Striking out on one’s own and first Sex..

 

Etching ‘is it love?’

The next few years after the momentous and epic Woy Woy first date journey, time seems to have gone quickly.  I kept up going to Vic’s Cabaret and even expanded my dancing skills by learning ‘the Stomp’ which was of short duration. It was taken over by doing the ‘twist’ . Looking at old footage of twisting and stomping it all seems to have been so silly. You did not even touch the girl. At least with jiving you threw the girl over your back,  or dragged her beween your legs, teach her a good lesson.  Of course, the hidden message of that dance was for the boy to be dragged between the girls’ legs which happened in some rare instances but always with the boy facing the floor, never upwards into her billowing skirt. I did not experience that till later. It was with a nice woman from Malta that I finally lost my virginity. “It was on the Isle of Malta where I met you…”, no, not really, it was in a boarding house in Sydney’s Paddington. The problem with the Maltese woman was not her generosity of spirit and her overabundance of yielding softness but that she had a husband, a butcher by trade, who kept a loaded shotgun in the wardrobe.

I would be lying to say that dating girls ever led to much more than a furtive kiss given in return for a movie with chocolate Maltesers or packet of crisps. The Parramatta scooter club that I belonged to folded when motor bikes joined and we could not agree on how to keep the Vespa club at bay. They seemed to outnumber the Lambrettas now and ran treasure hunts to Palm Beach to which a few of our own members had been seen going to. There was a seething discontent in scooter clubs of the fifties and sixties. Now of course this has seeped into the Comancheros and Hells Angels. They now have guns and rocks of crystal meth while we had malted milkshakes.

This boat of love seemed to flounder forever on the rocky shores of my Isle of Doom. The problem was my ‘mien’. It was the somewhat sombre impression at first sight. Girls had to overcome this. Not an easy task.  I could not change what was the essence of my own being.  It was at the same time also my best feature. I say this with some confidence because this mien always stood me in good faith later on.  The dilemma is that most young girls and boys like good cheer with easy going friendly smiling demeanours. Not many girls seemed to be drawn at my ice-breaking attempts introducing small talk about a demonically violin playing  Paganini, or a ponder about lives behind the venetian blinds, or indeed my clear own unique insight in the state of Australian cemeteries. I suppose suburbs don’t encourage seriousness when the essence of  life in burbs can be so bleak and lacking in a joie de vivre already. The last thing anyone wants on a night out is a dark Schubert journey of KlageLieder and hopeless love buried in the deepest of  oceans. This Jeremiah wasn’t a Don Juan.

A helping hand was soon  knocking at the front-door of my life. A fortuitous move on hindsight was the move away from home to rent a room with board in Paddington. The Landlady was from Malta and she certainly had a good mien. A bundle of laughs and generosity expressed by ample heaving  and shuddering breasts. On accepting the terms she immediately cooked me some lovely lamb cutlets with lots of garlic and salted anchovies with rosemary. I remember it so well. “I give you plenty food, Gerard,” she said. The full board was to include bed and all meals with her and family, including the husband, with shotgun as previously touched upon.

etching

Within a week of settling in I was watching TV with her husband sitting opposite from his wife sitting directly next to me. A few days before she had invited me over to look at some photos of her and her husband’s wedding in Malta. We were both seated on her marital bed. I thought it a very friendly gesture and put it down to Maltese culture and openness. None of that Anglo Saxon reserve. I was happy but a bit nervous. Her bosom was  welling up but with such a large and generous endowment one would have to wear a knight’s armour and necktie to seek cover. “My husband sick now”, she added, of which its significance escaped me at that moment.

While watching TV and Bonanza with the three brothers and their father galloping around the same set of rocks several times, I felt a movement in my left pocket. It was the hand of the Maltese landlady searching me…. me. It took a while to sink in but was sure her hand wasn’t looking for my hanky. It was definitely an amorous attempt, sexual even. A tour de force. I was petrified and with her husband sitting in the other opposite corner!.  Did he not know? However, her hand and gentle but insistent fingers ambushed my resolve to end it by me running away.  Au contraire. It was so lovely.  I was so excited and even collegially leant a bit backwards to give more room to her expert married hand. I had the temerity to lightly stroke her back,  keeping a guilty eye out for her husband. What could I do for her. Wasn’t this supposed to go twin carburettor for both of us? The horses and Bonanza all but a black and white blur, running berserk for all I cared. A fata morgana that was now really happening to me. The oasis of a real woman.

