On the Up: The Making of a Perth Boy

By Tony Gallagher

Beachside Como and South Perth in the 1950s and 60s - the time and place of my early life. Then, even more than now, Perth's remoteness gave its citizens a distinctive independent spirit.

To guide you to that distant time and place, I write as wholeheartedly as I can - of Perth, the city of my youth, as well as the events, people, songs and movies that moulded me. That said, the biggest influence in the making of this Perth boy was my dad. So this memoir is as much his as mine.

In my dad's bleak childhood in Northern Ireland, family life and family love were absent. Sadly, such emotional harshness fractured his self-belief.

Like boys the world over, I copied my dad to be loved by him. And in my case, as I grew, I soaked up dad's repressed childhood anxieties. Eventually, they became a persistent, unwanted inner voice telling me I wasn't good enough. As a young man, finding and then grappling with the source of my deep insecurity became a relentless quest. And yet, as you will read, it was because of that personal struggle that I discovered a way to admire and accept my dad as he was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Mar 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922542182

Tony Gallagher

Dr Gallagher's professional life began at high schools in Western Australia (1965), after which (1970), he joined the Commonwealth Public service. Much later, (1974), he became a Foreign Expert at Peking University.Annette, the author's wife of 47 years, passed away in 2014. His son has two daughters, and his daughter a son and two daughters. The grandchildren are all gorgeous.Preferring to burn out, not to rust out in retirement, he continues to write and teach English gratis.

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Copyright 2021 © Tony Gallagher

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Disclaimer

As well as the life of the author, this work depicts actual events as they happened during the 1950s and 1960s in Western Australia and the wider world. This has been done as truthfully as recollection permits and/or can be verified by research. All persons within are actual individuals. The names of some have been changed to respect their privacy. Some re-created dialogue has also been modified or extended.

Front and back Perth cover images © Weston Langford.

https://www.westonlangford.com/images/photo/400150

https://www.westonlangford.com/images/photo/401721

Cover images of Tony from © Tony Gallagher’s personal collection.

Internal images, unless otherwise stated, are from © Tony Gallagher’s personal collection.

For my dear sister.

Rose, you perceived our shared

childhood experiences differently.

Then, and during my life since,

you never ceased looking out for me.

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I pay tribute to the process of writing.

Late in 2006 I began collecting memories of my life. Then, I had no bedrock idea of why this was so important to me. It took me many drafts to face up to what was hidden in plain sight: this poignant story of my dad’s awful losses throughout life, together with residual effects in my early life – negative effects, leading to self-doubt by the bucketload. Therefore, for me without question, the process of writing became a process of healing. So much so that now I accept those childhood losses and grow from them.

Secondly, local, national and world events, songs, poems and movies of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s form the context of my memoir. Their veracities have been checked - for the most part via internet sources. In addition, information contained in the following two source books anchors the chronological sequencing: The Visual History of the Modern World, funtastic 2005; Chronicle of Australia, Chronicle Australasia 1993.

Next, sincere thanks to the following people for their help.

Rose, my older sister, forthrightly disagreed with the harshness and imbalance evident in early drafts. Despite this, the special bond between us from early childhood was never at risk. Throughout my life Rose had my back. So it was with my writing. My daughter Lucy read early drafts too, very carefully. I’m grateful because Lucy’s considered opinions and error corrections were most useful.

Thank you cousin Kay for the many conversations we’ve had about the life of the Hughes family in London at the time I was a very young boy. What Kay recalled about Aunty Margaret (my mum), and our grandparents, has been put to good use in Chapter 1.

A big thank you to Jan Cornall, author and teacher. We met late in 2019 at Jan’s Turning Memories into Memoir course at the Workers Education Association (WEA), in Bathurst Street, Sydney. Jan’s sensitive and incisive suggestions have been a huge encouragement.

Sometimes sheer coincidence turns into a stroke of luck. That’s what happened in 2014 when lifelong friends Bob and Lyn Fisher sent me copies of a couple of 1963 photos - two of my UWA mates, plus Bob and myself on holiday in Carnarvon. One photo, their ‘Snake pic’, has pride of place in the ‘On the Up Photos’ section.

Finally, thanks so much to Jenny, Astrid and Ally of MoshPit Publishing. Due to their patience and skill, my story, appropriately and beautifully dressed, is ready for whatever pleasures await every reader.

Prologue

I returned to my room at UWA and got stuck into it again – that big essay on Shakespeare’s history plays. I had the feeling I was going to make it. The draft was close to completion, and less than two months to the final exams. Outside my window I could smell the new gum leaves, fresh and clean. The soft afternoon spring rain stirred me. Enough, enough of Shakespeare for now, I thought. Time to head home to mum and dad’s in East Victoria Park where dinner was waiting.

