Life at ” The Cross.” (Auto-biography)

Fountain at King’s Cross

Our move to Sydney’s Kings Cross was decided the next day. It needed no considering really. We walked around the main shopping street, looked at the apartment of Kanimbla-Hall which Helvi really liked. She has always been able to see the potential in any of our homes. Perhaps that sense of good proportions and making the best of any given space as well as this undefined art of recognizing what makes things look good or awfully ugly. It seems to be the domain of a Finn. Perhaps it is also a genetic thing.  I don’t think you can teach good design if the eye for the visual is absent nor make a good writer by teaching cobbling  words together when they enter a brain better equipped for understanding Rock-a-Billy or galloping horses . The idea that we are all capable of doing amazing things if only given the encouragement together with being diligent enough and have the determination to succeed, might be over-rated. We do the best we can and the philosophy ‘and may the devil take the hindmost’ always a good thing to keep in mind. Just in case! (“or Love Lies a-Bleeding, 1611:)”  Does it really matter? It is in the doing and we can all do, surely?

In the mid sixties, Sydney did have a few areas where multi- culture and a cosmopolitan life existed. Now of course almost everything has ‘a life style’, even buying a house or an electric knife sharpener, is imbued by its promise to ‘add’ to your lifestyle. The advertising world has managed to make us all fear in missing out on the promised land of the magic lifestyle and have hordes of people rushing to Harvey Norman and those Meccas of consuming, the shopping Malls. It is all proof on how we are goaded into leading our lives never quite fulfilled of having attained this desired ‘lifestyle’, while sinking somewhat deflated into our latest acquisition, the reclining sofa, while watching Neighbours on a three metre barking mad wide flat screen TV. It resists all our efforts, no matter how we shop till we drop and of course ‘drop’ we finally do. The ultimate ‘life-style’ finally achieved with ashes to ashes!

Kings Cross was the very heart of what life is capable of throwing up. There were artists, vagabonds, drug addicts, criminals and smiling red rouged but lovely prostitutes, mothers with babies in prams and some normal fathers.  It was a friendly and safe place then. Perhaps still is! It had book shops, and a great butcher shop  named ‘Hans Fleischmeister’ that sold continentals, including rookworst, sauerkraut, and marinated olives as well as prosciutto, preserved red cabbage and cooking apple in Hak glass containers and other strange and twisted looking delicatessen. On a Saturday morning the queue spilled over onto the pavement and the smell of this shop lured many to venture out of the apartment blocks like the town-crier of earlier times.

There were also nightclubs and strip joints, spruikers and American soldiers on RI leave from Vietnam or from wars somewhere. Many looked for romance but compromised with a hurried love for sale. We knew by sight some of the girls who scored a trick and nodded us with a smile. We were part of a world that still walked the pavements. A blushing fountain depicting a dandelion flower seed head was the very centre of our chosen domain and such a vibrant area to live in. It was surrounded by seats on which the book reading pensioners of the time could be seen reading or nodding. Sometimes both. The library and Franklyn supermarket were edged on this lovely little park. It was to be our home for a few years. Both of our daughters were born in Kings Cross and lived at our apartment.

Helvi transformed the apartment by lifting the ‘wall-to-wall’ under which we found a perfect hardwood floor which we partially covered with a rug. One of my paintings was hung on the wall together with a Finnish wallhanging- a wedding present-now hanging in our present home. We also replaced the crockery with the Finnish Arabia brand and bought a very nice set of cutlery in a wooden box made in Austria. The Bakelite radio and laminated kitchen table and bed-head replaced with  nicer looking accoutrements. We bought a black and white small TV and watched ‘Pick-a Box’ with Bob Dyer and an excruciatingly irritating  wife with the name ‘Dolly’ who would come on-stage to drool ‘Oh yes Bob’ in a strong  accent, over and over again whenever she was beckoned by Bob. There was a world champion contest between the world’s best factual informed with also the most and best of the retentive memories at call on this Pick a Box. It was between an Australian named Barry Jones and a Finn. Barry Jones won and became a politician later on in life, which shows you how pure knowledge can be a bad thing.

These were our Kanimbla Hall years. Very good years they were too!

The Safari suit.

