axle of a Morris Minor. The generator always chose to break down right when the kids were watching a television show. Or in the middle of the night. Or when a terrible storm was shaking the house. Carole and the children would often be sitting in darkness waiting for me to get the thing going in the light of a feeble torch. The generator wasn’t the only thing that was breaking down. Our marriage suffered the same fate.

1976–1980

Shortly after my wife Carole, the four kids and I moved to Warrnambool I discovered something amazing. A forty-acre block of land for sale with absolute title up to the edge of the Southern Ocean. The edge was an edge indeed. The bare farmland ended at the top of a thirty-metre cliff which plunged straight into the sea.

By this time Carole and I had been married for fourteen years. Our four children were aged from eight to twelve. We were not poor. But we were struggling to make our dream come true. The purchase of the empty paddock situated on a seaside cliff used up almost all of our money. We did not have enough left to build a house. I was told that there was an old farmhouse for sale fifty miles away in the small town of Penshurst. We bought it for five thousand dollars, the remains of our savings.

It was a huge, eighty-year-old wooden structure occupied only by chickens. The owners had built a smaller modern house next to it. The bank agreed to lend us ten thousand dollars, with which we planned to move and renovate the building.

A local man named Stuart Wallace owned a house-removal business. He is a lovely man with a ‘can-do’ attitude, so we immediately employed him to move the farmhouse.

Our little family had to knock down both chimneys before it could be moved. We started at the top, dropping the bricks down to the fireplaces and carting them out to our small trailer.

The house was then cut into two sections, which were jacked up and lowered onto semitrailers. The sections hung over the sides of the trucks and at times completely blocked the road. I was worried that the house would never get to its destination, due to narrow bridges, roadside posts and drooping power lines.

Stuart was not worried. After a quick check for prying eyes, a long wooden pole lifted the power lines and a chainsaw handled any roadside obstructions. His only concern was an egg that a chicken had laid in the middle of the kitchen floor. He made up his mind that he would jack up the house, cut it in half, put the two sections on his semitrailers and shift the whole structure fifty miles without touching or breaking the egg.

Our kids were more concerned with a swallows’ nest that had been built underneath the overhanging verandah. The journey started slowly, with the two swallows diving in to check on their unhatched eggs. They followed the moving house for forty miles before, sadly, they gave up. Years later I used this little incident in my novel The Nest.

The slow journey began. Never had a house that was being relocated been treated with such gentleness. It would have been a real feather in this cheery removalist’s cap to have moved the huge house without breaking the egg. The journey was meant to be completed in a day, but due to the need to stop the egg rolling about, darkness fell with fifteen miles of the journey yet to be covered. The house was parked in a clearing next to the road. During the night some kids got into the house and broke the egg. Stuart was heartbroken.

But the rest of the journey was completed in record time.

Due to our lack of money we moved straight into the house. It sat on high posts only metres from the edge of the cliff. The two sections butted up to each other with five-centimetre gaps running along the floor, up the walls and across the ceiling. It was summer and the temperature was not too bad, but the winds were enormous.

The whole house shook under the force of the well-known south westerlies. There was nothing between us and Antarctica but the Southern Ocean.

Our first visitor was a rather grumpy old man who told us that he was the unofficial ranger for that stretch of clifftops. He wanted to know what we were up to. No one had built close to the edge like that before. He talked for a while and then when the children came out his manner softened and he welcomed us. He said his name was Fred Shirrefs. The kids loved him right from the start and he became a regular visitor. He would always stop for a cup of tea on his ‘inspections’ along the coast.

I could tell that he felt sorry for us, living like hippies in this old wreck. He started to bring us a large box of fruit every Sunday. He would purchase the fruit from the local greengrocer and wouldn’t take anything for it. One day he arrived to find me there alone with my daughter Sally.

‘Where are the others?’ he asked.

‘At the pictures.’

‘Why isn’t Sally with them?’

‘She’s been naughty so I didn’t let her go as her punishment.’

His face fell. ‘Oh, Dad,’ he said. ‘That’s terrible. That’s not fair. Poor little Sally.’

He berated me to the point where I hung my head.

After that he always brought a chocolate bar or a little treat along with the fruit – but it was just for Sally. The other kids didn’t really mind, but it always made me feel guilty for being harsh with her.

Fred had lived on the coast all his life. When he was six, he had ridden unaccompanied on a horse to the local Allansford School on his first day. It was a single-room building and he was starting in the middle of the year. All the desks were taken and there was nowhere for him to sit. He told me what happened.

‘The teacher took me by the hand and led me up onto the platform at the front of the room. He motioned to his chair and said, “You can sit there for the present.”’

Fred smiled sadly.

‘I sat there all day waiting for the present but none came.’

He often regaled us with tales of days gone by, as well as stories from more recent times. He was known locally as the Bat Man because he was collecting samples of bat fleas for a research project at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). He knew where all the bat caves were and would sometimes take my eight-year-old son, Andrew, with him.

It seemed that all the fleas he was collecting from the bats were female. No matter how hard he searched for male fleas, none was ever found. In the end he reported that the mystery had been solved. The females laid eggs around the mouths of the bats, who then swallowed them. The male fleas were in the bats’ digestive tract and fertilised the eggs as they passed through.

It was an adventure living on the clifftop, but it was also a disaster. Carole and I would go to work every day and then return to nail, scrub, build and resurrect the groaning old building. The windows had to be replaced, sewerage trenches dug. Everything had to be financed on our wages and the rapidly diminishing five thousand dollars, which was all that remained of our bank loan. The kids all had to help.

My father made a visit to inspect our new property. As soon as he saw the house, he had only one comment:

‘Have you got a match?’

Autumn came, then winter. It was freezing. Cups and saucers would rattle on the table as the floor beneath us trembled in the wind. The children loved the place. But after eighteen months our marriage began to creak under the strain.

Whenever I watch the television show Grand Designs, I wonder about the many couples who are struggling to the point of collapse and despair as they face bankruptcy and total exhaustion while building those amazing houses. How many of those relationships end up in divorce or separation? How many angry words are spoken? How many doors are slammed? The stresses involved in building a house with little money and needy children can only be understood by someone who has done it. Like we did.

I remember one particular day when we were renovating the lounge room. We had, as usual, both worked a full day before turning our attention in the evening to the renovation project – more sawing, hammering, painting, sanding and digging. It had been fun at first, but now our relationship was really starting to suffer.

I had bought an electric heater of the type that could be inserted into a wall between two rooms. The old timber was as hard as nails. The rectangular section I cut out in the wall was about a centimetre too small for the heater. I spent hours chipping away at the ironbark wood and finally managed to insert the heater. I knew that it contained a sensitive thermostat and should not be dropped. It was wedged in tightly, so I decided to leave it sitting in place until the morning. The kitchen and lounge were covered in dust and wood shavings. Carole picked up a broom.

‘Leave it until tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’m only going to make more mess in the morning.’

She ignored my words and began sweeping. She accidentally touched the heater with the broom and it fell out of the wall and crashed onto the floor with an enormous bang. My head felt like it was going to explode. I wanted to scream and yell and kick the guts out of the heater.

It wasn’t Carole’s fault. But we had no money to buy another one or repair the damage. I ran off into the bedroom and got into the wardrobe, closed the door and squatted down in a foetal position with my head between my knees. Goodness knows what Carole made of this. The whole project had become a nightmare. And so, possibly, had I. In the morning I put the heater back in the wall.

It worked fine.

Finally, Carole left me. She had fallen in love with another man. I was broken-hearted. I wanted her back. But I didn’t deserve her back – I can see that now.

It was my sad duty to tell the children that Carole would be leaving. The children cried when they heard the news.

In those days one parent would obtain full custody of the children, with the other gaining visitation rights. On our first night without Carole, I dragged our mattresses into the lounge room and the kids and I all slept together on the floor for mutual comfort. I was totally crushed. And so, I imagine, was Carole, spending her first night away from her children.

The next day I received a phone call from Timothy’s brother in far-off Melbourne. He told me some terrible news. Timothy had thrown himself off the top of a twenty-storey building. I was devastated by this. His brother asked me if I could go to Melbourne and identify the body.

I clutched the phone. ‘My marriage has just broken up,’ I choked out. ‘Yesterday. I’m sorry, I just can’t leave the kids.’

I’ve always felt so bad about that. It was one of those times in life which I always find excruciating – choosing between two options where someone will be hurt whichever way you go. Later, I reflected on the time that Timothy had walked along the broken pier while I had crawled back to shore in terror. I would never have had the guts to even have looked over the edge of that building.

A month or so after Carole left, we tried to give it another go. She moved back in. We were both shattered and in chaos. It was obvious that she was still unhappy, to say the least. As I was to find out myself many years later, you don’t just fall in love with someone else and turn it off like a light switch. And what had not been working for us before was still not working.

One night during this period I had a dream.

I looked out of our bedroom window and saw a misty swamp, a sort of bayou. Carole was in an oarless dinghy that was drifting into the fog. I was calling out her name but getting no reply. My words faded away. The dinghy began to be swallowed by the mist. Then it was gone and I was left alone in the silence.

In the morning I asked her if she loved me as much as the other man in her life. She shook her head. I swallowed my despair.

‘It’s not working,’ I said. She nodded in agreement.

We both knew that it was over.

A week or so after this she asked if she could come and collect some of our possessions. I told her to bring a truck and some friends and she could have whatever she liked. As it turned out she arrived in a small car with only one friend, a woman. She gathered a few personal possessions and headed for the door. She spoke to me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘I’m leaving with fifteen years of my life in a cardboard box.’

A few weeks after Carole left, I had a visit from a local council officer. He told me that the house should have ventilation slots in the walls.

I stared at the knotholes in the floor and the gaps where the house had not yet been joined. I looked at my kids wearing two jumpers each, shivering at the breeze coming through the gaps around the windows. Outside, the Southern Ocean was roiling with white foam and I could hear the waves thundering to death on the cliffs beneath.

I said, ‘This is the most well-ventilated house in the world.’

I have always been one to obey the regulations, but something inside me rebelled. It was just one thing piling on top of the other. I went into town and bought some Federation-style tin ventilation duct covers. I traced around them and painted black rectangles on the wall. Then I nailed the vent covers over the fake holes. Perfect. The house passed inspection.

Only a small gesture – a sort of fist-shake at a fate that had left me a single parent in a draughty house. But I felt a little better for the doing of it.

The kids and I now had to take over Carole’s role in a lot of areas. Tracy, my eldest, became my chief support and advisor. I now know that I shouldn’t have let that happen. I was extremely depressed. I remember her grabbing the Valium pills that my doctor had recently prescribed. She flushed them down the toilet and said, ‘You’re walking around like a zombie, Dad.’

She was right. I had to face up to the pain and get organised.

We started making the week’s school lunches on Sunday night and then putting them in the freezer. Everyone had a part to play – buttering the bread, cutting the cheese, meat or vegetables, wrapping the sandwiches and so on.

One Sunday we were listening to songs on the radio while we made the lunches. Suddenly silence fell and I noticed the kids all staring at me in apprehension. I listened to the lyrics of the popular Kenny Rogers song ‘Lucille’. It was about a farmer whose wife had left him with four hungry children and a crop in the field.

We all looked at each other, not knowing how to respond. The kids didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Then someone grinned. And we all started to laugh.

I loved them all. They loved me and their mother. I still enjoy writing stories that show how full of love single-parent families can be.

During this period, my sister Ruth was a frequent visitor and proved to be a great source of comfort. On one occasion she arrived with her three daughters, Fiona, Sharon and Kirsten. I decided to take the two older girls, Sharon and Fiona, for a hike along the clifftops. It was a lovely ramble, with the wild ocean surging below us to the right and the distant farmhouses in the valley below on our left. Suddenly Sharon gasped, ‘Look, Uncle Paul.’

We all stared down into the sea far below. A single small rock was just showing above the surface of the water. And standing on it, trapped and trembling, was one lonely cow.

There are no beaches along this particular strip of the coast. The cow had obviously fallen off the cliff into the water and swum to the small rock. I stared at it helplessly. The girls looked at me. There was no getting down there and nothing that could be done, even if it was possible.

I pointed to a farmhouse in the valley below and we began to hurry towards it. A figure emerged and started towards us. It was the owner of the property. He looked at us with a raised eyebrow. I could see that he thought we were trespassers.

‘There’s a cow in the water,’ I said.

His expression softened.

‘Wait here,’ he said.

He walked back to the house and returned carrying something in one hand.

‘It’s a gun,’ whispered Fiona.

The girls didn’t speak as we returned to the cliff. The farmer was Dick Vickers, who later became a friend and neighbour. He stared down at the solitary cow and then nodded towards Fiona and Sharon. I took his meaning.

‘I think we’d better be going, girls,’ I said.

The three of us walked until Dick fell out of view.

All was quiet. Suddenly there was a sharp sound like the snapping of a large, dead branch.

The girls gasped. We walked slowly back to the old house on the cliff, talking about the sad and ineffable mysteries of life and death.

A month or so later, Ruth rang me up from Melbourne. She told me that Fiona had written the incident up as a story and entered it into a competition at school. She had won first prize.

If we look hard enough, it seems to me that there is often some small outcome, maybe just a hint of hope that can help us keep going, even in the saddest moments.

Finally, the time came when, for various reasons, I had to sell the house on the cliff.

I thought to myself, No one will buy this old place. It’s an incredible block of land with an amazing view, but it’s a building from a world of long ago. Only a romantic would dream of purchasing it.

And as an estate agent once said to me, ‘Romantics never have any money.’

In a way I was glad that no one seemed to want the place. It really was wild and beautiful there. If it didn’t sell, maybe I could find some way to keep it. I had ‘open listed’ the house with all the estate agents in town but there had been very few inspections.

I was standing staring out to sea one day when a posh car drove over the hill. It was one of the agents. Sitting inside with him were wildlife artist Robert Ulmann and his wife, Helen.

During the Ash Wednesday bushfires their home and art studio and all his collected works had been destroyed.

I blinked back tears. I knew that they would love the place.

Later that afternoon another posh car pulled up. It was a different agent who wanted to speak to me about the house.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Robert Ulmann just bought it.’

He threw his arms into the air and wailed.

‘We had Ulmann.’

He turned to his lovely car and began kicking it. Shades of Fawlty Towers. I couldn’t believe what I was watching.

Robert and Helen moved in and set up a studio there and opened it to the public. Robert looked after injured wildlife, and painted birds, animals, whales and some landscapes. In addition, he was a talented sculptor. They both knew that I loved the house and they always made me welcome.

I once opened an exhibition of his paintings and he launched one of my books in return.

Some years after this I asked Robert if he could make me a sculpture of a mermaid to put into another seaside house that I had built further down the coast.

He agreed and purchased a large sandstone rock and started chiselling away at it.

Only a few facial features could be seen. Just the hint of some eyes. Helen showed it to me sadly. Robert’s tools – a hammer, chisel and mallet – formed a little triangle on a natural ledge on the rock where he had left them. We both looked at the beginnings of the sculpture without speaking. Robert had died of a burst aneurism two days before.

Later I asked Helen if I could still buy the unfinished work, but she wanted to keep it in his memory. I was happy to agree to that. After all, I had a picture of the old house that he had painted especially for me as a gift.

I think it would please him to know that I have put it on the first page of this memoir.

Sometimes people ask me why there are so many single parents in my stories. I find it a hard question to answer. Partly it’s because in a short story you don’t need too many characters. There’s not as much room for filling in backgrounds. And partly it’s because I want to legitimise families that don’t follow the norm. And maybe, as Julie has pointed out, it’s also because I am writing about myself a lot of the time.

Literature is full of stories where one person in a marriage flees a cruel partner. I know that there are terrible and real stories like this. On the other hand, for many of us the responsibility for a breakup can be shared. Often, at some point, both parties betray themselves or their partner. Alternatively, sometimes the only ‘guilty’ party in a breakup is the cruel hand of fate.

Anyone who has listened to a recently divorced friend tell their story knows that they are probably hearing a jaundiced view. The ‘blame’ (a terrible word) is often being placed on the other in the absence of any alternative view.

It’s my feeling that any unpleasant fallout in my relationships was due to a mismatch of personalities rather than being anyone’s fault. In taking this attitude I know that some people will say I am letting myself off the hook or that I should use the opportunity to attack or defend. I choose to do neither because there is one thing I know as a person who loves a good story – the truth is easily twisted.

I haven’t mentioned much about my children’s lives because they are now all adults with their own stories to tell. And they would like to be known for their own achievements. They can tell their own tales if they want to.

I became engaged to Carole when she was sixteen and I was eighteen. We were married, four years later, both still virgins. We were committed evangelical Christians looking forward to a lifetime together. Much to the annoyance of many of the relatives who attended our wedding, there was no alcohol served at the reception.

We were total innocents. As far as we were concerned there were no clouds in the sky, although I might have overlooked one that was peeping over the horizon; Carole was not overly impressed with my wedding present to her – a hardback copy of the Women’s Weekly Cookbook.

I was determined that I would not be like my father in the way he ignored his children. But he was my only model of a dad – sitting at the head of the table carving the roast and holding forth on every subject that arose, going off to work, coming home to slippers and a well-made bed, opening the dressing-table drawers to freshly folded pyjamas and the wardrobe to neatly ironed shirts. He and I both knew where the washing machine and oven were located, but that’s about as close as either of us ever got to them.

The man of the house cut the lawns, built fences, repaired engines and drove the only car to work. The woman walked to the shops with a homemade trolley and cleaned up all the untidy rooms.

Carole’s model of a wife was her mother, a strong woman who had worked every day of her adult life. She had sold insurance and built and sold houses, gradually working her way up from relative poverty to a comfortable middle-class existence. She called things the way they were and was the dominant force in the home. My father said she was a ‘battleaxe’, but I liked her. Carole’s father was a gentle, quiet man who spent most evenings out in the shed welding.

When we married the world was a million miles away from where it is today. The milkman was still making deliveries in a horse-drawn cart. The dunny was at the far end of the garden. The road was unmade and filled with puddles in the winter. The washing machine had a mangle sitting on top of it. We had sheets nailed to the windows for curtains.

By government regulation, Carole was forced to leave her job as a secretary in a high school because she now had a man to look after her. Neither of us had received any meaningful sex education and I had never heard that there were such things as foreplay or female orgasm. Carole’s mail was addressed to Mrs Paul Jennings.

After she was forced to resign she found another job, but I viewed my career as a teacher and then lecturer as the main one.

With hindsight I can see that Carole felt confined by all this. Right from the start she showed signs of wanting, and being capable of, making a much bigger imprint on the world. She was active in Community Aid Abroad and began going to demonstrations in support of the Fretilin independence fighters in East Timor. She was becoming a left-wing activist and at the same time was working full-time and doing more than her share of the housework and being a mother to four kids. Looking back, it’s easy to see that underneath her happy disposition there was a feminist and a fighter and a growing dissatisfaction with the models we had inherited.

All I wanted apart from my lecturing job was ‘Mum, Dad and the kids’ – trips to the beach and the snow fields, camping, reading stories to the littlies, dressing up as Santa, ten weeks’ holidays every year and, of course, being head of the family and getting all the attention. Bliss.

For a man.

But the world was changing. Small transistor radios, colour television, electric carving knives, inside toilets, Victa lawnmowers … and Germaine Greer.

One day I brought a tape recorder home from work to capture some of our kids talking – I wanted to use these samples in my lectures on language development in children. I accidentally left it running when a friend of Carole’s arrived. The sound system recorded everything we had said. On playback, I was horrified by what I heard. I dominated the conversation. Every time someone else spoke I interrupted and began a monologue. Shades of my father. I realised then that there was something deeply wrong with my behaviour.

I had been reading a lot of psychology as part of my studies and had developed an interest in personality types and Jungian theory. In those days I thought that I was an extrovert and Carole an introvert. But now I see that the opposite was true. She obtained all her energy from people and events and meetings – from being involved and making things happen. From worthy causes and fights for justice and equality. I was and am an introvert. I obtain my energy from cogitating and musing over things. From wondering and dreaming and fantasising and speculating about why things are as they are.

It seems to me that two people like this can get on well together. But not if the man’s world takes precedence. Not if he gets what he wants and the woman is trapped in a world that will only change if she forces it to. Something will have to give or the trapped person will die inside. And in the case of women in those days, the whole culture was their enemy if they wanted a full and balanced life. I know that now. But I didn’t then.

And of course, upon reflection I can see that my mother did die spiritually when, in addition to living a life like the one I have described above, she left her home, her mother and her sister to live in another culture in another land.

After Carole left me, we had some difficulties over visiting rights. Carole was given access to the children every second weekend and for half of the school holidays. It would have been very difficult for her. I knew that some people would be making judgements about her decision to leave. I was angry about what had happened and consequently was strict about the court-imposed rules. I was inflexible and did not allow any variations.

Ruth had just written a book about step-families. She said, ‘No matter what the law says, Paul, the moral position is that the visiting rights belong to the children, not the parents. You have to be open and generous.’

I knew straight away that I was doing the wrong thing. I told the kids that they could see their mother whenever they wanted. It worked extremely well and also allowed each of them to visit her on their own at times instead of the four always going together.

I was incredibly lonely when the four children were away with their mother. We had a long straight track that led uphill from the cliff house for about a kilometre before falling out of sight towards the road below. There was one solitary pine tree about the size of a man silhouetted against the sky. In the wind it would sway, and look like someone approaching.

I was like a person who always falls for the same trick. When I looked down the track and saw that tree, I always momentarily thought it was a person. My heart would beat more quickly. And then I would realise it was just the tree and would fall into lonely despondency.

After two years had passed, I began thinking my chances of meeting someone else were fairly slim. Not everyone would see a man with four kids as a great catch.

Well, two years after Carole left it turned out that there was someone who did.

One problem I have had with this memoir relates to the reactions that other players in the story will have when they read about themselves. All of them have done silly or selfish things in their lives in the same way that I have but because I’m the one writing the memoir they probably won’t have a right of reply. So I have tried to disguise some people’s identities by changing their names. In other cases, I have not given the person a name at all. A number of the people I have written about are dead, but there are still relatives to consider so I have changed names here as well (Timothy, for example, is one of them).

In the end I decided that I would send copies of the manuscript to five people whom I described at length. Four of them, including Carole, were totally happy with what
I had written. But one person did not want her part in my story to be told at all.

I have to respect my second wife’s wishes and the manuscript now refers to her in a generic rather than a specific way.

Life as a single father had many lovely moments. But I desperately wanted to meet someone else. It so happened that one of my colleagues at the Warrnambool Institute who was recently divorced himself invited me to a ‘singles party’. I didn’t really want to go, but time was passing and I had to make an effort. At the last minute I chickened out of going to the party. I thought, I just can’t do it. It’s not my scene.

The last time I had asked a woman out on a date had been twenty-two years earlier, and I had no confidence at all. Instead of going to the party, I went around to my mate Tony’s house and had a drink with him and his wife. He told me to get off my bum and go. So, I did. I made a vow that even though I always felt awkward at parties I would talk to every person in the room.

