Growing Pains

Growing Pains
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 22, 2015

I have an acute case of cabin fever. For the past week I have presided over the house of gastro. The virus that took down 5-year-old daughter has now claimed its next victims: her father and brother. It’s Saturday morning and I am shackled to my mop and bucket after another sleepless night.

Teenage son and I are the only members of the family still in rude health. But wog and weather conspire to keep us in solitary confinement. Leaden skies dump a succession of showers. My 15-year-old is stultified. He languishes on the lounge as time slows to a dawdle on his normally adventuresome Saturday.

I glance at my sturdy lad. His six-foot frame engulfs the lounge. He flaps his two clown feet to eject his size 11 shoes. When did he slyly colonize this man-sized body? What happened to the rose-lipped baby who rode around on my hip? The toddler who loved lift-buttons and train rides and eating frozen peas one at a time from a cup? Where did he go – the small boy in a Batman suit who squealed with excitement when a bobcat arrived next door.

How much time did I waste fretting about bottles and dummies and why he didn’t like fruit? Why he still preferred crawling to walking at 15-months? Was there something wrong with his chubby little legs? Last weekend I watched him skateboarding at the park. He walks just fine. He outruns me.

I try to recall him at six; how he looked as he slept, the wobbly teeth and skinned knees, the night he choked on a squid ring. I revisit the everyday anxieties and triumphs of raising a child. If it weren’t for photos, I might not remember the smallness of him at all.

I squandered so much time second-guessing myself. How did I measure up to other mothers? On school mornings, I admired the stylish mums who swept serenely into class, depositing docile children in ironed shirts at their desks.

I tried to be efficient, but mornings were shambolic. Work calls interrupted breakfast. Library books went incognito. I could hear the distant siren of the school bell as we bolted out the door. There was bad language – mine, not his. Will he remember my tantrums over missing sneakers and scrappy homework?

I hope he blanks out the time I dropped him at a party an hour after the guests had gone home. I’d rather he remembers his night-time pyjama walks that cured his fear of the dark. Or the day we painstakingly sieved the sandpit for his missing first tooth. (When he swallowed the second one, we fooled the tooth fairy with a Tic Tac.)

Firstborns are an experiment. They’re good for shattering sleep, egos and expectations of perfection. They cop the best and worst of their mothers. I should’ve worried less and enjoyed more. I should have opened more cans of baked beans and done less vacuuming and spent more time inventing obstacle courses at the park. I didn’t live enough in the moment. I was always rushing to get onto the next job: his dinner, his bath, book, bed.

And here he sprawls on the sofa with his headphones clamped to his ears, tapping those giant feet to some rap song I can faintly hear but fortunately don’t understand.

He is finished with Star Wars and sandpits. The sound of a bobcat no longer turns his head. He knows how to tie his own shoelaces and make custard and ride the motorbike at the farm. He no longer needs my homilies about manners and why bullies are cowards. Instead, he wants bus money and long hair and privacy. He keeps his door shut more than I’d like. My baby has gone. I say this not with sadness but with disbelief.

I want to go back. Rewind the years and build more Lego. Play longer at bath time. Dig more holes at the beach. Fuss less about bedtime.

The washing machine interrupts my thoughts. It shudders to a stop, then beeps for my attention. I wander into the laundry and survey the output from dawn’s washing frenzy. I drag wet sheets to the clothes horse and begin another load.

As I pass the stairs, I see my teenager has flung his sweaty soccer socks over the balustrading. His wet towel is dumped on the carpet. I feel a surge of annoyance and trot round the sofa to chip him about laziness. He catches my eye, puts a finger to his lips and I see that his small sister has fallen asleep in the crook of his arm. And in that moment, I make peace with my mothering self. This weekend, in the house of sickness, there’ll be no attempts at perfection. I’ll be playing Monopoly instead.

Mother Love

Mother Love
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 13, 2015

I joined the tail of the takeaway coffee queue as two women settled themselves at an empty table beside me. The older woman signalled the waitress by gesticulating above her head. The younger one looked away, abashed.