Balmain cottage downstairs room

We are now going back to a period when our children numbered just two. It was a long time ago. We were living in our second house on Sydney’s Balmain harbour peninsula after having lived in a 1 bedroom apartment in a somewhat  bohemian area called Pott’s Point which is next or part of Kings Cross, Sydney. It was an area of artists, crooks,  prostitutes with sandaled souteneurs, and priests. There were also many delicatessen where one could buy real coffee , prosciutto, cheeses not named ‘tasty’ and books. If I remember correctly there was also special dispensation given to some  Euro-continental shops allowing to stay open after 6pm. It was still frowned upon as decadent by some who tried desperate to uphold decent ‘peace and quiet’ Anglo closed up traditions. This all during the  sixties when our marriage was so young, sprightly and sprouting  first babies.

The one bedroom apartment was soon crowded out with birth of our second daughter. We bought a very old and rickety weather board cottage that just had one large sitting-kitchen-dining-bathroom downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. The downstairs would  originally have had rooms but the previous architect owner had taken all walls out leaving just one spacious room that looked out over a glorious and vibrant harbour. In those day it was always sunny.

That the bathroom was part of our sitting area could not have worried architect nor did it us. In the middle of this room was a round wood burning cast- iron heater with the name ‘Broadway’ on it. It was  lined with stone on the inside and as chimney had a large galvanised pipe going through the ceiling and upstairs bedrooms ending finally through both levels  on top of the roof. It was capped by a china- man’s hat to keep out rain.  It heated the whole house during winter with cut up old wooden rail sleepers.The cottage had a waxed wooden floor downstairs and upstairs I painted the floors white. This was a typical workman’s cottage that might have housed some years back, a family with three or four children with a husband who could well have been employed in the stevedoring industry. He might  have smelled of tar, salt and rope each time he arrived home with his wife making tea and his children playing outside.

The harbour in front of this cottage was less than 100 metres away and always busy with towing of large boats of which the house would vibrate each time the propellers reversed. We made own furniture and made do with little.  Milk came in glass bottles and bread by baker doing the rounds announced by barking dogs. Even roosters were still around. We could afford the luxury of a nappy service and had a second hand washing machine of which the only drawback was that the pump had packed it up.  No worries, we sucked on the hose to get the gravity of flow going and let it run into our court yard. That is how it was. Not anymore now.

And at Christmas we had parties and fondues with friends and family sitting on planks suspended between paint drums while listening to the Beatles’ Sargent Pepper or Peter, Paul & Mary  thumping out from home made giant speaker boxes with 12 inch woofers, tweeters and cross-overs. Did we not also drink cheap headache wine squeezed out of bladders but yet into nice fluted glasses?. We would meet and compare the tie dyes. Wives sometimes dressed in pantsuits, men with hair the longer the better,  jeans dangerously flared. The enormous shoulder pads were yet to come, waiting in the wings.  They were the best years but aren’t all years of past the best?

In Athens

During that time when things had settled and some money coming in Helvi decided to visit her family in Finland taking our two young children with her. Our youngest daughter would be carried in a papoose while her sister was old enough to walk at airports  during change- overs while helpful in carrying her own little bag. It was quite a trip from Sydney with another plane to catch in Finland to the closest airport where her family lived. Finland is a huge country,  greater than the UK.

It  was going to be a six weeks holiday and I would be on my own. I could hardly wait for their return but had to do with receiving letters for the time being and the rare phone call. It was a lonely time and I missed my family.

It is then I made a choice that till this day I am still haunted, remembered and reminded of. I bought a wine-red knitted Safari suit. It had flared pants and a double breasted jacket held together with brass gold buttons and a belt of same material above my hips but below armpits with large gold coloured ostentatious looking  buckle. The pants were held up with its own wine red belt made of same knitted material.I also bought  something resembling shoes that were from Egypt and made of rope that was coiled around the toe  and heel  part above the sole with in between the rope arrangement  a  cream leather-like material and  a buckle on top. I completed the whole outfit with a modest gold chain worn unobtrusively but magnificently opulent, around my neck.  My idea was to look a new man or at least a reborn man.  A proud prince of unsurpassed passion and vibrant vitality. I wanted to impress my Helvi. I looked of course a one hit pop star failure, but at the time wasn’t aware of this, blinded as usual by foolish folly.

Finland, just married.

I went to the airport on the day of my family’s return to Sydney. All good things come to an end. As my little family passed through customs and into the  arrival hall I spotted them first. The look on my wife’s face was of utter disbelief soon followed by a scowling disapproval. ‘What are you wearing now?’ she said. My daughters too looked frightened. Of course we drove home all excited to be together again but Helvi kept on looking at my suit and shaking her head. I never wore the suit again nor ever shopped for clothes without Helvi having an input. I am fashion blind.

The shoes went into the slow combustion Broadway.

