When I was very little we moved to Hampton. It was the first house that my parents bought. Old. Californian bungalow. Outdoor dunny. Unchanged from when it was first built just after the first World War for returned soldiers. The street was called Imbros Street, named after one of the places where Australians were during the first World War.
But when we moved there, it was just a house being sold, the history no longer relevant.
Up the road from us, in the same street was a family consisting of three children, two parents and a grandmother. Of the three children, one girl was my age, her brother was 16 and her older sister must have been in her early twenties and had long ago moved away from home.
My mother and the young girl's mother became very close friends and I was good friends with Sharon. We played with one another a great deal and went to kindergarten and then primary school together walking side by side each week day, even sharing the same prep class.
Sharon's parents were English. But they were also South African. I am not sure how that worked really. The way they spoke about it, it seemed as though being English and South African was somehow the same in those days. Sort of the last legs of the British Empire.
Her father was a heavy smoker. He had a droopy moustache and he coughed a lot. I recall that he was quite bad tempered and shouted a great deal. Her mother was a very tall and thin woman with a dry sense of humour. I always felt a sense of kindness from her. Whenever I spoke to her she would stop what ever she was doing and give me her full and complete attention.
Sharon had the most amazing collection of toys. Bayko building set, Britains Floral gardens, Enid Blyton books galore and a collection of hard plastic horses in various poses. She was horse mad.
My memories of visiting Sharon are quite significant. I cannot explain why. There is a mix of the sweetness of childhood and the loss of innocence mingled amongst the memories. Her house was full of interesting things. Glass fronted cupboards filled with ivory figurines, fragile china tea cups and a variety of little ornaments. In her home there were things you were not allowed to touch which amazed me as in my house everything was allowed to be handled, albeit very carefully. I would peer in the cabinets with intense interest at the contents.
The rooms in her house were always dark, with the exception of the spartan kitchen with it's butter coloured walls. Along one side of the sunny, utilitarian room was a kitchen bench fixed to the wall with two hand made brackets. It was timber and painted white. Sharon and I would sit there and have afternoon tea which consisted of thick white bread with butter and sugar on top which was then soaked in cream. I was only ever allowed white bread as a treat on Sunday's in my own home so you can bet it was eaten with great relish. I can still remember that lovely snack. If we were very good, her mother gave us each a tube of condensed milk and we would sit on the concrete back step in the warm sun squeezing the sickly goo into our open mouths. It may explain my numerous visits to the dentist years later.
Often I stayed the night at her house. One morning I woke up early and could her the sounds of the rest of the house awakening. Her father turned on the radiogram that sat in the hallway and I heard the song "When there is no getting over that rainbow" by Karen Carpenter drift into the bedroom. The smell of toast made me hungry and I made my way into the kitchen where her mother gave me a piece thickly spread with soft butter. She patted my hair very softly as I ate it. Whenever I hear that song, I am able to capture that moment of feeling small and treasured.
Her mother had a dress up box which was full of clothes that she no longer wore. One dress was a full skirted black and white checked number with appliqued Scottish Terrier dogs around the entire hem. It had two green and white stitched pockets on the front and I recall putting it on and going home wearing it with the full intention of keeping it. Unfortunately my mother forced me to take it back.
We played in the back yard with her many toys. After her father mowed the lawn Sharon and I would rake the grass clippings into a big pile and lay on it in the warm sun, the lush smell filling my head as I looked up at the blue sky.
Sharon had a collection of small dolls that were made of rubber. The brown hair was painted onto their smooth heads in the style of a Marcel Wave. They had little red lips, brown eyes and eyebrows all painted onto their small faces. Even the little red shoes and short white socks were in paint. The clothes, however, were glued on. Sometimes I would peel off the clothes just to see them naked and smooth. There is actually a small toy shop not far from where I live that still sells those funny little dolls and they have not changed at all.
One year her mother bought her a jar of luminous paint. We painted our teeth and skin with it and sat laughing in her darkened bedroom at our funny faces. Unfortunately you can no longer buy that paint, I am sure it was toxic as it did have a rather hostile smell and taste about it.
Her grandmother lived in a bungalow out in the backyard. She was always very sweet to me and would give me a lolly whenever she saw me. Her little living space was filled with all sorts of china. Cups and saucers, t-pots, ornaments, fancy dishes and a great variety of vases. For a building so small, she managed to fill it entirely with all sorts of bric a brac. Years later my mother told me what an interfering bitch that the grandmother had been in the marriage of her son and Sharon's mother.
When I was six, Sharon's brother, who was 16 at the time, molested me in the shed. I went home and told my parent's and was told to forget it, which I actually did until I was 24 years old. The memory was pulled to my immediate world when I heard the sound of an outdoor awning flapping in hot wind on a summer day. It was quite confronting to recall it so clearly, but what was more confronting was the fact that when I was 16 my father had hired Sharon's brother to work on our house for a few weeks. He was 26 and had just come out of jail after being inside for sexually assaulting a woman.
Why my father would employ a man who, only ten years earlier, had sexually molested his daughter, has always been a difficult thing for me to understand. It says a lot about my father.
We moved away from the area but my mother kept in contact with Sharon's mother. At one point her mother became seriously ill with cancer. It was a long struggle but she got on top of it. We moved up to Queensland and my mother would ring her from time to time. We moved back down to Melbourne and then bought a house just around the corner from Sharon's. My mother decided that instead of ringing the mother and telling her we would be moving down near her it would be a great surprise. The night before the move my mother got a phone call from Sharon's father telling her that his wife had committed suicide. For years my mother could not forgive herself for not telling her she was moving nearby, perhaps it would make a difference. The reality was, the cancer that she thought she had beaten had come back with a vengeance and she could not face going through it again.
We moved back to the area and I went to the local high school. Sharon went there but we were no longer friends, she was very academic and athletic. I was the opposite.
Her father died years later of a smoking related disease and spent the last twelve months of his life attached to a bottle of oxygen.
I last saw her in 2006. She had just left a very abusive 20 year marriage and was leaving to do charity work overseas. I think she was finally happy. She talked a great deal about her mother and I gave her my own mother's phone number in case she wanted to know more. But she never called her.
Such fond and significant memories are intertwined within that small window of time in my life. Those long sunny days, that lovely food, the kindness of her mother, the innocence and subsequent early corruption of of a childhood already troubled in many small ways.
Even then I think I knew how special it was.
Ciao
LC
