Over the Top with Jim

Chapter 1 A Russian called James

You couldn't get much further away from international politics than to be a child in Brisbane in 1951 but, although I was only nine years old, I knew enough to know that you just don't get Russians called James. I don't know how I knew this. But I did.

Perhaps it was because the nuns said the government was going to ban the iron heel of Communism in Australia. Or maybe I was just suspicious of all foreigners because of the number of non-Catholics and State School kids who were living at Annerley Junction in those days. Or maybe, after six years of religious instruction by the nuns at our Saint Joseph's Convent, I knew that the name of an apostle didn't sit well on a Red. Not even Judas, let alone James. For, despite what he had done by telling on God, Judas was still a Catholic and he could well have made an Act of Contrition just as he passed away and thus could have died in the State of Grace (barring any last-minute impure thoughts) and gone straight to Heaven.

And I knew from our religious instruction that no Communist like this new kid in the class could go to Heaven or even get past Limbo, even if he did somehow find out about our secret of doing the nine First Fridays so that Saint Joseph would make sure we went to Heaven.

I knew a lot about Saint Joseph because the convent was run by the Sisters of Saint Joseph. They named themselves after him because he was God's Dad and it was their job to teach us about God and how he made the world and Catholics. In fact the first line in our most important study book, the Catechism, was "Who made the world?" I was pretty stupid when I started at the convent when I was only four years old and so, because the next question in bold print was "Who made me?", for a long time I said my prayers to "Who".

But that was before we learned the answers off by heart: "God made the world", and "God made me, giving me a body and a soul". After that I worshipped God.

Then the answers got much longer and more complicated like some of the prayers after you learned off by heart the simple ones like the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and the Act of Contrition. These were the three main prayers other than the "Glory Be": the first one admitting that I was a sinner; the second asking God to deliver me from the evil that was everywhere; and the third begging forgiveness for my sins and promising never to sin again.

Not that there was much chance of risking a sin at the convent with all those nuns around, at least twenty of them, I reckon. They were sort of like God's policemen, dressed in black and able to predict sins before they were even committed. Think of cheating and you would be warned; consider swearing and one would appear; throw something and your name would be called. Impure thoughts were just far too risky. Boys seemed to be their main target, which perhaps explained why there were so few of us and so many girls at the school: outnumbered probably four to one.

They often referred to a boy as "his nibs" and if you did something tough, like pulled a girl's hair, they said you were "looking for notice" yet if a big girl hurt you they said "we should put you in a glass case and throw sugar at you".

The Sisters liked the same things as the girls - especially Holy Pictures - even though the nuns were almost all incredibly old and often had men's names: like Sister Vincent, Sister Damian, or Sister James. They wore large crucifixes stuck into a black belt around their waist like a dagger. Giant black rosary beads hung down from their waists to near the ground, rattling a muffled warning when they glided into a room like moving statues.

Apart from their hands, the only visible human parts of these nuns were all the holes in their face: the eyes, nostrils and mouth. This made them look like non-human creatures who could only talk, breathe and see. Particularly as the face was framed tightly by a stiff white material which hid their foreheads, ears, and necks. Their hair was hidden beneath a black veil pinned to the stiff white material with long pins which they often removed and replaced while talking to the class so it seemed they were sticking long sharp pins deep into their heads. The white material folded down over the bosom, reflecting light up into their faces from below.

It was this lit-face look and the stiff-headed effect which made them seem like the life-sized statues we prayed to in the huge red brick church in the school grounds - a church so sacred and holy it was called Mary Immaculate after "Our Lady": which is what we Catholics called the Virgin Mary to show she was no one else's but ours.

Not that I knew the meaning of "virgin" or the other words we used every day in prayers about her, like "womb" and "immaculate" - but I guess I knew enough about them to know not to ask any of the nuns what they were.

And I knew enough to think it strange that the nuns dressed in black, because it was not a church colour: it was the Devil's colour.

What I didn't know, as we lined up in our grade five class at assembly, was that one of these black figures was watching me, realising I was about to sin. Standing in the row in front of me was the new boy, the Russian, James, whose family had just arrived in Australia. The nuns said he was a White Russian, but he didn't look very white to me. Everyone who came to Australia was supposed to be white before they could get in, so it was obvious he and his family had slipped into Brisbane one night in the dark. We were all white - even the State School kids - but this Russian's skin was brown and his hair was as black as our school shoes. He had an ugly scar down the length of his nose in the middle of his round face. He also had a funny name the like of which had not been heard at the convent before - "Egoroff".

