Like the clappers

Like the clappers
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 24, 2015

Rough landings test my nerves. Belted tightly into my window seat, I stared at the wing tip flexing violently. The rain sheeted in grey gusts. My bird’s eye view of the city was a blur. As the cabin jolted and jerked, the young woman next to me clutched our armrest. She caught my eye, searching for reassurance. I returned her a half-hearted smile and stiffened for the landing.

One set of wheels slammed onto the runway, then the other. I gasped as we lurched sideways and the overhead lockers groaned. The engines roared into reverse and the air brakes on the wing bit into the thick air.

Above the dying screech of the engines, I heard the sudden but unmistakeable sound of someone clapping a few rows ahead of me. My neighbour glanced sideways at me and began clapping too. I felt compelled to join her. A moment later, the cabin erupted into brief applause: we passengers united in our appreciation for our pilots’ skill.

It was still raining as I clambered into a cab. En route to the city, transfixed by the rhythmic arc of the windscreen wipers, I thought about clapping. Why do we clap? Why is it so infectious? What if that passenger had decided not to applaud our pilot? Would our landing have been met only with grateful silence?

I decided clapping is a social contagion – the more a crowd begins to clap, the more pressure there is to join in.

I learned about clapping protocols from my grandmother. We had season tickets to the Concert Hall, stalls, row G. Seat 16 belonged to me, aged nine. Nan, in her fox stole and smelling of lavender talc, squeezed her bottom into seat 17. Even better than the plush crimson seats was the packet of Allen’s Fantales that appeared from the depth of Nan’s handbag. As she turned to discuss the programme with the cognoscente in seat 18, I hastily unwrapped three Fantales and crammed them into my mouth.

My euphoria at having achieved this feat undetected was shortlived. Two toffees were a manageable deceit, but three cemented my jaw shut. I could feel my molars straining at the root as I tried to force top and bottom teeth apart. After a minute of lockjaw and unable to contain the toffee dribble, I tapped Nan’s arm in panic. She turned, frowned at my bulging cheeks and my stained dress and passed me her hanky: “Clean yourself up!” The conductor will be out in a minute. You’ll need to clap hard.”

The maestro, in suit and tails, swept onto the stage with his halo of wild hair and took a deep bow. I clapped furiously, but wondered why, seeing he hadn’t performed yet.

I thought those concerts would never end. I got tired of examining the orchestra so I rubber-necked my fellow concert-goers instead, daring them to return my stare.

And then the conductor let his baton rest, and the music stopped. People rustled and coughed. I started to clap but Nan pinned my hands firmly to my lap. “Not now,” she whispered, “it’s the height of rudeness to clap between movements.” Not clapping mid-symphony became my mark of sophistication.

Nearly an hour later, when Mahler was spent and the maestro rejoined us mortals, I was allowed to clap. I made as big a racket as I could, desperate to release the tension from sitting still for so long. My ears rang and my palms stung but I kept clapping, because everyone else was. Who decided when the applause should stop?

Since then, I have discovered several ways to clap: flat-palmed, hands cupped, thumbs locked, two-fingered (for smart-alecs). My favourite is the fingers of my right hand smacking the palm of my left. If I reverse hands, I feel awkward. (A limp clap is as gauche as a flaccid handshake.)

Historians say clapping descended from the Roman legionnaires who banged spears against shields to applaud a commander. Roman audiences added clapping to their repertoire of finger and thumb clicking, toga flapping and handkerchief waving to express degrees of approval. A disappointed crowd would stay conspicuously silent.

Now, I fear clapping has become rote and ritualised, often an expectation rather than a reward. I blame television for manufacturing applause the way it added canned laughter. In the late 50s, the clap-o-meter purported to measure the popularity of quiz-show contestants. It was a sham, given the producers had already pre-selected the winner. Now, floor managers and warm-up guys whip audiences into raining applause onto even mediocre performers. (Everyone else gets a standing ovation.)

I once went to a performance at a school for the hearing impaired where we were taught how to flap our hands above their heads to signal our approval. Clapping soundlessly took a bit of getting used to. But I’ve never forgotten the rapt silence that accompanied a hundred pairs of hands waving their congratulations. The most deserved applause is not always the noisiest.

