Before I Sleep (4 page)

At Norwood we had a King and Queen money-raising campaign. I was elected King by the class. We were given cards in which little holes were punched for every threepence collected. I didn't bother to take mine home, we had no spare threepences. The Queen's mother let me know in clear language that my family had let the class down because my mother had not joined in any of the activities. I had not really known what was expected of us, and had not told my mother. I was eight years of age. It took a long time for me to get over the feeling of inferiority which stemmed from that dressing down.

For some reason, my mother never gave me a cut lunch. I received sixpence to pay my tram fares to and from Norwood Public School and later Adelaide High School and this left fourpence for lunch. I only travelled one way by tram, which meant that I would have fivepence each day with which to buy boys' comics. I did this for all of my school days, going without any lunch on most days when I could not persuade another lad to trade a sandwich for one of my comics. After school I walked each afternoon from Norwood to Halifax Street, a distance of four miles. I preferred to walk and have comics to read, rather than to ride — comic-less — on the tram. I have always tended to over-eat, but even the desire for food took second place to books and comics. The comics were all English and full of stories about English boarding schools. Billy Bunter appeared quite regularly. It seems odd now, but in those days I never felt that the culture they depicted was alien or strange. Australia then was an extension of England — we shared a language and a sense of humour. For many of the people I knew when I was growing up, England wasn't called England, it was simply Home.

When I was about twelve and selling newspapers at weekends on Hutt Street corners, I found it easy to smuggle out novels from my employer's lending library. I must have taken half a dozen, mainly Zane Grey's and Edward S. Ellis's cowboy yarns. That was not my only shopstealing — I also stole tins of sardines from the Adelaide Co-op.

When I was nineteen, I went back to both these places and compensated the surprised managers. I explained that I would be expected within a couple of years to arrest people who stole items from shops. I could not do this with a clear conscience unless they accepted my apology. We parted friends.

My mother persisted with her dream of giving me a good education. This included an ability to play a musical instrument. I went down by tram every Saturday morning to a private tutor in Lockleys for a half-hour session of violin instruction costing one shilling. I did this for five years, though I did little practice. It was difficult to practise without access to a piano. I hated the small violin my mother had somehow obtained, no doubt at great family sacrifice. As soon as I could, I revolted. I must have greatly disappointed my mother, but she never nagged at me.

In many ways, the move to Halifax Street was a success. The house was a nicer three rooms, but still with no electricity. We still had no ice-box or even a Coolgardie safe. (I wasn't to live in a house with an ice box until I was married in 1938.) The Halifax Street house was set back about 12 feet (4 metres) from the footpath and in this space grew a few neglected shrubs. There was a concrete bath in a bathroom outside, but this still had to be filled from the copper so usually I had a bath in a large tub in the kitchen. There was no shower in the bathroom, and only one kerosene lamp. There was a grapevine around the back door which each summer produced bunches of sweet, white grapes, but the vine was covered in mildew and we couldn't use the grapes. There was a fig tree which struggled to produce some tasty figs each year but which received no encouragement from us. We were also able to keep a few fowls, but rats were a nuisance. My parents must simply have accepted the rats as an inevitable part of city life, for they took no measures to get rid of them. Big Uncle Fred, who lived nearby in a substantial two-sto-reyed stone house and kept a large collection of prize-winning pouter pigeons, made his cages ratproof by cementing the floors, but then his wife owned the premises. Fred was probably a bit of a disappointment to his wife. He was a big man and worked as a train guard. He would often arrive in Glenelg on the last train of the day and then cycle back to the city in the middle of the night. He enjoyed his life but never fulfilled his wife's expectations of social success.