And, something even stranger, although he claimed his first name was James someone had checked the roll book and his initial was "D": which proved I was right. Even I knew enough to know that James did not start with a D.

One of the smart girls found out that the D was for Dimitri, another foreign-sounding name like Stalin and Egoroff.

"You Communist pig, Dima," I sneered from behind him: shortening Dimitri because it was long, as was our custom. Confident in the knowledge that none of the boys around me wanted anything to do with him, and convinced that he was too scared to answer I continued: "You Russian dog, Dima." At last, after nearly six years, I had found a way to be popular with the rest of the boys - the girls didn't matter: the only thing that interested them was homework and Holy Pictures. Particularly new Holy Pictures, which seemed to arrive every week to be held up triumphantly before the class by a nun so that the girls could cry in sickly unison "Oooohhh Ssssisterrr". Which was their girls' way of saying they liked something a lot.

Just as I was about to give the Russian another one Egoroff turned around: "You Australian donkey," he said, in English. Donkey? Of all the animals he could have picked this was the last one I had expected. Rat, dingo, grub, snake, yes ... but donkeys were friendly like kangaroos or horses. And how could they allow a foreigner, a dark New Australian, a banned Commo, to come to our school in Brisbane in broad daylight and call Australians names? "You Red worm," I answered just before Egoroff lunged his palms at both sides of my head saying "I rubber your ears", "I rubber your ears".

It was like torture, Japanese torture at its worst, and this smart-alec Russky added a whole new threat to my already awful existence. If ever an example of Red aggression was needed this was it: the Cold War they talked about all the time in Dad's cake shop was really starting to hot up. Forget the Berlin Blockade and Korea, where the Cold War was being fought in snow, and which filled the Telegraph every day. In the fights behind the immaculate church during Big Lunch or with the State School kids on the way home headlocks were applied by the winner. No-one had ever yet resorted to rubbing ears: not even in the serials at the flicks on Saturday afternoons. It wasn't our way of doing things. Our society - Protestants included - boxed or wrestled.

We didn't grab hold of protruding pieces of the body and try to destroy them, or, worse still, rub them off.

Only recently had the Russians got the same bomb the Americans beat the Japanese with when I was four ... a real humdinger of a bomb my older brother Jackie told me could blow up the whole of Annerley Junction in one hit. And now this alien had arrived: not only from Russia but after having lived in China, a country full of yellow people, which had suddenly turned Communist a few years before and was fighting against us in Korea. Right into my own class. What they said on the wireless all the time was so right: there was no place to hide from Communism. Egoroff got into our convent, and he wasn't even a Catholic.

Two things struck me about this Egoroff as he rubbed my ears - he stank of garlic and he was much stronger than me. Jackie always claimed that you could beat anyone up if you were determined enough about it but, try as I might, I could not get past Egoroff's arms to apply my winning headlock, let alone Jackie's favoured Full Nelson. And I could not get him away from my ears. Luckily the young nun who had just been appointed our teacher -Sister Veronica - came to my rescue and pulled the ugly, dark, scarred Russian off me.

Then she took me up onto the hall verandah to talk to me alone.

Unfortunately, Sister Veronica had heard everything I had said to Egoroff and, being new and young, she stuck up for Dima. She was nowhere near as tough as the other nuns. There was no way Sister Vincent or Sister James would have copped any nonsense from foreigners. They had both told us of God's warning that one day a dark cloud would spread from the north across most of the world - and they waved their hand across the map from Russia down to Australia. And on other days they had also warned of the Yellow Peril from the north ... until I didn't know which to fear the most: the black peril or the yellow.

Poor young Sister Veronica was too pretty and soft for her own good. The peril had arrived, yet for hours and hours she lectured me about this poor Commo. How would I like to be driven from my homeland and forced to live in another country and speak a strange language?

How would I feel if people there called me names and wouldn't be friends? He couldn't help it if he looked and spoke a bit differently. English was not his mother tongue. What would God think looking down from Heaven and seeing me abuse one of his children? What would Saint Joseph think? What would my Guardian Angel think?

