Almanac Memoir: Crawford Street

 

 

From when I was born until the age of eight, Crawford Street – and the streets in the surrounding block – was my whole world. My football and I were familiar with every crack in the footpath, and every bump in the bitumen on the road. Apart from games of footy and cricket, the other kids in the street and I would entertain ourselves with games of anything else that someone might improvise on the day. My blue sky memories are of every day being sunny and bright. On the weekends and school holidays we would play outside on the street, and in the backyards and driveways of houses, from morning until dusk. The only house off limits was the dilapidated old place on the corner which everyone believed was haunted.

 

Then the mums would call in their children for dinner. Before eating, my mum would insist that I wash up. Sometimes I would need her to help me to remove stones and gravel from scraped knees, elbows, and palms. Generous dabbing of Mercurochrome onto the grazes would follow. It’s funny how the cuts and bruises never started hurting until it was time to come inside. I suppose there wasn’t time to worry about aches and pains when there were games to be played and mischief to be made. In the warmer weather, sometimes my dad would make an excuse about needing to fix the television antenna, and he would clamber up a ladder and onto the roof of our house. Then he would reach down and haul me up, then we would sit quietly. From the peak of the roof we could see across Hobson’s Bay to the city.

 

The street was lined with workers’ cottages, in varying states of disrepair. Gentrification had not yet arrived in 1970’s Newport. There was one brand new house that had been built on a vacant block only a couple of years before. When I was four, mum would prepare for me a Vegemite sandwich and I would set off in my pedal-car and watch the bricklayers work on this new house. One morning, when I returned home early, mum asked me why. “We are fucked for bricks!” I announced.

 

The milk bar around the corner was the centre of this self-contained universe. It sold everything from sliced meats to smokes and matches, from loaves of bread in wax paper to firecrackers. It was the place where neighbourhood gossip and rumours were dispensed and shared. Mum and dad would regularly send me around to the shop with money for Black and White cigarettes, which Mr and Mrs Miles had no hesitation in selling me because everyone knew everyone else.

 

Rod and his family lived directly across the road from our house. Rod was ten years old, and at that age a difference of two years could sometimes feel like a generation gap. He lived with his mother and two sisters. He introduced me to comic books and the word ‘ratbag’. I could not understand why his father lived in Western Australia. Whenever I asked him why his dad not live with him he would shrug off the question and simply say, “I am the man of the house”.

 

Some days, Rod and I would mount our bicycles and venture further from the comfort of our usual surroundings. Cycling through streets only two or three blocks away from Crawford Street felt like exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. The houses in those streets were unfamiliar and the kids who lived there seemed unfriendly. But probably it was only because we did not know them. Occasionally Rod would suggest that we stray even further, but I was always too timid to travel too far from home.

 

My dad tolerated Rod, but never warmed to him. He straight out said to me that Rod was a bully, but I said that I didn’t think that he bullied me. Dad pointed out I was taller and stronger than Rod, despite the age difference. “He teases and makes fun of the smaller kids, especially the girls in the street.” I watched Rod more closely after that. I began to notice that he possessed a nasty streak, which wasn’t so much physical as verbal. I was not surprised that my dad was correct, but I was disappointed, nonetheless.

 

I couldn’t comprehend why it no longer felt as enjoyable to be mucking around with Rod. But the discomfort was real. I gravitated toward Nicky and Vlado, a pair of Yugoslav brothers who lived further down the block. Their parents spoke very little English, but there was always the smell of food wafting out through the windows. In the small, concrete backyard their dad and his mates would sit on chairs placed in a circle, drinking, arguing, laughing, and shouting in a language I had no hope of understanding. The brothers were a year younger than me, and one day they confessed that they were frightened of Rod.

 

Rod and his family moved away from Crawford Street when I was nine years old, and our family followed not long after. I never again saw Nicky and Vlado. But I did see Rod again. Once.

 

In a crowded Williamstown pub one night in my early twenties, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned, and recognized him instantly. Rod was looking a little worse for wear, and not just from the beers. He seemed happy to see me. It was only slightly discernible, but there was a harder edge to him, perhaps explained by the period of time he had spent in a youth prison. He did not recommend the experience but wore it as a badge of honour. We scratched and strained to recall the names and faces of the kids and families who lived in our street fifteen or so years earlier, and laughed about the games we had played incessantly. I wondered if he remembered how I pulled away from him. I could not recall the time that he accompanied our family to the Royal Melbourne Show, but he distinctly remembered that my mum had bought him a couple of showbags. I felt sad for him when he said “Those years in Crawford Street were the best years of my life, mate. It was all downhill from there.”

 

There was an awkwardness to our conversation, for the only thing we really had in common was that we had lived on the same street when we were children in primary school. Sometimes that connection is enough, but I suspect that more often than not, such a tenuous link is insufficient for two very different people to sustain a relationship. Despite keeping an eye out for him for months afterwards, I never saw him again.

 

Occasionally I detour down Crawford Street. In some ways it is familiar, nearly all of the houses of my youth still lining the street. In other ways it has changed, the makeovers and additions adding a sparkle to what was a decidedly blue collar area. Even the haunted house on the corner has been renovated – it changed hands a few years ago for $2 million. And I marvel that what was once my entire universe now seems so small, so narrow, much more green and leafier, and seemingly shrunken with the passage of time.

 

 

You can read more from Smokie HERE

 

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