For me, however, the big advance was living almost opposite the Baptist Mission. This had a large Sunday school of neighbourhood children. Our youth leader at the Mission was a well-known young West Torrens cricketer and YMCA member, a Mr Gar Gooden, a fine gymnast and at the time a bachelor. He also taught me rudimentary chess. I attended the Sunday afternoon school and found myself with six local lads of my age — ten — all from families of a similar socio-economic class. I won my first prize for a short Bible essay and this helped to establish me with my peers. That was important for, during the next five years, I spent much time at the Mission. It ran a boys' gym, a basketball team, a cricket team, took some of us to the beach on hot nights and had a Christian Endeavour Society — all of which I belonged to. The Mission also had electricity. On nights when our house was dark and there would be little to do at home but go to bed, the bright lights of the Mission were irresistible. I was seldom home before eleven and managed to do very little homework. This didn't matter very much while I was still at primary school, but by the time I got to high school my academic progress had slowed.

2
Finding the future

(
1925
-
1934
)

I
N 1926 a classmate at Norwood walked the eight miles to and from my place in order to persuade my mother to let me join the Boy Scouts. My mother was so impressed by this feat of endurance that she said I could join despite the cost of the uniform. I soon found myself in the company of fellow enthusiasts in a very good troop at the Adelaide YMCA. I read
Scouting for Boys
by Baden-Powell and was enthralled. Our scout leader was a young surveyor aged about twenty-three, with a good imagination and a flair for enthusing young lads with a spirit of adventure, both in outdoor activities and in intellectual pursuits. And so, for the next four years, I went without fail to the regular Friday night meeting at the YMCA in Grenfell Street. I was smartly turned out in the costly uniform that my mother had scraped for and later washed and ironed every week. We had a fierce annual inter-patrol competition that ensured that punctuality, teamwork and personal achievement were rewarded. Several times a year, our patrol of about six boys organised weekend camps. We always went to the Sturt Creek Reserve in the hills just outside Adelaide. On Saturday afternoons we would take the train to Blackwood Station and then, laden down with our gear — which included a heavy canvas cottage tent, walk the one and a half miles to the Reserve.

By the time we had erected the tent it would be time to light a fire and start cooking the evening meal. We always cooked stew. We did so because one of the requirements of the Scout's Second Class badge was the ability to cook this particular meal. Sausages would not do. This was a pity because we could easily have grilled sausages to perfection in half an hour. As it was, the long, slow simmer that is necessary for a good stew was always cut short by our growing hunger and the meal was eaten half-cooked. Once or twice it rained in the night and we thought how splendid it was to be dry and snug inside a tent while the rest of the world soaked. On Sunday morning we struck camp and walked back to the station with all our gear. Little else was achieved on these camps, but the simple experience of being on our own and fending for ourselves — if only overnight — made it all worthwhile.

Once a year, at Christmas, the whole troop went off to an exciting new campsite for ten long days. One year we went to Long Island in the Murray, another to Silver Lake at Mylor and once we went to Tailem Bend just upstream from Lake Alexandrina. Our leader had a flair for introducing city kids to the delights of the country. In my teenage eyes he was a model bloke: clean-cut, active, enthusiastic and ambitious. He was a surveyor by trade. After I left the scouts, I lost track of him, but years later I met one of my fellow scouts and asked after him. It was extraordinarily disappointing to learn that he had married and settled down in a country surveying practice where he had grown fat and taken to a life playing bowls. There was no reason why he shouldn't have done just this, but it is always disconcerting to learn that the heroes of our youth are merely human.

