A Long Way to Goulacullin

Copyright © 2013 by John Kingston McMahon.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013922133

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4931-3116-7

                Softcover       978-1-4931-3117-4

                Ebook              978-1-4931-3118-1

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Rev. date: 12/03/2013

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Goulacullin

(gill-a-cullen)

Goulacullin (1429 acres) Gabhal a Chuilinn—Forked place of the holy. In the centre is Barrboy_Barr Buidhe (yellow summit) on which are remains of a prehistoric dwelling, beehive-shaped and probably thatched.

Gaelic translation:

Cullin—glen or woods

Goul—river

Goulacullin—River by the glen

In memory of Snr. Constable Christopher Cameron Malone,

Victoria Police 21999.

1959-1988.

I dedicate this story to all the young men and women brought up in the often-harsh world of child welfare homes and loveless institutions. We had no parents to love and guide us through our childhood, and our parent, the state, denied us our basic right of knowing our identity.

We are the children of yesterday. Old and forgotten. Who will give us justice? Who will give justice to those of us who have suffered in silence for a lifetime? In silence because if we spoke about our pain and the abuse we suffered, it made those to whom we spoke uncomfortable. So we suppressed the pain. We waited and waited, but still nothing happened; no acknowledgement of our abuse was forthcoming from the politicians and others who could have done something about it. For them it was too hard to address the suffering of a generation of children that were in their care, even though they must have been aware of it.

Who will give justice to those of us that didn’t survive in the homes where evil lived? My sad little companion whose eyes had seen no joy or laughter and whose only crime was to be born to parents that had no room in their hearts or lives for a child. Who will give him justice? If I hadn’t suggested to him that we run away, he may have survived! But I was 11 years old and he was 10, I did suggest we run away and he died. I feel so melancholy when I think of that little boy who had no tears left to cry. Why was he beaten again that day and I wasn’t? Why did I live and he didn’t?

How many other nameless children died at the hands of their abusers, and how many are buried in nameless graves?

Who will give them justice?

We cannot undo the past anymore than we can cleanse our memories, and the ultimate responsibility for our welfare lay with our parent, The State. They fed us and they clothed us, but they turned a blind eye to our torment, our pain, and our suffering. Any parent that does that is a bad parent, and the current governments of all political persuasions should now make amends with more than just platitudes.

Every child in care should have the right to know about their past, whether it be good or bad.

To all of you who have not found what you have been searching for, stay strong and believe in yourselves.

By the time that I was 15 years old, I was a criminal. I had been charged numerous times with being an uncontrollable child, and being uncontrollable was a crime in the 1950s in New South Wales.

This was reality.

A few years later, this criminal record would see me sent to Long Bay Jail

for a theft that I didn’t commit.

I was a dumb welfare kid. I stood in the dock at North Sydney Magistrates Court charged with stealing forty dollars’ worth of second-hand saucepans and a car.

It all happened so quickly. I spent a night in the North Sydney police cells,

and the next morning, I would front the magistrate.

The charges are read out, I was declared guilty and sentenced to six months’ jail.

The whole process took about two minutes. Nobody asked me for my version of events. The police prosecutor told the magistrate that I had numerous

prior convictions, so I must be guilty and I am going to jail.

I was 18 years old.

The seasons of my life have passed by so quickly, and now as I reach the autumn of my life, I reflect on what has been and what might have been.

I have been lucky and am somewhat surprised that I have made it this far on my journey of life. Now I look back and remember, on these pages, those that I knew and those whose lives were never fulfilled.

I am only one of a quarter of a million people who were brought up in the child welfare system in the 1950s and ’60s in Australia, and who are now referred to as the Forgotten Australians.

This is my story and the recollections of the years that are called by some ‘the good old days’!

CHAPTER 1

M y sister Cathy and I were born in England. Our mother was English and our father was Irish. These days I prefer to think of myself as Irish rather than English; that’s just one of my many idiosyncrasies. England was still in turmoil, as the Second World War had ended two years prior to my birth. My parents had left their little Irish farm and its poverty to travel to England, to search for work. Instead they ‘found’ immigration to Australia. My father died within seven months of arriving in Australia, and my mother just disappeared, leaving Cathy and myself in an orphanage in Sydney. We of course knew nothing of this. It never appeared to bother my sister (not knowing where we came from), but not knowing about my roots, and in particular not knowing about my father, had created a deep inner turmoil. It would take another forty plus years before I could soothe my inner demons to find the truth about my father and my heritage. Before this happened, I would be involved in the death of a man under the wheels of a train. As fate would have it, this death would become the key to unlocking my past.

