Category: Five Ways to Remember

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Five Ways to Remember: Jack’s Loves

L-R: Thirza Pidgeon (nee White), Bill Pidgeon, Isabella Paterson (nee White) and Jack Pidgeon, c.1919

Come to think of it my brother Jack had the makings of a great lover.  Great lovers and Jack had this in common, that something or other, they were irresistible to females.  Mostly, I suppose to females of Homo Sapiens species, because I do not remember any errant or rubbish behaviour on the part of the lady hippopotami or rhesus femonks when he confronted them at Moore Park Zoo which we used to visit with our grandparents before they turned it over to the boys & girls of Sydney High.

Most important about the old zoo and in the recollections of that august tea drinking safari were the lions mangily skulking over the lack of knacker’s meat.  It was practically impossible to throw yourself into their jaws because of the Bessemer steel bars which inhibited such spontaneous gestures.  The Moore Park lions never had laissez-faire of the Taronga Park or Perth Zoological Garden cousins, or were, properly descendants, who have the facilities to eat up any Christian in the mood for martyrdom and a paragraph in the chatterbox columns of the daily press.

But at that earliest age I cannot remember whether he had any real charm for all females.  Nobody had stuffed him through the bars of the lioness’ cage or tried him on a lady panther.  All I remember was him sitting under a palm tree wolfing the sandwiches and lolly-water of which I never got my just share.  So, to be quite truthful I really can’t say much about Jack as a lady killer of all species.

Down in the old buggy house the steps had been trodden on and the dust scuffled. In a way this was very upgrading.  I had been put to making love in the bran bin and always smelt of chook.  For now on we all sat is state in the back of the buggy in the dark and leaking shed.  We weren’t niggardly – the neighbours and their girls – all of us sitting up in state, riding darkly nowhere at all, but living in a past grown-up land alive with ghostly liverymen and pale proud trotters.

Somehow Jack’s loves seem to have been sidetracked.  It is a habit of mine to get off the beam.  But that is at it maybe.  Jack’s loves were innocent enough but the grand parents used to worry about him helping the help.  When she fed the fowls he was missing.  If you ask me he was in the bran bin rising out of the unexpected pollard with a barouche on his tongue.

I was sad when brother took the help out one evening.  It must have been every bit of nine o’clock before be returned after having been in God knows how many back lanes.  The backdoor and side gate had long since been bolted, screwed down and nailed up against all intruders.  Even the broken fence back of the barouche shed had been fastened to.  Nine o’clock was no time to tug at the great puller beside the front door which spung off the angry bells into the corridors and kitchen, I only heard about it next day.

But as a latter-day destroyer of domestic help he was the terror of Duxford St.

Now domestic help in those days was available and cheap. It was expendable too.  The great problem was not so much a matter of kow-towing to the staff – of bribing them with hot soup and cast-off dresses – as of keeping them moral and careful of the dignity of established righteous family life.

There comes a time in all young men’s lives when they are conscious of the mysterious amalgam of M and F.  I was fully conscious of this fruitful synthesis of the opposites by the time I had matured in Paddingtonianisms at the age of eight.  Brother never discussed the mysteries with me but I gather that he understood what it all added up to.

We had an old barouche or town-wagon or cabriolet or some family whatnot – down in the back shed at Grandpa’s place.  It was a wonderful thing, and although the varnish was a dim grey it had a genuine craquelle finish.  It had a high driver’s seat with a footbrake and a sometime silverplated receptacle like a narrow guttered epergne to hold the whip which had long since gone the way of the horses which had not warmed the shafts for many years.  Behind the box set (the driver’s) was a sort of miniature pub lounge with the seats surrounding U-like and terminating in the up and down folding steps.  This ensemble was preserved under a Puritanical layer of tell-tale dust.  That is – until the new help came.

Jack was in disgrace and the help unhelpen.  Sad.  Because I liked her too.  She left next day.  We won’t go into Jack’s other loves for he kept them outside the borders.

There was no possibility of any further unhappy family romance in “Trelawny” (Grandpa’s place). Out next useful was a swarthy Amazon with the shoulders of a Strangler Lewis and the bosom of a robin.  She had a moustache and beard as vigorous as Archbishop Makarios’ and was as tough as a Cypriot as one could meet in any dark corner of Nicosia.  Aunty Bella has picked her out and smugly aware that there would be no hanky-panky between her and brother.  I was sure too – I could not foresee the slightest disgrace darkening the now sunlit portals which overlooked the vistas of Rushcutters Bay.  I thought that this help a veritable horror – and to all believers in the reasonable workings of natural genetics, she was at that.  There would be more chance of winning yourself three lotteries running than envisaging scandal hand in hand with this Frankenstein Aunty Bella had cooked up.

