The Story of Danny Dunn (4 page)

Over the second week Danny's fever lessened and he began the slow road to recovery. Throughout this period Brenda lived with the fear that her son might suffer permanent damage to his heart or brain. Despite Dr Light's assurance that he was coming along nicely and that there appeared to be no abnormal signs in his recovery, the die was cast, and for the remainder of his childhood she would fuss over his health. The slightest sniffle brought her running with the cod-liver oil; a cut or abrasion, and the iodine bottle appeared at the trot. But Danny recovered completely and seemed no worse for the experience. Despite his mother's over-enthusiastic ministrations he was to become a rough-and-tumble kid, eager to play any kind of game and quite happy to take the school playground knocks and bumps without complaint.

Incidentally, Happy decided he couldn't live without Half Dunn's bacon sandwiches, and agreed to be adopted by Brenda as the pub verandah dog. She'd hoped the old dog would be a mate for Danny, but, as they say, you can't teach an old dog new tricks and Happy only had eyes for her. Half Dunn would make Happy's favourite tucker every morning, but the dog would only accept the offering from his mistress. On one occasion she'd been away at her parents' farm for the weekend and had returned to find an unhappy Happy with his nose beside four uneaten bacon-and-egg sandwiches, which he proceeded to wolf down the moment she granted him permission to do so.

Brenda, grateful for her son's full recovery, had only one abiding regret: the diphtheria and Danny's lengthy recuperation meant he had missed a precious year of school. In fact, when he started school she discovered half the class was aged either six or seven, but she ever afterwards felt that she'd let a precious year of her son's education slip by.

In April that year, after a long battle with cancer, Dulcie died at the comparatively young age of fifty-three, followed three months later by Fred, after a sudden and massive heart attack on his way to the corner newsagent to get the morning paper. His friends, travelling up together on the train from Wagga Wagga for the second time in three months to attend the funeral, agreed that he'd almost certainly died of a broken heart over his beloved Dulcie.

The mourning contingent were well prepared for the journey up to Sydney for Fred's funeral with two crates of beer for the men and four bottles of sweet sherry for the ladies. After drinking their way through Cootamundra, Harden and Yass, they were pretty well oiled by the time the train rolled into Goulburn.

The conversation had progressed beyond the virtues of the dearly departed to discussion of his origins. His father, Enoch Dunn, was claimed to have won the pub in a game of poker on the Bathurst goldfields in the 1860s. The general consensus was that, all in all, the Dunn name had stood for something in the town and there was speculation about the present and the future.

Sergeant Bob Barrett, clad in a brown worsted suit that must once have buttoned over his front and looking decidedly uncomfortable out of his blue serge police uniform, seemed to express all their thoughts – well, those of the males present, anyway – when he ventured darkly, ‘Ah, a truly blessed union, Fred and Dulcie, a tribute to the town.' He paused and raised his beer in memory. ‘But, I'll give it to you straight. The boy has turned out to be a bloody no-hoper. If it weren't for that splendid young lass he married there'd be no pub and he'd be in the gutter, mark my words, a regular in my overnight lock-up. She keeps him out of harm's way, though gawd knows why, the useless bastard!'

But this tribute to Brenda didn't go unchallenged. The chemist's wife, Nancy Tittmoth, sailed in for her tuppence worth, her fourth glass of sweet sherry turning to pure acid as it touched her lips. ‘Don't believe everything you see, Bob. Bog Irish, that one! Still eat with their fingers. The only way her kind can get out of the gutter is to land with their bum in the butter! That girlie has lots to answer for. Little hussy housemaid gets herself pregnant to the publican's son, both Roman Catholics, so they have to marry. Then her keeping the boy in a state of permanent intoxication so she can rule the roost. The hotel is in his name, of course, but as long as she hangs on to him, well . . .' she smiled primly, ‘. . . the little tart and her son with the girly hair can enjoy all the benefits of a fortunate marriage.'

Bob Barrett held his tongue. Everyone in town knew that Nancy had earmarked Mike Dunn for her eldest daughter, Enid, a sweet enough girl, though very tall, exceedingly plain and rather dull.