The older woman ordered a latte.

“Can we keep that door open?” she asked the waitress politely, pointing at the cafe’s front door.

“It’s a bit stuffy.”

Her companion appeared mortified. “Mum!” she whispered urgently. “It’s fine.”

The waitress obligingly edged the door ajar. The mother smiled her thanks and leaned across the table, eager to chat. She looked sweet, sensible, middle-aged.

I guessed the daughter was about 15, fully grown but still gauche. She was clearly miffed at having a mother make preposterous demands of a waitress.

My mum and I once inhabited the same parallel universe. Aged 16, I feared a shopping expedition was doomed if Mum suggested she join me. What if she wore her enormous paisley scarf? What if someone overheard her making a fuss in the change rooms? Would she reflect badly on me? I was such a teenaged twerp.

But if I rewind my memory further to when I was small, I can remember my desperation to be near her. The smell of her was a heady melange of Oil of Olay, Velvet soap and talcum powder. I can recall the shape of her beautiful hands, the slender fingers, their perfect oval nails. I loved her smooth muscled calves; can still hear the buzz of her Remington Princess electric shaver as she sanded her legs before tennis. I’m still able to summons the scent of her Coty lipstick; how she’d kiss my forehead as I sat in her lap, my head tucked under her chin, breathing in the warmth of her neck. Nothing ever went wrong in my life when she was around.

Until I was eight. I’d started a new school. Mum had a new job and a new habit of arriving late to collect me.

“Mr Elsner needed me to type a letter,” she’d say.

Or: “I had to take dictation.”

I didn’t care about the demands on a working single mother, because I was the last child left clinging to the monkey bars in the deserted playground. All my friends were home drinking Ovaltine and snarfing Gingernuts. My mother was likely dead. She’d been hit by a truck. Or shot by a bank robber. By the time her battleship-grey Sigma rounded the corner, I was already in an orphanage and inconsolable. The world was a fearful place without her.

Age 11, she whacked me across the ear. I’d been whining and thrashing about while she tried to brush my knotted hair. I deserved that slap. But I pretended to be deaf for two days.

“Pardon?” I strained, cupping my good ear so she’d have to repeat her question. On day three she apologised, but I was tired of being deaf by then. It was a hollow victory.

Aged 26 and living in Sydney, I couldn’t wait for her visits. We’d drink G & T’s on my cramped balcony and plan weekend adventures in the Blue Mountains. She was as much fun as any of my girlfriends. They came to her for advice about terrible bosses and wayward boyfriends. She could empathise with any problem.

She walked me down the aisle the day I was married. She was as excited as I was, until she saw the crowd and had to pause to overcome her nerves. When I was pregnant, she’d feel her way around my belly while explaining to her unborn grandchild the importance of following the Eagles.

As I grappled with the stricken nights and foggy days of multiple motherhood, she’d arrive with a cottage pie and a tray of baked apples. Then she’d gather up baby, toddler and nine-year-old and herd them to the park to play Frisbee.

My children call her Noo-Noo. Always have. None of us can remember why. This year, Noo-Noo’s 79th, she and I are spending a lot of time in doctors’ waiting rooms. I now hold her arthritic hand the way she held my grandmother’s. I see her skin has become crepe-paper thin, the knuckles swollen, the fingers painfully bent.

We laugh at what’s become of her beautiful hands, what the years will do to mine. She tells me she found her missing keys in the fridge. Ten minutes later she tells me again. I smile and nod but I fear for the prospect that mother and daughter are reversing roles.

The doctor writes her another script to add to her collection. We go for coffee before I drop her home. She talks about the opera season in New York, how much she’d love to go. “Maybe I should stay closer to home,” she says. I think I hear a tinge of unease. But she’s already up and gleefully inspecting the cake cabinet.

Going Up

Going Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 9, 2015

The traffic lights at Labouchere Road flipped to orange and I slammed on the anchors. The car in front sped across the intersection. In the distance I could see cars choking the freeway on-ramp.

“This could take a while,” I said to my three noise-makers in the back, but they were busy singing out of tune to the radio.

