Summer Holidays
At home the Summer between school years usually passed agonisingly slowly. Shirley, at eight years old, was allowed to head to the Richmond Swimming Pool whenever she pleased, if she organised the admission money with her father beforehand. The diving squad in Richmond was a popular club, and children of all ages flocked there and lined up to show off their most graceful dives for the coach, in the hope of being selected for the regular inter-club competitions. Shirley had a natural ability at diving, and her tiny frame made for a slick and graceful entrance into the pool. It may have had something to do with the countless hours she spent at the pool mornings and afternoons, and on stinking hot Summer nights, but Shirley developed some of the best diving ability for her age range.
On days when she couldn’t go to the pool, or when even the swimming stalwarts did not want to brave the weather, she still hung around with Kenny and Lloyd Gill even though it was becoming a bit embarrassing at times to be seen playing with boys. Shirley didn’t really care what anyone said, as she was a tomboy at heart and loved racing around with the Gill boys, climbing fences and throwing overripe apricots at the disaffected, feral cats perched on neighbourhood roofs.
Summer holidays also bought the plum pudding season, and Shirley would sit on the bench in the laundry and watch as her mum hung up the dozens of plum puddings that she made for Christmas Day, lamenting that all this time, effort and sugary stuffing was going into, what was to Shirley, such an inedible treat. Most of them were given away, as May was considered the family expert in the plum pudding department. The rest were kept as desserts for the Redding household until the following Easter, when on Sunday the last precious morsel of plum pudding would be devoured. Shirley never knew what all the fuss was about and preferred to eat the brandy custard and cream on its own.
Christmas Day itself was a quiet family affair when Shirley was a child. Her grandmother Sarah would catch the train over and eat lunch with May, Arthur, Eileen and Lorna. Eventually the older girls’ boyfriends would appear later in the day. However, usually it was a long boring day, punctuated by an early snoop around the makeshift Christmas ‘bush’ for a practical present or two (new blue underpants, some socks, perhaps a small hand knitted cardigan, a new pair of swimmers, a bag of lollies or a comic). This was then followed by a ‘feast’ involving the pet duck who had resided in the backyard for at least 10 months of the previous year. Shirley was never able to eat duck again after she moved out of Griffith Street. If the weather so decided, the tin roof could turn the tiny house into an oven and Shirley empathised with the duck even more.
After lunch, her father then retreated into the library for an extra-ordinary session of Christmas port wine, and the women folk would be relegated to listening to the ABC radio station in the lounge-room, and all would seem very lacklustre until Uncle Tom turned up around 3pm. On hot days of course, he did not venture out for fear of boiling his lady wife in the front seat of the Buick, but if it was a nondescript summer day – a cool breeze dancing with the dehydrated hydrangeas – he would come over to celebrate some Christmas spirits with his brother Arthur. There was always a present from Uncle Tom and Auntie Lillian that was more exciting to unwrap than to ever make use of – a little trinket such as an embroidered hankie, or a pair of gloves, and then the day returned to deafeningly boring dreariness. Later the street outside might offer some chance of admiring a new acquisition of one of the neighbourhood children, if they weren’t seconded into a day of relatives on the other side of town.
After Christmas Day was over, there was a traditional Boxing Day picnic involving her Redding family relatives; her grandmother, jolly Uncle George who made the gruelling journey down from Beulah when he was alive, Auntie Kathleen who resided with George since the depression, Tom and Lil of course, and Arthur’s sister Lillian who would come down from Myrtleford on her Christmas leave to visit all the family. Shirley’s numerous cousins from her dad’s side would turn up too, as well as Uncle Harold who worked for ‘The Argus’ alongside his poker faced, besuited boys, and young Uncle George and his son James Redding (whom he idolized) who at 12, haughtily loitered around the picnic table in a grown man’s suit and a starched collar, with his hair slicked down and parted in the middle, barely cracking a smile the whole day
The tribe would usually head either to Yarra Bend Park or the Botanic Gardens for the day. Everyone would dress up in their best formal gear and summer hats, and hike into the gardens laden with scones, cupcakes, leftover pudding, lemonade and tea caddies. The younger kids would tear around chasing seagulls and ducks, playing tiggy or cricket, and the adults would catch up on what all the folk in Samaria or Benalla or Deniliquin were doing; who had had a baby, fallen sick, or succumbed to yellow jaundice; who had fallen on rough times in the bush and the city, and what had become of them. Arthur would come along under sufferance, as he hated staying sober and wasting a day off, but it provided him with some interesting conversation with Tom and Uncle George and oftentimes a sip or seven of port wine which helped ease his discomfort. He always looked the wild man though, with his collarless shirt and his unbrushed hair. He refused to parlay with any of the niceties of formal grooming on a Sunday or holiday, as it was his philosophy that with no conventions to care about, he was free to dress as he pleased. No one took any notice however, because he had been doing it for years.
