OUR STREET

 

I HAVE the misfortune to live in one of the most unfriendly streets in Melbourne. Sure, we know our neighbours on both sides, and they are both polite and have been in the house on the odd occasion and they are approachable and make you feel safe and offer you reassurance that they will help prevent burglary or arson of your property. However,

oh, there is the woman across the road who sometimes knocks on our door to bring food from the church, and she is comforting as well, and she doesn’t have to do this, and she seems to like us,

there is also the small matter of the people down the road a bit, on the corner opposite who run a small business, and work incredibly long hours and are never home. We visited once when we had the fanciful notion that we might get to know the people in our street when we purchased our house. We had a lovely time, they were in good spirits, I think it was around Christmas, at any rate a rare day off for them but I don’t think they have had a day off since, we never see them,

well anyway I walk up and down the street a lot to catch the bus that runs down the busy street at the end of our street. I walk up the street most mornings at about 7:30 and I walk down the street most nights around 5:00. I rarely see anyone. All the houses are like the houses in the Ray Bradbury story I’ve just read- The Pedestrian- where everyone is shut up inside watching television, and grass f=grows on the footpaths and there’s never a soul around because walking’s not the done thing to do,

and I know that people do still walk. I’ve seen this happen in other streets, even close by here. As I said I walk up and down a lot and never see anyone. Even worse, some of the paths are obscured because of low hanging branches from overgrown trees in people’s untidy backyards. There is rubbish on people’s lawns and cracks in the pavements and many of the houses have a kind of dishevelled look that doesn’t inspire confidence. And when there is no house with a jungle in the front yard and depressing overhanging branches, it’s an ugly block of flats that have sprung up everywhere like mushrooms and you can’t help but think of twenty or thirty closed doors instead of just one, and how people in the flats are probably suspicious of each other and have never been in each other’s lounge…

we have quite a wide street here, bookended at both ends by a busy road. We have, potentially, as the Irish might say, quite a grand spot. It could be a lovely street. As I said it is quite wide, and it is set back a bit from either end of the busy streets, and there are a few houses that are quite lovely to look at, the one next door in particular that should be heritage listed. But it is those damn front doors that are perpetually closed, those shutters that block out any light, those people on the other side who stick to themselves and don’t want to know you, or slip in and out like they worry they’re under some sort of surveillance. There are even kids across the road, and I’m not exaggerating if I say it seems like we’re invisible. There’s no curiosity, no warmth, no interest. You feel like ringing door bells to shake them out of their slumber. This is not what I bargained for. I dreamt. Of….

street parties. We all go to Dan Murphy around the corner. We congregate in the middle of the street and the police block off the road. Everyone wears some sort of funny hat and each of us has a book under our arm, or have a funny story to tell. There is a little microphone set up where you can share your story. People even sing, like they do in Ireland. Someone has a machine that’s got a backing track. You all belong. You all share something important. You are all members of the same street. You feel free, and comfortable, and you launch into ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and the lovely woman across the road sings ‘You’re My World’, and the older one you know already from Lebanon knows some Lebanese music and that’s great, and the students you didn’t even know about are interested in the ARIA’s and you learn something new, and there’s even a Doors fan somewhere e=down the road, and you chat, just the two of you, for two hours about each other’s collection, and you are in a world of your own before you slip back into consciousness and get to know more kindred spirits, other people who have been transported mysteriously to your street just like you have. Towards the end of the night. No-one wants to leave. People pair off-

not in that sort of way. The ones who like poetry talk more in the encroaching shadows. There are two or three plumbers who promise to share each other’s tools, the two mechanics query each other over the size of their garage. Two men and two women from separate houses have all been jilted by somebody and never knew that they weren’t actually quite alone. Then there’s the kids. They might be friends for eternity. Any spare time they have in the future will be spent doing unfashionable things, like playing cricket or Cluedo, or ‘hit the gutter’ or four square at each other’s houses, and suddenly the iPad or the Nintendo will gather dust and won’t be used again. One day,

everyone will decide one street party every now and then isn’t enough, and these people won’t even feel they need to know anyone from the outside world. The houses are never sold, so none of them are turned into flats. Maybe, just maybe, the people in the existing flats might be invited. It might take years, but people will start trading and bartering and grow shared crops. Doors will remain open at all times. There will be no overgrown weeds and overhanging branches. Front fences will be torn down just because it is easier. And milestones and big news items will be shared and celebrated and there might be a big cricket match like the one in the novel ‘The Go Between’ and romances will occur, harmony maintained, and animals and birds will share the common humanity. Right now though,

I will wake up tomorrow, leave the house, the street will be silent and creepy, with not even a Boo Radley anywhere about, people will go about their business in the safety of their homes, those wandering about, few and far between, will have their heads bowed, and I will try one last time, because I can be incredibly patient, to catch the eye and smile at the guy who I see standing at the same bus stop every morning, catching the same bus.

