Bonzer Words!: Wimbledon Avenue
....In 1942 most people left their doors unlocked and children, even very small children, freely wandered the quiet suburban streets. Our family lived on the first floor of a cream stuccoed apartment block. The glassed-in balcony was my small bedroom; Mama and Papa slept next door; the sitting room with its shiny mantelpiece clock chiming the quarter hour was on the other side of the corridor...
Goldie Alexander recalls her childhood days in Australia.
Goldie writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
Wimbledon Avenue, Elwood, was where, in the later 1930s, the more upwardly mobile Polish Jews migrated before continuing on to plusher suburbs. To move here was a statement in itself. Wimbledon Avenue with its Californian bungalows and art deco flats was a world away from the factories, boarding houses and overcrowded back-of-shop dwellings of working class Carlton and Princes Hill.
My earliest memory is of a narrow street sliding off busy Brighton Road curving into leafy Hennessy Avenue and looping back on itself. In 1942 most people left their doors unlocked and children, even very small children, freely wandered the quiet suburban streets. Our family lived on the first floor of a cream stuccoed apartment block. The glassed-in balcony was my small bedroom; Mama and Papa slept next door; the sitting room with its shiny mantelpiece clock chiming the quarter hour was on the other side of the corridor. My only boundary, a stern caution not to step outside Wimbledon Avenue, was mostly obeyed. Not that this mattered. Everything I needed was right here: the footpath was wide enough to tricycle to the milk bar at the Brighton Road end. Cycling in the opposite direction, I came to where my best friend Harry and his baby brother Colin lived. Pedal a little further, past the overweight marmalade cat, a yelping bitser, two sets of tessellated fences and one privet hedge, and I was at Mrs.Goldblum's apartment.
Mrs.Goldblum of the pale bulbous eyes and hair lacquered into unyielding waves, thoroughly distrusted children. Instead she collected dolls which she laid out each morning on a quilted satin bed cover. I recall a raggedy Ann, two exquisite shepherdesses and a silver haired beauty costumed as Marie Antoinette. If I asked politely, oh ever so politely, very occasionally Mrs. Goldblum would allow me to admire her display. But only from a distance and with my grubby hands safely tucked inside my pinafore.
My best friend Harry, nine months younger and a full head shorter, had mahogany eyes surrounded by thick curly eyelashes, a mouth permanently strawberried by food and cold sores, and no matter how often his mother brushed his hair, it would never lie down and be still. Harry had a way of examining a captured caterpillar or horny backed beetle which showed total concentration. Squatting on the floor, our backs curved like question marks, we spent hours examining blades of grass, flowers, old magazines, one of Mama's favorite illustrated books; anything that could be cut up, mixed, then offered to the birds, dogs and cats as pretend food.
Somehow Harry found a book of raffle tickets lying in the gutter outside his house. Or so he said. Somehow we discovered that our neighbours were happy to spend a penny for the sheer bliss of being rid of us. The raffle tickets had us knocking on every door with a request to buy a ticket. No one asked what we were raffling. Twelve tickets to a book. Twelve pennies to a shilling. A shilling bought twelve small ice-creams or four large ones. Between us we saved enough pennies to buy several books and many ice-creams. I don't think it struck us that this was dishonest. Nor did anyone ever mention that we were running a scam.
On sunny days, one foot on the back bar, the other paddling furiously and with Farfel, Harry's yappy blue heeler nipping at our heels, we tricycled down the street over broken bitumen and jutting tree roots so that our insides frothed like milkshakes. Once, when Harry's baby brother Colin had been left to sleep under a tree, we hooked the pram handle onto our bikes and towed Colin almost into the path of an oncoming car. Another time we turned on the gas in his mother's kitchen, lit a match and waited for the bang. Mostly we dressed-up —Harry in his father's old hat and coat, myself hobbling about in a purple sequined frock and Mama's three inch mules.
By 1945 the world was just beginning to comprehend those happenings of a dreadful past decade and the news on the wireless was grim. I remember halcyon days when the sun shone through dappled leaves, when neighbors spoke a strange mixture of Yiddish, Polish and English, and a richness of real and adopted aunts fed us on cinnamon biscuits, honey cake and lemonade made from real lemons; when adults had plenty of time for children and streets were safe enough to play in. Halcyon days until the birth of my twin sisters forced my father to look for a larger dwelling and we left Wimbledon Avenue never to return. But that's another story.
© Goldie Alexander