Jack naturally behaved like a gentleman and was highly regarded by the family.  But I – being supposedly too young to know what went on, and yet being blessed with an observant eye – was vastly intrigued by the amount of time our help and an equally uncouth tradesman used to spend in the cupboard under the first floor flight of stairs.  Having been dutifully drummed into the adage of being seen and not heard, I kept my peace and was not unduly scandalised when I heard that the lady wrestler had taken the count with the tradesmen in the room on the first floor back.

I don’t know how he got in to stay the night- but I do know the lady wrestler left and possibly took the makings of another with her.

After that Aunty Bella did all the work. We had no more trouble.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

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Five Ways to Remember: Hoddle Street

Hoddle Street never had much aesthetically. Apart from Alma Gahan and the bamboos in Sharkey’s place there was nothing of such stuff as men’s dreams are made on.

Bamboos and palms are good for young Robinson Crusoes and Fridays in the fun and games of tropical islands but children cannot be aloft all the time and finally we would wearily settle for the asphalt comfort of footpaths and gutter.

Out of this scruffy little street you could at any drop of the hat rake out the three rough diamonds set cluster-wise in the hollows. Billy Stoddard, Billy Gallagher and Cyril McCaffery. Anytime was trouble time when all were allowed out to play. The asphalt jungle was beset with terrors, catapults, pea-shooters and the garbage missile to say nothing of an occasional air-rifle loaded with spud-shot. Fearsome it was!

Yet, in dinkum retrospect I suppose Hoddle Street was the best around. An abundance of children could play happily along its buggy less fairway.  A short, pleasant fairway which any amateur with a No 7 iron, would have sliced from Glenmore Road to Goodhope Street in one.

We would play for hours at cricket, tip-cat, hop-scotch, marbles, tops and all that was fun without expense.  The only traffic apart from the residents was the evening lamp-lighter and the occasional perve, who we could smell a mile off.

Our back lane ran into Hoddle Street, so we were sort of part-owners of it anyway – inversely we were part of it.  Years later when I looked over the deed of 290, I found that our ground was a section of an 1833 grant of eight acres to one Robert Hoddle.

Mr Hoddle was quite something in the way of being a surveyor.  He charted the Bell’s Line of Road over the Blue Mountains, he surveyed the sites of Berrima, Goulburn, Brisbane and Melbourne where he finally settled.

Surveyor-General of NSW T.L. Mitchell snobbishly fobbed him off as a character who couldn’t spell and who should have stuck to his links and chains.  With a name like Hoddle who would want to take an interest in high-falutin’ English anyway? After a mis-spelt life he died in Melbourne on 24 October 1881 leaving a crumby £500,000 behind.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

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Five Ways to Remember: Haute Cuisine

Proust could have done it.  He would have remembered every taste of boiled swedes, or cheap oatmeal he had from the days before he even would accept a cup of tea.  All the awful healthy flavours which were not in the race with lemonade and marshmallows.

Sometimes when the leaden soldiers were not battling well my brother and I would have a go at peanut brittle, Bulgarian Rock or even marshmallows.  Most of our efforts were not worth keeping, although peanut brittle & Bulgarian Rock were hard to dispose of.  They had an indestructibility that even our scones lacked.

Mother was probably collecting the rents or playing bridge.  She accepted our beginnings of haute-cuisine with a great deal of grace – so long as we consumed or gave away the delights and washed up after the mess.

We didn’t seem to be pushed around too much to household chores – maybe we kept to a minimal area – easy to clean.

Yet it was laid down that on Sunday morning, mother was taken tea and toast to her bed three floors up where she read the papers in luxurious ease.  Occasionally she would borrow a “Truth” which would be hidden under a cushion later.

On the way back from Union Street the warmth of the meal tucked under my armpit released urges which the smell of chips rendered irresistible. I never knew how many chips I pilfered on the way home from the newspaper bundle.  Doubtless the greasy paper contained the latest news of the attack on Passchendaele or Gallipoli for all I bloody well knew – or cared.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

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Five Ways to Remember: Haunted House

Somewhere just down from King’s the chemist, was an empty house which should have been haunted, but was not.  It was cracked and all the cracks weren’t just the hairline things you see in the footling little walls people build these days.  These cracks had the nobility and the vigour of the Mississippi River network.  From the front gate which had even then long since been locked into rusted immobility, it was never used, seeing that there was no fence attached to it and one really did not have to open the gate to an estate which was not inhabited, anyway.