I have vague memories of my father but none of my mother. I remember my father laughing, and now, as I get older, I like to think that the one legacy he left me is the ability to laugh.

Our family’s emigration to Australia happened in 1949. My father was a farm labourer, and on our arrival in Sydney, he was offered employment as a laborer on a farm at Kybeyan, outside the small town of Nimmitabel in the southern highlands of New South Wales. Even today, it is a remote and desolate place. God only knows what it was like in the 1950s.

We lived in a small farmhouse at Kybeyan. I think that there were two or three houses together, all for the farmworkers. The farm was large, over three thousand acres, and my father would spend days away from us. I later learned that my mother formed a relationship with another farmworker. The solitude and loneliness of that desolate place, coming from the bright lights of London, must have been unbearable to her.

She left Cathy and I and disappeared with her new lover. My father got sick. The stress of having to look after two young children, with no family to assist him, took its toll. In his little room, he knelt on the floor next to his bed, as if he were praying. He had a rifle; he put the barrel to his chest and pulled the trigger. I think I saw this, but I didn’t understand what had happened. As a child and into adulthood, I carried the burden of not knowing what had happened to my father. Where were my roots? Who was I, and where did I come from? I wanted to know, I needed to know. There was no freedom of information laws in those dark days.

I was a ward of the state of New South Wales, and therefore, the state was my parent. Not a very good one. It wouldn’t tell me what I desperately needed to know. As I grow older, my mind wanders and I think of fate and how it entered my life twice. I wonder if in my overwhelming desire to learn about my roots, I forced fate to lend a hand. But before fate pointed me where I needed to go, I would firstly be involved in the death of a policeman, and then secondly, fate would have it that I would make a late-night phone call, on a whim, to Ireland. That whim would see me travel there, where I would find the answers to the questions I had been searching for, for more than forty-nine years.

CHAPTER 2

A fter the death of our father, Cathy and I were taken to an orphanage in Ashfield in the western suburbs of Sydney. There were many children there, nuns in dark habits and women in what appeared to be nurses’ uniforms. The dormitory that I slept in had a dozen or so iron-ended beds covered in grey blankets.

I don’t remember when I first started to wet the bed, but I think I was about two and a half years old. It is my first recollection of being punished. I remember a nurse woman yelling at me because my pyjamas were wet. Another morning after I had wet the bed again, the other children had gone down to have breakfast and I was told to stand next to my bed. The nurse took off my wet clothes and gave me a hiding; she was smacking me on my bare bottom and yelling at me, ‘What a naughty boy you are.’ I was crying after the beating, and I saw her take the wet sheets from my bed and replace it with a dark rubber sheet.

I was still crying and naked when she told me to get back onto the bed, the rubber sheet was cold and I had to stay on that bed for a very long time. I wasn’t allowed to join the other children for breakfast. Later on, I recall another woman coming into the dormitory and dressing me before sending me down to dinner; it wouldn’t be the last time that I would go all day without being fed.

I continued to wet the bed, and depending on which nurse was on duty, the punishment was always the same.

The play area at the orphanage was on a slope and went down to a stone fence where we would sit. The highlight of our day was when an old man would walk along the path below the stone fence. He always carried a tin of lollies (sweets). He would hold up the tin so that we were able to take one lollie each. I clearly remember that tin because it was oval and I could never remember seeing an oval tin with lollies in it before.

Some days some children would be called out, and then dressed; somebody had told us that when you were dressed in new clothes, it meant that you were to meet your new parents. I don’t know how long Cathy and I were at the orphanage before this happened to us.

Our new parents were Alice and Paddy McMahon. Paddy was a public servant who worked for the taxation office. He had been a soldier during the Second World War and had seen service in the Middle East; he was a man of few words and fewer emotions. My recollections of Paddy are of a hard man. On the other hand, Alice was quiet and loving in her own way, but the needs of Paddy would always come first. Alice could not have children of her own and desperately wanted a little girl. But baby girls for adoption were few and far between, so Cathy who was nearly 4 would have to do.