Greener Pastures

Greener Pastures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 17, 2015

I’ve never understood the relationship between man and lawn. On any summer’s morning, I can wake to find my live-in greenkeeper out the back, in the smallest of silky pyjama shorts, inspecting his Sir Walter buffalo. Hands on hips, he meanders back and forth tracing grid patterns in his turf, engrossed in the grass at his feet. The swell of his New Year’s tummy throws a soft round shadow on his beloved lawn.

I lean against the kitchen bench and admire his XL silhouette through the glass doors. Something catches his eye. He drops to one knee and prospects in the grass with a stick. I predict a lone dandelion weed, or some marauding clover or – quelle horreur! – a lumbering black beetle.

Watching him worship his lawn, I feel a surge of jealousy. Why is he yet to descend on bended knee before me, the saintly mother of his children? I brush aside my Virgin Queen fantasies as he rises and greets me with a winsome smile. He points triumphantly to the leafy weed he has snuffed from the grass. Such devotion to his turf!

Our lawn spreads from the back veranda like a viridescent carpet. It’s eye-calmingly green but has become inexplicably brindled with two brown patches along the south fence. By day’s end, I’ll find my man crouched beside one circle of yellowed thatch, hose in hand, lovingly coaxing four small green shoots to proliferate.

In summer, the soundtrack to my weekend becomes the absonant roar of his mower. My bloke emerges from the house in a Panama hat and shorts, printed with a vivid pattern of interlocking elephants. The garden shed is emptied of trimmer, edger, whipper snipper, blower and broom. He lines them up along the driveway and stands back to admire his arsenal of gardening tools. (In our house, a chore can be elevated to a hobby if it requires a trip to Bunnings and the purchase of a power tool.)

He flexes his biceps and leans down to grasp the pull cord. With a single powerful jerk, his periwinkle-blue Victa Vantage coughs, then screams to life.

“And that’s how it’s done!” he calls over his shoulder to seven-year-old son. Small boy bolts inside, hands clapped to his ears. As his father marches the mower across the lawn, small daughter pinches her nose, choked by the smell of petrol. I remind myself to appreciate the sight of man and machine in perfect congruence.

The lawns of my childhood were swathes of spongy buffalo needing constant nurturing. In the early mornings, our street thrummed with the tic-tic-tic of sprinklers, calling to each other like birds. I practiced my handstands and cartwheels on the front lawn only to be rewarded with a patchwork of grass cuts that stung like blazes.

In the summer holidays, it was my job to shepherd our Beagle on his morning constitutional. We’d sniff our way around the golf course. Even at 6.30am, I could smell the heat riding in on the easterly. Then the greenkeeper would climb aboard his ride-on mower and saturate the air with the humid sweetness of cut grass. I warily skirted the par four fairway, where the giant sprinklers spun around on their tripod legs, trying to blast me with machine-gun jets of water.

On drowsy February afternoons, our back lawn would be baked crisp. My job was to water the garden with the hose. Cranky and hot, I haphazardly squirted the grass, yanking on the hose and cursing the kinks. More often than not, I heard the sound of the kitchen window being wrenched open and Mum’s voice shouting: “And if you break that hose, young lady, you’ll be watering ‘til April!”

Thirty years later, I live with a man who has joined that great confraternity of lawn devotees. How green is it? How lush is it? How neat and clipped and weed-free is it? These are the questions that try men’s souls.

I asked the local lawn-mower man, Selwyn, about his philosophy of lawns.

“Mowing grass is therapeutic,” he explained. “It’s about power and control: crisp lines, clean edges. A perfect result in a crappy world.”

That made sense. At 78, my mum still cuts her own lawn with a hand mower.

“I do my best thinking when I’m mowing,” Mum says. “In any case, a lawn should reflect nicely on a house.”

Arriving home yesterday, I discovered my lawn-lover face down on the verge. He’d hacked up a square foot of grass and was elbow deep in dirt, swearing over a retic pipe I’d driven over. I sat beside him and gently suggested his lawn fetish was becoming obsessive.

“Honey,” I asked. “What’s that relationship in nature when one organism lives off another?

“You mean marriage?”

“No,” I bristled. “I meant symbiosis. But feel free to sleep out with your lawn tonight.”