I must admit she stopped me there. I was so impressed by large pictures on the classroom walls of men with wings guarding children near cliffs that the one person I particularly respected was my Guardian Angel. Life was so dangerous in Brisbane in those days that I always left room on my form for my Guardian Angel to sit next to me.

Sister Veronica must have noticed the effect this had because she announced in triumph that she was going to sit me next to Egoroff in class all day every day - like a human Guardian Angel so that I could help him adapt to our way of life.

That was all I needed.

I was enough of an outsider with the other boys as it was without becoming friendly with a Russian. I couldn't run fast, I couldn't fight much, I was down near the bottom of the class in all subjects, and I had a funny name. So there I was in class sitting next to a Communist who stank and who was so far behind in his work he couldn't even help me. I sat as far from him as our single form allowed and every time I looked across at him I wondered how he got that big scar down the middle of his nose.

Although we knew the Communists didn't allow churches, Egoroff claimed he belonged to some Russian church which had some relationship with us because their bishops were also - unlike the Protestants - what the nuns called "apostolic": able to trace themselves back in an unbroken line to the apostles and Saint Peter, who was the rock God built his church on. Not much of a foundation mind you, a man who had denied God three times in succession when he was in a lot of trouble with some foreigners. But you didn't criticise saints - it was too dangerous. What size sin criticising saints was I didn't know, but certainly it was even worse than impure thoughts, though perhaps not as bad as that most unmentionable of sins: "impure actions".

So Sister thought life was tough for Dima - well it wasn't being too kind to me either. Here I was forced to spend my days pursued by a posse of angry nuns, stonkered by the piano, the mouth organ, the theory of music, analysing sentences, writing compositions, spelling, doing fractions and long division, answering questions like what grows in Africa (I got into big trouble when I replied "elephants"), parsing words, and saying the Ten Commandments and the Apostles' Creed, when all I wanted to do was play marbles or stay home and play with Jackie or hang around Dad's cake shop watching everyone come and go.

That was the best - so long as you could avoid having to serve the shop or sort the soft drink bottles.

Long division got me into trouble a few days before this Russian run-in when Sister Veronica tricked me by asking those in the class who could do it to put up their hands. I knew better than to admit to ignorance of anything to a nun so I put up my hand: along with the five smartest girls in the room, including of course Imelda Holyoak - whose very name gave her a big advantage with the nuns - and, naturally enough, Carmel Sherman, who knew more than the nuns.

I also knew not to confess to a lie, and, being new and young, Sister Veronica believed me where no other nun in the school, or anyone in our class, would have. Anyone with any brains would have known I could never have learnt anything as complicated as long division.

In her ignorance, Sister divided our class of more than forty into six groups so that each of us who completely understood long division could teach the others. You can imagine the disastrous result. I was given one side of a blackboard, some chalk, and six classmates with absolutely no idea what to do and twenty minutes to go until big lunch.

For fifteen minutes I pretended, I faked, I cleaned the blackboard perfectly, I drew mathematical signs, I created numerous sets of figures, I questioned each of the six as to what they knew and what they didn't, waiting desperately for the school bell, or divine intervention, until even Sister Veronica woke up that I didn't know how the trick was done. But I got away with it because, unlike most of the nuns, she didn't give the cuts.

In fact, Sister Veronica didn't even have a cane she was so new and weak.

But now that she had seen me in action Sister Veronica realised that I wasn't any good at schoolwork. Not only couldn't I parse words and analyse sentences but I couldn't write a composition to save my life.

Every year the choice of composition topics was always the same, and every year I just couldn't think of anything to say about "A Day in the Life of a Penny" or "The Bushfire". While the nuns would read bits from essays by the girls about a penny being dropped by the tram conductor into a bag full of nasty pennies or being dropped in the rain and nearly drowning in a puddle, I could only see the penny as a round piece of copper that you could buy things with ... things like conversation lollies that you were able to read in different colours, and tram rides clear across town, and marbles and small ice-creams. These precious pennies were like flat Queensland nuts and about as hard to come by.

They were dead things. Not things like people.

After all I had seen a lot more pennies than anyone else in our class from serving in the shop. And, as for bushfires, I knew nothing of the fiery horizons and frightened animals the girls wrote about: but I did know what it was like to be caught in a fire.