The problem with Cathy was that she came with baggage. ‘Me.’ The McMahons didn’t want two children, and they certainly didn’t want a little boy. The problem that they had, though, was that we couldn’t be adopted at that time because our mother was still alive. The law in NSW wouldn’t allow a child to be adopted if a parent was still alive, even when, as in our case, our mother had abandoned us and couldn’t be found. My sister and I were available to be fostered out only, and that meant if they wanted Cathy, they had to take me as well. Such was the system of the child welfare agency in NSW in the 1950s.

Put a child into a foster home even though they weren’t wanted.

I was standing in the hallway, next to Cathy, dressed in my new clothes, a new small suitcase stood on the floor with us. This was the day Alice and Paddy McMahon were taking Cathy and me to our new home.

Alice was quiet and gentle, overly sensitive and compliant to Paddy’s wishes. Paddy was short and stocky. A disciplinarian. I think his time in the war had scarred him emotionally and love to Paddy was just a word in a dictionary.

CHAPTER 3

T he McMahons had a big house in suburban Arncliffe, about eight kilometres from Sydney; it stood directly under the flight path for the big planes landing at Kingsford-Smith Airport, a few miles away at Mascot. As a kid, I loved to stand in the backyard and watch the big planes flying low as they came in to land.

Alice and Paddy were devout Catholics. Sunday Mass was mandatory, as was going to confession every Saturday night.

I didn’t understand confession, but Alice would always tell me what to confess to the priest. She would list any or all of the things that I had done during the week that she and Paddy thought constituted a sin. The priest would listen to my confession before handing out my penance, which was usually anything from saying two Hail Marys to a complete rosary.

A sin was anything that I had done that displeased Paddy.

During mealtimes, Cathy and I were not allowed to talk, unless we were asked a question. Before we could eat, we had to say grace. We were not allowed to leave any food on our plates. It didn’t matter if we didn’t like what Alice had cooked, we had to finish what had been put there. And it didn’t matter how long it took, we couldn’t leave the table until she had checked our empty plates. One night when we were eating, Paddy was talking to Alice and I accidentally burped. Without any warning, he grabbed me by my earlobe and dragged me outside. He was in such a violent rage and I was so scared. He held me down and belted me on my backside until his rage had subsided. He told me to stay outside in the dark. I fell asleep on the cold concrete, and sometime later, Alice came outside and woke me and took me to bed.

That night was the night the fear of Paddy was instilled in me. I was about 5 years old. Alice and Paddy were children of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This was brought about by the stock market crash in America in 1929. There was massive unemployment and no social security, which saw people living under road bridges and in camps. People who had nothing were not about to waste anything, so there was precious little scavenging to be done.

As this was the way of Alice and Paddy’s childhood, it was now the way of my childhood. Nothing was wasted, and money was not spent on anything frivolous.

The next-door neighbours had chooks, and Paddy grew his own vegetables, so Paddy would swap his vegetables for eggs. One day we were having boiled eggs for lunch. Alice had cut the top off my egg; it was nearly black inside and smelt revolting. Alice, who had no opinion unless it was Paddy’s, asked him if my egg was off. Without as much as a glance, he said that there was nothing wrong with it and that I should eat it. The smell was terrible. Paddy was yelling at me to pick up my spoon and to start eating it, and because we were not allowed to waste anything, I had to eat the egg. The first spoonful made me gag and I coughed up what I had eaten. Paddy flew into one of his rages, grabbed my spoon, and started to scrape up all of the egg bits that I had coughed up. He held my nose and forced the spoon into my mouth, then still squeezing my nostrils, forced spoonful after spoonful of that rotten egg down my throat until it was finished.

And nearly sixty years later, I still can’t eat boiled eggs.

CHAPTER 4

I think that I was about 6 years old when I started to rebel.

Alice and Paddy owned a small two-roomed weekender in the little town of Blackheath at the top of the beautiful Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, as well as their large house in suburban Arncliffe. After Paddy came home from work on Fridays, we would all walk to the station. Cathy and I would each carry a small bag, Alice would carry the weekend supplies in a string bag, and Paddy would carry the big suitcase.

From where we lived to Arncliffe station took about half an hour to walk. Not many people had cars in those days and the McMahons certainly didn’t. It was a long walk for little legs carrying a bag.