Salami

Todays word that came to mind on wakening was ‘salami’.

With my conversion back to white bread from whole-meal, it brought back memories from way back. My mother making sandwiches for my three brothers and one sister going to school in Australia. It was part of the ‘New Country’ that schoolkids did not come home for lunch as schoolkids did and still do back in Holland. Instead they would stay at school and have a lunch made by mothers. Sometimes, but rarely by fathers. My dad never made a single sandwich but did excel in pancakes with golden syrup.

Of course in the heat of summers and in mid flight, the opening of hundreds of lunch boxes simultaneously, created a stench that over the years impregnated the class rooms, the walls and indeed, the whole building. I can walk-by any school today and get an instant re-call of banana sandwiches, spaghetti sandwiches and the essence of any lunch box; Devon with tomato sauce. It is now thought that the Devon sandwich with tomato sauce started school bullying. In England the Devon was called luncheon meat or Spam.

My mother was at her wit’s end trying to find interesting filling for my brothers’ and sister’s sandwiches. Australia was very sunny and very spacious but as far as sandwich fillings, back in the fifties and sixties, it was a dark unforgiving place. I mean, I can still taste the tinned spaghetti with Tom. sauce sandwich. Is it of any wonder that failure followed so many that went to school?

Till the late eighties and at social adult gatherings, it was the pickled gherkin surrounded by Devon or in some rare cases ham, pierced by a toothpick’ that would brake the ice and get things rocketing and moving. Men with beer around the barbeque and the girls in the kitchen. If a man dared to move to the kitchen he was suspected of being a bit of a poofter.

It was left to the genius of Barry Humphries of the Edna Average fame to make this famous quote of someone quietly farting on entering the lift on the ground floor filling up with lawyers of Madigan and Madigan Ltd (solicitors and family lawyers) suffering all the way up to the 26th floor;… “Who opened their lunch box?”

It was some years after that Italian salami, prosciutto and non plastic cheese came to the shelves at David Jones delicatessen, soon followed by olives, real coffee and anchovies. I remember the advertisements on TV ’43 beans of coffee in every Nescafe instant coffee. In the late seventies coffee lounges opened up in Kings Cross and garlic made its entrance. It was a true revolution.

Look at me now.

What price vanity?

Milo after many pats

My social life is not hectic. Our Jack Russell gets all the smiles and pats. I even told a nice lady who was patting Milo, “I never seem to get such attention.” She gave a quick answer “if you looked anything like him, you would too.” I never had the physical facial combination of a Jack Russell who, in the case of Milo, immediately attracts pats and belly strokes.

At parties (a long time ago) no one really looked much at me, even unattractive people would kind of look me over and quickly avert their eyes to the table with crackers and bits of gherkins pierced and clothed by sliced ham or prosciutto. I took notice of how people react to appearances. The loud thumping music at most parties does cover a lot of awkwardness between people. I think it acts like blotting paper soaking up difficulties in relating to others. It wasn’t unusual for people to walk away while I was still in mid-sentence about something as riveting as the local council and new parking laws, or the advantages of a particular paper shredder..

Of course through the decades, my concern about my exteriors in facial features such as nose, chin, lips etc. did wane and with a bit more nous, obtained through bitter experience and soul searching of the heart, overcame the frivolity of looks and charmed myself into relating to others on a more, if not substantial level, at least on a more sustainable plateau. It just took more effort and a repertoire of succinct one liners, nothing too obvious. The trick is to show interest in the other person without getting too personal.It’s the sage advice given to me during a stint in a George Gurdjieff group many years ago.

Even so, it is worrying that Milo seems to so effortlessly get all the attention. Are they my teeth? For years I have forgone wearing my ‘partials’. Partials, I just learnt, are partial false teeth embedded in a pink look alike jaw. I haven’t worn the contraption for years. I hated putting a combination of plastic and fish hooks in my mouth. In any case, I still did not get public pats, stroking or any, “oh, you are so cute.”

The double glazing now being put into a future action, I am now toying with teeth implants. Ideally I should get a complete facial re-build or at least a kind of fill-up. I have most of my teeth but foolishly had three teeth pulled by an over-enthusiastic dentist many years back. Some molars at the back disappeared as well. With my inexorable decline towards a coffin of one sort or another the remaining years might well get a boosting renewal with tooth implants. I will never reach the looks and charms of Milo but I am hopeful of more public attention in the future. Now, just notice the use of ‘future’. Isn’t that a positive sign? I have made an appointment with a local implant specialist.

I’ll keep you informed.