take me belt off to youse.’ We wouldn’t argue, we’d be off like Flash Gordon and sometimes he’d chase us yelling, ‘Go on and if youse come back again I’ll boot youse in the arse.’
Yes, he was a good Irish Catholic. Full of love and good cheer to all.
When he died, he was laid out in the front room for all the relatives and friends to come and view the body and pay their last respects. I went over because I’d never seen a dead’n before but they wouldn’t let me into the front room so I was a bit annoyed about that.
The Ballard family lived next door. Mr Ballard was a funny man who originated from Scotland. He’d been in Australia for years but his accent was as broad as if he’d arrived off the boat the day before. I liked him as he was always nice to any kid who came to play with his five kids and more times than not, he was always half shot. He’d often burst into song, singing all the old Scottish songs. I remember him always trying to make me laugh by saying funny things. One particular day he was trying to teach us all to talk with a Scottish accent, ‘It’s a broad brit moonlit nit tonit, always remember, it’s not the way you wriggle your tongue it’s the way you wriggle your R’s.’
Mrs Ballard was also a funny person not funny ha-ha though, she was funny peculiar. Peculiar in the sense that she would cross to the other side of the street with her head down, rather than say hello to any of her neighbours. She was friendly enough once you got talking to her in her own home but if you saw her five minutes later in the street, she’d avoid you like the plague.
Hannah, the eldest of the family was exactly one month younger than Edward. She had olive skin, black hair and brown eyes and was a very attractive girl with a lovely dimpled smile. People who didn’t know her mistook her to be Italian or of foreign extraction.
Dotty was eleven months older than me she was fair skinned and rather plain. She had a habit which I have always detested she bit her nails right down to the base of the quick. She was mousy and most like her mother in nature.
Lorna was about two years younger than me she had olive skin and black hair and she too was a timid sort of person yet with a rebellious streak which came to the fore as she got older. You’d be forgiven for mistaking Lorna as being part Aboriginal except for her lips which were very thin giving her a rather downtrodden look about her.
Annie was about two years younger than Lorna and was blonde, blue eyed, fair skinned with an attractive face and bright personality. She was a lovely girl.
Jimmy was about a year younger than Annie and he too had olive skin, brown eyes and black hair. He was a typical little boy who annoyed the living daylights out of all the girls, but he was a nice enough good kid.
Everyone who saw all the Ballard kids together could not believe they were related. Someone, I don’t remember who, told me that Mrs Ballard’s grandfather was a South Sea Islander hence the dark skin of Mrs Ballard and three of the kids. Or as Edith succinctly put it, ‘They’re throw backs’ Whatever that meant.
Lorna was an easy target for my terror tactics, it’s not a bit of wonder she became rebellious in her teenage years I probably drove her to it. I’ll never forget the day that I lured her onto our front veranda on the pretext of wanting to play a game with her. I had one of Edward’s cowboy guns hidden behind my back and when she came onto the verandah, I pointed it at her and told her it was a real gun and that I was going to kill her. I thoroughly enjoyed watching her squirm and I made her beg me not to kill her. She pleaded and cried but I told her it wasn’t good enough and I cocked the barrel and shot her. The poor little bugger almost died too but of heart failure. I swore her to secrecy to never to tell anyone or I’d load the gun with real bullets next time.
Living directly behind us was a little girl about two years younger than me, her name was Stephanie and the only time I ever saw her was from a distance. She was never allowed out to play. I used to call out to her through the cracks of the old grey wooden paling fence but her mother wouldn’t allow her to stay out talking for very long. When she first arrived there, she had her head shaved and wore a scarf around her head in the same fashion that the blacks in the cotton fields. I asked her why her head was shaved and she said she had ringworms. Edith held the theory that she had nits and told me to keep away just in case I caught them.
Hannah, Dotty, Lorna and I all went down to the Brisbane River near the Regatta Hotel one particular afternoon. I think we were sailing paper boats on the water or some such silly adventure. Hannah waded into the river, I think she must’ve thought it was only waist deep all the way across and all of a sudden, she went down like a stone. I thought Lorna was going to have a heart attack she panicked so much she screamed her lungs out for Hannah to come back. The current started to take Hannah further out and I began to fear that she’d end up drowning. Fortunately, though she managed to get back to the bank and drag herself out. It was an incident that could quite easily have ended in tragedy. Even at my tender age I learnt that day to never underestimate the power of the water.
I rather fancied myself as being a brownie and saving the world from itself so I joined up and went along every Saturday morning. Edward went to scouts and he seemed to enjoy them more than I enjoyed the brownies. Edith and Mum took great pains buying the uniforms and sewing our first patches on. To use Edith's terminology, ‘Once the uniforms had been bought, she became a nine-day wonder and stopped going.’
I had to beat a hasty retreat from Brownies when I found I had to tie knots in pieces of string and ropes. My hands were nearly always permanently wet with perspiration and I always managed to make the string and rope a sodden mess. The same with my piano playing, great globs of dirty sweat would splosh all over the keys as I was trying to play. I always had to stop and wipe the keys with my hanky which was completely useless because more often than not it was saturated from me having wiped my hands on it before I started the lesson. I can’t ever remember a day in my life that my hands weren’t hot and sticky and I’d have to blow on them or wipe them on my dress or handkerchief. It’s eased up in the last few years but even as I write now probably thinking about it, my hands have been dripping wet and my feet have joined them in sympathy.
Every so often Hannah, Dotty, Lorna, Edward and I would arrange a secret rendezvous at midnight in our special hidey hole. We’d raid the ice box and kitchen cupboards getting as many goodies as we could get our mitts onto and we’d have our midnight feasts and plan all sorts of adventures. None of which ever saw the light of day. I think we’d all read too many Enid Blyton books about The Famous Five and The Secret Seven because our planned adventures always included looking for smugglers.
The best part about those rendezvous was that our parents never knew about them.
I went to tap dancing and ballet classes for a while I was the only kid who could cheat in ballet class. We had to sit on the floor with the soles of our feet together and press our knees onto the floor to enable us to learn how to do the splits. I’m double jointed in the upper part of my legs and I found this to be a particularly painful exercise. So, I’d sit in my comfortable position with the tops of my legs together all the way to my knees with my lower legs facing outward. Anyone who has seen me sitting like this nearly break their legs trying to copy me. It’s something like frog’s legs trying to swim.
The best part about my tap-dancing days, immediately after my dance class I’d go to the pictures. I’d always be a couple of minutes late so I never had time to change my shoes. I’d run down the aisle of the pictures in my taps making a hell of a din during the first cartoon or the serial. Everyone always knew when little Amelia Long arrived at the pictures. A few times after I’d stopped going to dance classes, I’d wear the taps just to make a grand entrance and annoy the other kids as I ran past them click clacking all the way to the front row. I got more lollies that way. I wasn’t above picking up the many Fantales, Jaffas and Minties off the floor that the other kids pitched at me when I sat down.
Every Saturday afternoon in the Long household the black roller blinds were pulled down and sometimes a blanket would be draped over the heavy curtains as well so no one could see inside the house as they walked past. Dad and Edith would sit near the telephone taking many calls and writing messages on the top of the marble phone table. Dad would give us kids two shillings (twenty cents)