From the locked gate, locked so irrevocably that even St. Peter could not have opened it against the sole remaining erstwhile staunchness of the fence its opposite style member had parted with the things in it. It spread the non-fence demarcated by chick weed and pee-the-bed.

Am I still alive in Paddington?  I have lost the contact.  The stream of sub-consciousness is receding from awareness. – I am not remembering – I am not helping my childhood or my sons.  If I put it down, it is out of my system, – the agonies, fixed – classified, not to be endured again, exhibits.  That much of the effort sucked from the memory – one less thing in the bucket.

What in that crazed house must be written down and commented upon from the memory of our blood?  Windows awry, concrete cornucopias adrift from the brave façade.

Sunflowers growing through the gasbox and behind the windows a suggestion of life becomes sometimes the grey sun drapes were not so fixed as there had been a week before.  In the garden the long johns wart bent and withered in its maturity: the paspalum only just held its own with the buffalo because Glenmore road was kind in buffalo and greeted it.  It grew in such great clusters as only a motormower salesman could envisage.  Not that it was in any danger then, for the only pair of hand shears within blocks was regularly borrowed for the necessary training of the tiny lawns at Waverley Cemetery, wherewith monstrous regularity, our neighbours made their abode.

I’ve had this house – It hasn’t come to life—I have started off to say something and it has died in my throat. I don’t like that house now – It is not amusing, and if I think of it, I feel pretty near like it looked.  Some other day we will both go down to Glenmore Road and throw a stone at its memory.

[W.E. Pidgeon c.1971]

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Five Ways to Remember: Meals at Trelawny

You, that is if you were under forty and were a guest at my grandfather’s table, were not allowed to laugh outright or for that matter, even giggle. If you were under thirty you had to wear the mask of a sphinx no matter what clean clerical joke was cracked.

It always seemed a little odd to me that on the seventh day there had to less humanity in the house than there was on the other six.  Not that is to say that there was much fun and games for the young from Monday at 1 am (if you were up) till Saturday 12 mid. during the week.  It was just that if you felt like smiling on the sabbath you just daren’t.

Bill and Jack Pidgeon in the backyard of their home at 290 Glenmore Rd, Paddington, c.1915

Grandma who always wore a great collar which was distinguished by its height and purity of whale boned lace, always saw fit to give my brother a good clip under the ear whenever he passed.  Why Jack never learnt to pass her underneath the table or beneath the throne she held court on is still beyond me.  Not that Jack did anything very much. Being four years older than I, he couldn’t sense the danger of just being around.  I suppose his Eton collar and the fact that he sang in the choir sort of gave him (falsely in his own view) an air of sanctity which Grandma always failed to discern.

The clips on the ear Jack always earned for the little things he might have done or even thought of doing, but never had the hardihood to do.  For the things I would have liked to do Jack got two clips.

So it was that Jack always smothered up in a neutral corner when Grandma was around.

Grandpa was beyond all this.  He just sat and ate and ate and bemoaned his lack of appetite.

His theatrical indifference to food never seemed to dim his awareness of what was going on or off the plates to the right and left of his august presence.

One dreadful 1st Sunday before Pentecost our hired help foolishly skidded her meat  and peas on his lap.

If this girl ever had a name, that is immaterial.  Today she is probably wrestling under the name of Big Chief Thunderplate or another latin alias.  Although young, she had an extraordinarily powerful jaw which was never really clean shaven.  The mole, which on another face would be called a beauty spot. remained untrimmed.

A few weeks after she tipped her Sunday dinner on the lap she went completely to pieces & either stayed out on a tram or sat on a gas box till 10 pm.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

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Five Ways to Remember: Grandpa

John White, Wep's grandfather, c.1923
John White, Wep’s grandfather, c.1923 – born 1851 in East Looe, Cornwall, he was a Master Builder and former president of the Master Builders’ Association. He built many of the beautiful terrace buildings around Paddington including Paddington Town Hall. He served as an Alderman on Paddington Council from 1884-1913 and was elected Mayor in 1892. He was also the founder and first president of the Cornish Men’s Association.

I reckon that Grandpa was quite a character. He seemed always a bit like God to me. Not that his beard was over flowing and lustrous like the high cumulus that came over Taronga.

Grandpa always sat at the top of the table in the big kitchen and regularly complained about his lack of appetite.

