For Old Time’s Sake

For Old Time’s Sake
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 19, 2014

He’s wearing a pale grey tracksuit with darker cable-knit panels decorating his shoulders like epaulettes. An emergency buzzer is looped around his neck. Dangling off the silver chain is a plastic likeness of Walt Disney’s Goofy, painted orange. His name is Jim. He’s 85.

We’re settled into a small lounge curtained off from the dining hall of an aged care home. A bookshelf is lined with a well-thumbed collection of Robert Ludlums and Frederick Forsyths. Someone has lit the fire in the brick fireplace.

Jim’s wheelchair is one of several parked together to gather a small knot of elderly male residents. I’m the only visitor amongst this clique of men. “One of the ways to rejuvenate is to tell your stories,” the invitation said. “Women stay connected as they age, but men can forget how to talk.”

These old blokes, marshalled by a devoted handful of volunteers – all male – meet once a fortnight, encouraged to reminisce about the past and find comfort in the present.

Jim is keen to introduce himself. He fiddles with his hearing aid and grins at me: “Two years ago, I had a stroke on Monday, a stroke on Wednesday and lost the use of my legs on Friday. I’d never been in the sick-house all my life, and here I was being told I’d be living in one.”

I lean towards him to better decipher his Glaswegian accent. He adjusts his lower dentures, which have slipped from their mooring. He tells me his wife, Millie, of 65 years standing, lives in another apartment a few minutes walk down the winding driveway of this village.

“There are no shared rooms here,” he says. “My Millie has dinner with me every evening. Afterwards, I wave her good night through the window.” He raises his arm and mimics a cheeky wave for me. “When I’m separated from her I worry myself sick. Millie’s part of me and I’ve become part of her.”

He turns his head to survey the other gents, who are deep in conversation around us. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Now it’s loneliness who comes at night, instead of sleep, to sit beside my bed.” His eyes are growing watery. I look away so he can compose himself. I feel like an imposter, parading my sturdy health.

Bill is 89 and dressed in his tennis gear. He wears a white Nike cap pulled low over his forehead. He’s painfully thin, though I can still make out the ropey muscularity of his arms. He tells me he gave up the game at 87 after forty years of being a coach. “Arthritis,” he tells me. “Stole my grip. I’ve been on my own for fifteen years. My wife died from an aneurism. She was only 63.” He pauses, then brightens and begins regaling me with a colourful tale about how he lost his middle finger in 1937.

“I was 22. Strapping lad I was. My brother and I were cutting trees when a hollow log threw my hand against the saw. ’Look, Tommy!’ I said, and I showed him my finger swinging loose. Nothing to do but cut it free. One snip and it fell into the grass!”

He chuckles at the memory. I laugh too, trying not to sound too gleeful at this gruesome tale. Bill examines the lonely knuckle between his remaining fingers. I notice the road map of purple veins at his temple, his skin papery and translucent.  

I can’t help but admire these long lives. But fertile minds are now imprisoned in decrepit bodies. In their stories I hear old men nostalgic for their working years, a lament for what they can no longer be: farmer, plumber, soldier, truck driver.

“If only my mates in Glasgow could see me now, dressed in a pair of big knickers!” Jim says, and slaps his thigh. “I grew up in Kinning Park without a dunny, a fridge, or a bath. Lucky I forked out tuppence for a public bath the day I met my Millie! It was New Year’s Eve, 1950.” He grins. “We got married seven weeks later and I shipped us to Australia. We been living in Utopia ever since.”

At his right, 94-year-old George nods his agreement. “I made tyres on an assembly line. My boss says to me: ‘Had a barbecue yet mate?’ Course I hadn’t, so he sent out for some chops and snags. He cleared a bit of ground, collected some sticks and cooked my first barbecue on a shovel!”

I place my teacup back on the tray, quietly push back my chair and smile my goodbyes. The conversation turns towards musical theatre. As I slip behind the curtain, I hear the unmistakeable sound of yodelling. Quavery but with a tuneful falsetto, the yodel peters out to a faint chorus of applause. Another talent re-discovered!

Contact Peter Fry, Circle of Men – volunteer coordinator – pjfry@iinet.net.au

It’s all fair game

It’s all fair game
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 12, 2014

In our house, I’m in charge of adventures. The man of the house is in charge of predictability. On Saturday mornings, he sprawls on the sofa with his newspapers (and a crimson knee rug). He’ll stay clamped to the lounge like a limpet until I bundle the kids out of the house, leaving him child-free to confront the weekend’s maintenance project. By the time we return, I hope he’s changed three light bulbs and dug up a deep-rooted collection of sticks once known as the camellia bush.

“Kids who get in the car right now get chocolate Clinkers for the drive!” (Sometimes, bribery replaces reasoning in our house – especially when the Morley toy and hobby fair opens in twenty minutes).

In a micro-second, my two smallest children are scrabbling for their shoes. As brother and sister bolt out the door, I count out the Clinker rations.

Chocolate clinkers, with their pastel honeycomb-insides, have held currency in our family since I was a kid. The pink ones are as rare as Rose Porteous at a Red Dot shop. Most Clinkers are disappointingly green and yellow. If you you bite into a Clinker and it’s pink, you automatically qualify for an extra one. Kids with clinkers can stay amused for ten minutes.

