In the life I now lead, Rocky’s place looms large, larger by far than the place occupied by any of the dogs of my childhood. He wakes with me in the early morning and prepares for our walk, even as I do, our separate rituals connected by our common purpose. Our days, even when those days involve my leaving him, nevertheless share the rhythms of a seemingly ordered life, by which I mean there are certain things we do together every day. I am at an age of regularity, even predictability, which means that Rocky, like all dogs a creature of habit, knows each day what to expect from me. Ours is a friendship based on shared rituals. The dogs of my childhood—a golden cocker spaniel called Rodney is the one I remember best—were more like younger siblings, loved intensely one minute, ignored the next. Sometimes they were allowed to be part of our backyard cricket matches or the cowboy and Indian wars we reenacted late on Saturday afternoons. These wars were inspired by the Saturday matinee cowboy movies shown at the Astor Theatre, especially those movies where the director had wisely rejected the need for a silly love story which interrupted the fighting, the climax of which was always the slaughter of bad Indians by good and decent cowboys. Rodney, I recall, was rather sensitive to the sound of gunfire. The sound was made by caps which came in rolls and which were inserted into a barrel inside the silver pistols that we wore in plastic holsters over our hips. At the sound of this gunfire, Rodney would leap into action and in my memory, run around the yard for what seemed like hours before dropping exhausted as the last Indian met his maker.
This was before we moved, my father, my mother, my sister Rita and I, to Fitzroy, my mother having convinced my father to buy a milk bar and grocery shop in this inner city working class suburb which was on the north side of the Yarra River. It was perhaps an hour away by tram from Caulfield where we had lived, my family, including my sister Rita, with my eldest sister and her husband and two children—not to mention Rodney and other dogs whose names I can’t remember– for several years, from the time we arrived in Australia in November 1949. My sister’s eldest son was three years younger than me and though I knew that I was his uncle, I always thought of him as my brother. I am not sure whether I considered my sister to be my mother. She took me to school each day and prepared my lunch and came on parent-teacher nights to discuss my progress. I was aware, always, that my mother was old enough to be my grandmother.
From the moment we moved to Fitzroy, to the milk bar and grocery shop on the corner of Gore Street and Webb Street, I begged my parents to buy me a dog. I had become enamoured of silky terriers because someone had told me they were brave and the perfect dog for a milk bar and grocery shop that had only a small courtyard at the back with a shed in which the soft drink crates and packages of groceries and empty wooden pickling barrels were stored. My father eventually bought me a puppy, a silky terrier, though my mother had not wanted a dog for she was of a time and culture that considered dogs something that only goyim allowed into their homes. I am tempted to transform into a metaphor the puppy’s vanishing within weeks of his arrival, stolen I believed then and still believe, by a man who lived at the end of Gore Street up near Brunswick Street. My mother died in Fitzroy and I could, I suppose consider her death as a form of theft, her being stolen from me. That is not how I felt at the time. Of those years with my mother in Fitzroy, one of the memories I have is of the time when she fed the dog a piece of boiled chicken and how surprised I was, for she refused ever to touch him.
My parents and I slept in one bedroom which meant that my puppy, for the weeks I had him, could never sleep with me. My mother would never have it. The four walls of our bedroom were painted in pastel colours, green, blue, pink and tan, which gave the room, with its high white painted Victorian ceiling, a Mediterranean feel. My friends and I, mostly Greek and Italian and Yugoslav kids and a few Aussies, considered the fact of the different colours of each wall evidence of something un-Australian. There were wogs—that’s what we called them and each other– living in many of the slightly seedy Victorian terraces on Gore Street. These houses were painted in pastel shades inside and out, though some Greeks favored white and blue for the exteriors of their houses, no doubt in response to homesickness and the urgency of their memories. My bed was jammed against the pink wall beside the large sash window which looked out onto Gore Street. On summer nights, while my parents were still downstairs in the shop, often until close to midnight, I would climb out through the window and sit on the red-painted tin roof, hidden from sight of the street by the curved awning above the shop’s plate glass front.
The brothel across the road was my chief interest, though I was also hopeful, on warm and muggy nights in particular, that the fights between the couple who lived in the grey-painted terrace directly opposite our shop—the paint a sign that therein lived no wogs—would spill into the street and I would witness the woman, blond hair cropped short widgie style, in her bra and panty-girdle, small hatchet poised above her head, threatening to chop off her husband’s dick if he came any closer. Her husband worked in the shoe factory around the corner on Webb Street and each working day, he would buy a packet of Craven A cigarettes on the way to work and two pickled onions from the jar that stood on the silver top of the glass case with its boxes of lollies—chocolate bullets, green sugar- coated mint leaves, snakes of various colours, banana sticks and straps of black Nigger Boy brand licorice. He wore blue overalls and a flannel shirt in winter, a blue singlet in summer, and though he went home each lunch-time, he had a brown kitbag, in which he stored his smokes and his pickled onions. Though he lived only two doors down from the brothel, I never saw him go inside. He did, however, from time to time, stand outside it, a safe distance from his hatchet wielding wife and threaten to put her to work because she was a slut and might as well get paid for it. She was, I thought, in all probability a slut, for she never denied, at least not during those times when they fought on the street, that she was one.