Can you understand the dread, fear and yet the rewards coming finally to me so longed for and dreamed about? The misery of home life. The rejections of dates and dorky evenings at the cinema with Ben Hur, a Moses with tablets, or some Quo Vadis on a big screen. Here it was, her lovely hand, let the husband shoot me, who cares! Bonanza finished. She got up after her husband had left. “Gerard, get some ‘Frenchies’ tomorrow, quickly”. She smiled and kissed me good night. What a Bonanza.

Next day at 9.01 am I was at the chemist. You will know that condoms at that time could only be given consent and sold by the chemist himself. He or a she would always be standing, as today, on a podium. I asked for three packets of condoms. All caution to the wind now and I was on a high. He looked me over and grumpily sold me the condoms. Next morning, I was in bed which was on a linoleum floor, all shiny and clean. She walked in with husband gone to work (slicing the sausages). She smiled and lifted her dress standing next to my head. Both of us in a single bed and she was so big. But where there is a will… And that was it. A great initiation by a good woman. I left suddenly after a few days. I did not like the deceit on her husband and especially not with a loaded shotgun in the wardrobe. The situation was so dangerous.

Was he really sick and why this gun? I could not understand that she had the nerve to do this with her husband in the same room. She did like me and for a year or so she would phone and I knew it was her. She would say, “Gerard, Gerard”, but I did not answer her.

Perhaps she too had sadness. Don’t we all at times?

 

The plight of a Camellia hater.

We all know that as a general rule, nature is just about perfect. I tend to go along with the notion that the more I get to know about mankind the more I tend to look at the growing grass for salvation and nurture. I like nature and dislike wars and camellias. Oops…sorry, but camellias I did remove from my list of nature some years ago when I discovered to my horror the people who associate intimately with camellias.

I always had a feeling of unease when walking past heaps of brown rotting flowers littering the concrete footpaths along stretches of my first Australian taste of suburbs. I finally mustered up enough will, courage and asked what those flowers were. Camellias was the answer.

Many know that I often touch upon my personal blight of having lived in a suburb. It dates back to my teen years of isolation many decades ago after arrival from Holland. I narrowly escaped by moving into a room in the inner city area of Paddington. What a relief, finally understanding there was life after all. This all happened some years before the most fortuitous event of them all, even outdoing my escape from Australian suburb, meeting up in Europe with my future wife from Finland. Camellias have come, gone and rotted but we are still together all those years.

I hope I don’t tread on the toes of lovers of Australian suburbs nor on camellia fans. I understand that having a back yard for the kiddies is important. I fully understand and acknowledge that this is as ingrained in our national psyche as prawns on the barbeque with frozen peas. However, does that have to include growing camellias as well?

My dad used to shake his head in amazement when the neighbours’ camellias used to shed their flowers in our garden. It was good mulch. He also detested those flowers. So maybe my aversion is genetic based rather than just personal prejudice. It is all so complicated and one spends a lifetime trying to figure out other peoples foibles instead of trying to sort out own problems and silly idiosyncrasies.

Let me confess at least (before my time is up) to admitting my camellia phobia is illogical and very limiting in experiencing more joys than just relying on growing grass for sustenance. Perhaps a good psychiatrist or reading Emmanuel Kant might throw light on this camellia phobia of mine. He did say:
He who is cruel to camellias becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of camellias.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/i/immanuelka390204.html#EFzSyyoRLeYw2Poo.99

Who really cares?

They look so plastic. Those shiny leaves? I know of no other plant that so readily takes to looking artificial. In my suburb of before mentioned sad teen years, a neighbour higher up, belonged to a camellia society. He also was forever mowing his lawn with one of the first Victa’s lawnmower that used to never start except when he got close to going berserk in his backyard. He used branches of his beloved camellias to thrash his Victa lawnmower into submission. I used to watch his lawn mowing efforts through our venetian blinds. It is perhaps now easier to understand for you readers how low I had sunk in my spiritual suburb dehydration.

If there is one thing that I still have a burning ambition for, is; please never leave plastic flowers on my headstone nor any camellia, even within my very limited sight.
Thank you.