 

A Place In Your Heart

‘YOUR street, rich street or poor

Used to always be sure, on your street

There’s a place in your heart, you know from the start

Can’t be complete outside of the street

Keep moving on through the joy and the pain

Sometimes you got to look back to the street again

Would you prefer all those castles in Spain

Or the view of the street from your window pane…’

VM (from Inarticulate Speech of the Heart)

 

Well, Reservoir is gone. Specifically, 50 Chauvel Street. I spent my final hours there the other night, with my parents, who were moving out the next day. In the end the lounge was filled with boxes and there was sparseness everywhere else where formerly there was clutter… and going back, children.

I first entered the white weatherboard house days after I was born in the now defunct PANCH hospital, in Preston, just a few miles away. Mother and father, and my sister and two brothers were already well acclimatised. I was to share a smallish room with G and J for the next 15 or 16 years, then just me and G for a while when J spread his wings. It was in this bedroom with my brothers where I lost most of my sight. I was on the bottom bunk, no lamp, with the main light mostly obscured, reading Enid Blyton and then Agatha Christie in the semi darkness. I have a feeling I continued to read when G put the light out. A weak yellow moonlight was my only guide. Until he left, J was on the other side of the room in a single bed. He must have still been there as an adult. I can remember him being at home well after he finished high school. G and I played a lot of word games, using the alphabet, well into the night. My only sister, C, was next door in a room of her own, and she would chime in through the walls. I can remember having difficulty sleeping. I would shake my head and send an enormous rattling of wood and bed springs from the end of the bed throughout the entire house. Mostly, people slept through it.

 

The next room along a narrow corridor from the two kids’ bedrooms was the kitchen, which led you out to the toilet and laundry, eventually to the back door. I have more memories of the kitchen than most of the rooms in the house. We had a green laminated table to place our food on. Always, it would be mother cooking. Minced meat would be squeezed through the manual blender to make cottage pie. Steamed vegetables. Little plastic animals attached to magnets on the metallic stove top. The tinned food cupboard. The drawer that housed the Glad Wrap and the rolling pin. The large curtained window that opened up to a vista of the expansive back yard. Venturing on entering the toilet by opening the closed door you would be greeted with a frantic ‘I’m in here!’

Most of us would eat at the table together in the kitchen. The forgotten conversations were probably about school. Father, however, usually after a long day at the fire brigade, or coming off night shifts, would be drinking in the lounge watching the news or ‘This Day Tonight.’ Mother would rap brusquely on the adjoining wall to let him know dinner was ready, and he would say he wasn’t ready, and his dinner would be placed in the still warm oven wrapped in alfoil for the next hour or two. Eventually he would walk in and say ‘Who can’t eat their tea?’

 

Mother and father slept in the large top bedroom, its window looking out onto the front street and the garden. Mother’s dressing table mirror was huge and we all pranced in front of it at some stage during our lives. Next door was the bathroom, and opposite this, the sliding doors into the lounge, the other oft frequented room in the house. Here were the cats on cold nights, sitting in front of the fire, and in latter days, heater. Gustave, Crystal, Snowy, Tiger, Penny- all had time there over the years. As is the case in most households, the lounge was the place to watch television. It was rarely switched off, besides a period early on when the room was dominated by a large billiard table. At some stage father bought a fancy Marantz stereo from a shop in Moonee Ponds. This provided hours upon hours of entertainment. I still remember buying Abbey Road from a shop at Northland, and playing it to death in the lounge. Countless Melanie and Moody Blues records were played on this stereo, all of these surpassed after the purchasing all The Doors records one by one, some of them imported presses from America, from Gaslight Records in Bourke Street. ‘Waiting For The Sun’, for example, was a real gem because it opened up inside with the lyrics to ‘Celebration of the Lizard.’

Although visiting Chauvel Street became a little grim at times towards the end, with its cracked tiles, worn carpet, flaking paint and dilapidated furniture, there are countless good memories. And that’s inside the house, not to mention the fun-filled experiences in the back yard playing soccer, and on the corner playing cricket. One of the best of these times was the ritual of Tuesday night visits that lasted for a while, after we had all moved out. J, G and I would join with mother and father for roast meals and we would compete in an exciting electricity of words, all of us with stories to share from our new found independent lives.

 

Opening out, to Reservoir itself, I think of all the lives I shared with neighbours and those close by. I still think of the Arbuckle’s and Luch and the Pretto’s in the same street, and from the adjoining streets, precious times shared over the years with Joe, Bob, Linda, Lisa, Michael, and others. Now, I don’t really have a reason to go to Reservoir. I don’t think there is anyone I know in Reservoir any more. There’s a place in my heart for my suburb, my street, and more specifically my home. But leaving it all behind is a part of life. We all have to grow.