I started circulating and chatting with different people until I met a smiling woman who seemed to already know me. When she told me her name, I exclaimed, ‘You’re one of my external students. In fact you’re my top student.’

That was something she already knew, as the exams were over. We talked together for the rest of the night. She told me that she was divorced with two children aged three and five. I asked her out on a date and she accepted.

One thing led to another and we were soon married and moved into a house in central Warrnambool that had six bedrooms. My four kids had a room each and my wife’s two children, who were the youngest, shared one. It felt a bit like the Brady Bunch (which was a popular TV show at the time).

In all, our marriage lasted for twenty-two years. A lot happened in that time.

12

‘I’M WITH AN AUTHOR’

The waiting area in the lobby of Penguin Books was lined by shelves of handsome books. I was totally intimidated. My crazy short stories would never find a place there.

I was led up to senior editor Kay Ronai’s office. There were two other editors with her, Julie Watts and Teresa Pitt. They were friendly, kind and welcoming. The discussion had only just started when a secretary popped her head in the door.

‘Kay,’ she said, ‘Donald Horne is on the phone for you.’

Donald Horne. An intellectual, historian and Australian icon. I was overwhelmed by this environment in which people like him could just ring up or pop in for a chat.

Kay nodded. ‘Tell him I’m with an author and will ring him back.’

Startled, I instinctively looked around for the author and they all laughed. The author was me.

1981–1989

One day in 1982 I was sitting next to my son Andrew listening to him read aloud. I was supposed to be an expert in the teaching of reading, having spent the last sixteen years working in the area.

At this stage I was a single father of four kids trying to hold down a demanding job as well as renovate the dilapidated house that still shook every time the wind blew. I was close to broke and my career was in danger. Unemployment was a distinct possibility.

My son was sighing and groaning and not enjoying reading aloud to me. The book that he was holding had a low but appropriate readability level, which meant that he could decode most of the words and understand the story.

Suddenly the book went flying across the room. He had tears in his eyes.

‘I’m sick of these piddly little books,’ he shouted.

I picked the thin volume up and looked more closely. It had a passable plot so there must have been something else causing his reaction. I thought back over my own journey that had led me to write four similar remedial readers.

I had put a lot of thought into writing them. I figured that my techniques were sound. Here, briefly, are just a few of the guidelines I discovered when I reviewed the literature before starting on them.

A short sentence is usually easier to read than a long one. There are exceptions. Sometimes joining two sentences with a conjunction like ‘but’ or ‘so’ makes things easier, but generally a shorter sentence is clearer for young readers. Short paragraphs also look less forbidding than long ones.

Phonically simple words are usually easier to read than phonically complex ones. If I was writing for six-year-old children I would call my main character Ted rather than Christopher.

Embedded clauses make things more difficult for struggling readers. For example: ‘The boy with a green jumper fell off his bike.’ Lose the green jumper if you are writing for severely challenged readers.

Illustrations help give an author the chance to introduce difficult words. Children quickly learn to scan the pictures for clues. This is a good strategy. Don’t tell them off for looking at the pictures.

Idioms can make things difficult. Youngsters will go looking for the hammer if you write something like ‘He hit the nail on the head’.

Metaphors can confuse some readers. ‘The cold hand of fate’ doesn’t have fingers.

Similes are not so bad – particularly common ones. ‘He ran like a rabbit’ is probably okay, but authors should make their similes relevant to the age group. I love writing them but I recognise that sometimes this can be a personal conceit that I have to give up.

Active sentences are easier to read than passive sentences.

‘John pushed Mary’ is easier to decode than ‘Mary was pushed by John’.

Keep dialogue markers simple for younger children. I read about ten of Raymond Carver’s beautiful short stories before I realised that he only ever used ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ or the character’s name to identify the speaker. There were no markers like ‘She declared through clenched teeth’.

Set up difficult words so that the reader can guess them. For example, the word ‘cell’ with a soft ‘c’ is difficult to read and has two meanings. The sentence ‘He looked at the cell’ offers no help. ‘He was locked in the cell’ gives a clue.

Short stories give children a quick reward. Struggling readers don’t have to plough through a whole book to feel they have achieved something.

A mix of strategies will make sure that the prose sounds natural. I don’t stick rigidly to any rules. I pick and choose between techniques and do everything I can to make the story interesting and the prose sound loose and unrestricted.

If someone gives a writer a list of phonic restrictions that are to be used in their tale, they will not be writing a novel – they will be producing a graded reader. Dr Seuss, who was a genius, could write a hilarious story using mainly phonically regular words. It can be done. But it is difficult.

I have never been against the use of phonics in the teaching of reading – it is one of the strategies that help children to identify unknown words – but it’s essential that it does not become an unpleasant task for the children. The English language is incredibly irregular and extremely unreliable phonically. Take the words ‘rapped’, ‘wrapped’ and ‘rapt’. Each one of them has the same four phonemes (speech sounds), but each word means something different from the other two. Of these only ‘rapt’ can be sounded out easily and even that gives problems sometimes. A young high-school student once wrote me a letter as follows:

Dear Paul Jennings, Please, please, please come to our school. Everyone will be raped if you do. Especially the English teachers.

I had used all of the above strategies when I wrote my own remedial readers. And I thought that the books contained reasonable stories. Why weren’t they taking the world by storm? Finally the penny dropped. Andrew throwing the book across the room held the answer.

The remedial readers were thin little volumes with pictures. They cried out, ‘I am a book for someone who can’t read.’ The quality of the story and the simplicity of the text were not the only issues. They looked like stories for little kids. Just picking one of them up in the classroom was humiliating. Why hadn’t the penny dropped all those years ago at Turana when I cut out arithmetic problems from a Grade Three text and pasted them inside the cover of a Grade Six book?

No older child is going to read a book that makes them look like an infant.

I came to a conclusion that I have repeated hundreds of times in the last forty-five years: there is no such thing as a book for reluctant readers – there can only be a book that looks, and is good enough, to capture both proficient and struggling readers.

This was in my mind when I began attending Carmel Bird’s writing classes. I had to publish into the trade where the books looked just as appealing as any others on the shelf.

After her encouraging words telling me that I was ‘good’, I set to work. But it was a lot harder than I thought to come up with something that was bulky enough to attract both proficient and struggling readers without using illustrations.

Short stories were the answer. When combined into a single volume the books will be thick enough to appear respectable. However, every story must be good enough to lead the readers into starting the next one. How could I achieve this?

Eureka. I finally had the answer. Write in the genre that every child loves.

Humour.

I immediately made a start. But two years passed and I had only written three of them. I was busy with the kids and my teaching duties. I had moved on, remarried and gained two more children. Now on one income, with six kids, things were really tight. But I was still obsessed with trying to achieve my goal.

I was writing the stories by hand with a biro and paying a secretary at work to type them up for me in her own time after hours. In the end this became too expensive and I borrowed an old Olivetti Studio 42 typewriter and taught myself to touch type. It was an ancient machine that needed heavy pressure to depress the keys. I spent two hours a day practising for six weeks, over the holidays. Finally, I mastered all the letters and could touch type.

I was set to go. I photocopied the three little manuscripts and sent them to six different publishers. I didn’t know anything in those days about the ‘slush pile’, which refers to the mass of unsolicited manuscripts that accumulate in publishing houses until an editor gets around to reading them.

A junior editor often gets the job of sifting through these before passing any with potential on to senior editors. I know now that the strike rate is incredibly low. Most manuscripts are rejected. I can’t describe how much of my psyche was involved in these stories. I was obsessed, worried, driven, excited and fearful. I haunted the letterbox waiting to hear from publishers.

Over the next six months replies started to dribble in. It was quickly apparent that a large envelope meant that the manuscripts had been returned, not wanted. I received three of these in a row and my dejection grew. One of these rejections offered a little encouragement by telling me that they had taken the stories to committee level, where they had caused an animated discussion. But in the end, they had decided that the stories were a bit too ‘far out’ and might offend the gatekeepers of children’s literature.

Then – oh, yes, just a letter with the small oval orange symbol in the corner. Penguin Books had kept the manuscript. I could hardly bring myself to open it. It could still be a rejection. I tore it open and read quickly.

There were a few polite comments and then, We quite like these. Why don’t you come in and discuss them some time?

It was signed by Kay Ronai, senior editor in charge of Penguin’s children’s books. They were based in Ringwood, Melbourne. A four-hour drive from my seaside home. An editorial assistant named Kelly Davis, who had been working on the slush pile, had taken out my manuscript and passed it on to her. I ran to the phone and Kay answered.

‘What about tomorrow?’ I blurted out.

The next morning was scorching hot. It was one of those days where the air literally burns your lungs. Our battered green Holden had a driver’s seat with collapsed springs that made it difficult to peer over the top of the steering wheel. We called it Apple Core because of its mottled colour and the number of half-eaten apples scattered around among the kids’ junk. Worst of all, it had no air-conditioning.

I put on a pair of shorts, sandals and a T-shirt. I planned to change into neatly pressed trousers and a business shirt in a park toilet near the Penguin office when we got there.

My wife and I and the kids set off with all the windows down. Everyone was drained by the hot, buffeting air. Finally, we reached the park. I went to the boot to get my change of clothes.

Horror of horrors. I had left my trousers behind and there was only a few minutes left until my appointment. I had to go to the interview dressed in my sweaty beach clothes.

I needn’t have worried. Kay, Teresa and Julie were incredibly kind and reassuring.

I was told that my stories were fresh and different and maybe just a little subversive. They loved them, and Kay said she would give me a contract if I could write five more of the same standard.

On the way out I made a feeble apology to the receptionist about my clothing. She said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I knew you were an author. They all dress like that.’

I went home and wrote like crazy. After receiving two more stories Penguin sent me a contract and an advance for four hundred dollars. I still have the photocopy of the cheque on my office wall today.

Julie, who was to go on to become an incredibly successful and admired publisher, is still my friend and editor thirty-five years and forty books later. As a new author I was always treated with kindness and respect at Penguin. But new authors don’t get to throw their weight around. I remember receiving a Polaroid photo of my cover with a note saying, Good, isn’t it?

It was good, too. These days, however, I get roughs from the artist and also the book designer and am included in the process from the beginning.

Penguin did meet my requests to make the book appear acceptable to both accomplished and struggling readers. It was A-format (a popular adult paperback book size at the time). It had no illustrations, small print and not much white space between lines and around the margins. The fashion has changed now. Larger print with a lot of white space in a larger format is more than acceptable. So are pictures in books for older children. I think that the modern appeal of animated interactive stories on electronic devices are partly responsible for the acceptability of pictures in books for sophisticated readers.

Teresa edited my first book and Julie took over after that. I didn’t know much about publishing, but I was in good hands.

When Unreal! came out I was extremely proud of it. I used to carry it around with me and occasionally look at it and say to myself, ‘I wrote that.’

After it was published, I searched in vain for a copy in the bookshops. The first time I ever saw one on a shelf was in Apollo Bay – a coastal holiday resort on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. After about six months my kids started noticing it in other stores. They would turn the copies face-out when the bookshop owner wasn’t looking.

Sometime later I started to receive a few letters from schoolchildren. I would get some from particular areas, maybe Perth and then from across the country in a suburb in Queensland or Tasmania. Something was happening. Teachers were encouraging every student in their class to write to me and the letters started coming in avalanches.

Twelve months passed and Unreal! was on the children’s bestseller lists in many newspapers.

The timing was good. Deakin University was indeed taking over the Warrnambool Institute. Anyone without a PhD would soon be history. Generous redundancy packages were offered to all lecturers who did not have higher degrees. It was time for me to leave. I filled in my application and submitted it.

Surprise, surprise. Now that I was published and starting to become well known, they didn’t want me to leave. Well, fair enough. Bruce Jeans had told me that I would have no future there if I didn’t get published. And now I had and his prediction was correct.

I decided to take the risk and resigned without the generous redundancy package.

Still, they had been good to me there and I was grateful for the many wonderful years I had spent at that institution.

And I was sorry to be leaving the students and my friends on the staff.

My wife, who was still a mature-age student, was not earning anything at that time and I had six kids to support, so it was going to be risky.

But oh, the excitement. I was a full-time writer.

I wished my mother had lived to see it.

13

INFLUENCES

On a school visit in Tasmania a year before this photo was taken, nine-year-old Lisa Bantoft decided to help me out when I told her class that I found new ideas hard to come up with. She told me how her brother had once left their pet budgerigar’s cage door open. The bird had flown out and been accidentally sucked into the vacuum cleaner by her mother. Unfortunately, the bird died.

Lisa offered me the incident and I jotted it down in my ideas book. It became the stimulus for a little story about a boy who tries to set a trap for the tooth fairy with a vacuum cleaner and accidentally captures a budgerigar instead. The bird lives and the story has a happy ending.

The following year I was a guest speaker at a reading conference in Hobart and was able to visit Goodwood Primary School, show Lisa the book and thank her for the idea personally.

1985–1990

I have never knowingly stolen someone else’s work and passed it off as my own, but I do know of people who have stolen my material. It’s extremely annoying when it happens but is, in my opinion, not worth spending time and money pursuing those who are so desperate that they will copy someone else’s creations.

I do believe, however, that it is possible to accidentally use a plot or idea from something you have read or seen that has become buried in your psyche. I once started to feel that a short story I had written might have come from one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books. On checking, I found that this was indeed the case and I immediately threw my story into the bin.

But has Richmal Crompton been an influence on my writing? I would have to say yes. My mother loved her funny short stories about the scruffy little boy who was always getting into trouble and being saved in a most surprising way. I still have my copies and occasionally re-read one or two of them for old times’ sake.

I should also say that at the age of nine or ten I was totally dismayed to find out that Richmal Crompton was a woman. How did she know what it was like to be a boy like me? I was gobsmacked.

The sight of my mother laughing always cheered me up. I was so happy when she was happy. I remember her giving me a novel called Alf’s Button by William Aubrey Darlington. It’s about a British soldier who polished a button on his uniform only to have a genie appear.

‘What is your command, master?’ says the genie.

In shock and surprise Alf exclaims, ‘Strike me pink.’

Alf, of course, to my mother’s great joy, immediately turned pink. She often told this story to other people and would give me similar funny children’s books from the library to read.

Over the following years my mother also introduced me to the short stories of O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Damon Runyon, Gerald Kersh, Somerset Maugham and many others. All of these writers were masters of the surprise ending.

Once I had begun writing stories myself, I made up my mind not to read the books of other children’s authors. The possibility of being influenced by the work of someone else is just too dangerous. I have never read the books of JK Rowling or the many authors who have become my friends in the world of children’s literature. I have only ever read the adult stories of Roald Dahl.

Shortly before my first book was released, I rang someone in the publicity department at Penguin Books.

‘I’m phoning to ask you to put my new book in that advertisement you run on the first Saturday of every month in the Age newspaper,’ I said.

There was a stunned silence before I was politely told, ‘That advertisement is never used for new authors. And never for children’s books.’

I had no idea of the huge number of books that a publisher like Penguin released each month. Or how expensive it was to run advertisements. Publicists send out details of new books to radio and television stations, newspapers, magazines and bookshops and anyone else who might be able to give the book some free publicity. Unless the author is already well known or has written something particularly interesting, their book will not attract much attention.

I was, however, fortunate enough to have a publicist assigned to my first book. Nancy Mortimer was sent to Warrnambool to arrange some school visits for me.

My first promotional activity was to talk to some children at a school in Colac, in western Victoria. They had seen an article about my book in the Warrnambool Standard and taken the opportunity to invite me. My fifteen-year-old daughter, Linda, came along to watch me give the talk.

As we left, a small girl followed me out of the room and held out a piece of paper for me to sign. I felt embarrassed – the idea of me signing an autograph seemed absurd – but I did as she asked.

‘You blushed, Dad,’ said Linda.

I nodded. Then I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be a collector’s item.’

My first autograph ever had just been signed on a piece of toilet paper.

The day after my first school visit we held a book launch at a local store – Warrnambool Books. About thirty people were there and it was a happy time.

A small queue formed to have books autographed. After a while an elderly lady put down a copy and said, ‘My grandson John hates reading. Write something in your book that will make him read it.’

I sighed. I had spent so much time trying to make this little volume accessible to reluctant readers. If only there was a magic sentence that would do the trick.

I scribbled a few words and she left.

Linda said, ‘That lady didn’t look too pleased, Dad. What did you write?’

I told her what I had scribbled.

Dear John, when you have finished reading this book Grandma will give you ten dollars.

Nancy had come to Warrnambool on the train so the next day we travelled together in my car to a small rural school where I was to speak. It was about thirty kilometres out of town.

I don’t remember what I told them, but I do remember one reaction. A small girl asked me how I got the idea for one of my stories.

I said, ‘Well, I was at home doing the ironing when a …’

I was unable to finish the sentence because the entire class broke into laughter. I couldn’t figure out what I had said that made them laugh.

Afterwards the teacher told me.

‘This is the country, Paul. All of these kids live on farms. They have never seen a man doing the ironing.’

After my presentation I drove back through the open, sparsely settled farmland with Nancy. Suddenly my car started spluttering and then stopped. I looked at the dashboard.

I felt my face go red. It was like some cliché from an old movie. What a thing to do – running out of petrol in the deserted countryside alone with an attractive married woman. There were no mobile phones in those days, of course.

‘Sheeba,’ I exclaimed. ‘We’ve run out of petrol.’ She looked at me in disbelief. Then she burst out querulously, ‘Where did you learn to say “sheeba”?’

I blinked for a second or two, somewhat disorientated by the question.

‘Bentleigh West State School,’ I finally said.

‘Paul Jennings,’ she yelled. ‘You were in the same class as me – Grade Six.’

We sat there for ages exchanging memories of a time when we were both twelve years old.

Then I walked to a distant farmhouse and borrowed a can of petrol.

During that period I couldn’t do many school visits as I was still lecturing full-time and had a large family. My first event away from my Warrnambool base was at a bookstore in Northland Shopping Centre in Melbourne. My wife and some of our younger children stood by proudly watching as I sat behind a small table with a pile of books next to me.

Time passed. No one purchased a book or even stopped to look. More time passed. Still no one. It was becoming embarrassing. The poor bookshop owner felt sorry for me. She rang up her husband, who dragged their own three kids in to the shop. They were the only books I signed.

Over the years I’ve had quite a few experiences with book signings. On one occasion a family of three children fronted up to the desk – two older girls and a small boy aged about three. There was a long line and many observers gathered around the table. The two girls slid their books over to me and I signed them. Then the small boy pushed his book forward. I signed his as well.

He grew red in the face and burst into tears. He pointed at me accusingly and shouted angrily at the crowd.

‘That man wrote in my book.’

Laughter filled the shop. But the boy didn’t calm down until I gave him another free (unsigned) book, which mollified him slightly.

Book signings are always a point of discussion between authors – we all have our stories. Some event organisers seat a number of authors together behind a long trestle. If you’re a new author unfortunate enough to sit next to a well-known one it can be humiliating. You might be the only writer without a huge line awaiting your signature. You try to spin things out by spending ten minutes talking to each kid in your short queue. If you are an illustrator, which I am not, you can always slowly draw something inside the cover for the delighted child.

My first experience of this was at a signing when I had the misfortune to sit next to author Doug MacLeod, who, together with illustrator Craig Smith, had written a fantastically popular book titled Sister Madge’s Book of Nuns. Doug’s line stretched out of the conference centre’s door while only one single person approached me.

Gradually my lines became longer. In the end, nonexistent or short queues stopped being a problem. But even the long lines can be difficult sometimes. You can’t get up and walk away before the last book is signed or you will disappoint both parents and children. Furthermore, the bookshop owners want you to stay until all the stock is sold.

Once I was signing on a circular mezzanine in a busy shopping centre. The line was so long that it spiralled around the circle three or four times. Parents and children started jumping across to the inner circle to try to get to the front more quickly. There was much pushing, shoving and shouting. Security guards had to be called to calm the situation down.

Needless to say, I was delighted with the success of Unreal! But I was totally unprepared for my sudden popularity and all the publicity that ensued. Success is wonderful, but it comes with challenges.

Author Mem Fox and I were once the warm-up acts in Adelaide for Roald Dahl when he came to Australia on tour. He gave many amusing talks to huge audiences of children. It was obvious that the huge reception he received at every event was tiring him out. I remember thinking, When I’m his age I’m going to give up touring. He was seventy-two at the time and I was forty-four.

After his performance in Adelaide a large number of Australian children’s authors were gathered in the green room to meet him. Roald Dahl was seated on a large throne-like chair at one end of the room. We were lined up in pairs and were each given a minute or so to say a few words. The line snaked forward slowly. To my delight I was paired up with one of my heroes – Colin Thiele, author of Storm Boy and many other books. We had a lovely chat and years later he asked me to launch his picture book, Pannikin and Pinta, which was beautifully illustrated by artist Peter Gouldthorpe.

When Colin and I finally reached the front of the line, we somewhat nervously faced the king on his throne. For some reason, author Beatrix Potter was mentioned. Roald Dahl told us a little scornfully that her ‘trivial books’ were totally devoid of any worth. He clearly had no time for her.

A few years later I was informed that he had once lived near her house and, as a boy, had knocked on her door for a few friendly words, only to be told to go away and not come back. He would not have been happy with that. I’m obviously not the only one who has found it hard to shake off the pains of childhood.

When I first started submitting my manuscripts to publishers, one of the replies claimed that children didn’t like short stories. I always thought, Well, I did when I was a boy.

Writing short stories suits my personality. I know that I am a quick-reward person. I can’t bear waiting a year for my new book to be printed. And I just have to finish a story once I have started writing it. Or reading it. Once I have decided to buy something I rush out and say, ‘I’ll have that one.’ Later I realise that I could have done much better if I’d done a little research or haggled a bit.

Not long before writing my first book I found that a lot of my students were overusing exclamation marks. I suggested that it was a sign of weak writing and decided that I would never use one. When Unreal! was first released I found to my dismay that an exclamation mark had been put on the cover. Despite this I have stuck to my original resolution. Up until this very day I have never used one!

A few people took me to task about my attitude to exclamation marks and I realise that I should be careful about making proclamations. I once handed my literature class students a list of tips about writing. One of the points unintentionally declared, ‘Be careful in the use of the word “very”. It’s a very weak word to use.’

They didn’t let me forget that one for a long time. Fortunately, a lot of them thought it was a joke (like my exclamation mark above).

I always struggle to get that first idea and turn it into something worth writing about. Most of my first efforts go into the bin. During book signings children often generously offer up their own ideas. ‘Something funny happened to me,’ they will say. ‘You can have it if you like.’ I always nod and smile and thank them and suggest that they use it themselves. On two occasions a child has offered me something which I did use. One I have already mentioned. The other was given to me by a little girl in Darwin.

She told me that on a hot day she had gone to the fridge for a drink of water but there was none there. On the metal freezing compartment, she spied a small droplet of water that had frozen. She poked out her tongue and licked it. And her tongue stuck to the freezer. She couldn’t speak and she couldn’t pull her tongue away.