With the death of his parents, Mick and Brenda now had the total income from the pub and expectations of a further inheritance that might mean they could afford not only Mick's enduring thirst but Danny's education as well. To Mick's consternation and lasting bitterness, when the will was read, the Randwick property, Fred's half-share in two racehorses stabled at the racecourse and a not inconsiderable sum of money in the Bank of New South Wales had been left to Dulcie's two older sisters, both nuns approaching retirement.

It never occurred to Brenda that she could now afford to be a lady of leisure; she had always worked and she would continue to do so. But now she was no longer beholden to her parents-in-law, Brenda decided she'd had a gutful of running a country pub. Mick was all piss and wind and contributed little, either as a husband or a worker, besides his gift of the gab. She'd had her fill of commercial travellers stealing towels or jacking off in bed and leaving sperm stains on the sheets; she was sick of locals defaulting on their monthly beer tab, of drunks fighting or throwing up on the pavement outside. And Sergeant Bob Barrett, older than her father, the dirty old sod, propping up the bar most nights for an hour after closing when she was exhausted, ogling her as he downed a couple of complimentary schooners and a plate of ham sandwiches. She was sick of it all. The final straw came when one morning she'd gone out to feed Happy and found him dead. The ageing verandah dog hadn't shown any signs of being poorly. He'd simply passed away in his sleep. Brenda shed a quiet tear, sorry that she hadn't been present to say goodbye and to whisper into his tattered ear that she loved him. She decided she wanted a bigger world, and it was time her bright young son was educated in the city.

Brenda felt she'd fulfilled her duty to her own family. She'd put the twins through convent and paid for courses in shorthand and typing. While she still helped financially with the farm, good rains had fallen and the saltbush was coming back. She'd even noticed a gleam of hope occasionally in her mother's pale-blue eyes. Confident she would survive in the big smoke, they sold the pub to Toohey's Brewery in August 1929 and moved to Sydney, where they rented a small house in Paddington while Brenda looked for a suitable pub to buy. She thought she'd received a good price for the Commercial, but she was astonished at the pub prices in Sydney. After a few months she was beginning to wonder if she'd been wrong to sell up and leave Wagga. Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, the effect resonating around the world to panic investors and set in train the Great Depression. Suddenly, cash was king and she found two run-down pubs, the Hero of Mafeking, in the working-class suburb of Balmain, and the King's Men, in Parramatta. While the Parramatta pub was a slightly better buy, she'd discovered that each year the brightest two kids in their final year at Balmain Primary School would be chosen to attend Fort Street Boys High, a selective school with an enviable academic reputation. For a working-class boy it was the first step to a university education and Brenda fancied her chances with Danny, who was proving to be very bright. It was for this reason that she ignored the advice of the hotel broker and chose the more run-down of the two pubs.

The gathering hard times had bankrupted the licensee, but Brenda reasoned that men still needed a drink, no matter how hard things became. She soon discovered that the pub had been cheap for several very good reasons. The previous publican had a reputation as a surly bastard who drove away more patrons than he ever attracted. With thirty pubs to choose from on the peninsula, this was not a very intelligent way to conduct business. Furthermore, the Resch's brewery rep had cut off his supply when he couldn't come up with the cash for his deliveries. The place was so run-down, shabby and dirty that the brewery had decided not to follow their usual practice of buying the freehold and installing a lessee, thus tying the pub to their beer forever. The premises were infested with cockroaches and rats, although the former were a product of Sydney's humid summers and the latter – not exclusive to the pub – emanated from the wharves and ships anchored at the docks. In fact rats on the peninsula were in plague proportions, adding to the general sense of misery since the Wall Street crash. Everything and everyone went hungry, from the packs of emaciated dogs that roamed the streets, to the families who had once owned and loved them. Only the cats had full bellies.

Danny, now nine, was enrolled in the local primary school in time for the first term of 1930. Brenda wasn't happy that he was growing up in a pub, but she'd managed to keep him out of the pub in Wagga and she'd do so again in Balmain.