Grandpa suffered no ills. Apart from lack of appetite which was cured at meal times – he suffered only the livings of cold weather.  These afflict the ageing and the thin like me, the un-diesel heated, the Grandpas. I suppose it was really Isabella Garrick McRitchie, his dour Scots wife who had the nostrum for all ills. Her recipes for cold agues had the genius of simplicity.

Grandpa wore, what Grandma sewed. A two inch bandage of red flannel around each wrist.  This was an infallible preventative against goose flesh and wintry shivers, and so far as Grandpa went it worked. We’d sit shivering over some bread and dripping and marvel over his pulse warmed vigour as his flashing crimson wrists downed with gusto a Scots Irish Stew.

I really think it was more a psychological matter thing than a good old viable commercial. Somewhere in the boggy ice ages Dracula had got to Scotland. The keen old biddies knew that if you had bloody looking red flannelled, medial tuberosities of the radius wrists – he’d be confused and drop you as a pass-over has-been, a very traumatic connection twice done-over somewhere about those thin blue veins on the inner sides of his wrists and consuming teeth.

It must have had something to do with the night he baby-sat me. God knows where Grandma was but I’m in the double bed with Grandpa paradisaically night shirted and me trendy in pyjamas. It was a handsome four posted cedar mausoleum with a horsehair mattress as soft as a concrete slab. Grandpa slept with the sonority of a Bach fugue.

I don’t know whether it was the austerity of repose or if dreams of vampires which woke me in terror.  I felt I was being masticated or impaled with an oaken shaft.  Awake, upright as the cold moonlight, my fears were resolved unheard.

It all came clear and simple in the cold light of the moon.  Rationality triumphed, cause and effect were vindicated as I unhooked his dentures off my flesh and slid them gently back beneath his pillow.

I hadn’t expected that – mostly they sat overnight on the mantelpiece keeping a purposeful vigil from their tumbler full of water.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

John White, W.E. Pidgeon [c. 1927]
Painted when Wep was 18, this is one of Wep’s earliest portraits.

“John White.” SYDNEY’S ALDERMEN https://www.sydneyaldermen.com.au/alderman/john-white/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2023.

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Five Ways to Remember: Grandma’s Funeral

Wep’s maternal grandmother, Isabella Garrick White, nee McRitchie (1853-1924), c.1916

[19 September 1924]

WHITE .—The Relatives and Friends of Mr. JOHN WHITE, Master Builder, are kindly invited to attend the Funeral of his late beloved WIFE, Isabella Garrick, which will leave her late residence, “Trelawny”, Gurner-street, Paddington, THIS FRIDAY, at 3 p.m., for the Church of England Cemetery, Waverley.
CHARLES KINSELA, Funeral Director,
‘Phone, Padd. 694., 143 Oxford-street. Sydney.

WHITE.—The Relatives and Friends of Mr. and Mrs. JOHN A. WHITE, EDWARD C. WHITE, HARRY F. WHITE, Mrs. T. J. PIDGEON, Mr. and Mrs. S. E. PATERSON are kindly invited to attend the Funeral of their late beloved MOTHER,- Isabella Garrick Whlte, which will leave her late residence, Trelawny, Gurner street, Paddington, THIS FRIDAY, at 3 p.m., for Church of England Cemetery, Waverley.

WHITE.—The Relatives and Friends of Mr. D. MCRITCHIE, Mr. ROBERT MCRITCHIE, Mrs. R. THEW, Mrs. F. CROWE, Mrs. J. MCRITCHIE, Mr. and Mrs. McLEAN, Mr. and Mrs. E. CARR. Mr. and Mrs. CAMEREAUX, Mr. ROBERT MACKEY, and Mr. JAMES MACKEY are kindly invited to attend the Funeral of their late beloved SISTER and AUNT, Isabella Garrick White, which will leave her late residence, Trelawny, Gurner-street, Paddington, THIS FRIDAY, at 3 p.m., for the Church of England Cemetery, Waverley.

Family Notices (1924, September 19). The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), p. 7. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article16160237

WHITE.— September 18, 1924, at her late residence, “Trelawny,” Gurner Street, Paddington. Isabella Garrlck, dearly beloved wife of John White, and mother of William, Frederick, Thlrza, John, Edward, Harry, Percy, Isabella, and Blanche, aged 71 years.

