In my small area of Melbourne there were not many boys, fortunately. Boys meant being made to go outside and kick a football or risk scarifying name-calling from my father, who was very quick to call me a sissy. I don't think that he was much happier when I did kick it, because it usually went anywhere but straight ahead. This was the problem with my father. He saw me as some kind of neurotic supernerd, and what I thought of him isn't printable. At cricket, I wasn't much of a bowler but held my own as a left-handed bat. I was hearing remarks about batty bats long before The Wiggles but no-one could deny that I could put a ball pretty much where I wanted it to go. And take some fast, risky run calls.
I was around seven when I began Sunday school. For some obscure reason it couldn't possibly have been at St Mark's, my nearest Anglican church which was about a ten-minute bike ride away but at St Andrew's, next door to Brighton Grammar and a good 5km away. I had to ride there and back every weekday and I wasn't happy about having to do it on Sundays as well. Gary was someone instantly in my face. My age, and a student at Brighton Beach Primary although he lived not far from me, which should have made him a candidate for Wilson Street Primary or Bentleigh West. A spitfire little choirboy, fresh from Matins and knowing he couldn't escape Evensong. "Well, well. The Grammar school elite! What are you doing here with the likes of us?" And so on. There was a sort of manic brittleness about this guy but no malice. He'd ride behind me on the way home, catcalling and jeering until we reached his street. I started to find him pretty funny, which infuriated him; he so desperately wanted to be taken seriously.
Brighton Beach Primary had originally been called "Brighton Orphanage School" because it had once been part of the Melbourne Orphanage, which was adjacent until it was demolished in 1963. My father sometimes threatened to disown me and send me there. The first time, when I was around six, I screamed and cried but after meeting Gary, found that he knew some of the kids who lived there. One in particular, Sols, was happy to tell me about it and, as the British say, it didn't sound half bad. Yes, discipline was strict, kids could be sometimes beaten and were often bullied. All standard fare at the time and things all boys accepted as normal. Everything was very cut and dried and there were absolutely no mind games. After that, my father's threat to send me there didn't have the same impact and when I was around nine I told him that I'd be happy to go if that was what he wanted.
He didn't believe me. As it was only a ten-minute journey, he bundled me into the car and drove me to the door. Into a large, echoing, mansion-style house called Windermere where the staff and kids clearly thought he was unreal. End of that story but not the end of Sols: he turned up in my class at the start of the first year of high school and was one of the kids at Sara, a place I'll talk about a little further on.
Les lived a few houses from us and was one of my father's closest friends. He and his wife had three daughters who became my friends. Eventually, a son came along but too many years separated us for us ever to know each other well.
My father and Les had gone 50/50 in buying a lawnmower that had the temperament of a particularly spiteful camel. It wasn't a Victa, that ubiquitous Aussie mower of the 50s that "turned grass into lawn". My job was to supply the labour: not just to mow our lawn, but Les' as well. It was on Les' back patio that my father used to like to sit, quaffing beer and giving his running commentary on how badly I was doing. I missed that bit there, which of course you'd expect a dolt to do. I went too fast in another spot, and that was because I was too lazy to do a good job. He despaired. Have you ever seen a sissy mow a lawn? Look right now at how I did it. And so on. I had been getting along very well indeed with these girls and some others in the neighbourhood since I'd been around four. And they weren't unhappy to have a compliant boy around. They were more tolerant of difference and nowhere near as competitive. My father purported to be disgusted by this although I think he was secretly grateful that I could make friends at all. Without doubt, he would have much preferred me to mix with Ross next door, but we didn't particularly like each other. There was one boy, David, whom I liked a lot, but he lived in a different part of Brighton which made it hard for us to see each other until we were old enough to bike around. As far as neurotypicals are concerned, I have always got along best with women or girls, followed by gay males. The segment of society which has given me most grief has been teenage/young adult heterosexual males.
Despite my father's behaviour, the best roast dinners I've ever enjoyed I ate in Les' house. Les was a butcher, so the quality of his meat was better than even my grandmother could provide. That's where I drank my first bottle of beer, with Les, something of a closet subversive, looking on with a huge smile. They had TV before we did so on every possible afternoon I'd stroll up there to watch five year old episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club, with Walt Disney giving us progress reports on the construction of Disneyland.
