Chapter One of my Autobiography

CHAPTER 1

 

POST-WAR RESTRICTIONS

 

London and Hobart, 1953–1964

 

I’D HAD ENOUGH.

 

Nine years old, and I had been in Australia for three years. I was at primary school in Hobart, and everything became too much. They bullied me. Always. Pushed, punched, sneered at, shouted at, beaten up. 

 

It seemed random. Attacks from kids I’d never seen before.

 

‘What do I do when boys attack me?’ I asked my mother.

 

‘What do you mean?’ she snapped.

 

‘Some boys stopped me on the way home. They said I’d stolen their friend’s name. They hit me.’

 

‘You say “Please don’t bully me”,’ said Mum, slow, irritated and exaggerated, as if stating the obvious, ‘then they stop’.

 

I went to my father.

 

‘Where did they hit you?’ he asked.

 

‘In the stomach,’ I replied.

 

‘Then just tense your stomach up and it’s like they’re punching a brick wall,’ said Dad.

 

Ian, the worst bully at school, frog-marched me over to where his older brother was playing football.

 

‘Watch this, Ben,’ boasted Ian, and kicked my legs from under me. I fell uncomplaining to the ground. Ben watched: infinitely large, tough, adult, and strong. He was 11.

 

‘Look, Ben,’ said Ian, and he dragged me to my feet and kicked my legs from under me again. My lip quivered. The brutality. Total isolation. There was no reason why the world attacked me when all I wanted was to be by myself and ignored.

 

‘Go to Miss,’ said Ben. ’Up her skirt, past that barbed wire and kiss her piss hole.’

 

I sobbed at the sheer crude savagery of the world. Ben sneered. Ian laughed and walked off.

 

One day Ian swung a fist at me. I snapped. I ducked under his guard and seized him by the throat. He flailed. I hunched my shoulders. He fell to the ground and, by now unable to release my grip even if I had wanted to, pulled me down with him. He thrashed, no longer even trying to hit me, but gasping. I held on grimly. Ian wheezed and drummed his heels. I judged him to be done. I got to my feet, blinking back tears, and made a gesture of washing my hands over him. Ian lay there.

 

The next day he and his friends surrounded me.

 

‘That wasn’t a fair fight,’ he said indignant, ‘you’re a girl.’

 

I said nothing. They would beat me senseless. I could only fight when I lost control, and control was something I desperately needed.

 

Ian and his friends walked off, muttering and looking over their shoulders at me, alone. But he never troubled me again.

 

I was not to realise for many years but it was the start of something. The start of asserting myself, of choosing my own path, and making my mark in the world.

 

***

 

But before then, in London.

 

Grandfather Horner could barely read and write, and was a council labourer. His wife, a onetime widow, had seen death among her own children and had no illusions about life. This savagely Victorian woman victimised her precocious, bookish and ill-fitting son, my father.

 

‘Mum, Jack hit me,’ his little brother would call. And Mrs Horner would sweep in, and, with not a word uttered, thrash Dad.

 

Dad joined the Royal Navy for life, upon the World War II death of his elder brother, whom he revered as a father-figure. They honourably discharged him after the war as psychologically unsuited to the service. He was given a job as a librarian because of his knowledge of books and schoolwork.

 

Granddad Lloyd was a boilermaker, called on at three in the morning to fix the boilers at the mill because the engineer, the owner’s son, knew his own limitations. Grandma Lloyd was a maid to the aristocracy. She had been an unmarried mother, a total pariah and outcast in those times. Granddad risked his job and name in marrying her.

 

My mother was the youngest of three girls. ‘You’re not beautiful, Eff, but you’ve got something,’ her mum would say. In her teens, Eff became a victim of sexual abuse. She could not reveal what was happening. Who would believe her? It left her with half-hidden, bitter anger. Her innocence forever lost.

 

Dad started work at Upper Norwood Public Library after the war. After three weeks, he and his colleague Miss Lloyd were engaged.

 

I was born in 1953, the result of their marriage.

 

***

 

I was too young to be so paranoid and watchful.

 

Aged five I stood with my mother at the door of Granddad Lloyd’s worker’s house.

