The Raid

This piece of my memoir writing was originally published in 2017 in  Harvest, the Anthology of the Past Tense Group at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Wrters' Centre in Greenmount, Western Australia

The Raid

Viewed from the front, there was nothing unusual about my grandparents' house in Strathfield, but to me as a seven-year-old, around the back was a place of intrigue and mystery. A towering brick wall formed the boundary fence between their house and the row of shops beyond. Shards of broken glass had been cemented along the top of the wall, like a row of sharp brown fangs to scare off intruders.

'Why are there broken bottles on the wall, Gran?' I asked.
'Because they don't want people climbing over.' She folded her arms across her bony chest and stood tall.

Curiously, the window of the room above the shops had been plastered over with brown paper.

'Do people live over the shops, Gran?'
She shrugged and turned to go inside. 'I'm not sure.'

But Gran was dodging my question. Sometime later, I discovered that my grandparents often heard shouting, late into the night, behind the browned-out window.

Most of the days when I visited, I spent the time in my grandparents' bedroom at the front of the house, playing with my little sister. While Gran toiled in the kitchen, preparing her famous coconut-ice, we would be getting into mischief, bouncing up and down on their big old iron-frame bed. We'd crawl under the bed and explode into fits of giggles at the large porcelain chamber pot, hidden there. I don't know why they kept a chamber pot, because they did possess an indoor toilet. Maybe because they were country people at heart and old habits die hard?

Grandpa was semi-retired and spent his leisure time growing vegetables in a garden bed along the side of the house. We'd trail behind while he pulled up a fresh crop and couldn't wait to sink our teeth into the juicy sweet carrots, still smelling of earth. During the school week, I took the train to Strathfield Station and dropped in to see Gran and Grandpa on the way to school.

The peace of my grandparents' suburban life was shattered late one night when they were rudely woken from their slumber by a sharp knock at the front door. Grandpa stepped into his felt slippers, pulled on his chequed, woollen dressing gown and, still half-asleep, shuffled to the front door. Gran padded after him, gathering a shawl over her tall frame. They turned on the veranda light and cautiously opened the door, peering out into the gloom. Standing there on the front veranda was a uniformed policeman. The light caught his sandy-coloured mustache as he smiled reassuringly. Behind him, in the dim light of the front path, were several more policemen, one of whom held a long wooden ladder under his arm.

'Sir, we're sorry to disturb you at this late hour, but we need to cross over your backyard to gain access to the shops behind you.'

Grandpa led the way down the driveway and the men tramped behind him, their black leather boots leaving deep imprints in the garden soil and squashing the precious carrots. Gran retreated into the house and emerged at the back door in time to witness events from a safe distance.

The police propped up the ladder and scaled the fence, avoiding the spikes of glass. They climbed to the covered window, and tried to force it open. When it wouldn't budge they took a mallet and crashed through the glass.

My grandparents couldn't see inside the upstairs room, but they heard the commotion and voices shouting: 'police raid!' – followed by the muffled footsteps clomping down the timber staircase as men were being frog marched out. And so, that night, another Sydney Two-up school was busted.

Over the next few days Gran pored over the morning newspapers, searching for juicy details of the late-night raid. Shoppers at the local butcher shop winnowed through the husks of the story, searching for the precious grains of truth. It transpired that more than a dozen men had been apprehended at the Two-up school above the shops. They were taken to Strathfield Police Station and charged with being found in a common gaming house. The mystery behind the backyard fortress was revealed. The next time I visited Gran on my way to school, she regaled me with the whole thrilling saga.
In the postwar years, Two-up schools were common across Sydney. From Kirribilli to Surrey Hills, if you were keen for a flutter, the local taxi driver knew where to find the action. Usually a man, known as the cockatoo, would stand guard to warn of an imminent raid. On the night of the Strathfield raid, the hapless cockatoo, like the guns defending Singapore, must have been facing the wrong way.
Law enforcement never did stamp out the evil of Two-up and eventually they surrendered the fight. By 1954, the era of clubs and pokies had already begun. In the 1990s, the New South Wales government legalised Two-up and in so doing, eliminated a long standing element of Australia's larrikin tradition. My grandparents dined out on the story of the Strathfield Two-up raid for several years, until they moved away from the neighbourhood in the 1960s.

Harvest Past Tense Group Anthology 2017

Our writing group recently published an anthology of members' writing. The title is Harvest:  Anthology of the Past Tense Writing Group at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre. Below is one of my memoir pieces that appeared in Harvest.

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Visits to Labrador

Our visits to Labrador are always on a Sunday when no one else is around. On these occasions, Dad drives into town and parks opposite in the grounds of the colonial hospital. Labrador – a strange name for a building. Mum says it's also the name of a dog that lives on a rocky island off the coast of Canada. But my Labrador is the four-storey terrace building where Dad has his dental surgery.

Sometimes, we see a scruffy old lady with a pile of canvas bags, camped outside Labrador. Dressed in sand shoes, a full-length dark coat and a green tennis shade, she scares me, especially when she shouts out strange words.

'She's speaking Shakespeare,' Dad says. 'She went to the university and lost her marbles.'