I sped off into the traffic on my Vespa scooter, light and easy. Yes, looking back, the pace of life itself was easier in the early 1960s, when I was 21. I also remember that, as I gathered speed, I hadn’t even the slightest hint that my life was about to undergo a huge change.

There were just four of us around the dining table. Quiet too, although dad continued to needle me. His darned emotional insecurity was bubbling up again. Of course it’s not me, I reminded myself. It’s from way, way back – even before we emigrated from London. It’s those awful feelings of rejection during his horrible Irish childhood. I felt tense nonetheless. But there was no relief. My parents were preoccupied, caring for my 12 year old sister. Ursula’s cerebral palsy meant that she couldn’t feed herself. Once plates and other dinner stuff were washed and stacked away, mum wheeled Ursula into the lounge. The TV snapped on. Then I heard muffled noise and sensed flickering light.

We sat opposite one another at the table. As was dad’s usual habit, he wore those old beltless shorts, his faded white singlet and no shoes. On display too were his muscular shoulders and sinewy torso. Without a word, dad stirred two teaspoons of white sugar, heaped, into his teacup. Then he lit a cigarette. The acrid wisps of smoke sought out my eyes and nostrils.

For openers, I asked dad what he thought of President John Kennedy’s recent visit to marooned West Berlin, to the Berlin Wall. Slurping his hot tea, dad waved it all away. It’s useless. Only for show. Then he began sounding off about Premier David Brand and his deputy Charles Court, finishing with, They’re useless too. I disagreed. The West was on the move. Iron ore mines beginning in the Pilbara. A natural gas discovery in Dongara looked very promising. Good progress with the standard gauge rail link from Perth to Kalgoorlie, so soon we’d be better connected to the East, at least by rail. The efforts of our political leaders counted, of course they did. And from them no kowtowing to Bob Menzies either, I said.

Dad would have none of it. He became angry, arms flailing. The personal hits started again. My working class roots? Apparently forsaken. My experience of real hard work? Forgotten as well. I’d shrugged off his ravings many times. But this time the insults hit too deep. No more, I decided. Without another word, I looked directly at my father, thrust my chair back firmly, and stood. He stood too. Oh, that look on his face. It was hard, so hard. I took a half step towards him and put up my fists.

1

From the Midst of War:

1942-47

‘My contribution to the war was to have babies,’ my mum used to say. True to her word, from 1938 to 1947 she had four. Like her wartime leader, Winston Churchill, never giving in was one of mum’s strengths. She was a Londoner to the core.

In August 1939, when my older brother Frank was a new-born infant, dad was recalled to the Second Battalion, Irish Guards. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. A few weeks after re-enlistment, dad was accidentally run over by an army truck, and his right leg was broken. By April 1940 he’d been discharged. He secured an office job in London.

Actually, dad’s accident was dad’s good fortune. It meant he avoided what happened to his army mates. In May 1940, the Second Battalion, Irish Guards, sustained heavy casualties at Boulogne, whilst assisting in the evacuation of British Expeditionary Forces across the Straits of Dover.

On the first day of the London Blitz, 7 September 1940, my older sister Rose was born. The night afterwards, fearing the worst, dad baptised Rose in the kitchen sink. Severe bombings continued for fifty-seven nights. The centre of London, around the Docks, was destroyed. Throughout 1941 the bombings went on and on. In May 1941, the Commons Chamber in the Houses of Parliament was destroyed by fire.

Through it all, Londoners were terrified, yet defiant.

Then, in the midst of war, on May 25 1942, I came into the world. The midwife who came to our house was paid £1, one quarter of dad’s weekly income. When speaking of my birth, mum would say,

‘You were the cheapest. You were a placid child.’

I can now say more than ‘placid’. My appearance of calm played an important part in the making of me as a Perth boy. It was my stronghold, the place where I sorted my responses to the buffetings we all experience in growing up. And of buffetings, I had my share, especially in my relationship with dad.

*****

Mum, Margaret Mary Hughes, was born and raised in Seven Kings, Ilford. During the war, mum’s heartache was that Seven Kings, where her family lived, was some 20 miles north, and across the Thames, from our sturdy, two-storey house in New Malden, Surrey.

Throughout the war, grandma was too arthritic to move from their home in Ilford to the nearby air raid shelters. Bombing raids were frequent and terrifying. During one, in January 1941, my grandparents lost most of their window glass. So mum was anxious about her parents, with good reason.

Blackouts were frequent, public transport unreliable and risky. So mum stayed in touch with her beloved parents via letters, delivered across the war-torn city. For their own safety, other kids were sent away from London in droves by their parents. But not us. Our whole family stayed put.

When I came along, grandpa was at the point of retirement from his job as a cargo supervisor at the London Docks. For years and years, my grandpa, James Hughes, a Dubliner, had been ship’s cook on The London Queen a big, sea-going ferry which plied the regular route between London and the Channel Islands. Indeed as a young man, during World War I, my plucky grandpa crossed the English Channel many times in supply ships, dodging German naval mines, and getting paid extra for dangerous work. During World War II however, no sea journeys for The London Queen – the Channel Islands were under German occupation.