“Fat is Good,” so is Spam

“Fat is Good”, so was Spam.

I like spam. Back in the late nineteen fifties I was living in a sparsely furnished room at a Paddington Boarding House. The front door had a sign “Migrants Welcome”. The boarding house was run by a Maltese woman. Her husband was a butcher. They were a good and devout family and a loaded shotgun was kept in the wardrobe.

On the wall and above my bed was a picture of a Jesus cruelly nailed to a wooden cross. What was disconcertingly spooky, depending on what angle this picture was viewed at, that its eyes would open and shut alternatively when stepping past.

When the Jesus had its eyes open they were piously cast upwards. Perhaps the subliminal message and hope being, that the viewer would also become pious and work towards that upwards heavenly goal as well. It turned me off 3D pictures and holograms for life.

At night, and before hopping into my bed, I would turn the picture facing the wall. During the day and before going to work I would always politely turn Jesus back again allowing it to ponder and gaze over my bed. It would, at least during daytime, allow Him to cast his eyes, perhaps in a despairingly manner, heavenly upwards again for anyone passing my bed during the day. I did not want to upset a devout family with a shotgun in the wardrobe.

Sometimes, most often after work and tired, I used to sit on the edge of my single bed, open a tin of spam with that handy little tool that was attached to the top and ever so slowly (in order not to break it) turn and twist the lid off.

One was greeted by a little white coloured blubbery bit of fat coagelatined to the top hiding its deliciously pink coloured innards. The bouquet of the spam greeting the nostrils was always immensely pervasive. Scooping it up with a teaspoon while turning the pages of V.Woolf’s Orlando, was one of those little pleasures of bachelorhood that  gets forgotten once married, and sitting and eating on the edge of a bed becomes, very sensibly IMHO, banned forever. I remember it though as if yesterday.

Now the original and true meaning of ‘spam’ is lost  and for baby boomers that joy forever denied, even though, while sauntering past the acreages of Woolies isles I sometimes still spot a  tin of Spam, proudly and defiantly competing with more modern delicacies such as the cryonically preserved  Crunchy Chico Bar or boxes loaded with healthy  Fruity Loops.

So much now is lost and gone into the bowels of history forever, the same as so much else during that era. We have all but  forgotten the pungent smell of the spattering mutton legs on Friday afternoons together with mum’s baked pumpkin and spuds, and  happy kids hurtling  down-hill on Billy carts, all at Redfern’s or Rockdale’s back lanes.

And yet, looking at photos from the fifties and sixties, there is striking difference between then and now. We were all skinny. Well, skinny, not really, but compared with now, sure, skinny! Hardly a fat person is in sight. Now, here  surely  is something to ponder about? The latest information on obesity puts the blame on diets.

The question that never seems to get asked is; if we were all so slim and taut some fifty years ago, and Spam and Mutton was one of our most staple diets, how come we were all so much slimmer?

The answer might well be because of spam and mutton spatter with lashes of salty larded on white Tip-Top. Let’s go back, if that’s the way to beating obesity.

I have noticed that canny advertisers are quick in the uptake to grab the dollar and turn a perceived adversity into a handsome profit.  All of a sudden we have the most glorious and lusciously full ample bosomed and ravishingly beautiful size eighteen models lolling and rolling around on our TV screens and on beaches. They are shown on the advertisements seducing equally larger men that drive around Volvo’s or seen walking into banks for larger mortgages.

Larger men are also now used in advertising with huge bums sticking out of large cars strapping in the large toddlers with the large wife looking on with smiles of conjugal promises and/or generous approval. Yes, definitely, model agencies are looking for larger people now and those anemic looking bone skinny girls on catwalks will soon be given the flick. About time too ,we all need more room, move over. C’est la vie.

Obviously, those large Insurance companies have done their homework and also assiduously studied the latest statistics. They don’t seem at all alarmed or daunted by large people. They wouldn’t advertise them would they? Is ‘fat is good’ replacing ‘greed is good?

As for those boarding rooms in Paddington, they are all gone now. The Maltese family most likely retired in Santa Magdalena retirement villa on Rosella’s circuit at Dooley-Vale. The picture of Jesus and the roving eyes having survived all. It’s hanging above their double bed, the loaded shotgun never used. They were a devout family.

“Fat is good”.