Knowing so many neighbourhood girls stood me in good stead not just in childhood but also during early adolescence when there was a dancing class, for example. The other boys were terrified and vicious and it didn't help their collective mood to see me on such good terms with so many of the girls. In one hilarious incident I was sent by my principal to deliver a package of papers to Firbank, the nearby Anglican girls' school. (Their motto is Vincit Qui Se Vincit, which means: (S)he conquers who conquers him/her self.; I've always liked it and believed it to be true.) When I arrived it was morning break and, as I was making my way through the crowded playground, one girl called out: "Look! It's Lindsay." Another girl called out: "I knew you'd make the right decision eventually!" Soon I was surrounded by inquisitive, friendly girls and soon after that explaining myself to an inquisitive, friendly headmistress. That afternoon, and on every other school afternoon for the rest of the year, girls, who got out of school 15 minutes earlier, were waiting outside to bike home with me. That, of course, was social death with the boys but by then, as I'll relate in time, I really had nothing at all to lose.
My father's oldest friend dated from his childhood. They had gone to the same school, played on the same football team, enlisted in the same unit at the beginning of WW2 and were prisoners together in Germany. Eddie had two daughters, one my age who was a good friend and a younger one who, until recently, ranked as one of the most unpleasant people I have ever met. One summer when I was about ten I was invited to stay with them at their beach house for a couple of weeks and because Joanne and I spent so much time together, it was great. Well, great for us. We were able to go for long walks in the bush or along the beach and to swim whenever we liked. It wasn't great for her sister, who felt excluded or for her mother, who thought that I was churlishly taciturn at best and at worst, insane.
One weekend I went around to their house and was told by Joanne's sister that I wasn't wanted because the family didn't want Joanne to get too close to me on account of my "bad genes". Eddie was digging in his back garden so I was able to check with him easily. He didn't look up or say anything, just went red so I walked off their property and never went back. How did I feel? I didn't, much. Not enough to say anything to my parents. I can't remember a time when I have ever inwardly reacted much to either criticism or praise. Outwardly, any reaction was even rarer.
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At school, Chapel at St Andrew's was compulsory each morning. For Chris and I, this was the best part of the day, for both of us loved the organ music that rolled over us and around us and through us and while that was happening, it seemed almost as though nothing else could get us. At lunchtimes, we used to risk being beaten on our behinds with a cane by sneaking into the church to hear the organist rehearsing for the next day. I always used to speak to Charlie Brodribb, whose grave lay nearest the north door. He'd died in 1852 at the age of eight. Chris was convinced that Charlie's ghost and I could converse and was no longer scared of ghosts when I told him that Charlie had been quite a nice guy. Religion itself meant something to Chris (or at least it did then) and tied him up in knots trying to make sense of it. Religion was not for me. A part of me wanted to surrender to it, to sink into the somewhat spartan comforts of Christianity's exigent doctrine, even the watered down version professed by The Church of England, but I couldn't. And to do so seemed like moral cowardice. I believed that we, homo sapiens sapiens, evolved. I believed that we came from nothing and go back to it. I believed with the Romans that "semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda" ("once brief light sets, night is one continuous sleeping"). I was sometimes challenged to explain human self-consciousness. I couldn't and still cannot but my best guess is that it's sustained by a frontal lobe and a very rapid shuttling of perceptions along the corpus callosum, the "bridge" between the brain's left and right hemispheres. However, the music's terrific, I can listen to organ music all day.
The "junior school" was staffed entirely by women. Very good teachers, all. Many of them were quite eccentric: Mrs Green wore only shades of green, carried a green handbag and drove a green car, Mrs Chapman arrived at and departed from school on a pink bicycle and regaled us with Chiri-Biri Bim on the day she became reconciled to her husband and on Friday afternoons the junior school principal, Miss Mabel Fairweather, a gifted reader, told us pre-Disney tales from Kipling about Mowgli or the "grreat, grreen, grreasy Limpopo river" which had us enthralled.