Up ahead, I spotted the block of flats I lived in as a four-year-old. I flipped up my sunvisor and counted up four floors to single out the two bedroom apartment Mum rented us after her divorce.

Time had forgotten the five-storey brick box at No. 89 Mill Point Road. All around it, towers of penthouse apartments were drinking in river views. Our 1960s apartment block squatted on the corner, a dumpy brown eyesore.

I studied our fourth floor balcony – a square envelope of concrete jutting out from an expanse of peanut-coloured wall. I could still make out the mulberry-coloured arches painted on the walls at ground level, a clumsy trompe l’oeil stained by the sprinklers with bore water. The umbrella tree in the carpark had grown ten-fold, its flower spikes still catalogued in my mind as giant pink starfish.

Staring at that old building, I was swept away by a flush of early memories. My brain delivered up a snapshot of our flat’s doorbell. It sat just shy of a four-year-old’s straining fingertips, a tantalising square of shiny silver mounted to a green door. I could replay the strangled ‘ding-dong’ of its tuneless chime. I mentally re-traced the swirls in the green carpet on our landing. My mind summonsed the enormous fire hydrant bracketed to the wall beside the lift.

The lift!

I suddenly remembered the lift; could feel again my excitement at being allowed to press the button to summons a ride. The lift announced its arrival with a ‘ping!’ The metal door jolted sideways, vanishing into the wall to reveal a tiny Aladdin’s cave.

Our elevator liked to land where it pleased, forcing me to hop up or jump down to board. I could still recall the tummy butterflies as I contemplated stepping over the two-inch gap between lift and landing. One stumble and I thought I’d fall through the crack and plummet to the lobby. Small girl would be squashed flat by a 2000-pound box. (My brain, enjoying this game, served up a grotesque tableau vivant of the rat Mum once steamrolled with our car.)

Our lift was designed to carry eight people but could only comfortably transport one. It became cramped and awkward with two passengers; incommodious with three. Adult options were limited: stand side by side, shoulders rubbing, or one behind the other, heel to toe. I jammed myself next to the control panel, securing the coveted job of button-pusher.

I tried to identify the smells of the various residents spoiling my ride. Perfumes were stiflingly pungent or sickeningly sweet. Other peoples’ clothing smelt fusty or dank, or reeked of sweat or B.O. Sometimes, Mum got out one floor early and took the stairs.

Later, having conquered my lift-paranoia, I appointed myself elevator-astronaut. Over and over I drove that lift-rocket, cruising down to the lobby then blasting off for Flat 12 on the fourth floor. It mattered not that it was quicker to walk up the stairwell, because I was the pilot in charge of five buttons. (Truthfully, it was only four, because the fifth button was still out of reach.)

Back on Labouchere Road, the traffic lights turned green and my consciousness rejoined the present. As we inched towards the freeway, I wondered if other peoples’ first memories are as equally pedestrian as mine?

The following day, I prodded a girlfriend to tell me her first memory. In vivid detail, she described for me a vignette from her childhood growing up in the Wheatbelt. She remembered being clad in a nappy playing with a toy washing machine on the lid of their septic tank. Her overwhelming feeling, she said, was of the warm sun radiating off the tank, and being absorbed in her domestic idyll, washing her doll’s clothes.

The pair of us were certain our first memories were real, not imagined or distorted by time.

So the next morning, I drove back to my old block of flats in South Perth. A friendly painter allowed me into the building. Climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, I discovered Apartment 12 still had its square doorbell. Bolted to the wall was the very same fire hydrant, (though smaller than I remembered) and the still swirling green carpet.

But unlike me, my beloved lift-rocket had not grown up or moved out. It still had its metal door and faux-timber panelling. Aged 47, I rode that lift up and down – twice – just for kicks, and revisited the favourite scenes from my life, aged four. My job now is not to forget them.

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.”

Only the Lonely

Only the Lonely
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 21, 2013

“So, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” asks the school mum I’m standing with.

