The Spiv: The Robbie Sparrow Story

By Jeff Hopkins

A retired sports’ journalist who we come to know only by his nickname, ‘Lumpy’, decides to tell the life story of one of his earliest and most interesting friends, Robbie Sparrow. The writer is caught in a dilemma; should he ‘tell it like it was’, or sanitise a life for a more palatable product. After consultation with the subject of the proposed book, ‘Lumpy’ finally decides to recount the story ‘warts and all’.

So we share Robbie’s naughty, and sometimes wicked childhood, his adventurous and experimental teenage years, and the early part of his working life, which sees him fishing commercially up and down the West Australian coast. The last fishing trip results in a period of incarceration in Fremantle Gaol.

Called up for National Service, Robbie subsequently does a year-long tour of duty in Vietnam. Upon his return he retreats to a bush block in the great southern of Western Australia. ‘Lumpy’ helps his friend develop the block and build his house, and meets Angela for the first time. Then with commitments at two America’s Cups, ‘Lumpy’ and Robbie lose touch.

When there is a ‘twitch on the thread’ everything has changed, and not for the better. A previous ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between Robbie and Cliff Birmingham, honoured years before, is now paid back in spades, and Robbie Sparrow has some ‘golden years’, and a positive influence on some young lives. ‘Lumpy’ gets an ending to his book, but it really wasn’t the one he wanted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781925447095

Jeff Hopkins

Jeff Hopkins (1950) is a retired schoolteacher. He lives in Walyalup, Western Australia. Walyalup which means 'lungs' is the Whadjuk name for Fremantle, and is part of the Noongar Nation. As the drama master at Hale School in Perth, he wrote ten original musical plays and produced and directed them at the school.In 1992, he researched and wrote a family history, 'Life's Race Well Run', and after retiring in 2006 he has written twenty novels, a memoir, and three 'faction' biographies.

Book preview

1.

An Introduction and Explanation

On the 26th March 1951 The West Australian reported that a young man had slipped over the side of a small fishing boat in Gage Roads off the coast from Fremantle, Western Australia. The report went on to say that the young man’s name was Robert Graham Sparrow and he was twenty-three years of age. He was Robbie Sparrow’s father.

At the time Robbie Sparrow was only nine months old and I had been alive just six months. So began the strange and often tumultuous story of Robbie Sparrow. I wouldn’t join the tale for another four years and then our lives would become intertwined for another fifty. Sometimes it was a close association and on other occasions we would be drawn apart, often for long periods, however like all strong interactions we affected one another’s lives profoundly.

Eventually when a lot of time passes you start to review your life in retrospect and there are always things that have been left undone. You come to the realisation that if you don’t do them soon, then they will never be done and that part of a life will be lost forever. That is how I felt about the story of Robbie Sparrow, who I came to call the Spiv. He has always been on my mind. Perhaps it is because he was one of my earliest friends and I knew him off and on until his death near the end of last century. More probably it is because he was one of the most interesting people I have ever known, both as a boy and a young man and then later, although I didn’t share much of that part of his life with him, as a man.

I had written things all my life as part of my career and when I retired in 2006, I was determined to eschew that as a pastime in my declining years. However, after years of DIY projects and endless gardening and the occasional journey, Robert Sparrow kept coming back to me, so I knew I had to do something about him. Before I started I had some real concerns. Chief among them was the issue of an authorised and unauthorised biography. In an authorised biography the subject is usually still alive and not only gives their permission for their life story to be told, but also has some form of editorial oversight. Conversely an unauthorised biography is one where any form of editorial rights is denied. When unauthorised biographies are published it is usually not all that is denied. The content is often questioned as part of a process of undermining the writer who didn’t get permission to tell the story in the first place.

I think this is an authorised biography even though the Spiv has been dead for the past seventeen years. In our last conversation when I suggested to the Spiv that I might attempt this project, at some stage in the future, he made one request:

Well if that’s what you want to do I have no objections, but I do have one request.

What’s that Spivey?

Please tell it like it was and is. Don’t sanitise my life and make me better in death than I was in life. If you can’t do that then we shouldn’t kid ourselves and might as well not record anything at all.

Warts and all, Spivey?

Warts and all; the bad behaviour, risqué bits, the sex, my time in gaol and National Service and all the sorrow, death and depression. You won’t have any trouble writing the ‘golden years’ particularly at Baldivis. You’ll enjoy that. You can also include all the times I urged you to break your duck as well.

It’s a deal, Spivey.

That conversation has become the defining mantra of this memoir. At times I wrote things and showed snippets to people and they would frown and say things like:

You’re not really going to include that are you?

That is when I would get discouraged and put the project to one side, but after a hiatus the magnetic attraction of the Spiv would draw me back. Then the cycle of starting and stopping would repeat itself seemingly endlessly. During the writing process, I have flushed with embarrassment at times, as I retold things that haven’t been mentioned for half a century. I shuddered when I recalled and relived some events and I must admit I have shed a few tears of both joy and sadness, as I typed away.