My husband says the Clinker game rewards gluttony and encourages one-upmanship. I remind him Morley is a 20-minute drive. Half way there, with the back seat rations exhausted and not a single pink clinker amongst us, I promise to share out my last two lollies. “Yellow!” announces my boy, inspecting the pastel interior with disgust. “Green!” yells his sister, brandishing her half-eaten stump. I turn into the carpark at the Morley Recreation Centre.

Our clinker defeat is forgotten because the Toy and Hobby Fair is a panorama of toys resurrected from my childhood. Footy-mad son peels away to a table where kids in rival guernseys are rifling through boxes of team posters.

“The Six Million Dollar Man!” I whoop, picking up a creaky board-book with Steve Austin on the cover. “He was my favourite.” I show the pictures to small daughter. I explain that at age 8, I had a crush on Steve Austin: “I’d snuggle into my beanbag and watch him on the telly. He ran so fast in his red tracksuit they had to show him in slow-motion. He was even more handsome in slow motion. He had bionic legs, a bionic eye, and a bionic arm with the power of a bulldozer. AND a built–in Geiger counter.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “And then The Bionic Woman came along and ruined everything. She wasn’t good enough for him! Her bionic legs could only leap two storeys, but he could jump three.” I look up from the book to discover my daughter had slipped away to inspect a carton of Barbies.

My heart gives a little flutter as I spot my beloved game Mastermind on the next table. I recognise the boxer cover instantly – the mysterious gentleman with the air of a James Bond villain, seated at a gaming table. Over his shoulder stood his po-faced mistress, in a sleeveless white dress.

Growing up in the 70s, I’d pit my eight-year-old intellect against Uncle Andy’s code-making skills. Mastermind’s faux-wood pegboard made me feel sophisticated. I never wanted our games to end.

“How much for the Mastermind?” I ask the 30-year-old child behind the trestle table. “Ten bucks. It’s a first edition, you know.” I didn’t, but I bought his Mastermind anyway.

Both my children were now magnetised to a metal box brimming with footy cards. I shuffle along to the next stall. There, leaning against the wall, is Wonder Woman. She still has her big hair and bullet-deflecting bracelets. Her golden lasso is tucked into the golden belt encircling a wisp of a waist. Her suctioned-on starry bloomers are still so tight they make me wince (but how I envy the 5cm gap between her thighs).

I toy with the idea of buying that life-size laminated poster for $69 but I don’t want to risk my husband preferring the competition. I buy her red utility earrings instead, because they’re only $2 and they let me breathe in outer space.

It’s time to go. Seven-year-old son is euphoric, clutching a paper bag stuffed with cast-off footy cards. His sister has an armful of decrepit Barbies.

After lunch, the kids play round after round of Mastermind as the rain dribbles down. Eldest son pits his 13-year-old intellect against my MENSA code-making skills. Then we play in teams. My reluctant gardener, weary from transplanting the camellia, sinks into the sofa to read his Economist, undisturbed. There’s only one squabble the entire afternoon. (Why can’t he ever get up to answer the phone?)

I notice on the box that Mastermind was Toy Of The Year in 1973. It was again in July, 2014.  

Stranger Danger

Stranger Danger
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 5, 2014

I hadn’t found myself a target of public aggression since pub crawl days. I certainly wasn’t expecting a verbal stoush in the childrenswear department of Target. A week later, I’m still feeling rattled. (Why do I take things to heart?)

It was mid-afternoon and the shop floor was quiet. I was rifling through the flannelette pyjamas, searching for pink or purple ones for my 4-year-old. (She’ll only wear a two-tone palette).

Somewhere nearby, a toddler was coughing uncontrollably – a raspy bark that set my teeth on edge. In between hacks, I could hear his attempts to suck in a lungful of air, only to choke on another volley of coughs.

The sound of that child’s spluttering wormed its way into my head until it was all I could hear. Around me, shoppers stopped talking. Two women in Boyswear craned their necks trying to get a fix on the sick youngster. I could spot neither child nor carer. I could only picture a distraught toddler in a pram, his anxious mum trying to soothe him.

I rounded a rack of cardigans in Girlswear 1-7yrs. A small man with a chirpy daughter in his arms was sifting through a pile of jumpers. He acknowledged me with a smile then mimed his bottom lip thrust forward. “Poor bubba” he said, and we both nodded.

“Where’s it coming from?” I asked.

“Over there somewhere,” and he motioned towards an aisle stacked with nappies and baby food.

As we turned to look, a woman in her 60’s with a stylish silver bob rounded the corner of the aisle. She was pushing an upmarket stroller containing the distressed toddler, a blonde poppet about two.

“Poor thing, is she okay?” I said to the grandmother.

“Oh, she’s fine!”

“Sounds like croup, doesn’t it? My son used to get it as a toddler – it was awful.”

“It’s actually none of your business what she’s got! For your information, it’s just a cold. She got it from day care, all right?”

Uncertain how to react, I offered her a weak smile. At that, she gave me both barrels: “You think you’re a bloody doctor do you? Do you?”

“Um, no. I just remember that barking sound they make when they get croup.”

“Well, who the hell do you think you are? Mind your own business!”

