Goodbye Crackernight Read online

  About the author

  Justin Sheedy was born in 1968 and grew up in North Epping in Sydney’s north-west suburbs. He was educated by the Little Sisters of No Mercy, then by the Jesuits, and obtained a degree in fine arts, qualifying him to drive a cab.

  He has worked in radio, for a while as a go-go dancer as well as for the Australian Public Service though has since made a full recovery. If you have ever worked in the public service, you will understand. If you still do work in the public service, Justin remembers you, so you better have been nice to him as he’s writing books now.

  He lives happily with his wife in Sydney.

  First published in Australia 2009

  This edition published October 2014

  Copyright © Justin Sheedy 2009

  Cover design, typesetting: Chameleon Print Design

  The right of Justin Sheedy to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Sheedy, Justin

  Goodbye Crackernight

  ISBN: 978742984667 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978742984674 (ebook)

  Digital Editions Distributed By

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  For Juliette

  ‘I’m thin and emaciated’

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Let’s Pedal

  There Goes the Neighbourhood

  Family Snaps

  My Darling Josie

  Is There a Psychiatrist in the House?

  Preschool

  Bikes

  Tears

  Juliette

  Chapter Two

  Kindergarten

  ‘Little-kid Speak’

  But Whyyy?

  Fireworks

  Sex Education

  My Deepest, Darkest Secret

  Bad Rudies

  The Wonder Years?

  Chapter Three

  Bullies

  Afternoon Telly

  Towering Teenagers

  Religion

  Mum

  Dad

  Christmas

  Chapter Four

  Simple Times – Simple Pleasures

  The Valiant

  ‘The Dubbo Incident’

  Five-Star Family World Trips

  Night of Nights

  Chapter Five

  Good Boy, Bad Boy

  Punishment.

  Independence Days

  Wait For Me! Wait For Me!

  A White-bread World

  Favourite Foods

  Not On Bread Alone

  Chapter Six

  Epping, Epicentre of Nowhere

  Sunday Afternoon Parties!

  My Birthday

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  Drink It, Freddy, Drink It

  The Easter Show!

  Chapter Seven

  The Thunderbirds on a Saturday Morning!

  Sport, Sport and More Sport

  Aussie Cop Shows!

  The Midday Movie

  Summer Feet

  Big Boy

  Chapter Eight

  Fun For Nothing

  Neighbours

  The Suburban Unthinkable

  A Better Life

  Goodbye, Little Boy

  Sleep-overs!

  Chapter Nine

  Catch and Kiss

  What I Did For Love

  Childhood Smells

  Childhood Sounds

  Star Wars!

  DIY

  Chapter Ten

  Dress-ups

  My Heroes

  The Remarkable Joe

  Teachers

  Payback Time

  Higher Education

  The Hand-me-down System

  Chapter Eleven

  Siii-lent Night

  My Special Old Girl

  New Year’s Eve!

  The End of the Seventies

  Changing Tastes

  The Revenge of the Brevilles

  Seventies Crazes

  Seventies Fashions!

  Seventies Spunks

  Chapter Twelve

  Inheritance

  The Landmine

  My Favourite Place

  The Beginning of the End

  Rites of Passage

  Involuntary Acts

  New Taboos

  A Trip to the Seaside

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part of It.

  ‘Finishing’ School

  All the World’s a Stage

  Comedy

  The Immortality of Youth

  The Opposite Number

  Nails

  The Last Birthday Party

  So Long, Josie

  Chapter Fourteen

  A New Decade

  What’s It All About?

  Welcome to the Jungle

  Play the Game

  The Music of the Suburbs

  Goodbye, Crackernight

  As Promised, Back Home In Toime For Tea

  A Final Look Back

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  For any young child growing up in the suburbs of 1970s Australia, there were three days of any year that you held as holy. One was your birthday, one was Christmas, one – and by far the most primordially sensual, wondrous and potentially lethal to your young life – was Crackernight.

  Crackernight was a night of skyrockets, bungers, po-hahs, thunders, Tom Thumbs, ball-shooters, throwdowns, Roman candles, blazing parachutes, Catherine wheels and more. If my birthday celebrated my birth, Christmas the birth of Christ, then Crackernight was my childhood’s annual pagan festival. One night a year, the infinite normality of the suburbs was shot with utter magic.

  It was a childhood full of fireworks, and not without attendant injuries. A time of manic innocence, of euphoric adventure and discovery in adult hindsight the equal of any designer drug experience and of which, surely, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would have been envious. Let me take you back there. Join me on a ten-speed Malvern Star bike ride back to where we came from. To a lost era, and a vastly different Australia. If you’re really lucky, I’ll let you ride my dragster complete with sissy bar, chunky gearshifter and speedo, but only if you give me a Peach Moove. Hell, a half-sucked Sunnyboy’d do. In any case, I’ll have you home in toime for tea.

  I never had a Malvern Star. I never had a dragster. I had a second-hand, single-gear Oxford with a frayed couch cushion tied on for a seat.

