nicholson

I don’t know how old I am when we leave McConnell Street and move to 44 Nicholson Street, a fortress of white Mount Gambier stone on a steep service road above a cutting. My mother walks me to the kindergarten behind the famous Fletcher Jones factory. I remember making a daisy chain on the grass outside the kinder, but nothing else.

Prep, the grade before grade 1, is called Bubs at Warrnambool State School. I am nearly five and a half. My teacher is Miss Confeggi. My mother likes her and so do I. A naughty girl sits at her feet and picks at Miss Confeggi’s stockings. Her bad behaviour shocks me. In my last week in Bubs I get mumps and miss the end of the school year. My mother takes me to the Botanical Gardens. I have a sister but she is yet to figure in any memory.

Grumpy Lucas drives the school bus. He parps the horn in the cutting below the house when my mother has not got me ready for school on time. I make a shortcut by digging some steps into the cutting, my first sign of practicality.

The Kellys at number 52 are devout Catholics. Mrs Kelly wears a stained apron and smells warm and milky. Grattan Kelly is my best friend, using the Seinfeld criterion—he’s the only other boy in the street. Grattan attends the Christian Brothers College and complains of ‘the cuts’. He is eight.

A boy at school called Billy drags a calipered leg behind him. He has polio and I hope it doesn’t happen to me. I walk two miles across town rather than use the school toilet. I use my pants along the way.

A new school is built on the other side of Nicholson Street—Warrnambool East. I start grade 1 in Miss Lawry’s class. I am diligent about spelling. The schoolyard is a vast paddock pocked with sandstone. Boys lie on the ground and piss into cavities in the stone.

We get a corgi and a duck. My sister and I teach Sammy to clamp his teeth into the washing on the rotary clothesline. We spin it, lifting the dog into mini-orbit. The dog is dispatched to a better home but the duck, Dabbity, shits on our back doorstep for ten years.

Warrnambool Football Club’s coach, Leo Turner from Geelong, lives next door. I kick a football of rolled up socks up and down our backyard, obsessed. When we get a leather football at school I lead the horde chasing it and kick it further than any other boy can.

One night we gather on our fortress’s upstairs balcony to see the lights of the Westralia, my father’s ship, pass on its way to be scuppered. I know nothing of the war, barely ten years past. A television aerial is erected in the front yard, the first in Warrnambool. I crane my neck to see the top of it. My parents watch the seven o’clock news and turn it off.

I watch the steam trains chuff along the embankment behind the school and over the Flaxman Street bridge. A diesel is a rare event. I play cowboys and Indians in the paddocks and crouch on a ledge in the railway cutting with sooty smoke billowing about me.

Suddenly, for no reason I understand, it ends and we move to Melbourne. I am seven and my halcyon days are over.

Rock on.