I told her that it was a good story and thanked her as usual. A couple of months later I remembered that incident and thought that it might make a good tale. At first, I struggled to think how the situation might develop. The little girl was just stuck to the refrigerator. I needed to give my character mobility, so I thought that in my story she could grab a large block of ice, like the ones the iceman used to deliver to our kitchen when I was a boy in Melbourne. She could walk around stuck to that. Then I remembered the ice sculptures that you see in some restaurants. What if there was a statue of a frozen girl and the boy fell in love with it? He kisses the ice-girl and his lips stick to hers. Straight away I knew that I had a story – this boy can stagger along the street with his lips glued to the statue’s frigid lips.

This story, ‘Ice Maiden’, is one of my most popular. The themes in it are romantic love, being different and life as a redhead.

Unfortunately, I don’t know the name of the little girl who long ago told me her funny anecdote. She is the one I should thank. When it was published, I was accused of pinching the plot from the well-known American folktale ‘The Tar Baby’.

I once jotted the following down in my ideas book: What if a boy’s fingernails and toenails started growing in rows up his fingers and toes and then kept spreading to cover his whole body?

It occurred to me that the nails would look like scales on a fish. But why would it happen? What could be the cause? I came up with the idea that while the boy’s father was a man, his mother was a mermaid. I wrote the story of a boy who lives alone on an island with his father, who will never let the boy leave. The father dies and the boy has to bury him.

I realised that this was a particularly sad story but I went on with writing the tale. I wrote one of my usual happy endings, where the maternal relatives of the boy, including his mermaid mother, carry him off into the ocean. The story was called ‘Nails’.

When I was touring overseas to promote the book, I read ‘Nails’ to a large audience in Ireland. One of their older, respected lovers of Irish literature came up to me afterwards. He said, ‘Thank you for your lovely interpretation of our Selkie story.’ I nodded and pretended I knew what he was talking about. I soon rushed off and found out about the legend of a seal who was also a woman and could come out of the ocean, take off her skin and live as a person.

Is this folktale about the Selkie what Jung would call an archetypal story? One which is buried in the collective unconscious of all peoples? It is often claimed that all cultures have a Cinderella story – even remote communities that have never had a connection with any others have a version of it.

Zeitgeist is another phenomenon that any publisher will tell you is common in the industry – the effect where certain themes emerge spontaneously but without connection at the same time right across the world. It also occurs in other disciplines. It’s widely accepted that Charles Darwin came up with his theory of evolution at around the same time as naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace.

One of my early stories was titled ‘Tonsil Eye Tis’. It was about a boy who grew an eye on the end of his finger. After it was published, I received a letter from a distressed author – Duncan Ball, who was living in Canada at the time. He told me that he had just finished the manuscript of a whole book called Emily Eyefinger. Then he discovered my short story and now would have to dump his whole book because I would think he had pinched my idea.

I told him that he should publish the book. We both thought of it at the same time and anyway, my story was just one in a collection. He went on to publish eleven successful books about Emily Eyefinger. We both came up with a funny story about the same thing at the same time. It didn’t belong to me. I really respected his offer to trash his book.

What were the influences that led me to write humour? It’s tempting to go into another discussion about how useful humour is to children and how it can be used to attract them into reading books. Of course, these things are true. And I have always loved to make people laugh. As an adolescent I was often telling jokes and staging tricks at school. Around the campfire I would be called on to tell shaggy-dog stories, at the end of which the weak joke would elicit amused groans.

This ability to tell jokes, debate and perform in front of an audience really masked a feeling of isolation and loneliness. I always felt that I was lacking something that everyone else knew – some secret bond that would never include me. When I was thirteen, I even worried for a while that people could read my mind. As if I was the subject of a worldwide conspiracy in which I was the only person not in on the secret.

People like a comedian. The audience gives out a form of love in return for the humour – a little from each person. An individual who loves you, be it a wife, husband, sibling or friend, is the opposite – one person giving a lot of love. Is the former equal to the latter? Having experienced both, I think not. But applause is still good at the time.

A sense of humour also has other uses and origins. The ability to tell a joke well might indicate the presence of one of the skills involved in writing fiction. Telling a tale and throwing the reader off with red herrings or hints seems to be an instinctive as well as a learned ability. I know people who just cannot tell a joke without giving away the punchline in the first few seconds. Could they write fiction? I’m not sure.

I also know a man who can create and tell very funny jokes but he never laughs at anyone else’s. What does this say about him? I don’t know the answer to this either.

I always liked sketch comedy on television. As a young man I remember Doug MacLeod of the television show The Comedy Company in a skit about training garbage collectors how to throw a bin lid onto the roof of a house or under the wheels of a car. The ability to notice that most people become irritated by having their bin lids flattened by the traffic is the sign of a creative joke-teller. On the same program I loved Mary-Anne Fahey in bed scenes with her then husband, comedian Ian McFadyen. They used to stir each other up with hilarious, often unscripted dialogue in which each shocked the other in an instinctive and creative way. How I envied their place in the world of comedy.

Not all my stories are funny. Some are poignant and others downright sad. One of the sad sorts fell into my lap while I was holidaying on a resort in Queensland. The guests were seated in groups of six at shared tables for meals. I noticed that a woman sitting opposite me was wearing two watches. Another guest asked her why.

‘My husband died ten days ago,’ she said. ‘My daughter has brought me on this holiday to help me deal with my grief. This large watch was his. I am going to keep it ticking on my arm for the rest of my life to remind me of how his heart beat so closely to mine for all those years.’

Along with the other guests I was very moved by this. Afterwards, I introduced myself as a writer and asked her if I could use this incident in a piece of fiction.

She readily agreed and I went straight to work when I returned home from the holiday. I think it is worth outlining my plot here because it illustrates so much of what I have already said about my own life and the origins of my stories.

The boy in my story, ‘Ticker’, lives with his grandparents in an old house on the edge of a wild sea-cliff. He hates the wind that constantly buffets the house. He overhears his grandmother promise her husband that when he dies, she will keep his watch ticking on her wrist for the rest of her life. She vows never to let it stop ticking. The watch is a self-winding type that is kept working by the constant movement of the wearer’s arm. It has no battery or winding knob.

One day the boy is out fishing on the edge of a distant cliff with his grandfather. The old man collapses with chest pains and the boy rushes off to get help. When the rescue party finally reaches the fishing spot the grandfather is dead but the watch his wife agreed to keep ticking is not on his arm. Bad weather stops anyone going back to look for it. Time passes and it is clear that the self-winding watch will have stopped by now.

The grandmother goes into deep depression. She has not kept her promise. The boy does everything he can to cheer her up. Nothing works. The watch, even if found, will have stopped ticking. She has no interest in going to look for it. Finally, the boy sneaks off and after much tribulation finds the spot where the grandfather died. He searches for the watch and eventually finds it strapped to the branch of a tree, which is rocking in the wind.

The watch is still ticking and showing the correct time. The grandmother cheers up. The boy has cured his grandmother’s depression. He finishes the story by saying, ‘I love the wind.’

I sent a copy of the story to the woman who had inspired it and she wrote back telling me that she loved it.

14

FLYING HIGH

The flight was brilliant. Smooth and shining. Vapour twisting in concentric circles from each wing. A small shiver as we broke the sound barrier and then eerie silence. It was magnificent.

I’ve still got the slim pen we were given on the plane. It looks like it’s made of titanium. But it probably isn’t. My office manager, Fiona, wants me to put it up on eBay.

But as they say on the Antiques Roadshow, it’s not for sale.

1990–2000

The first really big tour that was designed just for me was organised by the popular Myer chain stores. My initial talk was in the formal dining room of their store in Melbourne. A hundred or so children were seated for a meal at tables. The chief publicist at Myer was a middle-aged woman who would later accompany me from Melbourne to Adelaide and then on to Perth. She had contracted Patti Newton, well-known actress and TV personality, to chair my sessions. I was overawed. TV personalities were above my league and even though both women were extremely nice to me, I was quite nervous in their company.

We were accommodated at the Grand Hyatt, where I was allocated a large suite complete with all the trimmings. In the lobby a pianist was tinkling a soft melody.

‘We’ll meet in the breakfast room tomorrow morning, at eight,’ the woman from Myer told me.

I had never been in such a posh hotel before. I luxuriated in the beautiful suite but didn’t sleep well because I was nervous about everything to do with the trip.

In the morning I arrived at the breakfast room early and sat down in a booth. I was soon joined by the Myer executive.

‘You shouldn’t have selected this table,’ she said in a kindly voice.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘It’s next to the servery.’

‘Where should I have sat?’

‘Over there by the window. Nice and quiet with a view into the garden.’

I felt stupid. I wasn’t used to this world. But it didn’t take long to adjust to life in the limelight. I might as well admit it: I started to get a bit too used to the top-end treatment.

Soon, even though I was terrified of flying, I found myself travelling business class with a glass of wine and wide, comfortable seats. I began to expect this level of luxury, but it came with a problem. My fear of flying became worse with every flight. On the way home from a gig I could always have a couple of gins in the Qantas Club (more luxury courtesy of my publisher) to get me onto the plane. But I couldn’t drink on the way there because I knew I wouldn’t perform properly.

A year or so after the Myer events I agreed to do another tour. But soon after it was arranged I started to worry about the flights I would have to take. I couldn’t sleep, and the closer it came the more anxious I became. I enrolled in a ‘Fear of Flying’ course run by Ansett Airlines, but it was cancelled at the last minute. I was somewhat relieved because my phobia was now so severe that I doubted I would be able to complete the last two lessons – get on the plane, and then, finally … take a flight.

It was almost as if this problem was some sort of self-punishment for the excesses of my new life. I was going to have to force myself onto the plane to Hobart, and a week later take the long flight to Perth. Then, happily and unexpectedly, there was a pilot strike and my trips were cancelled. Hooray, I didn’t have to go.

But suddenly the trip was on again. Prime Minister Bob Hawke had ordered the Royal Australian Air Force to start making passenger flights in an effort to break the strike. I was booked onto an RAAF Hercules transport aircraft, which was usually used to parachute commandos into battle.

When the time came, I dragged myself onto the plane. All the passengers were seated on benches and were strapped to the sides by thick red harnesses. The RAAF pilot, who looked like he was aged about sixteen, gave us the safety lecture.

‘If this plane crashes,’ he said, ‘follow me out that door because I’ll be the first one off.’

There was scattered nervous laughter from some of the passengers, but not me. I was terrified as the plane lurched into the sky.

When I returned from Hobart I heard that there was no air force plane available to go to Perth. Good news.

Penguin, however, who did not know about my problem, did not give up easily. They booked me a seat on a small private jet. I was told not to worry. The pilot had once been Colonel Gaddafi’s personal airman. He was very experienced. I groaned. I could just imagine him taking off and landing in the middle of the desert with shells bursting all around. I had to do something so I went to my doctor and told him my situation.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you some sedatives.’ He gave me two pills – one for the four-hour flight to Perth and the other for the return journey.

At the airport I sat looking at the small jet. My fear level kept rising. I wasn’t sure that I could go through with it. My stomach seemed to have a life of its own. Businessmen in suits were starting to board. They didn’t look like the sort of people who had earned divine intervention if the plane’s engines failed. They were probably all mining executives. God wasn’t going to save them, or me. I panicked and quickly took both pills before reluctantly boarding.

We took off and the sedatives began to kick in. I felt great. I grinned as I looked down at the desert beneath us. There was only one pilot in the cockpit. The seat next to him was empty but it didn’t worry me. These pills were fantastic.

Then came an announcement. We had encountered an unexpected headwind and the jet would have to land to refuel. The trip would be extended by several hours. The plane landed at a small deserted runway somewhere on the Nullarbor Plain. We all disembarked and waited. Time dragged by. Finally, a dusty truck arrived with some forty-four-gallon drums filled with aviation fuel. More waiting around. Finally the jet was topped up.

I was still feeling pretty good from the pills. I said to the pilot, ‘Can I sit up the front with you? I’m a writer and I’d like to get a few ideas for a story.’

‘No worries,’ he said.

I settled into the co-pilot’s seat and strapped myself in. I looked at all the instruments with interest. There was a large hole in the front panel with wires hanging out of it.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘The radar,’ he said. ‘It’s been taken out for repairs.’

The pills started to wear off. My old fear returned with a vengeance. And the weather began to turn nasty. Why in hell was this plane allowed to fly without radar? By the time we approached Perth it was pitch black outside and lightning was flashing across the sky. The jet began to shake and buck crazily. I tried to peer out but the windscreen might have been made out of steel – I couldn’t see a thing. The plane suddenly dropped and then bottomed out with a bang. It began to bounce around wildly. I felt a clunk as the wheels were lowered. The pilot began to prepare for landing. I couldn’t see where we going. That meant he couldn’t see where we were going.

‘What’s happening?’ I said in a trembling voice.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to concentrate.’

The plane kept rocking from side to side and my imagination went into overdrive. In my mind I could see the plane falling out of the sky. Or one of the wings tipping too far and hitting the runway and the lot of us going up in a ball of flame. I closed my eyes as we bumped and bounced onto the runway and finally came to a stop.

Two nights later I saw the pilot sitting alone at a table near me in the dining room of the hotel where I was staying. He had a bottle on the table. Was that wine or water? My imagination knew no bounds.

I rang up the railways and booked myself onto the train for the return trip. The journey back to Melbourne took three days. I looked out of my little sleeping compartment at the featureless Nullarbor Plain – beautiful in its own desolate way, but monotonous after hundreds of dusty miles. Someone had scratched a little message on the windowsill. I am so lonely.

I tried to imagine what sort of person had desperately engraved that message. I began painting a melancholy picture of them in my mind. In the windowpane I suddenly caught sight of my own reflection and I had my answer. Despite all my success and all the people who were sharing it with me, I always felt achingly alone. At the time no one else knew this about me. Somewhere in the back of my mind a thought was trying to surface – my life was starting to unravel.

Over the next couple of years, I kept forcing myself onto planes and in the end, after countless flights, I managed to cope with flying reasonably well.

At one stage Penguin sent me on a promotional trip to the USA and the UK. They arranged for me to fly from New York to London on the Concorde.

I was now largely over my fear of flying – but this was the Concorde. I was filled with a gut-stirring mix of apprehension and excitement. The John F Kennedy International Airport had a special lounge that overlooked the plane we were about to travel on.

An announcement came over the loudspeaker. There was a problem with the aircraft. Something to do with the hydraulics. I knew a bit about hydraulics from my knowledge of cars. I was pretty sure that even the Concorde could not fly without hydraulics to operate various moving parts. This was serious.

It was announced that a new part for the plane was being flown out from London on another Concorde. This would take about three to four hours.

We waited. It wasn’t too bad. The surroundings were sumptuous. Finally, a van pulled up next to our plane. Looking straight down from above I saw a workman step out and put a ladder up to the fuselage. He climbed up, took out what appeared to be a screwdriver and removed a small panel from the side of the aircraft.

This plane was going to travel at twice the speed of sound and he was using what looked like an ordinary Phillips-head screwdriver to repair it. Where was the supersonic, atomic, neo-facilitating reactionary titanium extraction device which flashed and hummed like the one used by Doctor Who? My old phobia returned with a vengeance.

The workman finally replaced the panel and left. Shortly after this we boarded. The plane was amazing. Two rows of two seats on either side of a narrow aisle. It was like sitting inside a steel pencil. Everything was sleek. It filled one with confidence. The plane began to taxi. Then came an announcement:

‘Sorry, folks, it’s malfunctioning again. We’ll have to return to the main building.’

I decided that when I got off, I was going to cancel my flight on the Concorde and fly to London on a good old jumbo.

The plane stopped and then started taxiing again. Another announcement.

‘No, it’s working. Let’s go.’

I was really shaking by this time. But oh, that experience. The speed at which we were accelerating along the runway pushed me back into my seat with seemingly unlimited force. The nose confidently lifted. I snatched a glance outside. New York was already disappearing behind us. In only a few seconds it turned from a patchwork bed cover into a postage stamp. And then it was gone. The plane suddenly but smoothly tilted and pointed at the heavens, seeming to stand on its tail. The seat seemed to be trying to suck me into itself. I was enthralled.

Finally, the plane levelled and fell silent. We were alone in a different world.

Suddenly a uniformed flight attendant disturbed my reverie. I had a hard decision to make.

Was it to be lobster claws or the wild pheasant?

There was one other choice, but it was something posh I’d never heard of. I gave that a miss and went for the lobster.

15

FIFTY FUNNY YEARS

I always excitedly scribble YES in my notebook when I have come up with a funny storyline. But to be honest, I would rather be known for my serious stories than my humorous ones. I have written a lot of them.

This wish is my personal conceit and I have to own it. When people tell me they loved my short stories ‘Skeleton on the Dunny’ or ‘Little Squirt’ or the novel The Unforgettable What’s His Name I smile and thank them for their kind comments. But I get a real buzz if they mention ‘Grandad’s Gifts’ or ‘For Ever’ or A Different Boy, which are all stories that might bring a joyful tear to the eye.

Mind you, when I do suddenly crack it with a funny concept that occurs to me after days or weeks of scratching around, I start to laugh hysterically to myself. Those ‘yes, yes, yesses’ on the paper result from genuine outbursts of mirth.

In the days when my children used to read my manuscripts I would peer through a little hole in the frosted glass door in our lounge room and watch for reactions. If they were laughing, I knew that I was onto something.

They were also onto me. They would wag a finger at that hole and tell me to buzz off.

1950–2000

I first started to realise that there are more subtle forms of humour than simple jokes when Timothy and I went to the pictures aged about twelve. Every week the local cinema screened a program of shorts and movies for kids at eleven o’clock on Saturday mornings. There was much cheering for the cowboys in the white hats as they thundered after the black hats on the backs of their horses. Humour was usually provided by the likes of Laurel and Hardy or Donald Duck.

At three in the afternoons a movie for grown-ups would be screened. Timothy and I were not allowed to go to these. One day we told our parents that a Superman movie was screening at the matinee and we were permitted to go for the first time.

We were lying. The movie was in fact Lady Godiva, the legendary story of the woman who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in protest over unfair taxes that had been imposed on the peasants.

Our lustful curiosity, however, was not rewarded because the heroine’s modesty was preserved by her lovely long hair. When we arrived at Timothy’s house after the show, we were startled to find his father poring over the cinema program in the local paper. A cold wave of fear swept through my body. We had been discovered.

Timothy’s father looked at us seriously.

‘Was the wind blowing, boys?’

He grinned and with a flick of a finger dismissed us.

I walked home amazed that Timothy’s father obviously related to our youthful world in an understanding and knowing way. I thought he was wonderful. And although I didn’t realise it at the time, he had introduced me to irony.

There are other types of humour that are more obvious and less subtle. Scatological jokes are dangerous for authors, but kids love them. Once a writer enters this territory they are in danger of being known as the person who writes bum stories, and their more thoughtful work consequently may not be taken seriously.

Around the turn of the century when I was writing the Rascal series I thought I should ramp things up a bit. These books feature a little dragon and are illustrated by Bob Lea’s fantastic digital artwork, which was years ahead of its time. We both worked hard at trying to combine the pictures and a limited number of words to make the text predictable for beginning readers.

In one of the books I decided to use a kids’ favourite, which up until this point I had avoided – ‘who farted?’ As any teacher can tell you, if someone releases a noisy or gaseous discharge into the room it will take a long time to bring the class back to order.

The Rascal story in question was aimed at five-to six-year-old children and was set in Dad’s lounge room where Rascal and the other four dragons were playing with our hero, little Ben. Dad and his girlfriend, Sherry, were also there enjoying each other’s company when a bad smell filled the room. In this piece of fiction, the guilty party is unknown. The little dragon, Rascal, was told to start sniffing bottoms to detect who had made the dreadful odour. It turned out to be Dad, who (unlike my own father) was totally embarrassed.

Not long after I submitted the first draft, I received a phone call from Catherine McCredie, my editor at the time. She suggested that the story would be funnier if it was Sherry who was the guilty party. I laughed out loud and made the change.

I only had one serious problem with this little tale – an issue that often presents itself when I have finished a story. What to call the book? I knew that I could not get away with using the word ‘fart’ on the cover. The book would be banned from every school in the country. I searched for suitable synonyms. Suddenly I remembered my own schooldays and the often-asked question, ‘Who fluffed?’

I named the book Rascal Finds the Fluffer.

Shortly before publication I received a panicky call from Penguin.

‘We can’t have this title.’

‘Why not?’

Embarrassed silence.

‘Er, there is an occupation where people are known as fluffers so we can’t have it.’

‘What do fluffers do?’

Embarrassed silence.

‘Come on, give.’

‘One of our staff says that fluffers have a role in the production of pornographic films.’

‘Yes?’

‘A fluffer is a woman who keeps the male star aroused between takes.’

Embarrassed silence.

‘Oh, who knew that?’

‘We can’t tell you. They don’t want anyone to know.’

So now I know what a fluffer is. I don’t know which member of staff at Penguin knew about this strange occupation. But I do know that I was saved from publishing a book for five-year-olds that would have had an R classification.

I thought that my new Rascal book was hilarious. So did quite a few readers. Here’s an email (tongue in cheek, I hope) I received from one parent:

Dear Paul,

I was very happy to buy your Rascal books but then I discovered Rascal and the Bad Smell! Women do not make bad smells!! Why don’t you write about men who leave their clothes on the floor and can’t find their keys or phone without help!! My husband and daughter laughed well into the night but I did not find it funny at all. I suggest another title which features men as the subject of your jokes!!

Susan D

When we first arrived in Australia all those years ago, my parents were shocked to find that the toilet was a small outhouse called a dunny at the bottom of the garden. My little sister didn’t like visiting it at night. There was no light and only cut-up newspaper instead of toilet roll. There were also cobwebs and the possibility of the dreaded redback spiders.

‘I’m scared and it’s dark down there,’ Ruth said one night. ‘There might be ghosts.’

‘Take your sister to the toilet,’ my father said to me.

‘I don’t want to,’ I replied.

He gave me a look that said, ‘Do as you’re told.’

Ruth and I walked along the narrow track in the black night. She entered the toilet and closed the door. All was still and silent. After a bit, a small voice filtered through the wonky door.

‘Are you still there, Paul?’

I said nothing.

A bit louder.

‘Are you still there, Paul?’

Still I said nothing.

This time, screaming, ‘Are you still there, Paul? I’m telling Dad.’

I knew there would soon be tears. And trouble.

‘Yes, I’m still here.’

Thirty years later I remembered this little incident (Ruth never let me forget it). I thought to myself, What if there was a ghost down there? I don’t think anyone has ever written a story about a haunted lavatory before.

So I wrote my story ‘Skeleton on the Dunny’. In this tale a boy drops his false teeth down the toilet and has to visit the local sewage farm to retrieve them. The toilet is haunted by the ghost of an old man who was sitting down there when he died.

The story proved to be popular. But when I finished it, I had an uneasy thought that the universe might punish me by letting me die on the toilet one day like the old man in my story. The thought still sometimes haunts me.

Anyway, I decided to set the tale in Timboon, a small rural town near Warrnambool. I like to use local place names because so many books and films are set overseas, and kids here in Australia love to see their own places in a story.

