when I learnt that Dad was an S.P. Bookmaker and the messages he wrote on the phone table were the bets. Dad had never wanted us to be in the house on Saturday’s just in case he was raided. If we had’ve been there and they found the bets on the premises the likelihood of us kids being taken away and put in a home as wards of the state was quite on the cards. The police apparently came in through the windows like bull elephants and frightened the living daylights out of Granddad and Edith. Dad was too smart to get caught he just wiped the marble table top with a wet cloth and erased all trace of the bets which were written in pencil. He probably lost a few quid that day and that’s why he was in such a bad mood. Dad got caught on another occasion but not by the police. In those days there was no direct broadcast of the southern state races, the races were always delayed by about five minutes. On this particular occasion Dad received a phone call from one of his regular customers a couple of minutes before the start of every Sydney and Melbourne race and placed rather high stakes on each winner. At the end of the day when he realised how much the fellow had won, he knew he’d been conned somehow. He had no alternative other than to pay up and shut up. He later found out the fellow had gained the names of the winner by telephoning two friends in New South Wales and Victoria, that’s when Dad found out that the southern races were delayed broadcasts. It was a costly lesson of two hundred and fifty pounds (five hundred dollars) a king’s ransom in the early fifties. That doesn’t sound much in this day and age but when you consider a weekly wage in the 1950s was about ten pounds (twenty dollars), imagine how you’d feel if you lost six months wages in one afternoon.
I think Dad’s interest in horse racing must have had a big influence on his three kids because none of us showed any interest whatsoever in wasting money on the nags except for the Melbourne Cup, of course.
Chapter 6
Urban Terrorists
Near our street was a Railway Station, beyond that was a big eerie building that would’ve made an excellent location for a monster’s castle in a horror movie. It was Legacy House where all the orphans of World War Two were housed. The building has been altered with extensions and improvements in recent years and is now a Hospital. Occasionally we’d play in a little park alongside Legacy House which we called the oval. It was large enough to have a football game or a basketball court but for some unknown reason the Legacy kids weren’t allowed to play there.
Many years later I met a young woman about the same age as myself and she told me she recognised me as being one of the kids whom she always wanted to play with. How cruel of the powers that be denying children the basic rights of little kids to interact with other kids simply because they forgot what it was like to be a kid themselves.
The Mulvihill family lived down around the corner from us opposite the railway station. John was James age, Michael was Edward’s age, Ray was about a year younger than me and Malcolm was approximately three years younger than me. John and Michael were brutes of kids. They’d always muck up any game that was started and if they didn’t get their own way, they’d start a fight especially with Edward. Michael was a fair little swine. Ray was a fairly quiet kid and Malcolm was the one whom we all felt sorry for, when he was four, he climbed up to look out the window he overbalanced and fell on his head on the cement footpath twenty feet (three metres) below. Well that’s what we were told. He never seemed to have any control of the mucus in his nostrils because of the damage caused by the fall and he always seemed to have permanent green candlesticks streaming onto his top lip. Recently Ray (now deceased) has been named as the murderer of a cold case of Sharron Phillips back in the 80’s. It makes me wonder now if he pushed Malcolm out the window.
At the top of the hill of our street was a twenty-foot high brick wall, which encompassed a huge area of land where the Carmelite Monastery was built. No one was ever allowed in there because the Carmelites had taken a vow of silence. Savage dogs patrolled the land and anyone walking down the street near the fence would invariably be frightened almost half to death by the dogs barking at them.
All the kids would stir the dogs every time we went anywhere near the fence by calling out or whistling. As soon as the dogs began to bark, we’d toss sticks and stones over the fence and yell at them to shut up.
On the other side of the Carmelite Monastery lived another boy of Edward’s age Billy McCulkin, Billy made Michael look like the Archangel Gabriel. He was such a bad egg of a kid that Dad forbade us kids to have anything to do with him. The police came around to tell Dad that Edward, Joey and Michael were in Billy’s company whilst Billy ran around the streets with a 303 rifle shooting birds from the trees. In 1974 Billy’s wife and two daughters mysteriously disappeared. Since then two associates of Billy were convicted of their murders.
Billy’s name has been linked to the Whiskey AU Go Go fire which killed 15 people.
We had the choice of the paddock at the bottom of our hill, the Legacy oval, the local park or the chalk dump opposite Stephanie’s house to play in. The chalk dump was good to get as much white chalk as we wanted for the rest of our lives. I have no idea where the chalk came from or why it was dumped there, but it was something that none of us kids ever thought about. We just accepted it as a natural part of everyday living to have a chalk dump in the street behind our home. Eventually it was cleared and the Chinese Association was built on the site.
The paddock was a good flat area of land to play tiggy or throw a ball to each other, but as it was only at the bottom of our street, it was too close to home. Our mothers could call us home to go to the shop or to have our bath early so we all preferred to play in the park. Not only was it further from the house, it had a hill with a rough road we could drive our billy carts down full pelt. There were plenty of trees in the park to play hide and seek and on the other side of the park was the football oval and swings, seesaw, roundabout and slippery slide. Best of all we loved to spy on the couples who parked in their cars near the railway line. It was surprising the many cars that would park there in broad daylight. We’d give the poor buggers heaps by peering into the cars and when they told us to P.O.Q. we’d take off and grab a handful of goolies (stones) and toss them at the hapless couple until they drove off. Sometimes but only occasionally the men would give us all the change in their pocket and we’d leave them alone in peace.
There was one odd-bod who’d often come into the park to talk to us kids. He wasn’t a child molester or anything like that he was just a poor simpleton who loved kids. He always wore a rope around his waist with about six tennis balls hanging off it on pieces of string. As well as the tennis balls, he had a spoon dangling on a piece of string. He spoke with a foreign accent and would repeatedly tell us,
‘Childrik drenk planty mulk,’
Whenever he came around, we’d stop whatever games we were playing to talk to him. He’d stay for about ten minutes and then keep walking to wherever he lived and we’d resume our game.
At the top of the hill on our side of the street lived a wonderful old lady by the name of Mrs Ward, all the kids liked her and it was obvious that she loved kids. She would often give biscuits to the kids but none of us went to visit her specifically to get biscuits. We all genuinely liked her and it was a pleasure to go and talk to her. Directly across the road from Mrs Ward, next door to the White’s house lived an old battle-axe by the name of Mrs Stanley. We all called her old mother Stanley among other names. As much as Mrs Ward loved us kids old mother Stanley hated us double fold, we in turn felt likewise. She had an orange tree in her backyard that none of us, that I knew of at any rate, ever raided. But that didn’t stop her from putting big chunks of glass and barbed wire along the top of her fence obviously to stop the kids from jumping the fence.
Her house was always locked up like a tomb and on one particular summer day I decided on the spur of the moment as I walked past to remove the glass and put it in the gutter. I removed about thirty pieces of the jagged chunks placing them in the gutter. Out of the blue, the back door