Arncliffe is about eight kilometres from Central station in Sydney where all of the country trains depart. We would catch the suburban train to Central where we would board the steam train to take us to Blackheath. Blackheath is about 150 kilometres from Sydney and sits about 1,200 metres above sea level. It’s the highest point on the Blue Mountains, and the journey usually took us about three and a half hours.

There was almost an hour stopover at the little town of Valley Heights. This was because another locomotive was needed to help pull the train up the steepest part of the line to Blackheath. When we arrived there, it was usually about 9:30 p.m. We would then walk the five kilometres to their little shack.

The shack had no electricity and an outside pan toilet. Cathy and I would be exhausted, as the entire journey would take us about five hours. I hated this trip every weekend; we seemed to do nothing but walk. I was too young to appreciate the beauty of the Blue Mountains.

Sunday morning we would be up early and dressed in our best clothes, and then we would walk for nearly an hour to get to the church for Mass. I would suffer through an hour of boredom, then Alice and Paddy would spend about half an hour talking to their friends outside the church, before we started the one-hour walk back to the little house. We used to get up at about six on the Sunday morning and we couldn’t have breakfast until we had been to Mass, so by the time that we got back to their little shack (to have breakfast), it would be almost eleven o’clock.

By the time we had finished breakfast, it was time to pack up and get ready for the trek back to Arncliffe. The train left Blackheath at 3:00 p.m., so we had to start walking at about 1.30 p.m. for another tortuous hour-long walk back to the station.

In later years, I saw the irony of what we used to do. For Catholics, Sunday was a day of rest and shops didn’t open. It was supposed to be a day of rest, how come we spent nearly eight hours walking and travelling? I was always exhausted by the time we got back to Arncliffe.

CHAPTER 5

O ne Friday afternoon as Alice was packing the food and clothes that we would need for the trip to Blackheath, I decided that I wasn’t going. I hated the place and I hated the trip to get there.

In my mind, I thought that if I ran away and hid, they would go without me. To me it was so simple; they would go and I would stay. I was about 6 years old and I really didn’t see a problem with this logic. In the spare bedroom at the front of the house was a makeshift cupboard. It stood in one corner of the room and it was about two metres long by a metre wide. Paddy stored a small wooden ladder and other assorted gear in it.

The cupboard walls were made from a blue green material and hung from the ceiling to the floor. I thought this would make a good hiding place until they left to go to the station. I quietly climbed up to the top of the ladder and sat on the top rung, very still. After a while, I heard Alice calling me. I heard her asking Cathy if she knew where I was. She kept walking around the house calling my name. After a while, I heard Paddy come home from work.

Alice told Paddy that she thought I had run away. Paddy flew into a rage and started to yell at Alice and to abuse her for not watching me. He kept yelling and saying that we were going to miss the train. I was really scared now; this wasn’t the way that I had planned it. I sat really still and dared not move.

We didn’t have a phone in the house. Not many people did in those days; if you wanted to make a phone call, you used the public phone that was in the street nearest to you. There was a public phone box down at the end of our street, Segenhoe Street.

I heard Paddy say to Alice that he would go and ring the police, and with that, I was frozen with fear. It was normal in those days for the police to belt wayward kids, so I didn’t know what to do now. I just sat on the ladder and trembled.

Sometime later, two policemen arrived at the house. The front doorbell rang and Paddy let them in. I heard him say that Cathy and I were wards of the state. I could hear every word that was said, as they were in the hallway next to the room where I was hiding. Paddy told the police that when they caught me, he didn’t want me back.

I was crying, and as much as I tried to suppress my sobbing, someone heard me, the curtain flew back and I was exposed. I was shaking with fear. Paddy grabbed me and pulled me off the ladder; he was yelling and shaking me and saying that he was going to give me a good walloping. One of the policemen took hold of me by the shoulder and said to Paddy that I would have to go with them.

Alice was watching me but said nothing. The police spoke some more to the McMahons and then they led me to the police car. I was told to sit in the backseat; seat belts didn’t exist then. This was the first time that I could remember being in a police car, but it wouldn’t be the last.

I was driven to Rockdale police station. Rockdale was about a ten-minute drive from Arncliffe. At the police station, I was put into a room and told to stay there until someone came to get me. The room had drab green walls, two wooden cupboards, a small table with a black typewriter on it, and two chairs.

