had glasses when he was your age.’
Mum pulled up at traffic lights next to the Whipper Snapper fish-and-chip shop. I was looking at people waiting in cars when my heart skipped a beat. Elizabeth Taylor was sitting in the passenger seat of an orange Chrysler Valiant! There was even something sparkly around her neck. It had to be the Cartier. I waved. She waved back. The lights changed and my mother put her foot down. I was about to tell Mum when I saw David Niven heading toward us in an old Vauxhall. I took the glasses off and rubbed my eyes.
A letter from the United States of America was waiting for me when I got home.
Dear Fan and Friend,
We’re delighted by your interest in the official Liz Taylor International Fan Club. You’re one of thousands of fans around the world following Liz’s sparkling career.
Full membership in the official Liz Taylor fan club is just ten American dollars per year. For this nominal fee you receive a fan-club badge and certificate. Naturally, you also get our quarterly Liz Taylor fanzine, Liz, Camera, Action!
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Don’t forget to include your money order for club membership.
Yours truly,
Barbara Bushel
President of the official Liz Taylor International Fan Club
The envelope contained a studio photo of a young Liz Taylor with her arm around a dog’s neck. There was also a quote from one of her movies: ‘“It’s a very odd feeling – to be someone’s God.” Liz Taylor as Kathie Merrick in The Courage of Lassie.’
Mum and Dad were having money problems. Dad said his problem was having to support a moaning wife and three thankless children. Mum said the problem was his having to support his drinking and horse-racing habits. She went out one day and got herself a job on the production line at the Tassie Textiles factory. We were each given a set of keys to the back door and warned not to let strange men or brush salesmen into the house.
Mum’s timing was unhelpful for my career aspirations. I’d just decided to take up tap-dancing after watching Gene Kelly with an umbrella and required her encouragement on the old heel-toe routine. Her abrupt decision left me high and dry. In one fell swoop I’d lost both my impresario and audience.
I struggled to adjust to this sudden loss. Mum had always been there for me after school. She was my cheerleader and I was her beauty consultant. The focus of our relationship shifted once she started work. She was tired after a day at the factory and wasn’t as switched into my pizzazz or the Golden Microphone. I had to work like hell to make her laugh or get a ‘Twinkle’ out of her and, even worse, I lost my only beauty client. I knew better than to touch Mum in front of Dad. Whenever I got her alone, I did my best to fluff and style but this didn’t give me the same satisfaction.
One day, in a moment of desperation, I bribed Carmel with a family block of Shelby’s to sit for me. I hadn’t even put all the curlers in her hair when she finished the chocolate and shook them all out. I let her go without a squeak of protest. She was now an active member of the girls’ cricket and hockey teams. She and her friends had budding breasts and thick arms. They openly smoked cigarettes and rode their bicycles everywhere in third gear. Boys were frightened of them.
A couple of dismal months had to drag by before I could appreciate the benefits of not having parents around. Under the new arrangement, no one knew what time I came home and no one told me what to do when I got there. While I enjoyed this new freedom and the extra television-viewing it permitted, I still craved an audience.
I’d started taking French at school. It was one of the elective culture lessons set aside for the last hour of every Friday. The choices were limited: debating, charity work, Bible study, crochet or French. When I discovered that boys were excluded from the crochet class, I chose French. It was not only the language of Brigitte Bardot but it also did something nice to the back of my throat. The lesson was taught by a big friendly woman with the unlikely name of Mrs French. Most of the vocabulary we learned was related to food and restaurants: my kind of language.
Jimmy Budge had also chosen French. He lived around the corner from us in a notorious bungalow in Wallaby Place. People stopped at the Budge hedge and shook their heads. Jimmy’s father was a quiet-spoken widower but a sore point with the mothers of the neighbourhood because he bred and raced pigeons. His birds flew over our houses as a massive cloud to land on his front lawn in a grey flutter of feathers. People didn’t like the pigeons. There was talk of disease and droppings. My father said Mr Budge’s hacking cough was pigeon-fancier’s lung and warned me not to get too friendly with his birds. I liked Mr Budge. He was a vast improvement on Dad. He was a friendly man and never told kids off.
Jimmy was probably the best-looking boy in our school. His sandy-blond hair was faultless and flopped perfectly over his eyes, which were slightly different colours. He told me that one eye was green with envy because the other was blue. ‘That’s what my father says. He’s got the same genetic defect. Bung eyes and lungs run in the family.’ I started walking home with him after school on Fridays.
On the third Friday, I stopped in front of our gate and invited him into the garage. ‘You want to see my amphitheatre?’
I had a feeling about Jimmy Budge. It was the way his eyes had shone when he repeated ‘La cuisine de la France’ for Mrs French.
I’d created the amphitheatre behind the firewood in the garage. From the outside it looked like a normal stack of wood but inside it was a private chamber with bedding and other personal comforts. It was where I kept my valuables and ate contraband.
The only way to get inside this secret chamber was to climb up the exposed timber framework of the garage wall and jump. I did this and disappeared from Jimmy’s view. He scrambled up the wall after me and watched as I stripped off my clothes. I was twirling my underpants in my hand when he jumped into the amphitheatre, peeling off his clothes with the efficiency of a German tourist.
I’d learned all about the German enthusiasm for nudity while staying at the Bland holiday cabin. From a sand hill, I’d observed a couple of tourists prepare for sunbathing by removing all their clothing except for their socks and sandals.
My father should’ve been happy that Mum had a job but he was more disagreeable than ever. Mum said he lacked pizzazz. He certainly had no interest in music or show business. The only celebrities he appreciated were famous thugs who played sports. At least since the Dent diagnosis he’d stopped harassing me about ball games. My Nana Mouskouris confirmed for him that I wasn’t quite right and he now avoided eye contact. This was fine by me. He’d diverted his attention to John who’d come up with the insane idea of becoming a doctor and started doing homework every evening after school. John thought this choice of career made him superior and Dad seemed to agree.
They could keep each other as far as I was concerned. I had better things to do. Jimmy had put in a word with the distributor of The Bugle and I’d started delivering newspapers with him in the mornings. Within a couple of months I’d lost weight and looked almost normal when I held in my stomach. I had to get up at five in the morning but the job gave me freedom and power. For the first time in my life