And with that parting shot, she marched away with the still-wheezing toddler. My heart was thumping. I turned around to see the friendly dad, rigid with surprise. He shrugged and said quietly: “She sounds pretty sick to me!”

I made a beeline for the checkout, still trembly from the altercation. I handed over a pair of pj’s and was reaching for my wallet when the grandmother with the toddler arrived at the checkout next to mine.

“I’m so sick of you paranoid mothers!” she snapped at me.

I froze in fright. Shoppers swivelled in our direction. She repeated: “There’s nothing wrong with her. Got it?”

Two rows of checkout operators and their customers were agog. I tried to shrink and pretend she wasn’t addressing me. I hurriedly tapped in my pin, stuffed the pyjamas into my bag and sped outside, keen to escape my bemused audience. I scrabbled for my phone and rang a girlfriend: “I’ve just been shop-raged! Some woman just had a real go at me! I’m still shaking!”

“Oooh that happened to me once!” she replied. “I burst into tears in the middle of the shop!”

My department store stoush has dogged my thoughts. Two nights ago, I dreamt about that grandmother, replaying her diatribe in my head. I woke up still bewildered about what I’d said that set her off. Had she misread my concern as impertinence? Had I sounded judgmental?

I thought back to the last time my 7-year-old had croup. His fever spiked at 39 degrees. It was terrifying: he was disoriented and stiff, his movements jerky. I raced him to emergency and we spent a night on the ward, spooned together on a gurney while he barked himself hoarse.

Perhaps, after that trip to hospital, I did overreact in Target. Obviously that nanna resented my solicitude about her two-year-old charge. Or maybe she snapped because a stranger expressing concern made her feel negligent. Perhaps she really believed her granddaughter just had a cold.

I’m not good at dealing with hostility – a tongue-lashing like that and I fall apart. But I’m usually adept at reading strangers. I can normally pick the ones who’re open and chatty. I’ll pass over those whose body language says ‘do not disturb.’ I enjoy making small talk, but there’s a delicate balance between being friendly and appearing pushy. On this occasion, I may have poked a lioness with a stick.

Airing Dirty Laundry

Airing Dirty Laundry
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 28, 2014

My laundry is a showcase of my domestic shortcomings. A pagoda of clean clothes is stacked on the bench. Eldest son’s sports gear lies reeking on the floor awaiting fumigation. Suspended under the skylight is a dowel rail trimmed with dripping garlands of blue and white school uniforms. My husband’s favourite polo shirt, the lavender one with the chlorine stains, hangs damply off the door knob to the broom cupboard. A load of wet washing I forgot to hang out yesterday is crumpled in the washing basket, beginning to turn whiffy.

I am not a laundry-proud kind of person. My laundry is a sweat-shop that’s either stopped up with five peoples’ dirty clothes, or clogged up with clean ones. No-one but me ever puts anything away.

Of all the domestic duties that co-habitation requires, it’s the laundering that my live-in clothes horse takes for granted. Before bed, he unbuckles his trousers, liberating a roll of tummy. His fawn chinos drop to the floor. He daintily steps over them and untucks his business shirt from his underpants. He inspects his shirt front for soy sauce and coffee drips. Satisfied at finding both, he balls up the shirt and lobs it almost into the laundry hamper. Jocks and socks follow in alphabetical order. He knows it’s only a matter of time before these items of clothing will magically reap ear, spotless, back in his wardrobe.

On weekends, his gaudy, fraying favourites emerge from his chest of drawers. The burnt-orange tracksuit top is a permanent Saturday fixture. He usually teams it with the dung-brown trackie daks with a navy stripe and a saggy seat. These are the items of clothing that pass regularly through the laundry on their way to Bunnings, or to middle son’s soccer game. Another dad snorts in my husband’s direction: ‘Get dressed in the dark, mate?!” Later, after father and son’s obligatory post-match hot dog, I soak the tomato sauce stains out of the pants and dry the orange tracksuit top over a chair so it won’t shrink, because I know what love is.

My laundry is also a dumping ground for miscellaneous household items. I’m supposed to find a home for the secateurs, a container of ceiling putty and half a metre of air conditioning duct in case in case they’re urgently needed. I babysit an assortment of batteries (possibly live, more likely dead) lined side by side beside the washing machine. A lonely shin-pad waits for me to locate its mate.

On the highest shelf next to the dryer, I keep a stash of Allen keys. These keys sit atop an Ikea screwdriver kit, now on permanent standby after last week’s upstairs emergency.

In a huff, 13-year-old had stomped into his bedroom, slamming the c 1978 door. The outer door-knob flew off taking the spindle with it, and imprisoning teenager inside his room for forty minutes. (I congratulated the house for that stroke of genius).

I have friends whose laundries are more show-pony than work-horse. I don’t understand how their laundries operate with such efficiency. Even when I call in unexpectedly, their polar-white Corian benchtops are pristine. They must live in the nude.

When my kids are whining and husband is jet-lagged, I use the laundry as a safe-haven. No-one in my family expects to find me there. I make a start on folding t-shirts and re-uniting socks, but my mind is elsewhere. I fantasise about washing teenage son’s new black jeans with husband’s burnt-orange tracksuit and watching gleefully as the colours run. I peel a pelt of lint from the dryer filter and sweep up the gravel of spilled cat biscuits.