The Spiv is dead and all but a few of the players who fill up these pages have followed him on that last journey through ‘the vale of tears’. Do not judge him too harshly, in the end he was just my friend and I remember him fondly and miss our interactions. The only thing I do not miss is the nickname he gave me that endured throughout our shared lives. I use it here, but no one else is entitled to use it as the Spiv did.

So why was this ‘Introduction and Explanation’ necessary? Well I guess it is like one of those warnings you hear at the start of a particularly provocative television series.

The material included here may offend some viewers.

In this case the material may offend some readers. If you choose to read on then you do so in the full knowledge of the nature of some of the upcoming topics I have ‘teased’ you with here.

Now let’s go back to the beginning and see what sense we can make out of the Spiv’s journey.

2.

The Early Years

The Spiv lived two doors up from me. His family’s house was a weatherboard worker’s cottage. By some quirk of town planning it was built on one sixteenth of an acre. The rest of the blocks in the street were one eighth of an acre. So someone it seems had divided the block at number 100 and built two tiny weatherboard cottages. The mysterious Mrs. Chesney lived at number 102 the other one sixteenth of an acre. She was rarely seen and was very old. When she did appear she looked like Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations. We all thought she was a witch. She was probably just a lonely old lady. Today 100 Hubble Street occupies the entire space that used to be 100 and 102. So there is no number 102 anymore. Postal addresses go from 100 to 104. So Mrs. Chesney has been obliterated. It is as if she and her unpainted grey jarrah weatherboard house never existed. The Spiv lived next door to her.

My family had owned the same house in Hubble Street since 1913. However my father had decided to knock the old place down and build again. While the build went ahead we rented in Subiaco. So when we moved back into the new place in 1954, both the Spiv and I must have been about four-years-old. His birthday was in July so in fact he was three months older than I was. At times during our lives that gap seemed a lot wider. It seemed the Spiv did so much more ‘living’ than I ever managed, even though my job later took me all over the world. The Spiv didn’t travel all that much. Unrequested, the army took him to a lot of different locations in Australia and then to Vietnam and luckily brought him home again, but that is another story for later.

So I guess the Spiv and I met for the first time sometime in 1954. To explain his family is a little difficult because for a long time I didn’t know his true history. I can’t remember when he told me his actual lineage, but it must have been as early teenagers. That was the time when we had most of our best conversations. Where he told me I don’t remember either, but it would have been in a quiet place, probably fishing from a jetty on the Swan River, or under the wharf in Fremantle harbour where the Spiv could guide you through a labyrinth of pylons and narrow planks to his favourite spots. That is where we usually had our confidential talks with one another.

Anyway the time and place really doesn’t matter the Spiv told me that his mother and father, as I knew them, weren’t his mother and father at all. In fact Danny Sparrow and his wife, Annie, were the Spiv’s grandfather and grandmother. His older sister, Myra, and older brother, Ronnie, weren’t his siblings either. In fact they were the Spiv’s Auntie and Uncle. Now when I heard all that I was confused. As it turned out the Spiv’s father, who was called Robert, had drowned in his twenty third year, not long after Robbie Sparrow, the Spiv, had been born.

The story went like this. After his release from Fremantle prison twenty two-year-old Robert Sparrow had a brief affair with an eighteen-year-old girl from the district who fell pregnant. Robert didn’t offer to do the right thing and marry her, but he stayed with her. When her parents discovered she was ‘with child’ they abandoned her to her own devices and Robert and she lived together until little Robbie was born.

Not long after that Robert and his father, Danny went fishing in Gage Roads. Danny was a ‘lumper’ who worked on the wharves, but he was almost a professional fisherman as he fished most days and kept the Sparrow household well supplied with fish and sold the extra to bring in some much needed cash. Danny had a small boat and Robert and he set out to fish during the high tide that Saturday night, the twenty-fourth of March 1951.

Robert had been drinking, so Danny later stated, but whether he fell overboard or deliberately slipped over board we will never know. Danny who was virtually legally blind and wore ‘Coke bottle bottom glasses’ noticed Robert was missing and slipped over the side and went down the anchor chain to try and feel for his son. He couldn’t find him and returned to shore after hours of fruitless searching with the grim news. A sea and air search was mounted, but it was three days later when Robert’s body washed up on a beach at Lancelin some sixty kilometres north of Fremantle. The autopsy found that he had drowned.