As soon as the book was published, I started receiving letters from children and parents who lived in the area. There was no sewage farm in Timboon.

Another mistake on my part. Poor research.

Fifteen years passed and I received an unusual invitation. Timboon finally had a water purification plant (the note added, Please don’t refer to it as a sewage farm). Would I consider attending the official opening to launch the facility? Sherryl Garbutt, the then minister for environment and conservation, would also be attending.

The ceremony was in a large hall. I said a few words and the dignitaries and local people clapped politely. Then the minister rose to speak. She took out a copy of my book and started to read the story ‘Skeleton on the Dunny’.

Everyone laughed but I thought, Australia is the only country in the world where a minister of the Crown would get up and read a story about a haunted toilet.

It made me feel good. I am a little less worried about dying on the toilet since that event.

But I still prefer not to linger.

I long ago realised that, like everyone else’s, my own past is a goldmine as far as funny stories are concerned. Take the following little nugget for example.

When I was seven years old, I placed a brass drawing-pin (thumb-tack) between my front teeth. I coughed and accidentally swallowed it. It lodged painfully somewhere in my throat. My parents called the local doctor and he came straight over to our house.

I have to digress a bit here and nostalgically say how lucky I am to remember a time when my mother could phone the doctor and he (usually a ‘he’ back then) would make a house call. Even for something as slight as a head cold. Mum would always clean up the bathroom and put out new soap and a hand towel for him. He would bend over the bed, take one’s temperature with a thermometer, say a few kind words and leave a prescription.

On this particular occasion his visit was not so enjoyable. He told my parents to make me drink large amounts of salt water to make me sick. This would bring up the drawing-pin. It was a terrible and terrifying experience and did not have the desired result.

The doctor had left instructions that if the salt water failed my parents should examine my faeces for the next few days to make sure that the pin left my digestive tract. I found it really embarrassing and also disgusting to have to poo into a bowl and then watch Mum and Dad sort through it with pinched noses and the help of a little fork. Their efforts, however, were futile – nothing was found. I spent much of my childhood wondering if it was still inside me.

Of course, many years later, this story eventually found its way into my ideas book and I finally wrote a tale based on it.

I created a boy who stole a small opal. He repented and needed to return it to its owners before they found out. I decided that the opal could be swallowed by a goat instead of a boy.

Goat poo comes in small pellets shaped like marbles. The boy in the story refers to them as ‘Little Black Balls’, which is also what I called the story. The poor boy has to follow the goat around picking up these poo pellets and breaking them open in an effort to find the opal.

Not long after the book was published, I received a letter from a teacher. She told me that this story caused so much hilarity in her class that even just bringing the book into the room resulted in uncontrollable laughter. The boys in her class actually collapsed on the floor with mirth. This of course pleased me. Until I read the next bit.

She was a teacher in an Indigenous community in Arnhem Land. The Aboriginal boys in her class were not laughing at the story. It was the title that they found so funny.

Sometimes you just get it wrong.

I had a similar problem with my first book. In Unreal! the story ‘Without a Shirt’ is about a boy who lives alone with his mother in a small house in the middle of a cemetery. He owns a dog called Shovel. This dog has fleas, is scruffy, has no tail and only one eye. But the boy loves him and is anxious that Shovel’s habit of digging holes will get him into trouble.

One day the dog drops a bone at the boy’s feet. The boy who is telling the story in the first person is very worried about where it came from. He bends down and the text says, I looked into his deep brown eyes.

I immediately started getting letters telling me that the dog only had one eye.

By this time the book had sold out its first print run, so I asked my editor Teresa to remove the ‘s’ from the word ‘eyes’ in the planned reprint.

After the reprint came out, I received a tongue-in-cheek letter from a teacher who told me that I had now written the rudest sentence in the history of children’s literature.

When I was eleven, my mates and I loved Luna Park, with its Big Dipper, River Caves and Ghost Train. We would ride for miles on our bikes to reach this fun park, which was located near the beach in St Kilda. Our favourite ride was the Rotor – a huge cylinder with an open top. Visitors could watch the action from above or go inside the revolving drum and become stuck to the wall as it started to spin.

When Mum and Dad decided to take Ruth and me to Luna Park for my birthday, I was rapt. They had never been on the Rotor before. It would be fun watching the expressions on their faces when they realised what was going to happen.

We entered the building and looked around. To the left was a sign with the word ‘PARTICIPANTS’, pointing down a corridor. To the right was a narrow staircase labelled ‘OBSERVERS’.

‘You go that way,’ I said, pointing down the corridor. I scampered up the stairs to watch the fun. Many observers were already in place around the top of the cylindrical room. They stared down into it as the participants below entered the chamber.

There were only three victims. Mum, Dad and Ruth looked up at the grinning faces peering down at them. They were confused and nervous. The whole room was like the inside of a monster water tank. And the crowd above were like spectators at the Colosseum before the lions were released.

A man placed the three of them against the wall and exited through a small door. The drum began to spin. Ruth went white as the Rotor went faster and faster, pinning her to the wall. The floor slowly fell away beneath her feet.

Now I began to feel guilty. The three of them were suspended like flies stuck on wallpaper. My mother’s dress suddenly started to rise and she struggled to pull it down. Too late; her face was covered by her dress and her arms were glued above her head. Her slip and frilly white knickers were revealed for all to see. She began to struggle and ended up sideways like a leaning tree.

My father gritted his false teeth and closed his eyes as the floor fell further and further away. All the spectators were roaring with laughter, but I was suddenly filled with guilt and shame. Ruth, my dear little sister, cried out in embarrassed agony as a wet trickle began to scribble its way across the wall. Oh, no, no, no. She was wetting her pants.

The Rotor continued to spin for what seemed like hours. I couldn’t look. Oh, what had I done to them? Eventually, it began to slow. They slid gradually down as the floor rose to meet them.

I raced outside to await my fate. Why had I been so mean? Guilty, guilty, guilty. I waited and waited. Where were they? In the sick bay? Taken to hospital? Come on, come on.

Finally, they emerged, full of good cheer. I had forgotten that the participants were permitted to go and watch the next bunch of victims from above.

Ruth was resilient and never complained about anything. All I got was good-humoured teasing from my mother. Even my father took it well. And it was a great anecdote to put into a book forty years later. The story was called ‘Ringing Wet’. I told the story from the point of view of a gutsy girl. Her problem is bed-wetting. After the Rotor incident she requests an alarm-bell mattress that will ring if she wets the bed. Separately, my heroine has made a bet with her horrible brother that she can go for a whole day without speaking to anyone. But she also thinks that the man next door has buried his dead wife in the backyard and wants to find out if he has. This is what she says:

That’s it. Tonight is the night. I will sneak out into Mr Grunge’s garden. I will dig up his wife before he can come and get me. I will be famous. I bet there will be a reward. And it will be worth at least fifty dollars. Maybe more.

That night, she hears someone getting through her bedroom window but is determined that she will not yell out in fright and lose her bet:

What will I do? What, what, what?

I know. Suddenly it comes to me. I know what to do.

And I do it. Yes, I do it.

ON PURPOSE.

I wet my pants. Wonderful warm wee runs down between my legs.

‘Ding, ding, ding, ding.’ What a racket. It is like the sirens and the police and the fire brigade all put together.

After this story was published, I received a letter from an eleven-year-old girl who told me that she often wet the bed. She said that this story had made her laugh and had completely cured her enuresis. I remember really hoping that this was true.

Previous to this I had penned one of my most difficult stories. It was called ‘A Dozen Bloomin’ Roses’.

The origins of the story could be found in a tale that my father said was true. While he had been travelling on the Underground in London, a young man stepped onto the train carrying a large bunch of roses. He was embarrassed to be seen with the flowers and held them behind his back. The doors slid closed on the stems of the roses, with the blooms shut firmly outside. The young man stood there with a red face, pretending everything was normal. The train sped off through the tunnel. When the doors opened at the next station, he was left holding just a bunch of stems.

I was touched by this story and decided to make use of it. The idea of a man carrying roses on the train was a good chance to play with gender stereotypes. As part of this story I invented a really tough character who had a job in a florist shop and did all the heavy lifting for the women who worked there. The trick in my story was that this tough character was actually a woman. I played on the (sexist?) assumptions of the reader that this strong person was a man.

It was extremely hard to tell that story in such a way that the reader would be fooled. The character had to seem to be male without me actually ever saying so. It was incredibly difficult to write without using the character’s name or the pronouns ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘his’ and ‘hers’.

At one stage in my life when I was unattached and very lonely, I became friendly with a talented, charismatic woman called Felicity. She was a performer and also a horticulturalist; she was charming and great company. We went out together a number of times and exchanged emails and phone calls. Nothing of a romantic nature had passed between us – we were just friends, but there was obviously something happening, and who knew where it might lead? I had my hopes. And she had not discouraged me in any way.

Once, when she was on the road, Felicity wrote me a letter telling me that she had been camping with a friend in Tasmania. Naturally I wondered who the friend was. It was not clear from the letter, but I knew straight away how hard she had worked at writing it. She had overused the phrase ‘my friend’ to avoid all gender-based personal pronouns and names. She was trying to hide the fact that she was off camping with a man. So that was that. She now has a husband and for all I know he could be the bloke in the tent.

On the way to work one day I switched on the radio to listen to the local news. The lead story was set not far from the house I shared with my kids. Along the cliff from where we lived there were a number of deep holes in the limestone ground. These holes were dark and damp. The farmers used to toss dead sheep and cattle down them to save having to dig holes to bury the carcasses.

A farmer had been passing one of these holes when he thought he heard a sound from far below.

‘Yip, yip, yip.’

‘A dog,’ he said to himself. He listened again carefully. ‘Yes.’ It was definitely a dog. He peered into the hole but could see nothing. It was so black down there.

After a bit of organising he managed to get a truck with a small crane and park it next to the hole. He attached a swing-seat to the end of the crane’s cable and asked the operator to lower him into the gloom. Down, down, down. He looked up and saw that the opening above was so far away that it seemed no larger than a bright twenty-cent coin. Finally, he reached the bottom. The stench was awful. Bones crunched beneath his feet. Using his torch, he located a small dog. He gently picked it up and put it inside his jumper.

Up, up, up. Finally, he stepped onto solid ground. The bright sunlight hurt his eyes. He kept the dog inside his jumper for a few minutes and then placed it on the ground.

The poor little dog had a serious problem. It could only walk around with its head bent back and its nose pointing to the sky. All flexibility had gone from its neck. It had spent a month looking up for help to come.

I switched off the radio, turned the car around and headed home to my keyboard.

In my story I invented a mean man who puts his dog down the hole on purpose. When the dog finally gets out, this man falls down the hole himself. The dog, bearing no grudges, drops him a few morsels of food – a dead cat and bits and pieces that it scavenges from rubbish bins.

And of course, we can guess what happened to the horrible man when he finally gets out of the hole. He spends quite a bit of time staring up into the heavens.

People seemed to like my story. But I can’t take much of the credit. This one was handed to me on a plate. It was funny but also sad.

As I have already said, amusing stories are hard to write. It’s not just a matter of picking a scatological topic and jotting down a few jokes. It’s torture coming up with a great punchline or a surprising twist. I often think that it’s like turning over pebbles on a beach – there are thousands of them and underneath just one pebble is a gem. It’s boring and hard work but you just have to keep turning them over.

I have never missed my final deadline with a publisher but once I almost did. I had written seven short stories but I needed one more to complete the book. Julie rang me to ask if I had finished the last one.

‘We go to the printer in two weeks, Paul,’ she said.

I was standing in Collins Street, Melbourne, opposite the Regent Theatre at the time. I’d been scratching in my notebook fruitlessly for about a month trying to think of a new story.

I had just made up my mind to tell her the truth when I noticed a billboard promoting a production of Fiddler on the Roof.

‘Don’t worry,’ I shouted into my mobile. ‘I’ve got a great idea.’

When the book was published, a farmer who lived a few properties away from me in Warrnambool came up to me in the local milk bar. Like me, he used rainwater for all domestic needs, including drinking.

He gave me a playful shove.

‘That story, “Piddler on the Roof”, was your funniest yet,’ he said.

I once spoke about the difficulty of writing humorous fiction with a leading children’s author who has topped the bestsellers list many times. I said to him, ‘If you offered me a million dollars to go into a room and write a story overnight that would make people laugh, I would not be able to do it. But make me the same offer about a story that would make people cry and I know I could write it.’

He replied, ‘I’m the opposite. I couldn’t write the sad story in the time, but the funny ones are a cinch.’

This discussion of humour takes me back to the time when I was a young father with only two children. Our family car was always something cheap and second-hand until eventually I took out a loan for a brand-new XY Falcon. Six cylinders, a gear lever on the steering wheel and a bench seat in the front. Just right for a family of four. I loved it. I cleaned and polished it regularly and never parked next to wrecks whose owners might swing their doors open and dent it.

One day I parked my precious vehicle parallel to the kerb in a suburban shopping centre. When I returned it was raining heavily and a young woman was jiggling her car around in front of mine. I could see that she was a nervous driver. I became worried that she might bump into my new car in her efforts to get hers out of the parking spot. I tapped on her window and she wound it down.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s no car behind mine,’ I said. ‘Wait a second and I’ll move back out of your way.’

She opened the door and said, ‘Oh, thanks.’ Then she stepped out and indicated that I should replace her behind the wheel. She had misheard me and seemed to think that I had offered to extract the car from its parking spot.

Oh, well, why not? I was a good driver. I stepped inside. Her mother, an elderly lady, was sitting in the passenger seat. Carole and our two kids stood on the footpath shivering under a small umbrella, slowly getting wet. The children were looking on proudly.

Confidently I grabbed the steering wheel. Then instantly my confidence evaporated. What was this? Where was the gearstick? And where the hell was the clutch pedal? What were these letters? ‘DPNR’? Oh, no. This was an automatic and I had only ever driven manual cars.

Automatics were a luxury well beyond the reach of anyone I knew. I looked at the letters nervously. ‘R’ must be Reverse. I selected it. The car jumped backwards and clunked into the bumper of my Falcon.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said the old lady.

I quickly selected ‘D’, which I figured must mean Drive. This time the car jumped forward and collected the car in front. Again, two bumpers clashed.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ the old lady repeated.

Our kids were only young at the time, but I could see that by now even they were worried. And I knew that Carole would not be impressed, standing there watching in the rain. She probably thought I was showing off to the young woman driver and now I was getting my just punishment.

I selected ‘R’ again, but this time kept my left foot on the brake. Slowly I got the hang of it. It took ages, but I finally jiggled the car out of the space without further contact with the other vehicles.

Trying to put a brave face on things, I bowed to the young woman and said, ‘There you go. I got it out for you.’

She glared at me and then said, ‘I was going in.’

My life has been full of funny events. Often the joke is on me.

16

AROUND THE TWIST

Some years after I lived on the cliff with my four children I brought my memories of the time to life on the screen. I used the situation as the background for a television series about a single-parent family who went to live beside the sea. My first draft was set in the kitchen of a house with an egg on the floor. In the opening scene, the kids and their father were sitting around a table when a signpost sailed past the window. It would become clear to the viewer that the house was moving along a road.

The producers told me that moving a house for just one episode of television was too expensive. I tried to think of something solid and interesting for the family to live in.

I came up with a lighthouse.

1987–1993

After I agreed to give an option to the Australian Children’s Television Foundation to make a television series based on my stories, I immediately rang up executive producer Patricia Edgar.

‘I’d like to write the scripts,’ I said nervously.

‘Have you ever written any before?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘It would be cruel,’ she said, ‘to expect one person to write thirteen episodes of television, especially in the time frame. And anyway, we need people with experience.’

Later she told me that I could write one draft of one episode and if they liked it, they might let me take it through to final draft. They sent director and script editor Esben Storm to guide me through the process. I wrote a draft and he edited it. He handed it to Patricia. A response came quickly.

‘Not funny enough.’

I was mortified. What a criticism.

I pressed my case. I really wanted the job. In the end she relented and let me have another go.

This time I chose a different story to base the script on. I put everything into it. Gag after gag. Draft after draft. Once again, I handed it over to Esben. I waited anxiously. Finally, I received the response. This time Patricia was a little more enthusiastic.

‘You can do them all,’ she said.

It was an amazing journey. Totally exhausting and exciting. When it was finished, I wrote a piece for Magpies, a magazine about children’s literature, describing my adventures.

Writing Round the Twist

I have finished the first drafts for all thirteen episodes of Round the Twist. I have completed final drafts for seven of these. Shooting has started. Writing is continuing. I am producing seven drafts for each episode.

Writing to deadlines is creating enormous pressure. And there are many problems. The third director (Mark Lewis) doesn’t like two of his four scripts. And I have been told that I can’t let Nell die in the final episode. ‘It’s too depressing after thirteen weeks,’ says script editor and director Esben Storm. ‘We can’t finish a series by killing off a well loved character.’ I look him in the eye. ‘If we don’t let her die, her ghost can’t return. The episode is ruined.’ Esben shrugs. Patricia Edgar the executive producer agrees with him. I feel weak at the knees. I have to think of a new plot – very quickly.

This comes on top of the earlier news that episode seven, ‘Frozen Stiff’, has been cancelled. It is too expensive to freeze a horse and thirty other animals inside large ice blocks. I have rewritten this script three times but the axe has finally fallen. I don’t have the faintest idea what I am going to replace it with. The cameras are rolling, gobbling up the minutes, days and weeks which are left.

Friday. The phone rings. Director number two, Steve Jodrell, has a problem. The flying cow’s skeleton has to go. Five thousand dollars is too expensive for one gag. Think up a new one – by Monday, when he is shooting this sequence.

The doorbell rings. It is the courier come to collect several more pages of ‘Santa Claws’. They are sweating on the final draft because this episode has gone into pre-production and a new location is needed. The producer couldn’t get a department store as required in the script. About half of the episode now has to be set in a school hall instead. I groan. There are scenes on the elevators and escalators, on the roof garden (where Santa Claws crashes), in the pet department, the make-up section and the record bar. A school hall has none of these.

Mark Lewis and several others are inspecting Williamstown Primary School for possible scene locations. I have to go. I wander around the beautiful old bluestone building gloomily. There is nowhere for Claws to crash. The roof is too steep. The kids won’t be able to walk on it. Finally I spot a gutter between two turrets. ‘Claws could crash there,’ I say. ‘His wind-up toys could totter to the edge and fall over. Pete could catch them as they fall.’ This is a new idea. Director Mark Lewis smiles. He likes it.

I rush back to my word processor. Claws will have to wait for the time being. Steve needs his flying cow replacement scene by Monday. I can’t think of anything. A billy cart – no, too old-fashioned. A telephone box – no, shades of Doctor Who. A dog kennel – no, not funny enough. I can’t think. My mind is in a whir. What can fly through the air and land on an old lady, trapping her inside? Nothing comes to mind. I stay up all night. Just before dawn I think of a supermarket trolley. A flying supermarket trolley. The very thing.

I ring Steve at the studio. He likes the trolley. ‘It’s cheap too,’ I say. He laughs loudly. I wonder if I can get a joke out of this for the script. No, it might be seen as condoning theft.

This is a children’s program.

Episode thirteen. Nell is not allowed to die – everyone is firm about this. The story is ruined. And we have already seeded ghosts at the top of the lighthouse in all the earlier episodes. The story has to be about musical ghosts. And Nell can’t die. I don’t have the faintest idea what to write.

Then there is still the replacement episode for ‘Frozen Stiff’. A whole new episode. There won’t even be time to work up scene breakdowns. I will have to go straight from story outline to first draft. The courier arrives with Esben Storm’s reactions to the twelfth episode, ‘Without My Pants’. His red pen has gone through half the scenes. ‘Not funny enough.’ ‘Repetitious.’ ‘Too many new characters.’ ‘Scene twelve doesn’t take the story anywhere.’

Esben has been my teacher. Until I met him I had never even seen a television script. I learned that scripts are written in the third person present perfect tense. I learned that there is no room for simile and metaphor. The writing must be sparse. No directions to the actors or they will be insulted. Not a suggestion of what the camera is doing, this is the director’s business.

Esben informed me that storylines, which are used to sell the show, must be literary masterpieces capable of hooking in the investors. Anything is allowed here as long as the writing is compelling. But I am talking about fourteen months ago. The storylines have long since become redundant. We have the investors. Otherwise the series would not have been proceeded with.

The phone rings. Rodney McLennan, who plays the part of Bronson, has used up all his night hours. Child actors are strictly regulated by law and Rodney can’t work at night any more until he has rested. ‘Write him out of scenes 17 to 22,’ says Esben. I feel ill. Bronson is a central character. These scenes had some great jokes suitable for a little boy. Bronson is the only little kid in the show so I can’t give them to someone else. What a waste.

There is another problem with Rodney. Esben is worried that he will get swept out to sea or catch a cold in the surf rescue scene. ‘Leave him on the shore shouting instructions to the others instead,’ suggests Esben. Oh no. More writing. What about episodes seven and thirteen? I haven’t even started them and time is rushing by.

I decide to leave Melbourne and go to Warrnambool to camp in our empty house, which has just been sold. There are no phones. I won’t emerge until I have a first draft for episode seven. Esben gives me parting instructions. ‘Use the lighthouse, the set was expensive and it has to be used.’ I am really worried about this script. If Mark Lewis doesn’t like it he won’t direct it. In addition to this worry I have the pressure of the time deadline, which is galloping towards me.

I set out for Warrnambool. I want to feature Linda (Tamsin West) in this episode. Tamsin is a good actress and Linda is an interesting character who has not featured as much as the boys. Linda and the lighthouse. Those are my parameters.

After two days I have a plot pinched from my short story ‘The Copy’. Linda copies herself in a cloner in the top room of the lighthouse. The copy turns out to be obnoxious. Linda and the copy fight to push each other back in the machine and switch on ‘reverse’. Each wants the other dead. The copy wins and is the survivor. This is the twist at the end of the story.

Deep in my heart I know it’s not right. Linda is a nice character. Trying to reverse the copy is really attempted murder. She couldn’t murder someone. It just won’t work.

I start again. This time Linda likes the copy. She and her copy care about each other. The cloner blows up after a rabbit keeps doubling itself. The copy of Linda disappears and Linda cries over her lost twin. Great stuff.

I ring through to Esben. I am excited as I outline the plot to him over the phone. There is a long silence. At last he says, ‘There’s no climax.’

No climax. I am stunned. Why didn’t I see it? What’s wrong with me? I go back to the empty house. I think and think and think. I try again. Linda and the copy love each other. One of them has to be reversed or they will both die. All the copies of objects and their originals begin to melt. Linda and her double realise that this will be their fate unless one of them is reversed in the cloner. Each fights for the privilege of sacrificing their own life. A desperate battle at the door of the flashing cloner will be a great moment.

I have a climax. I know that this is a good story and I write the first draft. I fax it to Esben. The next day he rings back. He likes it. Patricia Edgar likes it. And … Mark Lewis likes it. He wants to direct it.