Yesterday morning, my husband was running late for a meeting and rummaging through the laundry clothes pile for his lucky lilac-checked business shirt. “This place is a sty!” he complained loud enough for me to hear from the bathroom. “Where’s that shirt?”

“I think your blue one’s dry!” I called back. He grabbed his blue shirt from the bottom of the stack, upending the pile. As he barrelled past me to get dressed in our bedroom, I braced myself for this month’s lecture. (He calls this talk a ‘minor marital adjustment,’ I called it a ‘blazing row’).

He swung open the bathroom door and poked his head around the corner, hopping on one leg to put a sock on the other. “We’ve been in this house for more than a year now,” he said. “Any chance you could get a system going in that wash-house of yours?”

Of yours? What a cheek! I was incredulous. Then furious. I bent down and retrieved yesterday’s purple socks and his lime-green running shorts. “Here you go!” I said, tossing them in his direction. “The laundry’s all yours. Let’s see how you manage in there!” And I flounced into the shower, grabbed the soap and got to work shaving my legs with his new razor.

Too Busy to Care

Too Busy to Care
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 21, 2014

They were locked together in amorous congress: two shopping trolleys refusing to part. “Stand clear!” I warned small daughter, handing her my bag. I grabbed the trolley handles and tried using brutish force to wrench them apart.

“Having fun yet?” I heard a woman say.

I turned to fit a face to the familiar voice. She was a schoolmate from last century. I hadn’t seen her in years. “How are you?” I beamed.

“Busy!” she sighed and rolled her eyes. “So busy! Crazy busy!” she said, before rattling off a list of work commitments and social obligations. “The school wanted me on its fundraising committee – how could I say no? And we’ve just started renovating the house,” she continued. “The carpenter keeps turning up at 10 to 7!”

Her young kids were crazy busy too. “Swimming training, hockey, orchestra, maths tutoring Tuesdays and Thursdays” she reeled off. “And the weekends are manic too!” She shook her ponytail in mock exasperation.

I couldn’t work out if she wanted my commiserations, or my congratulations. I stood nodding and smiling dumbly, feeling insignificant. She glanced at her phone. “Gawd! It’s nearly 4. Gotta go!” and blew me a kiss. “Must catch up properly! Let’s put something in the diary!” and she dashed off to the butcher’s.

Four-year-old and I gave up on the untangling of trolleys. I grabbed a shopping basket instead. Looping the aisles, I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend lamenting the frenetic pace of her life.

Almost everyone I know is busy. Perpetual busyness has become an epidemic. Maybe even a boast. People with crowded schedules should be admired for their drive and dedication, shouldn’t they?

Being busy used to make me feel important. Or at least valued. A decade ago, I was a single mum with a three-year-old son and a full-time job that required constant travel. I was always racing from home to work, or work to home. My frantic existence had a point – I was shackled to a big mortgage and determined to hang onto my house. Mostly I was just exhausted and jittery.

Now, I’m busy by choice. I still get anxious on those days I’m swamped by my (often self-imposed) obligations. But on quiet days, I feel guilty for taking it easy, for being less-than-productive. Busyness is addictive.

And yet we’re supposed to have more freedoms than ever. We’re living with internet-aided efficiency, caressed by our portable technology and with time-saving appliances awaiting our commands.

Right now, the dishwasher’s throaty gurgling means there’s one less load of dishes for me. I let the washing machine struggle through a week’s worth of school uniforms. I’ll stuff them into the dryer if it’s still raining and suppress my guilt at heating the planet with my wrinkle-free cycle.

I put on the kettle and pay the $80 parking ticket I’ve been hiding in the glove box. I head out with the kids to buy two kilos of grout so the tiler can fix the leaky shower. Next I’ll stock up on milk, eggs and dolphin-friendly tinned tuna, deliver youngest child to a birthday extravaganza, middle lad to soccer practice and eldest son to the skate park.

For me, mother-of-three, working from home, that’s a busy afternoon. But to the Iraqi waitress I’ve befriended at the local cafe, my afternoon must sound like a holiday.

She works day-shift at the cafe, then catches the train to Fremantle to be a kitchen-hand in a French bistro by night. “This word ‘busy?”’ she asks, as she clears the adjacent table, layering its dirty plates along her arm. “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘too busy.’ Maybe you mean ‘tired?’” I decide I’m not that busy after all.

We all know people who flaunt their hectic timetables to impress others. Parading a bustling life of material privilege has become a marker of social status. Perhaps I covet my crowded to-do list because I don’t really want to slow down? Maybe busyness is a hedge against emptiness?

Only yesterday, I caught myself moaning to the neighbour opposite about the tatty state of our front garden. “There’s just no time,” I said. And there it was: my own self-delusion. “Of course there’s time,” I thought later, “I’m not that busy! I’m the laziest busy person I know. Lazy – and a prized procrastinator.”

That night, my breadwinner barrelled through the door just in time for the TV news. As he subsided into the sofa, I regaled him with my front-yard epiphany in absorbing detail. “Maybe we’re not all as busy as we think we are?” I concluded my story, hoping he’d disagree. “Is being overwhelmed a sign I’m no good at time management?”