The Balmain peninsula jutting out into Port Jackson was distinguished by the beauty of the harbour and the polluting industry that festered at the water's edge. It was an inner-harbour suburb of Sydney, with Iron Cove on the west, White Bay to the south-east, Mort Bay on the north-east and Rozelle to the south-west. But Balmain did not regard itself as a part of anything or anyone. To the people who lived in its just over half a square mile, it was a different place, a separate village, a different state of being and of mind.

How this overweening civic pride had come about nobody quite knew. Clearly Balmain was superior to Rozelle, which was lumbered with Callan Park, a lunatic asylum.
‘Yer gunna be thrown in the loony bin if yer don't behave!'
was the customary threat to children growing up on the peninsula. Balmain boasted an impressive Italianate town hall of brick and stucco, and several handsome winding streets leading down to the two wharves or terminating in broad stone steps that led to jetties projecting into the sparkling harbour. Along Darling Street, rickety, swaying, clattering trams bore passengers down the steep slope to the Darling Street Wharf where they could take the ten-minute ferry ride to the city terminus.

Yet, despite its beautiful setting and impressive civic centre, Balmain exhibited all the signs of working-class poverty. Spidering out along the peninsula on either side of Darling Street were humble back streets of run-down wooden and sandstone terraces of one and two storeys fronting directly onto cracked and weed-infested pavements. The tiny backyards contained only an outdoor toilet and a washing line, a rope or wire strung from the top of the kitchen door to the dunny roof. The
Daily Worker
once described these workers' hovels as not fit for dogs to live in.

A coal loader left a residue of fine coal dust on Monday's washing, blackened the rind of dried mucus round the nostrils of the snotty-nosed kids, and added a sharp, acrid smell to the atmosphere. The air was filled with coal smoke from a power station and sulphur from a chemical factory near the Rozelle end, causing throats to burn and eyes to water. Two soap factories contributed the fetid stink of sheep tallow, and a host of small engineering factories added to the din and stink, squatting in niches and coves around the harbour.

Others may have described Balmain as poverty-stricken during the Great Depression and the ongoing misery of the thirties, but locals were largely unaware of their particular misfortune. While many of its working-class residents struggled more than most to survive – unemployment in Balmain was double the state average – they nevertheless possessed a peculiar and unreasoning pride: they came from Balmain and were therefore fiercely, even foolishly, tough and independent. ‘Balmain boys don't cry' epitomised the breed.

They needed every bit of determination as the 1930s progressed. Moonlight flits were common – a huddle of cold and hungry urchins together with their desperate parents escaping down a dark street at midnight carrying between them everything they owned, unable to pay the rent or persuade the landlord to extend them any more credit. In winter people were reduced to rowing out at night to ships waiting to unload, dodging the water police, then stealing aboard like rats to pinch coal or vegetables from the holds. War veterans sold matches or busked outside pubs on harmonicas, playing the popular songs of the Great War and the roaring twenties. Men turned up at dawn to get a place in the labour queue, their stomachs rumbling or cramping with hunger after a dingo's breakfast – a piss and a good look around.

Balmain became a place of hungry, bronchial, barefoot children, many suffering from scabies. Paradoxically, the children attending school were well scrubbed, unlike those from other poverty-stricken neighbourhoods. Similarly Balmain men standing in the labour queues were, as a general rule, neatly shaved. This came about, not from fastidiousness, but because soap and shaving cream were stolen from the production line of the local Colgate Palmolive and Lever Brothers soap factories and handed out to friends and neighbours. There was always soap beside the tub, even if there was no food in the cupboard.

But Brenda had been correct. Although poverty gripped the peninsula and per capita beer sales had dropped, pub patronage increased. Tired and defeated men could go to the pub and know that they were not alone; it was neutral territory, where they could share a middy or a seven, have a whinge and a joke and talk football or the race results at Wentworth Park and Harold Park or at Randwick. They could linger over a beer beside another bloke and forget the labour queue they would both be joining the following morning, competing for a dwindling supply of jobs.