I return to Melbourne and work on the final episode. At the same time I am knocking out various drafts for another five episodes, writing the new scenes for ‘Santa Claws’ and working on the last-minute changes needed by the two directors. Mark Lewis doesn’t like any of my drafts for ‘Without My Pants’. Esben Storm loves them. He takes over as director for this episode. And for the last one, which has yet to be written.

That week at rushes I see Steve Jodrell. ‘How did the flying supermarket trolley go?’ I ask him. ‘Oh,’ he replies. ‘We ran out of light so I cut that scene.’

I write three different storylines for the final episode. Esben doesn’t like any of them. I am exhausted. Seven days a week, writing into the night. Draft after draft. Joke after joke. I have been writing nothing but this series for eighteen months. And now I can’t think of a plot for the last episode. It has so many restrictions. Three kids living in a lighthouse with their dad. Musical ghosts that have to be explained. A whole new plot. And a suitable end to the series. It has to be the best episode. I can’t do it. Nothing I write works. Everyone is worried. After all this time we have two days to get a first draft. Other people are suggesting plots. This has never happened before. All of the other episodes had my name on the script. It looks as if someone else will have to be brought in to help. Millions of dollars are at stake. The film crew and actors have to have a script. They can’t just stand there waiting while I fight for an idea.

My head spins. I’m cracking up. I don’t think I can go on. I receive a phone call from Patricia Edgar, who is in San Francisco. ‘Go for your gut feeling,’ she says. ‘I don’t want anything unless you like it.’

It is the little confidence booster I need. I gather all of the rejected scripts and some ideas suggested by Esben. I sit down and pick out the best. I add new elements. A story emerges. A fight to save the lighthouse from developers.

A romance. A little girl ghost. At the very end of the episode she can kiss Bronson in front of a magnificent sunrise. All the main characters will witness it.

On a cold winter’s morning I watch as Esben and the director of photography (Jan Kenny) shoot this scene.

Then it is all over.

Three months later the finished tapes arrive by courier. I tear open the parcel and rush to my video player. I watch the last story first. My family gathers around the television set. It is a beautiful episode. In the final scene, the rising sun bursts out between the softly touching lips of Bronson and the little girl ghost.

I look around the lounge room. Everyone is crying.

(Magpies, SEPTEMBER 1990)

The first twenty-six episodes in Round the Twist came from my collections of short stories. I had wanted to have thirteen different episodes closely following the plots and characters in these tales. This would have meant thirteen different casts of actors playing new characters in each episode. And thirteen different sets and locations. Too expensive. So, I invented a family based on my own life and wove the short-story plots around them.

The piece above that I wrote for Magpies magazine was composed shortly after the series was finished. Reading over it again after all this time reminds me of how much fun it was, but also how exhausting. I still remember having to get a massage every week to try and loosen up my neck muscles after spending more than twelve hours a day typing.

My first scripts came back from Esben covered in corrections and objections. They were like bad school essays, covered in crossings-out and lines through whole paragraphs. Sometimes my drafts for stories come back from Julie looking like this. I groan. I almost resent it, because fixing things up is so difficult and uninteresting. But I do appreciate it enormously. I know that I need it. I am a very heavily edited author.

And I love the praise often scribbled in the margins. Pathetic, I know, but I still scavenge the manuscript for every kind word.

Writing scripts is a different process to writing books and it contains formalities that have to be followed. And some demands that are different entirely.

I remember giving the character Pete the following words:

‘Look at that old sea-chest washed up on the shore down there.’

Esben had put a red line through the whole sentence.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked. ‘What should he say?’

Esben replied with one word:

‘Look.’

I felt foolish. Of course. The camera tells us what Pete sees. In a book we can use a character to tell us what he sees, but on film you don’t need it. I should have known this, because many picture books use the same strategy. The illustrator is helping tell the story and the words can be modified or removed to take this into account.

Another time I wrote an instruction about the way a scene would be shot. I wrote: Through the wagon wheels we see …

That was struck out.

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘You are not the director. I’m the director. Where the camera is placed is none of the writer’s business.’

I know that some book illustrators also feel like this. Others are quite happy to let the author in on the process.

The rules for writing scripts are not hard to learn. Just follow the conventions. Esben was a good teacher. And he had a great sense of humour. In the end I got the hang of it.

Sometimes when we were working over my drafts, we would laughingly egg each other on. I recall discussing a scene where Pete has been hypnotised to think that he is a chicken.

I said, ‘What if he eats a snail?’

Esben added, ‘I’ll put in crunching sound effects.’

We both rolled around splitting our sides. It was often like that. If we were laughing at our own gags it was a good sign.

But, like a novel, in the end a TV show depends on a good story well told. If you don’t have that, you have nothing.

I was a novice and everyone on the set knew it. They were extremely nice to me. I think my naivety about the industry resulted in my acceptance in a most generous and unusual way. I was invited to sit in on the casting and given the opportunity to address the actors. I remember Esben telling me that I had been paid a great compliment in being invited to do that.

At the first reading of my first script I spoke nervously. I said that I didn’t want pratfalls and slapstick comedy. The humour was sophisticated and contained in the writing. Just because the viewers were children didn’t mean that the acting had to be childish. The jokes had to be good enough to make the adults laugh, too.

I also pointed out that this particular genre, contemporary fantasy, depended on the background world appearing to be normal and believable. I wanted the school to be a typical school. And the teachers to be real teachers, not fools. The environment could be ten per cent removed from reality, but no more.

I hope I didn’t sound pompous. I knew that I was a beginner in many ways. Esben taught me plenty. I had never heard of the rule of three – a funny thing can happen once, then again slightly expanded and exaggerated, and then the final crunch. Any further repetition is too much.

He also told me that when the audience sees something funny on screen they will laugh. But if they also see a character in a movie watching the funny incident in amazement, they will laugh more.

The first time I visited, the set was in a disused hospital. I arrived before dawn because shooting was starting early. The cast and crew were lining up at the food wagon for breakfast. I was hungry and wondered whether or not I was permitted to partake of the food. I tentatively joined the end of the queue.

‘Who are you?’ said the chap in front of me.

‘The writer,’ I said nervously.

He pointed further down the line. ‘You should be down there.’

I didn’t know that there was a strict protocol for one’s place in the food line. The director was always first, followed by the actors and others depending on their status or whether or not they were going to be required on set immediately. He took me further down the line and placed me in front of all the extras.

Auditions for the child actors were held in a huge hall. A hundred or more kids turned up. They were all filled with excitement and accompanied by anxious parents. A page from one of my scripts was handed out to each as they entered. I saw that it was the last page from my script ‘Lucky Lips’.

This script had given me a lot of trouble. In the original book, a bully named Gribble finds some magic lipstick that will make the nearest female kiss him. Every time he uses the lipstick it backfires, and he ends up being passionately kissed not by Fiona, the desired girl, but someone else. Kisses come from Fiona’s mother, his schoolteacher and a very old lady. Finally, Gribble gets his comeuppance by falling into a pigpen, where he is kissed by a sow.

Esben told me that he wanted the story to be about Pete, the hero, not Gribble, the bully. I protested. Pete wouldn’t go around stealing kisses.

‘Nice boys do silly things sometimes, too,’ he said.

I sighed and went home to try and solve this problem. Finally, I decided that Pete must repent. The story could stay the same but must now end with him sitting on the beach with Fiona. He apologises for kissing her mother.

She says, ‘That’s okay, I know it was the magic lipstick.’

She gently lifts his chin and gives him his first real kiss. End of story.

The prospective actors have all been paired up – boy girl, boy girl. They are told to memorise the final scene in ‘Lucky Lips’. They will then come up in pairs and act out the kiss in front of the panel and all the other hopefuls who are also watching.

We sit behind a long trestle table from which we will make our evaluations.

Some of the auditioning students refuse to do the kiss – they are immediately told that they can leave. The rest come out in pairs and act out the scene with great courage and sensitivity. I had never seen any of my stories performed before. I found it incredibly moving and blinked back tears.

I thought, All of these people are kissing each other just because of me.’

It wasn’t all because of me, of course. But on the other hand, it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t written the story in the first place.

After the first series of Round the Twist was in the can, my work wasn’t finished. I was committed to writing a tie-in book to accompany the series. Books written from scripts are known in the trade as novelisations. I had no idea how I could write one when the stories in the episodes had already been published in my earlier books. It created a huge problem. I couldn’t just collect the thirteen short stories and republish them – that would be ripping off the readers. So would writing thirteen novelisations of the same stories.

Julie was just as worried as me as the weeks ticked by. I’d signed a contract and taken my advance payment. Penguin was depending on me to deliver. The book had to be finished, printed, and in the shops before the launch of the series. I just didn’t know what to do.

This was a really big problem. I became more and more anxious. I spent day after day scratching around in my ideas book. Nothing. Time raced by. I was going to let everyone down.

Then one day Julie arrived on my doorstep with a bottle of champagne.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said excitedly. ‘You are really good at talking directly to kids about your stories, the way you work and what’s behind them. You do it in a way that makes each one of them feel they are the only one in the room with you. Tell the story of how you wrote the series and the way it was made.’

I raised an eyebrow and she continued.

‘Put all that material on each left-hand page along with interviews of the actors. Use stills and bits and pieces of your scripts. On the opposite pages, novelise three episodes as examples of how the plot has been adapted for the screen.’

I was jubilant. It was a fantastic idea. I grabbed the champagne bottle and we knocked it off. I met the deadline and the book went on to sell over two hundred thousand copies.

When we decided to make the second series of Round the Twist, Esben said to me, ‘You only get to lose your innocence once.’

He was right. The second series was also terrific, but everything changed and by the time we finished shooting my media-world innocence was well and truly gone. I think I believed in myself a bit too much. And I was exhausted by the whole process. I was ready to return to writing books, my first love.

Round the Twist was the product of a group of inspired and brilliant people. I won an AWGIE award (‘Best Children’s Television Adaption’) for the screenplay of the first series and shared another one with Esben for the second series. These episodes went on to be shown all around the world. It is still the most successful series ever produced by the ACTF. They are proud of it. And so am I.

17

IN NEED OF HELP

My dear friend, writer and illustrator Ted Greenwood, was the only man I knew who lived anywhere near me in the Dandenong Ranges when I first moved there. He was someone who had his priorities well worked out. From his example I learned that fame and success are false gods. He was someone who knew what was really important in life. He was as wise and thoughtful as I was by now extravagant and impulsive.

1990–1994

Nineteen ninety was the year I relocated to Belgrave in the Dandenong Ranges with my wife and two stepchildren. The other four kids from my first marriage were now young adults and had left home. The move meant that I could be closer to the film studio while I wrote the scripts for the second series of Round the Twist. We bought a fairytale cottage on the edge of Sherbrooke Forest and settled in for a new life among the ferns and tall mountain gum trees.

My wife had a job tutoring at Deakin University and I was at home all day working alone. I now had a lot of time to myself. Too much, in fact. I needed a distraction. It came in the form of a historic car. A 1936 model Riley Kestrel. It was a beautiful old saloon that was so gracious and lovely, I decided to have it restored to mint condition. When it was finished it looked fantastic and I vowed to never drive it in the rain. I had always loved classic cars and knew the names of most of the pre-and post-war English models. The Riley was to be one of many I bought in the following years.

Ted Greenwood liked the car a lot. I knew that he had once been friendly with author Ivan Southall – one of my heroes, who had long before created a series of books about a space cadet named Simon Black. As an eleven-year-old, I had loved his books. I never dreamed that it would be possible to meet him. I asked Ted if he could introduce us.

He shook his head. ‘We’ve drifted apart,’ he said sadly. ‘I haven’t seen him for ages. But I can tell you he would love this car.’

About a year later Ted rang me. He was excited.

‘I spoke with Ivan for the first time in years,’ he said. ‘And he would love to see the Riley. It’s all on for tomorrow. We can drive up to Healesville and take him and Susan for a spin.’

My heart sank a little. Much as I wanted to see Ivan, Healesville was a long way off and we would have to drive over the Dandenong Ranges from my place. The Riley was temperamental and didn’t like hills. But I agreed.

The next day it was pouring with rain. Oh, no. I thought about trying to put the trip off, but some occasions have their moment and you can’t chance missing it.

We reached Healesville without any trouble except a few crunches from the difficult-to-use pre-selector gearbox.

When they saw each other, Ivan and Ted embraced with great emotion. They hadn’t seen each other for a long, long time. We all went for a drive and then returned for morning tea. Now in retirement, Ivan was propagating fuchsias. He showed us his collection of these lovely flowers just as we were preparing to leave.

‘Here’s a new variety that I have developed,’ he said.

He produced a photo and showed it to Ted, who was an avid gardener. He looked at the flower in the picture. All purples, greens and reds. Splendid.

‘What’s it called?’ said Ted.

‘Look on the back.’

Ted turned it over and saw the words: Variety, Ted Greenwood.

They both started to blink back tears. So did Ivan’s wife, Susan. Ted and I drove back to Belgrave in silence. Our cheeks were wet.

And so was my Riley Kestrel.

I had originally met Ted when he accepted my invitation to be a guest tutor at the Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education. He became incredibly popular with the staff and students. He was a natural therapist who could help others with their problems in a kind and gentle way. Ted put a daily calendar on his office door showing the times he was available. I remember passing his office one day and seeing a long line of people waiting. I had never seen that before. Even other staff members sought him out.

Whoever sat next to Ted at a dinner party received the same interested and enquiring attention. No matter what a person’s background or education, he listened in the same involved way. He responded with concern and gentle humour.

I knew that Ted was interested in spoonerisms and that he was a master of word games. I asked him if he would be interested in joining me in writing a fun word book about them and he readily agreed.

We both held the view that anything that makes reading a laborious effort for children will hold them back, so we thought a funny book would be ideal. We got together and designed a tiny mock-up. We were both out of our minds with excitement over this ambitious project and knew that we needed an illustrator with a terrific sense of humour. We approached comedic genius Terry Denton to illustrate the book and to our great joy he agreed. We were off.

Terry produced a full colour dummy that was wickedly funny. We were thrilled with it, but because the book involved a lot of paper engineering, we were nervous. Would Penguin take the risk on this bold and expensive project? Julie tells me that she and Erica Wagner (who is now my publisher) fell about with delight when they saw it.

It was basically a puzzle book. Spoonerisms are sentences or phrases where a person accidently makes a ‘slip of the tongue’ and the individual speech sounds become mixed up, resulting in a ridiculous sentence.

Probably the most well-known example of an Australian spoonerism was an announcement made by the conductor of a train as it approached the Victorian state border. At the time no fruit was allowed into the state because of a fruit-fly infestation affecting crops in New South Wales.

The conductor announced over the PA system, ‘Open your flies for a fruit bag inspection.’

In our book, Spooner or Later, readers are given a sentence and have to find a picture that illustrates what the speaker meant to say. The spelling is irrelevant – it’s the speech sounds that matter.

Here’s a few of our spoonerisms with answers.

Mown Gran – grown man

Bee on the peak – pee on the beak

Two lunged blizzard – blue tongued lizard

Head waiters scaring rats – red skaters wearing hats

And four others without answers.

Rex tested the strudel by poking it

A handle colder

A mild waiter skipping sadly

The rude spectre yanks a gnu

One of Terry’s drawings got us into big trouble. It was only a few centimetres in size and hidden among fifty or so other drawings on a big fold-out page. The scandal-loving and now defunct newspaper Truth blew it up into a large picture and declared that it was corrupting our youth.

The illustration in question was the one Terry drew in response to the last spoonerism on the list above.

Ted, Terry and I were proud of the design of our book, which involved a number of small pages inside larger ones. Ted and I made up the spoonerisms. Terry illustrated. His crazy and off-the-wall pictures have tremendous appeal to children. He has a mind that sees things completely differently to most other people. Ted and I were amazed by his hilarious interpretations.

We had such a great time that we went on to produce two more puzzle books. Our planning meetings were filled with laughter and camaraderie. There was always a bottle of wine on the table and so many laughs and jokes were thrown around in these sessions that we could have gone on to produce fifty books. It seemed these happy times would go on forever.

Sadly, they didn’t. Ted was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Although it slowed him down quite a lot, he continued working for a number of years. But in the end the condition caught up with him. He collapsed into a coma while visiting his brother-in-law in Portland. Ted had been dancing around in his underpants. I’m sure he would have thought that it was a great way to go.

Ted’s family, knowing that he would never wake up again, and aware that I lived nearby, kindly invited me to see him in hospital. They left us alone for a few minutes so that I could say goodbye.

I kissed him on the forehead and told him that I loved him.

Terry and I were devastated by his loss.

I remember someone once saying, ‘If you want to know who you are, look at your friends.’

I used to cheer myself up sometimes by thinking, I can’t be too bad. Ted is my friend.

When Round the Twist was finished and in the can, I returned to writing books. For most of my adult life I had been surrounded by staff and students and had always enjoyed the give-and-take that took place in staffrooms at lunchtimes. Ted lived on the other side of the mountain and I was finding it hard to make any new friends closer to home. Often the only contact I would have with a human being in a whole day was when I walked down the street to the local cafe and could exchange a word or two with the barista. At times my loneliness morphed into despair and depression.

One day my stepdaughter told me that one of her friends at school had a father who was, like me, interested in old English cars. His name was Keith Hulstaert. I asked him and his wife, Alison, around for a coffee and we immediately became friends.

I was out one day wandering aimlessly in the main street when Keith drove by. He pulled over for a chat. We got to talking about cars. He was between jobs and also at a bit of a loose end.

‘Why don’t we buy an MG and race it in the Targa Tasmania?’ I blurted out.

‘Great idea,’ he said. We both went home and left notes saying, Gone to Ballarat to buy an MG.

In the end we didn’t buy the car from Ballarat, because it had only four cylinders and not quite enough grunt for racing. We returned to Melbourne and eventually bought a bright yellow Triumph TR6, which had six cylinders and twin carburettors.

We didn’t make it to the Targa Tasmania, but Keith and I did race at many tracks around the country. Keith later bought another TR6 and introduced me to his friends Johno and Cheryl, who also bought a TR6. We were then joined by Peter and Marilyn and landscape gardener Arie. With these new friends and their wives, I was on my way to one of the most fun times of my life.

At one point I bought a copy of the book The Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck and inscribed it to My Friend Keith. After that he became known in the group as MFK. He is still my dear friend.

For the first time in my adult life I had no debts. I bought an XJS Jaguar. Later I purchased an E-Type – considered by many to be the most beautiful car ever built. At the time I had no idea why I spent so much money on these cars. My father had always lusted after a Jaguar. He was dead by this time, but it still hadn’t occurred to me that my purchases might be some sort of unconscious metaphorical one-upmanship. Or did I just love these restored symbols of an earlier, gentler time?

Next, I employed Terry Wright, a builder who also became my friend, to construct a huge garage with a pit and all the latest tools. The garage was designed with sliding doors featuring huge curved windows so that I could look at my vehicles as I walked by. I would immerse myself in there on weekends and spend hours working on various projects. I bought myself a white mechanic’s jacket and took great pride in my new set-up.

I was having a wonderful time with the cars and the guys and our wives, touring around the countryside visiting wineries and car shows. We would lunch in cafes and nod knowingly at the admiring blokes outside inspecting our shining row of historic sports cars.

‘My dad used to have one of these,’ they would say wistfully. This always made us smile.

It was all such fun. The mateship was great. I will never forget that time and those wonderful people, who became and still are my friends. But deep down I knew that my growing fleet was excessive. Unfortunately, I got carried away. In no time at all I had the 1936 Riley Kestrel, a 1934 MG Special, the E-Type, two Triumph TR6s, and a TVR Griffith.

Seven English cars in all, including the XJS. But despite the picture I have been painting of all the fun times, the excesses could not lift my ever-growing bouts of depression.

After a few years in our fairytale home, I bought the cottage next door and employed two assistants – the incredibly talented Louise McCall and her offsider, Monique. Arie, who tended our garden and was also a close friend, was part of it all. Terry Wright was erecting a series of extensions to the house, including a three-storey turret and a new kitchen. These building works went on for years.

Every lunchtime this growing group would gather around a table in the office. It was just like the staffrooms I had once enjoyed as a teacher. I was no longer lonely, in the sense that I now had company, but some sort of inner loneliness continued to bug me. It was almost as if two parts of me were not speaking to each other.

At the time, someone referring to the cars, buildings and merry band of people, gave me their opinion. ‘You have built a shrine to yourself.’

There was a dark side to the extravagant lifestyle but I largely kept my worries about it to myself. My periods of depression were growing worse and worse. I would look at all the happy people in the street and think, They are normal. I am not. I am alone and different.

The problem with depression is that when the gloom descends, the real world seems dreamlike or non-existent. When in the depths of this dark abyss the sufferer does not believe that a sunlit world exists just nearby. Once I wrote myself a note and sealed it in an envelope. I planned to open it next time I was visited by Churchill’s Black Dog of depression. The note said, This bleak period will pass. Life is really good. Get over it.

Of course, the message didn’t work – I simply didn’t believe it, even though I had written it myself. I regarded it as a total lie. I asked my doctor for a referral and he sent me to a psychiatrist. I was nervous about this, especially on my first visit.

I arrived early at the front door of the narrow Victorian terrace where the psychiatrist had a practice. There was only a street number to identify the building and it looked just like any one of the others in the line of terraces. I knocked on the door. After a bit, a whiskery-faced man opened it and barked at me in a gruff voice.

‘Yes?’

I told him who I was.

‘You’re early,’ he snapped. I nodded.

‘Oh, well, come in then.’

He stood aside as I entered and then opened another door on one side of the gloomy corridor.

‘In there.’

I stepped in and he banged the door closed behind me. The blinds were down and it was totally dark. I felt my way to a chair and sat there in silence. I wondered if I was allowed to turn on the light. I felt like a naughty child. Finally, I got up, felt my way to the door and switched on the light.

After a while I heard footsteps and then the sound of the front door opening and closing. I guessed that another patient had left. Whisker Face entered and led me to a bare room that contained a couch and two spindly chairs. He pointed to one of them. We both sat. And stared at each other. I waited for him to speak. Seconds passed. Maybe minutes.

Eventually, I said, ‘Well, what happens now? What do we do?’

He said, ‘How old are you?’

I said, ‘Forty-seven.’

He said, ‘Well, a forty-seven-year-old man must have had a lot of things happen to him.’

I said, ‘Yes.’

He continued to stare at me without speaking. After a while, I started to tell him about some of my problems and my childhood experiences.

He listened without commenting. If there was a pause or silence, he would not fill the gap. I hesitantly spoke for fifty-five minutes until it was time to leave. He had not made one comment since I started talking.

I left confused and disappointed. I couldn’t see how this was going to help.

On my second trip it was pouring with rain. I had promised to meet my daughter Tracy and give her a lift to the station but had been delayed and unable to contact her. I stopped the car several times to ring her from a phone box but couldn’t get through. I knew that she would be worrying about where I was.

When I finally arrived for my therapy session, I asked the psychiatrist if I could use his phone. He showed me into a small kitchen and stood there silently listening to what I was saying.

I hung up and we returned to the consulting room.