Egoroff had his scars but I had mine: a burnt ear.

I had spent three months in Brisbane's Mater Children's Hospital when I was six years old after setting Mum's house on fire during the night. But I wasn't going to tell anyone at school about that - the less said to the nuns the better. Children weren't supposed to play with matches, and I had. But once again it was a case of me sinning by accident.

It happened just after the War finished and there wasn't much of anything around in Brisbane: probably because the rest of Australia wanted to save themselves by giving Brisbane to the Japs - "the Brisbane Line" grown-ups called it.

There were even ration cards for tea and Mum used to look forward to Jackie's ninth birthday because he would be eligible for the tea ration, and she planned to drink it for him. Fags were rationed and kept in brown paper bags under the counter at our shop with the name of the man they could be sold to on the packet. Even if you had the money to buy a comic it didn't mean the paper shop had any for sale - maybe one torn second-hand action comic. When they did get some comics in, Jackie - who was two-and-a-half years older than me - used to get very frustrated because my young sister Gay and me would always try to buy whatever comic Jackie bought.

To try to stop us, he would take us out of the paper shop and sit down in the gutter and explain how we were all in the same family and, if we each bought a different comic, it was like the family buying three comics which we could all read. It was, he claimed, sheer stupidity to own three comics which were all the same.

We did what he said, but I would still have preferred to buy the same comic as Jackie.

There mustn't have been much paper around after the Japs had been defeated because when I arrived at the convent we wrote on pieces of black slate with thin grey sticks half wrapped in red-and-white or blue-and-white checked paper. These were called "slate pencils". They broke very easily and were difficult to write with, but the marks they made washed easily off the slate with a wet sponge each of us kept in a bottle.

To help teach us to count, Sister instructed that we should each have a collection of dead matches: since there was nothing much else around to use. Which was a problem for me since no-one in our house smoked, and Mum wouldn't allow me anywhere near matches. So, when I was at the shop, I pinched a couple of boxes from behind the counter - it wasn't a sin because Sister had asked us, and Sisters were somehow married to God and even wore wedding rings to show it. I then hid the matches on the ledge behind a door leading from the breakfast room to the verandah in our house.

I remember clearly what happened, though the doctors didn't believe my story: they claimed I lit a match and put it under my pillow because the pillow was badly burnt. But that wasn't it at all.

When I awoke in the dark that night I went and got the matchboxes and got back into bed. I knew enough about matches to know that when they were thrown on the ground they went out. I had watched cigarette smokers outside the shop do it hundreds of times, and it looked great fun: which I supposed was why only adults could do it.

So I lit one and threw it on the brown lino floor: and it went out.

So did the next one.

The third one just touched the side of my mosquito net where it reached the floor and a small semi-circle of fire formed as big as a shoe heel and I decided to get up and hit it with a shoe to put it out.

But I didn't get time.

Before I moved there was a sheet of red instead of white around me - and that was the last thing I remembered until Mum was cuddling me in the lounge room as my left ear dripped onto my burnt left shoulder.

I didn't feel any pain at all. I vaguely knew I should be in lots of trouble for being naughty but I knew I would be all right because Mum had her arm around me and was talking softly about how I was so important to her. But still the lounge room was just too quiet. Jackie, Gay, and the street were too quiet.

Everyone was waiting for something in that lounge room, and somehow I knew they were all waiting for me to be taken away.

When I arrived at the hospital a nurse covered a piece of cloth with white zinc cream and slammed it on my dripping ear ... a terrible mistake because it was so painful for them to scrape it off the next day. The doctor said I had third degree burns which, since I was only in grade one at the convent, sounded pretty high. Jackie and Gay could only wave to me in my hospital bed because children weren't allowed in because of diseases. And, for three months, I did my penance with only visits from Mum, and green jelly on Sundays, to look forward to. I cried everytime Mum left and everytime she was late arriving because she had to serve the shop. And I cried everytime I thought of home.

For the first time I found out that there were places like Hell and Purgatory and Limbo where they could keep you from going home.

The nuns were right.

People could easily be punished with isolation forever. And God was also right to punish people with fire in Purgatory and Hell because, as I now knew, burns hurt so much that you wished your body did not belong to you.

Thus I left the Mater Hospital more determined than ever to stay out of Hell.