 

‘Remember!’ she hissed. ‘Be careful of Granddad’s bowling balls!’

 

My aunt appeared behind the glass in the front door and opened up for us. At once my mother’s face and manner changed to brittle happiness, and she gushed as she said hallo. I stood, frightened.

 

At Granddad’s, the formal front room was untouched, cold and empty. Socialising took place in the living room, near the kitchen. That morning was the same. I came to myself, and realised I was alone in the front room, with the door shut. 

 

Granddad’s bowling balls! They were kept in the front room cupboard!

 

Panicking, I banged on the door and shouted. I imagined the huge, heavy, black bowling balls getting out of their case, rolling across the floor and attacking me.         

I redoubled my screams and banging.

 

My aunt came at the double, opened the door and picked me up. I sobbed on her shoulder. She carried me into the living room, where everyone was sitting.

 

‘Were you frightened because you were alone?’ she cooed.

 

‘Yes,’ I sobbed. But I knew, even at that age and in the depth of emotion, that I was lying. I knew, even then, that I couldn’t tell the truth about the bowling balls because people wouldn’t believe me or they would laugh.

 

I was already an outsider.

 

***

 

In 1960, when I was six, the family moved to the far side of the world. 

 

They were ‘assisted migrants’ and my father was to be Training Officer at the State Library of Tasmania. I found my parents’ copy of Whittaker’s Almanac, an ancient encyclopaedia, and painstakingly copied by hand the section on Tasmania.

 

I worried terribly.

 

My father, my mother, my three-year-old sister Clare, and I arrived in Hobart. 

 

We had a house in a suburb called Chigwell. Chigwell, a huge public housing estate, was one of the city’s roughest areas. The ravaged weatherboard houses were of standard designs and colours. The fences were loose wire mesh, often flattened to the ground by marauding tykes. The children flung stones onto the roof of my parents’ house, shouting: ‘Go home, pommy 

bastards’.

 

I started at the local primary school. I was well above average in schoolwork, but well below average socially.

 

***

 

I knew, even at that age, that I didn’t know how to communicate. This frustrated me and I tried the only way I could, by showing off and giving speeches.

 

One day half a dozen kids had congregated in the classroom at recess. I leapt up and paraded in front of them, reciting a poem I had learned from an English humour book:

 

‘I do not like thee Dr Quell. 

The reason why I cannot tell. 

But this I know and know full well 

I do not like thee Dr Quell.’

 

The kids stared at this grinning, posturing loon.

‘D’you think we listen to you?’ said one little girl witheringly,‘ shut up.’

 

***

 

I found myself one day with some children at a local boy’s house. 

The other children chased me round the garden.

 

‘Woob, woob, woob, I’m so scared,’ I trumpeted, ‘woob, woob, woob!’

 

The children soon tired of my warbling. The host marshalled his young friends and they went inside. I stood stock still.

 

The boy’s father came out: ‘Do you want to come in?’ he asked.

 

The invitation and his gentleness sparked my inner feelings. I burst into tears and punched myself in the face, again and again.

 

‘I hate myself!’ I sobbed, ‘I just want to die!’

 

The man stood there, and I walked out, still sobbing and punching myself, back to my parents’ house.

 

***

 

At the school’s Open Day, I told my parents the boys were bullying me.

 

‘They can’t be,’ said my father with weary frustration, ‘if they were bullying you they’d be doing it right now.’

 

‘Yes, Lawrence,’ sighed my mother, ‘why do you tell such lies?’

 

In bed, at night, alone, almost safe, I wept.

 

***

 

Sister Clare was three years younger than me, tall, slender and blonde, like our father. 

 

She was well-behaved and super intelligent. But, unlike me, she had the common touch. She mixed with the local children, and they played outdoors. Nature was Clare’s early delight, long before the hippies. She was never happier than when she was playing in the bush at the back of Chigwell, with her little Chigwell friends.

 

***

 

Mum was in hospital. Dad said she would come home with a baby sister for us. This was Ruby.