  It was bloody wonderful.

  That bike guided me through the streets of the childhood we shared.

  Chapter One

  Let’s Pedal …

  What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you think of your childhood? I asked my lifelong friend Steve. His reply?

  ‘It’d have to be riding my bike, in the summer, in bare feet.’

  Ours were simple times. We didn’t have much, or ask for it; we didn’t need it. We were just too busy laughing till it hurt and having too much fun to notice.

  Now, if this sounds to you a glamourised vision, a rose-tinted retro gawk – well, that’s because it is, but I’m not being self-congratulatory à la ‘In mah day, we was dead poor ‘n’ proud of it, boyo’. I put the following to you. How many suburban kids do you know today who don’t own or at least have home access to a personal computer worth a few thousa
nd dollars? When I was a kid, the biggest things I owned were a second-hand bike and a surfboard made out of polystyrene foam.

  Yes, we might have spent an hour every arvo in front of the telly, yet we couldn’t have been as sedentary as the PlayStation playing kids of today. Now I think of it, there wasn’t a fat kid in the whole neighbourhood. By the same token, unlike the Internet-surfing, computer-savvy kids of today, our level of social and technological sophistication hovered somewhere around zero. The most technically sophisticated kid I knew could work a lawnmower.

  We didn’t realise how lucky we were at the time; we had nothing to compare anything to. Terrorism seemed as far distant psychologically as it was geographically, another world away in Northern Ireland and Beirut. To me, the Vietnamese boat people were just black-and-white pictures at teatime, and the ABC News with James Dibble always ended with a ‘funny’. We always finished our plate during that half hour. ‘Think of the starving kids in Africa,’ Mum would say. And I think that did sink in for me. Either that, or because of the time I left a single brussel sprout on my plate and was refused sweets. ‘No Two-Fruits and ice-cream for you.’

  No, if you grew up in 1970s Australia – white, that is – life was a heaven.

  I grew up in a cul-de-sac: Howard Place, North Epping in Sydney’s north-western suburbs, a street laid down on the original site of an old fireworks factory. In fact, since the 1930s it had been the site of the great Howard Sons fireworks company. The fireworks for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, for any New Year’s Eve display or Royal Easter Show since that time, this was where they came from. Evidently, when the first houses were being built on the street in the late sixties, pyrotechnical materials were unearthed. Whether the builders put on their own unscheduled Crackernight is unrecorded.

  North Epping wasn’t the Western Suburbs. It wasn’t the North Shore either – that was the twinkling lights across the bush of Fox Valley. No, North Epping was slap-bang in the middle of north and west. If the middle class had a ‘middlest’, Epping was it, and the residents of our street knew each other well. Geographically, it was a no-through road, the blissful dead end of an inward-winding system.

  There Goes the Neighbourhood

  July 1968: The Salvation Army Band struck up in the exact same moment my mother opened the door of the hospital with one arm, me swaddled in the other. They played Abide With Me as she carried me down the stairs. Whether or not the Salvos were heralding my first public appearance or protesting outside the very Catholic Mater Hospital of North Sydney was never sorted out. My second public appearance occurred an hour later.

  Even my grandmother laughed out loud as, in Howard Place for the first time, I was unswaddled. I’d had a bad dose of nappy rash in my last days at the Mater, the accepted treatment for this being to have your tiny genitals, thighs and bottom painted with a chemical solution by the name of gentian violet. All was a flail of bright purple parts.

  ‘He’s a bit skinny and strange looking, Barb,’ my grandmother chuckled, ‘but don’t you worry. Give him a few weeks and he’ll fill out.’

  ‘I think he’s nice,’ offered my sister, Frances, age ten.

  ‘Why’s his doodle all coloured-in for?’ squinted my brother, Pat, age five.

  ‘Mind your language, Patrick,’ ordered Dad.

  Bridget, age seven: ‘Let’s call him Violet.’

  ‘Be quiet, Bridget,’ countered Mum.

  ‘Your new brother’s name is Justin.’

  My new world was a haven of safety. By age two, I had already introduced myself not only to Mrs White next door but to several of the other housewives in Howard Place. I used to go out by myself – in my nappy – and knock on each of their doors, such a healthy, chubby little toddler as to be called ‘Juicy Lugs’ by my own family.

  ‘Hello there, little fellow. What’s your name?’

  (Dummy out): ‘Hello. My name’s Justin. I’m thin and emaciated.’ (Dummy back in.)

  That was exactly how Mrs White related it to me many years later, and many times.

  Family Snaps

  Before I was even two, I had been given a red terry towelling hat. Or rather, my parents bought it for me and had indeed tried to put it on me, but little Jussy didn’t want a bar of it. Each time they’d try and put it on my head, I’d tear it off. ‘No! No! No! Bad hat! Yucky hat!’

  After a few days of this, a solution was devised by my grandmother. The offending article was placed on my head and I was quickly lifted up so that I could see my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Well! Do you think my obstinate grimace didn’t melt? And to a smile of wonder and self-adoration, no less? My parents had gambled on my under-two-year-old narcissism and had won.