We’d been chatting, this new friend and I, waiting for our six-year-olds to come barrelling out of class. I feel a thud of embarrassment at her question, but I force a smile and reply: “I’m an only child.”  

I say those four words with a shrug so they’ll appear weightless, but they drop between us like stones. I see on her face that peculiar mix of curiosity and suspicion. She can’t hide the look I know so well.

“Wow!” she says, “I wouldn’t have picked you for one of those,” and our conversation skids in a direction that makes me feel exposed.

“What was it like growing up?” she asks.

“Oh fine!” I reply, “You don’t know what you’re missing if you never had it.”

She looks at me expectantly, waiting for more, but I’m saved by the bell as kids come swarming through doorways.

On the walk home through the park with my son, I feel a familiar pang of alienation, an uneasiness at having been outed. Even as an adult, a single childhood still feels like something to hide.

My mum wanted lots of babies, but she and my dad divorced when I was three. No matter – I had a long-suffering Siamese kitten who filled the role of baby sister. I’d squeeze her into dolls’ dresses and wheel her up the street imprisoned in my toy pram.

As a kid, I’m not sure I even knew what ‘lonely’ felt like. I was just alone, and I was very good at it. Inventing ways to compete against myself turned into elaborate tests of endurance. (I was a fierce opponent). My nanna gave me a plastic kitchen timer which I put to work, furiously pedalling my blue bike around the block, trying to beat yesterday’s record.  

Obstacle courses were my specialty. I mapped them out with an eight-year-old’s precision:  start at the thunderbox, swing once around the Hills Hoist, sprint to the back fence, twice down the slide and leap onto the veranda to finish. 53 seconds – not quick enough. (Losers got eaten by the crocodiles who lived in the cracks in the pavement.)

 We had little spare money for toys, so I grew expert at collecting odd things. I sorted buttons by colour into glass jars and curated coin exhibitions on bedspreads. I invited beetles into plastic containers fitted with five-star cotton-wool day beds and leafy gazebos .

Sleeping over at my cousins’ house, the noise of their big family was overwhelming.  Tormented by her big brother, my girl cousin would unleash her ear-piercing shriek:

“Mum! Christopher yanked my hair!”  

“I did not, you dobber!” he’d bellow in protest.

I’d be scared witless but secretly thrilled as he chased us down the hallway. My role was reluctant witness for when brother whacked sister, or sister pinched brother. My Aunty would storm out of the kitchen with flour on her hands and shout at us over the ruckus: “ENOUGH! All of you – outside and sort it out!

I was worn out from the rioting but even so, I hated being detached from the herd. In the quiet at home, I’d head for my room and dive back into The Famous Five. Books transported me into other teeming families where I could observe the action without feeling compelled to join it.

But my favourite story was about an only child who lived in a third storey apartment in New York, just as Mum and I had lived in a third-floor flat in South Perth. The girl in the book had strung a makeshift sign out of the window, hoping the people walking below would look up. “Hello!” the sign said. “Wave to me if you see this.” When we moved into a duplex, I scolded myself for not playing that game when I’d had the chance. In my teens, it dawned on me the story’s theme was isolation.

In high school, I worried that a kid with no siblings would be branded a misfit. But I wasn’t. Friendships came easily and I cherished girlfriends like sisters. (I still do). But I envied their take-for-granted solidarity with siblings. They always had someone to watch their back or take their side.

I carried into adulthood those traits often ascribed to only children:  over-achieving, over-sensitive, over-indulged, self-centred. I’ve tried to rub out those tics, tried not to conform to stereotype, lest someone point a finger and say: “See!”

Now, when I meet another only child, we make an instant connection. Feeling safe, I’ll plough straight in and ask: Did you feel lonely growing up?” Almost always the answer is “No,” followed by a pause: “But now that I think about it, maybe I was.”

And then I go home to my own brood of three, cavorting and messing up the loungeroom and yelling: “Mum! Come into our cubby!”

I put my childhood aside and concentrate on theirs.

