From 2 to 20
OK, so my story starts with boring baby pictures. Don't they all? Am I not cute? I liked my baths, still do. The first couple of unremembered years of my life were spent at a home in Mann Terrace, North Adelaide.
I must have been a wanderer and needed to be tied to a stake (note the rope doing just that). Could this inhumane, immeasurable cruelty have influenced me the rest of my days? By the look of that foot off the ground, I guess I was trying to climb into the bucket.
A little older with my dog, Buster (above). Making mud pies (as we all did) on the right, with my cockatoo on the cocky perch, and the kookaburra, hardly seen, on the bottom of the clothes-line prop. At one time we also had a pet magpie. A pet in as much as its wings were clipped so it couldn't fly away: a sort of pet prisoner as, I guess, were all the birds.
We moved to 213 Young Street, Unley, a suburb of Adelaide, when I was about two years old. An aging block of flats sits there now.
Mum (Lucille Wormwell) and I.
My dog, Buster, and I. I don't think he wanted to have his photo taken. Both these photos were taken in the hope that my brother, Jeff, would receive them in the POW camp.
So, the war is over and we're all a little older ... except, it would seem, for my brother, Jeff. No one knows who took these photos or why but it's one of the rare occasions, after the war, that he played the clown.
Mum in front of her garden. The garden was built over a fille-in air raid shelter. I remember that when Dad was digging the shelter, he found the stone wall of an old cellar.
Dad on one of Jeff's old (probably old, even then) motorbikes, a Triumph.
Behind the fence is a lane that ran between Young Street and Hughes Street.
Adelaide is surrounded by parklands, and the road running alongside the park, south of Adelaide, was Park Terrace. The next main thoroughfare parallel with Park Terrace was Young Street, then Hughes Street. When I was a kid, cows were grazed in the parklands and driven from there, down Palmerston Road to Young Street, and then down my lane and over Hughes Street to continue down the lane, somewhere, to be milked. I have ridden on the back of a cow in the suburb of a capital city.
When a boy, I used to walk from my home, thought the parklands to the movies in the city.
A rare family photo (below) in front of one of Jeff's many cars purchased out of his deferred army pay. Jack, still in the RAAF, still in uniform.
My friend, Merv (right), lived just across the road. Still mates. He maried another mate's sister, Lucille.
Jack, Mum and me in front of our vegetable garden.
Me, Mum and Jeff. I must have been 14 years old. I'd just started work at Myers and had bought my first suit.
As I got a little older (probably around 16), I became more friendly with Bob. Bob's house backed onto my lane (as I always thought of it) and Colin lived a little further along. Brian live two doors away from me in Young Street. We all used to go spotlighting (shooting rabits) in the Mount Lofty Ranges in Bob's father's old work car, a Rugby Ragtop.
Another photo of me to fill in a blank space.
Kevin and Alan (probably aged around 14) on my first motorbike, a 1939 Matchless 500.
It was about this time, when I was 20 years old, that I was conscripted into the army to do five years National Service. I was deferred twice, once to complete my electrical trade apprenticeship, and then because of an injury caused by Alan running in to me on his bike and crushing by leg against the rear bumper of the car in front of me. I was stationary and Alan was looking at girls so it was a justifiable, no fault, accident.
A little older still and I've got my second bike.
Here with Brian and his brother, Alan. My bike was a Triumph Speed Twin 500cc: I can't remember what Brian or Alan had. The photo was taken opposite Brian's house, two doors from mine, and with Mervyn's in the background.
It really was amazing how many lads of our age lived within a stone's throw of my home. There were a number who were my age, then more like Alan, a couple of years younger, and then another group a little younger still.
Did parents plan to have children at two year intervals and then to live in close proximity to each other, a Stepford-like conspiracy?