  I kept the red hat on every day after that. From those years, until I started preschool at age four, no photo of me exists without it: Dad, laughing, holding me up in my nappy. Red hat. My grandmother, beaming, coddling me in her arms. Red hat. My first ever sit on a tricycle. Red hat. My first ever day at the beach, me standing under beach umbrella looking deeply concerned. Red hat. Me and my brother sitting in a wheelbarrow in the backyard, brother looking content and serene, me looking pissed off about something. Red hat.

  There is one photo still in my possession which speaks volumes, not so much about me as about my brother. There’s red-hatted me in red cardigan, short brown pants and buckled shoes, sitting on the rockery by the fish pond in the front yard. Face down under red hat, my tiny knuckle is wiping back a bit of a tear, probably in trouble with Dad. (In fact, definitely. Dad isn’t in the photo, but he’s there, all right; a line of rubber garden hose across the driveway points like an arrow to his presence, just off to the right, out of shot, watering the front lawn.) Five years older than me but also in short pants is my brother Pat – he used to call me ‘Juh’ – sitting right next to me, his arm around my shoulder. His face is looking down to mine, full of patient compassion and understanding. ‘There, there, Juh. Come on, now. Everything’s all right …’

  What had been my crime? ‘Loitering with intent to chat-up housewives’? ‘Being small and curious in a public place’? ‘Being three without a licence’?

  Oddly, Les the Builder never had the slightest problem with me. He’d done our rockery and was now doing the rockery of the new house at the end of the cul-de-sac. I’d toddle up there every day around 11, we’d talk while he worked, then he’d drive me home in his truck in time for my lunch. All fifty feet. First he had a red truck, then a grey truck. We did this five days a week.

  Another family photo is conspicuous for me not looking in trouble for anything! In the vivid light of a late afternoon, we’re all sitting before a bed of flowers, all smiling up at the camera; Pat at eight in a candy-striped T-shirt; my sisters Bridget – ten, in ponytails – Frances, thirteen, looking as if she considers her chunky framed glasses in no way hideous. They’re all smiling. Coddled amongst them, me too. Red hat.

  My Darling Josie

  I was very close to my maternal grandmother. I just didn’t seem to do anything wrong around her. Consequently, there was no possibility of being ‘in trouble’ with her, and I must have responded to that.

  Her name was Josephine though through the experience of sibling after sibling before me learning to speak, it had become ‘Josie’ or just ‘Jose’. With curly white hair, horn-rimmed spectacles and pearls, she was a large woman with an even larger collection of corsets. ‘Oooh, I can’t wait to get me stays off!’

  I was the baby of the family and one day she told me that my arrival had filled the terrible gap in her life after the passing of her husband Ray. I loved her as an infant loves, yet her telling me this gave me my first ever sense of feeling honoured.

  From about the age of three, I would regularly stay over at her flat just a few miles from us near Epping Station. In the morning, we would watch Romper Room together, thrilling to the part at the end of the show where they called out viewers’ names in ‘the magic mirror’. This recurring experience provided me
with my first ever sense of nail-biting anticipation. ‘Romper bomper stomper boo, tell me, tell me, tell me, do. To all our friends at home today, have all our friends had fun at play? And in the magic mirror, I can see Michael and Sarah, and Patrick, and Sarah … I can also see Sarah…’ They saw Justin once …

  The bastards.

  But in truth, it was a wondrous moment. I was so small, I was standing up on the couch next to Josie, seated, and when Miss Patricia said my name we cheered with joy and Josie hugged me a hug I can still feel.

  After Romper Room, she would pour us tea from a pot with a powder-blue, knitted tea cosy and then we’d watch The Great Temptation with Tony Barber and the beautiful Barbie Rogers. At age three I was compulsive about watching this show. The lovely thing about Josie was that she took my need to watch it perfectly seriously.

  ‘Come on then, Juddy, your program’s on. Here’s your tea.’

  I loved staying over at Josie’s flat. It was across the road from the train line out of Epping, the traffic on it at the time including actual steam trains. One night after lights out, she had to come racing into my room to calm my yelps and assure me that the steam trains weren’t actually coming up the hall; they were just passing by.

  More than once I heard her praying aloud, thanking God for the wonderful life her daughter had and for the excellent man she had married. It was always the same prayer – a very long one, her voice very intense. As I was falling asleep each time, I had the feeling that when Jose had been my mother’s age, everyone must have been very poor, sad and afraid.

  Josie told me never to be afraid of the dark, nor of ghosts or anything like that. She certainly wasn’t and gave me a concrete reason why not. As she lay in bed at night, she told me, she often saw strange flashes of light around her room. With distinct hand movements she portrayed how these lights would flash up over her bedspread and into her face. But she was never scared of them. ‘That’s just my Ray,’ she winked. I was never scared of ghosts after that … except for the ‘Holy Ghost’, a little bit later on.