I hold my breath as I run past her, to avoid breathing in her smelly old socks.

The building has an old-fashioned cage lift of ornate iron work. After we press the black metal button, the lift comes clanging down from the top floor and shudders to a stop at the ground floor. You pull down on the iron door handle and step inside an open cage that ascends slowly, past all the other tenants, their doors locked on Sunday.

Once inside the surgery, we always make a circuit around the benches, picking up the tiny brown pottery jars and fingering the neatly laid out rows of spikey instruments. Dad lets us mix the amalgam for the fillings, putting the liquid mercury into a china bowl and crushing it with the pestle. The mercury breaks into tiny little droplets that dance around the bottom of the bowl, until he adds some extra ingredient to form a silvery lump.

I climb into the dentist's chair, like queen of the realm, while my sister pumps the foot pedal to send me upwards. The drill has a shrill, noisy motor and Dad ties a ball of cotton wool onto the rotating wire and tell us to 'watch the rabbit going around'. One Sunday I need a filling and Dad asks me to be the guinea pig to try out his new drill. He has just acquired a thrilling new-fangled model that makes a fast whizzing noise and sprays water at the same time. It's all over so quickly. I am always encouraged to be very brave and to this day my dentist can't believe how calm I am in the chair.

Then, one day Dad breaks the news that Labrador has been bought by the bank and is to be bulldozed. In 1958, the site was subsumed for a massive commercial development in the heart of Sydney. Out of the rubble of old Labrador, rose the headquarters of the Reserve Bank of Australia at the corner of Macquarie Street and Martin Place. The eccentric old lady we used to see outside the building, turned out to be the well-known eccentric, Bea Miles, whose life was depicted by Kate Grenville in her novel, Lilian's Story.

Lessons learned

Me with my little sister Cathy in Toronto 1953

The following piece of my memoir writing appeared in the Katharine Susannah Prichard Past Tense Anthology in June 2016

Lessons Learned

It was a day of firsts – the first snowfall of winter, my first experience of snow, and my first day of school in Canada. I was only five and a half in that winter of 1953. My Canadian mother had brought us all the way from our home in Sydney, Australia to spend nine months with our Nana Mollie in Toronto. My mother had married an Australian and she left Canada to move to Sydney, in 1946. She always felt guilty about leaving her newly-bereaved mother behind and when Nana sent the money for the ocean voyage across the Pacific, she jumped at the opportunity. Dad had to remain behind in Sydney, because of his work. I would be attending the local school in Toronto over the winter term with my older sister Pat.

Lambton Park Primary School was within walking distance from Nana's house, but mother decided to drive us on our first day. I climbed into the back seat of the Austin, rugged up like a rolly-polly doll with my nose pressed to the frosty window. The neighbourhood gardens were covered in snow, like a dusting of fine icing sugar.

'Do you think we'll be playing in the snow Mummy?'
'Yes darling, most probably.'
'Will I make new friends there?'
'Yes of course, you'll be fine.' She reassured us.

Mother dropped us off at the front entrance of the school. I stepped out of the car and anxiously scanned the scene. A long path led up to the front portico of the two-storey brick building. On either side of the path, groups of boys lurked behind the trees. I swung back to the road to call for my mother, but her car had already moved away.

Pat held out a confident hand and we hoisted our school cases and marched at a steady pace towards the front entrance. We were half way down the path when I noticed a boy's head dart out from behind the trees. Then snowballs started flying. I moved behind Pat, but a something like a hard rock hit my arm with a painful whack.

'Ouch!'
A blonde boy laughed. 'Gotcha!'
I bent down to grab a handful of snow, but Pat yanked on my arm. 'No time! Quick, make a run for it!'

We ducked and weaved between the icy missiles, our shoes slipping in the snow, eyes fixed on the entrance up ahead. Other children fled, screeching with us, until we reached the safety of the front door and threw ourselves inside.

The rest of that first day is a blur to me now and it probably passed uneventfully. We had learned our first lesson of survival in the Canadian winter schoolyard. There was a trick to making snowballs and if you didn't know how, you'd better duck for cover. Over that winter we worked hard at perfecting our snowball skills. Although we tried, adding layer upon layer, until the snow turned to ice in our bare hands, we could never quite match it with the local children.

We had other adventures and mishaps in those months in Canada. One bitterly cold day, Pat and I went skating on a makeshift outdoor ice pond at the school. We had been dropped off and were to walk home, a distance of a half mile or so. Later, our hands blue with cold, we could not untie our skates and were alone in the darkening gloom of the afternoon. The other children had somehow vanished. We had to clomp down the street with in our skates still on our feet, and clamber up the stairs of a stranger's house to call for help. It was a moment of lasting embarrassment for my responsible older sister – and another lesson in winter survival.

Before long, we were on the ship sailing across the Pacific, back home to Sydney. Dad was waiting on the wharf to welcome us with big hugs. The summer heat blazed through the car window on the hot drive home through the western suburbs. When we arrived we were greeted by a deafening buzz coming from the backyard trees. The local boys were up there, perched on a branch, collecting cicadas. How did they manage that feat? Our next lesson awaited us. In due course, the dreams of ice and snow melted away.