I found the thought of her being a slut thrilling, as did my friends, even if we had only a vague idea of what this actually involved, the nuts and bolts of it I mean. Just as non-specifically thrilling was the thought of what happened in the brothel. What a mystery it was, this thing the men who came there came there for. The brothel was not a terrace but rather a large, brown, brick house on the corner of Gore and Webb Street. It was opposite the pub on the corner diagonally across from the shop. At least once a fortnight, before they headed home from work in the textile and shoe factories on Webb Street, men would push and shove and punch each other for a few minutes when the pub had closed after the six o’clock drinks mayhem. During the day, some of the women from the brothel bought milk and bread and a few pennies worth of mixed lollies. When I served them, I would look for signs for evidence of what it was that they did. I was ten years old but when I served them, I wished that I was wearing long pants, the long pants my father had promised I would have tailored for me by the dark-haired Italian man who lived down a few houses from us and who, like my father, was a socialist, though unlike my father—I gathered this from listening to hours of argument between the two, often late into the night, in the kitchen at the back of the shop where my father ran a sort of working-class salon three or four night a week while my mother prepared the shop for business the next day—he was not disposed to consider communism, in its Soviet, Stalinist form, as a total betrayal of socialist principles and dreams. My mother was not a participant in the salon discussions. Instead, when she was able to cajole me into watching the shop, she would go backwards and forwards from the shed at the back, to bring in crates of soft drink and boxes of lollies and small barrels of salt herring and pickled cucumbers. She carted the stuff into the shop, past the salon debates and explications of socialist theory taking place around the wooden table which filled most of the kitchen. She moved slowly and methodically, silently, ghost-like, a wiry, slightly bent woman with white hair tied in an awkward bun, her long, lined, skinny face pale and sad, her eyes hooded, sleepy looking, heart-sick, her chest sunken and scarred where her left breast had been removed and yet fiercely determined, steely in her resolve, unflinching in the task of preparing the shop for the next day’s business.
It is my most vivid memory of her, dragging the soft drink crates along the concrete path from the shed, through the back screen door, past the kitchen and into the little storeroom hidden behind the curtain beside the stairs that went up to our bedroom The night before she died, in the bed she shared with my father, the bed which consisted of two single bed mattresses pushed together, the bed head up against the pink wall beside the bedroom door, the bed where they slept, often with me separating them, me lying on the edges of the two mattresses, up against my mother, afraid that her scarred chest was a sign of terrible things to come, listening for her sick heart beat, that evening, my mother had dragged crates of soft drink into the storeroom and I had refused her half- hearted request for help, determined, on that warm November night, to have my time on the roof. I slept all night, the night she died, in my bed beside the window and woke at daybreak to my father calling out my mother’s name. My mother’s name was Chaja but the goyim called her Helen. My father’s name was Chaskiel but he became Sam. Helen and Sam; names without history and without meaning, names designed to mask and yet proclaim their foreignness.
After my mother died and before my father had sold the shop and gone back to work in the carpet factory, the Italian tailor who was soft on communism finished my pair of long trousers. Until then, I had worn grey shorts made from thick and stiff overall material, light blue or white nylon drip dry short sleeved shirts, grey socks and cheap black shoes reinforced with heavy leather soles which my father fashioned from squares of black leather using a sharp knife and an iron shoe-frame he had purchased second hand from the local shoe repairer on Smith Street. I wore my new dark grey trousers when one Saturday night, I walked up to Johnston Street—the geographic boundary of my Fitzroy territory—to go to the pictures at the Fitzroy picture theatre. I saw Love Me Tender. I was alone I think, sitting there in the dark watching Elvis singing:
Love me tender
Love me true
All my dreams fulfill
For my darling
I love you
And I always will
It is not so much the song that I remember, but rather his shiny luminous black hair swept back at the sides and falling in an untidy curl over his forehead, his baggy light-coloured pants—this was a black and white movie—that danced every time he moved his legs, his long-sleeved shirt turned up at the collar, the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his smile suggesting, telling me, that when my hair too was swept back in a great curl at the front rather than sitting there on my head like a limp pancake, only then would my most longed for dreams come true.
I think that when my mother died, Rita was living with Hinda, my eldest sister, for Rita was going to a Jewish private school on the Caulfield side of town, my mother having saved for years to send her there. That morning, after my father had woken me shouting that my mother was dead, my sisters and my two brothers-in-law arrived at the shop before sunrise in my brother-in law’s FJ Holden. My two eldest sisters wept for hours but it was Rita, 17 years old and gorgeous, so loved by my mother, whose face I still remember, a teenage girl’s face, the face of a girl whose life had been ruined and who knew it.
I went back to Fitzroy a few times after my father and my aunt and I moved back to Caulfield, at first to Hinda’s house but after a while, to a single-fronted Edwardian house with an outside toilet that my father had bought after he sold the milk bar and grocery shop. On those visits to meet with some of my friends from my time there, most of whom now lived out in the suburbs, I walked down Gore Street, its terraces all renovated and painted in the colors, brown and green mostly, of the educated middle-class professionals who had worked with great energy and creativity to wipe out the working class Fitzroy of my childhood. I walked down Gore Street to Gertrude Street and I think I recognised the house into which my silky terrier had disappeared.
I have not been back to the Gore and Webb Street corner for decades, not since I went there with a photographer for The Age who took my photograph there in front of the shop which was no-longer a milk bar and grocery shop but an art gallery of some sort. The brothel was long gone, the imposing Edwardian house so tarted up that I thought even the ghosts of the working women and the men who frequented it would find it hard to live there. The photograph was to accompany an article I had written as part of a series on childhood that the paper was running during summer, one of those series created out of desperation during the so-called news `silly season’. I tried to find that article today but failed. I wanted to know whether I wrote about the stolen silky terrier and how broken-hearted I was when it happened and how mystified I was that the man who stole him, who I saw take him into his house at the end of Gore street near Gertrude Street, denied it when my father took me there to confront him. On reflection, I think this was a metaphor for our time in Fitzroy though I am not exactly sure what it illustrates.
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