“You wouldn’t be half as busy if you stopped gossiping on the phone to your girlfriends,” he replied. “What’s for dinner?”

Tasty Treasures

Tasty Treasures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 14, 2014

I lifted the metal lid of our circa-1958 shamrock-green letterbox. Small daughter handed me with a wodge of envelopes, clamped with a fat elastic band. “Bills!” I groaned.

Four-year-old was now scrabbling behind the rickety mailbox post. “Something fell out!” she shouted and flapped her discovery above her head.

It was a postcard. A striking botanical drawing stood out against an inky background. It pictured the life cycle of a sunflower, drawn in exquisite detail in every incarnation, from bud to bloom to seed.

I turned over the postcard and immediately recognised the handwriting – straight-limbed but slanting slightly backwards. The text was a recipe from a friend in her 70’s, a magnificent cook. She appreciates my weakness for chocolate and our shared love of baking. So she’d sent me a copy of her latest triumph – a delectable chocolate cake using sour cherries, ground almonds and rum.

I was touched. Some of my most treasured recipes were originally hers. Over the years, she has transcribed them onto handsome stationary, adding tips and tricks she thinks will help me, her less-seasoned protégé.

To make her famous cumquat chutney, I begin roaming the neighbourhood in May for trees festooned with fruit. I beg stripping rights from owners, then lug my golden cargo home. I’ll spend an hour chopping the bitter fruit, extracting pesky seeds. By kilo’s end, my fingertips are pruned and the juice is biting into the quicks of my nails.

My friend’s recipes are reminders of raucous dinners at her place in the 90s. Her table was always laden: slabs of salmon and rollmops washed down with schnapps, curries made from scratch, ripe cheeses and her renowned chilli jam. Her family’s prized dishes have become firm favourites amongst mine.

I’ve been collecting my trove of recipes since I was a teenager. The recipe for Mum’s signature dish, Pineapple Chicken, sits atop a bulging file in the top drawer of my desk. Still rich with evidence of its original owner, Mum’s handwritten page is dog-eared and spotted with greasy thumb-marks. But it’s not the recipe I covet, rather the remarks that live in the margins. “MUCH POSHER THAN APRICOT CHICKEN,” Mum has written in capitals, then underlined it, in case anyone should doubt her.

From her notes, I can track her attempts to combine fruit with fowl. They date back to the 80s, when her kitchen had glazed orange tiles and a clinkerbrick pantry. She has scribbled on the recipe in red biro: “1st time – used fresh pineapple – try tinned.”

“2nd time: Golden Circle Pineapple Rings work best. Check for rust.”

“3rd Time: Delicious served with rice and frozen peas.”

As a child, I anointed Mum’s Pineapple Chicken (and defrosted peas) the birthday dinner of choice.

My grandmother’s surviving recipes are frustratingly terse. Her buttermilk scones require ‘enough flour to make a soft dough’ and should be baked ‘until done.’ She needed only the bare basics to jog her memory. Her cooking was instinctive, a repertoire of corned beef and baked custards learned at her mother’s elbow in the 1920s, recipes she mentally fine-tuned each time she made them.

I have no such confidence in my productions. I like my baking instructions precise and foolproof. On a whim, I might vary the ingredients, but that’s when the dish flunks. I blame my catastrophes on the recipe. “Hopeless!” I’ll scrawl across the page, having wasted six eggs and a pat of Danish butter on a rubbery sunken sponge.

I still remember the first cookbook I fell in love with. I was 28. The Sydney restaurant critic Terry Durack had written a rhapsody to food. (On the cover was a woman wearing nothing but a skirt strung with garfish.)

I took Terry to bed every night for a week. “It was the slippery, silky, mother’s nightie feel of it that got me at first, a reassuring and arousing smoothness of impossibly luxurious proportions.” That’s how he described the taste of his first smoked oyster. I went to the fish shop, hoping I, too, would be overcome with mother’s nightie raptures. Sadly, my first smoked oyster tasted like an old slipper, plus grit.

Recipes are rich histories for swapping between friends and passing between generations. The internet has made recipe-sharing a furtive pleasure. I can waste an hour browsing through litanies of slow-cooked beef cheeks and self-saucing puddings when I’m uninspired by a kilo of mince and a limp head of broccoli.

But my laptop’s cold, plastic interface is no match for Mum’s butter-stained school recipe cards, relics from compulsory domestic science. Sometimes I’ll flick through the cards and marvel at how unappetising 1950s food now seems. (Rock cakes feature heavily). Other times, I just want to see Mum’s girlish handwriting, alive on every page. Satisfied, I’ll put the cards back in the drawer, reach for the can opener and make a start on tonight’s Pineapple Chicken.

Driven to Distraction

Driven to Distraction
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 7, 2014

My first car was a 1976 custard-coloured Datsun 200B. I bought it from my Uncle Andy for $800. Aged 19, I was now free to explore my Perth universe.

My car had no air-conditioning, no wing mirrors and often no petrol. After a week of crunching the gears to locate reverse, I snapped off the gearstick knob into my hand.  “Knobs don’t like rough treatment,” Mum sighed. I rammed a squash ball onto the gearstick and drove it like that for the next four years.