That was in 1957, in grade five. In that year, as in all the others, I'd been using the toilets across the street. One of the other boys who also did this walked in one day, held out his arms and said: "Kiss me." I thought he was joking and laughed. I had no idea that boys were even physically capable of kissing; the thought had never entered my head. He was terribly offended and began to shout abuse which prompted Marge, the neighbour, to call the school. I saw a teacher coming from the senior school and said so. The boy didn't believe me; he thought I was making it up to get away from him. I warned him again and then ran for it along the edge of the oval, using trees for cover. The boy was caught and, although a junior, was taken to the senior school and caned almost senseless because Marge had mentioned exactly what the shouting was about. Under the code of behaviour that boys had at that time, I should have stayed with him. I wasn't aware that a code even existed but in similar circumstances a few years later, I remembered. (See my essay Autism and The Police.)
One thing that I did well and often was dash across roads without being run over. I had a knack for being able to compute a path with one very quick glance and then making a run for it. I think that this is an autistic talent. None of the other kids in my neighbourhood were even confident enough to try except for my sister, who wasn't about to let her nerd brother get away with anything. She was run over but wasn't badly hurt. I got into trouble for "not knowing that she would follow me" but of course had no idea that she would. Today, not being able to make these inferences is aptly called "mind-blindness". My sister is 3.5 years younger than I and does not figure much in my life. We always got on reasonably well as children, but she has never understood autism.
All through my childhood I was in and out of hospital, and this was always to do with that blocked pulmonary valve. I had raised blood pressure, therefore my nose had to be cauterised so it wouldn't spontaneously bleed. I had to be cathetered to give the doctors some idea of the pressures inside my heart. There always seemed to be something looming, but actually I liked being in hospital. Nothing out of turn ever happened. From the first rattle of teacups before dawn until late at night, everything ran like clockwork and I was always happy there, provided that I knew why I was there and what was going to happen to me. My parents never told me anything but it didn't take long to find out from the nurses.
It's not well known that the world's first open heart surgery took place at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne. It was developed throughout 1957 by a brilliant cardiologist, Dr Jim Gardiner, and implemented by a surgeon not afraid to take chances, Ken Morris. For several years they had worked on pigs, perfecting their routines and techniques and then, suddenly, set a time to operate on all the children who were outpatients at the hospital's cardiac clinic. They repaired hearts at the rate of three each week until they'd done them all. Their survival rate wasn't brilliant by today's standards, only around 50%, but those of us who survived are grateful that they tried and succeeded.
So in 1958, aged eleven, I underwent open heart surgery to correct the valve problem. Today, this operation is routine and done by threading a catheter through the arteries, into the heart and inflating a balloon. Back in 1958, things were a lot more major and I was in hospital for about six weeks. There was only a 50/50 chance of surviving the first week, but it never occurred to me that I could die. Not even when I saw others die, as obviously happened quite often. That happened to them, not to me. And it taught me two very valuable lessons which I have never forgotten, that pain is just a state of mind and that people who give up, die.
And how did I learn these lessons? The pain was simply incredible. No other pain I've ever felt has been anywhere near it. And that was because my sternum had been sawn open along its length and the two halves of my chest prised open. After the operation I had to stay in an oxygen tent for about a week to reduce any chance of infection, and oxygen heightens sensation. I was given pain killers by injection, but not too many as nobody wanted me addicted. Every four hours I was also given antibiotics by injection, and so my behind both looked and felt like a pincushion.
So intense pain was a fact of life that had to be dealt with but those kids who cried for Mummy to come along and make it go away, or because they were lonely in the middle of the night, or just because everything was too much, were the ones who gave up and died. I saw it again and again, not just as an inpatient but during the outpatient process as well. Late one night, I was talking to the girl in the next bed when there was a pause in the conversation. She'd died. Her heart had simply stopped. Most of the girls lived but the boys who died were often the ones who seemed likely to grow up into big, boofy "he-men". It's been my experience that these types, for all their macho posturing, carry on like babies when they're hurt. The other lasting legacy of this time (apart from having a heart that sounds very odd but nonetheless works) was my total intolerance of people who elect to solve their problems with drugs rather than face their issues and deal with them. I absolutely cannot abide junkies or alcoholics; they may as well wear signs around their necks stating "Major Personality Defects".
