birth

My mother tells me I was born early on a Monday morning. She should know. Nonetheless I check on one of those perpetual calendars. A Monday it is, then.

The traditional nursery rhyme has it that Monday’s child is fair of face. I don’t have it in me to argue.

Numerology would have something to say about the time of birth—5:20—but I don’t give a fig for numerology so I have no idea what significance such an early birth might have. Astrological implications depend on natal time too, but of these I could care less.

My own explanation is that I was keen to get up early and get on with the day and the week, a lark, an early riser. And so it is.

Exactly why my atheist—she prefers agnostic because she doesn’t like to commit—mother bore me at a Catholic hospital, the St John of God in Warrnambool, remains a mystery. It was established in 1939 so must have been quite ‘modern’ in 1951. Today it’s a 75-bed hospital, offering “patient-focused, values-based care”, whose satisfied patients rate it in the 96th percentile.

I’d have been taken home ten days later to 14 McConnell Street. I’m not sure if I remember my earliest memories or have mind-pictures of them from the stories my mother tells. I watch the bantams my mother keeps for hours. One, Brownie, lays her eggs on my bed after hopping in the open window. I can see the bed and the egg, or can I?

I climb the side fence and ask our 84 year-old neighbour, Mr Wallace, for an apple from his tree. “Akin, man,” I plead.

A notorious climber, I scale a 12-foot trellis just for fun. I climb out the front window and hightail it to the local milk bar, naked, and plead for lollies. Nothing changes.

I disappear one day while my mother prepares tea. I am located after dark in a small pond in a front yard a few houses up McConnell Street in a very wet sailor suit. I seriously burn my feet by stepping into the embers, hidden under silky ashes, of a fire left by workmen who boiled their billy in the gutter after repairing the road.

I watch my parents push a perspex-windowed Austin A40 up the street but it won’t start.

 Sex is on my mind. The strange smell from a bush in a driveway opposite ours stimulates my little libido, though I don’t know why. Smell remains a powerful arouser.

   

Rock on.