very year he was supposed to take his Senior Certificate examinations at the Perth Technical College. As far as I could see, the guilt and sins that weighed heavily on me never touched him. In his final examination, my brother failed every subject except Art, in which he topped his year.
The headmaster summoned father and hit him with the news that Wesley had failed to score a single mark in English. The headmaster was not angry, only stunned. "Let him paint," was my advice. I need not have spoken. When they moved to Melbourne and moved into a house at 59 Bowen Street, Camberwell, father got Wesley a job in a flour mill. Wes acted as though he didn't even hear the proposal. He just went on painting until the house was full of drawings and the walls and ceilings had changed from white to a Michaelangelo-istic kaleidoscope. Every room was thick with the smell of paint and turpentine, crammed with paintings, paper and musical instruments. On the few feet of wall space were books on religion, philosophy and how to fix anything. My parents not only condoned it but also wallowed in it. Some of the nude women would have made Young and Jackson's [famous painting of] Chloeblush. Somehow the self-same parents, who'd once scolded me for carrying a girl's suitcase, now lived unblushingly among mountains of naked flesh - and the devil. Wesley often painted the devil. He painted everything in sight. He even painted the cat.
In 1937 I was selected in the Western Australian team to go to the Australian National Games in Brisbane. After the games I got a job in Melbourne at Trinity Grammar School and soon found out that Methodism is better for scholars, Anglicanism much more comfortable for staff. During my last few months at Wesley, three of the unmarried staff members formed an Oxford Group. We practised Absolute Purity, Love, Unselfishness and Honesty. We prayed, meditated and confessed. It did little good for any of us. I signalled my release from Wesley College by forgetting the Four Absolutes for a start.
The day after the W.A. team reached Brisbane, I won the Queensland pole-vault championship and did not run in the half-mile. I should have landed in the sandpit while doing the pole-vault but landed on the grass instead. In the national championships I hobbled up to the bar and sailed underneath it, sic transit gloria. This prevented any chances I had of being chosen for the 1938 Empire Games. I did some training with du Plessis, the South African who won the Games pole-vault. He gave me his green South African running pants, which later on led me to my first wife. After the vacation, I began teaching at Trinity Grammar, Kew, Melbourne.
The Headmaster, the late Frank Shann, was a totally different kind of principal, a hedonist who believed that boys should be allowed their idiosyncrasies in the boarding house. No matter how much we tried to change things, Shann thwarted us. I don't know whether he believed in Honesty, Purity and Unselfishness, but he certainly did believe in Love, and he was a famous headmaster. After the rigours of Wesley College, Perth, it was, nevertheless, disturbing to me as a boarding-house master, that big boys abused little boys in dormitories and preferred to sleep on the roof rather than in their rooms. My assistant one night caught all the seniors traipsing off to the showers, stark naked with their towels draped over the most convenient peg. For some of their excesses he wanted to belt them with his cricket bat. This was forbidden.
Shann was very kind to me and he and his family assisted very much in building up the school's music and sporting reputation. I was straight from the Four Absolutes and I found the relaxed rules, the wine, the classical-music afternoons in the Shann household and the immodest housemaids a little disturbing. I had virtually become a vegetarian by this time and found the greasy roast mutton every day quite revolting. I complained to Shann. "All my life I have lived on boarding school food," he said. He smoked and drank and enjoyed life in every way. There is no doubt about that. He was also a remarkable headmaster. In my first week there I had the temerity to tell him that he would die of a heart attack by the time he was sixty. I may have been a few days out, but it happened.
Shann's elder son, Frank, became a well-known educationalist too, and headmaster of Hamilton Grammar School, western Victoria. Another son, K.C.O. Shann (Mick), achieved glory by becoming a diplomat. Mick had the best collection of dirty jokes and recordings of the masters of music that I'd met up to 1938. He introduced me to a repertoire of music, which I hadn't known existed. His enthusiasm for good music made him one of my most important influences. I wrote to him when he was ambassador to Japan or somewhere else. He replied that he did not listen to music much any more.
His elder brother, Frank Junior, almost secured my dismissal from Trinity. One of the boys of 5B (eleven-year-olds), to whom I taught everything except religion, raised an interesting question one day. "You teach us physiology and the systems of the body," said Dickenson, sophisticated son of sophisticated forebears, "and you have left out the most important - the reproductive system."
"Not I," I said. "It's not in the book." This was not Queensland but Victoria in 1939. It was the era when the righteous used to bash deviates in the Melbourne Domain. Nice people never said "sex" in front of children - they spelt it. I consulted Frank Shann Junior, who was at Trinity at this time. "Will I teach sex?" I asked.
He was gleeful and answered "Why not? Let's try an experiment. Give them the whole story."
"O.K.," I said, "but who'll tell the old man?"
"Don't tell him," Frank chuckled.
I did, however, call a meeting of parents. They all turned up one evening and sat on seats usually occupied by their sons. I got full approval and away we went - full descriptions in Latin and English words. After this course, there was nothing more to explain. No longer were there sniggers at double meanings. All those who'd been worried about something revealed their problems in front of all. Most of the boys in 5B were Dr A.E. Floyd's choristers from St Paul's Cathedral and some of them had problems. Young Gerry was brave enough to bare all. When he was three years old he was urinating through the chicken-house wire one day. The rooster had pecked the end off.
"Will I still be able to have children?" he 'd asked in front of the class.
"How much did you lose?" I asked. "The end? The middle? The lot?"
"The very end bit," he said.
"No problem, you may go forth and multiply," I assured him.
The whole class seemed pleased. I set a question in the exam paper. "Describe the reproductive system of birds, bees and humans." The paper had to be handed in for checking. I was summoned to the headmaster's office. There were no preliminaries. "I will not have this question placed on an exam paper in this school. I will stake my reputation that this sort of thing should not be placed on an exam paper or discussed in public."
"If you take it off the paper, I'll resign," I said.
"I accept," he snapped, so I went to start packing. As I waited in my room to cool down, I began to think. "We have won the athletics and we have an orchestra, described in the newspaper as the best school orchestra in Australia. He'll back down." He sent his wife to tell me [that he had?]. Perhaps I should have left in a hurry. Had I gone then, I may have kept the vow I'd made to my mother: "I won't marry, Mum," I'd promised, "and we'll go on a trip to the Old Country." But I did not keep my promise.
It happened this way. I trained the football team, the athletics team and supervised boarders from four in the afternoon through the night until nine the next morning. I was training hard at athletics and writing music for the school orchestra. Almost everything the school orchestra played was written by me and I even got my first opera, "Peter Pan", produced at the school by Alma Sylvester, later commander of the women's army. I was exhausted and on edge. The only time for training was after lights out at night. I contracted scarlet fever, diphtheria, golden staff or a mixture, or something else, which almost killed me. The medical superintendent of the Infectious Diseases Hospital called in the family for a farewell visit. The medical superintendent was an Old Trinity Grammarian. "Let's give him private nursing," he suggested. Sister Helen Wakefield took over the chore, got all systems going again