It was then I discovered that I liked the night. I became nocturnal. Whenever possible, I've been nocturnal ever since. This made a lot of sense because it meant that I slept through the busiest, noisiest part of the day and was awake when everything was still. Once I was able to walk again, I roamed over the entire hospital and often it seemed as though I had it all to myself. Except for a flurry of activity when there was an emergency admittance or when someone died.
A death on the ward was interesting for the number of lies it generated from the staff. It seemed that they were incapable of acknowledging children as intelligent individuals, but rather as fools who would believe anything they were told and who needed to be kept from the truth at all costs. Thus we were told that people had "been transferred" or "gone home" when they were still incapable of walking. This odd behaviour also taught me two things: never assume that children can't understand or that they can't handle the knowledge when they do.
My grandmother came to see me every day. She made the trip on two trams, laden with pies and pastries which she'd cooked the night before. Such was her guilt. Unbeknown to her, she was feeding, in rotation, an entire ward of about thirty kids. There was silence and a sense of great anticipation when she walked in because all the kids were ravenous, having lost a lot of weight and needing to regain it fast.
I offended my father by telling my parents that my mother could visit me as often as she wanted to and that my father could come sometimes, too. That remark set a lasting strain between us. After that, we hardly spoke to each other.
The recovery rate was long, around three months, and after that they told us it would be unwise to subject our hearts to any strenuous activity for at least a year. No sport for a year! It seemed too good to be true, and it was. I arrived back in school physically frail and weighing less than 30kg. (My mother said that I looked like a concentration camp survivor.) My form teacher, Mr Tolley, greeted me with the words: "So, Weekes, you think you're special?". Inwardly cursing my father I told him that I didn't think so at all. That day, he asked me the brunt of his class questions. I had no hope of answering correctly, as I was behind and needed time to get up to speed. Tolley did not give me time but kept after me day after day after day. Those people well-disposed to me caved into the pressure to avoid me except Chris, who simply didn't realise what was happening.
The boys in the year above me had always been difficult to deal with; now, they became impossible. I spent my break times in the school library, reading about modernist architecture until the librarian ordered me out, then found refuge for a while in the toilets because in the senior school they at least had doors. That lasted a while but when kids learned to wait for me on the way in I found a final refuge at the top of the clock tower stairs. Quiet, out of the way and a great place to read. I was not completely out of sight but nobody thought to look up. Away from this refuge, Tolley was always in class and even out of it would loudly draw attention to me if I caught his gaze. None of this could have happened without the connivance of the staff: this was a school for leaders, I was not one, I was being driven out. I was happy to go.
On one week in the winter of that year, perhaps in July, we were told by John Sotheran, the sports teacher, to turn up for an athletics day on the following Saturday without exception, or else. I duly turned up. He looked at me and said: "What are you doing here?" At first he told me to keep score for the football game but changed his mind and said: "Just go home".
The highlight of the day was riding home with the girls at the end of it. I said that I had nothing to lose by doing that; now you know why.
I can remember the last time I was assembled with that school as clearly as the day it happened. We were all in the quadrangle for the Remembrance Day ceremony, rank upon rank of boys, listening to the Headmaster telling us for the umpteenth time what the day was and meant. (If you've never heard of it, Wikipedia's a great place to find out.) It was warm, I was standing in the sun and began to feel faint. I'd been told that if that happened, to break ranks and sit under the oak in the centre of the quad. That's just what I did and my footsteps echoed, echoed, rang out clearly on the red bricks, cutting into whatever the old bore was saying, distracting every single student. And I knew that was terminal.
So a final anecdote about this school: On the first day of year six, the Tolley year, who should be in my class but Gary. After all he'd said about elitism he did at least have the grace to look embarrassed. His years at the Grammar school were very bad. I can remember him being commanded to do a back somersault in gym class but he lay prone on a mat, holding himself absolutely rigid. Screaming. The following year he had to take part in the cadet corps where he distinguished himself on camp by refusing to even pick up a rifle. Eventually, halfway through year ten, he walked out of the school, faced down his father and never went back.
I know this because he told me. In 1968, I ran into him on the steps of the Brisbane GPO. In 1988, I met him twice at his flat in the Sydney suburb of Manly. After leaving the grammar school, he'd spent twelve months alone on Maatsuyker Island, off the southern coast of Tasmania, trapping mutton birds for food. After that, he drifted around from one dead end job to another.