Shirley found it hard to play with her male cousins. They were a bit more standoffish than Kenny and Lloyd, and more overdressed. They usually just hung around the men in their ill-fitting suits or played cricket with a boy’s only air. Her main activities were scouting the picnic table for any extra special titbits like boiled lollies or Marella jubes.
As the afternoon faded and the shadows grew strong, the family would gather for a photo from Uncle Harold’s Brownie camera, and the crew would wander back up to the street to catch the bus home.
The rest of January was spent at the pool, roaming Bridge Road in search of school friends, visiting Lorna and playing with her brothers, or as a special treat, an afternoon expedition to the Port Melbourne Pier with her mother, where Shirley would wade into the water and prise off the fattest mussels she could find. She would tuck her skirt into her undies and stagger from pylon to pylon, purloining huge bagfuls of sweet shellfish that she and her mother would take home, boil up and gorge themselves on.
Special Friday nights sometimes occurred when Arthur would suggest that Shirley meet him after work at his office on the corner of King’s Street and Flinders Street where he worked for a Shipping Agent. Her mother would walk her to the tram on Bridge Road, and she would ride into town with a composed air of self-importance that a day of visiting her father’s office imbued her with. Once she arrived, she headed through the heavy panelled doors and up two flights of stairs where the secretary at her father’s office greeted her with her ever-so-twinkly receptionist voice. She smelled of lavender and cigarettes, and her stockings rustled under her knee length, heavily pleated skirt as she ushered Shirley into an elevated seat behind one of the spare typewriters. There, Shirley would tip tap away at her secretarial memos until the keys would jam and ‘Margaret’, or ‘Joan’ or ‘Melva’ would have to save them. Various workers would wander past, counting down the minutes to knock off time, and stop for a chat and a cigarette with Shirley and ‘Muriel’, leaning heavily on the mail counter, until they sauntered off down an awfully important looking dark panelled corridor back to their mysterious doorways. After swinging on the chair and typing a sheet or two of gibberish, her father would appear, and rescue ‘Maude’, and together they would head out into the blinding sunlight and breathe the bustling Flinders Street air.
From there the pub crawl would begin.
The first establishment was a mere half a block away. Shirley would be deposited in the stale smelling ladies lounge with a lemon squash and a cracked bowl brimming with biscuits and cheese. A few women sat smoking in the corner with their hats curlicued with wisps of cigarette smoke. Cheerful barmaids always looked out for Shirley, greeting their father with cackling grins through crooked teeth. When the first drink and bowl of crackers was finished, her dad would soon reappear, breathing beer and jollity, and they would make their way down to the Duke of Wellington where the men spilled out of the public bar on to the street at peak hour. The Ladies’ Lounge was crowded at the ‘Duke’ and the bar was crammed with a group talking raucously, hats jiggling amid tottering cigarette ash. A vicious round of laughter sometimes erupted from the far end of the bar, and Shirley would feel very small on her stool as the Friday evening frenzy started to take hold.
Arthur’s favourite pub was the ‘The Town Hall Hotel’ on the corner Lyndhurst Street and Bridge Road where he always ended his evening with the ‘Six O’clock Swill’, so at Russell Street Arthur would raffishly toss Shirley a sixpence so she could dart up Russell Street to Bourke Street just in time to order one of the last serves of Fish and Chips and chocolate milk from Coles’ Cafeteria, after a quick fossick through the ledges of trinkets on the ground floor.
Full of sugary drinks and salty treats, Shirley would squeeze into a small hollow between lurching bodies on the tram home, sometimes finding her mum waiting at the stop at the top of Griffith Street where May was audience to her recount of city adventures and which pubs her father had taken her too. Occasionally there were a few extra pennies for Shirley to buy a comic or two. An exciting afternoon all in all.
Some Friday nights though, after an early mark from work that enabled the inclusion of even more corner pubs en-route to Griffith Street, the pavement home ‘wasn’t wide enough’ for Arthur, and later – raised voices and the dismal sound of staggering footsteps and cursing crept creaking up the hallway to Shirley’s room.
Memoirs and Memories 