Working Class Boy (18 page)

From the back row I heard a whiny voice: ‘James . . .'

‘Panopoulos.'

‘Here, sir.'

‘He's a James . . . ooh . . .' The voice was getting more annoying and I looked around to see a boy in the back row smirking at me. He was bigger than the other kids. He continued to taunt me whenever there was an opportunity. I wanted to get up and belt him but I couldn't. Not on my first day.

The teacher was too busy calling the roll to really care but every time the noise got out of hand he'd look up and say, ‘Right, keep it down. You're not on the oval now. McCulloch?'

‘Here, sir.'

‘Stevens?'

‘Here.'

‘Jaammees . . .' The boys in the back were laughing along with my tormentor.

‘Right you lot. Who's laughing?'

The back row sat up straight and acted as innocent as they could. The teacher had obviously dealt with these guys before and went back to what he was doing.

‘Cooper?'

‘Here, sir.'

‘Jaaammes . . .'

I snapped, and turned around to face him. ‘Right, mate. After school.'

‘Ooh, I'm soo scared.'

He sneered at me. The teacher finished roll call and went on with the lessons for the day.

During the lunch break some of the nicer, gentler kids told me not to go near him as he was very vicious. He was a rocker or something like that; he wore desert boots and slicked his hair back. In my head I went through what was going to happen after school and I was a little worried.

The final bell rang and the air was electric with excitement. All the kids in the class wanted to see what the new student would do when faced with the school bully. I walked out to the school gate and he was waiting for me with his sleeves rolled up and a smug look on his face. Before he could speak I ran at him and punched him to the ground. As he curled up in a ball I stood over him, kicking him.

I looked up and all his friends were yelling at me, ‘That's not right. You don't fight fair.'

I stopped and screamed back at them, ‘If you want to fight fair you've come to the wrong place. So fuck off.'

And proceeded to give him a beating. No one ever picked a fight with me at that school again. It seemed that they didn't fight the same way we did in Elizabeth and that was fine by me.

Things went well at school after that. In fact, not long after that, I became captain of the soccer team; they obviously saw how well I could kick. It wasn't long until I was top of the class too. All the old patterns of survival were working for me even though my circumstances had changed. When in doubt, lash out, and I did for many years to come.

Around Wingfield where we lived, there seemed to be a lot of European immigrants – Italian, Greek and Polish and all different European people. I thought this was really cool and made friends
with as many as I could. But when these kids came to school, the Australian kids would pick on them. I don't know why because the Australian kids didn't have any more than these kids had. The European families would be making salami and wine in the houses next door to working-class Australian families and this seemed to cause problems. Maybe because they wanted the wine, I don't know.

Their lunches were very different from those of the other kids at school and they were picked on because of it. The European kids' lunches looked a thousand times better than ours. I couldn't work it out. We would have Vegemite sandwiches and they would have prosciutto and provolone cheese, and olives and salami. I knew what lunch I wanted.

I thought it was great and wished my folks could make salami and grow vegetables, but they didn't. I ended up getting into fights at school again, sticking up for these little Italian and Greek kids, but I didn't mind, I was happy to fight. I started to hang with these families more and more. It seemed to me that the Australian families were the ones with the problems, not the Italians or Greeks.

The so-called normal Australian families around us seemed to have problems like we had had in Elizabeth. Not quite as extreme as we had experienced but similar. The dads were drinking too much. It might have been beer instead of whisky but they still drank too much. And there was violence in their homes too. I didn't see this with the European families; maybe it was there too but I didn't see it. They all seemed to work really hard and put all their money back into the family. That had to be good. So my world was expanding and I was beginning to realise that the world was a big place and not what it seemed to be from where I stood.

* * *

If you had told me that I would be leaning on a fence of a drive-in movie watching
The Sound of Music
even a year earlier, I would have laughed and then probably slapped you. We weren't a musical sort of family. Of course I'd heard of movies like
West Side Story
but where we came from gangs didn't dance to settle disputes unless it was on each other's heads. But there I was, leaning on the fence humming along with the songs. If my mates in Elizabeth could see me now.

‘You've turned real soft, Jim. I reckon we should give you a hiding to toughen you up.' That's what they would be saying to me. No, they wouldn't even be talking to me, just kicking me to bits. But I wasn't in Elizabeth anymore. I thought that the gangs around Wingfield might have a dance-off instead of a fight. I felt safe. I felt positive. I wasn't used to this.

The voices of the people around Wingfield sounded different too. I was sure I'd heard a German accent a minute ago. Along with a Greek, and an Italian. A Russian and a Polish. I might have left the country, not just Elizabeth. They weren't whining about everything being better somewhere else. They weren't lying in the gutters, drunk. They were living life and loving their families. This was
The Sound of Music
. I must be dreaming.

I had walked about a quarter of a mile from home and I was sitting on the ground with a bunch of kids I didn't know outside the drive-in, watching a movie. And I wasn't in any danger.

Well, my musical taste might be a bit damaged but I'd live through it.

So who had saved me from the life I was leading? My mum had a lot to do with it. But I had a feeling that Reg Barnes had been my Julie Andrews. He's the reason I felt safe. He was the reason I could walk the streets and not get beaten up. He was even the reason I knew the words to these songs. But he couldn't be perfect, could he?

* * *

Around that time, I noticed the girls that were my age were beginning to change. They were getting curves and bumps and I couldn't take my eyes off them. The girls that is, not the bumps. No, you were right the first time – the bumps and the girls.

I'd always liked girls and had even fancied girls for a long time but these were the girls in my class. Not only were they changing physically but they acted differently too. They seemed to think they had some sort of mystical control over boys. And they did – when there wasn't a football around. If there was sport to be played, we managed to shake it off and leave them to themselves.