Hello Stranger

Hello Stranger
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 18, 2013

Moving neighbourhoods is a test of my social skills. I knew the shift would be a wrench: How could we replace our favourite family across the road? Three brothers under nine who shimmy like monkeys up their wrought iron fence and hang on the crossbars yelling: “Hello! Hello! Can you come and play?”  

Our three would send back an equally ear-splitting chorus of greetings (whilst taking turns to ride the gate off its hinges). We two mothers would leave surprises at each other’s doors – a bunch of parsley, or my latest attempt at low-fat brownies. (why bother, we decided). On chaotic mornings, I could signal a mayday from the porch and she would walk my boys to school.

Two doors up, the mum of another trio of boys would share with me her recipe for lemon cupcakes and raising 12-year-olds. Her bags of hand-me downs outfitted my eldest son for years.

Further along was the Italian nonna who gushed over my babies and leant on her rake explaining to me the old ways of bottling home-made tomato sauce and how to stop basil going to seed. On weekends, the kids would flash past her on their bikes bellowing: ‘Ciao Ciao Pina!’ Or they’d call up to her as she dusted the Doric columns of her Juliette balcony: “Can we practice our scooter tricks on your driveway?” (She has a spotless expanse of concrete.)

I don’t like putting barriers around my family. They should feel safe by instinct. I want my children to have the same freedoms I had growing up in the 70’s, when we knew almost everyone in the street by name and the neighbourhood kids roamed as a motley tribe. I don’t want my children being fearful of strangers. I like it when people stop at our fence to ask my 5 year-old: “Was that your big boy’s bed arriving this morning? How’d they get it through your door?”   

We have been in our new house for four months now, and our old suburb is becoming a faded postcard. Now I need to memorise another footpath for potholes and jutting pavers that could tip up a scooter or skin the knees of a budding skateboarder.

Diagonally opposite our century-old cottage, there’s another wrought iron fence and three little faces curious to see who has moved in. I feel the throb of awkwardness and insecurity as I make the first tentative offers of friendship. But the kids hit it off and we are away! – Within a fortnight small children are madly swapping houses – and we two mums discover we have a girlfriend in common.  

I’m heartened by the elderly couple who cross the road to say to tell me: “You’ll love it here.” The neighbours on the west side say: “It’s so good to hear children in the backyard again.”

Uprooting forces me to be resilient. The kids dream up the idea of walks after tea in their pyjamas. I make a point of smiling and talking to everyone we meet. I would never have had such confidence before motherhood. But a gregarious small daughter and two excitable boys make conversation-starters easy: “Why are you wearing that funny hat?” asks my small daughter of an elderly lady sweeping her path. The lovely old dear replies: You know what? It hides my funny hair.”  

After a weekend of work at the family farm, we bring home a load of fallen apples and juicy Meyer lemons. The kids want to make the “deliveries” they enjoyed in the previous suburb. They laboriously count out a dozen Fuji’s, still with leaves attached, and add a couple of lemons to each bag. Five-year-old son proudly draws a tree dotted with red splodges and writes: “Wood you lik some fresh appels from our farm? XX from us”

We leave our surprise bags at front doors. without being spotted. Within the week we have several handwritten thank-you’s in the letter box. The kids are delighted.

There are shopkeepers to befriend too. We five become Dave the Icecream Man’s best customers. While the small ones deliberate over cups or cones, Dave and I discover we once lived in the same street.

I feel at home. The kids are settled, the neighbourhood is becoming familiar – apart from one decrepit old fella who makes two round trips past our house each day. Is he shuffling to the shops? He always returns empty-handed. No hello, just a grunt. And then one lunchtime, he takes a tumble at our gate. Blood is dripping from his papery hand. We bundle him home to number 39 in the car. Without a word, he lurches inside, leaving his startled wife to make apologies.

The next morning he stops at our gate as I’m unloading the car. He extends a bandaged right hand: “I’m Milton” he says gruffly. “Had one too many at the bowling club yesterday.”

The kids now yell out “Hi Milton!” If he hears them, he raises his hand but his eyes remain firmly on the pavement. Neighbourhoods embrace all types.

