It's late October in Melbourne, Australia, my home town. It's spring. All the vegetation is blooming, the air is thick with its perfume (not to mention pollen) and there's just enough heat around to give Melburnians cause to speculate that we might have a hot summer ahead.
This morning I went back to Brighton, that part of Melbourne where I spent my childhood. I lived in East Brighton, which was subsequently called South Brighton and then East Brighton once more. Presumably, someone who could read a compass became a voice to be reckoned with on Brighton Council. The road I lived in bordered an area of vacant land called, optimistically in my childhood, Dendy Park. Spell park backwards and you get krap which pretty much describes what it was like. Actually, to be honest, it was, for the first few years of my residence, which began when I was aged around 18 months, the Brighton tip, complete with reeking, smouldering mounds of garbage and quite fascinating bulldozers moving them around.
On weekends, I used to wander through the dirt tracks skirting the mounds and it was as though I were on another planet. At around the time the tip was closed and the area allowed to lay fallow for several years in preparation for the day when it truly became a park, I realised that I didn't have to pretend to be on another planet, but I digress.
I sat at a table outside a small coffee shop bordering the Nepean Highway, all eight lanes of it and that doesn't include the service road. In my childhood, the Nepean Highway consisted of one seriously congested lane each way and was neither more nor less than a gasoline alley. On the side of the highway nearest my home were houses, long gone for additional lanes, in which people could be heard choking late into the night. On the other side, which was not actually part of Brighton but of another, altogether darker and more downmarket area called Moorabbin, were light industrial premises: a tyre shop, an electroplater, a sweatshop and so on. It was the electroplater's that had been converted to a coffee shop and outside which I sat this morning, drinking a long black and munching a strawberry muffin.
Gazing across the service road, which had actually been the southbound lane of the original highway, and looking further across the eight lanes divided into two parts by a not unattractive three metres of median strip, I could see the fence at the back of Les' property. Les lived close to the end of my street and still does. He had three daughters who became my friends. He and his wife eventually managed to produce a son as well but too many years separated us for us ever to know each other well.
My father and Les had gone halves in buying a lawnmower that had the temperament of a particularly spiteful camel. My job was to supply the labour: not just to mow ourlawn, 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.
With all this coming back, the muffin was starting to taste like old seaweed. Concentrating on something more pleasant, I recalled a small tent pitched on Les's back lawn wherein I and his oldest daughter enjoyed our own little anatomy lessons, with the adults in deckchairs all around us, not suspecting a thing. That brought a grin to my face and fleetingly I noticed that the coffee was pretty good.
The best roast dinners I've ever enjoyed I ate in that house. 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.
Neither was that time all girls and catcalls from my father. I'd left my car in the lot over at at Victory Park which was where I used to mix it with the local boys, playing 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 came along 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.
OK, moving right along. I had a reason to be in Brighton: an appointment in Middle Brighton to talk to some people about autism, whatever that is. Walking along Church St, the main shopping precinct, I noticed only a few changes from an earlier time. Tiilen's had gone. Tiilen had been a Finnish jeweller and why such a person should ever have had a shop in Church St, Middle Brighton was one of life's little mysteries. But he retired, died, whatever and now the space has been eaten up by the neighbouring pub and turned into a beer garden. Or whatever Brighton calls them these days: "The Annexe" would be a likely candidate. Crabbed, wizened, whining, carping Len Herberte the barber had probably been dead for years. His shop was on the corner of Church and Carpenter Streets across from what was then the post office and he was very good at the 1950s style known as the "short back and sides" or the "short backa" which was just as well because it was all he could manage. Memories of him butchering my hair every two weeks go back to an early time in my life indeed.
Church Street. Range Rovers galore driven by women to whom $300 spent on a hairstyle was a bagatelle. They'd spend that much on their dogs' hairstyles. Whose sons went to Brighton Grammar and daughters to Firbank. Farting around in glorified tanks and speaking in affected accents. Taught to think of England as "home".
The railway still runs across Church St on its way from the city to Brighton Beach and Sandringham. This is surprisingly much as it was. Walking across it brought back the memory of an incident with Freddie Dawkins and Ash. All of us in year 8 at Brighton High. Freddie Dawkins was a wally. He'd always been one and always would be and had leeched onto me because our fathers were friends and no-one else would have him. I didn't put Freddie into my autobiography; whatever else that document is, it isn't Wally World. So I'm waiting on my bike at the Church St level crossing for a train to do it's thing and who should come along but Ash, someone I particularly wanted to talk to about the upcoming weekend. Ash and I were both members of a small club called the Midwich Cuckoos, named (we believed) quite appropriately after the book by John Wyndham, which met on weekends in Johnny B's garage but I wanted to spend some time with him alone. Now seemed like a good time to arrange it.
Who else should come along but Freddie. "What are you talking to Ashley for? Don't you know he's a poof?"
Ash, blazing red with both embarrassment and anger, the crossing gates open so he goes storming off. "Listen Freddie", I say, "there's something you need to know"...........
............exit Freddie, mercifully, from my life forever. Ash and I laughing about it on the following weekend.
I crossed there a thousand times as a child. Why that memory should come along I have no idea.
So on to the appointment. What used to be called a "sheltered workshop", now given just a name like BRIVIS which means something terribly complicated but it's just a sheltered workshop located in Middle Crescent, Middle Brighton. Where I have spoken before. The last time got me an invitation to visit Brighton Grammar on a reminiscence, which I describe in my autobiography like this: "I saw small boys draped over desks, I heard them speak before they were spoken to, and, occasionally, in the brilliant light of day, I saw old ghosts. A turn of light or the turn of a corner managed sometimes to bring memories flooding back. The clock in its tower still has the same old chime. I saw a diagnosed autistic student become distressed in a playground and I saw him comforted by other students, instead of kicked. An autistic boy was with me and when he saw that, wanted to enrol." No such invitation this time.
Staff having their professional development. All terribly interested. "Nice to see you again, we were so interested last time. Now we have a lot of new staff. Cup of tea?" Yackity blah x 3, questions, goodbye, come back to see us again. I go to my car parked outside what used to be Marge of Baleful Memory's house, drive past Firbank and head into Bay St in North Brighton for lunch.
Pick the boutique restaurant. Cheese rolls for 50% more than just about anywhere else. How about a nice focaccia? Why not? Rubenstein's hardware is now a vegetarian restaurant with a good line in cheese and tomato focaccias and, at only 30% more than I'd pay in the city, represents a bargain.
Gee, it's changed around here. The gutters around Brighton Technical College used to flow with more blood than water and now the tech itself has gone, replaced by townhouses. The workers' cottages between Bay St and the Nepean Highway have been renovated, many have had extra storeys added and none sells for less than three quarters of a mil.
It's the herd instinct gone absolutely bonkers. People slaving their guts out to get an address in Brighton, for what? Oh, so that they can feel successful, to show off. In the hope that their grandchildren might be elected to membership of the Yacht Club? When I was growing up, most of Brighton was nowhere. Now it's gentrified to the point of absurdity. I'm not sure I'm still on Earth until I reach my car which is comfortingly terrestrial. The seat is a seat, the wheel is a circle and all's right with my little world. Over the Nepean Highway, into Elsternwick and I'm back in reality.