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1958 was a milestone for me in another way. Back at the YMCA, I had my first encounter with a pedophile. Autistic people are very vulnerable to predators of all kinds, because we find it so hard to tell what non-autistic people are thinking and because we tend to believe everything we're told. Not doing that takes a lot of painful experience. At the YMCA, because no females were allowed in the pool area, there was no need for bathing costumes. So while that place was great insofar as one could swim naked, it did mean that a lot of gays were attracted to it. Which, in itself, was no bad thing. Mostly the men chased other men and the older boys chased older boys, but of course there were pedophiles as well.
I had heard remarks about Ace for quite a while. Other boys made jokes in the showers about not bending over to pick up the soap when he was anywhere near. The pool had three shower rooms: one each for boys, men and "businessmen". It was common to find men in the boys' showers and vice versa. Because the businessmen had to pay a premium for their more upmarket changing rooms, these were off limits to all but paying customers. Ace was often in the boys' showers and was never challenged. I had no idea what the other kids were talking about, nor did I care to find out. One day some of the boys told me in words of one syllable exactly what they were talking about, but I didn't believe them. Fastidious as I was, I couldn't believe that people did that sort of thing with each other, any more than I could believe that boys kissed each other.
Ace was in his early twenties, a highly successful seller of industrial sewing machines who was fairly new off the boat from Glasgow. He tried several times to talk to me in the showers but I was put off by his constant chatter and innuendo. Undaunted, he was waiting for me one day as I walked out onto the street and offered to buy me a milkshake and to take me to the table tennis centre in Albert Park. That was too good an offer to refuse, or maybe he just caught me on a good day, but I accepted. He did exactly as he said he would, so I knew that he was OK and that those boys were kidding me. He took me out several times, not just for games of table tennis which I began to be good at, but to places like the Melbourne Chess Club and to the state herbarium for lectures on botany. And one night while driving me to Flinders Street to catch my train he touched me between the legs. So that was what he wanted. Well, so did quite a few girls, and if that was all he wanted, I had no objection. Each time we went out I let him touch me. Then one day he performed oral sex and I started to positively like Ace.
I need to pause here and explain that in the 1950s and 60s children had much more freedom than they have today. All in all, I think that was a good thing. After hearing the rumours about Ace, I had asked my father about people like him and he'd lectured me about "homosexuality" and told me, among other things, that the laws forbidding it had come from the Bible where it was described an "an abomination". Indeed, the Act outlawing it referred to "the abominable crime of buggery". But it didn't occur to him that I had any particular person in mind.
So the law outlawing homosexuality was derived from the Bible which to me was nonsense. That was interesting, and a very good reason to take no further notice of it. The Bible was nonsense to my father, also. His beliefs tended more toward paganism and he believed in reincarnation. The impetus for me to be educated as a Christian came from my mother.
Soon enough I was regularly going to Ace's house on weekends because his food was good, he had a lot of good music and could teach me how to repair radios. (I was a shortwave fanatic). Also, he had an endless fund of jokes which, while crude, were usually very funny. There was nowhere else on earth where I felt so relaxed and free from worry. Ace liked to perform oral sex and, as I was still a long way off puberty, he could, and did, often. One day he suggested anal sex. I was very surprised. I told him that I thought it was disgusting but he said that it was he who was getting dirty, and he was prepared to take his chances. I told him that it would hurt me. He assured me that it wouldn't. And it didn't.
But neither did I particularly like it. I tolerated it because I liked Ace and he was very good to me in other ways: he taught me the things I could have learned from my father, had that man not been abusive and sarcastic. For example, Ace taught me to play table tennis very well. Instead of calling me an idiot or a dolt or a big girl whenever I blew a shot, he just showed me how to do it properly. He had a half interest in a cake shop. His partner was an older Scot just known as "Jock" who shared Ace's tastes and was an excellent pastry cook. Jock jokingly nicknamed his shop "Dodgson & Barrie's Patisserie" and I've never been able to think of it as anything else. It became my second home, both because I was treated well and because I love cakes and pastries, especially those with cream.