Family Notices (1924, September 19). The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW : 1883 – 1930), p. 6. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article245208210

Grandma was dead.  It must have been in the morning sometime in December [sic] because I was given some money to go to the pantomime down at Tivoli. What the pantomime was about, or its name and its impact on me remains securely forgotten, rotting away in some remote and atrophied cell of the brain.

Amy Rochelle could have been the Principal Boy. Principal boys were always girls anyway and Amy Rochelle boarded with us once.  So maybe a little boy was sent off to see the big girl boy he knew while the family went about the duties attendant to the proper care of the dead.

Funerals were always a big occasion in those days. Uncles, aunts, cousins, even down to the fourth remove would congregate at “Trelawny” while the men went off to do the right thing at Waverley Cemetery, the women busied themselves in the preparation of sandwiches, tea, fruit cake and the inevitable port wine to refresh the returning mourners.

Glasses of the ale too were served under the dancing shadows of the grape vine trellis to the convivial grievers.

All those garrulous relatives, complete strangers flushed out of obscurity by death mingled in monetary bonhomie and parted till death again did them join.  I suppose there were extra trams on these great days – no one had a car.

It was 1924 when “Trelawny” first housed a motor vehicle.

Uncle Sep, a devastatingly handsome and successful dentist had married Aunty Bella.  They lived at “Trelawny” and looked after Grandpa White.

Somewhere along the line, the old dray, the buggy and the mad town (carriage) had been sold to more rural folk.  The old carriage house was taken over by the Dodge.  Uncle Sep’s friends had successfully updated and hard-sold him into switching from trams to a car.  I was appointed car-washer and mechanic. Like all young boys, I knew more about cars than it is possible to know.  I was constantly tuning the engine from perfection to imperfection. If anything was right I’d fix it.

L-R: Bill’s mother Thirza Pidgeon (nee White), Bill Pidgeon (in car), Sep Paterson (Bill’s dentist uncle), Ted Paterson and his mother, Isabella Rose (nee White) and possibly Sep’s brother with Sep’s 1924 Dodge Brothers Four Door Tourer car

Still we used to go so far as Windsor or Katoomba at speeds of up to 45 mph and have picnics on the running board  safe from bull ants and other bushland horrors.

I learnt to drive it like a kangarooish motion. All very safe for the streets were as vast and “unencumbered” as the only hazards on the Nullabor Plain.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

[In 1925, Wep was employed as a Cadet Newspaper Artist for the Evening News and Sunday News, after his dentist Uncle Sep “armed with forceps and needles ‘intimidated’ his patient”, editor of the paper, Marmion Dart.]

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Five Ways to Remember: Grand Plants

That tuck-shop and residence opposite the school gate has not changed its shape in sixty years.  The weatherboards and the paint of what is left of it are still as they were when the Thomson widow ran it.  Of course it had to all come back in a gush of memory.  Nowhere else in recent years have I seen the small sunflower stretching in glory to the face of being.  Only here in the weedy ground have I seen the remnants of old time proliferation of sunfire blaze. Everywhere, sunflowers bright like the burst of color of coreopsis in bloom along the north shore line.

Long ago, before Van Gogh made the big ones commonplace, we as small children would stare up to the swaying sol six feet above and with a face as big as a soup plate – bending over the fences to radiate a joy to small children in the shadows of the lanes.  Sunflower and chokos over bore the tattered fences – the sunflowers were gay – we got sick of chokoes and chops.  The little sunflower plants had leaves like the feel of a cat’s tongue, raspy on the skin the loving tactile semblance of a sedge tooth file.

There used to be the depths of night shaped into gramophone horns adorning the more neglected lanes. With our bited dogs we passed the convolvulus bells with siren tendrils clutching at our throats.  In the twilight, the vibrant blue weeds of our back yards. I never remember ever seeing a frangipani or hibiscus or any other modern exotica.  There were scents of the evening – perhaps we were too young to notice the small white jasmines or the occasional tuberoses. Red geraniums, yes everywhere in little window boxes – not children’s flowers at all – very adult.

Arum lilies and cannas yes (mostly around the semi detached) -seemed to lend a glory to the necessities of human functions.

Who was not enabled on the way back from the out-house by the soft lick of the lily leaves and a fairy touch brush across the face of the asparagus fern?

My Grandmother had grape vines which bore somewhat edible fruit.  She had too, a sturdy clump of verbena shrub. Somehow this seemed to go along with her personality extremely well.

On Sunday afternoons after being let out of Sunday School we would aimlessly roam around the cabbage patch (fenced off of course) past the manure bin through the carriage paint shops (as those sheds were called) all mucky & soiled. A good fistful of verbena leaves crushed up in smelly hands.  How those verbena leaves reminded me of Grandma.