He glared at me angrily. ‘You requested that phone call in order to exert your dominance over me,’ he said. ‘You are a control freak.’

I mumbled some sort of apology as we went through a session identical to the first one.

When I reached home, I wrote him a letter:

Dear Dr X,

I will not be coming to any more of your sessions. After two hours with you I feel normal.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Jennings

The depressive periods began to get even worse. I still needed help. I decided that I would have to look elsewhere.

This time, on a recommendation, I contacted Dr Peter O’Connor, the well-known therapist and writer who was known to have a more friendly approach. I knew that he had an interest in Jungian theory and dreams and had written several books, including one titled Understanding the Mid-Life Crisis, which I had enjoyed greatly.

His waiting room was on the first floor of an old mansion. It was filled with warm sunlight. This was a good start. He greeted me with a smile and indicated a comfortable chair. I told him that I just wanted a quick fix for depression and would only need a few sessions. He smiled again and nodded kindly. Little did I know that I would still be seeking his help five years later.

He asked me why I had come and I began to blurt out my problems. He asked me if I’d had any dreams prior to coming to see him.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In the dream I was in my father’s garage. And one of the friends from my church Youth Fellowship days arrived and used chloroform to put me to sleep.’

It was quite a long dream and I described it in detail. Peter nodded. ‘Tell me about that garage.’

I wondered why he wanted to talk about that specific part of the dream. It seemed such a small detail to pick out.

‘It was nothing special,’ I said. ‘Big enough for a car. My father’s workbench and drills and tools were at the far end.’

He nodded. ‘Anything else?’

There was. I told him about the agonising weekends I spent there with my father. And later, after many sessions, I was able, for the first time, to speak about my shameful secret. The mental stings from invisible bees – the unwanted images of bashing my father on the head with a hammer. Oh, the relief that it brought just to talk about it to someone who understood. I had half-expected that he might send for the men in white coats, but he was not in the least surprised at my story. How reassuring. The calm way he informed me that I was far from being the only person with that problem instantly lifted my spirits.

One thing that particularly impressed me was the way Peter listened. Like my friend Ted, he would let me speak for ages, concentrating in an engaged way. I used to wonder how he did it with patient after patient. After my long rambling he would come out with a few observations and suggestions, which inevitably led to the nub of the problem. He was also extremely insightful as to the meaning of dreams.

Although I would sometimes find myself weeping during the sessions, I looked forward to every visit. Peter was amazingly helpful. Over those five years we covered a lot of ground together. I told him about the time I finally had a confrontation with my father. And the problems I faced with my new-found fame. As a result of his sessions I was now starting to feel as if I was part of the human race. I was neither crazy nor special. And, given all the ups and downs of the sort that everyone has, I was finding myself at peace with the world. I’ll never forget his patient and insightful assistance.

Peter also helped me with my enlarged ego. I wasn’t exactly in rock-star territory, but I was living in a manner a long way from my previous anonymous life. And it was starting to go to my head. With the extravagant house, the cars and all the publicity, I had finally got my dream. I had become the boy in the pirate’s costume.

In response to this realisation I swung to the opposite position. When people asked me how I could ever come up with so many different stories I began saying, ‘It’s just an aberration – nothing special.’

Peter said to me, ‘Stop saying that. You should respect your talent.’

There is always a middle ground. On the matter of owning seven cars he had a different view. I had come to worry about it. It was excessive. And I was definitely starting to project an image of success and wealth.

‘Do you think it’s okay to have seven cars?’ I asked. ‘They’re worth about half a million dollars.’

I thought he was going to give me a lecture about all the good and worthy things I could have done with the money. But he made only one comment:

‘Your ego might be able to handle it,’ he said. ‘But mine couldn’t.’

I knew he was right. The real purpose of the glass doors on my garage was for other people to look at the glistening cars as they passed by. I was aware of looking at the reflection of my vehicles in shop windows when I parked.

I went home from the session and put most of the cars up for sale.

But not the Riley.

There’s more to controlling a rampant ego than selling a few cars, however, and I discovered I still had a long way to go.

Not long after this, children’s author Morris Gleitzman and I co-wrote a serial novel in six small parts called Wicked! I wrote the part of the boy character in my chapters and he wrote his from the view of the girl. Because the books were written in the first person there was a possibility that the readers might become confused as to which character was speaking at the beginning of each chapter. We decided to put a silhouetted drawing of the girl at the beginning of Morris’s sections and one of a boy in front of mine to signal which character was speaking.

Keeping in mind my obsession with making things easy for struggling readers, I was very attached to this device. I didn’t want the kids to become confused.

When one of the books was printed, some of these silhouettes had been placed incorrectly – the image of the boy had been placed at the beginning of the girl’s chapters, and vice versa. I was terribly upset about this. I rang Peter Field, the managing director at Penguin at the time, and asked him to pulp the books already printed and issue a new edition. He was very nice about it – he actually came to my house to talk it over, which I knew was a generous compliment.

But in the end, he said, ‘We are not going to pulp seventy thousand books, not even for you, Paul.’

It was a great print run, but all the more reason to increase the pressure. I replied, ‘Hundreds of parents and teachers will write in and complain. If you don’t pulp the faulty books, I won’t publish with Penguin anymore.’ This saddened him but he refused to budge. Others at Penguin, including Julie, thought that I should reconsider. She felt that my writing voice was distinctive and the kids wouldn’t even notice the slip-up.

But I was adamant. I decided to leave.

A little after this I dreamed that I was stuck up on the spar of a huge sailing ship. Far below was the pier. I was shaking with fear looking down from this enormous height. Suddenly Julie appeared with a long ladder. She held it up to the spar but I was too frightened to put my leg down and step onto the top rung. I awoke trembling.

I relayed this dream to Peter O’Connor and he said, ‘Typical of you, Paul. Impulsively taking the high moral ground and then refusing to budge even when you’re offered a way out.’

I went home and considered his words. I thought about all the people at Penguin who had supported me on my publishing journey – Kay, Julie, other editors, book designers, illustrators, publicists, sales reps and the friendly administration staff. I would also be walking out on them. And this was the company that had given me my start. But changing my mind now would make me look stupid and weak. How humiliating.

In the end I made an appointment with Peter Field and went into his office and apologised for kicking up all the fuss. He was very good about it and we shook hands.

After the book was published, we did not receive one complaint. No one even seemed to have noticed the mistake.

I don’t believe that dreams necessarily tell you what to do. But I do think they help you to know what you are really feeling. I have had many dreams like the one above that have made me reconsider some of my actions.

The most interesting dreams seem to occur in the morning. I think that we are close to our unconscious mind at this time and I know that I do my best writing just after sunrise. Most of my new ideas seem to occur around this time.

On the other hand, I know a number of successful writers who work at night. There are no rules in writing. Everyone is different.

There isn’t any such thing as normal.

18

FAIRYTALE COTTAGE

It has long been a convention in children’s-book publishing to put some biographical information about the author at the rear of the book. Publishers like something interesting to attract the kids’ attention and also build an author profile. One of the things they said about me was that I lived in a fairytale cottage in the hills outside of Melbourne.

One day I received a letter that had come all the way from Queensland. It was written in a child’s handwriting and simply addressed as follows.

Paul Jennings fairytale cottage in the hills

Apart from being pleased that I was now well known enough for that letter to find me, I thought that Australia Post had made a pretty impressive effort.

My wife and I had some wonderful moments in that house, but we also had some very upsetting ones.

Unfortunately, for us, the fairytale was coming to an end.

1990–2011

When I hit the big time, my wife was in her element. She loved the high life and all the razzle-dazzle of the publishing world and, to be honest, at that stage, so did I. We went together on publicity tours and expensive holidays in Australia and abroad. We became well known for big parties and extravagant outings and we had a lot of fun.

But I could only take so much of that life. When at parties and dinners, I would have to go outside and look at the stars and find a bit of silence. I much preferred to find one person to talk to rather than engaging in group discussions and arguments at dinner parties.

When we moved to Belgrave the four kids from my first marriage had grown up and left home. There were just the four of us – me, my wife and her two teenage children. I started to become depressed and was finding it hard to get out of bed. My wife and I were having many arguments.

These things, combined with the absence of my other children, left me looking for an escape from the marriage.

One night I had a dream that I had died and was now a ghost floating up near the ceiling and looking down on my wife and two stepchildren. They were laughing and talking and totally unaware that I was there. The feeling of sadness that I felt as a ghost was so intense that it woke me up.

It washed me with feelings of loneliness for months. I remember thinking that the life of an unseen spirit looking at their surviving happy family would be extremely painful.

Finally, we decided to sell the fairytale house and return to Warrnambool, where my adult children still lived. I started searching for another block of land that ran to the top of the wild cliffs. I approached Dick Vickers, the farmer whose cow had become stranded on a rock years before. I asked him if he would sell me part of his farm. We bought sixty acres of land from him just down the road from my original old house. This time we planned a modern minimalist home that was to be snuggled into the ground overlooking the sea.

Someone had once complained that my previous building ‘stuck out like a sore toe and you can see it from Port Fairy’.

His words were meant as a criticism. The little coastal town of Port Fairy was thirty-four kilometres away. I realised with some shame that it is better if coastal views are not ruined by tall houses sticking up and spoiling the seascape. My new house would be built into the ground and the roof planted out with native vegetation so that it couldn’t be seen at all from the road and the surrounding properties.

The high life continued in the stylish modernist house that we built into a sandstone cliff overlooking the sea. We hired local bands and held rock-and-roll parties with a hundred or more people in attendance. I still felt lonely and disconnected in the midst of all this. Our arguments grew worse and worse. We separated twice but, in an echo of my relationship with Carole, had several sad, desperate efforts at reconciliation.

What happened next turned our world upside down. I fell in love with another woman – a violinist. I will call her Veronica. She was a lovely person and our short friendship exploded into wild, out-of-control love and passion. It was chaotic and totally overwhelming. In terms of days, our love affair (a horrible word) only lasted four months.

But it took me seven years to get over it.

My marriage ended but Veronica’s did not. My wife and I had a few discussions about getting back together, but too much had happened for us to give it yet another try. What had not been working for us before was still not working. And it wouldn’t have been fair to her. I was still crazily in love with Veronica.

I was particularly miserable about everything that had happened. Having made the decision to stay with her husband, Veronica asked me not to contact her anymore and I had no choice but to respect this.

I was always hoping that I would get a phone call from her. Even a text message (something that was new to me) would have been better than nothing. But nothing was all I got.

Seven years after the end of my passionate but short-lived romance, I was sitting on a stone block in Melbourne’s City Square, sipping a takeaway coffee. I looked up to see her standing there. My heart began to pound.

‘I’m just going to get a coffee,’ Veronica said awkwardly.

‘Bring it back here,’ I said, trying to calm myself.

She walked slowly over to the cafe. I would have hurried hopelessly, unable to stop, showing my vulnerability, spilling the coffee. She always walked like that. Quietly confident.

When she returned, she simply said, ‘Sorry, I can’t.’

Seven years. It had been that long since we had last talked. And I was still nuts about her. I knew nothing of her circumstances. Was she still with her husband? Or someone else?

She turned, and in the same slow, determined way, walked across the square, blended into the crowd and was gone. The bustling city centre was filled with noise, but inside my head there was only an aching silence.

I felt drained and disappointed at the finality of her few words. But at least I knew for certain that it was over.

During this period, I had once more started to see my therapist, Peter. The next time I saw him I said, ‘Do you think that I will ever fall in love like that again?’

He said, ‘Probably not.’

I left the session feeling a bit low. But then I had a thought.

He didn’t say no.

Maybe there was a chance. You never know what the future holds. Or whether or not there is some meaning to it all that will one day reveal itself. I did not have that special person to share my life with, but I did have something else: fifty-eight acres of bare paddocks.

My wife gained ownership of the modernist house overlooking the ocean and I took over the attached land, which included a tiny soldier settlement house. I moved into it and surveyed my new holding. The land did not contain a single tree or shrub. I made up my mind to plant the whole lot out with species indigenous to the area. I decided to create a forest and do it by combining direct seeding with the planting of tube stock.

I turned to the land for help. I needed a project that was both calming and inspiring. I think these trees saved my life. Even so, it was tough.

The first step was to collect seeds from remnants of untouched bushland along creek beds, the coastal strip and some private properties. I employed an expert contractor to gather the seeds and scatter them. He sprayed the kikuyu grass and other weeds twice to kill off the competition for the seeds. Next the property was ploughed into long furrows and sprayed again a month later. Then the seed was scattered.

At first the seeding part of the process was disappointing. I would trudge over the land looking for small sprouts. They were hard to find and few in number. And weeds regrew and started competing with the new plants for moisture and sunlight. Rabbits and hares arrived and made the most of it. I complained to the contractor and he urged me to be patient. The whole thing looked like a disaster to me. I started to put in more tube stock – thousands of individual plants protected by plastic bags or empty milk cartons.

For most of the next ten years I lived on my own. I wrote, worked on the forest and extended the little cottage.

Two people who helped me survive this time were my office managers – Deidre Grayson, who gave me incredibly loyal, caring and efficient support, and the equally wonderful Fiona Parker, who succeeded her.

Fiona was my office manager, and together with her husband, Pete, and their two daughters, Nina and Milly, she assisted enormously with the planting and care of the slowly growing forest. Fiona and Pete were ‘hands on’ building their own home at the same time as having jobs and parenting the two girls. I had converted a huge barn into an office where Fiona worked. She is a person who can turn her hand to practically anything. Bookkeeping, taxation returns, contracts, tiling, painting, building, plumbing, care of livestock, repairing cars, cooking, catering, reading manuscripts, cheering up a dejected author, running a bookshop and even dealing with Telstra patiently on the phone.

During this period, I used to receive groups of schoolchildren and talk to them about writing books and also my revegetation project. Some of them even brought native plants to add to the project. We didn’t charge for these visits – it was a good chance for me to keep in touch with my readers and I greatly enjoyed showing the teachers and students over the property.

Despite the rabbits, the salty wind, the droughts and the weeds, the forest began to grow. At first it was just sprouting around my ankles. Then, inside of a year, it was knee height, and then in no time at all reached my shoulders. The birds started to come.

I sometimes visited the flat that I had bought in Melbourne. During my marriage, my wife and I would go to Melbourne to watch movies and plays and make the best of the festivals and celebrations the city is well known for. Living there on my own, however, was a different thing altogether.

I recall one day giving a talk to around a hundred enthusiastic women who worked as sales representatives. They were a happy bunch, who laughed good-heartedly at all my stories. Afterwards they flocked forward for autographs. There was much joking and taking of photos. Many of these lovely women told me how much my work meant to them and their children. At times I was surrounded by four or five of them squeezing in around me so that they could get into the picture.

Julie had left Penguin by then. Jane Godwin, who was now my publisher and also an author herself, said to me, ‘Paul, it must be so amazing having all these women adoring you. You could have whoever you wanted.’

I said, ‘No, it’s not like that. They will all return home to their husbands and partners. I will go back all alone to a reheated takeaway meal from Woolworths.’

The loneliness was terrible. A miserable dripping-away of the soul.

One day I received a letter from an old friend, Russell Lewis-Nicholson. He had been a member of the Youth Fellowship in our church all those years ago. I hadn’t seen him since I was seventeen years old. He had had a dream about me and wanted to catch up.

It turned out that as a youth he had gone to England to become an Anglican monk and then a priest. After many years he had lost his faith and more recently his marriage. We met for lunch and became close friends, revisiting our shared history and discussing the similar circumstances we found ourselves in.

One of the difficulties faced by those whose marriages have failed relates to the relationships one has with happily married friends who may want to help but often have little insight into your problems. A fellow sufferer to talk with was just what we both needed. We met at least once a week and often rolled around laughing at each other’s foolish attempts to navigate the world of single men.

I sold the Melbourne flat and started to renovate the old soldier settlement house. Builders were on site off and on for years. The boss, Dave Williams, and his crew were a happy mob and I enjoyed having them working around me. I kept adding and changing things. Fiona was there on weekdays and Arie helped me with the forest every Wednesday. We all had lunch together with the builders. There was much joking and fooling around.

Occasionally actor and comedian Mary-Anne Fahey would visit Warrnambool to visit two of our mutual friends. Whenever I could, I would jump at the opportunity to have a few words with her. Little did I know that she was going to play a big part in my future.

My children and grandchildren would visit regularly. I don’t think I was guilty of building another ‘shrine to myself’. We all had a lot of fun and when the others had gone, I wasn’t alone. I had my growing forest.

At first the only birds on the property were starlings, an introduced species considered by many to be the rats of the air. They would perch on the electricity wires in their thousands. In order to get rid of them I bought some very realistic large rubber snakes. I put them out at various places including one up on the roof of Fiona’s office.

I could tell that the starlings did notice the snakes because they would walk around them, never getting closer than about a metre. But otherwise these unwanted birds totally ignored their rubber enemies.

One day I heard a terrified shriek from the office roof. One of the builders had almost stepped on the artificial snake. Fortunately, he did not fall off the building and it caused much hilarity.

A week later I found the snake in my bed.

This time I was the one doing the shrieking.

As the trees grew, new species of native wildlife started to appear – fairy wrens, black cockatoos, rosellas, ibis, wattlebirds and many more, including the very rare, sacred kingfisher. And into the bargain, there was not a starling to be seen – the wedge-tailed eagles, black-shouldered kites, and barn owls frightened them away much more effectively than rubber snakes.

I would often sit on the deck after work drinking a glass of wine and watching the sky redden. Sometimes a family of blue fairy wrens or New Holland honeyeaters might start hopping around my feet. I find it hard to describe just how much pleasure this gave me.

The forest grew and grew. In the end the trees towered over our heads. We had koalas, wallabies, kangaroos, echidnas, blue-tongue lizards and, of course, real snakes.

During the days I wrote furiously. This creative endeavour was the other thing that kept me going. Feeling good after a hard day’s writing I would take a glass of wine and wander through the forest to the sea. I was so proud of this restored bushland. Most of it around Warrnambool had been cleared at the beginning of last century. On these walks I would be filled with ecstasy. There is something incredibly uplifting about a growing forest. As our bodies start to fail, the sight of trees and shrubs developing somehow compensates by reminding us that life goes on and is beautiful.

During this period my body had started to fail. My first serious illness started with a headache.

I visited two doctors over this. Both diagnosed my problem as a ‘just a headache’. It wasn’t until Jim Olesen, a brilliant general practitioner, asked me if I had any other symptoms that something more sinister was found.

I said to him, ‘I don’t think I’m driving too well. I seem to be making a few mistakes.’

‘What sort of mistakes?’ he asked.

I said, ‘I seem to wander over the centre line a bit.’

He immediately reached for the phone, rang the nearby hospital in Warrnambool and booked me in for an emergency CAT scan. It was late in the afternoon and I think I was his last patient.

‘Get yourself down to the hospital straight away,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait here until we get the results. And don’t drive yourself there.’

By six pm the CAT scan was ready for analysis. It revealed a huge subdural haematoma (a bleed between the brain and the skull). The scan showed that my brain was badly compressed.

I was put in an ambulance straight away and driven the three hundred kilometres to Melbourne for an operation. Every bump of the ambulance seemed like a blow to my head.

I was shocked by the revelation of my injury, but became resigned to the fact that from now on it was out of my hands. I was operated on the next day and spent two weeks recovering. As best we could work out the bleed had been caused by a bump to the head which I had thought was a minor matter.

When I left the hospital after the operation, I looked dreadful. All the hair on my head had been shaved off and a row of metal clips held the healing red scar together. When I returned to the hospital to have the clips removed, a bittersweet moment happened on the tram. It was a first for me. A young woman stood up and offered me her seat.

For many months afterwards I felt unsteady on my feet and was unable to drive. I was also having minor word-finding difficulties, and this really concerned me. Would I ever be able to write again? I wasn’t sure. Certain words evaded me. I just couldn’t find them. As a former speech therapist, I was only too aware of what was happening. Not being able to write would be a major blow.

Sometimes I found the wrong word, which can be embarrassing. On one occasion I went into Coles wanting to buy some marinara mix to make a seafood salad. I made my request to the woman behind the glass counter.

‘Can I have a handful of marijuana mix, please?’ I said.

She laughed hilariously and so did her companion.

I still blush every time I go to the delicatessen section of that supermarket. I’m sure that those two women are still trying to suppress their mirth.

In all, I’ve had four operations for life-threatening conditions – a heart bypass and three head operations, which were the result of minor accidents. Jim Olesen was involved in all these life-saving diagnoses. I can never thank him enough.

19

THE NUMINOUS

This is my mother aged about sixteen. I always wondered what the title of the larger book she was holding might be. Using a magnifying glass, I finally made out the words Cheerio’s Language of the Hand.

I thought that perhaps it was a manual for sign language used by hearing-impaired people. Finally, I managed to track down a copy and found out that it is about palm reading.

My mother and grandmother both thought that they were ‘fey’ – able to sense spirits and obtain signs. They were interested in dreams and their meanings. So am I.

Mum’s sister, Bessie, remained in England when we migrated. She made a brief visit to Australia when I was aged eleven. On her return she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Seven years later my mother sat up in bed and said aloud, ‘Bessie’s dead.’ She told my father that she had seen her sister standing at the end of the bed. In the morning she received a telegram from England saying that Bessie had died. My father was witness to Mum’s waking words, so I guess that part of it is true.

1973–2016

Mum was not always unhappy. She often sang while she was hanging out the clothes or doing other housework. I’ve always thought that someone who sings around the place is having an enjoyable experience at that particular moment. She also laughed at funny television shows and particularly enjoyed I Love Lucy and Dad’s Army.

I searched out one of my school reports when researching this book and I’m pretty sure that it hadn’t brought a smile to her face when she first read it. Phrases like easily distracted and uncaring attitude and too busy daydreaming were abundant. But she was proud of my teaching career. She was also proud of Ruth’s academic successes.

At the age of sixty-two a shadow on one of my mother’s lungs went unnoticed in an X-ray. A year later it was apparent in both lungs. The doctors were unsure whether she had lung cancer or tuberculosis, so they admitted her to the Kingston Centre outside of Melbourne. Here the diagnosis would be made by trying to grow a tuberculosis culture. She spent three months in residence there, spending the time in occupational therapy, reading and sewing. She was very proud of the seven stuffed toys she made – one for each of her grandchildren.

No culture was forthcoming, and she was admitted to the Austin Hospital to have her chest opened and her lungs examined. We waited anxiously for the results. Before she was conscious the surgeon told my father, Ruth and me that Mum had inoperable lung cancer and not long to live. This was devastating to all of us.

I had no idea what I was going to say when she regained consciousness. As it turned out I didn’t need any words.

When she woke the operation was not discussed. She didn’t ask and we didn’t say anything. It was as if nothing had happened. To this day I wonder about this strange means of dealing with terrible news. It was not part of her way to discuss a personal problem or a delicate subject – even one as serious as terminal cancer. I think that this was common in her generation.