The summer came, and suddenly outside the house smelled really bad. I thought that it would go away but it didn't. The smell was there all day, every day. It smelled like dead animals and I remembered when we lived in Gepps Cross and the abattoir was across the road, through the forest, so I asked Reg what it was. He told me that an abattoir and tannery were just down the road. It seemed my life always ended up around slaughterhouses and here I was again.

I walked down the road to have a look at it and found myself gagging the closer I got to the place. It was horrible. I couldn't help thinking how bad the poor animals felt. I could sense fear in the air and being a person who had spent his life afraid, this really disturbed me. I ran home and tried not to think about what was going on up the road. But I couldn't forget it as the smell lingered around, outside and inside the house.

I knew because of the smell that our house wasn't in the best area, so I spoke to Reg and he told me that when Mum and he went to get a house, this was all they could afford. The gloss started to peel away from my dream home.

I came home one afternoon to find Reg in the backyard. He was in a hole in the lawn and he had a handkerchief over his face. There was a different horrible smell this time, one I hadn't noticed before.

I shouted out to him, ‘Reg, Reg, what are you doing in there?'

And he came over to me with a bucket on a rope in his hands. ‘We have no money, love, so I have to empty the septic tank by hand or we won't be able to use the toilet.'

As far as I could see this was the worst thing anyone could think of doing, especially in the one-hundred degree heat.

So I said, ‘Why are you doing it, Reg? It's disgusting.'

He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘Because I love you, son. That's why I'm doing it.' He pulled the handkerchief up over his nose and went on with the job.

He was a bit dramatic, our Reg, but he meant it. He sacrificed a lot for us and I knew it. Most people paid for a truck to come around and empty their tanks but we couldn't afford it.

‘This is as poor as you can get,' I thought. Poor Reg.

While I was checking out the abattoir at the end of the road I came across a horse-riding school. The idea of riding horses really appealed to me. I always wanted to be a cowboy, so I started hanging around the school, trying to help out when I could.

My brother John used to hang around there sometimes too. As usual, anything John tried to do he was good at, so he very quickly became really good around horses. He started working at the riding school whenever he wanted to. The guy who ran it could see how keen I was and started giving me the odd bit of work around the place too. Cleaning up shit and even feeding the horses. In return for my hard work he let me ride the horses. I was not very good at it but I tried really hard. A few horses threw
me off but it didn't stop me and I developed the liking for horses that I have to this day.

I stopped for a while after a particularly big horse, a Clydesdale, stood on my foot and nearly broke it. Being a very keen football player, I couldn't afford to have broken feet so I stayed away for a while.

The idea of changing our names came up. I'm not sure if it was Reg's idea. It may even have been Mum's, one last chance to plunge the knife into her ex-husband.

I didn't need to think twice about it. I changed my name to James Dixon Barnes. Jim Swan was my father but Reg Barnes was the man who cared for me, he was my dad, and I wanted his name.

John was the only one of the kids who wouldn't change their name to Barnes. He wanted to keep his dad's name. Which was fine by us. We loved Dad too.

I was the biggest eater out of all the kids. They nicknamed me seagull because I would hover around the table, waiting to eat anything that was put in front of me. And while the others were busy with other things, homework or watching television, I would be getting ready for bed and heading into the kitchen to have one last bite to eat with Reg. It was a moment where he could ask me about school and check that I was all right. Unfortunately, the late-night cereal he and I would eat together was gone. We couldn't afford it anymore. But Reg tried to make it all right.

‘Bread with milk and sugar is better than cereal, Jim,' he assured me as we sat eating at the kitchen table. ‘When it gets cold, we'll heat the milk up. And it'll taste really great, you wait.'

It didn't taste that good but I still liked it because I was sitting having it with him.

‘Now let's wash these bowls and set the table. If you do it now you get a little bit more time to yourself in the morning.'

‘Can't we do it in the morning? I'm tired.'

‘Listen, son. In this life you can't put things off. Get up and do what you have to do. Then you can put your feet up. That's a lesson you have to learn if you want to have a good life.'

Reg had a way of making me feel sad, just by how he spoke. I think it was because he had never been a parent before and every day he was learning how much it took to bring up a family. Sometimes when he spoke to me, he was on the verge of tears, trying to hold them back. This just made me respect him more; I knew it wasn't easy for him. He would tell me that life was not always easy and sometimes you had to do things you didn't want to do because it was the right thing to do. We were one of those things. I know that if Reg had to do it all over again he would and he wouldn't even think twice about it because we needed him and he was our guardian angel.

Speaking of guardian angels, Reg told me one day that he had an angel watching over him. To a young boy from Elizabeth this sounded a bit like having fairies at the bottom of the garden. But it obviously meant a lot to him so I listened as he told me about a native American Indian who watched over him. Now there was a Red Indian hanging around the house. It was already crowded enough.

I wasn't sure I believed him but it was kind of cool to think about. I never saw the Indian myself but my sister Linda, who saw ghosts everywhere, did, and said, ‘He is real. I see him when Reg is sleeping, by the bottom of the bed.'

My mum said, ‘I saw an Indian near Reg's bed one day when he was in the hospital.' And she wasn't one to see ghosts. The only spirits she'd seen before then, my dad had been drinking.

We would laugh it off as politely as we could but still take the mickey out of Mum. Many years later, when Reg died, as I was leaving his funeral I started seeing photos of Indians everywhere. American Indians. There were billboards that I'd never noticed before, right in front of my eyes, with huge pictures of Indians looking down, smiling at me. I found an old lighter that Reg had given me with an Indian on it. It was very strange; they seemed to pop up everywhere. When I noticed them I felt a strange sense of calm come over me, as if Reg was there somehow looking out for me again. I know he was, and still is, my angel.