Jock liked to argue and would happily discuss all sorts of issues loudly, arrogantly, in depth and was remarkably well-informed. He gave no prizes for second but instead invited those he was arguing with to go to the university library and read up on whatever subject was being discussed. Sometimes I did, and usually I was accompanied by Danny, a boy my age whom I knew from the YMCA and who was Jock's partner. That might seem too adult a concept to use but Danny was precociously wide awake. He taught me a lot. Sometimes, he can still teach me. He did so not so long ago by standing stock still in Sandringham library, smiling serenely when I was on the point of throwing books at a librarian.
Researching issues in libraries became second nature to me. Neither Jock nor Ace would ever answer questions if the information was available in a book. When I asked them who Dodgson and Barrie were, for example, they wouldn't tell me, just said to go and look it up. Danny and I did so and found that both Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and JM Barrie were not, after all, people to invite opprobrium or the snide insinuations Jock liked to make.
Sometimes, I must have exasperated Ace when he was sleeping with me. Once, I went to sleep during it and he sulked for days. Another time, I asked him whether he would mind if I read a book during it, and he got very terse then, also. Yes, he would mind!!!
Ace had no interest in doing anything other than getting himself off. I often wondered who he was really thinking of when he did it. Some girl he hadn't had the guts to approach? Who knows? But Danny and I became friends. He was unashamedly gay at a time when his family, who were Jewish, would have disowned him if they'd known and when the maximum adult penalty for being caught was seven years jail and a whipping, while for people our age it was confinement to a juvenile facility until we turned 21. Confinement and being raped because, after all, we'd like it, wouldn't we?
Sometimes he and I would go to a movie and then back to his home, which wasn't far from Dodgson & Barrie's. There he showed me how good sex could really be. I found that I particularly liked what the American writer James Baldwin called "the flaming torpor of passivity" which always left me feeling truly relaxed and happy.
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At the beginning of 1959 I was old enough to begin year seven at my local high school, situated in grounds that were unusually bleak and windswept. So they remain. My father felt that what I needed was a fresh start. My mother said that I needed a psychiatrist, but no son of my father's was mad.
Two weeks before the end of summer holidays I had to buy books at the school for the coming year. It couldn't have been more different. People strolling casually along the corridors while the bookshop was staffed mainly by students, some not much older than myself, supervised by a middle-aged Polish medical doctor who was much too old to study for an Australian qualification. Long on both accent and wit, he proved to be a funny and likeable guy so I hoped he would be one of my teachers.
The new intake, year seven, consisted of five classes sorted not by academic ability (that didn't start until year eight) but by name. The school took no notice of grades at earlier schools and a year to make up its mind about just where to stream you. So I was in the S - Z group. The biggest difference was that half the class was made up of girls, who sat rigidly segregated in the two rows to the teacher's right while the other two rows were occupied by the boys. Class size was around 40.
There were girls in my class whom I knew, but the sexes were rigidly kept apart by each having its exclusive, and very well-defined, area. Not knowing any boys I kept to myself quite happily; at least the Grammar school's merciless persecution had come to an end. Every class has its group of quiet students and they had recognised each other and me. Two boys gravitated to me over time, both called Peter. I can't stand to write about Freddie, a pest who thought that because our fathers were friends, we should be too.
Peter Still should have had his name reversed. Adults at that time would have called him "steady" and steady he was, but with depths to him so deep that I sensed I might never plumb the bottom. I liked having him around: kindly disposed to the world but missing nothing; quiet and clever. It was Peter Still who taught me that when some people talk, you shut up and listen. Above all, I felt safe when I was with him.
Peter Witchell was quiet in the way of a beaten dog; wary, watchful, friendless. A natural ally. A natural friend. Not a steadying influence on my eccentricities but if anything a party to them. Kids looked at us and kept clear; when just the two of us were together they figured we were two of a kind who had found each other. Peter Witchell who invented the chant "long, lanky, skinny and cranky, Weekes squeaks when he leaks". It always made me laugh because the adjectives were true and other kids, when they saw that I wasn't so aloof and could laugh at myself, were more accepting. Peter Witchell who, at the end of a morning recess said: "You're weird, but we love you anyway".