She began to deteriorate quickly in hospital and was soon struggling with brain tumours and delirium. On one of my visits she was terribly upset and told me to be careful, as the whole hospital was surrounded by the Irish and they had guns. Watching someone you love hallucinate is a terrible experience. You are unable to help. No suggestion that the haunting visions are not real seems to work. The person is not the person they were. A deep sense of loss and love swept through me.

When she was young my mother had worked as a sales representative, selling tins of Callard & Bowser’s chocolates and other treats. She loved the little cubes of rice-paper-covered nougat in particular and would sometimes buy herself a packet or two.

During the time she was in palliative care I noticed that our local milk bar had an open tin containing a hundred of these confections selling at fifty cents each. I bought the lot. It was a bit excessive, but they made her smile and she really hopped into them.

In her last days in hospital Mum allowed one intimacy – she enjoyed having her hair brushed. I always made it a point to do this when I visited.

In her lucid moments, Mum made it known that she would like to be buried in the little coastal town of Robe in South Australia, where her friends from the Country Women’s Association lived. She and my father had moved there after he lost his job and decided to retire.

She passed away just before Christmas, 1972 at the age of sixty-two. My father insisted that she have a funeral in Melbourne and then be cremated. I was furious that he did not respect her dying wishes.

In Robe the funeral would have been attended by all the ladies from the Country Womens’ Association, which she had joined and enjoyed. And she could have been buried in the one place in Australia where she had been really happy. At the church service in Melbourne there were only about a dozen people present. It was an incredibly sad ending for a woman who had devoted herself to her husband, children and grandchildren and put aside all personal ambitions and luxuries in order to care for others.

Cremation was relatively rare in those days. The ashes were given to Ruth, who passed them on to me to sprinkle in Robe the next time I visited the town. My father showed no interest in them.

I arrived on the outskirts of Robe in the middle of the night and pulled into a clearing in the forest. In the dim light of the car I undid the brown paper parcel. I was confronted by a grey, brick-sized plastic box with a flat stopper in the top.

With trembling knees, I walked into the trees and prised open the stopper with a screwdriver. My hands were shaking – this was the remains of my mother. I could hardly comprehend this. I didn’t know what to expect. I was close to tears, and ashamed at this amateurish, lonely ceremony. I shook the box gently. Nothing came out of the hole. I shook it more vigorously and felt something that felt like a lump of clay bumping around inside.

Dreadful thoughts raced through my mind. What if there was some identifiable part of her in there? I couldn’t bring myself to put a finger inside, but somehow figured out that the ashes were in a sealed plastic bag. I desperately jabbed it with the screwdriver and managed to pierce the bag.

I was beside myself, filled with horror and guilt. Finally, I managed to shake the contents out into the night. Now I had another problem. What to do with the plastic box.

I quickly shoved it down a rabbit hole and made my way back to the car. A small dog was waiting there. It began pawing at my leg. It had no collar and I realised that it had been abandoned. I couldn’t manage my thoughts well enough to handle the situation. I stepped inside and started the engine. The poor little dog began scratching at the car.

I opened the back door.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Get in.’

There was no RSPCA in Robe at the time, so I took the dog home with me and kept it. It was a nice little terrier cross. Always happy. I named it Skip, after the skipjack fish my mother liked to catch.

Many years later when I was in the Epworth Hospital recovering from a quadruple bypass operation, I was advised that I might experience a fibrillation attack sometime after the surgery. These out-of-control accelerated beatings of the heart can be fatal.

My surgeon attempted to put my mind at rest. He said, ‘Don’t get alarmed at the thought of it. We know how to handle fibrillations.’

He is a famous and talented man and he was right about the fibrillations. But when it happened, I was caught by surprise. I was in a small room on my own. At the end of the corridor was a nurses’ station where a TV monitor registered my vital functions. Suddenly I felt my heart racing. It felt as if my carotid artery was a large worm having convulsions in the side of my neck. Everything went black.

I found myself inside an open coffin on top of a hospital trolley. A male nurse was pushing me along. Everything was gentle and calm. The corridor began to slope downwards and entered a large cavern. On one side of the cavern was a glass wall where a large group of people were talking, eating canapés and sipping wine, as if attending a wake.

The cavern was filled with a golden light – warm and welcoming. A feeling of absolute peace and love embraced me. At the other side of the cavern was the opening of a beautiful, beckoning tunnel. I allowed myself to be gently pushed towards this place of tranquillity and love.

Suddenly I yelled out, ‘Bugger it, I’m not going to leave Mary-Anne.’

I tried to open my eyes but they seemed to be glued shut. I fought furiously with my eyelids. Bingo. They sprang open. I was back in my room.

The following day a nurse came to visit me.

‘I have to apologise,’ she said. ‘You had a fibrillation attack and it went unnoticed because we were attending an emergency. We did get to you in time, though, so that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’

Was this a near-death experience? I don’t know. I do know that I’m glad to be here with Mary-Anne and the opportunity to write this memoir. But when the time comes for me to go, I hope that the tunnel is still there.

I mourn the loss of my religious beliefs – they were so comforting – but the notion that an all-powerful, all-good God exists does not make any sense when we look at all the pain and suffering in the world. As the sceptics say, ‘He can’t be both all-powerful and all-good.’

On the other hand, I am tempted to think that there is something, but I don’t know what it is.

The possibility that the mind and the brain could be separate entities fascinates me. Maybe it’s true. It hasn’t been disproved. I’m aware that I am a layman but I do read a lot of introductory texts on the topics of astronomy, physics and quantum mechanics. And in my own writing for children I shamelessly use the speculations and ruminations of these scientists as platforms for works of fiction.

For example, at one stage Stephen Hawking was suggesting that the universe would eventually run out of energy and that time would begin to run backwards. Everything that has ever happened will unhappen (he later changed his mind about this). The notion of time running backwards really grabbed my imagination and I wrote a story called ‘Spaghetti Pig Out’, which featured one or two vital functions like eating going into reverse.

Another notion that interests me was put forward by none other than Albert Einstein, who declared that there is no such thing as time. If this is true, there can be no beginnings or endings, and our perceptions of the world we live in are only glimpses from the few stimuli we are able to perceive. Some scientists believe that every possible universe exists.

Many years after the death of my mother I visited her birthplace, the seaside town of Great Yarmouth in England. I stayed in the home of a distant relative. I was filled with ghostly memories of this fading seaside resort, even though I had never been there before. I walked out onto the pier and encountered a woman selling coffee mugs to tourists. I asked her if she had the time.

‘Five-and-twenty past four,’ she said in a broad Yarmouth accent. My eyes filled with tears. I had not heard that accent or way of telling the time since my mother died.

That night, while sound asleep, I heard a loud woman’s voice say, ‘I love you.’ There was no one there, of course. The voice sounded like my mother’s, but surely it couldn’t have been – they were words I had never once heard her use.

20

MY ARTHUR

I was thirty-two years old when I finally confronted my father. Our argument turned into a shouting match, but it had nothing to do with the way he had treated me all my life. Even though I was now a man, I still couldn’t even consider the prospect of naming his lifelong dislike for me.

I did, however, take him on over the way he treated his second wife, Mary.

After it was all over, I was not even left with a feeling that I had done the right thing.

The solitary man peering over the bridge in this painting saw to that.

1975–1983

Sometimes, rather than take your breath away or make you cry out in surprise, the end of a story will instead leave you pondering the fragility of the human psyche and the ambiguity of our motivations and actions.

Raymond Carver’s short stories leave you wondering and worrying about small events that seem to be clear-cut but, on reflection, are actually an outward sign of deep, hidden, catastrophic events and emotions. He was a master at this.

Carver is also probably one of the most copied writers in the world. Students attending writing workshops often have a go at this type of fiction. It looks easy. The plot might be just two married people talking while they are babysitting in someone else’s house noticing the physical signs of the inner life of the owners. An activity that suddenly casts a devastating light on their own relationship.

This type of enigmatic ending is not easy to achieve, but I have had a try at it in some of my stories for children. Kids are quite capable of understanding some of the complexities of human relationships and the difficulty involved in determining what is the right thing to do. I feel that we need to respect children’s growing awareness of the fragility of human relationships and stimulate their own personal development with stories that are entertaining but also make them think. I went as far as giving one story the title

‘You Be the Judge’, and threw the children a challenge to make up their own mind about how it should end.

But a true-life event involving my father and his second wife, Mary, presented me with an ending that was as ambiguous and moving as any that I could have written.

I am driving all the way from Warrnambool to Robe to have it out with my father. Ruth is sitting next to me. I have never, ever confronted him before. Not after the time he deliberately gave me an electric shock, nor after any of the thousands of small criticisms and scornful jokes that he had directed at me, his ‘simple’ son. This is about someone else he has hurt and for some reason this makes it easier to do.

During the war my father worked in England as a factory manager, making parts for aeroplanes. There were a lot of women filling the industrial jobs of the men who were fighting overseas. My father was a bit of a lad and had a good time with the ladies. He used to cut an impressive figure racing around on his Norton motorcycle. In a restaurant he always made a show of pulling out the chair for a woman and tipping the waiters. Or swirling a glass of red wine and taking his time to give it his approval.

‘Stay away from him,’ the other girls in the office warned Phyllis, the woman who was to be my mother.

She was a very attractive woman, but at the age of thirty, time was passing and she wanted a home and children. There were not many men to pick from. She married him.

From that time on, my father was beyond reproach as far as other women were concerned. His own mother had died when he was eleven years old and now he had another woman to shine her light on him. When my mother died, my father was heartbroken and his grief was genuine. He was now alone in Robe.

It was not exactly a frontier town, but by today’s standards might have seemed rough. Fishing shacks and small, peeling weatherboard houses with tin roofs sat in gardens in need of weeding. Motels with small rooms and doors like rows of bad teeth began to offer cheap accommodation. Due to its beautiful empty beaches the small coastal village was gradually transforming into a holiday destination for surfers and anglers.

Now my mother has been dead for four years and I am driving furiously to Robe to have it out with my father. And get Mary’s money back. I can’t stop thinking about it.

No longer dashing in appearance, Arthur Jennings still maintains the style. As always, he is full of stories about his adventures and escapades. When dining out for lunch he orders the full three courses – entrée of oysters, mains and sweets. One glass of wine. Makes it last all afternoon.

All this appeals to another Robe resident. A woman I will call Meadow, whose husband seems boring by comparison. He owns a timber mill and a motel named the Pelican’s Beak. He has no interest in fine dining or conversation. He does not mind the fact that his wife has a friendship with Arthur and that the pair are constantly together, fishing from a small tin boat or dining in the cafes and hotels. He is not worried when their friendship turns into an affair, as Arthur is able to provide something for Meadow that he himself either does not or cannot provide.

There is no doubt that what exists between Arthur and Meadow is love. They long to be together and snatch brief moments of secret passion. But for Arthur the nights are lonely. Meadow must return to the motel and her husband. She is not going to leave this man because he has money and, now retired, my father does not. She makes this quite clear.

One evening Arthur becomes desperate, lying awake in the bed he once shared with Phyllis. The sound of the distant surf and a hooting barn owl combine to remind him that he will probably die alone in this small wooden house. His thoughts wander to Mary, the pretty young woman who turned him down all those years ago, back in England.

He picks up the phone and obtains her number from the directory service in Yorkshire, England. She still lives in the same small cottage that her parents did and she still has the same name. He dials the number.

‘Hello,’ says a voice that he last heard forty years ago. ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Arthur,’ he says. ‘Will you marry me, Mary?’

There is a pause.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I have always loved you, Arthur.’

Another hour and I will be in Robe. Ruth is next to me in the passenger seat. Together we will beard the dragon in his lair and rescue Mary. We discuss what we will do and what has happened.

I tell her about the last time I drove our father somewhere. It was twelve months ago, when I took him to Melbourne Airport, from which he would leave to marry Mary in England.

For some reason I was emboldened then to say what I thought.

‘Dad,’ I said. ‘You have to finish your affair with Meadow. You can’t bring a sweet little lady to Australia who hasn’t even been out of Yorkshire before and keep your thing with Meadow going.’

He exploded.

‘Don’t you start giving me orders. Shut your mouth and mind your own business. Since when did I need you to tell me what to do?’

We drove on in silence. I was taken aback. I struggled to find more words, but couldn’t overcome the strength of the unwritten law which I had transgressed by giving him advice.

The wedding in Yorkshire was a great success. It was on the front page of the local newspaper. What a story. What a photo. This beaming, tiny lady in a matching hat and dress standing next to my father, Arthur Jennings. There he is outside the church in his three-piece suit. They are married after forty years of absolutely no contact. She had once declined his proposal for the noblest of reasons. And now, over the phone from ten thousand miles away, he proposes and she accepts. They are to start their new life together in Robe four weeks later. She has lived as a ‘spinster’ all her life and often thought of those long-ago years when she turned Arthur down.

Carole and I decided to repaint the outside of Dad’s house as a surprise wedding present. The weatherboards were in terrible condition and it was a long and dirty job. On the last day we were there, the heater in the lounge room stopped working. There was no time to fix it but summer was coming and he could easily get another one when he got back.

The events that follow were as told to Ruth and me by Mary. She and Arthur drove to Robe in his little Mazda. It was not the sort of car that he had been used to. He had always driven stylish, expensive ones but now that he was retired this was the best that he could manage. He had already told Mary that it was the law in Australia that wives should have their money in their husband’s bank account. So, the money from the sale of her house in England was now safely in his account in the local bank.

In the town of Portland, he pulled over, stepped out of the car without a word and disappeared. Time passed. A lot of time. Mary became worried sitting there alone in this foreign place. A strange man appeared and started kicking the tyres of the car. Now she was frightened. Why was this person attacking their car? Where was Arthur? The man disappeared but there was still no sign of her new husband. Finally he returned.

She told him about the man kicking the tyres. He laughed.

‘I’m buying a new car,’ he said. ‘That was the salesman checking this one out for a trade-in.’

They arrived for their first night together in the home in which he had lived with Phyllis. Mary had agreed to live there with him for the rest of her life. He didn’t mention the newly painted weatherboards. It wasn’t clear that he even noticed them. But he did discover the useless heater.

‘Paul’s broken it,’ he said. ‘He’s hopeless. And it’s cold. We will have to go and stay in the Pelican’s Beak Motel for the night.’

They were greeted effusively by Meadow and less so by her husband. Soon they were settled in their room. Arthur told Mary that he needed to go to reception to order their breakfast. Mary, who was tired and nervous and feeling far from home, was left sitting on the bed. Arthur was gone for a long time. Finally, Mary left the room and walked to the lobby. The lights were out and there was no one there. She entered and saw a door that opened into the motel kitchen.

Arthur and Meadow were embracing each other and kissing passionately. Mary fled back to the room in tears.

Things only got worse for her after that. She was all alone in this rough town, apart from Arthur and Meadow, who joined them for lunch almost every day. The three of them went fishing in his little ‘tinny’ and Mary made sandwiches for lunch. So did Meadow. Arthur always ate Meadow’s sandwiches and not Mary’s.

Mary had no money, and no friends. The only two people in Australia she really knew were Ruth and me, living in far-off Melbourne. She began to phone Ruth regularly. She told her of her suffering and, deeply embarrassed, of her more intimate problems. She came to the marriage as a virgin in her late sixties. The sex was painful.

After twelve months Mary can’t take any more. She wants to get her money back and go home. Her friends in England will welcome her back. She needs our help because she is frightened of Arthur.

As Ruth and I drive towards Robe we plan our raid carefully. We book into a motel – not the Pelican’s Beak. Mary is to take a bag with some of her possessions to the local shops, where Ruth will meet her and whisk her away. I will go and have it out with my father.

We are both nervous. We might as well be planning an attack on a foreign country. We are breaking a lifetime of obedience – our father must not be confronted or something unspeakable will happen. If I do not die on the spot, surely he will.

He is surprised but not pleased to see me. We stand up in the lounge, squaring off, even though he is not aware of why I have come.

‘Mary has left you,’ I say bluntly. ‘She’s with Ruth and she’s not coming back. You’ve treated her dreadfully and she wants to go home to England. She’s frightened of you.’

Rage crosses his face but I continue.

‘I’ve come to get her money back. You had no right to take it. I want you to write out a cheque now.’

‘No,’ he shouts. ‘I’ll do no such thing. Bring her back.’

I shake my head. ‘She’s never coming back. She’s lonely and hurt and you are still carrying on with Meadow. If you don’t give her money back, I’ll get the lawyers onto you. Or the police.’

I feel as if I have just jumped off the diving board and can’t get back. Am I really speaking to him like this? I feel both bold and scared. Wild and wicked. Breaking all the rules.

He starts to splutter. He doesn’t explode. He doesn’t die. In this moment he is impotent in the face of my temerity. God doesn’t strike either of us down. He has no case to put forward and he knows it.

He loses control.

‘I’m going to get into my boat,’ he screams. ‘And take it out to sea and kill myself.’

Terrible emotions from past events swirl through my mind – my mother’s life was altered forever by her brother’s suicide and then at a later time she was brought low by her best friend killing herself too. My own best mate from childhood had done the same. Now, I can’t find the words. There seems to be no correct response to this. From my fevered, angry mind I make my unforgivable reply.

‘Good,’ I shout as I rush out of the door and slam it behind me.

Mary and Ruth share a room in the motel and they sit up all night talking about what has happened. I spend a sleepless night in the next room. In the morning we all return to Melbourne. Mary moves in with Ruth until they can organise her flight back to England.

Weeks pass and nothing is heard from my father. Finally, he transfers Mary’s money back into a new bank account Ruth has set up for her. Then he pays Mary a visit. He begs her to come back, but she is adamant. She is going home.

And she does. She corresponds with Ruth and me and sends postcards. She has moved into a home for elderly ladies and has a nice room there. Her letters are about the jonquils in spring and the roses in summer. And stories of the other women in the home and her friends there.

Three years later I visit England on a sabbatical. Mary is excited that I am going to visit her in Yorkshire. She is putting on afternoon tea for her friends especially so they can meet me. When the time comes, I dress up in my three-piece suit. I know that she will like it if I impress the ladies.

It is a pleasant room in a pleasant retirement village. And the jonquils are indeed flowering outside the window. She has put out scones and cream and we have tea in delicate cups and saucers that are decorated with wildflowers. The ladies are lovely and it is so good to see the way they care for each other. I make a little speech, telling them how brave and kind Mary is, and they all nod and smile.

I have since wondered whether I did the right thing in helping Mary to escape from my father. One of my friends told me that I should have stayed out of it.

‘It was none of your business,’ he said. ‘Typical Jennings, rushing in without a thought.’

I feel a little comforted when I look around at Mary and her smiling friends in the neat and well-cared-for retirement village.

When the others have gone, Mary shows me a print of an impressionist painting that hangs on the wall. It is of a scene in a botanical garden. In the background is a humped stone bridge with a lonely figure looking down into the water. The features and thoughts of the man are impossible to discern.

Mary stands back, gives the softest, most loving smile and points.

‘When I look at that man on the bridge,’ she says, ‘I always say … that’s my Arthur.’

The other day I was in the pub having lunch with my old friend Gordon Forth. I told him about the memoir I was writing.

I said, ‘It’s not a kiss-and-tell. I’ve changed the names of some people so that no one can identify them. And I haven’t put the dirt on anyone – well, maybe a cruel teacher who died years ago. And maybe an academic who has also gone.’

Gordon knows me and my story well.

‘What about your father?’ he said.

‘Well, you’ve got me there,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve been fair but one can never know. I don’t think that revenge is a good reason to write a memoir. It leaves a sour taste with the reader, and it’s not a worthy intent.’

Gordon’s question made me think about the balance of my story. I can remember some good qualities about my father. He was generous with money. So much so that it sometimes annoyed my mother. He ‘lent’ several thousand pounds to a young man at work to enable him to put down the deposit on a house. My mother was furious about this. He and my mother also gave Carole and me five hundred pounds as a deposit on a block of land. When I was a teenager, he spent a lot of time working on my cars in order to make them safe and reliable.

After my mother died, I stayed with him at his home in Robe for a few days. I remember picking up a book of poetry that Mum had been reading in the last few days before she entered palliative care. A small, lady’s handkerchief marked her place in the book. My eyes fell on the title of the last poem she had been reading – To My Only Son.

As I read the words tears came to my eyes. My father gently took the book from my hand and closed it with a concerned smile. Could a narcissist make such a gesture? Was there a hint of empathy there?

Now as I look over this memoir, I’m feeling guilty that I have ‘done him over’ in my portrayal. But then other memories flood back – he thought I was hopeless and he let me know it. He didn’t like me at all – ever.

The difficulty I am left with in dealing with my feelings about him is an existential problem we are all ponder at some time or another. People who are uncaring, thoughtless or selfish are unfortunate. They have been formed by either inherited or environmental factors over which they had no control. My father didn’t ask to be the way he was – something was lacking in his early life. So, shouldn’t I just put all thoughts of his behaviour behind me?

I can’t forget and I don’t think I should try, but I am no longer angry. And I do have some understanding of what life must have been like for him. It makes me sad.

My father had his own suffering. In midlife one of his kidneys failed and he went into hospital for a protracted period. At his last place of work, another engineering company where he was works manager, a young man filled in for him until he recovered. When my father finally returned after his illness this young man did not want to relinquish the reins and after a shouting match my father fired him for insubordination. The managing director reinstated the young man and my father had to resign. It was the end of his career.

Many years after Mary left him, he lay in hospital dying. I sat by his bed. Both kidneys had failed and he had ordered that all medications and treatments be stopped; he wanted his life to end quickly. He lapsed in and out of consciousness. He became delusional and started yelling at a young man who wasn’t there. Like my mother before him, he was suffering terrible psychological and emotional pain.

As I walked along the corridor to get help, I heard him shout out one particularly loud, angry order at his imaginary antagonist.

‘Don’t you talk to me like that, young man.’

I encountered the doctor who was treating him.

‘Can’t you do something?’ I said. ‘He wants his life to end. He’s suffering terribly. Can’t you speed it up?’

The doctor looked at me intensely. He said nothing but turned on his heel and walked back briskly the way he had come.

I was the only person from the family who was there in that small country hospital. Ruth and I had been taking it in turns to make the long drive to Robe for weeks. Now that the time had come, we wanted someone to be with him when he died. No matter what had passed between us, that was the least we could do. The nurse on duty said to me, ‘He’s not going to die tonight. Go back to your motel and get some sleep. I’ll call you if anything happens.’

At six the next morning, the nurse phoned to say that he had died. She said that I should call and collect his possessions. The door on his room was closed but sitting on a bench outside was Meadow, holding a handkerchief to her face and weeping.

I sat down and tried to comfort her. She was not a person I had admired, but she had obviously loved him.

She said, ‘I’ve got some jewellery that Arthur gave to me. I’ll give it back to you.’

I gave her a little smile and told her that she could keep it.

As I started the long drive home, I suddenly had a thought.

I think the young man he was yelling at as he was dying was me.

I’ll never know. And I’ll never able to find out if my words to the doctor ended his life.