Doctor’s Orders

Doctor’s Orders
Ros Thomas
The West Weekend Magazine
Published January 19, 2013

What is it about growing up in Perth that sticks to me like beach sand whipped up by the Freo doctor? Remembering mums and dads struggling to wrap wet kids in flapping towels. Brothers and sisters duck-diving under waves trying to stall their departure until someone shouts over the howling wind: “Icecreams for kids who help carry!” Everyone searching for their thongs.

Try explaining to someone who’s not a native: “Hey! I think the doctor’s in” – that bastard-saint of bluster and balm so familiar to Perth beach-goers. The sea breeze that’s welcome relief from yet another stinking hot day, but the killjoy that makes the beach so unpleasant everyone packs up and heads back to the baking car. As a kid, the bitumen was always so hot you had to stand on your towel until there was a break in the traffic. Back then, as we drove away from the sinking sun with all the windows open, I would take one last look back at the ocean, sun-dappled but choppy now. One last laugh at the seagulls being buffeted sideways as they swooped down to the fish and chip wrappers on the grass.

Thirty years later, these are the memories that hallmark an Australian childhood. We must tell our children how we tortured the Hills Hoist in the backyard, how it made terrible creaks and groans that brought Mum outside to tell us off. We, too, now have the buffalo lawn, and another generation of kids knows the sting of grass cuts from rolling around on it. Someone still gets sent inside to fetch the calamine lotion. And little ones still go to bed in shortie pyjamas with the fan on full bore, legs covered in pink calamine dots.

I want my children to know by instinct all these ways of being Australian. I want to hear them squealing  as they jump on the trampoline while Papa squirts them with the hose. I want them to know that the best thirst quencher is a slab of cold watermelon; that the hot plate needs a slosh of beer before you cook a dozen snags. I think back to all those backyard barbies where Uncle Hughie would send me inside for the tomato sauce (“Get the dead horse for me will ya Rosi-gal!”) I would sit by his elbow and marvel as he drowned his steak in it.

Killing flies was small-game hunting when Mum handed us the red plastic swatters she kept on top of the fridge. (Fly spray was expensive and only for special occasions.) Anyone who didn’t shut the flyscreen door got a peeved: “Were you born in a tent?!”

I’d spend Sunday afternoons on the swings at the park with a girlfriend from six houses up. Sometimes we’d vanish to the corner deli to play Pinball while we waited for Countdown to start. We’d blow our pocket money in an hour, but a dollar lasted for ages and Smarties were three for a cent.

I try to give my 12 year old son the same long leash –  let him skateboard round the streets and vanish ‘up the shops’ with a mate. I hope he’s sensible enough not to take for granted the freedoms  I give him, because I feel uneasy every time I let him out the door. At the same age, I was horsing around at the local pool for hours, only coming home when I was hungry.

I spent most Saturday afternoons unsupervised at the tennis club, racing my blue bike up and down the driveway, or hitting balls up against the clubhouse wall. The members’ last sets always seemed the longest – waiting around for the grown-ups to finish play because then we were allowed a packet of chips and a bottle of red creaming soda. With a paper straw. We didn’t get in the way of the adults socialising: we were part of a family, not the centre of attention.

All those sunburns, and heat rashes, and chafing from too much sand in our bathers – the small but vivid discomforts of an Australian summer.  How many times did I slather myself in baby oil and lie out in the backyard to summons the New Year’s tan? That night, I’d be soaking in a bath loaded with bicarb soda to take the sting out of red shoulders. My childrens’ peachy skins will be saved by sunscreen and long sleeved rashies. And the comfort of air-conditioning.

I have promised my children we will go to the beach every single day of these holidays. Their father thinks that’s way too much effort. But I have chosen to ignore the sand-pit in the car and the endless wet towels. Rather, the kids and I are now craving our daily dose of sea and salt. With each swim, a new generation of Aussies is laying down a patina of beachside memories. I hope these memories will be easily retrieved when in years to come, someone asks them: “So what was it like growing up in Perth?” Or better still: “Who’s this Freo Doctor?”