I must have been only six months old at the time, so all this was told to me later by my parents. Dad went to the funeral, as he always went to funerals and described it as a ‘communist service’. Danny Sparrow was a member of the communist party and there was no place for any sort of religion in the Sparrow household. The man who lived between our two houses and was the next-door neighbour to both of us was one of Fremantle’s leading watchmakers. He delivered the eulogy for Robert. So the Spiv had lost his father before he was one-year-old and his mother was destitute. Her parents wanted nothing to do with her and she started suggesting she would have to put her little boy into care and up for adoption. That lit the blue touch paper for Annie Sparrow and she decided that no grandson of hers was going to go into care and be adopted, so she took the Spiv on as her own son and brought him up accordingly. She made such a good job of it that I never knew until Robbie himself told me the real story.

Now that I think about it I should have ‘twigged’ to all this much earlier, but as our narrative goes on you are going to discover that I was always a little naïve about most things and tended to believe what people said and take them absolutely at face value. You see Danny and Annie were so much older than even my own parents who had married late and had their children much later than most people did. Also Myra and Ronnie were a lot older than Robbie, but it never occurred to me that he was not their ‘little brother’.

Anyway the Spiv and I got to know one another from 1954 onwards and we played together a lot. The Spiv was an excellent marbles’ exponent and would always clean me out. I remember ‘dobbing up’ a parrot reel one day with no conception of its value and when Robbie won it fair and square and told me its worth I was mortified. I felt cheated and didn’t think I could ever trust the Spiv again. The moment passed and we put the parrot reel behind us. When we discovered a pump action fly spray dispenser together and the Spiv ran off with it, I felt ‘duped’ by him again. On the early evidence I should have guessed what was going to come later, but of course I didn’t.

We went to primary school for the first time together in 1956 and our one street continent expanded to a suburban world as kids from two and three streets away came into our lives. Later some of them would begin to dominate and even come between the Spiv and me, but for the moment we were one another’s protective blankets in an every expanding universe. Try as I have done I can’t place the Spiv in my early classes. I know where lots of people sat and I can still see some of them in my mind’s eye even today, but I cannot place the Spiv.

I do know he always came to school barefoot, but dressed in clean clothes and well groomed. He had his blonde hair slicked down with Californian Poppy hair oil. Annie used to comb it in a part on the left and then a big push back wave. I seem to remember the Spiv’s smell as that distinctive brand of hair product.

I can remember one incident in Grade Two when a group of us bullied the Spiv and pushed him up against the wall in the lunch shed and taunted him. Well I paid for that right royally when his elder brother (actually Uncle Ronnie) caught me on the way back to school after lunch and punched me in the nose for bullying Robbie. It bled profusely and Annie Sparrow rushed into the bathroom in our house and apologised to my mum who was trying to stop the bleeding. I was devastated when my mum told Annie:

Don’t worry about it, there is nothing broken and he probably deserved it. This boy needs to be taken down a peg or two every now and then.

I have never been punched in the nose again (even though I should have been many times) and I am now in my sixties, so I guess I learnt the lesson. Part of that lesson was never expect any sympathy from your mother when you get yourself into situations entirely of your own making. I don’t know how many times she said to me:

You are your own worst enemy!

The whole business never seemed to affect my relationship with the Spiv. We just carried on. In the summer we swam in the river at the bottom of the street, or played cricket across the road with a lamppost as the wickets. In the winter we kicked the footy on the high school oval and in between times we went to school and just grew up like kids in those days did. I liked growing up with the Spiv.

3.

Naked Wrestling

During our last year of primary school, the Spiv asked me whether I would like to come and do some naked wrestling with him and a few friends. I was quite shocked and adamantly said:

No!

I can understand that. You probably don’t like to be seen without your clothes on do you? You are a bit ‘lumpy’.

There it was, the first time he ever called me ‘Lumpy’, and it stuck. So it was, that for the next forty odd years, that was all he would call me. As nicknames go it wasn’t very flattering and I must admit I hated it then, but just got used to it when I was dealing with the Spiv. For him, it was nothing more than a term of endearment, he never said it viciously or as a putdown and I suppose like so many words, which get used all the time, it simply lost some of its meaning for him. I just became ‘Lumpy’ and that was that. The Spiv was not finished on the naked wrestling issue though and he pursued it:

Well if you don’t want to take part, would you like to come and watch?

What? Watch you and some other kids wrestle in the nude?

Yes. It is good clean sport and although we take it seriously, it is also a lot of fun.

Who are these other kids?

Fawkesy and Gerard Marks are going to wrestle with me this afternoon after school.

And where do you do this stuff?

There is a half built house just across the road from the school in Forrest Street. It is at the lock up stage, but we know how to get in.

Won’t someone see you breaking in?

No. On one side there is another house that is just being built and on the other there is a high fence so they can’t see us climbing in. So do you want to come and watch?

This afternoon?

Yes.

Oh, alright I’ll come, but I’m not taking my clothes off or doing any wrestling.

That’s OK, Fawkesy and Marks won’t mind an audience. There is one catch though.

Oh yeah. What’s that?

"Well we each put in a bob as prize money, winner on the day takes all. If you come you’ll have to put in a bob too and make the prize four