21

HAPPY ENDINGS

From the moment we are born we are all looking for love. When an actor or a writer puts themselves out there, I believe that is part of what they are after. The adoring public does not really know the person who is wearing the wig. In real life, people still see, and want to see, the created persona, who is always hanging around in the background.

2010–2020

Mary-Anne Fahey knows what applause is like. In 1988 she won a Logie for being the most popular comedian in the country. She invented a large number of widely loved characters. She has appeared on the stage many times and has featured in major movies and TV series. She has written some of the funniest scripts to appear on our television screens. Her list of achievements and accolades is long indeed.

She enjoys the applause and the knowledge that her creative skills are appreciated and give people pleasure. One would expect that she enjoys the limelight. But the opposite is true.

She is an introvert: quiet, gently sensitive, shy and extremely intelligent. Sure, she can make the whole table laugh at a dinner party, but I know that she finds these situations very challenging and, like me, would rather be talking quietly to one person in the corner than be the centre of attention. I also happen to know that she worries a lot before attending social outings and often has to call on all her resources just to get her through the front door at these events. She will also sometimes get a bit of external support before leaving home for a function. A nice strong gin and tonic.

Her most loved character, the one that most often looks over her shoulder when people recognise her, is the anarchic, extroverted and outspoken Kylie Mole, whose monologues were fuelled by a mixture of anger and anxiety. I have seen a little bit of the anarchist in Mary-Anne, but I have never known her to be outwardly angry. So, if there is something deep in her psyche that is also seen in Kylie Mole, I don’t know what it is. And anyway, that’s her story to tell.

I first heard Mary-Anne speak when she was launching Isobelle Carmody’s young adult novel The Gathering. I was expecting a riotously funny performance but instead, what I heard was a deeply moving, serious analysis of the book and its implications for readers. After her address everybody was saying how moving and interesting it had been. I made a point of telling her afterwards how much I enjoyed it.

Over the years, Mary-Anne and I would bump into each other at different functions and I grew to know the real person behind the performer. At dinner parties I would try to wangle it so that I could sit next to her. She was particularly knowledgeable and thoughtful about human nature and we would fall into a pleasant and all-too-short conversation.

Many years after her partner, Morris Gleitzman, and I had worked together on Wicked Mary-Anne began to come to Warrnambool to visit two dear friends, Wenn and Beatrice.

When I reached the age of sixty-nine I had been living on my own for ten years. I had good mates, wonderful adult children and a great job that I loved. But I was still achingly lonely. Some people enjoy the solitary life, but I have always wanted to live with that one special person.

On one of her visits I heard that Mary-Anne had been separated from Morris for two years. That was interesting. Very interesting. But I told myself that I would have no hope with her. I wasn’t game to even try.

Then one day, I happened to attend the auction of a small house in Warrnambool, and found to my amazement that Mary-Anne was bidding on it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I stood there watching. It became clear that she was not an experienced house buyer. Most people bidding at auctions try to look disinterested and raise an eyebrow or a finger to make a bid. Mary-Anne was doing the act she often uses to cover her shyness: jumping around making comments and asking questions about what you are allowed to do. She was immediately surrounded by estate agents who were only too happy to tell her.

Mary-Anne’s friendly comments and questions to the auctioneer and onlookers had everyone smiling. Finally, she reached her limit.

‘I can’t afford any more,’ she said. ‘I want those lovely people over there to have it.’

This caused a roar of laughter. I knew instinctively that underneath the bravado was a person who was totally intimidated by the whole scene.

And I was gone. Totally in love.

I snuck off, nervous but determined to have a try at breaking down her defences.

I rang her two friends. Wenn answered the phone.

‘Could I speak to Mary-Anne, please?’

‘She’s in the shower. What do you want?’

‘I would like to take her out for a coffee.’

‘Just a minute.’

Wenn returned. ‘Are we coming too?’ he said.

That floored me. I didn’t know what to say. I blurted out my answer.

‘No.’

‘Just a minute.’

Wenn went off and then returned again.

‘She says to pick her up at ten o’clock tomorrow.’

I took Mary-Anne to the most romantic place in town – a cafe overlooking Lady Bay. We talked for ages. We had so much in common – an interest in dreams, psychology and human nature. She had written a children’s novel, I, Nigel Dorking, about an autistic boy. She was very knowledgeable on this subject.

I particularly remember her saying, ‘I’m not interested in sex anymore and I’m never getting into another relationship.’

One of the things I had become aware of as a person living on their own was that few people touch you physically. I asked her if she didn’t miss being touched.

‘Get a cat,’ she said with a laugh.

I drove her back and said goodbye. Inside I thought, I’m not giving up that easily.

I decided to go slowly, however. It was clear she was still a bit raw from her own past.

A month or so later she rang me up from Melbourne. ‘Catherine is having a hard time at work,’ she said. ‘I thought you and I could take her out to dinner to cheer her up.’

Catherine McCredie was a dear friend to both of us. As I have already mentioned, she had edited some of my Rascal books at Penguin, as well as Mary-Anne’s novel.

It was a great dinner and the three of us enjoyed it enormously. But nothing hinting at romance between Mary-Anne and me occurred at all.

The next time she was planning a trip to Warrnambool I heard about it in advance. I thought of a crafty idea. I found out which train she was coming on. Then I went to Melbourne and booked a return ticket on the same train. The seat next to Mary-Anne was vacant and I asked if I could sit next to her. She looked surprised to see me but smiled and nodded. Three and a half hours of talking together.

Bliss.

I waited a week or two and then I rang her up and asked her out to lunch. She paused and finally said, ‘Yes, that would be nice.’

I booked a posh restaurant in Melbourne and then bought a return ticket from Warrnambool on the train. By now I had sold the flat in Melbourne but I could have stayed with my sister Ruth overnight. However, I wanted Mary-Anne to see that I had planned a return trip and wasn’t expecting anything more than lunch. It was a lovely meal. As we were saying goodbye, she gave me a little peck on the lips.

I was over the moon. I know that my behaviour sounds naive for a sixty-nine-year-old man but I was totally in love. I was walking on air. I texted one of my mates who knew about my feelings for her.

‘I got a kiss.’

Ecstatic as I was, I still had no idea how she felt about me. It was time to declare myself.

I invited her out to lunch again in the cafe by the sea. We talked for ages, both enjoying the conversation. Neither of us had anything to drink. I wanted this to be totally real and she didn’t want alcohol anyway. I paid the bill and then asked her to come out onto the boardwalk overlooking the beach. My knees were shaking.

‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Oh?’

‘I love you.’

For a second, she looked as if she’d been slapped in the face with a wet fish. Then, almost as if she was back at the auction, she threw up her arms, embraced me and gave me a kiss.

I was ecstatic. We walked off hand in hand. In the back of my mind I was fleetingly aware that she hadn’t said those three words back.

But a fortnight later she did.

We have now been together eight wonderful years and plan to get married soon. God, we laugh a lot. She is such a funny person. She always tops my jokes. We are similar – two introverts who love books and writing. We talk about our dreams and our fears and our similar histories.

We support each other’s creative endeavours. Mary-Anne reads all my manuscripts (but won’t let me read hers) and makes insightful suggestions. We are different in the way we search for ideas. I’ve already said how hard it is for me to find new ones. She churns them out and happily hands them over to other people as if they are no more important than a packet of French fries.

One morning we were discussing our own childhoods, remembering a time in different parts of the world when we both sat on the sidelines in the schoolyard.

I said, ‘I’d love to write a story for younger kids about being shy and not being noticed. It’s a problem that we all have some time or another. But I can’t think of a vehicle to carry a plot that will draw the kids in.’

She immediately said, ‘What about a boy who is like a chameleon and changes colour to blend in with the background? You could find a really good artist and the kids could enjoy trying to find the chameleon boy in the pictures.’

‘That’s a fantastic idea,’ I yelled. ‘But I couldn’t possibly take it. You write it.’

She laughed. ‘Nah, I’ve got plenty of others where that came from. And anyway, I’m too busy writing my sitcom.’

I went off to my study and started writing my junior novel The Unforgettable What’s His Name. It has wonderful illustrations by Craig Smith. It’s one of my most popular stories.

It is great to share life with another creative person. I know that many happy couples are different in their beliefs, abilities and personalities. All sorts of seemingly contrasting pairs can make a go of it. It’s not that the search for love ends with finding the perfect person, because no one is perfect. But when the cogs in a machine are synchronised things will run smoothly.

Mary-Anne also brought something else into my life – a friendship with two other thoughtful and generous people. Her two grown-up sons, Tom and Jamie.

For me it’s definitely a story with a happy ending.

Even though Mary-Anne is hopeless at stacking the dishwasher.

AFTERWORD

Thank you for staying with me through the book. At the beginning I asked the question, ‘Will I be able to pull it off?’ Now that I’m finished, I don’t know the answer. But the one thing I do know is that it has been worthwhile for me personally.

Writing about my life was a tough process that challenged me on intellectual and organisational levels more than anything else I have written. The reliving of personal injuries was at times quite painful and sometimes made me sad. On the other hand, it was incredibly useful in terms of my own understanding of myself. And I did have a lot of fun retelling the humorous incidents and anecdotes.

Writing and organising my own story has given me many new insights into my own behaviour and motivations. It gave me a bird’s-eye view of my own life, spread out beneath me with all the connecting threads in view.

Until I wrote this story I didn’t realise how much of an ‘instant’ person I am. During athletics at school I loved sprinting but disliked marathons. I like reading and writing short stories where one gets a reward very quickly. This memoir is seventy-six thousand words – the longest book I have ever written.

Having gone back over my life in this way has made me wonder if I didn’t only give up my Masters degree because it would have been too much of an effort. Or maybe even because of a fear of failing. Yesterday I looked at my thesis proposal from all those years ago. It was based on an earlier project I had written with another speech pathologist, Russell Brown, when we were converting our diplomas into degrees. The topic was as follows:

A Distinctive Feature Analysis of Auditory

Discrimination Errors and Articulation Substitutions in Children.

A Correlative Study.

I clearly remember my appointed supervisor asking, ‘Are you really enthusiastic about this topic, Paul? Because experience shows that if the answer is “no”, you will never finish it.’

I nodded my head. I didn’t actually say yes, but I knew that I was lying.

So, yes, this memoir has finally made me admit the truth. The reason I didn’t finish the Masters was not just because I was a single parent but also because I found the topic uninspiring and difficult.

Looking back, I can see how much I love new projects. I have impulsively jumped into them with enormous enthusiasm. I renovated ten houses. I’ve bought and sold forty cars. And I’ve written books.

One of the aspects that the memoir forced me to face is a personal trait that people who have lived with me found distressing. I have mood swings. I can be euphoric in moments when I walk through the forest or finish a manuscript. But on other occasions I can be triggered by some small stimulus into depression and become upset and overly sensitive to criticism. This can then spiral down into gloomy despair.

I am aware that many people do not like the idea of sharing deep feelings or worries. They often use disparaging phrases like ‘too much information’ or ‘navel gazing’ in a rather thoughtless way, in my opinion.

It was difficult talking about my intrusive thoughts. My feeling is that until mental health issues can be discussed in the same open way as physical illnesses we will not have a fully inclusive society. Mental health problems should not be hidden away as if they are something to be ashamed of. If we share our experiences from the darker side of life, it is helpful to others who have been washed up on the same shore.

When I started writing this memoir I didn’t have a plan. Just a few groupings of incidents and events. Nor did I have a theme or an arc.

It’s well known that most novels and movie scripts do follow an arc – a beginning, middle and end. Biographies can have one too – they often start (usually in childhood) with the subject’s struggle to be recognised. There are many obstacles, setbacks and failures on the journey and then, at last, success. Life at the top is related with gusto. Often this is followed by a dramatic failure or setback due to illness, bad luck, drugs or foolishness. Finally, this fall from grace is followed by growth, wisdom and a comeback. This particular variation is popular where actors, rock stars and writers are the focus.

Some of my story fits this structure but a lot of it doesn’t. I didn’t struggle much to achieve success as a writer. I gave up when I was thirteen and didn’t try again until I was forty. My first book became popular within a year of publication and many more quickly followed, all of which sold well.

I think that the arc of my story starts with my wish to be a pirate as a six-year-old. I wanted to dress up so that everyone would admire me in my splendid outfit. It now seems to me that the longed-for applause was, and is, a substitution for the one thing my parents were not able to express.

Ancient folktales are full of stories where the silly son or daughter either leaves or is pushed out of the castle. These characters return as men and women who have made it in the outside world and have come back to receive their rightful inheritance and save the kingdom from peril.

What this memoir has taught me is that the kingdom to which the silly son returns is, in reality, his own inner self. My writing journey has been a by-product of the search for love and some understanding of what makes me who I am. The silly son has not succeeded because of wealth or fame but because he has finally realised what is important.

A COMPLETE LIST OF BOOKS BY PAUL JENNINGS

1985 Unreal!

1986 Unbelievable!

1987 Quirky Tales!

1988 Uncanny!

1990 Unbearable!

1990 Round the Twist

1991 Unmentionable!

1991 The Naked Ghost, Burp & Blue Jam 1993 Undone!

1995 Uncovered!

1996 The Paul Jennings Superdiary 1996

1996 Stagefright (play) 1997 The Paul Jennings Superdiary 1997

1998 Unseen!

1998 Uncollected, Volume 1

2000 Uncollected, Volume 2

2000 Uncollected, Volume 3

2002 Tongue Tied!

2002 The Paul Jennings Superdiary 2002

2005 Thirteen! Unpredictable Tales — UK

2005 How Hedley Hopkins Did a Dare…

2005 Paul Jennings’ Funniest Stories 2006 Paul Jennings’ Weirdest Stories 2007 Paul Jennings’ Spookiest Stories 2008 Paul Jennings’ Trickiest Stories 2009 The Nest

2015 Unreal! The Ultimate Collection

Illustrated by Craig Smith

1989 The Cabbage Patch Fib

1996 The Cabbage Patch War

2002 The Cabbage Patch Pong 2004 The Cabbage Patch Curse 2007 The Cabbage Patch Fibs (bind-up) 2016 The Unforgettable What’s His Name

Illustrated by Jeanette Rowe

1991 Teacher Eater

With Ted Greenwood, illustrated by Terry Denton 1992 Spooner or Later

1994 Duck for Cover

1996 Freeze a Crowd 2003 Spit it Out

Illustrated by Peter Gouldthorpe

1992 Grandad’s Gifts

Illustrated by Keith McEwan

1994 The Gizmo

1995 The Gizmo Again

1996 Come Back Gizmo

1996 The Paw Thing

1997 Sink the Gizmo

1998 Singenpoo Strikes Again 1999 Singenpoo Shoots Through 2001 Singenpoo’s Secret Weapon 2002 The Many Adventures of Singenpoo (bind-up) 2010 The Fantastic & Amazing Gizmo (bind-up) Illustrated by Glen Lumsden & David de Vries 1994 Round the Twist Graphic Novel

Illustrated by Jane Tanner

1994 The Fisherman and the Theefyspray

With Morris Gleitzman

1997 Wicked!

2000 Deadly!

Illustrated by Terry Denton

2000 Sucked In

Illustrated by Andrew Weldon

2004 The Reading Bug

2013 Don’t Look Now Book 1: Falling For It and The Kangapoo Key Ring 2013 Don’t Look Now Book 2: A Magician Never Tells and Elephant Bones 2013 Don’t Look Now Book 3: Hair Cut and Just a Nibble 2013 Don’t Look Now Book 4: Hobby Farm and Seeing Red

Illustrated by Bob Lea

2004 Rascal the Dragon

2004 Rascal in Trouble

2004 Rascal’s Trick

2004 Rascal Takes Off

2005 Rascal at the Show

2005 Rascal and the Cheese

2005 Rascal and little Flora 2005 Rascal and the Hot Air Balloon 2006 Rascal and the Monster 2006 Rascal Goes Fishing

2006 Rascal and the Dragon Droppings 2006 Little Rascal to the Rescue 2010 Rascal Plays Up

2010 Rascal Runs Away

2010 Rascal’s Shadow

2010 Rascal and the Bad Smell 2011 Rascal Bumps his Head

2011 Rascal’s Big Day

Illustrated by Geoff Kelly

2017 A Different Dog

2018 A Different Boy

2019 A Different Land

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the help of five incredible professionals who read and re-read this manuscript so many times — all working under the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 outbreak — I would never have finished this book. Thank you so much to Mary-Anne Fahey, Julie Watts, Erica Wagner, Kate Whitfield and Sandra Nobes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Jennings has written more than one hundred stories and sold over ten million books, Since the publication of Unreal! in 1985, readers all around the world have loved his stories. The first two series of the top-rating TV series Round the Twist were based on Paul’s popular short-story collections and he received two Awgie awards for screenwriting episodes. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to children’s literature in 1995, was awarded the prestigious Dromkeen Medal in 2001 and was made a Fellow of Monash University in 2010. In 2019 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. He lives in Warrnambool with his partner, comedian, actor and author Mary-Anne Fahey.

INDEX

Ahlberg, Allan 30–31
arrival in Australia 43–45

Bantoft, Lisa 183

Bentleigh West State School 44, 59, 68, 77, 115–16, 188

Billy Graham Crusade, 1959 90, 100–1

Bird, Carmel 3–6, 176

Blyton, Enid 13
book signings 186–90, 192

Burwood State College, see Institute of Special Education Cairns, Jim 139–40

Carole see Howlet, Carole Carver, Raymond 294
children with disabilities, teaching of and working with 96, 114–15, 121–4, 134–6, 138, 142
classic cars 250, 256–8, 263–4, 320

Council of Adult Education 3

Crompton, Richmal 184

Dahl, Roald 185, 190–91

Dandenong Ranges 63, 249–51, 255, 268, 269–70

Deakin University 1, 180, 250

Denton, Terry 253–5
depression 258–9, 261–2, 270, 321

A Different Boy 35, 118, 130–1, 211

A Different Dog 64–7

Edgar, Patricia 232–3, 238–9
emigration to Australia 89, 35–41

Fahey, Mary-Anne 197, 277, 289, 308, 310–17
fear of flying 202–9

Field, Peter 265–6

Forth, Gordon 304

Fox, Mem 190

Fox, Robert 7–9

Frankston Teachers’ College 105–17, 142

The Gizmo 98

Gleitzman, Morris 264–5, 311–12

Godwin, Jane 276

Gouldthorpe, Peter 191

Grayson, Deidre 274

Greenwood, Ted 248, 249–55, 263
heart bypass 281, 288–9

Henry, O. 4, 185

How Hedley Hopkins Did a Dare 96, 138

Howlet, Carole 103, 147–8, 152–7, 162–7, 228–9, 272, 299

Hulstaert, Keith 256

Institute of Special Education, Burwood State College 69, 141–5

IQ test 109

Jeans, Bruce 1–2, 41, 181

Jennings, Arthur 14–15, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 36–40, 44, 47, 50–1, 54–5, 71, 74–7, 79–89, 94–6, 105, 110, 136, 142, 152, 163, 165, 216, 221–13, 257, 262, 283, 286–7, 295–300, 304–7
confrontation of 88, 263, 293, 295–8, 301–3

Jennings, Carole see Howlet, Carole Jennings, Phyllis 9, 15, 21–6, 28–30, 35, 39, 44, 48–54, 74, 76–7, 85–9, 91, 94, 98, 103, 110, 166, 181, 184–5, 218, 221–2, 282, 283–7, 290–1, 295–6, 304–6

Jennings, Ruth see Webber, Ruth Jodrell, Steve 233–5, 238

Langer, Albert 101

Lawson, Wenn 311-13

Lea, Bob 213
lecturing 2, 141–2, 145
letters from readers 20, 96–7, 175, 180, 215, 217, 219–20, 223, 269

Lewis, Mark 233–4, 236, 238

Lewis-Nicholson, Russell 276–7

Lincoln Institute 135
marriage 162–6, 169
breakup, first 1–2, 147, 152–7, 161–2, 166; second 270–73
children 1, 61, 147–57, 162, 165–6, 169, 176, 180–1, 211, 228–9,

250, 270, 277

Andrew 152, 172

Linda 186–7

Sally 150–51

Tracy 157, 260

‘Mary’ 86–7, 293, 295–304, 306

McCall, Louise 258

McCredie, Catherine 214, 313–14

McEwan, Keith 98

MacLeod, Doug 190, 197

Menzies, Sydney 75, 88

Monash University 101, 142–3

Mortimer, Nancy 186–8
multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner 110
nieces, Fiona, Sharon, Kirsten 158–9

The Nest 78, 84, 149

O’Connor, Peter 92, 261–4, 266, 273

Oleson, Jim 279, 281

Parker, Fiona 201, 274–5, 277–8

Penguin Books 145, 171, 177–80, 185–6, 204, 207, 214–15, 245, 253, 265–6, 276

Pitt, Teresa 171, 179–80, 220
postgraduate studies 1–2, 135–6, 142–3, 319–20

Potter, Beatrix 191
practice-teaching placements 110, 112–14

Rascal series 213–14
reading, teaching of 115–17, 122–23, 129–30, 136, 141, 172, 175
religious faith 91–95, 98–103, 105, 108, 162
loss of 102–3, 124, 289

Richardson, Pamela (Granny) 34, 89

Ronai, Kay 171, 178–9, 266

Round the Twist 137, 231–47, 250, 255

Royal Children’s Hospital Orthopaedic Annex 133–5

Ryan, Ronald 139
sex education 95–7

Shirrefs, Fred 150–2
single parenthood 1, 154, 157, 161, 166, 172, 231

Smith, Craig 190, 316

Southall, Ivan 5, 250–52
speech therapy 135–8, 141

Storm, Esben 232–3, 235–42, 244, 246
subdural haematoma 279–81
suicide 89, 103, 154
teachers’ college 6, see Frankston Teacher’ College Thiele, Colin 5, 191

‘Timothy’ 59–60, 65–66, 99, 102, 105, 139–41, 154–5, 212–13

Turana Youth Training Centre 35, 123–33

Ulmann, Robert and Helen 6, 160–61

The Unforgettable What’s His Name 211, 316

Unreal! 180, 190–92, 219

‘Veronica’ 272–3

Vickers, Dick 159, 271

Wagner, Erica 130, 253

Wallace, Stuart 148–50

Warrnambool
cliff house 1, 6, 61, 147–150, 152–54, 156, 159–60, 172
modern house 271, 273
forest/property 273–5, 277–9

Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education 1–2, 145, 180–1, 252

Watts, Julie 96, 131, 161, 171, 179–80, 226, 240, 245–6, 253, 265–6, 276

Webber, Ruth (nee Jennings) 36–7, 39–40, 42, 44–8, 51–2, 58, 77, 86–9, 91, 102, 110–11, 158–9, 166, 216, 220–22, 284, 286, 295, 297, 299–303, 307

Wenn see Lawson, Wenn

Wright, Terry 257–8
writing for children 12–17, 20–21, 31, 60, 65–7, 70, 84, 173–6
humour 20, 66, 176, 195–7, 211–12, 215, 218, 226–9, 252–4
inspiration for stories 60, 64–66, 84, 87, 98, 130–1, 136–8, 144–5, 183, 192–4, 197–8