Grandpa’s character was strong, yet gentle. Consequently, his life at sea, all the boredom, all the terrors, didn’t loom large in the Hughes family life.

‘There are worse troubles at sea,’ he’d say.

My grandma, Florence Hyde, the youngest daughter of English middle-class parents, was born during the reign of young Queen Victoria. Her childhood at Marple, near Manchester, was happy and comfortable.

‘My mother came from the heart of England,’ mum would say.

The Hyde’s factory produced candlewick, but by the 1860s oil lamps and gas lamps had begun to replace candles. Unfortunately, by the 1880s the Hyde’s wealth had rapidly declined, so my grandmother Florence had to seek domestic work in London. That’s where she met my Irish Catholic grandpa, James. She agreed to convert to Catholicism.

Mum grew up in an overcrowded but generally happy household. The eight Hughes children were raised from day to day by my grandma, and her mother, Lucy, my great grandmother. As the middle child, my mum encountered little parental pressure or domestic discord. However, there was much hardship.

I remember mum telling me, when I was a boy, ‘Until I married, I shared a bed with Betty, my oldest sister.’

So mum learnt how pennies could be stretched, and I learnt that from her.

A bright child, mum won scholarships in primary school. She then attended the local Catholic secondary school where, she claimed, the Ursuline nuns gave preference to girls from richer families. Nevertheless, mum’s successes at school bolstered her self-respect. She learnt positive ways of ignoring snobbery and circumventing prejudice. In matriculation year she won a teacher-training scholarship but decided to seek work in the public service to help support the family.

About a year before I was born, mum’s younger brother Pat enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He was sent to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to train as a pilot and bomb aimer. His many night raids over Germany and occupied France began two years later. By then, mum’s oldest sister Betty was working as a shop assistant and her other older sister Anne was a secretary in a private company. Mum’s younger sister Flo worked in the railways, the next youngest sister Eve in the War Office and the youngest, Ursula, in the Civil Service.

According to her favourite sister, Flo, mum wanted to marry a man who could provide for her, someone above her status. Whether this is true or not, when mum was twenty-three she met dad. My Irish dad, John, was handsome, hard-working, light on his feet and a charmer. He had little money and few connections. Both loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ movies. They went out dancing cheek to cheek at the Hammersmith Palais.

Mum gave him unconditional love. Dad told us, more than once, when we were kids, ‘Your mother gave me my first birthday cake, with candles’

Indeed she did – on dad’s twenty-sixth birthday.

That was in 1936, the year Fascism took hold in Europe, the year the Spanish Civil War started and Edward V111 abdicated. And people everywhere in England began to sense another big war was looming.

In sad contrast to mum’s family experiences, dad’s child­hood and youth in Northern Ireland had been bleak and loveless.

By the time dad’s mother Annie was thirty, she’d been twice widowed, had six small children and was destitute. Annie had little choice but to leave dad, then aged four, and his two older sisters at an orphanage in Londonderry.

Over the dinner table, dad once told us, ‘I never saw my sisters for a long time after I went to that place – boys and girls were separated. I didn’t even know they were there,’

And Mum chipped in too.

‘Your dad’s mum left him just inside the locked gates. Poor little mite. He gripped the bars and cried and cried.’

Dad stayed under the rather loveless care of impoverished nuns at the orphanage in Derry for the eleven years of his childhood and youth – from 1915 to 1926.

‘As a child, I saw no sugar or eggs. We ate bread and blinkin’ skilly,’ dad would say.

During those grim and troubled times, Britain was determined to hold on to Derry at any cost. It was a vital port, a gateway to the Atlantic, the seaway to and from America. In 1922, when dad was twelve, Ireland, including Derry, was rent by civil war. People in the streets near the orphanage were under siege.

‘One young feller at an upstairs window poked his head out too far at the wrong time and was nearly shot,’ dad said.

In 1926, as a Catholic sixteen year old teenager with no means, dad saw his Catholic countrymen and women being ‘sold’ in Derry, and in the market squares of nearby townships. Anglican and Protestant landholders named their price and set conditions for Catholic labourers to tend their cattle and grow their oats and potatoes. Land ownership for Catholics in Northern Ireland was almost impossible. They faced conditions akin to slavery. Because of these circumstances, a feeling of oppression became ingrained into my dad’s character. Was ‘being sold’ to be his fate too?

At eighteen, dad was working, with little prospects, as an assistant in a distant relative’s legal office in Armagh. He decided to enlist in the Irish Guards. This meant he’d join the British Army – the army of the enemy. But what other choices did he have? Since the General Strike in Britain in 1926 work had been very hard to get. Being a soldier meant regular pay of about three shillings and sixpence a day.