I sat in that room for a long time and eventually went to sleep. When I woke, I was cold and hungry. A man wearing a suit and a wide-brimmed hat came into the room, accompanied by a policeman. The policeman told me to go with this man. He was carrying my small brown suitcase that I had been given when I left the orphanage. He told me to follow him. Which was all that he said.

It was dark by now and we walked to the train station at Rockdale. I didn’t know where we were going, and when a train arrived, we got on. I sat next to the window and still the man didn’t speak to me. This was not unusual, as children in those days were to be seen and not heard; you didn’t speak to an adult unless the adult spoke to you. So I sat in silence, not knowing where I was going.

I thought that I was being taken back to Arncliffe and I was fearful of another belting from Paddy; however, as the train pulled into Arncliffe, the man made no attempt to get off. Then Arncliffe was behind us and the journey continued until we got off at Central station.

The man continued to carry my small suitcase and we walked down to Eddy Avenue where the trams and buses were. I was so cold and hungry as we stood at the tram stop waiting for the tram. After a while, a tram arrived and it trundled and rattled its way through the city. I was wide awake by now; I think that this was the first time that I had ever been on a tram.

There were polished slatted seats with brass handrails and advertising posters on the wooden walls. The lights were dim, and every time that someone wanted to get off, they pulled the long cord that ran along the underside of the roof and a little bell would ring to notify the driver. There were leather straps hanging from the ceiling and some people were standing up holding on to them.

As we trundled along, I watched the bright lights in the shop windows and the flashing bulbs around the awnings of the movie theatre. They had big posters on the walls outside, giving passersby a glimpse of a scene from the movie showing inside. I had never seen a movie or been to a theatre; the flashing bulbs and the bright lights were very inviting to a boy of 6.

After a while, the man with the hat stood up and pulled the cord hanging from the ceiling, a small ding, ding sounded; the tram stopped and we got off. I had no idea where we were and the streets were dark. I was so very tired and the man, who had not spoken to me since we had left the police station at Rockdale, now said, ‘We are nearly there.’

We soon came to a house that was surrounded by a large stone wall with creepers growing over it. As we went through the wooden gates, I noticed a polished brass plaque on the pillar next to the gate that said BROUGHAM. There was a tiled verandah returning around the house. The man rang a bell and a woman opened the door. Some words were exchanged, and the man handed the woman my small suitcase. Then he turned around and walked away. No goodbye, nothing.

The lady smiled at me and asked me my name. I told her that I was Joseph. Just then, a little brown dog came running down the hallway towards me, its little tail wagging madly. I stood there not knowing what to do. I had never seen a dog in a house before; the McMahons had not had any pets or animals.

The lady with the smiling face said, ‘He likes you, you can pat him if you like.’ I knelt down and the little dog started licking my face. It felt so good; the unadulterated affection that little dog gave me has stayed with me my whole life. The lady asked me if I was hungry and I nodded. She picked up my bag, and the three of us, puppy included, walked down a wide hallway to the kitchen. She went to a large cream-colored double-door fridge and poured me a glass of milk from a jug. When I had finished it, she said that it was time for me to go to bed.

She took me down the corridor and into a room with more iron-ended beds. She took my pyjamas from my case and told me to put them on and get into bed.

The next morning, the smiling lady woke me and told me to get dressed. There were other children around, both boys and girls. There was much noise and laughter. My new friend, the little brown dog, came over and gave me a lick and then he was off to play with someone else.

This was a joyous place for a child, everyone seemed happy, no one was yelling at me, and I wasn’t getting smacked. There was a large yard with mature trees that kids were climbing, there were toys and teddy bears to play with, and I had soon forgotten about my sister and the McMahons. This was a happy place and I thought that this would be my new home forever.

In later years, I tried to find this place as a reminder of a short burst of happiness that I had experienced as a welfare child. Somebody told me that it was somewhere around Bondi Junction, but I never did find it again.

Sometimes when the regret of my lost childhood surfaces from the dark recesses of my mind, I think that in my desperation to be a happy normal child, I just imagined my short happy stay at Brougham.

I had been at Brougham for about four weeks and had settled into life there when my world fell apart. One morning when the other children had gone out to play, I was told to stay behind.