Just like carraway seed cake.  You’d have to have been born in 1860 to have acquired a taste for that.  Sunday afternoon tea was a bloody trial. Carraway seed cake and Sao biscuits, or Thin Captain. Perhaps we were given lemonade – if we had been, the occasions have left no impact on my junior memories.

Only one other plant ever impressed me.  Grandpapa’s glossy tree on the 3’ x 4’ lawn in front of “Trelawny”.  Grandpapa used to sit on the gas bar during the dusk  and note the comings and goings of the locals.  Everyone was on foot just like in a communist city. This tree, or shrub, was not more than three times taller than I. Looking from underneath its leaves were dull and undistinguished but from the verandah they were miraculously transformed bright green and glossy as a cerebric glaze. It was a very formal affair & impressive but never to the day has it had a name or a signature of being.  Perhaps it is still there – I should look again.

Trelawny (1896), 11 Gurner Street, the home of Wep’s grandfather, John White, master builder and Mayor of Paddington at the cnr Gurner and Duxford St Paddington, c.1920

[W.E. Pidgeon]

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Five Ways to Remember: Bishop Gaslamp Lighter

From round Goodhope Street and down by McCaffrey’s (or was it Stoddard’s) place he would come in the settling mist. It was colder and darker in the early winter. We had ceased play, even old Warder had given up his dismal barking, his sniffing at the old cast-iron lampposts. Huddled in anticipation of the new world, we awaited his coming. Mr. – I cannot dredge up with name but to us, he was a real mister, almost a bishop.

His silhouette against the last gas lamp he had lighted, greater, closer and bigger in the full dusk – until he greeted his tiny congregation. With his crook he would pull on the light. Down Hoddle Street and up around to Lawson Street we followed. The admiring flock, the bishop of the young and the lighter up of the lamps existed only for our particular joy and wonderment.

Always the shadows marched east from Goodhope Street. It didn’t matter whether it was winter or summer, those shadows marked the creeping end of day, finally to engulf the short valley of Hoddle Street with twilight yet leaving to the last moment the repossession of the golden light on the school and the tips of the terraces on the odd side of Glenmore Road.

Sometimes we children were quick and naughty enough to anticipate the elderly lamp lighter – yet mostly we seemed to follow him in a religious rite of observance to his ritual motions of the crook which brought the gas to light on the corners of our territory. We followed the soft effulgent glows so far as Cascade Street and called the ceremony a day, or better speaking a night.

Crickets and cicadas gave the drone notes to our shrill childish cadenzas as we marched back to a wash and something hot to eat.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

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Five Ways to Remember: Frederick Castledine

Wep’s father, Frederick Castledine Pidgeon,c.1912. Fred was a stained glass artisan and glazier and an accomplished landscape painter.

When you’re a small child and all you ever see in the house is knees and a tablecloth, and the big key which locks a door, what do you remember? What do the chokos growing wild around the lanes; the new fangled Studebaker depot down past the old horse drawn McCaffery’s? Motorcars spoiling our pitch on Glenmore Rd.

You know I dreamt up that these “Studies” had even killed our dog Sandy. But this was not so. It is just that so many cars are about now, I project a hatred.

Once, I remember my father coming down the steps, right down to the bottom of the house. I suppose he had finished work and was coming home to the area where the dining room and kitchen hung out. Perhaps to where under the steps leading to the salon de resistance was a grimy little poke hole in which one put brooms and mops and a hand clipper for cutting the meagre grass of our back lawn – or to tidy up the always overgrown wilderness of 6’ x 3” which covered father in lot 702A at Bronte and looked so wildy and beautifully, as the winds from the sea and the extra salty south.

Of course I have no memory of Frederick Castledine’s internment. A box in a house with a father in it.

Twenty seven years later at or on, the same site I learnt to hate funerals and all the bullshit and beatification which comes with the mothballs and glossy white gloves.

Fred Pidgeon, c.1912
Notes:

Wep’s father, Frederick Castledine Pidgeon, passed away June 12th,  1913 when Wep was only four years old. Wep retained the memory of seeing his father in his coffin, laid out in the front room of the family home at 290 Glenmore Road and suffered from claustrophobia for the rest of his life as a consequence. Bill hated funerals, subconsciously perhaps from the trauma of his father’s death at a young age but reinforced  as he says, approximately twenty seven years later at the time of his mother’s funeral in August 1941.

 

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