My Datsun boasted six ashtrays – we teenagers didn’t let driving inconvenience our smoking. The flip-down trays in each door panel blew ash in our faces as soon as we wound down a window. Two larger ashtrays slid side by side out of the dashboard, side by side, in case driver and passenger didn’t want to share.

After another month of rough treatment, my driver’s side window jammed down inside the door. On frosty mornings, I’d arrive at work numb with cold. Parked at the beach in February, however, my car would be roasting. The vinyl seats heated up like a George Foreman grill and seared the backs of my thighs. I’d leap out of the car and throw my towel over the seat only to have the steering wheel scorch my palms. Wrapping the towel around my legs, I steered with my knees until I could grip the wheel.

The cassette player slyly chewed up my favourite tapes. The eject button seldom did what it promised. Instead I would prise loose my beloved John Farnham from the slot, only to discover he’d been disemboweled. I’d gather up the intestinal tangle of tape and reach for the Bic Biro I kept in the glove box for emergency repairs. That biro gripped the cogs of the cassette perfectly, so I could wind back the messy entrails. But John Farnham, with his innards wrinkled and flabby, never sounded the same.

My Datsun was no looker. But my neighbour had a canary yellow Datsun Stanza – how I envied its sporty brown stripe! Datsun also had models called Sunny, Cherry, Fair Lady and Bluebird. (The Bluebird-U series launched in 1971 using the short-lived slogan: Bluebird U- Up You!)

My girlfriends acquired their first cars in various states of dilapidation. Stephanie’s Honda Civic was a rusty shade of burnt-orange. We named it The Baked Bean. It shook violently if asked to go faster than 60kph. When Steph’s mum gave her some chocolate-brown seat covers for Christmas, we re-named it The Jaffa.

Another bestie had a Ford Laser Ghia. A pale blue one. Three out of four door handles had broken off. To get out of it, we wound down the windows and flipped up the handles from the outside. We called it The Man Trap.

I had friends with cars named Black Beauty, Bertha, the Red Rocket and Mertle (yes, with two “e’s”). Mertle was a Morris Minor with a tartan interior, whose driver’s door would fly open if she was forced to take a right hand turn in third. She’d happily take a fast turn left.

I can’t remember the last time I drove a car with gears. But I can recall my fear of the dreaded hill-start. I panicked if the cars in front and behind were parked dangerously close, because my clutch-riding abilities were dangerously unpredictable.

I jammed the clutch to the floor and roared the accelerator. Then I snapped off the handbrake and let the car lurch forward. Slamming on the brakes, I stalled the engine. Humiliated and defeated, I abandoned the car and caught the bus home.

Mum decided I should do a car maintenance course. If I got into trouble, at least I’d know how to check the dipstick or change a tyre.

But no-one told me what a flat feels like. Driving on the left rear rim, I thought the road was uneven. At the lights, a nice lady shouted through her window “Flat tyre!” I gave her a wave and pulled over halfway down a hill.

Fresh from car maintenance 101, I prized the jack free and wedged it under the rear axle. I began cranking the lever and was surprised to see how easily the car lifted off the ground. A truck grated to a halt behind me.

“Stop!” yelled the driver, jumping down from his cab and waving his arms.

“You can’t jack up your car here! It’ll roll down the hill! He snatched two bricks from his tray and shoved them under the front wheels.

“For pete’s sake, where’s your chocks?!”

“What’s a chock?” I asked.

Twenty years later, my live-in grease monkey says I still don’t know the difference between a sump and a hump. But I know a car with character when I see one. New cars don’t have personalities. They have names like Spark and Volt. Cars with grunt. No Datsun Fair Lady driver would climb daintily into one of those.

Lending an Ear

Lending an Ear
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 31, 2014

Someone once said train stations are the gates to the glorious and the unknown. As our train slid into Fremantle station, the kids and I spilled out into the chequerboard foyer. I stopped to do up small son’s shoelaces. That’s when I heard a quavery voice over my left shoulder:

“Can you plug me in?”

We were the last passengers left. All I could see were four small grey wheels behind a mobile advertising stand. I took two more steps and realised the wheels belonged to a motorised wheelchair. It was tucked into the corner, backed up to the wall. Its occupant, an old man with rheumy eyes and a grubby green shirt. His woollen vest was peppered with moth holes. He waved a power cable at me.

“Plug me in?” he asked again.

My first shameful instinct was to look away and hurry past.

But he caught my eye and pointed down to a power point: “Can’t reach it. Flat battery.”

He wasn’t irrational. He was stranded – trapped in a comatose machine.

My youngsters scampered over to inspect the mystery man behind the billboard.

I took the cord from his hand, crouched behind his wheelchair and inserted the plug. His chair emitted a shy peep as the battery awoke.

“Where’s your ear?” I heard my four-year-old daughter say. I scrambled to my feet: “Don’t be rude!” I whispered. And then I saw he was indeed missing his left ear. I squirmed at her impertinence, but the old bloke didn’t miss a beat. “That’s what happens when you don’t wear a hat!” he said. He winked at me as small child studied his bald, pink head.

“The sun got to my ear” he told her. “First they cut off this little bit,” and he grabbed the top of his remaining ear. “Then this bit went.” He waggled the lobe. “And before I knew it, I just had a hole.”