Bite Your Tongue

Bite Your Tongue
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 6, 2014

It was the first roadhouse I’d seen in forty-five minutes and I needed coffee and petrol. In that order. I swung off the Brand highway and pulled up at the pump, feeling dwarfed by the half a dozen road trains stretched out across the carpark.

At the counter, I stood beside a truckie who made me feel petite.

“A coupla cheese sausages and a pie n’ sauce,” he said.

In the bain-marie, two shrivelled sausages with wrinkly red hides lay sweating behind the glass.

“How’d they get the cheese in?” I said, thinking out loud.

“Beats me,” said the truckie, “but they’re bloody good,” and he slapped a ten dollar note on the counter and gathered up his two paper bags.

While the waitress made my coffee, I tried guessing what was inside the crumbed and battered shapes glowing under the warmer. The square ones were likely hash browns, I decided. The yellow rings would be squid. Or maybe onion? I could tell the crabsticks by their customary pink stripe .

My late step-father, Stan, refused to call them crabsticks. “They don’t put an ounce of crab in them!” he’d snort. He called them Sea Legs instead. (Stan was convinced “they” were also responsible for eighteen minutes of missing Watergate tape, the disappearance of Harold Holt and the refusal of a brand new Victa lawn mower to start on the first pull.)

Growing up in the 70s, the arrival of convenience food gave the Watsonia polony knob cult status in our kitchen. “At last!” my Nan’d say admiringly, as she sawed through the rubbery tube with a bread knife. “Someone’s making life easier.”

The polony knob was always served cold from the fridge, sliced into thick discs and sandwiched between buttered slices of cob loaf. Nan called it luncheon meat, and marvelled at its durability. Polony knobs lasted for a fortnight. They never dried out and retained their lovely rosy shade until the very last slice (which was puckered, obscenely, where the metal catch pinched closed the tube.)

For a while there, ‘polony pink’ was my favourite colour. But Nan said polony was actually ‘Baker-Miller pink.’ “That’s the colour they’re painting asylums these days,” she explained, pointing to the little pile of polony slices on my open sandwich. “I read in the Reader’s Digest that a psychologist called Mr Baker, and his colleague Mr Miller, discovered a shade of pink that keeps patients calm and compliant.”

As a child with excitable tendencies, I always calmed down after lunch, which, according to Nan, only enhanced polony’s reputation as a superfood. I was never convinced the Watsonia polony knob tasted like meat, but it didn’t taste like broccoli either, which was all that mattered.

Usually a Nan’s polony sandwich came with a side serving of Kraft processed cheese. We called it ‘plastic cheese’ as a compliment. It, too, appeared indestructible. Plastic cheese came cocooned in Alfoil inside a small silver and blue cardboard box. I recycled those cheese boxes as coffins for pet snails who inexplicably expired on their diet of grass clippings and polony crumbs.

No matter how high Nan cranked the griller, plastic cheese never melted like normal cheese. It sat on my toast like a doormat. Even if the bread was cremated, plastic cheese would only ever develop a black blister. Poked with a knife, the blister would shatter into a fine layer of ash.

By the time I was a teenager, Mum had discovered French Onion dip. She made it from scratch by tipping two sachets of Continental French Onion Soup Mix into half a litre of sour cream. Even now, I can’t understand how a dish so high in calories didn’t make me a fattie. Perhaps because it was too repulsive to eat. French Onion dip couldn’t be saved even by Ritz crackers.

Mum’s coleslaw however, was a triumph of convenience cuisine. It contained the usual shredded cabbage and carrot, but she added a tin of Golden Circle crushed pineapple and a handful of sultanas to give it a tropical edge. Then she took the edge off with a whole jar of Miracle Whip mayonnaise. It was the perfect accompaniment to a mob of lamb chops with fatty tails and a scoop of Deb instant mashed potato.

Back at the roadhouse, I paid for my coffee and contemplated a chocolate bar, casting my eye over the sea of shiny wrappers. Some were new to me with names I didn’t recognise – Crispello, Pods, Bubbly. “Whatever happened to the Polly Waffle?” I said to the young waitress.

“The what?” she said, giving me a guarded look.

“The Polly Waffle!” I repeated. “You know – that chocolate log-thing with the tube of white marshmallow inside!”

“Never heard of it,” she said. “But it sounds gross.”