 

New Digs, Again

Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes

 We sold our house a bit more than a year ago and have lived in another apartment until now- a smallish two bedroom one just off a busy, busy street. The people surrounding us were either quiet and non-judgemental, inhabiting their innocuous spaces, or they were friendly and harmless, agreeable benign apparitions in our small garden. Living in tight and predictable enclosed spaces doesn’t agree with me. I am glad to be away from it. I find renting is unsettling, but it’s not just that. It’s the lack of mystery and openness. I like some things to be secluded and hidden and undisturbed.

So we have left the little apartment behind, which, for all intents and purposes, was pretty kind to us in its uncomplicated style. We have spent our first night in the new place. A proper house with stairs and enough rooms, and a bit of mystery and seclusion, and little places to put things, and these lovely stained glass doors and windows. It feels like a lucky house- or at least, that it might be when the finishing touches take place. It still needs plastering and painting, and we cannot put some things away in their proper places because we know that the air will be disturbed again by noise and workmen making messes in the name of making things look better.

But who’s complaining? I can tinker away in my upstairs study surrounded by some beautiful books. I have these large picture books by Umberto Eco near me. One of them, called ‘The Infinity of Lists’, has a lovely picture by Burne-Jones on the cover. A detail from ‘The Golden Stairs.’ There is a Munch biography on display next to it featuring an intense self-portrait on the cover. Munch is staring in anguish holding a cigarette in his right hand. The three Thames and Hudson volumes of the ‘Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh’ sit underneath it. These are books that were purchased for me in December 1986, and will always be with me for their sheer beauty. The new Edinburgh University volumes of Katherine Mansfield’s works are also lovely. The first volume of her complete stories features a browny-purple cover, and has a photo of KM from 1910, at the age of 22, living in London like a bohemian and looking almost Maori. She is wearing a smug expression. The second volume is a rich blue, and its cover features a photo of KM from 1920, living in a hotel in Menton, France, at 32 but looking more middle aged and more mature than this, wiser, with barely three years to live. It is the year of the great volume of stories called ‘Bliss.’ I even have all my old diaries at my feet, the first entry of the first diary dealing with my turbulent emotions after the assassination of John Lennon.

 

 

 

Already this study feels like it has been with me for a long time. I can see a portion of the outside street from the window above my desk. Dusk is invading the street and there are some people outside somewhere talking. There is a tall plane tree in the right hand corner, its branches filled with ferns that are reaching upwards towards the sky. There are empty boxes around me and everything else is ghostly quiet. I can think and feel and breathe better than I have been able to do for a long time. It’s a quarter to nine at night. In the Australian summer there is still some light, but soon much of the light will be bluish, glowing from the computer screen.

 

 

NEW DIGS

OUR new digs are not going terribly well. We all feel a bit dislocated and would like to return to our waterlogged home as soon as it is fully ready, which seems to be taking some time.

We have a dishwasher that is unpredictable and washes some things clean, but leaves some things mysteriously mucky and greasy. It also makes incessant groaning sounds. The stove is a problem. The hotplate seems to get hot reasonably efficiently but the heat somehow fades and then some things are ready for dinner on time and others aren’t.

The water in the shower is a bit passive, and although it’s not exactly coming in drips, it isn’t a torrent either, and would please nobody, with the possible exception of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

The kitchen table is firm and sturdy, however there is a plate of glass on top, and sometimes water gets under the glass which makes it messy and difficult to clean.

It’s good, some might say, to have three television sets, and even better, some might say, to have Foxtel, however the ‘movie channel’ isn’t operative and we can only access Foxsports 1, 2, 3. To the uninitiated, this is the difference between watching regular games of AFL football with robust football discussion programmes, and watching boring rugby league matches, insignificant golf tournaments, and darts.

There are not enough plates to go around if we have visitors, and the bowls are too shallow. The frying pan seems to have been scrubbed with sharp fibres in the past, and there are only two saucepans. The plastic tongs have lost their spring, the coffee plunger leaks and offers only watery coffee, and the amount of available and necessary bench space is a sick joke.

The beds are too soft, sinking in the middle, and the sheets are too thin and cold. The trams shriek and clang as they go by outside during the night and the walls are so thin that normal children’s voices carry all the way along the corridor to the lifts. The lifts, by the way, are a problem because you can’t access other floors unless you swipe a little plastic card, which you invariably forget.

Apart from all of that, one could say the temporary digs are satisfactory for a small amount of time, but obviously not ideal for extended stays. It is difficult enough for two adults- add two small children into the mix and it’s a nightmare.