This gruesome tale only emboldened my daughter. “Same as a snake,” she said.

I cringed. But the old fellow chuckled, then motioned towards my 6-year-old son who’d been struck dumb by fear or curiosity.

“Got any questions about my ear, son?”

My boy shook his head and inched closer to my side.

“Will you grow another one?” his sister piped up.

“Could’ve, but I’m too old now.”

Satisfied, she took off to play hopscotch on the tiles. Her brother began hopping too.

Why had I been so reluctant to stop and talk to this witty fellow? He was scruffy, but then, so was my four-year-old. He’d unnerved me by calling out, but how else could he attract my attention? Confined to a wheelchair, he was hardly likely to leap out and snatch my handbag.

“Name’s Ned,” he said, and raised his arthritic hand in salute.

“Was it skin cancer that took your ear?” I asked him as we watched the kids, his wheelchair tethered to the power point.

“Twenty years on Koolan Island’ll do that to you” he said. “Worked for BHP. Just a singlet I wore – a singlet and footy shorts. I’m covered in these blasted splotches.” And he rubbed the dark mottles on his arm.  

We fell into an easy patter about harsh summers. And when my youngsters began bickering, I said: “Nice talking to you,” and the kids and I trooped off.

A week later, I’m still thinking about that stranded pensioner. My children are still skiting about Ned’s missing ear. I repeated the story to the German student we’re billeting.

“I would have kept walking,” she said. “In Berlin, we avoid eye contact in the street. We call it ‘wie Luft behandeln.’ It means to look through someone like they’re air.”

Many a time I’ve given a passing stranger a friendly nod and been snubbed. How that irks me!

A sociologist in Chicago reports that commuters who acknowledge each other enjoy their trip far more than those who ignore their fellow travellers. Even a small smile, or a throwaway line about the weather, makes people happier.

Ned’s story about life on Koolan Island made me curious. My laptop told me that in the 60s, Koolan was the largest and most remote iron ore mine in the country. Not much bigger than Rottnest, the island was then home to 900 workers. (Koolan also claimed to have the world’s longest golf hole, an 860 yard, par seven, which doubled as the air strip.)

I don’t want my children being fearful of strangers. Out with me, I want them to be comfortable saying hello to the kaleidoscope of passers-by. I want them to empathise with people who are different.

Keen to keep her ears, my daughter now wears a hat without argument.

All credit to you Ned!

Come Rain or Shine

Come Rain or Shine
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 24, 2014

Every morning, even before I roll out of bed, I wonder how the sky is behaving. I lie still for those few moments between sleep and wakefulness and take a guess at the weather.

I prise open my right eye (the one nearest the window) and make a mental measurement of the light streaming in through the gap in the curtains. Sometimes, the brightness bounces painfully off my retina. I clamp my eye shut and my brain registers with a jolt that it’s sunny outside. Other mornings, there’s only a soft splash of daylight that dapples the carpet and I sense it’s overcast, clouds on the move.

As I throw back the doona and my feet kiss the floor, I can tell you whether the air this morning is crisp, chilly, bracing or brisk. Crisp is any May morning before 7am. Chilly is unpleasantly cold. Bracing is cold, but pleasantly invigorating. Brisk is for the conversation I have with the man next door after nipping out to get The West in my nightie.

How’s the weather at your place then? It’s how the world speaks to us. The weather tells me what to wear. It alters my mood, colours my day. It can even change my plans.

Weather is the universal language of strangers, a conversation-starter that guarantees an ally: “Geez, how cold was it this morning?” No-one argues over the weather. I can predict rain and never be held to account. I can complain incessantly about the weather and escape being branded a whinger. A bore, maybe, but not a whinger.

My nan was the family meteorologist. During the long summers of my childhood, she would have daily discussions about the weather with Mrs Anderson next door. They’d talk across the side fence, standing in their respective backyards. Being seven or eight, I could only make out the top of Mrs Anderson’s head, but Nan got to see her bloomers on the line.

“Chance of rain?” Mrs Anderson would ask. I could just make out her mouth moving in the gap between the pickets. She and my Nan would crane their necks and take in the sky, all hopes pinned on one lonely little cloud adrift in iridescent blue. “We should be so lucky!” my Nan would say matter-of-factly, and then they’d change the subject and talk about the humidity.

Some mornings, my Nan would swap fences to the eastern side to confer with Mrs Fry. Mrs Fry had tight white curls and a lovely husband called Mr Fry, who slipped me a jelly bean every time I pulled a weed from his front lawn. His wife hated the heat even more than my Nan did. “Chafe! she’d complain loudly. “All you get from this weather is chafe!” And my Nan would nod sagely.

My Nan had two sayings which she alternated depending on the season. During a stinking hot summer Nan would chant, “This heat will be the end of me!” and in the winter, she’d declare “This cold is going to give me chilblains.”

I never understood what chilblains were but Nan was always warning me: “Don’t sit so close to the radiator. You’ll get chilblains.” I didn’t sit on her cold lino either, because she said that would give me something called piles.

These days, the weather isn’t just geographical, it’s extraterrestrial. It’s photographed from outer space, probed, plotted, and predicted. We can read the weather of the entire planet on our laptops and smart phones.