Once he began his life in the army, dad sent money from London to his mother Annie, who lived in a two-roomed stone cottage near Ballyshannon. But it was not acknowledged. Her coldness towards him is still hard to believe.

We learnt as kids that one time dad crossed the Irish Sea and went to see his mum with some army pay. Annie accepted the money. She then persuaded dad to take off his army trousers, offering to wash them. Once Annie had the trousers she hid them. Then, according to family legend, she said to dad, ‘No son of mine is going to be seen on the streets of Ballyshannon wearing a British uniform.’

Such remarks cut deep.

For certain, on top of the oppression he suffered as a young Catholic in Northern Ireland, dad had a feeling of rejection. How horrible it must have been for him to feel unwanted by his mother. It was dad’s ill fortune. As far as I can tell, she never gave dad the affection he craved.

Lack of maternal love gave a sense of insecurity to dad’s family relationships. We, his children, came to experience it. When I was a kid, dad’s fear of rejection showed. How? Many times he’d become extremely edgy. Of course I didn’t know it then, but the root cause was his crackbrained childhood fears of abandonment. They’d bubble, up. Dad was scared my mum would take her love away. He feared, because of his own mum’s rejection, our mum would discover he wasn’t worth loving.

This twist to his character puzzled me. Most times, he was a likeable enough dad – then an explosion. At those times of high anxiety, dad would turn to rage. I couldn’t work him out

Sadly too, the absence of a father left him without any model of how to be a dad. Indeed, my dad was a stranger to the territory of family. As a child, he didn’t know what it was to belong, so how could he pass on this precious gift?

Like sons the world over, I learnt from my dad’s example – and that included damaging stuff, stuff I absorbed subconsciously. Dad wouldn’t have wanted that, and I certainly didn’t. Be that as it may, I wanted to be like him and to be liked by him. So much so, that dad’s repressed childhood anxiety, his anxiety about being unwanted, about not being accepted by those he loved, wormed its way into the making of this Perth boy. As a consequence, making sense of my dad, and sense of my relationship with him, became a big part of my struggle for a balanced sense of self-worth.

Years and years later, I come to write this. Along the way, experience, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, taught me this lesson. Memory, mine, yours, everyone’s, is opaque – containing wishful thinking and unfulfilled dreams. Memory of facts is easy enough to verify, facts like the year World War Two ended or the year Gough Whitlam was elected Prime Minister. Check facts of this kind as you read my story if you like. So that’s not what I mean by the opaqueness, the cloudiness, of memory. And the cloudiness happens most when we attempt to unearth feelings banished from our conscious minds.

Laying bare the deep sources of emotions, especially our fears, is tricky. We protect ourselves, we self-sabotage, by sheltering behind our preferred perceptions – they’re like firewalls. So it was with me. When it came to the pain of facing up to who I really was, I tried to slide away, many times. However, once I decided to make sense of things by looking back, something within me persisted. I dug deep, and insofar as I can tell, I reached bottom.

As a consequence, I feel in my heart that I offer you my truth, the truth of what went into making me a Perth boy.

*****

When does one’s memory begin? Later in life my mum would tell me, ‘When I was four, from our family home in Seven Kings, I could hear the sound of big guns when the east wind was blowing.’

That was in 1916 when, at the Somme, and elsewhere on the Front, European manhood was being slaughtered.

Well, I reckon my recollection of facts and events could match my mum’s. D-Day (June 6, 1944) occurred not long after I turned two, and one of my earliest ‘memories’ is vibration and deep rumbling. Many planes were passing overhead. Croydon RAF base was not far from our home in Surrey. At much the same time, the Germans began hitting London with V1 rockets (buzz bombs), and then from September with V2s – the world’s first ballistic missile. I can recall the vibration of planes, but have no sensory memory of rockets.

I can remember too, between three and four, falling down our internal stairs; feeling claustrophobic during an air raid practise when sheltering under a blanket covering our kitchen table; scary, suffocating gas masks; and the horrible taste of cod liver oil, distributed free as a tonic.

We had a large garden in New Malden. Even today in my mind I hear that crunching sound from loose tiny stones as I stepped on the pathway leading to the front gate. I see dad’s muddy Wellington boots beside his sturdy garden fork, speared into the lumpy soil near the veggie patch. And I savour the sharp taste of dad’s ripe raspberries, plucked off the bush. All the while, inside and outside the house, I sense my older sister Rose watching over me, as she did all my life.

As the war was ending, on the fateful night of December 15, 1944, my uncle Pat flew in his Lancaster on yet another night bombing raid from Cambridgeshire. He had been on many, and this time he stood in for a fellow crew member who had to withdraw at the last moment. The Lancaster bomber flew over Essen. He and the crew were never seen again. The