The smiling lady told me that I was going home, but I didn’t know what she meant. This was my home and I didn’t want to go anywhere else. But a state ward, who was nearly 7, went where my parent, the state, told me to go. My parent had decided that I should go back to the McMahons.

The smiling lady said, ‘Goodbye, Joseph’, and the stranger with the big hat who had taken me to this joyous place was now taking me away from it. I didn’t know where I was going until we got off the train at Arncliffe station. I was mortified that I was being sent back to the McMahons. Nobody cared about what was good for me. I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t wanted at the McMahons. The only reason that I was being sent back to them was because of some stupid law that said that I could not be separated from my sister.

I am still bitter with the child welfare system of NSW after all of these years. Our interests were of no consequence to them. As long as it was someone else’s responsibility to look after us, it was two less kids that the agency had to look after.

CHAPTER 6

B ack with the McMahons, life assumed some normalcy. I did what I was told to do. I went to the Catholic primary school in Arncliffe. I didn’t fit in, I didn’t understand religion, and we always seemed to be praying. Prayers before class in the mornings, prayers before lunch, and prayers before we were sent home.

I wasn’t a good scholar and I didn’t take a lot of notice of the classes. Even at that young age, I was like a caged animal just biding my time until I could escape. As the lesson droned on, I would be daydreaming about anything other than the lesson at hand, and that got me into trouble with the nuns.

They never smacked any of us that I could remember, but when I was asked a question and I couldn’t answer it to the satisfaction of the nun teaching us, I would be made to stand in the corner and wear the Dunce’s hat. It was made from black cardboard with a long pointed top. It looked like a witch’s hat, except that it had the word ‘Dunce’ written across the top in white letters. I seemed to wear that hat a lot more than any of the other kids, and there were always a lot of giggles coming from the class whenever I was made to wear it.

The nuns had arranged an inter-school sports day and we were sent home with a note to tell our parents that we would need to have white shorts, shirt, and sandshoes to participate in the games. I already had the white shirt and shorts, but I didn’t have any white sandshoes. Alice wanted to buy me a pair, but Paddy said no, I could borrow someone else’s shoes.

We were doing jumps and leapfrogging and a nun had a spare pair of sandshoes that she said I could borrow. They were about three sizes too big for me, my toes came to where the tongue of the shoe started. The nun told me to tighten the laces up really tight, it still didn’t make any difference. I felt so stupid, and I must have looked like Goofy. All of the kids were laughing at me, and as I ran to start my first jump, I tripped over my big shoe ends, and as my knees came down to meet the bitumen, my left knee came down on an upturned bottle top cap.

As I lay in agony with blood coming from my injury, I was crying. I remember all the laughing faces. I was so humiliated. I pulled off the stupid shoes and threw them across the playground as I ran over to the shelter shed to hide. I still carry that perfect bottle top scar on my left knee.

CHAPTER 7

I never had any money to spend. Cathy and I never got any pocket money and I was always envious of the other schoolkids who could go into the tuck shop and buy a big cream bun or some lollies. Some kids even had money to buy school lunches. The lucky ones would give the teacher their money; the teacher would write down their order on the front of a brown paper bag and then place the money inside the bag. All of these bags would be taken to the tuck shop and the orders would be made up in time for lunch.

I had never had a lunch order or a cream bun. Alice used to make her own bread, four loaves a week, and that’s what we ate. Fresh bread on Monday, stale by Friday.

For Sunday, Alice would usually cook a roast. Occasionally it was beef, but mainly it was mutton. When the roast was done, the hot dripping was usually poured into a jug and then put into the icebox to harden. The icebox was like a small wooden fridge. Every few days, the iceman would deliver a large block of ice, which would go into the top of the box. It would keep the butter and milk cool for a couple of days. Most days, school lunch consisted of a couple of slabs of Alice’s bread smothered in dripping and topped with salt and pepper. Not very healthy by today’s standards, but it tasted pretty good, and when I was hungry, I ate almost anything. Even so, by the end of the week, Cathy and I were fed up with bread and dripping sandwiches.

It was about this time that I became a thief. At our place, Paddy paid for the milk every Saturday morning when the milkman came around.

In the 1950s, the milkmen used to deliver the milk to your front door in the early hours of the morning. You would leave your empty bottles, which were glass, on your front door step with