Mug Shots

Teeth

My mouth is wide open and my brother Gavan is peering into it. It is 1970. He's not long back from America and keen to try his new expertise on me. He wears a pale-blue gown and mad-scientist magnifying glasses as he picks and prods. Newly Mastered in Dental Science, he is the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of bridges, and he's going to construct a tricky one across the gap between my lower teeth. It's called a Maryland Bridge, the first to be built in this country.

Lifting his mask so I won't miss a word, he explains that despite innumerable injections there may well be some pain: a payback, he jokes, for what I did to him when we were kids. Like the Chinese burns inflicted on him when he sat on my school lunch. Or my pushing him into deep water off St Kilda pier.

With a mouthful of cotton logs, all I could do was shake my head. ‘Intra osseus,' he seemed to say to the nurse. Os? Latin for bone? Into the bone? He moved in on me with the kind of syringe vets use on large animals. Shouldn't it be osseum, the accusative? Had he forgotten how I helped him with Latin grammar?

He sank the nightmare instrument deep into the gum, then the bone, beyond the reach of novocaine. I yelped, and prayed for numbness. Then he began his drilling, with a device that could have broken concrete. I yelped again. Oblivious, he stepped back, admired his excavations and began photographing each step.

‘This is the tricky bit. If the cement sets too soon, you'll have metal half in and half out of your mouth, and I'll be halfway down the street.' But it worked, and the furled lips, pitted teeth and bleeding gums would one day be studied by dental pornographers, and my food properly masticated at last.

At one stage, as he moved in close, I noticed a small white scar on top of his right ear. It was the mark left when a truck backed over him in 1938 when he was playing in the gutter outside our house. A back wheel had missed his head by a fraction of an inch. He was carried inside bleeding and screaming, but according to the rapidly summoned Dr Darcy, otherwise unharmed.

It had been Dr Darcy—horn-rimmed, pin-striped and reeking of chloroform—who etherised me on our dining-room table and removed my adenoids—mysterious entities somewhere behind the nose. He was a brusque little man who was held, as doctors were then, in inordinate respect. ‘Clean up your room—Doctor's coming.'

The Christian Brothers (quickly)

Nineteen thirty-eight was also the year I began at the Christian Brothers' College in St Kilda—when, one February morning, I was dragged screaming down the driveway behind their ­residence into a seething quadrangle—a brief anarchy before a whistle was blown, order imposed, and I was enclosed in a regimen that would last ten years. It was not a preparation for life but an intensification of it. When, in life, are you publicly strapped? When do forty of your peers see you blush as you suffer the teacher's ridicule?

It was weakness that was despised, by both teachers and kids. If you were strapped and cried (I managed never to), if you fainted (as I once did during a graphic description of a ­compound fracture—‘Take that boy out, will you?') or worst of all vomited (as Kevin Cherry did across two desks—to be ostracised at lunchtime from then on) your humiliation was absolute. School was the kind of test that belonged at the end of life, not the beginning.

With brother Gavan at the Estate Agents' picnic, 1939.

War broke out when I was in third class, and the Christian Brothers' College had its similarities: you too had been conscripted, uniformed and sergeant-majored. And in third class you moved up to the front line. If you didn't get the sums Brother Egan wrote up on the blackboard right you were strapped. Sometimes, when most didn't make it, we'd line up on the platform in pairs. Your and your classmate's hands were held out together, so one strap did the work of two: ­mathematics in action.

In my first year of secondary school I sat next to Eric Donnelly. Eric was dexterous, and devised an ingenious rubber-band-and-ruler mechanism which, when the lid of the desk was closed, would make a tongue poke up from a paper face pasted over the inkwell. He became a surgeon and did missionary work in Papua New Guinea. When an operation on a tribesman failed and he died, a nun was axed to death in a classroom as payback. Eric blamed himself, and when he visited me years later in Richmond he was unhinged. The world, he told us, was running out of silver nitrate, which would mean the end of photography. In the meantime, he said, we must look at our walls. ‘See?' he said. ‘Look hard—Christ's Holy Shroud face is imprinted there—can't you see?' Eric is buried in Africa ­somewhere, in the loneliest of lonely graves.

This was also the year I became close to Dick Hughes, who occupied a nearby desk. We had the greatest of teachers, a layman called J.P. Ward, a tall raw-boned man in a worn blue suit, who salted his teaching with stories of his early days in country schools: snakes in the classroom, disembowelling by an enraged boar of a man thrown from his horse, bush hermits raving mad from loneliness, goannas big enough to kill a dog.

The stories had an invariable beginning: ‘Up bush, thirty-odd years ago,' which was enough to send Hughes and all those luckless enough to sit near him into implosions of giggles. Mr Ward had a scooter tyre as a strap, and the more his stories set us off, the angrier he'd get. Dick would start his giggling, the whole row would shake, and a cabal would be summoned out the front to put out our hands for, as Mr Ward termed it, ‘a smack'.

Hughes was also a master mimic. He'd developed a passion for Dixieland jazz, and his specialty was an imitation of the great drummer Gene Krupa ‘in a frenzy'. He'd wait for a Brother to turn to the blackboard, and while the voyages of Magellan were being sketched out, Hughes would do his imitations with two whirring rulers, soundlessly, stopping the moment the Brother turned to face us. His neighbours would laugh but the phantom drummer would not: strappings again.

I had only one skill, and that was tennis. I still have a photo of the 1944 school team, my bone-thin arms cradling one of those racquets with flattened tops that went back to the days of Henry VIII. You went out on the orange gravel en-tout-cas (the word has disappeared) and because you represented your school, your racquet became heavy, your strokes uncertain and often you lost. Top sport is about temperament. Neurotics didn't have a hope.