My husband is obsessed with the Bureau of Meteorology’s radar plots. He is not normally excitable. But if I glance out the window and casually inquire: “What’s the weather doing?” he’ll hurry over to his computer. Madly tapping his keyboard, he’ll pull up the satellite images of the West Australian coastline. He’ll zoom in on a low pressure system a hundred nautical miles out to sea and declare: “Rain tonight! Maybe three millimetres. About midnight!” Teenage son and I trade smirks.

The weather shapes our identity. We pride ourselves on how well we recover when the floodwaters recede, the fires are doused, the cyclone dissolves to a squall. In our family, elders recount survival stories from Cyclone Tracy. The devastation and trauma are passed over in favour of a ripping yarn: “It was Christmas Day you know, and your Auntie Jill had a turkey in the oven, and you know where your Uncle Ray found it? The cyclone had blown it clean out of the oven and it was floating in the neighbour’s pool!”

Remembering that story, I tell it to my youngsters. “What’s a cyclone?” asks my six year old. I point to their father who is tracking his satellite radars. “Let’s ask the weather-master shall we? And while he’s at it, he can tell us what it’s gonna be like tonight!”

“Dark” he says. And with a smug look on his face, he slams shut the lid of his laptop.

A Woman’s World

A Woman’s World
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 17, 2014

We met in the rice cracker aisle. I hadn’t seen him in 25 years. We’d worked in radio together when I was the bumbling cadet and he was the news editor, sure-footed and velvet-tonsilled. I’d been in awe of him – or scared of him – one and the same thing to a 21-year-old feeling hopelessly inadequate. I can remember how he’d grow more and more frenzied as the clock sped towards news hour. He’d pound away on his IBM electric, a gravity-defying stub of ash dangling from the cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.

Now he was barefoot shopping in Coles and I was loading up on Saos for school lunches. We made small talk about radio days before he announced matter-of-factly: “You chicks have got it made. The media’s biased towards women. I should know – I got the sack for being male.”

“You don’t mean that!” I said, taken aback.

“Yes, I do. I was a man and they only wanted women. Attractive women, of course. I tried to grow breasts, but all I grew was resentment.” He laughed, but I could hear the indignation in his voice.

I wasn’t sure if he wanted my sympathy or a comrade in arms. Our conversation limped to a farewell at the checkout. Walking home, my arms strung with shopping bags, I tried to picture my career from his point of view.

I remember when alpha males ruled radio newsrooms. In the late 80’s, hardened newsmen with gravelly voices would sub my scripts then give my right cheek an encouraging pat: “Have another go, sunshine!”

Anxious to impress, I worried they’d peg me as the dumb blonde. (More often than not, I was). So I put my hand up to do the graveyard shifts, reading news bulletins til midnight, and fumbling out of bed at 4am, just as friends were staggering home. I thought hard work would make up for lack of talent.

One summer, desperate to be taken seriously, I took to wearing pretend glasses to work. They were Lois Lane style with square black rims. I thought they made me look intelligent. My girlfriends said they made me look hilarious.

By the time I’d crossed the divide into television, female reporters with big hair and pastel suits were as much in demand as their chain-smoking male counterparts. To me, gender was irrelevant: a scoop was a scoop. We never questioned that our news directors were all male: the corridors in management were awash with testosterone too. Women reported the news, they weren’t in charge of it.

For the next eighteen years, I had only one female boss. She grilled me once: “Are you wanting to get married? Are you thinking about children?”

“No interest in either!” I replied proudly, aged 27. Three months later she was gone, emptying her desk after a dip in the TV ratings and complaints about her abrasive ‘management style.’

Feminism didn’t do young female reporters any favours either. It told us we needed to be ball-breakers, to be strident and brash. But the one thing despised in a newsroom more than a bimbo, was a woman as aggressive as a bloke.

Sure, there were perks for women in telly. I got $2000 to spend on clothes. Staying blonde became a tax deduction. But the night a male rival got sloshed, I discovered his salary beat mine by $30,000.

I returned to one job after baby number two, feeling crushed by the conflict of motherhood. On Monday mornings, I’d race out my front door in tears, my small son howling in the arms of his babysitter.

The newsroom had moved on in my 18-month absence. Young, fresh-faced reporters eyed me suspiciously. I was intimidated by the new computer software and embarrassed to ask for help. What if I was outed by my childless colleagues as less competent? Or less committed? In the afternoons, I’d make a flurry of whispered phone calls to make sure 6-year-old son was safely home from school, that he was dressed for Tae Kwon Do, that a girlfriend was still good to take him, that my toddler had woken up happily from his nap.

Three months into that job, I fell pregnant again. It took me a week to work up the courage to ring my boss in Sydney: “Ben, I have some news you’re not expecting…” I couldn’t decide whether to sound euphoric or apologetic, as though I’d connived to deceive him.

He took my announcement in his stride. But I was floored by the glamorous young reporter who griped: “But didn’t you get pregnant last year?”

So, in answer to my former male colleague at the supermarket, the one feeling downtrodden by the effortless rise of women in media? Don’t complain to me buddy! I’m tired of talking about sexism. Ageism’s my thing now!