 

As Ruby grew, in her home-made cloth overalls, she got into everything: cupboards, drawers, my plastic model aeroplanes. ‘Wreck peck’ was the pet name Mum had for her.

 

Ruby spoke. She had a stutter. She became angry, frustrated and anxious with her own condition, and wept helpless tears.

 

Ruby’s stutter did not resolve. Mum and Dad saw Ruby as an extra, a supernumerary not really needed on the film set. She was to occupy this position, within the family, then within our wider circle, for years.

 

***

 

One day, I sat in the living room eating. I thought I was alone in the house, but my mother came in. She stared, suspicious at my terrible guilt, as I strove to hide my collection of ten buttered crackers.

 

‘And who, pray, said you could eat those?’ asked my mother, cold and sarcastic.

 

I was silent.

 

‘Go to your room,’ she shouted, ‘and take down your trousers. It’ll save time later.’

 

In my bedroom I sat on my bed in abject terror, my shorts round my ankles, for an age.

 

Finally, she entered. She held a slipper. White-faced with fury, she grabbed me, hauled me onto the bed, held my hands behind my back and slapped my bare behind with the slipper.

 

‘Mum mum mum mum mum mum stop please stop please stop I’ll die I’ll die I’ll die,’ I shrieked.

 

My mother ignored me, thrashing me, grunting from her guts with effort. Finally, she stopped, exhausted. I could not move.

‘No woman would ever marry you, you’re too weak,’ she spat, and stalked from the room.

 

***

 

I established a private world.

 

I claimed the area under my parents’ drab weatherboard, the below-floor space where the foundations were, slats protecting it from the outside air. My parents had large rolls of coarse red matting, which had wrapped some of their goods on the ship. This became the walls of my fort. I dug out a space inside, so that I could stand up. They had discarded an ancient electric clothes boiler, a round 50s plump item on legs. This was my gun turret. Large wooden trunks became trench emplacements.

 

A military desk, a series of planks hanging on rope from the floorboards above, was where I wrote up manifests of equipment and troops. There were lists of kit and weaponry, rules and regulations, and IOUs for money. I always felt that if they owed me money, then it might come in handy when things went wrong.

 

I read.

 

I thought Dickens wrote great yarns, especially about children in orphanages who triumphed just the same. Military history fascinated me, and I read advanced texts. My favourite and rather guilty reading was about children who had friends. 

 

They were normal. I was not.

 

By the age of nine, I was dipping into my first Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead. That gloomy, romantic title.

 

***

 

I said ‘goodnight’ to my parents one evening, and Dad looked up.

 

‘Don’t go to sleep yet,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

 

I went to bed and lay there with the light off. I’d heard about this at school. 

 

Soon my father came in. 

 

‘I want to tell you how babies are made,’ he said. I was right.

 

He described sex very badly indeed: ‘You move it back and forward and white stuff comes out the end.’ He adopted a deep and meaningful tone of voice, and went on and on. It mortified me. That he should think all this applied to me. That he’d consider telling me at all. Even that he should be so Deep and Meaningful about it.

 

‘If you have questions, just ask me,’ he finished.

 

I stared at the darkened ceiling. My father thought I would do that. Who to? 

 

Which girl would say ‘yes’? None. I was ashamed of myself.

 

***

 

At the end of my last year in primary school, the class had to write stories about a sporting achievement. I invented a young man, terrible at all sports, but who had painstakingly learned to climb mountains. He climbed to prove himself. He climbed solo. Now, he was attempting the most terrifying climb of his life. At last he got to the top and was so relieved that he forgot for a second what he was doing. He fell to his death. He lay at the foot of Mt Everest, an indistinguishable mound of clothing at A great distance, and the wind gently caressed his hair.

 

The headmaster, notoriously bad-tempered, came into my class and stood at the teacher’s desk. He held my story up. 

 

‘In my 25 years as a teacher I have never read a child’s short story like this one,’ he said with terrible calm. The class waited with bated breath for the outburst. It terrified me. But his next statement left me reeling. 

 

‘I am sending it to the Ministry of Education to show what this school can do. Twenty out of twenty.’

 

 

© Lawrie Horner 2024