Unconsciously I must have internalised the moral code that Baden Powell had succinctly summarised in his Ten Scout Laws, for they have provided me with clear ethical guidelines ever since: trustworthiness, loyalty, helpfulness, brotherliness, courtesy, kindness to animals, obedience to a superior, cheerfulness, thriftiness, and purity. (This last used to give me trouble until I defined “purity” in a more mature manner.) I remember being greatly impressed by an account of the way in which an American visitor to London in 1912 had been helped by an English scout who had refused a tip, saying that he had undertaken to do a daily good turn. When the businessman returned to the United States, he formed the first American branch of the scouting organisation. I have tried to keep that simple undertaking to do a daily good turn myself. Many years later, my belief in the practical ideals of scouting was reinforced when one of my senior Commonwealth Police officers, whom I had recruited from the New South Wales Police Force, sneeringly referred to one of his former colleagues, Superintendent Ford, as “just a boy scout”. Bruce Ford had gained accelerated promotion in a force where seniority was almost the sole criterion of preferment by an act of “extreme bravery”. Happening upon two bank robbers fleeing from the scene of their crime, he had tackled them both and managed a double arrest. Ford was brave and honest; he was not a man to take bribes. It was this latter trait that my cynical officer regarded as typical boy scout behaviour. My own assessment of the officer was immediately modified. I also wondered if my own commitment to honesty was not well enough known in my own force for him to have ventured that comment. But I was pleased that the scouts tenet had been recognised by hard-bitten police. Subsequently my own officer's three sons became members of my scout group in Canberra.

To return to Halifax Street, our neighbours were a Mrs Ryan who took in a male lodger from time to time and, on the other side, a dear old pensioner, Mrs Bennett. My mother's two sisters and their boyfriends or husbands visited us slightly more often than they had when we were in the Murrays Lane cottage, but my father's many brothers and sisters still never came to our house and we very rarely went to theirs. Some we never visited. I was unaware of any rift in relationships — it just seemed that no visits were made.

I was allowed a lot of freedom. With hindsight, I suppose that's how the younger Haylock children behaved in Birdsville under my mother's supervision. I was at home very little. I formed a mateship with another young boy who lived nearby and who went to the Mission, Jack Chesson, and another, Alan Lovell. Alan Lovell was an expert at making wire prongs for shanghais. To these we fixed rubber bands and then cut out the tongues from old shoes to make a pouch to hold the BB shot or small stones. We hunted birds in the east Parklands. This was before I had made the Scouts' promise to be “kind to animals”.

In the evenings there was usually something on at the Mission and I went there with my mother's approval. Friday evenings were reserved for the scout troop. I never developed a habit of doing homework. I disliked schooling, both primary and secondary — partly because I couldn't see much advantage in it, and partly, I suspect, because of an administrative move at Norwood School. After I had been in Grade 5 for a term, four of us were moved into Grade 6 on the grounds that we were bright enough to cope with that year's standard. But I think the real reason was to balance out class sizes. These were, in any case, quite large by modern day numbers: forty children in a class was common. I did catch up scholastically with the rest of the grade 6 pupils eventually, but there was an unexpected bad outcome. The Grade 6 boys spent Friday mornings at a distant carpentry school learning woodwork. We four arrived in second term, but the carpentry instructor — he was a tradesman rather than a trained teacher — made no effort to provide any elementary instruction for us. I felt unwelcome. We were three projects behind the rest of the class and I, for one, had never held a plane or saw in my hands before. I hadn't the slightest idea how to sharpen a chisel. I tried hard at woodwork but just made a mess. Nobody came to my rescue. Teachers and principals were not as approachable then as they are now; it didn't occur to me to ask them for help. I became so fed up and miserable that one Friday morning I stayed away. Since the roll was never called, my absence was not noted, so for the rest of that year and the next I wagged it from woodwork lessons. I would spend Friday morning walking the lanes of Kensington in the hope of finding an empty bottle or two that I could return for the penny or halfpenny deposit. I never received a proficiency certificate for my woodwork, but I didn't care.

Joining the Mission brought me into contact with local lads of my age and participating in the various activities gave me some experience of teamwork. One of these lads, Keith Davies, lived nearby with his parents, and four brothers, in an attached cottage similar to ours. Keith was our enthusiastic wicket keeper when we played scratch games of cricket in the Parklands. I visited the Davies' home on a few occasions after school to borrow a bike spanner. Each time I found Keith and his three younger brothers studiously doing their homework under the eagle eye of their mother. The Davies boys all succeeded in adult life in varying professions. In later years I have regretted that in those days I was not similarly organised in relation to homework. Relying on a good memory and some intuition I was able to do reasonably well at primary school without any homework. I topped my Grade 7 class at Norwood Primary with a qualifying examination result of 610 but there were two Grade 7's and another lad topped the school with 630. This gave him a small scholarship when he went on to high school.

