bike and playing speedway games on the way around the lake was more fun than school. The slippery leaves, fallen from the trees, made a perfect racetrack.
After three years of academic degradation and shame, I was faced with the Intermediate Certificate examinations. Any teacher would have given one hundred to one that I wouldn't pass. For a few months I gave up everything and studied far into the night, every night. Everyone was surprised when I was among the only four who passed. [This seems unlikely.]
My father started nailing down packing cases again and soon we were back in the queen city of the south, Melbourne. We settled in Thornbury and I enrolled at Northcote High School. In 1931 James F. Cairns [later a member of the federal parliament] had left, so had Ron Todd, the best forward the V.F.L. ever had. My career went curiously parallel with that of Jim Cairns for years and he and his wife, Gwen, became close friends. Cairns was still a hero at Northcote High for many years after he left. He was a champion athlete, captain of the Melbourne Harriers, leader of the school's team and already a humanist. When I left Northcote High School, I joined the Melbourne Harriers, Australia's oldest athletics club and thus became associated with Cairns.
Later, we fought a few minutes of the war together in Morotai, but before the war I'd been out with him on one or two of his detective cases, while he was in the police force. We would hide behind a hedge or some other shelter and keep a house under surveillance, mainly chatting about athletics and the correct running style. Jim was head of the police force's debating team. He was promoted fast, resigned just as fast and never went back after the war. Cairns studied by correspondence while he was in the armed forces and got a very good economics degree. After demobilisation he became a lecturer in economic history at Melbourne University. He was working on his Ph.D. while I was studying at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. I'd been at Olympic Park the day our club president introduced him to his future wife, Gwen, the girl from Blue Knob near Nimbin, N.S.W. [Gwen had two little boys and had been left in some difficulty. Almost immediately Jim said; "I'll look after them" - and he did. I was in their house a lot - I know how caring for Gwen and the boys Jim was. I never saw the slightest suspicion of a glance at anyone else.] Much later on, [after the Juni Morosi affair] when we were standing together at the easternmost point of Australia, Byron Bay, Cairns grabbed me by the lapels and shook me. "I'll tell you about love," he said. "You don't have to tell me," I replied, "I don't want to hear." So we changed the subject.
Jim Cairns is one of the great humanists, an excellent economist and an exceptional lover of all that is pure, sane, intelligent and moral. The trouble with the world is that great humanists, great economists and exceptional lovers are vulnerable to the monstrous beings that are his opposites. Jim could not have survived the Canberra political game. In a better world he may have been a great Australian prime minister. His philosophy of matriarchy is, of course, fundamentally correct and it is quite natural that the female should be acknowledged as the superior being. His book, The Untried Road", 1991, is a handbook for human survival at a time when the earth is threatened by social conflict and greed. "Love is the only way out," he says. What amazes me is that Cairns still believes. What troubles me is that I don't.
At Northcote High School I managed to become dux in humanities and went on to University High School to do Leaving Honours. At the time this was the best school in Victoria and, even today, it takes only top students and top teachers. I pretended to study deeply English, British History, European History, Ancient History and Latin. I also played in the school orchestra under the elegant baton of Stuart Wilkie, who was, in my estimation, one of the progenitors of Melbourne's musical life. His influence on instrumental music in Victoria gave the State a head start over the rest of Australia. He founded music in Victorian high schools.
Sport and Teaching
From the sublime to the Australian mania, sport. I was the fast bowler in the school's first eleven, bowled at and bowled out by Bluey Truscott, Melbourne High School's hero [and later an R.A.A.F. fighter ace]. I played in the first-grade football team and nearly won the interschool half-mile footrace. I only dabbled in schoolwork. This was the time of the Great Depression and I don't know how my father kept me at school. It was I who insisted. I was there, at University High School, when the German cruiser, Koln, visited Melbourne. We entertained the sailors at the school. To us they were heroes, examples of humanity, and they told us about their wonderful leader, who gave them a clean, wonderful fatherland full of athletes, health, hiking in forests, parks, gardens, buildings and superhuman beings. We all became Nazis overnight.
At that time the senior girls wore long skirts down to their ankles. I found that curiously sexy. This fashion lasted no longer than our newfound political philosophy. In the holidays I looked for work, standing in long queues outside rubber factories and other places. Sometimes these queues were a hundred yards long. Every time I got to the place where the employment officer sat I heard the sad words, "Job's filled". So I went back to school at U.H.S. I thought I would be a prefect and have another year of Sport, History and Literature. This luxury lasted only a few days.
The Salvation Army and a newspaper advertisement suddenly sealed my life and fate. Mentone Grammar School wanted a junior master. My father couldn't get to the phone quickly enough. The employer made an appointment and I subsequently met a gentleman named C.C. Thorold, M.A. (Oxon.). There is no other way to describe him. Always a curious man, this dignified scholar organised a walk through the empty streets of Melbourne the next Saturday afternoon. After about an hour chatting in the deserted echoing chasms of Melbourne city, I found that I'd been appointed senior housemaster and junior teacher at Mentone Grammar School. Mentone is a Melbourne bayside suburb, more famous then for racing stables than anything else.
That I got the job had little to do with my qualifications or my good looks - it was simply because my father was a Salvationist. Now I had another debt to the Army. Thorold told me that he once had an excellent gardener at the Hutchins School in Tasmania, who happened to play the euphonium in the Salvation Army. This Salvationist was honest and worked well. It was obvious that from me the headmaster expected morality, not ability. Mr Thorold had been Headmaster of Barker College in N.S.W. and of the Hutchins School. Now he was the sole owner of Mentone Grammar School. There were forty-five boys in the senior school and twelve in the junior. The senior school was a wooden hall with an annex. Within these humble walls, Mr Thorold brought academic distinction and the highest forms of English gentlemen's behaviour to the sons of racing trainers and jockeys.
My first day's teaching at Mentone Grammar was hilarious. In fact, the whole two years of my teaching there can have been of little value to any of my poor students. I hadn't the slightest idea how to teach three-year-old cherubs, six-year-old pants-wetters, nor a slow-learning ten-year-old, who sat there smiling all day at anything and everything. The twelve-year-old son of a racehorse trainer was much too sharp for me so, from the very first day, I left the important business of education to a part-time buxom Irish girl named Lois Murphy and a red-headed sportsman named Jim. Academic excellence was of little importance at Mentone Grammar in those days, except to the charming Headmaster, who did his best to imbue the forty-five scholars with wonderful grace, charm and good manners. The Junior School was one side of a flywire shed. The other side was the boarding house. There was a small corner behind a screen where I slept. Everyone had a cold shower every morning and there was no other kind available.
Mrs Thorold, a straight homely lady with manners to match those of her husband, occupied with utmost graciousness the position of cook and housekeeper. There was a dear old teacher named Mr Tanswell, who had somehow lost his way and strayed into the area - I think he was the senior housemaster. I am sure he was Dickensian. Major Holt, a ramrod, taught drill and I helped famous ex-Collingwood football star, Bruce Andrew, to train the football team. The boarders consisted of Smith Minor, Thompson Major and a lost Russian child named Rovkin. Smith could not be managed at all; Thompson could only be controlled by knocking him senseless and nobody worried about Rovkin - we pretended he wasn't there. The true story, of course, is that the three boys were absolutely delightful characters.
Breakfast