At Adelaide High School, I similarly coasted along and managed to pass each year, but with increasingly less success. I still did little homework. I had no goal in mind: I was just passing time. I could not have been an attractive pupil. I wore a heavy serge suit that had belonged to my mother's brother, Bill. He had developed stomach ulcers on the stations around Birdsville and had retreated to Clara's house in Adelaide to die. He left no will and few possessions apart from his suit. Bill had been taller and thinner than I was, so his suit fitted me very poorly. Most of the other boys had better fitting school blazers and, of course, the girls in our mixed class were neatly attired. After my Intermediate year, I was one of the younger and obviously poorer members of the Matriculation class. The afternoon classes were especially tedious for I was usually hungry, not having had any lunch. But this feeling may have had a psychosomatic element, for after school I found energy enough to go to football practice without fail. On Friday afternoons in winter I played soccer for the school team, on Saturdays football for the school, and on Sunday morning I went down to Victoria Park and kicked a football around with some mates. In summer I was captain of the school athletics team and most Saturdays ran the mile and the half mile in competition with other secondary schools.

I was in my Intermediate year at Adelaide High School before I fully grasped that there were two types of beings on this planet: one male and the other female. I suppose I might have been a slow learner in this regard, but I didn't fully realise the extent of the difference until I began mixing with the girls at Sunday School and became conscious of the girls in my Intermediate year classes. There were some much older lads doing Intermediate and these boys talked a lot about girls and sex.

All through my life I have been uneasy in the presence of women. Perhaps this is the result of being an only child for eight years and then only gaining a brother. I noticed that Alan Lovell and Jack Chesson, my two mates, seemed more at ease with the girls at the Sunday School. Alan Lovell had three older sisters — very attractive ladies who were Sunday School teachers and whom I much admired. And Jack Chesson had a younger sister by twelve months. She was a bit of a pain in the neck, always wanting to join in whatever activities Jack and I were planning. We had to almost forcibly exclude her from our outings. But I realised that both my companions were better able to talk to and understand girls than I was. I noticed that girls were able to stare meaningfully into each other's eyes and smile, without saying a word. Often there was an indirect, almost ambiguous, note to their sentences that I couldn't grasp. They seemed to be more interested in talking about people than about things. Jack and Alan and I talked about sport and events in the outside world. The girls seemed to be more interested — whenever I listened to them — about what each other was doing. Some of this talk seemed a bit spiteful, some of it seemed mere personal gossip, and it didn't interest me at all. Recent studies of the brain show how different males and females are from one another — that male and female brains are “wired” differently. This affects both outlook and behaviour; there are real differences between the sexes.

I used to walk home from school in my Intermediate year and on the way I sometimes encountered a girl called Rosie who was in my Sunday school class. She was also engaged in a Commercial Intermediate year and so we had similar teachers who taught us similar subjects. On the way home we would stop and talk about our school work. Rosie always seemed to be much ahead of me in grasping what the teachers were saying. She was about a year older than me, a recent arrival from London. She had older brothers and sisters and her parents had set up a small fruit and vegetable shop in Hutt Street near where I lived. Our paths often crossed. Rosie was a very conscientious student and she eventually married one of the lads from the Baptist Mission. I lost track of them both when I moved to the Flinders Street Baptist Church. Some years ago I bumped into Rosie and her husband after I had given a talk to a Rotary club in Unley about the Victims of Crime Service. Rose (as she was then known) complimented me on my achievements in life and said she was surprised I'd done what I had, both academically and in my public service career — she'd never thought I was all that bright. She had good reason to think this: during our school days she used to finish in first or second place in her class while I was always well down in the bottom half.